Zoe Bernard (X) is a journalist working on a book on prediction markets. I had her on the podcast to talk about the new Nathan Fielder movie, You Can See Everything, which follows Elizabeth Holmes as she gets ready to report to prison. Links from the discussion: The Deep Left take John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood John Carreyrou in 2015 breaking the story My ChatGPT query about federal prison rules Billy Evans on the All-In podcast Wired on “Theranos 2.0” Podcast on The Curse with Rob Henderson This podcast is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process. Below is a cleaned-up version of the transcript. Coming to the Elizabeth Holmes Story Richard Hanania: Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m here today with Zoe Bernard. We’re going to talk about the Nathan Fielder movie about Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything, which is in theaters right now. Zoe, can you introduce yourself to the audience before we begin? Zoe Bernard: I’m a journalist, mostly covering tech, culture, and the world of business. I’m currently working on a book about prediction markets that should hopefully come out next year. And I have a lot of thoughts on the movie. Richard: Awesome. You’ve written for Vanity Fair, right? Zoe: I’ve written for Vanity Fair in the past, and also for The Information, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Business Insider. Richard: Got it. It looks like you came into this having read a lot about Elizabeth Holmes. Zoe: I was a reporter when John Carreyrou initially broke the story, and it was the coolest story on the tech beat at the time. I avidly consumed everything he was writing. I read Bad Blood when it came out, and I watched The Dropout only fairly recently, maybe a couple of months ago. So I came into this with a ton of cultural baggage and an understanding of the reporting background of what had happened at Theranos. Richard: I’d read some stories about Elizabeth Holmes, probably eight years ago, but I didn’t remember much or follow it closely. I knew the basic outline: She wanted to be like Steve Jobs; it was all fake; she had Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and these other people on her board. I knew the sexy details, but I never got into the evidence of what she did or how strong the case was. Zoe: You knew about the voice? The fake voice? Richard: I remember that, too. I watched the movie yesterday in the theater. Then today, in preparation for this conversation, I read a bunch of old New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporting and made it through most of Carreyrou’s book. Zoe: Oh my God, you read fast. Richard: I skimmed it. I skipped the parts about where an employee majored in computer science and went to Stanford. I don’t need to know that. I tried to get as much of it as possible. And I talked to ChatGPT, of course, to ask about some of the details. I sent you a comparison I had it make between Elizabeth Holmes’s exaggerations and lies and Elon Musk’s. That was interesting. I love that you can just have it spit out a report for yourself. Did the Movie Make Elizabeth Holmes Seem Innocent? Richard: Here’s my impression of the movie, and then you can tell me yours. I watched it and thought, There’s a chance Elizabeth Holmes was innocent. From the film alone, I mean. Zoe: Wait, really? Whoa. That’s wild. Richard: Yes, just from the film. And a spoiler warning to the audience: There’s a sense in which there are no spoilers because we know she goes to jail, but there are spoilers in how the story plays out. If you want to experience the movie without knowing any of that, consider yourself warned. By the end, you’re led to think about this guy Billy Evans—her partner, although I found out they’re not legally married. Zoe: Are you convinced by that? I wasn’t convinced. Richard: No, I’m not convinced anymore. I’m talking about what I thought when I had no context beyond the movie. She seems—people use the word autistic too easily these days, but she seems almost like that. There’s the big scene where Nathan shows her Abbott and Costello, and he asks why it’s funny. She says, “I don’t know.” It’s very strange. I sent you a screenshot from Carreyrou’s book about something similar: Somebody made a parody advertisement or poster, she didn’t get the joke, and she basically locked down the company. That seems consistent with the film’s portrayal. I knew she had this old boyfriend, Sunny, and now she has Billy. One interpretation you could take away, just from watching the film, is that she’s a woman who’s socially unaware, gets taken in by men who aren’t good for her, and is manipulated by them. Maybe that happened with Billy, and maybe it happened with Sunny when she was running Theranos. But then I read all day, and the evidence is much stronger that she was on top of everything. She created an entire culture of denying reality. She had this reality-distortion field. You can compare her with Musk or Jobs: These people can be bullshitters, but they actually built great products. Theranos got as far as Walgreens, where its testing services were offered before they were pulled. And the technology just didn’t work as promised. The company had about a decade to get it right. At some point, you have to deliver. Maybe if she’d managed it by 2012, everything would have been forgiven. But she didn’t. She was lying the whole time. So I think she was guilty. That’s my way of saying the film was good to her: It fooled me into thinking that maybe she was innocent. What was your impression? Zoe: That’s interesting, because I’ve seen that take online a lot: People whose only entry point into Elizabeth Holmes is this movie walk away thinking maybe she’s innocent. I knew so much about her already that I didn’t experience it that way. One of the central questions the film asks is: Did she knowingly lie, or did she believe her own lies? My assumption walking in was that, of course, she believed her own lies. I think most founders have to believe what they’re selling. She’s obviously the hero in her own story, and she had to justify what she was doing again and again. But it’s fascinating that you were able to walk out thinking maybe she was innocent. Richard: Everyone knows there’s a spectrum of how much entrepreneurs get away with, how much they b******t. Just watching the film, I didn’t know where she fell on that spectrum. I sent you that Deep Left article, which we’ll probably talk about. The author seemed to have the impression that entrepreneurs all b******t, and from the article I wasn’t sure he’d read much beyond what was in the movie. I thought maybe Elizabeth Holmes was within the normal range. But she’s not. She wasn’t just exaggerating that a product would be ready in a year. She told bald-faced lies. She claimed the devices were being used in Iraq or Afghanistan, carried around in Humvees by our troops. It’s presented as this patriotic product. There were fake reports with pharmaceutical-company logos, making it look as though those companies had verified Theranos’s techniques. These were things made up out of thin air. She’s obviously guilty. Whatever the exact legal standard is—knowledge, reckless indifference to the truth, whatever—she has to meet it. But you said you had a contrarian take on the movie. Was It All Fake? Zoe: My contrarian take is that everyone seems obsessed with this movie, and I thought it was fine. I didn’t totally love it. That surprised me because I love Nathan Fielder and have watched just about everything he’s done. Richard: Did you see The Curse? Zoe: Oh my God, I loved The Curse. I thought it was excellent. Brilliant. Richard: It was … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe
