Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Elizabeth Holmes: The CEO Who Treated Your Blood Like a Phone

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

If you watch any documentaries about Holmes, or read much of the more sensational coverage about her life, you are left with a question: how did she trick so many prominent, intelligent people  into believing her smoke and mirrors were real, functioning technology? In Part Two, Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus and they examine this question and continue to discuss Elizabeth Holmes.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards TV podcast. Bad people talks about- What are you talking about? Oh my god. It's part two of our Elizabeth Holmes podcast. It's actually a TV podcast. It's a TV podcast. The video of this would include even more salad eating than the audio does.

Oh yeah, and that's actually a bonus feature. That is a bonus feature. It's actually something you can just turn on, like audio commentary. You can just watch me eating a salad throughout. It's you watching a salad, eating a salad, and me commenting on the nature of salads over the years. The salad's really- Behind the salads. The salad's really big, and I'm not going to finish it. It's too large. It's substantial. It's an enormous salad. Closing it. Part two. Now, in our last episode, we talked about Elizabeth Holmes' rise to prominence and the kind of wealth that people make when they haven't actually made anything, but because of tech industry voodoo, everyone says their company's worth billions of dollars.

She got that kind of rich. I also, during the break, came up with a nickname for Sonny Balwani, like we had LIHO for Elizabeth Holmes. Sunball. Sunball. I was listening to the ABC News podcast about Elizabeth Holmes a few months ago. My dog's name is Sonny, and every time they would mention Sonny Balwani, my dog would be like, they'd be like, Sonny was a known scammer, and then I could just stare at my dog and know that he's also alright. One thing I'm excited for is when we have a mass shooter named Alexa, because the news that day is going to be quite a trip. That's going to be the time that it's like, you know what, we are never again reporting on

a mass shooter's name. It's too messy. That'll finally do it. Now, if you watched any documentaries about Holmes or read much of the more sensational coverage about her life, you were left with a question. How did she trick so many prominent intelligent men into believing her smoke and mirrors were real functioning technology? Jim Mattis is probably the USA's most respected living soldier. He's a general so widely admired that the Democrats in Congress didn't bother fighting when Trump appointed him Secretary of Defense. His nickname is the Warrior Monk. Here's what he told Fortune about why he trusted Elizabeth Holmes. She really does want to make a dent in the universe, one that is positive. The strength

of the leader's vision in the military is seen as the critical element in that unit's performance. I wanted to be around something again that had that sort of leadership. In 2000? I just have strong opinions about how... J Matt? Not about J Matt specifically, but about how all the people, specifically men who fell for all of this, have never been really asked to back it up with other things. I want to get through all of the different things and then we'll discuss. In 2014, Fortune talked to board member Henry Kissinger as well. The 91-year-old former Secretary of State and forever war criminal first said she looks like 19. And then, quote,

asked to assess her as a leader because he's seen a few. He responds, I can't compare her to anyone else because I haven't seen anyone with her very special attributes. She has iron will, strong determination, but nothing dramatic. There's no performance associated with her. I have seen no sign that financial gain is of any interest to her. She's like a monk. She isn't flashy. She wouldn't walk into a room and take it over, but she would once the subject gets to her field. Now, if you read up on Elizabeth Holm, we'll hear a number of theories as to why this is all the case. I've run across a lot of speculation on Twitter, mostly by women, that it's just because she's hot and these old distinguished men were just horny for her and

let themselves get fooled. Definitely part of the reason. That's certainly in line with some of the claims Dr. Fuse has made. Remember back in 2005 when she convinced that VC, Donald Lucas, to invest a bunch of money in Theranos, well, Dr. Fuse claims, quote, Elizabeth called Lucas from China and he would hear her speaking Mandarin in the background. When he saw how attractive she was, he got Oracle chairman Larry Ellison involved and he invested. Now again, Fuse is biased and a doctor. He's a biased physician and also psychiatrist. But we do have Lucas' own recollections about why he got involved with Theranos. In a 2009 interview with a Berkeley PhD student, he said this,

My assistant and I had a call from Beijing. Of course, I'll take the call. He said, you've got to meet this young lady, Elizabeth Holmes. I said, John, what you've got a meter. She's fabulous. Okay, I'm figuring 20 minutes, right? This young lady comes in. I think she probably was 21 years old at the time and had left Stanford, didn't graduate and she had a company called Theranos. And I thought this was going to be a short conversation. Well, now I'm chairman of the board and I spent a lot of time with her and the company and she's doing super. He didn't went on to tell this grad student that she was also good looking and then left. Of course. Which is crazy because everyone now is in retrospect being like, oh, Elizabeth Holmes

is like a mad genius for pitching her voice lower and dressing like more masculine. Yeah, we're not going to talk about her voice that much in this. I don't think it's relevant, super. No, but it's just like, no, it is so transparent when you look at it for two seconds. It's like there's some bias involved. Yeah, one of the reasons I don't want to get her on the voice. She objectively altered her voice for it to sound deeper. That's been very well documented. For sure. I've known a number of women who had to manage men, particularly in male dominated fields like agriculture, and they do the same thing because it's just what you do if you're trying to get a bunch of men to listen to you. You have to. Yeah, you have to affect a more

masculine tone because men have worms in their brains. Because men have worms in their brains. Yeah. And I'm not sure why, or how much importance I give to the fact that she was hot, but I will admit that watching early videos of her before she was as media savvy as she got makes it seem like hotness must have been a bigger factor than her raw charisma and brilliance. Here is an excerpt from her very first TED Talk in 2014. So she's like one of the very first. This is a classic. Yeah, and it's. I believe the individual is the answer to the challenges of health care. But we can't engage the individual in changing outcomes unless individuals have access to the information they need to do so.

Okay, that's that's probably about enough. That's not a great speech. That was a lot of words delivered in random order. That was that was rough. It's bad. It's not charismatic. It's not like it's nothing to do with the deepness of her voice. It's just like not good presentation. No, and it's totally unclear what the company is based on that conversation. Exactly. Yeah. Now with her body language and her outfit, which of course the people listening won't have seen, she's very clearly imitating Steve Jobs. I mean, it's it's egregious. Yeah, it's egregious. And everybody, everybody, even in the praiseful fortune article, they noticed that like she dressed identical every day, and specifically in order to like

look like Steve Jobs, that he was a hero for her. She hung a portrait of his Apple Internet bio like that she printed out on the day he stepped down as CEO because of cancer. Yeah, hung it up in her office. Yeah, it didn't seem to be much of a secret. No, no, she kept all the thermostats at Theranos offices extra low so she could always wear her trademark turtleneck. That's also just another another Lisa Frank thing. Yeah, it's always 55 degrees in those offices. Well, that I agree with because I prefer it to be cold. You're wrong. No, that's okay. I'd like to be cold. Why do you live here? I am not soon. But yeah, I forgot I was sad about that. Yeah. But I just don't like it warm. Now, Elizabeth Holmes did not just affect Jobs' choice and

outfit. She went well out of her way to present the perfect image of the aloof, eccentric, genius founder. Here's fortune again. Holmes grips a plastic cup of an appetizing green juice. Her first of the day, it is made from spinach, parsley, wheat, grass, and celery. Later, she'll switch to cucumber. A vegan, she long ago dropped coffee in favor of these juices, which she finds are better able to propel her through her 16 hour days and seven day weeks. She admits, laughing nervously at the eccentricity of it, that after a meal, she sometimes examines a drop of her own or others' blood on a slide and says she can observe the difference between when someone has eaten something healthy, like broccoli, and when he splurged on a cheeseburger.

When we dine one night in an Italian place downtown with $14 pastas, the manager knows what she'll have. A Spartan dressingless mixed salad and an oil-free spaghetti with tomatoes. Prepared from whole wheat noodle, she has provided the restaurant in advance, since it doesn't stock them. No wine. Yeah, what a weird, self mythologizing pack of lies. But so many Silicon Valley people do shit like that. Yeah. And so here's the question I want to get to. Peter Teal is a literal vampire. Peter Teal is a literal vampire. Yeah. This is the question I want to ask. So we've got the one speculation that like all these old guys bought into her because she was hot. And we've got the other speculation, which I think is at least as big

a part of it and maybe a bigger part of it, is that she made herself look like a crazy Silicon Valley genius. And these guys were just, they were looking for that. And then gender was a component in that. Gender was a component in that. But not the entire thing. But not the entire, like the fact that these guys thought she was attractive was part of their magnetism to her. But I think it was more the part that like they were, they all wanted to get a shitload of money by being involved with the next Steve Jobs. And what do you look for in the next Steve Jobs? A crazy asshole who does weird things. Right. Which she was imitating to a tea. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I agree. I think it's like reductive to say that it's like completely

because of her looks. But I also think that like, especially like old dudes are always, like I'm sure that they thought they were supporting much like people like early supporters of like Cheryl Sandberg when she was starting to do fucked up stuff. They're like, well, I'm supporting a woman. So I'm not a bad person where they just started like searching for the easiest, least challenging version of what they're, what they think is feminism. And then being like, Oh, so I'm, it's like the equivalent of like saying you have a black friend. I gave money to a woman. I don't hate women. And this is, this gets on like a totally different issue I have. But it's like, you remember when Joss Whedon, it came out that he like cheated on his wife a

bunch and everybody was saying he was a fake feminist or like, no, he can be a feminist and cheat on his wife. It doesn't mean you're a good husband. You can be a shitty person and a feminist. It's not a high bar. It's the bottom. It's like, you're not a good person for saying black people and white people should have equal rights. That's the bottom. They're serial killers who aren't racist. Yeah. Like they're, I don't know. I mean, and I think that a lot of these like investors, that's just like, it's at least in part them failing to meet that bottom. Cause they're just like, well, I threw money at a woman's company. But she is imitating one of the, I mean, I don't know. A lot of it is a testament to her commitment. She really knows how to commit to the bit. She is,

I mean, I wish I could, I would be a lot more successful if I could commit to the bit like that. Oh, Jamie. Sometimes I think if I had only used my power as a tall, confident white man to start a Silicon Valley company making, I don't know, an app that does your laundry. I could have a billion dollars right now. Yeah. Oh, a laundry? I bet that exists. Oh, no, they've tried it a couple of times. Damn it. I probably, yeah. Like half of Silicon Valley right now is just doing things that 19 year old millionaires moms used to do for them. Cool. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Totally sustainable. Great part of the world. Terrifying place. Yeah. Now, it didn't hurt. Elizabeth Holmes' ability to con all these statesmen who people

think are brilliant. I don't think being a secretary of state makes you brilliant. I don't think Haley Christon, I don't think Kissinger is all that smart. Whatever. I think he's, I think he's smart in certain ways. He's, I mean, that's a whole other. That's a whole, let's not talk about Kissinger. When we talk about Kissinger, it's got to be like a four-hour talk about Kissinger. Like I don't even know where to start. Yeah. But I think it helped a lot that like everyone always talked about when, before Theranos, like the con was revealed that she had the most distinguished board of any company in the history of the world. There were like three secretaries of state on it. Like it was, and it was like, you look at just like the,

like that's part of what tricked that fortune article is he's talking to all these people who are like, well, all of you are some of the most famous people in the history of American politics and you're all for the same company. And the cosines were on both sides of the aisle too. Like there was like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. Betsy DeVos put in like 150 million dollars. Joe Biden. You've got Biden and Clinton too. Biden and Clinton approved it. Yeah. So it's, yeah, she's got bipartisan that's. Yeah. And it, and here's what's most important is that like all of those people were very distinguished. None of them had any background in medicine or science. Like none of them were quit. Like anyone is equipped to look at a phone and be like,

oh yeah, I bet people want to put this in their pocket. Anyone's qualified to use a phone. Like almost no one's qualified to test blood. Yeah. Like the bizarre footage of Joe Biden going to fair nose and being like, cool blood curings guys. And it's one of those things like I can't even attack like, I don't like Biden, but I can't attack him for that. He's like, what was he supposed to do? Like, like he walks into a lab and he's like, yeah, it looks, it looks like a lab. I'm Joe Biden. I'm not a doctor. Yeah. There's better Joe Biden hills to die on. Yeah. I mean, speaking of like who you as the administration sent to look at their nose, maybe the, what do you call the, the boss doctor? What? The boss doctor of the country. The, the, the,

the doctor in charge. Yeah. The president of doctors. Big doctor. Big daddy. Surgeon general. You send the surgeon general. Like that would have been a better person to send. Big doctor. But that's not as famous. The big doctor. The big doctor. Dr. B. He's just the biggest doctor. They have to fight each other. They have to fight each other. So Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos were actually incapable of selling themselves to people who knew the first thing about medical science, which is why they focused on grifting secretaries of state and retired generals. According to Dr. Fuse, Holmes was expert at talking her way through little matters like her technology, not actually working mainly by bringing up her famous dead

relatives. Quote, that family background was part of the con. She would be introduced. And when questions were asked about her scientific knowledge of business acumen, these family members would be brought up. Now, Fuse Hapsi again has an ax to grind and is a doctor. But the 2009 interview with that venture capitalist, Donald Lucas, back when Theranos was still King shit, backs all this up. Quote, here's what Lucas said when he was explaining why he invested. She had no background at business. So it's quite presumptuous for somebody to say, I'm going to be president of the company, but there's an important distinction. That's what I felt when I first met her after spending a lot more time with her. I learned her great grandfather was an entrepreneur and started

Fleischmann's packaged yeast. It was very successful. So that was one side. That's the entrepreneur side. But she was in the medical side. Ah, it turns out later, the hospital very near where they lived is named after her great uncle, who was involved with medicine. So she came by both of those talents necessary here. One medicine and the other entrepreneurship quite naturally. Completely unhinged. That's insane. Completely unhinged. He's literally saying, I thought it was crazy that a 19 year old would run a company. But then I learned out one of her relatives was a doctor and another 200 years ago started a business. That is completely unhinged. I mean, the fact that she constantly is like deploying this excuse of like, but yeast. And then they're like, oh yeah,

totally the yeast. And when I first read that fuse quote, I was like, okay, this seems like he's exaggerating. But then you read this thing from Lucas and it's like, Oh no, that's exactly what she did. It worked. My grandfather was a prisoner of war in Korea. That doesn't make me a prisoner of war in Korea. It just doesn't make that does Jamie. Thank you for your service. Thank you. So I listen, I use the cloud I got to break traffic laws constantly. That's mainly what I just shouted at the traffic cops as you drive past. Yeah, I just flip them off and say, you know, POW bitches, baby. My purple hearts. Keep like a pile of purple hearts in the center console. Stay strapped with my purple hearts. That's fucking absurd. It's ludicrous. Imagine

saying that and meaning it. Imagine saying that as Donald Lucas distinguished venture capitalist and not realizing that all of venture capitalism is a fraud. Right, right. You're literally saying because two dead people that she never met were good at two parts of her business that she's equipped to run a business genetically qualified. Are you are you fucking serious business? That is, I've never heard that quote before. Yeah, it's fucking insane. Wow. Man, it's like the stupidity, you know, infects at every level. Yeah, it sure does. That should be, that should replace e-pluribus unum as our, as our national motto, stupidity. Now, one thing Elizabeth Holmes could not fool were the laws of physics. Theranos's equipment

did not work in 2014, but they were performing tens and then hundreds of thousands of blood tests in multiple states. While Theranos' marketing focused around the nanotainer, the friendly little capsule that only required a teeny bit of your blood, that was only capable of handling a couple of different tests. Theranos used traditional venipuncture, aka the thing everyone in the industry did, for the others and just continued to lie on their marketing that they could handle more than 200 tests. Roger Parloff, the author of that fortune article I keep going back to, pinned a mea culpa in 2015 after Theranos exploded, talking about how Holmes had misled him. He thought it was weird when he learned they still did venipuncture for many of their tests

and he asked her about it. Quote, The biggest reason Holmes told me in May 2014 is we're scaling as we're building out this infrastructure. We're also building out our inventory and our capacity in terms of the number of samples that we can handle at any given point in time. We'll use venipuncture in addition to the micro samples just to handle the volume of sample that we're processing. Now, Parloff noted correctly that this made no goddamn sense. Drawing way the fuck more blood would not help in handling volume. He kept asking her about it until she told him answering this question would be revealing a trade secret. Right. And the fact that I mean, that's what I hope is one of the outcomes of this whole

mess is that like you can't say, you can't like withhold information when it's a medical company. Like that can't, there can't be all these NDAs surrounding medical equipment or this happening. God damn iPhone. Right. Like yeah, keep your iPhone secret. Who cares? Who gives a shit? I find the facial unlocking to be triggering. I don't, I don't do that. It doesn't recognize me when I look nice. Oh, Jamie. I know. It hurts. It hurts my feelings. That's hurtful. It hurts my, it hurt my feelings. Let's go pee on Steve Jobs' grave. Okay. Honestly, I was gonna, yeah, I was just gonna dump my diva cup in Steve Jobs' grave anyways. Oh, that sounds like a fun road

trip. Yeah. Now, in August of 2015, the FDA did its goddamn job and surprised there and us with an inspection. According to Vanity Fair, quote, according to someone close to the company, Holmes was sent into a panic, calling advisors to try and resolve the issue. And around the same time, regulators from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates laboratories, visited the labs and found major inaccuracies in the testing being done on patients. CMS also soon discovered that some of the tests Theranos was performing were so inaccurate that they could leave patients at risk of internal bleeding or of stroke among those prone to blood clots. The agency found that Theranos appeared to ignore the erratic results from its own quality

control checks during a six month period last year and supplied 81 patients with questionable test results. Cool. Cool. Some of the most unfortunate things about like the story is that one of the major people who like exposed Elizabeth Holmes, his name is Tyler. Yeah, that's a frustrating thing. I don't like when Tyler's win, but in this case, he was right to. He seems like a nice guy. I know. He seems like someone who really hasn't like a conscience. I just don't want to chalk one up for a Tyler. No, it's like when you meet a nice guy named Chad, which I have a couple of times and it's always like, yeah, you're like, I don't like this. I would prefer. Okay. Just wish he wasn't, but like good for him, but good for him. Good for you for breaking the mold.

You know, speaking of breaking the mold, you know, it really breaks the mold, Jamie Loftus. What these products and services, these services and products, products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver

hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Yeah. Now, the next month after that surprise FDA inspection thing that found out nothing worked, the FDA declared the nanotainer to be an unclear device, removing it from availability for all but one test. Theranos was now using traditional old-fashioned venopuncture for nearly all of their tests. And since neither the Edison nor its successor,

the Minilab, worked for shit, they were doing most of the analysis on equipment they bought from other companies, including the companies they were claiming to want to disrupt. It's sort of like if Apple had just been ripping apart HP laptops and putting a fancy looking case on the outside. They're just like, here's an iPhone, but it's a Sony vial. No, at this point, you're probably wondering what the hell was going on with the rest of Theranos at this point. Was anyone inside like standing up and saying, what the fuck? Nothing works? Oh yeah. Well, like any good quote leader, Elizabeth Holmes organized the entire company in such a way that everyone's job was incredibly compartmentalized. People knew about their specific project and nothing else that was

going on at the company. Employees were often banned from communicating with one another about their work. This didn't seem super insane because many Silicon Valley companies like Apple had similar policies aimed at stopping devices from leaking out, but was weird because this is literally the opposite of the way good medical science is done. Kind of when everyone talking. You want there to be transparency. That's the point. That's the point. It's crazy. Elizabeth Holmes at no point was like, wait a second. Lives aren't phones, but that's not her vibe. Lives aren't phones? Yeah, I'll say that for Steve Jobs. He never was like, after Apple, he was like, I guess I'll make fun movies and different computers. He was like a repulsive person who had a stink and harassed

everyone, but he wasn't trying to kill anyone. He knew his place. He's like, this is what I can get away with and I'm going for it. He wasn't like, I'm going to make a machine gun next. I bet I can make a really good machine gun. But that's classic. She's really disrupting people's health. Yeah. Yeah. Disrupting people's health. That's a good tagline for this. Oh, boy. You want to know the tagline that I initially had for this episode? Yes. Elizabeth Holmes, the white woman who became a white man. Whoa. Brave. Brave of her. God. I mean, I just want girls to also have access to the spoils of late capitalism. Is that so wrong? Don't we all? Oh my God. Now, the secrecy and stress of managing a $9 billion company did not

actually do anything that didn't actually do anything required an insane schedule from Holmes. She reportedly slept four hours a night and ate chocolate-covered coffee beans all day in order to stay awake. Corporate grifter recognition tip, be wary of anyone who brags about how little they sleep. It is not a good thing. No one makes better decisions when they don't sleep. Absolutely agree. In order to keep shit further under wraps, she hired her brother Christian to be the Associate Director of Project Management in 2011. Super cool. He had been out of college for two years and had no relevant educational experience that would help him manage products in a blood diagnostics company. Amazing. Yeah. Well, he'll fit right in. He'll fit right in with suddenly the president of

the company. He's going to shout his way into a medical breakthrough. He's like, we're just screaming in a cold building or ruining people's lives. That's kind of what we do here. Numerous employees did, of course, recognize that something was up. Theranos had outrageous rates of turnover. In one point, Holmes hired a bunch of employees from her favorite company, Apple, that were all gone inside of two years. But Theranos kept any former employees from talking by threatening to sue anyone who so much as wrote about their job in detail on LinkedIn. I think it's also a dead giveaway when your company hires a disproportionate amount of people fresh out of college who don't have other options. Yeah. Part of it. She did a lot of that. She did a lot of that. Now, Theranos'

law team was incredibly expensive and headed by David Boyes, another incredibly respected old white dude. He was Al Gore's lawyer during the recount, among other things. He was one of the big lawyers behind marriage equality. He's like the Steve Jobs of lawyers, I guess she'd say, but that doesn't really translate because he's actually... I was like, so is he good or bad? He's bad. He's bad. I was like, he's bad, right? He's a bad person who was a lawyer on good cases. All right. That happens. Lawyers are often bad, whether or not they do good or bad things. They're lawless people. Yeah, exactly. All lawyers are anarchists. Yeah. Justin Maxwell was one of the designers behind the Edison. He later spoke to Kerry Roo

for the book Bad Blood. His story provides a good look at just how Holmes treated her employees on a one-on-one basis. Quote, During an email exchange one evening, he asked her for a piece of information he needed to write a section of software. She responded that she'd look for it when she was back at work the next morning. The clear implication was that she had gone home, but minutes later, he stumbled on her in Tony Nugent's office down the hall. Justin got angry and stormed off. Elizabeth came by his office a little later to say she understood why he was upset, but warned him, Don't ever walk off on me again. Justin tried to remind himself that Elizabeth was very young and still had a lot to learn about running a company. In one of their last

email exchanges, he recommended two management self-help books to her, The No Asshole Rule, Building a Civilized Workplace, and Surviving One That Isn't and Beyond Bullshit, Straight Talk at Work. Included their links on Amazon. He quit two days later. His resignation email read, In part, Good luck and please do read those books. Watch the office and believe in the people who disagree with you. Lying is a disgusting habit and it flows through conversations here like it's our own currency. The cultural disease here is what we should be curing before we try to tackle obesity. Savage. I mean, I mean, it will towards you since you believe in what I was doing and hoped I would succeed at Theranos. I feel like I owe you this bad attempt at an exit interview

since we have no HR to officially record it. Ooh. That's, that's a great resignation. That is a savage moment for him. A Savmo. A Savmo. Another Savmo. That's great. I don't understand why he recommended she watch the office. That just seemed like a fun thing to. I think it might just be because she was that bad of a boss and he was like, maybe you'll understand what you're doing. If you watch, I think he's saying you're like Michael Scott. That seems generous, honestly. Yeah. Cause at least he had a Michael Scott. Well, no, Michael Scott would totally have tried to create a medical device company. She carries herself more like a Jan Levinson Gould, but Jan Levinson Gould was good at her job. That's the

difference. Yeah. At the start, at least. Yeah. Now, Elizabeth did not respond. I found no evidence that she ever watched the office either. God damn it. God damn it. The areas where she most shown seem to be one, talking people into investing in Theranos and two, motivating employees at company-wide events and parties. She was legitimately talented at inspiring people. During one company Christmas party, she gave the speech. The mini lab is the most important thing humanity has ever built. If you don't believe this is the case, you should leave now. Everyone needs to work as hard as humanly possible to deliver it. Cool cult. Cool cult. During the company party to celebrate the deal with Safeway, Holmes told everyone, if anyone here believes

you are not working on the best thing humans have ever built, or if you're cynical, then you should leave. And for all of these speeches, I like to imagine she's sipping from a mug of human blood and just getting a little milk mustache from it. She's like, anyways, slurp. Yeah. I do give Sophie almost that same speech before every single episode of Behind the Bastards. Behind the Bastards is the most important thing. If you don't believe this is the most important thing anyone's ever done. And then you chug a 40 of blood. That's generous. I've seen it. It's malt liquor. Okay. It's very dark and viscous. Well, I mean, you put my protein powder. Oh, you got your yeast in there. After I get my pump on, I pour a protein shot into my malt liquor,

stir that up real good. Get it really thick. I feel sick. Great, great, great. My big problem with Colt 45 is that it's not quite thick enough. I wish the beer was thicker. Yeah. I wish that malt liquor, we're not talking about beer when we talk about Colt 45 and steel reserve. I wish that Mike's heart lemonade came in a solid. Mike's heart jello. Oh my god. Jamie, that's our billion dollar idea. We make ice cubes too. Get them on the fucking phone. Someone call Mike. Someone call Mike. We need this shit cubed. Cube your shit, Mike. Are you fucking fool? One of the few distinguished older men Elizabeth Holmes was unable to brainwash was John Kerry Roo, a multiple Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist with the Wall

Street Journal. He received a tip from a former Theranos lab director that led to a much deeper investigation. In October of 2015, he published the first of two dozen articles. His first piece revealed Theranos' problems with the nanotainers and the fact that very, very little of their promised revolutionary technology actually worked in that they were using other company's technology to do their blood tests. This was not great for Theranos. The company went into lockdown. For two days and nights, she holed up in what was probably a very smelly conference room with Sonny Bawani and all the company's lawyers, plus a team of crisis management professionals. Forming a good plan proved impossible because Theranos' technology was fucking vapor.

And had been for 10 years. And had been for 10 years. Yeah. According to Vanity Fair, absent a plan, Holmes embarked on a familiar course. She doubled down on her narrative. She left the war room for her car. She's often surrounded by her security detail, which sometimes numbers as many as four men who, for safety reasons, refer to the young CEO as Eagle One and headed for the airport. She's been known to fly alone on a $6.5 million Gulfstream G150. Holmes subsequently took off for Boston to attend a luncheon for a previously scheduled appearance at the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, where she would be honored as an inductee. During the trip, Holmes fielded calls from her advisors in the war room.

She and her team decided on an interview with Jim Kramer, the host of CNBC's Mad Money, with whom she had a friendship that dated from a previous interview. It was quickly arranged. A few friends with Jim Kramer. That's not a great sign. If that's, I mean, that's such a bad look where you're like, well, here's the, here's the trusted, very rational source I've chosen. Yeah. It's like, oh, okay. A guy who's won two Pulitzers is attacking us. We got to fight back with Jim Kramer. With the bastion of truth, Jim Kramer. There, oh God, her interview and that is iconic. Oh yeah. I'm going to play a brief selection from that interview right now. It's amazing. Just a fucking liar. She does get, she is, if, you know, compared to the first clip

we played, she's gotten a lot better at talking. She's a her PR trainer. Yeah. Nailed it. That person, you should hire. They're Pulitzer. Yeah. They should get a Pulitzer for lying. This is what happens when you work to change things. And first they think you're crazy, then they fight you. And then all of a sudden you change the world. And I have to say, I, I personally was shocked to see that the journal would publish something like this when we had sent them over a thousand pages of documentation demonstrating that the statements in their piece were false. But what we're doing things differently and we're working to make a difference and that means people raise questions. And that's okay. Yeah. But in this case, it was pretty

disappointing to see that after every single one of the sources that we spoke with, who the journal had contacted, told us that the statements that were being attributed to them were false or misleading. And the only sources who were left were ones who wouldn't speak with us, who on their own website say that they now do business with LabCorp in their office or in the other case demanded in writing that we pay them in cash upfront $2,500 for an hour to talk to them about their statements to the journal. Did the journal know what you just said? Did the journal know everything that you just said before they wrote the article? Of course, absolutely. That was all lies, of course. I mean, commit to the bit. There is something to be, I like, she's horror. I like, no doubt she's

bad person, but there is something kind of majestic about watching someone go down with the ship, just incomplete ignorance. Yeah, it's, it's, there's a little bit of the Elran Hubbard in her where it's like, well, okay, you didn't, you didn't just run away and blame someone else. You just denied there was ever a problem. She is not going to admit she's done anything wrong. She said like 666, I don't recalls. Like, yeah, it's amazing. It's Ronald Reagan level. I don't recalls. Yeah, not genius, but consistent. Yeah. Now, it was obviously not a super compelling rebuttal to, again, one of the best reporters on the planet, tearing you apart in an article for the Wall Street Journal, but it was the best she could do, getting the fact that, you know,

everything that Kerry Rosette was accurate. Yeah, she's got, she's, she's got that mad money. Yeah, fucking mad money. Why is he on the air? Why, why is he in the documentary? How is his heart not exploded from what I assume is a daily cocktail of cocaine and Red Bull? I will say it was when, when he appears in the documentary, it was very jarring to see him outside of that set. It seems like he does not left in many years. He seems to shuffle. It seems like they must lock him in there. I think he lives in a tent on, on just off screen. There's guys with like rifles hanging out outside the set. We got to make sure Kramer doesn't get out. I've never seen him outside of that set. It was very jarring. It's weird. Yeah. I guess

he just had to. Now, uh, when she got back to Palo Alto, Holmes had to finally address her employees. She insisted again that the journal had gotten the story wrong and that the reporter, John Kerry Rue, was just picking a fight with her company to make a name for himself. You know, a better name than having two Pulitzer Prizes. Okay. Yeah. Now, as Holmes and Balwani pumped up the crowd, a chant started up. Fuck you, Kerry Rue. Fuck you, Kerry Rue. Fuck you, Kerry Rue. First of all, original weapons. Very original. Super love it. Kind of runs. Did they start shooting out their nose t-shirts out of t-shirt guns? You know it. You know, she was just tossing blood vials in purple hearts.

Yeah, they were shooting out nanotanners. Jock Shams started to play. I, you know, go down, go down in style. And if you want to go down in style, you need the stylish products and services advertised by our advertisers. Smooth transition. Thank you. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may

not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back! For a while, employees in management at Theranos hunkered down and tried to wait out the storm. They attempted to ignore the mounting problems by focusing their rage against Keriru. At one company party, Theranos staff programmed a video game based on space invaders. The gun was the mini lab, the bullets were nanotainers, and the aliens were John Keriru's face. Kind of a niche game. Kind of a niche game, feel like it's an envelope. Inside baseball. Not a lot of traveling power. Tragically for Theranos, that was not enough to stop Keriru's reporting and the inevitable unraveling of Theranos that it triggered. Walgreens cut all ties with the company and closed their wellness centers. The FDA banned the company from using the Edison too. The centers for Medicare

and Medicaid services banned homes from owning or running a medical lab for two years. The SEC and the US Attorney's Office opened investigations. Two class action lawsuits from people who had their blood analyzed by Theranos are still underway. Forbes removed homes from its list of America's richest self-made women. They lowered its estimate of her net worth to nothing. Something like a million people were told their blood test results had been complete bullshit and they would need to retake them. Now, Holmes tried to stage a comeback for some reason, but she started this by adopting a husky puppy and naming it Balto. After the dog that led a sled team filled with medicine to save an Alaskan village in 1925, Balto became a constant companion both at the Los Altos Mansion that

Theranos rented for Elizabeth and at the Theranos offices, even though all her scientists warned her that dog hair did not mix well with blood testing laboratories. She did not bother to potty train Balto, so he pissed and shit all over what was ostensibly, again, a medical lab. Holmes also started to claim that her husky was a wolf at this point, telling everyone who asked and probably also a lot of people who did not ask. By the end of 2017, things were bad enough that Elizabeth Holmes had to stop traveling by private jet. The company was forced out of the office that had been expensively redesigned and spent more than a million dollars a month in rent on. They moved into a lab facility in Newark, which is not generally seen as as nice as Palo Alto. Balto

continued to shit on the floor in this new facility. According to Vanity Queer, fair quote, it's been a long read. According to Vanity, fair quote, through all this, former employees of the company have told me Holmes had a bizarre way of acting like nothing was wrong. Even more peculiarly, she seemed happy. The company was falling apart. There are countless indictments piling up. Employees are leaving in droves and Elizabeth that's just weirdly chipper, one former senior executive told me. One former board member also noted that Holmes would come to board meetings chirpy and acting as if everything was great. She would walk up to people in the office who have just testified in front of the SEC or been questioned by lawyers at the FDA and

she would give them a hug and ask how they were doing. She was so confident that the company would be fine. Executives who worked with her said that she enrolled Balto in a search and rescue program. Holmes spent weekends training him to find people in an emergency. Unfortunately, Huskies are not bred for rescue. They are long distance runners and Balto failed out. Her dog failed out of school. Her dog failed out of school. I bet her narrative is like he actually dropped out. He dropped out. He actually had an idea for a business. He's going to start a search and rescue company. Oh God. I mean, these are like classic things of just like ignoring reality. Your best friend is not a person. I mean, listen, I love my dogs who's named after

Sonny Baloney. My best friend is a cat that lives in Texas. That's true. It's not that, but you know, like the completely ignoring reality and being like, my dog's a cop. Yeah, my dog's a cop. Therein has officially died in September 2018. All 900 million dollars Elizabeth Holmes had raised via grifting evaporated into a pile of broken nanotainers and dog shit. Numerous lawsuits and investigations into Holmes and Theranos are still ongoing. She faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted for all her crimes. Your defense and the defense of her co-defendant Sonny Baloney seems to rest on the idea that they didn't actually commit fraud. Theranos was just a normal business failure. Also technically, neither of them made money off the company. This is sort of

true. But for more than a decade, Holmes's travel, bodyguards, mansion bills, etc. were all paid for by Theranos. One former employee later recalled, quote, the company paid for everything. She would submit her miles if she drove the six miles to her house in Los Altos. Just what you do if you're working for like 20 bucks an hour. Not what you do if you're the CEO and they're renting you a mansion. Elizabeth former Theranos executives who were close to Elizabeth Holmes during the end of Theranos noted that she never really accepted any responsibility for what had happened. One former colleague said, Elizabeth sees herself as the victim. She blames John Kerry Rue. She blames David Boyce and she blames Heather King. Boys and King were both her lawyers. Holmes thinks that her

lawyer should have somehow been able to contain the bad PR. From again, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter tearing their company open with unimpeachable facts in a Wall Street Journal article. At this moment, Elizabeth Holmes lives in San Francisco in a very nice apartment that seems to be paid for by the rich kid she is dating. She now dresses like a normal person. Last year, she and her boyfriend went to Burning Man. She looks weirdly normal in the pictures. Like an actual adult person. She seems to be trying to turn her dog into an Instagram star. Here's her, some of her Instagram pictures. Oh my god. This could have been your life, girl. She looks like a normal person though. She looks like a normal basic white lady. Yeah. Wow. Look

at that hat. Look at that fur vest. It is a great dog. No shade on the dog. The dog did nothing. The dog did nothing wrong. The dog was just trying to- Could have learned how to- She's trying to make her dog into an Insta thought. Yeah, it seems like it is. Oh my god. She's got nicknames for him. I'm very interested as into what happens with her because it's like, I could see it going one way of classic scammer getting the minimum punishment and then staging a comeback 10 years from now. But I could also see it as a making an example for Silicon Valley and actually putting her away. Maybe she'll go to prison even though none of the guys in the financial industry who did irreparably more harm will ever see the inside of a cell.

Exactly. Like one of those example makers. She's more criminal than she is victim, but part of her seems to be a victim. I just don't know enough about the relationship with Sunny, but it does seem like something fucked up happened there. I mean, it's- and I'm sure that there's some relationships that each kept that have turned out fine by and large, but I don't know. I mean, not to continue to stand for those perthelms. It does seem like she has deluded herself into thinking she did nothing wrong. I do believe that she thinks that. Yeah, I totally believe she thinks that. And it's partly because she was doing, again, when I say Steve Jobs was a grifter, it's not that he didn't eventually produce great stuff. It's that he knew how to

lie and obfuscate and con people until the product was ready. And I think that's what she was trying to do. But I think that my impression of Steve Jobs was always like he knew more what he was doing and like just didn't care versus like totally scissor fucking your own brain into believing something that is patently untrue. Yeah, I think he was a very comfortable person with himself and I doubt she ever was. Maybe she is now. Maybe. I mean- She looks happy in the pictures. She's got a hot boyfriend. They're going to Burning Man. That's everything that's annoying to me. So cool. It's possible that if she doesn't wind up doing 20 years behind bars, Elizabeth Holmes may have gotten over the need to cosplay as Steve Jobs. I don't know. What I do

know is that the system that allowed her to fuck with so many people's lives and cost so much money and con so much money is still alive and well. That Vanity Fair article I keep referring to has a great breakdown of this. Quote, it generally works like this. The venture capitalists who are mostly white men don't really know what they're doing with any certainty. It's impossible, after all, to truly predict the next big thing. So they bet a little money on every company that they can with the hope that one of them hits it big. The entrepreneurs, also mostly white men, often work on a lot of meaningless stuff like using code to deliver frozen yogurt more expeditiously or apps that let you say yo and only yo to your friends. Man, people are so hard on yo. It was a fun app.

The entrepreneurs generally glorify their efforts by saying that their innovation could change the world, which tends to appease the venture capitalists because they can also then pretend that they're not only there to make money. Also, this helps to seduce the tech press, also largely composed of white men, which is often ready to play a game of access in exchange for a few more page views of their story about the company that is trying to change the world by getting frozen yogurt to companies more expeditiously. The financial rewards speak for themselves. Silicon Valley, which is 50 square miles, has created more wealth than any place in human history. In the end, it isn't in anyone's interest to call bullshit. Hard to agree. Yeah, kind of nailed it. Well,

yeah, no, that's like a terrific piece. That is everything that's happening in that little chunk of California. And it's and it's very unclear of like whether anything will actually be done to nothing. She might. Yeah. I mean, she might, but it's but there's always so many cases of like sacrificial lambs in just so like Silicon Valley can move forward with being like, no, we took care of that. Yeah. Elizabeth Holmes is in jail. The one female CEO is in jail. The one grifter in Silicon Valley is in jail. Mark Zuckerberg is disrupting AIDS medicine. I mean, either way, I feel confident that bullshit will prevail. That also could be this country's new motto. Bullshit will prevail. Bullshit will prevail. I hope that, you know, Elizabeth Holmes goes to prison. She does

a do Facebook live streams from her gorgeous cell. I hope that she tries to write a novel a la Lauren Conrad. Oh, I bet it'll be great. I hope she tries to start a lifestyle coming. I hope she does every scam. I hope she tries to write a novel that is like a fictional way of addressing America's race problem. Because I think if anyone's qualified to take it on, it's LIHO. Oh God. I don't know. I guess we just have to sit tight and hope that this Jennifer Lawrence movie doesn't come out because it sounds insufferable. Yeah. I hope it proves to be like Theranos, a giant overfunded unworkable mess. Still, I mean, blood curic, a good idea. A great idea. A great idea for a haunted house. A great idea for like the sequel to what we do in the shadows.

Oh, like a fantastic idea for that. I hope it's in the TV series. That would be great. Absolutely a great idea for that. Well, she should have just been in Hollywood. She's just in the wrong area of California. Yeah. And I think it was just that she came in too late to like try to make a tech product. Like she saw that like, well, no, like that's that clearly we're near the end of where you can just jump into that company with a new gadget. So yeah, blood, blood. Yeah. Hey, hashtag relatable. Hashtag relatable. Got it. Right. We've all got blood, except for Peter Teal, which is why he needs your blood. Peter Teal vampire narrative. That's what I want now to make a movie about. I want to Peter Teal vampire Peter Teal, the vampire nerd who is

helping the government track undocumented immigrants in using like appropriating, talking terms to do it like that's a better use of stealing the name of the worst guy in those books as device to name his company. Stop it. Stop it, Peter. I don't think we need to run Elizabeth Holmes over with another intellectual property car. I just don't think we do. No. So Jamie Loftus, we're back in the P Zone. Here we are. P Zone of the P Zone. It's freezing here. It is. It's very cold. It's for my turtlenecks. Yeah, you can listen to the Bechtelcast every Thursday with me and Caitlin Durante. You can find me on Twitter at Jamie Loftus Help, and I'm touring my show, Boss Whom is Girl, about a fictional girl boss called Shell Gasoline

Sandwich. Touring that around the country in the spring and summer. Well, that sounds great. Check out her show, even if you're not in Cleveland. What? Can I get you to say I apologize for pronouncing Steve Jobs 10 different ways throughout this episode? I don't apologize for pronouncing Steve Jobs 10 different ways throughout this episode. You know why? Why? Because he was a dick. Whoa. May he burn. I'm kidding. I don't feel how strong he was. Yeah, I don't feel that strongly about it either. I just feel badly for Steve Wozniak, who I'm sure still mourns him beautifully. I feel badly for his daughter, I read her book. Oh, that's a heartbreaker. Yeah, it's a tough one. Bad dad. Bad dad. Bad dad.

Check out our website, BehindTheBastards.com. Check us out on the Twits and the Grahams at At Bastards. Bod, listen to our t-shirts, buy them. Listen to our t-shirts. They have a lot of secrets. Listen to our t-shirts on t-public, Behind the Bastards. I have a new podcast called It Could Happen Here. It's a sad podcast about how we're all going to die in horrible, horrible conflict soon. Awesome. Can't wait. I love you. Bye. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for

this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to

go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.