The Dropout is a podcast recorded by ABC Radio’s Rebecca Jarvis about a Stanford University dropout that became the youngest, self-made female billionaire. She was dubbed as “the next Steve Jobs”, her idol, by many of her peers due to her ambitiousness and pure brilliance as such an early age. The company she founded, Theranos, is a biotech company that was set to revolutionize the healthcare industry with a portable, accessible and affordable single drop blood tests that is able to run a multitude of tests and diagnose patient’s symptoms. However, Holmes’s world suddenly turned upside-down when people started to realized her technology to do such revolutionary things didn’t work. Investors and philanthropists realized they were putting billions of dollars into a determined woman with false claims about her company. Now, she is facing extreme scrutiny with the federal court for all the fraudulence and lying. The first podcast takes a dive into Holmes’s early life and included some interviews with people that worked for her or were significant in her upbringing to becoming a billionaire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Holmes’s was no ordinary child with an ordinary childhood. At the age of nine, she was asked by a relative what she wanted to be when she was older, and without hesitation, she replied, “I want to be a billionaire”. When asked why not the president, she retorted, “The president is going to want to marry me because I’m a billionaire”. Those aren’t words you hear from a nine year old everyday, or at all. They went on to interview her grade school teachers, all saying that she was different than the rest of her classmates due to her brilliance. She was a typical straight A student with a brain too big for her head. Then Jarvis was able to interview her ex-workers. One of them explained a situation where they were essentially held hostage for keeping her corporate lies a secret from the public. He said, “Yeah she basically gave me an ultimatum to sign legal papers that would essentially tie me under the company and not allow me to spread negative propaganda to the public”. There were a bunch of other ex-workers that went on about how controlling and manipulating a boss Holmes was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I appreciated the narrative features of having interviews for the first podcast. This gave me a real good insight to who Holmes was by the people that knew her best and were around her most through her pivotal years. The interviews were very professional and the questions were clear cut and straight to the point. There might be a bias present, however, because the interviewees were volunteers who agreed to talk about Holmes so people could have accepted to express their extreme feelings about Holmes. The podcast started with her early childhood and shifted to college years and then young adult years as a CEO, with interviews at each stage. This made the most sense chronologically and made it easier to comprehend. The music used gave it a vary scandalous and criminally vibe, which kind of matched the situation Holmes was in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I look forward to listening to more about Holmes’s situation, specifically her motives for why she chose to lie about her technology over and over again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Word Count: 540<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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