Elizabeth Holmes 的丈夫 Billy Evans：审判、监狱与 Nathan Fielder 的纪录片

speaker_0: Billy Evans, who is Elizabeth Holmes's partner The subject of the forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, has had an unconventional love story with her fiancé, Billy Evans. The couple first connected as federal authorities were investigating Holmes for fraud and conspiracy connected to her failed blood testing startup, Theranos.

speaker_1: A new documentary is offering an unprecedented look into the life of Elizabeth Holmes, the tech CEO turned convicted felon. At the center of a massive multi-year fraud.

speaker_0: Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced today to 11 and a quarter years in prison, four counts of criminal fraud.

speaker_1: The disgraced tycoon and her fiancé, Billy Evans.

What’s up?

Hi, everyone.

Grab a seat. Have you ever done a live interview like this?

Dude, I’ve never done an interview.

You’ve never done an interview?

Thank you guys all for being the guinea pigs here. I appreciate it.

You’re Elizabeth Holmes’s husband.

That’s typically not how I love to be introduced. My name’s Billy Evans, and yes, Elizabeth Holmes is my wife and best friend and partner.

You and I met at a party—

Yeah.

—about a year and a half ago, I think.

Yeah, around F1, I think, in Austin.

And we started talking, and that kind of got us chatting about Elizabeth and the case and the history.

Yeah, I think I came up to you and said, “David, my name’s Billy Evans. You guys talk about my wife a lot on your podcast, and you’ve got a lot of the story pretty fundamentally wrong. If you’re ever interested in learning some more details, I’m happy to read you in.”

I’d had a couple drinks. I’m like, “Sure.”

He was great.

I’ll hear your side of the story.

Yeah.

And one thing led to another. We talked on the phone, and I ended up getting on a plane to Texas. I went and visited Elizabeth in prison.

Yeah.

I spent the day with her, and you—

Yeah.

—and her parents and the kids, going quite deep into the whole thing. There was a lot more to this story than what I think had been portrayed. I was aware of the documentary. I had heard in Hollywood that this documentary was happening, and I had heard that it had been—

But it was a pretty well-kept secret.

Yeah, but I know people.

Yeah, well—

And—

I don’t doubt it. Look at the crowd.

Yeah. So the secret got out. I want to get to that. We’re not going to litigate the case today, the Theranos case. That’s Elizabeth’s story to tell when the time is right. She was under a gag order until last April.

Yeah.

From the time the DOJ began its investigation, Elizabeth was under a gag order through the trial and through the appeals process, which ended last April, I believe.

Yeah. One thing for people to know about her, which might shock you, is that Elizabeth follows rules maniacally, to a T. When the judge said that we were going to litigate this in the courtroom and not in the media, she held true to that.

She never spoke to the media.

No, for the entirety of the process, she remained silent.

And there were a lot of articles being written.

Yeah, and movies being made—

—and she didn’t respond.

—and podcasts.

She didn’t give interviews or… Okay.

Yeah.

There’s a lot to the story that we’re not going to talk about today—the trial and the case—but I’m curious to hear a little bit about the experience. Maybe we can go back. How did you and Elizabeth first meet?

Elizabeth and I met at a Fleet Week party in San Francisco, on the roof of some venture capitalist. He was trying to hire me and date her. I was going to be there for maybe five minutes. I had 100 people coming over to a house I lived in with four other guys, and we were going to throw a big Fleet Week party. He called me when I went out to grab ice and said, “Billy, are you coming by our event today?” I said, “Of course.” I’d totally forgotten. So I drove over to his place, parked my car in the red, went up the elevator, and a few minutes later he introduced me to Elizabeth.

That killed my whole afternoon. The next two and a half, three hours, she and I just spoke, and we started a conversation that really has never ended. I don’t know if I can say I fell in love with her in that moment, but she was just incredible. Her ability to listen and really care about everything you’re saying made you feel so seen. She was infinitely curious about the smallest things that nobody else really cared about, or that people were too cool to pretend mattered. As the planes flew overhead, she was just amazed by them, with this childlike wonder.

When I first met her, I didn’t know she was Elizabeth Holmes. She was just Elizabeth. She was wearing a big floppy hat and dark sunglasses, and had a Band-Aid on her face because her husky puppy had just scratched her. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, we got to where we worked, physically. I told her I worked on Page Mill Road. She said, “Oh, no way. Where?” I said, “1891.” She said, “You know, I’m at 1790,” or something. She was two doors down, and that’s when I really put it together.

What year was this, and what was the state of the Theranos story at that point?

This was October 7, 2017. It was peak bad.

So this was after the DOJ or the case—

It was before she was indicted.

Before she was indicted.

Yeah.

The Carreyrou article machine had started.

Yeah, like 100 of them. Those were already out there.

They had been out there. So she had this reputation as—

A horrible reputation.

—a fraudster, all this sort of stuff. And you’re saying that when you first met her, it was her, who she is, that you engaged with, not the story of Elizabeth Holmes. Then you found out it was her.

Yeah. It’s like the 30 people I’ve spoken to while I’ve been here, where I know nothing about their story.

Right.

I’m just seeing the person in front of me.

So then when you found out who she really was, did you not just shut down and say, “What am I doing talking to this person?”

It was pretty hard to grok. It was a hard thing to come to terms with because you get to know this person, separate and apart from how you’re supposed to feel about them. Then you invariably go back to this idea of, “This is who I’ve been told this person is.”

Mm-hmm.

Those 2 things were so radically different from one another. It was really challenging.

Mm-hmm. And then—

But we didn’t just start dating. I met her, and then I was looking at renting her building because we were right next door. Our business was doing this, and hers was doing this at that time. We were looking at renting the Theranos headquarters, and that was the context under which she gave me her business card. She crossed out her cell phone number on it and wrote “personal cell.” I was like, “Huh, maybe this just isn’t business.” That’s how we originally connected.

And then did you guys start hanging out?

Yeah. When I first met her, she told me that she had this husky, and I told her I had a dog. I didn’t really have a dog; it was my roommate’s dog, but he was like mine. The first times we hung out, we’d just go on walks. I was really curious about the circumstance, probably like many of you are because you’ve heard so much.

There was some infamy at the time. You’re curious to understand what’s going on.

I think I was most curious to understand the difference between the person I experienced and the person I was told existed. They were so different. I was really curious, and I was interested in her, and she made me feel good because she listened so intently.

Mm-hmm.

Basically, we were friends for 6 months. We’d go on walks with her dog and my rent-a-dog that was my roommate’s.

And then there was a romantic turn.

Yeah, and it moved super quickly. It went from us being friends—I was traveling a lot at the time. I was working for a company that built LiDAR, and we were selling to car companies around the world. That year, I made maybe 12 trips to Germany and—

What was your role?

I was just solving the most important problems that the CEO didn’t want to solve.

Kind of like a startup type of—

Special projects.

Special project.

So everything from sales—

All kinds of stuff.

—to big automotive manufacturers, hiring executive team members, raising capital at times. Just really anything that needed to get done. In a startup, there are a lot of problems that need to be solved, and I was just really willing to say yes.

So you guys, this becomes more serious, becomes emotional, and she’s going through this court case. Right? The indictment started.

Yeah. I think about 3 weeks after we started dating, she got indicted.

She got—

I mean, it’s one hell of an experience to fall in love with somebody so quickly and then immediately come to terms with: I didn’t even know what an indictment was. I was really unfamiliar with the entirety of this process.

But was she going through a period of crisis in her life during this courtship period?

She’s cool as a cucumber.

So while this was happening, all the articles were coming out—

Yeah.

—and before the indictment, she didn’t feel super fazed or freaked out by this?

No. There were certainly things to be freaked out about, but you have to put yourself in her mindset. I don’t want to speak for her, but I can share the perspective I saw, which is that this is somebody who fundamentally believes in her innocence. Before the indictment, she was being told, “You’re never going to get indicted. You did nothing wrong. The company did nothing wrong.” I know that’s hard for you guys—

This is what lawyers say.

—to comprehend and believe, but yes, this is what was going on behind the scenes.

Yeah.

So I think at each of these chapters, as thing after thing happened, we were perpetually surprised.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way.

Yeah. I think that’s a good way of describing it.

And then she gets indicted.

Yeah.

How was that?

That’s the first night I met her parents. It’s a tough way to meet your in-laws.

How was she? Obviously, it was mounting. There were a lot of articles and press about this, but—

Yeah, kind of infinite press then.

Yeah.

But she wouldn’t read it. I’ve seen maybe an episode and a half of The Dropout, for a reason maybe some of you guys will understand in the future.

You didn’t watch this?

No, but I skimmed Bad Blood because my lawyers told me to, for other reasons. Otherwise, I really didn’t consume any media on the subject.

And then she gets indicted. How was this for you guys and your relationship at this point? I mean, now—

It was 3 weeks into a relationship with somebody.

Mm-hmm.

But we were so close already because we’d spent 6 months really being friends. It was intense, man. I think part of it is, if I knew then what I know now about how painful the process was, I probably would’ve responded differently at the time. But I was in new territory. This was 2018. I was 26, 27 years old.

Yeah. And then the trial began.

Well, it took a while for the trial to begin.

Right, because there was this period—

1. The Trial And Its Fallout

Right. So we had a long period of time in which there was this impending thing, and an enormous amount of time was spent with lawyers and her working late into the night to go through hundreds of thousands of records and try to piece together a story that she didn’t fully understand that was being told about her. It was a really intense time, but there were also some really beautiful moments in there. One thing nobody knows, but I guess you guys are the first to know, is Elizabeth and I spent 8 months traveling the country in an off-road RV. We had our dog, Balto. He’s a husky. If you’ve never seen a husky in the wild, it is a sight to be seen, because that dog lived. We went to trailer parks and national forests where you’re allowed to stay and park your car for 14 days without moving it. We’d hike all day and work at night, sit around the fire, and just be together.

What about your job?

By that time, I’d already left the business, and I was starting something else. So I was kind of working for myself.

So you guys are just, “Let’s go be free. Get away from all this”?

I think part of it was just the enormous attention from the media when we were in San Francisco. I’ve got an entire collection on my phone of—here’s how the situation works. We’d go into a restaurant, and within 30 seconds, 6 people would pull out their phones. Some were sneaky, and others pretended they were taking a photo of their friend, but it was obvious. It was so uncomfortable. We couldn’t go anywhere without immediately being recognized, immediately being judged.

We’d go to a restaurant for a friend’s dinner celebrating their anniversary or their engagement, and then we’d have articles written about how Elizabeth Holmes was gallivanting around San Francisco. It’s hard to know how to act when every action you take, every decision you make, and every place you go is being judged through the eyes of a thousand angry journalists.

There was this period of time when everyone talked about Elizabeth Holmes being manipulative—

Yeah.

—in wearing the turtleneck, talking with a deep voice, and having this character that she played. The idea was, if she’s playing a character for everyone else around her, clearly she’s playing a character all the time, and that might be the origin of the fraud, of the manipulation.

I think there are a lot of things that have been said about that. Some of them, if you look back with as much clarity as you can muster and try to disassociate Elizabeth Holmes from the situation as much as possible, are pretty crazy. The idea that she would manipulate people with her big blue eyes, and that her deep voice would immediately have people give her $100 million—I mean, it’s incredibly sexist, for one. But I’ve read a lot of this stuff.

Would you say that about a man?

No, you’d never say that about a man. Liz would have a meeting with somebody—I’ll not insert a name here, but think of one of the biggest family offices on Earth. It would be a 45-minute meeting. They’d commit $100 million by the end of the meeting. Any guy who did that, people would say, “Wow, what an incredible ability to tell a story. What an incredible ability to have deep conviction in the thing that you believe in, that this person wants to support your mission and your vision.” And when it’s Liz, it’s, “Wow, she fleeced that person in 45 minutes.”

Okay. But then there are these stories about things that were misrepresented. The machine does this, and then it doesn’t do that. Again, I don’t want to litigate the case. But was there any experience you had where Elizabeth stretched the truth, where she was pushing the boundaries, where the imagination in her mind maybe became the reality?

That’s a good question. Where the imagination became the reality. Liz is somebody who believes so deeply, and until you’ve met somebody like her, it’s really hard to understand what that’s like. But I think a lot of the things most litigated in the press, at least, and most described—this is not the machinations of a woman, of a single person. This was hundreds of employees working tirelessly for 16 years to solve a really difficult problem.

One of the things that I think has been largely described as fraudulent behavior was missing revenue numbers, right? She missed her revenue numbers. She should have known that was going to come. If you look at where that comes from, just a brief bit of the case: they had contractual obligations with Walgreens to pay them that amount of money. Then, when bad press came out, they defaulted on those obligations, and the business didn’t fulfill those revenue obligations. So they missed it by a large number, but it wasn’t a made-up number. This was a number that was obligated to be paid by the company they had a contract with.

The number of Walgreens stores—

It was like 800 Walgreens stores and a billion-dollar store—

—and they were going to roll out over time, and Walgreens had done this contract to do that.

Yeah, and they—

And Walgreens stopped doing that after the Carreyrou article came out.

That’s right.

Right?

Yeah.

You guys then start going through this process of preparing for the trial. Is that when you got pregnant?

Well, she did.

Sorry.

Hey, man, it’s—

I mean, I don’t know the right term.

“You guys got pregnant,” and I’m like, “I didn’t really do much.”

I’m always about five words away—

Yeah.

—from being canceled, so—

Yeah, yeah.

—I’m gonna watch myself.

You’re pre-canceled, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think my X File says, “Already canceled.” The question was, what was it like—

When did you get pregnant?

—preparing?

When did Elizabeth get pregnant?

Well, our son was born on July 10th of—

And when did the case, the trial, start?

It was supposed to start well before, but this was COVID.

Right.

It was a really weird experience because we were all masked going into the courtroom. There were all these discussions about whether or not—

But you guys settled down and had a kid—

Yeah.

—knowing that there was this trial coming up. Was that ever a debate or a discussion, that you’ve got potentially this case—

This was not a planned and decided thing, just to be clear, okay? Sometimes God gives you gifts that are unexpected. It’s been the greatest experience that I’ll ever know.

Yeah. You guys have two children.

We have two children.

Yeah, yeah.

My son is now 5.

Yeah.

And my daughter is 3.

So how was it going through the trial with these little kids and Elizabeth?

It was so gnarly. So many people say, “The reason why she did this or they did this was to get sympathy.” I’ll tell you what: first of all, the jury had no idea this was happening. Elizabeth was militant about not letting people see her in a place of weakness at this time.

We would wake up at 4:30 every morning with the baby, Wills, is his name. Liz would feed him, and we’d change him and get him ready, and then we’d put him back down. Then she would start getting ready. Liz isn’t very good at doing her hair, and I bought a Dyson Airwrap and would help her with that after watching YouTube videos.

We’d get all prepped and get into the car with our family, typically her mom and me, and sometimes my mom, and just our closest friends, to go to what felt like war. It was really hard. She would pump milk all the way down with these mobile pumps because our son was 3 months old when the trial started, and he needed milk throughout the day.

She bought a special diaper bag so it wouldn’t look like a diaper bag, so people wouldn’t be able to say anything about it. During breaks in court, she would go to the bathroom and pump more milk. Then I would collect it at lunch and send it up to the house in an Uber, and my mom or Liz’s mom, who was at the house, would feed it to our son.

It was crushing to spend the first 2 months away from this thing that you love more than everything in the world, without the ability to hold him all the time. It was really tough timing.

You guys think you were gonna win the case?

100%. Yeah. 100%.

There were only a few counts that she was convicted on. She was found not guilty. This is what a lot of people don’t really get about—

Yeah, so the basic math on it is that there were 13 counts. Liz ran about 12.5 million tests on patients at Theranos over an 18-month period. The government spent years investigating.

12.5 million blood tests—

Yeah.

—on patients.

Yeah. It’s not a small number. It’s a pretty big number in a short period of time. The next year, they were gonna do 100 times more. They were gonna be the third-largest lab company in the country.

After Quest and Labcorp.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the year after that, they would’ve been bigger than either of them. Sorry, I lost my train of thought. Can somebody remind me where I was?

Well, we were going through—

Oh, the counts. Yeah.

—the counts.

So there were 13 counts. Of the 12.5 million tests that she ran, the government brought forward 4 patients that they accused her of defrauding with inaccurate results.

Patient fraud.

Yeah, patient fraud.

Medical fraud.

So, you gave this person a bad result, you knowingly gave them a bad result, and you are responsible for having done so.

Mm-hmm.

She was acquitted of those counts, so there was no evidence brought forward that was convincing to a jury that there was any fraud associated with the patients. I think one thing that’s really strange to me as an inside observer, but also at times an outside observer, is that diagnostics is an inherently inaccurate space. For some tests, 90% accuracy is good, and for other really inaccurate tests, 70% is really good.

If you’re running 12.5 million tests, 4 patients isn’t exactly statistically significant to show that there are problems there. But yeah, she was acquitted of the counts.

But she was convicted of financial fraud.

She was, yeah. She was convicted of defrauding 3 investors, and then colluding with her partner at the time to do so—conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

And the conspiracy conviction is what gave the judge the authority to give her a bigger sentence—

Yeah, that was insane.

—coupled with the fact that they brought in Rupert Murdoch as a victim after the case—

That’s right, yes.

—which allowed them to add additional time to the sentencing guidelines.

Mm-hmm.

—to the sentencing.

Yes. For context, Elizabeth was sentenced to 135 months in prison. That’s 11 and a quarter years. The way sentencing works is there are all these aggravating factors. They calculate this through a point system, and the points are dependent on a variety of things. Was there any aggravation in what you did? What was the amount of financial loss?

Elizabeth was convicted of these 3 counts of defrauding those 3 investors, which, again, she and I deeply believe she is innocent of. I implore you to look at—

Do you wanna tell me why?

What I will say, which my lawyers would probably kill me for, is—

They’re not here.

They’re watching on YouTube. In the next 2 weeks, I ask you to read something that we are going to put out. I’m not telling you what to think, but I’m asking you to spend the time to look at it and think honestly about what it means. I think it’s gonna be pretty shocking because we have spent years trying to understand what the hell has gone on here. It will be pretty illuminating.

But to understand what the hell has gone on here, one can get a story that’s, to a lot of people, very clear-cut: the book Bad Blood, the articles, and the awards that were given for the investigations and the reporting that came out of these articles.

Yeah.

And there are a lot of anecdotes and stories and so on that have painted a very clear picture for the majority—for everyone, I would say—that this person is guilty of fraud.

Yeah.

This person should be convicted of fraud. Tell me about the side of the story that she wanted to tell and the context of why she didn’t tell it.

Well, I think that’s her story to tell.

Yeah. But why didn’t she tell it?

I can tell you why she didn’t tell it.

But why didn’t she tell it? If there’s such a different story and you guys were so convinced yourselves—

Yeah.

—you and she—and it was, “We’re 100% not gonna be indicted; we’re 100% gonna win the case”—why was that never released? You’ve mentioned this gag order, but maybe just help us understand that.

Yeah. I wanna be really specific because I know a million people are gonna pick this apart, clip it, and do whatever they’d like with this interview. But technically, it was not a gag order. Technically, what the judge said to the trial team in pretrial hearings, in the very beginning, was that this is a case that’s going to play out in the courtroom and not in the press.

I think that was the single biggest mistake that Elizabeth has ever made, to be really clear. Maybe Sunny’s is number one, but it’s up there, because her power was in her voice. Her power was in her telling that story, and she did not, because she followed the rules of not going against what the judge had asked her to do. That case just ended a handful of months ago. It’s been a long time in which she was silent.

So she felt like she didn’t wanna risk going through the court process and winning there—

Yeah.

—by speaking out of court and—

Yeah, that’s right.

—getting in trouble.

Yeah, and she’s a really idealistic person. She grew up in a house with a mom and a dad who both worked for the government.

Her mom worked with Charlie Wilson, and her dad worked with the EPA and USAID, doing water projects around the world. We still have conversations around the dinner table because her parents are helping me with my kids, and they’re in my house all the time. I’ve spent more time with Elizabeth’s parents over the course of the last few years. They lived with us throughout the entirety of the trial. They’re amazing people, but they’re also very idealistic.

Mm-hmm.

The conversations around the dinner table were always about service. It was, “What pain and suffering did you alleviate in the world today?” That was always what she was so focused on because that was her upbringing. I think if you look at somebody’s parents and their lived experience at a young age, it tells you a lot about who they are.

I have to ask because I tried earlier, but I’m gonna get in trouble if I don’t ask. Not in trouble, but people will harp on it. Why did she wear the black turtlenecks and speak in a deep voice?

Why did she wear the black turtlenecks?

And speak in a deep voice. I’ve met her. She doesn’t, I mean, you know—

I mean, she’s got a deep voice, but why did she wear the black turtlenecks?

Tell me about the experience you heard from her about being a young CEO. Is that where this is coming from, where she was always telling her story and felt like she had to play a role in storytelling? I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but I’m just trying to understand the context.

Yeah, it’s a really heavy subject, and I’ll touch on it briefly. But again, this is her story to tell. I think this is probably her calling. Sorry. Oh, it is.

Put her on speaker?

I think the BOP would have something to say about that. Do you guys mind if I just say hi for one second? I can’t call her back because she’s in federal prison.

Are you allowed to put her on speaker?

No, she’ll get sent to the SHU. That’s the solitary housing unit. It’s not a nice place to be. You can hear this part: “To accept this call…” This is what I hear every time she calls me. “…to block this call and all future calls…”

I swear to God, this was not planned.

No. Hey, baby.

Can you hear her voice, and then hang up?

I’m on stage right now in front of a bunch of people.

Can I say hi?

Yeah. Dave, can Dave say hi? You’re not on speakerphone or anything. Don’t worry. But I love you with my whole heart. Here’s Dave. Sorry, guys. Thank you.

I don’t want to get you in trouble.

The context is we’ve got 500 people—

Okay. There are thousands of people here. We’re just talking to Billy. Okay, we’ll talk soon. Bye. That’s actually her.

I love you.

That was crazy.

I miss you. We’ll talk soon, okay, baby? Okay, bye.

What’s it been like since she’s been gone, for the kids and for you? What’s it like?

First of all, I am not unique in going through the process of having your partner in prison. Liz’s facility is called the Bryan Federal Prison Camp. It’s a camp that everybody says is super easy. Let me tell you, it is not. It’s in College Station, where Texas A&M is, and there are 800 women there. Elizabeth has been there for 1,205 days, and every single day has been incredibly painful.

But I recognize that I’m not unique in that. There are 130 million Americans who have a family member who will be incarcerated, and the incarceration rates are insane. It’s really hard to do this alone, and I have a newfound, really deep respect for the moms out there who do this by themselves while working and raising a family. It’s impossible to have your best friend in the world—the person I knew I wanted to marry, or have as my soulmate—and be apart from them. I knew I wanted that when I genuinely realized I wanted my kids to be more like her than they were like me. It’s hard knowing that they’re spending a lot more time with me than they are with her.

What do you tell them? Why is she there, and why do we go to prison every Saturday?

Yeah. It’s kind of a mix because one is 5 and the other is 3, and they have different levels of comprehension. My son knows where she is. To start, it was just, “This is Mommy’s work.” He was 22 months old when she went to prison. How do you describe that to a 2-year-old? Our rule is really simple: when they ask questions, we tell them the truth. Regardless of how complicated or uncomfortable the conversation is, we want them to understand what’s really happening. But it’s hard.

Mm-hmm.

It’s really hard. It’s hard because I’m building a business, trying to free my wife from federal prison, and raising 2 kids.

What was that moment like when she went in and said goodbye to the kids—for you guys, for the kids?

My kids weren’t there. We thought it would be too emotional for them, so I flew out. A friend very kindly paid for a plane to fly us to Austin, and then we stayed the night there. We did some filming with Nathan and Lance. We were told all these things about prison that turned out to be totally wrong. We were told she was allowed to bring New Balances, but they’re not allowed. You pay these prison consultants who are supposed to know the system, and you’re woefully unprepared.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. We drove her to the prison. I got out of the car. There are 3 parking spots right in front of the facility. She got out wearing these ridiculous New Balances and a little sweater that was a gift from a friend. I hugged her and said, “I love you more than everything.” She looked at me and said, “Now we are free.”

Tell me about the documentary. How did it come about?

Yeah.

Why did you—

Pretty crazy, huh? Have you guys seen this thing?

Everyone’s seen the trailer.

Okay. Yeah. Why did we do it?

Yeah, how did it come about? How did you do it, and what is it?

Well, you will see what it is. For context, I also haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t pretend to know more than I do.

But what was the context going into this?

The context is that Elizabeth is facing an 11-year sentence. She’s been prevented from speaking publicly in any way, shape, or form, and this would come out after the period when she’s allowed to talk. There’s been a lot of media produced about her, and a lot of people have told her story. That narrative is pretty ossified. So the whole idea was: here she is, see her, and make up your own mind.

As a person?

Yeah. It’s not to relitigate the case.

So you don’t talk about the case in the documentary?

Practically, at this time she wasn’t allowed to talk about the case, so she was going to follow the rules and not talk about it.

So it’s just a personal life? It’s a reality context of your lives?

Yeah, one of the most stressful times imaginable. Liz had given birth to our daughter, Ivy, in February. Shortly thereafter, she went through IVF, and then she was going to report to prison about 2 months later.

So you guys chose to do this to give people an opportunity to tell the story of who she is differently?

It was to have people see who she is. I’ve gone through this really consistent experience with the people who love me most, from my grandmother, who’s my idol, to my best friends who are backstage right now. They’d hear that I knew this person to start, or that I was falling for this person, or that we were going to have a kid. In the beginning, every single one of these people would say, “Billy, you are crazy. What are you doing? Do you know who she is?” I’d tell them, “I understand why you feel that way, but just meet her.”

Those people would meet her, spend time with her, and see her in a totally natural environment, like going on a hike or helping a friend. Every single one of their opinions of her would radically shift. It wasn’t because she convinced them of something related to Theranos or some specific detail. I think if you have the opportunity to meet her, see this film, or spend time with her, that was the intention of the film: to help scale that up and allow other people to sit with her and make up their own minds.

How do you think it went? Do you sit down with—

Well, I haven’t seen it yet.

Yeah.

I might think this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.

Because this guy’s a pretty unique guy to choose to do this show with—

Yeah, absolutely.

Right? And it’s been 3 years, so why has it taken so long?

It was supposed to come out within a year of when they first started shooting.

Right. So it’s been 3 years.

Yeah. It’s a long time, man.

Have you heard any updates about why it’s taking so long, and are you worried about it?

Well, it’s out now.

Are you worried about it?

About what part?

The whole show. Are you worried they’ve edited it in a way that doesn’t showcase who she is, but maybe—

Look, we signed—

Because the trailer—you look at the trailer—

Yeah, she looks insane.

And it’s just reinforcing the narrative that she’s a manipulative narcissist, or whatever the narrative is. It feels like, “Whoa, this is gonna be crazy. She’s bad, you know?”

Yeah, it’s pretty intense.

Yeah.

Well, especially the music.

Yeah, I think the music—

Whoa.

—makes it, by the way. Yeah.

Yeah? Well, there we go.

Yeah.

Am I nervous? I’ve been through so many intense, surreal experiences that it takes quite a bit to raise my blood pressure. And this one, there’s certainly concern, but ultimately it’s our decision.

What’s the status with Elizabeth in prison? How much longer does she have? How much longer until you guys can be together, and so on?

It’s a really confusing process understanding what they call the calculator. Prison numbers 101: You’ve got your sentence, which is how long you’re supposed to be under the watchful eyes of the Bureau of Prisons altogether. Then you have the amount of time that you actually spend in the facility itself, within the four walls of that prison. Then you’ve got some time that you can spend at a halfway house, and some time that you can spend on home confinement.

President Trump, in his first administration, passed something called the First Step Act, which has been one of the most incredible pieces of legislation to help bring my wife home sooner. She can earn 16 days off her sentence for every 30 days that she’s there if she’s doing programming. That means doing things that are proven to reduce recidivism, which is your likelihood of going back to prison. The short answer is that, as of now, the expectation is that she could be at a halfway house in the second quarter of next year.

One of the most remarkable things for me was when I went to visit in prison. When you send money for commissary to her—

Yeah, 70% gets taken.

There’s a deduction because 70% gets taken away. How much does she owe to the victims of the financial fraud?

Yeah, $435 million. And it’s important to note that less than—I think it’s less than $100 million. She would know the exact math, but that number is made up of 10 investors. From my perspective, it looks like the people who did the sentencing basically said, “Who are the 10 biggest investors? Let’s add them all on, because then that increases the sentence length.”

Yeah.

Originally, her sentence without these additional investors—she was never convicted of, or proven guilty of, having done anything to them—but they were arbitrarily added on—

Because they had the conspiracy charge, they were able to bring them in.

That’s my understanding of it, yeah. So that raised her sentence from something like 4 and a half or 5 years to 11.

Right.

And it did 2 things: It increased the loss amount, and it meant that it was now fraud involving 10 or more victims. One really interesting thing to note is that recently we got a 1-year sentence reduction for Elizabeth because they changed the sentencing guidelines. At that time, even the government argued that there was no evidence that any of the investors who lost money faced any financial hardship from this.

Right. Yeah.

These are people like the DeVos family, the Waltons, and the Niarchos family. These are really rich guys.

Yeah, and so she can’t, like, buy food and stuff at the commissary. It seems difficult to.

She can buy it.

We spent the whole afternoon together buying trail mix at the vending machines with her.

Yeah, she’s like a squirrel. She eats infinite nuts.

I spent all the money I had on vending-machine trail mix. It was really remarkable. I’ve never been to prison before, but when you see prisoners, it’s easy to dismiss criminals. You go through this, and you always have to feel something for people who are being punished for their crimes.

Well, the saddest thing to me is there are 800 women in the facility, and on a given weekend, maybe 30 of them will get a visitor. It’s just crushing.

Yeah.

You see these little kids just crying, saying goodbye to their mom.

Yeah.

And, you know—

So I just—

—screaming at the door.

2. Building Beyond Theranos

I want to talk, just real quick as we wrap, about how people in the press have been reporting that you’re running Theranos 2.0.

Yeah.

What is the business you’re building today, and why is it not Theranos 2.0? Is it an Elizabeth thing that you’re doing this for or with her? How did this come to be for you?

My background’s in the photonics space. I helped build a company called Luminar. We built lidar for autonomous vehicles using lasers, so I’ve got a background in photonics. I did that for a handful of years, and I found Elizabeth’s mission incredibly compelling, as I hope you all do. The idea is that diagnostics are broken today: They’re way too expensive, and we want to make them more accessible and cheaper.

In the wake of Theranos failing, very few people have tried to do something incredibly ambitious in that space. My company is called Hemantis. We’re building a new layer of sensors to better understand biology. We use a technique called Raman spectroscopy, in which we shine light through biological samples. It creates a scattering effect where the light changes color, and then you can interpret what chemical structures are within that sample. This is a really well-known technique. People do it in research labs around the country.

The problem is that these devices cost millions of dollars, are many feet long, and are super complicated to use. I’m taking a lot of the learnings from my work in the photonics space to make them cheaper and widely distributed, so we can give artificial intelligence really rich and deep data sets for biology. Today, most things are built for human doctors to understand, and we’re trying to create really deep data sets that artificial intelligence can use to create correlations between all these disparate signals.

So, photon-based—

Yep.

—chemical detection—

Laser-based.

—that can be used broadly in a bunch of different techniques.

Yeah.

And so the Theranos 2.0 story may be a bit of a press—

Yeah, I mean, look, what sells more? “Billy builds technology.”

Raman spectroscopy devices?

Yeah, it doesn’t exactly drive clicks. It’s a lot easier to make it seem like Elizabeth Holmes is El Chapo running a diagnostics cartel from prison than it is to say Billy’s building a nerdy company.

Okay. Well, look, I appreciate you being with us today, Billy. We’ve talked a lot over the last year and a half to start to share your story. I think there’s a lot more of your story and Elizabeth’s story still to come. Is there anything else you want to say before we wrap up?

Gosh, there are so many things I want to say, but I just want to say thank you guys for listening. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for being here. Thank you, bro. We did it.

We did it.