“The real trade secret was that there was no secret.”
Elizebeth Holmes—Founder of Theranos—raised billions of dollars in startup capital. The entire company failed to produce a functioning technology, putting customer’s lives in danger and defrauding investors.
Tyler Schultz recounts his harrowing experience as a young graduate working in one of the Theranos labs. Insisting on doing the right thing, he blew the whistle on one of the biggest corporate frauds of all time. Along the way, he teaches us key lessons about having an ethical career and living an ethical life.
About Our Guest:
Tyler Shultz is the CEO of Flux Biosciences, a biotech firm. He graduated from Stanford with a Biology degree and entered the national scene when he blew the whistle at Theranos. Tyler complained to the public health regulators in New York and was a source for a series of Wall Street Journal articles exposing Theranos’ dubious blood-testing practices. Owing to his role in exposing the fraud.
Useful Links:
Thicker than Water is Tyler’s Audible Original where he tells his story, first-hand. There’s no better way to get his unique perspective on all that happened.
Bad Blood, this book features Tyler Schultz and the Theranos scandal. Penned by John Carreyrou, the original author of the Wall Street Journal articles,
Flux Biosciences, Inc., Shultz is the CEO and Co-Founder of a bay-area start-up that aims to bring medical grade diagnostics into the homes of consumers.
Forbes name Tyler as “30 under 30” Health Care 2017 list.
CNN highlights tech ethics venture Ethics in Entrepreneurship
Wallstreet journal “Theranos Whistleblower Shook the Company – and His Family.”
Pleasant Pictures Music
Join the Pleasant Pictures Music Club to get unlimited access to high-quality, royalty-free music for all of your projects. Use the discount code HOWTOHELP15 for 15% off your first year.
The hardest problems to solve are usually the ones we want to keep.
I’ve been laying the groundwork for a new project collecting “helping experiences.” Our hope is that we can start to better understand the multitude of ways we try to help one another. Helping is in our nature, but there’s still so much about helping that we don’t understand.
One common feature of helping experiences is that they’re often imbalanced. Givers and receivers of help typically see things very differently. For example, you’ve probably had the experience where someone’s kindness was monumental to you, and yet they probably don’t even remember the help they gave. This is just one of the ways the experience differs so much for those involved.
Perhaps the most heart-wrenching imbalance is when the person offering help is rebuffed by the person who really needs it. Parents perhaps feel this most keenly. In Episode 2 of the How to Help Podcast, Dr. Marsh shared in our interview that kids who have been diagnosed with psychopathy are extremely difficult to help because they are incapable of seeing their own failings. She said:
I've worked with teenagers who have been thrown out of multiple schools and their parents were afraid of them. They didn't have any friends and they'd been in detention many times. The question we've asked all the kids we work with is how would you rate yourself overall on a scale from one to 10. [These kids] would routinely answer…at a 10 or at 11.
Not that they don't have any good traits, because they all do. They all have lots of good traits, but things are not going well. And the problem is, if somebody doesn't feel that room for
improvement in themselves, then they will not be motivated to do any therapy to change themselves.
It doesn’t take a psychopathy diagnosis for any of use to refuse help, whether it’s out of pride, anger, or even just the desire to not be a burden. The result is still the same. We repeatedly run up against this one truth: the hardest problems to solve are usually the ones we want to keep.
But if we’re the ones wanting to help, and our help is rebuffed? What can we do then? I find great comfort in these lovely words by Norman Maclean, from his novella A River Runs Through It and Other Stories:
Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.
Arthur Brooks has been writing a weekly column for The Atlantic called “How to Build a Life.” The articles have all been research-grounded and thought-provoking.
This YouTube video from Vox takes a fascinating, if troubling, look at how biases are inadvertently created from the algorithms running much of the Web.
Impact Highlight
APOPO is one of those organizations that’s developed a mind-boggling innovation, the kind of accomplishment that seems too unlikely to be true. Using trained rats (and dogs), APOPO safely sweeps minefields in former conflict zones by relying on the amazing sense of smell of their animal companions. You read that right: landmine-sniffing rats.
As if that wasn’t enough, the heroRATs have also been trained to identify undiagnosed tuberculosis. Since APOPO’s founding over 20 years ago, they’ve cleared more than 106,000 landmines and prevented an estimated 90,000 cases of tuberculosis infection, saving thousands of lives in the process.
Promotional Stuff
The How to Help Podcast is live and ready to go. I hope you’ll take a moment to listen, subscribe, rate, and share. Here are links to the first three episodes.
Episode 1 - Finding Your Calling - Prof. Jeff Thompson (Listen Here)
Episode 2 - Neuroscience of Altruism - Dr. Abigail Marsh (Listen Here)
Episodes 1, 2, and 3 of the How to Help Podcast are available now in your favorite podcast player. If you're already a podcast listener, click the button below to subscribe and start listening right away.
Please consider sharing the podcast on your social media. (If we get enough listeners in the first week, it helps draw the attention of people who write the recommended playlists.) I pasted a link below, or you can use the Share button in your podcast player.
Last, if you're new to podcasts I have instructions below for you too. :)
Please be sure to listen, rate, and subscribe. Thank you for your help in spreading the word!
You can listen to the podcast using Google Podcasts either in your web browser or the Google Podcasts app. This link will take you there, where you can listen, rate, and subscribe:
If we look, we can see missing hope in all kinds of places. Some parents lack hope because their child struggles with chronic illness, some families don’t even know if they can buy groceries next week, and some don’t even have a home. Throughout his career, David Williams has become an expert in giving people hope, and he’ll share what he’s learned so that all of us can be better at building hope in others and ourselves.
About Our Guest
David Williams has served as the Executive Director of the Houston Food Bank, COO of Habitat for Humanity, CEO of the national Make-A-Wish Foundation, and CEO of GenesisWorks. He currently works as CEO for Shelters to Shutters, a national organization addressing homelessness through the real estate industry.
Useful Links
A minute with David Williams: David Williams discusses what it takes to deliver inspiration to families with children faced with illness.
GenesysWorks: GenesysWorks provides pathways to career success for high school students in underserved communities through skills training, meaningful work experiences, and impactful relationships. Our program consists of 8 weeks of technical and professional skills training, a paid year-long corporate internship, college and career coaching, and alumni support to and through college.
Batkid Make-A-Wish: It all began with a new superhero who rallied the entire world as he confronted evildoers in San Francisco. Today Batkid is a symbol of everything that is right and good with the world.
Houston Food Bank: Founded in 1982, the Houston Food Bank is a certified member of Feeding America, the nation’s food bank network, with a four-star rating from Charity Navigator. We distribute fresh produce, meat and nonperishables and prepare nutritious hot meals for kids in our state-of-the-art Keegan Kitchen.
National Make-A-Wish: An Interview With Make-A-Wish President &CEO David Williams.
Shelters to Shutters: We seek to change the trajectory of those experiencing homelessness in our country by providing two critical components- housing and employment.
Charles Snyder developed a psychological framework for hope, using ideas like pathways-thinking and agency-thinking.
About Merit Leadership
Learn more about Merit Leadership and its offerings at:
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