Enron

And then what do you, so speaking of terrible parents, let's talk about her parents.

I, so her parents are bad people too, because first of all, her dad saying he was an Enron.

I was like, what the

fuck? I thought that was wild.

Crazy.

And he talks about it as if, um, oh, when I built the Titanic, uh, we did that compartment decision.

Like he's just, You're talking about working for Enron like it worked? Like it

wasn't? And they believe she's innocent.

Firstly, unlike in the oil and gas industry, or unlike with solar and wind, we never had the scale.

And what happened to those industries was that, as we found in GE, we bought a small wind turbine business from Enron when it went bust.

It was not a very good company.

And finally, when the US decided, well, to make certain tax concessions that the industry scaled, that's when the industry scaled.

It's never going to fail.

Enron, huge example where people who work for them had everything in their company.

And then all it took was one thing that nobody saw coming.

And now it's all worth zero.

It's almost like if you're looking at something like portfolio theory, like in in like investing, like you can have great returns on your portfolio, but you also want to look at your Sharpe ratio, which is how risky your portfolio is.

Because if you have everything in one company, what if that company is exposed for fraud, it's Enron and goes down, then your portfolio shoots down or there's fluctuations there.

So I think with YouTube, it's like you have one entity that's paying you so it's like having a big client if you have like a like a client like servicing business like that's great but you should also do everything you can to de-risk it especially if you're putting a lot of eggs in this basket

Yeah, that's true.

Like a commodity.

In fact, I have a funny story because I almost went to work for Enron in the nineties.

I was so glad that, I didn't get the job in the end, right? But my friends, a lot of my college friends, that was the big thing.

Enron was like the place to go.

There was two companies in Houston that graduates, especially in IT, wanted to go work.

Wanted to go work for Enron.

And they wanted to go work there.

for Arthur Anderson, which was an accounting firm, which got in trouble, by the way, along with Enron, right? I ended up working for IBM, but that's another story, you know, but, you know, but it's a commodity.

Well, that was an awful long time ago, but a lot of it was in direct response to the way that FERC handled the West Coast energy crisis, and from our perspective, protected the interests of some of the most egregious manipulators.

For example, FERC blocked the public release of the Enron tapes.

And it was Snohomish that ended up forcing FERC through a federal court decision to make those tapes public.

And that instantly transformed the public narrative.

It's after effects of the Telecommunications Act.

And we all have computers that are using electricity.

Once the Enron tapes got into the public domain, it changed that debate overnight that we saw that a company intentionally created power shortages for the sole purpose of making electricity scarce to drive prices up so that they could make bigger profits.

So are you saying then that manipulation was the cause of the crisis?

She got into Stanford.

Her dad was an Enron VP.

Yeah.

That's right.

Didn't she work for Enron? Yeah.

Like

she comes from a significant family.

That's more than double the cushion of the entire industry.

And I believe this is bigger than Madoff and bigger than Enron.

I sat down with the man who's been warning about it for 41 years, Tom Gober.

He's a certified fraud examiner who spent his early career examining insurance companies for the state of Mississippi.