00:36:32 · John Carreyrou, Max Read
[00:36:32] S7: Thanks for having me again. This is becoming a regular thing. [00:36:35] S1: Yeah. I'm enjoying it. So we saw this movie last week. We both enjoyed it. We had a great conversation about it on Friday. And then since then, the movie has actually come out, and there's been a frenzy over Elizabeth Holmes, over, some of the stuff that comes out in the movie. I am wondering what your experience of that has been like. You had sort of been saying you were done with the Elizabeth Holmes story, here you are right back in it. [00:36:57] S7: I mean, it's been surreal. This movie has gone completely viral, and it feels like the the story has only become bigger in terms of the the public impact. Even, you know, at the height of my newspaper reporting for The Wall Street Journal in in 2015, 2016, the height of publicity around the book, 2018, or even, you know, the coverage of the trial, I never felt like quite as many people were being read into the story and paying attention as now. [00:37:32] S1: Yeah. I was talking with some of our production staff, and they were saying they've been going to bookstores to pick up a copy, and it's sold out here in New York, that it's off the... Going off the shelves in airport bookstores. Have you heard any of this?
00:37:32 · Max Read, John Carreyrou, Rob Copeland
[00:37:32] S1: Yeah. I was talking with some of our production staff, and they were saying they've been going to bookstores to pick up a copy, and it's sold out here in New York, that it's off the... Going off the shelves in airport bookstores. Have you heard any of this? [00:37:42] S7: Yeah. Before walking into the studio, I got an email from my editor at Knopf telling me that they just printed another batch of 10,000 copies, and, it's been great. I I like the fact that people are going to, you know, what what I like to think is the definitive account of what happened. They don't wanna stop at just seeing the film. A lot of people, you know, understand that this is art, and they also wanna get at the underlying facts and understand the underlying facts. [00:38:13] S1: Yeah. So last week, we talked about the movie. We did our best to avoid sort of spoilers because a lot of amazing, insane, unrepeatable stuff happens in the second half of the movie. Is there anything that you have been thinking about since or that you wish we could have talked about last week since this is a spoilers episode? Well, the second half of the film, for [00:38:32] S7: for those who have seen it, is structured around trying to answer the the mystery question of whether Elizabeth knew or not that she and Billy were gonna profit from the movie in the original deal that that Billy had reached with a 24. And I came away thinking that there's no way she didn't know. [00:38:56] S2: Mhmm. [00:38:57] S7: I just don't think it's possible.
00:38:57 · John Carreyrou, Max Read
[00:38:57] S7: I just don't think it's possible. [00:38:59] S1: Yeah. I mean, maybe this is a good opportunity to get into some of the facts. One of the interesting reactions I've seen is, I think, people who haven't read Bad Blood, which I recommend everybody read. It's a great book of reporting and a sort of fascinating documentation of a particular culture in Silicon Valley in the years that Theranos was around. People who haven't read it are not necessarily as familiar with exactly what was going on at Theranos or with Elizabeth Holmes. And we solicited a bunch of questions from the many people who were commenting and talking, and a lot of them had questions for you. And here's here's one that just sort of to start with to, like, get us a kind of map on the ground is a question from Ben Ryan, and he asks, what are the most unimpeachable pieces of evidence that Elizabeth Holmes is a fraudster?
00:39:42 · John Carreyrou
[00:39:42] S7: So, you know, she gave media interviews, and she met with investors in 2014 and and 2015 and represented very explicitly that, she had a new technology, a new device that could do hundreds of blood tests off just one drop of blood prick from a finger. The the reality, which has, you know, was shown by my reporting in the book, but also then later confirmed in the trial, was that they had a machine that could do 12 tests, and that machine, which was called the Edison, was a machine that was very faulty, and, you know, they had to void every single one of those 12 types of tests for which they issued results. Every single result had to be voided. That's how riddled with errors that machine was. Tyler Schultz, who was one of the whistleblowers, one of my confidential sources at the time, grandson of the former secretary of state George Schultz, pointed out when he went on CBS this morning yesterday that the machine that she unpacks for Nathan Fielder, and You Can See Everything, isn't the Edison. It's a machine that was called the mini lab, which was the next iteration of the Theranos machine that was supposed to cram more components into one device and and was supposed to do more tests and have more capabilities, that machine was never finished. It it never convincingly produced reliable test results, and they were never confident enough with it to use it Mhmm. On live patients. And and so, you know, there's there's a bit of obfuscation and misleading going on in in the film in that scene when when, you know, she unpacks that device, and it's not even the device that they used on Theranos patients.
00:41:38 · Max Read, John Carreyrou
[00:41:38] S1: Right. Can you actually talk a little bit about Tyler Schultz? He doesn't come up in the movie at all, but he's a sort of... I mean, I don't wanna narrativize it too much, but he's a sort of main character in the story of Theranos and its its decline and fall. How did you how did you come to hear from him, and and what was his role in your reporting and further in the fraud trial? [00:41:56] S7: Yeah. So my first primary source... The first primary source I made contact with, and I I can now use his real name. I was shielding his his identity for years, is Adam Rosendorff, who shortly before he began talking to me was the laboratory... Clinical laboratory director at Theranos. And when I started talking to him, I think it was in February 2015, you know, he was terrified. I asked him if there were other people who might be willing to talk to me if I... You know, I was looking for other corroborating sources. And in that very first conversation, he mentioned a young man named Tyler Schultz who had left the company, I think it was about eight months earlier, and who he had reason to believe had left on bad terms and had been raising questions. He didn't know the details, but he thought you should look this kid up. And, oh, by the way, he's George Schultz's grandson. So the grandson of a, you know, a very high profile board member [00:42:58] S1: Right.
00:42:58 · Max Read, John Carreyrou, Rob Copeland
[00:42:58] S1: Right. [00:42:59] S7: Had left the company and potentially, you know, could be a corroborating source. And so that got my interest and attention, and I tried to get in touch with Tyler in the ensuing weeks. Wasn't able to. I reached out to him through LinkedIn, and I I don't think I heard from him for, like, two months. And then suddenly, I was at my desk at the Wall Street Journal's newsroom in Midtown, one afternoon, and my phone rings. [00:43:23] S2: Mhmm. [00:43:24] S7: Out of the blue, I answer, and it's Tyler Schultz. [00:43:27] S1: And so Tyler was in a fairly awkward position as a whistleblower who also was related to a person who was involved in the management of Theranos. And I think one of the things that maybe gets lost in the film a little bit is the extent to which Holmes and Theranos respond... Like, the the lengths to which they went to pursue you, to pursue Schultz, trying to stop this story. If you could tell me a little bit about that. [00:43:51] S7: Yeah. So Tyler actually tried to blow the whistle to Elizabeth first and to to meet with her and tell her what was bothering him, and that didn't go very well. She sort of fobbed him off to to Sunny, who got really angry with him, and to the lawyers. And so then he tried to blow the whistle to his grandfather. [00:44:11] S2: Mhmm.