Mentions personal use of Conspiracy of Fools.

Transcript context

…By Bethany McLean. Yup. And I read Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald, both of which I think are really good. Conspiracy of Fools is great. It is a very, very well-researched history of Enron. I thought a good place to start is right at the end of the prologue of Conspiracy of Fools. Kurt Eichenwald writes this, and I just thought it was so perfect to frame the Enron story and the FTX story today. He says, "This, then, is more than the tale of one company's fall from grace. It is at its base, the story of a wrenching period of economic and political tumult as revealed through a single corporate scandal. It is a portrait of an America in upheaval at the turn of the 21st century, a country torn between its warship of fast money, and its zeal for truth between greed and high mindedness between Wall Street and Main Street. Ultimately, it is the story of the untold damage wreaked by a nation's folly, a folly that in time, we are all but certain to see again." It's so literary. My God, those words. After trying to consume an insane amount of Enron stuff over the last couple of weeks, the thing that occurs to me is this is something that can only occur to this height in a bull market, where there's so much capital saturating so many opportunities that people are willing to go way out on the risk curve looking for returns, where there's so much FOMO playing into it that they have to pile into these low disclosure, super risky type of assets, because everything else is already at all time highs and crazy multiples. Of course, it's the people's fault driving the car that gets us here, but the environment around the car on the road is definitely facilitating it.…

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