The Whistleblower Who Exposed Theranos | Amanpour and Company

remember the name theranose touted as a revolutionary blood testing startup until it came crashing down and its co-founder or rather its founder elizabeth holmes was charged with fraud in 2018. tyler schultz worked at that company before becoming a whistleblower about the technology which didn't actually work in his new podcast thicker than water he tells his side of the story here's our hari sreenivasan talking to tyler about that and lessons learned when it comes to the hunt for a covid19 vaccine christian thanks so much tyler thanks for joining us now for our overseas audience who might not have kept up with the story of what their nose is i mean a very thumbnail summary right off the top here they you wanted to build 200 different tests that you would run off of an incredibly very tiny sample of blood what went wrong at the company oh well where to start um but what went wrong is that i think we um i think the ambitions were a little bit too big and the technology wasn't quite there to back it up um but really it was just you know it's a story of vision outpacing reality and the idea of doing anything that a central laboratory can do from a single drop of blood in a walgreens or in an operating room or in a medevac helicopter or in a battlefield is an amazing vision and elizabeth was great at selling that vision but not so great at actually executing on it and really the technology did not exist to enable it you're talking about elizabeth holmes the ceo and your story as you tell it in this podcast is also about how so many of us the press included society at large investors wanted to believe that something so grand was possible was here today but we really didn't look under the hood until well after patients were already affected yeah i mean it was a great story and you know everyone loves a good story um and unfortunately i think people like this story so much that they didn't really question it um you know there were a lot of systems that had to fail in order for theranos to become what it was you know the investors failed they didn't do their due diligence um it's actually pretty astounding elizabeth was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and not a single investor ever saw an audited financial statement which is pretty mind-boggling um they had a partnership with walgreens and they actually hired an expert in laboratory science to go to their nose and do due diligence on their technology and they kind of they wouldn't show them what it was so he went back to walgreens and said don't do business with these people and they ignored him and did business with them anyway so there were red flags there but people were just blinded by this uh good story and what did you do with the company um mostly at the company i was doing what was called assay validation where my job was to make sure that the tests were safe and working correctly before we tested actual patients and when did you figure out something was off i learned that something was off about four days after i started working there full time the biggest red flag at that point was actually seeing the technology and i was expecting some fancy microfluidic technology and some signal transduction method that i had never dreamed of but what it was was just a pipette inside of a box on a robotic arm so it was very rudimentary technology there was nothing in there that i hadn't seen before um so that was the first moment where i kind of went uh-oh what are the consequences of something like theranose not working when it comes to actual patients lives who are basically looking for information from this test if the test is wrong what's the consequence um i mean yeah the consequences can be pretty wide-ranging um when i started really raising my concerns it was over a syphilis test which i was convinced did not actually work and we were starting to run that test on real patients we had made the decision we're gonna we're gonna push this to to production we're gonna start running patient samples and syphilis is a great example of a test where if you're told you don't have it when you actually do there are really serious health consequences one you can spread it to other people and then two untreated syphilis is is no joke um it's one of those diseases where if you catch it early and get treatment it's really not that big of a deal but if you're told you don't have it and you go on and live your life and let it grow it's it's it can be really bad and there were actual patients in arizona that were going to walgreens and giving their blood yeah there were actual patients who were using this and we were running tests for hiv for hepatitis c um i think we had a fertility panel so um yeah maybe women were told they uh maybe lost their baby when they hadn't or or maybe they were pregnant when they weren't um so there are all kinds of potential um bad outcomes i know particularly that our potassium test did not work very well and i remember one instance when i was at theranos where a patient got tested for potassium and the result was so far out of range that that person should have been dead so the technician actually called the patient and said you have to go to the emergency room immediately and upon retesting there was nothing wrong with her listening to your podcast i wondered you're really describing red flags almost from day one obviously you have the benefit of hindsight now but there are so many moments in the story where i hear you saying well that that didn't sound right that doesn't sound right i wondered what kept you going back what is it that made you want to go back to work knowing that you were leaving a lab and you were working with equipment that was not performing anywhere close to how it was being sold yeah so there were a couple of things you know one i was a huge believer in elizabeth and it was really hard for me to reconcile the differences between what i was seeing and what elizabeth was telling me and it is really strange looking back to see kind of like the power she had or the influence she had over the way people thought including on myself um you know in this audible i describe halloween at their nose where you know at that point i i've been there about two months and i had seen tons of red flags but i still dressed up as an entertainer for halloween because i was still drinking the kool-aid that badly you know i wanted it to work i wanted to be part of the vision i wanted to be part of this company um and it's like when i listen back to that part of the audiobook or the audible i just kind of like shake my head like man how what was i doing i was still kind of like you know sucking up to elizabeth you know there were instances about the culture and the climate that you're working under that were a little scary at times what kind of surveillance for example were you under while you were working there what did the employees know about who was watching or how they were being watched yeah so most people actually had kind of post-it notes so they would stick over their the camera on their computer because they thought that sunny the president of the company was watching people through the webcams um and seeing when people were working or weren't working every door was you know had video monitors but that's not all that unusual yeah but when i did so there's one part where i smuggle out a stack of emails and i didn't want the security cameras to see me walking out stack of papers so i just put them straight under my shirt put my head down and walked out the door so the cameras seen me taking papers out of the building when did you decide it was time to speak up and and how did you do that so i started speaking up after i started seeing you know many many more red flags and that was probably five to six months later that i actually started raising my concerns and then you really you went to the press i mean you were not an uh open source for quite some time but was that a more effective route to get the government's attention yeah it was absolutely the most effective route i you know i confronted the the ceo the president a board member i i reached out to the government none of that did anything the only thing that worked was talking to a wall street journal reporter and i think it just it comes down to the government has just way too much to look at and you know they they may not really be aware of what's happening until it appears in the wall street journal and i also think that our government responds to the collective consciousness of the people as they should so when people are outraged the government should should act so now you're talking secretly to the wall street journal the theranos lawyers are after you because they think you're giving up trade secrets your lawyers their lawyers going back and forth you're concerned about being taken to court and sued you can't talk to your friends or your family about this because then that implicates them so during all this in your story you say that your mental health suffered to such a point that you were contemplating taking your own life why um just it was it was just so tough you know um i every morning i woke up and just felt like it was the worst day of my life and i was right every morning i woke up and it was again the worst day of my life just the worst day of your life on groundhog day and it was just unrelenting you know i would have a court date and i would be fighting to stay out of court they would finally say we'll give you more time to negotiate then they would just set a new court date so there was constantly just this kicking the can just a little bit further down the road about when i'm gonna have to go to court and i knew that when i did go to court i would be spending a fortune i mean we're talking a a good case scenario would be to spend two million dollars possibly spend much more than that um you know my dad's a high school biology teacher my mom's a nurse um so they were gonna sell their house to pay for my legal fees you feeling guilty about that yeah oh yeah feeling totally guilty about that because they were begging me not to let that happen they just said give theranos whatever it is they want and they didn't really know the specifics of what was happening they just said whatever it is they want give it to them don't make us sell our house so you can keep fighting this fight it's not your fight this is not your responsibility and i totally understood where they were coming from but you know i made the decision and actually look again listening back and looking back it's um it's tough because you know i made the decision that i was willing to bankrupt my my parents to continue fighting this fight um which is things that turned out differently you know it would look really stupid it would be very selfish and in a lot of ways i just got lucky that things turned out as well as they did and now people look back and say hey what a hero but it easily could have gone the other way your grandfather george sults he played what role in this my grandfather was on the board of directors i first met elizabeth in my grandfather's living room when i was a junior at stanford your grandfather happens to be somebody who served three different cabinet positions he's kind of esteemed in the in the circles of diplomacy and you keep talking about how george schultz seemed to be picking the version of reality that elizabeth holmes was presenting to him versus you his grandson who's saying hey there's something wrong here yeah that's true i mean over and over and over there were instances where he could have taken my side over elizabeth and every single time he chose to defend elizabeth over me and you know eventually i got to a point where i just thought you know i just i have to not worry about him and just worry about myself i can't stop making decisions with him in mind at all i just gotta worry about me if if she if he's chosen to stick with elizabeth he's he can live with it i'm gonna move on what is it about elizabeth that people seem to believe or want to believe especially people like your grandfather yeah it's it's a tough question to really answer um it's kind of funny when the hbo documentary aired or premiered at sundance right afterwards i went and watched a documentary about harvey weinstein and you hear people describe harvey as this very charismatic person who you were just drawn to and you wanted to be around and you look at them now and you think how could anyone ever think this person was charming and charismatic and that's kind of the same feeling that i have towards elizabeth it's really hard to describe exactly what it was but in part it was you know her her big blue eyes kind of locked you in she had a very deep voice that almost rolled you into some kind of hypnosis um and at the time i think both of those attributes were pretty charismatic but now when people look back on it they say how could you ever think she was charismatic she had that really weird voice in psychopath eyes so it's weird how interpretations of character traits or of traits change once you know the truth about somebody theranos elizabeth holmes and sonny balbani are still facing criminal charges their court date could be next year because of the coronavirus delaying things what do you hope for at the end of that process i just hope that it happens i hope that it happens sooner rather than later i'm ready for this to be over um as for like my hopes of the outcomes i you know i honestly don't really think all that much about it and but unfortunately i'm afraid that elizabeth is going to walk away from this still being a multi-millionaire and that's just kind of like i don't know that's just kind of a sad realization to me um like i feel like elizabeth deserves to have a conversation with her parents where her parents have to sell their house to pay for her legal fees that's not gonna happen i feel like this is gonna end and she'll probably walk away a multi-millionaire one way or another so what's the what's the cautionary tale here what should we be able to learn from what happened to theranos and apply towards how we are looking at either the diagnostic equipment that's coming around for covid or for the tests or even for the vaccine i think the key thing is to do due diligence you know we have to verify that these things actually work before we pour hundreds of millions of dollars into them and that's really what it comes down to and elizabeth was really good at making sure people didn't look too closely where is government oversight when it comes to the amounts of money that we are investing in lots of different companies to try to help provide a vaccine for the coronavirus and to make sure that that vaccine gets to everyone i do think that a lot of the conditions that allowed theranos to thrive are pretty prevalent today in this pandemic there's a lot of stimulus money out there a lot of you know just money from investors or from the government being poured into diagnostics and into vaccines and into therapies and there's really only so much regulators can do um so i do think that it is a great time to commit fraud if it's something you're looking to do um and you know my my expertise is really in diagnostics not in the vaccine so um just speaking on the diagnostics side there were a lot of stumbling blocks early on with the diagnostics the the fda tried to decrease regulations to allow good products to come into the market but then they realized that there were a lot of bad products out in the market so um the fda had to really crack down on the companies that weren't offering quality products um and so i actually do have to give a lot of credit to the fda for being as flexible as they've been you know they started out probably too lenient and now i think we're in a much better place all right tyler schultz the audible uh is called thicker than water thanks so much for joining us yeah thank you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Amanpour and Company

Views: 224,433

Keywords: interview, CNN, PBS, Christiane Amanpour, world news, news anchor, news show, news, public affairs, late-night TV, journalist, Chief International Correspondent, Theranos, Hari Sreenivasan, Tyler Schultz, tech, Elizabeth Holmes, Thicker Than Water

Id: kuK57kt1oiI

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020