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?
00:46:35 · Max Read, John Carreyrou, Rob Copeland
[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? [00:47:17] S7: No way. I mean, Sunny absolutely had a hand in this, but they ran this company as a couple. [00:47:23] S2: Mhmm.
00:47:23 · Rob Copeland, John Carreyrou
[00:47:23] S2: Mhmm. [00:47:24] S7: And probably the the best way to understand that is to go and look at their texts. Mhmm. The government pulled, you know, thousands of their texts spanning a number of years, I think, essentially, from from when he joined Theranos in o nine to 2015, 2016. And when you read those texts, you get the the picture of a couple running this company together. They're checking in with each other all the time. They're doing everything together. This was a duo. Mhmm. And, you know, you could certainly accuse Sunny of being a bad influence on her. You could also make the case that she was a bad influence on Sunny. But the the notion that that she wasn't involved Mhmm. Is farcical. Yeah. And I would argue that the the blame should be on her even a little bit more than on Sunny because she was CEO. Right. She was chairman of the board. She had voting rights that gave her, you know, something like 90% voting control of the company. She was at the controls of this thing. Right. And she was piloting the cover up.