Elizabeth Holmes Doc, Pope Leo Cancer, Bryan Johnson Genome

The all-new Nissan Nystagmus: Deviate your Driving! 😁

It's VPZD Ep. 46, ⁠originally streamed LIVE on YouTube⁠.

Chronological topic list

Housekeeping: 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

Zubin’s daughter’s factor V Leiden and whether she can take the pill

Goldfinger, a Scooby-Doo clip, and how standards have changed

Next week’s topics and a plug to watch the Holmes documentary

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