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.
00:44:11 · Rob Copeland, John Carreyrou, Max Read
[00:44:11] S2: Mhmm. [00:44:12] S7: And his grandfather, didn't believe him and wouldn't listen to him. And so he ended up leaving, the company after a little less than a year. And then when I started getting in touch with ex and current Theranos employees, word got around through the grapevine among ex employees. And Tyler got really concerned that if he did get in contact with me, that the company would somehow know because, you know, litigation was always... The threat of litigation was always in the air when you worked at Theranos. And it turns out, I I later learned, that they had figured out who several of my sources were, And they had ambushed Tyler at George Schultz's house, which was on the Stanford campus, and tried to to get him to admit that that he was speaking to me and tried to get him to sign, you know, paperwork, basically recanting, and tried to get him to to say who the other ex employees were who were talking to me. And from that point on, Tyler's life became a nightmare. Mhmm. He had to, you know, get his own legal representations. His parents were almost bankrupted by the legal fees. He spent that summer sleeping with a knife under his pillow. He was afraid for his life. And, you know, she went... When when I say she went after him, I'm not exaggerating. I mean, this was a ruthless cover up, a ruthless attempt to prevent the truth from coming out. We're talking legal threats, intimidation. [00:45:49] S1: I know she tried to get Rupert Murdoch even to shut down the Wall Street Journal investigation.
00:45:49 · Max Read, John Carreyrou
[00:45:49] S1: I know she tried to get Rupert Murdoch even to shut down the Wall Street Journal investigation. [00:45:54] S7: That's right. She appealed to Murdoch. There was a a point in, I think, was September 2015. We were about less than a month from publishing the story where she showed up in New York and took the elevator. I think it was the 8th Floor at the time where Murdoch had his office and went to visit him there. Of course, you know, she had access because Murdoch had invested in Theranos. He was actually Theranos... Unbeknownst to me at the time, he was Theranos' biggest... Single biggest investor. He had put in a $125,000,000. So she went to see him in the News Corp building, three floors up from where I was in the newsroom, and appealed to him to to kill the story. [00:46:35] S1: Yeah. Let me get to another viewer question. The the movie is constructed around encounters that Nathan Fielder has with Elizabeth Holmes. And in the movie, at least the first half, he's living in this beach house with her, and he's sort of trying to figure out, you know, who she is in some sense, whether she really believes what she's saying. And she, both intentionally and maybe inadvertently tries to defend herself. One of her defenses, which comes up in the film on a few occasions, is that she was misled or framed by her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, the chief operating officer. I have a question from a Twitter user named Mark b. Devil's advocate, is it possible that it was all Sunny? I'm genuinely asking. What do you say, John?