This actually says nothing at all about how the documentary deceives you. It simply claims that it does, with no evidence provided. This basically a clickbait headline stretched out to blog post size. Total garbage, IMO.
I think what's going on with this article and many of the comments here is that movie (I hesitate to necessarily call it a documentary) takes some twists in the second half that are causing a lot of people who have seen and enjoyed it to talk about it in very vague terms so as to not spoil those twists for anyone who hasn't yet seen it. Holmes is the central figure of the movie, but the filmmakers very clearly have higher ambitions than simply informing the viewer of the facts of her life.
This was one of the most engrossing theatrical experiences I have ever had and everyone that I know whose seen it has said they can't stop thinking about it. At the moment, it's literally the highest rated movie of all time on Letterboxd with 74% of ratings being 5 out of 5 stars with 98% of ratings being 4 stars or higher.
People are just trying to thread the needle of how to handle discussing this movie in this short window so soon after release. We want others to watch the movie so we can both have more people to talk about it with and so we can eventually talk about it more openly. But as is, the movie just came out a few days ago so people are trying to not diminish anyone's experience of watching this movie for the first time without knowing what transpires. I realize this likely all sounds frustrating to someone with little interest in the movie, but it's all a good intentioned way of engaging with a very special piece of art.
Completely agree. The whole spoilers thing is relatively recent and I think there's a strong argument that people who object to discussion of the narrative in any discussion of works of narrative art probably need to just avoid reading about anything. If you really don't want to know about a film or book because you're reserving judgement that's fine, but online communities these days seem fine with censoring discussion these days based on lazy spoiler grounds.
I think I would have had this position prior to seeing the movie. After seeing it last night, I'm 100% inclined to do everything in my power to not spoil the experience. It's truly, truly that wild.
I have revisited this thread, after having originally left despairing of the weird conversation. Thanks so much for clarifying what's going on! I hadn't followed this film and assumed people were afraid of being picked off the streets by the government if they spoke articulately about it. It's the "spoilers" problem then--online people who aren't used to how creative works are discussed thinking they have to use tradecraft. Ze beef iz in ze butchers!
I appreciate this point of view, but I think people who are religiously adhering to "spoilers" to censor aesthetic discussion need to be honest about highlighting what they are doing. A proper discussion about this would have been explicit about what was being discussed. We are not children.
Well that explains a lot about the doomerism and misinformation we regularly find on HN. If you don’t see the agenda being pushed or look into who is funding the documentary for just about every documentary in existence then you’re just not very intellectually honest. For example one of the vegan pushing ones on Netflix is straight up funded by/closely tied to for-profit artificial meat companies
Actually came here to "attack" that point. It's a view of reality that requires a conceptual bias-free media as reference for any commentary, and bias-free media is a tautology.
Compelling a perspective is the only thing cinematography / photography is doing. Bias equals point of view. There can't be any unbiased point of view because they're the same thing.
There's a conversation on education to be had here.
You're right but the distributors and creators pretend that documentaries are objective fact-finding media. and so does the audience.
Look at Super Size Me . The trailers, news media, promotions, critics, broader news media presented it as an objective case study. And McDonalds canceled a popular sales promotion over it. *and it had an enormous negative influence on McDonald's reputation, that it still hasn't yet recovered from.
90+% of people watch and share documentaries with the perspective that they are objective, truth seeking works.
You know, I was invited to go watch Super Size Me in the theater with a Catholic youth group, and I more or less believed every claim and depiction that was shown on-screen at the time. After all, this guy was consulting with actual, reputable physicians about his condition. And everyone knows that McDonald's food is horrible stuff to begin with.
But I was unsurprised, years and years later, to discover that Spurlock's extensive and growing liver damage, and other adverse symptoms, were being helped along quite a bit by his severe alcohol abuse throughout principal photography. It really sort of drove home that there is more than one side to this story they put up on screen, no matter how much they appear to seek and depict the truth.
Nathan Fielder is pretty well-known for his work in The Rehearsal and Nathan for You. Nathan for You resides in the docu-comedy genre, where you take advantage of real people's reactions to absurd situations for comedic effect. Other examples are things like Kitchen Nightmares (where Gordon Ramsey goes into real restaurants and "fixes" them). It's a well-done version of the idea, but not revolutionary IMO.
The Rehearsal, however, extends the idea further. In that show, he helps real people "rehearse" for hard conversations. It involves Fielder building extravagant sets and having absurdly detailed set-ups with multiple actors, then running the conversation multiple times. What makes this "different" is that now the real person is partially in on it? Like, they know that they're on a set. They know that this is a simulation. So the show is more "meta" than previous entries in the genre, opening up other avenues for humour.
I say this because You Can See Everything is best understood as a further extension of those projects. Even the name indicates this, because by nature of a documentary, you can't see everything. You have a real person in Elizabeth Holmes, being interviewed by a person in Fielder that's known for his stunts taking advantage of "real people," where he watches fictionalized versions of Holmes with Holmes herself? Viewed in light of his previous projects, this feels like an extension of them.
But even with that, I think the setup does allow you to see something real in Holmes. She also knows how people "want" to see her! So there's also a sort of meta-narrative there too, where you know Holmes is on her best behavior to try and dispel the narrative from those fictionalized TV characterizations. The fact that she comes off poorly in the documentary says something, even accounting for the fact that Fielder is trying to sell a narrative.
It's a real mind game, but I think it's representative of Holmes because of that. She is going to jail for a fraud that amounts to a similar sort of mind game, she agrees to a documentary to show herself differently, but that documentary is also a mind game. Wild stuff.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I fail to see anything that seems particularly "wild" in a film featuring a bunch of insipid mind games. Mind games are not exactly new or fascinating, you find them almost everywhere you go these days.
There is no longer any mystery about Holmes. As everyone already knows, she was a fraudster convicted of criminal fraud. The whole story of Theranos has been covered at length in the press, including an award-winning book that was published several years ago [0].
This so-called documentary seems like another reality show featuring a former celebrity with little self-awareness, who is incapable of seeing how absurd and ridiculous she appears now that she is no longer powerful.
[0] John Carreyrou (2018) Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Knopf
I cannot imagine being so hostile towards curiosity. You approach this as "I already know everything there is to know, and therefore this documentary (that I haven't seen) has no value".
>she was a fraudster convicted of criminal fraud...
>a former celebrity with little self-awareness, who is incapable of seeing how absurd and ridiculous she appears now that she is no longer powerful...
As someone who has seen it, there's simply no way both of these descriptions of her are true. If you believe that she's guilty of everything she's accused of doing, she's incredibly self-aware and her entire participation in this movie is a desperate Hail Mary attempt to save face in the court of public opinion. At one point in the movie Fielder is having a conversation with another person and says something along the lines of "She's either innocent or maybe the most manipulative person in human history". The movie isn't as concerned with a true journalistic investigation of her guilt or innocence, there are better accounts of that elsewhere and plenty of people who can tell that story better than Fielder. What he seems to be most interested in is the absurd commitment to she has to her claimed innocence and how effective that is or isn't.
> If you believe that she's guilty of everything she's accused of doing, she's incredibly self-aware
There was a mountain of evidence against Holmes, and she was convicted in a criminal trial. So it seems like a safe assumption that she was guilty.
Does it follow then that, because she is almost certainly guilty, that she must be "incredibly self-aware"? Of course not. It's just as likely that she is totally lacking in self-awareness, and that she simply does not know when to shut her mouth because she has no idea how stupid she sounds.
>It's just as likely that she is totally lacking in self-awareness, and that she simply does not know when to shut her mouth because she has no idea how stupid she sounds.
No, because she doesn't sound "stupid" in the movie. The mountain of evidence against her is so extreme that being able to carve out any narrative in which her innocence has any plausibility requires such a calculated and well constructed plan that is shows a high level of social intelligence and self-control. Fielder literally lives with her 24/7 for weeks and her mask doesn't slip. You don't have to believe her story to recognize she's not a "stupid" person who "does not know when to shut her mouth".
No one including my wife was interested in seeing it so I went by myself. It was long, but interesting. The author hits the nail on the head:
“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I haven't seen the documentary, but I have a background in media and art. There are a couple of ways I could understand this.
The first is the general public's lack of understanding of documentaries as an art form. Documentaries are essentially narratives presented as unfiltered reality ("facts"). Most folks don't truly understand this, or they lose sight of it through suspension of disbelief. That is, they don't know or forget about the film crew, editing, framing, and other artistic choices that form what they see. The illusion becomes invisible; they see only "facts" rather than a constructed narrative designed to guide their interpretation.
Second, filmmakers often use deception as an artistic device in documentaries. Mockumentaries are a pretty clear example of subverting the conventions of documentary filmmaking. It's a bit meta for most folks, so I could see how someone without much media literacy might totally miss this. But it's definitely a very interesting artistic choice given the subject matter.
The achiles heel of the documentaries as a form of propaganda & psyops (aka "narratives presented as reality") is that they have a profound dependence on aural cues for manipulating the audiance. It is difficult to be subtle regarding that intent when sound is involved.
So pay attention to the sound track and adjust your "suspension of disbelief" accordingly.
Tantacrul (software project manager, UX guy, muso and YouTuber)’s “Music on Reality TV is Insanely Manipulative” https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I is pretty good.
Heck yeah! Thanks. It's bad-tasting medicine, but Tantacrul makes me laugh, so I don't mind thinking about what this manipulation can do to me. Hopefully, I'll also pick up some resistance.
This isn't confined to "documentaries" - everything we accept as unfiltered 'facts' must be from 'a certain point of view'. Consider the Canon illustration from the article. Those present a man from different lighting, angles and perspectives. No matter how much a photographer might want to convey objective truth, a picture will always be from some perspective and lighting.
The same can be said for the news we watch. Or the history we read. Or the stories we tell each other. In 2026, we have swung too far toward the fanciful end of the spectrum of storytelling. We're now beset on all sides by BS generators (both human and artificial) and it's more important than ever to carefully handle truth in our stories.
But make no mistake - the teller of a story is absolutely crafting a reality for you. It's on you to decide whether you trust the narrator, or not.
> No matter how much a photographer might want to convey objective truth, a picture will always be from some perspective and lighting.
A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
It's one reason that long-form YouTube interviewers like Lex Friedman are so popular with a more discerning crowd.
"But he's so bland, monotonous, and boring!" cry the haters.
> A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
I don't think this works.
And I think it might be actually easier to exploit. The fraudster knows what you're going to do in advance, and can target their own presentation to maximally take advantage.
If the way you show someone conveys X about them, especially when due to outside cultural cues - here's the millionaire framing, here's the convict one... - and you just use the same X for every subject, then you're just suggesting a particular framing over and over. You're avoiding a layer of "my active framing is telling a particular story" but only with a passive—but still deliberate—framing of "my framing is telling a particular story" that you hold constant across every story.
In some ways this is similar to what Holmes exploited originally! Lots of industry media was willing to uncritically frame and present her with their "visionary tech founder" styles, and she leaned even further in to that with the Jobs-isms.
Would not a truer "fair" framing would've been to dig into the claims and let the evidence determine the visual language, to avoid the visual language of "Steve Jobs!!" bias the reader/viewer into giving Holmes' claims more credence?
One of the most stunning things to me is that most people do not recognize film cuts as breaks in time. The classic example of a guy shooting a basketball and then a cut to the ball going in, and 90% of the population says "Yeah, I saw the video, he made the shot".
Most modern people would laugh at those who scuttled away from the Lumiere's approaching train back in 1896, but in fact they are really not that superior mentally.
Growing up in a very high-functioning and very dysfunctional family, I felt that a lot of people were missing the basic truth. Even the film seemed to circle it without really understanding it.
Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know her own center. She responds to the people around her; everything she does is to please her partners and/or the internalized expectations of her family. In the psychological parlance, she is an extreme fawner with narcissistic traits.
Such people are, in a sense, masters of deceit, but once you understand that they lack a real center outside of how others perceive them (and that they also have real feelings, even if their notions of love are profoundly confused), there's no longer an enigma. You know exactly what you'd looking at.
They show Holmes reluctantly watching the movie "The Dropout" which is a dramatized version of "the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes" starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes.
Later in "You Can See Everything" Amanda Seyfried literally becomes an important character in the documentary including voicing her opinions and impressions, arguing with and challenging Holmes' husband Billy (they have just met for the first time) and talking at length with Fielder about his opinions and impressions.
This inclusion of Seyfried in this manner ruined for me any chance of this film feeling like a "documentary." This is the point for me where the film went "off-the-rails" and begins to feel like a very confusing experiment in audience manipulation.
I had the same question for the author of the article, but it's understandable that people are going to be cagey answering this question because they may not want to give away spoilers.
Well, it's both. We have all the public facts about Theranos. Nathan Fielder got to live with them for a period of time. That's not public information. It's still a documentary.
In my experience with Fielder material, the only truth is what you said. I never know if what I see and hear is real or some flavor (if not entirely) acting.
If I buy a security product, and the seller sends me nothing, therefore showing how easy it is to scam me. Are they somehow less of a scammer, did I actually buy anything of value? Are they raising awareness of the problem? Or are they just the problem?
I saw the movie Friday night. It is a mind job. You'll walk away with more questions than answers.
Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.
> That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of.
Thanks!
Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.
I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".
People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.
I think it’s incredibly bad faith to knee-jerk respond that people unwilling to reveal the surprises that made the film enjoyable to them are LLMs or shills.
Almost everything you'd want to say about it would spoil something interesting about the film. (This is not hearsay. I've seen it and I can't think about how to say anything meaningful about it without spoiling it.)
So if the movie can be "spoiled" it's at least....entertaining? I'm not sure to think if people are just leaving disturbed and mildly traumatized or what
I felt the movie was entertaining, but also somewhat unsatisfying. You don't really get answers or catharsis from Holmes being further confronted and exposed. To me, the movie was about media narratives and how deceptive lies of omission can be.
Reading reviews about almost any movie is like this. But, I expect the comments on HN to be more genuine than I’m witnessing in this thread.
It almost as if the comment section is filled with HN-trained LLM-backed bots intentionally being absurdly vague; just like the trailer last month was.
I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
It's a movie with at least one surprising twist, which seems to be fairly central to enjoying the experience, and people who've seen it don't want to spoil it for others. Hence they're vague in their descriptions. It's as simple as that.
The general twist is that she doesn’t really come off as the villain of this film (though she certainly does not come off in a flattering light) - her current husband it turns out is actually a pretty terrifying sociopath who seems to possibly have a bit of a cocaine habit (inferred from the excessive sniffles and insane demeanor) - and he really becomes sort of the films main antagonist.
All of this is completely subjective so someone else could come away with a different take, but if there was a twist (which I would not say this is a film with an overt twist) - it would be this.
For me it was a window into insane wealth and privilege and the types of lives these people lead and the engines that power their sense of self importance and delusions. I do think it was a phenomenal documentary.
SPOILERs kinda: Notably, it's all in the presentation and form of everything that went on. There were about ten different moments in the packed theater where something was said or happened where the entire audience was... silent. tense. I've never felt that sort of palpable and shared tension anywhere in my life like that.
>I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
Yes, these comments look like a very serious well-funded astroturfing campaign.
Maybe it's just because I've been around a bunch of people in startup circles, seaking angel and vc, etc and myself raised and had exits and been deposed in highly contentious situations.
Holmes doesn't talk like any innocent person has ever talked. Period. Not even like a naive rube either.
She explicitly initiated this whole thing as a narrative exercise and she just had to stick to the script for what, 45 days? While letting herself feel the genuine self pity all these types of people feel when they are experiencing the consequences for their actions instead of being able to foist them onto someone else?
Her only path forward is to FULLY commit to the bit as a way of deceiving the credulous, even a moment of cynicism and the whole thing falls apart.
Now, did she in fact succeed in that or was it a choice to show no cracks in the facade because it made a more engaging movie?
News flash, I love his media but Nathan Fielder is a monster as well he's my favorite monster but let's not pretend. We can just hold both things to be true instead of engaging in cognitive dissonance.
Other than the children (and that one flatulent horse) everyone involved in this is a monster, and the only way to hide that fact is to ensure the ending is ambiguous, otherwise it just feels like non-transcendent tabloid pap profiting off of bad behavior.
There is goodness, and people attempting to increase goodness and it looks and talks nothing like any of these people.
It really sounds like you would consider most people to be monsters. That is, the vast majority of us participate in exploitation to some degree and rationalize that exploitation as necessary, acceptable, minimal or merely something we cannot change.
That's an arguable position, but the problem with it is that it lacks any kind of gradient. Is the person who stole someone else's lunch from the fridge at work (an unfathomable act, to me) a monster in the same way that any person in federal prison is?
The film is relevant: initially, Amanda felt like a proxy for us, the viewers, someone to point out the abnormality in what we have seen. But then, she showed her unwillingness to even confront the possibility the miniseries was exploitative. She displayed a voyeuristic enthusiasm for more information and involvement. She blended into the film at that point, no longer our proxy as unsullied observer. But, can we really not think of a time we reacted defensively instead of with considered reason? Can we not think of a time we dove into a lurid topic that was fully irrelevant to our lives?
There are a number of cases where people involved in monstrous gang violence appear to show genuine rehabilitation. They devote significant effort toward encouraging others to avoid the mistakes they made. Do they do that because they are no longer monsters, or do they do it because it's one of the few acceptable choices available to someone in their position? I'm not sure we can reliably know.
The idea that anyone in this film has a lived experience close to those who grew up embedded in gang violence is a laughable comparison. The idea that anyone involved in this project has demonstrated, through proof of work, even .5% of what's involved in a person who has engaged in gang member reform is absurd. This is extreme category error.
Are you going to pretend that anyone in this film can be rightly considered a representation of the average persons lived experience?
I agree that Amanda Seyfried is an audience proxy in this movie initially. Are you going to assert that her lived experience and her role and place in society is representative of the norm? In this case is it reasonable to accept the films implicit presentation of her as a audience proxy? How is that reasonable? We do not have to accept or enter into the frame the film wishes us to, we do not have to allow it to anchor our starting point in how we engage with the piece of media.
Humans are the only monsters that actually exist, it doesn't make them less human and it doesn't mean they can't change their lived behavior.
I did not suggest anyone in the film had done a single shred of work towards redemption. Not one person in the film recognizes or admits doing anything wrong, which is a usual first step. Nathan never second-guesses his personal rationalization for making a documentary that financially benefits a subject against his own values. Successfully emerging with clean hands in the end does not fully resolve that.
I did not equate anyone in the film with the lived experience of a gang member. When talking about the categorization of people as good or bad or monster, examples where the dichotomy is extreme are relevant.
And yes, of course, Amanda not having our lived experience is part of why she blends into the film. That's no accident. We are shown her farm, horses and a picture perfect fireside setting. Nathan doesn't need to narrate that "Amanda is comfortable and rich with a farm in the Catskills and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan at one of those buildings where you regularly peek into the courtyard you aren't allowed to enter while you walk past" for the film to make that point.
Whether or not the average person has a different lived experience is still a different question from whether or not the average person is classified as a monster by your measure. And the lived experience of the average HN poster could be closer in relative terms of privilege to that of Nathan and Amanda than to that of the much less privileged, even in the so-called developed world.
I do not believe that the average person would agree with your classification of Nathan and Amanda as monsters. That doesn't invalidate your argument, but it does suggest very broad boundaries, and it becomes unclear what, if anything, prevents a plurality or majority of people being defined as a monster by your worldview. My question was about the utility of the binary classification if it ends up being that overarching.
Explain what position you think is being taken? Is it a binary position? A spectrum? Discrete? Continuous? How can anyone understand what you are even arguing against?
The attempt to extrapolate a generalized formalism from a single specific analysis is really building a pattern out of a single data point.
The pattern you've chosen to build is one that allows you to take the negative position but no one knows what position you're actually complaining about?!?
Talking to someone outside of the situation confronts the possible compromising of Nathan's objectivity, and dialog is a common way to process experiences.
I felt it as a break from the intensity and absurdity of the initial half, a lull in the rollercoaster. Then the film reduced Amanda's distance from the subject matter and we were off again.
(I do think the intensity of the first half is partly manufactured by a soundtrack that almost cartoonishly conveys 'unsettling' and 'eerie.' That's probably my main complaint about the film.)
I haven’t seen the Holmes movie, but this article reminded me of Orson Welles’ F for Fake. An amazing movie that plays with some similar ideas in a pseudo-documentary format.
It's a worthy movie, plays with form, true to Fielder's style.
However I strongly disagree with the author of this post. The one thing it does wrong is under-emphasizes how much hard evidence there is the Holmes personally did serious crimes:
1. Concealed use of competitor's machines since she knew there machines weren't capable.
2. Fabricated military contracts and endorsements.
3. Knowingly presented widely inflated revenue projections to investors.
4. Explicitly admitted in court to forging reports using the letterhead and logos of major pharmaceutical companies without their permission
5. There's text messages, internal emails, and firsthand whistleblower testimony—proving that Elizabeth Holmes and her chief operating officer, Sunny Balwani, orchestrated a ruthless campaign to silence anyone who tried to expose the fraud.
If anything the movie tries to let Holmes dupe you into forgetting this. Frankly the fact that SHE invited NATHAN to film this makes me think she was trying to use her baby as a way to garner sympathy and whitewash her life (presumably not really understanding his work).
It wasn't about Theranos though, but the person behind it. I would say this comment sums it up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137988 - so much of the screen time is dedicated to (A) the New York Times quote about if Holmes actually said "They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created", and (B) whether or not she knew about the money Billy asked for.
And, with (spoilers) the final prison visitation exchange, honestly it's pretty telling that she probably was just being manipulative the entire time because she doesn't seem to care that Billy asked for the money.
In a way, this documentary was probably _going to_ be about exploring the factual matters and whether or not she knew she was actually guilty or had some level of remorse. There are many aspects of that in the film. But Billy asking for the money to sign the appearance/likeness contract seems to have derailed Lance and Nathan's original intention for the movie, since that ask - and that Holmes stepped away - directly plays into whether or not she is this incredibly manipulative person.
I agree. The EH portrayed in this movie is much more sympathetic than the one portrayed in the Carreyrou book, and in Dropout. Fielder obviously knows all of this, and he is consistently interested in the "meta" levels of storytelling. So I don't think the point of the movie is as simple as "but wait, maybe she is actually innocent!".
One point seems to be mindfuckery -- EH making Nathan unsure of who she is, and when she is being honest; him doing the same to his audience; even Amanda seems to get in on it. For example: when Amanda and Nathan are in front of the fireplace talking about Nathan's visit to EH in prison: was that scripted? Or was it a genuine conversation? Or an improvised conversation (with an agreed set of points to be made)?
I just watched this movie tonight and it's one of those where I feel like everyone else saw a different film. For me it was too little butter spread over too much bread. All the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story have been explored, so all that's left is her personal life with her new partner who's also a weirdo.
At best I can say that it makes you think about things like deceit and honesty/accuracy in media, but it definitely didn't blow my mind like it apparently did for this author. After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.
> After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.
I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”
But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
See also ppl in toxic relationships, who will complain to their friends incessantly about how bad the other person is and how they know they need to get out of it, only to rarely get out of it.
> I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”
That's easy enough with a bullshitter in your private life.
A professional bullshitter is a different thing and you might not always have the luxury of just walking away and never encountering that person again (or the problems they create).
> most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
I think that's what "setting boundaries" is about: Standing your own ground, and decide: "Not worth my time and energy.", yet still believe in the good in people. I think even bad people have something good in them. It's just not healthy to figure it out for me, once the manipulative (or bad) habits have surfaced.
I think this can go too far in the opposite direction. Sometimes an entirely foreign concept sounds like bullshit at first contact. Or someone speaking a bit incoherently–good people can get confused or get struck by a thunderbolt of stupidity from time to time.
So ceteris paribus, yes, cut off bullshitters. But context matters. If a friend of a good friend is striking me as stupid, I'm going to make damn sure that's what's happening versus me misunderstanding them (or catching them at a bad moment).
Maybe too many people don't see it this way an it ends up backfiring, but I actually think it's important to "humanize" 'bad' people and show their 'redeeming' qualities -
I think it's important to inoculate yourself against presentation. Like, sure, now we know that Elizabeth Holmes was evil, an we can be binary about it - but would it have easier to be more critical of her rise if we could look past her apparent positive qualities?
Bullshitters bullshit for personal gain and amusement.
Most people aren't like that, a few are.
It becomes a lot less interesting and curiosity invoking when you have such a bullshitter in your life. The interaction becomes "the lied about this, so what did they really mean". For example, my bullshitter will often have car troubles, a dead pet (that comes back to life) or medical issues whenever they don't want to show up to a family event.
I can promise you there's really nothing more deep to understand beyond the fact that they've become overly comfortable with using lies to get what they want.
Most people, even toxic people, do have positive qualities.
At the most basic strategic level, it’s vital to recognize this so that we don’t fall for such people in the future. It’s sooooo easy to say “well so and so can’t be too toxic… I mean, they volunteer at the soup kitchen on weekends” or whatever. That’s part of how they (intentionally or unintentionally) lure you in. All very valuable for engineer-types, who may tend to be very literal in actions and their interpretations of others’ actions.
At a more nuanced strategic level, it’s good to recognize that since all people are a mix of positive and negative traits, How can we coexist with such people in cases when we can’t avoid it? It’s simplistic to say “just avoid toxic people” — it’s a good “north star” but is often impossible or impractical. e.g. it’s convenient to say “just cut toxic family members out of your life” and sometimes it’s the right call, but I’ve heard people toss that phrase around like it’s nothing and wow it’s heartbreakingly glib.
I think it’s also valuable for introspective purposes. It’s very easy to fall into the mindset of “well, I’m a good person because of X, Y, and Z” while blinding ourselves to negative ways in which we affect others.
Finally, yeah, sure — I admit it. I like a puzzle. Specifically the puzzle of figuring out if these people believe their own bullshit!
(For the record, I thought this movie was incredible, though HN’s collective “meh” on this thread was expected)
I found it a bit tough how many people in this thread are able to instantly spot people who are “bad” or “suck” and immediately cease all interaction and cut them out of their lives completely.
We must be living in very different worlds; in my experience these things are never that black&white.
I do agree that it’s very important to know where your boundaries are in life and stand firm on them; and you don’t need to keep people in your life who are a bad influence.
It’s just not as easy to make that distinction as some of the comments itt make it out to be …
It's important to be able to recognise behavioural patterns that suggest a narcissistic personality. Once you've established that, you need accept they won't change, because personality doesn't change, it's a stable pattern. Some people can spot these patterns due to long life experiences and know cutting out is the only option that leads to growth.
> you need accept they won't change, because personality doesn't change
I don’t think that is true. I know from myself and many of my friends or family that personalities can change, at times quite dramatically. Sometimes for “good” other times not so much.
We're talking specifically about bullshitting/lying/fraud, not other kinds of badness. The reason you have to cut such people out immediately once you realize what they're doing is because if you don't, they will keep trying to manipulate you. And usually if you catch someone in a lie it's pretty unambiguous: it really is black and white.
And I agree with the OP. In the past I've often been amazed and appalled at how someone can be proven to have lied, and the people around them barely update at all. They just brush it off and keep going back to be lied to again. It feels like the average normie has an extremely high tolerance for lying to the extent they don't feel it's much of a crime at all. Which I guess is why people like Elizabeth Holmes can thrive.
I assume you mean huge lies like Holmes-level lies.
Because everyone lies, it’s just a part of human nature.
Of course some lies are unforgivable. But it would need to be a pretty big lie for me to go and immediately cut people off.
Also I would argue the people that are obvious in their lying and manipulating aren’t the dangerous ones - those that aren’t obvious, that you don’t spot easily off the cuff are much more dangerous. And I’m 100% certain you also have such people in your life, it’s just unavoidable. And others might look at you and have the same thoughts: “look at this normie who doesn’t realise they are being lied to”
Overall I think there is a lot more nuance to this than you and OP make it out to be.
But I do understand the appeal of simple black/white narratives;
they are very attractive.
I just hope you treat the people close to you more merciful and forgiving.
> Also I would argue the people that are obvious in their lying and manipulating aren’t the dangerous ones - those that aren’t obvious, that you don’t spot easily off the cuff are much more dangerous.
Yeah. The person that's constantly bragging about fantasy stuff or reflexively claiming nothing was ever their fault might warrant cutting off because they're tiresome, but they're not likely to undermine you never mind pull off this level of scam because they're so unconvincing, and that might make them more harmlessly amusing than anything else. The manipulative person who's constant spreading false rumours might raise red flags, and definitely isn't someone you want to spend time with once you've spotted that some of their claims simply don't line up. But a large part of why people are often good at covering stuff up even if its the most heinous shit is that they manage to be plausible and likeable most of the time and generally tell the truth on other subjects.
Holmes likely fell into that category, though she didn't exactly downplay her lies in the way someone covering their deep dark secret usually does.
And yeah, in practice whether you cut someone off after learning their deep dark secret probably depends a lot on what it is and how it relates to you (and usually it's more "I'm hiding my affair" than "my billion dollar enterprise supplies fraudulent medical tests")
It is not about "what you miss" by avoiding "toxic" people like Elizabet Holmes. Bad people like her are dangerous! She killed several people, by providing fake medical tests!
> like a puzzle... people believe their own bullshit!
That's a strategy when it's personal. But it's catastrophic when Bullshiter Mode doesn't just define a person, it defines an entire industry - arguably the politics and economics of entire countries - and the only way to give it zero attention is to go fully off-grid and live like a hermit.
Holmes is interesting because she's not a freak or a one-off. She's pretty much a generic tech startup CEO billionaire wannabe, finance industry person, and/or familiar political archetype - arguably more extreme than most, but there's nothing truly exotic about the DNA here.
I'll avoid naming specific names here so that the reader can (probably rightly) project this onto whoever they want instead of rejecting it for naming their idol but... This is the problem I have with listening to the public "opinions" of major CEOs in general:
Their statements are usually made in service of a goal, not earnestly-held good-faith opinions. Even if someone is "very intelligent", what makes you think they are giving you access to the fruit of that intelligence? How do you know they aren't using their intelligence to try and manifest an outcome that would be beneficial to themselves, completely divorced from what anyone with their level of access to information could possibly believe (much less someone intelligent)? Sure, they'll tell you some truth if they happen to believe that doing that will reward them. But they'll also tell you that they're deeply committed to your local city when they have a meeting to discuss tax incentives for moving their HQ later that same day or that their plant has a sterling safety record while deliberately burying records of payouts for injuries. The only real difference between this and someone like Holmes is that they have a better level of skill in forecasting consequences.
What this ultimately means is: There is often little value in listening because you end up having to estimate the truth from less-manipulative sources yourself. And if you're going to spend the time and energy to do that anyway, you can skip straight to this step.
> But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone put this into words.
> I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”
I have something like that, but not (just?) for people. When I read (or listen to) something I very often fairly quickly recognize meta signs of bs and go 'kthxbye'. I call it bullshit filter and I am often surprised that some, even fairly intelligent, people can have suprinsingly weak one. As for morbid curiosity towards bs, I have very little. I'm even afraid that being too curious about it might be detrimental so I'm keeping my distance even when I engage somewhat.
I've only met one constant bullshitter in my life and unfortunately I worked with him so couldn't just leave. The thing that blew my mind was that nobody else seemed to care, at all. I get that it takes a significant amount of social capital to call out a bullshitter, especially at work... but still.. you don't have to believe them. Very weird.
Usually it's a management problem (like favoritism or something), so going to management is just going to put a target on your back.
Usually they've made a couple enemies. Just gang up with their enemies. If it's a group effort, there's only so much management can do at that point (depending on how much leverage they have). It's all dependent on the specific political situation.
This whole image of them being "well-liked" and socially invincible is just a play. Usually this type of person has made a shit ton of enemies. It may or may not be worthwhile depending on how shitty of a situation you're in, how bad the company's stack ranking and layoff quota is, how attached they are to you, etc
I think that’s a great reason to get into the psychology of bullshitters, or at least get really familiar with their tactics. You are going to have a lot of situations in your life when you can’t just flip a switch and get rid of them.
When you're working with a bullshitter and can't just leave, what use is there in performative caring? Your coworkers may have still cared, privately, but actively complaining about it, presuming boss man doesn't care anyway, is just pissing into the wind. You may as well accept that he's a bullshitter and get over it. Some people are like that and it doesn't help you to spend your time seething over it.
If you can get him fired then go for it. Otherwise, you're only harming yourself by letting yourself dwell on it. As for believing him; when my coworker starts rambling about the time the Navy seals came to him for help, I just say "wow man, crazy". I don't believe him, but neither do I confront it. Why bother? I'm not being paid to call out his dumb lies. This is probably what your other coworkers were thinking.
Caring and "seething" over it helps helps you to not become like them, not to adopt their projected views, not to blame their victims or otherwise contributing to the harm.
Conversely, actively complaining about it prevents enabling group thing to form. It helps victims identify the situation sooner, to leave of better protect themselves.
I’m not worried about becoming like them, and I have never once seen complaining about them or calling them out work positively for the person doing it. But, I’ve found acting confused and asking them for more detailed information has helped.
Maybe so, but its a mistake to assume others are falling for it just because they don't outwardly react to it. Ignoring it is the low-effort route that gets you through the day, so most people will usually do that.
Personally when I ignore things that I feel are wrong it just gnaws on me constantly.
I agree that it’s the low-effort route but if I had an extreme bullshitter I had to work with on a daily basis would need to do something about it or switch jobs.
Doesn’t mean I constantly need to call out ever single bit of untruth; like so many things it’s a spectrum
True. The practical reality is that it causes colleagues to divert limited resources to address this web of lies. No one wants to do that unless you're a fiend for emotional drama (practically speaking, some are desperate to gather any and all ammo to use against each other). For everyone else, it's emotional labor. And no one is getting paid to do emotional labor (unless that's the unspoken agreement that isn't written in their job descriptions).
If you really wanna out a liar and come out clean on the other end, it's just so much documentation, emotional decision trees, how to phrase & frame & present things, etc. etc. etc.
Often, the compulsive liar will out themselves, create their own demise, or be enabled and further empowered by a toxic system that rewards such types (which if possible, you'd wanna get out of ASAP because prolonged exposure leaves lasting damage to anyone in such systems).
Yes most people either show nothing and later end up believing at least portion of lies ... or believe lies.
But, you acted as if there was something wrong with those who dont. And as if there was some higher value in enabling and playing along. I disagree with both.
note, especially in cases like Holmes et al., how these people are full of shit for the sake of being full of shit. they are not just deceptive for their own sake but for the "et al."s sake, too, often enough just being the one thrown or throwing themselves under the bus to distract from or obscure what's going on "generally" or "currently, specifically" in that industry or it's supply chain and derivatives. you can spin up the whole story within the bigger picture, including "corona mass testing & sites cough cough, vaccines & boosters cough cough" and so on or look at the finer details of Holmes et al. endeavor itself and what derivatives the details "enabled" ...
it's hard to see through at first, but toxic relationships often actively obfuscate the toxicity of the social circle the partner is a--often seemingly lesser--part of ... but that's child play and toxicity or even betrayal on these levels is only "hard" if one loses more than a good conscious decade. in professional lives however, that harm is pretty much irreversible, within a single project's time frame, ... what's lost, practically non-retrievable, non-compensable ...
That whole Holmes story felt dodgy from the start. What she was gunning for was partially (recursively) done elsewhere, successfully. Then the whole Corona bit broke out and I still find myself wondering what the fuck ... but that might be a residue non-actual-conspiratorial-they-are-hiding-aliens kind of thought process that still wants to write one or the other post-they-don't-have-the-capacity-to-tap-everyone's-phone-calls and tor-exit-nodes-are-definitely-mostly-owned-by-the-same-privacy-loving-folks-who-maintain-those-8mil-lines-of-linux-and-other-distros story ...
> most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time”
You have to admit that shutting people out is still a defense mechanism that can backfire.
You're not immune from a skilled sociopath for doing this. They know what you're doing. The moment you turn your back is when they know they can blindside you.
It's the moment they start talking behind your back, shutting you out of conversations, undermining your work, etc. You're a lot more vulnerable when you're out of the loop. You can't assume you're stronger or smarter for trying to take the "high road". There is no high road with these people. They'll ruin everything in any way possible. They have their bases covered.
Yeah. “Just cut bullshitters out of your life” is about as unhelpful as “Don’t get sick!” when it comes to medical advice.
Like, duh yeah that’s the goal. Do that as much as possible, but a lot of your life is going to involve dealing with these people.
On a slightly deeper level, essentially nobody is 0% or 100% bullshitter. Nearly all of humanity falls into the middle. Even the most literal, level 2+ ASD folks I’ve known were, at a minimum, cagey at times.
No it's good advice. Most people don't react at all when they discover they were being bullshitted. Dropping interactions to the minimum you're forced to deal with them is still a huge improvement.
These sorts of people push people's buttons and lie and get what they want and then they wind up in civil or criminal litigation. They think this is just another people problem that they can lie and manipulate their way through, but the judge sees these kinds of people all day in their courtroom because they often wind up getting sued or prosecuted. They finally meet someone who doesn't expect them to be a normal "good person" and they face the first real consequences they can't just power through.
German nerd here. I know next to nothing about "the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story", is there a documentary on the facts instead of the villain somewhere?
I don't know of any worthy documentary, but I have read the book "Bad Blood" [0], which I thought was thorough, well written and, to me, an excellent read.
> Tyler Shultz went to work at Theranos right out of Stanford and soon noticed that things weren't as they seemed. Lots of other employees knew there was something fishy going on, but Tyler was one of a tiny handful able to resist the mesmerizing and intimidating Elizabeth Holmes and speak out about the fraud that was putting patients at risk.
> All the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story have been explored
This is similar to the Musk doc. When everything about the person is already explored real-time in the media, there's no mystery left. There's no drama. It is almost as dull as the subject's personality and almost as vacant as the subject's morality. Hmmm, so I guess in a weird self-referential way maybe it is genius? Nah.
I got a feeling that the 4 hour Musk documentary is going to be a similar kind of experience, exploring in extreme detail all the myriad ways that guy is an asshole.
This article falls into the same trap, I dunno what to call them, artsy-upper-class-society-and-film reviewers often do; writing vague yet meaningful-sounding things about the obvious subtext of a movie as if it was a revelation, yet without any specific observations about it.
Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.
But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
> But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
If you’re that interested in getting these answers, you probably should watch the film
Unfortunately, it has such a limited release that most people who want to watch it outside North America won't be able to. No one has been able to explain why it has had such a limited release.
Seems like most documentaries from my point of view in Spain. Seems we won't be able to see this in cinemas until February sometime, and before that it'll probably be available via other channels. In the end, most interested will have seen it before February already, so when times come around, not that many people see it. So the cinemas adjust future viewings since not that many end up seeing them, as it takes so long time to arrive here.
Been like this with most mainstream documentaries like this one.
> this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous [...] with ambiguous subject matter?
There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.
I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.
Without having watched the film, I'm sure they can make it look like Sunny Balwani was the guy in charge, or something like that. I don't even know the whole story of Theranos and never followed it with much interest - startup scams are a dime-a-dozen. HP's acquisition of Autonomy always struck me as such a tale: CFO takes the fall for CEO and CTO for a $11 b acquisition that a few years later was worth a tenth because of accounting fraud and when he gets out the CEO gives him a sinecure; then the week of CEO and CTO acquittal the latter gets killed in a bicycling accident and the former dies when a tornado sinks his yacht.
Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are interesting characters, true, but there's so much nuts in tech, it's just fertile ground for stories.
The story is so much more than a startup scam. It's about large numbers of supposedly savvy men being duped by a kid. What kind of kid could and would do such a thing?
It seems that everyone interviewed about this story has their own red flag moment -- the point where they knew that something was way off, and that they should stay far away. Silicon Valley VCs being the prime example. It is incorrect to say that Theranos was a VC company, it was more funded by angels who were incapable of objectively judging what was being proposed.
At Stanford a prof (important to say: a woman) who knew that the idea was technically infeasible. (And interesting to contrast with another very senior prof -- a man -- who left his tenured position to join Theranos). I remember reading a New Yorker profile of EH years before Theranos blew up, and the story described how she had all of these extremely powerful old men on her board: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger. That was my red flag moment. Yes, they are brilliant and powerful, but they are also clueless about biotech and medical tech. So why get them involved? Something seemed very off to me. Lots of people knew that something was very off, and yet ...
I’ve watched the film. There are things that happen during the filming of it, involving the people making the project, that I would indeed classify as big spoilers and knowing them beforehand would lessen the experience.
besides the topic that is being explored is deception so its expected the documentary Will use a rethorical or film technique that has some connection to that theme of deception?
I don't think there is any magic sauce to this movie. I saw it yesterday, and do agree (spoilers ahead) there are three acts: deception, sympathetic, puppeteer. I feel though that this article treats the movie as if its some sort of hypnosis; it's not. Its a very well put together movie that makes you question everything thats happening. I and others came out of it largely questioning:
A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen
B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her
and not:
- Is she guilty
This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.
The simple concept is some version of the Peter Principal.
You just flat out don’t get into these positions without being a psychopath. Partially that it wouldn’t be attractive to you, and partially that you won’t succeed without those behaviors.
I’m a big fan of conscript political assignments. The people that don’t want to do it I think would make better decisions.
I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).
It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.
And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.
When a lawyer says "reckless" it's an extremely strong word. It doesn't mean "negligent", IANAL (and it depends on the state etc) but it's more like if you knowingly run over a pedestrian in your way, and you aren't trying to hurt them but don't care if they get hurt. And often criminal law will treat it as just a little less bad than intent.
It very much depends on where the lawyer is. What you’ve described would be more like “depraved heart” or “wicked recklessness” in jurisdictions that have it, where reckless was that you were doing 90 in a residential area. I think the point is more that the legal term “reckless” may have a specific meaning in given places.
Yes. So many of her replies to Nathan's questions were "I don't know" or "I don't remember" or "I don't understand" for questions that were very straightforward.
At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.
While far from a complete technical breakdown, Hank Green's recent video on Theranos is a good starting point. These are not serious people. The special sauce has never been the self promotion.
It is one thing to fake and misrepresent the completeness of a video game, but it is entirely another to provide false or unverified medical results to patients.
In virtually every company there are questions you intuitively know that your managers don't necessarily want to know the answers to (or at least, they only want to know the answers to them if you have a solution), usually it's something relatively trivial like minor infractions of corporate rules.
There are some leaders who are extremely good at convincing you about the importance of belief in a particular thing to the point where you avoid even thinking up those questions - if they are ever cornered (and they rarely allow it to get to that point) they will wriggle endlessly rather than responding to a line of inquiry that bursts the collective bubble.
Do they know? It's hard to argue about their internal motivations.
It's above reckless, in other legal systems there is a level above gross and reckless negligence where the prosecution argues not only they should have known, in fact they did know and chose to proceed anyway.
Best take of the movie here. When the whole crew met with them before production, Nathan's idea to say "fuck it, let's just see how they do business" was the right call and might show she actually may not have known as much as you'd think, but it's fully intentional to the point of complete insanity.
I think if you're stuck on that question, her manipulation poked through the silver screen and worked on you.
To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.
Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, would you have fallen for it? If you feel the need to write apologia after watching a documentary that's basically a hit piece, you know the answer.
I don’t think an accusation of ‘apologia’ is justified here. If some particular cognitive process generates deception genuine to the deceiver, that does not make the deception acceptable.
There’s a story in the movie about a magician performing a trick, but where there is no trick. The magician really does the thing he appears to do. I think that’s more where GP’s question lies, i.e.: Is her unusual processing of the world an elaborate conscious construction, or is it automatic, and to what degree?
That isn’t a direct determination about her merit or culpability.
I have no idea what this movie is actually about. I only know Holmes is a classical sociopath. Knowing what that means I cannot imagine any surprises coming from this movie.
Here are key observations of sociopathic personalities:
* They are never wrong, but there are rare times they will admit to being wrong if they have calculated an advantage in doing so.
* They don't care about you, or anybody else. They can't. A sociopath is a damaged personality that cannot empathize. What's interesting is that introspection is the same skill as empathy, so they cannot do that either. As such, they have no faults.
* Sociopaths tend to be charming. They want to appear pleasant. A primary goal of any narcissist is admiration. This is all temporary though, because they lack the empathy necessary to adapt and build trust or extend relationships, which means they are more important than you. It also means they will extend an irrationally great amount of energy to inform you of just how charming they are or how wrong they aren't.
* Sociopaths tend to become hostile when they don't get want they want. They live in a world of "i want" or "i don't want" and there is no further action to execute. This also tends to make for controlling and abusive personalities.
* Sociopaths are not necessarily sadists. The goal is not typically to harm other people, but rather to fulfill themselves irrespective of any harm.
While not criminal like Homes this seems to describe a lot of the most currently vaunted tech CEOs
Musk, Altman and Zuckerberg all are able to somehow ignore the harm they cause and have an amazing ability to justify it in pursuit of some “greater good”.
My take away, same as from Martha Stewart documentary, is that the law goes for you much harder if you are a woman. Musks or the world can deceive and produce vaporware for decades but God forbid you are a woman that's deceiving other men. A "b*tch hunt" somebody called it in Martha Stewart doc.
Respectfully, do you think you're shifting goalposts?
Your argument was that women were more punished by law. The studies (as someone else linked) show that women are less punished by law.
You switched your argument to "powerful women," which would require a lot of evidence, because it is contrary to the statistical expectation from the previous data, that women of all kinds would be less punished by law than their male counterparts.
Now, your argument and the study you linked just refers to how many women get promoted and the attention and criticism they get, which is separate from our legal system.
Lololo. It is exceptionally rare to be prosecuted, let alone convicted, as a woman.
The musk’s of the world are just exceptional at getting leverage - and pretty good/exceptional at manipulation.
Holmes was just good at manipulation, not so good at leverage, and eventually her fraud rose to the level even her manipulation skills were insufficient - and then had nothing to fall back on.
I did look up the numbers actually. On average women get lighter sentences for fraud, not exceptionally rare at all more like 30% shorter sentences. But on the other hand prominent women (CEOs) are much highly scrutinized, especially their departures so average and prominent here are not the same.
This is research conducted and published by an executive search firm in London, versus the mountains of actual academic studies somebody else linked on sentencing disparities.
Why would the documentary be deceiving you? The documentary has no reason to deceive you. The document is just trying to reach out to you and connect with you as a person. Why would it be deceiving you? It has no reason to be deceiving you.
Like having kids while facing jailtime, it can be read as a ploy to evade responsibility. Rational has a secondary, economics meaning, i.e. selfish, utility-maximizing - whatever furthers the individual's interests.
If you are in desperate need of something you don’t deserve that only Trump can supply, and that alone doesn’t cause you not to want it, then yes, pretending you don’t have principles is rational: it is the only thing that will get you what you want.
Trump is an ignorant Leland Gaunt. If only he can help you out of a mess you made, being helped is going to violate every remaining principle you have. Worth just getting rid of them up front.
Elizabeth Holmes is probably practicing doing her hair like Ivanka. Her pardon is going to cost a lot of money and probably some face time.
She had (two!) children solely to try and avoiding having to go to prison. She has no principles other than self-interest and self-preservation. It would be shocking if she didn’t attempt to curry favor with Trump for a pardon since he’s been handing them out to the wealthy like Halloween candy.
morals are generally not a factor that sociopaths like holmes entertain at all, and using that as your lens... your best odds of a get out of jail free card is to cozy up to the guy who pardons people that say nice things about him
In case you aren't, her Twitter account isn't run by her. She doesn't post of it; it's another person impersonating her. This movie touches on this fact very significantly partway through. The person impersonating her is a MAGA guy and was given access to her account by reaching out to "people pretty high up with X"
> her account by reaching out to "people pretty high up with X"
Is it manipulation to show particular positions and connect with X/republicans? Because in the movie he is reaching out to X support with legal power of attorney, and it was also shown as another sign of overcontrol from him
The documentary aside, if she hadn't been caught for the fraud, I wonder how many of us (myself included) would be singing her praises. I wonder how many people are operating like she did right now.
In that counter-factual do you propose that she/her company actually/eventually develops what they said they did? So a fake-it-until-you-make-it gone right?
She was saying that they had developed a system that could run a bunch of tests on a single drop of blood, and do so with better accuracy than existing tests. When in fact what they were providing used the off-the-shelf systems on diluted blood, returning horribly incorrect results.
Note that it was not "we will deliver this", the company (and often Holmes herself) were touting the existing customers already getting this. I should also note that behind the scenes Holmes had no great insights into how they were going to accomplish this leap forward, and knew that all of their work at that point had failed.
> In that counter-factual do you propose that she/her company actually/eventually develops what they said they did? So a fake-it-until-you-make-it gone right?
No, I mean the fraud continuing, and how much of a culture of knowingly cheerleading and gaslighting fraud exists in a forum such as this. Is it the majority, or is it a loud minority.
From Theranos to meme coins and NFTs, there is a long history of shilling for outright fraud here.
Anyone accountable for AI being deterministic (this is most of the bay) - am curious how they incorporated the movie into the BS they shill (if they do).
> A non zero amount of people here would do exactly what Holmes did for money.
To go even further, "fake it til you make it" used to be a mantra lots of startup founders followed, and the whole story about how reddit got started with puppet-accounts to make it look busy when it was just three guys in a bedroom, was hailed as a successful strategy for growing startups.
Every documentary is inevitably deceiving; the only difference is whether the author tries to hide it.
> Very early on, I worked out that one of the most stupid things that they do on television is these things called cutaways or what used to be called “noddies” where, when you cut an interview with someone, you insert a noddy of the reporter looking noddingly at the interviewee to disguise the cut.
> I would never do that. I just cut and you can see what I’m doing, that I am actually cutting this person, or I will use music to push my argument.
> I mean, I have arguments and I have stories. That’s what television journalism has and you can either dress it up as “this is the absolute truth” or you can dress it up with me by saying “look, I’m telling you a story, all this is true but have you thought that it could be like this?” to provoke you.
> And of course I want people to agree with me because, you know, all human beings will, but I understand that my job is to push and good journalism should do that especially at a time of uncertainty.
> At the present moment, to go back to my original point, you know what you’re going to get with most journalism. So therefore you sort of switch off and you go “oh yeah, it’s a climate change film”. “Oh yeah, it’s a ‘bankers have done something ever bad’ again.”
Therefore, you don’t look.
> It’s like if you’re showing a picture of the Mona Lisa. You don’t look at it.
You just look at it as a pattern. You go, “oh, that’s the Mona Lisa”. I don’t know when I last looked at the Mona Lisa.
I don’t think I ever have, because it’s a thing. And so much of journalism is a thing now.
> We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it. This is my theory as to why we’re so divided in this country.
While this is true, the reason we are much more divided country than in the past is that today's tech actively amplifies this. You can always find the news to support your belief, and social networks are tuned to reinforce it. This is a vicious circle - the more we are divided, the more division is propageted.
>An entire theater full of grown adults was falling for it. At one point, people were shouting so loudly at the screen that I couldn’t hear the dialogue. I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.
Is this a parody lol?
Maybe when I read about "cinemas are a bad experience nowadays" on american sites (reddit, HN) they mean this but I always felt that they are deceiving me.
Maybe I'm just too Asian-European because I never experienced that in any European or Far East Asian cinemas.
No one did anything like that in the theater I saw it in and I have a hard time believing this happened. As if she was some major figure that the avg person was familiar enough with to form an emotional opinion on. I've had to explain who she was to everyone I know and they were all kind of like "oh yeah, I remember hearing something about that."
Saw it on Friday in Berkeley, and: yes, there was absolutely audience participation, and there were moments where I had to restrain myself from joining in.
I watched it in San Jose at Alamo and no one was heckling, but they also played a recording at the beginning reminding people not to talk during the movie. So if you want a quiet movie experience you should try a nearby Alamo Theater. The audience did clap after it was done.
I have heard from musicians who visit the bay that concert audiences are more frequently obnoxious here than other places, and they attribute it to a general lack of social skills in conjunction with all the artists being priced out of the area.
> I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.
No, that's called "obnoxious virtue signalling" and people do it all the time in places like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. It's gross and unnecessary. Don't glorify it.
Hi! I grew up in Seattle, lived in SF just prior to the pandemic, and have since lived in Portland.
While I understand the stereotype of these places lends itself to that view, I have never, ever seen this type of behavior displayed in a movie theater, from blockbuster showings to small, art-house stuff that touches on controversial issues you think people would be vocal about.
Hi! I lived in Seattle, in SF and I’ve been to Portland many times. And I’ve seen the behavior I’ve described in all of the locations I’ve mentioned. Personally. With my own eyes and ears. More than once in each place! Strange, that.
So I don’t know…right back at you with the stereotyping thing? Because what you’re doing is taking your own limited experiences, overgeneralizing those and throwing shade at people who say things you disagree with.
(Also, by the way: the “please stereotype less” response is practically a whole delicious stereotype in itself. And here you are using it! The way non-passive-aggressive people say what you’re trying to say is: “I think you’re wrong, because I’ve never seen that.” This approach has the distinct rhetorical advantage of being honest, clear and direct, but of course, lacks that emotional punch of trying to belittle your inquisitor with a subtle insult.)
> ... and calling someone else a liar (without actually doing it, naturally).
I mean, when someone blanket generalizes and casts a very wide net, saying that it happens "all the time", and someone with 40 years of theater-going experience in those locales has not seen it happen once, then yeah, they're gonna point out that you're, at the very least, hyperbolically stretching the truth.
Please spare me the high and mightiness about any passive aggressiveness in my post, I just responded in kind to your own passive dig at those locales. If you're going to make tall claims like you did, don't be surprised when people push back.
> when someone blanket generalizes and casts a very wide net, saying that it happens "all the time", and someone with 40 years of theater-going experience in those locales has not seen it happen once, then yeah, they're gonna point out that you're, at the very least, hyperbolically stretching the truth.
Well, now we’re getting somewhere! You want to say I’m being hyperbolic? That’s cool. I clearly was. It literally does not happen at every single movie. I exaggerated for effect. Mea culpa.
(Doesn’t change the fact that I’ve heard and seen these things often, of course.)
> Please spare me the high and mightiness about any passive aggressiveness in my post, I just responded in kind to your own passive dig at those locales.
Erm, OK. I wasn’t being passive. I said it pretty bluntly. Was it unclear?
I've had several awkward experiences lately, in the opposite direction.
You know how cinema is a good opportunity to sit there among several dozen strangers (at least), and enjoy a shared experience, and laugh, cry, scream, whatever you do, together?
Well, I've been to several films where nobody laughed. Like, there were at least a dozen or more other people in the audience, and there were genuinely funny parts of these films, and there was nobody else laughing in there, except me.
And I can tell you which ones: Disclosure Day, The End of Oak Street, and Digger. Now, the first two aren't comedies. But they definitely had comedic, sort of awkward bits that were obviously supposed to be LOL funny, to break the tension and establish some moods. And Digger itself, classified as a black comedy, was thoroughly hilarious, and farcical, although exceedingly awkward in some parts. And I was walking out behind two nerds and they were having an intellectual discussion of how "interesting" it was to them.
But nobody's laughing in the theater. And I am not exactly sure why. It is not long ago when I noticed that younger people were reacting and laughing much faster than I could react, for some reason. But now, the audience has simply stopped laughing altogether.
Is this unique to my experience? Anyone else in the USA noticing this? I know that not a lot of people are attending movies these days. But The Odyssey was selling out, over a month into its run. But there were no funny parts to it, I suppose.
I had this experience watching Eddington. My adult son and I were laughing all the way through and the packed audience was totally silent. Very strange experience.
It's the whole style of Nathan Fielder too but Herzog wouldn't ask so many yes-no questions... and then Holmes just dodging them. I don't know, I don't remember etc. It's not just answers but the questions too.
There was a movie, maybe on Netflix, about Holmes not too long ago. I was surprised to see this movie coming out because I thought that one was pretty well done and covered everything this movie might (I have not seen this one).
Has anyone else seen both and can they comment on the differences?
The previous documentary focused on Theranos’s downfall, the mechanics of the fraud, the fake technology, and investigative journalism. It featured archival footage only as Holmes declined interviews and retained tight media control.
This new one focuses on Elizabeth Holmes's personal life, her mindset right before going to prison, and her ongoing insistence on her own reality. It has direct, intimate access and was filmed inside her home with her partner Billy Evans and their children in the 34 days leading up to her prison sentence.
“ She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup. That’s a significant distinction, but as a society, we don’t love nuance” Ok she’s still a fraud what am I missing
"""How much of your opinion of her comes from the facts of her criminal case & how much comes from the images and/or videos and/or TV dramas you’ve seen over the years?"""
There is a book by the WSJ reporter that uncovered the lies carrying the startup Theranos ("Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou) and led to its downfall.
There is a well-produced podcast ("The Dropout" by ABC News/ABC Audio) that also reveals the dichotomy between investor harm and patient harm and it was originally completed before the criminal trial.
Would recommend those if someone is interested in the paths of the people involved in Theranos, and how they managed to carry on the deceptions.
Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know why A24 has not released this movie at the same time across different regions? It's really frustrating seeing so much discussion about the movie but not being able to actually see it until the end of November in the UK.
>> It definitely didn't blow my mind like it apparently did for this author.
It did for the author because this is a service she provides. To even suggest that Elizabeth Holmes didn't really harm anyone because she in prison for investor fraud, and then have the nerve to call that distinction "nuance", is absurd.
Theranos generated around 7.8 million test results for Arizona consumers alone. Of those, roughly 834,000 had to be voided or corrected. These were real people getting medical information they relied on. Some received terrifying and incorrect indications of prostate cancer. Pregnant women received results suggesting they were miscarrying when they weren't.
It's like claiming a blood bank supervisor didn't put patients at risk by giving them incompatible blood transfusions, simply because the state only managed to prosecute them for pirating the inventory software they were using.
She did it before for Paul Logan and Anthony Scaramucci, and now is softening the road for Elizabeth Holmes pardon.
She did the same in her newsletter for Logan Paul when he was trying to move beyond his image as a toxic YouTube prankster, and spent months embedded with him and his brother.
Then did the same for Anthony Scaramucci, when he had to rebuild his credibility in the investment world, as his bitcoin hedge fund was about to go nowhere. Pompliano opens with his fascination with astrology. Astrology!
Call monsters what they are. The victims deserve it.
> Theranos generated around 7.8 million test results for Arizona consumers alone. Of those, roughly 834,000 had to be voided or corrected
I got one of these! I called my New York doctor in a panic because apparently my kidneys and liver were failing. We ordered a bunch of rush tests, they came back fine, then we did a bunch more to confirm. That was a lot of stress, wasted medical professionals' time and cost for a single person. (The only reason I didn't go straight to ER is I was doing my start-up at the time and, America being America, didn't have the best health insurance.)
I don't think my doctor reported that result as being wrong. I certainly didn't–I was too busy confronting my impending doom. So my HDHP wound up paying for not only the un-needed follow-up tests, but also for the Theranos test. (I don't remember if I paid a deductible. It was at a Walgreens.)
> She did it before for Paul Logan and Anthony Scaramucci, and now is softening the road for Elizabeth Holmes pardon
She's maintaining access to powerful people. It's a well-known problem with access journalism.
Having followed your comments here for years, I was shocked to read that you got Theranos tests. From the get-go, long before the WSJ exposé, it was apparent to me this was a complete fraud. I based my thinking on long experience (38 years) drawing blood for tests.
I’d been reading about them for a few years, never got personally involved in any capacity, was in Phoenix for a long-distance relationship and saw the billboard and thought “why not?” When I saw the results I panicked. Ex post facto I figured something went wrong with my draw (full venous draw, by the way).
I have no background in medicine, and I was probably considerably stupider at the time inasmuch as I was in my twenties, so I never connected it to being a fraud, instead concluding their kit didn’t work reliably and that they’d launched prematurely and would have to pull back from the market and regroup (and get sued) for a while.
I would NEVER patronize a doctor who sent my blood to Theranos. At the time it was operating in Arizona, it was only after a tremendously intense and expensive lobbying campaign to get approval. That was very much in the news at the time.
Is your doctor the one who actually takes your blood and sends it in for tests? Where I'm from, the doctor just orders a blood test, and you go to some other lab facility somewhere (with some discretionary choice) and get it done by a phlebotomist and its more or less outside of the doctor's purview.
In the USA either my doctor takes the blood, or in certain cases, they have Labcorp or similar do the test (I asked and it was because they didn't have the proper vial labels to do the blood test in house). I also get copies of the test and it has the logo of the testing company.
It works both ways. I walked into the Theranos and volunteered for bloodwork. I’ve also had my doctor send my bloodwork order to a lab of my choosing when I’m e.g. traveling.
This doesn't make sense. You are just getting your blood drawn. You don't even see who is doing the test until it's done. How on earth would you even know.
>Theranos generated around 7.8 million test results for Arizona consumers alone. Of those, roughly 834,000 had to be voided or corrected. These were real people getting medical information they relied on.
Those are rookie numbers.
When Merck hid data showing Vioxx was causing heart attacks and death, not only did no one go to jail, but the fines were less than the revenue of the drug.
Vioxx would go on to kill an estimated 50,000 people before being pulled off the market.
Holmes made the mistake of having too few lobbyists and FDA insiders.
What Merck did was rookie numbers, what about Genghis Khan?
Whataboutism aside, "having too few lobbyists and FDA insiders" isn't going to save a product that doesn't work and that doctors stop relying on. Once people were shown behind the curtain, it was game over.
Thats why I found the article so interesting. I was literally thinking about this yesterday: how your story shapes who you are. It isn't particularly profound, but it is interesting how your perception is shaped by how you present yourself, what is on the internet about you, your story and crucially, who vouches for you.
Then I got to the end of the article and saw all of those other articles with other people with "reputation issues". It was so meta. Even having this story hit the top of Hacker News might have been calculated.
Unfortunately that's the big message the courts gave, isn't it. Elizabeth Holmes used the names of important government officials to deceive two classes of people:
a) as you point out, give wrong medical information to nearly a million people. Information they probably acted on and damaged themselves.
b) deceived investors.
ONE of these things matters to the American justice system.
Whose names did she use for that?
Henry Kissinger (former United States Secretary of State);
Jim Mattis (retired Marine Corps four-star general);
George Shultz (former United States Secretary of State);
Richard Kovacevich (former CEO of Wells Fargo);
William Perry (former United States Secretary of Defense); and
William Foege (former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
These are the people that were in charge of leading the company and giving credibility to it. Needless to say all these people have not faced any kind of responsibility. They "were all deceived", in other words none of them ever checked.
I agree energetically that this is how it turned out.
However, the prosecution did bring charges for both against Holmes, harm caused to patients by Theranos, and the defauding of investors. She was only convicted of defauding investors, by a jury of her peers.
Sunny Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients and Theranos did settle a class-action lawsuit against them.
I do believe the publicity around Holmes in part was about distancing the investors (the list you provided) from any kind of responsibility or PR blowback.
Anyway, the game is rigged, I just think it's important to see how it is rigged. I don't like to shed doubt on jury decisions, it really is the best thing we have. Prosecution motivation can be swayed, defense can be under/over funded, but a jury of your peers, while imperfect, really is the best way to make these decisions.
I also don't know what legally an investor can be held accountable for.
Yeah without jury trials Trump would have the ability to BOTH convict people and let them go, since he controls prosecutors, who are the only ones that can bring a case and hiring of judges.
Now he only has the option to let people go for crimes, either by pardoning them or instructing prosecutors to do nothing.
Trump has used both options he has, so the ability to convict people would have been disastrous.
This cuts to the heart of it. Elizabeth Holmes' real crime, the reason she was actually punished (insofar as anyone in her position ever gets punished), is that she both embarrassed and defrauded many wealthy and influential individuals.
> They "were all deceived", in other words none of them ever checked
While I agree to the larger point you are making, I am hard pressed to understand what they could have done. Its not like they were not involved at all, there are plethora of accounts of these people receiving reports which just lied. They were blocked from access to the actual equipment for "security reasons" so they couldn't get a third party assessment done. At some point you have to believe your business partner will not outright lie because otherwise how do you do business with them. Life cannot run on cryptographic proofs.
They could have exercised any sort of reasonable oversight. If you're getting any sort of stonewalling from your business partner, that is a massive red flag, and something that should get you talking to the rest of the board about kicking them out
Ian Gibbons, Theranos chief scientist was facing a deposition that threatened to expose the company technology issues. Under pressure, and fearful of losing his job, he attempted suicide and died a week later. When his grieving wife contacted Theranos, rather than receiving Holmes condolences, she received a demand for the return of company property and confidential materials...
That’s a good reminder: With scarce few exceptions, your job doesn’t actually care about you, companies and platforms aren’t your friends, and life is too short to waste it on assholes and sociopaths.
The number is much higer, the 834,233 is not the total number of incorrect results. It is the number Theranos formally invalidated or revised. Theranos performed many tests using conventional laboratory equipment rather than its proprietary Edison machines. The company initially voided results from Edison devices and subsequently corrected other results. But conventional equipment did not guarantee accurate results, because Theranos also had problems with its laboratory procedures.
In November 2021, a woman named Erin Tompkins testified in Elizabeth Holmes's trial that Theranos had given her a false-positive HIV result in 2015
> To even suggest that Elizabeth Holmes didn't really harm anyone because she in prison for investor fraud, and then have the nerve to call that distinction "nuance", is absurd.
I have been blown away by all of the efforts to rehabilitate Holme’s reputation and erase any of her wrongdoings.
I’m sure some of it is coming from directly seeded or funded efforts from Holmes doing PR work, but I think most of it across social media is actually organic. Elizabeth Holmes was so clearly caught out committing fraud that it’s triggering contrarian reactions among people who think they’re the ones who can see the real story behind every media narrative. Unlike other unpopular figures like Zuckerberg or Musk, most people had never heard of Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos until her fraud was revealed and became a major news story. When the media introduces a figure as a bad person, some people are so hardwired to be contrarian that they must take the opposite position.
The other difficulty with this story is that many people still don’t understand what she did wrong. This is common all over social media and even on Hacker News in this thread. I see a lot of arguments that she was only doing “fake it till you make it” like every other startup from people who don’t understand what that phrases means (it means you present yourself as a bigger, more established company to overcome resistance to being a small startup, not that you literally fake that your product works). I responded to another comment from someone who thought that because all blood tests have error rates, Theranos having problems was no different than any other blood testing company, which is a false equivalence that doesn’t even begin to compute if you know anything about the fraud they were doing.
Then there are layers of other social issues being injected into the controversy. I knew someone in person who grew suspicious that the only reason Elizabeth Holmes was prosecuted was because of her gender. They lived in a social media bubble where all CEOs were evil criminals doing frauds all the time and therefore the only reason Holmes could be singled out and treated differently was due to her gender. This led to a wild argument that going after her was unfair, actually, even acknowledging that she did the fraud. That was a conversation I exited from because there’s no overcoming that type of belief with logic.
The most interesting conspiracy theories I continue to see are the belief that Theranos technology actually was working and she was on the way to solving it all, but that the industry didn’t want to be disrupted and therefore they had her taken out. This one doesn’t even hold up to minimal research but it persists among those with deep conspiracy theory tendencies.
It’s wild to observe how often this plays out. Something about this cases triggers a lot of people’s desires to doubt and defend, and there’s a large audience for content that takes Holme’s side no matter how illogical or contrary to the facts.
> I see a lot of arguments that she was only doing “fake it till you make it” like every other startup from people who don’t understand what that phrases means (it means you present yourself as a bigger, more established company to overcome resistance to being a small startup, not that you literally fake that your product works)
Not disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but regarding this tangent: haven't there been a ton of (say) "AI" companies that quietly used humans in the background and gave the impression AI was doing the work, because their vision was that that was the future?
Not that I think that would excuse this case in any way regardless - just mentioning because of the drawn comparison.
A couple, yes, but I wouldn’t say it’s a ton of companies.
These stories were popular during the period when people didn’t understand how AI worked or what was possible. It was feasible to produce fake demos that relied on humans doing the work because few people understood how AI worked. If your demo took an input and produced an output 1 to 12 hours later with variable delay nobody questioned it because they didn’t know what AI looked like. They thought maybe that’s how long the computers had to think or that there was a single computer working through a backlog.
Now everyone has used ChatGPT and understands that actual AI doesn’t work like that, and if the task actually took 12 hours of crunching on tokens the bill would be an eye watering large number. So you can’t get away with faking your AI responses with a few humans doing the work.
There were also follow on stories where writers got confused about hybrid systems that had humans doing review and RLHF, thinking that any involvement of a human in the loop was equivalent of faking AI by having humans do the work. Most of the stories I saw toward the end of this trend were this style.
> They lived in a social media bubble where all CEOs were evil criminals doing frauds all the time and therefore the only reason Holmes could be singled out and treated differently was due to her gender.
They’re also unfamiliar with FDA-regulated spaces where it’s not unheard of for VPs and C-suite types to receive fines and jail time and bans from the industry.
> People who get inaccurate diagnostics get scared.
That's only true if those people always follow up with a second test using traditional means. If they don't follow-up and instead immediately go past diagnostics into some sort of action, then it could be catastrophic in a manner exceeding being scared.
Now you can argue that if the patient is working with any medical practitioner worth their salt, that med will surely ask for a second test. But is it obvious that that will always be the case?
additionally, the "get scared" is only if the theranos test incorrectly gives a "something is wrong" diagnosis. What if the theranos test incorrectly gives an "everything is ok" diagnosis? Then the patient does not get scared when they should be, and potentially get significantly harmed
Not if they get told they are clear. Then their cancer gets worse and before anyone realises it’s untreatable. Downplaying faked test results is disturbing.
They get scared but if the doc believes the test results, they get more invasive (prostate biopsy, breast biopsy, etc) testing which is painful and traumatizing for the patients. They may not die but they don’t deserve this.
Based on my anecdotal experience dealing with pervasive cancer in a family member. They almost always confirm stuff before throwing a ton of poison into you.
And what if you -do- have pervasive cancer, but a Theranos test told you you didn't? You go about your day, and the cancer continues to worsen, untreated (speaking of poison inside you).
I don’t know a thing about Holmes, I’m just reacting to your framing - don’t all medical tests that real people rely on have error rates? Doesn’t an 11% error rate suggest something that was real and mostly works but maybe wasn’t ready for prime time? The error rate could have been higher, perhaps. You only listed false positives, while the much more concerning problem would be false negatives - people who didn’t get scared or act when they should have. Still, a medical test error rate on its own doesn’t suggest deceit or fraud. People receiving terrifying but wrong results is a common problem that already exists in medicine.
Google tells me the FIT test for cancer has a false negative rate of between 8% and 26%. That appears to be likely worse than the Theranos numbers you cited here.
All tests do have error rates and all doctors know this very closely because they look at results every day.
However saying “all tests have error rates, therefore all tests with error rates are equally bad” is a completely wrong takeaway. One of the things Theranos was doing was using traditional equipment to run the tests as a smokescreen for the fact that they didn’t have any working technology. So the results should have been similar to anyone else running them when that was the case.
But there is a problem that when a company is saying they’re doing one thing or using one technology but your actual tests could be run on unknown combinations of unknown lab hardware depending on the day and the whims of a CEO trying to defraud investors, you don’t know what kind of results you’re going to get.
Real labs have established controls and ship reference ranges for their test results because they control their processes. If Theranos was doing who knows what to keep the test results flowing to keep the illusion up for the primary purpose of satisfying investors, that’s not what you want to see out of your test lab.
> Google tells me the FIT test for cancer has a false negative rate of between 8% and 26%. That appears to be likely worse than the Theranos numbers you cited here.
You’re looking at the wrong thing. The Theranos number above is for tests they determined had to be voided because they weren’t run properly due to procedural errors they identified. Their own incompetence or fraud. And those are just the ones they admitted to!
The false negative rate for the test you Googled is a false negative rate, which is a simple fact that tests can’t reliably diagnose everything even when run properly. Tests look for markers in samples as a proxy for a condition, and those markers aren’t always present at levels that meet the thresholds even if the condition exists. Even when run absolutely perfectly, a test like that will have false negative rates.
The part you’re missing is that
the Theranos voided and invalidated tests were due to problems on top of the normal test variation rates because they were from Theranos doing things wrong, which is directly downstream of Holmes manipulating investors.
> Theranos was doing was using traditional equipment to run the tests as a smokescreen for the fact that they didn’t have any working technology. So the results should have been similar to anyone else running them when that was the case.
> But there is a problem that when a company is saying they’re doing one thing or using one technology but your actual tests could be run on unknown combinations of unknown lab hardware depending on the day and the whims of a CEO trying to defraud investors, you don’t know what kind of results you’re going to get.
Exactly. They were using Siemens machines, but they often had insufficient blood because they were trying to maintain a pretense of "nano collection". Siemens' machines weren't even trying to pretend they could work like this, so Theranos kept trying to figure out ways to dilute or diffuse the samples they did have to get to a usable volume for the tests. But of course every experimentation there was destructive, so they had even less to use.
So we're not talking about error rates on properly calibrated machines, with sufficient blood that re-tests could be performed before needing another collection, we're talking about error rates on effectively misusing machines.
Only 11% of errors were reported, there were probably many more.
Also, the standard for tests in the medical world is usually much higher than 11%, except for things that are life threatening for which no better test exists.
This reads like a high schooler discovering that film can manipulate you, but doesn't go any further than that.
"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."
She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.
> We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not. Here’s how it actually goes: We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it. This is my theory as to why we’re so divided in this country. Beliefs built on emotion are nearly impossible to reason with.
This idea is explored in depth in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.
And related David Hume quote:
> Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions
I haven't watched the movie yet. I've read the book too. I want to read the book and then watch the movie.
The fact that it is documentary, and is being marketed along the lines of a block-buster on X with memes should have raised eye-brows. There are lot of genuinely good documentaries out there, they all are left to be discovered, and people discover them. But this one, was/is being marketed as must-watch documentary, and with no reference to the book bad blood?
Why would the documentary reference a book that it has nothing to do with? It's not an adaptation of prior works on Holmes or Theranos. You Can See Everything is something else all together.
Wont there be any overlaps? I tend to think, that great documentaries follow from greatly researched books. The later usually have more space to explore and can in depth, the documentaries to try to condense.
For building startup, you need a story on the person who is going on the front. Example he/she from top university, worked in a big company. That is sufficient to build something with zero revenue and sell it for billions.
Documentaries and video in general are just dramatically, intensely worse mediums for communicating factual learnings compared to books and text in general.
>At one point, people were shouting so loudly at the screen that I couldn’t hear the dialogue. I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!”
I’m not sure this is some data point that supports the article.
The article seems to indicate that the film is some special event in the idea of deception, but i honestly couldn’t figure out how exactly. They just describe conflicts that might occur with any film….
Documentaries are compelling, but they are the lowest-signal and most manipulative forms of rhetoric. Heavily biased & one sided, emotionally manipulative. They impose an uncritical point of view because of the first-person perspective (the camera puts the viewer in the room).
I include citizen footage in this as well. Even un-edited "raw" footage is shot from a single perspective, and promoted with an agenda.
A movie can't be objective -- it is told from the Director & DP's point of view. Camera perspective imposes the viewer's perspective. And documentary filmmakers are never experts on the subject matter. They are entertainers.
This has a very interesting way of showing it to you, how easy it is to deceive us. What we see is what er believe in, but it can be very much easily used to exploit us.
It's fascinating to me that the upper classes find Holmes interesting. In the working class world I grew up in, chicks like her are a dime a dozen and can usually be found at Grateful Dead tribute concerts espousing the benefits of crystals and channeling her alien guide who she discovered while chanting an invented baby talk language high on molly and nitrous oxide.
People who commit fraud on this scale are simply those who start at this scale. Not always the super wealthy but often the super wealthy and sometimes those with social ties to the super wealthy.
They were taken with her blue-blood "high WASP" background. Elites put a premium on pedigree (because they benefit from theirs!) and so they just loved the fact that her ancestors started Fleischmann Yeast even though her fam squandered their inheritance within 2 generations. Part of the reason her parents put so much pressure on her to become wealthy was to try and claw back that generational wealth they felt they were owed. Her dad in particular was very bitter over how dad had lost a load of money on bad investments in Hawaii. He then flopped at his oil career (Enron) and never got over his family's loss of wealth and status.
If you read Bad Blood there are quotes from her wealthy investors saying things like "well, her great-grandfather was a famous surgeon so medicine runs in her family!" as part of their decision to invest in her.
Generational wealth is often squandered within a couple generations. The first generation can often times keep it together, but the generation after that and beyond have no connection to the origins. If Elizabeth Holmes’s parents were upset at their loss of wealth, it’s because they had no special abilities that would make them good capital allocators.
It’s quite interesting and can be both. Many well-of friends have a period of rejecting their heritage and end up abusing all kinds of things, only to later fall back into the lane so to speak. Some lose it completely tho.
I learned of an interesting case of this in the film "The Sunshine Makers" about LSD production in California in the 1960's. Billy Hitchcock was a wealthy heir to the Gulf Oil fortune who financed the labs but eventually went back to being a protected rich guy by betraying his chemists.
Many rich people are really gullible to direct bold face lies because they are used to things working out for them and so are often less skeptical / guarded(generally speaking) if the lie sounds good.
I grew up with the mindset being told if things were too good to be true they probably were and to expect failure and be pleasantly surprised if things worked out. This is practical advice for many lower to middle class individuals, but it can also hold you back because you stop looking for genuine opportunities. Better advice would be to do your due diligence.
With Holmes, and hindsight is always 20/20, it should have been obvious that she was full of shit. As you say, I have met dozens of people, men and women, like her, that just lie reflexively and I have learned to spot them from a mile away and avoid them at all costs. If you catch someone lying or exaggerating something inconsequential, and by that, I mean it really does not in any way help them or get them out of trouble, it is easy to brush it off as a white lie, but it is the people who will lie for no reason at all who are the most dangerous because you can be assured that they will lie when they do have a reason.
Most people (including rich ones) who had any scientific knowledge passed on investment/partnership. Humanity has developed ways to evaluate ideas without all of the contextual noise people are referencing in this thread. They’re just effortful and sometimes awkward, so too many people of all types just don’t.
I think particularly in the case of investors it's that they're pretty comfortable with founders that straddle the fine line between bullish and bullshit, because the ones who back up their claims that seem too good to be true make them money, and the ones who don't are priced in. And some who make them lots of money tell a lot of "white lies" on the way. FOMO is a way of missing red flags too.
Holmes' mistake was to massively overdo the "fake it til you make it" in a regulated industry where the implications of the lies appal people, as well as to have a product that was never going to work so the lies were more "this car definitely isn't just rolling down the hill" than "the person at the wheel is only for regulatory reasons". If she'd settled for fantasy metrics and self dealing in a real estate play rather than faking medical tests she'd have investors lining up to fund her second venture...
I'm more intrigued by how she managed to keep customers and at least some of her employees believing and how often that mask slipped.
I think there was an internet meme somewhere, that suggested something along the lines of: if you consider pain to be an essential learning signal, and that beyond a certain level of wealth, you can more or less eliminate pain, then the cognitive effects of such wealth is like being kicked in the head by a horse on a daily basis.
> Many rich people are really gullible to direct bold face lies.
I agree with this point. I think that in the investment world, many VCs investing in deep tech are not deeply familiar with the underlying technology. They often say they are betting on the founders, which can inadvertently encourage this behavior, since founders know that their investors are unlikely to scrutinize the technical details too closely.
Those don't seem like particularly lower class attributes, I know many trust fund babies that are jam band wooks/roadies that could be described this way.
You should have mentioned cocaine, meth, anything that strips away your ability to empathize. If she took shrooms she’d have had some connection to her fellow humans.
Those who make fun of crystals fail to realize that technology is literally a race to who can etch the finest/smallest inscriptions into the most perfect crystals. Followed by who can best feed the knowledge of the world into those very crystals via optimal mechanations such that those crystals produce intelligence.
I really want to see the movie, sadly it is not yet know when the film is gonna release in German theaters.
Actually, I am seriously considering starting my own film distribution and acquiring the rights to this film and a couple others. I would do straight to theater release, ov-only, no subtitles, no fluff.
I'm surprised anyone would even assume there is a chance a Nathan Fielder "documentary" might not be deceiving. Has it gotten so bad that people consider this real reporting now?
Maybe this question is related to polls showing a significant percentage of Americans considering the likes of Colbert, Stewart, and John Oliver trustworthy news reporters btw.
There’s a difference between using real news as comedy, and being deceptive about what you’re reporting. This was the Derren Brown version of a documentary.
So many comments about Holmes, I think, are missing the point. This isn't about Holmes, and neither, IMO, is the article. Like all things Nathan Fielder does, this is a movie by Nathan for Nathan. Elizabeth Holmes is just used, in every sense of the word, as a prop.
The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.
I don't think this is anything like Nathan's normal stuff. He didn't manipulate at all. He just hung around and asked really direct and obvious questions and you watched her and her husband squirm and lie.
if I'm being honest with myself, I doubt I will ever watch this movie - I was very interested in theranos when it looked like a real technology, but once it turned out it was just another scam in an industry rife with them the whole thing just felt boring and grubby. the review, on the other hand, was a superb piece of writing, and I'm glad to have read it.
I meant the general industry of flashy looking "health tech" devices, though perhaps it's unfair to link theranos in with some of the more consumer targeted products. but people really want to believe that silicon valley style technology can come in and solve long-standing medical issues, especially around diagnostics, and I've seen a lot of scammy products go by.
Yeah, as if medical tech has no good engineers, true. An advantage of consumer tech, though, is that because they don't have to be 100% reliable and precise, there is less red tape and they can innovate faster.
As long as they don't pretend otherwise, I guess that's fine.
I have no interest at all in watching this. Some woman scammer that got funding because she was a woman means there are no skills of any variety involved in any of this. I would probably even watch something where an intelligent scammer was able to trick investors out of their money, but this isn’t even that. Keep it moving folks, nothing to see here.
Off topic, but as I was reading it I went through the Canon experiment- there where it says:
> each photographer was given a different description of [the same person]: a millionaire, a convict, a fisherman, an alcoholic, a psychic, and a lifesaver.
Well I looked at the pics and thought "yeah, wow, the millionaire, the convict (so obvious!), the fisherman, the alcoholic" it's really impressive! And only immediately after I saw that each picture had the caption with the supposed character and they were all scrambled- what I thought was obviously a sagacious millionaire was in fact the convict, the slightly deranged looking guy was the fisherman, the millionaire was in fact the alcoholic... Lol.
I kind of missed the Elizabeth Holmes thing first time around and only really had a look at it due to the recent buzz.
My conclusion was that guilt or innocence, 99% of the people who are totally certain of her guilt(or indeed innocence) do not have a good basis to do so. The access to the information required for that is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy. Most seem to have pre decided and are interpreting everything as cast iron proof of their opinion.
It seems like utter madness. I see comments like "You can tell she's a sociopath because of her wide blue eyes" it's like people have started believing their own sarcastic comments.
I see Hank Green has an extended piece on it, but extended Hank Green is quite tiring.
I would rather like to see a detailed teardown of one of the machines to get a sense of how far from working they actually were and what were their blockers.
>The access to the information required for that is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy
I followed the trial, what information is unavailable from that?
>I would rather like to see a detailed teardown of one of the machines to get a sense of how far from working they actually were and what were their blockers
The blockers is what they were trying to do isn't biologically or physically possible. When theranos first got publicity all the experts said what they are trying to do isn't possible with known technology and what we know about capillary blood. That's why I found the navel-gazing so strange.
>I followed the trial, what information is unavailable from that?
Did you follow the trial, or did you read reports from people who followed the trial?
I cannot say what was missing from the trial because I do not know what was presented there in detail. Most of those claiming utter certainty, know as little as I do.
> what they were trying to do isn't biologically or physically possible.
I can easily accept that it is beyond our technical means, but I don't accept that it is physically impossible.
If we stipulated that there was a technology that could create an accurate record of a drop of blood at an atomic level, with all structures and bonds intact.
If it were impossible to derivevthe required information from that data, I would agree that it is impossible.
That is an enormous amount of data. Millions of blood cells. Even if you had a single red blood cell there may be sufficient information in it to determine a white blood cell count through data analysis and the fact that they share an environment.
Of course it isn't possible with current technology. That is true of all technologies before they are invented.
It just seems like every claim it is impossible is just a claim that they can't imagine how it would be done. Almost every invention has a crowd claiming it can't be done.
The only real question is do they have a technolocal advance to get past those hurdles. I would guess that they didn't or it wasn't developed quick enough. That is a reasonable point of challenge.
Going straight to it can't be done so it's fraud puts you among those who claimed powered flight was a fraud, as well as the internet, the telephone, transplants, overnight delivery, and today AI.
> I cannot say what was missing from the trial because I do not know what was presented there in detail. Most of those claiming utter certainty, know as little as I do.
Okay but can you see how this is a different point than, "The access to the information required for that is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy"? The latter implies that most people literally could not obtain access to the necessary information. The former states that you have not looked into it that much and you doubt others have either. The trial is public record; it is available to everyone.
Dude, you're putting a lot of words in my mouth I did not say.
When I first heard of this company trying to do something that didn't appear to be physically or biologically possible I just assumed it would fizzle out eventually. Good for them if they find people willing to fund their reach for the stars. We need those!
Then the publicity came. I found the navel-gazing extremely strange because it was done without any proof they could do what they said they can do. Very little acknowledgement that they were able to do something that required a Nobel Prize level breakthrough and they did it without any bio-science investors or board members. It also came with a heavy dose of a cult of personality which gave me the ick and made me distrust it all even more. Was so weird and performative rather than hard science. Seemed extremely scammy. Certainly not the making of a company that made huge breakthroughs in biomedicine.
Then they announced their partnership with Walgreens. I assumed at that point I was wrong and they had to have been able to show Walgreens they were able to do what they claimed. I didn't think Walgreens would partner with them without doing their due diligence. I was happy to be proven wrong.
Shortly later it turned out, no, it actually was just a straight up scam and Walgreens didn't do their due diligence. Which is the most obvious outcome, but I was sad Walgreens would be duped so easily.
So I am not dismissive of them because I am dismissive of anyone who tries to find a way to do something that has never been done before - I was dismissive of them because they were an obvious scam based on a weird cult of personality.
>I cannot say what was missing from the trial because I do not know what was presented there in detail
What a bizarre thing to say, if you don't know what information was presented at the trial, how can you concluded "The access to the information required [to determine guilt] is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy????"
I wonder if it was part of the contract that the film makers not use the word sociopath of psychopath in the film. The closes we get to wondering if she may be "the most manipulative person."
I understand that the film should not be trying to give a psychiatric diagnosis yet it's something that I feel could have been discussed, and possibly dismissed, directly.
> I remember one Halloween when the Theranos scandal was at its peak, it seemed like everyone was dressed in a black turtleneck carrying tiny vials of fake blood. Holmes was everywhere.
Rolls eyes
I guess I travel in very different circles than this author.
>But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup. That’s a significant distinction
Now my eyes are getting sore from all the rolling. I don't think that fact gets "lost," and it's not a significant distinction.
I think I'm done with this article, whatever it's point is.
> But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup.
For context for others, Holmes was acquitted of defrauding patients. A juror stated that she was acquitted because Holmes didn't directly interact with the patients. On the other hand, she did directly interact with investors, so the evidence was much clearer.
Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.
Also, just because the jury didn't think there was enough evidence to convict her of defrauding patients (beyond reasonable doubt), doesn't mean she was innocent.
It actually does. You can judge her, but she is not guilty. The more we as a society decide the justice system is just an arbitrary way of deciding who gets punished and not _the_ way of deciding if a person is or is not a criminal the more we slide towards oblivion.
If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.
Important to note that western civilization is fundamentally ok with the knowledge that the statement issued by a jury or judge does not actually define whether a person is morally, factually or colloquially “innocent”. Disputes may be addressed c/o OJ Simpson and the Central Park 5.
Not guilty doesn't mean innocent. It means "guilt could not be proven", it does not mean "innocence was proven".
Seriously, this is why OJ was found liable for the murder of his wife in a civil case, as they're judged on the balance of probabilities.
And it's why people who have served time, then had a retrial ordered and then found not guilty, can be denied compensation, because decisions on compensation are also done on the balance of probabilities.
Important to note that in the original conception of western civilization, no one is 'innocent'. This idea that you have some secret special power to sniff out a persons true heart from a distance, which is separate from a jury of a persons peers studying and debating the evidence, is at best misguided and arrogant, and at worst a pernicious threat.
there is no way to argue that without also believing that the millions of people the state has tossed into prison are all guilty, which is really not something that I can do.
No. To argue what you argue is to play pretend stupid.
Court of law with its ability imprison people must have higher standard for the "guilty" decision. That makes it possible for rich guilty people to not be judged guilty.
You are allowed and expexted to use own brain. You can consider people guilty.
What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.
This point is also clearly made in the film. Sounds like the article has nothing to say and just wants to leech off the success and attention of the doc.
Holmes and Theranos leadership did more than defraud investors. They knowingly ran unreliable tests on actual patients. People were told they were miscarrying when they weren't, or that they had HIV when they didn't. And they drove an employee, Ian Gibbons, to suicide, then threatened his widow with a lawsuit when she talked to reporters about it.
That is not because Theranos did not commit such fraud against patients; Balwani was convicted on those charges. It's just the prosecutors were unable to prove that Holmes was culpable.
As others have noted her current prison time is for fraud against Walton, Ellison, Murdoch etc - the same family funds funneling money to the Trump-klepto-universe.
They are the ones who propped up the company without any independent testing and enabled the bad tests and are ruining our society with their dumb money.
That’s true but not relevant. I have absolutely no sympathy for the rubes who thought FTX was a good place to put their money, but that doesn’t make the fraud any more OK.
This is conflating users and investors. Investors have the obligation of diligence and it's clear here (and with FTX) they didn't. If they did, neither would be happened.
Also it's exactly the opposite, scamming the public is fine -
United healthcare can scam the government out of billions, no one goes to jail, minor fees but it's +ROI for them.
Murdoch's lose an investment after YOLO-ing a few hundred mil and no diligence and they get the feds to give jail time?
The people that invested their money did not make these decisions. The people running the fund did. You're victim blaming. Most people don't get a very wide choice where their money goes outside the couple of options the fund managers present. I'd also venture most people do not even look at what stocks are in the fund. They'll look at the past earnings and check the box.
This is family funds - Murdoch, Walton, Ellison. You think they shouldn't be responsible for doing due diligence? The device didn't work. They could've independently verified that at any point.
If there were users that were given bad tests, that was due to these investors not doing their jobs.
I hate these kinds of documentaries. Even after being caught and punished, these wannabe larger than life con artists still get an exit. If school shooters shouldn't be plastered all over the news, then why are these people.
I've never cared for that nate dude and I don't think the behaviors his content seems to encourage is healthy or useful, I'm so sick of hearing about it already.
This actually says nothing at all about how the documentary deceives you. It simply claims that it does, with no evidence provided. This basically a clickbait headline stretched out to blog post size. Total garbage, IMO.
I think what's going on with this article and many of the comments here is that movie (I hesitate to necessarily call it a documentary) takes some twists in the second half that are causing a lot of people who have seen and enjoyed it to talk about it in very vague terms so as to not spoil those twists for anyone who hasn't yet seen it. Holmes is the central figure of the movie, but the filmmakers very clearly have higher ambitions than simply informing the viewer of the facts of her life.
That's fine, but that leaves two legitimate options:
1) Warn readers there are "spoilers ahead" and then proceed to actually say something.
2) Withhold from writing a totally vacuous post and write about something else instead.
As it is this reads like an Onion article titled "Man, that twist at the end of Empire Strikes Back was totally crazy!"
This was one of the most engrossing theatrical experiences I have ever had and everyone that I know whose seen it has said they can't stop thinking about it. At the moment, it's literally the highest rated movie of all time on Letterboxd with 74% of ratings being 5 out of 5 stars with 98% of ratings being 4 stars or higher.
People are just trying to thread the needle of how to handle discussing this movie in this short window so soon after release. We want others to watch the movie so we can both have more people to talk about it with and so we can eventually talk about it more openly. But as is, the movie just came out a few days ago so people are trying to not diminish anyone's experience of watching this movie for the first time without knowing what transpires. I realize this likely all sounds frustrating to someone with little interest in the movie, but it's all a good intentioned way of engaging with a very special piece of art.
Completely agree. The whole spoilers thing is relatively recent and I think there's a strong argument that people who object to discussion of the narrative in any discussion of works of narrative art probably need to just avoid reading about anything. If you really don't want to know about a film or book because you're reserving judgement that's fine, but online communities these days seem fine with censoring discussion these days based on lazy spoiler grounds.
I think I would have had this position prior to seeing the movie. After seeing it last night, I'm 100% inclined to do everything in my power to not spoil the experience. It's truly, truly that wild.
I have revisited this thread, after having originally left despairing of the weird conversation. Thanks so much for clarifying what's going on! I hadn't followed this film and assumed people were afraid of being picked off the streets by the government if they spoke articulately about it. It's the "spoilers" problem then--online people who aren't used to how creative works are discussed thinking they have to use tradecraft. Ze beef iz in ze butchers!
Agreed. Terrible writeup.
Revealing more would spoil it for anyone that hasn't seen it yet.
I appreciate this point of view, but I think people who are religiously adhering to "spoilers" to censor aesthetic discussion need to be honest about highlighting what they are doing. A proper discussion about this would have been explicit about what was being discussed. We are not children.
there's a valid point (not well reinforced) on how cinematography / photography can compel a perspective .
? That’s the point of film - to compel a perspective.
I agree, though documentaries are presented as objective / fact finding films. And most viewers seem to share that belief.
Even the trailer for this film implies "look at how cooky / manipulative this woman is -- we're just showing her staring at Nathan"
> and most viewers seem to share that belief
Well that explains a lot about the doomerism and misinformation we regularly find on HN. If you don’t see the agenda being pushed or look into who is funding the documentary for just about every documentary in existence then you’re just not very intellectually honest. For example one of the vegan pushing ones on Netflix is straight up funded by/closely tied to for-profit artificial meat companies
Actually came here to "attack" that point. It's a view of reality that requires a conceptual bias-free media as reference for any commentary, and bias-free media is a tautology.
Compelling a perspective is the only thing cinematography / photography is doing. Bias equals point of view. There can't be any unbiased point of view because they're the same thing.
There's a conversation on education to be had here.
You're right but the distributors and creators pretend that documentaries are objective fact-finding media. and so does the audience.
Look at Super Size Me . The trailers, news media, promotions, critics, broader news media presented it as an objective case study. And McDonalds canceled a popular sales promotion over it. *and it had an enormous negative influence on McDonald's reputation, that it still hasn't yet recovered from.
90+% of people watch and share documentaries with the perspective that they are objective, truth seeking works.
You know, I was invited to go watch Super Size Me in the theater with a Catholic youth group, and I more or less believed every claim and depiction that was shown on-screen at the time. After all, this guy was consulting with actual, reputable physicians about his condition. And everyone knows that McDonald's food is horrible stuff to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me#Counter-claims
But I was unsurprised, years and years later, to discover that Spurlock's extensive and growing liver damage, and other adverse symptoms, were being helped along quite a bit by his severe alcohol abuse throughout principal photography. It really sort of drove home that there is more than one side to this story they put up on screen, no matter how much they appear to seek and depict the truth.
Occam's Razor of Hollywood. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. He was just a boozer.
Thousands of through-hikers live on McDonalds and Ramen for months and are some of the fittest people. Dozens of other activities like this too.
If A24 / Nathan Fielder promoted this "documentary" like Ali-G / Sasha Baron Kohen's works, they would be honest about it.
Kohen lampoons subjects in candid videos but at least presents his works as a joke, and we're all in on it.
This movie is the exact same thing, but it's promoted as an inside & sincere look at Holmes, when it's really just the Ali G schtick.
Nathan Fielder is pretty well-known for his work in The Rehearsal and Nathan for You. Nathan for You resides in the docu-comedy genre, where you take advantage of real people's reactions to absurd situations for comedic effect. Other examples are things like Kitchen Nightmares (where Gordon Ramsey goes into real restaurants and "fixes" them). It's a well-done version of the idea, but not revolutionary IMO.
The Rehearsal, however, extends the idea further. In that show, he helps real people "rehearse" for hard conversations. It involves Fielder building extravagant sets and having absurdly detailed set-ups with multiple actors, then running the conversation multiple times. What makes this "different" is that now the real person is partially in on it? Like, they know that they're on a set. They know that this is a simulation. So the show is more "meta" than previous entries in the genre, opening up other avenues for humour.
I say this because You Can See Everything is best understood as a further extension of those projects. Even the name indicates this, because by nature of a documentary, you can't see everything. You have a real person in Elizabeth Holmes, being interviewed by a person in Fielder that's known for his stunts taking advantage of "real people," where he watches fictionalized versions of Holmes with Holmes herself? Viewed in light of his previous projects, this feels like an extension of them.
But even with that, I think the setup does allow you to see something real in Holmes. She also knows how people "want" to see her! So there's also a sort of meta-narrative there too, where you know Holmes is on her best behavior to try and dispel the narrative from those fictionalized TV characterizations. The fact that she comes off poorly in the documentary says something, even accounting for the fact that Fielder is trying to sell a narrative.
It's a real mind game, but I think it's representative of Holmes because of that. She is going to jail for a fraud that amounts to a similar sort of mind game, she agrees to a documentary to show herself differently, but that documentary is also a mind game. Wild stuff.
> Wild stuff.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I fail to see anything that seems particularly "wild" in a film featuring a bunch of insipid mind games. Mind games are not exactly new or fascinating, you find them almost everywhere you go these days.
There is no longer any mystery about Holmes. As everyone already knows, she was a fraudster convicted of criminal fraud. The whole story of Theranos has been covered at length in the press, including an award-winning book that was published several years ago [0].
This so-called documentary seems like another reality show featuring a former celebrity with little self-awareness, who is incapable of seeing how absurd and ridiculous she appears now that she is no longer powerful.
[0] John Carreyrou (2018) Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Knopf
I cannot imagine being so hostile towards curiosity. You approach this as "I already know everything there is to know, and therefore this documentary (that I haven't seen) has no value".
>she was a fraudster convicted of criminal fraud...
>a former celebrity with little self-awareness, who is incapable of seeing how absurd and ridiculous she appears now that she is no longer powerful...
As someone who has seen it, there's simply no way both of these descriptions of her are true. If you believe that she's guilty of everything she's accused of doing, she's incredibly self-aware and her entire participation in this movie is a desperate Hail Mary attempt to save face in the court of public opinion. At one point in the movie Fielder is having a conversation with another person and says something along the lines of "She's either innocent or maybe the most manipulative person in human history". The movie isn't as concerned with a true journalistic investigation of her guilt or innocence, there are better accounts of that elsewhere and plenty of people who can tell that story better than Fielder. What he seems to be most interested in is the absurd commitment to she has to her claimed innocence and how effective that is or isn't.
> If you believe that she's guilty of everything she's accused of doing, she's incredibly self-aware
There was a mountain of evidence against Holmes, and she was convicted in a criminal trial. So it seems like a safe assumption that she was guilty.
Does it follow then that, because she is almost certainly guilty, that she must be "incredibly self-aware"? Of course not. It's just as likely that she is totally lacking in self-awareness, and that she simply does not know when to shut her mouth because she has no idea how stupid she sounds.
>It's just as likely that she is totally lacking in self-awareness, and that she simply does not know when to shut her mouth because she has no idea how stupid she sounds.
No, because she doesn't sound "stupid" in the movie. The mountain of evidence against her is so extreme that being able to carve out any narrative in which her innocence has any plausibility requires such a calculated and well constructed plan that is shows a high level of social intelligence and self-control. Fielder literally lives with her 24/7 for weeks and her mask doesn't slip. You don't have to believe her story to recognize she's not a "stupid" person who "does not know when to shut her mouth".
No one including my wife was interested in seeing it so I went by myself. It was long, but interesting. The author hits the nail on the head:
“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”
I couldn’t agree more.
I haven't seen the documentary, but I have a background in media and art. There are a couple of ways I could understand this.
The first is the general public's lack of understanding of documentaries as an art form. Documentaries are essentially narratives presented as unfiltered reality ("facts"). Most folks don't truly understand this, or they lose sight of it through suspension of disbelief. That is, they don't know or forget about the film crew, editing, framing, and other artistic choices that form what they see. The illusion becomes invisible; they see only "facts" rather than a constructed narrative designed to guide their interpretation.
Second, filmmakers often use deception as an artistic device in documentaries. Mockumentaries are a pretty clear example of subverting the conventions of documentary filmmaking. It's a bit meta for most folks, so I could see how someone without much media literacy might totally miss this. But it's definitely a very interesting artistic choice given the subject matter.
The achiles heel of the documentaries as a form of propaganda & psyops (aka "narratives presented as reality") is that they have a profound dependence on aural cues for manipulating the audiance. It is difficult to be subtle regarding that intent when sound is involved.
So pay attention to the sound track and adjust your "suspension of disbelief" accordingly.
I am lucky that I am very sensitive to emotionally manipulative music in contexts where I don't want to be emotionally manipulated by music.
In general, it would help anyone to know more about the craft of how filmmakers get people to feel emotions.
Tantacrul (software project manager, UX guy, muso and YouTuber)’s “Music on Reality TV is Insanely Manipulative” https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I is pretty good.
Heck yeah! Thanks. It's bad-tasting medicine, but Tantacrul makes me laugh, so I don't mind thinking about what this manipulation can do to me. Hopefully, I'll also pick up some resistance.
Fielder has said that setting the tone with music in documentaries is among the most important things he does. I also find that unsettling.
My favorute example of a "documentary" whose sound stage reveals it as a psyop very obviously is the 2007 "Zeitgeist: The Movie".
This isn't confined to "documentaries" - everything we accept as unfiltered 'facts' must be from 'a certain point of view'. Consider the Canon illustration from the article. Those present a man from different lighting, angles and perspectives. No matter how much a photographer might want to convey objective truth, a picture will always be from some perspective and lighting.
The same can be said for the news we watch. Or the history we read. Or the stories we tell each other. In 2026, we have swung too far toward the fanciful end of the spectrum of storytelling. We're now beset on all sides by BS generators (both human and artificial) and it's more important than ever to carefully handle truth in our stories.
But make no mistake - the teller of a story is absolutely crafting a reality for you. It's on you to decide whether you trust the narrator, or not.
> No matter how much a photographer might want to convey objective truth, a picture will always be from some perspective and lighting.
A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
It's one reason that long-form YouTube interviewers like Lex Friedman are so popular with a more discerning crowd.
"But he's so bland, monotonous, and boring!" cry the haters.
"Yes! That's the point!"
> A workaround is to always shoot everyone the same. If a journalist or interviewer grows a reputation, they can show everyone "on level ground" by keeping the pose, lighting, etc... constant.
I don't think this works.
And I think it might be actually easier to exploit. The fraudster knows what you're going to do in advance, and can target their own presentation to maximally take advantage.
If the way you show someone conveys X about them, especially when due to outside cultural cues - here's the millionaire framing, here's the convict one... - and you just use the same X for every subject, then you're just suggesting a particular framing over and over. You're avoiding a layer of "my active framing is telling a particular story" but only with a passive—but still deliberate—framing of "my framing is telling a particular story" that you hold constant across every story.
In some ways this is similar to what Holmes exploited originally! Lots of industry media was willing to uncritically frame and present her with their "visionary tech founder" styles, and she leaned even further in to that with the Jobs-isms.
Would not a truer "fair" framing would've been to dig into the claims and let the evidence determine the visual language, to avoid the visual language of "Steve Jobs!!" bias the reader/viewer into giving Holmes' claims more credence?
Where would Ancient Aliens fall into this lack of understanding?
One of the most stunning things to me is that most people do not recognize film cuts as breaks in time. The classic example of a guy shooting a basketball and then a cut to the ball going in, and 90% of the population says "Yeah, I saw the video, he made the shot".
Most modern people would laugh at those who scuttled away from the Lumiere's approaching train back in 1896, but in fact they are really not that superior mentally.
Growing up in a very high-functioning and very dysfunctional family, I felt that a lot of people were missing the basic truth. Even the film seemed to circle it without really understanding it.
Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know her own center. She responds to the people around her; everything she does is to please her partners and/or the internalized expectations of her family. In the psychological parlance, she is an extreme fawner with narcissistic traits.
Such people are, in a sense, masters of deceit, but once you understand that they lack a real center outside of how others perceive them (and that they also have real feelings, even if their notions of love are profoundly confused), there's no longer an enigma. You know exactly what you'd looking at.
Well said. I agree with you.
I had no interest in seeing it until I read this article. This sold me.
I didn't knew it existed before reading. Still, I have no interest in watching it.
What was deceitful about it?
They show Holmes reluctantly watching the movie "The Dropout" which is a dramatized version of "the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes" starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes.
Later in "You Can See Everything" Amanda Seyfried literally becomes an important character in the documentary including voicing her opinions and impressions, arguing with and challenging Holmes' husband Billy (they have just met for the first time) and talking at length with Fielder about his opinions and impressions.
This inclusion of Seyfried in this manner ruined for me any chance of this film feeling like a "documentary." This is the point for me where the film went "off-the-rails" and begins to feel like a very confusing experiment in audience manipulation.
It suddenly feels contrived because of this.
Isn't that typical of Nathan's work? To mess with the viewer.
But, I want my media to stop exposing my internal biases and just agree with them.
I had the same question for the author of the article, but it's understandable that people are going to be cagey answering this question because they may not want to give away spoilers.
To a documentary?
If anything that's the part that convinces me it's more than just a documentary, the fact that people apparently don't want to spoil what happens.
Well, it's both. We have all the public facts about Theranos. Nathan Fielder got to live with them for a period of time. That's not public information. It's still a documentary.
>> It's still a documentary.
Then what was the point of bringing Amanda Seyfried into the "documentary" as a major character?
What does Amanda Seyfried actually have to do with the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos?
Because it is not a documentary about the history of Theranos or a bio of Holmes, it is about truth, deception, and media.
> To a documentary?
Well, yes. We know the plot, but we don't know in what light the movie casts here, and how they do it.
Spoiler she goes to prison
OMG you ruined it!!!!
(/s in case it's necessary)
I'm guessing it's because she's still trying to control the narrative even though she's literally just waiting until her prison date.
In my experience with Fielder material, the only truth is what you said. I never know if what I see and hear is real or some flavor (if not entirely) acting.
It's not a particularly strong value proposition.
If I buy a security product, and the seller sends me nothing, therefore showing how easy it is to scam me. Are they somehow less of a scammer, did I actually buy anything of value? Are they raising awareness of the problem? Or are they just the problem?
People pay magicians to be deceived for entertainment.
Neither you nor the author are saying how you were deceived. I think neither of you are being genuine
Both just apologists for obvious scumbags
I saw the movie Friday night. It is a mind job. You'll walk away with more questions than answers.
Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.
> That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of.
Thanks!
Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.
I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".
People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.
This.
Accountability.
Yes but wasn't she only convicted of defrauding investors and no harm was found to customers or other businesses like the partnership with walgreens?
Can anyone say anything of substance about this movie?
I think it’s incredibly bad faith to knee-jerk respond that people unwilling to reveal the surprises that made the film enjoyable to them are LLMs or shills.
That said, this contains a decent spoiler-included summary of what happens in the film, if you can tolerate or filter the ads: https://www.slashfilm.com/2287438/you-can-see-everything-end...
No.
Almost everything you'd want to say about it would spoil something interesting about the film. (This is not hearsay. I've seen it and I can't think about how to say anything meaningful about it without spoiling it.)
So if the movie can be "spoiled" it's at least....entertaining? I'm not sure to think if people are just leaving disturbed and mildly traumatized or what
I felt the movie was entertaining, but also somewhat unsatisfying. You don't really get answers or catharsis from Holmes being further confronted and exposed. To me, the movie was about media narratives and how deceptive lies of omission can be.
Reading reviews about almost any movie is like this. But, I expect the comments on HN to be more genuine than I’m witnessing in this thread.
It almost as if the comment section is filled with HN-trained LLM-backed bots intentionally being absurdly vague; just like the trailer last month was.
I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
It's a movie with at least one surprising twist, which seems to be fairly central to enjoying the experience, and people who've seen it don't want to spoil it for others. Hence they're vague in their descriptions. It's as simple as that.
Can you tell us what the twist is, please? Just mark it clearly as a spoiler so people who don't want to be "spoiled" can skip your comment.
SPOILER!!
The general twist is that she doesn’t really come off as the villain of this film (though she certainly does not come off in a flattering light) - her current husband it turns out is actually a pretty terrifying sociopath who seems to possibly have a bit of a cocaine habit (inferred from the excessive sniffles and insane demeanor) - and he really becomes sort of the films main antagonist.
All of this is completely subjective so someone else could come away with a different take, but if there was a twist (which I would not say this is a film with an overt twist) - it would be this.
For me it was a window into insane wealth and privilege and the types of lives these people lead and the engines that power their sense of self importance and delusions. I do think it was a phenomenal documentary.
SPOILERs kinda: Notably, it's all in the presentation and form of everything that went on. There were about ten different moments in the packed theater where something was said or happened where the entire audience was... silent. tense. I've never felt that sort of palpable and shared tension anywhere in my life like that.
>I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”
Yes, these comments look like a very serious well-funded astroturfing campaign.
There is a downvoting campaign going on too. This points to potential manipulation.
Maybe it's just because I've been around a bunch of people in startup circles, seaking angel and vc, etc and myself raised and had exits and been deposed in highly contentious situations.
Holmes doesn't talk like any innocent person has ever talked. Period. Not even like a naive rube either.
She explicitly initiated this whole thing as a narrative exercise and she just had to stick to the script for what, 45 days? While letting herself feel the genuine self pity all these types of people feel when they are experiencing the consequences for their actions instead of being able to foist them onto someone else?
Her only path forward is to FULLY commit to the bit as a way of deceiving the credulous, even a moment of cynicism and the whole thing falls apart.
Now, did she in fact succeed in that or was it a choice to show no cracks in the facade because it made a more engaging movie?
News flash, I love his media but Nathan Fielder is a monster as well he's my favorite monster but let's not pretend. We can just hold both things to be true instead of engaging in cognitive dissonance.
Other than the children (and that one flatulent horse) everyone involved in this is a monster, and the only way to hide that fact is to ensure the ending is ambiguous, otherwise it just feels like non-transcendent tabloid pap profiting off of bad behavior.
There is goodness, and people attempting to increase goodness and it looks and talks nothing like any of these people.
It really sounds like you would consider most people to be monsters. That is, the vast majority of us participate in exploitation to some degree and rationalize that exploitation as necessary, acceptable, minimal or merely something we cannot change.
That's an arguable position, but the problem with it is that it lacks any kind of gradient. Is the person who stole someone else's lunch from the fridge at work (an unfathomable act, to me) a monster in the same way that any person in federal prison is?
The film is relevant: initially, Amanda felt like a proxy for us, the viewers, someone to point out the abnormality in what we have seen. But then, she showed her unwillingness to even confront the possibility the miniseries was exploitative. She displayed a voyeuristic enthusiasm for more information and involvement. She blended into the film at that point, no longer our proxy as unsullied observer. But, can we really not think of a time we reacted defensively instead of with considered reason? Can we not think of a time we dove into a lurid topic that was fully irrelevant to our lives?
There are a number of cases where people involved in monstrous gang violence appear to show genuine rehabilitation. They devote significant effort toward encouraging others to avoid the mistakes they made. Do they do that because they are no longer monsters, or do they do it because it's one of the few acceptable choices available to someone in their position? I'm not sure we can reliably know.
The idea that anyone in this film has a lived experience close to those who grew up embedded in gang violence is a laughable comparison. The idea that anyone involved in this project has demonstrated, through proof of work, even .5% of what's involved in a person who has engaged in gang member reform is absurd. This is extreme category error.
Are you going to pretend that anyone in this film can be rightly considered a representation of the average persons lived experience?
I agree that Amanda Seyfried is an audience proxy in this movie initially. Are you going to assert that her lived experience and her role and place in society is representative of the norm? In this case is it reasonable to accept the films implicit presentation of her as a audience proxy? How is that reasonable? We do not have to accept or enter into the frame the film wishes us to, we do not have to allow it to anchor our starting point in how we engage with the piece of media.
Humans are the only monsters that actually exist, it doesn't make them less human and it doesn't mean they can't change their lived behavior.
You are responding to things I did not say.
I did not suggest anyone in the film had done a single shred of work towards redemption. Not one person in the film recognizes or admits doing anything wrong, which is a usual first step. Nathan never second-guesses his personal rationalization for making a documentary that financially benefits a subject against his own values. Successfully emerging with clean hands in the end does not fully resolve that.
I did not equate anyone in the film with the lived experience of a gang member. When talking about the categorization of people as good or bad or monster, examples where the dichotomy is extreme are relevant.
And yes, of course, Amanda not having our lived experience is part of why she blends into the film. That's no accident. We are shown her farm, horses and a picture perfect fireside setting. Nathan doesn't need to narrate that "Amanda is comfortable and rich with a farm in the Catskills and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan at one of those buildings where you regularly peek into the courtyard you aren't allowed to enter while you walk past" for the film to make that point.
Whether or not the average person has a different lived experience is still a different question from whether or not the average person is classified as a monster by your measure. And the lived experience of the average HN poster could be closer in relative terms of privilege to that of Nathan and Amanda than to that of the much less privileged, even in the so-called developed world.
I do not believe that the average person would agree with your classification of Nathan and Amanda as monsters. That doesn't invalidate your argument, but it does suggest very broad boundaries, and it becomes unclear what, if anything, prevents a plurality or majority of people being defined as a monster by your worldview. My question was about the utility of the binary classification if it ends up being that overarching.
What are you talking about?
Explain what position you think is being taken? Is it a binary position? A spectrum? Discrete? Continuous? How can anyone understand what you are even arguing against?
The attempt to extrapolate a generalized formalism from a single specific analysis is really building a pattern out of a single data point.
The pattern you've chosen to build is one that allows you to take the negative position but no one knows what position you're actually complaining about?!?
Why does the audience need a proxy?
Bringing Amanda Seyfried in as a primary character was unnecessary as was the entire third hour of this movie.
Talking to someone outside of the situation confronts the possible compromising of Nathan's objectivity, and dialog is a common way to process experiences.
I felt it as a break from the intensity and absurdity of the initial half, a lull in the rollercoaster. Then the film reduced Amanda's distance from the subject matter and we were off again.
(I do think the intensity of the first half is partly manufactured by a soundtrack that almost cartoonishly conveys 'unsettling' and 'eerie.' That's probably my main complaint about the film.)
>Why does the audience need a proxy?
To voice the audience's opinions in the movie itself so the movie can directly address some of them.
> Why does the audience need a proxy?
Exactly.
What actions make Nathan and Amanda monstrous to you?
Amanda, I don't know about, for her it could all be in the editing.
I haven’t seen the Holmes movie, but this article reminded me of Orson Welles’ F for Fake. An amazing movie that plays with some similar ideas in a pseudo-documentary format.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake
I highly recommend it!
This is precisely what it reminded me of. F for Fake is a classic in deception documentary filmmaking.
Available here: https://www.criterionchannel.com/films/3BF6gJZI/f-for-fake
It's a worthy movie, plays with form, true to Fielder's style.
However I strongly disagree with the author of this post. The one thing it does wrong is under-emphasizes how much hard evidence there is the Holmes personally did serious crimes:
1. Concealed use of competitor's machines since she knew there machines weren't capable.
2. Fabricated military contracts and endorsements.
3. Knowingly presented widely inflated revenue projections to investors.
4. Explicitly admitted in court to forging reports using the letterhead and logos of major pharmaceutical companies without their permission
5. There's text messages, internal emails, and firsthand whistleblower testimony—proving that Elizabeth Holmes and her chief operating officer, Sunny Balwani, orchestrated a ruthless campaign to silence anyone who tried to expose the fraud.
If anything the movie tries to let Holmes dupe you into forgetting this. Frankly the fact that SHE invited NATHAN to film this makes me think she was trying to use her baby as a way to garner sympathy and whitewash her life (presumably not really understanding his work).
It wasn't about Theranos though, but the person behind it. I would say this comment sums it up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137988 - so much of the screen time is dedicated to (A) the New York Times quote about if Holmes actually said "They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created", and (B) whether or not she knew about the money Billy asked for.
And, with (spoilers) the final prison visitation exchange, honestly it's pretty telling that she probably was just being manipulative the entire time because she doesn't seem to care that Billy asked for the money.
In a way, this documentary was probably _going to_ be about exploring the factual matters and whether or not she knew she was actually guilty or had some level of remorse. There are many aspects of that in the film. But Billy asking for the money to sign the appearance/likeness contract seems to have derailed Lance and Nathan's original intention for the movie, since that ask - and that Holmes stepped away - directly plays into whether or not she is this incredibly manipulative person.
!!! SPOILERS !!!
I agree. The EH portrayed in this movie is much more sympathetic than the one portrayed in the Carreyrou book, and in Dropout. Fielder obviously knows all of this, and he is consistently interested in the "meta" levels of storytelling. So I don't think the point of the movie is as simple as "but wait, maybe she is actually innocent!".
One point seems to be mindfuckery -- EH making Nathan unsure of who she is, and when she is being honest; him doing the same to his audience; even Amanda seems to get in on it. For example: when Amanda and Nathan are in front of the fireplace talking about Nathan's visit to EH in prison: was that scripted? Or was it a genuine conversation? Or an improvised conversation (with an agreed set of points to be made)?
I just watched this movie tonight and it's one of those where I feel like everyone else saw a different film. For me it was too little butter spread over too much bread. All the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story have been explored, so all that's left is her personal life with her new partner who's also a weirdo.
At best I can say that it makes you think about things like deceit and honesty/accuracy in media, but it definitely didn't blow my mind like it apparently did for this author. After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.
> After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.
I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”
But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
See also ppl in toxic relationships, who will complain to their friends incessantly about how bad the other person is and how they know they need to get out of it, only to rarely get out of it.
> I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”
That's easy enough with a bullshitter in your private life.
A professional bullshitter is a different thing and you might not always have the luxury of just walking away and never encountering that person again (or the problems they create).
> most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
I think that's what "setting boundaries" is about: Standing your own ground, and decide: "Not worth my time and energy.", yet still believe in the good in people. I think even bad people have something good in them. It's just not healthy to figure it out for me, once the manipulative (or bad) habits have surfaced.
I think this can go too far in the opposite direction. Sometimes an entirely foreign concept sounds like bullshit at first contact. Or someone speaking a bit incoherently–good people can get confused or get struck by a thunderbolt of stupidity from time to time.
So ceteris paribus, yes, cut off bullshitters. But context matters. If a friend of a good friend is striking me as stupid, I'm going to make damn sure that's what's happening versus me misunderstanding them (or catching them at a bad moment).
> or their redeeming qualities
I can't stand this. Most people who suck aren't an onion. They just suck. Or there is a nice layer under that, and then beneath that a core of suck.
Maybe too many people don't see it this way an it ends up backfiring, but I actually think it's important to "humanize" 'bad' people and show their 'redeeming' qualities -
I think it's important to inoculate yourself against presentation. Like, sure, now we know that Elizabeth Holmes was evil, an we can be binary about it - but would it have easier to be more critical of her rise if we could look past her apparent positive qualities?
Reminder to everyone that an onion is an onion all the way to the core. Every layer is more eye sting for the peeler.
I value my time. I'm not going to peel all the way down if I don't think it's worth my time.
So Shrek was teaching people the wrong idea?
The core does tend to rot first
I think its because the constant bullshitting is behaviour that is so foreign to us, we feel a curiosity about it, a need to understand it.
Bullshitters bullshit for personal gain and amusement.
Most people aren't like that, a few are.
It becomes a lot less interesting and curiosity invoking when you have such a bullshitter in your life. The interaction becomes "the lied about this, so what did they really mean". For example, my bullshitter will often have car troubles, a dead pet (that comes back to life) or medical issues whenever they don't want to show up to a family event.
I can promise you there's really nothing more deep to understand beyond the fact that they've become overly comfortable with using lies to get what they want.
That's why the cult/con documentaries like Theranos are so popular.
Same formula across country, culture, time and people keep getting sucked in.
Few counterpoints:
Most people, even toxic people, do have positive qualities.
At the most basic strategic level, it’s vital to recognize this so that we don’t fall for such people in the future. It’s sooooo easy to say “well so and so can’t be too toxic… I mean, they volunteer at the soup kitchen on weekends” or whatever. That’s part of how they (intentionally or unintentionally) lure you in. All very valuable for engineer-types, who may tend to be very literal in actions and their interpretations of others’ actions.
At a more nuanced strategic level, it’s good to recognize that since all people are a mix of positive and negative traits, How can we coexist with such people in cases when we can’t avoid it? It’s simplistic to say “just avoid toxic people” — it’s a good “north star” but is often impossible or impractical. e.g. it’s convenient to say “just cut toxic family members out of your life” and sometimes it’s the right call, but I’ve heard people toss that phrase around like it’s nothing and wow it’s heartbreakingly glib.
I think it’s also valuable for introspective purposes. It’s very easy to fall into the mindset of “well, I’m a good person because of X, Y, and Z” while blinding ourselves to negative ways in which we affect others.
Finally, yeah, sure — I admit it. I like a puzzle. Specifically the puzzle of figuring out if these people believe their own bullshit!
(For the record, I thought this movie was incredible, though HN’s collective “meh” on this thread was expected)
I found it a bit tough how many people in this thread are able to instantly spot people who are “bad” or “suck” and immediately cease all interaction and cut them out of their lives completely.
We must be living in very different worlds; in my experience these things are never that black&white.
I do agree that it’s very important to know where your boundaries are in life and stand firm on them; and you don’t need to keep people in your life who are a bad influence. It’s just not as easy to make that distinction as some of the comments itt make it out to be …
It's important to be able to recognise behavioural patterns that suggest a narcissistic personality. Once you've established that, you need accept they won't change, because personality doesn't change, it's a stable pattern. Some people can spot these patterns due to long life experiences and know cutting out is the only option that leads to growth.
> you need accept they won't change, because personality doesn't change
I don’t think that is true. I know from myself and many of my friends or family that personalities can change, at times quite dramatically. Sometimes for “good” other times not so much.
We're talking specifically about bullshitting/lying/fraud, not other kinds of badness. The reason you have to cut such people out immediately once you realize what they're doing is because if you don't, they will keep trying to manipulate you. And usually if you catch someone in a lie it's pretty unambiguous: it really is black and white.
And I agree with the OP. In the past I've often been amazed and appalled at how someone can be proven to have lied, and the people around them barely update at all. They just brush it off and keep going back to be lied to again. It feels like the average normie has an extremely high tolerance for lying to the extent they don't feel it's much of a crime at all. Which I guess is why people like Elizabeth Holmes can thrive.
I assume you mean huge lies like Holmes-level lies. Because everyone lies, it’s just a part of human nature.
Of course some lies are unforgivable. But it would need to be a pretty big lie for me to go and immediately cut people off.
Also I would argue the people that are obvious in their lying and manipulating aren’t the dangerous ones - those that aren’t obvious, that you don’t spot easily off the cuff are much more dangerous. And I’m 100% certain you also have such people in your life, it’s just unavoidable. And others might look at you and have the same thoughts: “look at this normie who doesn’t realise they are being lied to”
Overall I think there is a lot more nuance to this than you and OP make it out to be.
But I do understand the appeal of simple black/white narratives; they are very attractive. I just hope you treat the people close to you more merciful and forgiving.
> Also I would argue the people that are obvious in their lying and manipulating aren’t the dangerous ones - those that aren’t obvious, that you don’t spot easily off the cuff are much more dangerous.
Yeah. The person that's constantly bragging about fantasy stuff or reflexively claiming nothing was ever their fault might warrant cutting off because they're tiresome, but they're not likely to undermine you never mind pull off this level of scam because they're so unconvincing, and that might make them more harmlessly amusing than anything else. The manipulative person who's constant spreading false rumours might raise red flags, and definitely isn't someone you want to spend time with once you've spotted that some of their claims simply don't line up. But a large part of why people are often good at covering stuff up even if its the most heinous shit is that they manage to be plausible and likeable most of the time and generally tell the truth on other subjects.
Holmes likely fell into that category, though she didn't exactly downplay her lies in the way someone covering their deep dark secret usually does.
And yeah, in practice whether you cut someone off after learning their deep dark secret probably depends a lot on what it is and how it relates to you (and usually it's more "I'm hiding my affair" than "my billion dollar enterprise supplies fraudulent medical tests")
It is not about "what you miss" by avoiding "toxic" people like Elizabet Holmes. Bad people like her are dangerous! She killed several people, by providing fake medical tests!
> like a puzzle... people believe their own bullshit!
Most people do not have this kind of resources.
That's a strategy when it's personal. But it's catastrophic when Bullshiter Mode doesn't just define a person, it defines an entire industry - arguably the politics and economics of entire countries - and the only way to give it zero attention is to go fully off-grid and live like a hermit.
Holmes is interesting because she's not a freak or a one-off. She's pretty much a generic tech startup CEO billionaire wannabe, finance industry person, and/or familiar political archetype - arguably more extreme than most, but there's nothing truly exotic about the DNA here.
I'll avoid naming specific names here so that the reader can (probably rightly) project this onto whoever they want instead of rejecting it for naming their idol but... This is the problem I have with listening to the public "opinions" of major CEOs in general:
Their statements are usually made in service of a goal, not earnestly-held good-faith opinions. Even if someone is "very intelligent", what makes you think they are giving you access to the fruit of that intelligence? How do you know they aren't using their intelligence to try and manifest an outcome that would be beneficial to themselves, completely divorced from what anyone with their level of access to information could possibly believe (much less someone intelligent)? Sure, they'll tell you some truth if they happen to believe that doing that will reward them. But they'll also tell you that they're deeply committed to your local city when they have a meeting to discuss tax incentives for moving their HQ later that same day or that their plant has a sterling safety record while deliberately burying records of payouts for injuries. The only real difference between this and someone like Holmes is that they have a better level of skill in forecasting consequences.
What this ultimately means is: There is often little value in listening because you end up having to estimate the truth from less-manipulative sources yourself. And if you're going to spend the time and energy to do that anyway, you can skip straight to this step.
> But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone put this into words.
Thank you. A very compelling thought.
> I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”
I have something like that, but not (just?) for people. When I read (or listen to) something I very often fairly quickly recognize meta signs of bs and go 'kthxbye'. I call it bullshit filter and I am often surprised that some, even fairly intelligent, people can have suprinsingly weak one. As for morbid curiosity towards bs, I have very little. I'm even afraid that being too curious about it might be detrimental so I'm keeping my distance even when I engage somewhat.
I've only met one constant bullshitter in my life and unfortunately I worked with him so couldn't just leave. The thing that blew my mind was that nobody else seemed to care, at all. I get that it takes a significant amount of social capital to call out a bullshitter, especially at work... but still.. you don't have to believe them. Very weird.
Usually it's a management problem (like favoritism or something), so going to management is just going to put a target on your back.
Usually they've made a couple enemies. Just gang up with their enemies. If it's a group effort, there's only so much management can do at that point (depending on how much leverage they have). It's all dependent on the specific political situation.
This whole image of them being "well-liked" and socially invincible is just a play. Usually this type of person has made a shit ton of enemies. It may or may not be worthwhile depending on how shitty of a situation you're in, how bad the company's stack ranking and layoff quota is, how attached they are to you, etc
I think that’s a great reason to get into the psychology of bullshitters, or at least get really familiar with their tactics. You are going to have a lot of situations in your life when you can’t just flip a switch and get rid of them.
When you're working with a bullshitter and can't just leave, what use is there in performative caring? Your coworkers may have still cared, privately, but actively complaining about it, presuming boss man doesn't care anyway, is just pissing into the wind. You may as well accept that he's a bullshitter and get over it. Some people are like that and it doesn't help you to spend your time seething over it.
If you can get him fired then go for it. Otherwise, you're only harming yourself by letting yourself dwell on it. As for believing him; when my coworker starts rambling about the time the Navy seals came to him for help, I just say "wow man, crazy". I don't believe him, but neither do I confront it. Why bother? I'm not being paid to call out his dumb lies. This is probably what your other coworkers were thinking.
Caring and "seething" over it helps helps you to not become like them, not to adopt their projected views, not to blame their victims or otherwise contributing to the harm.
Conversely, actively complaining about it prevents enabling group thing to form. It helps victims identify the situation sooner, to leave of better protect themselves.
I’m not worried about becoming like them, and I have never once seen complaining about them or calling them out work positively for the person doing it. But, I’ve found acting confused and asking them for more detailed information has helped.
My comment was not about person doing it, but what doing it does to victims.
Maybe so, but its a mistake to assume others are falling for it just because they don't outwardly react to it. Ignoring it is the low-effort route that gets you through the day, so most people will usually do that.
Personally when I ignore things that I feel are wrong it just gnaws on me constantly. I agree that it’s the low-effort route but if I had an extreme bullshitter I had to work with on a daily basis would need to do something about it or switch jobs. Doesn’t mean I constantly need to call out ever single bit of untruth; like so many things it’s a spectrum
True. The practical reality is that it causes colleagues to divert limited resources to address this web of lies. No one wants to do that unless you're a fiend for emotional drama (practically speaking, some are desperate to gather any and all ammo to use against each other). For everyone else, it's emotional labor. And no one is getting paid to do emotional labor (unless that's the unspoken agreement that isn't written in their job descriptions).
If you really wanna out a liar and come out clean on the other end, it's just so much documentation, emotional decision trees, how to phrase & frame & present things, etc. etc. etc.
Often, the compulsive liar will out themselves, create their own demise, or be enabled and further empowered by a toxic system that rewards such types (which if possible, you'd wanna get out of ASAP because prolonged exposure leaves lasting damage to anyone in such systems).
Yes most people either show nothing and later end up believing at least portion of lies ... or believe lies.
But, you acted as if there was something wrong with those who dont. And as if there was some higher value in enabling and playing along. I disagree with both.
note, especially in cases like Holmes et al., how these people are full of shit for the sake of being full of shit. they are not just deceptive for their own sake but for the "et al."s sake, too, often enough just being the one thrown or throwing themselves under the bus to distract from or obscure what's going on "generally" or "currently, specifically" in that industry or it's supply chain and derivatives. you can spin up the whole story within the bigger picture, including "corona mass testing & sites cough cough, vaccines & boosters cough cough" and so on or look at the finer details of Holmes et al. endeavor itself and what derivatives the details "enabled" ...
it's hard to see through at first, but toxic relationships often actively obfuscate the toxicity of the social circle the partner is a--often seemingly lesser--part of ... but that's child play and toxicity or even betrayal on these levels is only "hard" if one loses more than a good conscious decade. in professional lives however, that harm is pretty much irreversible, within a single project's time frame, ... what's lost, practically non-retrievable, non-compensable ...
That whole Holmes story felt dodgy from the start. What she was gunning for was partially (recursively) done elsewhere, successfully. Then the whole Corona bit broke out and I still find myself wondering what the fuck ... but that might be a residue non-actual-conspiratorial-they-are-hiding-aliens kind of thought process that still wants to write one or the other post-they-don't-have-the-capacity-to-tap-everyone's-phone-calls and tor-exit-nodes-are-definitely-mostly-owned-by-the-same-privacy-loving-folks-who-maintain-those-8mil-lines-of-linux-and-other-distros story ...
> most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time”
You have to admit that shutting people out is still a defense mechanism that can backfire.
You're not immune from a skilled sociopath for doing this. They know what you're doing. The moment you turn your back is when they know they can blindside you.
It's the moment they start talking behind your back, shutting you out of conversations, undermining your work, etc. You're a lot more vulnerable when you're out of the loop. You can't assume you're stronger or smarter for trying to take the "high road". There is no high road with these people. They'll ruin everything in any way possible. They have their bases covered.
Yeah. “Just cut bullshitters out of your life” is about as unhelpful as “Don’t get sick!” when it comes to medical advice.
Like, duh yeah that’s the goal. Do that as much as possible, but a lot of your life is going to involve dealing with these people.
On a slightly deeper level, essentially nobody is 0% or 100% bullshitter. Nearly all of humanity falls into the middle. Even the most literal, level 2+ ASD folks I’ve known were, at a minimum, cagey at times.
No it's good advice. Most people don't react at all when they discover they were being bullshitted. Dropping interactions to the minimum you're forced to deal with them is still a huge improvement.
These sorts of people push people's buttons and lie and get what they want and then they wind up in civil or criminal litigation. They think this is just another people problem that they can lie and manipulate their way through, but the judge sees these kinds of people all day in their courtroom because they often wind up getting sued or prosecuted. They finally meet someone who doesn't expect them to be a normal "good person" and they face the first real consequences they can't just power through.
German nerd here. I know next to nothing about "the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story", is there a documentary on the facts instead of the villain somewhere?
I don't know of any worthy documentary, but I have read the book "Bad Blood" [0], which I thought was thorough, well written and, to me, an excellent read.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood:_Secrets_and_Lies_in...
> Tyler Shultz went to work at Theranos right out of Stanford and soon noticed that things weren't as they seemed. Lots of other employees knew there was something fishy going on, but Tyler was one of a tiny handful able to resist the mesmerizing and intimidating Elizabeth Holmes and speak out about the fraud that was putting patients at risk.
https://www.thesocialradars.com/transcripts/TSR-S4-Tyler-Shu...
https://www.thesocialradars.com/transcripts/TSR-S4-Tyler-Shu...
This hasn't been mentioned, it's the only one which is a documentary, like the one being discussed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inventor:_Out_for_Blood_in...
There's a miniseries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dropout
“Bad Blood” by the journalist who broke the story while Theranos was peaking
Try the book: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Why is this downvoted? Who are these weirdos? This is a good question.
There a podcast that covers the trial - https://abcaudio.com/podcasts/the-dropout/
> All the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story have been explored
This is similar to the Musk doc. When everything about the person is already explored real-time in the media, there's no mystery left. There's no drama. It is almost as dull as the subject's personality and almost as vacant as the subject's morality. Hmmm, so I guess in a weird self-referential way maybe it is genius? Nah.
> peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer
In this case, the attempts are simultaneously tortuous, torturous, and tortious!
This article falls into the same trap, I dunno what to call them, artsy-upper-class-society-and-film reviewers often do; writing vague yet meaningful-sounding things about the obvious subtext of a movie as if it was a revelation, yet without any specific observations about it.
Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.
But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
> But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?
If you’re that interested in getting these answers, you probably should watch the film
Unfortunately, it has such a limited release that most people who want to watch it outside North America won't be able to. No one has been able to explain why it has had such a limited release.
Seems like most documentaries from my point of view in Spain. Seems we won't be able to see this in cinemas until February sometime, and before that it'll probably be available via other channels. In the end, most interested will have seen it before February already, so when times come around, not that many people see it. So the cinemas adjust future viewings since not that many end up seeing them, as it takes so long time to arrive here.
Been like this with most mainstream documentaries like this one.
The article makes it clear that most people didn’t get out of the movie what the author got out of it
Nah, that would never work.
> this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous [...] with ambiguous subject matter?
There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.
I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.
Maybe just for not spoilers?
If you’re watching this film, you likely already know who Elizabeth Holmes is. There isn’t going to be any Sixth Sense style plot twists.
Without having watched the film, I'm sure they can make it look like Sunny Balwani was the guy in charge, or something like that. I don't even know the whole story of Theranos and never followed it with much interest - startup scams are a dime-a-dozen. HP's acquisition of Autonomy always struck me as such a tale: CFO takes the fall for CEO and CTO for a $11 b acquisition that a few years later was worth a tenth because of accounting fraud and when he gets out the CEO gives him a sinecure; then the week of CEO and CTO acquittal the latter gets killed in a bicycling accident and the former dies when a tornado sinks his yacht.
Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are interesting characters, true, but there's so much nuts in tech, it's just fertile ground for stories.
The story is so much more than a startup scam. It's about large numbers of supposedly savvy men being duped by a kid. What kind of kid could and would do such a thing?
It seems that everyone interviewed about this story has their own red flag moment -- the point where they knew that something was way off, and that they should stay far away. Silicon Valley VCs being the prime example. It is incorrect to say that Theranos was a VC company, it was more funded by angels who were incapable of objectively judging what was being proposed.
At Stanford a prof (important to say: a woman) who knew that the idea was technically infeasible. (And interesting to contrast with another very senior prof -- a man -- who left his tenured position to join Theranos). I remember reading a New Yorker profile of EH years before Theranos blew up, and the story described how she had all of these extremely powerful old men on her board: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger. That was my red flag moment. Yes, they are brilliant and powerful, but they are also clueless about biotech and medical tech. So why get them involved? Something seemed very off to me. Lots of people knew that something was very off, and yet ...
> I'm sure they can make it look like Sunny Balwani was the guy in charge
Nope. He's barely even in the film. It's not a normal documentary.
I’ve watched the film. There are things that happen during the filming of it, involving the people making the project, that I would indeed classify as big spoilers and knowing them beforehand would lessen the experience.
besides the topic that is being explored is deception so its expected the documentary Will use a rethorical or film technique that has some connection to that theme of deception?
I don't think there is any magic sauce to this movie. I saw it yesterday, and do agree (spoilers ahead) there are three acts: deception, sympathetic, puppeteer. I feel though that this article treats the movie as if its some sort of hypnosis; it's not. Its a very well put together movie that makes you question everything thats happening. I and others came out of it largely questioning:
A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen
B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her
and not:
- Is she guilty
This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.
> Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen
Probably no. The most manipulative are still not in the jail and are running some well-known big companies.
> are running some well-known big companies.
Or religions, or religious-like communities.
Has the public at large "seen" those people though? They tend to want to stay out of the limelight, for obvious reasons.
And whole countries.
And the rest are in DC.
The simple concept is some version of the Peter Principal.
You just flat out don’t get into these positions without being a psychopath. Partially that it wouldn’t be attractive to you, and partially that you won’t succeed without those behaviors.
I’m a big fan of conscript political assignments. The people that don’t want to do it I think would make better decisions.
I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).
I've worked for someone very like her.
It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.
And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.
When a lawyer says "reckless" it's an extremely strong word. It doesn't mean "negligent", IANAL (and it depends on the state etc) but it's more like if you knowingly run over a pedestrian in your way, and you aren't trying to hurt them but don't care if they get hurt. And often criminal law will treat it as just a little less bad than intent.
It very much depends on where the lawyer is. What you’ve described would be more like “depraved heart” or “wicked recklessness” in jurisdictions that have it, where reckless was that you were doing 90 in a residential area. I think the point is more that the legal term “reckless” may have a specific meaning in given places.
How does this work though. At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.
Yes. So many of her replies to Nathan's questions were "I don't know" or "I don't remember" or "I don't understand" for questions that were very straightforward.
At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.
It's manufactured incompetence. You can see it a lot in companies who use a lot of subcontractors.
Deceitful vs delusional or incompetent matters for your legal defense, your parole hearing etc
> At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.
There's always the chance one could have ridden fake-it-till-you-make-it long enough for the engineers to solve the underlying issues...
While far from a complete technical breakdown, Hank Green's recent video on Theranos is a good starting point. These are not serious people. The special sauce has never been the self promotion.
https://youtu.be/d9EaqyoA29E
It is one thing to fake and misrepresent the completeness of a video game, but it is entirely another to provide false or unverified medical results to patients.
In virtually every company there are questions you intuitively know that your managers don't necessarily want to know the answers to (or at least, they only want to know the answers to them if you have a solution), usually it's something relatively trivial like minor infractions of corporate rules.
There are some leaders who are extremely good at convincing you about the importance of belief in a particular thing to the point where you avoid even thinking up those questions - if they are ever cornered (and they rarely allow it to get to that point) they will wriggle endlessly rather than responding to a line of inquiry that bursts the collective bubble.
Do they know? It's hard to argue about their internal motivations.
It's above reckless, in other legal systems there is a level above gross and reckless negligence where the prosecution argues not only they should have known, in fact they did know and chose to proceed anyway.
Does the film address that thing she does with her voice?
Not at all, though she does talk slightly less like that now.
Best take of the movie here. When the whole crew met with them before production, Nathan's idea to say "fuck it, let's just see how they do business" was the right call and might show she actually may not have known as much as you'd think, but it's fully intentional to the point of complete insanity.
I think if you're stuck on that question, her manipulation poked through the silver screen and worked on you.
To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.
Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, would you have fallen for it? If you feel the need to write apologia after watching a documentary that's basically a hit piece, you know the answer.
I don’t think an accusation of ‘apologia’ is justified here. If some particular cognitive process generates deception genuine to the deceiver, that does not make the deception acceptable.
There’s a story in the movie about a magician performing a trick, but where there is no trick. The magician really does the thing he appears to do. I think that’s more where GP’s question lies, i.e.: Is her unusual processing of the world an elaborate conscious construction, or is it automatic, and to what degree?
That isn’t a direct determination about her merit or culpability.
I have no idea what this movie is actually about. I only know Holmes is a classical sociopath. Knowing what that means I cannot imagine any surprises coming from this movie.
Here are key observations of sociopathic personalities:
* They are never wrong, but there are rare times they will admit to being wrong if they have calculated an advantage in doing so.
* They don't care about you, or anybody else. They can't. A sociopath is a damaged personality that cannot empathize. What's interesting is that introspection is the same skill as empathy, so they cannot do that either. As such, they have no faults.
* Sociopaths tend to be charming. They want to appear pleasant. A primary goal of any narcissist is admiration. This is all temporary though, because they lack the empathy necessary to adapt and build trust or extend relationships, which means they are more important than you. It also means they will extend an irrationally great amount of energy to inform you of just how charming they are or how wrong they aren't.
* Sociopaths tend to become hostile when they don't get want they want. They live in a world of "i want" or "i don't want" and there is no further action to execute. This also tends to make for controlling and abusive personalities.
* Sociopaths are not necessarily sadists. The goal is not typically to harm other people, but rather to fulfill themselves irrespective of any harm.
While not criminal like Homes this seems to describe a lot of the most currently vaunted tech CEOs
Musk, Altman and Zuckerberg all are able to somehow ignore the harm they cause and have an amazing ability to justify it in pursuit of some “greater good”.
My take away, same as from Martha Stewart documentary, is that the law goes for you much harder if you are a woman. Musks or the world can deceive and produce vaporware for decades but God forbid you are a woman that's deceiving other men. A "b*tch hunt" somebody called it in Martha Stewart doc.
The data shows that this is the opposite of the truth. There is considerable bias against men in the legal system.
Average is not the same as prominent, female CEOs face more scrutiny of their performance. I posted a link to a study on another comment.
Respectfully, do you think you're shifting goalposts?
Your argument was that women were more punished by law. The studies (as someone else linked) show that women are less punished by law.
You switched your argument to "powerful women," which would require a lot of evidence, because it is contrary to the statistical expectation from the previous data, that women of all kinds would be less punished by law than their male counterparts.
Now, your argument and the study you linked just refers to how many women get promoted and the attention and criticism they get, which is separate from our legal system.
Is the bias always in the same direction regardless of which laws are broken?
Care to share your data?
Take your pick of sources from here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentencing_disparity
You are delusional, the stats say differently, both for prosecution and for conviction.
I don't care either way, but I do wonder how those stats look if you focus on powerful women, rather than all women.
Lololo. It is exceptionally rare to be prosecuted, let alone convicted, as a woman.
The musk’s of the world are just exceptional at getting leverage - and pretty good/exceptional at manipulation.
Holmes was just good at manipulation, not so good at leverage, and eventually her fraud rose to the level even her manipulation skills were insufficient - and then had nothing to fall back on.
Oops.
I did look up the numbers actually. On average women get lighter sentences for fraud, not exceptionally rare at all more like 30% shorter sentences. But on the other hand prominent women (CEOs) are much highly scrutinized, especially their departures so average and prominent here are not the same.
https://www.russellreynolds.com/en/about/newsroom/women-ceos...
This is research conducted and published by an executive search firm in London, versus the mountains of actual academic studies somebody else linked on sentencing disparities.
What is the rate? That is what I am referring to.
It won't deceive me, I went to one of Canada's top business schools and got really good grades.
But do you now help struggling small businesses make it in this competitive world?
I try, but it's much harder these days if you don't rehearse your pitches. Maybe I'm cursed?
I'm not sure how I'll react to watching this film, so I hired some actors and built a fake cinema to see how I'd react
Is this comment satirical? I don't get the reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO8V72pDw1o
> My name is Nathan Fielder, and I graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades.
It's the opening line of the directors previous TV shows
Thank you!
He rehearsed it.
Do you know Abbott and Costello?
Why would the documentary be deceiving you? The documentary has no reason to deceive you. The document is just trying to reach out to you and connect with you as a person. Why would it be deceiving you? It has no reason to be deceiving you.
OP buries the lede.
The film is by Nathan Fielder, who specializes in fake situations and fake documentaries.
Any documentary (worth its salt) has a specific view it’s pushing that’s implicit to the stories told, the editing, etc.
The easiest demonstrative example is looking at someone like Leni Riefenstahl‘s work.
(the GP comment is making a joke; go take a look at the first teaser for You Can See Everything)
This has gotta be a reference to something, amirite? Do I need to watch the movie, or is it something from Nathan For You or somewhere else?
It’s this year’s most memed trailer. It’s also where the wide eyed Elizabeth meme comes from.
It's half of the trailer's dialogue
Why would David Copperfield shove an ice pick through his hand?
I am not sure if this is trolling? sarcasm? or just pure nativity ?
Is the text of the trailer. More or less.
Re-read it in Elizabeth Holmes voice
PR and propaganda are not just about corporates and companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJSRFWALTI
Checked her Twitter account yesterday (managed by her husband)
She is MAGA. That's enought to know about the topic.
The media and seemingly random persons like this stanning her is extremely weird.
Her X account, and how it came to be in the hands of her husband is actually a pretty major plot point in the documentary
It's a rational play for her to be MAGA. Trump has pardoned much worse criminals simply for sucking up to him.
It’s rational to lack principles?
Like having kids while facing jailtime, it can be read as a ploy to evade responsibility. Rational has a secondary, economics meaning, i.e. selfish, utility-maximizing - whatever furthers the individual's interests.
Isn't this partiuclar characteristic a bit too late in her case?
If you are in desperate need of something you don’t deserve that only Trump can supply, and that alone doesn’t cause you not to want it, then yes, pretending you don’t have principles is rational: it is the only thing that will get you what you want.
Trump is an ignorant Leland Gaunt. If only he can help you out of a mess you made, being helped is going to violate every remaining principle you have. Worth just getting rid of them up front.
Elizabeth Holmes is probably practicing doing her hair like Ivanka. Her pardon is going to cost a lot of money and probably some face time.
She already lacked them, so why question them now?
is self-preservation irrational?
in her position, given her history, it is 100% rational to continue lacking principles
Look how far it gets some people.
She had (two!) children solely to try and avoiding having to go to prison. She has no principles other than self-interest and self-preservation. It would be shocking if she didn’t attempt to curry favor with Trump for a pardon since he’s been handing them out to the wealthy like Halloween candy.
morals are generally not a factor that sociopaths like holmes entertain at all, and using that as your lens... your best odds of a get out of jail free card is to cozy up to the guy who pardons people that say nice things about him
That motivation makes her MAGA. No different then other MAGAs.
Disagree. He has indeed pardoned many criminals, but none who was even remotely as bad as she is.
The founder of Silk Road and the former Honduran president just to name 2
Evidently assaulting police officers in an attempt to overthrow an election is just fine too.
Nowhere close to the amount of damage she did.
Stanning?
Edit: looked it up. Who is stanning her? The person who wrote the article or Nathan?
Legitimately unsure if you're doing a bit here.
In case you aren't, her Twitter account isn't run by her. She doesn't post of it; it's another person impersonating her. This movie touches on this fact very significantly partway through. The person impersonating her is a MAGA guy and was given access to her account by reaching out to "people pretty high up with X"
> her account by reaching out to "people pretty high up with X"
Is it manipulation to show particular positions and connect with X/republicans? Because in the movie he is reaching out to X support with legal power of attorney, and it was also shown as another sign of overcontrol from him
The documentary aside, if she hadn't been caught for the fraud, I wonder how many of us (myself included) would be singing her praises. I wonder how many people are operating like she did right now.
In that counter-factual do you propose that she/her company actually/eventually develops what they said they did? So a fake-it-until-you-make-it gone right?
She was saying that they had developed a system that could run a bunch of tests on a single drop of blood, and do so with better accuracy than existing tests. When in fact what they were providing used the off-the-shelf systems on diluted blood, returning horribly incorrect results.
Note that it was not "we will deliver this", the company (and often Holmes herself) were touting the existing customers already getting this. I should also note that behind the scenes Holmes had no great insights into how they were going to accomplish this leap forward, and knew that all of their work at that point had failed.
> In that counter-factual do you propose that she/her company actually/eventually develops what they said they did? So a fake-it-until-you-make-it gone right?
No, I mean the fraud continuing, and how much of a culture of knowingly cheerleading and gaslighting fraud exists in a forum such as this. Is it the majority, or is it a loud minority.
From Theranos to meme coins and NFTs, there is a long history of shilling for outright fraud here.
Anyone accountable for AI being deterministic (this is most of the bay) - am curious how they incorporated the movie into the BS they shill (if they do).
It is fascinating to see so many comments defending Holmes. Are these even real people?
“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”
You’re on ycombinator, a forum for startups. A non zero amount of people here would do exactly what Holmes did for money.
> A non zero amount of people here would do exactly what Holmes did for money.
To go even further, "fake it til you make it" used to be a mantra lots of startup founders followed, and the whole story about how reddit got started with puppet-accounts to make it look busy when it was just three guys in a bedroom, was hailed as a successful strategy for growing startups.
Every documentary is inevitably deceiving; the only difference is whether the author tries to hide it.
> Very early on, I worked out that one of the most stupid things that they do on television is these things called cutaways or what used to be called “noddies” where, when you cut an interview with someone, you insert a noddy of the reporter looking noddingly at the interviewee to disguise the cut.
> I would never do that. I just cut and you can see what I’m doing, that I am actually cutting this person, or I will use music to push my argument.
> I mean, I have arguments and I have stories. That’s what television journalism has and you can either dress it up as “this is the absolute truth” or you can dress it up with me by saying “look, I’m telling you a story, all this is true but have you thought that it could be like this?” to provoke you.
> And of course I want people to agree with me because, you know, all human beings will, but I understand that my job is to push and good journalism should do that especially at a time of uncertainty.
> At the present moment, to go back to my original point, you know what you’re going to get with most journalism. So therefore you sort of switch off and you go “oh yeah, it’s a climate change film”. “Oh yeah, it’s a ‘bankers have done something ever bad’ again.” Therefore, you don’t look.
> It’s like if you’re showing a picture of the Mona Lisa. You don’t look at it. You just look at it as a pattern. You go, “oh, that’s the Mona Lisa”. I don’t know when I last looked at the Mona Lisa. I don’t think I ever have, because it’s a thing. And so much of journalism is a thing now.
— Adam Curtis
> We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it. This is my theory as to why we’re so divided in this country.
While this is true, the reason we are much more divided country than in the past is that today's tech actively amplifies this. You can always find the news to support your belief, and social networks are tuned to reinforce it. This is a vicious circle - the more we are divided, the more division is propageted.
To add to that, online comments.
People post vile comments because they don’t have to face the consequences which adds to the vicious cycle.
>An entire theater full of grown adults was falling for it. At one point, people were shouting so loudly at the screen that I couldn’t hear the dialogue. I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.
Is this a parody lol?
Maybe when I read about "cinemas are a bad experience nowadays" on american sites (reddit, HN) they mean this but I always felt that they are deceiving me.
Maybe I'm just too Asian-European because I never experienced that in any European or Far East Asian cinemas.
No one did anything like that in the theater I saw it in and I have a hard time believing this happened. As if she was some major figure that the avg person was familiar enough with to form an emotional opinion on. I've had to explain who she was to everyone I know and they were all kind of like "oh yeah, I remember hearing something about that."
Saw it on Friday in Berkeley, and: yes, there was absolutely audience participation, and there were moments where I had to restrain myself from joining in.
> Berkeley
That makes sense. Berkeley is part of the same social caste Holmes exploited for investment.
Nah, it's because Bezerkley.
I watched it in San Jose at Alamo and no one was heckling, but they also played a recording at the beginning reminding people not to talk during the movie. So if you want a quiet movie experience you should try a nearby Alamo Theater. The audience did clap after it was done.
I have heard from musicians who visit the bay that concert audiences are more frequently obnoxious here than other places, and they attribute it to a general lack of social skills in conjunction with all the artists being priced out of the area.
> I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.
No, that's called "obnoxious virtue signalling" and people do it all the time in places like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. It's gross and unnecessary. Don't glorify it.
Hi! I grew up in Seattle, lived in SF just prior to the pandemic, and have since lived in Portland.
While I understand the stereotype of these places lends itself to that view, I have never, ever seen this type of behavior displayed in a movie theater, from blockbuster showings to small, art-house stuff that touches on controversial issues you think people would be vocal about.
Please stereotype less.
> Please stereotype less.
Hi! I lived in Seattle, in SF and I’ve been to Portland many times. And I’ve seen the behavior I’ve described in all of the locations I’ve mentioned. Personally. With my own eyes and ears. More than once in each place! Strange, that.
So I don’t know…right back at you with the stereotyping thing? Because what you’re doing is taking your own limited experiences, overgeneralizing those and throwing shade at people who say things you disagree with.
(Also, by the way: the “please stereotype less” response is practically a whole delicious stereotype in itself. And here you are using it! The way non-passive-aggressive people say what you’re trying to say is: “I think you’re wrong, because I’ve never seen that.” This approach has the distinct rhetorical advantage of being honest, clear and direct, but of course, lacks that emotional punch of trying to belittle your inquisitor with a subtle insult.)
> ... and calling someone else a liar (without actually doing it, naturally).
I mean, when someone blanket generalizes and casts a very wide net, saying that it happens "all the time", and someone with 40 years of theater-going experience in those locales has not seen it happen once, then yeah, they're gonna point out that you're, at the very least, hyperbolically stretching the truth.
Please spare me the high and mightiness about any passive aggressiveness in my post, I just responded in kind to your own passive dig at those locales. If you're going to make tall claims like you did, don't be surprised when people push back.
> when someone blanket generalizes and casts a very wide net, saying that it happens "all the time", and someone with 40 years of theater-going experience in those locales has not seen it happen once, then yeah, they're gonna point out that you're, at the very least, hyperbolically stretching the truth.
Well, now we’re getting somewhere! You want to say I’m being hyperbolic? That’s cool. I clearly was. It literally does not happen at every single movie. I exaggerated for effect. Mea culpa.
(Doesn’t change the fact that I’ve heard and seen these things often, of course.)
> Please spare me the high and mightiness about any passive aggressiveness in my post, I just responded in kind to your own passive dig at those locales.
Erm, OK. I wasn’t being passive. I said it pretty bluntly. Was it unclear?
As the kids say: “do better”.
(that’s a joke btw)
That’s wild to me, I grew up going to movies… everyone is pretty much silent.
It doesn’t occur to me as to why I would want to do that…
American cinema is called "theatre" for a reason
I've had several awkward experiences lately, in the opposite direction.
You know how cinema is a good opportunity to sit there among several dozen strangers (at least), and enjoy a shared experience, and laugh, cry, scream, whatever you do, together?
Well, I've been to several films where nobody laughed. Like, there were at least a dozen or more other people in the audience, and there were genuinely funny parts of these films, and there was nobody else laughing in there, except me.
And I can tell you which ones: Disclosure Day, The End of Oak Street, and Digger. Now, the first two aren't comedies. But they definitely had comedic, sort of awkward bits that were obviously supposed to be LOL funny, to break the tension and establish some moods. And Digger itself, classified as a black comedy, was thoroughly hilarious, and farcical, although exceedingly awkward in some parts. And I was walking out behind two nerds and they were having an intellectual discussion of how "interesting" it was to them.
But nobody's laughing in the theater. And I am not exactly sure why. It is not long ago when I noticed that younger people were reacting and laughing much faster than I could react, for some reason. But now, the audience has simply stopped laughing altogether.
Is this unique to my experience? Anyone else in the USA noticing this? I know that not a lot of people are attending movies these days. But The Odyssey was selling out, over a month into its run. But there were no funny parts to it, I suppose.
I had this experience watching Eddington. My adult son and I were laughing all the way through and the packed audience was totally silent. Very strange experience.
People gin up this stuff up for some reason. The film supposedly had a 25 minute standing ovation as well at some film festival.
That was a different film called NAZA at the Venice Film Festival.
Everything you watch, documentary and narrative alike, attempts to shape your understanding of events through the director's lens.
This article is devoid of content
The article seems to be amazed that movies can manipulate your emotions.
I watched this film last night. It was very unique and not like anything I have seen before.
It's a pretty disorienting film, and I think that is part of the point. We're living in an age where presentation matters far more than substance.
I wish Werner Herzog made this film. He has the ability to just let people speak their mind but also don't letting them off the hook either.
How did the film let her off the hook?
It's the whole style of Nathan Fielder too but Herzog wouldn't ask so many yes-no questions... and then Holmes just dodging them. I don't know, I don't remember etc. It's not just answers but the questions too.
There was a movie, maybe on Netflix, about Holmes not too long ago. I was surprised to see this movie coming out because I thought that one was pretty well done and covered everything this movie might (I have not seen this one).
Has anyone else seen both and can they comment on the differences?
In one, Elizabeth Holmes refused to participate.
In the other, Elizabeth Holmes invites the filmmaker to live with her.
The previous documentary focused on Theranos’s downfall, the mechanics of the fraud, the fake technology, and investigative journalism. It featured archival footage only as Holmes declined interviews and retained tight media control.
This new one focuses on Elizabeth Holmes's personal life, her mindset right before going to prison, and her ongoing insistence on her own reality. It has direct, intimate access and was filmed inside her home with her partner Billy Evans and their children in the 34 days leading up to her prison sentence.
This article is a bit too desperate to connect the subject matter to the medium.
It’s such a good movie. Go with a friend and you can spend hours picking apart the layers.
“ She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup. That’s a significant distinction, but as a society, we don’t love nuance” Ok she’s still a fraud what am I missing
Ok while I agree with the substance of the article I just can't help myself:
>me, “So what did you think?” And I just responded with, “Forget Elizabeth Holmes.
Sigh. Why do we need to forget her?
>I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!”
In the theater? I'll take things that never happened for 500, Alex
>Think about Elizabeth Holmes
Who? We already forgot her
I would have expected the HN crowd to be more accepting of the meta-level strange loop shenanigans of Nathan Hofstadter I mean Fielder.
"""How much of your opinion of her comes from the facts of her criminal case & how much comes from the images and/or videos and/or TV dramas you’ve seen over the years?"""
There is a book by the WSJ reporter that uncovered the lies carrying the startup Theranos ("Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou) and led to its downfall.
There is a well-produced podcast ("The Dropout" by ABC News/ABC Audio) that also reveals the dichotomy between investor harm and patient harm and it was originally completed before the criminal trial.
Would recommend those if someone is interested in the paths of the people involved in Theranos, and how they managed to carry on the deceptions.
Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know why A24 has not released this movie at the same time across different regions? It's really frustrating seeing so much discussion about the movie but not being able to actually see it until the end of November in the UK.
I'd imagine it's because they're distributing it themselves and A24 is a relatively small company.
>> It definitely didn't blow my mind like it apparently did for this author.
It did for the author because this is a service she provides. To even suggest that Elizabeth Holmes didn't really harm anyone because she in prison for investor fraud, and then have the nerve to call that distinction "nuance", is absurd.
Theranos generated around 7.8 million test results for Arizona consumers alone. Of those, roughly 834,000 had to be voided or corrected. These were real people getting medical information they relied on. Some received terrifying and incorrect indications of prostate cancer. Pregnant women received results suggesting they were miscarrying when they weren't.
It's like claiming a blood bank supervisor didn't put patients at risk by giving them incompatible blood transfusions, simply because the state only managed to prosecute them for pirating the inventory software they were using.
She did it before for Paul Logan and Anthony Scaramucci, and now is softening the road for Elizabeth Holmes pardon.
She did the same in her newsletter for Logan Paul when he was trying to move beyond his image as a toxic YouTube prankster, and spent months embedded with him and his brother.
Then did the same for Anthony Scaramucci, when he had to rebuild his credibility in the investment world, as his bitcoin hedge fund was about to go nowhere. Pompliano opens with his fascination with astrology. Astrology!
Call monsters what they are. The victims deserve it.
> Theranos generated around 7.8 million test results for Arizona consumers alone. Of those, roughly 834,000 had to be voided or corrected
I got one of these! I called my New York doctor in a panic because apparently my kidneys and liver were failing. We ordered a bunch of rush tests, they came back fine, then we did a bunch more to confirm. That was a lot of stress, wasted medical professionals' time and cost for a single person. (The only reason I didn't go straight to ER is I was doing my start-up at the time and, America being America, didn't have the best health insurance.)
I don't think my doctor reported that result as being wrong. I certainly didn't–I was too busy confronting my impending doom. So my HDHP wound up paying for not only the un-needed follow-up tests, but also for the Theranos test. (I don't remember if I paid a deductible. It was at a Walgreens.)
> She did it before for Paul Logan and Anthony Scaramucci, and now is softening the road for Elizabeth Holmes pardon
She's maintaining access to powerful people. It's a well-known problem with access journalism.
Having followed your comments here for years, I was shocked to read that you got Theranos tests. From the get-go, long before the WSJ exposé, it was apparent to me this was a complete fraud. I based my thinking on long experience (38 years) drawing blood for tests.
> was shocked to read that you got Theranos tests
I’d been reading about them for a few years, never got personally involved in any capacity, was in Phoenix for a long-distance relationship and saw the billboard and thought “why not?” When I saw the results I panicked. Ex post facto I figured something went wrong with my draw (full venous draw, by the way).
I have no background in medicine, and I was probably considerably stupider at the time inasmuch as I was in my twenties, so I never connected it to being a fraud, instead concluding their kit didn’t work reliably and that they’d launched prematurely and would have to pull back from the market and regroup (and get sued) for a while.
Do you ask the doctor to stop so you can discuss which vendor will be recieving test materials prior to blood draw?
I would NEVER patronize a doctor who sent my blood to Theranos. At the time it was operating in Arizona, it was only after a tremendously intense and expensive lobbying campaign to get approval. That was very much in the news at the time.
Is your doctor the one who actually takes your blood and sends it in for tests? Where I'm from, the doctor just orders a blood test, and you go to some other lab facility somewhere (with some discretionary choice) and get it done by a phlebotomist and its more or less outside of the doctor's purview.
In the USA either my doctor takes the blood, or in certain cases, they have Labcorp or similar do the test (I asked and it was because they didn't have the proper vial labels to do the blood test in house). I also get copies of the test and it has the logo of the testing company.
So yes
It works both ways. I walked into the Theranos and volunteered for bloodwork. I’ve also had my doctor send my bloodwork order to a lab of my choosing when I’m e.g. traveling.
This doesn't make sense. You are just getting your blood drawn. You don't even see who is doing the test until it's done. How on earth would you even know.
I’m generally discerning of the lab doing my bloodwork. You can look up ratings online. Less out of paranoia for being defrauded and more for comfort.
>> It's a well-known problem with access journalism.
Yes, CNBC is a prime example :-)
>Theranos generated around 7.8 million test results for Arizona consumers alone. Of those, roughly 834,000 had to be voided or corrected. These were real people getting medical information they relied on.
Those are rookie numbers.
When Merck hid data showing Vioxx was causing heart attacks and death, not only did no one go to jail, but the fines were less than the revenue of the drug.
Vioxx would go on to kill an estimated 50,000 people before being pulled off the market.
Holmes made the mistake of having too few lobbyists and FDA insiders.
Well then, I suppose we should all just let her off the hook.
What Merck did was rookie numbers, what about Genghis Khan?
Whataboutism aside, "having too few lobbyists and FDA insiders" isn't going to save a product that doesn't work and that doctors stop relying on. Once people were shown behind the curtain, it was game over.
That's wild. Yeah, a quick look into the background of this author leaves little doubt about what their career is.
Thats why I found the article so interesting. I was literally thinking about this yesterday: how your story shapes who you are. It isn't particularly profound, but it is interesting how your perception is shaped by how you present yourself, what is on the internet about you, your story and crucially, who vouches for you.
Then I got to the end of the article and saw all of those other articles with other people with "reputation issues". It was so meta. Even having this story hit the top of Hacker News might have been calculated.
Incredible post. Thank you!
Unfortunately that's the big message the courts gave, isn't it. Elizabeth Holmes used the names of important government officials to deceive two classes of people:
a) as you point out, give wrong medical information to nearly a million people. Information they probably acted on and damaged themselves.
b) deceived investors.
ONE of these things matters to the American justice system.
Whose names did she use for that?
These are the people that were in charge of leading the company and giving credibility to it. Needless to say all these people have not faced any kind of responsibility. They "were all deceived", in other words none of them ever checked.I agree energetically that this is how it turned out.
However, the prosecution did bring charges for both against Holmes, harm caused to patients by Theranos, and the defauding of investors. She was only convicted of defauding investors, by a jury of her peers.
Sunny Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients and Theranos did settle a class-action lawsuit against them.
I do believe the publicity around Holmes in part was about distancing the investors (the list you provided) from any kind of responsibility or PR blowback.
Anyway, the game is rigged, I just think it's important to see how it is rigged. I don't like to shed doubt on jury decisions, it really is the best thing we have. Prosecution motivation can be swayed, defense can be under/over funded, but a jury of your peers, while imperfect, really is the best way to make these decisions.
I also don't know what legally an investor can be held accountable for.
Yeah without jury trials Trump would have the ability to BOTH convict people and let them go, since he controls prosecutors, who are the only ones that can bring a case and hiring of judges.
Now he only has the option to let people go for crimes, either by pardoning them or instructing prosecutors to do nothing.
Trump has used both options he has, so the ability to convict people would have been disastrous.
This cuts to the heart of it. Elizabeth Holmes' real crime, the reason she was actually punished (insofar as anyone in her position ever gets punished), is that she both embarrassed and defrauded many wealthy and influential individuals.
> They "were all deceived", in other words none of them ever checked
While I agree to the larger point you are making, I am hard pressed to understand what they could have done. Its not like they were not involved at all, there are plethora of accounts of these people receiving reports which just lied. They were blocked from access to the actual equipment for "security reasons" so they couldn't get a third party assessment done. At some point you have to believe your business partner will not outright lie because otherwise how do you do business with them. Life cannot run on cryptographic proofs.
They could have exercised any sort of reasonable oversight. If you're getting any sort of stonewalling from your business partner, that is a massive red flag, and something that should get you talking to the rest of the board about kicking them out
The list of names read like "Old men charmed by young girl let her get away with whatever she wants"...
Great comment, thank you for centering it on the actual victims of her deceit.
Ian Gibbons, Theranos chief scientist was facing a deposition that threatened to expose the company technology issues. Under pressure, and fearful of losing his job, he attempted suicide and died a week later. When his grieving wife contacted Theranos, rather than receiving Holmes condolences, she received a demand for the return of company property and confidential materials...
That’s a good reminder: With scarce few exceptions, your job doesn’t actually care about you, companies and platforms aren’t your friends, and life is too short to waste it on assholes and sociopaths.
Why only 830K of 7.8M?
The number is much higer, the 834,233 is not the total number of incorrect results. It is the number Theranos formally invalidated or revised. Theranos performed many tests using conventional laboratory equipment rather than its proprietary Edison machines. The company initially voided results from Edison devices and subsequently corrected other results. But conventional equipment did not guarantee accurate results, because Theranos also had problems with its laboratory procedures.
In November 2021, a woman named Erin Tompkins testified in Elizabeth Holmes's trial that Theranos had given her a false-positive HIV result in 2015
> To even suggest that Elizabeth Holmes didn't really harm anyone because she in prison for investor fraud, and then have the nerve to call that distinction "nuance", is absurd.
I have been blown away by all of the efforts to rehabilitate Holme’s reputation and erase any of her wrongdoings.
I’m sure some of it is coming from directly seeded or funded efforts from Holmes doing PR work, but I think most of it across social media is actually organic. Elizabeth Holmes was so clearly caught out committing fraud that it’s triggering contrarian reactions among people who think they’re the ones who can see the real story behind every media narrative. Unlike other unpopular figures like Zuckerberg or Musk, most people had never heard of Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos until her fraud was revealed and became a major news story. When the media introduces a figure as a bad person, some people are so hardwired to be contrarian that they must take the opposite position.
The other difficulty with this story is that many people still don’t understand what she did wrong. This is common all over social media and even on Hacker News in this thread. I see a lot of arguments that she was only doing “fake it till you make it” like every other startup from people who don’t understand what that phrases means (it means you present yourself as a bigger, more established company to overcome resistance to being a small startup, not that you literally fake that your product works). I responded to another comment from someone who thought that because all blood tests have error rates, Theranos having problems was no different than any other blood testing company, which is a false equivalence that doesn’t even begin to compute if you know anything about the fraud they were doing.
Then there are layers of other social issues being injected into the controversy. I knew someone in person who grew suspicious that the only reason Elizabeth Holmes was prosecuted was because of her gender. They lived in a social media bubble where all CEOs were evil criminals doing frauds all the time and therefore the only reason Holmes could be singled out and treated differently was due to her gender. This led to a wild argument that going after her was unfair, actually, even acknowledging that she did the fraud. That was a conversation I exited from because there’s no overcoming that type of belief with logic.
The most interesting conspiracy theories I continue to see are the belief that Theranos technology actually was working and she was on the way to solving it all, but that the industry didn’t want to be disrupted and therefore they had her taken out. This one doesn’t even hold up to minimal research but it persists among those with deep conspiracy theory tendencies.
It’s wild to observe how often this plays out. Something about this cases triggers a lot of people’s desires to doubt and defend, and there’s a large audience for content that takes Holme’s side no matter how illogical or contrary to the facts.
> I see a lot of arguments that she was only doing “fake it till you make it” like every other startup from people who don’t understand what that phrases means (it means you present yourself as a bigger, more established company to overcome resistance to being a small startup, not that you literally fake that your product works)
Not disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but regarding this tangent: haven't there been a ton of (say) "AI" companies that quietly used humans in the background and gave the impression AI was doing the work, because their vision was that that was the future?
Not that I think that would excuse this case in any way regardless - just mentioning because of the drawn comparison.
A couple, yes, but I wouldn’t say it’s a ton of companies.
These stories were popular during the period when people didn’t understand how AI worked or what was possible. It was feasible to produce fake demos that relied on humans doing the work because few people understood how AI worked. If your demo took an input and produced an output 1 to 12 hours later with variable delay nobody questioned it because they didn’t know what AI looked like. They thought maybe that’s how long the computers had to think or that there was a single computer working through a backlog.
Now everyone has used ChatGPT and understands that actual AI doesn’t work like that, and if the task actually took 12 hours of crunching on tokens the bill would be an eye watering large number. So you can’t get away with faking your AI responses with a few humans doing the work.
There were also follow on stories where writers got confused about hybrid systems that had humans doing review and RLHF, thinking that any involvement of a human in the loop was equivalent of faking AI by having humans do the work. Most of the stories I saw toward the end of this trend were this style.
> They lived in a social media bubble where all CEOs were evil criminals doing frauds all the time and therefore the only reason Holmes could be singled out and treated differently was due to her gender.
They’re also unfamiliar with FDA-regulated spaces where it’s not unheard of for VPs and C-suite types to receive fines and jail time and bans from the industry.
Some good points here except:
It is outrageous to say an early stage company giving inaccurate diagnostics "is like" giving patients incompatible blood transfusions.
10-15% of people who get the wrong blood die. People who get inaccurate diagnostics get scared.
Very different and this undermines the credibility of your otherwise valid point.
> People who get inaccurate diagnostics get scared.
That's only true if those people always follow up with a second test using traditional means. If they don't follow-up and instead immediately go past diagnostics into some sort of action, then it could be catastrophic in a manner exceeding being scared.
Now you can argue that if the patient is working with any medical practitioner worth their salt, that med will surely ask for a second test. But is it obvious that that will always be the case?
additionally, the "get scared" is only if the theranos test incorrectly gives a "something is wrong" diagnosis. What if the theranos test incorrectly gives an "everything is ok" diagnosis? Then the patient does not get scared when they should be, and potentially get significantly harmed
Not if they get told they are clear. Then their cancer gets worse and before anyone realises it’s untreatable. Downplaying faked test results is disturbing.
They get scared but if the doc believes the test results, they get more invasive (prostate biopsy, breast biopsy, etc) testing which is painful and traumatizing for the patients. They may not die but they don’t deserve this.
it doesn't matter if they're an early stage company or not. also they were a fraud company.
Sure hope nobody started emergency chemo based on a faulty test
Based on my anecdotal experience dealing with pervasive cancer in a family member. They almost always confirm stuff before throwing a ton of poison into you.
And what if you -do- have pervasive cancer, but a Theranos test told you you didn't? You go about your day, and the cancer continues to worsen, untreated (speaking of poison inside you).
I don’t know a thing about Holmes, I’m just reacting to your framing - don’t all medical tests that real people rely on have error rates? Doesn’t an 11% error rate suggest something that was real and mostly works but maybe wasn’t ready for prime time? The error rate could have been higher, perhaps. You only listed false positives, while the much more concerning problem would be false negatives - people who didn’t get scared or act when they should have. Still, a medical test error rate on its own doesn’t suggest deceit or fraud. People receiving terrifying but wrong results is a common problem that already exists in medicine.
Google tells me the FIT test for cancer has a false negative rate of between 8% and 26%. That appears to be likely worse than the Theranos numbers you cited here.
All tests do have error rates and all doctors know this very closely because they look at results every day.
However saying “all tests have error rates, therefore all tests with error rates are equally bad” is a completely wrong takeaway. One of the things Theranos was doing was using traditional equipment to run the tests as a smokescreen for the fact that they didn’t have any working technology. So the results should have been similar to anyone else running them when that was the case.
But there is a problem that when a company is saying they’re doing one thing or using one technology but your actual tests could be run on unknown combinations of unknown lab hardware depending on the day and the whims of a CEO trying to defraud investors, you don’t know what kind of results you’re going to get.
Real labs have established controls and ship reference ranges for their test results because they control their processes. If Theranos was doing who knows what to keep the test results flowing to keep the illusion up for the primary purpose of satisfying investors, that’s not what you want to see out of your test lab.
> Google tells me the FIT test for cancer has a false negative rate of between 8% and 26%. That appears to be likely worse than the Theranos numbers you cited here.
You’re looking at the wrong thing. The Theranos number above is for tests they determined had to be voided because they weren’t run properly due to procedural errors they identified. Their own incompetence or fraud. And those are just the ones they admitted to!
The false negative rate for the test you Googled is a false negative rate, which is a simple fact that tests can’t reliably diagnose everything even when run properly. Tests look for markers in samples as a proxy for a condition, and those markers aren’t always present at levels that meet the thresholds even if the condition exists. Even when run absolutely perfectly, a test like that will have false negative rates.
The part you’re missing is that the Theranos voided and invalidated tests were due to problems on top of the normal test variation rates because they were from Theranos doing things wrong, which is directly downstream of Holmes manipulating investors.
> Theranos was doing was using traditional equipment to run the tests as a smokescreen for the fact that they didn’t have any working technology. So the results should have been similar to anyone else running them when that was the case.
> But there is a problem that when a company is saying they’re doing one thing or using one technology but your actual tests could be run on unknown combinations of unknown lab hardware depending on the day and the whims of a CEO trying to defraud investors, you don’t know what kind of results you’re going to get.
Exactly. They were using Siemens machines, but they often had insufficient blood because they were trying to maintain a pretense of "nano collection". Siemens' machines weren't even trying to pretend they could work like this, so Theranos kept trying to figure out ways to dilute or diffuse the samples they did have to get to a usable volume for the tests. But of course every experimentation there was destructive, so they had even less to use.
So we're not talking about error rates on properly calibrated machines, with sufficient blood that re-tests could be performed before needing another collection, we're talking about error rates on effectively misusing machines.
Only 11% of errors were reported, there were probably many more.
Also, the standard for tests in the medical world is usually much higher than 11%, except for things that are life threatening for which no better test exists.
This reads like a high schooler discovering that film can manipulate you, but doesn't go any further than that.
"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."
She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.
The full quote from that para
> We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not. Here’s how it actually goes: We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it. This is my theory as to why we’re so divided in this country. Beliefs built on emotion are nearly impossible to reason with.
This idea is explored in depth in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.
And related David Hume quote:
> Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions
I haven't watched the movie yet. I've read the book too. I want to read the book and then watch the movie.
The fact that it is documentary, and is being marketed along the lines of a block-buster on X with memes should have raised eye-brows. There are lot of genuinely good documentaries out there, they all are left to be discovered, and people discover them. But this one, was/is being marketed as must-watch documentary, and with no reference to the book bad blood?
Why would the documentary reference a book that it has nothing to do with? It's not an adaptation of prior works on Holmes or Theranos. You Can See Everything is something else all together.
Wont there be any overlaps? I tend to think, that great documentaries follow from greatly researched books. The later usually have more space to explore and can in depth, the documentaries to try to condense.
For building startup, you need a story on the person who is going on the front. Example he/she from top university, worked in a big company. That is sufficient to build something with zero revenue and sell it for billions.
You can just read Bad Blood, too, and skip the movie / hyperbole/ whatever
They're incredibly different things telling different stories. One doesn't replace the other.
your parent comment just wanted to get a shot of serotonin by chiming and showing off that they've read (or are merely aware of) the book
No
Incredibly different? It defies credulity?
Yes. The degree to which this presents a different experience is one I would not have found credible beforehand.
I'll continue to exercise my disbelief in alternate narratives for this (rightfully) convicted felon then.
Documentaries and video in general are just dramatically, intensely worse mediums for communicating factual learnings compared to books and text in general.
If you're going into a Nathan Fielder documentary expecting a funnel of factual information, you must not know who that is.
>At one point, people were shouting so loudly at the screen that I couldn’t hear the dialogue. I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!”
I’m not sure this is some data point that supports the article.
The article seems to indicate that the film is some special event in the idea of deception, but i honestly couldn’t figure out how exactly. They just describe conflicts that might occur with any film….
Documentaries are compelling, but they are the lowest-signal and most manipulative forms of rhetoric. Heavily biased & one sided, emotionally manipulative. They impose an uncritical point of view because of the first-person perspective (the camera puts the viewer in the room).
I include citizen footage in this as well. Even un-edited "raw" footage is shot from a single perspective, and promoted with an agenda.
A movie can't be objective -- it is told from the Director & DP's point of view. Camera perspective imposes the viewer's perspective. And documentary filmmakers are never experts on the subject matter. They are entertainers.
This has a very interesting way of showing it to you, how easy it is to deceive us. What we see is what er believe in, but it can be very much easily used to exploit us.
It's fascinating to me that the upper classes find Holmes interesting. In the working class world I grew up in, chicks like her are a dime a dozen and can usually be found at Grateful Dead tribute concerts espousing the benefits of crystals and channeling her alien guide who she discovered while chanting an invented baby talk language high on molly and nitrous oxide.
Your comparison missed the actual interesting part about the billion dollar fraud.
People who commit fraud at that scale are not a dime a dozen.
They usually steal the weed and shrooms out of your backpack because you weren't using them at the moment.
People who commit fraud on this scale are simply those who start at this scale. Not always the super wealthy but often the super wealthy and sometimes those with social ties to the super wealthy.
They were taken with her blue-blood "high WASP" background. Elites put a premium on pedigree (because they benefit from theirs!) and so they just loved the fact that her ancestors started Fleischmann Yeast even though her fam squandered their inheritance within 2 generations. Part of the reason her parents put so much pressure on her to become wealthy was to try and claw back that generational wealth they felt they were owed. Her dad in particular was very bitter over how dad had lost a load of money on bad investments in Hawaii. He then flopped at his oil career (Enron) and never got over his family's loss of wealth and status.
If you read Bad Blood there are quotes from her wealthy investors saying things like "well, her great-grandfather was a famous surgeon so medicine runs in her family!" as part of their decision to invest in her.
Generational wealth is often squandered within a couple generations. The first generation can often times keep it together, but the generation after that and beyond have no connection to the origins. If Elizabeth Holmes’s parents were upset at their loss of wealth, it’s because they had no special abilities that would make them good capital allocators.
It’s quite interesting and can be both. Many well-of friends have a period of rejecting their heritage and end up abusing all kinds of things, only to later fall back into the lane so to speak. Some lose it completely tho.
I learned of an interesting case of this in the film "The Sunshine Makers" about LSD production in California in the 1960's. Billy Hitchcock was a wealthy heir to the Gulf Oil fortune who financed the labs but eventually went back to being a protected rich guy by betraying his chemists.
Many rich people are really gullible to direct bold face lies because they are used to things working out for them and so are often less skeptical / guarded(generally speaking) if the lie sounds good.
I grew up with the mindset being told if things were too good to be true they probably were and to expect failure and be pleasantly surprised if things worked out. This is practical advice for many lower to middle class individuals, but it can also hold you back because you stop looking for genuine opportunities. Better advice would be to do your due diligence.
With Holmes, and hindsight is always 20/20, it should have been obvious that she was full of shit. As you say, I have met dozens of people, men and women, like her, that just lie reflexively and I have learned to spot them from a mile away and avoid them at all costs. If you catch someone lying or exaggerating something inconsequential, and by that, I mean it really does not in any way help them or get them out of trouble, it is easy to brush it off as a white lie, but it is the people who will lie for no reason at all who are the most dangerous because you can be assured that they will lie when they do have a reason.
Most people (including rich ones) who had any scientific knowledge passed on investment/partnership. Humanity has developed ways to evaluate ideas without all of the contextual noise people are referencing in this thread. They’re just effortful and sometimes awkward, so too many people of all types just don’t.
I think particularly in the case of investors it's that they're pretty comfortable with founders that straddle the fine line between bullish and bullshit, because the ones who back up their claims that seem too good to be true make them money, and the ones who don't are priced in. And some who make them lots of money tell a lot of "white lies" on the way. FOMO is a way of missing red flags too.
Holmes' mistake was to massively overdo the "fake it til you make it" in a regulated industry where the implications of the lies appal people, as well as to have a product that was never going to work so the lies were more "this car definitely isn't just rolling down the hill" than "the person at the wheel is only for regulatory reasons". If she'd settled for fantasy metrics and self dealing in a real estate play rather than faking medical tests she'd have investors lining up to fund her second venture...
I'm more intrigued by how she managed to keep customers and at least some of her employees believing and how often that mask slipped.
I think there was an internet meme somewhere, that suggested something along the lines of: if you consider pain to be an essential learning signal, and that beyond a certain level of wealth, you can more or less eliminate pain, then the cognitive effects of such wealth is like being kicked in the head by a horse on a daily basis.
It was a tweet: https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888
> Many rich people are really gullible to direct bold face lies.
I agree with this point. I think that in the investment world, many VCs investing in deep tech are not deeply familiar with the underlying technology. They often say they are betting on the founders, which can inadvertently encourage this behavior, since founders know that their investors are unlikely to scrutinize the technical details too closely.
Those don't seem like particularly lower class attributes, I know many trust fund babies that are jam band wooks/roadies that could be described this way.
Well, in the upper class, they aren't dime a dozen.
(Btw, your comment filled me with warmth, thanks. I also recommend Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality" [1].)
[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/selfdelusion.html
Woah woah woah, lets not bring molly into this. The greatest drug on the planet has nothing to do with new-age nonsense. Nitrous on the other hand...
I agree. I should have said shrooms!
You should have mentioned cocaine, meth, anything that strips away your ability to empathize. If she took shrooms she’d have had some connection to her fellow humans.
Those who make fun of crystals fail to realize that technology is literally a race to who can etch the finest/smallest inscriptions into the most perfect crystals. Followed by who can best feed the knowledge of the world into those very crystals via optimal mechanations such that those crystals produce intelligence.
What does that have to do with what parent is referring to?
Both use the word "crystal." That's it.
I really want to see the movie, sadly it is not yet know when the film is gonna release in German theaters. Actually, I am seriously considering starting my own film distribution and acquiring the rights to this film and a couple others. I would do straight to theater release, ov-only, no subtitles, no fluff.
I'm surprised anyone would even assume there is a chance a Nathan Fielder "documentary" might not be deceiving. Has it gotten so bad that people consider this real reporting now?
Maybe this question is related to polls showing a significant percentage of Americans considering the likes of Colbert, Stewart, and John Oliver trustworthy news reporters btw.
There’s a difference between using real news as comedy, and being deceptive about what you’re reporting. This was the Derren Brown version of a documentary.
They don't call our society post-truth for nothing.
So many comments about Holmes, I think, are missing the point. This isn't about Holmes, and neither, IMO, is the article. Like all things Nathan Fielder does, this is a movie by Nathan for Nathan. Elizabeth Holmes is just used, in every sense of the word, as a prop.
The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.
I don't think this is anything like Nathan's normal stuff. He didn't manipulate at all. He just hung around and asked really direct and obvious questions and you watched her and her husband squirm and lie.
The thing where he said he'd gone through a break-up seemed like it could have been misleading (I don't actually know about his personal life)
How many people do you know who _haven't_ gone through a break-up?
I'm unsure why you'd think this was a deception, given the probability.
He said that he'd just gone through a breakup during a particular part. Trying not to spoil the movie here.
I will give you that. I wasn't sure if that was real or not.
sounds like the Primetime movie. good film. surely has little to do with real life.
“Local woman discovers Nathan For You”
What was his movie review when he saw Ocean's 11? This won't happen in real life? It's entertainment, get over it.
>only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you
Is this your first time encountering a Nathan joint?
if I'm being honest with myself, I doubt I will ever watch this movie - I was very interested in theranos when it looked like a real technology, but once it turned out it was just another scam in an industry rife with them the whole thing just felt boring and grubby. the review, on the other hand, was a superb piece of writing, and I'm glad to have read it.
"an industry rife with them"
Please do tell more. Do you mean pharma or diagnostics?
I meant the general industry of flashy looking "health tech" devices, though perhaps it's unfair to link theranos in with some of the more consumer targeted products. but people really want to believe that silicon valley style technology can come in and solve long-standing medical issues, especially around diagnostics, and I've seen a lot of scammy products go by.
Yeah, as if medical tech has no good engineers, true. An advantage of consumer tech, though, is that because they don't have to be 100% reliable and precise, there is less red tape and they can innovate faster.
As long as they don't pretend otherwise, I guess that's fine.
Has this person never seen Rashomon? Or any of the other films (even documentaries) that cleverly use different perspectives? Seems a bit breathless.
I have no interest at all in watching this. Some woman scammer that got funding because she was a woman means there are no skills of any variety involved in any of this. I would probably even watch something where an intelligent scammer was able to trick investors out of their money, but this isn’t even that. Keep it moving folks, nothing to see here.
I really wanted her to spoil this movie somewhere in this article.
Worth a read about Nathan Fielder, brings a bit of context.
https://archive.ph/sDeDD
I'd never heard of him and this was very helpful context, thanks!
Off topic, but as I was reading it I went through the Canon experiment- there where it says:
> each photographer was given a different description of [the same person]: a millionaire, a convict, a fisherman, an alcoholic, a psychic, and a lifesaver.
Well I looked at the pics and thought "yeah, wow, the millionaire, the convict (so obvious!), the fisherman, the alcoholic" it's really impressive! And only immediately after I saw that each picture had the caption with the supposed character and they were all scrambled- what I thought was obviously a sagacious millionaire was in fact the convict, the slightly deranged looking guy was the fisherman, the millionaire was in fact the alcoholic... Lol.
I kind of missed the Elizabeth Holmes thing first time around and only really had a look at it due to the recent buzz.
My conclusion was that guilt or innocence, 99% of the people who are totally certain of her guilt(or indeed innocence) do not have a good basis to do so. The access to the information required for that is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy. Most seem to have pre decided and are interpreting everything as cast iron proof of their opinion.
It seems like utter madness. I see comments like "You can tell she's a sociopath because of her wide blue eyes" it's like people have started believing their own sarcastic comments.
I see Hank Green has an extended piece on it, but extended Hank Green is quite tiring.
I would rather like to see a detailed teardown of one of the machines to get a sense of how far from working they actually were and what were their blockers.
>The access to the information required for that is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy
I followed the trial, what information is unavailable from that?
>I would rather like to see a detailed teardown of one of the machines to get a sense of how far from working they actually were and what were their blockers
The blockers is what they were trying to do isn't biologically or physically possible. When theranos first got publicity all the experts said what they are trying to do isn't possible with known technology and what we know about capillary blood. That's why I found the navel-gazing so strange.
>I followed the trial, what information is unavailable from that?
Did you follow the trial, or did you read reports from people who followed the trial?
I cannot say what was missing from the trial because I do not know what was presented there in detail. Most of those claiming utter certainty, know as little as I do.
> what they were trying to do isn't biologically or physically possible.
I can easily accept that it is beyond our technical means, but I don't accept that it is physically impossible.
If we stipulated that there was a technology that could create an accurate record of a drop of blood at an atomic level, with all structures and bonds intact.
If it were impossible to derivevthe required information from that data, I would agree that it is impossible.
That is an enormous amount of data. Millions of blood cells. Even if you had a single red blood cell there may be sufficient information in it to determine a white blood cell count through data analysis and the fact that they share an environment.
Of course it isn't possible with current technology. That is true of all technologies before they are invented.
It just seems like every claim it is impossible is just a claim that they can't imagine how it would be done. Almost every invention has a crowd claiming it can't be done.
The only real question is do they have a technolocal advance to get past those hurdles. I would guess that they didn't or it wasn't developed quick enough. That is a reasonable point of challenge.
Going straight to it can't be done so it's fraud puts you among those who claimed powered flight was a fraud, as well as the internet, the telephone, transplants, overnight delivery, and today AI.
> I cannot say what was missing from the trial because I do not know what was presented there in detail. Most of those claiming utter certainty, know as little as I do.
Okay but can you see how this is a different point than, "The access to the information required for that is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy"? The latter implies that most people literally could not obtain access to the necessary information. The former states that you have not looked into it that much and you doubt others have either. The trial is public record; it is available to everyone.
Dude, you're putting a lot of words in my mouth I did not say.
When I first heard of this company trying to do something that didn't appear to be physically or biologically possible I just assumed it would fizzle out eventually. Good for them if they find people willing to fund their reach for the stars. We need those!
Then the publicity came. I found the navel-gazing extremely strange because it was done without any proof they could do what they said they can do. Very little acknowledgement that they were able to do something that required a Nobel Prize level breakthrough and they did it without any bio-science investors or board members. It also came with a heavy dose of a cult of personality which gave me the ick and made me distrust it all even more. Was so weird and performative rather than hard science. Seemed extremely scammy. Certainly not the making of a company that made huge breakthroughs in biomedicine.
Then they announced their partnership with Walgreens. I assumed at that point I was wrong and they had to have been able to show Walgreens they were able to do what they claimed. I didn't think Walgreens would partner with them without doing their due diligence. I was happy to be proven wrong.
Shortly later it turned out, no, it actually was just a straight up scam and Walgreens didn't do their due diligence. Which is the most obvious outcome, but I was sad Walgreens would be duped so easily.
So I am not dismissive of them because I am dismissive of anyone who tries to find a way to do something that has never been done before - I was dismissive of them because they were an obvious scam based on a weird cult of personality.
>I cannot say what was missing from the trial because I do not know what was presented there in detail
What a bizarre thing to say, if you don't know what information was presented at the trial, how can you concluded "The access to the information required [to determine guilt] is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy????"
Holmes isn't disliked for lying to investors, she's disliked for lying to patients, endangering lives.
Yes - disliked for lying to patients, but prosecuted for lying to investors.
prosecuted and indicted for both, convicted by jury for only latter
I saw the film.
I wonder if it was part of the contract that the film makers not use the word sociopath of psychopath in the film. The closes we get to wondering if she may be "the most manipulative person."
I understand that the film should not be trying to give a psychiatric diagnosis yet it's something that I feel could have been discussed, and possibly dismissed, directly.
> I remember one Halloween when the Theranos scandal was at its peak, it seemed like everyone was dressed in a black turtleneck carrying tiny vials of fake blood. Holmes was everywhere.
Rolls eyes
I guess I travel in very different circles than this author.
>But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup. That’s a significant distinction
Now my eyes are getting sore from all the rolling. I don't think that fact gets "lost," and it's not a significant distinction.
I think I'm done with this article, whatever it's point is.
Now go watch F for Fake
The author appears to focus on a large number of grifters as her subject matter, while promoting them. Seems rather sudden in that regard.
> But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup.
trying to minimize fraud? what a weird article.
For context for others, Holmes was acquitted of defrauding patients. A juror stated that she was acquitted because Holmes didn't directly interact with the patients. On the other hand, she did directly interact with investors, so the evidence was much clearer.
Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.
Acquitted on a legal technicality, then, not in the court of accountability and consequences.
Also, just because the jury didn't think there was enough evidence to convict her of defrauding patients (beyond reasonable doubt), doesn't mean she was innocent.
It actually does. You can judge her, but she is not guilty. The more we as a society decide the justice system is just an arbitrary way of deciding who gets punished and not _the_ way of deciding if a person is or is not a criminal the more we slide towards oblivion.
If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.
Important to note that western civilization is fundamentally ok with the knowledge that the statement issued by a jury or judge does not actually define whether a person is morally, factually or colloquially “innocent”. Disputes may be addressed c/o OJ Simpson and the Central Park 5.
Not guilty doesn't mean innocent. It means "guilt could not be proven", it does not mean "innocence was proven".
Seriously, this is why OJ was found liable for the murder of his wife in a civil case, as they're judged on the balance of probabilities.
And it's why people who have served time, then had a retrial ordered and then found not guilty, can be denied compensation, because decisions on compensation are also done on the balance of probabilities.
So yeah, "not guilty" != "innocent".
The finding is ‘not guilty’, rather than innocent. It does not mean the accused is innocent. It means they could not be proven guilty.
Important to note that in the original conception of western civilization, no one is 'innocent'. This idea that you have some secret special power to sniff out a persons true heart from a distance, which is separate from a jury of a persons peers studying and debating the evidence, is at best misguided and arrogant, and at worst a pernicious threat.
Don’t overcomplicate it. People are discussing their opinions of truth, using relevant terms.
I mostly agree with the idea, but to accept this as an absolute implies our justice system is infallible
there is no way to argue that without also believing that the millions of people the state has tossed into prison are all guilty, which is really not something that I can do.
Not guilty != innocent.
No. To argue what you argue is to play pretend stupid.
Court of law with its ability imprison people must have higher standard for the "guilty" decision. That makes it possible for rich guilty people to not be judged guilty.
You are allowed and expexted to use own brain. You can consider people guilty.
What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.
Indeed. While she's not on the leaderboard of worst humans ever, she's still up there. Any whitewashing of her reputation is bogus.
This point is also clearly made in the film. Sounds like the article has nothing to say and just wants to leech off the success and attention of the doc.
I mean in do you really have a lot of sympathy for the oligarchic tax advantaged zombie family hedge funds that made a bet and lost?
They didn't do their diligence and do kinda deserve to lose their money.
Holmes and Theranos leadership did more than defraud investors. They knowingly ran unreliable tests on actual patients. People were told they were miscarrying when they weren't, or that they had HIV when they didn't. And they drove an employee, Ian Gibbons, to suicide, then threatened his widow with a lawsuit when she talked to reporters about it.
Important to note she was found not guilty of this charge.
That is not because Theranos did not commit such fraud against patients; Balwani was convicted on those charges. It's just the prosecutors were unable to prove that Holmes was culpable.
As others have noted her current prison time is for fraud against Walton, Ellison, Murdoch etc - the same family funds funneling money to the Trump-klepto-universe.
They are the ones who propped up the company without any independent testing and enabled the bad tests and are ruining our society with their dumb money.
That’s true but not relevant. I have absolutely no sympathy for the rubes who thought FTX was a good place to put their money, but that doesn’t make the fraud any more OK.
This is conflating users and investors. Investors have the obligation of diligence and it's clear here (and with FTX) they didn't. If they did, neither would be happened.
Also it's exactly the opposite, scamming the public is fine - United healthcare can scam the government out of billions, no one goes to jail, minor fees but it's +ROI for them.
Murdoch's lose an investment after YOLO-ing a few hundred mil and no diligence and they get the feds to give jail time?
The people that invested their money did not make these decisions. The people running the fund did. You're victim blaming. Most people don't get a very wide choice where their money goes outside the couple of options the fund managers present. I'd also venture most people do not even look at what stocks are in the fund. They'll look at the past earnings and check the box.
This is family funds - Murdoch, Walton, Ellison. You think they shouldn't be responsible for doing due diligence? The device didn't work. They could've independently verified that at any point.
If there were users that were given bad tests, that was due to these investors not doing their jobs.
I hate these kinds of documentaries. Even after being caught and punished, these wannabe larger than life con artists still get an exit. If school shooters shouldn't be plastered all over the news, then why are these people.
Come on, just go watch the movie like everybody else, she needs your financial support
I've never cared for that nate dude and I don't think the behaviors his content seems to encourage is healthy or useful, I'm so sick of hearing about it already.
I ship Nathan and Holmes
Most of the things that get posted here are deceiving. It's just that people care to deconstruct why it's deceiving when it aligns with their biases.