Welcome back to my blog! To quickly recap, I have been following a podcast named The Dropout which stars Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the company Theranos, who had an idea that would revolutionize the future of healthcare. If you refer to my previous blog post, you can learn more about the initial background that was set about Holmes and her early life. We learned a lot about the motivators for Holmes’ pursuit of founding Theranos. The one drop blood testing patch she had dreamed of was receiving so much positive attention to the point where suspicions began to arise. Nevertheless, Holmes decided to seek funding for the initial stages of prototype development. Episode one left us with some sort of a cliffhanger, “Holmes had something up her sleeve, a white knight…with deep pockets”.
We find out after a couple minutes of anticipation, in episode two, that the “white knight with deep pockets” is a man named Sunny Balwani. As the episode progresses, we learn more of the personal relationship between Holmes and Sunny and how it had been completely hidden from the rest of the employees at Theranos, ultimately affecting the employees’ trust in the two.
The way that the podcast structure was able to keep the listener on edge to continue listening from episode to episode seems a bit plain in my own opinion. The first episode somewhat jumps around a lot for nearly 35 minutes before getting to the last 5 minutes of cliffhanger that will lead into the second episode. At the end of episode two, the narrator literally just explains what episode three will be about, without actually using the story of Holmes to keep the listener excited. Like I mentioned in my first blog post, I think a lot of this can be attributed to the fact that The Dropout doesn’t follow any strict chronological order. Instead, the narrator choses to slowly reveal small details at a time that help the listener understand why the downfall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos was inevitable. By revealing details slowly and discreetly, I think the narrator aims to allow the listener to “actively” listen and try to piece together these details, formulating their own ideas about Holmes and Sunny. This seems to be a unique way of preventing the listener from simply reading news articles about Theranos to find out the whole story. The satisfaction that the listener may feel when predicting the turnout of a certain interaction between Holmes and an investor is enough to keep then listener engaged and intrigued about events to come.
Going forward, I think the podcast would benefit from using Elizabeth Holmes as a direct interviewee to hear her personal thoughts and reasonings for her actions. We still are yet to receive this critical perspective, but I think this may be part of the narrator’s plan in keeping the listener wanting more. The narrator paints a mysterious and deceptive picture of Holmes on purpose without letting us listen to Holmes’ own words so that the theme of manipulation and fraud is exemplified throughout the episodes thus far.
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I think that it’s really interesting that you mention that the podcast wants to keep the listener from going out on their own and figuring out the story from reading news articles. The dropout seems kind of unique in that way where the story that they are telling is not really a super exclusive thing as it was probably covered in news articles before and other people may have attempted to tell this story. Going forwards as podcast creators they really do have you ride the fine line of generating suspense so that you keep following but not enough that you want to go out and do that and I really don’t know how someone would be able to manage a task like that. To speak on your last note however I think that if they did have Holmes speak on the podcast I think that changes the entire narrative that they are building towards. I think what separates the podcast as a narrative versus just a news article is the fact that Holmes isn’t allowed to speak on it. The viewer is kind of at the mercy of whoever is telling the story. It may not be the best way to tell the story but it is probably more compelling than just having the person come on and tell the world why they are in the right.
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