Reading this article, the story sounds pretty wild. But I spent a weird amount of time with Martin Shkreli, and I’m not surprised the journalist fell in love w him

A few years back my team built an app called Blab. It was like clubhouse before clubhouse.

When he first joined the app I had no idea who he was. I just saw that his live streams instantly had 3-4K viewers. More than anyone on our tiny platform.

I googled him and it came up: “Martin Shkreli, most hated man in America”

I assumed he was bad news
And he was... but also he wasn’t.

He was a douchebag, but he was in on the joke. He was a dick, but he was also very entertaining.

In the mornings he would live stream himself analyzing stocks or walking through drug discovery pathways.
In the afternoon he’d let people call in and debate him live on air. A CNN reporter tried to get him to go on TV, he refused, and said debate me here on Blab, no edits, no tv time limits.

At night he’d host late night convos - and eventually fall asleep on cam
The guy was a pain in the ass but man he drove traffic.

We had big celebs like Tony Robbins, the Jonas brothers etc... he outperformed them all.

At one point he was bringing in 100k users per month directly to his channel. And Bc he was so entertaining, they stuck.
He also attracted a group of hackers who decided to DDOS us like crazy for 2 months because we allowed him on the platform.
He did some wild shit on blab.

One day he had to testify in front of congress.

His fans held a watch party of 4-5k attendees. In congress he just pleaded the 5th, but as soon as he left the courthouse, he called into the blab and started making fun of congressmen
You look at the guy and wonder - why would this journalist who was married fall in love with the pharma bro in prison?

But I saw it everyday. The guy has a weird charm. He was streaming live video on our app 10 hours a day, and people were hooked. So I’m not surprised!
Rip @blab !

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i almost feel bad for the guy, because someone this absolutely clueless about how he sounds really shouldn't be allowed to post under his own name.

he seems like someone who *genuinely* means well most of the time, but it extremely easy to excite and wind up, and who is just profoundly dense about the wisdom of getting wound up the way he does in public.

on the other hand, the tara reade business was indefensible, exploitative, and gross. if there is ever a writer who desperately needs an editor to save him from himself, it's nathan robinson.

i had a few friends in high school who were well-meaning, wealthier than they realized, and in drama class, and most of them grew out of their nathan robinson stage because, well, it was oklahoma. there's almost something a little charming about the fact that he didn't.

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)
MDZS is laden with buddhist references. As a South Asian person, and history buff, it is so interesting to see how Buddhism, which originated from India, migrated, flourished & changed in the context of China. Here's some research (🙏🏼 @starkjeon for CN insight + citations)

1. LWJ’s sword Bichen ‘is likely an abbreviation for the term 躲避红尘 (duǒ bì hóng chén), which can be translated as such: 躲避: shunning or hiding away from 红尘 (worldly affairs; which is a buddhist teaching.) (
https://t.co/zF65W3roJe) (abbrev. TWX)

2. Sandu (三 毒), Jiang Cheng’s sword, refers to the three poisons (triviṣa) in Buddhism; desire (kāma-taṇhā), delusion (bhava-taṇhā) and hatred (vibhava-taṇhā).

These 3 poisons represent the roots of craving (tanha) and are the cause of Dukkha (suffering, pain) and thus result in rebirth.

Interesting that MXTX used this name for one of the characters who suffers, arguably, the worst of these three emotions.

3. The Qian kun purse “乾坤袋 (qián kūn dài) – can be called “Heaven and Earth” Pouch. In Buddhism, Maitreya (मैत्रेय) owns this to store items. It was believed that there was a mythical space inside the bag that could absorb the world.” (TWX)