Podcasts about eys

For this week's episode of BOAT Briefing, we return to the fantastic speakers at BOAT International's Explorer Yachts Summit in Monaco. From Chile's rugged shores to the remote islands of Brazil, 73m Planet Nine has not shied away from the roads less trodden. In this conversation, captain Philip Atkinson tells our superyachts editor Katia Damborsky about an epic rescue in the mid-Atlantic and reveals some of Planet Nine's most memorable moments at sea. LINKS: Highlights of the Explorer Yachts Summit 2024: https://www.boatinternational.com/luxury-yacht-events/explorer-yachts-summit/highlights-2024?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_campaign=EYS_events_dec24 Planet Nine's many adventures, Hollywood included: https://www.boatinternational.com/yachts/editorial-features/inside-planet-nine-superyacht-hollywood-film-tenet-rothschild?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_campaign=planetnine_features_dec24 BOAT Pro: https://www.boatinternational.com/boat-pro Subscribe: https://www.boatinternational.com/subscriptions Contact us: podcast@boatinternationalmedia.com

Vi står ikke bare i en krise, men i en polykrise - eller kanskje flere polykriser. Dette er premisset for EY-rapporten "A New Economy", som både diagnostiserer det ubærekraftige ved økonomien vår, men også peker ut mer bærekraftige retninger og omstillingene som må til for å komme seg dit. Vi tok derfor en prat med Hanne Thornam, leder i Norden for EYs Climate Change and Sustainability Services-enhet. Hanne, som er NHH alumna og som har vært på bærekraftsfeltet lenge, gir innblikk i rapporten, det underliggende problembildet og endringene hun ser i næringslivet hun arbeider med. Vi snakker om muligheten til å sove godt for de som har ansvar for bærekraft, graver oss ned i polikrisebildet og spør oss om det er mulig å ha håp i møte med disse problemene. Vi hopper fra sirkulærøkonomi til efficiency, Sveinung hisser seg opp over kjøpesentre i London, etter at Lars Jacob snakker opp high-end fashion-selskaper. Hanne fortviler over stadig brutte varmerekorder, vi får høre om hvordan endringsviljen til næringslivet ser ut fra EYs kontorer og diskuterer de store dominobrikkene som må falle for at ekte endring skal skje. Fremtiden vil uansett være radikal annerledes, enten på godt eller vondt, argumenterer Hanne for, og Lars Jacob jazzer over klimaforebygging kontra klimatilpasning. Vi argumenterer for at vi skal se på hva bedriftene gjør heller enn hva de sier, snakker om at det er trangere på bærekraftskontorene til EY om dagen, innser at vi er "original gamers" og Hanne hyller EU for å være endringsmotor på bærekraftsfeltet. Vi snakker om at bærekraftsmarkedet er i vekst, Sveinung nikker til Florida og vi gleder oss over færre klimaskeptikere på radio. Vi svinger innom degrowth, snakker om nye måter å leve på, spør Hanne om hva hun ville gjort hvis hun ikke jobbet i EY og snakker om hvor de store bærekraftskampene står. AI skjønner kanskje ikke hva Lars Jacob sier, men hadde den gjort det, ville den sagt at han sier altfor ofte i denne podcastserien at det er nok problemer til alle der ute. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment in the election interference case. Time for Trump's SCOTUS pals to ride to the rescue again! And in Georgia, local election officials are preparing to gum up the works if voters don't give them what they want. Links: Trump DC superseding indictment https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.226.0_38.pdf Trump DC original indictment https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.1.0_10.pdf US v. Trump (DC) August 8, 2024 status report https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.209.0_3.pdf DOJ 2024 memo EYS https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1359366/dl DOJ 2012 memo EYS https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/oip/legacy/2014/07/23/ag-memo-election-year-sensitivities.pdf DOJ 2008 memo EYS https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2009/02/10/ag-030508.pdf 5 USC 2374 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7324 June 13, 2019 OSC report Kellyanne Conway https://osc.gov/Documents/Hatch%20Act/Reports/Report%20of%20Prohibited%20Political%20Activity,%20Kellyanne%20Conway%20(HA-19-0631%20%26%20HA-19-3395).pdf?csf=1&e=aMNhry DOJ OIG report June 2018 “A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election” https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/4515884/DOJ-OIG-2016-Election-Final-Report.pdf Trump v. US https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf Fischer v. US https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-5572_l6hn.pdf Here's How Pro-Trump Georgia Officials Wrote New Rules to Deny Election Results https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-how-georgia-officials-wrote-rules-deny-election-results-1235089385/  Abhiraman v. State Election Board — Complaint https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25074852/georgia-state-election-board-rules-lawsuit.pdf Heekin Petition https://sos.ga.gov/sites/default/files/forms/Rule%20Petition%20-%20Heekin_redacted.pdf Grubbs Petition https://sos.ga.gov/sites/default/files/forms/Petition%20-%20Grubbs_Redacted.pdf Show Links: https://www.lawandchaospod.com/ BlueSky: @LawAndChaosPod Threads: @LawAndChaosPod Twitter: @LawAndChaosPod Patreon: patreon.com/LawAndChaosPod  

Unlock the secrets to thriving in medical sales with our latest episode featuring Sheila Mallon, a standout graduate of the Medical Sales Career Builder program. Sheila shares her transformational journey from job-seeker to successful territory manager, offering firsthand insights into navigating an uncharted territory near Middletown, New York. Learn how she effectively balances a demanding career with family life while promoting opioid alternatives to a diverse range of medical professionals. Discover how determination and structured support can dismantle the barriers of ageism and lack of experience. Sheila and other professionals highlight the critical role of precise networking, tailored resumes, and the power of mock interviews in securing desirable roles swiftly. You'll hear about the financial benefits and career growth opportunities in transitioning from physical therapy to medical sales, and the importance of a supportive community and mentorship. Get inspired by Sheila's anecdotes about her favorite TV show, "The Feud," and her best dining experience at Cosmos in Central Valley, New York. This episode is a rich blend of professional guidance, personal stories, and practical tips to help you break into and excel in the competitive medical technology industry. Don't miss out on learning how to turn setbacks into stepping stones, regardless of your background or age. Tune in to transform your career aspirations into reality! Meet the guest: Sheila has built a successful career in physical therapy, dedicated to helping people restore function, independence, and overall well-being. After years of commitment to her patients, she expanded her expertise by earning an MBA, blending her healthcare knowledge with strong business acumen. This combination fueled Sheila's desire for continuous growth and the exploration of new avenues. Her journey eventually led her to the EYS program, where she connected with mentors and collaborated with peers who helped her refine her skills and build a robust professional network. Through this experience, Sheila discovered a passion for medical device sales—a field where her healthcare background could make a significant impact. By honing her networking and interview skills and crafting a professional profile, she was soon offered a role in medical device sales that perfectly aligns with her talents. Now, Sheila is making a real impact in her community, ensuring that cutting-edge medical devices reach those who need them most. Whether she's finding new ways to help others or embracing fresh challenges, Sheila remains dedicated to making a meaningful difference. Best Food/Restaurant - Clams with Linguine at Cosimo's, Central Valley, NY   Best TV Show - Feud on Hulu   Connect with her: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilamallondpt-mba/   This Podcast offers a pathway to continuing education via this CMEfy link: https://earnc.me/i3s10p

Medical sales expert Emma Sturtevant! join us to unpack the transformative potential of personal stories in the competitive field of medical sales. With her rich background in public health, psychology, and communication, Emma offers invaluable insights into how crafting a compelling personal narrative can differentiate you in job interviews and provide ongoing motivation in your career. She shares actionable advice on overcoming common objections and creating effective resumes that resonate with hiring managers, helping numerous candidates land their dream jobs within an average of 89 days.   Through Emma's lens, discover the profound impact of supportive networks and targeted coaching in the Evolve Your Success (EYS) program. Emma passionately recounts the journeys of students who, despite initial setbacks, found their passion and success through the program's community and her dedicated coaching. Her empathetic approach and personal experiences illustrate the importance of aligning your career with your values and aspirations, showing how a strong support system can turn uncertainty into professional triumph.   We also get a glimpse into Emma's personal favorites and cherished memories, adding a delightful personal touch to our conversation. From her top book pick, "Maybe in Another Life" by Taylor Jenkins Reid, to her best dining experience at Bosa in Bend, Oregon, Emma's vibrant personality shines through. Hear about her unforgettable trip to Europe with her mom and how these experiences have shaped her perspective. Join us for an episode that not only equips you with career-changing strategies but also inspires you with Emma's journey and commitment to helping others succeed.   Meet the guest:   Emma Sturtevant is a medical device sales representative and medical sales career coach, passionate about personal branding and helping aspiring reps stand out and land their dream job in the incredibly rewarding industry of medical sales. She is EYS' Personal Branding Coach, and helps transform student's personal stories in the interview process to confidently show how their true strengths and unique backgrounds bring value to their dream companies.     Connect with her: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-sturtevant-b746a4116/ https://www.tiktok.com/@emmacareercoach https://www.instagram.com/emmurs/   This Podcast offers a pathway to continuing education via this CMEfy link: https://earnc.me/vq0paw

The ultimate goal of building a company is to build its value. Designing a company that can get rich is not always top-of-mind for business owners, but it should be.   Christopher Volk is the author of The Value Equation. Christopher was instrumental in leading and publicly listing three successful companies, two of which he co-founded. A 2019 regional winner of EYs' Entrepreneur of the Year award, Christopher is a frequent university lecturer and serves on multiple non-profit boards.   Not all companies are created equal. While many companies focus on their goods or services that are designed to make the world a better place, what separates an average company from a successful company is its ability to master the financial aspects of business.   In order to get really good at one thing to the point that people are willing to pay money for it, business owners have to be willing to reject a lot of other things. Determine who your core customers are, identify what you can do to bring them value, and hone in on just that, leaving everything else behind.   Consider what you would do if you could do it all over again. How can you disrupt your business, or put yourself out of business? Those are the steps you need to take today to make your company more successful tomorrow.   Interview Links: Christopher Volk   Resources: Growth Navigator Coaching Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube Recruiter.com Short List (use code scaleup)   Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Scaling Up Coaches (formerly Gazelles). We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail.   Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the show, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.   We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth. Scaling Up is based on Verne's original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.   Did you enjoy today's episode? If so, then please leave a review! Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they, too, can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts.

Using Other People's Money to Build a Business Discover the untapped possibilities of cash flow and liquidity and propel your business to unparalleled financial prosperity with Christopher Volk. Christopher, a seasoned executive, entrepreneur, investor and real estate expert, has penned The Value Equation: A Business Guide To Creating Wealth For Entrepreneurs, Investors And Leaders.  With a successful track record of taking three companies public, two of which he co-founded, he has previously served as the inaugural CEO and later the executive chairman of STORE Capital His extensive contributions in the field have earned him the regional EYs' Entrepreneur of the Year award. Besides his corporate roles, he has produced award-winning content on corporate finance and is a board member of Banner Health and Chairman of Tenet Equity's Board.  Christopher's expertise in real estate investment provides crucial insights on wealth generation through strategic business decisions. His years of experience managing multiple companies offer valuable advice on managing cash flow and creating wealth in business. In this episode, you will learn the following: ●      Exploring cash flow management challenges and techniques for financial stability in successful businesses. ●      The impact of strong business models and efficient cash flow management in achieving business success. ●      Maximize business wealth by reinvesting strategically and seizing opportunities, regardless of capital cost. ●      The importance of prioritizing both customers and investors for a profitable business. ●      The investment strategies of Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple and Google. ●      Build a profitable business by mastering business investment and cash flow. ●      The importance of having a margin for error and an insurance policy in business. ●      Business owners must consider the downside and develop a plan for generating returns. Links: http://www.thevalueequation.com/ Hi, I'm the Profit Answer Man Rocky Lalvani! I help small business owners simplify their financial reports to make more informed business decisions with fewer hassles. We utilize the Profit First system created by Mike Michalowicz Sign up to be notified when the next cohort of the Profit First Experience Course is available! Schedule your free, no-obligation intro call: https://bookme.name/rockyl/lite/intro-appointment-15-minutes Check out our website: http://profitcomesfirst.com/ Questions: questions@profitanswerman.com Email: rocky@profitcomesfirst.com Relay Bank (affiliate link) - https://relayfi.com/?referralcode=profitcomesfirst  Profit Answer Man Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/profitanswerman/ My podcast about living a richer more meaningful life: http://richersoul.com/ Profit First Toolkit: click here to sign up This episode is part of the SMB Podcast Network. Find other great interviews from around the internet just like this one at https://www.SMBPodcastNetwork.com Music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs. #profitfirst

In this episode, Dr. Patt van Eys provides an incredible foundation of understanding about psychiatric illnesses and the U.S. system for diagnosing and treating mental health concerns. Listeners will find this conversation SO helpful as Dr. Patti connects child development, attachment, and dissociation to the critical ages of neurological growth for babies 0-3 years of age. For those parenting or teaching children who are neurodiverse, this episode will bring clarity to new research around “developmental trauma” and how this phenomenon can manifest in adults. Dr. Patti regularly visits prison residents with death sentences, and works to explain how trauma, dissociation, and the brain's protective instincts should be considered when assessing criminal behavior. ... Episode Highlights An introduction to Dr. Patti van Eys (2:58) DSM-5 and language evolution around developmental trauma (14:20) Early brain development and attachment (26:28) Understanding dissociation and developmental trauma disorder (35:39) Understanding children with adverse childhood experiences (53:17) Trauma, justice, and healing (1:01:36) ... For more information, details, and episode transcriptions, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠upwardlydependent.com/shownotes⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ... Links ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kindred Exchange⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Become a monthly donor to support this show and our mission ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Think Orphan ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Learn more and listen to the podcast ⁠What Happened to You by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey - the trailblazers in the work of development trauma for the last 30 years Dr. Patti van Eys - Learn about her work and request a consultation Neurosequential Network - A biologically respectful approach to treating children ... Connect with Lauren ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Leave a Review⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Connect with Dr. Patti Linkedin / Website

Vi inviterer sjefen vår til en prat om revisors rolle for bærekraft. Finn Kinserdal er førsteamanuensis og instituttstyrer ved Institutt for regnskap, revisjon og rettsvitenskap ved Norges Handelshøyskole. Før han vendte tilbake til akademia, hadde han flere tiårs erfaring fra revisjonsbransjen, hvor han ledet EY etter å ha vært i McKinsey og Arthur Andersen. Samtalen starter med at Lars Jacob utpeker Sveinung til å være den av hans venner (i den grad han har noen venner) som er mest sannsynlig til å bli saksøkt. Dette leder oss inn i historien om hvordan Arthur Andersen saksøkte Finn og partnerne hans for snaue 1,3 milliarder etter Enron-skandalen, og hvordan dette formet karrieren hans videre. Deretter beveger vi oss inn i et dypdykk i revisorrollen og hvordan den har utviklet seg over tid. Vi snakker om uavhengighet og profesjonsetikk og revisorens mer begrensede frihetsgrader i møte med bedriftens ledelse. Det leder oss til spørsmålet om hvordan revisorrollen har blitt utvidet til å vurdere bedrifters bærekraftsrapportering. Vi snakker om dobbel vesentlighet og EUs taksonomi, svinger pisken over SEC og amerikansk ESG, og er skjønt enige om at bærekraft har vind i seilene både på forsknings- og undervisningsfeltet. Finn forteller om den gangen han startet EYs klima- og bærekraftsenhet og utfordringene med å markedsføre tjenestene til markedet. Vi slår et slag for å ta doktorgrad på Institutt for regnskap, revisjon og rettsvitenskap, Lars Jacob mimrer tilbake til den gangen han og Finn tok doktorgradskurs sammen, og vi snakker om Finns nye artikkel om verdirelevansen til ESG-informasjon. Vi avslutter med å invitere unge flinke folk til å ta doktorgrad på NHH. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Saturday Mornings host Glenn van Zutphen and co-host, award-winning author Neil Humphreys are joined by Dominic Wong, Group CEO of Eu Yan Sang International and Ng Seow Ling, Managing Director, Eu Yan Sang Integrative Health & Certified TCM Physician on EYS's business, treatments, products, and how it's blending TCM and western medicine and to attract younger clientele.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, we unravel some of the most intriguing stories from around the globe, starting with the shocking discovery at Martha's Vineyard – a man found dead on Obama's estate. The twist? He's not just any man, but Obama's personal chef, who had a long-standing relationship with the former president. From there, we move into the realm of ideas with Yuval Noah Harari, renowned author of 'Sapiens' and 'Homo Deus', who recently appeared on Lex Friedman's podcast. We delve into Harari's insightful opinions on global cabals, fascism, communism, and their unique relation to our movie preferences. As we continue, we explore the futuristic vision of Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, who proposes paying people cryptocurrency just for being human. But what are the implications of such a plan, and why does it involve scanning our eyes? Lastly, we head over to Russia, where Putin has just signed a controversial law banning sex changes. Tune in for a deep-dive into these captivating topics, offering you insights, discussions, and a fresh perspective on current events. Don't forget to subscribe for more engaging content from the Adams Archive. All the links: Https://linktr.ee/theaustinjadams Substack: https://austinadams.substack.com Merch: https://antielite.club    ----more---- Full Transcription:     Adams Archive. Hello, beautiful people and welcome to the Adams Archive. My name is Austin Adams, and thank you so much for listening today on today's agenda. Is going to start with a wild story coming out of Martha's Vineyard. Allegedly, there was a man found dead on the Obama estate, identified as Obama's personal chef. And it's not just like this man had no ties to him other than cooking his meals. Obama literally recruited this guy from owning a five star Michelin, uh, restaurant in Chicago. Basically when he went into the White House. So it was a longstanding relationship to the point where this man was paddle boarding in the middle of the night on his property. So that's the first thing that we'll discuss. After that, we will jump into. A interesting conversation that came out of Lex Friedman's podcast with Yuval, uh, Yuval Noah Harra. He's the author of Sapiens and Homo Dose, or however you pronounce that, um, but very, very well known author who went on to the Lex Friedman podcast and talked about a few things that were interesting, including. Why in the world would anybody think that there is a global cabal who owns all of the corporations and has massive amounts of influence? Why would they ever think that? And then secondly, a, an opinion that he had regarding, um, the difference between fascism and communism and movie preferences, which I found to be interesting and timely with some of the more recent movies that we've had come out, which indicates to me which one we're leaning more towards. Hmm. So we'll discuss that. After that, we will move into open AI founder Sam Altman, to pay people cryptocurrency for simply being human. Apparently, uh, what seems like a big push towards a global digital currency and starting with the founder of OpenAI who says that we need to do this so that we'll eventually be able to differentiate between robots and artificial intelligence. And he wants to scan your eyes to do it and he'll give you money just to do so. How interesting. And then last but not least, we will jump into Putin signing a law banning. Sex changes in Russia. Alright, so all of that and more. So stick around. We're gonna have some fun today. And there it's all right. So all of that and more stick around. First thing I need you to do is hit this subscribe button. I would appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. If you are new here, thanks for being here. If you are not, thank you for sticking around. All right. Now, if you have been subscribed, leave a five star review. Helps me get up in the rankings, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and that's the only thing that you can do from where you're at right now. To positively affect somebody's life, and all you have to do is open that phone up of yours and click a little star all the way at the right. Uh, and I would appreciate it if you write something even more. All right, so again, subscribe five star review. Head over to Austin Adams dot sub stack.com. You will be able to get the podcast companion, which is free, and it has all of the links, all of the articles. And head over there right now. Austin Adams dot sub stack.com. Alright, and we discuss everything there. I'll, I break down all of the subtopic clips into other YouTube clips for you. It makes it all nice and organized. Um, all of the articles we discussed will be tagged in there for you. So, Head over there. Austin Adams, do sub stack.com. All right, and that's what I got for you. Let's jump into it. The Adams archive. All right, so the very first article today. Now as a reminder, if you head over to the YouTube channel, we actually had something happen last episode. I've been kind of working through the different technologies of the, you know, new setup that I have here. So last episode, some of the clips that I played, I guess didn't carry over into the podcast, so I fully understand that. Um, It'll be better this time. Everything will be included. You'll be able to follow along on the clips and actually hear it. This time, my apologies will not happen again, I promise. Okay. And if you head over to the YouTube, you're able to be able to yield it. You'll be able to follow along with me as I'm watching these clips. Um, so have a head over to the YouTube, um, the Adams Archive. You can actually find all of my links. Everything so you can follow. Watch the videos, you know, you can head over to the sub stack is the easiest way. Or go to link tree.com/the Austin Jadas. Also my social media handle. Alright now. The very first article coming from the post-Millennial, which says that there was a man found on Obama's property dead, who's been identified as his personal chef. And as I mentioned earlier about this is not like just some random guy who runs a food truck outside of his house. This is a guy that he. He frequented this man's restaurant in Chicago. He's a five star Michelin chef and frequented his restaurant for a very long time. Now, when he became president, he handpicked him to be the White House personal chef, in which I believe at some point will read more In this article, he actually declined because he'd have to actually leave his restaurant to do so, but eventually, uh, became the sous chef. Uh, at his estate. So let's read this article. It says, the 43 year old man who drowned while paddleboarding off of the Edgar Town coast of Martha's Vineyard on Sunday has been identified as none other than the personal chef of a Barack and Michelle Obama. Tafari Campbell was a White House chef before be, uh, coming on. In the personal employee of the Obamas, after President Obama left office in 2017, divers recovered his body just before 10:00 AM from Edgartown Great pond on which the Obama family's $12 million. Mansion lies dun, dun, dun, Massachusetts State Police said Campbell was from EYs, Virginia. And was Viding visiting Martha's Vineyard at the time of his passing President, uh, and Mrs. Obama were not president at the residence at the time of the accident. The Chicago Sun Times reported in the statement the Obama's praise Campbell saying that Tafari was a beloved part of our family. When he first, we first met him, he was a talented sous chef at the White House. Creative and passionate about food and its ability to bring people together. In the years that followed, we got to know him as a warm, fun, extraordinarily kind person who made all of our lives a little brighter. So apparently a little bit different than what I said. I. That's why when we were getting ready to leave the White House, we asked Ari to stay with us, and he generously agreed. He's been part of our lives ever since, and our hearts are broken, that he's gone today. He joins everyone who knew, or today we join everyone who knew and loved Ari, especially his wife, Charice and their twin boys, Xavier, and in grieving the loss of a truly wonderful man. Very tragic. It says The Obama's multimillion dollar vacation estate on Martha's Vineyard saw a massive response from emergency responders when accounts emerged of a man dressed in black without a life preserver paddle boarding off the coast. He was seen to be struggling. Another paddle boarder had been with the male at the time and saw him go under the water. The recovery was made around a hundred feet from shore. Where water was around eight feet in depth. Wow. Numerous agencies responded, including Edgartown Fire and all Island fire departments, local police, state police, patrol's, air wing, and detectives. The Dukes County Sheriff's Department and the Coast Guard all responded to this. And I'll actually pull up the article so you can see what I'm looking at here. All right, so, um, the original car article coming from the post-Millennial and we're looking at some comments here from rt.com, um, which is an interesting, uh, source, which I found some other articles relating to President, uh, Vladimir Putin, uh, having the. Ban on sex changes. So I found this article there and there was actually some interesting comments. So it says in the comments section here, so no potential validity to this whatsoever, but it says, oh dear, the chef with access to lots of privileged information who couldn't swim, suddenly takes up paddle boarding and goes and drowns at night in the pitch black. Hmm. Nothing to see here. Nothing at all. Another person, uh, said nothing to be happy about when someone drowns for sure. Uh, fortunately world leaders realize it's such a real danger to us, uh, cattle that oligarchs worldwide are buying up ocean front properties to save us plebes from drowning as the oceans rise, Greta is proud of their sacrifice. Uh, now the next person said who paddle boarded him on his head. Hmm. So, so this is where it gets interesting, right? It's like, what is the percentage likelihood that somebody dies on your property now, what is the percentage likelihood that you were president and then somebody suddenly randomly dies on your property in a very weird, a mysterious way? Hmm. So those are questions you have to ask yourself is what is the percentage likelihood that this happened? Why potentially could this have happened? Maybe it was a freak accident. Maybe he was paddle boarding. But honestly, if you're with somebody else and you're in eight foot water, how does something like this happen? How? How do you not pull that person out? How are you not there to help? You know, I just picture the Titanic where the, this guy's on this big, huge, long board and for some reason she just won't get off of the wood to allow this man back up. It just seems bizarre to me. Somebody else said, Somebody else said someone saw, someone saw Michelle's paddle and then mysteriously went away, right? So there's this whole conspiracy around Michelle being a man and also Barack being gay. So not sure what that has to do with it, but interesting comment nonetheless. Somebody else commented that maybe this is a part of the chef who had $65,000 worth of hot dogs and pizza brought to the White House during his presidency, which was a bizarre leak from the emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Can't imagine that this man knew anything that he shouldn't have known and, and had he that anything wrong would happen to him whatsoever. Couldn't imagine that. But mysterious and wild, and obviously our hearts go out to this individual. It's sad, it's terrible. You never want to hear of that, especially when there's children involved. But it's a little fishy. Just a little fishy. Alright, so the next article comes from the infamous infowars, which says, transhumanist World Economic Forum Advisor, Yuval Harri dismisses the New World Order as Nonsense and Fantasy. You know, the new World order that has been claimed to be a thing by. Claus Schwab himself and Joe Biden. There's been several speeches where both of them use that term specifically, and all of a sudden, this World Economic Forum advisor who's been at the Bilderberg meetings, who's been at, you know, in Switzerland during all of these billionaires flying in on their jets to yell at you about flying economy once a year when you can afford a vacation. Let's see what it has to say. It says, world Economic Forum Advisor Yuval Noah Harri shot down the notion of an elite global cabal working together to achieve a new world order, panning it as nonsense and fantasy. Harari, one of the key architects behind the World Economic Forum's. Great reset. Made an appearance on the Lex Friedman podcast last Monday to cast doubt on the new World orders conspiracy theory. Claiming the world is too complex for powerful individuals to map out a global agenda, which will actually frame for us quite perfectly the next episode that we're. Going to be filming, which is about a document called Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, which was a document outlined, allegedly picked up out of a copier machine from that was at a surplus store that somebody purchased. They found this top secret document called Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, and you should look it up. It's a wildly bizarre document that outlines the exact plan that we've se seen unfold over the last 70 years. This was document was supposedly brought to light at the first Bilderberg meeting and formulated by the rothchilds where it outlined exactly mathematically how to socially. Engineer society so that you can have a elite class and you can have the absolute pinnacle and then have legal slavery of the rest of basically the entire world by manipulating financial unions. So we'll actually dive into all of this in the very next episode. So you should absolutely listen to that episode, which I will have out tomorrow for you. But, You can't, can't get it unless you subscribe. So do that. All right. Um, so it says the global cabal theory has many variations, but basically there's a small group of people. Well, let's him, let's let him say it. Here you go. Cabal theory. It has many variations, but basically there is a small group of people, a small cabal that secretly controls everything that is happening in the world. All the wars, all the revolutions, all the epidemics, everything that is happening is controlled by this very small group of people who are of course evil and have bad intentions. And this is, this is a, a very well known story, that it's not new, it's been there for thousands of years. It's very attractive. Uh, because first of all, it's simple. You don't, you don't have to understand everything that happens in the world. You just need to understand one thing. The war in Ukraine, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, five G technology, c Ovid, 19. It's simple. There is this global cabal. They do all, all of it. And also it enables you, uh, to shift all the responsibility to all the bad things that is, that are happening in the world to this small cabal. It's the Jews, it's the free meso. It's not us. And also it creates, it, it, it creates this fantasy, utopian fantasy. If we only get rid of the small cabal. We solved all the problems of the world, salvation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Ukraine, the epidemics, poverty, everything is solved just by knocking out this small cabal. So, and it's simple, it's attractive, and this is why so many people believe it. Um, it's, again, it's not new. Nazism was exactly this. Nazism began as a conspiracy theory. We don't call Nazism a conspiracy theory because Oh, it's a big thing. It's an ideology. But if you look at it, it's a conspiracy theory. The basic Nazi idea was the Jews control the world. Get rid of the Jews. You solved all the world's problems. Now, the interesting thing about these kind of, of theories, again, they tell you that even things that look to be the opposite of each other, actually they are part of the conspiracy. So in the case of Nazism, the Nazis told people, you know,   This is what the Jews want you to think. Actually, the Jews control both communism. Rodsky Marx or Jews, blah, blah, blah. And capitalism Roth, the Rothschild, the Wall Street, it's all controlled by the Jews. So the Jews are fooling everybody, but actually the communists and the capitalists are part of the same global cabal. And again, this is very attractive because, ah, now I understand everything and I also know what to do. I just give P to Hitler. He gets rid of the Jews. I solved all the problems of the world. Now as a historian. The most important thing I can say about these theories, they are never right, because the global cabal theory says two things. First, everything is controlled by a very small number of people. Secondly, these people hide themselves. They do it in secret. Now, both things are nonsense. It's impossible for people to control a small group of people to control and predict everything because the world is too complicated. You know, you look at a real world conspiracy. And so what we're gonna see from this is how ridiculous these statements are. When you look at the way that this document that I'm gonna read to you in the next episode lays out is he's right. It is a very complex world filled with complex people in complex situations, but when you can simplify the inputs, And simplify the way that the herd moves and thinks. And with a long-term strategy and enough financial backing and enough data analyzation, you can accurately predict the way that people will respond to certain things, allowing you to both profit and manipulate people. Literally perfectly laid out in this document that I'm gonna discuss here in the next episode. So maybe even I'll play a clip of this then, but let's listen and, and, and just to say that, oh, it's so ridiculous that a small group of people could control the mass. What has been humanity's like, especially from somebody who wrote the book Sapiens, like you would think that he would understand that a small group of people has. Always been in power over the large masses since ancient Egypt. Since Rome, since there's always been slaves and there's been oligarchs. The oligarchs being a small minority who control the vast majority of people through monetary policies, through law, through government, through uh, through war, through all of these things. Through education systems. We're gonna break all that down. But let's, let's listen to this guy finish, which makes me a little sad. I have Sapiens and his second book upstairs that I would love to read through. I still will, but to hear that he is this puppet for the World Economic Forum makes me a little bit sad. Let's, let's keep hearing him. Well, first is basically just a plan. Think about the American invasion of, of Iraq in 2003. You had the most powerful superpower in the world. With the biggest military, with the biggest intelligence services, with the most sophisticated, you know, the F B I and the c I a and all the agents, they invade, uh, third rate country, third rate power, Iraq. With this idea, we'll take over Iraq and we, we, we will control it. We'll make a new order in the Middle East and everything falls apart. Their plan completely backfires everything they hope to achieve. They achieve the opposite. America, United States is humiliated. Yeah, because the people who are. Who we're discussing when it comes to a global cabal do not have a flag behind them. They don't. They aren't under the guidelines of a country. They don't care which country wins or who loses. They care that they profit the entire way. I. It's not about a country. It's about an, an a, a organized grouping of, of banking cartels who inflate and deflate the economy of different countries and then invest in the very corporations that are going to thrive. Once they bomb, its, they caused the rise of isis. They wanted to take out terrorism. They created more terrorism. First of all, the big winner of the war was Iran. You mean the terrorists that we funded as the c i A and put into power? Both times that we both went in and left Afghanistan and Iraq. You know, the United States goes to war with all its power and gives Iran, uh, a victory on a silver plate. The Iranians don't need to do anything. The Americans are doing everything for them. Now this is real history. Real history is when you have a, not a small group of people, a lot of people with a lot of power, carefully planning something and it goes completely out of, uh, against their plan. And this we know from personal experience. Yeah, because you have people literally destabilizing nations like George Soros. We know this to be fact. He has literally talked about it, right? He's, he's destroyed entire country's economies overnight by like shorting their stocks and like, this is all intentional. It's a facade. I was trying to see if I could get, actually, get some of the, uh, any of the. Comments to this, but it doesn't look like it's allowed for them. So pretty wild. So what this led me to believe I had, I had somebody that came and talked to me about this. So let's, let's go ahead and read, uh, through some of the response here. It says, Hari's dismissal of a global cabal who tried to steer global events is particularly ironic. That's because Harari, a staunch transhumanism or transhumanist and social engineer secretly attended this year's closely guarded bilderberg meeting. Hmm. An annual conference compromised of the most powerful individuals across banking, finance, military, media, academia, and business. A cabal, if you will, that meet to discuss in secret the agenda of the world while the public and the press are forbidden to participate. And it actually cites that source showing that he was there. Um, great reset. Architect Yuval Harra arrives through the back door at Bilderberg as uninvited guests, and they have pictures of it here. Of him actually showing up at this conference an an official list of roughly 130 participants released The group on its website does not show RA's name. Considering his role as a leading author and philosopher in the transhumanist movement, his background questioning humanity's role in the future dominated by artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies could make him a valuable contributor to Berg's discussions surrounding ai. A topic listed on their agenda this year. Hmm. Very interesting. Alright, so let's see what else it has to say about this. It goes on to say that many of Hari's previous statements deeply undermine his argument that there is no new world order agenda. Hari's claimed in 2019 that this age of free will is over because AI will soon be jacked into our minds and control our hopes and dreams. Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will. So whatever I choose, whatever, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this is my free will. That's over free will he said. Notably his mentor, world Economic Forum. Claude Schwab co-authored the book Covid to 19, the Great Reset, which outlines how to use Covid to 19 to completely reset the global economy towards creating a more sustainable and equitable society by essentially de industrializing the developed world and implementing social credit score initiatives. Almost like it's an agenda by the global cabal aimed at imposing their vision of the future onto the world. Hmm. Who would imagine Harari is also exposed by his social engineering ambitions? By deliberating, deliberating how to rid the world of useless people as AI becomes more prevalent where he says, I think the biggest question, and maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. He said the problem is more boredom and how, how, what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they're basically meaningless. I. Worthless. My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games. This is a solution for most. It's already happening. Fortunately, more and more people are waking up to the reality that the technocrats like Ferrari are trying to unilaterally, unilaterally determine humans' future. Almost like a cabal, like how ironic that he's the one to come out and say that against that when he was at the World Economic Forum meeting. Uh, very interesting. Alright, so, so this is something that I found that somebody brought to my attention. Uh, and they mentioned that he talks about, in the same interview with Lex Friedman, the difference in the way that. Communists and fascists look at media and look at movies particularly, which I found to be interesting in the application of the more recent discussion surrounding the sound of freedom and all of the weird things that happened surrounding that. So let's see what he has to say and we'll see how I can kind of attach this to what I'm thinking about here. So here we go. No, not in the best light. The same with beauty, you know, how does the fascist determine whether a movie is a good movie? Very simple. If it serves the interest of the nation, this is a good movie. If it's against the interest of the nation, this is a bad movie. End of story. Hmm. Liberalism says, no, there is a, a aesthetic values in the world. Uh, we should judge movies not just. On that question, whether they serve the national interest, but also on autistic value. Communists are a bit like the fascists instead that they don't place the nation at the main hero. They place class. As the main hero for them history. Again, it's not about individuals, it's not about nations. History is the clash between classes and just as fascists. Imagine in the end, only one nation will be on top. The communists think in the end, only one class should be on top, and that's the, the proletariat. And same story, the your a hundred percent of your loyalty should be to the class. Like if you, if there is a clash between class and family, class wins. Like in the Soviet Union, the party told children, if you hear your parents say something bad about Stalin, You have to report them. And there are many cases when children reported their parents and their parents were sent to the Gulag, like, and you know, your loyalty is to the party, to the, which leads the proletariat to victory in the historical struggle. Alright, so what he just said there, I find to be interesting. He said basically, That fascists only look at movies as valuable to the extent that they serve the country. So when you have a movie come out, like the Sound of Freedom, maybe. Where, I don't know. You see consistently over and over and over again, the fire alarms are getting pulled. They're spraying stuff to make it smell bad. The showings aren't happening, the air conditioning is off. The movie won't play how many times, how many videos. I know people personally in my family who went to go see the sound of freedom and the fire alarm was pulled. How many times did we see this happen? There's reels and reels and reels of videos on TikTok and on Instagram that show how many times it happened. So how much did the news media, how much backlash did the sound of freedom get for drawing attention to the most atrocious thing that is happening in humanity today? You wanna know why? Because it doesn't serve the fascist. Ideology. It doesn't serve the country. It actually hurts them because of how many people are in positions of power who participate in the very thing that this movie was calling out as terrible. That's why you have a media saying that you shouldn't go see this movie. That's why they tell you that you have brain worms if you go see it. That's why they call it a Q Anon conspiracy movie based in. Non-reality, right? Just like this guy tries to tell you about the global cabal that doesn't exist, where there's billionaires who get together every single year to decide how they're gonna socially engineer the slaves, you and I and the general public who don't have billions of dollars. That's a real thing. You know, just like the trafficking that was going on in the sound of freedom. So when it does not serve the country, when it does not serve the flag, then it has no value. That's exactly, exactly what we saw with the sound of freedom. It did not serve their ideology, it did not serve them as leaders. So BlackRock and Vanguard, the very people who, you know, are getting exposed from O M G, from James O'Keefe media for, you know, socially engineering, the, the entire country and wars and everything like that, where he came out and said, Ukraine, this war is good for business. And we know that just like we know, there's a small group of people who socially engineer the general public through education, through war, through industrialization, and, and distracting you with your jobs and taxes and not being able to get outta the rat race. So when he talks about this, how movies serve no purpose unless they serve the regime, unless they, they. Allow them to further their agenda. That's why you see it, and that's why every other movie that's come out that has a mainstream platform has some sort of indoctrination imposed in it, subconsciously at the very least, if not shoved directly down your throat. So thank you Yuval, for both proving to us that. The irony of somebody who goes to the World Economic Forum meetings telling us that there's no global cabal of elites who control and socially engineer the public, and then showing us exactly what was happening with the Sound of Freedom of me movie. Quite interesting, isn't it? Alright, the next topic that we're going to discuss here is going to be. We're gonna move on from that topic right there, and we're gonna move into Sam Altman, the Open AI founder of Chat. G p T now wants to pay people cryptocurrency for simply being human in what could turn into a digital identification system called World Coin, where they want to scan your iris to verify that you are actually human and you know, Pay you for it and then somehow turn this into a, uh, global digital identification project. So here we go. This article says, and again, you can join me, Adam's archive on YouTube. Sorry about that. This article says, OpenAI founder to pay people cryptocurrency for being human. The World Coin Global Digital ID Project has released a crypto token to entice people to fork over their biometrics, digital id verification. Startup World coin, which purports to distinguish real humans from AI by scanning their irises with a futuristic. Orb in storing their identities on the blockchain launched a crypto token by the same name on Monday. The project's website describes it as a digital currency received simply for being human, claiming it could drastically. Increase economic opportunity scale, a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI funded universal basic income. No thank you. Not I. Despite these goals, the World Coin Token usage appears to currently be limited to rewarding people for signing up to World Coin. This has not stopped major crypto exchanges from listing the coins such as Binance, K X Hu Obi, buy Bit and Gate were among the platforms that began offering their customers the ability to trade in. W L D On Monday, world coin, users must physically travel to a location where its iris scanning. Orb is present in order to obtain the equivalent of a global digital passport. The project's creator say that it will become necessary to distinguish humans from AI robots as the technology advances. You know, the guy advancing the technology wants to build a secondary technology to track you so that when he advances his technology, he can continue to track you. While some critics have panned the World Coin Ecosystem as a dystopian assault on privacy, built on exploitation of the poor co-founder, Alex Lanya told Reuters that blockchain storage was actually privacy preserving, and Altman has claimed it will actually fight incoming equality. The company has emphasized that biometric scans are more secure than providing personal information like phone numbers for proving one's identity. However, an investigation by M I T Technology Review found the onboarding process, collected significantly more personal data than World Coin publicly claims promising to encrypt and safely store it until it can be deleted without really releasing a white paper explaining how that will be done. The project's detractors include former Twitter, C E O, Jack Dorsey. Who tweeted at no time should a corporation or state own any part of the global financial system, a Monday in res uh, response to a launch tweet by the worldwide or World coin account. In a Twitter thread describing Wellcoin as a global financial and identity network based on proof of personhood. Altman claims that over 2 million people have already signed up to the project during its beta phase. This falls short of its early goals to bring 1 billion people by 2023. Altman acknowledged that AI technology has the potential to go quite wrong in testimony before the US Congress earlier this year, and even admitted he feared causing significant harm to the world through technology. Hmm. Let's look at some of the comments. When somebody says, Orwell's 1984 is coming to a country near you and yet many are asleep at the wheel. We all know what happens when somebody creates a new coin out of thin air. Hashtag ftx, uh, digital slavery, l o l. Um, what could possibly go wrong? Come on, man. It's safe and effective and once in his AI track and trace, 24 hours per day. The goal of these people all connected to Davos World Economic Forum, the un, the globalist, the C I a Mossad and the Banksters indeed make. Of internet, a prison planet, nothing else who is left of anonym. An anonymity and freedom on internet they intend to destroy. And of course, by using cryptos, hmm, somebody else said this is getting weird. Our new F B i, humans have to be transparent and tell the truth. AI is free to lie. Hmm. Interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. Nothing that I wanna be a part of. Right? Why? Why, why? What do we need this for? I barely think we should have a passport. I think you should be able to roam the world freely like it does. It doesn't belong to some weird global entity. Why in the world would I want to share? My biometric, I, I do not use face id and you shouldn't either. I do not use my thumbprint on my computer to open it. I don't use any of that technology. You wanna know why? Because eventually, and, and, and, and you have to ask the, for the convenience that anything like this gives you. Imagine the inconvenience is going to cost you later. On an individual level and on a full scale humanity level, right? Why in the world would they want this to begin with? Why do they need to do this? They need to do this because they want some way of tracking your every movement, and if they can pay you $300 a month so that they can take every piece of data that, that they can claim as your identity, as your personhood, to then determine further how they can socially engineer your actions. Moving forward, a la social credit scores, right, China, we're, we're getting pretty close. We're getting pretty damn close. And this is just another step towards that, which surprises me because Sam Altman didn't always, uh, Give me that type of feel. Um, I actually had a project that I was working on with a company that, uh, where we, and we, you know, I was a part of it, presented a business idea to Sam Altman. Sam Altman's was the creator of Y Combinator. Y Combinator being a startup, the, the leading forefront incubator for, uh, startups. Where you basically take your startup idea or you take a startup that you've started that is successful and take it to them and they, you know, kind of accelerate it and make you more profitable and teach you what you need to know and connect you with the right amount of people. You live in a house that's funded by them during this time that you, then you presented to all of these investors. So I actually went through some of that process with them to submit it and, and go be a part of that program at one certain point. So that was like four years ago, but, To, to hear now that Sam Altman is a part of something like this, I guess isn't as surprising after seeing OpenAI, but still just, just wild nonetheless how, how this world works. So it, and it's just gonna get weirder and weirder. Alright, the last article that we're gonna discuss, we'll come up in just a second, but first lemme tell you head over to the sub stack, Austin Adams dot sub stack.com. Subscribe. Leave a five star review. Head over to the Anti Elite Club. Anti Elite Club. You can check out some of the newer merch that is coming out over the next few weeks here. So keep checking back there. We have the Pelosi Capital Insider Trading hat. We have the Protect. Our children hoodie. We're gonna have some summer clothes coming out that's a little bit lighter than the hoodie stuff. But, uh, and then we have the Make Love Not Viruses sweater, which is a awesome tie dye sweater with a beautiful hippie looking flower on it. It's all really subtle. I, you know, when I did the anti league club, I didn't want it to be this in your face. A lot of conservative stuff is just not really tasteful and it's just super loud and rub your nose and that kind of stuff. So I wanted it all to be very subtle. But I also wanted to have some good messaging in there. So we'll be having an Act Conception shirt that comes out soon and a few other cool designs. So head over there, anti Elite Club and check it out. Alright, now next thing we're gonna talk about is Vladimir Putin signed a law stating that they will no longer allow any sex changes in Russia. Putin signed a law banning sex changes. In Russia, the legislation prohibits medical interventions linked to transitioning except when they are needed to treat birth abnormalities. Very interesting. And here's what it says. It says, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill banning sex reassignment surgeries into law on Monday. The legislation aimed at lighter regulation of what mps described as the transgender industry bans, legal sex changes and medical interventions associated with transitioning, except due to serious medical grounds, administration of drugs in surgeries associated with gender reassignment therapy will now only be permitted in cases that require treatment of reproductive organ deformities in children. Only licensed clinics linked to the Russian Health Ministry can now make decisions of such treatments and issue relevant certificates. The legislation says people can also no longer, freely change their sex on IDs and other documents. Those who do not or who do so may not adopt children until the new law. Or under the new law. Married couples can also have their marriage marriages declared, declared invalid if one of the spouses changes their sex. According to Russia, deputy Health Minister Evgenia Cova, over 2000 people legally changed their sex in the country between 2018 and 2022 when the practice was legal state Duma advisor Visor via Shela Odin blasted what he called the western transgender industry and defended the reasoning behind the law. The number of gender reassignment surgeries in the US has increased by 50 times over the last 10 years. Adding that around 1.4% of all US teenagers, aged between 13 and 17 identified themselves as transgender in 2022. What more? Almost 2%. Almost two. One out of 50 people who's under the age of 17 identify as transgender. That is crazy. That's like the amount of people that have a D H D. Now all of a sudden you're in the wrong body and you don't have the right sexual organs. This is the path leading to the degradation of the nation. He said, stating that the newly adopted law was designed to avoid such a scenario. The legislation still allowed the treatment of relevant diseases. There are conditions that can be identified during childhood. He said, yet when a person changes sex because they woke up in the morning and decided they are not a boy or a girl, that. It is just wrong, said the Duma head. According to the top Russian Senator Valentina Mat vco, the law was received many positive responses from European nations. Trans right activists still blast to the law, arguing that it seriously diminishes the rights of transgender persons in Russia. Critics also claim that the legislation's wording creates uncertainty related to treatment of certain diseases, not linked to gender reassignment procedures like mastectomies for women genetically predisposed to breast cancer. Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitri Pesco said on Monday that all such issues have been reviewed by experts. While the bill's text was still being debated in parliament, all those questions were answered. He said adding that risks associated with the law had been minimized. Hmm. Well, so I've claimed my opinion on this several, several times. I don't think anybody should be getting a surgery because you're have a mental illness. It doesn't help anything. It just furthers your mental illness. If you have schizophrenia and you, or, or, or, here's a better example that we've seen play out with those clips, right? There was a lady, a woman who thinks that she was blind. She should have been born blind. I just know it. I'm a blind person. Yet she can see. I just know it. I'm a woman, yet I just was born with a penis. Yeah, just because you have that mental illness, which I'm sure is difficult to deal with for anybody in that situation, it's gotta be horrible. If, if that's truly how you feel now, I think that's a far lesser percentage of the people than who are doing it for attention, or because they have maybe other mental health issues going on, but it's gotta suck. That sucks, right? Believing that you're a blind person when you can see, geez, what a terrible thing to deal with. Then that lady put draino in her eyes so that she actually became blind. Now, if you wanna cut your dick off in the kitchen and call yourself a woman, go right ahead. But should any licensed medical professional age you in that or do it on your behalf because you believe that you are something that you are not? No, that's not how medicine works. That's not fixing you. That's physically harming you. So I agree with this. I don't think anybody should be getting gender reassignment surgery. I don't think you should be getting your dick cut off and then inverted inside of you and then you like, have you guys heard of all this? Like how, what you actually have to go through for that to be a thing. They have to insert themselves something into this orifice that is self-created by these medical professionals every single day so it doesn't close up on them and they turn into a literal. Ken or Barbie doll, and then it gets infected and it's like this, Ugh. Ugh. Why would you wanna do that to yourself and why would a medical professional encourage it besides profitability, which is what we know it's about, right? So I don't disagree with this. I don't think anybody should be able to go to a medical office and have a doctor aid them in perpetuating mental illness. Now I think you should speak to a therapist. I think that you should get help and I hope that you feel better in your body. I've talked about this endless amounts of time, and I hate that I have to continually discuss this topic. It's so stupid. I. It's literally my least favorite thing to discuss. It's the most uninteresting topic that I have to talk about so consistently here, but I have to talk about it because other people, all these things are going on consistently about how stupid we are and actually playing into this. Ugh. Anyways, I don't disagree with this. There's my thoughts. Alright, so. That's what I got for you guys today. Go ahead and subscribe, make sure you're here. Next week we're gonna be discussing our next episode, which should come out tomorrow. We're gonna discuss that document. That's gonna be the entire episode is combing over the document. I've been studying it, highlighting it, pulling out all of the the things that we should be discussing from that article. Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. It's the wildest document from like a social engineering perspective, like what's actually been happening and seeing it all laid out in front of us from the 1950s. So make sure that you join, subscribe. Leave a five star review. Head over to austin adams.sub.com. I will include the article or the document. That I've highlighted for you guys and marked up and made notes on directly into the sub stack. Alright? So head over there right now. Check it out, be here tomorrow if it's not already tomorrow and how this podcast world works. Uh, but it's gonna be an interesting one. So thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. I hope you have a wonderful day. Adam's archive.    

Please join Marsha Casper Cook on Thursday, March 16th at 11EST 10MT 9MT 8PST when her guest will be Allyson Rice. Allyson Rice is the debut author of the novel The Key to Circus Mom Highway. (“Fans of family drama, road trips, and non-stop laughs will love this cross-country adventure.”–BookLife/Publisher's Weekly). She is an award-winning mixed-media artist, her photography was most recently seen in a show at Soho Photo Gallery in NYC, she's a Producer with Atomic Focus Entertainment, and she spent decades as an actress on stage and on television, her longest role being seven years as Connor Walsh on As the World Turns. You can see her multi-award-winning, comedic rap music video “Fine, I'll Write My Own Damn Song” here: https://youtu.be/7Xe3nuVDkC4 Allyson Rice - Website Author and screenwriter Marsha Casper Cook is well-known for her romance-themed books in Chicago, IL. She has produced many novels throughout her career, several of which have received accolades for their compelling plots and well-rounded characters. She is also the producer of all the Michigan Avenue Media Podcasts. Her latest accomplishment has been so exciting for her because she writes for a global magazine eYs magazine and they have just published her story in Build Your Success. Marsha's website  

Please join Marsha Casper Cook  March 8th at 8EST 7CST 6 MT 5 PST for a great discussion on censorship with Virginia Grenier. Virginia Grenier Award-winning Author / Business & Marketing Professional / Speaker / Advocate / Psychology Major at Bay Path University Her picture book "BABYSITTING SUGARPAW" is a Mom's Choice Silver Award-winner and Silver Quill League of Utah Writer's Award-winner. VS Grenier has also won awards for her short stories and articles Author and screenwriter Marsha Casper Cook is well-known for her romance-themed books in Chicago, IL. She has produced many novels throughout her career, several of which have received accolades for their compelling plots and well-rounded characters. She is also the producer of all the Michigan Aveune Media Podcasts. Her latest accomplishment has been so exciting for her because she writes for a global magazine eYs magazine and they have just published her story in Build Your Success.   .  

In this episode, Pie returns to the podcast to chat with Toria about poetic writing and how to teach this effectively. Pie is an excellent poet – but he is also an excellent teacher of poetry - reading it and writing it. Pie is a fount of imaginative teaching ideas that work to help children express themselves in poetry and/or prose and shows teachers how to create the bridge between the two. He created the Talk for Writing approach to learning, which is widely used in UK primary schools.During the episode Pie shares his approaches to teaching poetic writing, how he uses poetry models (which can be found in his book Catalysts) as starting points and even creates some poems with Toria. You can buy Pie Corbett's new poetry book, Catalysts here: https://shop.talk4writing.com/products/catalysts-poems-for-writing If you'd like to join in-person training with Pie Corbett this academic year, there are EYs and KS1 training dates for England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales online here: https://www.talk4writing.com/conferences/Previous episodes with Pie are: https://tinyvoicetalks.buzzsprout.com/1267127/10075609-talk-for-reading-with-pie-corbetthttps://tinyvoicetalks.buzzsprout.com/1267127/6068362-storytelling-with-pie-corbettSupport the showIf you enjoyed this episode please share it with others and I would love it if you would leave a review on Apple, Spotify or anywhere else.The Tiny Voices Talk book is out now . To get 30% off go to www.crownhouse.co.uk or www.independentthinkingpress.com and use the code TINY30.

Host: Kevin Smith Dives into the weekly news most impactful to the HeartlandHEADLINESOklahoma Charter School earns coveted largest abuse of taxpayer funds 'in the history of this state' award. Tulsa World - https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/state-auditor-to-lawmakers-epic-charter-schools-mismanagement-is-largest-abuse-of-taxpayer-funds-in/article_7d9f6fc4-83a6-11ec-9c66-836dae32ab96.htmlThe Oklahoman - https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/politics/government/2023/01/11/epic-charter-schools-scandal-to-be-prosecuted-by-oklahoma-ag-gentner-drummond-after-oconnor-dropped/69796742007/Decade Long Water Rights Battle Sees Supreme Court DecisionWall Street Journal - https://www.wsj.com/articles/rio-grande-water-deal-between-texas-and-new-mexico-is-opposed-by-u-s-11674045744LIGHTNING ROUNDMissouriMissouri Governor Mike Parson Embraces Build Back Better Programs in his State of the State Speech  Missouri Independent - https://missouriindependent.com/2023/01/18/parson-makes-i-70-a-focus-for-missouri-budget-heavy-on-infrastructure-education-spending/?fbclid=IwAR3Uco4MgaV8bZP3EEnvYcXIWZqONJyVH_iBSb3B6VwxXeUVfs3BMjLvozg&mibextid=Zxz2cZArkansasNew bill that would require adults to present proper identification before viewing pornographic content online in the state. THV11 - https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/proposed-arkansas-bill-digital-id-porn/91-59598af8-d81e-42c7-8414-d1b5ad40b6fdRetail customers in Arkansas to be compensated for any excess solar generation. Arkansas Advocate - https://arkansasadvocate.com/2023/01/18/arkansas-energy-stakeholders-begin-talks-on-new-net-metering-compensation-bill/PennsylvaniaGov. Josh Shapiro signs first executive order, removing a four-year degree requirement for state government jobs. Pennsylvania Capital Star - https://www.penncapital-star.com/government-politics/in-his-first-executive-order-shapiro-removes-degree-requirement-for-thousands-of-state-jobs/OklahomaPoultry pollution in the Illinois River watershed Tulsa World News -https://tulsaworld.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/after-18-years-a-home-run-for-oklahoma-as-judge-rules-in-poultry-pollution-lawsuit/article_3fa41802-9771-11ed-a005-a706e564ba4f.htmlNebraskaEducation funding decisions.Nebraska Examiner https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2023/01/17/nebraska-gov-pillen-wants-2-5-billion-in-new-funding-for-schools-property-tax-relief/IowaHouse File 3 targets SNAPIowa Hunger Coalition - https://www.iowahungercoalition.org/protect-snap/WisconsinConstitutional Amendment to raise bailMilwaukee Journal Sentinel - https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/19/wisconsin-lawmakers-vote-to-add-ballot-question-bail-to-april-ballot/69820307007/IndianaPrivate hands seek to pilfer from public schools.Indiana Capital Chronicle - https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2023/01/19/indiana-lawmakers-weigh-bill-to-create-universally-expand-school-choice-program/

Host: Kevin Smith Dives into the weekly news most impactful to the HeartlandHEADLINESOklahoma Charter School earns coveted largest abuse of taxpayer funds 'in the history of this state' award. Tulsa World - https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/state-auditor-to-lawmakers-epic-charter-schools-mismanagement-is-largest-abuse-of-taxpayer-funds-in/article_7d9f6fc4-83a6-11ec-9c66-836dae32ab96.htmlThe Oklahoman - https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/politics/government/2023/01/11/epic-charter-schools-scandal-to-be-prosecuted-by-oklahoma-ag-gentner-drummond-after-oconnor-dropped/69796742007/Decade Long Water Rights Battle Sees Supreme Court DecisionWall Street Journal - https://www.wsj.com/articles/rio-grande-water-deal-between-texas-and-new-mexico-is-opposed-by-u-s-11674045744LIGHTNING ROUNDMissouriMissouri Governor Mike Parson Embraces Build Back Better Programs in his State of the State Speech  Missouri Independent - https://missouriindependent.com/2023/01/18/parson-makes-i-70-a-focus-for-missouri-budget-heavy-on-infrastructure-education-spending/?fbclid=IwAR3Uco4MgaV8bZP3EEnvYcXIWZqONJyVH_iBSb3B6VwxXeUVfs3BMjLvozg&mibextid=Zxz2cZArkansasNew bill that would require adults to present proper identification before viewing pornographic content online in the state. THV11 - https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/proposed-arkansas-bill-digital-id-porn/91-59598af8-d81e-42c7-8414-d1b5ad40b6fdRetail customers in Arkansas to be compensated for any excess solar generation. Arkansas Advocate - https://arkansasadvocate.com/2023/01/18/arkansas-energy-stakeholders-begin-talks-on-new-net-metering-compensation-bill/PennsylvaniaGov. Josh Shapiro signs first executive order, removing a four-year degree requirement for state government jobs. Pennsylvania Capital Star - https://www.penncapital-star.com/government-politics/in-his-first-executive-order-shapiro-removes-degree-requirement-for-thousands-of-state-jobs/OklahomaPoultry pollution in the Illinois River watershed Tulsa World News -https://tulsaworld.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/after-18-years-a-home-run-for-oklahoma-as-judge-rules-in-poultry-pollution-lawsuit/article_3fa41802-9771-11ed-a005-a706e564ba4f.htmlNebraskaEducation funding decisions.Nebraska Examiner https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2023/01/17/nebraska-gov-pillen-wants-2-5-billion-in-new-funding-for-schools-property-tax-relief/IowaHouse File 3 targets SNAPIowa Hunger Coalition - https://www.iowahungercoalition.org/protect-snap/WisconsinConstitutional Amendment to raise bailMilwaukee Journal Sentinel - https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/19/wisconsin-lawmakers-vote-to-add-ballot-question-bail-to-april-ballot/69820307007/IndianaPrivate hands seek to pilfer from public schools.Indiana Capital Chronicle - https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2023/01/19/indiana-lawmakers-weigh-bill-to-create-universally-expand-school-choice-program/

Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% )Episode: [Best] Bethany McLean - Enron, FTX, 2008, Musk, Frauds, & VisionariesRelease date: 2022-12-21This was one of my favorite episodes ever.Bethany McLean was the first reporter to question Enron's earnings, and she has written some of the best finance books out there. We discuss:* The astounding similarities between Enron & FTX,* How visionaries are just frauds who succeed (and which category describes Elon Musk),* What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,* Why there's too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,* And why history keeps repeating itself.McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (see her articles here) and the author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, All the Devils Are Here, Saudi America, and Shaky Ground.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform.Follow McLean on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. If you enjoyed this episode, please share. Helps out a ton.Timestamps(0:04:37) - Is Fraud Over? (0:11:22) - Shortage of Shortsellers(0:19:03) - Elon Musk - Fraud or Visionary?(0:23:00) - Intelligence, Fake Deals, & Culture(0:33:40) - Rewarding Leaders for Long Term Thinking(0:37:00) - FTX Mafia?(0:40:17) - Is Finance Too Big?(0:44:09) - 2008 Collapse, Fannie & Freddie(0:49:25) - The Big Picture(1:00:12) - Frackers Vindicated?(1:03:40) - Rating Agencies(1:07:05) - Lawyers Getting Rich Off Fraud(1:15:09) - Are Some People Fundamentally Deceptive?(1:19:25) - Advice for Big Picture ThinkersTranscriptThis transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.Dwarkesh Patel: the rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars. Insider dealing and romantic entanglements between sister companies, a politically generous c e o, who is well connected in Washington, the use of a company's own stock as its collateral, the attempt, the short-lived attempt to get bought out by a previous competitor, and the fraudulent abuse of mark to market account.[00:01:00] We are not talking about ftx, we are talking about Enron, which my guest today, Bethany McClean, uh, first broke the story of and has written an amazing and detailed book about, uh, called The Smartest Guys in the Room. And she has also written, uh, a book about the housing crisis. All the devils are here, a book about Fannie and Freddy Shaky Ground, and a book about fracking Saudi America, all of which we'll get into.She's, in my opinion, the best finance nonfiction writer out there, and I'm really, really excited to have this conversation now. So, Bethany, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Bethany McLean: Thank you so much for the, for the probably Undeserved Conference, for having me on the show. Dwarkesh Patel: My first question, what are the odds that Sbf read the smartest guys in the room and just followed it as a playbook, given the similarities there?Bethany McLean: You, you know, I, I love that idea. I have to, I have to admit, I guess I love that idea. I don't know. That would make me responsible for what, for what happened, . So maybe I don't love that idea. L let me take that back . [00:02:00] Anyway, but I, I, I actually think that, that, that even if he had read the book, it would never have occurred to him that, that there was a similarity because self-delusion is such a, Strong component of all of these stories of business gone wrong.It's very rare that you have one of the characters at the heart of this who actually understands what they're doing and understands that they're moving over into the dark side and thinks about the potential repercussions of this and chooses this path. Anyway, that's usually not the way these stories go.So it's entirely possible that Sbf studied Enron, knew all about it, and never envisioned that there were any similarities between that and what he was doing. Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, that's a fascinating, um, which I guess raises the question of what are we doing when we're documenting and trying to learn from books like yours?If somebody who is a, about to commit the same exact kind of thing can read that book and not realize that he's doing the same exact thing, is there something that just [00:03:00] prevents us from learning the lessons of history that we, we can never just, uh, get the analogy right, and we're just guided by our own delusions.Bethany McLean: Wasn't there a great quote that history rhymes, but it doesn't repeat. I'm Yeah. Relying on who it is who said that, but I think that's, that's absolutely true. Oh, I think it's important for all of us, those of us who are not gonna find ourselves at the center of, uh, giant fraud or, so, I hope, I think my time for that has passed.Maybe not you, but, um, I think it's important for all of us to understand what went wrong. And I, I do think these, I do think just there, there's a great value and greater understanding of the world without necessarily a practical payoff for it. So I think when something goes wrong on a massive societal level, it's really important to try to, to try to explain it.Human beings have needed narrative since the dawn of time, and we need narrative all, all, all the more now we need, we need to make sense of the world. So I like to believe. Process of making, trying to make sense of the world. , um, [00:04:00] has a value in, in and of itself. Maybe there is small, some small deterrence aspect to it in that I often think that if people understand more the process by which things go go wrong, that it isn't deliberate, that it's not bad people setting out to do bad things.It's human beings, um, at first convincing themselves even that they're doing the right thing and then ending up in a situation that they, they never meant to be in. And maybe on the margin that does, maybe on the margin that does, that does help because maybe it has deterred some people who, who would've started down that path, but for the fact that they now see that that's the, that's the usual path.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. That actually raises the next question I wanted to ask you. Bern Hobart, uh, he's a finance writer as well. He wrote a blog post, um, about, uh, I mean this was before FTX obviously, and he was talking about Enron and he said in the end, it actually looks like we fixed the precise problem. Enron represented.Nobody I know solely looks at gap [00:05:00] financials. Everybody ultimately models based on free cash flow, we're much more averse to companies that set up a deliberate conflict of interest between management and shareholders. And I guess there's a way in which you can read that and say, oh, it doesn't FTX prove I'm wrong.But, you know, there's another way you can look at it is that FTX deliberately set up outside the us. So there's a story to be told that actually we learned the lessons of Enron and, you know, uh, so remains obviously worked. Uh, that's why, you know, they were in The Bahamas and we haven't seen the scale fraud of that scale in, you know, the continental United States.Um, do, do you think that the FTX saga and I guess the absence of other frauds of that scale in America shows that. The regulations and this changed business and investment practices in the aftermath of Enron have actually. Bethany McLean: Well, I think they've probably worked in narrowly, written in, in the way in which the writer you quoted articulated, I think it would be very hard for the cfo, F O of a publicly traded company to set up other private [00:06:00] equity firms that he ran, that did all their business with his company.Because everybody would say That's Enron and it would be completely. On the nose. And so, and Sarbanes Oxley in the sense of, in the sense of helping to reign in corporate fraud of the sort that was practiced by Enron, which was this abuse of very specific accounting rules. Um, I think I, I, I think that worked.But you know, you say there hasn't been fraud on a scale like Enron up until perhaps f ftx, but you're forgetting the global financial crisis. Yeah. And then the end, the line between what happened at Enron. and, and what happened in the global financial crisis. It's not a matter of black and white. It's not a matter of, one thing was clear cut fraud and one thing great.We love these practices. Isn't this fantastic? This is the way we want business to operate. They're both somewhere in the murky middle. You know, a lot of what happened at Enron wasn't actually outright fraud. I've coined this phrase, legal fraud to describe, um, to describe what it is that, that, that, that happened at Enron.And a lot of what [00:07:00] happened in the global financial crisis was legal, hence the lack of prosecutions. But it's also not behavior that that leads to a healthy market or mm-hmm. , for that matter, a a a a healthy society. And so there's a reason that you had Sarbanes Oxley and what was it, eight short, short years later you had Dodd-Frank and so Riri broadly.I'm not sure Sarbanes actually did that much good. And what I mean by that is when President George Bush signed it into law in the Rose Garden, he gave this speech about how investors were now protected and everything was great and your, your ordinary investors could take comfort that the laws were meant to protect them from wrongdoing.And you compare that to the speech that President Barack Obama gave eight years later when he signed Don Frank into law in the Rose Garden. And it's remarkably similar that now ordinary investors can count on the rules and regulations keeping themself from people who are prey on their financial wellbeing.[00:08:00] And I don't think it was, it's, it's true in either case because our markets, particularly modern markets move and evolve so quickly that the thing that's coming out of left field to get you is never gonna be the thing you are protecting against. Mm. . Dwarkesh Patel: , but given the fact that Enron, as you say, was committing legal fraud, is it possible that the government, um, when they prosecuted skilling and Fastow and lay, they in fact, We're not, uh, they, they prosecuted them to a greater extent than the law as written at the time would have warranted.In other words, were, uh, was there something legally invalid in the, in this, in the quantity of sentence that they got? Is it possible? Bethany McLean: So that's a really, it, it's, it's a, I I get what you're asking. I think it's a really tricky question because I think in absolute terms, um, Enron needed to be prosecuted and needed to be prosecuted aggressively.And while I say it was legal fraud, that is for the most part, there was actually real fraud around, around, uh, but it's on the margin. It doesn't [00:09:00] entire, it doesn't explain the entirety of Enron's collapse. Much of what they did was using and abusing the accounting rules in order to create an appearance of economic reality.Nothing to do with actual, with actual reality. But then there was actual fraud in the sense that Andy Fasta was stealing money from these partnerships to benefit himself. And they were, if you believe, the core tenant of the prosecution, which was their, this agreement called Global Galactic that was signed by, that was between Andy fau and Jeff Skilling, where Jeff agreed that Andy's partnerships would never lose money.Then that invalidated all of the, all of the accounting, and that's the chief reason that that. That skilling was, was, was convicted, um, was that the jury believed the existence of this, of this, of this agreement that in, um, one set of insider stock sales, which, which we can talk about, which was also a really key moment relative to the, so in absolute terms, I don't know, it's, it's hard for me to, to say there was [00:10:00] such, Enron was such a, to a degree that is still surprising to me, such a, a watershed moment in our, in our country, far beyond business itself.it, it, it caused so much insecurity that about our retirements, our retirement assets safe. Can you trust the company where you work? That I think the government did, did have to prosecute aggressively, but relative to the financial crisis where a lot of people made off with a lot of money and never had to give any of it back, does it seem fair that, that, that Jeff Skilling went to jail for over a decade and no one involved in a major way in the financial crisis paid any price whatsoever?People didn't even really have to give up that much of the money they made then. Then it seems a little bit unfair. Yes, so I think it's, it's an absolute versus a relative Dwarkesh Patel: question. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, who do you think made more money? Um, the investment banks, uh, like, uh, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, um, from doing, [00:11:00] providing their services to Enron as the stock was going up, or Jim Chanos from shorting the stock?In absolute terms, who made more money? Bethany McLean: Oh, I think the investment banks for sure. I mean, they made, they made so much money in investment banking fees from, from, from Enron. But, you know, it's a good question. . , it's a good question actually, because I think Jim made a lot of money too, so, Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, you've spoken about, I guess the usefulness and the shortage of short sellers des a sort of, uh, corrective on irrational exuberance.And I'm curious why you think that shortage exists in the first place. Like, if you believe in the efficient market hypothesis, you should think that, you know, if some company has terrible financials and implausible numbers, then people would be lining up to short it. And then you would never have a phenomenon like Enron.And so it's, it's, you know, it's so odd that you can. , you know, reporters who are basically ahead of the market in terms of predicting what's gonna happen. Uh, well, uh, how do you square that with like the efficient [00:12:00] market hypothesis? Well, do you Bethany McLean: believe in the efficient market hypothesis, ? Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'd like to, but I'm like trying to , trying to wrap my head around Enron.Bethany McLean: I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure how you. Can, unless you, unless you adopt Warren Buffett's point of view, and I'm gonna mangle the quote because, uh, but, but it's that the market in the short term is a voting machine in the long term. It's a weighing machine, right? Mm-hmm. , or is it the other way around? . Anyway, but the idea is that the market may be very efficient for a long, very inefficient, for a long period of time.But, but it does actually, rationality does actually work in, in, in the end. And I think I might believe that, but isn't it John Maynard Cas who said the market can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent. And so I think that's true too. I think believing that the market is efficient and rational in the short term is just obviously wrongUm, but back to your question about short sellers, which is, which is interesting, you know, I think part of it is that there is still this, um, there certainly was a couple of [00:13:00] decades ago, and I think it still exists, this idea that. Owning stocks is Mom, American, and apple pie in shorting stocks somehow is bad and evil and rooting, rooting against America.And I remember going back to the Enron days, someone, people criticizing me, even other people in the press saying, but you took a tip from a short seller. They're biased. And I. , I would say. But, but, but wait, the analysts who have buy ratings on stocks and the portfolio managers who own those stocks, they're biased too.They want the stocks to go up. Everybody's biased. So the trick as a journalist is getting information from all sides and figuring out who you think is right and what makes sense. But it's not avoiding anybody with any bias. But it was really interesting that people saw the bias on the part of short sellers and did not see it on the part of, of, of Longs.And I think there is that preconception that exists broadly, that somehow you are doing something wrong and you're somehow rooting for a company's failure. And that this is, I don't know, anti-American if you, if, if you [00:14:00] short a stock. And so I think that's part of why there's, there's, there's a shortage of shortage of, of, of short sellers.Um, I think also, I mean, we've had. Incredible, unprecedented bull market for the last four decades as a result of falling interest rates, and especially in the decade before the pandemic hit, it was very, very difficult to make money shorting anything because everything went to the moon. Didn't matter if its numbers were good, if it was eventually unmasked to be somewhat fraudulent, , it stocks just went to the moon anyway.The riskier the better. And so it is only diehard short sellers that have managed to stick it out . Yeah, and I think, I think lastly, Jim Chano said this to me once, and I, I think it's true that he could find, dozens of people who were skilled enough to come, smart enough to come work for him.There's no shortage of that. People who are technically skilled and really smart, but being able to be contrarian for a long period of time, especially when the market is going against you, is a different sort [00:15:00] of person. It that it requires a completely different mindset to have everybody in the world saying, you're wrong to be losing money because the stock is continuing to go up and to be able to hold fast to your conviction.And I think that's another, uh, part of the explanation for why there are fewer short sellers. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, and that raised an interesting question about. Uh, venture capital, for example, where, or private markets in general? Um, at least in the public markets, there's shorting maybe in shortage, but it, it is a possible mechanism, whereas, uh, I'm a programmer.So, you know, if, if like a one guy thinks the company's worth a hundred million dollars and everybody else thinks it's not, you know, the company will still be, uh, the price will still be said by the, you know, the person who's a believer. Um, does that increase the risk of some sort of bubble in venture capital and in technology?Um, and I guess in private markets generally, if they're, they're not public, is that something you worry about that they're, they will be incredible bubbles built up if there's a lot of money that's floating around in these Bethany McLean: circles. . Well, I think we're seeing that now, [00:16:00] right? And I don't think it's a coincidence that FTX and Theranos were not publicly traded companies, right?Mm-hmm. . Um, there's a certain sort of, uh, black box quality to these companies because people aren't charting them and aren't, aren't, and aren't, you know, whispering to journalists about that. That there's something wrong here and there aren't publicly available financials for people to dig through and look, look, and look at the numbers.So now I don't think that's a coincidence. And I do think this gigantic move into private assets has been, um, probably not great for the, for the, for the, for the. for the, for the safety of the system. And you'd say, well, it's just institutional investors who can afford to lose money who are losing money.But it's really not because institutional investors are just pension fund money. Mm-hmm. and in some cases now mutual fund money. So that distinction that the people who are investing in this stuff can afford to lose it is not really true. Um, so I don't, I don't like that rationalization. I think we're gonna see how that plays out.There was [00:17:00] just a really good piece in the Economist about private equity marks on their portfolio companies and how they are still looked to be much higher than what you would think they should be given the carnage in the market. And so all of what, what actually things are really worth in private markets, both for venture capital firms and for private equity firms, Is absent another, another bubble starting, starting in the markets.I think we're gonna see how that plays out over, over the next year. And it might be a wake up call for, for a lot of people. Um, you know, all that, all that said, it's an interesting thing because investors have been very complicit in this, right? In the sense that a lot of investors are absolutely delighted to have prep, to have their, their private, um, their private investments marked at a high level.They don't have to go to the committee overseeing the investments and say, look, I lost 20% of your money the way they might, um, if, if the numbers were public. And so that the ability of these of private investors to smooth as they call it, the, the, the returns is, is it's [00:18:00] been, it's been part of the appeal.It hasn't been a negative, it's been a positive. And so I would say that investors who wanted this moving are. Art might be getting what they deserve except for the pointing made earlier that it isn't, it isn't their money. It's, it's the money of, of teachers and firefighters and individual investors a around the country, and that's, that's problematic.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Being in the world of technology and being around people in it has. made me, somewhat shocked when I read about these numbers from the past. For example, when I'm reading your books and they're detailing things that happened in the nineties or the two thousands, and then you realize that the salary that Hank Paulson made a c e o of Goldman, or that skilling made as, you know, um, c e o of Enron, you know, I, it's like I have friends who are my age, like 22 year olds who are raising seed rounds, , that are as big as like these people's salaries.And so it just feels like the, these books were, you have $50 billion frauds or, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of collapse and the individuals there, um, it just feels like they, it's missing a few zeros, uh, [00:19:00] because of the delusion of the private markets. But, um, but speaking of short sellers and speaking of private equity, um, I think it'd be interesting to talk about sbf.So, you know, your 2018 Vanity Fair article I thought was really interesting about, you know, sbf factory in Buffalo H How, how do you think back on Tesla and sbf now, given the fact that. The stock did continue to rise afterwards, and the factory, I believe, was completed and it's, I hired the 1500 or so people that had promised New York State, uh, is sbf just a fraud?Who can pull it off? And so he's a visionary. How, how do you think about sbf in the aftermath? Bethany McLean: So I don't think that's right about Buffalo and I have to look, but I don't think they ended up, I mean, the Solar City business that Tesla has pretty much collapsed. I don't think people haven't gotten their roofs.There was just a piece about how they're canceling some of their roof installations. So sbf has repeatedly made grand visions about that business that haven't played out. And I will check this for you post the podcast, but I don't think [00:20:00] if there is employment at that factory in, in Buffalo, it's not because they're churn out solar, solar, solar products that are, that are, that are doing.What was originally promised. So I guess I, I think about that story in a, in a couple of ways. It definitely, um, it was not meant to be a piece about Tesla. It was meant to be a piece that shown a little bit of light on how sbf operates and his willingness to flout the rules and his reliance on government subsidies, despite the fact that he, um, presents himself as this libertarian free, free, free market free marketeer, and his willingness to lie to, to, to, on some level enrich himself, which also runs counter to the Elon sbf narrative that he doesn't care about making money for, for himself.Because the main reason for Teslas to by Solar City was that Solar City had the main reason, was it Tes, that was, that Solar City had, that, that sbf and his, and his and his relatives had extended the these loans to Solar City that were gonna go. [00:21:00] There were gonna be lo all the money was gonna be lost at Solar City when bankrupt.And by having Tesla buy it, sbf was able to bail himself out, um, as, as as well. And I also think a good reason for the, for the, for, and it brings us to the present time, but a reason for the acquisition was that sbf knows that this image of himself as the invincible and vulnerable who can always raise money and whose companies always work out in the end, was really important.And if Solar City had gone bankrupt, it would've cast a big question mark over over sbf, over over the sbf narrative. And so I think he literally couldn't afford to let Solar City go bankrupt. Um, all of that said, I have, I have been, and was I, I was quite skeptical of Tesla and I thought about it in, in, in, in.And I always believed that the product was great. I just, mm-hmm. wasn't sure about the company's money making potential. And I think that, that, it's something I started thinking about, um, background, the Solar City time, maybe earlier, but this line, something I've talked about [00:22:00] before. But this line between a visionary and a fraudster.You know, you think that they're on two opposite ends of the spectrum, but in reality they're where the ends of the circle meet. Characteristics of one. One has that many of the characteristics of the other. And sometimes I think the only thing that really separates the two is that the fraudster is able to keep getting mo raising money in order to get through the really difficult time where he or she isn't telling the truth.And then they, that person goes down in history as a visionary. Um, but because no one ever looks back to the moment in time when they were lying, the fraudster gets caught in the middle. Um, so Enron's Lo lost access to to the capital markets lost AC access to funding as the market collapsed after the.com boom.And people began to wonder whether skilling was telling the truth about Enron's broadband business. And then there were all the disclosures about Andy fasa partnerships if Enron had been able to continue raising money, Business of Enron's called Enron Broadband might well have been Netflix. It was Netflix ahead of its time.So Enron just got caught in the middle and all [00:23:00] the fraud, all the fraud got exposed . Um, but that's not because Jeff Skilling wasn't a visionary who had really grand plans for, for, for, for the future. So I think sbf falls somewhere in that spectrum of, of, of fraudster and visionary. And what's gonna be really interesting why I said that this, we bring it to the present time about what happens to the mu narrative.If something fails is what happens. Yeah. Is as the world watch watches Twitter implode, um, what does that mean then for the Elon sbf narrative overall? Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, going back to the Smartest Guys is the Room, the title obviously suggests something about. The, I guess in general, the ability and the likelihood of very smart people committing fraud or things of that sort.Um, but you know, Begar Jones has this book called Hi Mind, where he talks about how the smarter people are more likely to cooperate in prisoners dilemma type situations. They have longer time preference. And one of the things you've written about is the problem in corporate America is people having shorter, [00:24:00] um, uh, you know, doing two too big time discounting.So, uh, given that trend we see in general of greater Cooperativeness, um, and other kinds of traits of more intelligent people, do you think the reason we often find people like S B F and skilling running big frauds just by being very intelligent, is it just that on, on average smarter people, maybe less likely to commit fraud, but when they do commit fraud, they do it at such garat scales and they're able to do it at such gar scales that it just brings down entire empires?How, how, how do you think about the relationship between intelligence and fraud? . Bethany McLean: That's interesting. Um, I'm not sure I know a coherent answer to that. Um, smartest guys in the room as a title was a little bit tongue in cheek. It wasn't meant to say, these guys actually are the smartest guys in the room. It was, it, it was a little bit, it was a little bit ironic, but that doesn't take away from the really good question that you asked, which is what, what, what is that relationship?I, I mean, I think if you look at the history of corporate fraud, you are not going to find unintelligent people having [00:25:00] been the masterminds behind this. You're gonna find really, really, really smart, even brilliant people having, having, having been, been behind it, maybe some at part of that is this linkage between the visionary and the fraud star that so many of these, of these corporate frauds are people who have qualities of the visionary and to.The qualities of, of a visionary, you have to have a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty high intelligence. Um, and I do think so many of these stories are, are about then self delusion. So I don't think smart people are any less likely to suffer from self delusion than dumb people. And they're probably more likely to, because you can rationalize, you know, the smart person's ability to rationalize just about anything they wanna rational rationalize is pretty profound.Whereas perhaps someone who doesn't have quite the same, the same brain power isn't gonna be able to create a narrative under which their actions are blameless and they're doing the right thing. So I think sometimes, so maybe there is some sort of relationship [00:26:00] there that somebody more qualified than I am would have to study between smart people's ability to, to, to rationalize just about anything as a way of, as part of the path to self delusion and part of the path by which these things happen.Yeah, that's completely, that's completely , that's Bethany theory. There's absolutely nothing to back that . I'm just Dwarkesh Patel: well clear. Let's do some more speculation. So, um, one of the things, uh, John Ray talked about in his testimony, um, was it two days ago where he said that, you know, FTX had done $5 billion of investments and deals in the last year, and most of those investments were worth a fraction of the value that FTX paid for them.And we see this also in, obviously in Enron, right? With, uh, broadband and with, um, ul, or is that how pronounce it, but basically their international department. Yeah. Um, what is this, uh, this obsession with deal making for its own sake? Is that to appease investors and make them think a lot's going on, is that because of [00:27:00] the hubris of the founder, of just wanting to set up a big empire as fast as possible, even if you're getting a bad sticker price?What, why do we see this pattern of just, you know, excessive deal making for its own sake? Bethany McLean: That's an interesting question too. I'm not sure that that's, um, limited to companies that go splat dramatically. There's a lot of, a lot of deal making in, in corporate America has that same frenzied quality. Um, I haven't seen an updated study on, on this in a, in a long time, but, you know, I began my career working as an analyst in an m and a department at at at Goldman Sachs.And. Definitely deals are done for the sake of doing deals. And I once joked that synergies are kind of like UFOs. A lot of people claim to have seen them, but there's no proof that they actually exist. , and again, I haven't seen an updated study on, on, on this, but there was one years back that showed that most m and a transactions don't result in increased value for shareholders.And most synergies, most promised synergies never materialize. [00:28:00] Just getting bigger for the sake of getting bigger and doing deals for the short term value of showing Wall Street a projection. That earnings are gonna be so much higher even after the cost of the debt that you've taken on. And that they're these great synergies that are gonna come about from, from combining businesses.So I don't know that either the frenzy deal doing or deal doing deals gone wrong is, um, solely limited to people who are committing fraud. , I think it's kinda across the spectrum. , . Dwarkesh Patel: Um, um, well one, one thing I find interesting about your books is how you detail that. And correct me if this is the wrong way to read them, but that, uh, incentives are not the only thing that matter.You know, there there's this perception that, you know, we've set up bad incentives for these actors and that's why they did bad things. But also, um, the power of one individual to shape a co co company's culture and the power of that culture to enable bad behavior, whether scaling at Enron or with Clarkson Right at Moody's.Yeah. Um, is that a good, good way of reading your books or how, how do you think [00:29:00] about the relative importance of culture and incentive? Bethany McLean: I think that's really fair. But incentives are part of culture, right? If, if you've set up a culture where, where how you're valued is what you get paid, I think it's a little, it's a little difficult to separate those two things out because, because the, the incentives do help make the culture, but for sure culture is incredibly, um, incredibly compelling.I've often thought and said that if I had, when I was leaving my short lived career in investment banking, if I had, if I had gotten in some of the head hunters I was talking to, if one of them had said, there's this great, really energetic, interesting energy company down in Houston, , why don't interview there?If I had gone there, would I have been a whistleblower or would I have been a believer? And I'd like to believe I would've been a whistleblower, but I think it's equally likely that I would've been a believer. Culture is so strong. It creates this. What's maybe a miasma that you can't see outside?I remember a guy I talked to who's a trader at Enron, really smart guy, and he [00:30:00] was like, after the, after the bankruptcy, he said, of course, if we're all getting paid based on creating reported earnings and there's all this cash going out the door in order to do these deals that are creating reported earnings, and that's the culture of the entire firm, of course it's not gonna work economically.He said, I never thought about it. . It just didn't, it didn't, it didn't occur to me. And I think the more compelling the CEO o the more likely you are to have that kind of mass delusion. I mean, there's a reason cult exist, right? . We, we are as human beings, remarkably susceptible to.Visionary leaders. It's just, it's the way the human brain is wired. We, we wanna believe, and especially if somebody has the ability to put a vision forward, like Jeff Gilling did at Enron, like Elizabeth Holmes did it Theranos like SPF F did, where you feel like you are in the service of something greater by helping this, vision, , actualize then, then you're, particularly susceptible.And I think that is the place where [00:31:00] incentives don't quite explain things. That is, there is this very human desire to matter, to do something important. Mm-hmm to be doing something that's gonna change the world. And when somebody can tap into that desire in people that feeling that what you're doing isn't just work in a paycheck and the incentives you have, but I mean, I guess it is part of the incentive, but that you're part of some greater good.That's incredibly powerful. Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel: It's what we all speaking of. We all wanna matter. . Yeah. Speaking of peoples psychology, uh, crime and punishment, underrated or overrated as a way to analyze the psychology of people like scaling and S B F or maybe SBF specifically because of the utilitarian nature of SB F'S crime?Um, Bethany McLean: I think it's, I think it's underrated, overrated. I'm not sure anybody. , I'm not sure anybody has ever proven that jail sentences for white collar criminals do anything to deter subsequent white collar crime. Mm-hmm. , and I think one part of this is the self delusion that I've, that I talked about. Nobody thinks, [00:32:00] oh, I'm doing the same thing as Jeff Skilling did at Enron, and if I, and if I do this, then I too might end up in jail.Therefore, I don't wanna do this. I just don't think that's the way the, the, the, the, the thought process works. I think Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, probably for the most part, convinced herself that this was going to work, and that if you just push forward and push hard enough and keep telling people what they wanna hear and keep being able to raise money, it's gonna work.You know, if. . If, if you pause to think, well, what if it doesn't work and I've lied and I go to jail, then, then you'd stop right, right then and there. So I think that, I think that, that I'm, I'm not, I'm not sure it's much of a deterrent. I remember, and partly I'm, I'm biased because I remember a piece, my co-author Peter Alkin, and I wrote out right after Jess Gilling and Kenley were, were convicted and can lay, we're we're convicted.And we wrote a piece for Fortune in which we said that the entire world has changed. Now that corporate executives are, um, are, are put on high alert that behavior in the gray area will no longer be tolerated and that it will be aggressively prosecuted. And this was spring of [00:33:00] 2006 and the events that caused the global financial crisis were pretty well underway.It didn't. Do much to prevent the global financial crisis. Mm-hmm. , Enron's, Enron's jail time, didn't do anything to present, prevent, Elizabeth Holmes doesn't seem to have done anything to change what Sbf was doing. So I just, I, I just, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure, I'm sure a psychologist or somebody who specializes in studying white color crime could probably make a argument that refutes everything I said and that shows that has had a deterring effect.But I just, I just don't think that people who get themselves into this situation, con, con, consciously think, this is what I'm doing. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, speaking of other incentives, stock options, uh, you've spoken about how that creates short-term incentives for the executives who are making decisions. If you wanted to set up an instrument that aligned an executive or a leader's compensation with the long-term performance of a company, what would that look like?W would you have the options of less than 10 years instead of a [00:34:00] year? H how would you design it? How do you usually design a compensation scheme to award long-term thinking? Bethany McLean: If I could do that, I should ru rule the world . I think that very sweet. I think that is one of the really tough, um, problems confronting boards or anybody who is determining anybody who's determining stock options and that almost anybody who's determining compensation and that most compensation schemes seem to have really terrible unintended consequences.They look really good on paper. And then as they're implemented, it turns out that there was a way in which they accomplished exactly the opposite of, uh, thing the people who designing them wanted, wanted them to accomplish. I mean, if you think back to the advent of stock options, what could sound better?Right. Giving management a share of the company such that if, if, if shareholders did well, that they'd do well, nobody envisioned the ways in which stock options could be repriced. The ways in which meeting earnings targets could lead to gaming the ways in which the incentive of stock-based [00:35:00] compensation could lead to people trying to get anything they could in order to get the stock price higher and cash out when they're, as soon as their stock options vested.So, and even there was, there was, the whole valiant saga was fascinating on this front because the people who designed Mike Pearson's compensation package as ceo e o Valiant, they were convinced that this was absolutely the way to do it. And he got bigger and bigger, um, stock option incentives for hitting certain, for having the stock achieve certain levels.But of course, that creates this incredible bias to just get the stock to go up no matter, no matter what else you do. Um, it does seem to me that vesting over the long term is. is, is a much better way to go about things. But then do you create incentives for people to play games in order to get the stock lower at, at various points where there's about to be a stock optional board so they have a better chance of having directions be, be worth, be worth something over the long term.And do you, particularly on Wall Street there is this, or in firms where this sort of stuff matters the most? There [00:36:00] is this, there was this clearing out of dead wood that happened where people got paid and they got outta the way and made way for younger people. And I don't know, it was a harsh culture, but maybe it made sense on some level.And now at least I've been told with much longer vesting periods, you have people who don't wanna let go. And so you have more of a problem with people who should have retired, stick sticking around instead of in, in, instead of clearing out. And then it also becomes a question, How much money is, is enough.So if somebody is getting millions of dollars in short-term compensation and then they have a whole bunch more money tied up in long-term compensation, do the long-term numbers matter? At what point do they, do they, do they really matter? I mean, if you gave me $5 million today, I'm not so sure I'd really care if I were getting another $5 million in 10 years.Right. ? Yeah. So, so I think all of that is, is it, it's, I'm not, I'm not sure there's a perfect compensation system. All things considered though, I think longer term is, is probably better, [00:37:00] but. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I didn't think about that downside of the long investing period. That's so interesting there. I guess there is no free lunch.Uh, so with Enron, um, it, it was clear that there was a lot of talent at the firm and that you had these companies and these trading firms launch at the aftermath by people who left Enron, kinder Morgan and John Arnold's, um, uh, Sintas, uh, that were wildly profitable and did well. Do you think we'll see the same thing with FTX, that while Sbf himself and maybe the, his close cadre were frauds, there actually was a lot of great trading and engineering talent there that are gonna start these very successful firms in the aftermath.Bethany McLean: That's, that's interesting. And just, just for the sake of clarification, kinder Morgan was actually started years before Enron's collapsed, when Rich Kinder, who was vying with Jeffs skilling in a sense, to become Chief Operating Officer. Um, Ken Lay, picked Jeffs skilling and Kinder left. Mm-hmm. and took a few assets and went to create Kinder, kinder Morgan.But your overall point, I'm just clarifying your overall point holds, there were a lot of people who [00:38:00] left Enron and went on to do, to have pretty, pretty remarkable careers. I think the answer with ftx, I bet there will be some for sure. But whether they will be in the crypto space, I guess depends on your views on the long-term viability of, of, of the crypto space.And I have never , it's funny is crypto exploded over the last couple of years. I was, I've been working on this book about the pandemic and it's been busy and difficult enough that I have not lifted my head to, to think about much else. And I always thought, I don't get it. I don't understand , I mean, I understand the whole argument about the blockchain being valuable for lots of transactions and I, I get that, but I never understood crypto itself and I thought, well, I just need to, as soon as this book is done, I just need to put a month into understanding this because it's obviously an important, important enough part of our world that I need to figure it out.So now I think, oh, Okay, maybe I didn't understand it for a reason and maybe, um, maybe there isn't anything to understand and I've just saved myself a whole life of crime because it's all gone. And you have [00:39:00] people like Larry Fink at BlackRock saying, whole industry is gonna implode. It's done. And certainly with the news today, this morning of finances auditor basically saying We're out.Um, I, I don't, I don't know how much of it was, how much of it was, is, was a Ponzi scheme. You might know better than I do. And so I don't know what's left after this whole thing implodes. It's a little bit like, there is an analogy here that when Enron imploded, yes, a lot of people went on to start other successful businesses, but the whole energy trading business is practiced by kind of under capitalized, um, um, energy firms went away and that never came back.Yeah. And so I, I, I don't, I don't know, I'm, it'll be, I, I don't know. What do you. The Dwarkesh Patel: time to be worried will be when Bethany McLean writes an article titled Is Bitcoin Overvalued for the Audience. My Moments on That ? Yeah, for the audience that, that was, I believe the first skeptical article about Enron's, um, stock price.Yeah. Uh, and it was titled [00:40:00] Is Enron Overvalued. In aftermath understated, , title. But , Bethany McLean: , I joked that that story should have won, won, won awards for the NICU title and business journalism history. , given that the company was bankrupt six months later was overpricedDwarkesh Patel: Um, uh, well, let me ask a bigger question about finance in general. So finance is 9% of gdp, I believe. How much of that is the productive use and thinking and allocation of the, uh, the capital towards their most productive ends? And how much of that is just zero sum or negative sum games? Um, if, if you had to break that down, like, is 9% too high, do you think, or is it just.I think it's Bethany McLean: too high. I have no idea how to think about breaking it down to what the proper level should be. But I think there are other ways to think about how you can see that in past decades it hasn't been at the right level when you've had all sorts of smart kids. Um, Leaving, leaving business school and leaving college and heading into [00:41:00] finance and hedge funds and private equity is their career of choice.I think that's a sign that that finance is too big when it's sucking up too much of, of, of the talent of the country. Um, and when the rewards for doing it are so disproportionate relative to the rewards of of, of doing other things. Um, the counter to that is that there've also been a lot of rewards for starting businesses.And that's probably, I think, how you want it to be in a, in a product. In a productive economy. So I think the number is, is too high. I don't know how to think about what it should be other than what a, actually, a former Goldman Sachs partner said this to me when I was working on all the devils are here, and she said that finance is supposed to be like the, the substrata of our world.It's supposed to be the thing that enables other things to happen. It's not supposed to be the world itself. So the, the role of a financial system is to enable businesses to get started, to provide capital. That's what it's supposed to be. It's the lubricant that enables business, but it's not supposed to be the thing itself.Right. And it's become the thing itself. [00:42:00] You've, you've, you've, you've, you've got a problem. Um, um, and I think the other, Dwarkesh Patel: there's your article about crypto , that paragraph right there. . Bethany McLean: There you go. That's, that's a good, um, and I think, I think the other way, you, you, you can see, and perhaps this is way too simplistic, but the other way I've thought about it is that how can it be if you can run a hedge fund and make billions of dollars from, and have five people, 10 people, whatever it is, versus starting a company that employs people mm-hmm.and changes a neighborhood and provides jobs and, you know, provides a product that, that, that, that, that improves people's lives. It, it is a shame that too much of the talent and such a huge share of the financial rewards are going to the former rather than the latter. And that just can't mean good things for the future.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, when people criticize technology, for example, for the idea that, you know, these people who would've been, I don't know, otherwise teachers or something, they're, you know, making half a million dollars at Google. [00:43:00] Um, and I think like when I was in India, people were using Google Maps to get through the streets in Mumbai, which is, which is unimaginable to me before going there that, you know, you would be able to do that with, um, a service built out of Silicon Valley.And so, Yeah, I think that actually is a good allocation of capital and talent. I, I'm not, I'm not sure about finance. Um, yeah, Bethany McLean: I think I, I, I agree with you. I think there are other problems with Google and with the, the social media giants, but, but they are real businesses that employ people, that make products that have had, uh, huge.Um, impact on on, on people's, on people's lives. So in, in that sense, it's very different than a private equity firm, for instance, and especially private equity, even more so than hedge funds draws my ire. Mm-hmm. , because I think one of the reasons they, that it, they've been able to make part of the financialization of our economy has been due to super, super low interest rates and low interest rates that have enabled so many people to make so much money in finance are not, they're just a gift.It wasn't because these people were uniquely smart, they just [00:44:00] found themselves in a great moment in time. And the fact that they now think they're really smart because money makes me crazy. Dwarkesh Patel: Um, are Fanny and Freddy America special purpose entities? Are they our Alameda? It's just the way we hide our debt and uh, that's interesting.Yeah. Bethany McLean: Well, I guess we, you know what? I don't know anymore because, so I last wrote about them when was it in 2016 and I don't know now. No, you're right. Their, their debt is still off, off, off balance sheet. So Yeah, in a lot of ways they, they were. . I would argue though that the old Fanny and Freddy were structured more honestly than, than the new Fanny and Freddy, that it really is conservatorship that have made them, um, that have made them America's off balance sheet entities, because at least when they were their own independent entities.Yes, there was this odd thing known as the implicit guarantee, which is when you think about, back to your point about efficient markets, how can you possibly believe there's an as such a thing as an efficient market when their [00:45:00] Fanny and Freddy had an implicit guarantee, meaning it wasn't real. There was no place where it was written down that the US government would bail Fanny and Freddie out in a crisis, and everybody denied that it existed and yet it did exist.Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel: No, but we, I feel like that confirms the official market hypothesis, right? The, the market correctly, they thought that mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddy would have governments. Uh, okay, okay. You might be father Bethany McLean: and they did . You might be right. I, I, I think what I was getting at you, you might be right.I think what I was getting at is that it is such a screwed up concept. I mean, how can you possibly, when I first, when people were first explaining this to me, when I first read about Fanny and Freddie, I was like, no, no, wait. This is American capitalism . This is, no, wait. What? I don't, I don't understand . Um, um, so yeah, but I, I, I, I think that Fanny and Freddie, at least with shareholders that were forced to bear some level of, of the risks were actually a more honest way of going about this whole screwed up American way of financing mortgages than, than the current setup is.Dwarkesh Patel: What [00:46:00] is the future of these firms? Or are they just gonna say in conservatorship forever? Or is there any developments there? Well, what's gonna happen to them? Bethany McLean: The lawsuit, the latest lawsuit that could have answered that in some ways ended in a mistrial. Um, I don't think, I don't, I don't think unfortunately anybody in government sees any currency in, and I mean, currency in the broad sense, not in the literal sense of money in, in taking this on.And unfortunately, what someone once said to me about it, I think remains true and it's really depressing, but is that various lawmakers get interested in Fannie and Freddy. They engage with it only to figure out it's really, really goddamn complicated. Mm-hmm. and that, and that any kind of solution is gonna involve angering people on one side of the aisle or another and potentially angering their constituent constituents.And they slowly back away, um, from doing anything that could, that, that could affect change. So I think we have a really unhealthy situation. I don't think it's great for these two [00:47:00] entities to be in conservatorship, but at this point, I'm not sure it's gonna change. Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Speaking of debt and mortgages, um, so total household debt in the United States has been, uh, climbing recently after it's, it's like slightly d decline after 2008, but I think in quarter three alone it increased 350 billion and now it's at 16.5 trillion.Uh, the total US household debt, should we worried about this? Are, are, are we gonna see another sort of collapse because of this? Or what, what should we think about this? Bethany McLean: I don't know. I don't know how to think about that because it's too tied up in other things that no one knows. Are we going to have a recession?How severe is the recession going to be? What is the max unemployment rate that we're gonna hit if we do, if we do have a recession? And all of those things dictate how to, how to think about that number. I. Think consumer debt is embedded in the bowels of the financial system in the same way mortgages were.And in the end, the, the, the [00:48:00] problem with the financial crisis of 2008, it wasn't the losses on the mortgages themselves. It was the way in which they were embedded in the plumbing of the financial system. Mm-hmm. and ways that nobody understood. And then the resulting loss of confidence from the fact that nobody had understood that slash lies had been told about, about that.And that's what caused, that's what caused everything to, to collapse. Consumer debt is a little more visible and seeable and I, I don't think that it has that same, um, that same opaque quality to it that, that mortgage backed securities did. I could be, I could be wrong. I haven't, I haven't, I haven't dug into it enough, enough to understand enough to understand that.But you can see the delinquencies starting to climb. Um, I mean, I guess you could on, on, on mortgages as well, but there was this, there was this profound belief with mortgages that since home prices would never decline, there would never be losses on these instruments because you could always sell the underlying property for more than you had [00:49:00] paid for it, and therefore everything would be fine.And that's what led to a lot of the bad practices in the industry is that lenders didn't think they had to care if they were screwing the home buyer because they always thought they could take the home back and, and, and, and, and make more money on it. And consumer debt is, is unsecured. And so it's, it's, it's different.I think people think about it differently, but I'd have. I'd have to, I'd have to do some more homework to understand where consumer debt sits in the overall architecture of the financial industry. Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'm really glad you brought up this theme about what does the overall big picture look like? I feel like this is the theme of all your books that people will be, So obsessed with their subsection of their job or, or that ar area that they won't notice that, um, broader trends like the ones you're talking about.And in Enron it's like, why, why, why do we have all these special purpose entities? What is the total debt load of Enron? Um, or with the, you know, mortgage back securities a similar kind of thing, right? What, what, uh, maybe they weren't correlated in the past, [00:50:00] but what's that? Do we really think that there's really no correlation, um, uh, between, uh, delinquencies across the country?Um, so that, that kind of big picture, think. Whose job is that today? Is it journalists? Is it short sellers? Is it people writing on ck? Who's doing that? Is it anybody's job? Is, is it just like, uh, an important role with nobody assigned to it? Bethany McLean: I think it's the latter. I think it's an important role with nobody, with nobody assigned to it, and there there is a limit.I mean, , I hate to say this, it is not, uh, um, it is not an accident that many of my books have been written. That's probably not fair. It's not true of my book un fracking, but that some of my books have been written after the calamity happened. So they weren't so much foretelling the calamity as they were unpacking the calamity after it happened, which is a different role.And as I said at the start of our conversation, I think an important one to explain to people why this big, bad thing took, took place. But it's not prediction, I don't know, as people that were very good at, at prediction, um, they tried [00:51:00] to set up, what was it called? In the wake of the global financial crisis, they established this thing called fsoc, and now I'm forgetting what the acronym stands for.Financial Security Oversight Committee. And it's supposed to be this, this body that does think about these big picture. That thinks about the ways, the ways an exam, for example, in which mortgage backed securities were, um, were, were, were, were, were, were, were repopulating through the entire financial system and ways that would be cause a loss to be much more than a loss.That it wouldn't just be the loss of money and that security, it would echo and magnify. And so that there are people who are supposed to be thinking about it. But I think, I think it's, it's, it's really hard to see that and. In increasingly complex world, it's even, it's even harder than it was before, because the reverberations from things are really hard to map out in, in, in advance, and especially when some part of those reverberations are a loss of confidence, then all bets [00:52:00] are off because when confidence cracks, lots of things fall apart.But how do you possibly analyze in any quantitative way the the risk that that confidence will collapse? Mm-hmm. . So I think it's, I think, I think, I think it's difficult. That said, and of course I am talking my own book here, I don't think that the lack of the, the increased financial problems of journalism really help matters in that respect, because in an ideal world, you want a lot of people out there writing and thinking about various pieces of this, and then maybe somebody can come along and see the.Pieces and say, oh my God, there's this big picture thing here that we all need to be thinking about. But there's, there's a kind of serendipity in the ability to do that one, that one that the chances, I guess the best way to say that is the chances of that serendipity are dramatically increased by having a lot of people out there doing homework, um, on the various pieces of the puzzle.And so I think in a world, particularly where local news has been decimated mm-hmm. , um, the [00:53:00] chances of that sort of serendipity are, are definitely lower. And people may think, oh, it doesn't matter. We still got national news. We've got the Washington Post, we've got the Wall Street Journal, we've got the New York Times.Um, I would love to have somebody do a piece of analysis and go back through the New York Times stories and see how many were sparked by lp, a piece in the local paper that maybe you wouldn't even notice from reading the New York Times piece, because it'd be in like the sixth paragraph that, oh yeah, credit should go to this person at this local paper who started writing about this.But if you no longer have the person at the local paper who started writing about this, You know, it's, it's, it's, it's less likely that the big national piece gets written. And I think that's a part of the implosion of local news, that people, a part of the cost of the implosion of local news that people don't really understand the idea that the national press functions at, at the same level, um, without local news is just not true.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. And, but even if you have the local news, and I, that's a really important point, but even if you have that local news, there still has to be somebody whose job it is to synthesize it all together. And [00:54:00] I'm curious, what is the training that requires? So you, I mean, your training is, you know, math and English major and then working at working in investment banking.Um, is that the, uh, I mean, obviously the anecdotal experience then equals one, seems that that's great training for synthesizing all these pieces together. But what is the right sort of education for somebody who is thinking about the big picture? Bethany McLean: I, I don't, I don't know.And there may be, there may be, there are probably multiple answers to that question, right? There's probably no one, one right answer for me. In, in the end. My, my math major has proven to be pivotal. Even though , my mother dug up these, um, my, my parents were moving and so my mother was going through all her stuff and she dug up these, some my math work from, from college.Literally, if it weren't for the fact that I recognized my own handwriting, I would not recognize these pages on pages of math formula and proofs. And they're like, get gibberish to me now. So , but I, but I still think that math has, so I do not wanna exaggerate my mathematical ability at this stage of [00:55:00] the game.It's basically no. But I do think that doing math proofs any kind of formal, any kind of training and logic is really, really important because the more you've been formally trained in logic, the more you realize when there are piece is missing and when something isn't quite, isn't quite adding on, it just forces you to think in, in a way that is, that in a way that connects the dots.Um, because you know, if you're moving from A to B and B doesn't follow a, you, you understand that B doesn't follow a And I think that that, that, that kind of training is, is really, really important. It's what's given. , whatever kind of backbone I have as a journalist is not because I like to create controversy and like to make people mad.I actually don't. It's just because something doesn't make sense to me. And so maybe it doesn't make sense to me because I'm not getting it, or it doesn't make sense to me because B doesn't actually follow, follow away, and you're just being told that it does. And so I think that, I think that training is, is really, really important.Um, I also have, have often thought [00:56:00] that another part of training is realizing that basic rule that you learned in kindergarten, which is, um, you know, believe your imagination or you know, your imagine follow your imagination. Because the truth is anything can happen. And I think if you look at business history over the last couple of decades, it will be the improbable becoming probable.Truth over and over and over again. I mean, the idea that Enron could implode one of the biggest, supposedly most successful companies in corporate America could be bankrupt within six months. The, from its year, from its stock price high. The idea that the biggest, most successful, um, financial institutions on wall, on Wall Street could all be crumbling into bankruptcy without the aid of the US government.The idea that a young woman with no college degree and no real experience in engineering could create, uh, uh, um, could create a machine that was going to revolutionize blood testing and land on the cover of every business magazine, and that this [00:57:00] whole thing could turn out to be pretty much a fraud. The entire idea of ftx, I mean, over and over again, these things have happened.Forget Bernie Madoff if you had told people a year ago that FTX was gonna implode six months ago, three months ago, people would've been like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so I think just that, that, that, that knowledge that the improbable happens over and over again is also a really fundamental, fundamentally important.Dwarkesh Patel: If we're con continuing on the theme of ftx, I, I interviewed him about four or five months ago.Wow. And this is one of these interviews that I'm really, I'm, I don't know if embarrass is the right word, but I knew things then that I could have like asked, poked harder about. But it's also the kind of thing where you look back in retrospect and you're. If it had turned out well, it's, it's not obvious what the red flags are.Um, while you're in the moment, there's things you can look back at the story of Facebook and how, you know, Marcus Zuckerberg acted in the early days of Facebook and you could say, if the th

This was one of my favorite episodes ever.Bethany McLean was the first reporter to question Enron's earnings, and she has written some of the best finance books out there. We discuss:* The astounding similarities between Enron & FTX,* How visionaries are just frauds who succeed (and which category describes Elon Musk),* What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,* Why there's too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,* And why history keeps repeating itself.McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (see her articles here) and the author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, All the Devils Are Here, Saudi America, and Shaky Ground.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform.Follow McLean on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. If you enjoyed this episode, please share. Helps out a ton.Timestamps(0:04:37) - Is Fraud Over? (0:11:22) - Shortage of Shortsellers(0:19:03) - Elon Musk - Fraud or Visionary?(0:23:00) - Intelligence, Fake Deals, & Culture(0:33:40) - Rewarding Leaders for Long Term Thinking(0:37:00) - FTX Mafia?(0:40:17) - Is Finance Too Big?(0:44:09) - 2008 Collapse, Fannie & Freddie(0:49:25) - The Big Picture(1:00:12) - Frackers Vindicated?(1:03:40) - Rating Agencies(1:07:05) - Lawyers Getting Rich Off Fraud(1:15:09) - Are Some People Fundamentally Deceptive?(1:19:25) - Advice for Big Picture ThinkersTranscriptThis transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.Dwarkesh Patel: the rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars. Insider dealing and romantic entanglements between sister companies, a politically generous c e o, who is well connected in Washington, the use of a company's own stock as its collateral, the attempt, the short-lived attempt to get bought out by a previous competitor, and the fraudulent abuse of mark to market account.[00:01:00] We are not talking about ftx, we are talking about Enron, which my guest today, Bethany McClean, uh, first broke the story of and has written an amazing and detailed book about, uh, called The Smartest Guys in the Room. And she has also written, uh, a book about the housing crisis. All the devils are here, a book about Fannie and Freddy Shaky Ground, and a book about fracking Saudi America, all of which we'll get into.She's, in my opinion, the best finance nonfiction writer out there, and I'm really, really excited to have this conversation now. So, Bethany, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Bethany McLean: Thank you so much for the, for the probably Undeserved Conference, for having me on the show. Dwarkesh Patel: My first question, what are the odds that Sbf read the smartest guys in the room and just followed it as a playbook, given the similarities there?Bethany McLean: You, you know, I, I love that idea. I have to, I have to admit, I guess I love that idea. I don't know. That would make me responsible for what, for what happened, . So maybe I don't love that idea. L let me take that back . [00:02:00] Anyway, but I, I, I actually think that, that, that even if he had read the book, it would never have occurred to him that, that there was a similarity because self-delusion is such a, Strong component of all of these stories of business gone wrong.It's very rare that you have one of the characters at the heart of this who actually understands what they're doing and understands that they're moving over into the dark side and thinks about the potential repercussions of this and chooses this path. Anyway, that's usually not the way these stories go.So it's entirely possible that Sbf studied Enron, knew all about it, and never envisioned that there were any similarities between that and what he was doing. Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, that's a fascinating, um, which I guess raises the question of what are we doing when we're documenting and trying to learn from books like yours?If somebody who is a, about to commit the same exact kind of thing can read that book and not realize that he's doing the same exact thing, is there something that just [00:03:00] prevents us from learning the lessons of history that we, we can never just, uh, get the analogy right, and we're just guided by our own delusions.Bethany McLean: Wasn't there a great quote that history rhymes, but it doesn't repeat. I'm Yeah. Relying on who it is who said that, but I think that's, that's absolutely true. Oh, I think it's important for all of us, those of us who are not gonna find ourselves at the center of, uh, giant fraud or, so, I hope, I think my time for that has passed.Maybe not you, but, um, I think it's important for all of us to understand what went wrong. And I, I do think these, I do think just there, there's a great value and greater understanding of the world without necessarily a practical payoff for it. So I think when something goes wrong on a massive societal level, it's really important to try to, to try to explain it.Human beings have needed narrative since the dawn of time, and we need narrative all, all, all the more now we need, we need to make sense of the world. So I like to believe. Process of making, trying to make sense of the world. , um, [00:04:00] has a value in, in and of itself. Maybe there is small, some small deterrence aspect to it in that I often think that if people understand more the process by which things go go wrong, that it isn't deliberate, that it's not bad people setting out to do bad things.It's human beings, um, at first convincing themselves even that they're doing the right thing and then ending up in a situation that they, they never meant to be in. And maybe on the margin that does, maybe on the margin that does, that does help because maybe it has deterred some people who, who would've started down that path, but for the fact that they now see that that's the, that's the usual path.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. That actually raises the next question I wanted to ask you. Bern Hobart, uh, he's a finance writer as well. He wrote a blog post, um, about, uh, I mean this was before FTX obviously, and he was talking about Enron and he said in the end, it actually looks like we fixed the precise problem. Enron represented.Nobody I know solely looks at gap [00:05:00] financials. Everybody ultimately models based on free cash flow, we're much more averse to companies that set up a deliberate conflict of interest between management and shareholders. And I guess there's a way in which you can read that and say, oh, it doesn't FTX prove I'm wrong.But, you know, there's another way you can look at it is that FTX deliberately set up outside the us. So there's a story to be told that actually we learned the lessons of Enron and, you know, uh, so remains obviously worked. Uh, that's why, you know, they were in The Bahamas and we haven't seen the scale fraud of that scale in, you know, the continental United States.Um, do, do you think that the FTX saga and I guess the absence of other frauds of that scale in America shows that. The regulations and this changed business and investment practices in the aftermath of Enron have actually. Bethany McLean: Well, I think they've probably worked in narrowly, written in, in the way in which the writer you quoted articulated, I think it would be very hard for the cfo, F O of a publicly traded company to set up other private [00:06:00] equity firms that he ran, that did all their business with his company.Because everybody would say That's Enron and it would be completely. On the nose. And so, and Sarbanes Oxley in the sense of, in the sense of helping to reign in corporate fraud of the sort that was practiced by Enron, which was this abuse of very specific accounting rules. Um, I think I, I, I think that worked.But you know, you say there hasn't been fraud on a scale like Enron up until perhaps f ftx, but you're forgetting the global financial crisis. Yeah. And then the end, the line between what happened at Enron. and, and what happened in the global financial crisis. It's not a matter of black and white. It's not a matter of, one thing was clear cut fraud and one thing great.We love these practices. Isn't this fantastic? This is the way we want business to operate. They're both somewhere in the murky middle. You know, a lot of what happened at Enron wasn't actually outright fraud. I've coined this phrase, legal fraud to describe, um, to describe what it is that, that, that, that happened at Enron.And a lot of what [00:07:00] happened in the global financial crisis was legal, hence the lack of prosecutions. But it's also not behavior that that leads to a healthy market or mm-hmm. , for that matter, a a a a healthy society. And so there's a reason that you had Sarbanes Oxley and what was it, eight short, short years later you had Dodd-Frank and so Riri broadly.I'm not sure Sarbanes actually did that much good. And what I mean by that is when President George Bush signed it into law in the Rose Garden, he gave this speech about how investors were now protected and everything was great and your, your ordinary investors could take comfort that the laws were meant to protect them from wrongdoing.And you compare that to the speech that President Barack Obama gave eight years later when he signed Don Frank into law in the Rose Garden. And it's remarkably similar that now ordinary investors can count on the rules and regulations keeping themself from people who are prey on their financial wellbeing.[00:08:00] And I don't think it was, it's, it's true in either case because our markets, particularly modern markets move and evolve so quickly that the thing that's coming out of left field to get you is never gonna be the thing you are protecting against. Mm. . Dwarkesh Patel: , but given the fact that Enron, as you say, was committing legal fraud, is it possible that the government, um, when they prosecuted skilling and Fastow and lay, they in fact, We're not, uh, they, they prosecuted them to a greater extent than the law as written at the time would have warranted.In other words, were, uh, was there something legally invalid in the, in this, in the quantity of sentence that they got? Is it possible? Bethany McLean: So that's a really, it, it's, it's a, I I get what you're asking. I think it's a really tricky question because I think in absolute terms, um, Enron needed to be prosecuted and needed to be prosecuted aggressively.And while I say it was legal fraud, that is for the most part, there was actually real fraud around, around, uh, but it's on the margin. It doesn't [00:09:00] entire, it doesn't explain the entirety of Enron's collapse. Much of what they did was using and abusing the accounting rules in order to create an appearance of economic reality.Nothing to do with actual, with actual reality. But then there was actual fraud in the sense that Andy Fasta was stealing money from these partnerships to benefit himself. And they were, if you believe, the core tenant of the prosecution, which was their, this agreement called Global Galactic that was signed by, that was between Andy fau and Jeff Skilling, where Jeff agreed that Andy's partnerships would never lose money.Then that invalidated all of the, all of the accounting, and that's the chief reason that that. That skilling was, was, was convicted, um, was that the jury believed the existence of this, of this, of this agreement that in, um, one set of insider stock sales, which, which we can talk about, which was also a really key moment relative to the, so in absolute terms, I don't know, it's, it's hard for me to, to say there was [00:10:00] such, Enron was such a, to a degree that is still surprising to me, such a, a watershed moment in our, in our country, far beyond business itself.it, it, it caused so much insecurity that about our retirements, our retirement assets safe. Can you trust the company where you work? That I think the government did, did have to prosecute aggressively, but relative to the financial crisis where a lot of people made off with a lot of money and never had to give any of it back, does it seem fair that, that, that Jeff Skilling went to jail for over a decade and no one involved in a major way in the financial crisis paid any price whatsoever?People didn't even really have to give up that much of the money they made then. Then it seems a little bit unfair. Yes, so I think it's, it's an absolute versus a relative Dwarkesh Patel: question. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, who do you think made more money? Um, the investment banks, uh, like, uh, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, um, from doing, [00:11:00] providing their services to Enron as the stock was going up, or Jim Chanos from shorting the stock?In absolute terms, who made more money? Bethany McLean: Oh, I think the investment banks for sure. I mean, they made, they made so much money in investment banking fees from, from, from Enron. But, you know, it's a good question. . , it's a good question actually, because I think Jim made a lot of money too, so, Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, you've spoken about, I guess the usefulness and the shortage of short sellers des a sort of, uh, corrective on irrational exuberance.And I'm curious why you think that shortage exists in the first place. Like, if you believe in the efficient market hypothesis, you should think that, you know, if some company has terrible financials and implausible numbers, then people would be lining up to short it. And then you would never have a phenomenon like Enron.And so it's, it's, you know, it's so odd that you can. , you know, reporters who are basically ahead of the market in terms of predicting what's gonna happen. Uh, well, uh, how do you square that with like the efficient [00:12:00] market hypothesis? Well, do you Bethany McLean: believe in the efficient market hypothesis, ? Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'd like to, but I'm like trying to , trying to wrap my head around Enron.Bethany McLean: I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure how you. Can, unless you, unless you adopt Warren Buffett's point of view, and I'm gonna mangle the quote because, uh, but, but it's that the market in the short term is a voting machine in the long term. It's a weighing machine, right? Mm-hmm. , or is it the other way around? . Anyway, but the idea is that the market may be very efficient for a long, very inefficient, for a long period of time.But, but it does actually, rationality does actually work in, in, in the end. And I think I might believe that, but isn't it John Maynard Cas who said the market can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent. And so I think that's true too. I think believing that the market is efficient and rational in the short term is just obviously wrongUm, but back to your question about short sellers, which is, which is interesting, you know, I think part of it is that there is still this, um, there certainly was a couple of [00:13:00] decades ago, and I think it still exists, this idea that. Owning stocks is Mom, American, and apple pie in shorting stocks somehow is bad and evil and rooting, rooting against America.And I remember going back to the Enron days, someone, people criticizing me, even other people in the press saying, but you took a tip from a short seller. They're biased. And I. , I would say. But, but, but wait, the analysts who have buy ratings on stocks and the portfolio managers who own those stocks, they're biased too.They want the stocks to go up. Everybody's biased. So the trick as a journalist is getting information from all sides and figuring out who you think is right and what makes sense. But it's not avoiding anybody with any bias. But it was really interesting that people saw the bias on the part of short sellers and did not see it on the part of, of, of Longs.And I think there is that preconception that exists broadly, that somehow you are doing something wrong and you're somehow rooting for a company's failure. And that this is, I don't know, anti-American if you, if, if you [00:14:00] short a stock. And so I think that's part of why there's, there's, there's a shortage of shortage of, of, of short sellers.Um, I think also, I mean, we've had. Incredible, unprecedented bull market for the last four decades as a result of falling interest rates, and especially in the decade before the pandemic hit, it was very, very difficult to make money shorting anything because everything went to the moon. Didn't matter if its numbers were good, if it was eventually unmasked to be somewhat fraudulent, , it stocks just went to the moon anyway.The riskier the better. And so it is only diehard short sellers that have managed to stick it out . Yeah, and I think, I think lastly, Jim Chano said this to me once, and I, I think it's true that he could find, dozens of people who were skilled enough to come, smart enough to come work for him.There's no shortage of that. People who are technically skilled and really smart, but being able to be contrarian for a long period of time, especially when the market is going against you, is a different sort [00:15:00] of person. It that it requires a completely different mindset to have everybody in the world saying, you're wrong to be losing money because the stock is continuing to go up and to be able to hold fast to your conviction.And I think that's another, uh, part of the explanation for why there are fewer short sellers. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, and that raised an interesting question about. Uh, venture capital, for example, where, or private markets in general? Um, at least in the public markets, there's shorting maybe in shortage, but it, it is a possible mechanism, whereas, uh, I'm a programmer.So, you know, if, if like a one guy thinks the company's worth a hundred million dollars and everybody else thinks it's not, you know, the company will still be, uh, the price will still be said by the, you know, the person who's a believer. Um, does that increase the risk of some sort of bubble in venture capital and in technology?Um, and I guess in private markets generally, if they're, they're not public, is that something you worry about that they're, they will be incredible bubbles built up if there's a lot of money that's floating around in these Bethany McLean: circles. . Well, I think we're seeing that now, [00:16:00] right? And I don't think it's a coincidence that FTX and Theranos were not publicly traded companies, right?Mm-hmm. . Um, there's a certain sort of, uh, black box quality to these companies because people aren't charting them and aren't, aren't, and aren't, you know, whispering to journalists about that. That there's something wrong here and there aren't publicly available financials for people to dig through and look, look, and look at the numbers.So now I don't think that's a coincidence. And I do think this gigantic move into private assets has been, um, probably not great for the, for the, for the, for the. for the, for the safety of the system. And you'd say, well, it's just institutional investors who can afford to lose money who are losing money.But it's really not because institutional investors are just pension fund money. Mm-hmm. and in some cases now mutual fund money. So that distinction that the people who are investing in this stuff can afford to lose it is not really true. Um, so I don't, I don't like that rationalization. I think we're gonna see how that plays out.There was [00:17:00] just a really good piece in the Economist about private equity marks on their portfolio companies and how they are still looked to be much higher than what you would think they should be given the carnage in the market. And so all of what, what actually things are really worth in private markets, both for venture capital firms and for private equity firms, Is absent another, another bubble starting, starting in the markets.I think we're gonna see how that plays out over, over the next year. And it might be a wake up call for, for a lot of people. Um, you know, all that, all that said, it's an interesting thing because investors have been very complicit in this, right? In the sense that a lot of investors are absolutely delighted to have prep, to have their, their private, um, their private investments marked at a high level.They don't have to go to the committee overseeing the investments and say, look, I lost 20% of your money the way they might, um, if, if the numbers were public. And so that the ability of these of private investors to smooth as they call it, the, the, the returns is, is it's [00:18:00] been, it's been part of the appeal.It hasn't been a negative, it's been a positive. And so I would say that investors who wanted this moving are. Art might be getting what they deserve except for the pointing made earlier that it isn't, it isn't their money. It's, it's the money of, of teachers and firefighters and individual investors a around the country, and that's, that's problematic.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Being in the world of technology and being around people in it has. made me, somewhat shocked when I read about these numbers from the past. For example, when I'm reading your books and they're detailing things that happened in the nineties or the two thousands, and then you realize that the salary that Hank Paulson made a c e o of Goldman, or that skilling made as, you know, um, c e o of Enron, you know, I, it's like I have friends who are my age, like 22 year olds who are raising seed rounds, , that are as big as like these people's salaries.And so it just feels like the, these books were, you have $50 billion frauds or, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of collapse and the individuals there, um, it just feels like they, it's missing a few zeros, uh, [00:19:00] because of the delusion of the private markets. But, um, but speaking of short sellers and speaking of private equity, um, I think it'd be interesting to talk about sbf.So, you know, your 2018 Vanity Fair article I thought was really interesting about, you know, sbf factory in Buffalo H How, how do you think back on Tesla and sbf now, given the fact that. The stock did continue to rise afterwards, and the factory, I believe, was completed and it's, I hired the 1500 or so people that had promised New York State, uh, is sbf just a fraud?Who can pull it off? And so he's a visionary. How, how do you think about sbf in the aftermath? Bethany McLean: So I don't think that's right about Buffalo and I have to look, but I don't think they ended up, I mean, the Solar City business that Tesla has pretty much collapsed. I don't think people haven't gotten their roofs.There was just a piece about how they're canceling some of their roof installations. So sbf has repeatedly made grand visions about that business that haven't played out. And I will check this for you post the podcast, but I don't think [00:20:00] if there is employment at that factory in, in Buffalo, it's not because they're churn out solar, solar, solar products that are, that are, that are doing.What was originally promised. So I guess I, I think about that story in a, in a couple of ways. It definitely, um, it was not meant to be a piece about Tesla. It was meant to be a piece that shown a little bit of light on how sbf operates and his willingness to flout the rules and his reliance on government subsidies, despite the fact that he, um, presents himself as this libertarian free, free, free market free marketeer, and his willingness to lie to, to, to, on some level enrich himself, which also runs counter to the Elon sbf narrative that he doesn't care about making money for, for himself.Because the main reason for Teslas to by Solar City was that Solar City had the main reason, was it Tes, that was, that Solar City had, that, that sbf and his, and his and his relatives had extended the these loans to Solar City that were gonna go. [00:21:00] There were gonna be lo all the money was gonna be lost at Solar City when bankrupt.And by having Tesla buy it, sbf was able to bail himself out, um, as, as as well. And I also think a good reason for the, for the, for, and it brings us to the present time, but a reason for the acquisition was that sbf knows that this image of himself as the invincible and vulnerable who can always raise money and whose companies always work out in the end, was really important.And if Solar City had gone bankrupt, it would've cast a big question mark over over sbf, over over the sbf narrative. And so I think he literally couldn't afford to let Solar City go bankrupt. Um, all of that said, I have, I have been, and was I, I was quite skeptical of Tesla and I thought about it in, in, in, in.And I always believed that the product was great. I just, mm-hmm. wasn't sure about the company's money making potential. And I think that, that, it's something I started thinking about, um, background, the Solar City time, maybe earlier, but this line, something I've talked about [00:22:00] before. But this line between a visionary and a fraudster.You know, you think that they're on two opposite ends of the spectrum, but in reality they're where the ends of the circle meet. Characteristics of one. One has that many of the characteristics of the other. And sometimes I think the only thing that really separates the two is that the fraudster is able to keep getting mo raising money in order to get through the really difficult time where he or she isn't telling the truth.And then they, that person goes down in history as a visionary. Um, but because no one ever looks back to the moment in time when they were lying, the fraudster gets caught in the middle. Um, so Enron's Lo lost access to to the capital markets lost AC access to funding as the market collapsed after the.com boom.And people began to wonder whether skilling was telling the truth about Enron's broadband business. And then there were all the disclosures about Andy fasa partnerships if Enron had been able to continue raising money, Business of Enron's called Enron Broadband might well have been Netflix. It was Netflix ahead of its time.So Enron just got caught in the middle and all [00:23:00] the fraud, all the fraud got exposed . Um, but that's not because Jeff Skilling wasn't a visionary who had really grand plans for, for, for, for the future. So I think sbf falls somewhere in that spectrum of, of, of fraudster and visionary. And what's gonna be really interesting why I said that this, we bring it to the present time about what happens to the mu narrative.If something fails is what happens. Yeah. Is as the world watch watches Twitter implode, um, what does that mean then for the Elon sbf narrative overall? Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, going back to the Smartest Guys is the Room, the title obviously suggests something about. The, I guess in general, the ability and the likelihood of very smart people committing fraud or things of that sort.Um, but you know, Begar Jones has this book called Hi Mind, where he talks about how the smarter people are more likely to cooperate in prisoners dilemma type situations. They have longer time preference. And one of the things you've written about is the problem in corporate America is people having shorter, [00:24:00] um, uh, you know, doing two too big time discounting.So, uh, given that trend we see in general of greater Cooperativeness, um, and other kinds of traits of more intelligent people, do you think the reason we often find people like S B F and skilling running big frauds just by being very intelligent, is it just that on, on average smarter people, maybe less likely to commit fraud, but when they do commit fraud, they do it at such garat scales and they're able to do it at such gar scales that it just brings down entire empires?How, how, how do you think about the relationship between intelligence and fraud? . Bethany McLean: That's interesting. Um, I'm not sure I know a coherent answer to that. Um, smartest guys in the room as a title was a little bit tongue in cheek. It wasn't meant to say, these guys actually are the smartest guys in the room. It was, it, it was a little bit, it was a little bit ironic, but that doesn't take away from the really good question that you asked, which is what, what, what is that relationship?I, I mean, I think if you look at the history of corporate fraud, you are not going to find unintelligent people having [00:25:00] been the masterminds behind this. You're gonna find really, really, really smart, even brilliant people having, having, having been, been behind it, maybe some at part of that is this linkage between the visionary and the fraud star that so many of these, of these corporate frauds are people who have qualities of the visionary and to.The qualities of, of a visionary, you have to have a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty high intelligence. Um, and I do think so many of these stories are, are about then self delusion. So I don't think smart people are any less likely to suffer from self delusion than dumb people. And they're probably more likely to, because you can rationalize, you know, the smart person's ability to rationalize just about anything they wanna rational rationalize is pretty profound.Whereas perhaps someone who doesn't have quite the same, the same brain power isn't gonna be able to create a narrative under which their actions are blameless and they're doing the right thing. So I think sometimes, so maybe there is some sort of relationship [00:26:00] there that somebody more qualified than I am would have to study between smart people's ability to, to, to rationalize just about anything as a way of, as part of the path to self delusion and part of the path by which these things happen.Yeah, that's completely, that's completely , that's Bethany theory. There's absolutely nothing to back that . I'm just Dwarkesh Patel: well clear. Let's do some more speculation. So, um, one of the things, uh, John Ray talked about in his testimony, um, was it two days ago where he said that, you know, FTX had done $5 billion of investments and deals in the last year, and most of those investments were worth a fraction of the value that FTX paid for them.And we see this also in, obviously in Enron, right? With, uh, broadband and with, um, ul, or is that how pronounce it, but basically their international department. Yeah. Um, what is this, uh, this obsession with deal making for its own sake? Is that to appease investors and make them think a lot's going on, is that because of [00:27:00] the hubris of the founder, of just wanting to set up a big empire as fast as possible, even if you're getting a bad sticker price?What, why do we see this pattern of just, you know, excessive deal making for its own sake? Bethany McLean: That's an interesting question too. I'm not sure that that's, um, limited to companies that go splat dramatically. There's a lot of, a lot of deal making in, in corporate America has that same frenzied quality. Um, I haven't seen an updated study on, on this in a, in a long time, but, you know, I began my career working as an analyst in an m and a department at at at Goldman Sachs.And. Definitely deals are done for the sake of doing deals. And I once joked that synergies are kind of like UFOs. A lot of people claim to have seen them, but there's no proof that they actually exist. , and again, I haven't seen an updated study on, on, on this, but there was one years back that showed that most m and a transactions don't result in increased value for shareholders.And most synergies, most promised synergies never materialize. [00:28:00] Just getting bigger for the sake of getting bigger and doing deals for the short term value of showing Wall Street a projection. That earnings are gonna be so much higher even after the cost of the debt that you've taken on. And that they're these great synergies that are gonna come about from, from combining businesses.So I don't know that either the frenzy deal doing or deal doing deals gone wrong is, um, solely limited to people who are committing fraud. , I think it's kinda across the spectrum. , . Dwarkesh Patel: Um, um, well one, one thing I find interesting about your books is how you detail that. And correct me if this is the wrong way to read them, but that, uh, incentives are not the only thing that matter.You know, there there's this perception that, you know, we've set up bad incentives for these actors and that's why they did bad things. But also, um, the power of one individual to shape a co co company's culture and the power of that culture to enable bad behavior, whether scaling at Enron or with Clarkson Right at Moody's.Yeah. Um, is that a good, good way of reading your books or how, how do you think [00:29:00] about the relative importance of culture and incentive? Bethany McLean: I think that's really fair. But incentives are part of culture, right? If, if you've set up a culture where, where how you're valued is what you get paid, I think it's a little, it's a little difficult to separate those two things out because, because the, the incentives do help make the culture, but for sure culture is incredibly, um, incredibly compelling.I've often thought and said that if I had, when I was leaving my short lived career in investment banking, if I had, if I had gotten in some of the head hunters I was talking to, if one of them had said, there's this great, really energetic, interesting energy company down in Houston, , why don't interview there?If I had gone there, would I have been a whistleblower or would I have been a believer? And I'd like to believe I would've been a whistleblower, but I think it's equally likely that I would've been a believer. Culture is so strong. It creates this. What's maybe a miasma that you can't see outside?I remember a guy I talked to who's a trader at Enron, really smart guy, and he [00:30:00] was like, after the, after the bankruptcy, he said, of course, if we're all getting paid based on creating reported earnings and there's all this cash going out the door in order to do these deals that are creating reported earnings, and that's the culture of the entire firm, of course it's not gonna work economically.He said, I never thought about it. . It just didn't, it didn't, it didn't occur to me. And I think the more compelling the CEO o the more likely you are to have that kind of mass delusion. I mean, there's a reason cult exist, right? . We, we are as human beings, remarkably susceptible to.Visionary leaders. It's just, it's the way the human brain is wired. We, we wanna believe, and especially if somebody has the ability to put a vision forward, like Jeff Gilling did at Enron, like Elizabeth Holmes did it Theranos like SPF F did, where you feel like you are in the service of something greater by helping this, vision, , actualize then, then you're, particularly susceptible.And I think that is the place where [00:31:00] incentives don't quite explain things. That is, there is this very human desire to matter, to do something important. Mm-hmm to be doing something that's gonna change the world. And when somebody can tap into that desire in people that feeling that what you're doing isn't just work in a paycheck and the incentives you have, but I mean, I guess it is part of the incentive, but that you're part of some greater good.That's incredibly powerful. Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel: It's what we all speaking of. We all wanna matter. . Yeah. Speaking of peoples psychology, uh, crime and punishment, underrated or overrated as a way to analyze the psychology of people like scaling and S B F or maybe SBF specifically because of the utilitarian nature of SB F'S crime?Um, Bethany McLean: I think it's, I think it's underrated, overrated. I'm not sure anybody. , I'm not sure anybody has ever proven that jail sentences for white collar criminals do anything to deter subsequent white collar crime. Mm-hmm. , and I think one part of this is the self delusion that I've, that I talked about. Nobody thinks, [00:32:00] oh, I'm doing the same thing as Jeff Skilling did at Enron, and if I, and if I do this, then I too might end up in jail.Therefore, I don't wanna do this. I just don't think that's the way the, the, the, the, the thought process works. I think Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, probably for the most part, convinced herself that this was going to work, and that if you just push forward and push hard enough and keep telling people what they wanna hear and keep being able to raise money, it's gonna work.You know, if. . If, if you pause to think, well, what if it doesn't work and I've lied and I go to jail, then, then you'd stop right, right then and there. So I think that, I think that, that I'm, I'm not, I'm not sure it's much of a deterrent. I remember, and partly I'm, I'm biased because I remember a piece, my co-author Peter Alkin, and I wrote out right after Jess Gilling and Kenley were, were convicted and can lay, we're we're convicted.And we wrote a piece for Fortune in which we said that the entire world has changed. Now that corporate executives are, um, are, are put on high alert that behavior in the gray area will no longer be tolerated and that it will be aggressively prosecuted. And this was spring of [00:33:00] 2006 and the events that caused the global financial crisis were pretty well underway.It didn't. Do much to prevent the global financial crisis. Mm-hmm. , Enron's, Enron's jail time, didn't do anything to present, prevent, Elizabeth Holmes doesn't seem to have done anything to change what Sbf was doing. So I just, I, I just, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure, I'm sure a psychologist or somebody who specializes in studying white color crime could probably make a argument that refutes everything I said and that shows that has had a deterring effect.But I just, I just don't think that people who get themselves into this situation, con, con, consciously think, this is what I'm doing. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, speaking of other incentives, stock options, uh, you've spoken about how that creates short-term incentives for the executives who are making decisions. If you wanted to set up an instrument that aligned an executive or a leader's compensation with the long-term performance of a company, what would that look like?W would you have the options of less than 10 years instead of a [00:34:00] year? H how would you design it? How do you usually design a compensation scheme to award long-term thinking? Bethany McLean: If I could do that, I should ru rule the world . I think that very sweet. I think that is one of the really tough, um, problems confronting boards or anybody who is determining anybody who's determining stock options and that almost anybody who's determining compensation and that most compensation schemes seem to have really terrible unintended consequences.They look really good on paper. And then as they're implemented, it turns out that there was a way in which they accomplished exactly the opposite of, uh, thing the people who designing them wanted, wanted them to accomplish. I mean, if you think back to the advent of stock options, what could sound better?Right. Giving management a share of the company such that if, if, if shareholders did well, that they'd do well, nobody envisioned the ways in which stock options could be repriced. The ways in which meeting earnings targets could lead to gaming the ways in which the incentive of stock-based [00:35:00] compensation could lead to people trying to get anything they could in order to get the stock price higher and cash out when they're, as soon as their stock options vested.So, and even there was, there was, the whole valiant saga was fascinating on this front because the people who designed Mike Pearson's compensation package as ceo e o Valiant, they were convinced that this was absolutely the way to do it. And he got bigger and bigger, um, stock option incentives for hitting certain, for having the stock achieve certain levels.But of course, that creates this incredible bias to just get the stock to go up no matter, no matter what else you do. Um, it does seem to me that vesting over the long term is. is, is a much better way to go about things. But then do you create incentives for people to play games in order to get the stock lower at, at various points where there's about to be a stock optional board so they have a better chance of having directions be, be worth, be worth something over the long term.And do you, particularly on Wall Street there is this, or in firms where this sort of stuff matters the most? There [00:36:00] is this, there was this clearing out of dead wood that happened where people got paid and they got outta the way and made way for younger people. And I don't know, it was a harsh culture, but maybe it made sense on some level.And now at least I've been told with much longer vesting periods, you have people who don't wanna let go. And so you have more of a problem with people who should have retired, stick sticking around instead of in, in, instead of clearing out. And then it also becomes a question, How much money is, is enough.So if somebody is getting millions of dollars in short-term compensation and then they have a whole bunch more money tied up in long-term compensation, do the long-term numbers matter? At what point do they, do they, do they really matter? I mean, if you gave me $5 million today, I'm not so sure I'd really care if I were getting another $5 million in 10 years.Right. ? Yeah. So, so I think all of that is, is it, it's, I'm not, I'm not sure there's a perfect compensation system. All things considered though, I think longer term is, is probably better, [00:37:00] but. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I didn't think about that downside of the long investing period. That's so interesting there. I guess there is no free lunch.Uh, so with Enron, um, it, it was clear that there was a lot of talent at the firm and that you had these companies and these trading firms launch at the aftermath by people who left Enron, kinder Morgan and John Arnold's, um, uh, Sintas, uh, that were wildly profitable and did well. Do you think we'll see the same thing with FTX, that while Sbf himself and maybe the, his close cadre were frauds, there actually was a lot of great trading and engineering talent there that are gonna start these very successful firms in the aftermath.Bethany McLean: That's, that's interesting. And just, just for the sake of clarification, kinder Morgan was actually started years before Enron's collapsed, when Rich Kinder, who was vying with Jeffs skilling in a sense, to become Chief Operating Officer. Um, Ken Lay, picked Jeffs skilling and Kinder left. Mm-hmm. and took a few assets and went to create Kinder, kinder Morgan.But your overall point, I'm just clarifying your overall point holds, there were a lot of people who [00:38:00] left Enron and went on to do, to have pretty, pretty remarkable careers. I think the answer with ftx, I bet there will be some for sure. But whether they will be in the crypto space, I guess depends on your views on the long-term viability of, of, of the crypto space.And I have never , it's funny is crypto exploded over the last couple of years. I was, I've been working on this book about the pandemic and it's been busy and difficult enough that I have not lifted my head to, to think about much else. And I always thought, I don't get it. I don't understand , I mean, I understand the whole argument about the blockchain being valuable for lots of transactions and I, I get that, but I never understood crypto itself and I thought, well, I just need to, as soon as this book is done, I just need to put a month into understanding this because it's obviously an important, important enough part of our world that I need to figure it out.So now I think, oh, Okay, maybe I didn't understand it for a reason and maybe, um, maybe there isn't anything to understand and I've just saved myself a whole life of crime because it's all gone. And you have [00:39:00] people like Larry Fink at BlackRock saying, whole industry is gonna implode. It's done. And certainly with the news today, this morning of finances auditor basically saying We're out.Um, I, I don't, I don't know how much of it was, how much of it was, is, was a Ponzi scheme. You might know better than I do. And so I don't know what's left after this whole thing implodes. It's a little bit like, there is an analogy here that when Enron imploded, yes, a lot of people went on to start other successful businesses, but the whole energy trading business is practiced by kind of under capitalized, um, um, energy firms went away and that never came back.Yeah. And so I, I, I don't, I don't know, I'm, it'll be, I, I don't know. What do you. The Dwarkesh Patel: time to be worried will be when Bethany McLean writes an article titled Is Bitcoin Overvalued for the Audience. My Moments on That ? Yeah, for the audience that, that was, I believe the first skeptical article about Enron's, um, stock price.Yeah. Uh, and it was titled [00:40:00] Is Enron Overvalued. In aftermath understated, , title. But , Bethany McLean: , I joked that that story should have won, won, won awards for the NICU title and business journalism history. , given that the company was bankrupt six months later was overpricedDwarkesh Patel: Um, uh, well, let me ask a bigger question about finance in general. So finance is 9% of gdp, I believe. How much of that is the productive use and thinking and allocation of the, uh, the capital towards their most productive ends? And how much of that is just zero sum or negative sum games? Um, if, if you had to break that down, like, is 9% too high, do you think, or is it just.I think it's Bethany McLean: too high. I have no idea how to think about breaking it down to what the proper level should be. But I think there are other ways to think about how you can see that in past decades it hasn't been at the right level when you've had all sorts of smart kids. Um, Leaving, leaving business school and leaving college and heading into [00:41:00] finance and hedge funds and private equity is their career of choice.I think that's a sign that that finance is too big when it's sucking up too much of, of, of the talent of the country. Um, and when the rewards for doing it are so disproportionate relative to the rewards of of, of doing other things. Um, the counter to that is that there've also been a lot of rewards for starting businesses.And that's probably, I think, how you want it to be in a, in a product. In a productive economy. So I think the number is, is too high. I don't know how to think about what it should be other than what a, actually, a former Goldman Sachs partner said this to me when I was working on all the devils are here, and she said that finance is supposed to be like the, the substrata of our world.It's supposed to be the thing that enables other things to happen. It's not supposed to be the world itself. So the, the role of a financial system is to enable businesses to get started, to provide capital. That's what it's supposed to be. It's the lubricant that enables business, but it's not supposed to be the thing itself.Right. And it's become the thing itself. [00:42:00] You've, you've, you've, you've, you've got a problem. Um, um, and I think the other, Dwarkesh Patel: there's your article about crypto , that paragraph right there. . Bethany McLean: There you go. That's, that's a good, um, and I think, I think the other way, you, you, you can see, and perhaps this is way too simplistic, but the other way I've thought about it is that how can it be if you can run a hedge fund and make billions of dollars from, and have five people, 10 people, whatever it is, versus starting a company that employs people mm-hmm.and changes a neighborhood and provides jobs and, you know, provides a product that, that, that, that, that improves people's lives. It, it is a shame that too much of the talent and such a huge share of the financial rewards are going to the former rather than the latter. And that just can't mean good things for the future.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, when people criticize technology, for example, for the idea that, you know, these people who would've been, I don't know, otherwise teachers or something, they're, you know, making half a million dollars at Google. [00:43:00] Um, and I think like when I was in India, people were using Google Maps to get through the streets in Mumbai, which is, which is unimaginable to me before going there that, you know, you would be able to do that with, um, a service built out of Silicon Valley.And so, Yeah, I think that actually is a good allocation of capital and talent. I, I'm not, I'm not sure about finance. Um, yeah, Bethany McLean: I think I, I, I agree with you. I think there are other problems with Google and with the, the social media giants, but, but they are real businesses that employ people, that make products that have had, uh, huge.Um, impact on on, on people's, on people's lives. So in, in that sense, it's very different than a private equity firm, for instance, and especially private equity, even more so than hedge funds draws my ire. Mm-hmm. , because I think one of the reasons they, that it, they've been able to make part of the financialization of our economy has been due to super, super low interest rates and low interest rates that have enabled so many people to make so much money in finance are not, they're just a gift.It wasn't because these people were uniquely smart, they just [00:44:00] found themselves in a great moment in time. And the fact that they now think they're really smart because money makes me crazy. Dwarkesh Patel: Um, are Fanny and Freddy America special purpose entities? Are they our Alameda? It's just the way we hide our debt and uh, that's interesting.Yeah. Bethany McLean: Well, I guess we, you know what? I don't know anymore because, so I last wrote about them when was it in 2016 and I don't know now. No, you're right. Their, their debt is still off, off, off balance sheet. So Yeah, in a lot of ways they, they were. . I would argue though that the old Fanny and Freddy were structured more honestly than, than the new Fanny and Freddy, that it really is conservatorship that have made them, um, that have made them America's off balance sheet entities, because at least when they were their own independent entities.Yes, there was this odd thing known as the implicit guarantee, which is when you think about, back to your point about efficient markets, how can you possibly believe there's an as such a thing as an efficient market when their [00:45:00] Fanny and Freddy had an implicit guarantee, meaning it wasn't real. There was no place where it was written down that the US government would bail Fanny and Freddie out in a crisis, and everybody denied that it existed and yet it did exist.Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel: No, but we, I feel like that confirms the official market hypothesis, right? The, the market correctly, they thought that mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddy would have governments. Uh, okay, okay. You might be father Bethany McLean: and they did . You might be right. I, I, I think what I was getting at you, you might be right.I think what I was getting at is that it is such a screwed up concept. I mean, how can you possibly, when I first, when people were first explaining this to me, when I first read about Fanny and Freddie, I was like, no, no, wait. This is American capitalism . This is, no, wait. What? I don't, I don't understand . Um, um, so yeah, but I, I, I, I think that Fanny and Freddie, at least with shareholders that were forced to bear some level of, of the risks were actually a more honest way of going about this whole screwed up American way of financing mortgages than, than the current setup is.Dwarkesh Patel: What [00:46:00] is the future of these firms? Or are they just gonna say in conservatorship forever? Or is there any developments there? Well, what's gonna happen to them? Bethany McLean: The lawsuit, the latest lawsuit that could have answered that in some ways ended in a mistrial. Um, I don't think, I don't, I don't think unfortunately anybody in government sees any currency in, and I mean, currency in the broad sense, not in the literal sense of money in, in taking this on.And unfortunately, what someone once said to me about it, I think remains true and it's really depressing, but is that various lawmakers get interested in Fannie and Freddy. They engage with it only to figure out it's really, really goddamn complicated. Mm-hmm. and that, and that any kind of solution is gonna involve angering people on one side of the aisle or another and potentially angering their constituent constituents.And they slowly back away, um, from doing anything that could, that, that could affect change. So I think we have a really unhealthy situation. I don't think it's great for these two [00:47:00] entities to be in conservatorship, but at this point, I'm not sure it's gonna change. Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Speaking of debt and mortgages, um, so total household debt in the United States has been, uh, climbing recently after it's, it's like slightly d decline after 2008, but I think in quarter three alone it increased 350 billion and now it's at 16.5 trillion.Uh, the total US household debt, should we worried about this? Are, are, are we gonna see another sort of collapse because of this? Or what, what should we think about this? Bethany McLean: I don't know. I don't know how to think about that because it's too tied up in other things that no one knows. Are we going to have a recession?How severe is the recession going to be? What is the max unemployment rate that we're gonna hit if we do, if we do have a recession? And all of those things dictate how to, how to think about that number. I. Think consumer debt is embedded in the bowels of the financial system in the same way mortgages were.And in the end, the, the, the [00:48:00] problem with the financial crisis of 2008, it wasn't the losses on the mortgages themselves. It was the way in which they were embedded in the plumbing of the financial system. Mm-hmm. and ways that nobody understood. And then the resulting loss of confidence from the fact that nobody had understood that slash lies had been told about, about that.And that's what caused, that's what caused everything to, to collapse. Consumer debt is a little more visible and seeable and I, I don't think that it has that same, um, that same opaque quality to it that, that mortgage backed securities did. I could be, I could be wrong. I haven't, I haven't, I haven't dug into it enough, enough to understand enough to understand that.But you can see the delinquencies starting to climb. Um, I mean, I guess you could on, on, on mortgages as well, but there was this, there was this profound belief with mortgages that since home prices would never decline, there would never be losses on these instruments because you could always sell the underlying property for more than you had [00:49:00] paid for it, and therefore everything would be fine.And that's what led to a lot of the bad practices in the industry is that lenders didn't think they had to care if they were screwing the home buyer because they always thought they could take the home back and, and, and, and, and make more money on it. And consumer debt is, is unsecured. And so it's, it's, it's different.I think people think about it differently, but I'd have. I'd have to, I'd have to do some more homework to understand where consumer debt sits in the overall architecture of the financial industry. Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'm really glad you brought up this theme about what does the overall big picture look like? I feel like this is the theme of all your books that people will be, So obsessed with their subsection of their job or, or that ar area that they won't notice that, um, broader trends like the ones you're talking about.And in Enron it's like, why, why, why do we have all these special purpose entities? What is the total debt load of Enron? Um, or with the, you know, mortgage back securities a similar kind of thing, right? What, what, uh, maybe they weren't correlated in the past, [00:50:00] but what's that? Do we really think that there's really no correlation, um, uh, between, uh, delinquencies across the country?Um, so that, that kind of big picture, think. Whose job is that today? Is it journalists? Is it short sellers? Is it people writing on ck? Who's doing that? Is it anybody's job? Is, is it just like, uh, an important role with nobody assigned to it? Bethany McLean: I think it's the latter. I think it's an important role with nobody, with nobody assigned to it, and there there is a limit.I mean, , I hate to say this, it is not, uh, um, it is not an accident that many of my books have been written. That's probably not fair. It's not true of my book un fracking, but that some of my books have been written after the calamity happened. So they weren't so much foretelling the calamity as they were unpacking the calamity after it happened, which is a different role.And as I said at the start of our conversation, I think an important one to explain to people why this big, bad thing took, took place. But it's not prediction, I don't know, as people that were very good at, at prediction, um, they tried [00:51:00] to set up, what was it called? In the wake of the global financial crisis, they established this thing called fsoc, and now I'm forgetting what the acronym stands for.Financial Security Oversight Committee. And it's supposed to be this, this body that does think about these big picture. That thinks about the ways, the ways an exam, for example, in which mortgage backed securities were, um, were, were, were, were, were, were, were repopulating through the entire financial system and ways that would be cause a loss to be much more than a loss.That it wouldn't just be the loss of money and that security, it would echo and magnify. And so that there are people who are supposed to be thinking about it. But I think, I think it's, it's, it's really hard to see that and. In increasingly complex world, it's even, it's even harder than it was before, because the reverberations from things are really hard to map out in, in, in advance, and especially when some part of those reverberations are a loss of confidence, then all bets [00:52:00] are off because when confidence cracks, lots of things fall apart.But how do you possibly analyze in any quantitative way the the risk that that confidence will collapse? Mm-hmm. . So I think it's, I think, I think, I think it's difficult. That said, and of course I am talking my own book here, I don't think that the lack of the, the increased financial problems of journalism really help matters in that respect, because in an ideal world, you want a lot of people out there writing and thinking about various pieces of this, and then maybe somebody can come along and see the.Pieces and say, oh my God, there's this big picture thing here that we all need to be thinking about. But there's, there's a kind of serendipity in the ability to do that one, that one that the chances, I guess the best way to say that is the chances of that serendipity are dramatically increased by having a lot of people out there doing homework, um, on the various pieces of the puzzle.And so I think in a world, particularly where local news has been decimated mm-hmm. , um, the [00:53:00] chances of that sort of serendipity are, are definitely lower. And people may think, oh, it doesn't matter. We still got national news. We've got the Washington Post, we've got the Wall Street Journal, we've got the New York Times.Um, I would love to have somebody do a piece of analysis and go back through the New York Times stories and see how many were sparked by lp, a piece in the local paper that maybe you wouldn't even notice from reading the New York Times piece, because it'd be in like the sixth paragraph that, oh yeah, credit should go to this person at this local paper who started writing about this.But if you no longer have the person at the local paper who started writing about this, You know, it's, it's, it's, it's less likely that the big national piece gets written. And I think that's a part of the implosion of local news, that people, a part of the cost of the implosion of local news that people don't really understand the idea that the national press functions at, at the same level, um, without local news is just not true.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. And, but even if you have the local news, and I, that's a really important point, but even if you have that local news, there still has to be somebody whose job it is to synthesize it all together. And [00:54:00] I'm curious, what is the training that requires? So you, I mean, your training is, you know, math and English major and then working at working in investment banking.Um, is that the, uh, I mean, obviously the anecdotal experience then equals one, seems that that's great training for synthesizing all these pieces together. But what is the right sort of education for somebody who is thinking about the big picture? Bethany McLean: I, I don't, I don't know.And there may be, there may be, there are probably multiple answers to that question, right? There's probably no one, one right answer for me. In, in the end. My, my math major has proven to be pivotal. Even though , my mother dug up these, um, my, my parents were moving and so my mother was going through all her stuff and she dug up these, some my math work from, from college.Literally, if it weren't for the fact that I recognized my own handwriting, I would not recognize these pages on pages of math formula and proofs. And they're like, get gibberish to me now. So , but I, but I still think that math has, so I do not wanna exaggerate my mathematical ability at this stage of [00:55:00] the game.It's basically no. But I do think that doing math proofs any kind of formal, any kind of training and logic is really, really important because the more you've been formally trained in logic, the more you realize when there are piece is missing and when something isn't quite, isn't quite adding on, it just forces you to think in, in a way that is, that in a way that connects the dots.Um, because you know, if you're moving from A to B and B doesn't follow a, you, you understand that B doesn't follow a And I think that that, that, that kind of training is, is really, really important. It's what's given. , whatever kind of backbone I have as a journalist is not because I like to create controversy and like to make people mad.I actually don't. It's just because something doesn't make sense to me. And so maybe it doesn't make sense to me because I'm not getting it, or it doesn't make sense to me because B doesn't actually follow, follow away, and you're just being told that it does. And so I think that, I think that training is, is really, really important.Um, I also have, have often thought [00:56:00] that another part of training is realizing that basic rule that you learned in kindergarten, which is, um, you know, believe your imagination or you know, your imagine follow your imagination. Because the truth is anything can happen. And I think if you look at business history over the last couple of decades, it will be the improbable becoming probable.Truth over and over and over again. I mean, the idea that Enron could implode one of the biggest, supposedly most successful companies in corporate America could be bankrupt within six months. The, from its year, from its stock price high. The idea that the biggest, most successful, um, financial institutions on wall, on Wall Street could all be crumbling into bankruptcy without the aid of the US government.The idea that a young woman with no college degree and no real experience in engineering could create, uh, uh, um, could create a machine that was going to revolutionize blood testing and land on the cover of every business magazine, and that this [00:57:00] whole thing could turn out to be pretty much a fraud. The entire idea of ftx, I mean, over and over again, these things have happened.Forget Bernie Madoff if you had told people a year ago that FTX was gonna implode six months ago, three months ago, people would've been like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so I think just that, that, that, that knowledge that the improbable happens over and over again is also a really fundamental, fundamentally important.Dwarkesh Patel: If we're con continuing on the theme of ftx, I, I interviewed him about four or five months ago.Wow. And this is one of these interviews that I'm really, I'm, I don't know if embarrass is the right word, but I knew things then that I could have like asked, poked harder about. But it's also the kind of thing where you look back in retrospect and you're. If it had turned out well, it's, it's not obvious what the red flags are.Um, while you're in the moment, there's things you can look back at the story of Facebook and how, you know, Marcus Zuckerberg acted in the early days of Facebook and you could say, if the thing fell apart, that this is why, or, you know, this is a red flag. So [00:58:00] I have a hard time thinking about how I should have done that interview.B

Laura Choy joins me today to Celebrate Two Years of EYS podcast!  Her Top 5 CliftonStrengths are:  RESTORATIVE, INDIVIDUALIZATION, CONNECTEDNESS, EMPATHY & ADAPTABILITY.    You can learn about what she does with Noonday Collection here. To Listen to episodes mentioned you can click here:  Episode  33 Celebrating Our 40th Anniversary with  Warren Culwell  Episode 24 A Fun and Charming Go Getter with Rachel Buchanan Episode 28 Survived for a Purpose with Claire Culwell  Episode 36 Wondering if My Strengths Matter with Wendy Kohman Episode 57 Learning in a Season of Winter with Lisa Elmore Episode  61 Gifted by God to Bring Love and Hope to Others with Gerry Buchholz Episode 75 iAn Inspiring Teen Custom Cake Baker with Reese Saliceti CliftonStrengths Top 5 Assessment   Workshops and Coaching with Barbara Culwell Subscribe & Leave a Review on Embrace Your Strengths

Chris Volk is an investor and former CEO of three publicly traded companies. A 2019 regional winner of EYs' Entrepreneur of the Year award, Volk is a frequent university lecturer and serves on multiple non-profit boards. • Studying history/literature teaches that things don't necessarily follow a straight line.  • 300 rejection letters out of college.  • 6 years in banking opened the door to go from being a credit geek to CEO.  • Void of Knowledge – Learning how to sell yourself and how you can add value to the companies you work with.  TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [3:10] The thing about business majors. [8:20] Guy who had the solutions. [12:09] Summer job experience. For priceless insights, check out WEIDELONWINNING.COM To stay in touch with me follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/larryweidel/ Facebook: https://bit.ly/34c4Ul1 Twitter: https://twitter.com/larryweidel Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larryweidel/ Subscribe to my Youtube channel for more! https://www.youtube.com/c/WeidelOnWinning

Chris Volk is an investor and former CEO of three publicly traded companies. A 2019 regional winner of EYs' Entrepreneur of the Year award, Volk is a frequent university lecturer and serves on multiple non-profit boards. • Studying...

Please join Marsha Casper Cook, host at Michigan Avenue Media,on June23rd at 4EST 3CST 2MT 1PCT when she welcomes Amy Patricia Meade for a fun filled discussion about movies old and new! Amy Patricia Meade is the Author of the critically acclaimed Marjorie McClelland Mysteries, Vermont Country Living Mysteries, and Tish Tarragon Mysteries. Amy Patricia Meade is a native of Long Island, NY, where she cut her teeth on classic films and books featuring Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown. After stints as an Operations Manager for a document imaging company and a freelance technical writer, Amy left the bright lights of New York City and headed north to pursue her creative writing career amidst the idyllic beauty of Vermont's Green Mountains. After five years living in Bristol, England, Amy now resides in upstate New York. http://amypatriciameade.com Marsha Casper Cook is not only an award-winning author and screenwriter she is also the host and producer of all of the Michigan Avenue Media Podcasts on Blog Talk Radio. Her most recent accomplishment is her contribution to the worldwide magazine eYs. Marsha has written over fifteen books and twelve screenplays, including romance, dramas, and children's books. Her latest series is, The Warrington Legacy, where she writes about the trials and tribulations of a family using her own sense of love and family commitment as her guide. To her, family matters, and that is reflected in every book she writes. http://marshacaspercook.com Also, several of her books are translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian.

Please join Marsha Casper Cook and Trish Wilson for a fabulous discussion with John Skipp on Thursday June 2 4EST 3 CST 2 MT 1PST.  John Skipp is a New York Times bestselling author, editor, film director, zombie godfather, compulsive collaborator, black-humored optimist, and all-around Renaissance mutant. John Skipp is a splatterpunk horror and fantasy author and anthology editor, as well as a songwriter, screenwriter, film director, and film producer. He collaborated with Craig Spector on multiple novels and has also collaborated with Marc Levinthal and Cody Goodfellow. Trish Wilson's short fiction has appeared in "Zippered Flesh 3", "Wicked Women: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers", "Teeming Terrors," "The Black Stone: Stories for Lovecraftian Summonings", "Dancing in the Shadows: A Tribute to Anne Rice", "Death's Garden Revisited", "The Horror Zine's Book of Ghost Stories", "The Horror Zine's Book of Werewolf Stories", and more. She has interviewed numerous horror writers for The Horror Zine and is also the Media Director for The Horror Zine.   Link to Elizabeth Marsha Casper Cookis not only an award-winning author and screenwriter she is also the host and producer of all of the Michigan Avenue Media Podcasts on Blog Talk Radio. Her most recent accomplishment is her contribution to the worldwide magazine eYs. Marsha has written over fifteen books and twelve screenplays, including romance, dramas, and children's books.     

Please join Marsha Casper Cook, Jennifer Hilt, and Krysten Lyndsay Hager on May 26th at 4EST 3CST 2 MT 1PST for a great discussion and lots of fun!  Jennifer Hilt is a USA Today Bestselling author who has worked as a plotter and concept creator. She's written 24 books across four pen names and she has a degree in linguistics and literature. She lives in Seattle with her family and her canine fan club. She also loves collecting dictionaries in unfamiliar languages, bingeing Scandi-Noir streaming series, and shouting out tropes from the comfort of her couch. About Jennifer Krysten Lindsay Hager writes books about hope, true love, fame, self-worth, friendship, & happily ever afters. Krysten is the author of True Colors, Best Friends...Forever?, Next Door to a Star, Landry in Like, Competing with the Star, Dating the It Guy, Can Dreams Come True, and In Over Her Head: Lights, Camera, Anxiety. True Colors, won the Readers Favorite award for best preteen book and the Dayton Book Expo Bestseller Award for children/teens. About Krysten http://www.krystenlindsay.com Marsha is an author, screenwriter, and host-producer of all the Michigan Avenue Media podcasts on Blog Talk Radio. About Marsha Marsha Casper Cook is not only an award-winning author and screenwriter she is also the host and producer of all of the Michigan Avenue Media Podcasts on Blog Talk Radio. Her most recent accomplishment is her contribution to the worldwide magazine eYs. Marsha has written over fifteen books and twelve screenplays, including romance, dramas, and children's books.  

Please join Marsha Casper Cook and Dick Belsky on March 19th at 4EST 3CST 2MT 1PST when they discuss Ozark. It's going to be a lot of fun discussing all the seasons of Ozark and the cast. Dick Belsky is a New York City journalist and author. He is the author of 12 mystery/suspense novels and several non-fiction sportsbooks. He also was the Managing Editor of News for NBCNews.com - directing day-to-day coverage for the network website and also working closely with the digital extensions of Nightly News, the Today show, Dateline, and other NBC programming. Before that, he worked at NBC as Vice President of News for Local Integrated Media - which runs local websites in the 10 cities where NBC owns television stations. Dick will be talking about Ozark and other television series.  Marsha Casper Cook is not only an award-winning author and screenwriter she is also the host and producer of all of the Michigan Avenue Media Podcasts on Blog Talk Radio. Her most recent accomplishment is her contribution to the worldwide magazine eYs. Marsha has written over fifteen books and twelve screenplays, including romance, dramas, and children's books. Her latest series is, The Warrington Legacy, where she writes about the trials and tribulations of a family using her own sense of love and family commitment as her guide. To her, family matters, and that is reflected in every book she writes. Also, several of her books are translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian.

Save Your Asks: Evolve Your Networking Currencies. Grow Your Influence. Triple Your Business with Chris Tuff Chris Tuff was one of the first advertisers to work directly with Mark Zuckerberg in 2006 and filmed one of the first “viral” videos, which landed him on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Tuff's natural ability to connect with his nearly 80% millennial and Gen Z workforce led him to publish the national bestselling The Millennial Whisperer in 2019. www.christuff.me and get social with Chris on IG | FaceBook | Twitter | Linkedin! The Value Equation: A Business Guide to Wealth Creation for Entrepreneurs, Leaders & Investors with Christopher H. Volk Christopher H. Volk, author of THE VALUE EQUATION, has been instrumental in leading and publicly listing three successful companies, two of which he co-founded. He eventually created an award-winning video series on the topic while at STORE Capital. A 2019 regional winner of EYs' Entrepreneur of the Year award, Volk is a frequent university lecturer and serves on multiple non-profit boards. He resides in Paradise Valley, Arizona, and Huntsville, Alabama. www.thevalueequation.com Tips for Successful Bootstrapping, with Chas Sampson Seven Principles CEO Chas Sampson is an Iraq War veteran and the founder of several companies. Monikered after the seven Army values (Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage), Seven Principles empowers veterans transitioning out of the military by assisting with the VA claims process, appeal cases, entrepreneurship, and more. Chas currently serves as board chairman for the Partnership for Children of Cumberland County, a 502(c)(3) nonprofit that works to improve early childhood education, health, and family support. www.sevenprinciples.com

On todays podcast I had the privilege of hosting Christopher Volk, co-founder and former CEO of STORE Capital (NYSE: STOR) and author of the upcoming book " The Value Equation:  A Business Guide to Creating Wealth for Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Business Leaders” which is available in May, 2022. On the podcast we talked about how you are more likely to be a billionaire than win the lottery, the Six variables of analysing a company, value vs growth investing over the coming years and best piece of advice Chris has received. I hope you enjoy!The Book - Wiley - https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Value+Equation:+A+Business+Guide+to+Wealth+Creation+for+Entrepreneurs,+Leaders+&+Investors-p-9781119875642Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Value-Equation-Business-Entrepreneurs-Investors/dp/11198756410:00 - Introduction0:36 - What was your influence for writing the book?3:20 - How did students find the information?6:05 - More likely to become a billionaire than win the lottery8:02 - The Six Variables14:17 - Beat the average returns16:14 - Are others overcomplicating their analysis?19:18 - One of the biggest mistakes business make is running out of cash21:40 - Buy a good company, pay a premium23:10 - Any other variables?25:20 - What business models should investors be analysing?27:10 - Value investing vs growth over the coming years?28:50 - Are there any red flags that you keep an eye on?35:15 - Accounting systems35:35 - Future of the US Housing Market39:38 - Best piece piece of advice Chris has received?41:05 - What is the message you would like listeners to takeaway from the book?Christopher Volk, author of THE VALUE EQUATION, has been instrumental in leading and publicly listing three successful companies, two of which he co-founded. The most recent is STORE Capital (NYSE: “STOR”) where he served as founding chief executive officer and then as executive chairman. Volk, who has written about corporate finance since early in his career and has created an award-winning video series about the topic, is a regional winner of EYs' Entrepreneur of the Year award. He resides in Paradise Valley, Arizona, and Huntsville, Alabama.Christopher Volk - Website - http://www.thevalueequation.com/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-volk-86848b3/Article - https://medium.com/authority-magazine/author-christopher-volk-5-things-every-ceo-should-know-about-navigating-the-world-of-finance-58c07fa208cWTFinance - Website - https://www.wtfinance.online/Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/wtfinancee/Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/67rpmjG92PNBW0doLyPvfnTikTok - https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeUjj9xV/iTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wtfinance/id1554934665?uo=4LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-fatseas-761066103/Twitter - https://twitter.com/AnthonyFatseas

Christopher H. Volk, author of THE VALUE EQUATION, has been instrumental in leading and publicly listing three successful companies, two of which he co-founded. The most recent of these is STORE Capital (NYSE: “STOR”) where he served as founding chief executive officer, and then as executive chairman. Volk began writing about corporate finance early in his career, devising the Value Equation concept, which garnered an award upon its 1999 introduction. He eventually created an award-winning video series on the topic while at STORE Capital. A 2019 regional winner of EYs' Entrepreneur of the Year award, Volk is a frequent university lecturer and serves on multiple non-profit boards. He resides in Paradise Valley, Arizona, and Huntsville, Alabama. www.thevalueequation.com

Success is not attained with a snap of a finger. It definitely won't happen overnight, so you have to work your way through it. That is exactly how success was achieved by our guest in today's episode, Brett St. Clair. Brett worked in medical sales as an associate when he felt incomplete because it was not his dream role. So instead, he made this a stepping stone for his career to gain experience, learn more about the medical field through asking more questions to his seniors. He also enrolled in EYS program by Samuel, our host, which he considered to be his best professional decision and was able to help him towards his dream. So now he's living a completely different life with his dream company while making the magic happen. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here's How » Join the Medical Sales Podcast Community today: evolveyoursuccess.com

David Russell (Proselytize or Apostatize – PorA) and Dane van Eys join Noah, Josh and Tyler to answer questions like “How do we handle temptation & sin practically” and “How do we help others that are struggling with temptation”. All temptation is circumstantial yet, for believers, God has promised a way out in every temptation (1 Cor. 10:13). As believers in Jesus Christ, sanctified by the Holy Spirit of God, we must, at times, grit our teeth, push through the pain, find the door that God has promised to put in every temptation, and walk through it, even when we don't “feel like it”. In the second half, we offer exegesis of Matthew 4 so come hang out with us for an hour and let us know what you thought of this episode of The Complete Sinner's Guide!

Ein Sekt aus Eys in Limburg in den Niederlanden und drei Weine aus Auernhofen in Franken warteten gut gekühlt darauf, in der 31. Folge unseres Podcasts "Auf ein Glas" geöffnet, verkostet und probiert zu werden. Was die Domein Adenborgh in Eys und der Winzerhof Stahl in Auernhofen miteinander zu tun haben? Ja nüschte! Der Sekt war ein Mitbringsel aus dem Urlaub in Amsterdam und die drei Frankenweine waren der Test, ob 2017er noch gut ins Gastro-Geschäft passen könnten. Weil es sich so ergab, probierten wir dann abschließend spontan noch einen Sauvignon Blanc aus der Pfalz (vom Weingut von Winning)… Mehr bei den STIPvisiten...

Welcome to another episode of #TipTopTipsEdu!In this episode, we are joined by former Primary school teacher, now Product Manager of ReallySchool, Kat Cauchi. With a number of accolades to her name such as being a member of the Gender Equality Collective, a TechnoCamps GiST role model and an author for the Global Edtech team, Kat's work and sharing in the wider education community is worthy of checking out!  A positive role model for education on social media, Kat is passionate about connecting, collaborating and supporting other educators on social media, and can regularly be found sharing ideas around Early Years, Primary, wellbeing, mindfulness and more.With a laser-focus on supporting teachers in Early Years and Key Stage 1, I thought it only right to ask Kat for her top tips around these areas and so there are the five questions I asked her: 1.    What are your top tips for closing out the school year?2.    What are your top tips for fun end-of-term activities that still link to learning?3.    Do you have any top tips to ensure a smooth transition from Reception to KS1 or KS1 to KS2?4.       Anxiety can be a big issue for our youngest learners –  do you have any top tips to help with this issue?5.    We recently collaborated on the EYFS Periodic Table... could you share just FIVE must-follow EYFS educators from that table and any tips for engaging on Twitter?In a fantastic episode with, quite frankly, so many ideas and takeaways, I think it'd be useful for those who teach beyond Early Years and Primary phases. If you're interested in checking out the 82 people on the Early Years Periodic Table, you can find the post with the original resource, plus an interactive PDF, right here. You can follow Kat on Twitter: @ReallySchoolK. Prefer to watch? You can watch the podcast here:https://youtu.be/IC6_JLY1Biw

In this episode of CSG, David Pallmann and Dane van Eys drop by to discuss postmodernism in general and postmodernism in the Church! What is the Christian response to this ideology? Find out right here!!! Al Mohler points out that PM actively seeks to deconstruct Truth. Truth is revealed in Scripture by God. Seems to be a direct attack on Christianity. Hypothetically PM is an attitude of skepticism: irony toward rejection of grand narratives, ideologies and universalism. It criticizes objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, absolute truth and objective reality. Its predicated on the idea that the reason someone "categorizes" is to marginalize to obtain power. Power is pretty much all there is. One element of PM states that human nature is merely a social construct. Dr. Jordan Peterson criticizes this notion by explaining that the reason human nature is merely a social construct is so the postmodernist can construct it however they like! Postmodernism = Deconstructionism, Relative Feeling & leads to Socialism Metaphysical (hard) pm: no beliefs are true Epistemological (soft) pm: skepticism Subtle ways PM creeps in to the church: Bible studies: what does this verse “mean to you” Music Attack on Creation PM is both philosophical and cultural. What stems from PM: 1. Race and Gender politics 2. Advocacy journalism 3. Political correctness 4. Rejection of science and technology 5. Multi-culturalism (all cultures ways are equal) CRITIQUE: PM ultimately refutes itself with the denial of objective truth. If truth is not objective HOW can PM be objectively true? Regarding morality or truth, ultimately what is "accepted" or "rejected" is utterly arbitrary. This places the person (instead of Jesus) as "God", the determiner of all "truth". Practical Steps to Combat Postmodernism: PRAY!!! Know Scripture! Love Others! Make sure you are not part of the problem!

This week Anna (https://twitter.com/AnnaRRose) chats with Adrian Brink (https://twitter.com/adrian_brink), co-founder of the Anoma Network and long-time crypto builder. Adrian explains all there is to know about the new privacy-centric network, diving into concepts like fractal scaling, the validity predicate-based account model, the solution against front-running in Ferveo & much more. Here are some links for the episode: CowSwap & DAO Tech with Gnosis's Martin Köppelmann, Zero Knowledge episode 183 (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/183) Through the Cosmos Stargate Upgrade, Zero Knowledge episode 174 (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/174) Cosmos, IBC and ZKPs with Chris Goes, Zero Knowledge episode 115 (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/115) Trusted Setup Ceremonies Explored, Zero Knowledge episode 133 (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/133) Threshold Decryption for mempool privacy with Dev Ojha, ZKV Cosmos Privacy & ZKP showcase (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q_uvvKmqrY&list=PLj80z0cJm8QGNPbPJ2adQhN5W890O7YMr) The Wyvern protocol (https://wyvernprotocol.com) mentioned by Adrian. The Plumo trusted setup ceremony (https://celo.org/plumo) (phase 2 happening soon) mentioned by Anna Anoma's Whitepaper (https://anoma.network/papers/whitepaper.pdf) and blog posts (https://anoma.network/blog). The next zkSessions is scheduled for June 23 and will focus on DAOs and NFTs, in the context of privacy and zkps. This will also be a special event where the community will discuss the potential of a ZK DAO! Sign up for the zkSessions here: https://hopin.com/events/zksessions-daos-nfts Today's episode is sponsored by EY Blockchain. EY is committed to building a better working world on the public Ethereum blockchain with robust privacy technologies, like zero-knowledge proofs. EY believes blockchain technology will be the glue that knits together a productive global business ecosystem. To learn more about EYs products and services, visit them at https://blockchain.ey.com or check out their open source contributions at https://github.com/eyblockchain. If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) Join us on Telegram (https://t.me/joinchat/TORo7aknkYNLHmCM) Catch us on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWsYz5cKw4wZ9Mpe4kuM_g) Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/zkpodcast) Give us feedback! -https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A Support our Gitcoin Grant (https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2) Support us on the ZKPatreon (https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge) Donate through coinbase.commerce (https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/f1e56274-c92b-4a99-802f-50727d651b38) Or directly here: ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Revelation 1:20“The mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.” Rev. 1: The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John:2 Who bare record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.wail/wāl/Learn to pronouncenounnoun: wail; plural noun: wails a prolonged high-pitched cry of pain, grief, or anger. "Christopher let out a wail"

Welcome to Episode 47!  Check out the recorded livestream over at https://youtu.be/axagcen_Eys ! This week's Geek Question of the Day is: What fictional story would be the worst (or best depending on your viewpoint) 'dark and gritty' reboot and why? Evil Puppets and Twisted Nannies! (Thanks @geekquestioner for the question!) In our Roll for Credits segment, we spend time with the 2017 Korean action fantasy film, Along with the Gods; The Two Worlds! Oh my goodness what a great movie! We ramble on and on about how much we loved this movie! Come listen all about it! And as always, geekery, video games, and chickens.   (And apologies for the sound clip issues folks! Somebody donate a Stream Deck! LOL) Thanks for listening, and hit us up on Twitter for your thoughts on the episode! Sean streams whatever games he is playing Thursdays at 7:30pm. Come watch a livestream of the podcast every Friday at 8:00 pm EST at https://www.twitch.tv/genepoolvarietyhour! Hope to see you there! Oh, and we know all the Twitters! Gene Pool Variety Hour on Twitter at @GPVarietyHour... Sean: Headgamer on XBox Live @headgamer on Twitter @head_gamer on Twitch Connor: QuillMiester on Xbox Live @QuillMiester on Twitter @QuillMiester on Twitch

Các đời tổng thống Pháp đãi khách như thế nào ? Thực đơn gồm những gì và bàn tiệc được trang hoàng ra sao ? Guillaume Gomez, đầu bếp của điện Elysée, phần nào trả lời những câu hỏi trên qua tác phẩm A la table des Présidents (Bàn tiệc qua các đời tổng thống), do nhà xuất bản Cherche Midi phát hành. Trong hơn 200 trang, tác giả đưa chúng ta ngược thời gian, trở về với bữa đại tiệc ngày 08/04/1957 tổng thống René Coty khoản đãi nữ hoàng Elizabeth II và phu quân là quận công Philip, và chặng cuối của cuốn sách là thực đơn được soạn cho buổi dạ tiệc hôm 10/11/2018, với hình ảnh tổng thống Emmanuel Macron và phu nhân trên thảm đỏ điện Elysée đón chào nguyên thủ quốc gia Mỹ Donald Trump và first lady Melania. Vào thế kỷ 19, một nhà ngoại giao và chính trị gia lớn dưới thời hoàng đế Napoleon, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord (1754-1838) từng quả quyết : để thành công, một nhà ngoại giao cần có đầu bếp giỏi. Chìa khóa giúp cho Talleyrand giữ vững được sự nghiệp qua nhiều triều đại chính là ông vua bếp Antonin Carême (1784-1337). Carême ngay từ lúc sinh thời được xem là người mở đường đưa nghệ thuật ẩm thực của Pháp ra với thế giới. Ông được mệnh danh là « le roi des chefs et le chef des rois » do trong tiếng Pháp ông đầu bếp được gọi là chef. Antonin Carême là « vua của những ông đầu bếp và cũng là đầu bếp của các vua chúa ».  Antonin Carême đã để lại dấu ấn rất đậm nét tại điện Elysée, khi cung điện này còn thuộc về hoàng thân Joachim de Murat, em rể của hoàng đế Napoléon I. Từ khi được bước chân vào phủ tổng thống phục vụ trong nhà bếp, Guillaume Gomez rất hãnh diện được tiếp bước trên con đường Antonin Carême đã khai mở. Ngày nay, phục vụ trong dinh tổng thống, hơn bao giờ hết, vua bếp Gomez ý thức được xứ mệnh của mình rất lớn lao, bởi vì « người ta bị chia rẽ vì quan điểm chính trị, nhưng lại luôn đoàn kết chung quanh một bàn ăn ». Thời nào cũng vậy, một bữa ăn ngon một bàn tiệc đẹp mắt luôn là nhịp cầu ở mọi cấp từ « vua quan đến hạng bình dân ».   Cơ hội để nấu ăn như « nhà vua » Có nhiều lý do để độc giả được cầm trong tay cuốn A la table des Présidents. Nếu thích làm bếp, thích ăn ngon và muốn mỗi bữa ăn của bạn phải là một « tác phẩm nghệ thuật » bạn sẽ được đầu bếp Gomez dẫn giắt từng bước để thực hiện những món ăn cầu kỳ như là « Cœur d’artichaut Princesse » kết hợp hoa ác ti sô và măng tây trong món đầu tiên bữa tiệc tổng thống de Gaulle đãi vị quân chủ cuối cùng của Iran và hoàng hậu năm 1961, hay món « Rouget croustillant au Pistou », cá hồng chiên dòn với sốt dầu ô liu và lá nguyệt quế laurier mà tổng thống Valdimir Putin đã cùng thưởng thức với tổng thống Jacques Chirac năm 2003. Vào lúc món gan ngỗng béo đang ngự trị trên bàn tiệc của mọi nhà trong những ngày lễ cuối năm, đầu bếp Guillaume Gomez hướng dẫn cặn kẽ « với gan ngỗng, gan vịt tươi, nên chọn lá gan nhạt màu, gói trong miếng giấy hơn là túi nhựa hút hơi. Gan phải mềm, không tì vết và không có vết huyết ». Với một món ăn rất đặc biệt khác trong mùa này là sò huyết Saint Jacques. Trên đài RFI, ông vua bếp của điện Elysée khuyên chúng ta như sau : « Điều cần thiết là nên tin tưởng vào nhà cung cấp tùy theo nơi bạn ở. Sò điệp của vùng Bretagne hay Normandie không quan trọng, mà điểm chính ở đây là hải sản phải tươi. Kế tới, chúng ta nên lên thực đơn tùy theo những nguyên liệu mình có, chứ không nên làm ngược lại. Về kỹ thuật chế biến, tôi khuyên các bạn nên làm các món đơn giản, bảo đảm mọi người sẽ thành công. Cái khó nhất ở đây là cách mình canh lửa. Nấu kỹ quá là hỏng. Hơn nữa ta có thể ăn sò sống mà ! Nên không cần nấu kỹ quá. Mình có thể lạng thân sò thành những lát thật mỏng, vắt một chút chanh và ướp tí muối tiêu là có thể dùng được rồi. Còn nếu muốn nấu sò, thì chỉ bắc lên lửa Saint Jacques khi mọi người bắt đầu ngồi vào bàn ăn và nấu rất nhanh » ! Những câu chuyện ở hậu trường Nếu tò mò muốn biết về những chuyện ở hậu cung trong phủ tổng thống Pháp và nhất là trong nhà bếp của điện Elysée, cuốn A la table des Présidents sẽ rất thú vị. Đầu bếp Gomez nói qua về cung cách tiếp khách của cựu đệ nhất phu nhân Bernadette Chirac : « Bà Chirac có những đòi hỏi rất cao mỗi lần điện Elysée tiếp khách. Bà xem đây là một sinh hoạt hết sức quan trọng. Bàn ăn phải thật hoàn hảo từ nghệ thuật trưng bày đến phần thực đơn. Đây cũng là một sự thay đổi lớn trong xã hội. Bốn mươi năm trước, thử hỏi có ai biết đến tên tuổi bếp trưởng của phủ tổng thống Pháp hay không ? Còn giờ đây thì tôi đang được vinh dự phát biểu với quý đài ! » Gần như mỗi món được đầu bếp Guillaume Gomez giới thiệu đều đi kèm với một vài giai thoại : trên bàn tiệc năm 1961 tổng thống de Gaulle đãi đồng nhiệm Mỹ Kennedy, món « Velouté Sultane » còn đọng lại đến hôm nay như một viên ngọc quý trong số hàng ngàn thực đơn được lưu trữ tại Thư Viện Quốc Gia. Báo chí nói nhiều đến đôi vợ chồng tổng thống Mỹ đẹp như tài tử điện ảnh Hollywood, biểu tượng của một thế hệ lãnh đạo tuổi trẻ tài cao, của một nước Mỹ đầy nhựa sống. Vẻ đẹp quý phái của đệ nhất phu nhân Hoa Kỳ Jackie Kennedy đã chinh phục công luận Pháp. Điều mà đầu bếp Gomez không nhắc tới, đó là trong bữa tiệc hôm 31/05/1961, một phần tương lai của nhân loại ít nhiều được « đặt lên bàn tiệc ». Paris là chặng dừng trước khi tổng thống Kennedy sang Vienna dự thượng đỉnh với lãnh đạo tối cao Liên Xô Nikita Krushchev. Thượng đỉnh đó là điểm khởi đầu cho giai đoạn tan băng trong thời kỳ chiến tranh lạnh. Ngày 19/03/1990 tổng thống François Mitterrand tiếp đón trọng thể nguyên thủ Cộng Hòa Séc, Vaclav Havel. Sự kiện mở đầu bằng một buổi hòa nhạc trước khi quan khách ngồi vào bàn tiệc với món chính là « Turban de sole » : Thăn cá bơn chiên bơ nhồi củ cải. Hai năm trước đó, Vaclav Havel vẫn còn là một nhà văn, một nhà trí thức trong hàng ngũ đối lập, nhưng đã được François Mitterrand tiếp tại sứ quán Pháp ở Praha nhân một chuyến công du của tổng thống Pháp tại Tiệp Khắc. Gần với chúng ta hơn, đầu bếp Gomez kể lại kỳ tích chỉ có đúng 15 phút để phục vụ một bữa tiệc giữa nguyên thủ quốc gia Pháp Nicolas Sarkozy và tổng thống Hoa Kỳ Barack Obama. Ngày 06/06/2009, Barack Obama dự lễ kỷ niệm 65 năm ngày quân đồng minh đổ bộ lên bờ biển Noramandie giải cứu châu Âu thoát khỏi ách Đức Quốc Xã. Vua bếp Gomez đã phải thay đổi toàn bộ chương trình vào giờ chót, khi tổng thống Mỹ chỉ có 15 phút để thưởng thức tài nghệ của các đầu bếp Pháp. Giữa hai món ăn, hai ông Sarkozy-Obama đã bàn về hạt nhân Iran và tình hình Trung Đông: « 15 phút như vừa nói và như vậy chúng tôi bắt buộc phải thích nghi với những đòi hỏi của các nhà lãnh đạo. Xưa kia, dưới thời tổng thống Chirac, khi ông ngồi vào bàn, thì bất luận chỉ có hai thực khách hay có tới 250 người, phục vụ phải thật chuẩn. Tất cả phải sẵn sàng. Lần này tổng thống Mỹ Obama bị trễ so với lịch trình nghị sự. Bên lễ tân cho biết ông chỉ có 15 phút để dùng bữa trưa với tổng thống Sarkozy và trong đúng 20 phút nữa Barack Obama đã yên vị trong chiếc trực thăng rời khỏi thành phố Caen. Chúng tôi bắt buộc là phải thi hành các mệnh lệnh đó thôi và thế là trong đúng 15 phút, chúng tôi dọn bàn với hai khẩu phần cho hai nguyên thủ Pháp- Mỹ và bữa ăn có đủ ba món : khai vị, món chính và tráng miệng. Họ không có thời gian nói chuyện nhiều, nhưng 15 phút là đủ để dùng ba món ăn đó ». Nghệ thuật ẩm thực xoay chuyển cùng với thời đại Từ đời tổng thống này đến đời tổng thống khác, trong mọi hoàn cảnh, đầu bếp của điện Elysée phải hoàn thành sứ mạng làm thực khách hài lòng. Guillaume Gomez tiết lộ về thực đơn tổng thống Emmanuel Macron khoản đãi đồng nhiệm Mỹ Donald Trump mùa thu 2018 : « Phía chủ nhà luôn chú trọng vào đánh giá của các quan khách được mời vào bàn tiệc của tổng thống Pháp và điều quan trọng là thực khách phải hài lòng. Chính vì vậy trong bữa tiệc (ngày 10/11/2018), tổng thống Donald Trump đã thốt lên lời khen « It was amazing » sau khi thưởng thức món sườn heo mọi của vùng Bigorre. Khi đó tôi biết đã chọn đúng món nguyên thủ Mỹ ưa thích. Sườn heo gợi lại hương vị của món ăn rất Mỹ là món Ribs, nhưng thực ra thì đây là một món ăn mang nặng nét đặc thù của ẩm thực Pháp : nào là heo mọi đen vùng Bigorre, nào là khoai tây do một nhóm thanh niên của thị trấn Neuilly de Plaisance vùng Seine Saint Denis tự trồng. Khoai tây cắt sợi nhỏ rồi chiên vàng như là những cọng rơm. Bàn tiệc tổng thống Pháp khoản đãi đồng nhiệm Mỹ như vậy là đã vinh danh những sản phẩm của Pháp và công sức của những nhà chăn nuôi và trồng trọt Pháp ». Đầu bếp điện Elysée phải làm tất cả để nổi bật nét đặc thù của Pháp trong nghệ thuật ẩm thực, qua cách đặt bàn, nhưng không quên một thoáng gì gợi nhớ hương vị những người khách đến từ phương xa. Đó là điều cựu tổng thống François Hollande cảm kích trong nghệ thuật nấu ăn của vua bếp Gomez. Thí dụ như đầu bếp của điện Elysée đã tìm cho những quả tranh xanh Brazil một chỗ đứng xứng đáng bên cạnh những con sò điệp trong bữa tiệc tổng thống Hollande dành cho nữ tổng thống Brazil Dilma Rousseff. Đó là chưa kể bữa trưa phục vụ cùng lúc 190 lãnh đạo trên thế giới tại khu triển lãm Le Bourget nhân ngày khai mạc thượng đỉnh khí hậu Paris, COP21. François Hollande cho rằng nghệ thuật ẩm thực của Pháp ở chót vót trên đỉnh cao do tôn trọng môi trường và hệ sinh thái. Vua bếp Gomez nói đến nghệ thuật nấu nướng  thay đổi với thời gian và trào lưu xã hội : « Các công thức những món ăn không nhất thiết phải là văn bản viết ra. Đôi khi là các đầu bếp truyền miệng lại cho nhau, từ đời này sang đời khác và mỗi người lại có phong cách riêng để thể hiện món ăn đó. Đương nhiên các món ăn dù có được xem là kinh điển cũng chuyển biến theo thời gian và nhất là phải phản ánh xã hội Pháp vào thời điểm đó. Thí dự như 50 năm trước đây, nấu súp măng vào giữa tháng Giêng mùa đông giá lạnh, dùng rau quả trái mùa là một chuyện bình thường. Thế nhưng bây giờ các đầu bếp của Pháp không làm như vậy nữa. Chúng tôi dùng những sản phẩm tùy theo mùa và đó là một yếu tố then chốt trong nghệ thuật nấu nướng của các ông vua bếp. Kế tới là thực đơn được soạn tùy theo các nguyên liệu chúng tôi được cung cấp. Điều quan trọng là phải dùng đồ tươi, sản xuất tại chỗ và khoảng cách giữa người tiêu dùng với các nhà trồng trọt phải được thu hẹp tối đa. Để làm được như vậy các đầu bếp thường trao đổi trực tiếp với các nhà sản xuất. Thật ra thì lâu nay chúng tôi đã thay đổi cung cách nấu nướng này rồi, nhưng đặc biệt vào dịp tổ chức bữa tiệc chiêu đãi 190 nguyên thủ quốc gia và thủ tướng nhân hội nghị khí hậu Paris COP21, chúng tôi lại phải càng cố gắng, vì tiếng vang của bữa tiệc đó rất lớn. Các đầu bếp phục vụ cho sự kiện này phải làm gương cho tất cả với thông điệp : môi trường là một yếu then chốt đối với các dịch vụ ăn uống và nhà hàng ».  Bàn ăn ở phủ tổng thống, dù là đại dạ tiệc – diner d’Etat chiêu đãi một nguyên thủ quốc gia nhân chuyến viếng thăm ở cấp nhà nước, hay chỉ đơn thuần là repas de travail, tức là một bữa cơm trong lúc lãnh đạo cùng làm việc và tiếp tục thảo luận về một dự án nào đó, « đều là một tác phẩm nghệ thuật phù du với những nét rất đặc thù của Pháp ». Cựu tổng thống Nicolas Sarkozy đã viết như trên trong lời mở đầu giới thiệu cuốn sách của vua bếp Gomez. Đương kim chủ nhân điện Eysée Emmanuel Macron nhắc lại ý của nhà ngoại giao Talleyrand xưa kia : mỗi ông vua bếp đều là những « sứ giả » của nước Pháp. Họ là những cánh tay đắc lực của những người điều hành đất nước, bởi mỗi bàn ăn ở phủ tổng thống đều là « một khoảnh khắc để chia sẻ, để trao đổi, để hòa đồng. Những ông vua ngự trự trong nhà bếp giúp cho giới lãnh đạo ngồi vào cùng một bàn, kết thân, dẫn tới đối thoại và mang lại hòa bình ».   Trên đài RFI đầu bếp Guillaume Gomez nhận định : mỗi món ăn trên bàn tiệc của phủ tổng thống phải phản ánh phong cánh riêng của Pháp, những giá trị và cách suy nghĩ của người Pháp : Liberté - Egalité - Fraternité. Các ông vua bếp ở Elysée tự do đưa quan khách của tổng thống Pháp thám hiểm những kho tàng trong nghệ thuật ẩm thực Pháp. Họ có trách nhiệm tạo điều kiện để mỗi đặc sản của tất cả các vùng miền trên đất Pháp đều có một chỗ đứng công bằng trên các bàn tiệc của nguyên thủ Pháp. Quan trọng hơn hết, đó là các nhà trồng trọt và chăn nuôi, các nhà phân phối và những nhà đầu bếp đều là huynh đệ trong đại gia đình Ẩm Thực Pháp.

Dug chats with long time friends Mark Wook and Laura Kaye about continued transformation and pivoting in the music industry! Recording artist, performer, producer, inventor, Emmy award-winning composer, and music education advocate Mark Wood has spent the past four decades electrifying the orchestra industry – literally. Dubbed ‘The Les Paul and Jimi Hendrix of The Violin World' by PBS, Wood is the premier electric violinist of his generation who pioneered the entire genre. Wood rose to fame as string master and original member of the internationally acclaimed Trans-Siberian Orchestra, selling over 10 million albums. A successful solo artist in his own right, Wood writes and records original music for film and television, has released seven albums, and tours with his band The Mark Wood Experience. He also is featured on his own TED talk, and his YouTube channel (markwoodtv) has over 4 million views. Laura Kaye has a lyricism and musicality all her own and is a rock and roll chanteuse whose take-no-prisoners voice invokes the likes of Steven Tyler and Aretha Franklin. As a singer, songwriter, performer, and vocal coach, Laura has spent the last 20 years empowering young singers as part of Electrify Your Symphony (EYS), a groundbreaking music education program she co-founded with Mark Wood. Laura has worked with legendary musicians such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Lenny Kravitz, and Sean Lennon and her voice has been featured on countless television shows and advertisements. In addition to her solo work, Laura is the featured vocalist on many of Mark's recordings. The true passion of this power couple is music education. Their groundbreaking music education program Electrify Your Symphony (EYS) is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2020. EYS is an immersive rock and roll workshop and concert series for school music departments that boosts student self-esteem and helps raise much-needed funds. Mark, Laura, and their team of Artist Mentors visit upwards of 75 schools per year. EYS has been featured on NBC-TV's The Today Show, CBS Evening News, CBS Morning News, and regional media outlets. In addition to EYS, Mark and Laura run the annual Mark Wood Rock Orchestra Camp and Festival, now in its 11th year, as well as The Mark Wood Music Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization dedicated to supporting music and the arts in America's underserved communities. With schools closed due to COVID-19, Mark and Laura were quickly tasked with finding ways to continue their mission by reinventing every aspect of their shared businesses, as creative people must do these days. www.mwmfoundation.org www.woodviolins.com www.electrifyyoursymphony.com www.mwroc.com For your free Guided Hypnotic Meditation go to www.guidedhypnotic.com  

For more on this episode visit www.bcarrollevents.com/hearts-stripes IG at https://www.instagram.com/heartsstripes. Register for the 5 Day Combat COVID Marriage Summit to EYS at https://bcarrollevents.com/summit --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Today's Guest is Harry Gaskell, Chief Innovation Officer for EY UK and Ireland. What is a Chief Innovation Officer? Well that's something we discuss in today's show but at it's most basic, Harry is responsible for identifying emerging technologies to launch new platforms and products to help EY improve its clients' businesses. Prior to taking this role Harry was the Managing Partner of EY's UK & Ireland Advisory business which he grew from zero to £250m during his time at the helm. In addition to his work with EY Harry is the Chair of the Employers' Network for Equality and Inclusion, Chair of the Finance Committee for the University of the Arts, London and an angel investor and mentor to a number of innovative start ups. Harry was a fantastic guest with a truly unique perspective on the Consulting industry and how it's going to change over the coming years. If you're looking to understand how you can future proof your career and get to the top of the industry, or any industry for that matter, then you're going to love this conversation. We cover a whole host of topics including: What the Consultancy of the Future will look like and how the skills needed and the approach to working with clients is going to fundamentally change. The impacts these changes will have on the traditional Consulting Business model and the real world examples of how EYs use of emerging technology is resulting in them having to look at these questions now. How to foster a culture of innovation within your organisation and the common mistakes that Consultancies and large corporates make when it comes to innovation.  And why taking some time out of Consulting could actually be the best thing for your long term Consulting career. Harry was as open as he was insightful and this episode has a huge amount for everyone. Whether you're a consultant just starting out or a managing partner running your own firm I know you're going to get a lot from what Harry has to say. You can get in touch with Harry through his LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/harry-gaskell-ab94271/ This episode is brought to you by Create Engage the Digital Marketing agency for the disruptive Management Consultancy. Specific things we discuss in the show: Christopher Brooker's theory of the 7 basic plots for all stories - https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-seven-basic-plots-9780826452092/ Kim Paykel - EYX Programme Director - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimpaykel/ EYX - https://www.ey.com/uk/en/services/specialty-services/ey-taking-innovation-to-the-next-level George Orwell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell My country Right or Left by George Orwell - https://www.amazon.co.uk/George-Orwell-1940-1943-Collected-Journalism/dp/1567921345

In Oct 2018 the International Baccalaureate will release the long-awaited Primary Years Programme (PYP) Principles into Practice. Elements of this new curriculum framework have slowly been released over the last year and it has ignited a buzz of critical conversations across the PYP community. In anticipation of the release of these Enhancements, Angeline Aow has interviewed a number of leading PYP educators from around the world about their thoughts, hopes, expectations and developing understanding of the upcoming enhancements. In this episode, Angeline interviews Carolina Gianetto about transdisciplinary learning.  Carolina has been a PYP educator since 2000 as a starting homeroom teacher in Brazil. Since then she has worked in international PYP schools in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Moscow, Russia where she has been a teacher, PYP coordinator, Assistant Principal and is now the Head of EYs and Primary at St. Francis College in Sao Paulo. Carolina has been a PYP workshop leader and site visitor for over 10 years as she worked in IB Americas and in Europe and the Middle East. You can follow Carolina on Twitter, or visit her website here. Professional Learning International would like to note that these podcasts have been developed independently from the IB and were created with the intent to promote understanding, implementation and in support of educators around the globe. All content are the individuals’ perspectives and are interpretations of programme documentation that these IB Educators have access to through their IB schools and IB Educator Network roles. 

Thomas Holm Møller, partner at EYs digital strategy practice, joins us to elaborate on the first AI maturity survey - conducted in collaboration with Microsoft - across 277 European corporates. Additionally Maarten de Rijke, university professor AI at the University of Amsterdam, talks about what an AI eco-system could look like, what it asks of governments, institutions and corporates - and why a strong eco-system is crucial to stay competitive. What will it take to win in this new world? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Espen Norheim, leder for EYs rådgivning innen olje og gass, snakker om den blodferske oljeserviceanalysen som viser at norsk leverandørindustri for første gang går i minus. I samtale med oljejournalistene Glenn Stangeland og Erlend Frafjord. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Author: Dr. Blair Evans Dr. Michael Blair Evans is an assistant professor of kinesiology at Pennsylvania State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University, Masters of Arts in Kinesiology and Physical Activity from University of Lethbridge and his Bachelor of Arts in Sport Psychology at Laurentian University. His research interests include how personal relationships influence the experiences of athletes and exercisers, group dynamics, and youth sport. With several studies published already, Dr. Evans is expanding his research interests and following several specific lines of research that he discusses during the show.   Links:   Author: http://hhd.psu.edu/kines/directory/Bio.aspx?id=EvansBlair   Articles mentioned in the interview:   Bruner, M. W., Eys, M. A., Evans, M. B., & Wilson, K. (2015). Interdependence and Social Identity in Youth Sport Teams. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 27, 351-358.   http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10413200.2015.1010661   Evans, M. B., McGuckin, M., Gainforth, H., Bruner, M. W., & Côté, J. (2015). Informing programs to improve interpersonal coach behaviours: A systematic review using the RE-AIM framework. British Journal of Sport Medicine, 49, 871-877.   http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/49/13/871.abstract?sid=74624d71-9f50-40f5-af11-5c32b029bc79     Evans, M. B., & Eys, M. A. (2015). Collective goals and shared tasks: Interdependence structure and perceptions of individual sport team environments. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, 25, e139–e148.   http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sms.12235/abstract   Evans, M. B., Eys, M. A., & Bruner, M. W. (2012). Seeing the ‘we’ in ‘me’ sports: The need to consider individual sport team environments. Canadian Psychology, 53, 301-308.   http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&id=4FEC9C9C-072E-02AB-0949-371D2297124B&resultID=1&page=1&dbTab=pa&search=true       “I think there is huge potential to start teach coaches about more elements of team dynamics that extend beyond maybe norms and maybe motivational climate and enter into things like roles of members, interdependence and how you socialize people into groups and create that positive group environment.”  

OZZY, SHADYON, STONE SOUR, TERRY BROCK, FIRST SIGNAL, DROWNING POOL, NEGATIVE, END OF YOU, KORN, H.E.A.T, INDICA, SHINEDOWN, 69 EYS, ACCEPT, GRAND ILLUSSION, AVANTASIA, DANKO JONES... Sólo algunos de los nombres que vais a poder disfrutar en este programa que hemos preparado para despedir junio. Muchísimas novedades en un NU ROCKS mu caluroso. En el Hat trick, SOBER. Además hablaremos del ARF, del SONISPHERE, del vino WHITESNAKE.... NON STOP!

The hebrew letter Ayin and its relationship with eyes, imagination, meditation, samadhi, the teachings of Jesus, the pillars of cloud and fire, Samson, and more.