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So I was reading the New York Times, which I do, even though you do that at the risk of your own soul. And there was an article about you recently, and it’s pretty scurrilous, which is exactly what I’d expect from the fine folks at the New York Times. But I thought it would be interesting if you don’t mind. I thought I’d hassle you with it a bit and get your responses to it. Absolutely. My only caveat is I may not have read it yet. So just tell me which one this was. That’s okay. I can spring it on you. Well, it was published June 27th. And basically, let me walk through the criticisms because I’d like to see how you respond to it. And I think it’s reasonable to respond to them. So the first thing, here’s the first claim, for example. Mr. Ramaswamy’s enterprise is best known for a spectacular failure. As a 29-year-old with a bold idea and Ivy League connections, he engineered what was at the time the largest initial public offering in the biotech industry’s history, only to see the Alzheimer’s drug at its center failed two years later and the company’s value tank. But Mr. Ramaswamy made a fortune anyway. He took his first payout in 2015 after stirring investor excitement about his growing pharmaceutical empire. So basically, what they’re attempting to do is to cast you in the role of someone who produced a lot of hype around a product and raked off a fair bit of money as a consequence. And the next thing they do is also go after your claim to be a scientist. And the way they do that is by pointing out that you have a bachelor’s degree in a scientific field, but that you made your name in the world of hedge funds and that you did your graduate work in law. So tell me how to respond to reading that. So this is a very recent line of attack that seems to be the one that they’re trying most recently. There have been many others that have been tried and haven’t really stuck either. The fact of the matter is, I actually, when I gave my high school commencement address, one of the things that I try to do is highlight the failures that I’ve had in my career. Now, the reality is this wasn’t even really an unnatural failure. The way the biotech business works and anybody who has been in the business of ever developing a medicine knows that it is a business where you have many failures for a few successes, but the successes make up for the failures. The irony of this particular attack in the New York Times is the business that I started happens to have one of the most successful track records of success for any biotech startup founded in the last couple of decades easily. Most biotech startups in their first 10 years, if they have one FDA approved product, that’s a home run. Two is outstanding and three, you’re in the 99.9th percentile. In my seven years as CEO, I oversaw the development of five medicines that are now FDA approved today. That was the back of a 9 billion public company that’s returned a billion to shareholders before going to public. That’s actually how I built my success and wealth and success. Without those five approved medicines, forget about it. There would have been no financial success at the scale that I have achieved today. And I don’t wish to apologize for that. I actually believe we should be proud of successes and capitalism. Yeah. Okay, let me review your counterclaims. And I know something about the tech and the biotech world. And I also know that the ratio of failure to success among new enterprises is very, very high. There are far more successes than failures. I also know that most entrepreneurs who do eventually make a fortune generally have a string of something approximating 12 relatively catastrophic failures behind them because it takes a lot of experimentation before you find something that works. So I’m inclined to take your word for it. But your point is that you had a drug, if I understand it correctly, and this is your response to the criticisms, is that you did have a drug that didn’t turn out to manifest the promise that you had hoped. But at the same, approximately the same time and in a relatively short period of time, you managed to bring five drugs through the FDA approval process, which is a very, very difficult thing to manage. And your claim also is that those successes were what grounded your financial accomplishment. Now, what do you think the New York Times reporters, how would they respond, you know, if they were trying to… If you were steel manning their possible objections, what might a critic say about your success to failure ratio? I think that if you look at the hard facts, there would be no argument that the success to failure ratio is an outlier in the form of success. And these aren’t multiple different enterprises. So this is one thing they purposefully get wrong here. My company that I founded at Roivn was a parent company of multiple subsidiaries. Each of those subsidiaries housed different drugs. That way scientists could actually have skin in the game in their own projects, something they don’t get in big pharma. So that was the point of building the business this way. And so the whole premise was you set up a portfolio. Some are going to fail. Others are going to succeed. For others in the industry, the failure rate is very high. You get to maybe one approved drug out of that portfolio. That would be a success. To have gotten five is actually an industry shattering norm. Even my biggest critics in the pharma industry are people who know something about the industry. And by the way, many people in pharma do not like me because I called a lot of their bluff in the inefficiency of developing drugs and doing it at a fraction of the cost. But even those worst critics in the industry would tell you that this is an off the charts level of success. And, you know, really in a period of seven, eight years building a nearly 3 billion deal to a larger pharmaceutical company in late 2019, another of which is being marketed by Royvind, the company I founded. This is the stuff of outliers in the biotech industry. And so I’m actually very sympathetic to other entrepreneurs who have had four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten failures before they have a success of businesses. And I respect them. It so happens. I’m actually fortunate to not be in that category, actually. And, you know, there’s some fortune, but I think some forethought that went into this as well. I’ve probably been, you know, both not only age adjusted, though age adjusted as well, but even for a biotech startup built from scratch. I don’t mean to be boastful about it, but in response to the criticism, if you’re grounded to the facts, probably the highest or among the highest success rates of any newly formed biotech company in the last 20 years and the five FDA approved products are the absolute backbone of that. And so in a certain sense, I would say that if you’re going to go after me, you might want to there may be other places to look, but that’s probably the wrong place to be poking. And one of the things that I actually point to, and I think this is just important to understand is. One of the most greatest disappointments in my career was still even in the back of that success, that Alzheimer’s drug. Failing at what felt like striking distance of the goal line. I felt like we were within striking distance of changing history. Every Alzheimer’s 99.7% of Alzheimer’s drugs tested before then had failed. And so we were aiming to bend the historical arc of history and one of the best pieces of advice I would give to any entrepreneur. And I did this as well as one of the pieces of advice. I’m glad I got and I followed was be very like overabundant in telling people how risky what you’re doing really is actually right. So I would tell everybody would be there hasn’t been a drug that’s worked for Alzheimer’s. There’s a very good chance this one won’t either, but it has a reasonable shot. And it’s so happened that that actually ended up being a way of it turned out generating more conviction and excitement from others than doing what other, you know, entrepreneurs and startup guys and biotech do, which is laying out all the reasons why something’s going to work. Everyone has been watching the field knows you’re against the odds. So I actually took the other road of just being abundantly clear and saying that gosh, we’re up against a very big historical rock trucker, but even against that backdrop. Here’s why this has a decent shot. I thought it had a decent shot turned out. It didn’t we turned over the cards. There’s also something that’s an old trick in the biotech industry is you try to data mine and you try to find some trend and say, okay, we’re going to roll it forward raise more money. We didn’t do that. I just I just reject that model altogether. Honestly said, hey, this has failed. Move on to the other projects. Call it what it is. And I think that honesty is actually part of what built the trust for, you know, the backers who helped, you know, and the partners, the people who employees who came and worked with the company with a with a deep unshakable conviction. I think that honesty is part of what actually achieved it. And, you know, now there are medicines for endometriosis, uterine fibroids, prostate cancer, a rare genetic disease in kids for psoriasis that yes, I’m proud to have actually been. If I may say it causally responsible for those drugs being FDA approved and helping thousands of people today, and that’s how you generate wealth. That’s how you win. And that’s capitalism. And we shouldn’t apologize for that. We should embrace that. And I think that that’s something we ought to be proud of rather than ashamed of. We’re just days away from the Durbin Accords, the greatest threat to the US dollar’s global dominance in the past 80 years. On August 22nd, BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are expected to announce the launch of a new international super currency fully backed by gold or other commodities. You can protect your IRA or 401k from the fallout of this landmark announcement by diversifying with gold from birch gold. 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And that allows companies to fail without, well, calling, let’s say for the public execution of everyone involved, because that would have been more akin to the historical precedent. You know, I mean, it wasn’t uncommon in the ancient world if a leader lost a battle that it was incumbent on him to commit suicide. That was still happening in Japan in World War II. You know, you fail and that means you’re useless and you should die. And we’ve managed in the West and this is a bloody miracle of capitalism to set up a legal structure that allows people to take risks without having to put their neck on the line. You know, they still have skin in the game, but it’s not a vital organ, let’s say. Totally. And now the advice, the only advice I would give to entrepreneurs is while that is true, I actually thankfully did not have to go through that process versus actually advising people. If you are building a business, set yourself up even within the business itself to have enough learnings and room for experimentation and failure that allow you when you really lift off to have been strengthened by it. So that was the experience I had. That Alzheimer’s failure strengthened the existing company of Roivend, the parent company, to be able to have the fortitude and experience to then develop those next five. Okay. So that’s the only advice. Well, that segues nicely into the last criticism I want to draw from this New York Times article. So they say, Mr. Ramaswamy declined to disclose how much he lost on paper because of the drugs failure. Thanks to the way he structured his biotechnology empire, he did not hold a direct stake in accident. His personal stake was through Roivend, allowing Mr. Ramaswamy to weather the storm. QVT, the hedge fund where Mr. Ramaswamy once worked, had also invested in Roivend, insulating it for much of the fallout. QVT did not respond to a request for comment, but some investors lost real money on accident. One large public pension fund, the California State Teacher’s Retirement System, sold its stake months later when it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in the days leading up to the disappointing clinical trial news. Okay. So, you know, that’s again- I could go into the details of this actually. It may bore some people, but since the New York Times is doing it and you asked the question. So there’s an element of that reporting that is just false, actually outright false. So the narrative they’re trying to spin and maybe this is coming from opposition research from other campaigns and this is politics of blood sports. So might as well play it if you’re going to play it. So what they’re saying is that, oh, I had Roivend. There was a subsidiary, the Alzheimer’s subsidiary Axevent that had the failed Alzheimer’s drug. Roivend held shares in Axevent. The company, my parent company that I founded, Roivend, owned about a majority of Axevent, could have sold shares of Axevent before its fall. I could have sold shares. You know, it was trading at a high price. I almost felt on the long run principle that was the wrong thing to do. Even as a matter of risk management, a portfolio manager might have told you that was the right thing to do. I felt like that legally is perfectly acceptable. But in terms of the mission of what we’re accomplishing, that would have been the wrong thing to do. And so Roivend, nor I, nor anybody else affiliated with me, sold a single share prior to that failure. So nobody, I think, hurt more than I did and Roivend did as a consequence of that failure. And so the fact that the New York Times, it either reflects deep and I would say negligent lack of knowledge, which I wouldn’t put past them because these are presumably political reporters rather than business ones, or I think maybe even more likely an intentional misrepresentation to mislead people into believing something by painting a picture that’s just fundamentally false. And so just a hard fact is, could Roivend or I have sold shares of Axevent prior to turning over that card? Yes. Would it have been perfectly legitimate, legal, et cetera, to do so? Yes. Would it have been arguably even a good decision of short run risk management to do so? Yes. Did I do it? No, actually it was on principle. I told you the business was built on business principles, Roivend was, to think for the long run. So that would not have been in alignment with the business principles, even though it would have been alignment with perfectly legitimate normal behavior.