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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

I also suspect the guy (Robert Grant) is a conman, but whatever scheme he is running is quite elaborate: https://strathspeycrown.com/team

Does anyone have an insight as to what their endgame is, and where their funding is coming from?

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Having a team page like that is your first red flag.

https://strathspeycrown.com/subsidiary-companies-investments...

> "Strathspey Crown is a visionary portfolio of transformational businesses, focused on the most complex sectors of healthcare, energy, and technology."

This seems to be the parent company, check out some of the goofy things they claim to been involved in. Quotes like "changing the paradigm", "the internet of wellbeing", "where little things make a big difference". It's cookie cutter generic websites for every one of them, most of the time I can't work out what their product is supposed to be or what they're claiming to be working on.

Just spent the last 15 minutes reading through their websites in quiet amazement. How do they get funding? Why do people pay them?

When your ‘director of cryptography’ has this in his bio, surely something’s up:

> dedicated the last fifteen years to decrypting mathematical codes in Shakespeare’s writings that have revealed unknown sacred geometry hidden in the pyramids of Giza.

Another of their companies sells patches that relieves pain through the magic of quantum physics. Something about the energies of healing substances that unlock a pain relieving carrier wave.

Yikes.

It's like audiophiles; there's not too many people who believe it, but enough of the ones that do have enough disposable income to make a great grift.

I'm genuinely confused here... some audio equipment does actually sound better than other audio equipment. Are you referring to snake oil audio cable salesmen?

"Audiophiles" are generally associated with not high end audio equipment at absurd costs and no reasoning. Oxygen free copper cabling, making sure your cables are isolated from the floor on little stands to reduce the vibration they absorb, "burning in" amplifiers for thousands of hours to improve the flavor of the output in a supposedly perceptible way. Many behaviors with the consistency of rubbing deer blood on your car hood to give it bloodlust, and therefor extra speed.

> ...rubbing deer blood on your car hood to give it bloodlust, and therefor extra speed.

I've never heard this one; brilliantly funny!!

People differ about which point Audiophilia descends into nonsense. Obviously the magic stones and $5000 digital cables are ridiculous.

I would probably argue for a more expansive definition. If you have to listen really, really hard to hear the enhancement piece of equipment gives then it's a waste of time and money.

But hell, I grew up listening to music recorded onto a C90 through a $40 walkman.

Not just "listen very hard", but "listen very hard during a double blind test".

I remember a thread on avsforum.com where one individual has claimed he could hear the difference between cheap and expensive cables. Someone on the forum offered to travel to his house, do a double blind test, and post the results. The individual agreed, and the test was performed. The results of 20 tests were something like 12/8, where 12 was the number of times he mistook the $5 cable for the $900 one.

Well, that was kind of expected, however the most interesting part was that despite this clear evidence, the individual still refused to change his mind about importance of the "high quality" cables. It was a bizarre and eye opening experience for me to follow that development.

There is a fundamental issue here. Some people (with understanding of 101 stats) see the results of 12/8 of false/true outcomes and read it as a confirmation of null hypothesis - 50%/50% of guessing the cord.

Some other people, however, see it as 8/20 you can hear the inferior product, they think that they are not peasants to get 8/20 feeling of inferior product, so shut up and take my money, cause $900 cable will guarantee 0/20 of hearing bad cable, totally worth it. nuff said

I've seen a coil in a fancy box sold for 800 bucks to clean and smooth out the air structure in the room to improve your sound experience. I suppose, that kind of stuff is meant.

Speakers sound different, and thus some speakers will sound better to you. Most people find linear speaker performance "hard work" so you don't see it attempted in homes usually.

And maybe, if you don't use active speakers, the Amplifier makes a difference.

Everything else is snake oil, not just the cables. Separate CD transports, fancy DACs, "HD" formats, all snake oil.

Yes, the latter, and a lot of the really expensive home audio kit.

I had no idea the old equidistant letter sequences trick is still alive after all these years.

I would say all the companies are different branches of the same Con artist.

Just working on different directions.

I clicked around and some of them even don't exist outside of strathspeycrown. Several of them have just plain placeholder sites.

I think it’s funny that the portfolio page has a quite by Daniel Pink. Pink is like a pop culture, Malcolm Gladwell type. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it also doesn’t really provide ethos from an established authority.

Picking quotes is interesting, I think, as it gives a sense of the author and what the author values.

But the interesting part is that at least some of the people involved in these companies seem real (e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/in/amira-val-baker-47047123/)

One of the products seems to be real and FDA approved.

https://www.drugs.com/newdrugs/fda-approves-jeuveau-prabotul...

I don’t understand what it supposedly does that’s any different/better than Botox?

The text suggests whatever it is, it’s close enough to botox for it not to matter.

Real people, fronting unreal businesses. Here is their head of Business Development, Designer, and Cryptography Advisor

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamapollo/

Another page on achievement from the same group.

https://resonance.is/resonance-academy-faculty/

Including Mr. Apollo

After having a vision of the Universe as a fractal hologram at the age of 15, he extensively studied a wide variety of branches in theoretical astrophysics, completing major research papers on the potential interface between consciousness and the physics of space-time by the time he graduated High School.

His website is worth a look: https://www.adamapollo.com/

I'm going to sample a couple of his 27 albums. The cover art alone is a thing to behold.

EDIT - I'm beginning to think we've got this all wrong.

It's not a scam - it's a cult.

Found another one from the previous link for a more HN friendly topic, a social network.

https://core.network/

What is fascinating is that the partner organization are always referencing other organization in the same "network", so it looks impressive but it is always the same 10-15 people.

For example compare the team https://hiup.org/people/ with https://resonance.is/resonance-academy-faculty/ which is mostly the team of the Robert grant's company https://torustech.com/team/

And going down the rabbit hole, the Time AI trailer has some visual similarity to :

http://getconnected.resonance.is/#

A 2016 documentary pushed by Resonance Academy and Unify about all people being connected, which is also the mantra of torus tech (because obviously they are the same people...)

And if you look at the (paid) delegate program of the resonance academy (https://academy.resonance.is/), in the list of module down the page, you'll find Robert Grant and Adam Apollo.

Here is the module from Robert Grant: https://academy.resonance.is/language-of-light/

>This course attempts to unlock the mysteries of science and esoterica from a wholistic perspective, combining history and ancient sites, ageless symbology, polymathic philosophy, biology, musical theory and alchemy.

>We also explore the practical application of these mathematical discoveries and how they can be utilized along with hertz EMGR (Electro-Magneto-Gravito-Radiativity) to better understand time, the Inverse Square Law, biology, DNA genotypic and phenotypic expression, vacuum energy and matter transmutation.

So it is all circular referencing, but honestly this is kinda fascinating.

The main site links to the following project:

https://galacticfamily.net/

Galactic Fundamentals

Want to find out more about the Extraterrestrial Species who populate this Galaxy, learn how to make Contact, and explore the depth of your own personal relationship with the Stars?

We're still populating all the areas of this site with amazing content, but get on our list to be notified about our upcoming deep dives and contact experiences.

I mean, this doesn't quite say "come and talk to aliens" but "learn how to make Contact" does sound like promising something currently impossible.

I think the 4th picture in the first carousel is a desktop background I had once.

Looking around, all of the LinkedIn profiles I could find for these people look suspiciously empty and suspiciously similar. Most of them have only worked at companies closely related to that parent company.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maritza-banda-116806120 / https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-foster-039805111 / https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-nangle-b60255173

Strathspey Clown

I don't have a link handy but I came across a statement on their website earlier mentioning that they are mostly funded by doctors.

Their press release about prime numbers suggests that they are trying to convince doctors to invest. From https://strathspeycrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/SC_Pr...:

> "The firm's subsidiaries and investors include board certified physician specialists across key medical specialties, including plastic surgery, ophthalmology, dermatology, dentistry and orthopedics. Strathspey Crown is focused on working with physician investors to bring to market innovative technologies and services in the self-pay sector of the lifestyle healthcare market."

Some of their portfolio companies seem centered around Irvine, CA and Newport Beach and/or focus on plastic surgery and "wellness" marketing. Seems to me that this is a very well architected investor scam that maybe finds a legit investment from time to time, but is primarily organized around liberating small individual investors from their money.

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