Smartest Guys in the Room The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron

And we'll get to the authors and stuff. It was Peter Elkind and who was a co-author? Bethany McLean.

And it really is worth the watch.

But just want to point out that this is an overview of the Enron scandal.

The reason the documentary is called The Smartest Guys in the Room is because I think unequivocally everyone would admit that Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and we should introduce you to a younger recruit named Andrew Fastow who is a key player, eventually becoming the CFO and was up to all kinds of shenanigans. But these were brilliant guys with amazing ideas.

If you want to know more about Enron, go watch the smartest guys in the room. Definitely will leave you wanting more.

And we'll get to the authors and stuff. It was Peter Elkind and who was a co-author? Bethany McLean.

And it really is worth the watch.

But just want to point out that this is an overview of the Enron scandal. It's pretty clear once you start poking around that this could be like a 10 part series.

The reason the documentary is called The Smartest Guys in the Room is because I think unequivocally everyone would admit that Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and we should introduce you to a younger recruit named Andrew Fastow who is a key player, eventually becoming the CFO and was up to all kinds of shenanigans.

If you want to know more about Enron, go watch the smartest guys in the room. Definitely will leave you wanting more.

I actually encourage people to read about Enron. It's a very interesting story. The smartest guys in the room. It's a great book.

I think that Bethany McLean sort of puts it In this way where It's almost like InterNorth got hoodwinked Where they knew they were paying a lot But they knew it was important to get But then once they started looking at the deal With a couple of months of retrospect They were like, wait a minute We gave HNG A lot of board seats And their executives Are having a lot of influence On the combined company And wait a minute We just gave away the company

So this is sort of the first example Of someone in Enronland Getting the better part of an economic deal Even though on the other side of the deal There's a real hard asset That has quantifiable value for end users For customers, yeah

InterNorth had a ridiculously valuable hard asset This is now quoting from Bethany's book Among its 20,000 miles of pipeline Was a genuine prize Northern natural The major north-south line Feeding gas from Texas into Iowa, Minnesota And much of the rest of the Midwest

It was that Jeff's skilling insisted that in order to join Enron and start this new division Ken Lay and the board had to agree to use mark to market accounting.

He literally called it, and this is in the smartest guys in the room, a lay my body across the tracks issue about joining the company.