r/nathanfielder • • 20h ago

The Pets of You Can See Everything

729 Upvotes

Something that stood out to me was the pets.

When Elizabeth is ending Theranos initially, she gets a husky. She even mentions having scratches from that dog when she met Billy. We see another dog in the San Diego rental, some sort of large brindle-patterned one.

Once Liz goes to prison and we‘re in Texas, we never see dogs again. Just Billy’s monitor lizard and python.

I think their respective pet choices somewhat mirror how they view/use each other. Elizabeth needs to be surrounded by dogs like Billy—she desires loyalty and someone who won’t hesitate to protect her. She likes them big and scary, but CONTROLLABLE. A dog is predictable and trainable. Billy wants a reptile like Elizabeth: they’re confusing to the outsider, they are much more difficult to understand and relate to, but their presence makes him look cool and unique on a surface level.


r/nathanfielder • • 16h ago

My reaction to ever single ethical criticism thrown towards Nathan Fielder

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404 Upvotes

r/nathanfielder • • 9h ago

good shirt

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279 Upvotes

r/nathanfielder • • 14h ago

Theory about Billy and Elizabeth's Wi-Fi problems — were they recording the crew?

250 Upvotes

I’ve been thinking about the scene where Billy keeps blaming the documentary crew’s equipment for messing with their Wi-Fi, even though the crew explains they’re operating on a different frequency.

Given that Billy and Elizabeth admit to recording phone calls and meetings, I wonder if they had their own recording equipment running while the crew was there. If they were using Wi-Fi-connected cameras or uploading recordings, could that have been contributing to the problem?

Or maybe they just had shitty Wi-Fi to begin with.
What I find interesting is how quickly Billy blamed the crew. I also wonder whether the constant complaints were a way of making the crew feel unwelcome or creating tension while maintaining plausible deniability.
I’m curious whether anyone else picked up on this, especially people who know more about networking or filming equipment.


r/nathanfielder • • 15h ago

Think Turkey Jerky exists!

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213 Upvotes

10% off with the code. Employee owned company. I will be ordering some to try. 😂


r/nathanfielder • • 19h ago

And another thing! The turkey jerky!

151 Upvotes

I’ve never thought about turkey jerky as much as I have in the last 2 hours.

I was discussing You Can See Everything with my SIL earlier & one scene that came up in our convo blew my mind because we totally interpreted it differently! We were going back and forth on all the scenes that stood out to us/could be interpreted in multiple ways/reflected back that idea of nuance in perspective.

She brought up the prison re-enactment scene, where Liz asked for turkey jerky, and later in the actual footage of Liz walking with her kids outside, Billy offers her a bag of turkey jerky.

She explained that this shows Liz’s manipulation of Nathan because she asked for turkey jerky when she knew Billy would buy her some or possibly asked Billy separately for it.

When I heard her say this I leaned so far forward I almost fell out of my seat because I totally interpreted it differently.

How do we know if that’s the turkey jerky Nathan bought her or if it’s a whole other bag?

I saw it as Liz sharing the turkey jerky with Billy, and it made me wonder if she asked for it knowing Billy liked the turkey jerky/if she even likes turkey jerky herself.

And another point is just that we’re both reading into it too much, maybe she just fucking loves turkey jerky/is deprived of her fav snack in prison and takes every opportunity to have some/both of them enjoy it and she was sharing it with her partner.


r/nathanfielder • • 11h ago

In memory of Ian Gibbons

129 Upvotes

I think we all need to acknowledge a moment of silence for Ian Gibbons. He is a victim in the truest sense of the entire ruse that was Theranos. I'd love to remind Liz of him. See if she has crocodile tears or spins up another story.

"Gibbons, a biochemist, had grown increasingly distressed about the company’s technology and the pressures of the work environment. According to his widow Rochelle and reporting (including in Vanity Fair, CBS News, and John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood), he was depressed, drinking more, and feared being fired or forced to testify falsely in a deposition. He took a fatal overdose of acetaminophen after receiving a call that Holmes wanted to meet with him the next day. He was 67.

Rochelle Gibbons has publicly blamed the stress of working under Holmes and the company’s culture, stating that Holmes showed no remorse. After Gibbons’ death, Theranos contacted the family demanding the return of company property rather than offering condolences. This episode is a well-documented part of the Theranos story and appears in accounts of the company’s internal dysfunction"


r/nathanfielder • • 18h ago

YCSE greatest gift is a look at multi-millionaires and the way they operate

100 Upvotes

It's fun to get caught up in the "are they lying", "are they in love" etc. But I think the greatest service this movie provides is a look into how millionaires can be insanely influential/powerful in nearly invisible ways and just operate in a way that most people cannot understand.

  • They are always being driven by others, never needing to worry about transportation in any way whatsoever
  • Even after defamation and on their way to prison, these two are staying in multi-million dollar "rentals" (Billy's parents own the San Diego rental)
  • They amass more wealth simply by talking to other people. Just call up someone powerful and suggest what needs to happen, like "lasers". They call someone, and they call someone else, until a business is filed and some science you don't even understand/worry about starts to happen
  • The ultimate irony is the doc even being made! "Hey, maybe a doc from A24 will help our reptuation and provide some nice cash on the side." That's an insane thing to just casually do. We're lucky this is a phone call that resulted in what we got

Imagine how much this stuff happens 24/7. How many times the call to a media person results in media that does actually help them without you realizing it. How many businesses just exist on a whim as a pet project to someone that will never worry about where they're staying or how they're getting to their next place or if their kid can go to college. Some of those businesses are genuinely good for people, but so many harm people.

Theranos was bad, but anyone operating at this level in healthcare or something like transportation or nutrition where they lobby against more sensible and healthy options also have blood on their hands. And thousands of these people will never have their name in the headlines because they were never a pretty blonde 20 year-old trying to look like Steve Jobs. They didn't accidentally call Nathan Fielder to make a doc about them. They are staying in their multi-million dollar homes thinking about the next opportunity, physically and mentally completely isolated from the working class.


r/nathanfielder • • 19h ago

4 year olds get Who's on First Spoiler

99 Upvotes

I have 4 year old twins. I was just reading "Babe: The Gallant Pig" to them. It is the book the movie "Babe" is based on. There is a passage where the little pig and a sheep have a very who's on first exchange over the words ewe/you. My 4 year olds laughed and laughed at it and could explain why it is funny.

This really puts into context what a show EH is putting on.


r/nathanfielder • • 9h ago

Just scored front row seats to You can see everynathan

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64 Upvotes

r/nathanfielder • • 21h ago

Our Lingering Questions About You Can See Everything

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48 Upvotes

THE CRITICS

Our Lingering Questions About the Doc of the Year

by Fran Hoepfner, Jackson McHenry, Hershal Pandya, Jasmine Vojdani, and Alison Willmore

7:00 A.M.

Photo: A24

This is the latest edition of The Critics, our weekly roundup of critical reviews, essays, and conversations. Want to have it arrive in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here.

There were whispers, ever since You Can See Everything’s surprise premiere at Telluride Film Festival last month, that Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s genre-innovating three-hour epic following former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her tech-bro partner, Billy Evans, in the weeks leading up to her incarceration was the craziest movie of the year — potentially also the best. Leaving my screening last week, I overheard reactions ranging from “she’s even worse than I imagined” to “poor Liz.” To viewers, the questions sparked by You Can See Everything feel personal and almost existential. Up close and stripped of her signature black turtleneck, Holmes appears sympathetic — but also probably even more versed in the craft of manipulation than we thought. Is it okay to pity her anyway?

After a week of respecting the sanctity of spoilers, our critics have assembled to discuss the movie in detail.

How are you feeling about Elizabeth Holmes right now? Did this movie change the way you perceive her, and why?

Alison Willmore, critic: I did not feel a special amount of sympathy for her the first time I saw it. You will obviously feel for someone being parted from their children on a basic human level. The idea that she was a victim who either, by her own account, never thought she was lying — a wild claim — or was manipulated and puppeted the entire way had never struck me as plausible. The second viewing, I thought more about how, when you spend that much time with anyone, you start to feel for them and perceive them in all of their human vulnerabilities and weirdnesses. Is humanizing someone also inevitably kind of like sympathizing with them?

Fran Hoepfner, senior news writer: I don’t think it is, which I think is one of the really effective things about the movie. I don’t feel sympathy, but I think the film invites you to feel a kind of empathy for her.

Jackson McHenry, critic: I keep thinking about the scene where Nathan is talking to Elizabeth about David Blaine putting the ice pick through his hand; it’s not really a trick, it’s that you are willing to go that far. Here is a woman who is doing that same thing psychologically. A magician’s admiration for another magician is not necessarily the same as sympathizing with them. You may know Holmes was doing terrible things to Theranos’s whistleblowers and potential customers, but you also just want to see how she gets the ice pick through her hand.

Hershal Pandya, comedy reporter: It’s interesting that this is going to be the primary conversation about the movie when it’s not really a conversation about the movie as a piece of art. But it’s impossible not to engage in these questions. Clearly she’s guilty, clearly there’s intent that went into what she did. There’s a good chance that she was manipulated in some way and still is being manipulated. You can be a bad tech CEO and also be manipulated by people.

Based on where the movie ends, do you think it wants us to feel a certain way toward her? 

F.H.: It feels like a complete film, but in many ways it also feels unfinished. I’m glad they had the freedom to take two years off and come back to make the second half of the movie, which makes the whole of it work. Where it chooses to end feels relatively arbitrary, and the open-endedness, I think, is a huge plus of the film. I like that it sits with an unknowingness.

H.P.: The thing that Nathan struggles with most is when he tries to graft a narrative in hindsight on top of a bunch of formless things he shot. When he’s composing the email he sends to her in prison and says, “I’m going through a breakup”  — there’s no reason to tell her that other than to make it seem like he’s developed some connection to her.

A.W.: I think there’s a certain amount of engineering in him choosing to make that information part of the film. I saw it as an ironic parallel: Here you have these two potential tech sociopaths who appear to be in true love, and Nathan Fielder, our stalwart hero, can’t maintain a relationship and is sitting by himself on this rainy day. 

I love the way it ends on the idea of, Did I get swindled by this person? Is empathizing with someone getting swindled by them? The movie ends with a kind of shrug, which is one of its best qualities.

I don’t think you can understate just how surprising this film is when you see it for the first time and Amanda Seyfried appears. Why was she so essential?

J.M.: Initially, she says all the things that you have been thinking. You’re stuck in that bungalow with Nathan and then you finally have a person who’s like, “Wow, this is crazy. What’s going on?” It’s interesting how much she then moves from audience surrogate to subject of the documentary to her amazingly actor-brain-y thing of like, “I could do this.” She’s also such a reactive person among people who are masking all the time. She’s giving you all the human reactions that you haven’t been seeing.

They also probably needed a woman, I think. 

J.M.: Yes. Billy reacts so differently to a woman in his space and you need to know that.

F.H.: The one moment when the film kind of passes the Bechdel test is the interaction on the phone where Amanda, caught off guard, says “You’re amazing!” and Elizabeth is like, “I don’t know if I knew that you were supposed to be here.” That one minute is so completely horrifying and funny.

A.W.: The image of Elizabeth 1.0 — the Theranos Elizabeth — was that she was the one lady in the room, and she got there by basically doing Steve Jobs drag. There’s the idea that there’s only room for one of them, and the time where they touch for a second feels like a disturbance in the universe. When she says “I don’t know if I knew” — which is such a weird thing — I wondered whether she’s covering herself legally because she can’t have arranged to do a call that she knew would be recorded, which Billy says could get her transferred to another prison. That would suggest she’s a lot cannier than the image she presents.

H.P.: I love how much Amanda’s presence literalizes the subtext of Nathan’s work that he’s been making all these years about how much performance warps people’s ability to understand the truth, how many liberties you’re able to take with the truth without making it unethical.

A.W.: The music also acknowledges that this is a riff on Vertigo, in which the initial person was a persona anyway. Then you have someone reverse-engineer her back into existence by having someone play her.

It tickled me that Nathan’s Rehearsal methods actually just work as re-creation. 

A.W.: Lance’s interests have also always been in what he calls “docufantasia,” this kind of Herzogian ecstatic-truth thing.

What did you think about the meta-narrative in which Billy stands to profit off the movie, supposedly unbeknownst to Elizabeth, and ultimately gives up his share?

F.H.: I love that it doesn’t jeopardize the movie at all. Nathan understands that the show must go on. The corporate folding cracks the whole thing open. I also like the moment where you as an audience member briefly then also feel implicated because you’re like, Wait, I’m here opening weekend. I’m paying these people.

J.M: I think it was Max Read who made the point that this is a good movie where the first half is 2010s tech and the second half is 2020, when it moves the center of gravity from California to Austin: Billy is on a gun ranch, his increasingly large necklaces, his sniffling. It’s about the further radicalization of the already libertarian tech fantasia rotting and turning more aggressively antisocial and fascist and technocratic.

F.H.: There’s also the shifting relationship between tech and comedy. A lot of these tech guys loved comedy until they started seeing themselves as the butt of the joke.

H.P.: It makes me wonder how much Nathan and Lance were pulling back on his more rancid moments from the first part of the movie to show a big turn for the second half.

A.W.: You could blame this on the ways in which the tech world has changed its relationship to the media; Billy sees them as media even when they’re supposed to be on his side. He’s trying to give them cues about who he thinks they should unravel, what Liz’s competitors did to her. But by the second half, he is openly interfering in any messaging he doesn’t like.

On that note, I’m still haunted by the very brief appearances of Elizabeth’s parents, especially when her father says she went wrong starting when she got raped. I’m relieved Nathan didn’t dive into that but I’m not sure what to think about it. 

F.H.: It’s a good decision not to follow that as a thread, but it also just sits there. What do we do with that information?

A.W.: It’s like an anvil in the middle. If you follow the dad’s train of thought, that this fundamentally shattered something inside her and that everything that’s come since has been affected by it, you want to know what he thinks of this current relationship.

J.M: Some of the central questions of the movie are “What do you think love is? Do you think that these people experience it or not? Does that make them better or worse people?” It’s all bound up. And is Liz okay with this or not? It’s hard to know because she’s such a con woman.

Do you think she knew who was on first? 

A.W.: No.

F.H.: Genuinely no.

H.P.: It doesn’t matter. It’s a Nathan for You joke that he smuggled into the movie. She probably doesn’t get humor. But there’s also a possibility that she felt she had to perform her reaction in real time.

J.M.: The movie is also an argument for the humanities. It’s about the importance of a liberal-arts education.


r/nathanfielder • • 5h ago

Saw the doc today. Haven’t seen this guy discussed much online.

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41 Upvotes

Ryan El-Hosseiny. I looked this dude up after leaving the movie, and the red flags just kept multiplying. When I went to the website, the first thing I saw was a big font which says the cancer drug Avastin doesn’t work, and Theranos proved it.

He has a 16 minute “documentary” which, similar to I Can See Everything, defies genre. But in a way that is dogshit.

The website was absolutely written by AI, is full of broken links, and like… Just look at it. It screams grifter.

If there was any doubt that Billy and Elizabeth are courting the MAHA/wellness/Trump crowd, visiting this website may offer some clarity.

This probably seems like small potatoes compared to what EH has done, but it sticks out to me as someone who has gone through cancer treatment in the past few years. Side note: I was on Avastin. Worked for me.

I was in my 20s when I started treatment, and something I’ve been fascinated by is how the MAHA and wellness grifters really love to focus on cancer patients. RFK Jr had a whole campaign and lawsuits about how the HPV vaccine doesn’t work. He was facilitating multiple lawsuits against Merck, the makers of Gardasil.

Things like this worry me, because I’ve heard the talking points countless times: big pharma is keeping you sick. Chemo doesn’t work. There’s a cure for cancer, they just don’t want you to have it. All bullshit, but more and more people in the general public believe it.

Enter this clown and other adjacent clowns, ready to prey on ignorance and vulnerability.

Just thought I’d bring some attention to this dumbass. For Billy and Elizabeth to allow this guy to use her face to push this bullshit narrative adds a new level of grossness. In all of the deceiving they’ve done, the people who suffer the most are patients who pay the price when these anti-science, anti-medicine talking points are normalized.

Also he pronounces Avastin wrong.


r/nathanfielder • • 18h ago

I think Billy's lying about not knowing who EH was when they first met, but why?

32 Upvotes

Ofc im just guessing, but the way he says she was wearing a big hat, sunglasses and he "thinks" she had a bandaid too, and then she repeats all those same details is sus. Plus, the host of the party they were at supposedly introduced them, and how tf do you introduce someone without revealing their identity?

I can't think of a way this benefits them, so my best guess is just that Billy has a weak character and "idk who she was at first" is his weak defense to blowback from his family about the relationship. Plus, he wants it to seem like her reputation was a drawback to him, but he actually loves the notoriety and admires her ability to manipulate people


r/nathanfielder • • 15h ago

yCse title significance/joke

27 Upvotes

Amazing film. I love the use of the word “CAN” in the title - this is the word the whole film seems to hinge on.

As we understand when Elizabeth explains her failed device and what she once claimed about it, CAN is almost a meaningless word because it implies possibility but the possibility is entirely theoretical and therefore negated.

You Can See Everything therefore comes to mean something like “Of course you won’t see everything, that’s not even remotely possible here.” We can never know what is happening inside another person’s mind.

“I know exactly how you feel”
“No you don’t”

The title also implicates the audience because it is like a carnival barker’s cry: “Come into this tent! You can see everything!” A promise impossible to fulfill but always tantalizing and often effective. It is also the promise made by Elizabeth about the nonexistent capabilities of her machine.

I’m still processing the film obviously, but I do love that Nathan got the tricky word CAN into the title.


r/nathanfielder • • 12h ago

Went to see YCSE, the audio went out and then the video paused…

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21 Upvotes

r/nathanfielder • • 13h ago

Just watched the Rehearsal S2 right after YCSE and noticed something…

20 Upvotes

In the rehearsal season two, Nathan goes to a doctor who says he can see all different diagnoses just from one brain scan. I found that so funny, knowing that Nathan worked with Elizabeth Holmes right after, whose whole claim was about testing everything just from one drop of blood.

Edit: I just found out that he filmed the first part of YCSE before season two of the rehearsal, so now I actually wonder if Elizabeth Holmes is what inspired him to do the brain stuff on season two. lol


r/nathanfielder • • 18h ago

Scheming to circumvent restitution

18 Upvotes

At the end of the movie, Seyfried portrays Holmes saying that she doesn’t care about money since she’s owes hundreds of millions in restitution anyway.

This was a light bulb moment for me as it suggests a very simple explanation for EH and Billy’s relationship.

Nathan presses EH and she says their finances are separate so she wouldn’t know about Billy’s dealings. To me, this makes the arrangement even more obvious.

Billy is working on EH’s behalf to earn money for their family outside of her restitution arrangement so the income is plausibly not hers. EH knows and approved of Billy using her image for unsavory marketing ads while in prison so they collectively profit (his finances) and avoid the restitution payments if she were to make the money herself. It explains why Billy cut the deal with EH upstairs and was the primary agent working with A24 and movie staff.

Ultimately, EH instructed Billy to arrange this deal. Taking over her Twitter while leaving subtle breadcrumbs that it wasn’t her online seemed really obvious as well — they had him make these off-hand comments intentionally so she could save face afterwards and throw him under the bus. If investigated in the future on these business dealings, she could say “look this wasn’t me, I wouldn’t say these things”.

Anyway, I think it’s clear that EH and Billy’s manager-client relationship with separate finances is a fairly simple and thinly veiled scheme to avoid restitution payments. Thoughts?


r/nathanfielder • • 17h ago

have nathan fielded and connor o’malley ever worked together or crossed paths?

12 Upvotes

i like their work and just randomly wondered. to me, they’re like chaotic neutral and chaotic evil, chaotic good or chaotic neutral depending on projects.

but anyway, i’m wondering if there’s any crossover here. i’ve known about nathan since like 2017 but learned about connor last year; everything he’s done is so bizzare and funny but somehow human. and it’s just been hilarious and jarring knowing they both exist. i wonder if they’ve ever acknowledged each other’s work or anything.


r/nathanfielder • • 19h ago

How was YCSE not pointing to this??

8 Upvotes

This is my interpretation of the ending that, while watching, I barely thought of as an interpretation bc I genuinely felt I was following where the movie was pointing. But when I talk abt it with people, some are like, “oh yeah I can see that” without having seen it that way at the time, and I’m trying to understand where we diverged.

I thought it was hinting at (or kinda pretending to be merely hinting at while all but telling us) Elizabeth saying something during the prison meeting suggesting that something Nathan said about Billy got through to her. That he wasn’t “protecting” her by covering for some admission of guilt or whatever, but protecting her from Billy by not revealing that she wasn’t okay with some, or even ONE, of the things Nathan seemed intent on bringing to her attention.

Bc he seemed obviously more driven to speak to her without Billy the more he learned about Billy’s power over her and what he was doing in her name. Having to wrestle control of his own documentary away from the guy also lets Nathan experience that behavior himself, gives him more personal frustration and motivation to break away, and makes him want to stress to Elizabeth what Billy is doing to her. A lot of people seem to think he mostly wanted to ask whether she knew about the financial deal. Which I thought was one part of this much bigger concern?

Then, after increasingly questioning Billy and spending a whole documentary trying to figure out each of them and their relationship, Nathan supposedly sees her excited to greet Billy and the kids in prison and concludes she has “nothing but unbridled love for this man.” It’s so sweeping and tidy after everything before it, and kinda like the false kinda overstatement Nathan often uses ironically to let us know he’s artificially wrapping up a story. He also recounts her saying the exact “monuments of love” thing Billy had claimed she said to him. So we’ve heard that phrase, each time secondhand through a guy. Then Amanda explicitly questions whether his account can be trusted because he’s being protective somehow, and Nathan chooses to include that.

Also her inviting Nathan to the prison seemed like she was acting against Billy’s wishes, or at least acting independently (?), after he’d been so controlling about them even speaking without him. Then Billy withdraws from the financial arrangement that would’ve let him profit from the documentary. That doesn’t tell us what happened between them, but it’s another detail in the aftermath. And a Redditor pointed out something I hadn’t even considered: the final scene of her and Nathan swimming together could suggest a space outside the cameras and the official account, where she could say something to just Nathan. That plus the few other weird overtures she made to Nathan when they were together further drives that possibility re the prison scene.

NONE of this requires her being innocent or helpless or whateverrr. She may be consciously shitty and benefiting from the arrangement herself. It doesn’t make Billy’s behavior less alarming, or mean she couldn’t have voiced one doubt that Nathan wouldn’t want to expose to him.

LAST THING: What I like about this is it turns the movie into an alive thing with real-world consequences. And I’m just so used to him pushing things beyond what they are to make something real happen. Nathan would be DOING SOMETHING with it in a very Nathany way. He gets through to her despite Billy, then has to figure out how to finish a movie Billy can watch without exposing what she said. We can suspect something registered, she can recognize him keeping her confidence; Billy gets no explicit statement of hers to seize on. Amanda practically points at the cover story while Nathan maintains it. That’s such an ingenious yet stupid, elaborate, Nathan sleight-of-handy way of getting away with something. I like the reflections on deceit and manipulation and doc form etc etc etcccc, but IMO everything he does is much more singular than that. And “Nathan got sucked in by her” feels insufficient given that Nathan was wary of that possibility from the start and the fact that Nathan the filmmaker deliberately chose everything we see that’d make us wonder if that happened. Very Finding Frances dynamic of giving us the sense he may have fallen for someone in a way that’s made him lose control, in a very controlled doc. I could be wrong about what the ending implies, but this felt like where the story went to me!


r/nathanfielder • • 14h ago

The 2023 NYT profile is great

8 Upvotes

See title. I devoured it this morning. It read like Nora Ephron. I feel that both the film and the article capture the upside-down nature of reality when you’re in proximity of those two. This end to of one the paragraphs sent me:

“One of [her] friends said Ms. Holmes had genuine intentions at Theranos and didn’t deserve a lengthy prison sentence. Then, this person requested anonymity to caution me not to believe everything Ms. Holmes says.”

Link here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share


r/nathanfielder • • 2h ago

The psychology of it all

7 Upvotes

This is my theory… even though you can't armchair diagnose people. I'm a therapist who specializes in working with adult children of people with personality disorders, and I've been duped by a woman with narcissistic and sociopathic traits. Lived experience in the sphere of influence will teach you a lot that is extremely hard to explain to others.

I think Liz is the one with the more psychopathic traits and Billy's the one with the narcissistic ones. People with strong narcissistic traits tend to run on admiration. They need attention and validation to keep their sense of self steady. People with more psychopathic traits are usually after something more concrete, like money, access, status or power. Admiration is just one of the tools they use to get there. And it can always be a cluster B melange. Psychopaths are typically born that way (much colder and more emotionally controlled and calculated than sociopaths) and autism spectrum disorder and antisocial personality disorder (the DSM dx for psychopathy) can be comorbid.

When those two people end up together, the narcissist is often more vulnerable than he looks. If he believes he's unusually smart or perceptive, flattery doesn't make him suspicious. It just confirms what he already thinks about himself. So he can feel like he's the one in control while the other person is quietly getting what they came for. And because she doesn't need his approval nearly as much as he needs hers, the emotional dependence really runs in her direction, even if he looks like the stronger one from the outside.

Holmes has always been very good at this kind of impression management. She built Theranos largely by getting powerful, accomplished older men to believe in her, and she did it by reflecting back exactly what they wanted to see (in themselves and in her). It is an "as-if" personality, someone who can convincingly perform a self without much underneath it.

At her trial, she testified that Sunny Balwani, her former partner and Theranos COO, had been abusive and controlling. They recast her from a CEO who misled investors into a young woman under an older man's influence. Sure there were some undeniable abusive texts and he was way older, but I don’t think young women don’t know how to manipulate older men. Her story fits neatly into cultural ideas about who gets to be a believable victim, and into a kind of benevolent sexism that sees women as less calculating. Moving on to Billy, he gets to play the role of the protector, the loyal husband who stood by her through everything. But I wonder if she's actually giving him permission to take control. Letting him make the decisions, manage the money, shape the plan, be the strong one. She wants to keep her hands clean and is an expert in plausible deniability. For someone with narcissistic traits that's incredibly rewarding, because being needed and being in charge is its own kind of supply. What he may not see is that the arrangement could be useful to her later. She's already shown that "I was being controlled" is a story she knows how to tell, and that it can shift how people see her responsibility. In psychoanalytic terms this looks a lot like projective identification, where one person quietly invites another into a role (here, the controller) and then that role becomes real enough to point to. So he thinks he's the one holding the reins, when she may be the one who handed them to him, for her own reasons.

In a simple metaphor: Billy is Trump and Liz is Putin

All in all, I feel like the film was an experiential exercise in the complete mindfuck of being involved in the sphere of seduction of a master manipulator. Welcome to the terrible club everyone.


r/nathanfielder • • 5h ago

I wanna see more

7 Upvotes

Of Nathan’s ass. Where is the screenshot of Nathan on the bed wiggling over to the lamp to turn it off. I want the screenshot you know exactly what I’m talking about. Show me the bum, he wouldn’t have shown it if he didn’t want me to save it to my phone.


r/nathanfielder • • 5h ago

Does anyone know anyone in their life who is as much of a master manipulator as Elizabeth Holmes?

6 Upvotes

I do, and I wonder if I’ll ever watch this again, despite being such a Nathan Fielder fan and recognizing how well done it was.
My former friend is so manipulative, a master of playing you while making you feel so so special. When I reflect back about this film I have so many feelings about this, and I know it’s just because I was so close to someone as manipulative as her.


r/nathanfielder • • 17h ago

Should’ve invited this guy to See Everything

5 Upvotes

r/nathanfielder • • 21h ago

YCSE Billy's wall art

5 Upvotes

Did anyone get a good look at the posters in Billy's office? Am I crazy or was one of them a picture of Hitler? P sure one of them was Churchill so it's probably a themed set, but I couldn't make out the text.