Yet another Hacker News

How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving

111 points MaysonL 5 hours ago 104 comments

nickstinemates 3 hours ago | parent

> But the thing that often gets lost in the retelling of her story is that Holmes was actually acquitted of all four charges related to defrauding patients. She’s in prison because a jury found that she knowingly misled investors who poured more than $700 million into the startup.

trying to minimize fraud? what a weird article.

add-sub-mul-div 3 hours ago | parent

This point is also clearly made in the film. Sounds like the article has nothing to say and just wants to leech off the success and attention of the doc.

jghn 3 hours ago | parent

Indeed. While she's not on the leaderboard of worst humans ever, she's still up there. Any whitewashing of her reputation is bogus.

siliconc0w 3 hours ago | parent

I mean in do you really have a lot of sympathy for the oligarchic tax advantaged zombie family hedge funds that made a bet and lost?

They didn't do their diligence and do kinda deserve to lose their money.

thereitgoes456 3 hours ago | parent

That’s true but not relevant. I have absolutely no sympathy for the rubes who thought FTX was a good place to put their money, but that doesn’t make the fraud any more OK.

hypersoar 3 hours ago | parent

Holmes and Theranos leadership did more than defraud investors. They knowingly ran unreliable tests on actual patients. People were told they were miscarrying when they weren't, or that they had HIV when they didn't. And they drove an employee, Ian Gibbons, to suicide, then threatened his widow with a lawsuit when she talked to reporters about it.

erulabs 2 hours ago | parent

Important to note she was found not guilty of this charge.

hypersoar 2 hours ago | parent

That is not because Theranos did not commit such fraud against patients; Balwani was convicted on those charges. It's just the prosecutors were unable to prove that Holmes was culpable.

erulabs 2 hours ago | parent

You said

> Holmes ... did more than defraud investors.

Which was not proven in a court of law as judged by a jury of her peers.

hypersoar 2 hours ago | parent

You...you literally elided over the exact phrase I included in anticipation of this objection.

erulabs 2 hours ago | parent

You're conflating Holmes, Theranos and Balwani. Holmes was found not guilt of that which you accuse her of. That you also accuse others at the same time who where found guilty doesn't change that fact.

Jedd 1 hour ago | parent

You're conflating - 'Do we understand that Holmes did these things?' - with 'Were those specific charges brought against her and were they successfully prosecuted?'.

Reading John Carreyrou's book, it's pretty clear she was guilty of (lots of bad) things beyond the lone 'defrauding investor' charge that was successfully carried.

qup 28 minutes ago | parent

I've done many things I wasn't found guilty of.

dylan604 2 hours ago | parent

The people that invested their money did not make these decisions. The people running the fund did. You're victim blaming. Most people don't get a very wide choice where their money goes outside the couple of options the fund managers present. I'd also venture most people do not even look at what stocks are in the fund. They'll look at the past earnings and check the box.

phire 3 hours ago | parent

Also, just because the jury didn't think there was enough evidence to convict her of defrauding patients (beyond reasonable doubt), doesn't mean she was innocent.

erulabs 2 hours ago | parent

It actually does. You can judge her, but she is not guilty. The more we as a society decide the justice system is just an arbitrary way of deciding who gets punished and not _the_ way of deciding if a person is or is not a criminal the more we slide towards oblivion.

If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.

robotresearcher 2 hours ago | parent

The finding is ‘not guilty’, rather than innocent. It does not mean the accused is innocent. It means they could not be proven guilty.

erulabs 2 hours ago | parent

Important to note that in the original conception of western civilization, no one is 'innocent'. This idea that you have some secret special power to sniff out a persons true heart from a distance, which is separate from a jury of a persons peers studying and debating the evidence, is at best misguided and arrogant, and at worst a pernicious threat.

willy_k 1 hour ago | parent

Don’t overcomplicate it. People are discussing their opinions of truth, using relevant terms.

lazyasciiart 2 hours ago | parent

Important to note that western civilization is fundamentally ok with the knowledge that the statement issued by a jury or judge does not actually define whether a person is morally, factually or colloquially “innocent”. Disputes may be addressed c/o OJ Simpson and the Central Park 5.

shepherdjerred 1 hour ago | parent

I mostly agree with the idea, but to accept this as an absolute implies our justice system is infallible

malisper 2 hours ago | parent

For context for others, Holmes was acquitted of defrauding patients. A juror stated that she was acquitted because Holmes didn't directly interact with the patients. On the other hand, she did directly interact with investors, so the evidence was much clearer.

Separately, Theranos' COO and Holmes' boyfriend at the time was convicted by a separate jury for defrauding patients. Theranos also settled multiple lawsuits for ~$50M and declared bankruptcy soon after.

Earw0rm 1 hour ago | parent

Acquitted on a legal technicality, then, not in the court of accountability and consequences.

potamic 2 hours ago | parent

What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.

samschooler 3 hours ago | parent

I don't think there is any magic sauce to this movie. I saw it yesterday, and do agree (spoilers ahead) there are three acts: deception, sympathetic, puppeteer. I feel though that this article treats the movie as if its some sort of hypnosis; it's not. Its a very well put together movie that makes you question everything thats happening. I and others came out of it largely questioning:

A. Is she truly the most manipulative person we've ever seen

B. Largely oblivious to what's happening around her

and not:

- Is she guilty

This movie I would say does not answer those questions, nor do I think seeks to.

sippingabonedry 3 hours ago | parent

Does the film address that thing she does with her voice?

samschooler 3 hours ago | parent

Not at all, though she does talk slightly less like that now.

cm2187 2 hours ago | parent

I never understood why people care about that. Lots of corporate executives take courses on how to speak in public and change their behaviour on stage. Actors certainly do. As for Kamala Harris and her sudden southern accent in front of certain audiences...

bahmboo 2 hours ago | parent

Yes, to me that is catering to your audience. It also seems to overlap with coming back from your London trip with a British accent.

For her voice register change, where's the line or the gray area? It's a very personal human thing. I find her to be oriented around how she presents herself and how she is perceived. Then she uses her impressive talents to guide and manipulate.

I find her unnerving but also a great example of how the eyes are really part of the brain.

[edit: a lot, same general idea but composed bester[

willy_k 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah. “The eyes are the window to the soul” is true.

serf 1 hour ago | parent

everyone has a bit of a social chameleon thing going on, but when a person is nothing but facade to the point of others being totally unable to pinpoint their actual psyche it's a flashing warning sign for a lot of people that they're a sociopath or at the very least have a lot of tendencies towards that behavior.

let's flip it on its' head; she's now seeking sympathy and understanding from the public and her voice softened: Does that aid perception of truth and honesty? It doesn't for me.

maxbond 1 hour ago | parent

It's one of those cases where cringe becomes creepy. When someone is putting on a really transparent performance, and to the rest of us it broadcasts their insecurity, and they ought to know that but don't - it's eerie, it's mired in an uncanny valley. Too much to be a joke but not enough to plausibly work. When I see her back in the day with the turtleneck and the affected voice, it gives me the willies.

That said no it is not particularly important. But striking and memorable. The voice is the most striking part but I don't think it would land with me if not for also the turtleneck and the other Jobs knockoff stuff.

watwut 1 hour ago | parent

I agree. I dont get why people get outraged over it either. Yes, having deeper voice makes people take you more seriously. Works with students, bosses, colleagues.

Using deeper voice as a result is like putting on suit and making your hair - adjusting yourself to societal biases.

The issue with Holmes is not voice or cloth or whatever. It is fraud, lies and lack of care about harm she caused.

jimbob45 54 minutes ago | parent

It goes back to the parent poster’s question of whether or not she was doing it to manipulate people or if she genuinely looked up to Steve Jobs enough to want to emulate him down to his pitch.

watwut 48 minutes ago | parent

I dont buy either framing. There is nothing better about immitating Jobs.

And using deeper voice is no worsr then putting on cloth to impress. Or using makeup to impress.

If people are irrationally taking deeper voices more serious, using deeper voice is not some kind of evil manipulation. People with higher pitch are not unserious, only treated that way a bit more.

Your deeper voice is not making you more valid or serious in any way. Yes, it is advantage. It is ok to mimic it to get equal advantage.

Pengtuzi 15 minutes ago | parent

> As for Kamala Harris and her sudden southern accent in front of certain audiences...

Care to finish that thought?

wisty 2 hours ago | parent

I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).

Earw0rm 1 hour ago | parent

I've worked for someone very like her.

It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.

And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.

kromokromo 1 hour ago | parent

How does this work though. At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.

swiftcoder 1 hour ago | parent

> At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.

There's always the chance one could have ridden fake-it-till-you-make-it long enough for the engineers to solve the underlying issues...

Slow_Hand 53 minutes ago | parent

Yes. So many of her replies to Nathan's questions were "I don't know" or "I don't remember" or "I don't understand" for questions that were very straightforward.

At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.

roncesvalles 2 hours ago | parent

I think if you're stuck on that question, her manipulation poked through the silver screen and worked on you.

To me the subtext of the movie was that a sociopath's manipulation is so strong that even against the heavy counterforce of the filmmaker's bias, it makes it through. I agree with TFA's general premise that the film forces you to confront how easy it is to deceive you -- but it's not the filmmaker who's doing the deceiving. Sociopathic manipulation is about sparking doubt. Gaslighters don't need to prove anything, they just need to plant a "but what if" in some corner of your mind. The fact that the author felt compelled to write TFA at all is ironically a product of that manipulative power.

Another way to think of it is: the documentary makes you think whether, if you were in the room with her in the years that Theranos was operating, would you have fallen for it? If you feel the need to write apologia after watching a documentary that's basically a hit piece, you know the answer.

ksymph 3 hours ago | parent

This article falls into the same trap, I dunno what to call them, artsy-upper-class-society-and-film reviewers often do; writing vague yet meaningful-sounding things about the obvious subtext of a movie as if it was a revelation, yet without any specific observations about it.

Yes, this is a documentary about a person. And how the documentary is presented will color your perspective of the person. This should (hopefully) be apparent to anyone who's watched a documentary about a person before.

But how does it do it? What tools does it use to that effect? I appreciate that this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous, but what makes this unique from other documentaries that deal with ambiguous subject matter?

whilenot-dev 2 hours ago | parent

> this film remains relatively neutral/ambiguous [...] with ambiguous subject matter?

There's a big difference in ambiguousness and ambivalence, especially in documentaries. "Ambiguousness" represents an uncertain logical conclusion, whereas "ambivalence" stands in for (the strength of) conflicting forces.

I'd wager that an ambiguous documentary would be close to being unwatchable, and I can't remember that I've seen any. Since I've yet to see You Can See Everything, unfortunately I can't comment about it in any way.

comradesmith 2 hours ago | parent

Maybe just for not spoilers?

hnlmorg 1 hour ago | parent

If you’re watching this film, you likely already know who Elizabeth Holmes is. There isn’t going to be any Sixth Sense style plot twists.

arjie 1 hour ago | parent

Without having watched the film, I'm sure they can make it look like Sunny Balwani was the guy in charge, or something like that. I don't even know the whole story of Theranos and never followed it with much interest - startup scams are a dime-a-dozen. HP's acquisition of Autonomy always struck me as such a tale: CFO takes the fall for CEO and CTO for a $11 b acquisition that a few years later was worth a tenth because of accounting fraud and when he gets out the CEO gives him a sinecure; then the week of CEO and CTO acquittal the latter gets killed in a bicycling accident and the former dies when a tornado sinks his yacht.

Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are interesting characters, true, but there's so much nuts in tech, it's just fertile ground for stories.

watwut 1 hour ago | parent

That is literally expression of YOUR bias and prejudice.

DuperPower 1 hour ago | parent

besides the topic that is being explored is deception so its expected the documentary Will use a rethorical or film technique that has some connection to that theme of deception?

nlitened 1 hour ago | parent

> 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

moffkalast 27 minutes ago | parent

Nah, that would never work.

halyconWays 3 hours ago | parent

This reads like a high schooler discovering that film can manipulate you, but doesn't go any further than that.

"We like to believe that we form our opinions by gathering evidence, weighing facts, and arriving at reasonable conclusions. Be for real. No we do not."

She speaks for herself. The author then doesn't bring up a single fact, piece of evidence, or anything else besides just restating the pedestrian premise a few times. I don't share her inability to study a topic in-depth, come to a conclusion or challenge my previously held beliefs, and then pass judgment while attaching a calibrated degree of certainty to the soundness of my conviction.

greesil 3 hours ago | parent

You can just read Bad Blood, too, and skip the movie / hyperbole/ whatever

muglug 3 hours ago | parent

Everything you watch, documentary and narrative alike, attempts to shape your understanding of events through the director's lens.

spectraldrift 3 hours ago | parent

[flagged]

tomhow 1 hour ago | parent

Please don't post low-effort dismissals like this on HN. A comment with just two words and not even a period is not a thoughtful contribution, and the guidelines make it clear we're trying for something much better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

zetazzed 3 hours ago | parent

It’s such a good movie. Go with a friend and you can spend hours picking apart the layers.

nanolith 3 hours ago | parent

I saw the movie Friday night. It is a mind job. You'll walk away with more questions than answers.

Without spoiling the movie, it's possible for people to be multiple things at once. That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of. The movie is a wild ride.

charles_f 2 hours ago | parent

> That doesn't excuse what Elizabeth Holmes did or explain what others in her circle may be guilty of.

Thanks!

Surely the documentaries are made in a way that's depicts that very accentued, manipulative, borderline psychopathic person. This is likely more than she was in real life. She might even have been motivated by genuine will to improve the diagnostics field. So yeah you might be "deceived" by these docudramas.

I fear that this kind of poetic write-up muddies the water into "oh, maybe things are more nuanced, and played on her weird personality and background to make things look worse, maybe it wasn't so bad".

People got misdiagnosed and suffered directly because of her. She's every bit guilty of that, as deserving of a harsh judgement as any person directly causing that kind of harm.

Earw0rm 1 hour ago | parent

This.

Accountability.

jdorfman 3 hours ago | parent

No one including my wife was interested in seeing it so I went by myself. It was long, but interesting. The author hits the nail on the head:

“You sit there believing you’re watching a documentary about a woman who deceived the world, only to discover that you’re also watching a demonstration of how easy it is to deceive you.”

I couldn’t agree more.

esikich 1 hour ago | parent

What was deceitful about it?

lelanthran 42 minutes ago | parent

I had the same question for the author of the article, but it's understandable that people are going to be cagey answering this question because they may not want to give away spoilers.

miguelazo 2 hours ago | parent

Has this person never seen Rashomon? Or any of the other films (even documentaries) that cleverly use different perspectives? Seems a bit breathless.

JMiao 2 hours ago | parent

“Local woman discovers Nathan For You”

jamienk 2 hours ago | parent

I'm not bragging: but I do not watch any (almost any) video of the news, so I never see Trump speak or see the Israeli military against the Palestinians or watch the footage of the trials, etc. I do read the news. I just sort of drifted into it when I was an early cord-cutter. I think around the yr 2000 there wasn't much video and I got used to it. I do find that I am much less overstimulated than my friends and family who watch a lot of news video.

Lacan described registers of experience: the Imaginary (visual, sexual, emotional, fantasy), Symbolic (language, associations), and Real (the unsymbolizable, "impossible"). Watching video is immersion in the Imaginary, you get roused, riled up, turned-on, activated, thoughts are connected by paranoia, magical thinking, and aggression. It makes HUGE difference to not not follow the news that way! Again, I'm not bragging, not proud of myself, not espousing a Mr Spock outlook. But it is hard to miss the difference.

coldfloor 2 hours ago | parent

So many comments about Holmes, I think, are missing the point. This isn't about Holmes, and neither, IMO, is the article. Like all things Nathan Fielder does, this is a movie by Nathan for Nathan. Elizabeth Holmes is just used, in every sense of the word, as a prop.

The article was written by someone who's never seen any of Nathan's other work and is apparently blown away by his skill at and unquenchable fetish for using and deceiving people. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Congrats, you just watched a documentary about psychopaths.

gorfian_robot 1 hour ago | parent

sounds like the Primetime movie. good film. surely has little to do with real life.

esikich 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think this is anything like Nathan's normal stuff. He didn't manipulate at all. He just hung around and asked really direct and obvious questions and you watched her and her husband squirm and lie.

novia 19 minutes ago | parent

The thing where he said he'd gone through a break-up seemed like it could have been misleading (I don't actually know about his personal life)

ares623 2 hours ago | parent

I hate these kinds of documentaries. Even after being caught and punished, these wannabe larger than life con artists still get an exit. If school shooters shouldn't be plastered all over the news, then why are these people.

pxtail 9 minutes ago | parent

Come on, just go watch the movie like everybody else, she needs your financial support

meherabhossain 2 hours ago | parent

This has a very interesting way of showing it to you, how easy it is to deceive us. What we see is what er believe in, but it can be very much easily used to exploit us.

lopatin 1 hour ago | parent

This article is a bit too desperate to connect the subject matter to the medium.

jtrn 1 hour ago | parent

Most of the things that get posted here are deceiving. It's just that people care to deconstruct why it's deceiving when it aligns with their biases.

thrownawaysz 1 hour ago | parent

>An entire theater full of grown adults was falling for it. At one point, people were shouting so loudly at the screen that I couldn’t hear the dialogue. I heard a woman yell, “Criminal!” — and it wasn’t directed at Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theater. It was emotion, and it was visceral.

Is this a parody lol?

Maybe when I read about "cinemas are a bad experience nowadays" on american sites (reddit, HN) they mean this but I always felt that they are deceiving me.

Maybe I'm just too Asian-European because I never experienced that in any European or Far East Asian cinemas.

esikich 1 hour ago | parent

No one did anything like that in the theater I saw it in and I have a hard time believing this happened. As if she was some major figure that the avg person was familiar enough with to form an emotional opinion on. I've had to explain who she was to everyone I know and they were all kind of like "oh yeah, I remember hearing something about that."

suwapat 1 hour ago | parent

For building startup, you need a story on the person who is going on the front. Example he/she from top university, worked in a big company. That is sufficient to build something with zero revenue and sell it for billions.

unpopularopp 1 hour ago | parent

Checked her Twitter account yesterday (managed by her husband)

She is MAGA. That's enought to know about the topic.

The media and seemingly random persons like this stanning her is extremely weird.

naz 1 hour ago | parent

It's a rational play for her to be MAGA. Trump has pardoned much worse criminals simply for sucking up to him.

watwut 1 hour ago | parent

That motivation makes her MAGA. No different then other MAGAs.

layer8 45 minutes ago | parent

It’s rational to lack principles?

littlexsparkee 25 minutes ago | parent

Like having kids while facing jailtime, it can be read as a ploy to evade responsibility. Call it selfish, utility-maximizing, rational - whatever furthers the individual's interests.

p-e-w 29 minutes ago | parent

Disagree. He has indeed pardoned many criminals, but none who was even remotely as bad as she is.

ozaark 14 minutes ago | parent

The founder of Silk Road and the former Honduran president just to name 2

esikich 1 hour ago | parent

Stanning?

Edit: looked it up. Who is stanning her? The person who wrote the article or Nathan?

jzymbaluk 52 minutes ago | parent

Her X account, and how it came to be in the hands of her husband is actually a pretty major plot point in the documentary

yesitcan 40 minutes ago | parent

Why is this forum so anti MAGA?

danw1979 36 minutes ago | parent

Because most of the world is

yesitcan 35 minutes ago | parent

Why is most of the world anti MAGA?

midasz 23 minutes ago | parent

the myriad of wars he started, but i don't believe this question is in earnest

drayfield 1 hour ago | parent

It won't deceive me, I went to one of Canada's top business schools and got really good grades.

why_at 40 minutes ago | parent

I just watched this movie tonight and it's one of those where I feel like everyone else saw a different film. For me it was too little butter spread over too much bread. All the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story have been explored, so all that's left is her personal life with her new partner who's also a weirdo.

At best I can say that it makes you think about things like deceit and honesty/accuracy in media, but it definitely didn't blow my mind like it apparently did for this author. After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.

gyomu 5 minutes ago | parent

> After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.

I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”

But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.

See also ppl in toxic relationships, who will complain to their friends incessantly about how bad the other person is and how they know they need to get out of it, only to rarely get out of it.

lacoolj 26 minutes ago | parent

I really wanted her to spoil this movie somewhere in this article.

novia 24 minutes ago | parent

I ship Nathan and Holmes

throw310822 6 minutes ago | parent

Off topic, but as I was reading it I went through the Canon experiment- there where it says:

> each photographer was given a different description of [the same person]: a millionaire, a convict, a fisherman, an alcoholic, a psychic, and a lifesaver.

Well I looked at the pics and thought "yeah, wow, the millionaire, the convict (so obvious!), the fisherman, the alcoholic" it's really impressive! And only immediately after I saw that each picture had the caption with the supposed character and they were all scrambled- what I thought was obviously a sagacious millionaire was in fact the convict, the slightly deranged looking guy was the fisherman, the millionaire was in fact an alcoholic... Lol.