My tiny part? I was doing my fellowship in NYC. A childhood friend had a venture capital (he shall remain nameless; he has since made a tiny pot of gold). But his VC venture was affiliated with big players, including the likes of a guy from Omaha as well as people from Safeway.
He called me up specifically because they had gotten a request from a tiny company out of California called 'Real-Time Cures', that had a proposal that would change the medical industry!
It sounded like one of those elixirs from the 1800s.
I had, as they say, a very particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson would say. I had worked in labs studying microfluidics and biochemistry for analysis of serum samples.
In short...I kind of new what they were talking about.
At the time, my wife was expecting, I was in fellowship, we didn't have a ton of money...and my friend was going to throw me a few grand to go over the science here and tell them what I thought.
How could I refuse?
So, I got the documents they provided...and they were, to put it mildly, trash. They had no real data sets. Most of it was gibberish.
And I told my friend this.
But there were major people pushing this. So they offered me a little more money to join them on a meeting they were going to have with Dr. Roy, who was working with Holmes at the time (I never met Holmes).
In that meeting, I sat in the back, mostly because I was a nobody that was sleep deprived from being on call the night before ( I am not kidding).
But I got asked two questions. One was about the microfluidic technique, and was about the sample size.
Remember...I was sleep deprived! It is hilarious in hindsight. But I was annoyed, and basically said it was all bullshit.
I then got yelled at by some of the Theranos people for saying I didn't know what I was talking about. But I didn't care...I needed more coffee.
After the meeting, my friend and a couple of his colleagues (who represented a couple billionaires, but for the life of me I can't remember who) asked me again. I told them that it looked all fake to me. None of them invested.
The Safeway guys didn't ever talk to me.
Anyway, I took my check, and happily invested it in my son's college fund just after he was born, and didn't think about the entire thing for a LONG time.
Until about 2015, in fact. That was when John Ioannidis (of COVID fame) wrote this.
Now, this was almost a decade later. And I had forgotten the whole thing. So I call my friend...and he laughed. Basically, he knew the entire thing was going to blow up at this point (the VC guys had caught wind finally). He did thank me for saving them a bunch of money though.
I never did hear from the Safeway guys. I later learned they lost something like a few hundred million dollars. And the irony is, if I had a better cup of coffee that morning, I might have been able to make a better argument and saved them that money. Oh well.
So, overall, I think I got paid around $10k for the entire thing? Maybe a little more. Anyway, I dumped that into my son's college fund, and its grown so much that it probably will pay for most of his college.
So Theranos, in a weird way, is going to fund my kid's education.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is Palestine isn't alone as a British protectorate that was never an independent country before the Brits left.
India ALSO DID NOT EXIST BEFORE PARTITION IN 1947. There was no 'India', in any real terms.
India was divided by numerous British protectorates or provinces. There was no 'India', as a nation. This was basically true of Palestine as well...there was no independent Palestine before division.
Lets note that Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, opposed the name India all together. “He [Jinnah] was under the impression that neither state (India or Pakistan) would want to adopt the British title of ‘India’."
I think this article largely misses the point. The reason that they are struggling is that this undermines what they've taught about racism and bigotry for 50 years.
Why Colleges Are Struggling To Crack Down on Antisemitism via @politicopoliti.co/3ucgtsE
Reality is that it was always easy: Whites and those in power were the bigots. Those that were 'Almost White' (Jews, Asians) were lumped in.
But in this episode, its largely 'brown' people like myeslf that are the bigots, and their targets are Jews (who are viewed as White).
In short, this up ends half century of liberal/progressive theology on racism. And colleges, run by those that run that theology, are struggling to face the fact that they've largely been wrong for 50 years.
Again, if you are destroying other people's posters, then you are trying to suppress those people's free speech.
At that point, if you get shamed in public, and your family and employer know who you are, I have ZERO sympathy for you.
You want to go and protest, go ahead.
I would never hire anyone that acted like this. Neither should you.
What is funny is if they were protesting, I might make fun of them, but I wouldn't be doxxing them. But they have to be fascists, trying to stop others from getting their message out.
"SCREAMING 'FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA' IS CALLING FOR THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF JEWS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST...AND IS NOT MUCH DIFFERENT THAN NAZI OR KKK CHANTS."
Christians did a huge amount of colonizing over the Millenia, no question.
But the next biggest group to blame? MUSLIMS.
Their colonization in Northern Africa, Europe, India and the rest of Asia as colonizers had huge repercussions.
I mean, if you want to talk about colonizers, then most of Northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan (which was Hindu at one point) etc needs to be under discussion.
How stupid would that be?
Indonesia is the largest Muslim Country on the planet...and was colonized by Muslims, as they took over after Hindu empires ruled there for centuries.
So...kick them all out?
You have to be exceptionally stupid to even start this line of thought.
That said, unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan allowed the America to build a better World for the future. We are better off for it.
@VanWagoner "Hirohito portrayed himself as a powerless monarch who had no say in how the war was conducted. Scholars regularly debated the issue, with many agreeing he was innocent. Experts today, however, largely believe he played a sizable part in Japan's role during World War II."