Why No One Can Look Away From Elizabeth Holmes
Max ReadKevin RooseCasey NewtonJohn CarreyrouErin GriffithCaitlin Roper
Elizabeth Holmes’s enduring grip begins with the same founder-performance problem that helped Theranos rise: charisma and conviction substituted for verifiable science. Caitlin Roper’s 2013 blood panel looked plausible, yet she never saw the lab or spoke to a lead scientist; John Carreyrou’s suspicion began when bold claims appeared without peer-reviewed evidence. The diligence lesson is brutally durable: “She was sort of standing in for the lead scientist.”
The documentary’s access reveals more performance, not an uncontested “real” Holmes. Gone are the black turtlenecks and severe presentation; in their place are beach scenes, children, loosened hair and telegraphed intimacy. Carreyrou sees a charming public face concealing someone “feisty,” “combative,” “ruthless” and willing to evade direct questions—most starkly when Holmes insists she has never lied.
Sympathy and accountability coexist, which is precisely why You Can See Everything works. Roper felt genuine sadness watching a mother approach an 11-year-and-three-month prison sentence, while rejecting Holmes’s attempts to blame an entourage for publicity and implicitly shift responsibility onto Sunny Balwani. The film offers emotional access without resolving its central diligence question: “What does she think is real?”
Gender amplified both Holmes’s ascent and the appetite for her punishment. Tech publications and editors wanted rare female-founder examples amid a male-dominated industry, while founder-centric investing helped make Holmes a magazine-cover archetype; afterward, the panel argues, a deceptive woman attracted a different intensity of fascination and disparagement. Yet Carreyrou adds a crucial correction: 11 years after his exposé, Holmes herself renewed the cycle by inviting filmmakers into her home roughly a month before prison.
Theranos remains relevant because Silicon Valley still cannot articulate a clean boundary between visionary exaggeration and illegal deception. Erin Griffith argues Holmes followed the standard “fake it till you make it” playbook but crossed into lying; Carreyrou calls the line between Holmes and Elon Musk “extremely fine.” That ambiguity is investor-relevant risk: founder storytelling may be necessary, but unsupported product claims cannot be underwritten as merely ambitious road maps.
Character.ai’s bankruptcy shows the residue left by 2024’s AI talent wars. After Google brought back founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas plus roughly 20% of the staff, Griffith says the remaining company became a founderless “nub”; it later sought bankruptcy protection amid lawsuits and unprofitability despite about 12 million active users, while selling assets to Walt Disney. The episode’s broader warning is that acqui-hires can extract human capital while leaving liabilities, compute costs and diminished strategic value behind.
The week’s other AI stories expose a market selling both extraordinary strategic importance and mundane convenience. An OpenAI employee was accused of planting a recording device, underscoring why concentrated model IP attracts espionage interest; meanwhile Apple’s HomeView productizes the “kitchen iPad” as an always-on household manager. The hosts’ skepticism is consistent across both: OpenAI turned discovery of the device into model marketing—“We used our models”—while Apple’s polished ad may be inventing problems for another screen to solve.
1. Holmes first won attention where scientific verification was absent
Roper found Holmes in late 2013 while seeking female founders for Wired. Theranos confined her to one room containing Holmes and a phlebotomist; the conspicuous voice, black clothing, red lipstick and “big blue-eyed stare” already felt purposeful, but the healthcare-cost and patient-transparency pitch seemed far more consequential than another delivery startup.
Roper requested the same blood panel she had recently received elsewhere. Theranos drew a “teeny, tiny vial,” and the results looked very close to her comparison panel—but she could not inspect the lab, meet a lead scientist or validate the claimed science. In retrospect, she still wonders where and how the sample was tested.
What Roper did perceive was conviction. Holmes seemed to stand in for the missing scientist, while her controlled nonanswers resembled other founders withholding anything unhelpful to an IPO or funding round. Roper’s later regret was not personal animus; it was that Wired wrote early despite being unable to validate the company’s scientific claims.
Carreyrou’s skepticism began with what he recalls as Ken Auletta’s mid-December 2014 New Yorker profile: Theranos made bold claims without peer-reviewed studies and operated under conspicuous secrecy. A pathologist, although “three times removed” from direct information, independently questioned the technology’s feasibility; Holmes’s videos then left Carreyrou feeling that “some play acting” was occurring.
2. The new access exposes another carefully constructed Holmes
Carreyrou never interviewed Holmes despite repeated requests in late 2015 and again while preparing his book in 2016. He therefore watched the extraordinary access Fielder and Oppenheim got with some envy: Fielder spent roughly a month with Holmes, Billy Evans and their children immediately before prison and could ask questions Carreyrou never could.
His assessment contains two Holmeses. One can be “very pleasant” and “extremely charming”; the other is feisty, combative, ruthless and a liar. The film mostly shows the first, with flashes of the second whenever Fielder presses her to acknowledge wrongdoing and she snaps, “I did not.”
Roper reads Holmes’s changed appearance as another possible strategy. The turtlenecks and severe founder costume disappear; light clothing, loose hair, beach frolicking and constant proximity to her children telegraph “ease and intimacy,” inviting viewers to believe they have entered her authentic private self.
Repeated conversational breakdowns reminded Griffith of prosecutors asking Holmes the same question in slightly different ways at trial. Carreyrou rejects the idea that she simply fails to understand: “She’s not answering the question. She’s evading the question.” The documentary turns that evasion into evidence by allowing its loops to remain visible.
3. The film permits empathy without surrendering accountability
Carreyrou nearly jumped from his chair when Holmes cried before being photographed for a digital replica and said her former entourage had pushed her into the spotlight. He calls that “a brazen lie”: she embraced publicity, planned coverage and, according to trial texts, enjoyed it. To him, the tears manufacture victimhood while transferring responsibility.
Griffith preserves an alternative possibility: even if Holmes once wanted fame, its eventual consequences might have traumatized her. Roper likewise felt human sadness watching a mother face 11 years and three months away from young children; Carreyrou noted Holmes was apparently expected to move to a halfway house the following year, which he characterized as making it “only 5” years.
That sympathy does not negate calculation. When asked whether she had ever lied in her life, Holmes said no, prompting Fielder’s incredulous “Liz, really?” Carreyrou thinks the filmmakers gave her “enough rope to hang herself”: the straight-faced denial looks absurd rather than rehabilitative.
Holmes also implicitly redirects blame toward former partner and Theranos second-in-command Sunny Balwani. Carreyrou sees a persistent unwillingness to accept responsibility—blaming an entourage for publicity and Balwani for Theranos—while simultaneously asking viewers to feel for her.
4. Gender powered the rise and reshaped the backlash
Carreyrou attributes the fascination partly to “the psychology of deceit, especially when it’s a woman doing the deceiving.” Theranos was also more than a conventional investor fraud: blood testing introduced a public-health dimension and the possibility that patients’ lives were put in jeopardy.
Roper argues American culture routinely catches men lying without sustaining the same revulsion. She does not dispute that Holmes deserves condemnation, but sees gender influencing “who we disparage and continue to disparage over time.”
Griffith connects that backlash to the earlier promotional cycle. In the mid-2010s, a tech press searching for a female founder of a billion-dollar company found Holmes and put her on business-magazine covers; the later “girl boss” era repeated the pattern of disproportionate celebration followed by disproportionate criticism.
Yet attention is not merely imposed on Holmes. Eleven years after Carreyrou’s first Wall Street Journal story, she invited filmmakers inside 34 days before prison. “She is the one who is still asking for the public attention,” he says, making self-renewal part of the explanation for her cultural persistence.
5. Holmes repeats grandiose partnership patterns with Billy Evans
Roper sees striking continuity between Holmes’s relationships with Balwani and Evans: extreme devotion, shared business ambition and bombastic language that makes ordinary intimacy sound mythic. In Max’s reading, Holmes presents romance as perfect parity: she and her partner are “aligned and synced,” “2 twin souls,” even “dolphins” leaping toward one another, and they repeatedly call their relationship a “monument to love.”
The uneasiest scene arrives when Holmes and Evans excite each other over “Theranos 2.0” as her parents visibly steel themselves—“Here we go again,” in Griffith’s reading. Asked whether another business-romantic partnership is wise, Christian Holmes answers, “Good question. I trust Billy.”
That assurance is immediately undercut when Evans enters and shuts the conversation down: “No more talking.” The film’s title promises You Can See Everything, yet Griffith notes that Evans repeatedly restricts access, reproducing the tension between proclaimed transparency and active control.
Carreyrou considers both partners damaging influences: Balwani was a “terrible influence,” and Evans appears narcissistic, arrogant, controlling, manipulative and dishonest. Still, he resists reducing everything to performance: “Probably the most genuine thing in the movie is their love,” and he believes Holmes also genuinely loved Balwani.
6. Theranos still sits on Silicon Valley’s unresolved fault line
Griffith’s trial-era argument was that Holmes embodied Silicon Valley’s “fake it till you make it” ethos. Founders routinely exaggerate distant possibilities to recruit investors and employees; when that crosses into lying and deception, it becomes illegal, but founders and investors remain confused about where the line sits.
Valley investors strongly rejected the comparison—“She is not part of Silicon Valley”—yet Griffith calls her a product of its culture. She points to Elon Musk’s repeated undelivered promises; Carreyrou goes further, calling the distinction between Musk and Holmes “an extremely fine line” that an outsider could reasonably struggle to reconcile.
Roper remembers touring a Tesla factory and seeing impressive robotic arms before there was a car, followed by continued waiting for the car. Her conclusion is not that every founder commits fraud, but that “every single founder is trafficking across that line.”
“Theranos 2.0” therefore lands as dark comedy. If the original machine really performed hundreds of tests perfectly, Carreyrou asks sarcastically, why would a second iteration, lasers, drawings or another prototype be necessary? The new pitch collides with the film’s claim that the first technology worked perfectly.
7. The filmmakers make manipulation itself the viewing experience
Carreyrou initially found Fielder’s politeness frustrating; he wanted to seize the microphone and drill down as Holmes denied wrongdoing. On a second viewing, scenes felt more “pregnant with meaning,” and the film’s artistry, structure and unusually self-conscious construction won him over.
Roper entered wearing the philosophy embodied by her hat: “Make movies shorter,” specifically “97 minutes with credits.” Three more hours of Holmes sounded excessive, but the movie addressed the question she had carried for a decade: “What does she think is real?”
Her answer remains unresolved because objectivity is deliberately absent. Roper felt manipulated “on every level”—by Holmes, Evans, Oppenheim and Fielder—yet loved the film; its achievement is making viewers conscious of emotional engineering without giving them a clean place outside it.
Max Read experienced the same mechanism as irresistible cringe: “total anxiety, total fascination.” Unlike comedy that makes him hide, this encounter kept him watching as though everyone might go “off the cliff,” turning a three-hour documentary into an oddly adrenaline-driven experience.
8. OpenAI’s alleged bug turns frontier-model concentration into a spy story
The FBI arrested OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfasan, described as a 35-year-old from Saudi Arabia, over an accusation that he hid a recording device behind an office television. The hosts fixated on the photograph of him examining it—Griffith’s description was “a cartoon villain that just got gut punched.”
OpenAI said it found a “sophisticated recording device” and “used our models” to identify its origin and the employee who allegedly planted it. Read hears reflexive promotion in that wording: “Everything they do is marketing,” even when announcing a security breach.
The hosts speculate about whether high-level meetings were the target and whether any government was involved, while stressing that details remained unknown. The larger implication worried them more: every government would value access to AI-lab intellectual property, so an easily caught alleged operative raises the possibility of more capable ones.
Griffith connects the episode to remote-work identity risks exposed during COVID, when companies hired people they never met and wondered whether employees were real or secretly holding multiple jobs. Read’s broader inference is that modern espionage should increasingly target corporations holding valuable proprietary technology.
9. Character.ai, HomeView and AI cigarettes reveal three kinds of belief
Character.ai filed for bankruptcy while selling some assets to Walt Disney, citing unprofitability despite roughly 12 million active users and blaming compute and AI-talent costs. Its product also faced lawsuits alleging severe harms, including chatbots encouraging suicide, self-harm or starvation and posing as doctors.
Griffith sees the bankruptcy as unfinished business from 2024’s talent wars. Google brought founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas back, along with roughly 20% of employees, while leaving behind a company without its founders, strongest talent, fundraising momentum or obvious strategic future—a “sad, leftover” corporate nub.
Apple’s HomeView is Read’s “productized kitchen iPad”: a smaller screen fixed to a dome, always on and listening, combining messages, calendars and Siri. Griffith initially resisted another kitchen screen, but her reporting on families using Notion and Slack changed her mind; sufficiently complicated households genuinely value tools that offload mental load.
The comic limit of AI belief came from a Palantir CTO’s claim that some researchers smoke to signal confidence AI will cure cancer. Griffith first assumed nihilistic “P(doom)”; learning it was optimism made the behavior stranger. Read’s verdict: believing future AI neutralizes present cancer risk may be “the least cool reason to smoke cigarettes.”
Full transcript
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. 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 2 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 2 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 Read. This is Hard Fork.
So I'm joined today by 3 journalists who covered Elizabeth Holmes at 3 different stages in her life: investigative reporter John Carreyrou, executive producer Caitlin Roper, and tech writer Aaron Griffith.
I have a couple of 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 and come back later, but we're not going to reveal any of the big, sort of, second-half turns or revelations.
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. Caitlin, I want to start with you. You were, I think, the first person to interview Elizabeth Holmes for a magazine. What was that like?
1. Holmes First Profile
It was the end of 2013, and I was an editor at Wired magazine. I was looking for founders for us to cover and include in something. As one of the few women editors, I was always looking for women founders, and I found this mention in The Wall Street Journal of Elizabeth Holmes.
I did some research, and there weren't any magazine stories or profiles or interviews, so I reached out to Theranos and got a yes to come down and interview her. So I walked into 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 a place for me to sit with Elizabeth. 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 red lipstick. She had this thing that now we've become quite aware of: this kind of big, blue-eyed stare, still and looking directly at you.
I asked her a bunch of questions. Of course, Wired in general, especially at that time, was really oriented toward innovation and the celebration of that innovation. I was genuinely excited to meet a founder who was working in biotech instead of trying to make food delivery faster or cars come quicker.
The part about her pitch that was about reducing health care costs, making blood-test results transparent to patients, and potentially disrupting Medicare felt significantly more interesting to me. I thought 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. It was that teeny-tiny vial that you've seen in pictures, and because I was dealing with some 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.
I mean, obviously, and you guys know this, but there was no verifiable science. I couldn't see the lab. I couldn't talk to a lead scientist. In some ways, she was standing in for the lead scientist in the way that she talked about the company. Of course, she was also talking about new science: genetic testing of the blood in this different way.
Anyway, they took my blood, and I did look at the panel against mine. It was very similar data to the same tests—basically, 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 that tiny vial.
I don't want to go on because I've said so much already, but there are lots of things about the experience of spending time with her that were interesting and odd. If I had to characterize some of that, I would say I believe she had conviction—
Yeah.
—about what she was doing.
Yeah. I mean, let's definitely 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's conviction, and our conviction as interlocutors of Elizabeth Holmes.
Caitlin, 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.
Yeah.
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 experience of reporting on her?
2. The Theranos Investigation
She wasn't really on my radar until a New Yorker story, a profile by Ken Auletta, was published, I think, in mid-December 2014. I read that while commuting back from The Wall Street Journal newsroom in Manhattan to my apartment in Brooklyn. I 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 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. There was also a note in there about the secrecy, and I thought to myself, “There's something not quite right here.”
But then I didn't really think any more of it for the next couple of weeks, until about 3 weeks later. Out of the blue, I got a call from a source who was a practicing pathologist in Columbia, Missouri. He'd read the very same New Yorker story, and he knew a lot more about blood testing than I did. He was very skeptical of her claims and about the feasibility of what she asserted.
He was 3 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, made me willing to look a little bit more into it.
There were all these YouTube videos that I watched.
We've made it possible to eliminate the tubes and tubes of blood that traditionally have to be drawn from an arm and replace them with the nanotainer.
There's something really odd about her. I felt like she was playing a role, that 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.
Mm-hmm.
That made me even more 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. I believe it started in 2021, in San Jose, which is about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. Half of the San Francisco press corps and I were down there, hanging around the courthouse for about 4 months.
But it was really surreal in a way because we were in the hallway and in this same space as Elizabeth Holmes and her family. We wound up 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. They were very friendly and chatty with us. Billy would talk about Burning Man or various things, but never anything about the trial or about Holmes.
The oddest thing that happened, I'd say, is that Billy Evans's dad came to jury selection and was hanging out with all of us in the media and chatting with us. He told us his name was Hansen and that he was just there as an observer because he was interested in criminal justice. That's not a totally implausible story because there are a lot of people—some people call them gavel groupies—who hang out at trials. They just find the whole process interesting. There were some people who went to every single day of this trial over the course of 4 months.
So we just thought he was one of those people. Then, later on the first day of the trial, when Holmes showed up with her family, arm in arm, he was with them—Hansen—and it turned out he was actually Billy Evans's dad.
Wow.
Wild.
Yeah.
Once you see the movie, I feel like it clicks something into place to learn that his dad was doing stuff like that. Okay, so we have here 3 periods of Elizabeth Holmes's arc. Last month, a trailer dropped for a new documentary that seems to suggest a kind of 4th 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. Hmm? Why would I deceive you? There's no reason for me to do that.
Okay. All right. Good chat. How did you guys react when this movie trailer dropped? Were any of you aware that this documentary was in the works?
3. The Documentary Arrives
Yeah, I actually found out about it a little more than 18 months ago. Fielder reached out to me, and I was unfriendly to him because, at the time, I was being harassed by this guy. 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. I was pretty hostile.
Mm-hmm.
Wow. Did you mention that to him, or did you just say, “No, thanks”?
Eventually, I forwarded Nathan's email to my agents. Then my agent talked to his agent, and we were able to ascertain that they weren't working together and that it wasn't the same thing. But I still didn't really have a good idea of what exactly Fielder was working on. I didn't understand exactly what he wanted from me. I was done with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.
I heard about the movie at the beginning of their promotion, and I thought, “Why?” At that point, there had been so much. 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.
Yeah, I was—
As it turns out.
Caitlin, you were pretty sick of the Elizabeth Holmes story.
Well, it just raises questions for me: Why is she? In my job, I look at lots of stories of con people.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know if “con people” should be a phrase, but I find them unsatisfying because mostly they believe what they're selling for a long period of time. We think, as regular people who go to a party and see something weird, that if we were lying all the time, it would really suck—
Yeah.
—and be hard. I think, actually, they have a higher tolerance—
Mm-hmm.
—for deceit, sure—
Mm-hmm.
—but also just discomfort. I think both Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder have a very high tolerance—
Yes.
—for discomfort.
Yes, you could say that. It's interesting to hear you say this, Caitlin, because one of the most interesting things is how enduring the cultural fascination with a figure like Holmes is. There are a lot of people—I would include myself in this—who have been obsessed with her without ever having really met her. You guys are part of a small group of people who have gotten up close, to say the least.
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. Was it surprising? Did it feel new, or did it feel like more of the same old? John, you've spent the most time thinking about Elizabeth. Let's start with you.
4. Holmes On Camera
Right, and just to be clear, she never granted me an interview.
Yeah.
When I was researching Theranos, I tried to get an interview with her in late 2015. I made repeated attempts and repeated requests, and she would never grant me an interview because I think it was clear to her that I 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. Again, I was denied 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 there are 2 sides of Elizabeth Holmes. One is that she can be very pleasant, and she can be extremely charming if she wants to be. I think there's another side that she doesn't show much, if at all, in this film: She is feisty, combative, ruthless, and a liar.
The feisty, combative, ruthless parts you see in tiny little flashes, I'd say, in the film, when she's being asked by Fielder insistently, “Well, how did you get here? Don't you think you did something wrong?” And she says, “I did not.”
Mm-hmm.
There are a couple of times when she snaps back, “I did not,” and her demeanor is a little bit more tense. I think that's the closest you get to seeing that other Elizabeth Holmes. But for the most part, she does a very good job of hiding it.
Caitlin, what about you? Was this similar to the Holmes that you remember from those interviews, from that interview more than a decade ago?
I think I interpreted them differently in 2013 than I do now, in 2026. One of the things I've thought a lot about in the intervening years is teasing out what her performances are for and who they're for, right?
When I met her, there weren't a lot of female founders, and certainly not a lot raising this level of capital and focused on biotech. 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 purposeful—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. So, in my mind, I thought of that as partially trying to pass as a strong founder.
Mm-hmm.
At the time, the other thing that was going on was every single person saying, “Your investment is just in the founder,” right? It's this sort of auteur theory of technology—
Right.
—that you're investing in someone. But I couldn't tell exactly what it was. I did get a vibe that something wasn't totally right. She was performing something. And she's just weird.
Yeah.
So when I watched the movie, I felt some of the same suite of feelings.
Yeah. I mean, to Caitlin's point about her costume, she very conspicuously dresses and makes herself up in almost the exact opposite way from how she did at her most famous, in 2015 and 2016. There are no turtlenecks in this movie. There are very few dark colors. Her hair is down most of the time.
As you're saying, Caitlin, it's hard not to wonder if this is itself a sort of strategy. In some ways, it probably obviously is a strategy to come across in a more relaxed, intimate, and different way.
Yeah, especially in those scenes, it's like we're...
They were in a temporary housing situation, but they're at the beach.
Yeah.
It's like we're frolicking on the beach—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 a kind of telegraphing—
Mm-hmm.
Ease and intimacy, right?
Yeah.
You're inside someone's real self, and I don't know how to interpret that. I think the filmmakers, Oppenheim and Fielder, made careful choices about what's in their edit, as anyone would, and were thinking about the question of what she was performing. That scene where she doesn't understand Fielder's question, and over and over again she repeats the same answer, was one of the most intense scenes for me because it's completely baffling.
Yeah.
There was a parallel that reminded me of the trial. There were moments—I don't know if you remember this, John—when she was being interrogated by the prosecutors. They were asking the same question over and over, in slightly different ways. It very much reminded me of that, where there's a little bit of a communication breakdown here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, because I think the reason communication breaks down, quite simply, is that she's not answering the question. She's evading the question. She's eliding.
Yes.
I felt like there were some moments in the film where she was just brazenly lying.
Mm.
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. Before she goes on to have her picture taken, suddenly she breaks down in tears, and you hear her say through the tears that the last time people in her entourage pushed her into the spotlight, it didn't go well.
I almost jumped out of my chair because, to me, that was a brazen lie. The reason is that 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 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 and that moment at the photography studio were completely manufactured, and that she—
It's also possible, though, that she—
—and that she planned it.
But isn't it possible that, regardless of whether she was into it when she was doing it, the result is that she's kind of traumatized by how it all turned out?
Well, John, I hear you. That does seem like a brazen lie to me, and yet one of the interesting things about the film is that, as a mother, I'm watching it and, every time I remember that she's about to go to prison and just has these young children, I feel sadness and empathy for her. Because this is such a weird period of time to be with someone, no matter who they are, right? The last days before they go to prison for how many years? 12?
11 years and 3 months.
11. Yeah, although she's apparently going to be moving to a halfway house next year, so only 5.
But, John, I don't think that negates your point. My sadness about her situation—just a human sadness about her situation—doesn't change this question of her calculations about what she's saying and lying. I think that's kind of what makes the movie work so well.
I was very nervous that it was just going to be a redemption story, getting us all on her side emotionally. But it does take us into her emotional state, and it makes you feel bad for her at times. She's going to prison, and, like you said, she's going to be away from her family. But it doesn't also let her off the hook, which is what I was most worried about.
Mm-hmm.
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.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
And her answer is—
And she said—
—is no.
Never. And he goes, “Liz, really?”
Yeah, yeah, and that's the—
He's all of us.
Mm-hmm.
It's preposterous, but I felt like they gave her enough rope to hang herself there. 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 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, she looks worse for it.
There's a real sense that the movie is trying—and maybe Fielder, as the 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? Can we redeem her? 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 have been manipulated by Elizabeth Holmes. Did you feel manipulated, in retrospect, through that interview, by that interview?
Yes. I felt like 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. But do I blame her? I never felt personal animus against her. I felt regret that we wrote about her so early, when we couldn't validate any of her scientific claims.
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 she was dragging her feet?
No way. Not at all. 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 clearly she had already decided she wasn't going to answer.
It honestly 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. The idea of that manipulation was always at play in these interviews. These are not unvarnished people.
Again, back to my point about 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.
But that scene where she cries and blames her entourage at the time for pushing her into the limelight, I felt like that's shirking responsibility—her responsibility. And there's another moment where she does that too, when Sunny Balwani comes up.
Sunny Balwani was her partner, her romantic partner, but also her business partner at Theranos, and he was the chief operating officer.
He was her second in command—
Yeah.
—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 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.
5. Why Holmes Still Fascinates
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 the 2010s in tech, and yet here we are in 2026, and we seem unable to 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’ve got to say, I found the story interesting 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 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 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.
Mm-hmm.
And I think that, 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 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 I’m not equating 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 the idea that we want to continue to drag, focus, and expend 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—
Mm-hmm.
—but I do think there’s culture at play in the question of who we disparage and continue to disparage over time.
And Max, to your question, 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. 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, seemed to have a real problem with elevating women. When we had all these tech-bro unicorn founders, why weren’t there any female founders of billion-dollar companies?
And then suddenly, here is one. That’s why she got put on the cover of every business magazine, because we’d finally found an example of it. And I think this kind of happened later, too, with the so-called girl-boss era, where 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 takedowns because of all of that press and attention.
Yeah, and Erin, to your point, I literally wrote about her—
Mm.
—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 covering her—
Yeah.
—at that early stage.
But to your question about 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 odd or attention-grabbing. I mean, from the outfits to the voice to all of 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. One thing from the trial I remember: Toward the end, there were a lot of spectators showing up, including people who were in a book club who read John’s book and came together as a little book-club outing. And I’m asking them, “What are you guys doing here?” One of them told me something I’ll never forget: “Oh, we’re just fans of white-collar crime.”
And I was like, “You mean as a book genre or as a genre of story?” Okay, sure. In the same way that there are people who are fans of murder stories or murder podcasts, there’s also a fraud contingent.
John must be such a celebrity to 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 34 days before she was scheduled to go to prison. She is the one who is still asking for public attention. And so I think we also have her own very proactive efforts to blame for why this is still a story that’s in the news and generating tons of coverage 11 years later.
That’s a great point, and honestly, I would not be surprised if Sam Bankman-Fried is currently emailing Nathan Fielder about getting a meeting.
Unfortunately, Sam Bankman-Fried really has nothing on Elizabeth Holmes as a kind of cultural figure. He just does not have the juice in the way she does. I mean, sorry to be totally—
I think you might be right.
—reality-TV producer about it. She’s got something that he just doesn’t have.
6. Holmes And Her Partners
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.
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?
That’s one fundamental question. But then, what is the role of this partnership—this romantic partnership and business partnership—and then why is she picking these guys?
What I found so fascinating is when she and Billy are getting really excited, jazzing each other up, talking about Theranos 2.0, and her parents are there. They’re just slowly zooming in on her parents, and the looks on their faces are—you can just see them steeling themselves because it feels like they’re thinking, “Here we go again.”
Yeah.
Yeah, they look very nervous. And around that time in the film, Nathan 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.”
Oh.
“Good question. I trust Billy,” and implied, of course, is, “I didn’t trust Sunny.” My view of those 2 relationships is that, as much as Elizabeth tried to blame it all on Sunny 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 Sunny 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.
Mm-hmm.
He lies, and I feel like the pattern is repeating itself.
Yeah, I think that scene you describe, and then Billy Evans appears.
Mm-hmm.
Even though the dad, Christian Holmes, has just said, “I trust Billy,” he comes right over to say, “No more talking.”
Right.
Mm-hmm.
“No more talking.”
Yeah.
So that was a really powerful scene. But I do think 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 what’s going on inside of her. What is this? Because not only is she having these relationships with these kinds of men, but she’s also using this intense, eye-catching, desperate, extreme, bombastic language—
Mm-hmm.
In both cases, right?
Yes.
So there’s something there that’s performative and also some kind of construction, a romantic understanding of what romance is. There’s something in here that’s very strange on the question of why. I’ll put it this way: I don’t know how you guys feel about PDA, but seeing people walk down the street and make out, or talk in a loud, loving way, these things don’t bother me particularly. But having a friend say, “He is my everything”—that would be like, “Let’s go to a psychologist from here.”
You know what I mean? It’s like—and she’s doing all of that. So this question of what she thinks her romantic relationships are: We see her in this movie repeatedly show us that what she thinks this is is perfect parity. They’re aligned and synced. They’re 2 twin souls. They’re dolphins leaping out of the water toward each other. It’s very bizarre, and that’s what the texts with Sunny Balwani revealed.
Yes. Yeah.
Right.
A similar thing.
Yeah.
What’s that about?
She calls their love a monument to love over and over.
They’re—
Right?
They’re building monuments—
Yeah, monuments.
To love—
To love.
For each—
Every day.
For each other.
Yeah.
Every day. I think, all that being said, yes, it’s bizarre, 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 Sunny 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, she clearly commits full-on to basically everything she does. I don’t know whether that’s about reassuring herself or about 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, and 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 at one of the most intimate moments of your entire life?
And the irony being, it’s all about transparency, and You Can See Everything is literally the title, and Billy is then the one cutting off access left and right all throughout the film.
Yeah.
7. Silicon Valley and Holmes
I want to ask a question. I think this is a good place to mention it. There’s one way of looking at this movie as Elizabeth Holmes as a kind of allegory for tech. You have this way that she was, as we’ve been saying, a kind of emblematic figure of the 2010s. She’s doing this 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: I think it’s fair to say Elizabeth was an emblematic figure 10 years ago. Is she still now? What is the relationship that people who work in the Valley right now have with her?
I think in general the tech industry rejects somebody who has been convicted of fraud. During the trial, I wrote a lot about how the trial was kind of emblematic or symptomatic of 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 get people on board with their vision. But she had just taken it a little bit too far.
Judge Davila even talked about that in his sentencing and at the end of the trial as well. 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—
Caitlin’s talked about this a little bit as well. 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 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 between Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk. I think it would be completely legitimate for some layperson who parachutes into Silicon Valley today, or into American society today, to wonder why one of them is in prison and not the other.
Mm.
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 arms before there was a car? There wasn’t a car, and there still wasn’t a car, and there still wasn’t a car after that.
Not to mention high-speed rail in California. Every single founder is trafficking across that line. So I agree that that is true about Elon and Elizabeth Holmes.
In that spirit, we’ve got Theranos 2.0 coming. Do you guys think this is the next chapter? Are they going to be successful? Are we going to see an Elizabeth Holmes-run Walgreens wellness center anytime soon?
Oh, my God.
I don’t understand. The technology worked the first time. The machine could do hundreds of tests. She explains it in the film. The cloud sent the orders into the cartridge, and—
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 drawings and another prototype? It was all done right the first time.
Okay. My question for you, John Carreyrou, is—and I thought about this as I watched the movie—what was your emotional weather as you watched it? How did you feel?
I’ve seen it twice, and the first time I saw it was about 10 days ago at the A24 offices in Manhattan. I was in a screening room virtually by myself. Actually, one other person was there: my wife.
I nearly jumped 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. Revisiting some scenes the second time around, I felt like they were more pregnant with meaning than perhaps I’d given them credit for the first time around.
I guess, over 2 viewings, I was really won over by the artistry of the way they filmed this thing, but also the structure, the amount of meta-thinking that went into it, and how unusual it is.
And whereas the first time I saw it—Fielder living in that house in San Diego with them and asking Elizabeth repeatedly whether she did anything wrong, while she repeatedly denied that she did anything wrong—that first time I saw those 90 minutes was a little frustrating for me, because I would’ve liked to jump in and grab the mic from Fielder and drill down a little bit more, and not be so polite. But on the whole, I really liked this movie.
Caitlin, can I ask you the same question about your emotional weather as you watched it?
I have a hat that says, “Make movies shorter.” And on the back it says, “97 minutes with credits.” So that’s my philosophical platform.
I went into this thinking, not only are we culturally back to Holmes—not that we left—but also we’re spending 3 hours with Elizabeth Holmes. My emotional weather about that was, “What the fuck?” But on a number of levels, I’ve been asking myself this question for more than 10 years: What does she think is real?
What does she think is real? I know what is real now, thanks to John. But what does she think is real, and what does she think is happening? That was how I came in. My feelings were, What are we gonna learn that adds to what we know about her? Are we gonna learn anything different? Are we gonna see and perceive her in a different way, and how is it gonna make us feel? A lot of my feelings at the beginning were really just about the filmmaking.
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, about what they were gonna do—not to mention the edit.
But there are just lots of things in there that are odd. The feeling of it was manipulative in every way to me, emotionally. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like the movie. I actually loved it. I thought it was great. But I did feel manipulated on every level—by Elizabeth Holmes, by Billy Evans, by Lance and Nathan.
I love movies, so I don’t mind being manipulated, but I was so conscious of it that I felt it the whole time.
Yeah. My experience of watching this was that I love but am terrified of cringe comedy. I had this sense of really wanting to hide my head sometimes as the encounters got more and more awkward.
But unlike, say, the British Office or whatever, where I—as my wife will tell you—just have to completely go under the couch to have it happen, I was riveted. I could not hide. I could not look away. It was total anxiety, total fascination. Like you’re saying, Caitlin—and John too—there was admiration at what was happening there, but also this sense of—“roller-coaster ride” is almost too cliché. I was worried it was gonna fall off a cliff at any moment.
And it kind of does, in this way where you’re like, “I guess I’m going off the cliff. I guess I’m going off the cliff with you guys.”
It was an exhilarating movie to watch in a funny way, which is not something you often say about 3-hour-long documentaries. But it had this adrenaline-pumping aspect of not even mystery, but just the strangeness of the encounter that it kept circling around.
We also go in not just knowing Elizabeth Holmes at this point, but largely knowing Nathan Fielder culturally. The other thing that’s playing against that is your understanding of what he makes and what he does.
Yeah.
So I think, again, you were describing basically being in the chute.
Yeah.
And I’m very much out of the chute—holding onto the edges, not going down the chute. There’s this thing, because I’m conscious of it, 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 gonna drop off now. We’re gonna go to break, and Aaron’s gonna come back. We’re gonna 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.
Thanks.
After a stimulating discussion about Elizabeth Holmes, I’m back with our old friend, Erin Griffith, to talk about the headlines of the week.
Hey.
Hi. The big story that we need to talk about more than anything is the alleged OpenAI spy. 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 he’d plugged into the back of a television. I’ll describe it for our listeners. There is the accused spy, whose name is Abdulrahman Alfasan. 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 in a sort of 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 of me, because I assume I have this kind of pain expression.
Well, this is the question I have: Do they have a camera back there, or is—I mean, that wasn’t taken by the security device, was it? It was just a recording device, so where—how did they capture that photo?
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 this is, 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.
Of course, yes.
Exactly. It’s just really—it’s like, no wonder everybody accuses everything they do of marketing, because everything they do is marketing.
One thing that’s interesting about this is that I think we’re presuming he was spying on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government, which, we will also remember, allegedly planted a spy in Twitter or in X.
Not alleged. That one fully went to trial, and—
Yes, okay. He was convicted, in fact.
And we can just say it happened.
Yeah. So, the Twitter one, my memory is that some of it was about spying on dissidents who were organizing on Twitter.
Yeah, it was unmasking anonymous dissident Twitter accounts.
That’s right.
That’s what the person was trying to do.
This seems more about bugging meetings, like high-level meetings.
Yeah. No, that’s true. I would love to hear even more details about what they think this person was trying to get. We don’t know a lot about that yet.
I have to say, too, this guy’s obviously not 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. Surely every government on the planet would love to have one inside some of these places.
Yeah. This person has at least a long track record of working in tech. I’m not sure how real that is, but people are reporting on their LinkedIn that he was at Meta and was at various startups before. Either he’s been playing a very long game—he’s been spying for a very long time—or he just got converted. Given how easily he was caught, that 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 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. There were all these stories about people having 2 jobs, and that was the big thing, but there’s also an unspoken question: 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 when journalism finally collapses, Erin, 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, our audience will remember, 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 it later became quite controversial. It faced a number of lawsuits from states and individuals, with suggestions that it had pushed its users toward suicide and self-harm.
It filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, and it is selling some of its assets to Walt Disney. It’s claiming a lack of profitability despite having roughly 12 million active users, according to a Reuters article, because of the high cost of computing power and employing AI talent. What did you make of this?
I’ve actually been wondering for a while what’s going to happen to all the leftover nubs of these AI companies that did acqui-hire deals with big tech companies. This hasn’t been reported as prominently as some of the other stories, and for some reason I’m obsessed with it.
If you recall, Character.AI was started by these 2 Google guys, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, and they left Google because Google was moving too slowly. Google was like, “We need them back.” But for antitrust reasons, they weren’t really sure about making a big acquisition, and the founders wanted a lot of money.
So they did this backward deal where Google hired back Shazeer and the founders. They hired back 20% of the employees. As part of it, they had to leave this sad leftover company behind that no longer has its founders, is probably not going to raise any more money, doesn’t have the momentum or the excitement, and whose most valuable employees are gone.
I’ve been wondering what’s going to happen to all these old companies. A couple of them have already sold. Character.AI is notable in particular because it has faced a barrage of lawsuits over its product. There are harms that have happened, users who have died by suicide, and people who are suing because their chatbots have been posing as doctors and telling people to starve themselves or kill themselves. There’s some gnarly stuff happening with the product, so part of the bankruptcy is just to wipe the slate clean.
Right.
And deal with that. I sort of see it as a result of this extremely weird moment we had in 2024 of talent wars, when all the big tech companies tried to buy up all the most valuable founders without actually buying the companies.
Yeah, and the talent wars mean that a lot of the top people at these little—I think you called them “nubs,” which I enjoy as a sort of viscerally unpleasant way of thinking about them—disappear. Increasingly, you don’t need a specialized chatbot or whatever.
Yeah. Character.AI was one of the most promising AI companies developing core LLM technology because they had this guy, Noam Shazeer, who’s a very prominent researcher in this very small field. Basically, all of these companies in this class have gotten picked off during the talent wars.
Yeah. The other thing I want to talk to you about is Apple’s new device, the HomeView—
Yeah.
—for which an advertisement appeared this week. I don’t know how to describe this product except that they took the kitchen iPad and turned it into its own device. They productized the kitchen iPad.
You can’t take the iPad off the stand.
Right. Exactly.
It has to live there.
So it’s this little dome. It looks a little bit like those iMacs with the rotatable arm that were on top of the little dome. It’s a little dome—
Oh, I had one of those.
Yeah, I had one, too.
Yeah. It—
Exactly. I actually pulled mine out of my parents’ closet recently and found that it didn’t turn on, so that’s a pretty uninteresting story.
Mm.
This HomeView is sort of similar. It’s like a little dome. It’s got a slightly smaller-than-iPad-sized screen on it, and you can receive text messages on it, set your calendar, and ask Siri anything. It’s somewhere between an iPad and a HomePod—always on, always listening. I have to ask you: Would you ever put one of these in your house?
I’m the worst person to ask about this kind of thing. I’m sort of a late adopter.
Mm-hmm.
In my kitchen, I currently have an Amazon Echo from, I think, 2014, that is mostly a glorified timer and occasionally plays songs. I don’t really need a screen in my very tiny kitchen, so I’m not sure I need one. I saw Wired describe it as “a giant Apple Watch for the home,” and I don’t have an Apple Watch, so I’m not sure why my house needs one.
Really selling it there. That’s a great—
That one’s for the box.
I will say, though, I can see the value and the appeal. I watched this ad, which, as I was telling you, kind of reminds me of The Bear—the vibe of The Bear, but set to that Peter Bjorn and John song.
Becca, we’re late.
I’m right here.
Oh, Mom, breathe. It’s all 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 a thumping drum beat, it’s happy, fun music. That’s because they have the Apple HomeView—
Mm-hmm.
—which is kind of like another member of the family—
Yes.
—that they’re all interacting with. In my ideal version of the world, I can see that mornings are chaotic for families, for sure, but I don’t need yet another person or entity to be involved with the chaos.
Yeah. It had the real Apple marketing-materials feel, where they invented a bunch of problems that can be solved by the new Apple device. When you watch the video, you’re sort of like, they’re so much better at marketing than basically any other tech company because they seem to be the only one where 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, messy family—a sort of sitcom-y messy family.”
Yeah.
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 they’ve described.” If I did have one in my kitchen, I think I would probably just end up watching TV on it because it’s a screen, and that’s sort of—
That’s what you do on screens. So I’ll be very interested to see if this gets any kind of adoption.
I did a story a couple of years ago about couples and families using tech to manage their day-to-day lives, and I went into it thinking it would be a little bit poking fun: “Oh, these couples are using Notion and Slack”—all these tech tools to basically do the stuff that families do, just basic communication—and they’re managing their lives like product managers.
But 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 a technological household manager—anything that can simplify things and offload the mental load for you. I totally get it.” There are companies doing well selling these different family-friendly screens, and Apple’s probably now just going to put them out of business, unfortunately. But I can see where there’s an appeal for this specific use case.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, what I really need—Gus, my son, is in first grade, and there are 7 different apps across his camps and schools. I get texts, and I get emails, and I need Apple to find a way to receive all of that and just give it to me in one simple, easy format. 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 else to do it for me, please. And that is when I will buy the Apple—I’m sorry, I keep forgetting the name—HomeView. The Apple HomeView.
Yeah. Well, I was going to say—you beat me to it. I was going to say, just get an agent for that. But I did see a bunch of people sharing that Anthropic is hiring 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 the 101 stuff that agents all claim they’re going to solve for us—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.
Ugh, incredible. Incredible. When I first saw the headline, I have to say, I actually thought they were taking up smoking because they have a high P(doom), and it’s like—
Might as well.
It’s like The Leftovers. If you saw that show, they’re nihilists who are going to just start hanging out with Liv Tyler and wearing white because nothing matters.
But it’s the opposite.
Yeah. As it turns out, the reason is that they think AI is going to cure cancer.
Yeah.
So smoking is a way to show how much you believe that AI will cure cancer. So if you get cancer, it’s no big deal because, you know—
And it’s very funny. It has to be the least cool reason to smoke cigarettes I can possibly imagine. This is one of the classically cool things to do, smoking cigarettes. There are so many cool reasons to do it: nihilism, because you know you look good, to meet people, all this stuff.
Smoking because you want to signal to other AI researchers that you think AI is going to cure cancer soon completely negates all the coolness, all the cool points you get from smoking a ciggie outside. You completely lose them from this.
Yeah, you meet a woman outside a bar, and then you start explaining the way AI is going to—
You just lose.
—and she just walks away.
I actually don’t need a light anymore. I’m fine. Thank you. I’m good. 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.
Anytime.
You can catch Erin on OpenAI security footage trying to plug things into the back of a TV. She’s also, uh, she wrote a great piece this week that I hope we’ll get a chance to talk to you about, um, AI agent dinner parties that you can read in The New York Times app.
Oh, yeah. Thanks for the plug.
Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank, uh, let’s thank our audience. Thank you guys for listening. Um, it’s been another great week on Hard Fork.