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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14521 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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I almost feel like there should be a mega-thread for “You Can See Everything.” It will be The Thing everyone online is talking about and writing think pieces about for the next few weeks. Spoiler-free review – it’s as good as everyone says, 9/10. Go in with knowledge of Elizabeth Holmes and what happened at Theranos, don’t go in with knowledge of what happens in the movie.

Some rambling spoilery thoughts from the morning after I watched it:

The movie confirmed my model for Elizabeth Holmes (and by extension, Billy) and many other con men/crazy people.

I think most people have far too binary of a view of these types. They model them as either cynical, lying, grifters who know that they are lying all the time, or insane people who have no contact with reality. I think the real answer is that they are both at the same time, but more by instinct than design.

My take is that the best modeling for Holmes+Billy is Nathan’s analogy to the David Blaine ice pick trick. What Blaine does is a “trick” in the sense that he is fooling the audience and he isn’t hurting himself, but it’s “real” in the sense that he is genuinely putting an ice pick through his hand.

Homles is an extremely weird person, and at least somewhat crazy. And I think her crazy/weirdness manifests in an extremely manipulative manner by instinct. I think she’s a chameleon who adapts to context to get what she wants. At Theranos, she adapted to the role of young, genius, female tech CEO; in “You Can See Everything,” she adapted to the role of poor, sad, beleaguered, earnest, wrongfully convicted, loving mother. Her behavior in the movie is primarily crafted to get sympathy.

But I don’t think it’s all an act, or even mostly an act. I think she’s a genuine shapeshifter. She simply does and says too much stuff that would run counter to a planned, orchestrated con act to get sympathy. Like, telling Nathan that she never lied while at Theranos is very stupid – strategic contrition is the far better play. And telling Nathan that she has literally never, ever lied in her entire life is so absurd that it completely destroys her credibility.

I think I have a little bit of personal insight on this by seeing a friend go through a horrible relationship with a borderline personality disorder girl. She ruined his life for years with emotional manipulation, and though she would have occasional moments of clarity and realize what she was doing, most of the time it was pure instinct. This woman would seemingly genuinely believe that her partner was a piece of shit who deserved to die in one moment, and then ten minutes later she would be head-over-heels in love with her partner and feel that she will die if they aren’t together. The contradictory mental states and beliefs were both real, the mind itself flipped according to subconscious dictations trained and modeled by repeated uses of extreme emotions to manipulate her partner.

There is a part in Scot Alexander’s “You’re Still Crying Wolf” that has always stuck with me where he says that so much of Trump’s seemingly evil behavior is explained by him just being really weird. He talks weird, he acts weird, he constantly does things that normal people can’t model onto a real person because it’s so weird. And that weirdness in part explains his evil. Trump probably didn’t accuse Obama of being born in Kenya out of racism, but out of weirdness.

I think this movie is a great display of this concept. People tend to underestimate the depths and complexities of weirdness. Holmes is an extremely, deeply weird person. Maybe its autism, maybe its some other psychological disorders, maybe it’s just have different personality nobs turned way up or down, but it all amounts to a weirdness that no one can quite wrap their minds around or model, even after a 3 hour documentary.

And Billy appears to be a kindred spirit. There’s a scene where he describes his relationship with Holmes in a completely insane and blatantly manipulative and controlling manner, saying crazy shit like Elizabeth spends every second of every day thinking about how to build monuments to her love for Billy. He sounds like an awful sociopathic narcissist abuser. Then later in the movie, Elizabeth says the same exact stuff about her love for Billy, which indicates that they are both deeply weird and maybe crazy people, but they are, in a sense, right. Their love is (probably) not some insane manipulation, it is real and authentic, but it is so weird that it looks like abuse from the outside.

Enormously entertaining.

At some point what I felt watching it was that this person has been ossified by her choices at Theranos and her refusal to accept them. Her breaking down and crying upon being questioned about Theranos is the sort of thing that might be annoying but effective for a 19 year old but very much not cut at this point.

I think that explains her new persona. In Theranos she could win converts and believers. As it collapsed she took a more and more defensive posture but kept getting pushed back since the evidence was so overwhelming until all that's left is this sort of put-upon autist who can't even get basic jokes (read Carreyrou's account of how she put down the one board revolt to see if it tracks) so how on Earth could she have scammed Walgreens?

I personally think she's much more aware of her tactics than you give her credit for. The tell is the "I don't know" when Seyfried asks Holmes if she knew she'd be on the call. What the hell does that mean? She knows, what she doesn't know is the strategic value of knowing. That single scene alone blew up the entire absurd arc they were pursuing with Billy..

Of course Billy is a weirdo! He married and had kids with a woman undergoing trial for grifting and is actively aiding her in the con. The idea that she's really some abused autist dominated by her sleazy boyfriend is absurd. She already tried this with Balwani with more credibility, it's thinner the second time around.

This is why the movie elides any discussion of Theranos. It's trying to create ambiguity and the idea of falling under this vampire's spell but none of it works at all if you know what happened.

So what's the takeaway? If you remove your safeguards against liars they'll drag you into a whirlpool of uncertainty? No shit, that's why we hate liars. If you deal with manipulative people they may manipulate you? There's nothing really ambiguous here, in terms of Holmes' guilt and willful maliciousness. Nor particularly interesting in terms of telling us something new about how she'll double down endlessly. We know she does that, that's how she got convicted.

But enormously, enormously entertaining.

No shit, that's why we hate liars.

really? this seems like a revealed vs stated preferences disconnect . People who lie seldom face consequences ,and retain jobs and status. I think it's like, we don't like lying in principle, but we can also compartmentalize why people lie, so we are quick to forgive.

Most people do not lie so consistently and totally. You don't seem to be able to be in Holmes orbit without being sucked into her fantasies, and it's never to your benefit. In a sense she is always using people. It'd be exhausting to deal with.

Perhaps we should say that's why people don't like conmen.

I have not yet seen the movie (and I am not concerned about spoilers), but does anything happen that moves the needle from the (to me at least) obvious conclusion that she is personality disordered?

Actual grifters either have a better plan or more obvious impulse control issues.

That leaves being high on your supply likely due to personality construction.

It’s like, "don’t commit crime or we’ll send you to a white-collar dorm prison, where you’ll serve half your sentence after an extremely long post and pre-trial period, and Netflix deals and lucrative opportunities (e.g podcasts, consulting ) await your release.”

“Don’t commit crime so you don’t get brutally raped by barbarians in jail” just doesn’t seem to work so well as a disincentive to me. Do white collar South Africans or Colombians commit far less fraud because of the poor state of their prisons vs, say, white collar Spaniards or Canadians? I doubt it.

Separation of prison populations by whether they were involved in violent or non-violent crime seems reasonable.

in many cases defendants for white collar crimes get the book thrown at them, and I am trying to figure out why hers wasn't like that, and why she will bounce back.

She was sentenced to 11.5 years in prison which is relatively long for white collar crime / criminal fraud (a lot of potential charges around like endangering patients etc would have been hard to prove)”. If you look at white collar criminals who get much longer they tend to be either SBF types who repeatedly violate their bail or other conditions and get the book thrown at them because the judge is annoyed, or there’s some surrounding sob story (Madoff was basically the effigy burned for the entire financial crisis, and his victims were wealthy and ran a big lobbying campaign around all the nice upper middle class Boca Raton retirements he marginally inconvenienced ‘destroyed’ whereas Holmes’ investors were mainly billionaires and VCs) that can be tied directly to the fraud.

FPC Bryan is basically Girl Scout camp. I could probably swing by next weekend and say hi to her through the fence.

I didn’t see the point of this movie or why it was made. I guess if you want to gawk at some freaks then yeah it’s entertaining there. It didn’t seem all that deep to me.

There's an account from another film-maker who thinks they were rejected because they wanted to get into Theranos

I think the frog got boiled. Simple plan: go in, make a Theranos doc. But she's incredibly touchy about that. So let's do one about the mind of madness and how they're getting through this. Then she's in jail and not giving us more (maybe because she how senses things are going and is icing us out like the other guy) and we need more so let's get into the husband and what's going on in his crazy mind.

As a result, it goes all over the place.

A lot of the documentary is about A24 and Fielder being blackmailed by Billy to go against their alleged ethics and give Holmes a piece of the documentary's box office and basically trying to claw that back by driving a wedge between Holmes and Billy. Gives me the sense that they knew they'd got in too deep and got compromised.

Agreed. I've intentionally tried to read any and all spoilers I've come across, and I haven't seen anything revelatory or interesting. Nathan Fielder seems to have a very strong hold over his fans, and I've noticed lots of his fans are women. I don't even think he's polarizing. The people who like him really like him, and love everything he does, and the people who aren't like that don't think anything of him. So it's weird whenever he puts out something new. You have people who breathlessly praise it on the one hand and people who kind of just scratch their heads going "Huh?" on the other, and they can't really communicate with each other.

Try watching this clip if you haven't already. Then imagine reading a description of what happens in the clip instead of watching it. It would not sound very interesting. Words alone are incapable of communicating the experience.

I had never heard of Nathan Fielder before this film. The cinematography was riveting even though, writing it all down after the fact, not much of importance happens in the movie.

It looks really nice, and the sound is good. Looking at faces, especially ones with interesting features like Liz's, is enjoyable, but there's no substance here beyond its cinematic qualities, and from what I've read there's not much more than the enigma that is Elizabeth Holmes, or the selling of the idea that she's enigmatic. To me, Liz isn't the story. Her investors are the story. Her relationship with MSM is the story. How our culture treats women is the story. I don't care to what extent she's aware or in control of her ability to manipulate people.

I am one of those scratching his head at this. Nothing I've seen of Nathan Fielder has ever seemed remotely entertaining or amusing to me, but people have told me he's the funniest person of all time and that I need to watch multiple seasons of his show to properly appreciate this documentary.

large public interest, as evident by the strong box office gross

Completely agreed, this movie should be nominated for Best Picture (and at least Best Editing).

I think one way to model Holmes is the classic "liar vs bullshitter" paradigm.

The thing that goes up to eleven is exactly what you mention in that Holmes is an extremely weird bullshitter, and also gets involved with other extremely weird bullshitters (Billy) too.

There are so many questions that come out of this doc:

Is Holmes currently a victim of Billy or is Holmes manipulating an already troubled person? Are they just both just in their own two-person cult (though both Holmes and Billy parents are probably participants of this cult)? What does this say about society/humanity that bullshitters seems to go forth and multiply? Even at an individual level, do we have the defenses against such bullshit?

On the filmmaking side of thing. I noticed today that I am actively trying not to spoil a doccumentary to my coworkers. That's deeply intriguing. I do echo what others already say that this documentary changes the genre of documentary. Documentaries are often just dramatic retelling of facts, this feels like a true exploration, we are being manipulated, we know we are being manipulated, Nathan Fielder knows he is manipulating us, Nathan Fielder knows you the audience knows they're being manipulated, Holmes and Billy knows, etc.. But I suppose you need such a strange and bizarre confluence of factors that could lead to the creation of this piece of captured reality.

I think this is massively overthinking it, frankly. Holmes lied, knowingly and on purpose, when she claimed her company's test could do certain things. She lied, knowingly and on purpose, when she claimed drug companies who had not endorsed her product had done so. She is lying, knowingly and on purpose, about her knowledge about herself and her beliefs during the time she was committing the above frauds. There's an MSNOW review of the documentary that links to a bunch of other news stories about the trial that reference evidence introduced there. I see no reason why Holmes should be downgraded to "weird person" from "cynical grifter."

Society has become obsessed with overthinking criminals, it's been reinforced by the dominant therapeutic mindset. We need to return to a "he was a wrong un, simple as".

And this is what Holmes wants: the debate, which is better than what she had before.

Oh boy, this subthread is going to look like the Epstein Files, because there is no way to talk about the movie without spoilers.

The number 1 culture war implication is that Billy reveals he is a Republican during his climactic villain monologue. Charlie Kirk’s legacy might be the biggest unintentional victim of the film.

Working through this brings up the question: How much of a villain is Billy really? The film builds him up as the douchebag to end all douchebags, but what, specifically, did Billy do wrong? It is strongly implied that Liz would not approve of the things that Billy does in her name, but do we have a good basis to conclude this? Liz never says a single bad word about him.

Hollywood hates the idea that two imperfect people could be in a loving relationship with each other despite their flaws. They pretend that they don’t. They make lots of movies where the surface-level theme is about flawed people falling in love, but when it happens to real people they are treated with scorn. Amanda Seyfried flat-out admits that she wants to break Liz and Billy up. Why? What purpose would that serve? Is it because he asked for compensation in return for letting an entire film crew into his house?

The outwardly patriarchal family where the matriarch secretly calls the shots is a common archetype in traditional societies. Strange that it is so hard for modern people to recognize.

Hollywood hates the idea that two imperfect people could be in a loving relationship with each other despite their flaws.

I'm going to disagree on this, there are plenty of movies that shows "two imperfect people could be in a loving relationship with each other despite their flaws". We've got Bonnie and Clyde, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Silver Lining Playbooks. On TV, oh my the examples abound. I think the difference is that Hollywood, and I think normal people, doesn't want to encourage unhealthy co-dependence behaviors, especially when it might affect others. The story that Hollywood likes to tell, because people like to listen to, are two imperfect people who are with each other despite their flaws and are better people for it.

Amanda Seyfried flat-out admits that she wants to break Liz and Billy up. Why?

Because she shared camaraderie "woman to woman" and thought that Liz is a victim. But that's the key question: no one can really know. Is Liz an imbecile going through the world completely oblivious to all her lies, and therefore more akin to an insane person, and therefore at least worthy of pity? or is Liz a master manipulator that will never let up the act in the end in pursuit of riches, fame, and power without caring for the costs inflicted on people around her and therefore deserves her punishment? On a practical level though, obviously, for our own good, we should treat people like Holmes and Evans as just to be avoided and minimize what they can do and affect in the world.

I am 100% with you on Billy.

If you go through Reddit/Twitter threads, Billy is getting more criticized than Holmes, people think he is a monster. My read is that he a douchey maybe-coke addict who shares a lot of the same pathologies as Holmes, but hasn't actually done anything illegal or even unethical besides lying to make himself look good. The final reenactment scene with Seyfriend strongly implies that Holmes really does enjoy being in their controlling relationship, and she's fine with Billy running her Twitter and exploiting her digital likeness. They are weird people, and what looks like abusiveness from the outside is just their weirdness in action.

The other major culture war angle is that Holmes is using modern feminist tropes as part of her psychological defense. A narrative you can see all over the internet right now is that Holmes was raped in college, then groomed by Sunny, then manipulated into the Theranos fraud, and now she's being manipulated by another wealthy powerful man. I suppose all of that is possible, but it relies on giving Holmes a tremendous amount of credence about her relationship dynamics with Sunny, her being raped, and the psychological impact of the alleged rape. All of it is based on her testimony, and she's the most unreliable person on earth.

Holmes isn't using modern feminist tropes; she's using tropes so enduring even modern feminists go back to them. "Young woman was taken advantage of by older, more assertive man" (which was the argument she made against Balwani) is a feminist theme in the same way that pontiff is a Christian title.

Her original persona at Theranos was much more explicable in terms of specifically modern feminist themes. Which is why she took center stage in marketing as the visionary girlboss - down to the deep voice! - in contrast to the more experienced Balwani. It was when it crashed you saw a shift.

When she lost, she descended into the sort of hypoagency most societies would understand. Down to crying when pushed on things.

Truly successful grifters almost always have to believe.

Almost.

I think if you actually look at the scammers that the public is most fascinated with, year after year and decade after decade, it’s not the crazy true believers. Or at least it’s not the obvious true believers. There are a lot of those. Holmes was a true believer, and a crazy one, but seems interesting because she was a blonde autistic woman in a world of men and because the blood testing thing was more salacious / bloody / fun than the usual scam. Like Trump’s inner life isn’t very interesting. He believes he’s the best and always has had supreme confidence in himself, psychologizing him isn’t appealing - even libs don’t really do it more than halfheartedly, they just call him an evil narcissist.

I actually think the public is most fascinated by the very small minority of grifters for whom doubts exist about the extent to which they believed in their own innate luck. Examples that come to mind are Anna Delvey and L Ron Hubbard. Delvey never believed in her grift, she just thought everybody else was stupid and deserved to pay for her. Hubbard literally wrote his own science fiction and seemed to be relatively self aware, those who have studied Scientology’s history have often argued he never really did believe the way that his successors did. Another example? Madoff, who shielded his own children from his scheme.

Absolute self-belief is common. To hold the knowledge that you’re a fraud in your head and still continue takes much more fortitude, and makes for a much more interesting grifter.

Hubbard literally wrote his own science fiction and seemed to be relatively self aware, those who have studied Scientology’s history have often argued he never really did believe the way that his successors did

I'm reading a book about Joseph Smith at the moment and I'm really struggling to put myself in his mind and work out whether he really thought Jesus was talking through him. Like, he clearly believed in God and cared about religion (hence the fact he spent ages retconning the Old and New Testaments to get rid of all the obvious contradictions) but also his 'revelations' were so transparently self-serving. Like sureeee Joe, a big scary angel with a sword said he would kill you if you didn't have sex with all those teenage girls. You really didn't want to, but you're scared of the angel!

I think it is hard to read the CES Letter and conclude Joseph Smith was anything other than a fabulist.

Lol. A couple months ago on one of my days off I was resting, and I got accosted by these 3 young Mormon guys on the sidewalk as I was walking and decided to say, “… oh what the Hell, why not…”, and decided to oblige them. I was reading a book when they approached me and they got all excited and asked me what the book was. We went back and forth for a moment and they asked me if I was religious and I said I was Roman Catholic. One of them they said, “Oh! Is that the same as Catholic?!” (Yeah. This isn’t going to go well for you.)

They handed me a portable copy of the Book of Mormon and asked me to turn to some page and read along with them. And then they asked me to join them for a service on an opportunity I had off if I was available. I gave them a burner VoIP number linked to my phone and then later blocked them after they began calling me like a crazy ex-girlfriend would. There was a time several years ago when I had a desire to read the Book of Mormon just to see what it is these people believe and say about it; but I didn’t want to have to go through the whole cult initiation ritual just to obtain one. Now I have one though after that interaction and maybe I’ll get around to it one day.

I think my favourite "Catholic and proselytisers" anecdote is the one Tim Powers used in his story The Bible Repairman:

He had been doing Bible repair for twenty years now, but his reputation in that cottage industry had been made only a couple of years ago, by accident. Three Jehovah’s Witnesses had come to his door one summer day, wearing suits and ties, and he had stepped outside to debate scripture with them. “Let me see your Bible,” he had said, “and I’ll show you right in there why you’re wrong,” and when they handed him the book he had flipped to the first chapter of John’s gospel and started reading. This was after his vision had begun to go bad, though, and he’d had to read it with a magnifying glass, and it had been a sunny day—and he had inadvertently set their Bible on fire. They had left hurriedly, and apparently told everyone in the neighborhood that Torrez could burn a Bible just by touching it.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I wrote this story after watching the movie Man on Fire, caught up with the idea of a kidnap negotiator who finds that he has somehow got to the point where he must sacrifice himself in order to free the victim. And I used my current San Bernardino neighborhood as a setting, which led inevitably to the peculiarly pragmatic Hispanic style of magic.

Like Torrez in the story, I was once visited by proselytizers for some variety of Christian faith, and when I told them that we were Catholic, they replied that Catholicism was a false religion. I offered to show them, in their own Bible, why they were mistaken, and they handed it over—but, again like Torrez, I need a magnifying glass to read, and it was a sunny day, and I did inadvertently set their Bible on fire. I’m told that they still go door to door, but they now avoid our whole street.

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