(www.readtheprofile.com)
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!"
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.
I’d expect nothing less from Nathan Fielder. With his involvement, anything less than surprising weirdness taken to extremes would be a disappointment.
Even the trailer for this film implies "look at how cooky / manipulative this woman is -- we're just showing her staring at Nathan"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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".
“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.
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.
So pay attention to the sound track and adjust your "suspension of disbelief" accordingly.
In general, it would help anyone to know more about the craft of how filmmakers get people to feel emotions.
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.
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!"
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?
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.
Its so weird because at one point they really had me and I remarked to them that what I liked about them eas they were always up for it and openminded.
Turns out they were just telling you what you wanted to hear and reflecting your desires back at you while trying to capitalize on new business ideas and have you contribute food/supplies for their gatherings.
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.
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.
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?
Well, yes. We know the plot, but we don't know in what light the movie casts here, and how they do it.
(/s in case it's necessary)
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?
Both just apologists for obvious scumbags
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.
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.
Accountability.
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...
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.)
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.”
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.
Yes, these comments look like a very serious well-funded astroturfing campaign.
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.
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.
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?!?
But, monster is a superlative: there isn't much worse you can be. If you are calling a plurality or majority of people 'the worst kind of human,' does the term not lose utility? Do you use it as a mere stand-in for 'bad person?'
That is why I asked: 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?
This may seem less serious than I intend it to be. I do think stealing a colleague's lunch is a sign of severely compromised morality, but I wouldn't default to calling them a monster.
This ultimately matters to me, because I am concerned about the outcome. If we characterize people who do bad things as monsters or 'bad people,' it may follow that they be denied any sympathy, humane treatment in prisons or a path to rehabilitation. None of this is to diminish the harm to victims, whose concerns are a priority. I would posit this is a significant reason that sexual assault in men's prisons is tolerated or accepted as serving justice. The larger and more absolute the category, the more people are subject to that outcome.
I also tend to be a bit hypervigilant about anticipated objections. This may appear as a lack of clarity of opinion when it is intended to be concession for the sake of discussion.
Bringing Amanda Seyfried in as a primary character was unnecessary as was the entire third hour of this movie.
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.)
To voice the audience's opinions in the movie itself so the movie can directly address some of them.
Exactly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake
I highly recommend it!
Available here: https://www.criterionchannel.com/films/3BF6gJZI/f-for-fake
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).
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)?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
Same formula across country, culture, time and people keep getting sucked in.
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)
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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")
> like a puzzle... people believe their own bullshit!
Most people do not have this kind of resources.
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.
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.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone put this into words.
Thank you. A very compelling thought.
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.
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
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.
Conversely, actively complaining about it prevents enabling group thing to form. It helps victims identify the situation sooner, to leave of better protect themselves.
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).
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood:_Secrets_and_Lies_in...
https://www.thesocialradars.com/transcripts/TSR-S4-Tyler-Shu...
https://www.thesocialradars.com/transcripts/TSR-S4-Tyler-Shu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inventor:_Out_for_Blood_in...
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.
In this case, the attempts are simultaneously tortuous, torturous, and tortious!
> After 3 hours I was just exhausted...
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?
If you’re that interested in getting these answers, you probably should watch the film
Been like this with most mainstream documentaries like this one.
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.
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.
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 ...
Nope. He's barely even in the film. It's not a normal documentary.
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.
Probably no. The most manipulative are still not in the jail and are running some well-known big companies.
Or religions, or religious-like communities.
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.
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.
At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.
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...
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.
I grew up in one place with a very marked accent, and moved later in life to a place with another distinct, very different accent. My accent shifts within minutes of talking with people from either place. Sometimes I'm in a room with people from both places, and my accent changes depending on who's in my field of view. This doesn't take any effort; in fact, I need to make an effort to avoid it.
This is how accents work. Our brain adapts very quickly to try to fit in.
(I grew up in Buenos Aires and now I live in Madrid)
That said no it is not particularly important. But striking and memorable. The voice is the most striking part but I don't think it would land with me if not for also the turtleneck and the other Jobs knockoff stuff.
The point being people have different ways of speaking to different people.
Maybe another example is Hawaiians talking to each other vs to tourists
For her voice register change, where's the line or the gray area? It's a very personal human thing. I find her to be oriented around how she presents herself and how she is perceived. Then she uses her impressive talents to guide and manipulate.
I find her unnerving but also a great example of how the eyes are really part of the brain.
[edit: a lot, same general idea but composed bester[
let's flip it on its' head; she's now seeking sympathy and understanding from the public and her voice softened: Does that aid perception of truth and honesty? It doesn't for me.
Btw rather hardcore sociopathy is the norm amongt elites who worked their own way to some small pyramid of power and/or wealth, normal balanced happy folks give up that endless chase long before since true achievements in life are hardly up there. But you can't explain this to them, you get blank stare at best or get ridiculed more probably (tried a few times, sobering experiences).
Its rather exceptional when above is not valid, and certainly shouldnt be shocking when revealed. Take top 10 companies, CEOs and whole C suite are all that, they select for their own 'kin'. Take top 100 and still most would fall there firmly, they just know how to do self PR better.
Using deeper voice as a result is like putting on suit and making your hair - adjusting yourself to societal biases.
The issue with Holmes is not voice or cloth or whatever. It is fraud, lies and lack of care about harm she caused.
And using deeper voice is no worsr then putting on cloth to impress. Or using makeup to impress.
If people are irrationally taking deeper voices more serious, using deeper voice is not some kind of evil manipulation. People with higher pitch are not unserious, only treated that way a bit more.
Your deeper voice is not making you more valid or serious in any way. Yes, it is advantage. It is ok to mimic it to get equal advantage.
Care to finish that thought?
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
https://www.russellreynolds.com/en/about/newsroom/women-ceos...
> 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
The film is by Nathan Fielder, who specializes in fake situations and fake documentaries.
The easiest demonstrative example is looking at someone like Leni Riefenstahl‘s work.
She is MAGA. That's enought to know about the topic.
The media and seemingly random persons like this stanning her is extremely weird.
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.
Edit: looked it up. Who is stanning her? The person who wrote the article or Nathan?
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"
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
You’re on ycombinator, a forum for startups. 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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
People post vile comments because they don’t have to face the consequences which adds to the vicious cycle.
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.
That makes sense. Berkeley is part of the same social caste Holmes exploited for investment.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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)
It doesn’t occur to me as to why I would want to do that…
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.
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.
Has anyone else seen both and can they comment on the differences?
In the other, Elizabeth Holmes invites the filmmaker to live with her.
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.
>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
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.
"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
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.
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.
Yes, CNBC is a prime example :-)
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.
So yes
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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….
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.
People who commit fraud at that scale are not a dime a dozen.
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.
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.
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 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.
(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
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.
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'm unsure why you'd think this was a deception, given the probability.
Please do tell more. Do you mean pharma or diagnostics?
As long as they don't pretend otherwise, I guess that's fine.
Is this your first time encountering a Nathan joint?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
trying to minimize fraud? what a weird article.
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.
If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.
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".
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.
They didn't do their diligence and do kinda deserve to lose their money.
Reading John Carreyrou's book, it's pretty clear she was guilty of (lots of bad) things beyond the lone 'defrauding investor' charge that was successfully carried.
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.
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?
If there were users that were given bad tests, that was due to these investors not doing their jobs.
Richard Feynman called it "normalization of deviance", but there's other names for it as well depending on the details.
I'm sure everyone has heard some variation of this before, especially in the work place.
I once got angrily shouted at by a customer because I turned up as a consultant and apparently I told them exactly what the last five consultants had said!
Well, yes, of course. It's the solution to their problem.
I regularly face variants of this at work.
"Yeah, yeah, backups are important, stop talking about it already."
"Yes, but they're still not happening and they still remain the top priority and it is madness to start a project to reformat the SAN array until backups are working!"
"That's what you said last week! You always say that!"
Etc...
There's a point where people lean into it and become purposefully contrary, making their refusal to change their opinion a permanent part of their identity as a person.
Your comment doesn't seem to exhibit any understanding of the opposing arguments.
Just offering my take of your comment as an impartial observer.
I assume what you meant is that having heard about the person the movie focuses on, you have no interest in seeing more about her. Having felt entirely apathetic about Holmes since the early days of the Theranos scam, I can’t say I disagree with you.