Maybe I'm Beginning to Understand...

We're in Florida until the end of April, returned to the same townhouse we rented last year.  Simply put, we love it here.

That's not the subject of this post.

Driving down, we listened to a couple interesting books: Educated by Tara Westover and Bad Blood by John Carreyrou.  (Click on the link to read Bill Gates' notes about the book.)

An aside: if you have yet to discover downloading audible books from your local library, I highly recommend doing so tomorrow, if not today.  You have 3 weeks to listen and there is something quite soothing about being read to (ask any preschooler for an endorsement).

We were mesermized by the story of Bad Blood--it details the rise and fall of Theranos. If you aren’t familiar with the Theranos story, here’s the short version: (from Bill Gates's Gates Notes) the company promised to quickly give you a complete picture of your health using only a small amount of blood. Elizabeth Holmes founded it when she was just 19 years old, and both she and Theranos quickly became the darlings of Silicon Valley. She gave massively popular TED talks and appeared on the covers of Forbes and Fortune.

Holmes managed to, for lack of a better word, hoodwink some insanely wealthy and allegedly bright people into investing and sitting on her board, without them ever asking for data or results which proved the technology worked.  She was the proverbial snake oil saleswoman--a bright, attractive seller of a ghost technology.

As Bill Gates writes, some of the details of this tale are insane.  For example, Walgreens entered into an agreement with Theranos without ever checking whether the technology was accurate.  Company officers shrugged off concerns brought to them by one of their own because they didn't want Walgreens potentially moving ahead with another drug store chain.

The analogy I can make is this.  When I was an administrator, if staff brought a new, very expensive (as in Walgreens investing millions of dollars) curriculum that claimed if we used it, 100% of our preschoolers would be reading, my first response would be, "Where's the data?"

The heads of companies and venture capital firms bypassed this seemingly critical step.  If they did ask for data, Theranos executives put them off and the executives didn't pursue it.

The worst, to my mind, was what happened between George Shultz, who served in cabinet level positions for 3 Presidents, and his grandson, Tyler.  Tyler worked for Theranos, saw what was going on, quit, and became a whistleblower.  He attempted multiple times to convince his grandfather that Theranos was built on smoke and mirrors and that Holmes was not to be trusted.  The elder Shultz chose to believe Holmes, to the extent that at his 95th birthday party, Elizabeth Holmes was invited while Tyler was not.

Wrapping a lasso around this:  I was disappointed, if not outraged, to hear/read how easily intelligent captains of industry, finance and politics were taken by Holmes.  

And if it happens at that level, is it surprising, then, that the President's base continues to support him without question?

Like I said...maybe I'm beginning to understand.

Yesterday I drove down to Nokomis to meet an old friend for lunch.  On the way there, the GPS detoured around a major snarl up on the freeway which took me through a couple smaller Florida towns.  In one, there was a canopy set up on the side of the road, a table beneath it, and a poster which read:

Don can't do it by himself.

Stop and sign the petition.

Don't you love it?  DON.  Not Donald Trump, President Trump, but DON as in my best buddy, DON.

I was tempted to stop but the detour had already made me late.  I had no intention of signing the petition (what it was petitioning for remains unknown) and I was reminded that I'm not in Minnesota anymore, Toto.  When I met my friend, she shared that on her way to meet, she had also seen a canopy tent setup where Make America Great Again gear was being sold.  

Bad Blood reinforced for me that people believe what they want to believe and once they believe it, it can become so deeply ingrained in their own belief systems that they are then unable to question it.  Doing so shakes not only their belief in others, but their belief in themselves.

The book also reinforced the need for freedom of the press and the value of investigative journalism.  John Carryrou, the author of Bad Blood and an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was threatened by the Theranos legal team.  He, and others he spoke with, were followed by private investigators hired by Theranos.  And yet he persisted.

Remember--Don can't do it by himself.  And what are you going to do about that?