Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Not everybody in the AACC wanted her there, though.

The invitation to Holmes was highly controversial among its members, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou in his best-selling Page-Turner Bad Blood.

But the association's leadership, he continues, had seen a chance to generate publicity and buzz for the normally staid scientific conference.

Several dozen journalists did make the trek to Philadelphia to watch the spectacle.

The story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is told edge-of-the-seat style by my guest, John Cario, in his new book, Bad Blood.

Cario is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

He's been awarded the George Polk Award for financial reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism.

And that was actually an ambitious attempt to change blood testing.

And she ditched that after a few years in late 2007.

And then the second iteration of the technology, as I described in the book, was essentially a converted glue dispensing robot.

And, you know, an engineer at Theranos had ordered this glue robot from a company in New Jersey and reprogrammed it, affixed the pipette to the end of the robotic arm and reprogrammed it to mimic what a lab scientist would do at the bench.

And so from that point forward, the Theranos technology was no longer really any use.

He wrote the book.

Bad Blood.

On Holmes.

Great name.

Bad Blood.

John Carreyrou.

Carreyrou.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, maybe this is a good opportunity to get into some of the facts.

One of the interesting reactions I've seen is I think people who haven't read Bad Blood, which I recommend everybody read.

It's a great book of reporting and a sort of fascinating documentation of a particular culture in Silicon Valley in the years that Theranos was around.

People who haven't read it are not necessarily as familiar with exactly what was going on at Theranos or with Elizabeth Holmes.

Well, that's a great note to end on.

John, thank you for joining us again.

I have to recommend Hard Fork listeners, our audience, read Bad Blood if you've seen this movie.

If you haven't seen this movie, it's a great work of journalism, a great work of nonfiction.

And in true form to who I am on this podcast, it is because of a book.

I learned about John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, which is sort of the seminal book Written by the Wall Street Journal reporter who was the big newsbreaker on this story.

This is when the shit really hit the fan for Elizabeth Holmes.

And he has been very involved in her downfall.

And it's kind of interesting.

I did read Bad Blood.

We can talk about that.

But I still was like, I didn't know she was still in prison.

Everyone felt very locked in, which again is rare for just a general public screening of a three hour documentary.

So it definitely has something special.

You mentioned that you had read Bad Blood, the John Carreyrou book about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

But what else were you familiar with about Elizabeth Holmes or about Nathan Fielder in particular? Had you watched Nathan for you or the rehearsal? How prepared did you feel, I guess, to enter this documentary?

I don't think it's a negative thing.

I don't think there's any bad blood at all.

I just think they're like, it's in the family's hands now.

Yes, I too, I read the memoir, watched a lot of his rollout of the memoirs.

Like I just had an idea of her and I still kind of have that idea.

Well, you know, she's been the subject of any number of documentaries and scripted series.

And I read Bad Blood, which was the John Carreyrou book that was the definitive story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.

And what bothered me, two things bothered me about the movie, but I completely agree with you.

I think it's it pushes my credibility to think that she would never have heard of who's on first.

And two, this question, so John Carreyrou, who is the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story and wrote Bad Blood, which we have plugged every time we've talked about the story because it's so very good.

In his essay, in response to watching this, said that he... absolutely thinks that she knows exactly what's going on in that skit and that she's pretending to not understand because this is part of her strategy to pretend that she doesn't know, that she doesn't remember, that she doesn't understand.

She's just a simple girl who made a, you know, company that was valued at $9 billion at one point based on nothing, based on nothing, but an idea that she sold very well.