Dr Phyllis Gardner, Stanford professor and Theranos critic: "I'll only really feel good if she's convicted"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2019

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Dr Phyllis Gardner, the Standord medical professor who came across Elizabeth Holmes before she started Theranos and then worked behind the scenes to expose her, to talk about her background at Stanford (4:00), and in industry (5:00), meeting a young Elizabeth Holmes (6:55), rejecting her first idea (8:10), using her “charm” to accumulate prominent men (10:30), how Gardner got drawn in to the group of Theranos doubters (12:45), meeting John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal reporter who uncovered the scandal (16:50), how Holmes was appointed to Harvard’s Medical Board of Fellows (17:40), feeling lonely as a Theranos sceptic (21:45), the whistleblowers (23:00), why “fake it till you make it” doesn’t work in medicine (24:30), hurting the cause of women in business (25:45), Theranos’ legal attack dog (28:10), Holmes’ new company (30:00), the human costs of the fraud (31:55), the employees who quit (35:45), and why more women did not speak (38:20).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.7	I can't explain it, except for to say she was, I think she's a sociopathic liar and a narcissist.
0:14.6	And for me, I don't give her any leeway.
0:17.1	I don't think she was naive.
0:18.5	I think she was a liar from day one.
0:24.2	Hello. way. I don't think she was naive. I think she was a liar from day one. Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from deep inside the Silicon
0:31.0	Valley Future Machine. Thank you for tuning in, as ever. You will not be disappointed with this week's guest. On the program,
0:40.8	we have Dr. Phyllis Gardner, who's a Stanford Medical School professor who was one of the
0:46.9	very small band of conspirators who helped expose one of the biggest frauds in the history
0:53.0	of Silicon Valley, which is, of course, Theranos.
0:57.0	Now, I came across Gardner a couple weeks ago in San Francisco.
1:01.0	I was at the premiere of the new HBO documentary on Theranos,
1:05.0	and she appears in the film, and then she was also on a panel after.
1:10.0	And she gave some really pointed
1:11.8	answers about the Theranos scandal, and in particular about Elizabeth Holmes, the founder
1:18.2	who somehow convinced investors to give her more than $700 million without showing them a single
1:26.4	audited financial statement. And even worse,
1:30.3	not even giving definitive proof that her magic blood testing box actually worked. And so Dr.
1:37.7	Gardner has a unique perspective here because she was also one of the first people that a young
1:42.8	Elizabeth Holmes went to back when she was a first
1:45.0	year student at Stanford before she dropped out to do the company. She came to her with her first
	...

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