• Journalist Steve Fishman was interning at a newspaper when he was picked up as a hitchhiker. 
• Six months later, he found out that the driver was a serial killer and he could have been a victim.
• The case drove his career as a true crime writer, and he's recorded a podcast about what he learned.

When journalist Steve Fishman did an exclusive jailhouse interview with a serial killer and rapist, he had one particularly important question to ask.

"Why didn't you kill me?" the rookie reporter asked Robert Frederick Carr III as they sat in a cell in 1976.

"I thought you were too big," the felon said, referring to the moment he eyed Fishman as his next victim after giving him a ride as a hitchhiker the previous fall.

Nearly 50 years later, Fishman has reflected on his narrow escape in the true-crime podcast, "Smoke Screen: My Friend, The Serial Killer."

Fishman told Business Insider he realized he was naive when he first covered the story. "I guess I tried to understand and humanize him," he said, noting that his coverage focused heavily on the lack of psychological treatment for sex offenders at the time.

But, with the wisdom he has gained in his career and as a father of three, he described Carr as a "monster" who showed no remorse.

Fishman thought the driver who picked him up would be an interesting subject of a story

Fishman first met Carr at the age of 19 while hitchhiking. He was a poorly paid intern at a local newspaper and needed a ride to his workplace in Norwich, CT.

Carr drew up in his sedan, beckoned Fishman inside, and introduced himself as "Red." Balding with wisps of ginger hair, he was about a decade older than the hitchhiker.

"I run up excitedly," Fishman said. "But I'm also anxious because you never know what will be on the other side of that car door. I'm not a big guy and didn't shave then, so I looked younger than I was."

But Carr put his mind at ease, telling him he also lived in Norwich and knew a shortcut to their destination. "He seemed amiable, personable, and completely unthreatening," Fishman told BI.

His journalist radar went off when Carr disclosed that he'd recently been released from prison. "Instead of it setting off an alarm bell, I thought, 'maybe this could be a story, and I could interview him about his challenges getting back into the community.'"

Carr said he would interested in appearing in the paper and gave Fishman his phone number. The plan was for the intern to speak to Carr's probation team first.

Still, Fishman got scared after telling the driver where to pull over. "I said goodbye, but the handle on the door didn't work," he said. "It was anomalous — enough to cause a moment of anxiety and almost panic."

To his relief, Carr said, "Sorry, I've got to get that door fixed." He told him to wind down the window and release the handle from the outside. Fishman left safely after wishing him a great day and promising to follow up on the story.

But the idea didn't come off. Carr's probation supervisor nixed it.

Disappointed, Fishman tossed Carr's number into the back of a file and got on with his job at The Norwich Bulletin. He mostly covered high school sports games and other family events such as Easter egg hunts.

Six months after he met Carr, he saw the man's photograph on a breaking news alert.

The report from the Associated Press described Carr's arrest for the attempted rape of a hitchhiker in Florida. He had shocked police by confessing to kidnapping and raping more than a dozen people and murdering four of them.

"I can still feel the shudder when I read it," Fishman said.

The journalist's biggest scoop was a jailhouse interview

He dug out Carr's number. His wife answered and agreed to be interviewed.

The reporter covered every aspect of the story, including Carr's sentencing deal. The murderer agreed to lead detectives to the places where four of his victims were buried. A judge gave him three life terms plus 360 years instead of the death penalty.

One of Fishman's biggest scoops was securing the face-to-face interview with Carr behind bars. "I was captivated by the excitement, the dead bodies, the deadlines, and the sense of purpose."

The journalist, who was then 20, said Carr's agenda dictated the conversation.

"He held forth for a couple of days, sitting at the head of the table in this little room," he said. "He intended to convince me and make me listen."

Carr, who died of prostate cancer in 2007 at the age of 63, discussed why he'd spared Fishman's life. He recalled every detail of the encounter and told his near victim that his size had warned him off.

The journalist said the killer painted himself as the victim as the state had not provided him with therapy. "I took it very seriously — as I would do now," Fishman, who won national and regional press awards for reporting on the case, said.

The two men developed a friendship and frequently bantered on the phone. "He'd call collect to the newsroom from jail and joke around with me and the editors," Fishman said.

Meanwhile, his career flourished. He told BI that his experience with Carr helped "define" his journalism. "It gave me a deep hunger for being inside the story and wanting to understand it."

Fishman went on to interview the so-called "Son of Sam" serial killer David Berkowitz, in the 2000s. The murderer is serving a life sentence for crimes committed in the mid-70s. He also interviewed the notorious Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, sentenced to 150 years, before he died in 2021.

Now a father, he said that if he could have advised his younger self, he would have told the rookie to consider the human cost of the case more closely.

"At that point, I was extremely ambitious and driven," Fishman, whose children are 21, 15, and 2, said. "There was this seduction of having extreme access to this guy, so I told his story as he wanted. What I missed — but what I've learned a second time around — was that this guy was irredeemable."

• Former President Donald Trump named Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate on Monday. 
• But Trump isn't the first person to have spotted Vance's potential.
• Celebrity professor Amy Chua took Vance under her wing while he was studying at Yale Law School. 

Sen. JD Vance of Ohio has come a long way since graduating from Yale Law School in 2013.

The former venture capitalist-turned-politician's career trajectory got a big boost on Monday when former President Donald Trump named him running mate.

"As Vice President, JD will continue to fight for our Constitution, stand with our troops, and will do everything he can to help me make America great again," Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Vance does have benefactors, like tech billionaire Peter Thiel. But before Thiel, Vance caught a big break when he was still in law school.

The Marine veteran enrolled at Yale Law School in 2010 after graduating from Ohio State University.

In his 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," Vance likened his year at the Ivy League institution to attending a kind of "nerd Hollywood." Besides earning his law degree, Yale would also be where the seeds of his political career would be sown.

It was at Yale where Vance gained a mentor in the form of his contract law professor, Amy Chua, 61.

Chua, who earned her bachelor's and law degree from Harvard, pursued a career in corporate law before leaving for academia. She first taught at Duke Law School before joining Yale in 2001.

Chua, who gained notoriety for her 2011 memoir "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," encouraged Vance to write "Hillbilly Elegy."

"I always thought JD was destined for great things, and that going the conventional route would actually slow him down," Chua said of Vance in a 2017 interview with The Atlantic.

Representatives for Vance and Chua did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Vance's bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" wouldn't have existed without Chua's help

Besides reading Vance's drafts, Chua introduced him to her own literary agent, Tina Bennett. In the "Acknowledgments" section of "Hillbilly Elegy," Vance thanked both Bennett and Chua for their support.

"Besides Tina, the person who deserves the most credit for this book's existence is Amy Chua, my Yale contracts professor, who convinced me that both my life and the conclusions I drew from it were worth putting down on paper," Vance wrote.

"She has the wisdom of a respected academic and the confident delivery of a Tiger Mother, and there were many times that I needed (and benefited) from both," he continued.

Chua was also a huge cheerleader for Vance's book, which she helped to promote.

"When the book first came out, she probably emailed every single television producer and personality in the United States of America," Vance told The Atlantic in 2017.

"It's true, I emailed everybody. There were these creepy emails to people like Tom Brokaw, with lots of smiley faces and exclamation points," Chua said in the same interview.

The efforts ended up paying off, with "Hillbilly Elegy" becoming a bestseller in 2016. The book has sold at least 1.6 million copies to date, according to market research company Circana, the AP reports.

Vance's public profile was boosted even further after Trump's victory in 2016's presidential election.

Some news outlets even started calling Vance the "Trump whisperer" because of the book's focus on the poverty and social decay that was afflicting America's Rust Belt states.

Vance also got some relationship advice from Chua

In his memoir, Vance said he'd asked Chua to recommend him for a federal judge clerkship. Chua agreed, though she ultimately tried to dissuade him from proceeding with his application.

"I think you're doing this for the credential, which is fine, but the credential doesn't actually serve your career goals," Chua told Vance, who was already in a relationship with his law school classmate Usha Chilukuri, per Vance's memoir.

"This clerkship is the type of thing that destroys relationships. If you want my advice, I think you should prioritize Usha and figure out a career move that actually suits you," Chua said.

Vance ended up following Chua's advice. He married Chilukuri in 2014, a year after graduating from Yale.

"Amy's advice stopped me from making a life-altering decision. It prevented me from moving a thousand miles away from the person I eventually married," Vance wrote in his memoir.

"Most important, it allowed me to accept my place at this unfamiliar institution — it was okay to chart my own path and okay to put a girl above some shortsighted ambition. My professor gave me permission to be me," he added.

That said, a lot has happened after Vance left Yale to start his career.

Vance, who told a former Yale classmate in 2016 that he thought Trump could become "America's Hitler," has since metamorphosed into a devout supporter of the former president.

In 2022, Vance was elected as Ohio's junior senator after securing Trump's endorsement.

It is not clear how Chua feels about Vance's abrupt turn toward Trump and the politics now he represents. The celebrity professor came under fire in 2018 after she endorsed Brett Kavanaugh when Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court.

Chua, who continues to teach at Yale, declined to comment on her one-time protégé's embrace of Trumpism in an interview with the Financial Times' Edward Luce in 2021.

"I never turn on my students," she said.

• Bad experiences with talent acquisition can lead job seekers to ghost employers, a FlexJobs report finds.
• Other reasons they may ghost include unpaid work in the interview and a bait-and-switch on remote work policies.
• Ghosting on either side can have repercussions; sending even a simple email can help avoid trouble.

While it's generally more common for job seekers to never hear back from potential employers, ghosting can go both ways. Some job applicants may withdraw their candidacy without saying so, disappearing in the middle of the hiring process.

Knowing why they do so can help companies address issues in the hiring process to better attract, hire, and retain talent.

The biggest reasons job candidates said they ghost prospective employers have to do with bad experiences with talent acquisition, according to a report published Monday by FlexJobs and MyPerfectResume.

"The key touch points with HR and hiring managers during the hiring process all give job seekers information," said Toni Frana, lead career expert at FlexJobs. "Do they receive emails in a timely manner? Is the interview done shortly after the application happens? What is the tone of the messages that a job seeker receives in those touchpoints? All of those things help a job seeker determine if the culture would be a good fit for them and if this would be someplace that they would want to work."

The survey polled more than 2,000 professionals based in the United States in June. One question asked, "What factors would make you ghost an employer or pull out of the interview process?" Here's the breakdown of how they responded:

• Disorganized or unprofessional hiring manager (67%)
• Lack of communication (61%)
• Told the job is remote, but is actually hybrid or in-office (60%)
• Negative company culture (53%)
• Job doesn't align with personal values (45%)
• Unfavorable company reviews or reputation (43%)
• Poor employee benefits or compensation (43%)
• Unpaid work during interview (30%)
• Recent layoffs by the company (25%)

And while it may be tempting to ghost, remember that doing so could have repercussions — on both sides.

If you're a job candidate, consider "sending a simple email to your point of contact, explaining that you would like to move in a different direction and you wanted to let them know you appreciate all the time they have spent with you up until that point, can really go a long way," Frana said.

Employers should also let candidates know they're moving in a different direction and thank them for their time and effort in applying.

With any application, "the outcome might not be getting the job or offering the job," Frana added. But letting a candidate or prospective employer know before you go is "at least is a more positive end than just dropping communication altogether."

Have you ghosted a prospective employer before, or have another job search story to share? We'd like to hear from you. Contact this reporter at sjackson@businessinsider.com.

• Many experts have attempted to recreate ancient beer using recipes that are thousands of years old.
• Max Miller of 'Tasting History' brewed a 3,800-year-old Sumerian beer based on a hymn.
• Much is unknown about what the beers were like, but you can make your own version in a few days.

A Utah man recently spent months collecting ingredients and brewing beer with an ancient strain of yeast to recreate a 3,000-year-old beer. But if you don't have the time to source Yemeni sidr honey, frankincense, and Egyptian balsam fruit, you can still get an idea of what ancient beer tasted like with a little help from Max Miller, the creator of the "Tasting History" series on YouTube.

Last year, Miller made a video showing how he brewed a 3,800-year-old Sumerian beer from a region of Mesopotamia. While he often follows historical recipes, for the ancient beverage he had to rely on a hymn about a brewer. In the video, he compared it to trying to bake a dessert based on the "Patty Cake" nursery rhyme.

While that meant there was a lot of guessing involved, there was less chance of getting it wrong.

"If you just follow the basic steps, you'll end up with something that might be correct," Miller told Business Insider.

The basic ingredients for an ancient beer

People have been making beer in various forms for thousands of years, all over the world. Archaeologists think they may have even found a 13,000-year-old brewery in Israel.

Since Miller isn't an expert in ancient beer, he relied on archaeologist Tate Paulette's research to figure out how to create a recipe from the "Hymn to Ninkasi," which dates to around 1,800 BCE, making it 3,800 years old.

Paulette found that most of the written descriptions and brewers' receipts included the same basic ingredients: malted barley, bappir, a mix of raw and roasted grains, date syrup, and aromatics. No one knows for sure what bappir is, but Paulette thinks it refers to a dried cake of something similar to a sourdough starter.

To make his version, Miller used water, barley, barley flour, a sourdough starter, coriander, cardamom, date syrup, and brewer's yeast.

Here are his instructions:

• Day 1: Cover a cup of barley in water and leave it to soak.
• Day 2: For the bappir, mix 1.5 cups of barley flour with 1.5 cups of sourdough starter and 0.5 cups of water. Knead the dough on a clean surface for five minutes. Put the dough in a clean bowl then cover it it with a towel for a day so it can rise.
• Strain the barley from day one, and put it in cheesecloth. Let the cheesecloth hang suspended for two to three days to allow it to sprout. (Miller used the handle from a kitchen cabinet.) Spray the cheesecloth a few times a day so it doesn't dry out.
• Day 3: Use the dough from day two to make a flat, round loaf. Leave it uncovered to dry for a day.
• Day 4: Bake the dried loaf at 300°F for no more than 10 minutes on a baking sheet with parchment paper.
• Set the oven to 200°F, and arrange the sprouted barley on an unlined baking sheet. Bake for two to three hours, then leave them uncovered to dry out.
• Day 5: Turn the barley into powder with a mortar and pestle or a food processor. Cover the crushed barley with water and soak it for two hours.
• Crumble the dried loaf into pieces. It needs to dry for longer than two hours.
• Put the crumbled loaf in a large jar with the soaked barley and its liquid. Add in aromatics and 0.5 cups of date syrup.
• Pour in a gallon of water and stir. Cover the jug with cheesecloth and let it sit in a dark place for two to three days.
• Day 7 or 8: Strain the beer through a sieve. The beer is ready to serve but will start to go bad after two days.

Exactly what Mesopotamian brewers used for aromatics is another mystery, but coriander, cardamom, fennel, and cumin are all possibilities, as are juniper berries, honey, figs, plums, and other fruits, herbs, and spices.

Mixing and matching those options will result in different outcomes. "Just the smallest change in what you're adding into it can really affect the flavor quite a bit," Miller said.

When you add the ingredients can impact its strength, too. Putting date syrup in early in the process will up the alcohol content, while adding it later will just make the end result sweeter. Some experts aren't sure if ancient beer was even alcoholic at all.

However strong they were, ancient brews came in several varieties. Texts from around 2,500 BCE describe golden, dark, sweet, dark red, and strained beers.

Ancient beer is different from today's ales

Don't expect your hymn-inspired homebrew to resemble anything you can buy at the store. Beers based on ancient recipes generally end up cloudy and chunky. That's pretty authentic to how it would have been thousands of years ago.

"It is so different from what we think of as beer today," Miller said. "It's drunk through a straw, for goodness sake." That was likely to help avoid some of the clumps of grain or cake.

Developments in microbiology and technology like thermometers changed brewing techniques over the last few centuries. Some ingredients have changed, too, like the types of yeast used. There's also no evidence that ancient beer makers used hops, which is a ubiquitous ingredient today.

Miller's main tip is to just try brewing your own version if you're curious because there's really no wrong way to do it. "Just be patient," he said, "because these older dishes, they do take more time. But they're fun, and it's a fun summer project."

• Sen. JD Vance has a controversial venture capital background.
• Some of Vance's former colleagues previously told BI the senator wasn't very good at his job.
• Donald Trump announced Vance as his vice presidential pick on Monday.

Donald Trump's vice presidential pick, JD Vance, has a background in venture capital.

But his former colleagues previously told Business Insider in a 2021 report that his business expertise wasn't that noteworthy.

In making his running mate announcement, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Vance "has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance." But as Business Insider previously reported, it's unclear what impact Vance had in the VC world.

Vance, the Ohio first-time Senator perhaps most famous for his hit 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," got his start in venture capital just two months before his book came out, moving to San Francisco to join Peter Thiel-backed VC firm Mithril Capital.

Vance's former coworkers previously told BI that Vance was away from his new job much at the time to promote his book.

"It never seemed like he was even working," one former coworker told BI. "It felt like his full-time job was the book."

Vance himself acknowledged his lackluster contribution, saying in an interview at the time, "How useful I've been on that front is probably debatable." And by the time Vance left the firm, less a year after he started, coworkers said that he hadn't closed a single deal.

At the time, Vance's campaign didn't respond to questions about how Vance would manage his money while senator and didn't make Vance available for an interview.

After Vance was chosen, BI reached out again to Vance. Vance's senatorial office didn't respond, and emails to his campaign and his personal website weren't answered.

Trump's campaign also didn't respond to a request for comment about how Vance's old colleagues characterized his VC work.

Vance saw a bit more success working at Steven Case's VC firm, Revolution, where he focused on investing in tech startups through the Rise of the Rest fund.

There, Vance's networking skills helped him secure a number of deals in fields like military tech and artificial intelligence. But one investor who met with Vance said he was skeptical of what Vance brought to the table, telling BI, "I don't recall anyone at Rise of the Rest bragging about something JD Vance brought to the fund."

Vance's time at Revolution did provide him the connections needed to go off and start his own VC firm, Narya Capital, in 2019. But what exactly that firm has achieved is open to interpretation.

In 2021, BI reported that Narya only had five investments, just one of which was in Ohio, the state Vance had pledged to help. And more than a year later, Politico reported that Narya had four employees, including Vance. The 750 jobs that Narya claimed to have created in Ohio that year were in fact established by a group of 46 firms together, not just Narya alone, Politico reported.

When Vance first started running for Senate in Ohio, one VC expert cast doubt on Vance's self-proclaimed business acumen.

"There are a thousand red flags," Jeff Sohl, director of the University of New Hampshire's Center for Venture Research, previously told BI. "You're either going to be a really great VC and a bad senator or a bad VC and a great senator. Or what will likely happen is you're worse at both because you can't do both jobs."

Vance's VC dreams may need to take a back seat to a new aspiration: reaching the White House with Donald Trump.

In 2019, when President Donald Trump still served as commander in chief, Business Insider's chief video correspondent Graham Flanagan spent three days inside the James J. Rowley Training Center in Laurel, Maryland, where future United States Secret Service agents are trained.

After the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday, for which the Secret Service has come under scrutiny, BI is sharing this extended, never-before-seen version of the speech a group of new Secret Service recruits received on day one of their training in June 2019. Following is the original video published by BI.

NOTE: Lt. Christopher Fagan, seen speaking to new recruits in the video, died in 2023.

• Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and David Sacks pushed JD Vance as GOP VP nominee, according to Axios.
• Vance, a 39-year-old Ohio senator, was named Donald Trump's vice presidential nominee on Monday.
• Musk and Sacks were among those who praised Vance after Trump's announcement.

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and venture capitalist David Sacks personally lobbied Donald Trump to select JD Vance as his running mate, according to Axios.

The 39-year-old Ohio senator was named the GOP nominee for Vice President of the United States on Monday.

Trump told friends that Vance was his top choice several days before the announcement was made, Axios cofounder Mike Allen wrote in the publication's newsletter on Tuesday.

However, Vance only found out he would be Trump's running mate moments before the former president shared the news on Truth Social, according to multiple people familiar with the call speaking to CNN,

The two runners-up — North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. Marco Rubio— are believed to have been informed at around midday on Monday.

Axios said that a secret lobbying campaign continued into Monday morning, led by key figures such as Musk, Carlson, and Sacks.

The publication didn't elaborate on their involvement in Trump's selection. Business Insider could not verify the report.

According to CNN, Vance had the backing of Carlson who thought he would appeal to working-class voters. Meanwhile, Carlson's former Fox News boss, Rupert Murdoch, lobbied Trump to choose Burgum.

Sacks also influenced Trump's decision after being introduced to the former president by Vance, who is himself a former venture capitalist, the publication said.

Speaking to Axios, Carlson said Vance was the clear choice because "he doesn't secretly hate Trump, as all the rest of them do."

"He fundamentally agrees with Trump. That's precisely why neocon donors [who want more aid for Ukraine] fear him," he said.

Vance was one of 18 senators who attempted to block a $95 billion aid package to Ukraine and Israel earlier this year.

Though the package was ultimately approved, Vance told reporters that his actions made "it pretty clear to Europe and the rest of the world that America can't write blank checks indefinitely," according to Politico.

As BI previously reported, Vance was also a vocal proponent of the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust enforcement of Big Tech companies.

Musk publicly congratulated Vance on Monday, writing on X that it was an "excellent decision" by Trump.

Sacks reposted Musk's comments and wrote in a follow-up post that Vance was an "American patriot."

"When the Twin Towers came down, JD Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps, gung-ho to exact justice on America's enemies," Sacks wrote on X.

"Subsequently he came to believe the Forever Wars were a mistake. This is who I want by Trump's side: an American patriot, with the courage to fight America's wars but the wisdom to know when to avoid them. God bless JD, God bless Trump, and God bless the USA."

Vance went from being a Trump critic who once called him "America's Hitler," to a loyal supporter of the former president.

"I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016, but President Trump was a great president and he changed my mind," Vance said in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity on Monday.

"I bought into the media's lies and distortions," he added.

Representatives for Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and David Sacks did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

• Donald Trump's pick for Vice President may be good news for Peter Thiel.
• Thiel has played an outsize role in helping JD Vance's career rocket.
• The former PayPal CEO has a long history of putting figures of his choosing on a path to glory.

The first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was not just a monumental moment for former venture capitalist JD Vance but a defining moment in the career of another venture capitalist: Peter Thiel.

For 39-year-old Vance, the now-Ohio senator picked by Donald Trump on Monday to be his running mate in the Republican Party's battle for the White House, a career in politics — let alone a position as the right-hand man of the former President — may never have happened without an early bet from Silicon Valley's top kingmaker.

While Vance made his push in politics apparent with his memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" in 2016, it was Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and defense contractor Palantir, with deep ties to fellow Trump supporter Elon Musk, who would go on to play an outsize role in helping Vance's career rocket.

Of course, this is not the first time Thiel's had a hand in propelling those he favors into the spotlight. The 56-year-old who's worth just over $11 billion, according to Bloomberg, has a long history of putting figures of his choosing onto a path of glory.

The Thiel effect

For Vance, Thiel's influence first left its mark when he was still a student. In 2020, he recalled his first encounter with the investor in 2011, after Thiel turned up at his law school at Yale to give students a run-through of classic Thiel-isms.

Corporate ladder-climbing could subject a person to a life of meaninglessness, Thiel said. The "technological stagnation" gripping a society that could tweet but didn't have a solution to problems such as dementia and energy use that "increasingly dirtied the planet" needed a rethink, he added.

Vance, who admitted he "had no idea what to expect at the time," said the talk was "the significant moment" of his time at Yale Law School. This helped explain a consequential move he made in the mid-2010s: joining Thiel's J.R.R. Tolkien-inspired investment firm, Mithril Capital, as a junior investor.

Following a two-year stint at Mithril, Vance joined Revolution, a firm co-founded by former AOL chairman Steve Case. Thiel later invested heavily in Vance's venture capital firm, Narya Capital.

Record donation

Vance's relatively short history in the VC world, then, had clearly given him and Thiel clear exposure to each other, allowing a relationship to foster that would turn the billionaire into the senator's biggest backer. Thiel also got a shoutout on the acknowledgments page of Vance's 2016 book, "Hillbilly Elegy."

The former PayPal CEO has given $15 million to Vance's campaign, Politico reported — the largest donation ever given to one Senate candidate.

Thiel also reportedly accompanied Vance to Mar-a-Lago to seek Trump's council prior to announcing his Senate run in 2016. The backing ultimately led to Vance being elected senator for the first time in 2022 and appears now to have been capped off with the former "never Trumper" earning his spot next to the GOP's leader.

It's not Thiel's first attempt to play kingmaker. The entrepreneur has always stood out as a conservative figure in the relatively left-leaning Silicon Valley, but in recent years has become an increasingly dominant figure in the Republican Party.

One of Trump's biggest donors in the 2016 presidential campaign, Thiel has re-emerged as a key player in the MAGA movement after largely sitting out the 2020 election.

In November 2023, he gave an interview to The Atlantic about his disappointment with Trump and announced he planned to cut off Republican politicians in 2024.

However, he reportedly donated more than $20 million to support 16 Republican candidates in the midterm elections.

Thiel also appears to have pulled some of his Silicon Valley strings to advance Vance's campaign. He introduced Vance to David Sacks, a fellow PayPal Mafia colleague, who hosted a fundraiser for him and personally donated $1 million to a pro-Vance Super PAC.

Secret lobbying

Others in the tech world have been eagerly campaigning for Vance behind the scenes.

According to an Axios report, Musk, Sacks, and former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson have been running a secret lobbying campaign for Vance, calling up Trump even after Saturday's assassination attempt to advocate for him.

Thiel's formidable track record has extended beyond the political arena, too.

The first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel bet on the company when no one else would — and is credited with transforming an up-and-coming Mark Zuckerberg into the slick CEO he now is.

Thiel was also a cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and made early investments in Airbnb and Spotify. His other success stories include a well-timed SpaceX investment, and an early bet on bitcoin that reportedly netted him more than $1.8 billion.

These investments now form a successful track record that's hard to argue against. With Vance now at Trump's side, Thiel won't have long to wait to find out if his punt on an Ohio "hillbilly" will go all the way to the White House.

• I've been on 110 cruises. I don't like onboard flexible dining, when you can eat whenever you want.
• Traditional dining is a great way to make new friends and have reliability at sea.
• Flexible dining is nice for some, but it's not foolproof. I hope it doesn't become the only option.

I took my first cruise in 1977 and have since been on more than 110 ships. I'm in my 90s, and I still love traveling this way.

It's great that more young people are getting on board with cruises, which are surging in popularity. But some newer trends puzzle me.

Above all, I can't get behind flexible dining, which also goes by names like "my time dining," "freestyle dining," and "anytime dining." They're all just a way of saying passengers can eat whenever they want and sit in a new spot with different servers every night.

It's a move away from traditional dining on cruises, where travelers select in advance the daily dinner time they'll have for the duration of their cruise. They're assigned the same table and waitstaff for the whole trip.

Flexible dining sounds ideal for anyone who prefers to set their own pace. But I think that it's better in theory than in practice and that it kills some of the magic of old-school cruises.

Eating dinner on a ship whenever you want isn't foolproof

Norweigan Cruise Line is credited with creating this category of onboard eating, which it calls freestyle dining.

With it, passengers show up to one of its restaurants during operating hours and wait for their party to be led to a table. But though people can eat whenever that doesn't mean they do.

Passengers have routines that carry over onto a ship, and restaurants can get crowded between 6 and 7:30 p.m.

Years ago, my wife and I experienced it firsthand while dining on the Norwegian Wind. After two nights of standing in long lines to try for a 6 p.m. dinner, we started showing up later to try to dodge crowds. I wished we could've just had our desired mealtime locked in, but NCL doesn't do traditional dining.

A few weeks ago, I tried flexible dining again on a different cruise line while sailing with my free-spirited son, who I thought might appreciate the lack of a schedule.

On the first night, at 7 p.m., we found several lines leading into the main dining room. We were asked if we had a reservation. Puzzled, we explained that we didn't need one because we were doing flexible dining.

We were directed to a different line for people without reservations. On the way, we passed the noticeably shorter line for passengers with assigned dining times.

We waited about 20 minutes to be seated. After our meal, we made dinner reservations for the rest of the trip.

Flexible dining can make it difficult to build new connections

While partaking in freestyle dining on the Norwegian Wind, my late wife and I asked to be seated with other people every night so we could see some fresh faces. But that never ended up happening: In our eight days, we ate only with each other.

Though I loved having dinner with my wife, we did so every night at home. At sea, we wanted to expand our world.

I missed sharing tables with strangers, the standard with traditional dining (unless you have a large group). We'd share meaningful conversations with strangers who had become friends.

Flexible dining takes away the chance to build connections like this. You can request to sit with strangers as we did, but it doesn't always happen — and it's unlikely you'd connect with the same people twice.

Without repeat seats and mealtimes, it's also hard to build any real relationship or personal connection with the dining-room staff.

In the older days of traditional dining, servers who'd been paired with our table for the whole trip would tell us stories of living abroad and remember our order preferences and names.

When it was time to tip at the end of the cruise, we parted willingly with the suggested gratuities, often more.

I hope the traditions of more formality in the dining rooms aren't lost for future cruisers

A lot of people love flexible dining for the freedom it can provide on a cruise — but I think that's best saved for breakfast and lunch.

When it comes to dinner, I enjoy the old-school traditions that have made cruises so popular.

Fortunately, major lines like Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Princess Cruises that offer some version of flexible dinners still have options for traditional ones.

If given the option on your next cruise, consider keeping your dinners old school with a set time and table. You might just make a new friend, avoid a long wait, and enjoy the reliability of it all.

• Denver Airport is riddled with creepy conspiracy theories that have gone viral on social media.
• The airport's diverse artwork and underground tunnels fuel myths of secret societies and aliens.
• I visited the airport to check out the bizarre claims, but the theories were easily debunkable.

I was doom-scrolling TikTok a few months ago when a video of someone walking around empty terminals at Denver International Airport popped up. The video, posted at the end of May, had about 25 million views and 3.7 million likes as of this month.

Any other US airport probably wouldn't garner the same attention, but Denver Airport is riddled with conspiracy theories and ghost stories that date back decades.

The most famous myth is that a giant horse statue sitting outside the terminal killed its creator in the early 2000s. There's also the theory that the airport hides aliens and lizard people in secret underground tunnels, while some believe demon gargoyles haunt the halls.

I've always known about Denver's urban legends but never really believed in them, mostly because the stories are pretty outlandish and easily debunkable.

The runways being a Swastika, for example, is a nasty conspiracy, considering the shape simply compensates for wind and optimizes traffic, as planes can land and take off in several different directions.

But a trip down the TikTok and Reddit rabbit holes tells me there are plenty of people who think the airport is hiding something sinister — so I decided to fly out and see for myself.

The airport's marketing and communications team — which has leaned into the lore in its alien-themed gate events and talking gargoyle — gave me full access, including an up-close encounter with the "haunted" horse, a look at those empty hallways from TikTok, and a ride around its "secret" bunkers.

Secret societies aren't infiltrating Denver airport

Much of Denver airport's lore started in March 1994, when a capstone was placed ahead of the airport's 1995 opening to house a time capsule dedicated to the people of Colorado.

The capstone features the Freemasons' Square and Compass symbol and mentions a group called the "New World Airport Commission."

This snowballed into the idea that secret societies like the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the New World Order were operating from within the newly built airport with the goal of world domination.

Other artwork around the airport supposedly supports the theory. One mural, for example, has a man in a gas mask with a sword, who people say represents the New World Order's plan for genocide and destruction.

Another, no longer there after remodeling, was a floor inscription of a mining cart with the atomic symbols "Au" and "Ag" for gold and silver, respectively. Theorists said they stood for "Australian antigen" and exposed how the Illuminati planned to take out humanity.

While some of the airport's diverse collection of artwork is big and bold, Stacey Stegman, the airport's SVP of communications, marketing, and customer service, who has worked there for almost 13 years, told Business Insider that people are reading too much into it.

After seeing the "cryptic" works in person, I can confirm it really is just art. Stegman said the "commission" inscribed on the capstone didn't exist and was temporarily created for the airport's grand opening. Further, the masonry symbols are a nod to the stonemasons who, by trade, crafted the airport's capstone.

Meanwhile, I see the mural as a representation of how war decimates society, not a warning about how secret societies plan to kill children. Yes, people think that.

And the mining cart? It symbolized Colorado's history of mining both gold and silver, nothing more.

The giant horse is not a cursed killer

Although the towering 32-foot-tall cast-fiberglass horse standing outside Denver Airport is officially recognized as "Mustang," theorists nicknamed it "Blucifer" for its blue color and devilish-looking red eyes.

Mythmakers suggest the rearing horse is cursed after killing its creator, Luis Jiménez, in 2006. Jiménez was a famed artist who did, in fact, die building the statue — but not in the way conspiracists think.

Stegman said Jiménez was killed in his New Mexico studio after a piece of the sculpture fell on his leg and severed a vital artery and noted the glowing eyes didn't come about because of it.

"The artist's father was a neon sign maker, so the red eyes were a tribute to his father," she said. "It's really a beautiful story, not something demonic."

Jiménez's family and friends completed the statue and unveiled it in 2008, and I was lucky to see Mustang up close. It's truly a beautiful and fierce sculpture, but I had to be escorted by airport officials — police don't like random people parking nearby to see it, so stick to a drive-by.

The gargoyles aren't demonic creatures cursing passengers

To embrace its conspiracy theories, Denver Airport once hosted an animatronic talking gargoyle, voiced live by a comedian, to entertain travelers.

The temporary gimmick complemented two grinning gargoyles situated on the walls of baggage claim.

Theorists say the gargoyles — named "Notre Denver" after Notre Dame in Paris — are demons haunting the halls. However, Stegman said people are missing the point: gargoyles are there to protect a place from evil spirits, not harm it.

Stegman said that although the airport leaned into the fun with the animatronic gargoyle, some people on social media were unhappy.

"Some people thought we were intentionally doing something evil, which concerned me," she said. "We didn't do it to antagonize anyone; we did it to embrace the airport's personality, but I underestimated how strongly people believe in all of it."

The tunnels aren't secret and have nothing to do with the supernatural

My Denver airport tour was sparked by the viral TikTok. It turned out to be just Frontier Airlines' ground-loading gates, where people walk out to the plane via the tarmac, not jetbridges. Stegman said they simply weren't operating at the time of the video.

But it's not the only "hidden" place in Denver Airport where theorists believe something nefarious is going on.

When the airport was constructed, few aerial photos of the project existed, and the ones that did exist showed a labyrinth of underground tunnels being built.

Stegman said this caused people to think they were secret chambers to host things like the Illuminati's headquarters, a lair for lizard people, laboratories for alien experiments, and bunkers for the rich.

The fact that construction was years behind schedule and millions over budget further fueled the conspiracy theories because people assumed it was due to some sinister plot, she said.

"People have picked out this theme of death and destruction and think Denver Airport is the place where the world's elite will come for protection when the government or an apocalypse wipes out society," Stegman said.

The truth is the airport property is more than twice the size of Manhattan (yes, it's that big) and requires miles and miles of underground infrastructure to protect its baggage system from Denver's snowy winters.

The terminal train also runs through its own underground corridor.

I took a golf cart ride all around the tunnels, which you need special access to, and it's set up like a proper road system with stop and yield signs and lanes. There are random doors, but they're for things like storage or emergency exits — there were no little green people casually walking around.

"We served almost 78 million passengers last year, do people think we can hide secret bunkers and alien testing from them, as well as the 40,000 people who work here?" she said. "That's pretty brilliant if we could."