Fascinating that the only communications with Tyler Schultz, which was the main insider confronting the fraud, had all of ~4 exchanges with her. All in the same day.
Truly brave of him to go against the golden geese, despite turning his own family- and even former attorney generals & military officers- against him.
Its all on 4/11/2014.
Also interesting to see how Sunny & Holmes always thought it was Tyler, or the CLIA Lab Director (Adam) plotting against them.... when their scam was just in plain sight of regulators that bothered to actually do the work.
Holmes/Sunny reaction to Tyler's email and to Adam's resignation (Nov 2014) is one of outrage. Using the power inbalance to make their point, is 101 fraud.
I read the book (Bad Blood) and watched the mini-series (The Dropout) -- both absolutely great! and yet I still don't completely understand how Sunny & Holmes were able to fool experts inside their own company for so long.
Fooling the public is easy. But how do you fool the people working on the machines and trying to get actual results out of them? Sure, dividing the work into micro-tasks help, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion/excitement/respect for authority, etc. But still?!?
It is exceedingly difficult to convince someone of a lie, if their livelihood depends on believing that lie.
A case study in human psychology for sure.
$$$ and NDAs work
I can't speak to Theranos, but having worked in scientific R&D the researchers are used to business folk telling them work is good enough/sellable even when they think it needs more study, are worried about edge cases, etc. And it can be true and not fraudulent. A lot of scientists are always looking for 'better', a more complete model, an answer closer to 'truth'; business is looking for what can I sell, what is slightly better (or differentiated enough) than current market offerings.
I think that can create enough plausibility in researchers' minds (along with keeping work divided and some psychological manipulation). They're thinking this looks kind of terrible and doesn't work for A, B, or C situations, but the business folks tell me this is exactly what they need and works on the market. Add in good pay (Theranos paid well above market for biotech for quite a while) and people won't think too hard about it.
Wow I had never heard of this whistleblower guy Tyler, this email is honestly amazing.
> In my meetings with Daniel I found that the discrepancies between our CVs were due to Daniel calculating CV based on the median value of each precision run, while I was calculating CV of the entire data set for each level. When I asked him why we do this, he said that it was a way to average out the noise. I was under the impression that the coefficient of variation was meant to be, at least in part, a measure of how much noise exists in the data. By averaging out this noise before CV is calculated, the CV as a metric of assay performance becomes less meaningful.
“Becomes less meaningful”… this is the most polite way I can imagine telling your CEO, “hey, our results are all BS”. His message is so thorough and measured, and they just tear into him. He’s the only professional in the room.
Sunny's response to Tyler's email, the one full of sincere concern for the well-being of the company:
Tyler.
We saw your email to Elizabeth.
Before I get into specifics, let me share with you that had this email come from anyone else in the company, I would have already held them accountable for the arrogant and patronizing tone and reckless comments. In your case, I am giving you the benefit of doubt that your intentions are in the right place, and am taking the time to respond, even though your tone in this email all the way through the last paragraph is not that of someone seeking to understand, but rather someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom. Perhaps this too was not your intent but this clearly comes across as your mind set.
See my comments in red below.
> someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom
This is a good reminder that arguments on morality and wisdom are used and abused.
And also a good reminder that if someone is coming off to you as "at a higher perch of morality and business wisdom" maybe you should listen to them.
Sunny's interpretation of the tone is another way of saying "you come here acting all superior". This is very different from accepting someone is superior, so it has the opposite effect of wanting to listen.
If someone is coming off to you as "all superior" you would only listen if you genuinely agree they are, and it's not an act. Otherwise you'll just see a person trying to make you feel inferior. Nobody listens unless they are truly convinced of that superiority, or else it's just an insult. Sunny of course chose to see this as an insult. But the opposite, taking the superiority at face value and just listening to anyone who sounds superior is no better. There are many more signals to take into consideration before deciding whether someone's opinion is worth listening to or taking into consideration.
If someone is coming off as superior to you then you should probably figure out why. Because sometimes the reason is because they have too high an opinion of themselves. And sometimes it's because you are in defense mode and they are right.
I don't think that follows. A lot of folks like to position themselves as "holier-than-thou".
The key idea, perhaps, is that in questions of fact, tone is noise.
... and that doesn't mean one gets to discard the message because its tone is noisy. Especially when the message is warning of jail-time-worthy consequences for one's actions.
If someone says "Hey asshole, stop standing on those tracks, that's how idiots get dead..." Their tone makes it hard to accept their message but one is still standing on the tracks.
Wow. Do execs really talk/communicate like this in normal companies???
Absolutely not. If an exec talks to you like this you should leave immediately.
well, in a large company, you cannot leave for every asshole that thinks he is better than you, or you never work anymore.
the level of political correctness he uses to write his email should be forbidden in any tech / medical company lol
This is great, it reminds me of promotional websites from the Adobe Flash era. Ads were a lot more fun back then.
They replaced the old space jam website with a boring href to a yt of the trailer :(
It’s still there if you close that out: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
I cant believe they've done this. They didnt even use iframes.
I get a secure connection failure. Maybe it's for the best
It should be trivial to reauthor .swf content to modern web standards.
Macromedia Flash 1.0 was released the same year as the Space Jam website, I don't think it used .SWFs. In fact I don't remember .SWFs being common until 2002-2003 (but that's my biased viewpoint, since that's when I discovered Newgrounds.)
make ads fun again
Make ads go away
MAFA
Make Ads Fun & Interesting Again - MAFIA
Better
From Elizabeth's Sent mailbox, 10/26/2015:
> Theranos is a revolutionary business, founded and led by a remarkable engineer and businesswoman - joined by a team of professionals who have, at their core, embraced her mission to serve humanity through innovation in health care.
4 lines and only the last 2 words tell us what they do
What they pretended to do more like it.
Whoa. With a lidar scan of my house, a drone-captured point cloud of my neighborhood, and a backup of my icloud, I could create an immersive 3D snapshot of my life. And then what if other people did the same and we networked them together, so that we can actually interact in the snapshot. It'd be like second life except actually cloned from real lives. weird
You could pitch the idea to Zuck, see if he wants to burn $100b to try it out.
No please. Not again.
It seems we will be having gaussian-splatted 3D world soon.
Why not, it's big tech money, at least share it with the poor.
I had a thought the other day that you could probably divide up the world into cubic miles and with a few thousand codex subscriptions make a high fidelity blender model of the entire world based on google maps, street view, and tagged location photos.
What would you do with a whole model of the world? I don't know, but it would be fun to walk a national park while I'm on the treadmill or basejump off of a realistic el capitan.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
(Borges)
Microsoft has done that to some extent with Flight Simulator using older machine learning techniques. Wouldn't call most of the world high fidelity yet but I'm sure they could get there with generative AI models. I'm also sure the anti-AI screeching in the gaming community would be heard for miles.
Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s world map covers the entire Earth at approximately 1:1 scale: about 510 million square kilometres of surface, including roughly 149 million km² of land
Ref: https://flyawaysimulation.com/ask/answers/microsoft-flight-s...
I think they cheat somewhat with the ocean when far from labdy
It's impossible not to; We don't even have high resolution depth maps of the entire ocean.
In that case generative AI could be defended as a privacy preserving measure, I guess.
I love doing flybys of my house in MSFS
Pretty sure I've seen experiments to do this using a combination of AI and traditional photogrammetry.
Bro just go outside
no sorry have to keep in touch with agents
Who else is gonna type “just implement it” or press enter repeatedly
At the very least I would love a driving simulation based on that data. That way I can practice driving in weird neighborhoods without the stress
This is the core concept behind the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" (201).
Like most early-season episodes, it's incredibly depressing but absolutely worth watching. And honestly, I wouldn't mind if AI researchers were forced to watch it (along with The Animatrix).
That is exactly the idea of some minecraft projects: Mapping the entire world into minecraft.
And then you realize how boring it is.
If only google could use their AI to generate a wiremesh model out of their google maps streetview data, and make it public. And then another model to generate texture.
I mean Second Life has been around since 2003... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
I wasted a lot of hours in it when I was a teen.
It's so strange to see this here. I remember when this site was nothing but foaming-at-the-mouth fawning adoration of Elizabeth Holmes long after her scams were exposed.
My first memory of her being mentioned on this site was the dawning skepticism followed by the big expose. But it's possible I missed the fawning because it didn't sound as interesting
I recall there were plenty of people on here going into bat for Theranos way after others were calling it fraud.
The thing is, she expertly rode a belief system that was already prevalent: that SV was going to change the world and that SV and what was happening there was different. Plenty of WeWork fans as well. Plenty of fans of firms that actually did something as well, but most of those "did something"s were a website.
10 years ago I would defend FSD against the naysayers who said it would never work. We are currently at the stage of figuring out what approximates never.
I’d forgotten there was a time when “Tesla fan” didn’t feel like a political statement.
WeWork fans were incredible.
I posted about Theranos 2013. Not entirely sure, but I think it was when they launched publicly.
Crazy how my gut feeling was more than vindicated.
A lot of the comments on that thread are about how the board is full of military/CIA it smells like a cover company. It had Henry Kissinger on it of all people.
Did we ever find out what all those people were doing at Theranos? I really haven’t kept up to date.
I have a theory! They saw all the other security state people involved, and figured this was something it would be a good career move to support without knowing exactly why.
"Don't obey in advance", Tim Snyder said. But obeying in advance is called showing initiative and is a great career move. In secretive industries it can be hard to know what to obey in advance, but they don't let that stop them!
One of the unspoken secrets of research is that a lot of people are doing it to keep themselves in a job. It is perfectly possible to do research for years which goes nowhere, just goes over old ground etc. As long as the money rolls in, someone's making a living and not necessarily dishonestly if they're at the lower levels.
I think there was a lot of resentment here because of how easily it appeared she was raising money and how quickly the company grew at first without having a working product and a murmur from experts that their miniaturization play may not be able to work at all.
I remember before the expose a friend that did blood draws for a living was just like, “huh? It’s impossible to do the tests without a larger sample, it’s just not how it works”.
This is an ad for her upcoming, self-starred documentary. So nothing much has changed?
In the "Notes" app on the iphone, there is a note which says "msg me on X". Back then, it was Twitter. Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
What are we to believe this is some sort of, snort heh* magic iPhone or something?
She was truly ahead of her time.
“X” was actually a pre-Twitter BBS focused on transgenics and corpuscular macronutrients, based in Fort Worth. Any true believers would know that.
I'd love to agree with you but that look like the site designer asking for feedback on his site
its still called twitter
(for some of us)
I will never call it X and die violently on this hill
I've accepted X and call the posts "crements"
it's just kinda awkward, but worse than just "X" is the fact that now you're supposed to call tweets "posts on X" or "X posts"
like come on... it was so good before
How about Xitter? :)
pronounced "shitter"?
Rest assured that I still refuse to call it X, it's so stupid. But I couldn't pass up the opportunity in this instance. :)
If Elon Musk can deadname, we can too.
good catch, i may need to find a new job soon
> I hope somebody got fired for that blunder
Their name is probably Claude.
[Scoff, Scoff]
Cool, schultz made the docu, but I've seen this thread before any doubts were raised by anyone, it's a hilarious read by people who understand the topic and they called bs before any exposure.
Just keep it simple, quoting verbatim
The board of directors looks more like a team to negotiate peace with Iran rather than an actual biotech board
Why do I have Nathan Fielder's look in my face (same when he was staring at as EH on the pilot), as I'm going through all the features on this site?
Hope you're lounging on somebody else's bed too, while you're doing that. :D
It is a bit hilarious that most of the "apps" open faster in a fake desktop simulated inside the browser than it actually does natively on my Macbook Pro
*yes i know, not apples to apples.
All I feel is that UI of MacOS and iOS is so inferior now than it was then... :\
If only apps were opening in an instant, odd feeling of having it on random website but not have it natively.
Unfortunately the OS itself won't be the be-all / end-all, crossplatform (web) apps and a lack of care for optimization are the other major issue. I just timed how long it takes to open the 'calendar' tab in Teams - 8.5 seconds. MacOS' own calendar app takes <2 seconds (unrepresentative test due to factors) and does not show a screen with a spinner.
Same, but for that generation of MacBook Air. Insane quality and value for the price. And you didn't have to wait 6 weeks to get them!
Although I bet Lizzie used a Pro..
only because it was. We peaked with skeuomorphism at the turn of millenium.
Burying the api key in notes on the laptop is a nice touch.
I need to delete that key again. I keep recreating it with the same value, but nothing seems to work. I want to use this key with the value but in a way that nobody else knows the value. Sigh. Security is difficult.
For those who are curious, Elizabeth Holmes was originally charged to serve for 11 years and 3 months. However, now her projected release date is just right around the corner - 2030. That's just 6 years and 9 months. A little more than half of her original serving period.
They are moving her to a halfway house next year. So about 4 years in prison.
What explains the time reduction?
A lot of prisoners get released after about half their sentence when they become eligible for parole, so 12 years is really 6 (and life is really 20) in a lot of cases. Fraud is a white collar crime and basically everyone gets out on parole first or second try.
The only ones who don't are murderers, gang members, drug dealers or whistleblowers. The American legal system judges crimes on how far from "normal behavior" they are, not how much harm they cause.
I don’t know about this particular case, but sentences are usually reduced to 3/4 or 2/3 depending on a bunch of factors referred to as good behavior. Unless a judge or a law explicitly disallows that depending on the crime or the sentencing. The amount varies by state or court type and judges usually account for that when deciding on the sentencing
Federal criminal convicts usually serve 85-90% with good behavior, at least for men. The minimum is 85%. There is no federal parole. I think she's getting out early for a different reason.
I left some snaps on your iphone, so see we can stare into each other's eyes Liz.
Super slick buried Extend marketing
we parsed all the theranos PDF filings with Extend (https://extend.ai/) and wanted a fun interactive way of visualizing them!
Took me a while to figure out why, till I opened Safari read "document processing" and it clicked. Good job.
thanks!
Did we get their emails? Would be interesting to tease out the differences between the Enron culture and the Theranos culture (and similarities)
there's even an extend api key in there (invalid though, would've been cool if it did something special)
Given the context this made me assume extend is also some kind of a scam
Landed on it like 3 clicks in and immediately closed the page.
thank you!!
You know, for a single pretty rare case of fraud in tech, as opposed to the industries where fraud is common, this gets brought up an excessive amount a decade later.
Two theories:
* It was off-the-charts brazen, and amazing that so many prestigious people got behind it, and that it took so long for anyone blow the whistle/notice that the impossible product didn't in fact exist.
* Sexism.
If you want me to believe #2, I would like to hear what you think are the more comparable cases which don't get bought up as much as this one.
Tech? Not the health sector?
The "tech" sector label is a fraud in its own right.
It makes sense to have a separate label for companies that develop software. They have a unique investment appeal because their cost of production doesn't increase with units sold, so higher PE ratio if growing.
For "some reason" Netflix isn't priced as a media company. Tesla isn't priced as manufacturing.
That's fair, I guess it depends on how you divide it.
Theranos was first funded and mentored by Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. She's 100% tech.
It's hard to forget when the "pretty rare" (citation needed) case was also shoved down your throat by the fawning media for 5 years first.
Really cool. Actually makes me miss that era of macOS.
The page crashes instantly in Safari on iOS on an iPhone 13.
The memory limit for Safari on iOS is less than 400 MB so it's probably because of that
Doesn’t load at all on an iPhone 7
Works great on my iPhone 13.
looking into it!
[flagged]
A24 (the studio behind the movie) is one of our customers, so we're hosting a watch party in SF
plus, we used our APIs to parse all the theranos PDFs to power the experience
hope our content marketing made your day a bit more fun!
It's an amazing site - well done.
Sneaky and a little icky, but novel enough to pass.
Where’s the party? I just built something similar to your product for an SF-based non-profit (fully self-hosted on site) and it’s been extremely useful. Would love to get tips on how we can improve our setup.
I mean this in the best way possible: This reminds me so much of Microsoft Bob if it had survived to 2016.
At least this is a fun ad. I appreciate the level of commitment the developers put into it. It's not just vibe coded slop which is rare
I mean, fair play? I appreciate marketing that has effort involved, especially these days.
You do have to get your word out somehow
I would prefer if they were upfront about it so I could just not click on it.
The event they're hosting is a free watch party for the movie. You didn't exactly crack the case.
Feels like they are unintentionally marketing the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary rather than themselves.
Yes but intentionally:
Maybe creating the documentary was the most ambitious Nathan For You episode yet, and all simply to build publicity for this company.
The plan…
- Create a series of increasingly surreal reality TV shows that blur the distinctions between how we see ourselves and how we present to the world as characters.
- Convince a reality-distorting corporate sociopath that my experience making these shows makes me the ideal person to tell her misunderstood story to the world in a breakthrough documentary film.
- Use an advance screening of the film to generate publicity for this previously obscure AI document management startup.
Reddit is full of EH content lately, now this.
All of this must be a marketing campaign for the movie.
and most of it pumped years ago through JRE
Wait, this isn't marketing for the documentary?
Llllllllllllol?
Ok, I have to ask : is there a way to get a "cartridge" to insert into the theranos machine ?
I would love to have the machine "function" up to a point (except, actually doing the analysis results in a "NotImplementedException" of some kind.à
Keep clicking the menus on the screen rather than clicking on the tray itself. When you click “load cartridge” on screen it materializes and closes.
I also initially looked around the desk for a physical cartridge, such was the effectiveness of the rest of the “game”.
Was having trouble resolving this domain and it's because Quad9 (9.9.9.9) is blocking it lol
Man, was not prepared to come across a Sparklehorse track randomly tonight.
In my genearl observations of office desks/cubicles around me I have noticed that the only people with carefully stacked books, often more than one or two, were the ones who didn't really read.
Makes sense. I stack books every time I clean my table, but they get out of stack pretty quickly.
Not that it matters or anyone cares, but it's so obvious Balwani was manipulating her emotionally. There are so many instances where he says "Love you", or "love" or "I am in love with your beauty", while she is more direct like "I love you", "I am in love with you" etc.
I don't see how either of your examples are necessarily more direct than the other?
hmm..perhaps I was biased because I watched a couple of documentaries, a tv film and read the book by John Carreyrou "Bad Blood", so my eyes were primed to look for this pattern.
But he was definitely manipulative in this regard.
I love how incredibly vapid the emails and text messages are.
And by love I of course mean: I love, LOVE, LOVE, [repeat ad nauseam]
Nails on a chalkboard.
The reminders section is the second most entertaining bit after the messages. Look it up. It's hilarious!!!
yay i'm glad people are finding all the easter eggs!
The cookie banner is safari was a nice touch
Love the camera jump scare. Genius
Can't stop laughing at this one!
i'm glad someone found it!!
Might be the most tasteful ad I've seen in a hot minute, not bad at all.
Is this an ad for Extend?
What is Extend?
This is remarkably well-made, I love these little simulator dealies.
Ok I'm a pretty passionate anti-advertising advocate, but if advertising is gonna look like anything, it might as well be this!
Someone posted this[0], a couple of days ago. It was an old marketing ploy for a company called Veracity.
thank you :)
This is inspired by jmail.world, which may have been inspired itself.
It is obviously not as interesting as jmail.world, but, give her time
That's some sick marketing
The setting is unsettling. Remind me of some old horror flash games i used to play.
Genuinely curious: does anyone know if the backers ever got refunded?
The iPhone works and you can even play/listen to music on it!
Even the Theranos machine
this site is so slick great job! love how the email in the iphone works
there's too many easter eggs to count, I didn't even realize that one existed
thank you :))
I finished the juice. Now what ?
LOL
Excellent work! All the best for the documentary launch!
thank you for the kind words!!
The juice was great. Now I have to pee. Where do I click? Can the machine analyze it?
Best ad I've seen in a very long time, but I'm mildly disappointed I couldn't load the juice into the Theranos machine
Who made this?
Blew my mind away.....
I spent way to much time with that :-D
Immediately crashes on my phone, is this something related to Nathan Fielder's new doc?
I took a photo on the iPhone of Elizabeth Holmes and myself hanging out smoking a joint together!
The share button let me download it.
Kinda cool, but also annoying that it's just backdoor marketing for a b2b SaaS company.
There is no way to run for the door.
Bo you are a legend!!!
you can click on the drink to take a sip btw
playfulness is the key
I checked the health app on the phone:
> No health data.
:)
Very cool!
interesting seeing marketing content do so well on HN haha, not bad!
As someone who only knows Theranos by the creepy lady and that they did some scam this is very interesting. Only critique is that it calls Twitter X, which isn't historically accurate.
EDIT: uhh I thought the movie signup thing was a gag, didn't know it was real. Sorry I guess.
Context please. What is this?
Now do Epstein's Laptop!
woah this is such a throwback, made me oddly nostalgic. great fucking work
thank you!!
Why are people giving her anymore attention and time? Yawn. I don't get it. The story has been told, there is nothing new here besides some weird shots of her wide eyed like she always has been. Am I the only person who isn't impressed?