誰もエリザベス・ホームズから目を離せない理由――ドキュメンタリー『You Can See Everything』をめぐって

I want to talk about Elizabeth Holmes. She's the subject of a new documentary directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim called You Can See Everything. And when the trailer for the movie dropped in late September, it felt like it was the only thing anyone could talk about. At least anyone who spends too much time online and loves drama. It turned out that Fielder had secretly spent a month with Holmes, her partner, Billy Evans, and their two kids just before she began her 11-year sentence at a federal prison in Texas. But I think what made the trailer so fascinating to people wasn't just the secrecy of the project or the weirdness of letting Nathan Fielder, of all people, live with you and film everything. As a culture, as a media apparatus, we've been obsessed with her, but we've never really met her. And I think when the trailer dropped, it made this promise. You're finally going to meet Elizabeth Holmes. You'll finally learn who she actually is. Or are you? After all, we're also talking about one of the most notorious fraudsters of the 21st century. In any event, I knew I had to see the movie

and I knew I would have questions. The plan? Take John Carreyrou, the reporter who literally wrote the book on Holmes, to the movies with me. So today I've convened John and two other Times journalists who have their own experiences with Holmes to answer some questions. What happened to Elizabeth Holmes? Why does she persist in the public imagination? And is she actually like that? I'm Max Reed. This is Hard Fork. So I'm joined today by three journalists who covered Elizabeth Holmes at three different stages in her life. Investigative reporter John Carreyrou, executive producer Caitlin Roper, and tech writer Aaron Griffith. I have a couple quick notes before we start. The New York Times makes an appearance in this movie. We're not going to get into that, but I want to be clear that no one on this podcast was involved in the article that preoccupies Elizabeth Holmes throughout the movie. And I also want to reassure our audience, this is a very twisty and turny documentary. We're going to talk a little bit about some specific scenes. If you're extremely concerned about spoilers, I would hit pause, come back later.

But we're not going to reveal any of the big sort of second half turns or revelations. So with that being said, welcome to the podcast, guys. Hey. I thought we could start by asking each of you to explain briefly what your relationship is to Elizabeth Holmes. Kaylin, I want to start with you. You were, I think, the first person to interview Elizabeth Holmes for a magazine. What was that like? It was the end of 2013, and I was an editor at Wired Magazine, and I was looking for founders for us to cover and include in something. And always, as one of few women editors, I was looking for women founders. And I found this mention in the Wall Street Journal of Elizabeth Holmes. And so I did some research and, you know, there weren't any magazine stories or profiles or interviews. And I reached out to Theranos and got a yes to come down and interview her.

So I walked into a, you know, at the Theranos offices. I wasn't allowed to go anywhere else other than the room that we were in, which had a phlebotomist to take my blood. And then also a place for me to sit with Elizabeth. And that's when I met her. Most notable immediately was what seemed like an affectation of her voice. It seemed kind of odd. She was wearing her Steve Jobs outfit. And she had on, like, red lipstick. And she had this sort of, you know, this thing that now we've become quite aware of, but this kind of big blue-eyed stare, you know, kind of still and looking directly at you. and I asked her a bunch of questions. Now, of course, like I was, you know, Wired in general at that time especially was their orientation really was on innovation and celebration of that innovation and I was actually genuinely excited to meet a founder who was working in biotech instead of, you know, trying to make food delivery faster

or cars come quicker, you know, and it felt like significantly more interesting to me. The part about her pitch that was about reducing health care costs, making transparent blood test results to patients and potentially disrupting Medicare. You know, I thought that was that was pretty cool. And I was excited to be there. So I interviewed her for about an hour and then I had my blood drawn by a phlebotomist. So that was like the teeny tiny vial that you've seen in pictures, like a teeny tiny vial. And because I was dealing with the medical stuff at the time, I asked for the same panel that I had just had so that I could compare the results of my panel and the Theranos panel. Wow, you did more than a lot of her investors. Well, I mean, there was no, I mean, obviously, and you guys know this, but like there was no verifiable science. I couldn't see the lab. I couldn't talk to a lead scientist. In some ways, she was sort of standing in for the lead scientist in the way that she talked about the company.

And, of course, she was also talking about new science, right, genetic testing of the blood in this different way. But anyway, they took my blood, and I did look at the panel against mine, and it was very much similar data to the same test, like, basically, like, you know, not exactly, but very, very close. Of course, since then, I've wondered, where was it tested? How did they do it since it was such a small amount of blood? It wasn't a pinprick, but it was, like, that tiny vial. And so, you know, I don't want to go on because I've said so much already, but, like, there's lots of things about, like, the experience of spending time with her that were interesting and odd. And I think, you know, if I had to characterize some of that, I would say I believe she had conviction about what she was doing. Yeah. I mean, we definitely want to put a pin in that and get back to that because I think a lot of what we're going to be talking about is Elizabeth Holmes' conviction and our conviction as interlocutors of Elizabeth Holmes. Kaylin, you were sort of there at the rise. I mean, you're talking about early in her career. She had a little bit of investment. Right, exactly.

Let's turn to you, John, because you were there for the downfall. I mean, you played a prominent role in the downfall. When did you first hear about Elizabeth Holmes and what was your sort of experience of reporting on her? Yeah, she wasn't really on my radar until a New Yorker story of her, a profile by Ken Oletta was published, I think, in mid-December 2014. and I read that commuting back from the Wall Street Journal newsroom in Manhattan to my apartment in Brooklyn, read it on the subway, and there were some things that I picked up in that story that struck me as odd. The main thing probably is that, you know, she was making these bold claims about what her technology could do, but there were no peer-reviewed scientific journal studies or articles about her technology. And then there was also a note in there about the secrecy.

And I thought to myself, there's something not quite right here, but then didn't really think any more of it for the next couple weeks until about three weeks later, out of the blue I got a call from a source who was a practicing pathologist in Columbia, Missouri and he'd read the very same New Yorker story and he knew a lot more about blood testing than I did and he was very skeptical of her claims and about the feasibility of what she asserted. He was like three times removed from any real information. But the fact that he was so skeptical about the science and the feasibility of the science coming on top of my own questions that I had spontaneously reading the New Yorker story, that kind of made me willing to look a little bit more into it. So there were all these YouTube videos that I watched.

And we've made it possible. to eliminate the tubes and tubes of blood that traditionally have to be drawn from an arm, and replaced it with the nanotainer. And there's something really odd about her. I felt like she was playing a role. There was some play acting going on. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I felt sure that part of it wasn't genuine. And that made me even more kind of suspicious and willing to delve deeper into the story. So if Caitlin was there at the rise and John was there for the fall, Erin, you covered Elizabeth's trial extensively. What was that experience like? The trial took many, many years to actually happen. So I believe, you know, it started in 2021 in San Jose, which is about an hour and a half south of San Francisco.

So me and, you know, half of the SF press corps is down there hanging around the courthouse for about four months. But it was really surreal in a way because we are in the hallway and like kind of in the same space as Elizabeth Holmes and her family. And we wound up actually kind of spending a lot of time sitting around with Billy Evans, her partner, who plays a really prominent role in the movie, and her parents, who are also in the movie. And they were very, you know, friendly and chatty to us. Billy, you know, would talk about Burning Man or various things, but never anything about the trial or about Holmes. And the oddest thing that happened, I would say, is that Billy Evans' dad came to the jury selection and was hanging out with all of us in the media and kind of chatting with us. And he told us his name was Hanson and that he was just there as an observer because he was interested in criminal justice. And that's not a totally implausible story because there are a lot of people that, you know, some people call gavel groupies that hang out at trials.

They just, like, find the whole process interesting. There were some people that went to every single day of this trial over the course of four months. So, you know, we just thought he was kind of one of those. And then later on the first day of the trial, when Holmes shows up with her family arm in arm, he's with them, Hanson. And it turns out it was actually Billy Evans' dad. Wow. Wow. This is like, I mean, you know, once you see the movie, I feel like that clicks something into place to learn that his dad was doing stuff like that. Okay, so we have here sort of three periods of Elizabeth Holmes' The Arc of Her Career. Now, last month, a trailer drops for a new documentary that seems to suggest a kind of fourth period. I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you? there's no there's no reason for me to do that

okay all right okay good shot how did you guys react when this movie trail were any of you aware that this documentary was in the works Yeah, I actually found out about it about 18 months ago, a little more than 18 months ago. Fielder reached out to me and I was kind of unfriendly to him because at the time I was being harassed by this guy. And so when Fielder reached out to me in the middle of this, I was suspicious that he and this crackpot were basically in league and working together. and so I you know was was pretty hostile. Wow did you mention that to him or you just kind of

said no thanks? Yeah eventually I mean I forwarded Nathan's email to my agents and then my agent talked to his agent and we were able to ascertain that they weren't you know it wasn't the same thing and that they weren't working together. But I didn't, I still didn't really have a good idea of what exactly Fielder was working on. I didn't understand what exactly he wanted from me. I was kind of done with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. And I would say, like, I heard about the movie, not that, like, at the beginning of their promotion, and I thought, why? Just because, like, at that point, there had been so much. and then I found out it was Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder and I thought those are interesting artists but my overall question was how much are we going to be paying attention to this woman?

How long? Forever as it turns out. You were pretty sick of the Elizabeth Holmes story. It just raises questions for me. Like, why is she, you know, there's lots of, in my job, I look at lots of stories of con people. Con people should be afraid. And, you know, I just, I find they're unsatisfying because mostly they believe what they're selling for a long period of time. And we think as regular people, you know, who go to a party and we say something weird and we think about it for four days, or maybe that's just me, like that if we were lying all the time, it would, you know, really suck and be hard. And I think actually, you know, they have a higher tolerance for deceit, sure, but also just uncomfortability. And I think both Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder have a very high tolerance for discomfort. Yes, you could say that. I mean, it's interesting to hear you say this, Caitlin, because one of the most interesting things is how enduring their cultural fascination with a figure like Holmes is.

There's a lot of people, I mean, I would include myself in this, who have been sort of obsessed with her without ever having really met her. And you guys are part of a small group of people who have gotten up close, to say the least. And I am interested, one of the main questions I have after seeing this movie is what you think of how she was portrayed or how she portrayed herself in the film. Like, was it surprising? Did it feel new or did it feel like more of the kind of same old? John, you spent the most time thinking about Elizabeth. Let's start with you. Right. And just to be clear, she never granted me an interview. When I was researching Theranos, I tried to get an interview with her in late 2015 and, you know, made repeated attempts, repeated requests. and she would never grant me an interview because I think it was clear to her that I, you know, was very skeptical of what she had stated on the record about her company's capabilities,

and she just didn't want to engage with that. I tried to interview her again when I went on book leave in early 2016 for the book. I tried to make the case to her PR people that this was her opportunity to have some influence over the narrative. and again, you know, I was declining any access, so it was with a bit of envy, actually, that I watched Fielder and Oppenheim get all this access and be able to ask any question they wanted. In terms of her portrayal, or at least how she comes across, I think that there are two sides of Elizabeth Holmes. One is that she can be very pleasant and she can be extremely charming if she wants to be. And I think there's another side which she doesn't show much, if at all, in this film, which is that she is feisty, she's

combative, she's ruthless, and she's a liar. And the the feisty sort of combative ruthless parts you see in tiny little flashes I say in the film when she being asked by Fielder you know insistently well how did you get here Don't you think you did something wrong? And she says, I did not. And sort of there's that. There are a couple of times where she snaps back, I did not. And her demeanor is a little bit more tense. And I think that's the closest you get to seeing that other Elizabeth Holmes. Um, but, uh, for the most part, she does a very good job of hiding it. Caitlin, what about you? Uh, was this similar to the Holmes that you remember from those interviews from that interview now more than a decade ago? I mean, I, I think, I think I interpreted them differently, obviously in 2013 than, uh, now in 2026.

But one of the things I've thought a lot about in the intervening years is teasing out what, what her performances are for, who they're for, right? Like when I met her, like, again, there was not a lot of female founders and certainly not raising this level of capital and focused on biotech. And so I thought to myself that the way she was dressed, the sort of black on black, which didn't seem super weird to me, but seemed very like purposeful, was was also about just being in rooms with men when you're trying to raise money. There's lots of research that shows that women do not get investment in the same way that men do. And so in my mind, you know, I thought of that as partially trying to pass as a strong, you know, founder, which like at the time, the other thing that was going on was just like every single person saying like your investments are just in the in the founder. Right. It's just sort of like auteur theory of technology that, you know, you're investing in someone. But I couldn't I did get a vibe that something wasn't totally, you know, she was performing something.

And and and also she's just weird. Yeah. You know, so when I watched the movie, I felt like the same that I felt some of the same suite of feelings. Yeah. I mean, she to Caitlin's point about her costume, she very conspicuously dresses and makes herself up in almost an exact opposite way to her at her most famous in the 2015, 2016. There are no turtlenecks in this movie. There are very few dark colors. Her hair is down most of the time. And, you know, as you're saying, Caitlin, it's hard not to wonder if this is itself a sort of strategy. I mean, in some ways, it probably obviously is a sort of strategy to come across in a more relaxed and intimate and different way. Yeah, especially in those scenes. You know, it's like they were in a temporary housing situation, but they're at the beach. You know, it's like we're frolicking on the beach, like literally we're frolicking on the beach. We're just taking care of our dear child. I mean, her child is present. Yeah. Right. Constantly. And so that's also like a kind of telegraphing ease and intimacy, right?

Like you're inside someone's real self. And, you know, how to interpret that is kind of like I think the filmmakers, Oppenheim and Fielder, made choices carefully about what's in their edit, as anyone would, and were thinking about the question of, like, what she was performing. that scene where she doesn't understand fielder's question about like and over and over again she repeats the same answer it's like that was one of the most intense like scenes for me because it's just completely baffling yeah and there was a parallel that reminded me of actually at the trial there were moments i don't know if you remember this john when like she was being interrogated by the prosecutors and they're asking the same question over and over and over and like just slightly different ways and trying to, like, get her to, and it just very much reminded me of that where it's like, there's a little bit of a communication breakdown here. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think the reason communication breaks down quite simply is she's not

answering the question. She's invading the question. She's aligning. And, I mean, I felt like there were some moments in the film where she was just brazenly lying. One scene that comes to mind is when they're at this photography studio that Billy, her companion, has taken her to to film her from a bunch of different angles to basically create a digital replica of her that he's going to be able to show their children when she's in prison. And before she goes on to have her picture taken, suddenly she breaks down in tears, And you hear her say through the tears that last time, you know, people in her entourage pushed her into the spotlight. It didn't go well. And I almost jumped out of my chair because to me that that that was like a brazen lie. And the reason is that, you know, the first time around, she embraced the spotlight.

She jumped into the spotlight. She did everything she could to attract the spotlight. And there are even texts that show that she was enjoying the spotlight and that she premeditated the coverage, texts that came out during her criminal trial. So I felt like those tears in that moment at the photography studio were completely manufactured. Well, it's also possible, though, that she planned it. But isn't it possible that even regardless of if she was into it or not, when she was doing it at the time, that the result is that she's like kind of traumatized by how it all turned out. And also, I mean, I mean, John, like I hear you. That does seem like a brazen lie to me. And yet one of the interesting things of the film is as a mother, like I'm watching it and I'm actually every time I remember that she's about to go to prison and she's just given just has these young children. I felt like sad and empathy for her, you know, because like this is such a weird period of time to be with someone.

No matter who they are. Right. Like the last days before they go to prison for how many years? Twelve. Eleven in three months. Eleven in three months. Yeah. Although she's now going to be moving to a halfway house apparently next year. So. And John, I don't I don't think that negates your point. Like it's like my sadness about her situation, just a human sadness about her situation doesn't change this question of her. like calculations about what she's saying and and lying. I think that's kind of what makes the movie work so well. I was very nervous that it was like, oh, well, this is just going to be kind of a redemption story or getting us all kind of on her side emotionally. And it does take us into her emotional state. And like it makes you feel bad for her at times. She's going to prison. Like you said, she's going to be away from her her family. But it doesn't also let her off the hook, which is what I was kind of most worried about. Right. There's a scene where I think she and Fielder are outside in the dunes above the beach and

he asks her whether she's ever lied in her life, whether she's ever told a lie ever. And her answer is no. He goes, Liz, really? Yeah, yeah. He's all of us. It's preposterous, but I felt like they gave her enough rope to hang herself there. You know, you could take the point of view that letting her say that on camera with a straight face is giving her the opportunity to manipulate the public and to rehabilitate herself. But I think the way it comes off is not that. It comes off as this absurd statement that can't possibly be true. And if anything, you know, she looks worse for it. Yeah, there's a real sense that the movie is trying and maybe Fielder as the sort of motivating force within the movie is trying to come down on this idea.

Is she manipulative? Does she believe what she's saying? Is she full of it? Is she, can we redeem her? And I'm not sure there's a satisfying answer. But Caitlin, it was interesting to hear you say that you could generate a kind of academic sympathy for her or not even academic, a real sympathy for her in the situation. Because you're probably the person here who has the best claim to herself to have been manipulated by Elizabeth Holmes. I mean, did you feel manipulated in retrospect through that interview, by that interview? I mean, yes, I felt like I felt like it was, you know, the granting access to that interview was the beginning of a plan. that they rolled out and that there was a calculated interest in validating what they were doing. So like, but I was like, do I blame her? I never felt like I didn't feel personal animates against her. I felt regret that we wrote about her so early when we couldn't validate any of her scientific

claims, you know? I was wondering, did you ever feel like she was reluctant at the time, that she was a reluctant participant in the interview and that you were dragging her feet? No way. Not at all. I didn't. I thought she was trying to telegraph strength and thoughtfulness. And, of course, any time I asked a question that she didn't want to answer, she would look to someone. But, like, clearly she was deciding. She had already decided she wasn't going to answer. But, honestly, it seemed familiar to me. I interviewed other tech founders, and they would withhold some information and try to give you the information that was beneficial to their IPO or to their round of funding. And so the idea of that manipulation, it was always at play in these interviews. These are not like unvarnished people. Again, back to my point about like you're investing in a person. If you're not compelled by that person, you can't believe what they're going to do. I felt like that was a lot of what everyone was doing at the time. So that scene where she cries and she blames her entourage at the time for pushing her into the limelight,

I felt like is shirking responsibility, her responsibility. And there's another moment where she does that, too, when Sonny Balwani comes up. And without explicitly doing so, she implicitly throws him under the bus. Sorry, we should just say Sunny Balwani was her partner, her romantic partner, but also her business partner at Theranos. And he was the chief operating officer, if I'm remembering. He was her second in command and he was the chief operating officer. President, yeah. Right. And he essentially ran the company with her. But there's an unwillingness to take any sort of responsibility in Elizabeth Holmes. There's, you know, this subtle blaming of other people that I find incredibly manipulative because she's doing that at the same time as she's trying to get you to feel sympathy for her. Yeah. This is a great place to take a break.

When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about why Elizabeth Holmes continues to assess us and what it says about the tech industry today. Welcome back. I'm with Aaron Griffith, John Carreyrou, and Caitlin Roper talking about Elizabeth Holmes and the new documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. John, you are writing an essay about your experience watching this movie and your reaction to it, and also about the question of why Elizabeth Holmes is still an enduring figure. I mean, she's such a sort of emblematic figure of 2010s in tech. And here we are in 2026, and we seem unable to kind of escape her. So what for you is the thing that makes Elizabeth Holmes such a continuous object of obsession for culture and media? You know, I've long asked myself that.

Why are people so fascinated with this person? Because I got to say, I found the story interesting, you know, for a couple of years. But it's gotten a little bit old for me personally. I think the answer is that people are captivated with the psychology of deceit, especially when it's a woman doing the deceiving. And I think there's another dimension here, which is that this was a medical story. This was not just, you know, a fraud where investors were defrauded. It wasn't just your run-of-the-mill corporate fraud. There was a public health element to it where, you know, patients' lives were arguably put in jeopardy. And so I think people are just fascinated with the notion of what goes through the mind of a woman who's willing to play with patients' lives.

And I think that, you know, clearly a decade in, people are still captivated by this. Caitlin, you were saying before that you felt like gender played a pretty significant role also in her rise. I mean, do you agree with John that this is part of what's happening with the continuing kind of interest in her? Yes. I think that as a culture in the United States, we see men lie all the time and they get caught in those lies. And we don't see them reviled in this way. So, you know, I'm not equating, you know, stealing money or a phony business deal with exactly what Elizabeth Holmes did. But I think we are shocked when we see a woman do that. And we are not shocked when we see a man do that. And I do think that gender plays a huge role in just like the idea that we want to continue to drag, like, you know, focus and energy against a woman over time. I think there's a lot of energy for that. Now, I'm not saying at all that I think that that energy is not deserved for Elizabeth Holmes.

But I do think there's culture at play on the question of who we disparage and continue to disparage over time. And Max, to your question, I mean, her gender was absolutely a part of the rise because, like Caitlin was saying, The entire tech press was looking for examples of standout female founders because at that time in the mid-2010s, everyone kind of looked around and realized, oh, my God, where are all the women? Silicon Valley, more so than any other sector, seems to have a real problem with elevating women. When we've got all these tech bro unicorn founders, why aren't there any female founders of billion-dollar companies? And then suddenly here is one. And so that's why she got put on the cover of like every business magazine, because we finally found an example of it. And so I think this kind of happened later, too, with the quote unquote girl boss era, where like a lot of female founders got disproportionate press because there was so much excitement about promoting a female founder.

And then, of course, they got disproportionate criticism and like, you know, they would call it takedowns because of all of that press and attention. And Erin, to your point, literally I wrote about her because I was a woman editor at a mostly male magazine covering a mostly male industry. And it was so novel to me to find a founder who was a woman, and not only that, but someone in biotech. So I do think gender played a huge role in my, personally, my covering her at that early stage. But to your question of the enduring interest, that one is a little bit different because there are just so many elements of her story that are a little bit like odd or attention grabbing. I mean, from the outfits to the voice to like all of the kind of like the secrecy and obsession. Being a mother. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There are just enough pieces of it that I feel like it touches every possible demographic. Like one thing from the trial, I remember, you know, talking to a lot of the toward the end, there were a lot of spectators showing up and including people who were in a book club who read John's book and who came together as like a little book club outing.

And, you know, I'm asking them, like, what are you guys doing here? And one of them told me which I never forget like oh we just fans of white collar crime And I was like you mean as a book genre or as a genre of story okay sure and in the same way that there are people who are fans of like you know murder stories or murder podcasts like there's also a fraud contingent as well john must be such a celebrity those people yeah i agree with everything you guys just said but let me ask this though we're now 11 years after I broke this story in the Wall Street Journal, and who is stoking the interest? Who is recreating reasons for us to again pay attention to her? It's Elizabeth herself. She is the one who invited these filmmakers into her home 30 days,

34 days before she was scheduled to go to prison, she's the one who is still asking for the public attention. And so, you know, I think we also have her own very proactive efforts to blame for this, for why this is still, you know, a story that's in the news and it's generating tons of coverage 11 years later. That's a great point. And honestly, I would not be surprised if Sam Bankman Freed is currently emailing Nathan Fielder about getting a meeting. Unfortunately, SBF really has nothing on Liz Holmes as a kind of cultural figure. He just does not have the juice in the way she does. I mean, sorry, she's totally a reality TV producer about it. She's got something that he just doesn't have. So one thing I'd love to talk about is the romantic relationships of Elizabeth Holmes, which have been on display in these two giant ways in the trial and all of the reporting around what was happening at Theranos, but also in this movie in which we are inside her marriage, inside her house with her husband and her children.

and there's I don't want to spoil the movie but I would say the kind of extreme devotion that was captured in a lot of what we learned about her relationship with Sunny Balwani was very very similar here and there's something watching this as a woman of trying to toggle between well first of all you're still asking yourself the questions is this real Do they think it's real? Do real people talk like this to each other? Like, you know, that's one fundamental question. But then, like, what is the role of this, you know, partnership, romantic partnership and business partnership? And then why is she picking these guys? What I found so fascinating is when she's talking, her and Billie are getting really excited, like, jazzing each other up, talking about Theranos 2.0. and her parents are there and they're just kind of slowly zooming in on her parents and the looks

on their faces are they're just you can just see them just sort of you know stealing themselves because it feels like they're like here we go again yeah they look they look very nervous and around that time in the film Nathan uh asks Mr. Holmes Christian Holmes whether it's a good idea for Elizabeth to be getting into business again with a romantic partner, given what happened the first time. And his answer is, good question. I trust Billy. Good question. I trust Billy. You know, and implied, of course, is I didn't trust Sonny. My view of those two relationships is that as much as Elizabeth tried to blame it all on Sonny in the trial. The jury obviously didn't buy it. It convicted her. I didn't buy it. But I do think there was a grain of truth there in the sense that Sonny was a terrible influence

on Elizabeth Holmes. And I think we see through this film that Billy Evans is a terrible influence on Elizabeth Holmes. He's narcissistic. He's arrogant. He's controlling. He's manipulative. He lies. And I feel like The pattern is repeating itself. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, that scene you described, then Billy Evans appears, even though the dad, Christian Holmes, has just said, I trust Billy. And he comes right over to say, no more talking. Right. No more talking. So, like, that was a really, like, I thought that scene was very powerful. But, you know, I do, both of these guys seem pretty awful. Yeah. But I do feel like, as with everything around Elizabeth Holmes, we have to come back to, like, what's going on inside of her? Like, what is this? Because not only is she having these relationships with these kind of men, but she's also using this, like, intense, like, eye-catching, like, desperate, extreme, bombastic language in both cases.

like, right? So like there's something there that's performative and also some kind of construction, a romantic, an understanding of what romance is. Like there's something in here that's very strange on the question of like, why, you know, put it this way, you know, I don't know how you guys feel about PDA, but seeing people like walk down the street and they're making out or they're talking in a loud, loving way. These things don't bother me particularly but like having a friend say like he is my everything like that was like take let's you know let's go to a psychologist from here you know what i mean like it's like it's and she's doing all of that and so this question of like what does she think her romantic relationships are because we see her in this movie repeatedly show us that what she thinks this is is perfect pair you know perfect parody they're aligned and synced they're two twin souls they're dolphins, you know, leaping out of the water towards each other. It's like, it's very bizarre. And that's what the text with Sunny Balwani revealed. It's a similar thing.

Like, what's that about? She calls their love a monument to love over and over, right? They're building monuments to love. Every day. Every day. For each other. Every day. You know, I think all that being said, yes, it's bizarre and it's grandiose and it's cartoonishly romantic. but I do think probably the most genuine thing in the movie is their love. I actually do think they love each other. And I also think that Elizabeth and Sonny were in love. It does, I think, help explain a little bit why she was so willing to bring Nathan Fielder in to live with her for 30 days before she went to jail, which is to say, like, she really clearly has, she commits full on to basically everything she does. And I don't know whether that's about reassuring herself or about, you know, sort of faking it till you make it. But if you're going to commit to your relationship to that extent, if you're going to commit to your lies to that extent, you're going to commit to your fraud and your business. Why not commit to inviting this weird Canadian comedian to make a documentary about you in one of the most intimate moments of your entire life?

And the irony being like it's all about transparency and you can see everything is literally the title. and Billy is then the one cutting off access, like, left and right all throughout the film. I want to ask a question. I think this is a good place to mention it. So there's one way of looking at this movie is of sort of Elizabeth Holmes as a kind of allegory for tech. Like, you have this way that she was, as we've been saying, a kind of emblematic figure of the 2010s. She's doing the Steve Jobs thing. She's getting all these covers. And then there's the downfall. I wanted to ask you, Erin, since you're reporting on this all the time, you know, I think it's fair to say Elizabeth was like an emblematic figure 10 years ago. Is she still now? Like, what is the relationship that people who work in the Valley right now have with her? I think in general, the tech industry kind of rejects somebody who has been convicted of fraud. So during the trial, I wrote a lot about how this the trial was kind of emblematic or

symbolmatic of like Silicon Valley's ethos of fake it till you make it and how Holmes had simply taken the same thing everyone else does, including Elon Musk or other founders who need to exaggerate to, you know, get people on board with their vision. But she had just taken it a little bit too far. And, you know, Judge Davila even talked about that in his sentencing and at the end of the trial as well. So I had a lot of fights with Silicon Valley investors about this who were like, no, she is not part of Silicon Valley. This is not what we're about. But it's really hard, I think, for a lot of founders to parse where that line is because she was following the playbook that everybody and, you know, Caitlin has talked about this a little bit as well. Like you do have to exaggerate and paint a grandiose vision that may not be anywhere close to reality in order to get investors on board, in order to get employees on board with like whatever thing it is that you're inventing and bringing into the world. Obviously, when that crosses into lying and deception, it becomes illegal.

But I think there's a very strong argument that you can make that she was absolutely a product of Silicon Valley culture and that a lot of people get really confused about where the line is, especially when you have people like Elon Musk, who is constantly promising things that he doesn't deliver on. Right. I would say there's an extremely fine line, extremely fine line between Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk. And I think it would be completely legitimate for some lay person, you know, who parachutes in to Silicon Valley today or to American society today to wonder why one of them is in prison and not the other. And I would say as an editor at Wired around that time, did I get a tour of a factory so I could see incredible Tesla robot, you know, robot arms before there was a car, you know, and there wasn't a car and there still wasn't a car and there still wasn't a car after that. So, like, you know, I mean, not to mention, like, you know, whatever high speed rail in California.

I mean, you know, every single founder is trafficking across that line. So I agree that that is true about Elon and Elizabeth Holmes. So in that spirit, we've got Theranos 2.0 coming. Do you guys think, is this the next chapter? Are they going to be successful? Are we going to see Elizabeth Holmes run Walgreens Wellness Center anytime soon? Oh, my God. I don't understand. The technology worked the first time. I mean, the machine could do hundreds of tests. You know, she explains it in the film. You know, the cloud, you know, sent the orders into the cartridge. Weren't you listening? Everything worked perfectly. So why does there need to be a second iteration of the technology? Why do they have to use lasers now? And why did there even need to be, you know, drawings and another prototype? It was all done right the first time. Okay. Anyway, my question for you, John Carreau, is, and I thought about this as I watched the movie, what was your, like, emotional weather as you watched it?

Like, how did you feel? So I've seen it twice, and the first time I saw it was about 10 days ago at the A24 offices in Manhattan, and I was in a screening room virtually by myself. Actually, one other person was there, my wife. you know I did nearly jump out of my chair the first time I saw the scene of her crying and blaming other people for pushing her into the limelight I would say that the second time I enjoyed the film even more the second time I you know revisiting some scenes the second time around I felt like there was more, they were more pregnant with meaning than perhaps, you know, I'd given them credit for the first time around. I guess I was over two viewings. I was really, you know, won over by the artistry of the way, you know,

they filmed this thing, but also the structure, the amount of meta thinking that went into it, how unusual it is. And whereas the first time I saw Fielder living in that house in San Diego with them and asking Elizabeth repeatedly whether she did anything wrong and her repeatedly denying that she didn't do anything wrong, that first time that I saw those 90 minutes was frustrating a little bit for me because I would have liked to jump in and grab the mic from Fielder and drill down a little bit more and not be so polite. But, you know, on the whole, I really like this movie. Caitlin, can I ask you the same question about your emotional weather as you watched it? Well, I have a hat that says make movies shorter. And on the back it says 97 minutes with credit.

And so that's my, like, philosophical platform. So I went into this thinking, not only are we back to home culturally, you know, or not that we left, but also we are spending three hours with Elizabeth Holmes. And that, you know, my emotional weather to that was like, what the fuck? You know, but on a number of levels. But I have been asking myself this question, you know, for more than 10 years. Like, what does she think is real? What does she think is real? Like, what is real? And what I know what is real now, thanks to John. What does she think is real? And what does she think is happening? And so that was how I came in. Like, my feelings were like, what are we going to learn that adds to what we know about her? Are we going to learn anything different? Are we going to see and perceive her in a different way? And how is it going to make us feel? And really, a lot of my feelings at the beginning were really just about the filmmaking. Like, what, you know, this question is like, the idea of objectivity is nowhere, anywhere in the movie.

Yeah. And on purpose, like John said, thoughtfully so. It's meta. They're thinking about it. They obviously did incredibly important thinking, not just filming, right, about what they were going to do, not to mention the edit. But there's just lots of things in there that are odd. The feeling of it felt manipulative in every way to me, like emotionally. It doesn't mean I didn't like the movie. I actually loved it. I thought it was great. And but I did feel like manipulated on every level by Elizabeth Holmes, by Billy Evans, by Lance and Nathan. And I don't and I, you know, I love movies, so I don't mind being manipulated. But I was so conscious of it that I like felt it the whole the whole time. Yeah. My experience of watching this was like I love but am terrified of cringe comedy, you know. And so I had this this sense of like really wanted to kind of hide my head sometimes as the as the encounters got more and more awkward. But unlike, say, like the British office or whatever, where I really, as my wife will tell you, just have to completely go under the couch to like have it happen.

I was riveted. Like I could not hide. I could not look away. It was like total anxiety, total fascination. like uh you know like you're saying Caitlin sort of admiring and John too like admiration of what's happening there but also just feeling this sense of um uh roller coaster ride is almost too cliche it's just like I was worried it was going to fall off a cliff at any moment and it kind of does but it cut you know in this kind of this way where you're like I guess I'm I guess I'm going off the cliff I guess I'm going off the cliff with you guys um so yeah it was a it was a it was a sort of exhilarating movie to watch in a funny way which is not something you often say about three hour long documentaries, but it had this sort of adrenaline pumping aspect of not even mystery, but just like the strangeness of the encounter that it kept circling around. We also had like, we go in not just knowing Elizabeth Holmes at this point, but largely culturally knowing Nathan Fielder. And so the other thing that's playing against is like what your understanding is of what

he makes and what he does. Yeah. And so I think like again like just how much are you like you were you describing basically being like in the shoot Yeah You know and I just like very much like out of the shoot holding onto the edges not going down the shoot You know like it like there there because I because I conscious of this thing And yet I also really enjoyed the movie. Yeah, totally. Guys, this has been a fantastic conversation. I feel like I need to go see the movie again with all of this in mind. John and Caitlin are going to drop off now. We're going to go to break and Aaron's going to come back. We're going to talk about the spy from OpenAI, plus a bunch of other news headlines from the week. John and Caitlin, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us. Welcome back to Hard Fork. After a stimulating discussion about Elizabeth Holmes, I am back with our old friend Aaron Griffith to talk about the headlines of the week.

Hi. The big story that we need to talk about more than anything is the alleged OpenAI spy. So the FBI arrested an OpenAI employee this week, and he's been accused of planting a bug in the office. I think the main media that everybody needs to consume about this is the photograph allegedly capturing this guy, looking at the recording device, which he plugged into the back of a television. I'll describe it for our listeners. And there is the accused spy whose name is Abdul Rahman Al-Fazan. He's a 35-year-old from Saudi Arabia. Looking, I don't know, how would you describe it? He almost looks like he's sort of a movie monster pose. He looks like a cartoon villain that just got gut-punched. Yes, exactly. I mean, this is really like whenever I have to unplug stuff from the back of my TV, I feel very glad nobody's taking any photos for me because I assume I have this kind of pain. Well, this is the question I have is, like, do they have a camera back there? I mean, that's not taken by the security device, is it?

Like, it was just a recording device. So how did they capture that photo? Well, so OpenAI says, they made the announcement on their Twitter feed at the same time as the FBI was talking about it, and they said, and to me this is like an extremely OpenAI statement, we discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. Yeah, they used ChatGPT to discover the thing or whatever. Always be marketing your model. It's like no wonder everybody accuses everything they do of marketing because everything they do is marketing. I mean, so one thing that's interesting about this, I think we're presuming that he was spying on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government, which also we will remember allegedly planted a spy on Twitter or in X. Not alleged. That one fully went to trial. Yes, okay. It was convicted. And we can just say it happened. This seems to have been, so the Twitter one, my memory is that there was, some of it was about spying on dissidents who were organizing. It was on masking anonymous dissident Twitter accounts.

Yeah, that's what the person was trying to do. This seems more about bugging meetings, like high-level meetings. Yeah, no, yeah, that's true. I mean, I actually would love to hear even more details about what they think this person was trying to get. I mean, we don't know a lot about that yet. I have to say, too, like, this guy is obviously not like a top tier spy if he's just plugging stuff in the back of the TV and getting caught that easily. It does make you wonder if there are other spies inside any of the labs. I mean, surely every government on the planet would love to have one inside some of these places. Yeah. And I mean, this person has at least a long track record of working in tech. I mean, I'm not sure how real that is. You know, people are reporting on their LinkedIn that he was at Meta and he was at various startups before. So like either he's been like playing a very long game, he's been spying for a very long time or he just got converted, which, you know, given how easily he was caught might be might be the answer.

Sometimes I'm surprised we don't see more stories like this because it seems really clear to me that all the action in espionage these days has to be trying to, you know, insert people into huge multinational corporations with really valuable intellectual property. I remember this was a really big issue during COVID when everyone went fully remote for the first time because you're hiring all these people that you never meet. And then, you know, there's all these stories about people having two jobs. And like that was the big thing that there's also kind of a little like unspoken thing of like, what if our employees aren't real? I'm learning so much about how spying works here. Apparently the bar is pretty low. Clearly. Maybe that's maybe when journalism finally collapses, Aaron. This is something that you and I can get into. Delete that, please. Also in AI news, we should talk about Character AI, which recently declared bankruptcy. Character AI, you will remember. Our audience will remember. It was a sort of chatbot platform where you could create characters that you would interact with. I mostly knew it as a source of very funny screenshots that I would see posted on Twitter, but also it later became quite controversial.

It faced a number of lawsuits from states and individuals. There's suggestions that it pushed its users into suicide, self-harm. It filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, and it is selling some of its assets to Walt Disney. It's claiming lack of profitability despite having roughly 12 million active users. This is from a Reuters article. due to the high cost of computing power and employing AI talent. What did you make of this? Well, I mean, I've actually been kind of wondering what's going to happen for a while to all the kind of like leftover nubs of these AI companies that did acqui-hire deals with big tech companies. And this kind of hasn't been reported in some of the stories I've seen are not as prominently, and for some reason I'm obsessed with this. But if you recall, Character AI was started by these two Google guys, Noam Shazir and Daniela DeFratas. And they left Google because Google is moving too slow. Google is like, we need them back.

But for antitrust reasons, we're not really sure about making a big acquisition. And they won a lot of money. So they did this, like, backward deal where they hired Character AI. Like, they hired back Shazir and they hired back the founders. They hired back like 20% of the employees. As part of it, they have to leave this like kind of sad leftover company behind that no longer has its founders, is probably not going to really raise any more money, doesn't have the momentum or the excitement. The most valuable employees are gone. And I've been wondering, okay, well, what's going to happen to all these old companies? A couple of them have already sold. Character AI is notable in particular because they've had just a barrage of lawsuits against them over their product because there are harms that have happened. There are users who have died by suicide. There are people who are suing them because their chatbots have been posing as doctors. They've been telling people to starve themselves or kill themselves.

It's like there's some gnarly stuff happening with the product. So part of the bankruptcy is just to wipe the slate clean and deal with that. But I sort of see it as a result of this, like, extremely weird moment that we had in 2024 of talent wars where all the big tech companies tried to buy up all the most valuable founders without actually buying the companies. Yeah. And, you know, all these sort of the talent wars means that a lot of the top people at these little I think you call them nubs, which I enjoy as a viscerally unpleasant way of thinking about them, like disappear. And also like their reasons for existing seems sort of increasingly you don't need a specialized chatbot or whatever. Yeah. And this was one of the most promising AI companies that was developing the kind of like core LLM technology because they had this guy, Noam Shazir, who's like, you know, a very, very prominent researcher in this very small field. And, you know, basically all of these companies that were in this kind of class have gotten kind of picked off during the talent wars.

The other thing I want to talk to you about is Apple's new device, the HomeView, for which an advertisement appeared this week. I don't know how to describe this product except as they took the kitchen iPad and they just turned it into its own device, basically. It's like productized kitchen iPad. You can't take the iPad off of the stand. Right, exactly. It has to live there. So it's like this little dome. It looks a little bit like, you know, listeners who are about my age will remember the, like, those iMacs with the rotatable arm that were on top of the little dome. It's like a little dome. Oh, I had one of those. Yeah, I had one, too. Exactly. I actually pulled it out of my parents' closet recently and found that it didn't turn on. So that's a pretty uninteresting story. This home, the home view is sort of similar. It's like a little dome. It's got basically a slightly smaller than iPad-sized screen on it. and it has, you know, you can receive text messages on it. You can set your calendar. You can ask Siri anything.

It's somewhere between an iPad and a HomePod, always on, always listening. I mean, I have to ask you, like, would you ever put one of these in your house? I'm the worst person to ask on this kind of thing. I'm sort of a late adopter. I have currently in my kitchen, I have an Amazon Echo from, I think, 2014 that is mostly a glorified timer and occasionally plays songs. I mean, I don't want another, I don't really need a screen in my very tiny kitchen, so I'm not sure that, I saw Wired describe it as like a giant Apple watch for the home, and I don't have an Apple watch. It's really selling it there. That's a great, yeah, that one's for the boss. Needs one. I did, I will say, though, like, I can see the value and the appeal. Like, I watched this ad, which, as I was telling you, it kind of, the ad for it kind of reminds me a little bit of, like, the bear. Like, the vibe of the bear, but set to, like, that Peter, Bjorn, and John song.

Rebecca, we're late. I'm right here. Mom, breathe. So good. Who's that? That's Asa. Who's Asa? He's a person. It's like a family getting ready before school, and it's super stressful and chaotic, but instead of this thumping drumbeat, it's like, happy fun music. And that's because they have the Apple Home View, which they can, you know, it's kind of like another member of the family that they're all interacting with. And in my ideal version of the world, yes, I can see that mornings are chaotic for families, for sure, but I don't need yet another person or another entity to be involved with the table. It had the real Apple marketing materials feel where they like invented a bunch of problems that can be solved by the new Apple device. When you watch the video, you're sort of like, I mean, there's so much better at marketing than basically any other tech company because they seem to be the only one where like normal people work in the marketing department. And they're like, oh. It was compelling. Yeah. They're like, let's make a fun, loving, like messy family, sort of sitcom-y messy family.

And you're like, yeah, I totally need this. And then I'm thinking, well, no, I don't need it for any of the single use cases that they've described. And if I did have one in my kitchen, I think I would probably just end up watching TV on it because, like, it's a screen. And that's sort of what you do on screens. So I'll be very interested to see if this gets any kind of adoption. I will say I did a story a couple of years ago about, like, couples and families using tech to, like, manage their day-to-day lives. And I kind of went into it, like, thinking it would be a little bit poking fun. And like, oh, these couples are using Notion and Slack to like, you know, all these like tech tools to basically like just do the stuff that families do to basic communication. And like they're managing their lives like they're product managers. But then when I started talking to more and more families, I was like, oh, your lives are so complicated that I completely understand why you need like a technological household manager to anything that can like simplify things and offload the mental load for you. I totally get it. And there are companies that are doing well that sell these, like, kind of different screens that are kind of family-friendly that you can have.

And Apple's probably now just going to put them out of business, unfortunately. But, yeah, I can see where there's an appeal for this specific use case. I mean, what I really need, so Gus, my son, is in first grade, and there's, like, seven different apps across his camps and schools. and like I get texts and I get emails and I need to I need Apple to find out a way to like receive all of that and just give it to me in like one simple easy format and I know people are going to write in and be like just get an agent to do that I don't want an agent I just want somebody I want somebody else to do it for me please um and that is when I will buy the the Apple I'm sorry I keep forgetting the name Home View the Apple yeah well um I mean I was going to say you you beat me to it. I was going to say, just get an agent for that. But I mean, I did see a bunch of people sharing that Anthropic is hiring, you know, an assistant. They had a job listing that listed out all of these duties that are exactly what an AI agent is supposed to do, like scheduling

meetings and, you know, just like kind of the one-on-one stuff that like agents all claim that they're going to solve for us. And so everyone's like, ha, ha, ha. There's one last thing I want to talk to you about this week, which is this interview with the Palantir CTO, where he claims so many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI. Incredible. Incredible. I mean, when I when I first saw the headline, I have to say I I actually thought that they were taking up smoking because they have like a high P doom. And it's like a leftover. It's like the leftovers. Like if you saw that show where like They're nihilists who are going to just start hanging out with Liv Tyler and wearing white and like, because nothing matters. But it's the opposite. Yeah. As it turns out, the reason is that they think that AI is going to cure cancer. So smoking is a way to show how much you believe that AI will cure cancer. So if you get cancer, it's like no big deal. It's very funny. It has to be the least cool reason to smoke cigarettes I can possibly imagine.

Like this is one of the classically cool things to do, smoking cigarettes. there's so many cool reasons to do it like nihilism like you know because you know you look good to meet people all this stuff because you want to signal to other ai researchers that you think ai is going to cure cancer soon that is like it negates all the coolness all the cool points you get from smoking a cigar outside you completely lose from this i yeah like you meet a woman outside a bar and then you start you start like you know explaining the way that like ai is just walks away i actually don't need a light anymore i'm fine thank you i'm good But this has been the cigarette portion of our tech talk show. Erin, thank you for joining me again this week to talk through all of these things. You can catch Erin on OpenAI security footage trying to plug things into the back of the TV. She wrote a great piece this week that I hope we'll get a chance to talk to you about AI agent dinner parties that you can read in the New York Times app. All right, yeah. Thanks for the plug. Yeah. Well, let's thank our audience.

Thank you guys for listening. It's been another great week on Hard Fork. We love to hear from our audience. If you have any questions or comments or want to give us a piece of your mind, you can find us at nytimes.com slash hard fork. You can jump into the comments there. You can also email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. This episode of Hard Fork was produced by Whitney Jones and edited by Viren Pavic, with additional editorial support from Brendan Klinkenberg, Lisa Tobin, and Brooke Minters. We were fact-checked by Will Teichel and engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Diane Wong, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Video production by Stoyer Roque, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Sam Dolnik, Jessica Testa, Fui Wang Tam, Maddie Maciello, Nick Pittman, Bernardo Garcia, Michael Cordero, and Dahlia Haddad.