Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, AI Data Center Forecast Jumps, Poppi’s Pepsi Deal | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:02)

Yeah, this weekend, every time I would refresh, it would be, you can see everything takes, everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's a little bit of a, like, you watch the movie, and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes, being like, oh, maybe she wasn't, maybe she's not that bad, maybe there's more to the story, maybe she was manipulated, she seems to be manipulated multiple times, potentially, like, maybe she's more of a-

Jordi Hays (0:32)

Some people might be like, she's bad, but she'd probably be nice to me if I interact with her.

John Coogan (0:39)

Yeah, yeah, a little bit of that.

There's some sort of, like, suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having, where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it till you make it thing, it's not that big of a deal. I just can't stop thinking about, like, it seems like she's just a bad founder. Like, put aside the fraud, like, it just seems like total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos 2.0.

Jordi Hays (1:03)

Totally.

John Coogan (1:03)

And the whole time, I was, like, almost yelling at the movie screen because the way she describes Theranos is like this box and like it's in the cloud. It's just like, it's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she's making this point because like we even we have an invention and our invention allows you to test blood for things. And like we test all this stuff and she's making it sound like it's like magical science. And it's like, I looked it up. There have been 60 plus companies since Theranos started that sold for over $100 million in that category.

It's like, it's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical, we invented something. It takes information and stores it on a database that you can access through a website. It's like, so you make a SaaS product.

Literally hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry, and they've made boxes that look kind of like a Theranos box, and it runs a test, and they don't go to prison for 10 years. Yeah, they don't go to prison. And she never just says like, look, this stuff happens all the time. It's not crazy that I'm going to be able to build a box that tests for something. Like this happens all the time.

Instead, it's like, I'm the only one that could possibly do this, which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not just admit what's really happening on the field, which is that diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars. You could just do that. But instead, it has to be this pie in the sky nonsense. And it really, really frustrates me, as you can probably tell. Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept. He said, one of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the Ted Talk entrepreneur. And this is exactly what I was picking up on. So between 2011 and 2015, after the release of the social network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations. I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it, but Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook, and in the most scrutinized field, there is medical technology. When people ask how far she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in, and she got caught when the world suddenly woke up. And so there's other things, which is that this is strictly regulated by the FDA. So if you're a founder of a medical device company, what you are going for is FDA authorization. That's marketing authorization. That's literally the ability to sell the product. It's not illegal to build a medical device. It's illegal to sell it, to market it. And so that also includes, you typically can't go on podcasts and media and say, oh yes, we have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, oh, we're working on this progress. We can't say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the FDA. Spoiler alert, you don't want to hear spoilers. Just turn, leave the stream going, but just turn the audio down.