THE DROPOUT

 It's a lot more functional for me to drop into a podcast wormhole, because I can listen to it incessantly while commuting, doing dishes, laundry, shovelling, exercising, cooking and cleaning. A similar binge of video makes my bum a little flatter and wider, so when I started to watch The Dropout on Disney, it was fortunate that only a few episodes existed in video, whereas the podcast series had 24 episodes that I have eaten up in the last week while staying relatively active and productive!

If you don't know the story, it's a gripping one. Another Stanford dropout becomes a billionaire, but this time it's a woman. Elizabeth Holmes was, for a few years, the youngest female billionaire, by founding and becoming CEO of a Silicon Valley company called Theranos (therapy and diagnose) based on a revolutionary idea that blood tests didn't need to from a traumatic needle in a vein, but from a small quantity of blood from a smaller puncture to the fingertip. Unfortunately for many, it was never a reality, and Elizabeth's trial is followed from the beginning to the verdict. 

Attorney Jay Edelson says in the Verdict: January 5, 2022

"I think overall this is going to lead to a tremendous shakeup in Silicon Valley. We've had 20 plus years of Silicon Valley playing fast and loose with facts, and everyone kind of just agreed that it was okay, and it really isn't okay. It's not okay to steal a billion dollars ... It concerns me that Elizabeth Holmes was, at the time, the most prominent female startup, and the number of men who have gotten away with stuff that Elizabeth Holmes did, if not worse, it would fill (you know)journals. I do, just as someone who believes so much in consumer rights in not defrauding people, I am glad about this guilty verdict. It makes me uneasy that.. um, I don't want there to be one scapegoat here. I am not saying that she didn't do anything wrong. She deserves her sentence, but I think that there are a lot of other people, a lot of men, who have done similar things, and I hope that justice will done in other instances as well."

Silicon Valley investor and critic Roger McNamee  Crime and Punishment: October 12, 2021, 23:43

"The thing about Elizabeth Homes that I look at, that gives me hope for humanity: you wouldn't have had to go back more than 5 years when it would have been impossible for a woman to raise that kind of money, even for a great idea. Men have been raising money for bad ideas for a really long time... that actually represents social progress."