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.
00:48:44 · Max Read, John Carreyrou
[00:48:44] S1: Yeah. Another defense that comes up in the movie is the idea that she'd never quite quite lied, but had merely miscommunicated or sort of communicated incorrectly. Was that a familiar defense to you? Was that something that she had talked about before or or used at trial? Wait. I'm thinking specifically of this scene. We've already touched on it where she brings out, the Edison. And she She brings out the mini lab. Right. That's exactly the problem she brings out the mini And she effectively says that when she says this machine can do something, she doesn't mean it literally can do it, but but sort of in some hypothetical way someday could do it or something like that. Yeah. Was that a familiar defense to you? [00:49:22] S7: I mean, I think it's one of, you know, a panoply of defenses that she's used. I can't remember if she used it at at the trial or not, but the the bottom line is the mini lab couldn't do anything. The the mini lab... I don't think the mini lab had a single test ever validated on it. You know, using the word can [00:49:45] S1: Yeah. [00:49:46] S7: And and the whole debate they... The back and forth they have over the meaning of the word can, it's kinda besides the point. That machine couldn't do anything.
00:49:46 · John Carreyrou, Max Read
[00:49:46] S7: And and the whole debate they... The back and forth they have over the meaning of the word can, it's kinda besides the point. That machine couldn't do anything. [00:49:55] S1: Yeah. What did you make of the Abbott and Costello scene? This is another sort of pivotal scene in the movie where Nathan shows her who's on the classic Abbott and Costello routine, who's on first. And he tries to get her to talk about what's funny about it. And she says that she doesn't... She says, oh, I find it funny, but then she can't figure out... She... She's unable to answer the question, what's the name of the first baseman, which is obviously the whole premise of the joke. Do you think it's possible that she actually didn't understand? [00:50:24] S7: I think she understood it and that she was playing dumb. Yeah. And the reason for that is that there there was a a sequence. It was either the the sequence immediately before that one or the one before where, you know, they're sitting at the dining room table in the beach bungalow in San Diego, and the the pieces of the Theranos device are are, you know, laid out in front of them, and Fielder floats the notion that she just interacts with the world differently. [00:50:55] S1: Mhmm.