Podcasts about sarbanes

new york president chicago washington joe biden executive director congress white house turkey greece stake prepares cyprus focuses halc mitsotakis sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2024 48:41

Today we continue our series of Conversations with the Candidates. My guest is Del. Terri Hill, a Democrat, one of several members of the Maryland General Assembly. She is running for Congress in the 3rd Congressional District. The incumbent, John Sarbanes, will retire from the House of Representatives next January. Terri Hill is a physician who grew up in Columbia, Maryland. She earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her medical degree from Columbia University in New York. She is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who has practiced medicine in the Baltimore metropolitan area for more than 30 years.Email us at midday@wypr.org, tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

new york conversations house congress maryland baltimore democrats campaign columbia succeed columbia university harvard university candidates congressman congressional districts maryland general assembly sarbanes terri hill

Congress focuses on Cyprus as Mitsotakis prepares for US visit

The Greek Current

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 20, 2024 10:58

This week the leaders of the Hellenic Caucus in Congress sent a letter to President Biden calling on him to invite President Christodoulides to the White House to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Turkey's invasion of Cyprus. They also urged the Biden administration to take a series of steps that could take the US-Cyprus relationship to new heights. In the meantime, Prime Minister Mitsotakis will visit New York and Chicago next week, a visit that highlights Greece's growing reputation beyond Washington. Endy Zemenides, HALC's Executive Director, joins Thanos Davelis to break down the latest developments on Cyprus in Washington, and provide a look ahead at Prime Minister Mitsotakis' upcoming visit to the US.You can read the articles we discuss on our podcast here:Sarbanes, Hellenic Caucus Leaders Urge President Biden to Formally Invite the President of Cyprus to the White House to Mark 50th Anniversary of Turkish Invasion of CyprusPrime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Greece's Economic ComebackGov't rules out referendum on same-sex marriage billIeronymos says referendum could be held on same-sex civil marriagesGreece to Sell ‘Significant' Stake in Piraeus Bank in Months (1)Mitsotakis says he wants Greece to become exporter of green energy

Rep. Sarbanes's priorities in his last term; Harborplace redesign and other city headlines

On The Record on WYPR

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 6, 2023 26:07

Why is Democrat John Sarbanes leaving Congress after nine terms? What will he focus on during his last 14 months in public office? Plus: Baltimore Banner reporter Adam Willis on redrawing city-council districts and an ambitious plan to reimagine the Inner Harbor. Read:Harborplace developer pitches 900 residential units, rooftop park at Inner HarborSafe Streets staffer charged, Belair-Edison operations suspended following FBI raidCity Council approves Baltimore redistricting map, countering mayor's proposalDo you have a question or comment about a show or a story idea to pitch? Contact On the Record at: Senior Supervising Producer, Maureen Harvie she/her/hers mharvie@wypr.org 410-235-1903 Senior Producer, Melissa Gerr she/her/hers mgerr@wypr.org 410-235-1157 Producer Sam Bermas-Dawes he/him/his sbdawes@wypr.org 410-235-1472

congress record baltimore priorities redesign senior producer inner harbor sarbanes adam willis

S5E02: Overturned Tables: Democracy Reform: John Sarbanes

Another Way, by Lawrence Lessig

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2023 86:07

Reform is possible. Congressman John Sarbanes is proof. Sarbanes is the most important architect of democracy reform in Congress today. In this episode, Lessig and Sarbanes speak about the For the People Act, and where reform will continue.

congress democracy reform tables overturned people act lessig sarbanes

Congressman John Sarbanes on the state of the U.S. Congress

congress senate congressman sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2023 25:03

Congressman John Sarbanes joins Midday. Can Congress avoid a government shutdown? Will Speaker Kevin McCarthy be able to appease his right flank and the Senate?Email us at midday@wypr.org, tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Letters on the Autonomy Project w/Janet Sarbanes

The Real News Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2023 80:42

The notion of "autonomy" has growing political appeal in a time of rising fascism, but what does this term really mean, and what kinds of potential might it offer? TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with author and artist Janet Sarbanes to discuss her book, Letters on the Autonomy Project.Janet Sarbanes is an author and a professor of creative writing and cultural studies. Her books Army of One and The Protester Has Been Released are collections of short fiction.Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

project army letters autonomy sarbanes

[Best] Bethany McLean - Enron, FTX, 2008, Musk, Frauds, & Visionaries

The Valmy

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 22, 2022 85:58

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

united states america god ceo american spotify netflix culture english google art business washington giving advice speaking new york times truth elon musk leaving mom barack obama fortune congress human tesla theory force ufos silicon valley wall street ceos wall street journal helps washington post buffalo incredible audience kinder intelligence owning fraud capitalism insider pieces consumer ac collapse economists characteristics bahamas chief operating officer goldman sachs warren buffett aaa big picture visionary oftentimes shortage moody mumbai vanity fair google maps purdue new york state mm ftx blackrock admit pwc relying goldman texting morgan stanley justice department mclean nicu ponzi elizabeth holmes tes sha theranos george bush valiant visionaries enron fo sbf wirecard cra doubtful longs rose garden riri jeffs pliny larry fink dodd frank powerpoints solarcity skilling long term thinking permian sacklers john ray shaky ground sarbanes oxley bethany mclean john arnold washington mutual smartest guys mike pearson jim chanos 21this fannie freddie ken lay sarbanes wamo hank paulson eys devils are here svf dwarkesh patel jeff skilling

Bethany McLean - Enron, FTX, 2008, Musk, Frauds, & Visionaries

The Lunar Society

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 21, 2022 85:58

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

united states america god ceo american spotify netflix culture english google art business washington giving advice speaking new york times truth elon musk leaving mom barack obama fortune congress human tesla theory force ufos silicon valley wall street ceos wall street journal helps washington post buffalo incredible audience kinder intelligence owning fraud capitalism insider pieces consumer ac collapse economists characteristics bahamas chief operating officer goldman sachs warren buffett aaa big picture visionary oftentimes shortage moody mumbai vanity fair google maps purdue new york state mm ftx blackrock admit pwc relying goldman texting morgan stanley justice department mclean nicu ponzi elizabeth holmes tes sha theranos george bush valiant visionaries enron fo sbf wirecard cra doubtful longs rose garden riri jeffs pliny larry fink dodd frank powerpoints solarcity skilling long term thinking permian sacklers john ray shaky ground sarbanes oxley bethany mclean john arnold washington mutual smartest guys mike pearson jim chanos fannie freddie ken lay sarbanes hank paulson wamo eys devils are here svf dwarkesh patel jeff skilling

The Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act.

ACB Advocacy

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2022 38:31

On this episode of the ACB Advocacy Update, Clark and Swatha speak with John Pare, Executive Director for Advocacy and Policy at the National Federation of the Blind, Claire Stanley, Public Policy Analyst at the National Disability Rights Network, and Stephanie Enyart, Chief Public Policy and Research Officer at the American Foundation for the Blind, on one of ACB's 2022 legislative imperatives, the recently introduced Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act (H.R.9021 and S. 4998). We talk about how this bill got started, what it does and why we need it, and how listeners can get involved and build support to help get it passed. For the joint press release issued by ACB, AFB, NDRN, and NFB, visit Senator Duckworth and Representative Sarbanes Introduce Bill to Make Websites and Mobile Applications Accessible to Individuals with Disabilities | American Council of the Blind (acb.org) For the one pager, section by section analysis, and FAQ on the bill, visit Sarbanes, Duckworth Introduce Bicameral Legislation to Help Make Websites and Software Applications Accessible for Americans with Disabilities | Congressman John Sarbanes (house.gov) To contact your Representative and Senators, call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. To access NDRN's tool for finding and contacting your members of Congress on this bill, visit Tell Congress to Make the Web Accessible for People with Disabilities! (salsalabs.org) To access NFB's fact sheet on the bill, visit Fact Sheet: Twenty-First Century Mobile Apps and Website Accessibility Act | National Federation of the Blind (nfb.org) Find out more at https://acb-advocacy-update.pinecast.co

John Sarbanes, Democrat for MD's 3rd congressional district

covid-19 safety congress nasa advocacy congressional grab bag acb federal aviation administration sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2022 25:13

Early voting in Maryland begins this Thursday. Today, we continue our series of Conversations with the Candidates: 2022, Tom's guests are the Democratic and Republican nominees for Maryland's 3rd congressional district. The district includes Howard and most of Anne Arundel Counties, plus a slice of Carroll County. It used to include parts of Baltimore City and Montgomery County, but the lines were re-drawn this year. In the second half of the today's program, Tom speaks with Yuripzy Morgan, the Republican nominee. But we begin with Congressman John Sarbanes, a Democrat who is running for re-election. Rep. Sarbanes has served in the House since 2007. He serves on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and the House Oversight and Reform Committee. He also chairs the Democracy Reform Task Force, which was the driving force behind HR1, the For The People Act. John Sarbanes is 60 years old. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He lives in Towson. He and his wife are the parents of three adult children. John Sarbanes joins us on Zoom.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Advocacy Grab Bag Back in Session.

ACB Advocacy

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2022 29:12

Congress is back in session, and so is the ACB Advocacy team! On this episode of the ACB Advocacy Update, Clark and Swatha provide another round of updates for our listeners. Topics we cover include Rep. Sarbanes' letter to the Department of Justice with over 30 supporting Congressional offices, ACB's accessible at-home COVID test accessibility survey, the Federal Aviation Administration's request for comments on airplane seat dimensions and safety, and an upcoming live event with the James Web Telescope Science Institute on the recent accessible images captured by NASA. We also provide a teaser for ACB's 2nd annual Audio Description Awards Gala. For the Sarbanes letter - https://sarbanes.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/sarbanes-leads-colleagues-urging-department-justice-ensure-americans For the accessible test survey – https://gatech.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bdqaz5GtByY4H1I FAA Request for Comments – Request for Comments in Minimum Seat Dimensions Necessary for Safety of Air Passengers (Emergency Evacuation) | Federal Aviation Administration (faa.gov) Find out more about ACB's Audio Description Gala at Save the Date: ACB's 2022 Audio Description Awards Gala | American Council of the Blind Find out more at https://acb-advocacy-update.pinecast.co

Sarbanes Oxley's Legacy: A Refresher for Corporate Directors

McDermott Health Podcast Channel

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2022 27:03

July 30, 2022, marks the 20th anniversary of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, one of the most consequential pieces of federal financial regulation ever enacted into law. It serves as the foundation for many of the guidelines and principles that are now considered routine by boards and their audit, compensation and finance committees. It's difficult to overstate the continuing impact of Sarbanes on corporate governance. Thus, given the passage of time there is value in board members refreshing their familiarity with the Sarbanes history, in order to better appreciate its influence. To help underscore the Sarbanes legacy, Michael Peregrine welcomes back Scott Steffens, well-known audit partner in Grant Thornton's national nonprofit and educational practice. In their conversation, Scott and Michael review the circumstances that led to Sarbanes's enactment, and how auditor, management and audit committee interactions have changed over the last 20 years, particularly in the nonprofit and healthcare sectors, including: - The role and function of the Audit Committee - The continuing importance of independent directors in Committee membership - The frequency and length of Audit Committee meetings - Rotation of the lead audit partner - Preserving auditor independence - Internal consideration of issues raised in “Management Letter” - Related party disclosures

internal committee preserving rotation refresher grant thornton corporate directors audit committee sarbanes oxley sarbanes oxley act sarbanes scott steffens

Sarbanes Oxley's Legacy: A Refresher for Corporate Directors

Governing Health

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2022 27:03

internal committee preserving rotation refresher grant thornton corporate directors audit committee sarbanes oxley sarbanes oxley act sarbanes scott steffens

March 2nd, 2022: Congressman John Sarbanes & Former Baltimore Sun Writer and WBAL Contributor Peter Schmuck

american hands maryland senate deck joe manchin american democracy people act sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2022 99:06

C4 and Bryan Nehman heard weekdays from 5:30-10:00am ET on WBAL Newsradio 1090, FM101.5, and the WBAL Radio App.

writer congressman contributors c4 baltimore sun wbal sarbanes wbal newsradio peter schmuck wbal radio app

Episode 35: "All Hands on Deck" to Save American Democracy & the For the People Act w/ Rep. John Sarbanes

Democracy Nerd

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2021 35791394:07

The For the People Act offers to be the most consequential bill to expand voting rights protections and preserve American democracy in recent memory. With action on the bill in the Senate imminent, Democracy Nerd is joined by Maryland's Congressman John Sarbanes, one of the bill's co-authors, who explains the necessity for this bill to pass in this moment of time, his optimism that some form of voting rights protections will pass the Senate, and describes how Joe Manchin can cement his legacy as a voting rights hero.

SOX Compliance and the Promise of Technology and Automation

Powerful Insights from Protiviti

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 16, 2021 27:48

It's been more than a year since a historic global pandemic changed the way companies operate in the near term, and very likely for the long term future. We can see the impact on numerous fronts, certainly including the time, costs and efforts organizations are investing in their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance activities. And for certain companies the use of technology and automation rose to the forefront over this past year as a key advantage. Protiviti recently published the results of its latest Sarbanes-Oxley compliance survey. We recently had the opportunity to chat with two Protiviti experts on the expansive and often challenging areas related to SOX compliance. Kristen Kelly is a director with Protiviti's Internal Audit and Financial Advisory practice. Angelo Poulikakos is a managing director with Protiviti's IT Audit practice. Over the course of our chat, Angelo and Kristen talk about SOX compliance during the pandemic; growth in technology and automation and, for many companies, the best place to get started; and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance hours that are required, which continue their long term trend to rise on an annual basis.Protiviti's report, SOX Compliance and the Promise of Technology and Automation, is available at Protiviti.com/SOXSurvey.Contact Kristen Kelly at kristen.kelly@protiviti.com. Contact Angelo Poulikakos at angelo.poulikakos@protiviti.com.

technology digital management transformation costs automation compliance audit controls workflow sox pmo oxley internal audit financial advisory ipe sarbanes oxley protiviti sarbanes kristen kelly

June 10th, 2021: State Senator Bryan Simonaire, Comptroller Peter Franchot, RBC's Brian Kroneberger, And Congressman John Sarbanes

china education joe biden office congress students student hosts loans gop voters nih protections people act public service loan forgiveness sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2021 120:09

C4 and Bryan Nehman heard weekdays from 5:30-10:00am ET on WBAL Newsradio 1090, FM101.5, and the WBAL Radio App.

congressman state senators c4 sarbanes comptroller peter franchot wbal newsradio wbal radio app

Episode 44: Where Is Congress on Student Voter Access and Public Service Loan Forgiveness?

dotEDU

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2021 44:38

Hosts Jon Fansmith and Mushtaq Gunja talk with Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD), chief author of H.R. 1, the comprehensive election reform bill that could have an impact on how colleges register voters. They also discuss the past, present, and future of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program as Sarbanes moves to strengthen the program under the Biden administration. EPISODE NOTES Here are some of the links and references from this week's show: From Introduction: Senate punts on China bill amid GOP objections White House Releases Budget With Increased Funding for NIH, NSF Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education Announces Public Hearings on Protections for Students, Loan Repayment, Targeted Loan Cancellation Programs, and Other Higher Education Regulations U.S. Department of Education From Conversation with Rep. Sarbanes: John Sarbanes Biography H.R.1 - For the People Act of 2021 Here's What H.R. 1, the House-Passed Voting Rights Bill, Would Do The Washington Post (sub. req.) | May 11, 2021 Biden Administration Will Review Income Based Repayment, Student Loan Forgiveness Programs Forbes | May 24, 2021 Charles Testifies Before House Committee on Voting Rights Legislation ABOUT THE SHOW Each episode of dotEDU presents a deep dive into a major public policy issue impacting college campuses and students across the country. Hosts from ACE are joined by guest experts to lead you through thought-provoking conversations on topics such as campus free speech, diversity in admissions, college costs and affordability, and more. Find all episodes of the podcast at the dotEDU page. Tweet suggestions, links, and questions to @ACEducation or email podcast@acenet.edu. HOSTS Jon Fansmith is a director of government relations at ACE. He represents ACE and its members on matters related to the federal budget and appropriations process, with a particular focus on student aid. Mushtaq Gunja serves as vice president and chief of staff at ACE, where he is in charge of strategic initiatives, communications, and membership.

Episode 61: Pulling Democracy Back from the Brink

James Madison Center for Civic Engagement: Democracy Matters

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2021 45:58

Why do we have to run an obstacle course when we go to vote every two years in federal elections? How can Congress strengthen American democratic institutions and the right to vote by implementing new policies and procedures that will protect voting rights, limit corruption, expose "Dark Money" in politics, and make the political process more transparent? What can be done to address systemic disenfranchisement and voter suppression of historically minoritized and marginalized groups in the United States? In this episode, we talk with Congressman John Sarbanes about what it will take to secure voting rights for every American and restore confidence in elections and government. Congressman Sarbanes chairs the Democracy Reform Task Force, which has assembled HR1, the For The People Act, to reform and strengthen our democracy. See the show notes with links mentioned in this episode at https://j.mu/news/civic/2021/05-28-democracy-matters-episode-61.shtml

united states american congress engagement democracy voting pulling brink civic dark money hr1 sarbanes

How militarism eats the poor and destroys the planet

The Marc Steiner Show

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2021 71:06

From endless wars and imperialist violence to racist systems of oppression and climate destruction, the battles poor and working people face around the globe are as daunting as they are numerous. What will it take to build a grassroots movement that not only combats these destructive forces, but understands them as fundamentally interconnected? In the first segment of this week's blockbuster “Marc Steiner Show” (now premiering every Tuesday), we talk about what such a movement can look like with Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice.Then, in our second segment, we talk with Congressman John Sarbanes, U.S. Representative for Maryland's 3rd congressional district, who introduced H.R.1, the For the People Act, in the House of Representatives. Marc and Rep. Sarbanes discuss H.R.1 and what it would do to restore and protect voting rights in the U.S. They also discuss the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 in the context of the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd.Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Tuesday on TRNN.

How militarism eats the poor and destroys the planet

The Real News Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2021 71:06

For the People, with Rep. John Sarbanes

Skullduggery

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2021 54:20

How can we save our democracy from partisan gerrymandering, the influence of big money in politics, voter suppression, and the spread of disinformation? Congressman John Sarbanes says it is through the pro-democracy reforms of the bill he authored: the For the People Act, which is H.R. 1 and S. 1 in the current Congress — and he says a majority of the American people, regardless of their party affiliation, agree with him. He sits down with Michael Isikoff, Dan Klaidman, and new Skullduggery host Victoria Bassetti, legal expert and former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, to talk about the sweeping implications of these proposals, and whether there will be enough political will to overcome the Senate filibuster and GOP opposition.GUEST:Rep. John Sarbanes (@RepSarbanes), U.S. Congressman (D, MD-3), author of H.R. 1HOSTS:Michael Isikoff (@Isikoff), Chief Investigative Correspondent, Yahoo NewsDan Klaidman (@dklaidman), Editor in Chief, Yahoo NewsVictoria Bassetti, Fellow, Brennan Center for JusticeRESOURCES:H.R. 1, the For the People Act, Fact SheetH.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2021, full textH.R. 4, the Voting Rights Enhancement Act of 2019, full text"GOP warns HR 1 could be 'absolutely devastating for Republicans'" by Kendall Karson and Meg Cunningham, ABC News (Mar. 20, 2021)Follow us on Twitter: @SkullduggeryPodListen and subscribe to Skullduggery on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

american spotify chief congress md republicans senate fellow google podcasts gop senate judiciary committee people act brennan center skullduggery michael isikoff sarbanes victoria bassetti meg cunningham

Newsmaker: Md Rep.John Sarbanes (D-03) On The Fight For Voter Rights

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2021 49:44

Democrats in the Maryland legislature are proposing an array of bills that will make voting easier and more accessible. But elsewhere in the country, Republican lawmakers have redoubled efforts to restrict and curtail voting. The Georgia Senate has voted to end no-excuse absentee voting and they are considering a measure that would prohibit passing out water and snacks to people who are waiting in line to vote. In Iowa, new laws reduce polling place hours and early voting. In Arizona, lawmakers are considering rules to allow throwing out ballots even if they’ve arrived before Election Day. The Brennan Center for Justice in New York reports that following historically high voter turnout in the November 2020 elections, more than 250 restrictive bills were making their way through 33 statehouses across the country. The bills will place restrictions on mail in voting and create barriers to casting mail in ballots. They will expand voter roll purges, limit opportunities to register to vote, and implement stricter voter ID requirements. Earlier this month, the House passed HR 1, called the “For the People Act,” which would create a federal remedy to these efforts to curtail engagement in the democratic process. The bill calls for sweeping reforms in voting rights, redistricting, campaign finance and ethics. Senator Amy Klobachar has announced that the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which she chairs, will begin hearings soon on a Senate version of HR1, to be called S1. Republicans oppose the legislation on the grounds that it represents federal overreach in matters that should be left to the states. Tom’s guest today is Congressman John Sarbanes, a Democrat who represents Maryland’s Third District, including parts of Baltimore, Howard, Montgomery and Anne Arundel counties, as well as a portion of Baltimore City. Representative Sarbanes was the principal architect of HR1, and he joins us now on the line. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

March 8th, 2021: Congressman John Sarbanes

Alyssa Milano: Sorry Not Sorry

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 8, 2021 82:55

C4 and Bryan Nehman heard weekdays from 5:30-10:00am ET on WBAL Newsradio 1090, FM101.5, and the WBAL Radio App.

congressman c4 sarbanes wbal newsradio wbal radio app

Congressman John Sarbanes on H.R. 1 - the "For the People Act"

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2021 31:39

On February 23rd, 2021, Alyssa Milano hosted a special live episode of Sorry Not Sorry with Congressman John Sarbanes of Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District. He’s the lead sponsor of H.R. 1, the “for the people act.” This act corrects so many critical shortcomings and vulnerabilities in our election system, and is one of the most important pieces of legislation in the Congress in a very long time. This is a rebroadcast of that live episode. About Rep. Sarbanes Congressman John Sarbanes has represented Maryland’s Third Congressional District in the U.S. Congress since 2007. He currently serves on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, in addition to the House Subcommittee on Health and the House Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change. Congressman Sarbanes also serves on the House Oversight and Reform Committee and its Subcommittee on Government Operations. Since 2017, he has chaired the Democracy Reform Task Force, a bold effort in the House of Representatives to build a government that puts the public's interests ahead of special interests. Born and raised in Baltimore, Congressman Sarbanes has experience working in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. He and his family live in Towson, giving him the opportunity to drive home every night and hear from the people he serves in Congress. Listening to their concerns allows him to better represent Maryland and has shaped his work in the House of Representatives. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/alyssa-milano-sorry-not-sorry/message

Rep. John Sarbanes: Our fight to restore American democracy begins now

We've Got Issues

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2021 58:10

This week, we're joined by David Neiwert, the author of Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us, to talk about the heartbreak of losing a loved one to the QAnon cult--or down similar rabbit holes--and why it's so difficult to bring them back to the real world. This is something that social psychologists really need to figure out, because these conspiracy theories are ripping our society apart. And then we welcome Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) to tell us about the comprehensive package of democratic reforms that he introduced in Congress, H.R. 1, the For The People Act. We talk about what this much-needed bill would do, and how he hopes his colleagues in the Senate might get it passed in the narrowly divided upper chamber. PlaylistMaggie Lindemann: "Knife Under My Pillow"Jack Sheldon: "I'm Just a Bill"Sam Roberts Band: "All of Us"

congress senate restore qanon red pill american democracy counteract david neiwert jack sheldon sam roberts band sarbanes

Congressman John Sarbanes on the Most Important Bill in Congress

Off the Record with Paul Hodes

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 25, 2021 44:50

Congressman John Sarbanes authored the For the People Act, the single most important piece of legislation in Congress. Democrats have made it their very first bill introduced in both the House and Senate for a good reason: it might just save American democracy. What it does and why it's so critical, with Congressman Sarbanes, Paul, and Matt.

american house congress democrats senate congressman people act sarbanes

January 7th, 2021: NYT's Luke Broadwater, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, and Congressman John Sarbanes

christmas mike krzyzewski thumb warby parker lasik indiana hoosiers sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2021 97:14

C4 and Bryan Nehman heard weekdays from 5:30-10:00am ET on WBAL Newsradio 1090, FM101.5, and the WBAL App.

congressman c4 brandon scott baltimore mayor luke broadwater sarbanes baltimore mayor brandon scott wbal newsradio wbal app

T.O.M. Thumb

In Search of an Argument

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2020 31:59

Peggy is enjoying watching both college and professional football, particularly the recent success of the Indiana Hoosiers. But John remains skeptical about sports in general and in particular the recent comments of Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski regarding postponing the college basketball season. Shelly is excited that she just had her eyes checked and is getting a new pair of glasses. This leads to tangents regarding Lasik surgery and Warby Parker. John’s current obsession with Christmas cookies leads into a discussion about the bane of processed sugar, particularly for children. Jim remembers Senator Sarbanes and his experiences working on his staff many, many years ago.

A Tribute to Sen. Paul Sarbanes

university congress greek maryland baltimore tribute senate librarians united states senate ben cardin steny hoyer chris van hollen carla hayden sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2020 49:42

Today on Midday: Remembering Senator Paul Sarbanes, who died Sunday night at the age of 87. The son of Greek immigrants, Paul Sarbanes rose to become one of the most respected and effective legislators in the United States Senate, where he represented Maryland for 30 years. Tom is joined today by the late senator's son, Maryland's 3rd District Congressman John Sarbanes; Ben Cardin, who succeeded him in the Senate; his longtime Maryland congressional colleagues, Steny Hoyer and Kweisi Mfume; University of Baltimore president and former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke; former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank; and the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden. We'll also hear a portion of the tribute Sen. Chris Van Hollen offered to Paul Sarbanes yesterday on the Senate floor. They all reflect on the life and legacy of one of Maryland’s most consequential and influential political leaders. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A Tribute To Sen. Paul Sarbanes

university congress greek maryland baltimore tribute senate librarians united states senate ben cardin steny hoyer chris van hollen carla hayden sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2020 49:42

Former senator Paul Sarbanes passed away, aged 87 - «Έφυγε» ο πρώην Ελληνο-Αμερικανός γερουσιαστής Πωλ Σαρμπάνης

SBS Greek - SBS Ελληνικά

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2020 11:02

Well known Greek-American Paul Sarbanes, former senator of Maryland passed away aged 87. - Ο Ελληνο-Αμερικανός πρώην γερουσιαστής του Maryland Πωλ Σαρμπάνης, απεβίωσε σε ηλικία 87 ετών.

politics maryland passed aged former senator sarbanes politics of united states

December 8, 2020 | Daily News Brief | Former Senator Sarbanes dies. Sextortion of minors. COVID at the Academy. Ahsling Kitchen & Bar story.

Eye On Annapolis Daily News Brief

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2020 9:57

Give us about ten minutes a day and we will give you all the local news, local sports, local weather, and local events you can handle. SPONSORS: Many thanks to our sponsors... Solar Energy Services because solar should be in your future! And to the Kristi Neidhardt Team. If you are looking to buy or sell your home, give Kristi a call at 888-860-7369! Today...Former US Senator Paul Sarbanes has died at age 87. Local police warning parents about sextortion. Annapolis to host seminars to. prevent eviction. Trump to attend the Army Navy Game. COVID has halted basketball at the Academy. Governor Hogan to talk vaccines this afternoon. And a heartbreaking story from WTOP about the owners of Ashling Kitchen & Bar in Crofton! And of course, George from DCMDVA Weather is here with your local weather forecast! Please download their APP so you can keep on top of the local weather scene! The Eye On Annapolis Daily News Brief is produced every Monday through Friday at 6:00am and available wherever you get your podcasts and also on our social media platforms--All Annapolis and Eye On Annapolis (FB) and @eyeonannapolis (TW)

covid-19 donald trump local academy kitchen app tw minors annapolis sextortion army navy game former senator wtop crofton governor hogan sarbanes daily news brief

Former Maryland U.S. Sen. Paul Sarbanes Passes at 87

Diamond K In The Morning

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2020 4:08

#TheDiamondkShow - Former Sen. Paul Sarbanes has died at age 87. He represented Maryland for 30 years in the Senate as a leader of financial regulatory reform and drafted the first article of impeachment against Republican President Richard Nixon during the Watergate.

congress maryland baltimore senate watergate sarbanes

John Sarbanes says his father and Watergate childhood shaped his worldview

Baltimore Positive

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2020 23:26

John Sarbanes says his father and Watergate childhood shaped his worldview

father maryland mayors baltimore childhood senators shaped congressman worldview watergate seafood baltimore city baltimore county catonsville sarbanes lexington market nestor aparicio

The life and legacy of former US Senator Paul Sarbanes

The Greek Current

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2020 13:58

On Sunday night former United States Senator Paul Sarbanes - the son of Greek immigrants and the first Greek-American US senator - passed away at the age of 87. Senator Sarbanes served in the Senate for 30 years, leaving his mark at key moments in recent US history. William Antholis and HALC's Executive Director Endy Zemenides join The Greek Current to discuss his legacy and his tremendous contributions to the Hellenic community.William Antholis serves as Director and CEO of the Miller Center, a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history.You can read the articles we discuss on The Daily Roundup here: Paul Sarbanes, Former Maryland Senator, Dies at 87Former Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Maryland diesTurkey's actions worsen gas dispute ahead of summit, EU saysGreece wants arms embargo on TurkeyIn Greece, political spat over lockdown turns personalHoliday visitors to enter 10-day quarantine on arrival

ceo director university greek senate us senators former us halc hellenic miller center sarbanes daily roundup

Sen. Paul Sarbanes (1933-2020): A Reflection by Sen. Barbara Mikulski

america american money joe biden maryland political dark republicans ending democrats pac congressman hr1 fair elections campaign money sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2020 6:46

Today on Midday, remembering former Maryland Senator Paul Spyros Sarbanes, who passed away last night at the age of 87. A long-time friend and colleague of Paul Sarbanes, former Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski -- now a professor of public policy at The Johns Hopkins University -- joins us with a personal reflection. Born in Salisbury, Maryland on February 3, 1933, Paul Sarbanes was a graduate of Princeton University, Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. He first won election to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1966, where he served two terms. In 1970, he won a seat in the United States House of Representatives, representing Maryland's 4th and later Maryland's 3rd congressional districts from 1971 to 1977. He won election to the US Senate in 1976, and was re-elected four times until his retirement in 2007. Paul Sarbanes was the longest-serving senator in Maryland history until he was surpassed by Sen. Barbara Mikulski by a single day when her term ended on January 3, 2017. During an hour-long remembrance of Sen. Sarbanes on this Wednesday's Midday program, family members, friends, and former colleagues will discuss the wide-ranging impact of Paul Sarbanes' life and work on Maryland and the nation.

maryland reflection oxford princeton university delegates johns hopkins university us senate harvard law school salisbury united states house balliol college maryland house sarbanes barbara mikulski

Congressman John Sarbanes discusses clean and fair elections in America and ending dark campaign money

Baltimore Positive

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2020 50:29

Congressman John Sarbanes tells us about H.R.1 and why everyone in Maryland should care about the facts about who funds American political candidates with shadow money.

Rep. John Sarbanes, Democrat for Maryland's 3rd District

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2020 23:10

Today on Midday, it’s another in our series of Conversations with the Candidates. Tom's guest is Democratic Congressman John Sarbanes, who is seeking election to an eighth term representing Maryland's 3rd Congressional district, which includes parts of Baltimore City, as well as portions of Baltimore, Howard, Anne Arundel and Montgomery Counties. Congressman Sarbanes currently serves on the House Oversight and Reform Committee as well as the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Since 2017, he’s chaired the Democracy Reform Task Force,a group of House lawmakers focused on minimizing the influence of special interests andensuring fair elections. Congressman Sarbanes is 58 years old. He and his wife live in Towson. Today’s conversation begins with Rep. Sarbanes’ reaction to the news that broke in a tweet just before 1:00 this morning: President Trump announced that he and his wife, Melania, have tested positive for COVID-19. The President is 74 years old and, like more than 60% of Americans, he is overweight, which is considered an underlying condition that could complicate his disease. Mrs. Trump is 50 years old, younger than the age the CDC considers at high risk of fatal disease. The President and Mrs. Trump will quarantine at the White House. A White House official told NPR’s Tamara Keith that the President intends to keep working. White House Chief of Staff told reporters this morning the President is experiencing “minor symptoms” of a COVID-19 infection. Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee has also tested positive. The White House announced that this morning Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, tested negative for Coronavirus. The implications of the President’s diagnosis are not yet clear. This morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that the Senate can proceed with the confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, which are scheduled to begin a week from Monday. There have been several interactions in recent days between people at the White House, Senators, and Judge Barrett. The White House announced that Judge Barrett tested negative for the virus this morning. Rep. Sarbanes and Tom also discuss the Heroes Act, the latest effort by the House to provide COVID-19 financial relief to struggling families and businesses across the country, and steps the House is taking to protect the Affordable Care Act from a new legal challenge in the Supreme Court. We also take listener calls and emails for Congressman Sarbanes.

August 18th, 2020: Congressman Andy Harris, Congressman John Sarbanes, And The Director For The American Postal Workers Union Local 181 in Baltimore Courtney Jenkins

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2020 94:17

C4 and Bryan Nehman heard weekdays from 5:30-10:00am ET on WBAL Newsradio 1090 and FM101.5.

director baltimore jenkins congressman c4 andy harris union local sarbanes american postal workers union wbal newsradio

July 10th, 2020: Congressman John Sarbanes & State Senator and Congressional Candidate Johnny Ray Salling

Powerful Insights from Protiviti

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2020 77:51

The C4 Show heard weekdays from 9am-1pm ET on WBAL Newsradio 1090 and FM101.5.

congressman state senators congressional candidate johnny ray salling sarbanes wbal newsradio c4 show

CFO Perspectives on SOX Compliance

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2020 14:18

Chief audit executives and internal audit leaders are once again focusing on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance work, which has taken on a new dynamic in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic. But these leaders and professionals are not the only ones immersed in this work. Chief financial officers (CFOs) and finance leaders and staff continue to perform numerous activities related to financial reporting and attestation work, all in the “new normal” business world in which companies are now operating. Protiviti recently released the results of its 2020 Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Survey in a new report, SOX Compliance Amid a New Business Equilibrium. Our report and other materials and insights can be found at www.protiviti.com/SOXSurvey. This episode features our conversation with Protiviti Managing Directors Christopher Wright and Charles Soranno, who offer a CFO and finance perspective on Protiviti's 2020 SOX Compliance Survey results. They provide some interesting insights on how the work and focus of compliance programs and activities are changing in the wake of COVID-19. Wright is the global leader of Protiviti's Business Performance Improvement solution group. Soranno is a leader in the firm's BPI group and its Financial Reporting Remediation and Compliance practice.Transcriptions of Powerful Insights are available upon request from Kevin.Donahue@protiviti.com

covid-19 chief finance financial wright perspectives cfo reporting accounting compliance controls sox transcription cfos donahue bpi oxley sarbanes oxley protiviti sarbanes

CFO Perspectives on SOX Compliance

Powerful Insights from Protiviti

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2020 14:18

covid-19 chief finance financial wright perspectives cfo reporting accounting compliance controls sox transcription cfos donahue bpi oxley sarbanes oxley protiviti sarbanes

April 14th, 2020: Congressman John Sarbanes & The Paycheck Protection Program

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2020 60:00

The C4 Show heard weekdays from 9am-1pm ET on WBAL Newsradio 1090 and FM101.5.

congressman paychecks paycheck protection program sarbanes wbal newsradio c4 show

Rep. John Sarbanes Details $2 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Package

coronavirus relief package trillion sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2020 17:45

Congressman John Sarbanes joins to Tom to discuss the details of the package. What’s in it? Who will benefit? And whether further government subsidies will be needed to keep the economy propped-up for as long as it takes to conquer the coronavirus.

Sarbanes: Impeachment Acquittal Not The End Of The Road

WBAL News Now With Bryan Nehman Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2020 3:52

The impeachment trial is over, but Rep. John Sarbanes says House Democrats are intent on continuing oversight of the executive branch, though they want to talk about issues as well. On the other side of the aisle, Mitch McConnell secured exactly what he promised with the swift end to the impeachment trial, which he called a "colossal political mistake" by Democrats.

democrats impeachment mitch mcconnell house democrats end of the road acquittal sarbanes

Update On Impeachment With Rep. John Sarbanes & The New York Times' Scott Shane

Another Way, by Lawrence Lessig

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2019 30:17

It’s been quite a week in the nation’s capital, even by standards of the chaotic Trump Administration.On Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Congress would begin an impeachment inquiry. On Wednesday, the White House released what they described as an “unclassified memorandum” that summarizes a call between President Trump and President Zelensky of Ukraine on July 25, 2019. The memorandum was prepared by note takers who were listening to the call in the White House Situation room. And this morning, just before acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified in open session to the House Intelligence Committee, the Whistle Blower report that set an impeachment inquiry in motion was released. Admiral Maguire began his testimony shortly after 9:00 this morning. That testimony will continue in closed session later today.Tom talks about all of this today with Congressman John Sarbanes, who represents Maryland’s 3rd District. He also serves on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is chaired by his fellow Maryland Congressman, Elijah Cummings. And then, Scott Shane of The New York Times joined Tom. In 2017 and again last year, he was a part of teams that won Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Russian hacking and interference in US elections

The Author of HR 1 on Saving Our Democracy [09-19-19]

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2019 67:46

On this week's special episode, Larry Lessig talks with Representative John Sarbanes. Sarbanes is the lead author of HR 1, which passed the House in March and, if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would fundamentally alter the way politicians raise money and would improve our democracy in ways big and small. Sarbanes discusses the origin of HR 1, why he thinks that the way most politicians raise money is so harmful, and why the bill is so urgently needed.

president house saving senate democracy sarbanes larry lessig

Congressman John Sarbanes On The Government Shutdown And The Wall

WBAL News Now With Bryan Nehman Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2019 7:05

Congressman John Sarbanes joined Bryan Nehman this morning to talk Government shutdown and the wall.

government wall shutdowns congressman government shutdown sarbanes

Rep. John Sarbanes on Reforming American Democracy

house speaker maryland nancy pelosi national security reforming american democracy subcommittee house oversight sarbanes government reform committee

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2018 49:38

Rep. John Sarbanes joins Tom for the hour today. Last month, he was re-elected to represent Maryland’s 3rd congressional district for a seventh term. For nearly two years, Sarbanes has chaired the House Democracy Reform Task Force, a group of legislators seeking to minimize the influence of special interests on elections. He is the principle author of H.R. 1, a bill that addresses ethics and campaign finance reform as well as voting rights protections. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who will likely be the new Speaker of the House, said the bill will be the first order of business when the House reconvenes on January 3rd.Congressman Sarbanes also serves on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and its Subcommittee on National Security. He joins Tom live in Studio A.

Restoring our Democracy, Congressman John Sarbanes [MD-D]

Public Interest Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2018

Congressman John Sarbanes [MD-3-D] speaks about his interest in restoring democratic institutions by supporting redistricting reform and campaign finance reform. He believes that these initiatives... Good hearts make the world a better place

art interview science politics service medicine public democracy civil restoring philanthropy biography congressman sarbanes

Incumbent John Sarbanes, Rep. Maryland's 3rd Congressional District

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 12, 2018 49:30

We continue our series of Conversations with Candidates, which include those who currently hold public office. Congressman John Sarbanes joins us for the hour today. He has represented the third congressional district since 2007. The Congressman was successful in his efforts to reinstate EPA funding for the Bay Journal, but Congressional Democrats have been frustrated by inaction on DACA. Representative Sarbanes has also been working on addressing the crisis of opioid addiction, and he serves as the Chair of the Democracy Reform Task Force. The Baltimore native currently lives in Towson. We are streaming all of our Conversations with the Candidates on WYPR Facebook page.

conversations baltimore candidates epa congressman daca congressional districts towson incumbent congressional democrats sarbanes bay journal

Jazzmen Nico Sarbanes & Michael Benjamin: Live in Studio A

university donald trump russia budget fbi maryland republicans britain house democrats richard cross sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 19, 2018 7:59

To close our Friday show, the wonderful jazz trumpeter, vocalist and composer Nico Sarbanes joins Tom in Studio A, along with guitarist Michael Benjamin. They play three pieces in the set, including ----A Cottage for Sale,---- by Willard Robison; ----There Will Never be Another You---- by Harry Warren; and to take us out, a rendition of ----Groove Merchant---- by Jerome Richardson.Nico, Michael and bassist Shawn Simon will be performing a program of jazz standards and Nico’s own compositions at the Cultural Center at the Opera House in Havre de Grace two weeks from Sunday, Feb. 4 at 3 p.m.

sale cottages opera house live in studio havre cultural center jazzmen harry warren sarbanes another you michael benjamin

Rep. John Sarbanes on Trump's 'draconian' budget and 'ethical blindness' (episode 255)

Roughly Speaking

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 7, 2017 47:32

1:04: Dan's commentary on the terror attack in Britain and a potential hate crime at the University of Maryland.5:35: Richard Cross, a Maryland-based Republican political analyst and speechwriter, talks about the issues raised just before the president's trip abroad — the firing of the FBI director, the appointment of a special counsel to investigate possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign — and whether these controversies will prompt any Republican leaders to distance themselves from the president.16:02: Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes, D-3rd, says the Trump presidency presents "a maximum stress test for the democracy," with numerous conflicts of interest and now a "draconian" federal budget that could be "cataclysmic to the core functions of government." Sarbanes, chair of the House Democrats' newly created Democracy Reform Task Force, says Trump, with his cabinet and other appointments, has "filled the swamp" with former lobbyists and industry lawyers. "There's a fox in charge of every hen house now," he says. "They're locking the doors, pulling down the shades and ransacking the place." Also, looking ahead to the 2018 midterm elections, Sarbanes has a message for activists who form "the resistance" to Trump.

Nico Sarbanes making a name for himself in jazz world (episode 215)

Roughly Speaking

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2017 28:45

2:46: Paula Gallagher, Baltimore County librarian and Roughly Speaking book critic, recommends a new work of science fiction, "All Our Wrong Todays," by Elan Mastai.6:28: Sarbanes is a widely recognized name in Maryland. Paul Sarbanes was a U.S. Senator for 30 years. John Sarbanes, the senator's son, is a member of the House of Representatives, serving Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District. The next Sarbanes you’ll hear about is the congressman's son, Nico Sarbanes, a 23-year-old jazz musician who’s just releasing his first recordings this month. A trumpet player and singer, and student of jazz, Nico Sarbanes joins us today, ahead of his performance at the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival, to talk about his ambition to capture "the Baltimore sound."Links:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FEY5EP2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8----btkr=1http://www.midatlanticjazzfestival.org/artists/nico/http://www.midatlanticjazzfestival.org/

house maryland jazz baltimore senators congressional districts baltimore county sarbanes elan mastai all our wrong todays

JANET SARBANES DISCUSSES HER SHORT STORY COLLECTION THE PROTESTER HAS BEEN RELEASED, WITH MAGGIE NELSON

Skylight Books Author Reading Series

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2017 63:49

The Protester Has Been Released (C&R Press) Populated by wise animals and hapless humans, Protester brilliantly evokes an end-of-the-world feeling that is equal parts dread and hilarity. In nine precisely rendered stories and a novella featuring the American president’s daughter, Sarbanes takes on the big questions with gallows humor: What is freedom? What is love? What is art? And what does it matter now? In “Meet Koko,” the famous signing gorilla spends her nights secretly typing a hilarious “counter-narrative” onto her researcher’s laptop. “The First Daughter Finds Her Way” chronicles the quest of a president’s daughter to keep her father from invading the world’s nations in reverse alphabetical order. Sibling rivalry turns lethal in “Who Will Sit with Maman?” And in “Ars Longa,” a Colorado town riddled with cancer turns to art making in order to cope with the chaos of the present and the sins of the past. Whether chiseled into discretely titled chunks, or rendered via extended interior monologues, Sarbanes’ witty, affective prose deftly locates the promise of a new society within the shell of the old. A fierce, funny primer for our time. Praise for The Protester Has Been Released “The Protester Has Been Released is a spectacular and subversive collection, made even more so by its deceptive calm and supremely wry style.”--Maggie Nelson “Exploring the subtle and not-so-subtle disjunctions between the so-called animal and the so-called human world, between police and citizens, between the resident and its electorate, between rich and poor, and between humans and the world, The Protester Has Been Released is a funny, humane, and scalpel-sharp collection. Only after you finish do you realize how close these worlds are to our own, and how implicated you are.”--Brian Evenson “This is a profound book and necessary to the times we are living in now. Sarbanes explores the boundaries between ourselves and animals and Americans and the wider world in ways that illuminate the true issues behind the false ones. We need this book now.”--Danzy Senna “The Protester Has Been Released gives yet more proof that Janet Sarbanes is a comic genius. She’s also some other kind of genius: these stories and novella range over broad territory, but in every case, Sarbanes is artful, precise, and prescient. Unfortunately, her apocalypse is ours, too. But as the end approaches, she’s terrific company.”--Rachel Kushner Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collection Army of One, hailed by Bomb as a “stingingly funny fiction debut.” Her new collection, The Protester Has Been Released, will be published by C & R Press in February 2017. Recent short fiction appears in Black Clock, P-Queue, Entropy and North Dakota Quarterly. Sarbanes has also published art criticism and other critical writing in museum catalogues, anthologies, and journals such as East of Borneo, Afterall, Journal of Utopian Studies and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at CalArts. Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics which defy classification. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Timesbestseller The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007, reissued in 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, Wesleyan University, and CalArts. In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles.

Holding the President Accountable with Rep. John Sarbanes

Off the Cuff with Jared Huffman

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2017 25:51

Listen in on a recent Town Hall with President of the American Constitution Society Caroline Fredrickson, and San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Sara Eisenberg. But first, a conversation with Rep. John Sarbanes of the 3rd District of Maryland.

president maryland holding accountable town hall sarbanes

04/17/17 - Congressman John Sarbanes In Studio.

washington americans representative sarbanes

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 17, 2017 136:31

04/17/17.

congressman sarbanes

EPISODE 12: U.S. REPRESENTATIVE JOHN SARBANES (D-MD)

The Golden Mean

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 28, 2016 35:43

A champion for reforming the dirty river of money flowing through Washington, Congressman John Sarbanes talks about how his "Government By The People Act" would return the power back to every day Americans. Sarbanes also talks about our country's challenges with health care and rebuilding our infrastructure - and connects them right back to the money flood problem.

Crise de Credibilidade

business crise sox contabilidade oxley coso cobit sarbanes

Whistleblowers

Ringler Radio - Structured Settlements and Legal Topics

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2007 31:43

Medicare and medicaid fraud make up the biggest category of Qui Tam cases which are about whistleblowing on companies that are ripping off the federal government. Under a provision of federal law, an individual can file suit in the name of the Federal Government exposing fraud and share in the recovery of monies received. Join Ringler Radio host, Larry Cohen and co-host Jim Volanti of Ringler Associates with an expert in this area of legal practice, Attorney Brian Labovick, from the firm of LaBovick & LaBovick, Civil Justice Prosecutors with four offices in Palm Beach County, Florida. Don't miss hearing about some very interesting cases involving whistleblowers and how the system works.

personal injury medicare whistleblowers federal government tam plaintiffs palm beach county larry cohen oxley aaj sarbanes qui tam

Implementation Advice

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 28, 2006

With thanks to Lauri Tuulberg of Estonia, now studying in Hong Kong, this podcast addresses 5 typical problems common to installing a new quality method or program. Think of it as a "heads up" for change agents!

advice design management hong kong ethics experiments pillars compliance implementation estonia iso auditing oxley pdca tqm fmea sarbanes 9000

Definitions

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 27, 2006

There's a word for most everything, and often the choice of one or the other can lead to considerable head scratching. Here's hoping this Podcast helps those who are trying to decipher the differences between policies and directives, procedures and processes and a host of other close relations!

design management ethics experiments pillars compliance iso definitions auditing oxley pdca tqm fmea sarbanes 9000

Podcasting Basics -Live from Reno

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 20, 2006

This is a live demonstration, presented on October 20, at the ASQ Quality Audit Division Conference in Rno, Nevada. The podcast itself is a basic overview of podcasting and how it's done.

design management ethics experiments nevada pillars compliance reno iso auditing oxley pdca tqm fmea sarbanes podcasting basics 9000

It Should Work!

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2006

The science and art of Prevention is too often ineffective, leaving us to work on seemingly endless projects, designed to fix unnecessary mistakes and oversights.

design management ethics experiments prevention pillars compliance iso auditing oxley pdca tqm fmea sarbanes 9000

Rod Munro â€“ Quality Professional

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2006

May, 2006 Quality Magazine named Rod Munro as Quality Professional for 2006, confirming the privilege to have recorded a few minutes with him at ASQâ€™s recent World Conference.

design management professional ethics experiments pillars compliance iso auditing munro world conference oxley pdca asq tqm fmea sarbanes 9000

Quality Auditing with Dennis Arter

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2006

Dennis Arter is the dean of contemporary quality auditing and perhaps its best spokesperson. This podcast asks two simple questions, while their answers provide direction, common sense and the wisdom of a true subject guru.

design management ethics experiments pillars compliance iso auditing oxley pdca arter tqm fmea sarbanes 9000

Collegial Consenus

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2006

Here's the essence, the most essential components of making collective improvements and providing for the input of others to create excellence.

design management ethics experiments pillars compliance iso auditing oxley pdca tqm fmea sarbanes collegial 9000

Tools – Part Two – Computers

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2006

Few tools are as important as computers and their associated software. Where would we be without them?!

design management ethics experiments computers pillars compliance iso auditing oxley pdca tools part tqm fmea sarbanes 9000

Tools – Part One

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2006

Subscriber Paul Tolenaars offers some thoughtful insights to project management and asks that I comment on some of my favorite tools.

design management ethics experiments pillars compliance iso auditing oxley pdca tools part tqm fmea sarbanes 9000

Processes and Control