Part One: Elizabeth Holmes: The CEO Who Treated Your Blood Like a Phone

In Episode 54, Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Elizabeth Holmes and how she conned the world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M intro. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the Bastard Show.
We'll tell you about the bad people you don't know
enough about or you want to know more about. That's
the show. That's the show. Okay, Today my guest is
Jamie Loftus. Hi, Jamie eating a salad Loftus Jamie, Yeah,

(00:20):
eating a salad. I can already anticipate all the furious
comments that I'll get to dip into about my what's
the word my mesophonia? Really yeah, anytime anyone ever eats
on Mike, there's nine comments about like mymusophonia. I can't
listen to someone eating. And I was like, this is
the smallest problem. Well, you've hit upon a secret, which

(00:43):
is the secret bastard of this episode, like the thing
I'm blaming everything on. Yeah, no, you are a working
person and uh to all my us, I've eat a
lot of deritos. Show that's true. I mean, but that's
a satisfying a some are induced crunch It is, well,
it is, but so is the satisfying taste of a

(01:05):
I don't I can't find a brand on your salad.
You should brand. You don't know what it is frustrating
there's not enough. There's not enough visibility with this salad. Yeah,
speaking of branding today, we're talking about one of the
all time great branders up until about a year and
a half ago, Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes. Man, she's gone mainstream.
E home me. It's gonna be any Holmes connection here.

(01:34):
It's crazy how quickly she has become a central, like
a focus of the world. It seemed to happen very quickly. Yeah,
it really all kicked off in about like fourteen is
kind of when she blew onto the stage. That was
when I became a stand That's what you were. You
were you stand here for a while I was. I
was a stand. Yeah. Um, and there's elements of her

(01:54):
that I still stand a little bit changed my mind. No,
you know what, what what we'll get into what she
is later. Let's let's start by talking about her backstory
a little bit here. Let's I love a story of wealth,
a story of wealth and privilege and and what I
will call I will say her ethnicity is rich like
she's she she's she's of that background. I'll talk a

(02:16):
little bit more about that later. To so. Elizabeth Ann
Holmes was born on February three in Washington, d C.
Her father was Christian Holmes the Fourth, which might key
you in on the fact that her family was rich
as ship, which I wrote down before you spoiled that
care for her audience. I just didn't I didn't head
at it, so listen. I'm sorry for spoilers. I'm just

(02:37):
so excited to talk about Elizabeth. I know, I know
you're very your big your big stand. I'm a big stand.
I play her on stage a lot. I know you do. Ye. Yeah,
you've got a great lab coat. I've got it. I
don't wear a lab coat. Now. It's the it's the
it's the turtle turtleneck. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of the
iconic look, the turtleneck and the bad hair. That's something
that we have in common. What the frizzy hair. I mean,

(03:00):
she needs to like her whole thing. And I know that,
you know, we come down harder own women because of
their appearance. But it's like there could have been an
instructional on how to use a hair straightener more responsibly.
I guess I never Okay, it's neither here nor It's
crazy how many billionaires have split ends. It's like, get
it the fun together. I guess I never noticed that,
but like, I never do anything to my hair, and

(03:20):
I always look like a fucking You have infinitely better
hair than Elizabeth Holmes's due to eat Holmes, I know,
and to oll money. So her great great great grandfather,
the first Christian Holmes, was a World War One veteran
inventor and a surgeon. Part of the University of Cincinnati
Medical Center is named after him, and he seems to

(03:41):
have been a legitimately impressive dude. The family fortune, however,
went back further than that, to an ancestor named Charles
Louis Fleischman, Hungarian immigrant who founded the Fleischman Yeast Company
back in the eighteen hundreds. So I forgot she was
a Yeah, she's a yeast of fortune, which is too
on the nose. If you're I gotta say, like, if
like a rich a rich girl going to private school,

(04:02):
having your money come from a used for that's a
cross to bear, that's a that's a real like hashtag
girl boss. Yeah yeah, yeah. Now, pretty much regardless of
where you live, you can walk into a grocery store
and pick up a packet of Flishman's bread yeast. I
actually used to use it when I was eighteen, nineteen
and twenty to ferment hobo jug wine in my garage.
In other words, Elizabeth Holmes is descended from America's greatest hero.

(04:25):
Only costs like a dollar, so you can make a
lot of really cheap gut wrought wine with it. Is
it just like a kool Aid package style of kool
Aid packet style. I wonder where kind of font work
they've gotten. Just you just put sugar in a bucket
with water, some Flishman's bread yeast, stick an airlock on
that fucker. Let it sit two weeks. Then you can
get wasted for like four dollars. You can get like
a room full of people wasted for four dollars. We

(04:46):
used to brew thirty or so gallons at a time
and get like huge groups of people drunk on this
like terrible, terrible, terrible. Yeah no, because we would get
like canned um frozen, like like you get those candle
concentrated orange juice and stuff, dumped like five of those
into a five gallon bucket, and we do like six
of those at a time Fleishman's bread yeast making the

(05:07):
fucking yeast, and then you'd get to like six or
seven percent alcohol. So you can get you get like
a five gallon bucket of that. You can ruin some period. Yeah,
you can really ruin some lives and break up some
marriages that way. You remind me at the end of
the story, I'll tell you how we used Fleishman's bread
yeast to murder the Flash when I was twenty year old.
Oh okay, alright, So so this is some good uh,

(05:28):
some good utilitarian yeast, great yeast. Good. We're not we're
not against the yeast. Well, listen, there's a lot of
situations in which easter is not welcome. This yeast is
very welcome. This okay, this is welcome yeast. I like
their font I just had to look at solid. They've
clearly been added a while. Yeah. So in this CEO

(05:49):
was out for blood. The two thousand fourteen Fortune article
that ignited public interest in Elizabeth Holmes and Paranos. Her
father was described as a man who quote has devoted
most of his life to public minded government so of
US disaster relief in Africa, international development projects in China,
environmental work in this country, and is currently the Global
Water Coordinator for the US Agency for International Development. He

(06:09):
met Elizabeth's mother Noel on Capitol Hill, where she worked
as a Congressional Committee staffer. That's his parents distinguished, distinguished
it some distinguished ship. Depending on who you hear from,
you'll run into two very different pictures of her childhood.
In early interviews, Elizabeth would claim that her famous great
great great granddad's example was her earliest motivation. She read

(06:29):
a biography of him when she was a little kid,
and later told fortune he ultimately worked himself to death,
but he was so passionate in what he did. I wondered,
would I want to be a doctor. Since her family
was rich and connected as fu, some of her family
friends were able to arrange for her to watch surgeries
in order to see if she really wanted to get
into medicine as a career. Wait, how when she was
how old? I think when she was like a like

(06:50):
a kid and like like like grade school, you're going
to watch surgeries? Yeah you can do that, ship? Why not?
I don't know. I wouldn't let a child do that. Man,
if I ever have kid, that's what they're doing from
day one. They're watching straight up, no kindergarten, no first grade,
just surgeries. They're going to theaters and it's just you're
gonna be sitting in that ore you watch them take

(07:11):
that gall bladder out. It would be do you think
when they had like surgeries like in theaters that you
could like have your own box. They're like wasted, Yeah,
like cheer people be like just kill him. I would
love to like pop a couple of oxy and like
a bottles of steel reserve and then like smoke a
cigar and watch a surgery and Michael someone getting gall

(07:34):
bladder ship talk the surgeon call that a fucking incision,
fucking foul. Just some Niley stuff. You can make a
lot of money selling that as a business, Like poor
people get free surgeries and the rich get drunk and
heckle them. I feel like that's like America is ready
for that was it. We're reaching a point in society
where I feel like that may in fact be welcome.

(07:54):
We just need to find a way to add some
sort of We had to add the cloud to it
to make it seem vague le tech adjacent. It's got
to have that twitch thing where everyone can comment while
the surgery is going exactly or like a Facebook live
stream where it's like very heart for kill him. We
get five likes in the next hour, the surgeon will
dab before Yeah. If we get one thousand, like, the

(08:17):
surgeon will not perform surgery. He'll chug a forty. You
can just kill people, fok oh as well make it
that direct, rather than like nuts killing people on Facebook
and using their platform to spread it. Just have Facebook. Yeah,
now you can just kill cut out the middleman. Let's
just do what we were trying to do the whole time.
This has gotten off the rails a little bit well.

(08:40):
So Elizabeth claims that she did not enjoy watching surgeries.
She was utterly revolted by the side of blood and
developed a phobia of it. Quote. The concept of sticking
a needle into you and sucking your blood out, Home says,
has always been profoundly disturbing to her. As a child,
She says, when I knew I needed to get a test,
I would really be focused on that for weeks in advance.
She had a real big thing about blood, which I
guess a lot of people do. I've never had any.

(09:02):
I was sick as a kid, so I just grew
up used to it. But I guess a lot of
people like that. I've always been very squeamish with stuff
like that you had leeches on your body at one point.
I've had leeches on my body at one point. I'm
all about immersion therapy. Yeah, okay, yeah, but I don't
like blood. I can't like watch Gray's Anatomy. I can't either,
but for totally different reasons because I hate surgery and

(09:23):
I hate sex, my two at least favorite things. I
hate sex and I love surgery. That well, there's plenty
of shows for you, a million shows for you. Oh yeah,
I just watch House and touch myself all night long.
It's great. When she was nine, Elizabeth's dad took a
private sector gig with Tinnaco, a giant automotive equipment manufacturer.
The family moved from DC to Houston. Christian Homes the

(09:44):
fourth felt bad about forcing his children, Elizabeth and Christian
Homes the fifth, to move to Texas, which is a
reasonable way to feel about moving your children to Texas.
But like, rich white people in Houston are like chaotic evil,
Like they're fine. I mean, I don't want to throw
too much shade on Hugh because I have a lot
of friends there, but I know that I don't know anything.
I don't know anyone in Houston. It's like if you

(10:05):
built a city the density of downtown l A, but
on a swamp. Interesting. Yeah, how does that affect you
as a person? Well, I see you'd rather not say
it's not my favorite city, but other people like it
quite a lot, right now? Uh? Yes, Christian Homes. The
fourth was really concerned about moving as gets to Texas.

(10:27):
Elizabeth tried to reassure her dad by sending him a
letter assuring him, quote, I love adventures. She says she
was excited to move to Texas because it was big
on science. Which might be the most glaring misconception about
Texas that I have ever heard is that Elizabeth Holmes's
biggest lot. Yeah like that right there. Nothing comes close
to that. I have had more people that I can
account explain to me angrily that the world is six

(10:49):
thousand years old in Texas, So I do not get
that anyway. In every interview that Elizabeth has ever given,
basically she's made sure the interview reported on the first
sentence that she wrote in that letter to her dad, quote,
what I really want out of life is to discover
something new, something mankind didn't know was possible. To do.
So this is the homes approved version of the story.

(11:11):
It's the one most reporters and journalists and quote unquote
journalists reported or repeated in superpositive articles about Holmes and
Thereinos back in two thousand and fourteen. But it is
not the only version of her story. Dr Richard Fuse
is a psychiatrist who has known Elizabeth and her family
since she was a wee little child. He also got
embroiled in a gigantic, nasty lawsuit with Thearinos over a
patent issue in two thousand eleven. The whole thing was

(11:32):
a nightmare for his family and kind of tore his
life apart for years. It cost him five million dollars.
So Fuse is the furthest thing in the world from
an unbiased, objective commenter on the life of Elizabeth Holmes.
But a number of other people's stories back up things
that he says. So he also grew up like she
grew up alongside him. So he's got he's got some perspective.
I believe some things he says. I'm more questioning about others.

(11:53):
Um So here are some excerpts from a poorly written
Forbes article that interviewed Fuse about Holmes's background. Sorry but
poorly written Forbes. I know this is the only one quote.
A few said that Elizabeth's parents were striving to improve
their position in the world. As he said quote the
Holmes family parents were Christian in a well where our
neighbors in Virginia. They were very political and aspired to
use their Washington connections to get money. Our kids grew

(12:14):
up with their kids. They were jealous of our family.
I was a physician who had many patients and made
money off of them. And New Arabic. Okay, it seems
like a lot of bragging about a lot of bragging.
He seems like that kind of guy. A few says
that holmes mother tried to push Elizabeth to be like him.
Dr Richard Fuse quote, Noel programmed Elizabeth to be like
me and Vinton learn a language. I'm a psychiatrist and

(12:34):
a family practitioner and would tell a father and mother
not to treat their child that way. She'll be what
she'll be. Don't drive her into something she doesn't want
to do. And the pictures I have with our family,
she's withdrawn. She's always pulled to the side and was
not naturally a motive as a child. I don't know.
I mean I I I'm always had Like if you
think about like how your neighbor would describe you as
a child, Like if if Kevin O'Connell, the retired Brockton

(12:58):
cop or, did describe me as a child and presented
like twenty years later as canon. I don't know, I
don't I don't love he did that. Yeah, I don't
love it either. It's also though that like we have
the stuff that she approved and told journalists, and we
have the other side of this from this other guy.
So I'm going to present you with both and with
some other stuff in between. Yeah, because because her like

(13:19):
approved story is so myfic it is, and so like
you have to try to anyway, I'm going to present
a number of different totally like to attempt and again,
like Fuse is obviously the most biased source we have
on Holmes's background, but he also knew her her whole life.
How many more times does he say he's a physician.
It gets a little bit less pretentious after that. Um okay, Yeah,

(13:41):
So the book Bad Blood by John Carrew provides It's
a really good book, provides additional context who Holmes his
childhood ambition. It paints a picture somewhere between how Holmes
wanted to be known to fortune and how Dr Fuse
paints her quote. When she was nine or ten, one
of her relatives asked her at a family gathering the
question every boy and girl was asked, sooner orly, what
do you want to do when you grow up? Without

(14:02):
skipping a beat, Elizabeth replied, I want to be a billionaire.
Wouldn't you rather be president? The relative asked, no, the
president will marry me because I'll have a billion dollars.
These were not the idle words of a child. Elizabeth
uttered them with the utmost seriousness and determination. According to
a family member who witnessed the scene, so cool was
the baby? Yeah, I mean I just a billionaire. The

(14:22):
way people build up people's childhood stories is always so
weird to me, like anyone could have been. Like Jamie
told us that she was going to like marry Daniel Radcliffe,
and she sounded pretty fucking serious about it, like when
I was like nine or ten years old. For me,
it would be Robert wanted to make dinosaurs like in
the Park books, and that's the only thing he talked
about is becoming a scientist. You really wanted to make

(14:44):
some fucking dinosaurs, and I still do. If I ever
get a billion dollars, all of it's going to the President,
will marry you and then the dinosaur thing. God, I
just think about his his warm, rasping lips on my
on the back of my neck, and Jamie nothing my
heart more than I mean, we will feel bad Ford

(15:05):
about you. I know what, you know what play's got
to play. That's true, That's what I'm gonna It's true.
Carrierew's interviews with people who knew Holmes as a child
revealed that she was a huge fan of Monopoly and
was famously competitive at the game. One of those people
who demands you actually finished the game, even once it
becomes clear that they're going to win, because you can't
roll the die without landing on one of their properties.

(15:25):
She usually won, but when she lost, she would run
off in a huff. Carrierew notes that more than once
she ran through the screen of the condos front door.
Oh my god, that's pretty Yeah, that's very like that one.
I believe because that both sounds like someone who grows
up to do what she did, and also sounds like
a nine year old just sounds like a child who
isn't totally sure how to deal with failure at Yeah.

(15:51):
In those early funding articles, a lot of hay was
made out of the fact that Elizabeth Holmes learned to
speak Mandarin while she was young, during a study abroad
well before and during a a broad program in China.
Fortune article made it sound incredibly impressive. Quote Elizabeth and
her brother, who was now director of product management at
Thearanous totally above board there had both been intrigued by
their father's work in China. So when Elizabeth was about

(16:13):
nine and her parents found them both a tutor to
teach the Mandarin on Saturdays. Elizabeth been supplanted those lessons
with summer language programs at Stanford and later at two
universities in Beijing. Captivated by computer programming in high school,
she was struck by how the Chinese university's information technology
facilities lagged behind what she was used. To rectify that situation,
she started her first business while still in high school,
selling C plus plus compilers to Chinese universities. So it

(16:35):
always starts with like a weird early scam. One of
my favorite um because I have like vested interest in
girl bloss scammers, right, And one of my favorite examples
of that is Lisa Frank in college, like the Unicorn
art weird Things and stuff, all the trapper Keepers. She
started by um like basically stealing art and design from

(17:00):
Native American artists and selling them at an uptick and
then like later based a lot of her designs installed.
Like it's just like there's always like an early scam. Yeah,
there's always with everyone, I mean, of all genders. It's
always like a proto scam. Same with John McAfee if
you go back and he was like, yeah, they always
they're like, oh, no one's gonna say anything, Okay, cool,
moving along. That's why they get good enough to do

(17:22):
billion and multimillion dollar scams is because they start when
they're fucking twelve. I mean there's even like a case
to be made for like Billy McFarland doing something like
that where the Firefest guy. Yeah, yeah, like you're just
dipping your toe and like, oh, no one's checking. Great,
Let's see how far we can Yeah, how much further
can we can we push this? Liz you rascal, you

(17:42):
rascal so uh fuses recollections make that period of her
life sound like it's at best a little bit inflated.
He alleges that she was enrolled in the Study Abroad
program as a backdoor into Stanford. Quote. She was a
fair student with low grades. Her parents had heard through
their channels that she could improve her chances if she
took a summer program there and learned a language while
in high cool, they put her into summer program at
Stanford to study Mandarin. Now, Carrie Row's book makes it

(18:04):
sound a little better than that. According to his reporting,
she talked her way into the Stanford summer program um.
Whatever the truth, she eventually went abroad to China to
continue her studies. Fuse does not believe she thrived there. Quote,
Elizabeth would call the house from China crying. Noel would
take the calls from Elizabeth and asked my ex wife
to pick up. Elizabeth said, the people are dirty, the
hotel is filthy, and I want to come home. But
Noel would tell her to stop complaining and get with

(18:26):
the program. Okay, so it sounds like a Brady Rich
kid abroad. Brady Rich kid abroad. I'm not sure what
to make of her Mandarin. Some people say she was
good at it. But it's one of those things like
like Mark Zuckerberg learned Mandarin, and you you hear reports
from my Chinese people that like, yeah, you know, he's
not great, but like he's able to hold a conversation
and stuff, like he's got like a basic level and
that's impressive because it's really hard to learn. I haven't

(18:48):
run into any Chinese people commenting on Elizabeth Holmes's level
of Mandarin. I mean, does she have really much of
a history in that country other than like early in
her life. Not really. She went there several times and stuff.
That's where she met Sonny because that was like a yeah, yeah,
like he's like, oh, you speak Mandarin high. I'm all
a lot of people first, And that's part of why

(19:09):
I'm a little questioning about how good she was at it,
because like everyone who's impressed by her Mandarin is a
person who doesn't speak Mandarin. Right, It's like I know
Mark Zuckerberg because like I don't like Mark Zuckerberg, but
I know he's acquired an impressive level of it because
Chinese people are like, yeah, I know he was able
to give a speech and in China he does a
lot of work in China. He married a Chinese woman,
like he put in the time, I don't know about home.

(19:29):
He is a hero. He's a hero here. He wore
a tie for a whole year during the financial collapse.
Oh yeah, what so gross? Stand nobody can god that
chinless dork. I'm sure he has like a thirty thousand
square foot house because no one and his family wants
to be that close to him either. Do you think

(19:50):
that he has one of those bitcoin ties like that
guy in the Elizabeth homes HBO documentary. Depending on we
got to talk about the bitcoin tie guy, I'm gonna
fight him, and I'm gonna if you wear a bitcoin tie,
who then do you think you are? What are you
playing at? Motherfucker? Yeah? What's your fucking game here? Also,
I want you are the only person I would let

(20:12):
be on if when they do the documentary about all
the scams I'm running, I will be offended. You don't
wear a bitcoin time, you know, wear a bitcoin tie
and just like, yeah, we had no idea. I'm going
to play very dumb with the nasty ty shirt that
you're wearing. Yeah, and then I'll just and then I'd
be like Robert was always saying the earth is flat.
I don't know why everyone's so surprised it is, though. Okay, So,

(20:37):
given the recent revelations about rich families paying millions of
dollars to find ways to sneak your kids in the
fancy colleges, you might be wondering, why didn't Holmes this
family just pose her in the swimming pool playing fake
water polo to get her into Stanford. Well, it's because
that kind of scamming costs money, and by the time
she was looking to get into college, the Holmes family
was if not really broke, then at least rich people
broke upper middle class. Well it's more than like this

(21:00):
is what I was talking about with like ethnically rich
as as opposed to like just have a lot of money,
Like if you're in the NFL, or you become a
movie star and you get like tens of millions or
hundreds of millions of dollars, a lot of those people
or you win the lottery, a lot of those people
wind up broke eventually. If you're born rich, if into
like if if that's like really your background, your culture,
your ethnicity, like a Yeast family, you're like a Yeast family.

(21:21):
You may never have much in the way of liquid cash,
but it's impossible for you to ever be poor because
of the connections that you have from growing up on
a culture. Yeah, bounce back, and that's like your dad
used his connections in the early aughts to get an
executive gig at in ron Um that did not end well,
and some people say Fuse included that the collapse of

(21:42):
Enron basically wiped out the family fortune. Um Fuse claims
that when he came back after Enron failed, like that,
he and his wife had to live in one of
fuses extra houses rent free because like they didn't have
any money after Ron. He's actually, I don't know if
you know this about him. He's a physician. He is
a physician and a pschiatrists. Yeah yeah, so he actually
like an inventor. Yeah yeah. So anyway, whichever version of

(22:06):
her early background you choose to believe, if we know
for a fact that in the fall of thousand to
eighteen year old Elizabeth Holmes started at Stanford University, and
that is where we will continue from when we come
back from produce Bitcoin ties. Oh yeah, I mean, we
we really were. Actually this this podcast is all to

(22:26):
to advertise from my new cryptocurrency, bastard Coin. Yeah, each
each is we have actually like embedded a blockchain in
the decomposing bones of Saddam Hussein, buried under Iraqi desert
near kirk cook Um, and so as the winds of
time gradually decomposed his bones, new blockchains are created, thus

(22:50):
releasing more Bastard coins into the coin ecosystem. See. I
actually knew that because if you read every four word
and Saddam Hussein's romance not well, it tells you the
exact location. Yeah, she did it, You did it all right. Well,
pick up some bastard coins. Um, you can use them
to buy drugs on the internet, like all cryptocurrency, and

(23:12):
check out these fine products. We're back, We're back, We're back.
Where's where's Lizzie? She's in she just started Stanford. I'm
sure this ends well, s Fizzle. I don't know why
I'm doing that a lot today. Elizabeth Holmes was, by

(23:32):
most accounts, a diligent student and a diligent partire. John
Kerryrew writes, quote, Outside of the long hour she put
in at the lab, Elizabeth led an active social life.
She attended campus parties and dated a sophomore named J. T. Batson.
Batson was from a small town in Georgia and was
struck by how polished in world the Elizabeth was. Though
he found her guarded, she wasn't the biggest sharer in
the world, he recalls, she played things close to the vest.

(23:54):
She also wore a lot of vests. I don't think
that's what he meant there, but she she definitely wore
a lot of it. Yea, she she was a big
vest fan, which were a lot of us. I love
a good vest. I'm a big best guy myself, and
she knew how to wear a vest, and she did
know how to wear. Nobody's saying she was not dressed
well for the job. Where where is the conversations about
how Elizabeth Holmes could really wear a vest unlike any

(24:15):
other scammer. I feel like you should be on her
legal team. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't wear a vest. No, Mark
Zuckerberg barely wears I know, and it's just disgusting. Help
with a couple of ethnic cleansing is oh. I still
have nightmares about that episode. It's hell, It's hell. By

(24:36):
her sophomore year at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes seems to have
gotten fed the hell up with college, which is understandable.
Rather than dropping out to say, smoke a ton of
weed and eventually become a podcaster, home sat down with
her chemical engineering professor Channing Robertson and said, let's start
a company. Right, this is a Silicon Valley is so
confusing to me, where it's like imagine like listening to

(24:58):
a nine like a nineteen year old star eating a
business is a bad idea, Yeah, anything but like very
basic jobs and studying is a bad ideas, a bad idea, yeah,
and it like never ever leads to anything good. Yeah,
it's it's it's a bad idea to like let them
in the military and friends who were driving tanks at seventeen.

(25:19):
That's a bad idea. It's it's a really bad idea.
Like this, this is like the part of the Silicon
Valley narrative. H'm like why is this allowed? Like why
would anyone be like and this is going to end great?
See this is again there's a government bureau. I've suggested
they should be around to like slap people in the
face sometimes, but they should also be there just to
walk up to people in times like this, like like

(25:41):
someone in a suit with a badge should have come
up and said, Elizabeth Holmes, No, you can't know. You
gotta learn science first, go wait tables for a year,
Like do do a job that's like useful to people,
and you know, like isn't starting a company and getting
millions of dollars in venture capital and learn things and
live in the real world for a while. Yeah, learn

(26:03):
how to be a person for a spell. Elizabeth. She well,
she might have to, now, yeah, she might have to know.
That's that's that's that is enough. Yeah. Anyway, Robertson, the
guy she went to the professor that she went to
and said the started company had done seminars on drug
delivery devices, stuff like nicotine patches and even more advanced
things like small clear contact lenses that could deliver glaucoma medication.

(26:24):
Super advanced, noninvasive ways to deliver drugs. Cool stuff. Elizabeth
approached him with a design for a wearable patch that
would deliver both the drug and monitor the patient's blood
in order to adjust the dosage of that drug. Now,
Robertson had only known Elizabeth Holmes for a year, and
she was one of many, many, many, many, many undergrads
he'd worked with. But he told Fortune Magazine quote, I
knew she was different. The novelty of how she would

(26:45):
view a complex technical problem. It was unique in my experience.
I remember her saying, and we could put a cell
phone ship on it, and it could limit her out
to the doctor or the patient what was going on.
And I kind of kicked myself. I consulted in this
area for thirty years, but I had never said, we
make all these gizmos that measure and all these systems
that deliver. But I never brought the two together. So
he was impressed with her, with her moxie, with her inventiveness,

(27:08):
but he felt that starting a medical device manufacturing company
at age nineteen after probably dropping out of Stanford might
be not a great idea. And again, like not taking
the science classes, you know, if that would be possible
exactly exactly you figure out. Professor would be on that
fairly like anti college. But that's the sort of thing

(27:28):
that you gotta go. I think probably most people in college,
like the things that people should be doing in college
is like studying history and the humanities to learn why
you shouldn't let nineteen year olds run blood testing companies? Uh,
and also spending eight years to learn how to be
a doctor and design medical devices. Those things seem like
you need college, You do need training. Yeah, Like you
don't need college to do what I've done, which would

(27:49):
just go put myself in dangerous places and right about it. No,
and yeah, we've gotten so deeply in debt to do
things that require really like just comments. Yeah, exactly, So
everyone out there drop out, drop out of college, but
don't start companies. Never start a company, or at least
not medical device companies. Start a podcast company. That's like,

(28:10):
who cares? Anyone can do that if you fail, and
we all will at some point, we all will. This
bubble going burst. I feel it. I feel it pushing
again at the surface of my skin every single morning. Yeah,
but you know it will be a fun ride for them.
That's just that's just the life we chose anyway. Uh.
Robertson Yeah. Um asked her why she was hel bent
on doing all this right now while she was still
a teenager. Homes responded, quote, because systems like this could

(28:33):
completely revolutionize how effective health care is delivered. And this
is what I want to do. I don't want to
make an incremental change in some technology in my life.
I want to create a whole new technology, and one
that is aimed at helping humanity at all levels, regardless
of geography or ethnicity, or age or gender. I think
that's really important because I think that exact sentiment, whether

(28:53):
or not they've ever said it, is exactly what is
constantly going through the minds of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk,
all of these funing guy basical all of them, but
Bill Gates, like yeah, call out, no, I mean I
think he's he's the one who didn't like he was
he was always more of like a grounded kind of
like like he's a decent engineer, but he's more of
just like he knows how to run a business, and
he's like shitty like to like he's he's did a

(29:15):
lot of dickish things running a business, but he wasn't
like irresponsible. He was just like kind of an evil
corporate overlord. And then he dedicated his life to curing malaria.
Which yeah, it's like sure that's something you I guess
that's something I don't know. Yeah, once she gets into
like the I mean all the like the tech company
statements of grandeur of like how their technology will somehow

(29:39):
make the world a more equal place when it always
does the opposite. Um is freaky stuff, especially when it
comes to like uh hashtag girl boss like Elizabeth Toom's
who constantly has to like leverage her own identity as
a way of getting ahead. It's just so sinister and
shitty and bad. When was that line in the middle,
I don't want to make an incriminal change in some

(29:59):
technology like that. Why Elon Musk tried to build that
child coffin during the rescue because he's like, I don't
want to just like give some money to experts so
they can slowly and agonizingly, in a very unglamorous way,
save a dozen lives. I want to build a sexy
thing out of rocket parts, and I want there to
be like, like, you know, the old school newsreel footage
of me emerging the hero of the situation. But no,

(30:21):
sometimes you just need to very slowly and laborously teach
kids how to use breathing devices and agonizingly pull them
through tunnels to save their lives because that's what works.
And sometimes you just have to accept your own limitations
and be like, Okay, I have the money to make
this happen. Let me give money to people and not
then call them. Didn't he call like one of the
rescuers theophile. I'm just like, you're just not a dozen children.

(30:48):
He's like, yeah, he's a pedophile? Is this He's a
seventh grader, a man that, like the U. S. Army
and like the Thai navy divers were all like, oh yeah,
we wouldn't have saved those dozen children without this guy,
fucking pedophile. It's I mean, everyone has very different opinions
of Elon Musk, but there's no there's no doubt that
he is always finding new ways to embarrass himself. You know.

(31:11):
If he's like really an innovator, and I think more
so than anywhere else he has innovated embarrassing yourself as
a as an adult, it's really incredible. It's just stop tweeting, man.
We would all still like you if you'd never use
Twitter log out, don't. Elon Musk like shouldn't be on
podcasts if he was just a guy with a cool
name who owned a rocket company, yeah, car company, I

(31:34):
like him, who like got rich and did something about
his hairline. Great, sure, good for you. Oh yeah, we
need electric cars and rockets. Fine, that's great. Stick to that.
I don't want to look at you, and I don't
want you to, he ruined. I used to I liked
Grimes a lot in college, and he took that we
all liked Grimes a lot in college. He took that
from everybody. It's painful, man, that guy. It's painful. Anyway. Yeah,

(32:00):
probably lost a lot of listeners from the Elon Musk shade,
but the episode on him is coming listen, I mean there.
I have no distinct opinion on him other than he's
an embarrassing person. Didn't call him the PayPal Mafia for
entirely good reasons. That's a really embarrassing name. Yeah, but
like the PayPal mafia, that kind of fits like it

(32:20):
kind of fits like in the literal sense of stealing money.
I look forward to that episode. Yeah, well we'll talk
about that. So um Robertson told Fortune that when Elizabeth
Holmes said this thing about not wanting to do incremental
change was the moment he realized what Elizabeth was. I
realized I could have just as well been looking into
the eyes of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates.

(32:41):
And I do think he was half right there. But
we'll get to that later. He was looking in the
eyes of a shameless capitalist just to Steve Jobs. Steve
Jobs was a type of shameless capitalist. But she, I
think she's the exact same kind of person to Steve Jobs.
I don't think that was all in act. She yeah,
we'll talk about that a little bit. Um. Elizabeth decided
that come Heller high Water, she was going to start
her own damn company. She announced this to her father

(33:03):
during a break from classes. He was not happy to
hear that she was dropping out, and he urged her
to finish her degree. She responded, no, Dad, I'm not
interested in getting a PhD. I want to make money.
In the spring of her sophomore year, she broke up
with her boyfriend, explaining it this was because she was
starting a company, which obviously wouldn't leave her much time
for You know that d that's I actually wrote, dad,

(33:23):
d O j T s d R d J d
R A p j T S d j T s
D is out there somewhere Wilting, Wilting or d Well.
I'm sure he's fine. Yeah, he's probably. I mean, I'm
sure he's a rich kid to fucking Stanford, right, Yeah, you, Yeah,
he's fine. Facebook. Elizabeth did a summer internship at the

(33:46):
Genome Institute of Singapore, which had later proved to be
her last real dalliance with higher education. Her internship coincided
with the Stars epidemic, and she was frustrated by the
various inefficiencies and delays caused by testing patients with syringes
and nasal swabs. She decided, sased on her one and
a half years of college, that she could do better
than these damned infectious disease specialist fighting a massive outbreak
when you came home from Singapore, she spent five sleepless

(34:08):
days at her computer in Houston. Eventually she came up
with a patent application for an arm patch that would
diagnose and treat various medical conditions. Armed with this patent,
she dropped out of school and incorporated a company, Real
Time Cures, which wound up printed on employee paychecks. Is
real Time Curses due to a funk up? Oops, yeah,
well it happens to the best of us. Robertson, by
the way, joined the board and like supported this nineteen

(34:29):
year old in her dream to drop out of college
and create a medical device. This like middle aged professor
understand this culture. I don't know a whole lot about
him other than I think he's kind of a piece
of ship. He comes off that way, and the interviews
with him, Yeah, come on the show, Robertson talked, Yeah,
come on the pod, talk me out of that. He
I don't know, I mean yeah, I mean the very

(34:51):
there's so many like dudes in that in the HBO
documentary who just come off a super defensive and then
I mean the narrative of just like totally one eight
and b like, yeah, what a fucking dummy crazy, I'm like,
you gave her a billion dollars, big coin guy. The
only people in that documentary who come off well are
Tyler Schultz and uh and John Kerry Row even yeah,

(35:13):
even Alex Gidney doesn't come because it's kind of a
shitty documentary, kind of it's not a great document He
is using a lot of stock footage. He's using a
lot of stock footage. I think it's a hit piece
on Errol Morris personally, Well, wait, what are you talking about?
The HBO one orb on. Yeah, there was some amorse
in there, there was well Errol Morris, Yeah, he did
a lot of their ads he endorses. Yeah, I would
love to see an Errol Morris documentary about that experience

(35:36):
and finding out that he was wrong, because he's a
better filmmakers of that. Shade back on Maddis too, Yeah,
on fucking Henry Kissinger. How does Henry Kissinger get out
Scott free? I mean, in fairness, like it's the least
terrible thing Kissinger has been. Like if if if killing
millions of Cambodians didn't stick to kiss and jaff being

(35:56):
on the far and no sport isn't he's unkillable. He
really is unkilled And my how is he? I've like
operated under the assumption for a few months at a
time throughout my adult life, thinking he's dead and then
remembering he's not, never quite getting very upset about it.
He's one of those people that like there's just a
level of like hate but also like respect of just

(36:19):
like you've just you've been around for forever, You've been
bad for song, You've you've been one of the most
influential people in the world for almost a hundred years.
I wonder if he does like that Peter Teel vampire treatment,
and that's why he's going to live forever. I think
it's just he UH did some sort of like dark
magical ritual with all those Cambodians we bombed, and like

(36:40):
their blood extended his life by a couple of decades.
Him so much. He's a pretty bad person. When I
have like three straight weeks to read books about Henry Kissinger,
will do a Henry kissing. Yeah that's a long one. Yeah,
that's that's going to be quite the episode. So the
funding for Real Time Kiers came from Elizabeth Holmess family
connections mom and it may not have been rich anymore,

(37:01):
but they were still, as I said, culturally rich. Elizabeth
was able to meet with Tim Draper, the father of
a childhood friend, and convince him to invest one million dollars.
Is that Mr Big Kentie. I don't know. It might
have been. I think it might have been. Um Draper
was well known among the kind of rich people who
invest in unproven tech ventures. Grandfather Draper's grandpa had founded

(37:22):
the very first Silicon Valley venture capital firm back in
the fifties. Tim had invested in Hotmail early UH and
Elizabeth Holmes you know, with his name on them, UH
quickly attracted other investments quote. In a twenty six page
document she used to recruit investors, she described an adhesive
patch that would draw blood painlessly through the skin using
micro needles. The therapy patch, as the document called it,
would contain a microchip sensing system that would analyze the

(37:44):
blood and make a process control decision about how much
of a drug to deliver. Would also communicate its readings
wirelessly to a patient's doctor. She'd soon changed the company
name to Thearapos Combination of Therapy and Diagnose. In that
Fortune article, Holmes claimed she'd changed the name because too
many people reacted cynic to the word cure and made
her seem like a snake oil salesman. No, Lizzy, I

(38:06):
have a question. Sure at this point in the process,
how involved is Sunny Bowani? Do we know he's not yet?
He didn't come onto the company officially until I think nine.
So they so they met when she was young and
Captain dated Captain Touch. We're not sure. We don't know
exactly when they started dating. They definitely were while he
was working at Tharanos, but he's not there until two
thousand nine. So she she gets this all off the

(38:28):
ground before he comes on board. Now, whether or not
she's like like her brother did say that they would
call pretty regularly in stuff when she was eighteen nine.
Sounds like they were in touch, But I don't know.
I don't know, Like it's one of those things. Part
of why I didn't talk about it more is I
don't know how influential, Like there's a big debate about
like whether or not because they started dating when she
was so much younger than him, he had a big

(38:48):
influence on her practices. But it's also like she was
running this company for like six seven years. She was
very driven. It doesn't want to say that she was
not capable of doing as clear that she was. It's
one like it's tough because I don't want, like number one,
I don't want to like not go after a guy
who influenced a much younger woman to do bad things.
But also I don't want to like take away her

(39:09):
agency and doing shitty things by crediting this. That's like
one of the complicated things around conversations like this, where
it's like it is weird to me that in all
the coverage of this story, like Sonny Bowani's role and
stuff is not more carefully like scrutinized because it's clear
that you know, she set up the company by herself,
but that age difference when you're that young, it's big. Yeah,

(39:32):
like that is not a great person on the older
side of that relationship, and um, you know it's I
don't know, yeah, I'm I'm of the opinion that like,
if you're like a mature adult, I don't know. I
think like, if you're mature adult, you don't eat date teenagers.
You don't if you're twenty five year older. I don't
give a ship with the age differences out in the
world long enough to like know, some fucking ship, But

(39:55):
a fucking nineteen year old date and the thirty seven
year old that's not cool, man, that's weird. That's weird. Yeah,
that's weird. Now. Home slowly built her company up over
the next ten years, gradually refining and revamping her technology.
From the Fortune article quote, as much as she needed money,
she turned down many offers, she says, because so many
investors wanted quick returns. Too often, the question is what's
your exit strategy, she recounts, before you're really understanding what

(40:18):
your entry strategy is. What that's like a classic silicon
Valley thing, state the thing, and then reverse it to
make it seem like you've said something more profound than
it actually is, right, and then turn it into an
Instagram post fun font and post does your blood testing
equipment work? The question is does current blood testing equipment
really work? Well, yeah, they told me I had hepatitis

(40:40):
and she's like, well, she tastes your blood. And now
the technological fixation of Parinos eventually shifted away from those
medicated patches because what she was trying to do with
them actually technically sort of violated the laws of physics.
Homes moved on from that plan into one that was
arguably more ambitious than Nanottainer and the Edison blood testing machine.

(41:03):
While her first innovation had been inspired at least by
real medical ship she really experienced doing actual work in
the field, the Nanottainer and the Edison seemed more inspired
by Steve Jobs in the Apple Company. Elizabeth Holmes wanted
to produce a slick, attractive, technological gizmo that could eventually
wind up in every American home. She had a dizzy
dream of painple eventually being able to test their own
blood via pinprick and get diagnoses from tiny attractive little boxes,

(41:26):
like a curing size little thing. I think that was
the eventual goal. It was never like quite stated, but
if you read between the lines, it's like curing blood
machine is just going to be inside your house. It's
like a cool like you can imagine then like a
sci fi movie where somebody's like, oh no, I got
exposed to the thing. Let's do Steve, Okay, you're you're
still safe. You can see Oscar eyes exactly, we can
see Oscar eyes that yeah, in like the in like

(41:48):
the reboot twenty years from now of the thing exactly,
that's way less good and doesn't have a drunk Kurt Russell,
which why would you even watch? What's the point. What's
the point if Kurt Russell is not drinking. Yeah, don't
reinterpret perfection. Don't reinter perfection. Speaking of perfection, the products
and services that advertise on this show and or program,
tightening my bitcoin tie, tight your bitcoin ties, everybody, and

(42:09):
listen to these ads. We're back. So putting boxes into
houses was the far off goal of Sarapis. Her more
immediate goals were too utterly disrupt and remake the entire
blood testing industry. Well normal veina puncture required large amounts
of blood to be painfully drawn. The nanottainer would only

(42:30):
need a little bit of blood while still being good
for hundreds of tests. Two hundred tests is what they
were hoping to, like, be able to do off like
a tiny little pin prick. I think that that's what
they were saying they could do that. That is what
they were fraudulently claiming they were Ye. Now, the Edison
machine would not be meant for consumer homes, but she
figured she could put them in Walgreens and other similar stores,
and eventually the goal was to get one within every

(42:52):
five miles and then every mile of every single American.
That was like the goal. Now, that kind of plan
was going to require a lot more money than the
first wave of a VC funding. And in two five,
when she was twenty one, Elizabeth used her dad's connection
to set up a meeting with Donald L. Lucas, another
incredibly influential venture capitalist. He agreed to put in more
money and also talked Oracle chairman Larry Ellison into investing. Okay,

(43:13):
now we've got some of the top tier free. Yeah,
we'll talk more about that later. Also in two thousan five,
the company made its best talent acquisition. Holmes hired a
brilliant scientist named Ian Gibbons. Gibbons was a legitimate genius,
an inventor with countless patents I think over two hundred
to his name, who was drawn to Tharonos by the
sheer ambition of its mission. He wanted to change the world,

(43:36):
but it quickly became apparent to him that Tharonosis technology
just did not work as well as it was supposed to.
The Edison machines couldn't actually perform more than a handful
of tests, and then of the results were very accurate.
The samples taken by the nanotainers were just too small
for most blood work. Some of this was what you'd
expect for new technology. The first couple pre market iterations
of the iPhone were garbage, for example, But Elizabeth Holmes

(43:56):
was hell bent on taking Tharonos technology to market. The
science would have to come later. In two thousand nine,
Sonny Balwanni joined Theonis. Sonny was a tech industry guy.
He made like forty million dollars selling a company prior
to Theonis, and he gave them like a thirteen million
dollar loan when he came on board because they were
really hurting for cash. He had no relevant medical or
engineering experience. Elizabeth Holmes made him. Was he willing to

(44:17):
yell at people. He was a great yeller, and that
seems to be most employees at Theroonis will say like
most of his job was yelling at them, although he
got trained in how to do and operate the blood
tests and stuff and was doing that as a like
a business Like that's no, don't do that. I mean,
everything about this business is like I mean, comparing like
people's health to iPhones is just like well, you know,

(44:38):
strikes one through three. There's I mean, there's I hate
to keep bringing it up, but there's stunning like coincidences
between this story and the Lisa Franks story. She also
like made her husband president to scream at people. Yeah,
there's also something in like the whole don't don't treat
everything like the tech industry. If your iPhone doesn't work,
no one dies, No one dies. If your blood testing

(45:01):
equipment doesn't work, you might not get treated for their cancer. Yeah.
In two thousand ten, Safeway in Walgrains both inked deals
to invest in Tharonos and carry its technology in special
blood clinics inside their brick and mortar locations. Safe Way
agreed to spend three and fifty million dollars on renovations
to host these labs, and also pumped thirty million investment
dollars into THEANOS itself. A number of people at Safeway

(45:22):
were hesitant about the deal due to theonos's infamous secrecy,
no one had actually seen much evidence of their technology,
but CEO Steve Bird was convinced the company was legit.
The Birdman, the Birdman, I don't know anything about him,
but his nickname now. According to bad Blood quote, Bird
was over the moon about the partnership. He saw Elizabeth
as a precocious genius and treated her with rare deference.

(45:43):
Normally loath to leave his offense unless it was absolutely necessary,
he made an exception for her, regularly driving across the
bay to Palo Alto. On one occasion, he arrived bearing
a huge white orchid. On another, he brought her a
model of a private jet. Her next one, he predicted,
would be real. The Birdman. I'd take a bag. I
hate the Birdman. We all hate the bird Bag. Tharoness

(46:06):
worked out a similar deal with Walgreens around the same time. Yeah,
he gives you a giver of vagina flower. Come on, birdman, freak.
Neither company was wild about sharing. Elizabeth promised Walgreens would
be the exclusive drug store vendor and safe We would
be the exclusive supermarket location. Both companies would be required
to spend just absurd amounts of money making their locations
fancy enough to host theirinos. Three fifty million dollars in renovations.

(46:28):
For Safe Way alone, Thearoness required that the instore clinics
have luxury carpeting, custom wood cabinets, granite countertops, high end
large screen TVs. They were required by contract to look
quote better than a SPA. What the I hate Silicon Valley,
really hate Silicon I wonder if Elizabeth was like, and
here's what needs to be playing on the TVs, and
it's like the Twilight. It was like like like vaguely

(46:51):
Eastern music, Like yeah, I'm gonna guess she was the
one who picked it too, so just like yeah, like
vague appropriation. SPA called she spent four days in a
pall and based the music on that. Yeah. Now, when
Thoroness sold itself to Walgreens in Safe Way, they did
so by claiming that you know, they were legally authorized
to do blood tests that functioned and stuff that was
not quite the truth, as Bad Blood describes. It had

(47:15):
initially represented that it's blood tests would qualify as WAVED
under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, a nineteen eight law
that governed laboratories. The c l i A. WAVED tests
usually involved simple laboratory procedures that the Food and Drug
Administration had cleared for home use. Now Thoronis was changing
its tune and saying its tests would be offered in
Walgreen stores where laboratory developed tests. It was a big difference.
Laboratory developed tests lay in a gray zone between the

(47:37):
FDA and another federal health regulator, the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services CMS, as a latter agency was known
exercised oversight of clinical laboratories under c l i A well.
The FDA regulated the diagnostic equipment that laboratories bought and
used for their testing, but no one closely regulated tests
that labs fashioned with their own methods. They found a
way to not be regulated for a while. They found yeah,

(47:58):
they found a loophole. Together with never having invented anything
great loophole. Kevin Hunter, a clinical laboratory specialists working with
Walgreens to make sure Aaronosis tech did what they said
it did, became skeptical about this change. Elizabeth and Sonny
claimed that all big laboratory companies used lab developed tests,
which was an obvious live to test them, Hunter suggested

(48:19):
doing a fifty patient study comparing Tharonis blood tests to
once from Stanford Hospital. They should not have been a
big deal if the technology worked, but Elizabeth's immediate response
was no, I don't think we want to do that.
At this time, Hunter warned his bosses at Walgreens that
ship looked shady. He pointed out that when Aaronos had
drawn the blood of Walgreens as president of Pharmacy business,
they'd never actually provided him with his test results. Hunter's

(48:40):
boss said, quote, we can't not pursue this. We can't
risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them
in six months and it ends up being real right
fucking business right there, Jesus Christ. Tharoness was scheduled to
open Tharoness Wellness Centers and dozens of Arizona Walgreens in
two thousand and thirteen. As Elizabeth Holmes struggled to keep
anyone at Walgreens from finding out that her ship didn't work.
She decided it was a good time to sue Richard Fuse.

(49:02):
Now Fuse had basically created a patent out of spite
that Elizabeth Holmes hadn't consulted him, her own neighbor before
starting her company. Yeah, he's he's a physician. He's a physician, psychiatrist, inventor.
I think he called his patent like the Theorpis Killer
or something. Was like patenting a way to do the
same thing they were trying to do. Just to be
a dick. He seems like a dick. Yeah. Uh, the

(49:23):
details of the case aren't super interesting, but what's important
is that Fuses lawyers subpoena Theoronis executives involved in proprietary
aspects of the company's technology. This included Ian Gibbons, by
this point had been sidelined into an ancillary role within
the company by Elizabeth due to his nasty habit of
telling her that nothing worked and they really should not
be using the stuff on human beings. I'm going to
quote from a great Vanity Fair article on the fall

(49:44):
of Theoronis by Nick Bilton quote. Gibbons didn't want to testify.
If he told the court that the technology did not work,
he would harm the people he worked with. That he
wasn't honest about the technologies problems. However, consumers could potentially
harm their health, maybe even fatally. Holmes, meanwhile, did not
seem willing to tolerate his resistance. According to his wife,
Ruschelle Gibbons, even though Gibbons had warned that the technology

(50:04):
wasn't ready for the public, Holmes was preparing to open
Parinos wellness centers and dozens of Walgreens across Arizona. Ian
felt like he would lose his job if he told
the truth, Ruschelle told me as she wept one summer
morning in Palo Alto. Ian was a real obstacle for Elizabeth.
He started to be very vocal. They kept him around
to keep him quiet. On May sixteenth, thirteen, Ian Gibbons
received a phone call from Elizabeth Holmes. She told him

(50:25):
that she wanted to meet with him the next day
in her office. He asked his wife if she thought
Holmes was going to fire him. Rochelle said yes. That night,
Ian Gibbons attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills.
He survived, but the pills did tremendous damage to his
sixty nine year old body. One week later, he died
in the hospital. That is like the the one of
the most devastating elements of this entire story, because it

(50:47):
was clearly just like a really brilliant guy who like
couldn't take emotionally like failing at something like this and
being like and it seems like she was really abusive
to him, and like Sonny was too. In the absolutely
sounds like like Elizabeth was like the the like gas lighter,
and then Sonny was the enforcer. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, yeah,
it's fun. It's incredibly sad. Yeah. In two thousand fourteen,

(51:09):
that praiseful Fortune article dropped. On the surface, things looked
great for Paris. On February four, two fourteen, the Partner
Fund bought more than five point six million shares of
Paronos at a price of seventeen dollars a share, bringing
in ninety six million and raising Faronises overall value to
nine billion. Overnight, Elizabeth, owner of more than half the company,
became a multibillionaire. Fortune made a huge deal about homes

(51:30):
being the youngest female self made billionaire in history, which
would have been a hilariously inaccurate term for her even
if her technology worked. That's really one of some of
my favorite apologies surrounding the story are the guy is
the guy who wrote the Fortune article, who's like almost crying.
He's like, I did it check anything. It's like, well,
he didn't check things, but he checked things with the

(51:50):
people Paronos put forward for him to check, and like
you see with John careyrew what a good journalist does
when people said stuff like that, you know, and be
like ask my mom, Like no, Yeah. That was a
funny apology that the article that Fortune guy wrote really
hammered in the idea that Elizabeth was a brilliant inventor. Today,

(52:11):
Holmes is a co inventor on eighty two US and
a hundred and eighty nine foreign patent applications, of which
eighteen in the US and sixty six A brought up
and granted. Those are an addition to a hundred and
eighty six applications THEANOIS has filed worldwide that don't list
Holmes is an inventor, of which eighteen have already been granted. Now,
dr fuse alleges that this was bullshit, and this is
one of the things I really do believe him on.
He says that Holmes basically used legal trickery to take

(52:31):
partial credit for the work of Dr Ian Gibbons. A
dead man. Sounds correct, even though it was funded or
Leon Thranis used a patent writer rather than a law
firm to draft its patents. The patent writers not have
a fiduciary duty to study prior art, so they just
put her name on the patents, including ones that over
lapped with what Gibbons had invented at a prior company.
So that's fucking despicable. Stealing the work of a dead man.

(52:51):
Pretty messed up. The only dead man who could have
like made your stuff work. Yeah, pretty gross. I like
to end by talking about Elizabeth Homes his reaction to
the death of Ian Gibbons. When his widow called Homes
his office to tell her what had happened, Elizabeth's secretary,
being a human person, was horrified and offered her seemingly
legitimate condolences. She promised to notify Homes at once. Elizabeth

(53:12):
never reached out to Russelle. Instead, she had someone else
called a new widow and the man she returned anytharanous
property Givens had kept at his home. She also threatened
to sue her if she talked to anyone she is.
I mean, it's it's interesting hearing how many things about
her do line up with her clearly modeling herself after
Steve Jobs and just being a relentless asshole. Um, because

(53:35):
Steve Jobs would never have reached out to a dead
coworkers family like he was a tremendous asshole, was a huge.
He didn't shower for weeks at a time and just
made everyone deal with it openly hostile to everyone around him.
And it's and and you know his products, you know
it was dollars from the wa was her the watch

(53:59):
when she killed him. Waz dated Kathy Griffin for a second,
some great picks of them. I'm very PROA was getting
it in. I'm sure he's horrible too, but he knows
he made like three million dollars and then he instantly
blew it all hosting a series of giant concerts. I
didn't know that just and then now he just was

(54:19):
just a guy. Everyone should look up the Steve Wozniya,
Kathy Griffin picks from when they were a couple. They
seem so happy. Yeah, but but it's like it's crazy that, like,
you know, she so clearly modeled herself after they're cute.
I bet he's really nice. I've never heard a bad
thing about the laws. I I hope, I hope he's
a good I mean, if there's one good person, a miracle. Yeah,

(54:44):
but I don't know. It's it's weird the way that
she you know, you can't funk with people's health. Number one,
I'm glad no one died because of Sarah Knows. I
do think that the way that like girl bosses versus
boy bosses are treated when they are like people really
relish and and the takedown of woman in business because

(55:06):
even and she deserves it, but it serves like people
relish it in a way that makes me uncomfortable. One
of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read, because I
covered Steve Joe when the first journalism job I had
was in tech journalism. It was while Jobs was still
alive and still running Apple, and so like, you know,
you would have to write something about him and his
company every like week or two because it was fucking Apple.
And this is like when Apple was, you know, everything

(55:27):
was blowing up there. UM. And I read a book
about the founding of the company Um, and one of
the stories in it is that when he and was
before they founded Apple, like they got contracted with a
tari uh to like make a product, and of course
Jobs got them the contract and Wasn'ia did all the
actual work and then Jobs they're supposed to split it

(55:49):
fifty fifty, but Jobs stole five thousand dollars from from
Wosnia acts and comback and Wasnia found out about it
years later. It was because like an interviewer asked him
about it, and he was like in tears about it
because he had known it and he just like thought
this guy was his friend, and he's like he never
gave a shit about you. He just knew you were
a genius? Was that you naive? Little sweetie pie? Know?
I know it's a heartbreaker. May there never be a

(56:11):
behind the bastards about was? I don't know that I
can emotionally take writing that if there is anything terrible
about it. I can never in good conscience trust a
man and to be good, but I hope that he
ends up being good. I can occasionally trust like an
engineer and a scientist, although they also make our terrors,
but it could you could occasionally like those guys, like

(56:32):
the guy like it's the it's the fucking it's the
people who are running the companies, like there's some decent
couple one or two. Shirley, what do you what do
you think about the Elizabeth Holmes movie being made? I
think it's probably gonna be gross, right, Yeah, it's probably
gonna be really gross. I think I think miss me
with it. I don't. I don't want it. Yeah, I

(56:53):
don't want it. I can't imagine it being tasteful. Um,
I don't need Jennifer Lawrence to play Elizabeth Holmes. I
don't need that. What I do what I need that.
I would like an honest movie about Steve Jobs where
it because he's he was a grifter. He want another
movie about I want an actual movie about what he
We got the that's the Ashton Cutcher one, Robert. I
love the Ashton Kutcher one. I got blackout drunk on

(57:14):
my twenty first birthday and Son theaters. That sounds awful. Actually.
I love the part where he walked through the fields
and he's like, I have an idea for computers. I
love it, you play it's he's he's a He's a grifter.
He's a horrible he was always a grifter. He was
a grifter who did the same thing Elizabeth did. Is
he like had these demands for a product that nobody

(57:36):
could build, and he just stuck to his demands for
the product until they could. And he got lucky that
they got it right. And it was lucky that it
was a good idea, because if it wasn't a good idea,
he still would have stuck to it. With Holmes had
a good idea too. They both like, you can't be
a good grifter unless you understand what people want. And
that's why he jobs was a great person to make
certain decisions about like what do we want a smart phone?

(57:56):
Because people have tried smartphones. He was the first part
he was this like his one legitimate, brilliant thing was
understanding what people wanted a device they were always going
to have on them, right, Like that was his one
real innovation because like sucking everything at the first apple
was was wasniak that was any good? Right? Well, it
sounds like the I mean, the mistake is truly just
like putting people's lives at risk. Yeah, because you could

(58:17):
funk up the iPhone a million times and no one
would die exactly. And we all want what Elizabeth Holmes
was selling. We all want like the thing that just
takes a tiny drop of blood and they can do
all these tests. Sounds great, it sounds great, but it
just isn't possible. You know how to do it yet
you know eventually they'll probably figure it out. Well, that's
the episode. We've got a part two coming up on
Thursday where we'll get to the rest of this sad story.

(58:39):
But Loftissue want to plug some plugables up in the
p zone as we call it here, the zone zone
and the zone. I kind of hate it, but I
like it. Okay, pop an air horn in there and okay. Uh.
You can listen to the Bechdel Cast every week on Thursdays,
and that's the podcast host with Caitlin Torante where we

(59:01):
talk about women in movies. I'm doing a show called
Boss Home is Girl m touring across the country later
in the summer. You can go on my website or
my Twitter at Jamie Lofta's help to find out more
about that. Now, now that everyone knows who Elizabeth Holmes is.

(59:22):
You know, you listen to make some tweaks. You could
hear Jamie Loftus be Elizabeth Holmes in Cleveland. They're not
in Cleveland. Not well that you can't. If you're in Cleveland,
will have to funk off. No, And I'm not playing.
I'm playing like a fictionalized character. There's a lot pulled
from her. But if you live in New York, Philadelphia, Boston,

(59:44):
l A, or Chicago, you'll see it. Well, for some reason,
you live in one of those non Cleveland studies. Check
out Jamie Loftus is Boston Home was Girl. You can
find me on Twitter at I right, Okay. You can
buy T shirts at public dot com Behind the Bastards
we have shirts. You can put them on your body,
hide your nakedness, cover up your bits. All of those
things are options with T Public. Your bits will be

(01:00:08):
package uh. Sex positive or sex negative both. Yeah, we're
positive of the concept of sex. Negative about people having yeah,
just negative about joy if it's like joyless sex. I
have another podcast called it Could Happen Here. It's horribifying
and sad. Listen to it. Ye hard sell every Wednesday

(01:00:32):
Sophie's saying every Wednesday, I love about you.