 Yes. Hi! I missed you guys. Hi. Thank you. Thank you so stop. You're all too kind. We're back. We're back. I missed you all so much. Hello and welcome back to Dapper History. It's been a while but I'm finally back and I'm going to tell you about the parts of history that are really interesting that you probably haven't heard about. But before we get into that, I can't believe I'm saying this but story time. So I actually have a job in real life outside of embarrassing myself on the internet. I work in the medical field which is very fitting for today's episode. So recently at work I was sitting with a co-worker, things had slowed down so we like had a chance to breathe. Tell me why this dude looked me in the eye and said, oh Julia, I saw you on YouTube. Would I tell you that I have never been closer to quitting and changing my entire identity? Luckily he had just seen one of the Dapper History videos so it was all fine and he like thought it was funny or whatever. Anyway so I've just been taking about a month to recover from that traumatic experience. Look who joined us. It's Julia again. Anyway speaking of the medical field that's where today's topic takes place. When I say Dapper History I'm using that term lightly because this is actually a very recent story. So recent in fact that it's still ongoing at the time that I'm recording this video. So today I will be telling you the story of Theranos, one of the most costly scams in the history of the field of medicine. But before we get into that we need to talk about the woman behind all of it. That's right we're doing another Girl Boss episode. We're doing it. This is the story of Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes was born February 3rd, 1984. An Aquarius explains a lot. Her parents were very powerful people and so from a young age she wanted to be powerful too. From a very young age when asked about what she wanted to be when she grew up, Elizabeth would say things like I want to be an inventor. I want to be a billionaire. I want to be a Silicon Valley mogul. She wanted to change the world and she had the drive and the parents money to do it. Elizabeth had an uncle who she was close to who was a very important part of her life from a very young age. But tragically he was diagnosed with skin cancer which then spread to his brain and progressed into bone cancer. It was too late to treat him and he unfortunately passed away. This devastating event obviously had an impact on Elizabeth. Years later in the future Elizabeth would say that her uncle was one of her biggest motivations and the devastating loss of him made her want to invent something that would make less people have to say goodbye so soon. Now I've noticed that when people talk about the trainwreck that Theranos eventually became they very rarely talk about the story with her uncle and I understand that it's not exactly relevant to later events but I think that it's a very crucial detail in this story. Here in the United States where we don't have free healthcare it's kind of become the norm for people to put off seeking help for like medical problems because it's just so expensive and aside from just the astronomical cost there's other reasons why people here don't go to doctors. People of color specifically black women experience such disparities in treatment that many of them simply don't trust doctors to help them. Almost every person that I know has some horror story about either themselves or a loved one being failed by the healthcare system being let down by it being given a wrong diagnosis and wasting all of their money. I actually lost my grandpa a few years ago to pancreatic cancer. It was discovered too late to treat it after he went through years and years of false diagnoses and a lot of pain. When Elizabeth showed up on the scene and proposed Theranos she was speaking directly to the experiences and trauma of millions of people specifically in the United States. Did it sound unrealistic and lofty? Sure but what if it was possible? What if people who come after us won't have to go through what we went through? What if one woman is actually able to change the world? In 2004 Elizabeth dropped out of Stanford and used her parents' money to make her own company called Real Time Cures. It was here where she came up with the idea of inventing a machine that would be able to run blood tests with just a drop of blood rather than a large blood draw. This was actually inspired by her own fear of using needles. Okay so this is very ambitious already right? Especially for someone who has no experience in the medical field. Oh but our girl was not done yet. This thing was not just going to run one test. This was going to run all the tests. You can think of it they're going to test your blood for it. Cancer, HIV, herpes, your blood sugar, high cholesterol. It'll even screen you for ailments that you don't have yet and let you know if you're at risk for them. It'll tell you your 23andMe result. It'll tell you which sailor scout you are. I'm only kind of exaggerating right now. She pitched this idea to every medical professional who would listen to her and they all told her the same thing which is, Bestie this is not fucking possible. We don't have the technology to run even one of these tests with just one drop of blood. How would we run all of them? Looks like the girl boss is the one getting gatecapped. Since science had failed her, Elizabeth returned to something that she knew would work, nepotism. She scheduled lunch with Tim Draper a family friend and after explaining to him the idea of Theranos he wrote her a check for a million dollars on the spot. I'm not joking. This is why I hate Silicon Valley people. I feel like they have no idea what money is. It's an idea my daughter's friend told me. What could it cost a million dollars? Elizabeth rented some lab space and got to work pitching Theranos for all it was worth. I want to remind you that at this point they did not have the technology to actually make this happen. That didn't stop our girl from crowdfunding her heart out. By the end of 2004 Theranos had six million dollars in investments and that number just kept going up. Remember, we're talking about an invention that's going to change the world. Everyone wanted in on this. From the Silicon Valley moguls to the Wall Street bitches. Everyone was investing in it. And against all odds it looked like Theranos was keeping its promises as they had successful test results to show for their research. Keep this in mind. We're coming back to this later. With this new success they were able to start selling blood tests to the public to real people to test their blood. Keep this in mind too. We are coming back to it. At this point any rational person would say Liz this is all moving a little bit too fast. Someone needs to pump the brakes or else we're all going to get in trouble. But there's one more detail about Elizabeth that I haven't told you yet. The only thing she liked more than power was attention. A healthcare pioneer is being compared to visionaries like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Her innovation has made homes the world's youngest female self-made billionaire. By 2014 people could not stop talking about Elizabeth and she was loving it. She was on the cover of Fortune, Forbes, Inc. and so many other magazines. Forbes recognized her as the youngest female self-made billionaire ever. She was even named Woman of the Year by Glamour. And best of all around this time Elizabeth had to do a lot of interviews. And oh boy did she love doing interviews. I guess now's as good a time as ever to talk about how weird Elizabeth was in her personal life and in her work life. She ran Theranos in this really excessively secretive way. She would even fire employees who she heard were saying too much. Can you tell us a secret? I don't have many secrets. Any visitors who came to the headquarters would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and they were followed around by security everywhere including to the bathroom. She was also insane when it came to her employees. She would keep track of the time that everyone showed up and the time that they went home because she believed that everyone should be working as hard as she is, obviously. Yes, you know what inspires me? Fearlessness, drive. I hate lazy people. Bob, stay in school. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's talk about the Steve Jobs shit. Elizabeth was obsessed with Steve Jobs and would just try to be him in every way. She never took vacations because Steve never did. Her office was decorated exactly the way that Steve did and most obviously she always wore a black turtleneck because that's what he's best known for wearing. But then she took this black turtleneck thing and ran with it saying that like, oh I've always worn black turtlenecks. This has always been my style. It's all I've ever worn even when I was younger. Even though it takes like two seconds of googling to see that when she was younger she didn't regularly wear turtlenecks. I also find it interesting that she chose Steve Jobs as the person she wanted to idolize when he was notoriously abusive to his employees and generally regarded as a terrible person. But hey, he was successful, right? That's all that matters. Okay, hold the phone. Hold the phone. I apologize for derailing my own video but I just discovered something and I will not be silenced on it. So I was googling trying to find this article that I had read because I was going to use it as a source. For those of you who don't know I always put my sources in the description so if you want to see where I got the information it's down there. The article I was looking for was the one I had read about how Steve Jobs was very abusive to his employees and just like made a very toxic work environment and was a really bad boss. It should also be noted that I was looking this up on a MacBook Pro, an Apple product, okay? Steve Jobs' baby. Tell me why the suggested results when I typed in Steve Jobs' employees were, how does Steve Jobs motivate his employees? Steve Jobs empowering employees? Steve Jobs rewarding employees? How did Steve Jobs reward his employees? How did Steve Jobs empower his employees? All of these suggested results are obviously positive and meant to lead someone who just happened to be googling this to the conclusion that Steve Jobs must have been a really like inspiring, encouraging boss. Could it be that on Apple products when you google things about Steve Jobs it's not that it like suppresses information but it suggests positive information before you like get the whole story. I don't know, I just made this discovery. I thought it was interesting. If I get murdered after this video comes out it was not an accident, it was Elizabeth Holmes defending Steve's honor. But the cherry on top of this compulsively lying cake was her voice. In those dozens of interviews that she did Elizabeth would always speak in this very low baritone voice and would speak very slowly and deliberately. I believe the individual is the answer to the challenges of healthcare. And I'm not bringing this up to make fun of women with deep voices. I have a kind of deep voice myself. I'm bringing this up because like every other part of her persona this was faked. She would force her voice to be deeper while talking in interviews and you could sometimes hear moments where she like almost broke character and her voice got a little bit higher. People always noted that after she took a sip of her drink her voice would be a little bit higher and then it would drop lower very abruptly or like as she was talking as she was kind of running out of breath her voice would sort of go back to normal and then it would abruptly drop back down again. It's just so weird to hear it's like listening to a soprano trying to sing alto and she did all this because I could not fucking tell you. There's a lot of speculation on why she decided to talk like this. Some say that it was so that she would sound more authoritative and masculine and commanding of attention. Some even say that it was so that she would sound more like Jeff Bezos. Nope wrong ball guy. So that she would sound more like Steve Jobs that's it. But for whatever reason she did it her voice is one of the most striking things about her to the point that even years later people can't stop talking about it. And for good reason I can't think of one other person who I've seen consistently try to fake their voice like that. It's just that every single aspect of her identity was faked or borrowed or exaggerated in some way so that she could play this ideal silicone valley genius that she had spent years designing in her own mind. But I think you know what's coming next in this story. The facade unfortunately could not last. For alas they hate to see a girl boss winning. In 2015 John Kerryu an investigative journalist for the Wall Street Journal received a tip that something about Theranos's testing was fishy. He talked to former employees even obtaining private company documents on their lab result. In an October of that year Kerryu published an article revealing the truth. Theranos's devices were regularly giving inaccurate results and the accurate test data that they had been showing off was actually obtained using commercially available machines. You know the kind of machines that Theranos was supposed to be replacing but Elizabeth continued to gaslight and gatekeep calling the journal a tabloid. When asked about it on CNBC she said this is what happens when you work to change things. First they think you're crazy then they fight you and then all of a sudden you change the world. But at this point it was too late. People were losing faith in Elizabeth and Theranos was not able to withstand an actual investigation. For the next few years it was one blow after another until Elizabeth was completely stripped of all of her previous accolades. Oh yeah um remember earlier when I told you that Theranos started selling blood tests to the general public? This is my dramatic re-enactment of what I think the people who bought blood tests from Theranos looked like when they heard the news. Pretend this is a newspaper or something. Ah man that's too bad. I guess it really did sound too good to be true. It's always the crooked CEOs isn't it? Wait a second. She has my blood. That woman has my blood and I don't know what she used it for or what she is currently doing with it. What the f- In 2017 Theranos was sued by the state of Arizona for allegedly selling 1.5 million blood tests to the general public while misrepresenting information about these tests to the customers. Finally in 2018 Elizabeth and her business partner were indicted for nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Hey guys they probably did it. These charges were eventually racked up to being 12 counts of wire fraud one of which was related to a patient's blood. To be honest I don't know where this story ends because like I said it's still ongoing. Elizabeth is set to face trial in August of this year so I guess we'll all see and maybe I'll make an update video but I think I speak for everyone when I say that when the trial happens I'm genuinely curious if she's gonna talk with the deep voice or if she was just sound normal. If she talks with that voice I'm gonna flip out. I think the worst thing that Elizabeth Holmes did out of all the crimes that she committed was getting people's hopes up and I say this because I don't know if countries outside the United States really understand how bad it's gotten here but we are at rock bottom. It's the norm for diabetics to have to ration their insulin because they can't afford enough to stay alive. During the middle of the pandemic hospitals are getting shut down because they're not making enough money. We are desperate for things to get better and then here comes Elizabeth offering this pipe dream where things getting better is possible. How could we not get our hopes up? And this is where I circled back to that story about her uncle, how she said that losing her uncle is what motivated her to want to change medicine forever. She knew how badly it hurt to lose someone to a late diagnosis. She knew how bad people wanted this and she knew that it wasn't possible and she sold it anyway. She faked evidence to back up her claims. She faked evidence to make the fantasy seem feasible and for what? So that she got to play dress up as the billionaire genius she always wanted to be since she was a kid? People are dying Elizabeth. Grow up. God I just found out she's pregnant too. What the f-