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.
00:09:35 · Erin Griffith, Rob Copeland
[00:09:35] S3: What I thought is so notable about your story too is, like, in Silicon Valley, there's this kind of, like, unspoken rule where if you pass on a company, you you might tell your friends, like, oh, we didn't invest in that. But, like, it sends a really negative signal to the company, and you don't wanna be seen as, like, not founder friendly. And so no investor would ever publicly to The New York Times or anyone in the media say, I declined to invest in this company. And in fact, that's what stopped investors the first time around with Theranos one point o from speaking out and saying, looked at this company, but it didn't pass the smell test for me. They're all kind of worried about coming off as, you know, not founder friendly. And so the fact that you have someone like Jim Breyer in there on the record saying, we looked at this company, and we thought it was no good, and so we passed. It's like, that that is actually extremely unusual. [00:10:24] S2: Well, it sort of speaks also, I think, to the fact that Billy is not someone that anyone thought that they had to protect. You know? There's not a future relationship with Billy Evans that anybody necessarily wanted. [00:10:38] S3: Well, okay. One other question that I had isn't part of Elizabeth's punishment as a felon, now convicted, that she can't be involved in securities? [00:10:49] S2: She can't be an officer for sure. Yeah. Can she informally advise her partner on his company? I mean, how could you enforce that? Right?
00:10:49 · Rob Copeland, Max Read, Erin Griffith
[00:10:49] S2: She can't be an officer for sure. Yeah. Can she informally advise her partner on his company? I mean, how could you enforce that? Right? [00:10:58] S1: Well, I mean, certainly, if it was illegal, you wouldn't wanna have, say, a lot of footage of the two of you making a bunch of investment calls on behalf of the company. [00:11:06] S2: If those calls were made in 2023, I do question their their veracity because this company was not raising money in 2023. [00:11:13] S3: Wait. What do you mean? [00:11:14] S2: If those calls were filmed in 2023 Yeah. That that... There was no Theranos two point... I mean, maybe they were casual phone calls, but those those were not, like, serious. We're about to raise money. The real Theranos starts around 2024, so about a year later. They don't have offices. They're still working out of, like, a a house in in Austin as of last year. Mhmm. So still very, very early start up. [00:11:37] S1: And so at this point, Elizabeth Holmes is in prison. So this is entire... I mean, with the exception of whatever advice she's giving him during their visiting days, this is entirely Billy. Correct. Yeah. [00:11:47] S3: And they have a patent, and she's not on it. [00:11:49] S1: Right. Let me take this in a slightly different direction. Having now seen the movie, and this question is for both of you, what did you make of their relationship?
00:11:56 · Erin Griffith
[00:11:56] S3: I mean, we talked about this a little bit last week, but it just was so reminiscent of her relationship with Sunny Balwani, especially when it comes down to the fact that they're starting the same company again over again. And so, like... And and it's clear that the movie wants you to sort of make that connection. When I was preparing for this podcast, I went back and looked at the eight page single spaced letter that Billy wrote to the court ahead of Holmes' sentencing to try to essentially argue for her to get, you know, a lower sentence. And there were... There was, like, over a 100 letters that she collected from a bunch of people, and it was really fascinating because it was kind of the first look into her personal life. There was a lot of photos in his letter. But, like, one thing that really stuck out to me was that even then, he was kind of participating in this narrative that the movie continues, which is that she's this sort of weird person who doesn't really relate to others in the same way, and that's why she was a little bit of a miscommunicator with investors. And he had this line in it that was like, you know, everything about... So many things that were written about her were untrue, including the fact that she's a good salesperson. And he writes, Liz has no ability to sell something. She simply believes in things with such depth that it is alluring. She's more of a zealot than a showman. And it kind of it kind of fits into this movie a little bit because you're... The movie is showing us how she believes her own reality. And so you're like, okay. I I sort of see the narrative that you're making, and and it actually is kind of proven out in the movie.
00:13:30 · Rob Copeland, Erin Griffith, Max Read
[00:13:30] S2: Yeah. I I think I had a slightly different take, which was, one, I I didn't necessarily buy their relationship 100%. But as someone who interviews people for a living, he did something very recognizable, which is he volunteered answers to questions that were not asked. You know, Nathan asks him, you know, if he was dating other people when he met Elizabeth, and all of a sudden, he's volunteering. I was dating three people, actually. It was like he's wanting... He has, like, a PR strategy to answer the question he wishes he was asked, and it's sort of our job as journalists to get around that or to just repeat the question. But that seems very very b list corporate executive who's just done one day of PR training to me. [00:14:16] S3: Probably at two x speed. Right? [00:14:18] S2: Yeah. For sure. Whereas she at least... Elizabeth was sort of a a difficult person to interview, really, if you were trying to to get anything through her because she's just looking at you and not blinking. [00:14:31] S1: Do you guys think... I mean, I'm just gonna come out and ask it. Do you guys think they're in love? [00:14:35] S3: Yeah. I mean, maybe I just am a sucker who got taken along for a ride by Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes, but I felt like their relationship was genuine. It was maybe the most genuine thing in the whole movie. [00:14:48] S2: I thought, honestly, they had definitely made eggs together before. Like, she... He knew what... How long that was going to take, and I I related to that.