Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Elizabeth Holmes

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

Defrauded Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has become the subject of countless books, podcasts, documentaries, and now the brand new scripted Hulu series, The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried. Holmes's cult of personality—everything from her sociopath-chic Steve Jobs cosplay to her roster of Star Wars quotes (delivered in that mysteriously affected low voice) to her tyrannical lying and exploitation—has made her more than just your dime-a-dozen tech bro scammer. How did Holmes cultivate such a cult following among Silicon Valley investors, and now, why are true crime junkies so inordinately obsessed with her case? This week, with the help of listener call-ins, Amanda and Isa unpack the notorious grifter's zealous qualities to determine whether she really was more of a cult leader than a con artist, and if so, was her “cult” a Live Your Life, a Watch Your Back, or a Get the Fuck Out? For listeners of the show, Dipsea is offering an extended 30-day free trial when you go to DipseaStories.com/CULT

My name is Erica and I'm from Philadelphia. I think the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes is how she used specific quotes from things like Star Wars to word salad people into believing that things that were impossible according to physics were actually possible. Yoda's allowed to do that to me, not Elizabeth Holmes. My name is Annabelle. I'm from Georgia and I think the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes is how she glorified the toxic work culture that exists in Silicon Valley.

She always bragged about how she only needed to sleep four hours a night and how she wore the same thing every day so she could just work and didn't have to worry about her wardrobe. She ate the same thing every day, she didn't own a TV. That's just something a cult leader would do is trying to make everyone else around you tired to distract you from the fact that you're in a cult. This is Amanda from Columbus, Indiana and the cultiest thing about the Elizabeth Holmes trial is definitely all of the ladies and maybe some men that showed up at the courthouse in full on Elizabeth Holmes gear.

I'm talking wigs, lipstick, turtlenecks, the glasses, the whole nines. She really is an icon whether you love or hate her. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm Amanda Montell, author of the book Cultish the Language of Fanaticism. I'm Issa Medina and I'm a comedian. Every week on our show, we discuss a different fanatical fringe group that puts the cult in culture from essential oils to Starbucks to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really?

To join our cult, follow us on Instagram, it sounds like a cult pod. I'm on IG at Amanda underscore Montell and I'm on IG at Issa Medina, I-S-A-A-M-E-D-I-N-A-A. We are here to talk about something exciting. Yes, we are, our queen herself. Oh my God. The cult queen, Elizabeth Holmes. Give it up for our blondie. Go off, queen.

Oh my God. But this is something that we'll talk about. She literally does have earnest groupies, earnest and ironic groupies. Yeah. I also think people are really hard on Elizabeth Holmes' girl boss groupies when literally every deranged murderer has had super fans, like everyone from Jim Jones to Ted Bundy to Charles Manson had women who were dropping their panties for them. It's called Hybristophilia, by the way, when you have a fetish for criminals.

Oh, really? Mm-hmm. Okay. I don't have Hybristophilia. Me neither. I like nice boys. Yeah. What do you call it when you don't know what you like?

Hybristoconfusion? I don't know. Confusionophilia. Yeah. Just to clarify for everyone, I do fall in the ironic groupie category. Still, that's culty. Yeah. I mean, you weren't full on in the cult because you didn't show up to the trial standing

outside the courthouse in Elizabeth Holmes' cosplay. Yeah. I'm also not that in the know. I learned about her after the documentary came out. But this episode comes on the heels of the new Hulu scripted series, The Dropout, with Amanda Seyfried, who is going to play Elizabeth Holmes. So let's get into it. We're going to summarize who Elizabeth Holmes is, what she did, what Theranos, her defrauded

company is, but we're not going to get too into that before we start talking about the cultiest aspects of Elizabeth Holmes because there are already 400 podcasts and documentaries about Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah. I'm learning about this story. What corner of the internet are you even in? Hey, we have a lot of Australian listeners, but I feel like they're in the know. They know.

We had several listener Collins from Melbourne. Oh, we love our Australian listeners. Good day. You don't know who Elizabeth Holmes is already. She is a woman who, in short, began a startup, fundraised a billion dollars for it. And ultimately, it was all just an idea that wasn't even close to coming to fruition. It was a tech startup for a company that you would essentially put your finger in this machine and it would prick you and it would take all of your blood work for you in seconds

and turn it around. I feel like she just woke up one day after watching Disney Channel and was like, oh, technology is easy. And I'm just going to make it happen. Yeah. So her company was called Ferenose. It was founded in 2003. The whole mission was to make blood testing easy peasy lemon squeezy.

So the company was based on doing blood testing more, and I quote, quickly conveniently and inexpensively. She claimed that the product was able to detect this wide range of illnesses from high cholesterol to cancer using only a drop or two of blood, and she raised this $945 million figure from investors. The company was evaluated at $9 billion at its peak. It was rooted from her fear of needles. She hated going to the doctor every time and getting poked for different tests and also

lab testing is so expensive, painful, inconvenient, and she wanted to find a quick solution. But a little bit more about her is that she went to Stanford. So she's a smart cookie. She's a smart cookie, but she dropped out at 19, and I feel like it was in the era. A smart quitter. Yeah. She was a quick smart quitter. I feel like she's that generation of like Mark Zuckerbergs, you know, that like it was

cool to drop out because you're too smart for the system. Yeah, exactly. And like clearly she had a lot to learn. Yes. She should have stuck around and learned some things. Yeah, exactly. So she always had this interest in inventing technology and becoming a billionaire. She started a business in high school.

She sold software that translated computer code. So she was always interested in entering this world of hyper ambitious tech CEOs. Yeah. Not just being like another cog in the machine. She wanted to like change the world. Yes. And she grew up with that generation of like Steve Jobs who did change the world. And clearly that was one of her biggest inspirations because she started dressing like the man.

Yes. So she was special because she started gaining traction and power and investment pretty quickly and at an alarming rate. No one that she was preaching to knew the tech. The technology behind Theranos was extremely secretive, but she had this incredible cult of personality that allowed her to build this unicorn company as it's called in Silicon Valley terminology based on technology that simply did not work. Yeah.

But because of her charisma, she was able to get investors like Rupert Murdoch, the DeVos family, Walmart's Walton family. The investors are such red flags. Yeah. All of those investors are red flags and like it also shows like the privilege that she comes from being this white woman who got to like drop out of Stanford. It's like people really do see what they want to see. Right.

And I think when people started to ask a lot more questions was when she started to do partnerships with other big pharma companies like Capital Blue Cross, Cleveland Clinic. She had machines in Walgreens. These ineffectual bullshit scammer robots were being sold to people at motherfucking Walgreens. Yeah. And Safeway as well. And like it was these machines that were just a lie. They literally could not do what she was saying the technology could do.

And when everything started to unfold was when people started asking questions. And even the people at the company themselves were like, why is she being so secretive? People in different departments had no idea what anyone else was working on. Truly, nobody really was able to peer behind the curtain to see that this was all bullshit because anytime anyone tried to ask a question, they would get shot down, gas lit fired. Yeah. And when we had that cult of personality that people were scared to approach her, everyone thought they were in her inner circle, but they thought there was another inner circle

that they weren't in. I feel like. But the only inner circle was her. She was alone. Well, her and her partner, the COO of Theranos Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years her senior. Basically the epilogue where she is now is she was charged with all this fraud. She's facing 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 plus restitution. She was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud.

She was also found not guilty on a few counts that pertain to defrauding patients. But as of right now, she's free on bond until September 2022. And her sentencing is on September 26th, so that'll be exciting. Yeah. I think the reason that it's such an interesting case and all jokes aside that it's like, no woman is defrauding people, but like truly it's because there are so many men that have run companies into the ground. Actually 50% of all startups fail, 75% of startups funded by VCs, which she had fail

and 2.3% are like women led startups in Silicon Valley. That's not because they just had like bad business practices. I also think it's because a lot of them are promising things they can actually do. That is so true. I think one of the reasons why this case became so high profile and why it's so special is because it almost seemed like even more of a betrayal since Silicon Valley was giving this very unique level of power to a woman and then she exploited it. Hey guys, my name is Amanda, I'm calling in from Boston.

I think the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes is that she drops her voice really low and you can actually hear in one of the documentaries her slip into her normal voice and then fall right back into her fake deep voice and it's like really, really creepy. My name is Danielle and I'm from New York. I think the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes is the exit cost she imposed on people who left Theranos, like Tyler Schultz and Erica Chung who were harassed and legally threatened after whistleblowing. My name is Cyra, I am a psychotherapist located in Denver, Colorado.

I think the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes is the comparisons that a lot of the powerful men around her that she charmed like made about her. I think in the HBO documentary, one of them compared her to Archimedes, which is the guy who invented math, which is just like unbelievable to me. This whole case begs a lot of really fascinating questions. The first of which to me is like, what is the difference between a con artist and a cult leader? Elizabeth is called a con artist and a fraudster and a grifter right and left, but we're comparing

her to a cult leader and the way that I've been thinking about it is like, you know how all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. I do now, but it's like all cult leaders are con artists, but not all con artists are cult leaders. Like when I think of a con artist, I think of someone who's specifically going after people's money. But a cult leader not only wants your money, they want your mind, they want your soul, they want your autonomy.

And I think at the end of the day, what I'm getting from Elizabeth Holmes is that she was more power hungry than just money. And that's what makes her more of a cult leader. Yeah, because if her goal wasn't to actually like solve the tech issue that she brought forward as like her company thesis, then what she really was after was power. But in order to call her a cult leader, you have to say that Silicon Valley itself is a cult and she was trying to climb it a thousand percent. She was pitching to VCs and she was pitching to other people within the cult of tech.

While some cult leaders are trying to completely subvert a certain system in this example, the system being Silicon Valley and create something radically, tyrannically new. Elizabeth Holmes was really more of a person who was like a bit of a follower at the end of the day, because she was just trying to succeed within the system of Silicon Valley. Literally she dressed exactly like Steve Jobs. Exactly. So I think another interesting question that the Elizabeth Holmes case begs is what is charisma in the first place?

Just a brief etymology lesson about the word charisma. Charisma, the word actually has fundamental centuries old ties to religion, to Christianity. It derives from this ancient Greek word for gift or favor. By the mid 1600s, it'd come to mean God given abilities, like the ability to teach the ability to heal. And it wasn't until the 1930s when the word evolved to connote some sort of like earthly knack for leadership, and then only in the 50s was it used to describe this more pedestrian sense of like personal charm.

People would always fuse about her charisma as an outsider. I don't fucking see it. And I think that's because they were already in that space, in that cult of startup culture. Because if you're comparing her charisma to other people in the tech space, she had it. She was a star. But if you're comparing her charisma to people in Los Angeles, you're like, who the fuck is this bitch? It's so true.

And we give people the power we want them to have. I learned about this book called The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Caban. And she was talking about these three ingredients to charisma. Now charisma, kind of like you're saying, can work for good or it can be weaponized for ill. But fundamentally what charisma is, is not about creating the impression that you're a genius. It's about making other people feel good about themselves.

And it is a skill you can cultivate. These three ingredients to charisma that this author outlined were presence, power, and warmth. For her to like go up to the tech space and be like, I'm doing everything right and I've done nothing wrong and I deserve all of this, that is sociopath vibes. But also I think that's the confidence, the false confidence that comes with dropping out of Stanford University. It's clearly something that was part inborn and part cultivated.

Yeah, and because a little bit more background about her. Her mom was a congressional committee staffer and her dad worked for Enron and then he worked for a bunch of government agencies. So her parents have this follow the leader in her blood. Charisma is incredibly context dependent. But I think we perceive people as charismatic when they are trying to claim the type of power that we think they deserve. So when a white man speaks with confidence and zeal and enthusiasm about God and government

and money, we're more likely to believe him. When a pretty white woman speaks with confidence about health care or wellness or love, we're more likely to be enthralled by her. In the early 2010s, Silicon Valley was like ready for its first female billionaire and Holmes fit the perfect picture. Like she was young, she was thin, she was white, she was from a wealthy family. She was pretty, but not too pretty. She was feminine, but not too feminine.

And she wasn't promising some toy, but this like life saving medical technology whose advertisements had like babies on the cover. Yeah. And I think it was this perfect timing of white feminism coming to the forefront. And it was like the perfect example of like, oh, white women really are at the forefront of equality because she was able to get away with this Charisma and bullshit idea without having like the paperwork to prove it a hundred percent. She was like Silicon Valley, Gwyneth Paltrow, the ultimate girl boss.

Hi, I'm Corey. I'm messaging from Denver and I think that the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes is that she worked like 16 to 20 hour days in the office at Theranos and expected her staff members to do the same sleep deprivation is like one of the cultiest things that you could possibly inflict on the people who report to you. Hey, this is Jennifer from Chicago weighing in on Elizabeth Holmes. I think the thing that was probably the most cultish and also the most subtle was the control dynamics when people ask questions or gave pushback.

They were quickly met with communication or actual threats that they would possibly be putting their job in jeopardy if they questioned the leadership. Like that to me is a power dynamic that just screams cult. Let's go through like Elizabeth Holmes timeline and point out when did it start getting creepy? When did it get weird? The sort of rise and fall of Theranos, if you will. Yeah. 2003 immediately after she drops out at 19, she founds Theranos.

She goes on to focus on her company in 2004 and 2008, her board attempts to remove her as CEO, but she convinces them not to. Yes. And this is fascinating because I think her powers of persuasion are some of the cultiest things about her. This was this infamous board meeting that lasted three hours long. They tried to dethrone her because they were sensing those red flags and she was able to turn it around because she has this way of deflecting questions and hiding behind the

secrecy and classified nature of her tech to avoid sort of prying and pushback. She had this way of making these sort of like lofty and well composed promises in order to get people to feel inspired rather than suspicious. This is what happens when you work to change things. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world. But that's honestly truly genuinely inspiring because that's what men do all the time. Like men really do like bullshit you for years and years and that's what they do with companies

and that's what they do with women. It's just also so sad. You mentioned earlier it was like the one opportunity that a woman in tech got and she was full of shit. Yeah, I know. I don't know the statistics because I'm not a scientist, but women only apply to jobs that they are either exactly qualified for or over qualified for, whereas men apply to jobs that they aren't not even qualified for.

Such a paradox because her betrayal was as unique as the power she was given. Even though it's like women should have the opportunity to fuck over people just as much as men. Even though I do think that if she hadn't been trying so hard her whole life to approximate male power and maybe had cultivated like a new kind of feminine power, she wouldn't have done such evil things, but then again she wouldn't have gotten to where she was. But the thing is even the fact that you're describing it as evil, I don't think anything she did was evil.

Well she lied and exploited and she exploited billion-dollar investors who are okay throwing billions of dollars away a year on companies that they know are 75% likely to fail. So I think what makes her betrayal so unique is the type of power that she identified the ability to access was in the healthcare space, the wellness space. Like you said she wasn't inventing a silly toy, she was inventing something that was a little bit life or death. I think that's where she fucked up because she could have been able to hide behind so much bullshit, had her company, had her idea not been related to health.

But I'm unconvinced that she would have gained power if it hadn't been because that's the type of power we want to give to a woman. We want a woman to heal our mind's bodies and souls. We want men to invent the fun stuff. Yeah and why do men get to invent the fun stuff? They do it all wrong. Like they invented birth control and they fucked that shit up. You're right, you have to be a little bit cult leader-ish in order to get that kind

of status in Silicon Valley but you can't be so cult leader-ish that you end up harming people. Yeah. The harm could have been that she in 2013 actually started selling these machines for Walgreens and people could have been misdiagnosed. People were getting back- That is evil. Completely fraudulent results.

Yeah, that is evil. Under her nose. Misdiagnosing is no joke. Could you imagine if all of Los Angeles was misdiagnosed with Chlamydia and they were like, oh fuck and then people started texting their exes or like, what if people cheated and then they just came out and were like, oh my god babe, I fucked up. Oh that would be highly unfortunate, I'm thinking so many thoughts. I feel like it would just be a recreation of like what happens every year after Coachella.

Oh my god. I also think it's that kind of thing where like cult leaders believe their own lies. You have to. She was someone who lacked imposter syndrome entirely. Which is sociopathic. If you don't have imposter syndrome, you are a sociopath. I don't trust you. So she thought that it was working.

It's like deny, deny, deny so much to the point where she believed her bullshit. That's part of her charisma. Board members spoke about her as if she was a visionary. There was a quote from the Elizabeth Holmes documentary, the board members were talking about her as if she were Beethoven, as if she were this rare creature that maybe comes along once in a century or two. That's crazy. At the very, very same time, she created this incredible culture of fear and secrecy within

the company. A scientist, a real scientist, got fired on the spot for asking too many questions. And then there was this like culty culture she created, wow that was a deliteration, at Theranos where they would be like chanting at all hands meetings. Which is very tech industry vibes, very Google, like we have a campus. Yeah and like we have massage therapists and a ball pit. And fucking lactation stations and room rooms and like walking paths. I think those are just hallways.

That distracts you from anything negative because you're caught up in how transcendent all of that feels. Yeah, Elizabeth created fake community, which I think a lot of startups in Silicon Valley have all my friends who work in San Francisco work in tech and they all work at startups and half of them don't actually like do much, they're like oh yeah they just hired me because they wanted to make it look like the company was growing. So what these companies do, and I'm pretty sure Elizabeth did the same thing, is that they fundraise all of this money but in order to show that they're using the money for something

they hire people to sit around all day and not do anything. They cast extras. They literally like cast extras in the show of the startup just to make it look like they're doing something. Yeah, it's just funny to me that getting an extra role in Silicon Valley or in Hollywood is so hard but you're literally getting hired to do nothing. Yeah, like if you're like an extra dead body in law and order, you're just like showing up.

Yeah, and it's a huge deal. It's a huge deal. When you get to be an extra in law and order, that's like people are like my career is taking off. You just show up to like wave and cry, exactly. I think it's interesting to you how Elizabeth Holmes would and this is very cult red flag. This is done in every notorious cult I can think of from Jonestown to Nexium, how she would cast extras in the movie of Theranos but then she would make them stay at the office

for all hours, morning, noon, and night doing tedium, busy work because when you break someone down with sleep deprivation, exhaustion, tedium confusion, then they become disoriented and they just default to the leader that's done in every infamous cult. The turning point specifically for Elizabeth Holmes was in 2015 when the Wall Street Journal started to investigate Theranos. That was when it revealed that there were only ever 12 out of the 100 tests they offered performed on the machine that she was selling to people. The company was relying on third party testing devices, essentially lab testing, normal shit,

like the opposite of her technology. The machine was literally just for show. Hi my name is Sammy, I'm from Washington D.C. and I think the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes is the way that she acted when she was presented with dissenters. Her actions with silencing Tyler Schultz are the most culty to me because she hired private investigators, filed so many lawsuits against him that his parents had to almost sell their house for him. Hi ESA and Amanda.

My name's Jo. I'm from Brooklyn, New York and I think the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos definitely is her persuasion when it came to getting people to follow her. She had a board meeting where her team of millionaires and billionaires were plotting to overthrow her and in a three hour meeting she convinced all of them that she knew exactly what she was doing even though none of her tech worked and later fired every one of those people. My name is Rachel K. Albers and I gotta tell you the most culty thing about Elizabeth

Holmes is that like Jim Jones, she wrapped up her good ideas in bad ones. So let's talk about some of the things that we individually find cultiest about Elizabeth Holmes. When I say cult of Elizabeth Holmes, what qualities in her and in Theranos come to mind for you? Oh, I mean for me immediately like her look and the way that she talks and wearing the same thing every day and not just the fact that she talks weird, she wears the same thing every day.

It's if you look at pictures of her before and after, right, because like people in cults they like become a different person and she literally changed overnight. She had this persona curation, right? And Elizabeth Holmes had this like piercing. I don't think she did it right though, like her eye contact was so creepy. Totally. It was creepy. People are like she never blinked.

It was terrifying. This reminds me of Jim Jones so much and I don't mean to make like a one to one comparison between Elizabeth Holmes and Jim Jones, but in the way that Elizabeth Holmes would study the aesthetic of Steve Jobs and the rhetoric of Star Wars. You or do not, there is no try. In order to appeal to these like Silicon Valley bro sensitivities, these people she wanted to invest in her, Jim Jones would study the populist oratory stylings of everyone from MLK to fucking Hitler and he would choose the best bits and put his own Jonesian twist

on them. And that's how he was able to appeal to anyone at any time. It was expertly curated. That's so creepy. And I feel like a lot of people do that with different professions, which is not bad, right? Like I think it's really funny when people first start doing stand up comedy. They focus a lot on like what comedians do on stage when they first get on stage. They're like, oh, I think it's so funny that comedians like set the microphone to the side

and they wear like baggy clothes and they focus on all the wrong things. And I think that's like where Elizabeth went wrong. She focused on the really shallow thing. Oh my God. She was like an alien who came down to planet earth and was like, this is how you become a CEO. Yes. All this talk of charisma and persona curation leads me to what I think is by far the cultiest

thing about her, which was her very artificially deepened voice. Yeah. I mean, I agree. I said the thing that was cultiest to me about her was her whole change in presentation. Exactly. Exactly. And you're obsessed with the voice. You were just like going off.

At the early age, I began to believe that building a business was perhaps the greatest opportunity to making an impact because it's a tool for making change in the world. Is that really good or am I just, I feel like you're really into it, but I actually do think it's good. Oh, okay. Fundamentally, the answer is to our challenges in healthcare, rely and engaging and empowering the individual. It's almost like a little bit like surfer bro, the cadence.

I know what she was going for. Lower pitch is associated with authority. She is not the first female authority figure to purposefully deepen her voice to be perceived as more powerful. Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, comes to mind. Yeah. And also, I mean, the way that she dressed, we've seen this for years, is like women wearing suits.

In my first draft of cultish, I had a whole little analysis of Elizabeth Holmes' voice included talking about the language of fanaticism. I'll say that her incredibly affected voice in retrospect seems culty, outright ridiculous, but it's true that over the centuries, we've been conditioned to believe that the voice of a middle-aged white man sounds like the voice of God. In fact, during the heyday of television broadcasting, there was a known style of delivery labeled the voice of God, which applied to the sort of like deep, booming, exaggerated authority of newscasters like Walter Cronkite, you know?

I don't know who that man is. I really don't. But I love that you're bringing history lessons to this podcast, always. Interestingly, linguists have found that when women attempt to recreate this sort of masculine authority, it has historically been read as contrived. The public reacted terribly to Margaret Thatcher's voice, and it failed to achieve its desired effect. Of course, the voice didn't have its desired effect.

Whenever a woman does anything she's criticized, like if a woman skateboards, she's like trying too hard to be chill, or if she's like a girly girl and wears pink, she's like, oh my god, like why is she wearing so much makeup? Oh, it's completely true with women. It's like, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. There's actually, there's a name for that. It's called the double bind. Oh, of course.

Of course, it's a stretch. Of course, it's a stretch that I can't do. It's like a yoga pose, like the, and now we double bind. Yeah. And now I'm leaving the yoga class. But people bought Elizabeth Holmes' voice. The people she was pitching to bought it. It's because they were all dudes over the age of 60, like they were confused how she

even got to the office. They were like, women can drive. So true. I think her voice actively contributed to her allure, juxtaposed with this otherwise like perfect feminine image, her curiously masculine voice almost served as this like a learning quirk, like a Charlie's angel who's in like tight spandex and looks super feminine, but can carry a gun. I don't think it was like a quirk in the sense that people just thought it was like

cool. I think it made people want to get to know her more because they were like, this is weird. Exactly. What is this lady about? I want to know more and why she is the way that she is. Actually that I think people didn't know what to make of it and that was part of the draw. It like reinforced Holmes' promise that like she was something we'd never quite seen before.

Yeah. But it was just a weird voice. It was just a weird voice. It was just a weird voice and bad lipstick. My name is Jordan. I'm calling from Dallas, Texas. I think the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes is how obsessed the public has become with her with a podcast, multiple interviews, and multiple movies coming out about her life

in such a short period of time. Hi, this is Alexa Q. from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. And I just wanted to share what I think is the cultiest thing about Elizabeth Holmes. She was praying upon the wishes and dreams of people who are in vulnerable health situations. Okay, so out of the three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. What do you think about the cult of Elizabeth Holmes? I think now that she's been formally charged of a serious crime, she is get the fuck out

level. I don't think that Silicon Valley itself is get the fuck out level. I think it applies similarly to like the corporate vibe that we always talk about. You gotta watch your back. Elizabeth Holmes is for sure a get the fuck out, but I think there are a lot of men who've probably done similar damage, who have not become so high profile, who are also get the fuck out level, and they're just less intriguing to us because they're not special. Yeah, exactly.

And I want to make sure that like when we say if like Elizabeth Holmes is get the fuck out level, like 90% of men in tech are get the fuck out level. It's true. And Elizabeth Holmes had some qualities that are necessary for success, like she had this combination that we always talk about in the context of cultishness, which is a combination of privilege and hope and a sense of pride in her tools, because I don't even want to say genius like no, no, yeah, a sense of pride in like her work. It was opportunism.

It was confident trickery. And she was using all of those things to prey on this very real vulnerability, which is the necessity for better blood testing. And I think that hope that she had and that her investors and everybody that she swindled had in her is necessary for progress. Like sometimes you have to take leaps of faith, even when you don't know what you're doing. But when you combine it with too much money and not enough checks and balances like you were saying, you get Kanye, no, I'm just literally, no, I know, I can't stop thinking

about Kanye this whole episode because I'm like, he is a genius. I think musically, but it's like sometimes you take a little too far babes. I know. I wonder like what Elizabeth Holmes was good for. But that's what a cult leader is. It's just someone who's, who has something to offer, but isn't able to stop themselves because they're so power hungry. Well, that's our show.

Thanks for listening. We'll be back with a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty, but not too culty. Sounds like a cult is created, hosted and produced by Amanda Montell and Issa Medina. Kate Elizabeth is our editor. Our podcast studio is all things comedy and our theme music is by Casey Colb. Thank you to our intern slash production assistant, Noemi Griffin. Subscribe to sounds like a cult wherever you get your podcasts.

So you never miss an episode. And if you like our show, feel free to give us a rating and review on Spotify or Apple podcasts and check us out on Patreon at patreon.com. Sounds like a cult.