21/10/2026
A brand new episode wherein we turn all your Thera-nos into Thera-yeses! Leave your ideas for catchy medical car names in the comments 👇 Topics covered:
Clarifying brain death versus severe brain damage, and why a competent examiner matters
Zubin’s first travel speaking engagement in three years, a pain medicine panel in Dallas, and the Rodeo Goat burger
Vinay’s panel at a biotech conference and the longevity target question
Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and how John Ioannidis spotted the lack of peer reviewed papers
Why you can’t run 100 tests off a single drop of blood
Zubin’s Theranos lipid panel at TEDMED and whether the numbers were real
Finger sticks versus venipuncture, and why lancets hurt
The Nathan Fielder documentary and the 35 days before federal prison
Holmes’s personality, her belief that the machine works, and “Theranos 2.0”
Puppeteer or puppet: Billy Evans, Sunny Balwani, and the men in her life
Amanda Seyfried’s reenactments and the second half of the film
Did she commit fraud, did it harm patients, and was she scapegoated for flying too high
Why Holmes picked a claim that could be tested in minutes, and the harder to falsify claims in biotech
Health influencers, creatine, and observational studies as placebo
Stanford versus Berkeley, and the CAC score as a better measured number than Theranos
A glioblastoma device and the ambiguity of its trial
Whether Holmes really didn’t understand the “Who’s on First” joke
Spiritual people, pop culture, and why VPZD isn’t cognitive dissonance
Pope Leo’s lung cancer: luck or Providence, lead time bias, or an indolent tumor
Why Pope Leo’s case gets spun as proof that screening works, and the case against scanning non-smokers
Whether adenocarcinoma, secondhand smoke, and a Peruvian mission shaped the diagnosis
The Pope’s reported equanimity, and the politics of the papal job
A New York Times Daily episode on Texas Trump voters, and why a cherry-picked anecdote isn’t a poll
Why polling is a flawed science, plus spam calls and the “right to be left alone”
Indian call center scammers and YouTube videos of people hacking them
AI car dealership calls, and medical car names like the Ford Infarct and the Toyota Tetralogy
Bryan Johnson’s post that his genome was of no use, and Anne Wojcicki’s response
Francis Collins’s promise that genomes would guide blood pressure pills
Zubin’s factor V Leiden and prothrombin findings, and what a genome did and didn’t tell him
Why reading DNA like letters in a book is the wrong metaphor, and the Lego exhibit analogy
Craig Venter’s genome talk and his “we can tell you when you will die” pitch
Bryan Johnson’s changing positions, and what he eats
Cheese fries, GERD, and a Dallas talk that felt like the whole room was talking
Pain providers, opioids, the Sacklers, and the overcorrection that followed
The parallel with SSRIs and the dilemma of taking people off a drug they shouldn’t have started
A reported 40% rate of pancreatic cysts on MRI, IPMN, and the scan industrial complex
Jalen Hurts’s blood clots: cleats to the calf, a long flight, and Virchow’s triad
Lupus anticoagulant, factor V Leiden, and oral contraceptives
Factor V Leiden and whether you can take the pill
Goldfinger, a Scooby-Doo clip, and how standards have changed
Turning your Thera-nos into Thera-yes! 😁
