How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
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People who commit fraud at that scale are not a dime a dozen.
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.
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.
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.
(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
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.
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.
So yes
Yes, CNBC is a prime example :-)
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.
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.
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
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.
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 …
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone put this into words.
Thank you. A very compelling thought.
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inventor:_Out_for_Blood_in...
https://www.thesocialradars.com/transcripts/TSR-S4-Tyler-Shu...
https://www.thesocialradars.com/transcripts/TSR-S4-Tyler-Shu...
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...
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.
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”.
> 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
“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.
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, 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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake
I highly recommend it!
Available here: https://www.criterionchannel.com/films/3BF6gJZI/f-for-fake
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...
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.
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).
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)?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 is MAGA. That's enought to know about the topic.
The media and seemingly random persons like this stanning her is extremely weird.
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"
Edit: looked it up. Who is stanning her? The person who wrote the article or Nathan?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That makes sense. Berkeley is part of the same social caste Holmes exploited for investment.
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)
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.
Is this your first time encountering a Nathan joint?
>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
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?
"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
Please do tell more. Do you mean pharma or diagnostics?
As long as they don't pretend otherwise, I guess that's fine.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.