Elizabeth Holmes and her family's Fleischmann Yeast fortune fueled Theranos, where she dropped Stanford to pursue a pinprick blood test vision. Backed by Tim Draper and partner Sonny Balwani, the company exploited regulatory loopholes for partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway while ignoring scientific impossibilities. The narrative darkens with Ian Gibbons' suicide after pressure to hide failures, leading Holmes to claim his patents posthumously. Ultimately, this saga exposes how the "girl boss" myth glorifies ruthless deception over genuine innovation, leaving a legacy of fraud rather than medical revolution. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:10
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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From stocks to real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
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Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
Readers, Katie's finalists, Publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on Demand This Guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m. whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm wild.
Wild back to your wife.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, they're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
Jamie's Salad Crunch00:02:51
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturalistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Intro!
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastard show where we tell you about the bad people you don't know enough about or you want to know more about.
That's the show.
That's it.
That's the show.
Oh, okay.
Today, my guest is Jamie Loftus.
Hi.
Jamie, eating a salad, Loftus.
Jamie, yeah, eating a salad.
I can already anticipate all the furious comments that I'll get to dip into about my, what's the word? My mesophonia.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Anytime anyone ever eats on Mike, there's 900 comments about like, my mesophonia.
I can't listen to someone eating.
And I was like, this is the smallest problem.
Well, you've hit upon a secret, which is the secret bastard of this episode.
Mesophonia.
It's Jamie.
Jamie Loftus Reading.
I was like, the thing I'm blaming everything on?
Yeah.
No, you are a working person.
And to all my mesophonia.
I've eaten a lot of Doritos on this show.
That's true.
I mean, but that's a satisfying ASMR-induced crunch.
It is.
Well, it is, but so is the satisfying taste of a, I don't, I can't find a brand on your salad.
You should brand yourself.
I actually don't know what it is.
That's frustrating.
There's not enough.
There's not enough visibility with this salad.
Yeah.
Speaking of branding, today we're talking about one of the all-time great branders up until about a year and a half ago, Elizabeth Holmes.
Elizabeth Holmes, man, she's gone mainstream.
E home.
Me, eat.
Is there gonna be a E. Holmes connection here.
It's crazy how quickly she has become a central, like a focus of the world.
It seemed to all happen very quickly.
Yeah, it really all kicked off in about like 2014 is kind of when she blew onto the stage.
That was when I became a stan.
That's what you were saying.
You stand her for a while.
I was a stan, yeah.
Yeah.
And there's elements of her that I still stand a little bit.
Yeah.
Change my mind.
No, you know, we'll get into what she is later.
Let's let's start by talking about her backstory a little bit here.
Let's, I love a story of wealth.
A story of wealth and privilege and what I will call, I will say her ethnicity is rich.
Like she's, she is, she's, she's of that background.
I'll talk a little bit more about that later, too.
Cool.
So Elizabeth Ann Holmes was born on February 3rd, 1984 in Washington, D.C. Her father was Christian Holmes IV, which might key you in on the fact that her family was rich as shit, which I wrote down before.
You spoiled that factor for our audience.
I just didn't, I didn't head edit.
The Yeast Fortune Story00:03:12
So, you know.
Listen, I'm sorry for spoilers.
I'm just so excited to talk about Elizabeth.
I know, I know.
You're very, you're a big, you're a big stan.
I'm a big stan.
I play her on stage a lot.
I know you do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You've got a great lab coat.
I've got a, I don't wear a lab coat.
No, it's the, it's the, it's the turtleneck.
Turtleneck, yeah.
Yeah, that's kind of the iconic look.
The turtleneck and the bad hair.
That's something that we have in common.
What?
The frizzy hair.
I mean, she needs to, like her whole thing, and I know that, you know, we come down harder on women because of their appearance, but it's like there could have been an instructional on how to use a hair straightener more responsibly.
I guess I never, okay.
This is neither here nor there.
Split ends.
It's crazy how many billionaires have split ends.
It's like, get it the fuck together.
I guess I never noticed that, but like I never do anything to my hair and I always look like a fucking lightning.
You have infinitely better hair than Elizabeth Holmes.
That's so mean to E. Holmes.
I know.
Tell money.
So her great-great-great-grandfather, the first Christian Holmes, was a World War I veteran, inventor, and a surgeon.
Part of the University of Cincinnati Medical Center is named after him, and he seems to have been a legitimately impressive dude.
The family fortune, however, went back further than that to an ancestor named Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Hungarian immigrant who founded the Fleischmann Yeast Company back in the 1800s.
Oh, I forgot she was a yeast.
Yeah, she's a yeast fortune, which is...
That's too on the nose.
If you're, I gotta say, like, if you're like a rich, a rich girl going to private school, having your money come from a yeast fortune, that's a cross to bear.
That's a real like hashtag girl boss.
Yeah.
Now, pretty much regardless of where you live, you can walk into a grocery store and pick up a packet of Fleischman's bread yeast.
I actually used to use it when I was 18, 19, and 20 to ferment hobo jug wine in my garage.
In other words, Elizabeth Holmes is descended from America's greatest hero.
It only costs like a dollar, so you can make a lot of really cheap gut rot wine with it.
Is it just like a Kool-Aid packet style?
Kool-Aid packet style?
Wow.
I wonder what kind of font work they've got.
You just put sugar in a bucket with water, some Fleischman's bread yeast, stick an airlock on that fucker, let it sit two weeks, then you can get fucking wasted for like $4.
Oh.
You can get like a room full of people wasted for $4.
We used to brew 30 or so gallons at a time and get like huge groups of people drunk on this like terrible, terrible, terrible thing.
It can have been good, yeah.
No, because we would get like canned frozen like you get those cans of like concentrated orange juice and stuff.
Yeah.
You dump like five of those into a five-gallon bucket and we do like six of those at a time.
Fleischman's bread yeast making the fucking yeast.
And then you'd get to like six or seven percent alcohol.
So you can get you get like a five gallon bucket of that.
You can ruin some people.
Yeah, you can really ruin some lives and break up some marriages that way.
If you remind me, at the end of this story, I'll tell you how we used Fleischman's bread yeast to murder the flash when I was a 20-year-old.
Ooh, okay.
All right.
So this is some good, some good utilitarian yeast.
Great yeast.
Good.
We're not against the yeast.
Well, listen, there's a lot of situations in which yeast is not welcome.
This yeast is very welcome.
Okay, this is welcome yeast.
I like their font.
I just had to look at it.
It's a solid font.
It's a cute font.
It's timeless.
They've clearly been at it a while.
Yeah.
Mandarin Surgeries in Texas00:14:45
So, in this CEO is out for blood, the 2014 Fortune article that ignited public interest in Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, her father was described as a man who, quote, has devoted most of his life to public-minded government service, disaster relief in Africa, international development projects in China, environmental work in this country, and is currently the global water coordinator for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
He met Elizabeth's mother, Noelle, on Capitol Hill, where she worked as a congressional committee staffer.
All right.
That's his parents.
Some distinguished, some distinguished shit.
Some distinguished shit.
Depending on who you hear from, you'll run into two very different pictures of her childhood.
In early interviews, Elizabeth would claim that her famous great-great-great-granddad's example was her earliest motivation.
She read a biography of him when she was a little kid and later told Fortune, he ultimately worked himself to death, but he was so passionate in what he did.
I wondered, would I want to be a doctor?
Since her family was rich and connected as fuck, some of her family friends were able to arrange for her to watch surgeries in order to see if she really wanted to get into medicine as a career.
Wait, when she was how old?
I think when she was like a kid and like grade school.
You're going to watch surgeries?
Yeah, you can do that shit.
Why not?
I don't know.
I wouldn't let a child do that.
Oh, man.
If I ever have a kid, that's what they're doing from day one.
They're watching surgeries.
Straight up.
No kindergarten, no first grade, just surgeries.
They're going to theaters.
You're just going to be sitting in that OR.
You watch him take that gallbladder out.
It would be kind of cool.
Do you think when they had surgeries in theaters that you could have your own box there?
Yeah, so you can waste it?
Yeah, so you can get fucked up and cheer people on and be like, just kill him.
I would love to pop a couple of oxy and like a bottle of steel reserve and then like smoke a cigar and watch a surgery.
That sounds like a healthy gallbladder surgery.
Shit talk the surgeon.
You call that a fucking incision?
He fucking fouled.
Like just some gnarly stuff.
God, you can make a lot of money selling that as a business.
Like poor people get free surgeries and the rich get drunk and heckle them.
I feel like America's ready for that.
Well, I was like, we're reaching a point in society where I feel like that may in fact be welcome.
We just need to find a way to add some sort of, we had to add the cloud to it to make it seem vaguely tech adjacent.
It's got to have that Twitch thing where everyone can comment while the surgery is going.
Exactly.
Oh, or like a Facebook live stream where it's like, vote heart for kill him.
If we get 500 likes in the next hour, the surgeon will dab before.
If we get 1,000 likes, the surgeon will not perform surgery.
He'll chug up 40.
You could just kill people on Facebook.
You might as well make it that direct.
Rather than like nuts killing people on Facebook and using their platform to spread it, just have Facebook.
Yeah, now you can just kill survivors.
Just cut out the middleman.
Let's just do what we were trying to do the whole time.
This has gotten off the rails a little bit.
Well.
So Elizabeth claims that she did not enjoy watching surgeries.
She was utterly revolted by the sight of blood and developed a phobia of it.
Quote, the concept of sticking a needle into you and sucking your blood out, Holmes says, has always been profoundly disturbing to her.
As a child, she says, when I knew I needed to get a test, I would really be focused on that for weeks in advance.
She had a real big thing about blood, which I guess a lot of people do.
I've never had any.
I was sick as a kid, so I just grew up used to it.
But I guess a lot of people like that.
I've always been very squeamish with stuff like that.
You had leeches on your body at one point.
I've had leeches on my body at one point.
I'm all about immersion therapy.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
But I don't like blood.
I can't watch Gray's anatomy.
I can't either, but for totally different reasons.
Because I hate surgery and I hate sex.
My two least favorite things.
See, I hate sex and I love surgery.
Well, there's plenty of shows for you.
There's a million shows for you.
Oh, yeah, I just watch house and touch myself all night long.
It's great.
When she was nine, Elizabeth's dad took a private sector gig with Tineco, a giant automotive equipment manufacturer.
The family moved from D.C. to Houston.
Christian Holmes IV felt bad about forcing his children, Elizabeth and Christian Holmes V, to move to Texas, which is a reasonable way to feel about moving your children to Texas.
But like rich white people in Houston are like chaotic evil.
Like they're fine.
I mean, I don't want to throw too much shade on Houston because I have a lot of friends there.
I don't know anything.
I don't know anyone in Houston.
It's like if you built a city, the density of downtown L.A., but on a swamp.
Interesting.
Yeah.
How does that affect you as a person?
Well, I see you'd rather not say.
It's not my favorite city, but other people like it quite a lot.
All right.
Now, yes, Christian Holmes IV was really concerned about moving his kids to Texas.
Elizabeth tried to reassure her dad by sending him a letter assuring him, quote, I love adventures.
She said she was excited to move to Texas because it was big on science, which might be the most glaring misconception about Texas that I have ever heard.
Is that Elizabeth Holmes' biggest lie?
Yeah, that right there.
Nothing comes close to that.
I have had more people that I can count explain to me angrily that the world is 6,000 years old in Texas.
So I do not get that.
Interesting.
Anyway, in every interview that Elizabeth has ever given, basically, she's made sure the interviewer reported on the first sentence that she wrote in that letter to her dad.
Quote, what I really want out of life is to discover something new, something mankind didn't know was possible to do.
So this is the Holmes approved version of the story.
It's the one most reporters and journalists and quote-unquote journalists reported or repeated in super positive articles about Holmes and Theranos back in 2014.
But it is not the only version of her story.
Dr. Richard Fuse is a psychiatrist who has known Elizabeth and her family since she was a wee little child.
He also got embroiled in a gigantic, nasty lawsuit with Theranos over a patent issue in 2011.
The whole thing was a nightmare for his family and kind of tore his life apart for years.
It cost him $5 million.
So Fuse is the furthest thing in the world from an unbiased objective commentary on the life of Elizabeth Holmes.
But a number of other people's stories back up things that he says.
So he also grew up, like she grew up alongside him.
So he's got some perspective.
I believe some things he says, I'm more questioning about others.
So here are some excerpts from a poorly written Forbes article that interviewed Fuse about Holmes' background.
I'm sorry, a poorly written Forbes article?
I know.
This is the only one.
Quote, Fuse said that Elizabeth's parents were striving to improve their position in the world.
As he said, quote, the Holmes family parents were Christian and Noel were our neighbors in Virginia.
They were very political and aspired to use their Washington connections to get money.
Our kids grew up with their kids.
They were jealous of our family.
I was a physician who had many patients and made money off of them and knew Arabic.
Okay.
Seems like a lot of bragging about.
Seems like a lot of bragging.
He seems like that kind of guy.
Fuse says that Holmes' mother tried to push Elizabeth to be like him, Dr. Richard Fuse.
Quote, Noel programmed Elizabeth to be like me, invent and learn a language.
I'm a psychiatrist and a family practitioner and would tell a father and mother not to treat their child that way.
She'll be what she'll be.
Don't drive her into something she doesn't want to do.
In the pictures I have with our family, she's withdrawn.
She's always pulled to the side and was not naturally emotive as a child.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm always like, if you think about like how your neighbor would describe you as a child, like if Kevin O'Connell, the retired Brockton cop, were to describe me as a child and presented like 20 years later as Canon.
I don't know.
I don't love that.
Yeah, I don't love it either.
It's also, though, that like we have the stuff that she approved and told journalists, and we have the other side of this from this other guy.
So I'm going to present you with both and with some other stuff in between.
Yeah, because her like approved story is so mythic.
It is.
And so, like you have to try to, anyway, I'm going to present a number of different attempt to and again, like Fuse is obviously the most biased source we have on Holmes's background, but he also knew her her whole life.
How many more times does he say he's a physician?
Like it gets a little bit less pretentious after that.
Um okay yeah yeah so uh, the book Bad Blood by John Kerryrew Provides it's a really good book, uh provides additional context to Holmes's childhood ambition.
It paints a picture somewhere between how Holmes wanted to be known to Fortune and how dr Fuse paints her quote.
When she was nine or ten, one of her relatives asked her at a family gathering the question, every boy and girl is asked sooner or later, what do you want to do when you grow up?
Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth replied, I want to be a billionaire.
Wouldn't you rather be president?
The relative asked, no, the president will marry me because i'll have a billion dollars.
These were not the idle words of a child.
Elizabeth uttered them with the utmost seriousness and determination.
According to a family member who witnessed the scene, so cool was the baby.
Yeah, I mean I. Just the way people build up people's childhood stories is always so weird to me, like anyone could have been.
Like Jamie told us that she was going to like marry Daniel Radcliffe and she sounded pretty fucking serious about it, like when I was like nine or ten years old.
For me it would be, Robert wanted to make dinosaurs, like in the Essex Park books, and that's the only thing he talked about was becoming a scientist.
He really wanted to make some fucking dinosaurs, and I still do.
Right, if I ever get a billion dollars, all of it's going to die.
The president will marry you, and then the dinosaur thing.
Oh god, I just think about his, his warm, rasping lips on my, on my, the back of my neck.
And Jamie, nothing warms my heart more than that.
I mean, we will feel bad for Miss Kanye when she's displaced by you, but you know what?
You know what play's got to play.
That's true.
That's what I'm gonna do.
It's true.
It's true.
Carrie Rue's interviews with people who knew Holmes as a child revealed that she was a huge fan of Anopoly and was famously competitive at the game, one of those people who demands you actually finish the game, even once it becomes clear that they're going to win, because you can't roll the die without landing on one of their properties, she usually won, but when she lost she would run off in a huff.
Carrie Rue notes that more than once she ran through the screen of the condo's front door.
Oh my god, that's pretty on brand.
That's yeah, that's very like.
Ah, that one, I believe, because that both sounds like someone who grows up to do what she did and also sounds like a nine-year-old just a child who isn't totally sure how to deal with failure at all.
Exactly yeah, that tracks in those early fawning articles.
A lot of hay was made out of the fact that Elizabeth Holmes learned to speak Mandarin while she was young, during a study abroad uh well before, and during a study abroad program in China uh.
The 2014 Fortune article made it sound incredibly impressive.
Quote, Elizabeth and her brother, who is now director of product management at Theranos, totally above board there, had both been intrigued by their father's work in China.
So when Elizabeth was about nine, her parents found them both a tutor to teach the Mandarin on saturdays.
Elizabeth then supplanted those lessons with summer language programs at Stanford and later at two universities in Beijing.
Captivated by computer programming in high school, she was struck by how the Chinese university's information technology facilities lagged behind what she was used to.
To rectify that situation, she started her first business while still in high school, selling C Plus Plus compilers to Chinese universities.
So it always starts with like a weird early scam.
One of my favorite um because I have like a vested interest in girl boss scammers, right and one of my favorite examples of that is uh, Lisa Frank in college like the unicorn art weird thing, like the like 90s, the pencil cases and stuff yeah, all the Trapper Keepers.
She started by um like basically stealing art and design from Native American artists and selling them at an uptick and then like later based a lot of her designs and stuff like it just like there's always like an early scam.
Yeah, there's always with with everyone, I mean of all genders.
It's always like a proto scam.
Same with John Mcafee, if you go back to when he was like, yeah, they always.
They're like, oh no, one's gonna say anything.
Okay cool, moving along.
That's why they get good enough to do billion and multi-million dollar scams is because they start when they're fucking 12.
I mean, there's even like a case to be made for like Billy McFarlane doing something like that where you're just like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Firefest guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like you're just dipping your toe and like, oh, no one's checking.
This is okay.
Great.
Let's see how far we can.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How much further can we can we push this?
Liz.
Liz.
You rascal.
You rascal.
So Fuse's recollections make that period of her life sound like it's at best a little bit inflated.
He alleges that she was enrolled in the study abroad program as a backdoor into Stanford.
Quote, she was a fair student with low grades.
Her parents had heard through their channels that she could improve her chances if she took a summer program there and learned a language.
While in high school, they put her into summer program at Stanford to study Mandarin.
Now, Kerry Rue's book makes it sound a little better than that.
According to his reporting, she talked her way into the Stanford summer program.
Whatever the truth, she eventually went abroad to China to continue her studies.
Fuse does not believe she thrived there.
Quote, Elizabeth would call the house from China crying.
Noelle would take the calls from Elizabeth and ask my ex-wife to pick up.
Elizabeth said, the people are dirty.
The hotel is filthy, and I want to come home.
But Noel would tell her to stop complaining and get with the program.
Hmm.
Okay.
So.
Sounds like a Bratty Rich kid abroad.
Brady Rich kid abroad.
I'm not sure what to make of her Mandarin.
Some people say she was good at it, but it's one of those things like Mark Zuckerberg learned Mandarin.
And you hear reports from Chinese people that like, yeah, you know, he's not great, but like he's able to hold a conversation and stuff.
Like he's got like a basic level, and that's impressive because it's really hard to learn.
I haven't run into any Chinese people commenting on Elizabeth Holmes' level of Mandarin.
I mean, does she have really much of a history in that country other than like early in her life?
Not really.
She went there several times and stuff.
That's where she met some people.
Well, because that was like...
Yeah, yeah.
Like he's like, oh, you speak Mandarin?
Hi, I'm old.
A lot of people were impressed by it.
That's part of why I'm a little questioning about how good she was at it because everyone who's impressed by her Mandarin is a person who doesn't speak Mandarin.
Right.
It's like, I know Mark Zuckerberg has, like, I don't like Mark Zuckerberg, but I know he's acquired an impressive level of it because Chinese people are like, yeah, no, he was able to give a speech and it's comprehensible.
He's a lot of work in China.
He does a lot of work in China.
He married a Chinese woman.
He put in the time.
I don't know about Holmes.
He is a hero.
He's a hero.
You hear he wore a tie for a whole year during the financial collapse?
No.
Oh, yeah.
What?
So gross.
I can't stand him.
Nobody can.
God, that chinless dork.
I'm sure he has like a 30,000 square foot house because no one in his family wants to be that close to him either.
Do you think that he has one of those Bitcoin ties, like that guy in the Elizabeth Holmes HBO documentary?
Put a pen in it.
We got to talk about the Bitcoin tie guy.
I'm going to fight him and I'm going to win.
If you wear a Bitcoin tie.
Who the fuck do you think you are?
What are you playing at, motherfucker?
Yeah, what's your fucking game here?
Also, I want one of those ties.
You are the only person I would let be on.
If when they do the documentary about all the scams I'm running, I will be offended if you don't wear a Bitcoin tie.
I'm just going to wear a Bitcoin tie and just be like, yeah, we had no idea.
I'm going to play very dumb.
Wear a Bitcoin tie.
I don't know if you know anything.
With the NASA t-shirt that you're wearing.
Yeah, and then I'll just put it on.
And then I'll be like, Robert was always saying the earth is flat.
Bitcoin Tie Guy Rant00:02:31
I don't know why everyone's so surprised.
It is, though.
Okay.
So, given the recent revelations about rich families paying millions of dollars to find ways to sneak their kids into fancy colleges, you might be wondering, why didn't Holmes' family just pose her in the swimming pool playing fake water polo to get her into Stanford?
Well, it's because that kind of scamming costs money.
And by the time she was looking to get into college, the Holmes family was, if not really broke, then at least rich people broke.
So like upper middle class?
Well, it's more that like, this is what I was talking about, with like ethnically rich as opposed to like just have a lot of money.
Like if you're in the NFL or you become a movie star and you get like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, a lot of those people, or you win the lottery, a lot of those people wind up broke eventually.
Right.
If you're born rich, if that's like really your background, your culture, your ethnicity.
You're like a yeast family.
You're like a yeast family.
You may never have much in the way of liquid cash, but it's impossible for you to ever be poor because of the connections that you have from growing up in that culture.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bounce back.
And that's like her dad used his connections in the early aughts to get an executive gig at Enron.
That did not end well.
So fucking sad.
And some people say Fuse included that the collapse of Enron basically wiped out the family fortune.
Fuse claims that when he came back after Enron failed, like that he and his wife had to live in one of Fuse's extra houses rent-free because like they didn't have any money after Enron.
He's actually, I don't know if you know this about him.
He's a physician.
He is a physician.
Yeah, he's a physician.
And a psychiatrist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he actually like an inventor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, whichever version of her early background you choose to believe, we know for a fact that in the fall of 2002, 18-year-old Elizabeth Holmes started at Stanford University.
And that is where we will continue from when we come back from products.
Bitcoin ties.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, we, we really, we're actually, this, this podcast is all to advertise for my new cryptocurrency, Bastard Coin.
Yeah, each is, we have actually like embedded a blockchain in the decomposing bones of Saddam Hussein buried under an Iraqi desert near Kirkuk.
And so as the winds of time gradually decompose his bones, new blockchains are created, thus releasing more bastard coins into the coin ecosystem.
Well, see, I actually knew that because if you read every 14th word in Saddam Hussein's romance novel, it tells you the exact location of that.
So yeah, I got you.
Bastard Coins Ecosystem00:03:51
You did it, you did it.
You did it.
All right.
Well, pick up some bastard coins.
You can use them to buy drugs on the internet, like all cryptocurrency.
And check out these fine products.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict me.
Right.
Just finished five.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Wow.
This project.
Open your free iHeart radio app.
It's your Cicito show.
And listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
Elon Musk Business Ethics00:14:07
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back.
Where's Lizzie?
She's in.
She just started Stanford.
Oh, good.
I'm sure this ends well.
S-Fizzle.
Yeah.
I don't know why I'm doing that a lot today.
Elizabeth Holmes was, by most accounts, a diligent student and a diligent partier.
John Kerry Rue writes, quote, outside of the long hours she put in at the lab, Elizabeth led an active social life.
She attended campus parties and dated a sophomore named J.T. Batson.
Batson was from a small town in Georgia and was struck by how polished and worldly Elizabeth was, though he found her guarded.
She wasn't the biggest sharer in the world, he recalls.
She played things close to the vest.
She also wore a lot of vests.
I don't think that's what he meant there, but she definitely wore a lot of vests.
It was a Freudian slip.
Yeah.
Yeah, she was a big vest fan.
She wore a lot of vests.
I love a good vest.
I'm a big vest guy myself.
And she knew how to wear a vest.
And she did know how to wear it.
Nobody's saying she was not dressed well for the job.
Where is the conversations about how Elizabeth Holmes could really wear a vest, unlike any other scammer?
I feel like you should be on your legal team.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't wear a vest.
No, Mark Zuckerberg barely wears t-shirts.
I know.
It's just disgusting.
He also helped with a couple ethnic cleansings.
Oh?
I still have nightmares about that episode.
It's hell.
It's hell.
By her sophomore year at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes seems to have gotten fed the hell up with college, which is understandable.
Rather than dropping out to, say, smoke a ton of weed and eventually become a podcaster, Holmes sat down with her chemical engineering professor, Channing Robertson, and said, let's start a company.
Right.
This is Silicon Valley is so confusing to me where it's like, like listening to a 19, like a 19-year-old starting a business is a bad idea.
Yeah.
A 19-year-old doing anything but like very basic jobs and studying is a bad idea.
It's a bad idea.
Yeah.
And it like never ever leads to anything good.
Yeah, it's it's it's a bad idea to like let them in the military.
I have friends who were driving tanks at 17.
That's a bad idea.
That's a bad idea.
That's a really bad idea.
Like this, this is like the part of like the Silicon Valley Valley narrative where I'm like, why is this allowed?
Like, why would anyone be like, and this is going to end?
Great.
See, this is, again, there's a government bureau.
I've suggested they should be around to like slap people in the face sometimes, but they should also be there just to walk up to people at times like this.
Like someone in a suit with a badge should have come and said, Elizabeth Holmes, no.
You can't.
No.
You gotta learn science first.
Go wait tables for a year.
Like do a job that's like useful to people and isn't starting a company and getting millions of dollars in venture capital funding and learn things and live in the real world for a while.
Yeah.
Learn how to, you know, be a person for a spell, Elizabeth.
She, well, she might have to now.
Yeah, she might have to now.
That's, that's, that's, that is, yeah.
Anyway, uh, Robertson, uh, the guy she went to, the professor she went to and said, let's start a company, had done seminars on drug delivery devices, stuff like nicotine patches and even more advanced things like small clear contact lenses that could deliver glaucoma medication, super advanced non-invasive ways to deliver drugs.
Cool stuff.
Elizabeth approached him with the design for a wearable patch that would deliver both a drug and monitor the patient's blood in order to adjust the dosage of that drug.
Now, Robertson had only known Elizabeth Holmes for a year, and she was one of many, undergrads he'd worked with.
But he told Fortune magazine, quote, I knew she was different.
The novelty of how she would view a complex technical problem, it was unique in my experience.
I remember her saying, and we could put a cell phone chip on it, and it could to limit her out to the doctor or the patient what was going on.
And I kind of kicked myself.
I consulted in this area for 30 years, but I'd never said, here we make all these gizmos that measure and all these systems that deliver, but I never brought the two together.
So he was impressed with her.
Okay.
With her moxie and with her inventiveness.
But he felt that starting a medical device manufacturing company at age 19 after probably dropping out of Stanford might be not a great idea.
And again, like not taking the science classes just to know if that would be possible.
Exactly, exactly.
You figure a professor would be on that.
I'm fairly like anti-college, but that's the sort of thing that you gotta go.
I think probably most people in college, like the things that people should be doing in college is like studying history and the humanities to learn why you shouldn't let 19-year-olds run blood testing companies and also spending eight years to learn how to like be a doctor and design medical devices.
Those things seem like you need college.
You do need training.
Yeah.
Like you don't need college to do what I've done, which is just go put myself in dangerous places and write about it.
No, and yeah, we've gotten so deeply in debt to do things that require really like just common sense.
Yeah, exactly.
So everyone out there, drop out.
Drop out of college, but don't start companies.
Never start a company.
Or at least not medical device companies.
Start a podcast company.
That's like, who cares?
Anyone can do that.
If you fail, and we all will at some point.
We all will.
This bubblegum burst.
Oh, I feel it.
I feel it.
Pushing against the surface of my skin every single morning.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, it'll be a fun ride for them.
That's just, that's just the life we chose.
Anyway, Robertson, yeah, asked her why she was hell-bent on doing all this right now while she was still a teenager.
Holmes responded, quote, because systems like this could completely revolutionize how effective healthcare is delivered.
And this is what I want to do.
I don't want to make an incremental change in some technology in my life.
I want to create a whole new technology and one that is aimed at helping humanity at all levels, regardless of geography or ethnicity or age or gender.
Now, I think that's really important because I think that exact sentiment, whether or not they've ever said it, is exactly what is constantly going through the minds of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, all of these fucking guys, basically all of them but Bill Gates.
Like, yeah.
Call out.
No, I mean, I think he's, he's the one who didn't like, he was, he was always more of like a grounded kind of like, like he's a decent engineer, but he's more of just like, he knows how to run a business and he's like shitty, like he's, he's, he's did a lot of dickish things running a business.
Sure.
But he wasn't like irresponsible.
He was just like kind of an evil corporate overlord and then he dedicated his life to curing malaria.
Right.
Which, yeah.
It's like, sure, that's something.
You, I guess that's something.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Once she gets into like the, I mean, all the like the tech company statements of grandeur of like how their technology will somehow make the world a more equal place when it always does the opposite is freaky stuff, especially when it like comes to like a hashtag girl boss like Elizabeth Holmes who constantly has to like leverage her own identity as a way of getting ahead.
It's just so sinister and shitty and bad.
Well, it's that line in the middle.
I don't want to make an incremental change in some technology.
Like that's why Elon Musk tried to build that child coffin during the rescue because he's like, I don't want to just like give some money to experts so they can slowly and agonizingly and in a very unglamorous way save a dozen lives.
I want to build a sexy thing out of rocket parts.
And I want there to be like, you know, old school newsreel footage of me emerging the hero of the situation.
But no, sometimes you just need to very slowly and laborously teach kids how to use breathing devices and agonizingly pull them through tunnels to save their lives because that's what works.
And sometimes you just have to accept your own limitations and be like, okay, I have the money to make this happen.
Let me give money to people and not then call them.
Didn't he call like one of the rescue?
Yeah, we called him a pedophile.
We called him a pedophile.
I'm just like, you're the most juvenile fucking man who just knocks himself a dozen children.
He's like, yeah, he's a pedophile.
He's a seventh grader.
A man that like the U.S. Army and like the Thai Navy divers were all like, oh, yeah, we wouldn't have saved those dozen children without this guy.
He's like, fucking pedophile.
It's, I mean, everyone has very different opinions of Elon Musk, but there's no, there, there's no doubt that he is always finding new ways to embarrass himself.
You know, if he just.
He's like really an innovator.
And I think more so than anywhere else, he has innovated embarrassing yourself as an adult.
It's really incredible.
It's like...
Just stop tweeting, man.
We would all still like you if you'd never used Twitter.
Log out.
Elon Musk shouldn't be on podcasts.
If he was just a guy with a cool name who owned a rocket company, a car company.
I'd like him.
Who got rich and did something about his hairline?
Yeah.
Great.
Sure.
Good for you.
Oh, yeah.
We need electric cars and rockets.
Fine.
That's great.
Stick to that.
I don't want to look at you.
And I don't want you to, he ruined.
I used to, I liked Grimes a lot in college, and he took that from everybody.
We all liked Grimes a lot in college.
He took that from me.
He took that from everybody.
That's painful.
Man, fuck that guy.
It's painful.
Anyway, probably lost a lot of listeners from the Elon Musk shade, but the episode on him's coming.
Listen, I mean, I have no distinct opinion on him other than he's an embarrassing person.
They didn't call him the PayPal Mafia for entirely good reasons.
That's a really embarrassing name.
Yeah, but like...
The PayPal mafia.
That's kind of fit.
Like it kind of fits.
Like in the literal sense of stealing money.
I look forward to that episode.
Yeah, well, we'll talk about that.
All right.
So Robertson told Fortune that when Elizabeth Holmes said this thing about not wanting to do incremental change was the moment he realized what Elizabeth was.
I realized I could have just as well been looking into the eyes of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates.
And I do think he was half right there, but we'll get to that later.
He was looking in the eyes of a shameless capitalist?
Oh, just a Steve Jobs.
Yeah.
So Steve Jobs was a type of shameless capitalist, but I think she's the exact same kind of person as Steve Jobs.
I don't think that was all an act.
She, yeah.
We'll talk about that a little bit.
Okay.
Elizabeth decided that come hell or high water, she was going to start her own damn company.
She announced this to her father during a break from classes.
He was not happy to hear that she was dropping out, and he urged her to finish her degree.
She responded, no, dad, I'm not interested in getting a PhD.
I want to make money.
In the spring of her sophomore year, she broke up with her boyfriend, explaining that this was because she was starting a company, which obviously wouldn't leave her much time for, you know, that D.
I actually wrote Dad D.
Oh, JT's D. R.A.P. J.T.'s D. R.A.P. J.T.'s D. Damn.
JT's D is out there somewhere wilting.
Wilting.
Poor guy.
Poor D.
Well, I'm sure he's fine.
Yeah, he's probably.
I mean, I'm sure he's a rich kid, too.
It's fucking Stanford, right?
Yeah, if you...
Yeah, you're fucking.
He's fine.
He probably works at Facebook.
Elizabeth did a summer internship at the Genome Institute of Singapore, which later proved to be her last real dalliance with higher education.
Her internship coincided with the SARS epidemic, and she was frustrated by the various inefficiencies and delays caused by testing patients with syringes and nasal swabs.
She decided, based on her one and a half years of college, that she could do better than these damned infectious disease specialists fighting a massive outbreak.
When she came home from Singapore, she spent five sleepless days at her computer in Houston.
Eventually, she came up with a patent application for an arm patch that would diagnose and treat various medical conditions.
Armed with this patent, she dropped out of school and incorporated a company, Real-Time Cures, which wound up printed on employee paychecks as real-time curses due to a fuck-up.
Oops.
Yeah, well, it happens to the best of us.
Robertson, by the way, joined the board and supported this 19-year-old in her dream to drop out of college and create a medical device.
This like middle-aged professor.
I understand this culture.
I don't know a whole lot about him other than I think he's kind of a piece of shit.
He comes off that way in the interviews with him.
Yeah.
Come on the show, Robertson.
Very talk to.
Yeah, come on the pod.
Talk me out of that.
He, I don't know.
I mean, yeah, I mean, the very, there's so many, like, dudes in that, in the HBO documentary who just come off as super defensive.
And then, I mean, the narrative of just like totally 180ing being like, yeah, what a fucking dummy.
Crazy.
I'm like, you gave her a billion dollars, Bitcoin guy.
The only people in that documentary who come off well are Tyler Schultz and John Kerry Rue.
Yeah, even Alex Gibney doesn't come because it's kind of a shitty documentary.
It's not a great documentary.
He's using a lot of stock footage.
He's using a lot of stock footage.
I think it's a hit piece on Errol Morris, personally.
Well, wait, are you talking about the HBO one or?
HBO one, yeah.
I don't remember much.
Yeah, there was some Omars in there.
There was, well, Errol Morris.
Yeah, he did a lot of their ads.
He endorsed.
Yeah, I would love to see an Errol Morris documentary about that experience and finding out that he was wrong because he's a better filmmaker.
He throws some of that shade back on Mattis, too.
Yeah.
On fucking Henry Kissinger.
How does Henry Kissinger get out scot-free?
I mean, in fairness, like, it's the least terrible thing Kissinger's been.
Like, if killing millions of Cambodians didn't stick to Kissinger being on the Theranos board isn't.
He's unkillable.
He really is.
He's unkillable.
I'm like, how is he?
I've like operated under the assumption for a few months at a time throughout my adult life thinking he's dead and then remembering he's not.
He never quite is, is he?
And getting very upset about it.
He's one of those people that like, there's just a level of like hate, but also like respect of just like, you've just, you've been around for forever.
You've been bad for so long.
You've been one of the most influential people in the world for almost 100 years.
I wonder if he does like that Peter Thiel vampire treatment and that's why he's going to live forever.
I think it's just he did some sort of like dark magical ritual with all those Cambodians we bombed and like their blood extended his life by a couple of decades.
I hate him so much.
He's a pretty bad person.
He's very bad.
When I have like three straight weeks to read books about Henry Kissinger, we'll do a Kenry Kissinger.
Yeah, that's a long one.
Yeah, that's going to be quite the episode.
Dating Mature Adults00:04:52
So the funding for real-time cures came from Elizabeth Holmes' family connections.
Mom and dad may not have been rich anymore, but they were still, as I said, culturally rich.
Elizabeth was able to meet with Tim Draper, the father of a childhood friend, and convince him to invest $1 million.
Is that Mr. Bitcoin Tie?
I don't know.
It might have been.
I think it might have been.
Draper was well known among the kind of rich people who invest in unproven tech ventures.
Draper's grandfather.
Money, that is.
That is the Bitcoin Tie guy.
Yes.
Draper's grandpa had founded the very first Silicon Valley venture capital firm back in the 50s.
Tim had invested in Hotmail early, and Elizabeth Holmes, you know, with his name on them, quickly attracted other investments.
Quote, in a 26-page document she used to recruit investors, she described an adhesive patch that would draw blood painlessly through the skin using micro needles.
The TheraPatch, as the document called it, would contain a microchip sensing system that would analyze the blood and make a process control decision about how much of a drug to deliver.
It would also communicate its readings wirelessly to a patient's doctor.
She'd soon change the company name to Theranos, a combination of therapy and diagnose.
In that Fortune article, Holmes claimed she'd changed the name because too many people reacted cynically to the word cure and made her seem like a snake oil salesman.
No, no.
Lizzie, I have a question.
Sure.
At this point in the process, how involved is Sunny Balwani?
Do we know?
He's not yet.
He didn't come onto the company officially until I think 2009.
Okay, so they so they met when she was young and like kept in dated, kept in touch.
We're not sure.
We don't know exactly when they started dating.
Okay.
They definitely were while he was working at Theranos, but he's not there until 2009.
So she gets this all off the ground before he comes on board.
Okay.
Now, whether or not she's like, like her brother did say that they would call pretty regularly and stuff when she was 18, 19.
It sounds like they were in touch.
But I don't know.
I don't know.
Like, it's one of those things.
Part of why I didn't talk about it more is I don't know how influential, like, there's a big debate about like whether or not because they started dating when she was so much younger than him, he had a big influence on her practices.
But it's also like, she was running this company for like six, seven years.
She was very driven.
Yeah, it's like hard to want to like say that she was not capable of doing it.
It's clear that she was.
It's one of those, like, it's tough because I don't want, like, number one, I don't want to like not go after a guy who influenced a much younger woman to do bad things.
But also, I don't want to like take away her agency and doing shitty things by crediting this guy for her.
That's like one of the complicated things around conversations like this, where it's like, it is weird to me that in all the coverage of this story, like Sonny Belwani's role and stuff is not more carefully like scrutinized because it's clear that she set up the company by herself.
But that age difference when you're that young.
Yeah, like that is not a great person on the older side of that relationship.
And, you know, it's, I don't know.
Yeah, I'm of the opinion that like if you're like a mature adult, I don't know.
I think like if you're a mature adult, you don't date teenagers.
You don't.
If you're 25 or older, I don't give a shit what the age difference is.
You're 25, you've been out in the world long enough to like know some fucking shit.
But a fucking 19-year-old dating a 37-year-old, that's not cool, man.
That's weird.
Yeah.
That's weird.
Yeah, that's weird.
Now, Holmes slowly built her company up over the next 10 years, gradually refining and revamping her technology from the Fortune article.
Quote, as much as she needed money, she turned down many offers, she says, because so many investors wanted quick returns.
Too often, the question is, what's your exit strategy?
She recounts, before you're really understanding what your entry strategy is.
What's your entry set?
Yeah.
That's like a classic Silicon Valley thing.
State the thing and then reverse it to make it seem like you've said something more profound than it actually is.
Yeah.
Right.
And then turn it into an Instagram post and a fun font and post it.
Does your blood testing equipment work?
The question is, does current blood testing equipment really work?
Well, I mean, yeah, they told me I had hepatitis.
And she's like, well, then she tastes your blood on the little tip of her tongue.
She's like, you do have hepatitis.
And now I do too.
The technological fixation of Theranos eventually shifted away from those medicated patches because what she was trying to do with them actually technically sort of violated the laws of physics.
Holmes moved on from that plan into one that was arguably more ambitious, the Nano Tainer and the Edison blood testing machine.
While her first innovation had been spired, at least by real medical shit she really experienced doing actual work in the field, the Nanotainer and the Edison seemed more inspired by Steve Jobs and the Apple Company.
Elizabeth Holmes wanted to produce a slick, attractive technological gizmo that could eventually wind up in every American home.
She had a dizzying dream of pink people eventually being able to test their own blood via pinprick and get diagnoses from tiny, attractive little boxes, like a Keurig-sized little thing.
I think that was the eventual goal.
Okay.
It was never like quite stated, but if you read between the lines, it's like...
The Keurig blood machine is just going to be inside your house.
It's like a cool thing, like you can imagine then, like a sci-fi movie where somebody's like, oh no, I got exposed to the thing.
Let's do, okay, you're still safe.
I can see Oscar Isaac in the middle.
Exactly.
We can see Oscar Isaac in that.
Gibbons and Theranos Lies00:15:43
It's kind of like that.
Yeah.
In like the reboot 20 years from now of the thing.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's way less good and doesn't have a drunk Kurt Russell, which why would you even watch?
What's the point?
What's the point if Kurt Russell's not drinking?
Yeah, don't reinterpret perfection.
Don't reinterpret perfection.
Speaking of perfection.
Oh, the products and services that advertise on this show and or program.
I'm tightening my Bitcoin tie.
Tighten your Bitcoin ties, everybody.
And listen to these ads.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was like, hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Without this program, I'm going to die.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for a pitch, it's just like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
And at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you could get your podcast.
We're back!
So putting boxes into houses was the far-off goal of Theranos.
Her more immediate goals were to utterly disrupt and remake the entire blood testing industry.
While normal venipuncture required large amounts of blood to be painfully drawn, the nanotainer would only need a little bit of blood while still being good for hundreds of tests.
I think 200 tests is what they were hoping to like be able to do off like a tiny little pinprick.
I think that that's what they were saying they could do.
That is what they were fraudulently claiming they were doing for years.
Now, the Edison machine would not be meant for consumer homes, but she figured she could put them in Walgreens and other similar stores.
And eventually the goal was to get one within every five miles and then every mile of every single American.
That was like the goal.
Now, that kind of plan was going to require a lot more money than the first wave of VC funding had brought in.
In 2005, when she was 21, Elizabeth used her dad's connection to set up a meeting with Donald L. Lucas, another incredibly influential venture capitalist.
He agreed to put in more money and also talked Oracle chairman Larry Ellison into investing.
Okay, now we've got some of the top tier freaks.
Lar L.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
We'll talk more about that later.
Also in 2005, the company made its best talent acquisition.
Holmes hired a brilliant scientist named Ian Gibbons.
Gibbons was a legitimate genius, an inventor with countless patents, I think over 200 to his name, who was drawn to Theranos by the sheer ambition of its mission.
He wanted to change the world.
But it quickly became apparent to him that Theranos' technology just did not work as well as it was supposed to.
The Edison machines couldn't actually perform more than a handful of tests, and none of the results were very accurate.
The samples taken by the nanotainers were just too small for most blood work.
Some of this was what you'd expect for new technology.
The first couple pre-market iterations of the iPhone were garbage, for example.
But Elizabeth Holmes was hell-bent on taking Theranos technology to market.
The science would have to come later.
In 2009, Sonny Balwani joined Theranos.
Sonny was a tech industry guy.
He'd made like $40 million selling a company prior to Theranos, and he gave them like a $13 million loan when he came on board because they were really hurting for cash.
He had no relevant medical or engineering experience.
Elizabeth Holmes made him a good idea.
Why was he willing to yell at people?
He was a great yeller.
And that seems to be most employees at Theranos will say like most of his job was yelling at them, although he got trained in how to do and operate the blood tests and stuff and was doing that as a like a business.
Like that's no, don't do that.
I mean, everything about this business is like, I mean, comparing like people's health to iPhones is just like, well, you know, strikes one through three.
There's, I mean, there's, I hate to keep bringing it up, but there's stunning, like, coincidences between this story and the Lisa Frank story.
She also, like, made her husband president to scream at people.
Yeah, there's also something in, like, the whole don't, don't treat everything like the tech industry.
If your iPhone doesn't work, eh.
No one dies.
No one dies.
Yeah.
If your blood testing equipment doesn't work, people may not get treated for their cancer.
Right.
Yeah.
In 2010, Safeway and Walgreens both inked deals to invest in Theranos and carry its technology in special blood clinics inside their brick-and-mortar locations.
Safeway agreed to spend $350 million on renovations to host these labs and also pumped $30 million investment dollars into Theranos itself.
A number of people at Safeway were hesitant about the deal.
Due to Theranos' infamous secrecy, no one had actually seen much evidence of their technology.
But CEO Steve Bird was convinced the company was legit.
The Birdman.
The Birdman.
I don't know anything about him, but I want to talk about it.
Bird was over the moon about the partnership.
He saw Elizabeth as a precocious genius and treated her with rare deference.
Normally loath to leave his offense unless it was absolutely necessary, he made an exception for her, regularly driving across the bay to Palo Alto.
On one occasion, he arrived bearing a huge white orchid.
On another, he brought her a model of a private jet.
Her next one, he predicted, would be real.
The bird man.
The bird.
I take it back.
I hate the bird man.
We all hate the bird man.
The birdman's a douchebag.
Yeah.
Theranos worked out a similar deal with Walgreens around the same time.
Yeah, he gives her a give her a vagina flower.
Come on, Birdman.
Freak.
Fucking A. Neither company was wild about sharing.
Elizabeth promised Walgreens would be the exclusive drugstore vendor and Safeway would be the exclusive supermarket location.
Both companies would be required to spend just absurd amounts of money making their locations fancy enough to host Theranos.
$350 million in renovations for Safeway alone.
Theranos required that the in-store clinics have luxury carpeting, custom wood cabinets, granite countertops, high-end large-screen TVs.
They were required, by contract, to look, quote, better than a spa.
What the f- I hate Silicon Valley.
I really hate Silicon Valley.
I wonder if Elizabeth was like, and here's what needs to be playing on the TVs.
And it's like Twilight Zone episodes.
It was like vaguely Eastern music.
Like, yeah, I'm going to guess she was the one who picked it too.
So just like, yeah, like vague appropriation spa culture.
I'm going to guess she spent four days in Nepal and based the music on that.
Yeah.
Now, when Theranos sold itself to Walgreens and Safeway, they did so by claiming that, you know, they were legally authorized to do blood tests that functioned and stuff.
And that was the best.
That was not quite the truth.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, as Bad Blood describes, it had initially represented that its blood test would qualify as waived under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, a 1988 law that governed laboratories.
The CLIA waived tests usually involved simple laboratory procedures that the Food and Drug Administration had cleared for home use.
Now Theranos was changing its tune and saying its tests would be offered in Walgreens stores where laboratory developed tests.
It was a big difference.
Laboratory developed tests lay in a gray zone between the FDA and another federal health regulator, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
CMS, as the latter agency was known, exercised oversight of clinical laboratories under CLIA, while the FDA regulated the diagnostic equipment that laboratories bought and used for their testing.
But no one closely regulated tests that labs fashioned with their own methods.
They found a way to not be regulated for a while.
They found, yeah, they found a loophole to get away with never having invented anything.
Cool.
Great loophole.
Cool.
Kevin Hunter, a clinical laboratory specialist working with Walgreens to make sure Theranos' tech did what they said it did, became skeptical about this change.
Elizabeth and Sonny claimed that all big laboratory companies use lab-developed tests, which was an obvious lie.
To test them, Hunter suggested doing a 50-patient study comparing Theranos blood tests to ones from Stanford Hospital.
This should not have been a big deal if the technology worked.
But Elizabeth's immediate response was, no, I don't think we want to do that at this time.
Hunter warned his bosses at Walgreens that shit looked shady.
He pointed out that when Theranos had drawn the blood of Walgreens' president of pharmacy business, they'd never actually provided him with his test results.
Hunter's boss said, quote, we can't not pursue this.
We can't risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.
Right.
Fucking business right there.
Jesus Christ.
Theranos was scheduled to open Theranos wellness centers in dozens of Arizona Walgreens in 2013.
As Elizabeth Holmes struggled to keep anyone at Walgreens from finding out that her shit didn't work, she decided it was a good time to sue Richard Fuse.
Now, Fuse had basically created a patent out of spite that Elizabeth Holmes hadn't consulted him, her own neighbor, before starting her company.
He's a physician.
Yeah, he's a physician.
He's also a psychologist.
He's a physician psychiatrist, inventor.
Cool guy.
I think he called his patent like the Theranos killer or something.
It was like patenting a way to do the same thing they were trying to do just to be a dick.
He seems like a dick, yeah.
The details of the case aren't super interesting, but what's important is that Fuse's lawyers subpoenaed Theranos executives involved in proprietary aspects of the company's technology.
This included Ian Gibbons, who by this point had been sidelined into an ancillary role within the company by Elizabeth due to his nasty habit of telling her that nothing worked and they really should not be using this stuff on human beings.
I'm going to quote from a great Vanity Fair article on the fall of Theranos by Nick Bilton.
Quote, Gibbons didn't want to testify.
If he told the court that the technology did not work, he would harm the people he worked with.
If he wasn't honest about the technology's problems, however, consumers could potentially harm their health, maybe even fatally.
Holmes, meanwhile, did not seem willing to tolerate his resistance, according to his wife, Rochelle Gibbons.
Even though Gibbons had warned that the technology wasn't ready for the public, Holmes was preparing to open Theranos wellness centers in dozens of Walgreens across Arizona.
Ian felt like he would lose his job if he told the truth, Rochelle told me as she wept one summer morning in Palo Alto.
Ian was a real obstacle for Elizabeth.
He started to be very vocal.
They kept him around to keep him quiet.
On May 16th, 2013, Ian Gibbons received a phone call from Elizabeth Holmes.
She told him that she wanted to meet with him the next day in her office.
He asked his wife if she thought Holmes was going to fire him.
Rochelle said yes.
That night, Ian Gibbons attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills.
He survived, but the pills did tremendous damage to his 69-year-old body.
One week later, he died in the hospital.
That is like one of the most devastating elements of this entire story.
Because he was clearly just like a really brilliant guy who couldn't take emotionally failing at something like this and being like, and it seems like she was really abusive to him and like Sonny was too.
It absolutely sounds like, yeah, like Elizabeth was like the like gaslighter and then Sonny was the enforcer.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's fucked.
It's incredibly sad.
Yeah.
In 2014, that praiseful Fortune article dropped.
On the surface, things looked great for Theranos.
On February 4th, 2014, the partner fund bought more than 5.6 million shares of Theranos at a price of $17 a share, bringing in $96 million and raising Theranos' overall value to $9 billion.
Overnight, Elizabeth, owner of more than half the company, became a multi-billionaire.
Fortune made a huge deal about Holmes being the youngest female self-made billionaire in history, which would have been a hilariously inaccurate term for her even if her technology worked.
That's really some of my favorite apologies surrounding the story is the guy who wrote the Fortune article who's like almost crying.
He's like, I didn't check anything.
It's like, well, he did check things, but he checked things with the people Theranos put forward for him to check.
Use their sources.
You see with John Kerryrew what a good journalist does when people say stuff like this.
You know, and be like, ask my mom.
Like, no.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was a funny apology.
Yeah.
The article that Fortune Guy wrote really hammered in the idea that Elizabeth was a brilliant inventor.
Today, Holmes is a co-inventor on 82 U.S. and 189 foreign patent applications, of which 18 in the U.S. and 66 abroad have been granted.
Those are in addition to 186 applications Theranos has filed worldwide that don't list Holmes as an inventor, of which 18 have already been granted.
Now, Dr. Fuse alleges that this was bullshit, and this is one of the things I really do believe him on.
says that Holmes basically used legal trickery to take partial credit for the work of Dr. Ian Gibbons, a dead man.
That sounds crazy.
Even though it was funded early on, Theranos used a patent writer rather than a law firm to draft its patents.
The patent writer does not have a fiduciary duty to study prior art, so they just put her name on the patents, including ones that overlapped with what Gibbons had invented at a prior company.
So that's fucking despicable.
Stealing the work of a dead man, pretty messed up.
The only dead man who could have like made your stuff work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty gross.
I'd like to end by talking about Elizabeth Holmes' reaction to the death of Ian Gibbons.
When his widow called Holmes' office to tell her what had happened, Elizabeth's secretary, being a human person, was horrified and offered her seemingly legitimate condolences.
She promised to notify Holmes at once.
Elizabeth never reached out to Rochelle.
Instead, she had someone else call the new widow and demand she returned any Theranos property Gibbons had kept at his home.
She also threatened to sue her if she talked to anyone.
Wozniak Grifter Takeover00:09:49
So she is, I mean, it's interesting hearing how many things about her do line up with her clearly modeling herself after Steve Jobs and just being a relentless asshole.
Because yeah, Steve Jobs would never have reached out to a dead co-worker's family.
No, no.
Like he was a tremendous asshole.
He was a huge.
He didn't shower for weeks at a time and just made everyone deal with it.
Openly hostile to everyone around him.
And it's and on his products, Woz was Waze.
He stole $5,000 from the Woz.
Like Tean Gibbons was her, The Waz.
True and Wozz.
She killed him.
Woz dated Kathy Griffin for a second.
Oh, good for the Waz.
Some great pics of them.
I'm very pro Woz getting it in.
I'm sure he's horrible too, but he's not.
You know the Woz is a good guy.
He made like $300 million, and then he instantly blew it all hosting a series of giant concerts.
I did know that.
And then now he just is just a guy.
Everyone should look up the Steve Wozniak Kathy Griffin pics from when they were a couple.
They seem so happy.
Yeah.
But it's like, it's crazy that like, you know, she so clearly modeled herself after they're cute together.
I bet he's really nice.
I've never heard a bad thing about the Woz.
I hope.
I hope he's a good.
I mean, if there's one good person in Silicon Valley, it's got to be.
It would be a miracle.
Yeah.
But I don't know.
It's weird the way that she, you know, you can't fuck with people's health.
Number one.
I'm glad no one died because of Theranos.
Probably.
I do think that the way that like girl bosses versus boy bosses are treated when they are like people really relish in the takedown of a woman in business.
And she deserves it, but it's just like people relish it in a way that makes me uncomfortable.
One of the most heartbreaking things I ever read, because I covered Steve Jobs, the first journalism job I had was in tech journalism.
It was while Jobs was still alive and still running Apple.
And so like, you know, you'd have to write something about him and his company every like week or two because it was just fucking Apple.
And this is like when Apple was, you know, everything was blowing up there.
And I read a book about the founding of the company.
And one of the stories in it is that when he and Woz, before they founded Apple, like they got contracted with Atari to like make a product.
And of course, Jobs got them the contract and Wozniak did all the actual work.
And then Jobs, they were supposed to split at 50-50, but Jobs stole $5,000 from Wozniak.
He's a fucking scum behind.
When Wozniak found out about it years later, it was because an interviewer asked him about it.
And he was like in tears about it.
Like, cause he hadn't known it.
And he just thought this guy was his friend.
And he's like, he never gave a shit about you.
He just knew you were a genius.
Woz, you naive little sweetie pie.
I know, I know.
It's a heartbreaker.
May there never be a behind the bastards about Woz.
I don't know that I can emotionally take writing that if there is anything terrible about it.
I can never, in good conscience, trust a man in tech to be good.
Yeah.
But I hope that he ends up being good.
I can occasionally trust an engineer and a scientist, although they're also maker terrorists.
But you could occasionally, like those guys, like the guy, like it's the, it's the fucking, it's the people who are running the companies.
Like there's some decent couple, one or two, surely.
What do you think about the Elizabeth Holmes movie being made?
I think it's probably going to be gross, right?
Yeah, probably going to be really gross.
I think miss me with it.
I don't want it.
Yeah, I don't want it.
I can't imagine it being tasteful.
I don't need Jennifer Lawrence to play Elizabeth Holmes.
I don't need that.
I need that.
I would like an honest movie about Steve Jobs where it because he was a grifter.
You want another movie about Steve Jobs?
I want an actual movie about what he was doing.
We got the per that's the Ashton Kutcher one, Robert.
I love the Ashton Kutcher one.
I got blackout drunk on my 21st birthday and saw it in theaters.
That sounds awful, actually.
I love the part where he walks through the fields and he's like, I have an idea for computers.
I love it.
You play it.
He's a grifter.
He's a horrible.
He's always a grifter.
He was a grifter who did the same thing Elizabeth did, is he had these demands for a product that nobody could build.
And he just stuck to his demands for the product until they could.
And he got lucky that they got it right.
And lucky that it was a good idea because if it wasn't a good idea, he still would have stuck to it.
Holmes had a good idea, too.
They both, like, you can't be a good grifter unless you understand what people want.
And that's why Jobs was a great person to make certain decisions about like, what do we want in a smartphone?
Because people have tried smartphones.
He was the first person.
He was.
This was like his one legitimate, brilliant thing was understanding what people wanted in a device that we're always going to have on them.
Right.
Like, that was his one real innovation because like fucking everything at the first Apple was Wozniak that was any good.
Right.
Well, it sounds like the mistake is truly just like putting people's lives at risk.
Yeah.
Because you could fuck up the iPhone a million times and no one would die.
Exactly.
And we all want what Elizabeth Holmes was selling.
We all want a thing that just takes a tiny drop of blood and they can do all these tests.
Sounds great.
Sounds great.
But it just isn't possible.
Got to know how to do it.
Yeah.
You know, eventually they'll probably figure it out.
Oh, Liz.
Well, that's the episode.
We've got a part two coming up on Thursday where we'll get to the rest of this sad story.
But Loftus, you want to plug some pluggables up in the P-zone as we call it here at the B-zone?
Call it the P-Zone and the B-zone.
I kind of hate it, but I like it.
Okay.
I'll pop an air horn in there and edit.
You can listen to the Bechdel cast every week on Thursdays.
That's the podcast I host with Caitlin Durante where we talk about women in movies.
I'm doing a show called Boss Whom Is Girl.
I'm touring across the country later in the summer.
So you can go on my website or my Twitter at Jamie LoftusHelp to find out more about that.
Now that everyone knows who Elizabeth Holmes is, you know, you listen to make some tweaks.
You could hear Jamie Loftus be Elizabeth Holmes in Cleveland?
Not in Cleveland.
If you're in Cleveland, you will have to fuck off.
No, and I'm not playing Elizabeth.
I'm playing like a fictionalized character.
There's a lot pulled from her.
But if you live in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, LA, or Chicago, you'll be able to see it.
Well, if for some reason you live in one of those non-Cleveland cities, check out Jamie Loftus' Boss Whom Is Girl.
You can find me on Twitter at iRideOK.
You can buy t-shirts at tpublic.com, behind the bastards.
We have shirts.
You can put them on your body, hide your nakedness, cover up your bits.
All of those things are options with TeePublic.
Your bits will be packaged.
Is this show sex positive or sex negative?
Both.
Oh, okay, good.
Yeah, we're positive of the concept of sex, negative about people having.
People doing it.
Yeah, just negative about joy.
If it's like joyless, peaceful sex.
I love that.
I have another podcast called It Could Happen Here.
It's horrifying and sad.
Listen to it.
Hard sell.
Yep.
Hard sell.
Every Wednesday.
Sophie's saying every Wednesday.
Sophie's saying every Wednesday.
I love about 40% of you.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Earners, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm wild back to the.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturalistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.