With a Side of Knowledge is a podcast produced by the Office of the Provost at the University of Notre Dame. It brings listeners informal interviews with fascinating scholars and professionals from both Notre Dame and elsewhere that typically take place over brunch.
The 14th episode of season two, “On Enron, Business, and Cover Stories,” was released Thursday, April 18, and features Bethany McLean, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She visited Notre Dame as part of the Mendoza College of Business’s Ten Years Hence Speaker Series, which explores issues, ideas, and trends likely to affect business and society over the next decade.
McLean was previously a reporter at Fortune, where, in 2000, she received a tip suggesting she look into energy-trading giant Enron. Her subsequent investigative work would lead to The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, a coauthored bestseller that became the definitive account of one of the largest business scandals of our time. She has also coauthored a bestselling book about the financial crisis and written two mini-books published by Columbia Global Reports.
McLean and host Ted Fox started their conversation with her experience covering the Enron story and other instances of, in her words, “business gone wrong” before moving onto the new podcast she’s developing, our disrupted media environment and the appeal of audio content within it, and the time she wrote something very different—a celebrity profile—for the cover of Vanity Fair.
You can visit provost.nd.edu/podcast to learn more about With a Side of Knowledge, which is available through iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher or by searching “With a Side of Knowledge” in your favorite podcast app.
You can also listen to the episode with McLean using the player below.