00:03:43 · Max Read, Rob Copeland
[00:03:43] S1: So you hear that he's running a blood testing startup, and you start making calls? [00:03:47] S2: I start making calls, and someone had sort of tipped me off that he had asked them for money. And this person obviously took the meeting for the same reason we would, which was I can't believe this is happening. I will say that last year when I sort of got wind that there was such thing as Theranos two point o, although that wasn't what they were calling it by that time, I thought Billy Evans. I thought I'd call Billy Evans, and he would tell me to, you know, jump off a bridge. And in fact, he was extremely charming. I... When I called him and I said, I'd wanna talk about your startup, he said, which startup? That's a good joke. I mean, maybe the the one that involves blood testing, but... Yeah. [00:04:26] S1: Yeah. Wait. So tell me a little more about this business. We know it's called Haemanthus, which is the name of a flower also known as the blood lily, and it's really intended for pets. [00:04:35] S2: Correct. It was... The idea was you could take a sample from your pet instead of having to go to a vet and spend, say, $500 on a blood test, you could you could do it for, you know, a dollar a test. [00:04:47] S1: And presumably, the reason they're starting with pets is that it's a sort of lower regulatory threshold for them.
00:04:47 · Max Read, Rob Copeland, Erin Griffith
[00:04:47] S1: And presumably, the reason they're starting with pets is that it's a sort of lower regulatory threshold for them. [00:04:53] S2: Well, Max, I'm glad you asked because I just so happen to have here a piece of paper that Billy sent me, which was evidence in his mind that this was a lower regulated business, that it's dated October 2024 and it's correspondence with the USDA. And he said that this is evidence that we are allowed to do this. I called the USDA. They said that's not what that means. [00:05:20] S1: And what do you think was different between the Billy you talked to and the Billy that we see in the movie, if anything? [00:05:26] S2: Well, I would say that the big similarity is that Billy has a tendency to say, you can ask me anything you want, that he is an open book. And [00:05:34] S3: then You can see everything even?
00:05:34 · Erin Griffith, Rob Copeland
[00:05:34] S3: then You can see everything even? [00:05:35] S2: You can just say... Erin, enough. Come on. And and then proceeds to, you know, not tell you everything that you do want to know. The the big difference between what I was talking about and what was on screen was that on screen, he's so open about how Elizabeth is involved in this. I mean, I would have had no idea last year while I was speaking to him that they had already filmed months or years of footage of the two of them starting this thing together. Yeah. My impression was that she had nothing to do with this company, that they didn't bring her up in meetings. It was like she who must not be named. She's certainly not mentioned in the deck, and that Billy will give you long speeches about how qualified he is to start this, what a brilliant scientist he is, how he helped start this company which helps do, like, radar for self driving cars. So the... It was, like, the biggest inside joke. Right? Because it's a blood testing startup from Elizabeth Holmes' partner. The photographs they're providing look suspiciously identical to the Theranos device, but, oh, goodness gracious. Don't, you know, don't make the connection. I thought that I was breaking the biggest story in the history of technology, business, and media, and it turned out that Billy had been filming a documentary, like, memorializing it for two years.
00:06:55 · Max Read, Rob Copeland, Erin Griffith
[00:06:55] S1: So just to put this in the context of the film. So, 2023, we see them in San Diego. They're both on the phone with what we understand to be potential investors in in this new thing they're starting up. Elizabeth goes to jail. Billy continues working on it. Around 2025, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the directors of the of the documentary, start visiting him in Austin again. And it's around this same time that you are discovering that this startup is coming out, and you eventually published the piece. What was the react... What was his reaction to your piece? [00:07:26] S2: He was not thrilled with the piece. I think it's fair to say. [00:07:30] S3: I mean, he probably was fighting it all along the way. Right? I'm assuming that, like, if they wanted this documentary to be the big reveal of Theranos two point o, your story would have messed that up. [00:07:40] S2: Yeah. He kept trying to sort of push the story down the line, kept saying, oh, you can come visit the lab. You can do a great story of the lab. And then I would say, okay. What's in the lab? And he'd say, well, the lab isn't working yet. So at that point, I'm sitting with my editors, and I'm saying, well, what are we going to see in Austin? And to be clear, he... This startup had raised somewhere around $3,000,000, which much respect to mister Evans is just not enough to start a blood testing company. Think of [00:08:08] S3: all start somewhere. I mean, I think Theranos' first checks were probably very small too, and then they eventually built up to, you know, a 100,000,000 from Murdoch.
00:08:08 · Erin Griffith, Max Read, Rob Copeland
[00:08:08] S3: all start somewhere. I mean, I think Theranos' first checks were probably very small too, and then they eventually built up to, you know, a 100,000,000 from Murdoch. [00:08:15] S1: I would love to start with $3,000,000 personally. Did you talk to anybody who did invest in this business? [00:08:23] S2: I didn't speak to anyone who did, although we did find records of at least one person who had invested in it. He runs a Tapas restaurant in Downtown Austin, and Billy described him to me as a friend. Mhmm. So it seems like it was at that level. [00:08:37] S1: But to your point, Rob, this is not... You know, what we're hearing is a company that's raised $3,000,000, which is two orders of magnitude lower than it would take to sort of think about yourself as a tech player. As far as we know, there are not many notable investors except for this gentleman who owns a tapas bar in Austin. I mean, how would you... I'm trying to think of the right way to ask this question. Is this a real company?
00:08:37 · Max Read, Rob Copeland
[00:08:37] S1: But to your point, Rob, this is not... You know, what we're hearing is a company that's raised $3,000,000, which is two orders of magnitude lower than it would take to sort of think about yourself as a tech player. As far as we know, there are not many notable investors except for this gentleman who owns a tapas bar in Austin. I mean, how would you... I'm trying to think of the right way to ask this question. Is this a real company? [00:08:59] S2: If I were Elizabeth, right, I would say, like, what is a real company? What do you mean by real? The... It's a real company in the sense that it did successfully raise money. It's not a real company in the sense that it has a product that does anything. What really struck me too is... Was the gall. I mean, Billy was going after huge investors. He was going after, you know, Jim Breyer with the... One of the first backers of Facebook. He's going after Michael Dell, probably the most famous investor not named Elon Musk in in Texas. He really thought that he was going to be able to raise money from sort of the top tier for this.