Bad Elizabeth - Elizabeth Holmes with E. Jean Carroll
Gideon and Kathy discuss the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, the infamous CEO of Theranos. Holmes dropped out of college like Steve Jobs, she wore black turtle necks like jobs, and created a tech product like Jobs. But unlike Jobs, Homes' product didn't do what she said it would do and she lied about it repeatedly. The Theranos idea was to have a fast and easy way to run many medical tests using a tiny pin prick to the finger, but it turned out to be pie in the sky. If only Homes spent the same amount of energy covering up the fact that her product was a failure, and blaming her staff, into actually working on making the product work, maybe she'd attain the Jobs-like stature she desired. Both Gideon and Kathy have had their share of terrible work environments, but probably not nearly as toxic as that of Theranos. And like other bad Elizabeths we have covered, Holmes is attempting a comeback even though she's currently in prison, Gideon and Kathy discuss the how likely it'll be for her new ideas to work. Later in the episode Kathy and Gideon talk to writer E. Jean Carroll, who is also an Elizabeth, but a badass one. Carroll gives her take on Holmes and then we go in-depth about Carroll's life growing up in Indiana and her hard-fought battle to become the beloved writer she has become. The episode wraps up with Carroll talking about her gripping and often hilarious book "Not My Type" about her lawsuit against Donald Trump for assaulting her in the dressing rooms of a Manhattan, New York, Bergdorf Goodman. She won her case not once, but twice.
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Hosted by Gideon Evans & Kathy Egan-Taylor
Producer & Engineer: Will Becton / Executive Producer: Amber Becton
Recorded @ Jett Road Studios
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Jett Road Studios - Website - YouTube - Instagram - Substack
Bad Elizabeth - Instagram - YouTube - Substack
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SOURCES:
New York Times - Elizabeth Holmes Partner Blood-Testing Start-up
ABC News - Elizabeth Holmes Prison Release Date
Vanity Fair - The Talented Ms Holmes
Transcript
Welcome to Bad Elizabeth.
Speaker:I'm your host Gideon Evans,
Speaker:and I'm your host Kathy Egan Taylor.
Speaker:The premise of the show is exactly what it sounds like.
Speaker:Each episode we profile a different Elizabeth or a derivation of
Speaker:that name like Baba or Isabel or
Speaker:else pf
Speaker:he deserves to be called Bad.
Speaker:And let's face it bad is kind of on a spectrum.
Speaker:Some of these Elizabeths are bad, some are fricking terrible.
Speaker:Infrared or Ultra bot.
Speaker:That's our producer and engineer Will Becton of Jet Road Studios.
Speaker:Hi guys.
Speaker:Our episode today is Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker:Hey y'all, welcome to Battle Elizabeth.
Speaker:We do a different battle, Elizabeth, every episode.
Speaker:And I'm your co-host.
Speaker:I'm Gideon Evans.
Speaker:And I'm Kathy Ian Taylor.
Speaker:And we're here with Will Becton as well.
Speaker:Hi guys.
Speaker:Today's Elizabeth is Elizabeth Holmes,
Speaker:the founder of Theranos.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Which basically was a company, started to revolutionize the
Speaker:way that we analyze our blood.
Speaker:So rather than going, when you have to give blood to be
Speaker:analyzed, you have to, they
Speaker:take it outta your, uh, your vein and put a needle deep in there.
Speaker:And so she was developing a system where you could actually get a full
Speaker:blood screening from a single pinprick
Speaker:just on your finger, right to
Speaker:your index finger.
Speaker:So this is a fabulous idea.
Speaker:Yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker:And when I go to the doctor to get a blood test, they often
Speaker:do have trouble finding a van.
Speaker:It's not the most fun thing, the needles in your arm and they're kind of moving
Speaker:the needle around to find something.
Speaker:I actually have very nice veins I've been told by nurses.
Speaker:Is that
Speaker:right?
Speaker:I do.
Speaker:And you're tapping into a vein when you take blood, not an artery, right?
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:just a vein.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:The ones right at the crux of your elbow.
Speaker:The unfortunate thing is when you do sit down to get your blood taken.
Speaker:It's a mobile part of your arm so you can pop out.
Speaker:They sometimes miss the vein.
Speaker:It's an unpleasant experience
Speaker:and a nervous phlebotomist is one of the worst things you can encounter.
Speaker:True.
Speaker:Is
Speaker:that the, the proper name for someone who takes blood of phlebotomy, that's
Speaker:the person that takes the blood.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:HLEB.
Speaker:O-T-O-M-I-S-T.
Speaker:Okay, well,
Speaker:wow.
Speaker:Spell bound over there.
Speaker:Spell
Speaker:bound.
Speaker:And also good for jeopardy.
Speaker:Right,
Speaker:so this is the story of Elizabeth Holmes and there was a series called The Dropout
Speaker:that was based on this whole story
Speaker:and also a. Book called Bad Blood,
Speaker:bad Blood.
Speaker:But the one thing that sort of drove homes and for many reasons
Speaker:to sort of pursue this business venture, so to speak, is flashbacks.
Speaker:As a young girl that she hated giving blood, you know, made her
Speaker:faint, she would thrash around.
Speaker:It was an awful experience to her.
Speaker:So she said, I'm going to make this a positive experience because people
Speaker:are afraid to go to the doctors.
Speaker:People are afraid to give blood.
Speaker:When they are afraid to go to the doctors or give blood, then they're
Speaker:not managing their health properly.
Speaker:So this was a win-win for all.
Speaker:If we can find a way for people to give their blood to be
Speaker:analyzed in a, an easier way.
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:what a great idea.
Speaker:Who wouldn't want that?
Speaker:It'll make people miss their checkups and their Exactly.
Speaker:Their physicals.
Speaker:So you hear an idea like that, you're like, yeah, that
Speaker:could be a, that sounds great.
Speaker:Million or billion dollar idea, but then like, you actually have to do it.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:One thing about Holmes was she was really into Apple and Steve Jobs.
Speaker:Well, yeah, like, so we, we could tell a little bit of the
Speaker:backstory of her right now.
Speaker:So Elizabeth Holmes in 2003, she's a 19-year-old going to Stanford.
Speaker:She's from Houston and she goes to Stanford and she's
Speaker:a very dedicated student.
Speaker:She's very, very bright young woman.
Speaker:Steve Jobes has always been her mentor, her idol, not
Speaker:mentor, but someone she looked up to.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Because I don't think they, I don't know if she knew him, but Mind mentor.
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:To the point.
Speaker:She actually later on dressed like him.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:at 19 she goes to Stanford and she.
Speaker:Gets onto this idea of this pen prick.
Speaker:Well, I think the first idea that she had was to have a patch that
Speaker:would diagnose certain illnesses and provide medication at the same time.
Speaker:So that was the original idea.
Speaker:Sounds like a good idea
Speaker:too.
Speaker:Does, but then it couldn't work either.
Speaker:That's a lot happening not to get on a patch.
Speaker:Well also, apparently antibiotics are not like potent medicines, so
Speaker:you just, you have to take the pill and you have to take it every day.
Speaker:It couldn't all be in one patch.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:It just doesn't work.
Speaker:Meanwhile, you look at sort of like, you know, companies like Apple,
Speaker:they're doing sort technology.
Speaker:They're doing computers and phones like that.
Speaker:She's looking particularly in the medical field.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:Which is always going to be a great way to find investors.
Speaker:They're looking for a magic bullet for everything.
Speaker:Totally.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So it's a very smart idea
Speaker:and it's a good way to make money.
Speaker:There's a lot of venture capital money in the medical field.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:And she's not like a doctor or anything.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:She, I think
Speaker:she studied science, but she kind of observed those who knew more around her.
Speaker:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker:And sort of galvanized them to work with her.
Speaker:So she's 19-year-old, Stanford dropout
Speaker:drops out, she drops Kind of like Steve Jobs.
Speaker:That's exactly,
Speaker:and that was her.
Speaker:She said he didn't go to college.
Speaker:And there are all these things, these lores of these.
Speaker:Guys like the one thing is like they invented the thing in their garage and
Speaker:I wonder if the dropout thing she really did need to drop out or she did it because
Speaker:it kind of made her look like Steve Jobs
Speaker:probably.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:She was like, I'm so confident in this idea.
Speaker:She got the stamp
Speaker:of approval from
Speaker:Stanford already?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:There was a professor, she even like hired, I think there was,
Speaker:well there was a professor that she got to sort of agree to this sort of
Speaker:Theranos sort of experiment and he started bringing investors on board.
Speaker:So she was able to raise about, I think 7 million initially when
Speaker:she started all of her research.
Speaker:So by 2016 it's worth 9 billion.
Speaker:Her company?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:She's the youngest, self-made female billionaire herself.
Speaker:She's worth 4 billion.
Speaker:And this is billion kind of on paper.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Like it's not like she actually had a bank account.
Speaker:It's like the valuation is that, would that be the terminology?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And that's kind of how the business world works, right?
Speaker:It sounds
Speaker:speculative.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Like Jet Road Studios is probably worth a billion on paper.
Speaker:I think so.
Speaker:I haven't looked today.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:In my mind it's even worth more than that.
Speaker:You can't put a price on how much it's worth.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:But who wants literally billion dollars on paper?
Speaker:I want it in my bank account.
Speaker:Oh, yes.
Speaker:But in the meantime, so in
Speaker:the meantime, so the idea behind this company, the word Theranos, it's a
Speaker:combination of the words therapy and diagnosis, is that you get blood readings
Speaker:from a single pinprick to the finger.
Speaker:And uh, I think also like Apple and like Steve Jobs, the idea was this was a
Speaker:mobile device that they called the Edison.
Speaker:It was kind of like designed beautifully, like an iPhone where
Speaker:you could stick your finger in it.
Speaker:It very gently would take a tiny bit of blood and it would
Speaker:run like a thousand tests.
Speaker:It looks beautiful.
Speaker:It's a really beautiful object,
Speaker:like you can see the blood sort of going into its little cavity and all that stuff,
Speaker:and that was like when you buy an iPhone or an iPad.
Speaker:Part of the fun is just like opening the box.
Speaker:They put as much thought about like what the box looks like as
Speaker:the device, but when you open that box and then you get the device,
Speaker:eventually the device actually works.
Speaker:It looks like Elizabeth Holmes was like really preoccupied with the
Speaker:image of everything and her own image.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:We're all sort of seduced by packaging.
Speaker:I mean when you get your new computer, whatever, you don't
Speaker:throw that box away for a while.
Speaker:It's true.
Speaker:It just there even if you
Speaker:don't need it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:She
Speaker:liked the sort of the packaging of it.
Speaker:What she was imagining is like if you could go to your local Walgreens right.
Speaker:Screening center, get your blood done, pick up your groceries
Speaker:or whatever, and go home.
Speaker:How lovely.
Speaker:And Elizabeth herself, she had this sort of messy blonde look.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:She favored black turtlenecks and then she also liked black down vest and she kept
Speaker:her office temperature eventually when she had a whole office at a low 60 degrees so
Speaker:she could wear this outfit every day, no matter that everyone else was freezing.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:She had the turtleneck and vest combo
Speaker:and she also, I mean one thing she also did was she spoke with
Speaker:this really like low pitched voice that people said she kind.
Speaker:Put on
Speaker:mine is natural, by the way.
Speaker:Well, I
Speaker:was gonna ask you, you do have like, you have a little bit of a low voice
Speaker:that's, you know, it's funny 'cause when I was like 12,
Speaker:yeah.
Speaker:When we had landlines growing up and I think we had the office line,
Speaker:which was supposed to be mom and dad's line, but we used it anyway.
Speaker:But I was always mistaken for being much older.
Speaker:Do you feel.
Speaker:That can help you like be taken seriously.
Speaker:And I think part of this too is that because she was like a woman as and a
Speaker:prodigy as a CEO and a prodigy, is that something that women are conscious of?
Speaker:Of like how to be taken seriously by horrible, misogynist men who
Speaker:are like hearing pitches and stuff?
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:The, the way you dress and the way you present yourself, I mean, the very fact
Speaker:that women have suits that are tailored,
Speaker:right.
Speaker:You know, like who would think about that for the female body, you know?
Speaker:And I even watched my mother as a. Uh, you know, she ended up becoming a CEO, but
Speaker:when she was starting out, you know, they would say to her, you're an unfit mother.
Speaker:You've got four kids.
Speaker:Why are you here?
Speaker:So, I mean, I do have to give her the respect as a woman in this field, that's
Speaker:all the, you know, particularly Stanford, it's very much a, a boys' world in this,
Speaker:you know, venture, capitalist, whatever.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And inventing things.
Speaker:She really was the only female CEO of a, you know, of like a big company.
Speaker:A big company.
Speaker:And she used sexism as a crutch.
Speaker:And, and I think it did exist.
Speaker:And it's interesting because totally one of her early professors, a
Speaker:woman named Phyllis Garner, who was at Stanford when she was trying to
Speaker:pitch this idea and getting Stanford professor behind her and that get
Speaker:investors behind, she could launch it.
Speaker:And this one woman, Phyllis Garner, who is played by Lori Metcalf in
Speaker:the dropout, and she's fabulous.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:Good.
Speaker:Lori Metcalf's so good, plays a good bitch.
Speaker:When Elizabeth came to her, Elizabeth Holmes and said, this is my idea.
Speaker:And Phyllis Garner was like, yeah, but it's not going to work.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:That doesn't work.
Speaker:It simply won't work.
Speaker:And she also warned her.
Speaker:You can't skip steps.
Speaker:IE drop outta Stanford, go through the program.
Speaker:Women can't skip steps.
Speaker:We have to have the credentials and the background.
Speaker:We have to prove that we earned our place here because the other option
Speaker:is, Hey, there's a hot blonde.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Let's
Speaker:put her as the face of this.
Speaker:It's a tricky line.
Speaker:Do you feel like it's ridiculous that she changed her voice?
Speaker:Or are you like, you gotta do what you gotta do to be successful?
Speaker:I mean,
Speaker:I, I don't even think it's like, I even look at that, that she changed
Speaker:her voice, you know, being a woman.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I think it's just interesting that anyone who puts on a persona to be something
Speaker:else, to right to protect this thing.
Speaker:Just be who you are if Yeah, if your ideas, if you have the conviction
Speaker:behind it and you, you don't need to have those affectations.
Speaker:Remember when Madonna went
Speaker:British for a while?
Speaker:Kinda had
Speaker:a British, yeah.
Speaker:Like what was she trying to do there?
Speaker:An affectation is usually a bad sign.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:It usually means whatever's happening isn't gonna be sustainable.
Speaker:The interesting thing too is that like I grew up, a lot of my
Speaker:family have Philadelphia accents.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:You know, and when I went to school abroad, people could hear it, you know?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And it made me more conscious of it, the way I pronounce things.
Speaker:But apparently when I speak to our dog, I'm completely in a Philadelphia accident.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And when I'm from Brooklyn, New York, and there would be courses
Speaker:at schools, especially if you were trying to be a teacher, they'd
Speaker:require you to get rid of that accent.
Speaker:And when you hear Elizabeth Holmes talking, she kind of
Speaker:does sound like sort of street a little bit, like, I don't know.
Speaker:It's kind of unusual.
Speaker:People ate it up.
Speaker:She looked and played the part, and she looked great.
Speaker:I mean, she was featured on the cover of Fortune, Forbes.
Speaker:She was interviewed by Charlie Rose.
Speaker:I was going to rewatch that, but I, I can't, right.
Speaker:You can't go back there.
Speaker:Didn't he have a thing with his robe where he'd like.
Speaker:It's not pleasant there.
Speaker:There's all kinds of Charlie Rose staffer Bad stories.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It's so
Speaker:weird because there's so many great former interviews with him, but you
Speaker:just can't even play them anymore.
Speaker:He's sort of in the Woody Allen category of like, man, I can't quote that
Speaker:exactly.
Speaker:What made her get all these people to believe in her?
Speaker:So she has this professor at Stanford.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:You know, they get the seed money to start this.
Speaker:He vouches for her.
Speaker:He vouches for her.
Speaker:Everyone's very excited about this new medical technology
Speaker:because it sounds great.
Speaker:Also, she's young.
Speaker:I feel like the idea of like someone who's young, who has potential, by
Speaker:the time you're like in your forties, you've already failed and succeeded and
Speaker:your reputation is slightly tainted.
Speaker:I'm not speaking from experiences at all.
Speaker:No, no, not at all.
Speaker:But I do think when you're an upstart and you're kind of this new like.
Speaker:Nice looking person and they're like, this one's the new, uh, Steve Jobs.
Speaker:Well, the other thing too is that she often spoken sort of
Speaker:like platitudes and stuff, right?
Speaker:Like lots of cheery, like little sort of pat sentences, like good
Speaker:salesperson, you great at
Speaker:sales.
Speaker:And she was great at like sort of rallying, I guess they'd say the same way.
Speaker:She's a bit oily tongue.
Speaker:Like she knew how to talk to a crowd.
Speaker:Didn't she have a origin story or am I making this up?
Speaker:Did, did she have a family member that.
Speaker:Was sick or passed away or something like I felt like there
Speaker:was something that inspired her.
Speaker:She had an uncle and this was part of her story who had skin cancer and then
Speaker:it went into his bones and he died.
Speaker:So she always told people he didn't live to see his son grow up.
Speaker:I never got to say goodbye.
Speaker:And if there was a diagnosis earlier, and I think her partner, Sonny
Speaker:Balani, he also had a story like that, like his dad had a heart attack.
Speaker:And I do think pitching these things, it's always helpful to have like
Speaker:one of these stories in your pocket.
Speaker:Yeah, I think she had two personal stories.
Speaker:Number one she hit, she watched her uncle go through this horrible skin disease
Speaker:that, you know, skin cancer that went to his bones and, and manifested if only
Speaker:that they had this technology earlier.
Speaker:Also, her fear of giving blood.
Speaker:I mean the thing about what she could really do with this product
Speaker:was play upon people's heartstrings.
Speaker:'cause we all have a person we watched of course be misdiagnosed or suffer through
Speaker:something like, who wouldn't want this?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:We all have experienced.
Speaker:Something like that.
Speaker:So of course,
Speaker:and that's a huge fear of like finding out you have something too late that Exactly.
Speaker:It's like already at stage, you know, whatever.
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:exactly.
Speaker:Like the third allergist I've been working with,
Speaker:oh boy.
Speaker:You
Speaker:sound much better by the way.
Speaker:Oh, thank you.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Third allergist sounds like a good one.
Speaker:Act play.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:So anyways, she was on Charlie Rose and she was profiled in the New
Speaker:Yorker and she was the anomaly in Silicon Valley because she was a woman
Speaker:and that might have helped her too.
Speaker:And she had a product that was gonna change the world in a good way.
Speaker:That was like a cliche too in Silicon Valley.
Speaker:Remember that show Silicon Valley?
Speaker:Did you watch it at all?
Speaker:One of
Speaker:my
Speaker:good
Speaker:friends was on it.
Speaker:It was
Speaker:so funny, and they always had that thing like, we want to change the world.
Speaker:That was like kind of a joke that was real.
Speaker:Like the people in at Google their slogans like Do know evil or something like that.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Because it's so easy with these tech companies to either
Speaker:go one way or another, but
Speaker:you also have to buy into the hype, like buy into the sort
Speaker:of the cult of personality.
Speaker:And you don't want to throw money to an idea that isn't changing the world.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Like glasses for a mouse.
Speaker:Like that wouldn't be a good pitch.
Speaker:Did you try that once?
Speaker:No, but that was the first bad idea that came into my head.
Speaker:My head.
Speaker:That'd be really hard to keep on.
Speaker:Yeah, they work at night.
Speaker:Anyway, so she had this product that was to change the world and
Speaker:going back to her as a, as a young girl, she was always very driven.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:When she was nine, she sent a letter to her father.
Speaker:Meanwhile, her father in Houston worked for Enron.
Speaker:Oh right.
Speaker:And suffered as a result of that too.
Speaker:So there was a fraudulent company for
Speaker:those who don't know exactly
Speaker:the evil Enron.
Speaker:And so I think also she was coming out of that and felt the need to like help bring
Speaker:back her father's dignity and become a, a very successful business woman herself.
Speaker:When she was nine, she sent a letter to her father and
Speaker:she was quoting Jane Austen.
Speaker:What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something mankind
Speaker:didn't know what was possible to do.
Speaker:So that was always her sort of maximum, or whatever you wanna call it.
Speaker:What did you wanna do when you were nine?
Speaker:Do you remember?
Speaker:I remember this like being in, um, kindergarten, they said,
Speaker:paint a picture of yourself.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And I did a picture of myself wearing a nurse's uniform.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:You know, with the, with the Red Cross on it in the woods.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Woods nurse.
Speaker:A woods.
Speaker:I'd be a woods nurse that tended to squirrels and mice.
Speaker:For a animals that's smell.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And maybe not glasses for mice, maybe LASIK surgery for mice.
Speaker:You know what's interesting is there's, with the Enron thing,
Speaker:there's already like a precedent for a
Speaker:huge
Speaker:fall
Speaker:from Grace.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And that company too, like nobody even knew really what they did.
Speaker:Like this company.
Speaker:At least the idea was like an idea you could wrap your head
Speaker:around and maybe that's why.
Speaker:It went so far for so long.
Speaker:She also, being from Houston, she was well connected and she had a neighbor
Speaker:who worked similarly in sort of medical technology and I think she was surrounded
Speaker:by a bunch of wealthy white men investors.
Speaker:And I think through that, the Houston connection, certainly through
Speaker:like Bill Frist was on her board.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Former Henry Kissing, former senator, former senator.
Speaker:And he was a doctor, actually.
Speaker:He was also a doctor himself.
Speaker:And Henry Kissinger was on her board.
Speaker:On the board, yeah.
Speaker:So she got a very, and
Speaker:George Schultz.
Speaker:And George Schultz.
Speaker:Schultz was a, A secretary of State.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:In the movie he's played by Sam Waterson in the Dropout.
Speaker:Oh, interesting.
Speaker:She had a bunch of, uh, great people on her board.
Speaker:She's raising money.
Speaker:What attracted these really established people,
Speaker:I think because she sold the idea and her partner she met at Stanford, her partner
Speaker:Sonny, he was like 37 when she was 19.
Speaker:He was studying there.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And he's a Pakistani.
Speaker:He's a Pakistani.
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:And he also was sort of a lover boyfriend, right.
Speaker:He was also married, which is always not a great way to start out a
Speaker:relationship if your partner is married.
Speaker:Trust issues.
Speaker:I don't wanna be crass, but I do wanna ask, I mean, be crass.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:But I do wanna ask, I mean, all these like old men meeting with this woman who's
Speaker:like, you know, attractive women, like, do you think they were just these leches?
Speaker:I think it helped get her in the room.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:But when she was in the room, she was impressive.
Speaker:She's not stupid.
Speaker:I think what she realized, and she was told sort of early on, this
Speaker:thing's not gonna work, which made her even more intrepid about it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:The more people told her no, the more she was like, I'm going to make it happen.
Speaker:So she was very determined and I think it wasn't, yes, it got her in the
Speaker:room, but she was very well spoken.
Speaker:She's not a stupid word.
Speaker:No, I'm not
Speaker:saying that.
Speaker:It was only the appearance, but I have to think that played somewhat of a part.
Speaker:And also she lied to people.
Speaker:Like she said that these machines, the Edison could be used on like
Speaker:warships and medevac helicopters.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That the possibilities were endless.
Speaker:So everyone would've get in on this game, why wouldn't you?
Speaker:How did she sidestep?
Speaker:Demonstrating that it did in fact work.
Speaker:Here's the thing that's interesting.
Speaker:They never ever had anyone outside Theranos observe any tests.
Speaker:Huh.
Speaker:That's the thing that was kind of crazy.
Speaker:There was never any outside sources coming to investigate.
Speaker:They were
Speaker:very good at being evasive.
Speaker:Well, there was one thing where they were about to sign a deal with Walgreens, and
Speaker:Walgreens sent like this lab expert guy to just go there and check out what they were
Speaker:doing to like the Theranos laboratory.
Speaker:Well, he went to the company and he wanted to get into the laboratory, but
Speaker:basically they were babysitting him.
Speaker:Uh, they even like walked him to the bathroom when he, 'cause they didn't
Speaker:want him to like snoop around like a journalist in North Korea or something.
Speaker:Pretty much.
Speaker:Well, that, that was to her events.
Speaker:When she, this is the thing is she set the tone when she started out,
Speaker:when she founded the company and got her investors as wealth, she
Speaker:just said, you have my discretion.
Speaker:IE I'm in control of everything.
Speaker:Ah,
Speaker:their technology was never tested outside of the company and her
Speaker:five objectives to accomplish was extract blood without syringes,
Speaker:make a diagnosis with a few drops of blood, automate the test to minimize
Speaker:human error and get this all done.
Speaker:Within seconds.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:They failed at everything basically.
Speaker:None of that ever worked.
Speaker:There were
Speaker:like a couple, they wanted to do a thousand tests, but they ended
Speaker:up like maybe they could do like three, maybe they had like 10 or, I
Speaker:don't want to get the number wrong.
Speaker:But yeah, I mean it was pie in the sky stuff.
Speaker:And she also kind of was on the coattails of like the jobs model is like she loved
Speaker:the disruptiveness of Silicon Valley.
Speaker:We're here to change the world.
Speaker:We're disruptors.
Speaker:So everyone got behind that.
Speaker:I'm with a disruptor.
Speaker:Look how successful that is.
Speaker:So she's been operating for about five years and, and this company
Speaker:is growing, growing, growing, but there's really nothing to show for it.
Speaker:And so they do this New Yorker profile.
Speaker:Meanwhile, there is this Wall Street Journal reporter covers like basically
Speaker:the science medical beat for the paper.
Speaker:And his name is John Caro.
Speaker:So he started getting suspicious.
Speaker:He's like, there's so much secrecy about the company and she
Speaker:kind of controls the narrative.
Speaker:And tech companies are secretive and they're never transparent, but
Speaker:medical ones should be 'cause we're talking about people's health.
Speaker:And they also weren't necessarily in a testing phase.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:For years they figured out a way to start testing this out on
Speaker:regular people like terminal Yeah.
Speaker:Patients and stuff.
Speaker:And these things didn't work.
Speaker:So the thing that really struck John Carey Ruth of the Wall Street
Speaker:Journal Journal was whenever he heard her interviewed, and then people
Speaker:would ask her, how does this work?
Speaker:She was never really able to fully explain the process.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:She told people how she would like it to work, but they never really actually
Speaker:implementing things that were successful.
Speaker:He did talk to a couple of like whistleblowers.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Like one of them was George Schultz's grandson.
Speaker:Tyler Schultz.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And Tyler Schultz.
Speaker:Apparently he ended up leaving the company.
Speaker:He was very like worried about what was going on there.
Speaker:It was like a culture of fear and if you ask questions, you'd get fired.
Speaker:There was one unfortunate thing with one scientist.
Speaker:She kept trying to tell him to falsify data and he didn't wanna do that.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:It was sort of a cult of fear there.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It kind of reminds me of the, what was it, the 17th floor on Madoff
Speaker:or whatever the Bernie may like.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Like if you had a early defector, she was
Speaker:compared to Madoff.
Speaker:Well, one of her scientists ended up committing suicide.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Which is, you know, a terrible thing because he didn't know what to do.
Speaker:And it is so fucked up.
Speaker:Like people that are non-scientists and non like medical people.
Speaker:Who get all the benefits of getting paid huge salaries, treating like
Speaker:scientists and the people who really should matter and are,
Speaker:should be treated well, like shit.
Speaker:You know?
Speaker:So once the Wall Street Journal publishes this like expose, she gets word of
Speaker:it and she starts to panic, you know?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, she had that powerful lawyer who you had
Speaker:Oh, David Boce.
Speaker:Yeah, David
Speaker:Boce, who also, he handled the 2000 election,
Speaker:the Gore versus Bush.
Speaker:The Gore
Speaker:versus Bush.
Speaker:And he also was the lawyer for Nike and he was the one that handled the election.
Speaker:Al Gore, he's a great lawyer.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:Sort of like grassroots.
Speaker:He had our fingers in the dirt type of lawyer.
Speaker:Very bright guy.
Speaker:You covered uh, gore versus Bush.
Speaker:I did
Speaker:cover that election.
Speaker:I met David boy many times.
Speaker:Did you need him?
Speaker:What was he like?
Speaker:You know, like an absent-minded professor,
Speaker:you know?
Speaker:And so I think when the Wall Street Journal guy was gonna write the
Speaker:article, David boy essentially like threatened all of these people.
Speaker:Well he, he did publish the articles, but before he published it, they were like,
Speaker:they sent like private investigators.
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:To the whistleblower's house.
Speaker:There was another woman named Erica Chung.
Speaker:Who was, uh, threatened or like, they sent someone to sit outside of her workplace
Speaker:and they sent threatening letters, but they did publish it ultimately.
Speaker:So she was friends with Jim Kramer, Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:So that was the first show she went on.
Speaker:As things were sort of starting to fall apart, she spoke to him and he
Speaker:does Mad Money on does Mad Money c nbc.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:He rolls up his sleeves famously because he
Speaker:rolls up his sleeves, you know.
Speaker:Work is getting done.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So anyway, she goes on mad money, but she, she just basically speaks
Speaker:in circles and said platitudes.
Speaker:She said that
Speaker:thing about like, first they think you're crazy, then you change the world.
Speaker:Oh, so she framed that as like a stage in the process of a battery?
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:I'm like Thomas Edison or Galloway or Benjamin
Speaker:Franklin and electricity and all that crap or whatever.
Speaker:She's still speaking in these sort of circles and double speak,
Speaker:but at the end of the day she still can't explain the process
Speaker:and, and they do end up signing a deal with Walgreens, which is insane
Speaker:that none of this is gonna work.
Speaker:And yet they have wellness centers in a
Speaker:already said, I think they started out in Arizona.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:I think the goal was to be in like 8,100 Walgreens around the country.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:But they ended up.
Speaker:In like 40, but still, and they didn't even use this device in the Walgreens.
Speaker:They basically ended up buying machines from other companies.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And they take your blood at these Theranos
Speaker:Wellness Centers, as they call them, wellness centers.
Speaker:And then they'd mail it to Stanford and they wouldn't use
Speaker:Theranos to like analyze the blood.
Speaker:So it was all just like a front essentially.
Speaker:Well the other thing too
Speaker:is like one of the things she did with her investors, like the
Speaker:Fri and the Schultz and the Yeah.
Speaker:Kissingers of the world.
Speaker:She took their money from the investors on the condition that she didn't
Speaker:have to tell them how things work.
Speaker:Oh, interesting.
Speaker:So the people that gave them money, it was almost already signing in NDA
Speaker:saying, it's gonna be great, but I'm not giving reports about how things are done.
Speaker:Just trust me.
Speaker:And that's how, you know, she managed to raise 70 million when she started out.
Speaker:She had tons of investors, like the Waltons, the people who owned
Speaker:Walmart, they gave like 150 million.
Speaker:Rupert Murdoch, the DeVos family, the women that was the secretary of education
Speaker:of the first Trump administration.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:All gave so much money.
Speaker:They all were like, well, everybody is investing.
Speaker:This company's gonna, you know, make me tons of money.
Speaker:And the thing
Speaker:is, like she had, and her partner, Ramish, sunny Wan, who we mentioned mm-hmm.
Speaker:She met at Stanford.
Speaker:He was 37, a grad student.
Speaker:She was 19.
Speaker:But he was bad news.
Speaker:He was a real, like, he was violent, he was an asshole.
Speaker:And just basically put the fear of God in everybody.
Speaker:Well, he was basically the muscle.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:He was the one when things went bad, he was the one to send screaming into
Speaker:people's offices and threatening one.
Speaker:Hence the unfortunate researcher employee who killed himself.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So
Speaker:she, she was relieved of having to be the heavy, she could just
Speaker:be the, she just put it on him.
Speaker:Pla.
Speaker:It's interesting.
Speaker:I have a, a friend who said he knew someone who lived in, uh, Silicon
Speaker:Valley, that area in Marion County, rather, when all of this was going
Speaker:down and he would see Elizabeth Holmes walking and dog, oh my God.
Speaker:Without a Karen in the world.
Speaker:Like, it was just amazing.
Speaker:That's so weird how she could have all of this chaos.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And knowing how many people she was defrauding, yet she could wake up and walk
Speaker:her dog and smile at people, which is wow.
Speaker:It's an interesting, almost sociopathic way of living your life.
Speaker:There were so many former employees that ended up leaving that kind of were
Speaker:waiting for the company to fall apart.
Speaker:They knew it wouldn't last.
Speaker:I wonder if she deep down new.
Speaker:This is gonna all fall apart or did she, was she so naive and
Speaker:so diluted that she just thought it was gonna succeed eventually?
Speaker:I think it was kind of like throwing off things at the wall to see what sticks.
Speaker:Like something's gonna come out of it, fake it till you make it.
Speaker:Because even now she's in jail.
Speaker:Oh right.
Speaker:She looks at it and she says it wasn't fraud.
Speaker:It was a failure.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Well, it's funny because when we decided to do this as one of the episodes, we
Speaker:were like, oh, this story's kind of in the past, but now there's, she's like out
Speaker:there, well what are those billboards?
Speaker:Yeah, it's just blood today.
Speaker:What
Speaker:is
Speaker:that?
Speaker:Well, I think she just was recently up for parole, which was denied.
Speaker:I think she has like 11 years in jail.
Speaker:But she was up for parole and and denied and she's been sunny the entire time.
Speaker:She's never admitted to being fraudulent or lying.
Speaker:She said, I'm here because I failed.
Speaker:And failure isn't fraud.
Speaker:That's what she said.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Failure isn't fraud.
Speaker:And I think she also was kind of.
Speaker:Looking at it as sort of the, like the Martha Stewart model,
Speaker:like Martha Stewart went to jail.
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:And Martha Stewart's crimes were nothing compared to everyone else's, but Yeah.
Speaker:You know, she's trying to
Speaker:set up her second act.
Speaker:She's,
Speaker:she's like, yes, I'm a martyr.
Speaker:Like Martha, I'm just taking it.
Speaker:I don't want to gloss over the billboard thing because it's pretty crazy.
Speaker:So crazy.
Speaker:So the thing is,
Speaker:so anyway, she married a guy who is part of a hotel fortune out
Speaker:of San Diego, like luxury hotels.
Speaker:He's about 10 years young, a little younger than she is.
Speaker:And she has two children by him.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Who's now championing her.
Speaker:And you know, when she gets outta jail, he's developing a new product that's
Speaker:similar to this, but it's for pets.
Speaker:Ah, so, so she's trying to revive her image as we speak,
Speaker:even though she's still in jail.
Speaker:I mean, all this kind of went down at the end.
Speaker:The FDA finally did, after all these Wall Street Journal
Speaker:articles ended up rating Theranos.
Speaker:Eventually someone was like, maybe we should look into this.
Speaker:We should look into it.
Speaker:There was like an SEC investigation and she settled with them, but
Speaker:then there were criminal charges.
Speaker:Well, but the thing that's interesting is that while she was
Speaker:riding high, she was riding high.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:She took a gulf stream, like people took taxis.
Speaker:Her board was all white men who didn't ask any questions, and they had nothing
Speaker:to do with science for medicine.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:As we said, like kissing Sam Nun, army people, bill Frist, who
Speaker:was a doctor, he said, she's the future of the blood test business.
Speaker:You don't need four tubes of blood anymore when you do blood tests.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And he goes, he called it 1940s technology.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So everyone was just behind her and didn't ask questions.
Speaker:Are these people, like, is there such a thing as like smart, stupid.
Speaker:Where you can be smart, but also stupid.
Speaker:That's the way I live my life.
Speaker:Well,
Speaker:I think, yeah, it's a gullibility thing, right?
Speaker:Or a blind spot thing.
Speaker:Or a willful ignorance thing.
Speaker:Well, there's, but there's also, there's a groundswell of, you know,
Speaker:people want it to be true.
Speaker:Well, they'll benefit from it.
Speaker:You kind of wonder, was it a blind spot or they are they intentionally like lying?
Speaker:That's the big question I
Speaker:think.
Speaker:I think there was a blind spot for the investors.
Speaker:Like the other thing too is not only blind spot, but then they
Speaker:all have egg on their face too.
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:Because they were also behind and you know, it's embarrassing.
Speaker:You just get deeper and deeper and they get deeper.
Speaker:And
Speaker:like she actually, and she also brought her brother in who was a Duke graduate
Speaker:to become the director of sales.
Speaker:He had just graduated from Duke.
Speaker:He had no experience.
Speaker:Oh my God.
Speaker:But he was a Duke graduate.
Speaker:Ah.
Speaker:Another signifier of just trust me,
Speaker:I watched the Dropout with Amanda Sifri plays her.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, missed a good, it's very good.
Speaker:Amanda Siegfried is great.
Speaker:Does she come off sympathetic at all?
Speaker:No, not really.
Speaker:She comes off of someone not, not Humanlike.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:When she would unload at like office parties, she would get like blind drunk.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:But like that was like the one night she would do it.
Speaker:So she was very controlling in her life in certain ways and very sort of
Speaker:careless and others IIE carrying on a relationship with Sonny who was married.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So it's not like they even.
Speaker:Scrapped it for parts.
Speaker:It's, it wasn't like they figured out a lot of it, but just not all of it.
Speaker:It's like they figured out almost nothing.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And they carried on this charade for about five years.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:And when there was a problem, it was more like, let's blame someone rather
Speaker:than like, let's try to solve it.
Speaker:And when some of the tests didn't work, they were like, well, let's just
Speaker:highlight the couple that did work.
Speaker:She was also very charming to the point where like Henry Kissinger,
Speaker:because she worked all of the time, he's not knowing that she and
Speaker:Sonny were carrying on an affair.
Speaker:He tried to set her up with people from the country club.
Speaker:He's like funny.
Speaker:She needs to date, you know?
Speaker:She didn't need to date.
Speaker:She just did.
Speaker:I told
Speaker:you, I used to know Henry Kissinger.
Speaker:Did you?
Speaker:Oh my God.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:Well, when I worked at MSN bbc, it was like, that's hilarious.
Speaker:He was a go-to, and I would, he lived in Connecticut.
Speaker:He'd be like, oh.
Speaker:Good morning, Kathy, what
Speaker:do you need from me today?
Speaker:And I think one question to ask too is like, some of like what we consider
Speaker:to be a success in the business world isn't necessarily having a business and
Speaker:a carrying it through your entire life.
Speaker:It's like, let's get the business successful enough so
Speaker:that another business buys it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And pays you.
Speaker:You get acquired, you know, a billion dollars, you go public.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And that's kind of the dream.
Speaker:It's like, let's convince everyone this is a huge company and then
Speaker:we'll make our money, sell our shares and we're set for life.
Speaker:And I do think that's kind of a problem with how things work in America.
Speaker:So basically she lied to all of her investors.
Speaker:The, and you know, when the FBI got involved, so in 2022, she was
Speaker:sentenced to 11 years in jail.
Speaker:And her partner was sentenced too, right?
Speaker:13. 13 years
Speaker:in jail?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:So 11 years in jail, she was convicted of fraud and conspiracy, and she was
Speaker:ordered to pay 452 million in restitution.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:So she's 40 now?
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And she has two children by her husband, William Billy Evans, and he's the
Speaker:33-year-old, aired to the hotel relation.
Speaker:No, no relation to you kid.
Speaker:They have a son born in 2021 and a, a daughter born in 2023 and now
Speaker:her husband is trying to carry on and, and then now touching business.
Speaker:Hope he's wanted to
Speaker:do something with pets.
Speaker:It's a burgeoning business.
Speaker:Um, God.
Speaker:Well you can test them and use them on the same animal, you
Speaker:know?
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And again, pets won't go to the police so we know of.
Speaker:Yes, exactly.
Speaker:Which is also another thing.
Speaker:'cause everyone will do anything for their pets.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Oh, you know, you know, we end
Speaker:up spending so much money on our animals because we love them.
Speaker:Let's go into the pet industry, you know?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Which is a huge, huge business.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:You
Speaker:spend $2,000 on something that you have no idea if it's gonna work or whatever.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:So basically she's in jail, she's still steadfast.
Speaker:She doesn't, she's there right now.
Speaker:She's there right now.
Speaker:She was just a parole, a prison.
Speaker:Probably a prison.
Speaker:Federal charges.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:I'm sure it's a, it's a nice place,
Speaker:club fed.
Speaker:So, in terms of if she's bad or not, there's, there's definitely
Speaker:an interesting case because.
Speaker:We have what appears to be noble intentions,
Speaker:maybe.
Speaker:What do you think?
Speaker:Did she really wanna help people or just make a bazillion dollars?
Speaker:I think her intention was to help people, but I think her drive
Speaker:for success superseded that.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I
Speaker:think the nuggets were there.
Speaker:We don't all start out evil, but I do think she knew very early on it wasn't
Speaker:going to work and it didn't matter to her.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:But I do think she wanted the intention.
Speaker:I think she was motivated by her father's shame and failure from Enron
Speaker:and what that company did to him.
Speaker:When your intention also comes from a place of revenge, it's
Speaker:never gonna be a good one.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I also have to say we've both worked with people that are kind of control freaks or
Speaker:like micromanagers, and it's interesting how those people function and they kind
Speaker:of like treat you like shit because they want to meddle and everything.
Speaker:And then when things are not going well, they blame other people.
Speaker:But you can't have it both ways.
Speaker:If you're a micromanager, you're always to blame.
Speaker:You can't suddenly say, I'm not to blame because I hired the wrong people.
Speaker:So she had that kind of like contradiction when things were falling apart.
Speaker:She threw her team under the bus.
Speaker:She's like, I wasn't a scientist, but she
Speaker:was happy to be profiled of the New Yorker and beyond.
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:she took the credit when that was convenient.
Speaker:Charlie Rose and
Speaker:all that, she reminds me of almost like, uh, an infomercial or a
Speaker:Joel Osteen type uhhuh when she would ever talk to her company.
Speaker:Totally.
Speaker:She'd be wearing the headset and walking.
Speaker:Back and forth across the stage, kind of prowling and just throwing out platitudes.
Speaker:Well, those tech things are so, like, they're so ridiculous.
Speaker:People love those where they're like jumping up and down Steve Jobs.
Speaker:There's a whole eye
Speaker:iconography associated with that.
Speaker:Totally.
Speaker:Well, it's like, uh, I once had to, uh, do a piece on going
Speaker:to a Millionaire convention.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Does that literally exist?
Speaker:Oh, they do.
Speaker:They're called How to Be a Millionaire Convention and have, oh God,
Speaker:they have various millionaires.
Speaker:I could see that being popular.
Speaker:And I, I covered one.
Speaker:And the thing is the fee, if you do the whole weekend, it's
Speaker:like a thousand dollars fee.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So it was like, I did it for the Daily Show.
Speaker:It was a OneNote tune.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:It was just like, how do you become a millionaire?
Speaker:Throw a millionaire convention, because everyone at the entrance scene
Speaker:was so high and Donald Trump spoke.
Speaker:Oh, funny.
Speaker:And basically it was the same week that an unauthorized biography of him
Speaker:came out by a New York Times writer.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And he was there and all he did was attack the New York Times writer the whole time.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So
Speaker:that's all it was.
Speaker:It was just him defending himself.
Speaker:No instruction.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I mean, it's just believing the hype.
Speaker:Getting back to the question, I do believe she was bad.
Speaker:She was bad.
Speaker:She was early on, she was well aware.
Speaker:What she was selling wasn't what it was.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:She was misrepresenting
Speaker:and she made her staff miserable.
Speaker:Well, to the point where someone committed suicide,
Speaker:someone killed.
Speaker:But even apart from that, people were just running around
Speaker:like chicken with their heads.
Speaker:They, they lived
Speaker:in fear and
Speaker:we've been in bad work situations.
Speaker:It's, it can really affect your brain and your psychology.
Speaker:Well,
Speaker:also, I, I don't like the environment of the NDA.
Speaker:No, because that yearly says that should kind of be out.
Speaker:I think they started to outlaw that there are tons of red flags
Speaker:sprinkled throughout this story.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:One other reason why I think she's bad, I think you have to think about when
Speaker:you're raising money for ventures or.
Speaker:Companies.
Speaker:I mean, there is a limited amount of money in the world for those things.
Speaker:So like they're either going to Theranos or they're going to like
Speaker:some legitimate cancer research.
Speaker:Research.
Speaker:Research.
Speaker:Yeah, that's fucked up.
Speaker:Think of all the fucking people you can feed with.
Speaker:All the money she raised.
Speaker:Well that's the thing is
Speaker:that she kept saying it was 'cause Well they're gonna after me 'cause I'm a woman.
Speaker:No, you are working with medical technology and science y Yes.
Speaker:You're basically taking food out of the other people's mouths.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Even if you do start a company that seems like a good company, it starts to fail.
Speaker:You're obliged to your board to like tell them what is going on and then you go
Speaker:away and then other companies can try.
Speaker:And the other thing too
Speaker:is that she took full advantage of the gulf streams.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That she would take by herself.
Speaker:Oh, totally
Speaker:away.
Speaker:Oh God.
Speaker:Going
Speaker:to various speaking engagements, getting paid for them.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:While her scientists are back there, you know, in the labs
Speaker:going like, it's not gonna work.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, not only did she play with people's hope, which is a, A big
Speaker:betrayal, which is a terrible
Speaker:thing.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:But it's
Speaker:also such an affront to science and the scientific method.
Speaker:You're basically supposed to try to prove yourself wrong until
Speaker:you can't prove yourself wrong.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And she's basically doing the opposite.
Speaker:And she also knew from the very beginning, which she had that Phyllis Palmer.
Speaker:Professor say to her, you can't skip steps.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:' cause you can't, in science, you really can't.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And there were people who went to these wellness centers, wellness and
Speaker:Wellness.
Speaker:Wellness, and they were
Speaker:false results.
Speaker:Some woman had her estrogen level off the charts and she
Speaker:thought her cancer recurred.
Speaker:And even just going through that for a few days is horrible.
Speaker:Hell horrible.
Speaker:And it's, it's horrible.
Speaker:It's like nobody from the company took responsibility.
Speaker:At the end of the day, it's, it's about making money unfortunately.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I find that like sometimes when I go in an interview, that's the
Speaker:time to like figure out if it's gonna be a fucked up environment.
Speaker:'cause once you're on a show and you've signed an NDA or any job, really, it's
Speaker:much harder to speak out and people are gonna like try to control you and
Speaker:it's gonna be hard to speak the truth.
Speaker:But if you interview and you're like, so, uh, how does it work here?
Speaker:I'm sure people who worked for Theranos.
Speaker:I don't know if they asked those questions before they got the job
Speaker:where it's like, does this thing work?
Speaker:And then I guess they just wouldn't hire those people.
Speaker:Well, I mean, I think it's like, you know, obviously on paper it looks great
Speaker:and you're part of the best and the brightest, and you're going to change
Speaker:the world and humanity the way we live.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:You can
Speaker:say it doesn't work yet, but it will just
Speaker:give it time.
Speaker:Everyone fails.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Edison failed,
Speaker:you know.
Speaker:Well, Aon Musk's rocketships, they, they up just exploded all the time and
Speaker:he's like, they were still a good test.
Speaker:That's fine.
Speaker:That's fine.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:We learn something.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Well, we learn from our failures and we But you
Speaker:don't put humans on the rocket ship.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:And you don't take before
Speaker:they're gonna work.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Ideally.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:I have a, uh, what might be a gimmicky question, but Sure.
Speaker:So whatever the pet version of Theranos is.
Speaker:Are you guys rooting for that?
Speaker:No,
Speaker:I'm not either.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:You know what, my mom grew up with animals on the farm, you know?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And so I remember like when Sherman, uh, horse died on Christmas
Speaker:Eve, and I remember saying to my grandfather like, what's gonna happen?
Speaker:And he is like going to the glue factory.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Animals die.
Speaker:Some of these inventions to new technology.
Speaker:Part of the goal is to make things easier, but it's also to save money.
Speaker:Hospitals won't have to employ as many people.
Speaker:If her thing would've worked, they could fire a lot of phlebotomists.
Speaker:So it's like as great as it is to have new technology, there's always a downside.
Speaker:My cousin is a veterinarian, so it's like, oh, we're gonna like hire less
Speaker:people because we have a machine now that like can tell you if they have ringworm.
Speaker:Well, I
Speaker:think it's also been proven right, and that's even part of the medical
Speaker:terminology, like the laying of hands.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:What does that mean?
Speaker:Basically means like the act of being cared for.
Speaker:There's a therapeutic value to that.
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:like a physical connection.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It's like one of those expressions like do no harm or whatever.
Speaker:The first do no
Speaker:harm.
Speaker:Oh, I've been using that a lot and around with my doctors like, but
Speaker:I've been going through this stuff.
Speaker:I'm like, didn't you take an oath about first doing no harm?
Speaker:Like you're sending me to yet another person?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So yeah, with the animal thing, no animals.
Speaker:Unfortunately, they have shorter lifespans than we do, and
Speaker:I think there are some reasons why you want to get surgery for a dog.
Speaker:Oh, of I'm not gonna,
Speaker:of course, of course.
Speaker:My dog
Speaker:put his like head and paw through like a plate glass
Speaker:window in my house at one point.
Speaker:And yeah, we wanted to like do the stitches and stuff, but Yeah.
Speaker:Well of course what you gonna let him plead to that?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:I don't think that's a strong example, but if
Speaker:it gets No, no, I guess not.
Speaker:No, but I'm just saying like my husband's work colleague
Speaker:spends thousands of dollars.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:You the vet stuff of, that's, there's a
Speaker:tipping point where it, where it becomes a different thing.
Speaker:It's not about the pet.
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:So is there a moral to this story?
Speaker:Never.
Speaker:The thing about Elizabeth Holmes, it's the same way.
Speaker:If we would talk about our pilot episode.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:With Elizabeth Finch, the tools were all there.
Speaker:It's kind of like, do you use them for good or do you use 'em for
Speaker:evil, or does your ego get involved?
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Like hers did.
Speaker:She was so determined in her head that this was a success and
Speaker:she still believes it will be.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That I think that's when it gets dangerous and there's
Speaker:so much attention in our culture in the American culture, put on image
Speaker:and pr and you know that if you have money and you have investors, you can.
Speaker:Put a good front on things.
Speaker:And I do think when there's too much marketing involved before
Speaker:there's even a product, like I know when we work on a show, sometimes
Speaker:they're like, we need to do a promo.
Speaker:And I'm like, well, we haven't even finished the show yet.
Speaker:Let's focus on doing a good job with the thing we're actually doing.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Before you wanna like sell it to Walgreens, they make
Speaker:promises you can't keep.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well just focus on the job at hand.
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:So, was she bad?
Speaker:Yeah, I think, yeah.
Speaker:I don't like her.
Speaker:Yeah, I don't like
Speaker:her either.
Speaker:She's one of the people I really don't like of the people we've profiled, but you
Speaker:know, we don't want to be too judgmental.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, I'm gonna be judgmental.
Speaker:There's other people I actively hate.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:She's not one of them.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:But I don't imagine we'll ever wind up at the same restaurant.
Speaker:Now we're gonna shake things up a bit.
Speaker:Since we focus on so many bad Elizabeths.
Speaker:We thought it would be nice to focus on a badass Elizabeth.
Speaker:Welcome Eugene Carroll.
Speaker:She's an American author and longtime advice columnist who's asked.
Speaker:Eugene ran for over 25 years in El.
Speaker:Her latest book is not my Type one woman versus a president.
Speaker:You might be familiar with the story as we live and breathe.
Speaker:Welcome Eugene Carroll, who is joining us from Frog Island in upstate New York.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:Hello?
Speaker:Hello.
Speaker:Hello.
Speaker:How are you?
Speaker:Hello.
Speaker:Why are neither of you called Elizabeth?
Speaker:It's a good question.
Speaker:This is a failure.
Speaker:I am disappointed.
Speaker:We'll work on it.
Speaker:Really gi it
Speaker:after this.
Speaker:I might just go with it.
Speaker:I, I mean, you seem to have done well in life.
Speaker:Maybe I went wrong with Kathleen.
Speaker:So you were born Elizabeth, Jean Carroll, and then you were called.
Speaker:No, I was.
Speaker:No, no.
Speaker:So tell us your birth
Speaker:name.
Speaker:I do not.
Speaker:Deserve the name Elizabeth.
Speaker:Elizabeth is too fine and wonderful and evil, a name to be given.
Speaker:I was born Betty Jean Carol, and when I grew up I decided
Speaker:Betty wasn't nearly cool enough.
Speaker:So I just took the name Elizabeth and shortened it to E Jean, to e Jean Carol.
Speaker:That's what I did.
Speaker:I do not deserve Elizabeth.
Speaker:Well, in this podcast we talk about all kinds of Elizabeth, some
Speaker:who are infamous and famous, and some famous for the wrong reasons.
Speaker:So what we think you deserve to be called a badass, Elizabeth.
Speaker:So you've earned it.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:So in this episode at the front end, we talked about Elizabeth
Speaker:Holmes of the failed blood testing company, Theranos, right?
Speaker:Would you consider her bad?
Speaker:Uh, I consider her evil.
Speaker:She did a lot of harm.
Speaker:People went to her trusting that they would get results, which could tell
Speaker:them what further tests or how their health is or if they're in danger.
Speaker:And I was horrified when I realized that she was making that bullshit up.
Speaker:I mean, just making it up results of people's blood tests.
Speaker:It was amazing.
Speaker:And then she blames it on a guy, you know, I was just taking orders
Speaker:from my, you know, her lover.
Speaker:That part was really sickening.
Speaker:So she's serving jail time for it.
Speaker:It's well deserved.
Speaker:You don't think that if she was a man who lied or was fraudulent, you
Speaker:don't think that she got any a tougher sentence because she was female?
Speaker:You think she was just evil?
Speaker:I think she was evil.
Speaker:I think now she'll get out early.
Speaker:'cause she's had the child and she has special visitation rights
Speaker:and she has special everything.
Speaker:What I was enamored with was.
Speaker:When she ran the company, she was full on Steve Jobs, black sweater vest pants.
Speaker:The minute that trial hit, she is very fluffy.
Speaker:Hair is down, wearing light blue, light gray, very pretty swishy little skirts.
Speaker:They really redid her to present a more beautiful and helpful and
Speaker:nurse like Elizabeth to the jury.
Speaker:It didn't work.
Speaker:They saw right through it.
Speaker:Well, we're gonna talk about you on your, your outfits for trial as
Speaker:well, which is very interesting.
Speaker:But I wanted to start first with your history.
Speaker:So you grew up in Indiana, what was Indiana like?
Speaker:Like tell us a bit about like, you're from Indiana, David Letterman's
Speaker:from Indiana, Axl Roses there, but so is Jim Jones and Mike Pence.
Speaker:So tell us about Indiana.
Speaker:Indiana is the heart of the heart of the country.
Speaker:I grew up in the sticks, which were behind the sticks.
Speaker:I grew up in a tiny little red brick schoolhouse that my parents at the
Speaker:time, being young and full of beans, bought an old schoolhouse, and we
Speaker:moved in and that's where I was raised.
Speaker:It was great.
Speaker:The childhood was a total and brilliant freedom.
Speaker:My mother would open the front door, and this was back in the day.
Speaker:I could just go outside and not come back to lunchtime and we'd roam the
Speaker:hills with my dog for my entertainment.
Speaker:I'd climb on the tombstones across from the schoolhouse.
Speaker:I'd break into the church, you know, and steal their holy stuff.
Speaker:It's a terribly racist state, but otherwise it's
Speaker:nice, solid American values.
Speaker:So you sort of became a public figure, so to speak, when you were star
Speaker:cheerleader at the University of Indiana and you actually met President Johnson.
Speaker:So tell us the trajectory you from Cheerleader America and
Speaker:then you head off to Chicago.
Speaker:Let's, how'd you get there?
Speaker:How did you move forward and get into media?
Speaker:You have done your research.
Speaker:Really?
Speaker:I have.
Speaker:What the hell?
Speaker:Have you done anything but studied?
Speaker:I can't.
Speaker:That's amazing.
Speaker:The more I know about you e Eugene, the more I want you to be my best friend.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Well, pretend I didn't say that out loud, but thank you.
Speaker:What I was telling those guys is that you started out with that you're
Speaker:cheerleader and then you're fucking taking a president down twice.
Speaker:I know you're not no stupid person either.
Speaker:Well, here's the thing.
Speaker:I think it required sort of the rah rah type to put up with the.
Speaker:Incessant, horrible harassment of the nation of Trump followers.
Speaker:I had to be a cheerleader.
Speaker:I had to be like this because baby, you are not bringing me down.
Speaker:You know, watch out old man, I'm a cheerleader.
Speaker:Well, you don't mess with a cheerleader.
Speaker:So I think that aspect played into it because I had an advice fellow for
Speaker:27 years, and basically I just yelled at people and cheered them on, and
Speaker:you're the first person to mention this, Kathy, that's probably the
Speaker:essential ingredient besides having the greatest attorney in the world.
Speaker:The essential ingredient to beating Donald Trump is to keep your spirits up.
Speaker:I also like the fact that you always say amusement before anger too.
Speaker:Ah.
Speaker:That has to be my mantra, and it has been since I've been reading about you,
Speaker:because Gideon knows me for a long time.
Speaker:I, I need to follow that.
Speaker:Well, this is what I'm so fascinated is that you knew you were a
Speaker:writer, but you kind of knew you wanted life experience first.
Speaker:Like, I need to live a little before I can start immersing myself in other worlds.
Speaker:I started sending ideas to magazines when I was 12.
Speaker:It was not my choice to have all sorts of life experience.
Speaker:I wanted to just start and be a writer, writer away.
Speaker:But I got experience because nobody took any of my ideas.
Speaker:I could not break into magazine.
Speaker:It took me 25 years of no, no, no, no.
Speaker:25 years to get my first acceptance at a magazine.
Speaker:Can you imagine the go to hell?
Speaker:I don't care.
Speaker:Takes, whatever it takes kind of attitude that you would take No.
Speaker:For 25 years.
Speaker:I mean, that's how badly I wanted to write.
Speaker:Well, the cheerleader spirit Yeah.
Speaker:Must play into that as well.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:I
Speaker:hadn't thought of that, but that's true.
Speaker:Good.
Speaker:You, so what was your first, you didn't an outdoor magazine pitch with Fran Lebos.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So tell us about that, how that came to be and how you found her number.
Speaker:Well, my, my first husband and I, Steve Byers and I were living in
Speaker:Montana and I was spelling the mails with story pitches, was reading Vogue
Speaker:Magazine, and I was out in a pumphouse.
Speaker:We lived in the Spanish Peaks in Ennis, uh, Montana.
Speaker:And I came across this gorgeous picture of Fran Lebowitz taken.
Speaker:By the great photographer and Yitz, it's Fran on her bed yammering into her phone.
Speaker:I went into the house and got a magnifying glass and I read Fran's
Speaker:phone number on her dial up phone.
Speaker:Oh my God.
Speaker:From a photograph?
Speaker:Yeah, from the photograph.
Speaker:Got in the car, drove to the laundromat because of course we did not have a
Speaker:phone and called Fran and said, Fran, this is Eugene Carol, you don't know me.
Speaker:I'd like to take you camping for outside magazine.
Speaker:And she said, well, when I was, I said, well, maybe, uh, and I named
Speaker:a date and she said, all right.
Speaker:And that was it.
Speaker:That's amazing.
Speaker:And this is Friendly Woods who had described the outdoors as
Speaker:something she had to walk through.
Speaker:She get from her apartment to a taxi cab.
Speaker:So it was a scream and she went on the cover and that was really
Speaker:sort of the start of my career.
Speaker:And she was amazed by the moon.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:What is that thing?
Speaker:Shiny in the, what is that?
Speaker:It's the moon, Fran.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:You spent a lot of time writing about s Thompson and, and the book,
Speaker:which talks about a lot of serious things, um, is also very funny.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:You have a great section about Hunter s Thompson's daily schedule.
Speaker:Can you Yeah.
Speaker:Talk about that a little bit.
Speaker:Well, I showed up at Hunter's Place unannounced bags and
Speaker:baggage and wrote his biography.
Speaker:But what I did was I clocked him one day on the amount of things he
Speaker:ingested in a 24 hour period, and I kept a list and it is astonishing.
Speaker:Absolutely astonishing that he not only was alive, but thinking and
Speaker:playing golf and driving at 110 miles an hour at night with a snow cone in
Speaker:his lap, which is shredded ice with a Chev regal on with a grass pipe in
Speaker:his mouth and having just dropped ass.
Speaker:Oh
Speaker:my God.
Speaker:That's how he lived, that enormous Hunter Thompson brain.
Speaker:He probably had more effect on American journalism for the last half of the
Speaker:20th century than any other person, maybe Tom Wolf and Hunter Thompson.
Speaker:Those two really enormous fact, everybody wanted to be Hunter
Speaker:because he took an event.
Speaker:Then just swirled it around himself and that's how he reported it was brilliant.
Speaker:And you also, you wrote for a year at SNL with Al
Speaker:Franken.
Speaker:Well, I was, uh, the worst writer in Saturday Night Live history because
Speaker:I couldn't get anything on the air.
Speaker:But neither could Larry David.
Speaker:No, neither could Larry da Gideon.
Speaker:That's exactly right.
Speaker:It's hard, it's very hard to please Lorne.
Speaker:Who knows what he is doing?
Speaker:He knows what works at 1130.
Speaker:He knows what works at midnight.
Speaker:He knows what works at 1215.
Speaker:And Al Franken is hilarious.
Speaker:Can shoot off one-liners like in a normal conversation.
Speaker:Well, Gideon, you've gotten in a couple of zingers.
Speaker:Not like Al Franken though.
Speaker:He's pretty good.
Speaker:Not
Speaker:Franken zingers.
Speaker:He has a vast world do.
Speaker:He should never have stepped down from the United States Senate.
Speaker:I'll never forgive Chris Sting Gillibrand.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:For calling for it.
Speaker:Times have changed.
Speaker:So I when ask, so you, you brought this up before, so you wrote the advice Al um,
Speaker:ask Eugene for L Magazine for 27 years.
Speaker:How do you become an advice columnist?
Speaker:Well, because I was a, a journalist, Amy Gross, the
Speaker:editor in chief of LL is French.
Speaker:We, and they came to America and they had a year of American L and the French
Speaker:just threw up their hands because they couldn't figure out American women at all.
Speaker:And they had an interview with one of the top editors in New York, Amy Gross.
Speaker:And they said to her, we can't figure out how to do a magazine because
Speaker:American women don't like to read.
Speaker:So that was their view.
Speaker:So Amy took over that magazine and she hired the best journalist she
Speaker:could get ahold and she, it became the Thinking Women's magazine and
Speaker:she took me to lunch and asked me if I wanted an advice column and boy.
Speaker:I was raised on Dear Abbey and Ann Leonard.
Speaker:To me that was Tolstoy and Doki.
Speaker:That was, they were perfect.
Speaker:Were there any types of advice that would come in where people were
Speaker:asking you something that you were just squeamish about not touching?
Speaker:Or did you basically entertain anything?
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:Anything You'll want The kinda letter that you're talking about, Gideon, you want
Speaker:it spices things up.
Speaker:You want the kinda letter that where people stop you on the street
Speaker:and say, was that letter real?
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:It's the heartbeat of the culture basically.
Speaker:It really is.
Speaker:It's basically a reflection of everyone's fears and weaknesses, right?
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:How we're failing as a society.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:Like, okay, they, they're worried about their weight.
Speaker:How can we exploit that?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:How can we make money off of them?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I guess we wanna sort of transition now into your book.
Speaker:Also, myself, I'm a huge fan of Bergdorf's.
Speaker:Um, that was always my happy place as was, um, Bendell's, which is sadly God.
Speaker:Oh, remember Beals?
Speaker:Ah, so Donald Trump assaulted you in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room
Speaker:in 1996, and you kind of, it changed your life, but you put it behind you.
Speaker:But then in 2017, I believe, when these sort of Me too Harvey Weinstein
Speaker:stuff started, came out, you were like, I need to take action.
Speaker:I need to speak.
Speaker:So tell me about what compelled you to move forward.
Speaker:Like what was it that said to you like, Nope, this needs to be said.
Speaker:Uh, I turned 75.
Speaker:I thought, fuck it.
Speaker:I got nothing to lose.
Speaker:I could not for another minute.
Speaker:Continue to be the hypocrite I was.
Speaker:'cause I was advising women to do things that I was unable to do.
Speaker:In other words, I was telling women to go to the police,
Speaker:telling women how to deal with it.
Speaker:And there I am, the biggest hypocrite that's ever walked, you know?
Speaker:So I said, no more.
Speaker:You know when you reach 75, you know, you know a thing or two and
Speaker:you really have some strength.
Speaker:'cause you really, an old lady is probably the most powerful entity
Speaker:in the United States because old ladies have got nothing to lose.
Speaker:I didn't win until I was 81.
Speaker:So yeah.
Speaker:I just decided, no, that's it.
Speaker:I've had it.
Speaker:Nope, I'm done.
Speaker:I'm doing it.
Speaker:I'm coming forward
Speaker:in the book.
Speaker:You had a really interesting moment where you're at a Molly Jung fast party.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And you got some legal tips or something, tips.
Speaker:Molly Jung Fast had a party.
Speaker:And Molly's book is great.
Speaker:It's about her mother.
Speaker:Yeah, it's a read.
Speaker:So I'm at this party and this plump, dark-haired, very impish, sort of
Speaker:sweet and witty looking man who was over in the corner hiding and he
Speaker:was the only Republican in the room.
Speaker:I went over to him and thanked him.
Speaker:He had written a really great op-ed in the Washington Post saying,
Speaker:if you believe Juanita Broadway, you gotta believe Eugene Carroll.
Speaker:'cause her case is much stronger.
Speaker:So I went over to him and I said, George Conway, my name is Eugene Carroll.
Speaker:Thank you very much.
Speaker:I remember and my memory is very good.
Speaker:I remember that George says to me, you know, you could sue him.
Speaker:And George, who was a Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard and Yale Law School, you know,
Speaker:he started, uh, the Lincoln Project.
Speaker:He also has a good memory.
Speaker:And he remembers that I said, George, could I sue him?
Speaker:So E, either way, George, I came from Indiana.
Speaker:I didn't know lawyers.
Speaker:He took the time to explain to me what a civil case was, what a criminal case was,
Speaker:what would happen, what I had to consider.
Speaker:You told the truth, he called you a liar.
Speaker:And I said 26 times.
Speaker:He said, therefore you can sue him for defamation.
Speaker:He said, and I may have a recommendation for you.
Speaker:So the next morning I opened the email and it said introduction.
Speaker:And there was George introducing me to the great legal mind of
Speaker:her generation, Robbie Kaplan.
Speaker:And that was it.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:That was.
Speaker:Fate.
Speaker:It never would've happened if I had not run into George Conway.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:It was fortuitous for you because you needed to do it in the right way.
Speaker:And did you ever, so let's talk about going up to the trial,
Speaker:going up for the depositions.
Speaker:You, you did a very clever trick because which pertains to the way the name
Speaker:of the book preparing for the trial.
Speaker:You dressed like it was 1996.
Speaker:Correct.
Speaker:Which is when the assault happened.
Speaker:I still had the clothes and you
Speaker:should, they were gorgeous.
Speaker:Well, Catherine, do you throw it?
Speaker:I
Speaker:hold on to the good stuff.
Speaker:Yeah, you hang on to the good stuff.
Speaker:And we cut my hair like I wore at, in 1996.
Speaker:Did the makeup I wore in 1996.
Speaker:And the reason we did that is because we had mock trials,
Speaker:which you do before a big trial.
Speaker:You find out are your arguments working with a jury.
Speaker:And we found out, yeah, the argument was working, but they all
Speaker:thought I was begging him for it.
Speaker:They weren't like a woke couture you.
Speaker:Well, they just thought I was so old and ugly and dislocated
Speaker:that he could not have possibly
Speaker:really.
Speaker:So we had to change my look just to remind them that I was that
Speaker:woman in 1996 and anytime we had an opportunity, they had put a picture
Speaker:of me in 1996 in front of the jury.
Speaker:But of course the book is called, not My Type, because when Robbie Kaplan
Speaker:deposed Donald Trump and Merri Largo, she got him to say, had he ever seen me?
Speaker:Somebody had showed him a picture and what did you think?
Speaker:Well, she's not my type.
Speaker:She got him to say several times that I was not his type.
Speaker:Then she tells him three times that she's going to show him a picture of me.
Speaker:She shows him the picture.
Speaker:She said, can you identify the people in this photo?
Speaker:He goes right to John Johnson, my husband, that's John Johnson.
Speaker:Uh, great.
Speaker:You know, newscaster, I don't know him, but uh, he's a
Speaker:great, and that's, uh, Marla.
Speaker:Robbie said, you're saying That's Marla?
Speaker:He said, yeah, that's Marla, that's my wife.
Speaker:And of course he was pointing to me,
Speaker:oh my god, unbelievable.
Speaker:And Robbie said, I take it that your three wives were your
Speaker:type and he had to say yes.
Speaker:You couldn't have written it any better.
Speaker:No, I could not have been any better.
Speaker:That's exactly perfectly put.
Speaker:You talk a lot about how you understood why women don't come forward a lot of
Speaker:the time, because, you know, you felt that Joe Taino and the Trump lawyers
Speaker:were actually beating you up again.
Speaker:You were sort of getting assaulted verbally.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:They asked you who you slept with.
Speaker:I mean, did you ever kind of regret.
Speaker:Getting into this because of that.
Speaker:Well, I didn't mind talking about my lovers.
Speaker:I love my lovers.
Speaker:Come on.
Speaker:They are amazing.
Speaker:That
Speaker:was a miscalculation on their part because Alina Haba, Esquire asked
Speaker:me that to shame me and make me look like a floozy, but it didn't work.
Speaker:We had an upstate jury.
Speaker:This was not a Manhattan jury, so it was not an easy case.
Speaker:Trump could have won.
Speaker:Oh, by the way, that's, uh, forgive the dog barking in the background.
Speaker:Those are watchdog.
Speaker:They're two.
Speaker:That sounds like a big one.
Speaker:Well, we like those dogs barking.
Speaker:That one right there is 120 pounds.
Speaker:Ones barking.
Speaker:Oh.
Speaker:Oh wow.
Speaker:So, no, we like these dogs barking.
Speaker:We want 'em barking 'cause it keeps me safe.
Speaker:I wanted to bring that up at the top.
Speaker:Where you live is called Frog Island and that's upstate New York.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:So you're sequestered, but are, I mean, do you worry about your safety
Speaker:at all with all of this going on?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:I don't care if anybody shoots me.
Speaker:I don't care.
Speaker:Well, I can't sit around and worried about, I mean, are you worried about I
Speaker:live in la That's a daily thing, just walking down the street, so.
Speaker:Oh
Speaker:my God.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:I'm not kidding you.
Speaker:You got mud slides.
Speaker:You got rains?
Speaker:We got fires.
Speaker:You got fires.
Speaker:Oh boy.
Speaker:Now my phone is going off.
Speaker:Wait one sec. Let me just let my phone
Speaker:tell 'em I'll be right there.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Say hold on.
Speaker:Eugene will be right with you.
Speaker:So let's talk about the book that's coming out that's out right now, so
Speaker:we know where the title came from.
Speaker:So this was basically a diary of the trials.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And the thing that Gideon brought up earlier is that you write a so elegantly
Speaker:and so wittingly about traumatic events.
Speaker:And how do you do that?
Speaker:I know that you say, you know, comes from the cheerleader.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:How do you write about such an awful event with wit?
Speaker:Well, it was funny.
Speaker:I mean, that whole trial, have you ever been in a courtroom?
Speaker:It's hysterical.
Speaker:The book is very funny.
Speaker:For that reason, it was an instant New York Times bestseller boom.
Speaker:I mean, boom, within hours when it came out because it was, it's a difficult,
Speaker:tragic subject, but it's a funny book.
Speaker:And it shows you the details of what go on when you go to trial against an
Speaker:old man in dark apricot makeup with his hair all swirled up like Bette Davison.
Speaker:Now Voyager, I mean, what is not to laugh at?
Speaker:So let's talk about, uh, any sort of day-to-day things, anecdotes.
Speaker:Well, one of the things I had to do was, um, I was getting no sleep.
Speaker:'cause you're so, I'm so worried.
Speaker:There was a lot of pressure.
Speaker:So one thing I did was I had what I called the brain diet.
Speaker:You know, Uhhuh, I found that if you eat the brain diet,
Speaker:you can get through anything.
Speaker:The brain diet.
Speaker:Are you guys on the brain diet?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Tell me
Speaker:either.
Speaker:What is the brain?
Speaker:That's not fish.
Speaker:They always called that.
Speaker:Well,
Speaker:brain food.
Speaker:But
Speaker:Gideon, that is absolutely correct.
Speaker:Oh, fish are great.
Speaker:We should all have fish.
Speaker:I'm a vegetarian.
Speaker:I don't wanna eat anything with a soul.
Speaker:So therefore, berries.
Speaker:Leafy greens, nuts, whole grains, beans, olive oil, eggs.
Speaker:And every night I would make this huge salad and I eat that damn brain food.
Speaker:Yum.
Speaker:And it got me through because I never was sluggish.
Speaker:I remembered everything.
Speaker:You know, you can't have those moments when you can't.
Speaker:We have brain fog.
Speaker:Yeah, no.
Speaker:'cause it doesn't look good if you're testifying.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:It really
Speaker:works.
Speaker:I've continued the brain diet.
Speaker:So you actually went to trial against him?
Speaker:Uh, the first one you won 83 million.
Speaker:The second one you won 5 million.
Speaker:The first one, he called you a liar after the first settlement.
Speaker:Correct.
Speaker:And then you went after him again.
Speaker:Basically the headline is 83.3 million.
Speaker:That's all you need to know because it turns out he did cause me a lot of harm.
Speaker:Of course.
Speaker:That was the difficult thing in the trial.
Speaker:'cause I don't like talking about it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:The jury understood it and he so misbehaved during the trial,
Speaker:yammered the entire time he was sitting right behind me.
Speaker:I could hear everything.
Speaker:He was so loud.
Speaker:We kept asking the judge, please 'cause the jury could hear everything
Speaker:he said throughout the trial.
Speaker:I don't know her.
Speaker:I don't know who she is.
Speaker:I don't know her.
Speaker:I don't know who she is.
Speaker:He sounded like a leaky faucet that was just pouring out sewage.
Speaker:Constantly berated his own attorney, Alina Haba Esquire, told her what to do.
Speaker:Oh wow.
Speaker:Stand up.
Speaker:Stand up.
Speaker:What?
Speaker:So it comes to the end, the closing arguments.
Speaker:Robbie Kaplan.
Speaker:Is giving one of the great final arguments of the 21st century.
Speaker:There's a there, the dogs there, they're,
Speaker:Hey
Speaker:guys,
Speaker:young.
Speaker:Hi babies.
Speaker:I'm glad you showed your faces.
Speaker:Love them.
Speaker:And
Speaker:so, and they're in the final thing.
Speaker:And there's Robbie Kaplan looking sharp addressing the jury.
Speaker:How much money will it take to make him stop?
Speaker:Because even during the trial he was doing sometimes 40 posts an hour.
Speaker:Oh my God.
Speaker:On true social
Speaker:because he wanted to be on the golf course.
Speaker:Oh God, no.
Speaker:You know what?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:That man loved being in the courtroom.
Speaker:Loved it.
Speaker:Because why campaign funds were right.
Speaker:Coming in.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, it was the greatest campaign stop he ever had was at trial.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:There's Robbie.
Speaker:How much money will it take to make him stop?
Speaker:Ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker:And then she used information from his deposition in the fraud trial and he
Speaker:says, Mar Largo is worth $1,000,000,500.
Speaker:That Doral is worth $2 billion.
Speaker:That is brand alone is worth $10 billion.
Speaker:Ladies and gentlemen, she's into this thing and Trump, Steve
Speaker:coming off the top of his head.
Speaker:Both his shoulders were just like almost in flames.
Speaker:He was so burning with anger.
Speaker:He stands up in the middle of Robbie Kaplan's final argument
Speaker:and walks out of the courtroom.
Speaker:The jury was like, wow.
Speaker:Because if there's one thing that makes you look guilty, it's turning and running.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Of course.
Speaker:And that's what he did.
Speaker:That's
Speaker:incredible.
Speaker:So the jury goes out, the jury comes back very quickly and is 83.3 million and I'm
Speaker:going to give that money to everything.
Speaker:He hates women.
Speaker:We need to get our rights back in this country.
Speaker:We lost our rights.
Speaker:Women have been degraded so quickly and so fast.
Speaker:I can.
Speaker:So that's probably where the money's gonna go.
Speaker:And do you think, because once since Trump has been into office, the meep too
Speaker:movement has sort of backed down a little.
Speaker:You know, I, I, I know a lot of the, the DEI movement has had to back off
Speaker:because of lawsuits and stuff like that.
Speaker:So what are your thoughts on that and what do we need to do?
Speaker:Well, we need to get the fuck off Our lazy asses is what we need to do.
Speaker:We gotta stop being demoralized and depressed and, you
Speaker:know, I can't believe it.
Speaker:I don't know what's happened.
Speaker:In order to maintain a democracy, you need an active citizenry active.
Speaker:So many people are caving into him ahead of time.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:They're not even waiting to be challenged, like corporations,
Speaker:law firms, universities, the
Speaker:media,
Speaker:you can count a few people on one hand like yourself, who
Speaker:have actually stood up to him.
Speaker:Does that shock you?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:This is not the America I grew up in.
Speaker:Can't believe it.
Speaker:I really can't believe it.
Speaker:So we wanna plug your book, which is not my type one woman versus a president.
Speaker:It's out in, it's in bookstores.
Speaker:It's on Audible, it's on every sort of platform.
Speaker:Again, it's a bestseller of course, which is very exciting.
Speaker:And then what's next for you?
Speaker:I know there's a documentary coming out that's, that's about
Speaker:your life that we can look for.
Speaker:Anything else you'd like to plug?
Speaker:No, that's it.
Speaker:I'll plug bad, Elizabeth.
Speaker:That's a good thing to plug.
Speaker:We would love if you
Speaker:plug bad, Elizabeth.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Tell all your friends.
Speaker:I like battle Elizabeth.
Speaker:You know, if you wanna lend us $83 million, we're here.
Speaker:Okay,
Speaker:that's good.
Speaker:Also, you are our badass Elizabeth.
Speaker:Uh, we're so proud of all the work you do.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:But we are gonna come visit you in Frog Island.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:'cause it sounds fun.
Speaker:I love it.
Speaker:Thank you to our guest, the ravishing, Eugene Carroll.
Speaker:Please pick up a copy of her latest book, not my Type one Woman versus a president.
Speaker:And if you want more information about Elizabeth Holmes, you can
Speaker:find that in the show notes.
Speaker:Thank you for listening to Battle Elizabeth.
Speaker:Please rate and review the show on places like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker:We are Battle Elizabeth Pod on Instagram and Substack.
Speaker:We really want this podcast to be a conversation with our listeners.
Speaker:Feel free to email us at Battle elizabeth pod@gmail.com.
Speaker:If you have any questions or comments, they can be good or bad.
Speaker:Just don't be indifferent.
Speaker:Battle Elizabeth is recorded at Jet Road Studios.
Speaker:It is hosted by me, Gideon Evans,
Speaker:me, Kathy Egan Taylor.
Speaker:It is produced and engineered by Will Becton, and our executive
Speaker:producer is AM Beckton.
Speaker:Our theme music was composed by Alexis Cardo and Danny Gray.
Speaker:Thanks again for listening.
Speaker:We'll see you next time.
