What it’s like when Elizabeth Holmes decides to destroy your life

Elizabeth Holmes is the unlikely star of the year’s most talked-about movie, You Can See Everything. The Holmes we meet onscreen is enigmatic, enough so that some viewers have even begun to root for her. To Tyler Shultz, though, she’s still his former boss who tried to take apart his life and his family. What it was like working at Theranos, and what it’s been like watching the internet react to the new Elizabeth Holmes. Bad Blood https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549478/bad-blood-by-john-carreyrou/ by John Carreyrou Alex Gibney’s documentary The Inventor http://hbomax.com/movie/1d7c48f8-8064-46d7-a3b8-bb7b91fc2056 Sign up to become an Incognito Mode member! https://searchengine.supercast.com/#subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01PJ Vogt?

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• 1:48PJ Vogt?

  Something weird is going on with Elizabeth Holmes. A month ago, I thought she was just one of the few topics everyone agreed on. A fraudster found guilty in court, exposed by years of extremely dogged reporting. Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos were a brand like Enron or Bernie Madoff, where nobody in 2026 was taking the other side. Elizabeth Holmes, a rare, settled topic. But then this new documentary comes out. You can see everything, from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheimer. The movie is phenomenal and funny and surprising. But also, afterwards, online, for the first time, I've been starting to see this weird Elizabeth Holmes reconsideration.

• 2:31PJ Vogt?

  People, for the first time in years, defending her, including some people I know. This is a person, Elizabeth Holmes, who raised about $1 billion by lying to investors about her company's ability to provide accurate medical tests. A very consequential version of fraud. Someone who used her enormous war chest to hire ruthless lawyers to target people who crossed her. One of her employees died by suicide. His widow blames Theranos. For people who had a real appetite for the story back when it was first reported, there isn't Elizabeth Holmes they already feel they know. But the movie is now introducing a whole new cohort of people to its version of Elizabeth Holmes.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  There are a lot of people where this is their first and only interaction that they have with Elizabeth and Theranos. So out of my own curiosity, before we started recording, I just went on Google Trends to see how her fame has increased over time. And now it is at an all-time high.

• 3:29PJ Vogt?

  This is Tyler Schultz, a person who worked at Theranos and narrowly survived being targeted by Elizabeth Holmes. Someone who has found out what it's like when she brings the full weight of her attention on a person. Tyler believes that way more people are paying attention to Elizabeth Holmes now than there were even when the original reporting about her story came out. Which means, in a world where a lot of people want to see the new movie without spoilers, a lot of people are walking into this film not knowing the full Theranos backstory.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Google searches are way higher now than they were when she launched Theranos and when she was in the Wall Street Journal, than when there were documentaries about her, than when there was a Hulu show about her. And it just keeps going up. But if you go back to when the Wall Street Journal started publishing, which is, in my opinion, where most of the real information is, that's now down to like a 5 out of 100.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  So it's like, what people are seeing now is what people think of her. They're not paying attention to the actual investigative journalism that happened in 2016, 2015.

• 4:35PJ Vogt?

  How do you feel about that?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Well, it scares me, right? Because my initial reaction when I first saw the movie was like, that was a great film. As long as Nathan Fielder correctly estimated that his audience wouldn't use this as the sole indicator of whether Elizabeth was guilty or not, or had lied or not, that people would look at it as a piece of art and not necessarily as a source of truth. But just from what I've been reading on Twitter or X, it seems like there are a lot of people who are pretty much looking at this film as their one source of truth. And she's getting a lot of benefit of the doubt right now. And I also have to say that for 10 years,

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I don't think I'd ever heard anyone say a negative thing about me being a whistleblower until the last like four days.

• 5:27PJ Vogt?

  Oh, really?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Really.

• 5:29PJ Vogt?

  What are they saying?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  I mean, they're just like, I mean, I don't take it personally. You know, it's either, it's just mean things that people say on Twitter. It's the stuff like, oh, you became a whistleblower for the clout. You couldn't get your own job. And I, pardon me, wanted to comment like, you don't know what you're talking about.

• 5:47PJ Vogt?

  I saw the tweets, which were worse than I expected. Somebody called him a homophobic slur. The CEO of an actual health startup said Elizabeth Holmes should sue him for defamation.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  But, you know, I'm just making the comment that I had not seen like a single thing like that until this film came out.

• 6:04PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, I don't hear you saying woe is me. I hear you saying the fact that you now have online critics who believe that it was bad, that you blew the whistle on one of the most generationally important stories of medical fraud. That is a thing you track and notice more as a sign of that than anything else.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:23PJ Vogt?

  We're going to talk more in the second half of this episode about You Can See Everything, both the film and Tyler's questions for the filmmakers. But first, I thought it'd just be valuable for everyone who either thinks they knew that Theranos story, because they followed the reporting at the time, or for people who really just don't know anything. Maybe they saw some of the Hulu TV show. I think this is just a story where people would benefit from a refresher. And Tyler's story is just very important to understanding Theranos. Because the ways that the company affected him were deep and personal, and they permanently changed his actual family. Most crucially, his relationship with his grandfather, George Schultz. So George Schultz was, for most of his life, best known as a deeply celebrated American statesman.

• 7:08PJ Vogt?

  He was Secretary of Treasury in the 1970s. He helped steer the country off the gold standard. He was Secretary of State in the 1980s, when he helped negotiate the end of the Cold War. This is what Tyler's grandfather was known for. But towards the end of his life, unfortunately, he'd met Elizabeth Holmes. And he was deeply impressed by this young woman, who he saw as trying to do the thing he cared about, use science to help people. For Elizabeth Holmes, this relationship with an elder statesman proved to be very valuable. Her association with him gave her credibility and access to people with power. Theranos, as a scam, worked in part because the people who invested saw that other smart people with good reputations had already gone in,

• 7:53PJ Vogt?

  and that made them feel safe. And George Schultz was one of the big nodes in that network. George Schultz sat on Theranos's board. He completely believed in what Elizabeth was doing, so much so that when Tyler was in college, his grandfather told him he had to meet this extraordinary founder who'd recently entered his life.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  So the first time I met Elizabeth Holmes, I was a junior at Stanford University. And my grandfather happened to live and work on campus at the time. And he gave me a phone call. And he just said, you know, I'm having this brilliant woman come over to my house to have a discussion. And I think you would learn a lot if you came over and listened in. So I didn't have a whole lot of context, but I hopped on my bike, went to his house, and that's where I met Elizabeth for the first time. She was wearing her all-black outfit with the black turtleneck. I heard her very deep, monotone, hypnotic voice, saw those unblinking, piercing blue eyes. And she told us her story and her vision for Theranos for the first time. And what she told us was that she had dropped out of Stanford when she was 19 years old, invented this revolutionary blood testing technology

• 8:54Speaker 02

  in her uncle's basement that was capable of testing for anything a central laboratory could test for, but with just a single drop of blood. And you could do these tests essentially anywhere where you had access to electricity. So these tests could be done in battlefields and helicopters and operating rooms, patients' homes, Walgreens, Safeways, on and on. So I just was completely captivated by Elizabeth and this vision. And I just knew that it was something that I wanted to be a part of.

• 9:22PJ Vogt?

  And when you describe this person who's like striking and charismatic, and like, what was, what was the feeling of being around her?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  I mean, she just, um, people would describe Steve Jobs as having this reality distortion field, and she absolutely had that. Like, when you were around her, it was just like, I don't know, the world felt different. And she just made you feel like you were part of something that was bigger than yourself, that you were so important and could contribute to this huge vision that she had laid out for you. Like, when I first joined, it was actually right when we had moved into the old Facebook building. And so she was giving employees a tour of the building, and people would not leave her side. Like, at the end of the tour, she was like, it's all, okay, tour's done. And like, nobody would leave. It was just like, after hours, everyone just wanted to be around her.

• 10:11PJ Vogt?

  Including Tyler. He thought in Elizabeth, he'd found the person you look for as a young adult, the grown-up mentor who just tells you what to do with your life. And when they met, Elizabeth really did fit that role. The whole reason he was working at Theranos at all was because of Elizabeth's guidance. As a student, he'd initially been a mechanical engineering major. Elizabeth advised him to switch to biology, which he did, a decision both of them would come to deeply regret. But that would be later.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  My first job out of college was at Theranos, and I was so excited to join. Like, she was the female Steve Jobs. Theranos was the apple of healthcare. I literally thought that I would work there for my entire career. Like, it felt like the perfect place for someone like me.

• 10:56PJ Vogt?

  What was the work culture like? Like, before you realized something was wrong, what was it like, just like a day at work at our company?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the first thing that you realize about Theranos is just how secretive the company is. Like, we were given very overbearing NDAs to sign. I was given a list of words to not use when describing my job to people. It was like, you could not say anything. It was as if you were working at the CIA. Like, they told you not to tell your spouse about what your job was. They told you not to talk to colleagues about what your job was. Every room had a locked door, even within the locked rooms, there would be barricades sometimes that you weren't supposed to look behind. And so when I first joined, I was working in a research lab where we were developing antibodies that would

• 11:42Speaker 02

  be used in the tests. But not a single person that I worked with had ever seen the product, the product that we just launched.

• 11:52PJ Vogt?

  The product Tyler's referring to here was the device that Theranos called the Edison. The Edison was marketed as something almost magical, a little black box that could take just a few drops of blood from a finger stick and run hundreds of different tests, quickly and accurately. And Tyler showed up right as Theranos was supposedly using this black box on real customers at its first Walgreens location. According to Theranos, the device could create fast, cheap lab tests with just those few drops of blood, drops pricked from your finger, collected in a tiny tube that Theranos called the Nanotainer. There's a famous image of Elizabeth that you see over and over in the film. She's in a black turtleneck, one of those miracle Nanotainers held between two of her fingers.

• 12:36PJ Vogt?

  This was the marketing spiel. But customers never saw those Nanotainers go into the Theranos device. And even after launch back at Theranos HQ, most employees were not allowed to see the device in action. Why not?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  So at the time, Elizabeth had these, you know, narratives that there are Chinese spies in Silicon Valley that were trying to steal her technology, that Quest and Lab Core were trying to steal her technology. Part of their advantage was to stay very secretive about what they were doing to keep competitors behind and to keep Chinese knockoffs behind.

• 13:11PJ Vogt?

  But that's not like a crazy thing. I mean, it's the kind of conversation that right now is happening for people who work at the AI labs. Like, it's not a...

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:18PJ Vogt?

  There's a totally other version of reality where this technology turned out to be real, where you're like, yeah, I worked at a company that was secretive for reasonable reasons while the product was in development.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. That, that is why everyone seemed to accept it. It is reasonable enough to believe it.

• 13:36PJ Vogt?

  And so when did you start to understand that something was up?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  I mean, the red flags started popping up literally on day one, before I even saw the product, because even though we just launched the product, um, I basically learned on my first day that we were not using the product at all. So we had just launched the product, but we had zero tests that had been validated on the Theranos platform. So if patients went in to Walgreens, first of all, they would not get a finger prick, they would get a needle in the arm. And then, none of those tests would be run on Theranos equipment. We would contract with other labs, and we would send the blood out to like UCSF, or we would test it on third-party equipment from within Theranos, or we would dilute the blood and run it on the third-party equipment. And so, right off the bat, it was this weird thing, like, okay, we just launched the product, but we really launched the illusion of a

• 14:23Speaker 02

  product, because we didn't, we weren't using Theranos' device at all. So at the end of my first week, we got an email from Sunny that basically said, stop all of your research experiments, you're all being moved to validation.

• 14:36PJ Vogt?

  Sunny there is Sunny Balwani, another famous character in the story, president and COO of Theranos. And secretly, another secret at this very secretive company, Sunny was in a romantic relationship with Elizabeth. The reason it was a big deal that Tyler was being told to stop his research experiments and move to validation, the research phase is where you figure out how to make a medical device work. Validation is a step where, once the device is working, you prove to the outside world that it functions correctly. And Tyler and his colleagues, again, had moved into Theranos' validation labs, which held the device he'd been so curious to see.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  And it's funny, because Elizabeth and Sunny really, like, loved their, their naming conventions of things. And the lab that had all of the Theranos devices was literally named Normandy. So we got this email on, I think it was like Friday morning, that basically said, you are all being sent down to the beaches of Normandy. You are all being sent to the front lines of the company. And most of my lab mates were not happy with this, because we just saw how much burnout there was in that lab. So many people had quit. Teams were expected to work through the night and coordinate kind of amongst themselves who would be working night shifts. And so, my teammates were very unhappy with this news. But I was super excited, because it meant that I actually would get to go

• 16:01Speaker 02

  work with the Theranos device. I would get to see the thing that I had heard so much about. I was so excited.

• 16:06PJ Vogt?

  And how old are you at the time?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  I was 22.

• 16:11PJ Vogt?

  And so what happens when you get a chance to finally see the device?

• 16:16Speaker 02

  So as part of our onboarding into this validation lab, we get to see the device, and we get to see what they called the open reader, which was the device that didn't have the shell on it, so you could see exactly what was inside and exactly what it was doing. And since we were moved over together, um, the first time that I was seeing this was the first time that my manager was seeing this. And she had worked there for several years. She has a PhD and postdoc in molecular biology. And I so vividly remember this moment. We were watching the demonstration, and she turned to the woman who was running the demo, and she just said, "Do you think this is cool?" And the woman shrugged her shoulders and said, "I'll let you decide for yourself," and walked away. And in that moment, I realized

• 16:59Speaker 02

  that there was an open secret at this company, that the technology did not exist. Because what we saw was an eight-channel pipette on a robotic arm. It was not a standalone platform. It could only test for one thing at a time, could only run one type of test, and it was poorly engineered, so it couldn't even run that one test very well. But it relied on other equipment. There were like no centrifuges in it. The liquid handling inside was not accurate enough to do the initial dilution step out of the Nanotainer. So first, you know, you would manually put the Nanotainer into a centrifuge, spin it, manually pipette the serum out of the Nanotainer, pipette it into a different Nanotainer, put the Nanotainer

• 17:41Speaker 02

  into a T-can pipetting robot. The pipetting robot would then take out like the few microliters out of the Nanotainer, and put it into the Theranos cartridge where it would do the initial dilution step. And then you would take the Theranos cartridge and put it into the Theranos product that could only run one test. And so, you're sitting here thinking like, how is this ever gonna run hundreds of things from a single drop of blood? And how are we gonna put this in medevac helicopters? Like, we have this pipetting robot that has to go up there with it. Like, that just didn't make any sense. But I did think that I had to be missing something. Like, that was my initial reaction, was like, there must be something else. Like, this is a Band-Aid.

• 18:21PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  There must be something else. There's a locked door somewhere that me and none of my colleagues get to see that has the real technology. Like, I was holding out hope. And just the more, the longer I was there, we would only hear problems about the future version of the device, and it just seemed like it was never gonna come. And that is the device that Elizabeth put on the table in the documentary.

• 18:47PJ Vogt?

  So if you've seen the film, there's this very key scene where Elizabeth Holmes actually breaks out what she says is the Theranos device. Like, she pulls it out of storage and presents it on her kitchen table. She's showing it to Nathan Fielder, who then asks Elizabeth to defend public statements she's made about her device, overpromising what it could do. This is from a clip from the movie I saw floating online.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  So you say there, the fact that we have a single device that can perform any test is a big deal. But from what I know, you couldn't do every test on a single device. That's the whole problem. That's why you're going to prison, right?

• 19:25Speaker 04

  No, that was our invention. And in the case I talked about, the fact that we had invented a device that could do any test, our technologies...

• 19:38PJ Vogt?

  Elizabeth goes on to explain to a visibly confused Nathan that the device on the table can run all these tests, someday, in the future, in theory, once the chemistry to perform all these tests exists.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  What you're referring to is a future-based, the device can, is, is capable of running any, it's the word, I guess, can.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  What I'm talking about here is what we invented.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  What you invented?

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  So when you said the device can run any test, what you meant was the device is capable of running any test?

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Well, what I'm talking about here is that the device is capable of running any test. Yeah.

• 20:29PJ Vogt?

  As if you were watching the movie, you're trying to figure out if Elizabeth believes what she's saying. Like, is she neurodivergent in a highly specific way where she doesn't understand how most people use words? Or is she just being sneaky? But Tyler, watching the movie, was tearing his hair out because he knew 100% that she was lying in the scene about the device itself.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  So the device that she puts on the table in the film is not the device that we actually used. The device she put on the table was the future version that was never completed and was never used on patients. And so that is a huge distinction in my mind because that is not the reason she went to prison. She went to prison because we launched a product that did not work, that could not do the things that she said it was doing.

• 21:15PJ Vogt?

  So just to make sure I understand, it's like when you got into the room where you were seeing behind the curtain what the device actually was, it was both that the device couldn't do what the company was currently claiming, but also what they were showing you never could have gotten there.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Never.

• 21:29PJ Vogt?

  And then when you sat down and watched the documentary and she like reveals the prototype to Nathan Fielder, that device also couldn't do what she said it could do? But she could point to that device and say, one day it might be able to. But that wasn't even the device that the company was using when you were there.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Right, that was never used. So I'm trying my best to articulate this because my expertise is not in these semantic arguments like Nathan and Elizabeth. But she says like, we built the device that can test anything. She makes it sound like the device that can test anything had been built. It had not been built. So it was really, the true correct statement is, we were working on a device that theoretically could have done anything. That, to me, is the accurate description of what she's saying. The thing that we did build could not do those things. And worse, it was hurting people. We were knowingly giving people incorrect medical information with a device that could

• 22:29Speaker 02

  only test for one thing at a time and could not test for that one thing accurately. So if she had gone to her investors and said, we are working on building a device that could theoretically one day test for anything, and she raised $900 million with that, that would have been fine. That's not the reason she went to prison. She went to prison because she told them that they had built this thing and that every single test they run was done on a finger prick, that every single test they run was done on a Theranos product, that no test was run on third-party equipment. That was the interpretation that everybody had about what Elizabeth told them. And even when Elizabeth goes and relitigates the things like the exact words she said,

• 23:09Speaker 02

  her argument doesn't hold because that thing on that kitchen table had not been built. And she makes the audience think they had completed it. And Nathan even says like, well, you were running 12 things. And she allows Nathan and allows the audience to believe that they were using the device that could theoretically do anything and they had completed the chemistries for 12 out of the hundreds or thousands or whatever. But even that is not true.

• 23:42PJ Vogt?

  The question that the movie You Can See Everything is really asking over and over again is, is Elizabeth Holmes a liar or is something else going on? Self-deception, mental illness, trauma? In the world of the movie, that is an extremely interesting question, very entertainingly explored. But Tyler's exaggeration with how we are all reacting to the movie comes down to this. Elizabeth Holmes's character is a settled question. There was a trial. There was good reporting. The story dug up by all of that is mostly off-screen and you can see everything. But the Elizabeth you meet in court transcripts or in the reporting from that time, it's not only that it's clear that she's a liar, it's also clear that her power doesn't just

• 24:27PJ Vogt?

  come from that. Lots of people figured out early on that Theranos was a fraud. Elizabeth's hold on power relied on how mercilessly she treated those people, how effectively she and her henchmen scared people who could have spoken up, sometimes breaking one person as an example to others. Most people stayed quiet. Tyler ultimately did not. And he paid for it. In some ways, I think he's still paying for it. After the break, what actually happened back at Theranos? When Tyler tried directly confronting Elizabeth Holmes.

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• 27:13PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 27:19PJ Vogt?

  So in our story, it's 2014. Theranos has raised about half a billion dollars at a $9 billion valuation. Theranos is actively testing real customers at select Walgreens in America. People are getting false positives. People are getting false negatives. This is the year Elizabeth Holmes will begin to become a celebrity. Profiles in Wired and The New Yorker, she'll make the cover of Fortune. Tyler Schultz is a junior employee, remember, early twenties. He had started at Theranos the year before. He would not last through this year. He's employed by a CEO his grandfather thinks wants to make the world a better place. But Tyler has been working in the so-called Normandy lab where patient samples are being processed. And what he's seeing is making him very doubtful.

• 28:04PJ Vogt?

  What was a point like, when do you go from this looks funky to something's wrong and I'm going to do something about it? What happens back then to make that turn happen for you?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  So there's a few things that happened. One is when we got our certification renewed to be a central laboratory and test real patients, we locked the door to Normandy so the regulators never saw Theranos product. And so to me, it was obvious that we were intentionally hiding things from regulators.

• 28:34PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Then we cheated on something called proficiency testing, which is another form of regulation. It's kind of like a safety audit. But then for me, the thing that really broke the camel's back was when we validated a test for syphilis and we tested the known positives and only diagnosed 65% of them correctly. And then we essentially deleted that data and tried again, which is something we did literally every day. We, my manager started calling this the delete and repeat methodology, you know, like tongue in cheek. She was not happy about it, but it was just like what we had to do. If it didn't match what you wanted it to look like, you would delete the data and you replace it with new data. So we did that for syphilis. And the second time, we got 80% of those samples correct.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Then we tested samples from ourselves and from our colleagues. And it was like 25% of us tested positive for syphilis. So this thing was telling people who presumably did not have syphilis that they did have syphilis. It was saying that samples that we knew had syphilis did not have syphilis. And we sent all this data to the statistics team and they crunched the numbers, produced a validation report and the medical director signed off on it, who's a licensed MD, saying that this was

• 29:45PJ Vogt?

  Same.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, saying that this is safe and effective and we're going to start testing real patients for syphilis.

• 29:50PJ Vogt?

  And so like, I think, sorry, it's just like, it's so crazy because it's like, it's syphilis. Like, I think sometimes, I have also wondered, there's almost like this cultural exhaustion. Anything that people get sufficiently outraged about, people will just be tired of being outraged about it. And there will be this marginal side market and, ah, maybe we like this scoundrel. You know, like Martin Shkreli like has a little afterlife on Twitter, like whatever. And I think sometimes, maybe some of that is also about the idea that most Americans are not investors. Most Americans have jobs and it's the idea that someone may have ripped off investors. I don't think that matters to people, or there's lots of people who it doesn't matter to.

• 30:35PJ Vogt?

  But it's syphilis. It's like, if you went to get tested and you found out, and you had to call every single one of your exes to explain that you were positive for syphilis, that would be really damaging to your life.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  And then you didn't have it. Yeah.

• 30:47PJ Vogt?

  Or you did have it and you got a, like, that's a crazy risk to take with other people's lives.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Oh, totally. And, and that's why I felt like this is super serious, like, and, and not to say the other things we were testing weren't serious, like we were testing for like HIV, right? Like that, I'm not saying HIV was very serious. I just didn't work as directly with the HIV test. I work very directly with the syphilis test. Like, I understood that test. And so when we got that news in our, in the lab, I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. Like, I, I felt like I might throw up because I started having the feeling like something that I very much directly contributed to, without a doubt, is going to hurt somebody. Like, this test, I know, does not work. And that's when I felt like I had to start speaking up.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  And, and again, like, I, I obviously was hoping, like, there is like the real technology hidden behind some door somewhere. But the thing that I ended up speaking up about was, we are actively hurting people with the thing we're using and it doesn't matter if there is some amazing technology behind some locked door somewhere that I don't get to see.

• 32:00PJ Vogt?

  Tyler imagined that somewhere outside of the closed world of Theranos, their bad tests were already hurting real people. And his imagination was correct. In reporter John Kerry's book, Bad Blood, he writes about patients whose lives were being affected. A teenage girl was mistakenly told she was at risk of a heart attack. Other patients were wrongly rushed to emergency rooms. One doctor told Kerry Root she wrote to Theranos to complain, but the company never acknowledged her letter. One of the harder months of my life was spent waiting for a consequential genetic test about a neurodegenerative disease. I can't imagine waiting a month for some hard test and then just getting a fake result. But inside Theranos, some people justified all this as technology that was still being perfected.

• 32:45PJ Vogt?

  Silicon Valley fake it till you make it behavior. I told Tyler that it actually reminded me of this famous story about Steve Jobs and the first iPhone. Like Steve Jobs, when he released the first iPhone very famously, like, it kind of didn't work, but he kind of jerry-rigged it for the presentation. And if a bunch of people bought iPhones that, that year, that accessed the internet more slowly than they'd been led to believe, it doesn't really matter. But you were understanding that what was happening right then meant that people were getting fake medical diagnoses and that that would just hurt people in the real world.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Right. And, and to continue off of your Steve Jobs analogy, or, or just comparing it to software in general. When a software product fails, the user sees that it failed. Like, oh, my internet is not connecting right now. This is not working. It doesn't, it's not like Apple has like backup fake information statically held on iPhone that it starts throwing at you so that you think that it worked, when it didn't.

• 33:40PJ Vogt?

  Like fake texts from your mom saying she loves you.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Exactly. But with a medical diagnostic test, the user has no idea if the result they got is accurate or not. There, there's no way that the user has the ability to hold the company accountable.

• 33:55PJ Vogt?

  And so what happens to you when you start trying to ring alarm bells?

• 34:01Speaker 02

  So I ended up going directly to Elizabeth because we had seen instances where people had spoken up and they were immediately fired. And sometimes, there was one instance where after the employees were fired, Theranos sued those employees. So people were terrified and nobody wanted to speak up. Everyone was just quitting without raising concerns. But I felt like, by that point in time, my grandfather was on the board. So I thought, I was in a very unique position at this company where I could go have an honest conversation with Elizabeth and she could not fire me on the spot.

• 34:34PJ Vogt?

  Hmm.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  I saw her as my mentor, as my friend. She had come to like my family Christmas celebrations and, and birthday parties and Thanksgivings and things like that. So she, it was like she was becoming part of my family. So she was unfortunately someone that I put a lot of trust in. And I wanted Theranos to succeed desperately. So I wanted to go have a direct conversation with Elizabeth where I didn't go in there and say, you know, this isn't a fraud, this is never going to work. I very cautiously addressed two points that I thought would be a good starting point to have a larger discussion. One, I said, I've heard you say, and it says on our website, that our coefficient of variation is less than 10%.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  But I am the employee that runs the experiment to calculate that number and I have never seen a test come back less than 10%.

• 35:24PJ Vogt?

  And what's a, what's a coefficient of variation?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  A coefficient of variation is a way of, like, normalizing standard deviation. So for our syphilis test, I saw that in the data that I produced, that our coefficient of variation at our cutoff level was 43%, which means your standard deviation was 43% of your expected value.

• 35:44PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so your error bars are way, way, way outside of okay.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Yes, the error bars are huge, 43%. The error bars are 43% of your value.

• 35:54PJ Vogt?

  At that point, you could just be asking people if it seemed like you had syphilis, rather than getting a syphilis test.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so when you put these things together, like, the error bars are huge. We're telling negative samples that they're positive, positive samples that they're negative. The conclusion should be, you know, this isn't working.

• 36:10PJ Vogt?

  So that's point one. What was point two to her?

• 36:12Speaker 02

  So with point one, when I brought up point one, she said like, oh, that doesn't sound right. Let's check the website together. So first of all, the thing she's concerned about is not that our CVs are higher than 10%. It's that, she's, she's like, no, that's not what the website says, right?

• 36:26PJ Vogt?

  Right. It's, she's, she's worrying about it as a marketing problem.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Right. So I, she's like, come check it out with me. So I walked around to her side of the desk and I was like sitting, you know, shoulder to shoulder with her. And she types in Theranos.com into her computer. And on the landing page, in bold font, it says CV less than 10%.

• 36:46PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  And smaller writing underneath, it says vitamin D. So she goes, oh, that's only meant to apply to vitamin D. That's not meant to be indicative of our assay performance as a whole.

• 36:56PJ Vogt?

  But that's crazy. That's like used car salesmen techniques, like Lionel Huts from The Simpsons. Like, that's totally nuts.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  It is. It is totally nuts. That alone is totally nuts. And I'll, I'll continue on that thread later. But the second point that I brought up was that there were calculations that we make as scientists in the lab that then don't match what ends up in the validation report. And, and that is what is reviewed by the regulators. So I was concerned, like, what is happening between the scientist and the regulator where these numbers become dramatically different? Because with syphilis, we calculate our sensitivity. So sensitivity is if you have syphilis, how often do you tell someone they have syphilis? Our sensitivity was 65%, then 80%, because we repeated it. The validation report said 95%.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  And this is a very simple calculation. It is division of two numbers, right? So I'm like, how does 80 become 95?

• 37:54PJ Vogt?

  But you kind of, I mean, in your mind, it's like, the only really possible answer is that someone's fudging it. Like, like at that point, was that your assumption?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  That was basically my assumption, but no, I didn't say that out loud. I was just, I was approaching this with the naivete of a 22-year-old doing division, right? It's like, why, when I divide these two numbers, it's 80. And when you divide these two numbers, it's 95. Can you try to explain that?

• 38:21PJ Vogt?

  And so what did she say?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  She actually said like, oh, I don't, you know, I don't know exactly how that number came about, but I will set you up with a meeting with the vice president that oversees the statistics team and he'll describe to you how they got that number. So after that meeting, I leave her office and I go back to my computer. And I'm sure she did not know this, but I had access to the validation reports for vitamin D. And so, you know, double click, click, click, it opens. Look at the coefficient of variation for the vitamin D test that we validated. And at the three different levels we tested, the CVs were like 19%, 23% and 20%.

• 38:58PJ Vogt?

  So even on the narrow claim that the fine print was making, it was also untrue. But when she talked to you, she thought she was safe saying that because she didn't think you had access to that information?

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. She either thought I would just believe her or she thought that everything was on secret drives or whatever. And she must have thought like, he doesn't have access to that specific drive. And I did.

• 39:20PJ Vogt?

  But one of the questions, like, the movie is kind of asking, in, you know, the like, entertaining artistic choices of the movie, is like, might it be possible that Elizabeth Holmes? Like, one of the suggestions is that she's a person who's experienced a lot of trauma and kind of ends up in the same relationship over and over again. And what that relationship looks like is that she becomes a party to a fraud, where the fraud is really being run by a domineering man. And she's like, kind of

• 39:54PJ Vogt?

  Trauma is tuning her out of key decisions. So while she might kind of know something's going on, she doesn't like, she, her hands are not on the steering wheel of the decisions. And the person you're describing encountering at this time doesn't sound like that kind of person.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  No, absolutely not. She was absolutely steering this whole thing. There's no doubt in my mind. And she does blame Sonny. And I personally believe that she set Sonny up to take the blame. And, and she knew that he had this abusive type of personality. She knew that people did not like him. I know that my grandfather did not like him. And I think he was pretty open with Elizabeth that he didn't like Sonny. And I think Elizabeth wanted to keep Sonny around specifically for that reason. And fast forwarding quite a bit, there was a time after the Wall Street Journal reports came out, after a lot of these federal investigations come out, that my grandfather was still on the board.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  I just could not fathom why my grandfather would continue to stand behind her. And I went and I confronted him about it. And one of the things he said was that we fired Sonny. And he said, the board thinks that Sonny was responsible for what went wrong here.

• 41:06PJ Vogt?

  So you believe in your heart that she set, like, we'll never know, but like, what you suspect, having been there, having seen the relationship, is that she might have always, at least in the back of her mind, or maybe the front of her mind, planned to set him up because she understood that, like, he was someone that she could hang this on?

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Yes. And she intentionally used him as a buffer. She didn't really come into the lab very often. She wasn't interacting so much with the people who were testing the real patient samples. And she made Sonny do that. And, and that's why Sonny ended up getting convicted of 12 of 12 counts against him. And Elizabeth was only convicted of four. So this strategy worked to some extent to blame Sonny. And Sonny ended up getting more prison time because he was so much closer to the fraud, to the patient fraud, at least.

• 41:54PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, it's a little bit like in the documentary, there's like a really big moment where her current partner, Billy, like, asks to be paid for the project and she, like, happens to leave the room at the moment where the negotiations start. And one of the things the movie's asking is like, was that intentional or, or happenstance? But it's a dynamic you're kind of describing.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Yes. And then when that happened, I was like, this is stupid. This is so obviously planned and intentional. And I was kind of confused that that almost became like a central piece of the film. When it's, you know, I guess if you don't know her, it is a bit more of a mystery and it's more interesting. But to me, it's like, yes, this is, I, like, knowing her is like obvious. And this idea that she wasn't getting paid, but Billy was, who they have children together with, is like, she, her family was getting paid. But she could say, I'm not getting paid with a straight face. Like, that is also very intentional.

• 42:46PJ Vogt?

  But you actually, you don't just think that she's a convicted fraudster with a pattern of dating abusive men? It's like, having worked for her, been later targeted by her, the story that your brain supplies is, she may choose painful situations, at least partly because they are helpful to her in other things that she's trying to do.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's able to use these relationships to her advantage. I'm sure it's a combination of lots of things.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  But she is using them to her advantage. Like, she undoubtedly is using them to her advantage. That is how she's getting sympathy from audiences and from Nathan and from Amanda. That is how she was able to blame so much of this on Sonny and keep her job as CEO. That is possibly, I believe, how she was only convicted of four counts against her instead of the 12 that Sonny was. And like, as another example, when I, I sent Elizabeth an email with a lot of my concerns about this, and she didn't respond to it. She forwarded it to Sonny and let him respond to it. And the Wall Street Journal describes his response as quote unquote, dripping with venom. He says that I was arrogant, ignorant, patronizing, reckless, have no understanding of math, science, or statistics, that if I had any other last name, I would have been held accountable

• 44:03Speaker 02

  in the strongest way. And those were all the things that I believe Elizabeth wanted to tell me. But Elizabeth needs to have this angelic figure, this sympathetic face. She needed my grandfather to like her. So she was like, Sonny, go be the bad guy here. And he played to like, I'm not, I'm not trying to defend Sonny. He played the role way too well. Like, if you hire a hitman and the guy actually, you know, shoots somebody, the hitman deserves to be in prison, but so does the person who hired the hitman.

• 44:38PJ Vogt?

  Sonny was not Elizabeth's only metaphorical hitman. There was also her legal team. The lawyer she chose for Theranos was the same one Harvey Weinstein used. And Theranos's legal team aggressively went after Elizabeth's enemies. Private investigators were hired to trail people. Elizabeth's deputies would threaten or intimidate anybody who crossed the company as a lesson to everybody else. Elizabeth, remember, was the CEO. One person who got on her bad side was her chief scientist, Dr. Ian Gibbons. He had complained to a board member about Elizabeth's dishonesty.

• 45:12PJ Vogt?

  He ended up being roped into another Theranos court battle, where he was terrified of being deposed, being required to speak honestly about what he'd seen at Theranos. The day before he was supposed to appear in court, his wife found him. He'd overdosed on purpose. He died in the hospital. When his widow called Elizabeth's office to give the company the news, what she got in return was an email from a Theranos lawyer instructing her to return her dead husband's Theranos laptop, along with any other confidential material he may have possessed. That's the Elizabeth Holmes who Tyler would go up against. And it means that he can't just watch the movie as solely an entertaining film. No spoilers, please. Instead, he's someone who lived through it.

• 45:54PJ Vogt?

  He told me what life was like for him in spring 2015, when he found himself firmly on Elizabeth's bad side. This is about a year after he'd actually quit Theranos.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  So the retaliation happens after I speak to the Wall Street Journal reporter. And I, I just want to like, make perfectly clear that before I spoke to that reporter, I talked to my colleagues, to my managers, to a vice president, to the president and COO, to the CEO, to a board member, and to a regulator. And somehow, after all of that, nothing had happened. And it's not like they, I was proven wrong or anything. It's not like the regulator reached out and said, like, you, you missed something here. The regulator ended up just kind of losing my complaint in the shuffle. So when a Wall Street Journal reporter reached out to me saying that he was doing a story on Theranos, I could not help myself but to talk to him.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  And when I chose to talk to him, I felt like nobody had asked Elizabeth a tough question. And there is no harm in asking a tough question. And if I helped this reporter ask a really good question, and Elizabeth and Theranos have all the right answers, and they proved me wrong, and they unlock that back door and say, here's the real thing, and somehow proved me wrong that patients were not being hurt, I felt like, okay, that would be a perfectly acceptable outcome. In fact, I would love that.

• 47:13PJ Vogt?

  You sound like you still feel kind of bad, like, you're still, like, like, I don't think most people think that you need to defend the decision to whistleblow a company that was lying about a medical device. But like, I can hear the part of your brain that's still, like, had to justify it at the time or justify it now. Why do you think that's there?

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Uh, I've never been called out on that, and I've never really thought about it too much, but I do kind of always justify it every time I talk about it.

• 47:37PJ Vogt?

  But do you think it's just that it was hard because you're within, in the, this is not how, I just want to make abundantly clear, you obviously did the right thing. Do you think that the reason there's still like a computer program in your head that says like, justify decision, is because at the time, within the culture of Theranos, which was like the culture you were in, the culture your grandfather was a part of, like, this counted as a betrayal to people in that culture? And so you had to justify, like, why? It was not just the right thing to do, but if the company was what the company said it was, it wasn't really betrayal, because a company that's not lying can answer questions?

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Right. And yeah, maybe it did feel like partly a betrayal because my grandfather was still sitting on the board.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  And also, I even consulted my parents before talking to the reporter, because he had reached out to me on LinkedIn, and they were so excited, like, oh, it's great that someone's looking into this, but do not talk to him. Like, whatever you do, do not talk to him. Like, you know how scary they are, you know how much money they have, they're going to try to ruin your life. Do not talk to him, but it's great that he's digging into this.

• 48:45PJ Vogt?

  Oh, because maybe he'll find it without you.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And even more to the point on, you know, it maybe felt like a betrayal of my grandfather, I told the reporter in that first phone call, my grandfather was part of the Nixon administration during Watergate. He was part of the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra scandal. And he made it out of both of those with his integrity completely intact. So there's no doubt in my mind that if he is given the opportunity, he is going to make things right with the people that Elizabeth has hurt. And I want to make sure he has that opportunity before he passes away, because he was 95 years old at the time. So maybe that was also part of the justification, was, I'm not doing this in betrayal of my family, but I'm actually doing it for him.

• 49:29PJ Vogt?

  I understand. I don't think that's justification. I, like, I, I think that's moral reasoning.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, well, anyway.

• 49:38PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  So after I, I did talk to the Wall Street Journal reporter, and I, I sent him a copy of this email exchange that I had with Sonny. Um, not very long after, like maybe a month or two after, I went home and had dinner with my parents and my dad had just gotten off the phone with my grandfather and he said, "Have you been speaking to a Wall Street Journal reporter?" And I said, "Yes." And my dad was more angry with me than I'd ever seen in my entire life. And he basically said, "Well, they know it's you and they're going to destroy your life and they're going to do it with a smile on their face." And I said, "There's no way they actually know that I was a source for this reporting. I did my research on this reporter. He previously won a Pulitzer Prize

• 50:22Speaker 02

  for exposing a Medicare fraud." So he wasn't just gonna give up my name. So I called up my grandfather and he said, "Tyler, tell me what's going on." And I said, "I have no idea. You need to tell me what's going on." And he said, "Elizabeth tells me that you've been giving trade secrets away to the Wall Street Journal. And once they publish those trade secrets, they will no longer be defendable. So in order to prove that they tried to defend their trade secrets, they need you to sign a one-page nondisclosure agreement saying you won't disclose anything moving forward." So it didn't really make a whole lot of sense. And I told him that. I was like, "That doesn't make sense. I don't know why we need to sign this." And he said, "If you sign this one-page document, it will end a world of suffering

• 51:05Speaker 02

  for you." So that part I understood. And I said, "I'm happy to sign this one-page NDA." And he said, "Great. Come on over tomorrow morning and meet with Theranos lawyers." And I said, "All right, I'll come over and meet with them tomorrow morning, but before then, can I..."

• 51:20PJ Vogt?

  What did he feel like in your, like, what are you feeling in your stomach when he says that?

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Uh, just complete anxiety, complete anxiety. But also, the scheduled time to meet with the lawyers was the next morning. So I also felt like I have some time to get through to him. Like, I have a window of opportunity. So I asked him, I was like, "Before I meet with the lawyers tomorrow morning, can I come over to your house tonight and just talk to my grandfather without any lawyers around?" And he said, "Absolutely. Come on over around nine o'clock."

• 51:48PJ Vogt?

  Because to you, he's still this person who has navigated the Nixon administration, Reagan, like, a person who, it's almost like the definitional thing about who he is to you is, in times that are highly morally confusing, he's the person who's made the right call. Like, almost in the Olympics of doing that.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 52:09PJ Vogt?

  But it's also, like, my grandfather, who I loved, both of them, no one in my family has ever used the phrase, like, "world of suffering" to me. Like, it's just, it's crazy that the person, that that person said that to you. It's just like a crazy thing to hear.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  It was a scary thing to hear, but I knew that that was not coming from him, but from the lawyers and from Elizabeth and from Sonny, that they had told him, like, "We are prepared to destroy your grandson's life."

• 52:39PJ Vogt?

  But so you go over there to try to talk to him, and in your head, it's like, this, you're oscillating between total anxiety and, like, the hope that this is gonna work out. What happens when you go over?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  So somehow, in that first phone call with him, I had not actually told him one way or another whether I had had or had not spoken to the Wall Street Journal. Like, I hadn't committed either way. I decided to lie to him, to tell him that I had not spoken to the Wall Street Journal and to collect as much information as I could possibly collect. And so I went over to his house and I lied to him. I made the, I made the conscious decision to lie to him in order to collect information. And he didn't seem to believe me. He said, like, "They are saying they know for sure that you spoke to this reporter." And I made all my old arguments to him about, you know, they're not testing hundreds of things from a single drop of blood, they're not using the Theranos equipment, all this stuff. And he told me, he said, "These devices are currently being used in

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Medevac helicopters in Afghanistan." He said that. He said, "They are currently being used in operating rooms at UCSF."

• 53:42PJ Vogt?

  He's saying as a reassurance, and you're like, "Oh, that's so much worse."

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm saying, "This is completely false. And you are a board member who has been told completely incorrect information about where this device is being used and deployed and its state." Because he also said, "The only reason they have third-party equipment is for validation. Every single test is run on the Theranos platform. And we know that the most they could ever run on the Theranos platform was 12." And I want to emphasize that that is not 12 out of 10. That is, each device could run one thing. So they had, like, 12 versions of the Edison that each could run one of 12 things.

• 54:24PJ Vogt?

  It's crazy because they invented something worse than what exists.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Way worse. They were like, "How can we take what Siemens made and make it, like, way lower throughput and way higher failure rate?" Like, that is, like, what they invented.

• 54:37PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so you're understanding from what he's saying, that hit the level, he just doesn't know what's happening in the company that he's invested in, but he believes their version of the story, and he doesn't believe you.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's been completely misled here. Like, it is so far from reality. It's not even close. So our realities are not overlapping at all. There's zero common ground. But I stuck to this lie, and I said, "I have not spoken to the Wall Street Journal." And so, kind of after our argument that goes nowhere, he says, "You know, well, whatever the case may be, Theranos just needs somebody to sign a one-page NDA so they can say they defended their trade secrets. Can you be that person?" And I was just like, "Sure, yeah. I'll sign a one-page NDA." And he goes, "Okay, well, there's two lawyers here right

• 55:23Speaker 02

  now. Can I go get them?" And I was completely blindsided, unprepared, and just kind of felt betrayed, because I had very clearly, specifically asked him to have no lawyers around.

• 55:40PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, you wanted to meet your grandfather.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  I wanted to meet with my grandfather, but I told him, I was like, "Sure, go get those lawyers." And so he left to go get the two lawyers. And as soon as he leaves, my step-grandmother, who had been mostly quietly listening to this conversation the whole time, kind of leans in and goes, "Henry Kissinger thinks this is all fake. He thinks the box doesn't actually exist." I was like, "Yes, Henry Kissinger is right. How is it that there's another former Secretary of State who was on the Board of Directors, who had the exact same, you know, pretty much the exact same concern that I had, not articulated quite the same way? But all this pressure is being put on me, and there were board members who were thinking the same thing, that this does not exist."

• 56:26PJ Vogt?

  It's also just, not to be, like, all, like, freshman dorm bong-hitty, but like, just the fact that there were lawyers hidden in the house, the fact that, like, your step-grandmother leaned in to be like, "Henry Kissinger thinks the box isn't real." Like, it's just such a weird, every noun in that story is so crazy.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  It is completely surreal. Like, I still think about the story. I'm just like, "I cannot believe that all of this stuff happened." It is just so crazy. It is so crazy.

• 56:56PJ Vogt?

  It's also funny, you know, I saw, I was like, reading the social media discourse, which I shouldn't have, honestly, I mean, ever. But like, I saw a post from somebody where they were like, they were like, they were someone I usually agree with, and they were like, they're like, "You know, whatever happens with this Theranos story, you can be sure, like, old white men are gonna take credit for Elizabeth Holmes's work and make money off her ideas even when she's in prison." And it was weird, I was reading it, and I was like, "I think this is actually, like, I understand that old white men have made tons of social mistakes and then tons of social damage in recent and past history in America." This is one story where, like, there were people who should have known better or should have figured stuff out sooner, but I think old white men were kind of suckered in this one story.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they were the mark.

• 57:37PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  They were the mark for Elizabeth, but I also think that they, they actually, I think, are responsible. They gave her so much power. They gave her so much money, they gave her so much credibility, and they did not do their diligence. And, you know, on paper, the people who gave her $100 million checks are the victims. I think they are part of the problem, honestly. That's my take. And this happens all the time in investing. They were pointing at other people who they felt were the person who knew what was going on. Rupert Murdoch points at Larry Ellison, he's a genius. Larry Ellison points at my grandfather, says, "George Shultz is a genius." My grandfather points at Channing Robertson, says, "Well, he's a genius." And that's why I say that Channing Robertson was the kernel

• 58:22Speaker 02

  of credibility that snowballed all of this.

• 58:24PJ Vogt?

  That snowball had ultimately meant that Tyler had had that evening at his grandfather's house with the hidden lawyers. When they'd appeared, it turned out they weren't holding an NDA. They had a temporary restraining order and a notice to appear in court that Friday. For Tyler, that evening was the beginning of an expensive legal battle with Theranos. It cost him and his parents nearly $500,000. He says not only was he trailed by private investigators, so were his parents, he thinks their lawyers were as well. At one point, Tyler became so anxious, he was sleeping with a knife. What turned things around for Tyler eventually was Elizabeth's unwinding. The Wall Street Journal published its Theranos

• 59:07PJ Vogt?

  reporting, which led to Walgreens ending its partnership and investors pulling out. Elizabeth's story collapsed. So did her company. For a while, Elizabeth Holmes was not a main character in the public imagination, but now she's back. And in the news story that Elizabeth's telling, and you can see everything, what's prominent is the tragedy of a young mother going to prison, somebody who at this point really has almost no power. Tyler still thinks about this other version of her, though, the one that did. After the break, what Tyler Schultz sees in the movie that nobody else does.

• 59:59PJ Vogt?

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• 1:00:40PJ Vogt?

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• 1:01:02PJ Vogt?

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• 1:03:30PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 1:03:36PJ Vogt?

  I'd called Tyler originally because I just wanted to know what he thought about the new movie, You Can See Everything. The truth is, the way I'd seen the film is I was trying to answer the question of, how do you tell the story of a liar knowing she will lie to you about that story? And I thought the movie had really handled that problem masterfully. I loved the movie when I saw it in theaters. But then I got home, I went online. As soon as it was like I was watching the reactions of people who had just seen a totally different film. Even people I knew in real life were describing Elizabeth Holmes, they'd witnessed as maybe a patsy or at least a victim. I wanted to know how Tyler had understood the story when he'd seen the film. I'm curious, like even before you went on X or whatever, what was the movie you saw?

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's why the film is so interesting is because people see different versions of it. Every single person seems to have a different version of it. And that is what makes it so interesting and so artful. And like, when I first saw it before getting on X, I did, I thought it was, I don't know. I thought that people might have more context than they actually did. And the scary thing that I did see on X is the recommendation that you go into it blind. And I was like, that is the worst. That's the worst advice.

• 1:04:50PJ Vogt?

  Give her a chance.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  You should not go into this blind. I really feel like it's irresponsible to go into the movie blind. You should go into it a little bit researched so that you have the perspective that you have and the perspective that I have, where I felt like this was a very interesting artistic exploration of Elizabeth's psyche that you could not have gotten if you just took her to the slaughterhouse, right? But you also need to know that she is actually a liar, that she is actually truly guilty of the things she's in prison for. And I believe much more. She's only imprisoned for investor fraud. I believe she should also be imprisoned for harming people. And I was almost expecting at the end of the film for there to be like a post-credits reel

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  of just footage of her lying over and over and over and over again, because there is a lot of it. You know, so I thought, let's like, okay, we can end the artistic film. And at the end, just say like, look, we kind of duped you into having sympathy for her, but look at all the horrible things she actually did. And that would kind of drive the point home that like really good storytelling can obscure the truth. And then it wasn't there. And I was just kind of felt like, well, hopefully the world has enough context that it's not needed. And then after looking on X, it's kind of like, oh, yeah, a lot more context is needed. And it's the fact that she has shown zero remorse or accountability for what she did that I think especially bothers me.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Like if she was saying like, I'd made huge mistakes. I hurt people, but I'm surfing my time. And then I'm going to try it again. And I'm going to do it the right way. I'm really good at raising money. And like, she even says like, in the film, when she goes and she's raising money. And I don't know the exact context of the phone call that she had, but after the phone call, it looks like she was, had been like, took a hit of a drug. Like she looked different after that investor phone call. And she says like, this, I feel like this is what I was born to do. I don't know. She showed remorse, but also acknowledged like, I also know that I'm incredibly good at this one thing. I'm going to go do that incredibly good thing and surround myself with good people and scientists and do it right the second time. I might be more open to this idea if there is 2.0.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  But the fact that she's just saying, I did nothing wrong. I have no accountability and I'm just going to go do it again. That is the, like, that is scary to me. That is crazy to me. And even like the idea that they need lasers to do it the second time around, like you're saying that the first one works.

• 1:07:20PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Just use it, just do it. Go do it. Put the components back together and go do it. Come on. Prove me wrong. No.

• 1:07:34PJ Vogt?

  Do you feel, I mean, do you just feel, because it's like, you had a version of the story that was different from the version of the story that your family had and that everybody in the company where you worked had. And having a different version of the story was really dangerous for you for a while. And then like, society kind of worked correctly. Like journalism worked and the legal system worked. And, and your version of reality, which was real, became the predominant version of reality. And like, that doesn't always happen. That definitely doesn't always happen in the last 10 years. There's a lot of people who have felt crazy the way you felt, who in different contexts, that didn't feel sane afterwards. But that happened for you. And now this movie, which we both agree is an amazing movie. I'm glad I get to be alive in a time where things that great are being made.

• 1:08:16PJ Vogt?

  But a side effect of the movie is that like, that story, which had settled in something much closer to reality, maybe is being a little bit more unsettled. Does it make you feel like, I hate this word, but does it make you feel less safe in the world? Does it make you feel more crazy? Do you like, does it make you feel like something that was very hard to do has been slightly undone?

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  It does feel like it's been slightly undone. And it makes me wonder what the next stepping stone is in Elizabeth's rehabilitation and the role that this movie is playing in it. Although I will add that I do, I still think most people, like the overwhelming majority of people, agree with my version of reality. It is just the fringe that is getting maybe stronger or maybe they feel emboldened because of this film to start speaking out in her favor.

• 1:09:09PJ Vogt?

  Do you wish that Nathan Fielder Lance, I haven't reached out to you for the film?

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Yes, I do. And I'm happy to not be in the film. I'm like very happy. And if I were in the film, I would have been so on guard because I would have been thinking like, I'm going to get got here. Like, I know how Nathan Fielder works. I'm going to get got here.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  I wish I could have almost like prepared him. Or I wish he had consulted with me at least. And even right now, like I wish, like the one question that I want to know is when Elizabeth showed him that device on the kitchen table, did he actually know that that wasn't the device that we had actually built and actually used on patients? Or did he know that and he chose to let Elizabeth kind of mislead him and the audience down this semantic rabbit hole around the word can?

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  And I'm just curious, like, I just want to know if she kind of bested him in their game of chess and manipulation, or if he realized this movie is much more interesting if I allow Elizabeth to kind of lead the way here, as opposed to just calling her out?

• 1:10:20PJ Vogt?

  I think, I actually, I mean, I don't know either. I did read, they had interviews with Nathan and with Lance, where they were both saying that the sort of time between knowing there was an opportunity to film with her and filming with her was very, very short, in a way that makes me kind of assume that, at least in a moment, they didn't know. Like, that, like, it seemed like, and it was a thing that played to her advantage, is that the story is, for most people, complicated. For most people, something that happened a little while ago. My guess is that in the room, he didn't know. They had the footage for three years. And like, I don't know, I think sometimes what's good for the story isn't good for the truth. That like, it was a better story if he was more open to the idea that she was more interesting than just a liar.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Right. But I still think there could have been creative ways to kind of resolve that, at least a little bit, that would have been, still made the film good. Like, it wouldn't have ruined the film, I should say. And like, if I were to have participated, like, the way that I envisioned it maybe could have happened is similar to the way that Amanda was introduced, where he shows her like a clip and gets her reaction. I would have loved it if he would have shown me a clip of that conversation that he had with Elizabeth with the device on the table, and I could have just said like, "That thing is not the reason she went to prison. That thing is not the thing that we built." Like, that is the reaction that I wish I could have had in the film. So at least the audience

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  could have had that kind of grounding, that, okay, we are being misled here. But, I don't know, maybe that would have ruined the film.

• 1:11:54PJ Vogt?

  I don't know, I don't think it would have. I mean, if I could make Nathan Fielder movies, I'd make Nathan Fielder movies.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Which is why I think the best way to address this would have just been like a post-credits reel, where you can have the experience of the film, and then just get the grounding that she definitely lied, she definitely hurt people, she has shown no remorse. I feel like that just needed to be like a five-minute reel at the end.

• 1:12:21PJ Vogt?

  Maybe we should just make the reel.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Call every AMC and say, "You must play this at the end of the film."

• 1:12:29PJ Vogt?

  And we'll stand outside the theaters as people are coming out with a little eye.

• 1:12:41PJ Vogt?

  Tyler Schultz. You read more about his story in the excellent John Kerry book, Bad Blood. There is so much in there that is just fascinating and outraging about the Theranos story. I also recommend Alex Gibney's excellent documentary, The Inventor, which is available on streaming. And if you're a person who is pretty good in cap cut and just want to make this reel that Tyler would like to exist, of the known public lies of Elizabeth Holmes, like, the greatest hits, shoot us an email, [email protected].

• 1:13:16PJ Vogt?

  Two quick pieces of housekeeping before we go this week. So, one, we've been getting a lot of emails about this live event that we're doing next month in Brooklyn at Pies and Thies. That's for Incognito Mode listeners, we sent out an email. Thank you to everybody who bought a ticket, it sold out very quickly. People have been asking, "We don't have more tickets, but we are going to do more stuff like this soon in the future, and we are looking at places beyond just New York City and the tri-state area." So if live podcast experiments, sometimes with fried chicken and pies, seem exciting to you, the best way to stay on top of this is to sign up for Incognito Mode. Also, not related to Search Engine, but if you are going to be in New York between now and the beginning of November,

• 1:14:01PJ Vogt?

  you have to go see this one-woman show. It's called The Woman on the Edge by Elf Lyons. Don't Google anything, just go, just trust me. It's an hour, it is so unlike anything I've seen in a really long time, it's really, really special. You have to go. Okay, credits.

• 1:14:27PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Trudy Benaminani, who's also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer, Emily Multer is our producer. Garrett and Emily also fact-checked this week's episode. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor-Moore, Karen Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schaaf. If you have a question that you would like Search Engine to try to answer, shoot us an email. You can just email [email protected]. If you have a business and would like to advertise on Search Engine, same address, just use the subject line "advertising." If you are a listener and would like to hear a version

• 1:15:10PJ Vogt?

  of our show without ads, if you would like to be notified first when we do live events where there's pies and fried chicken, you can sign up for Incognito Mode. It's our paid feed. You also get bonus episodes, access to our weird experiments, online and offline, and so we get a discount on our very, very, very, very soon to release merchandise. You can find a link to subscribe in our show notes, or just go to searchengine.show. Contributions from our Incognito Mode listeners are what help us keep this project running. We depend on you. Thank you, as always, for listening. We will see you soon.

• 1:16:02Speaker 07

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