Why No One Can Look Away From Elizabeth Holmes

“I felt like there were some moments in the film where she was just brazenly lying.”

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  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." And 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 two kids, just before she began her 11-year sentence at a federal prison in Texas.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  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 Kairou, the reporter who literally wrote the book on Holmes, to the movies with me. So today, I've convened John and two 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?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  I'm Max Reed. This is Hard Fork.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  So I'm joined today by three journalists who covered Elizabeth Holmes at three different stages in her life. Investigative reporter John Kairou, 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, come back later, but we're not going to reveal any of the big, sort of, second-half turns or revelations. So with that being said, welcome to the podcast, guys.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  It was the end of 2013, and I was an editor at Wired Magazine. And I was looking for founders for us to cover and include in something. And always, as one of few women editors, I was looking for women founders. And I found this mention in the Wall Street Journal of Elizabeth Holmes. And so I did some research, and, you know, there weren't any magazine stories, or profiles, or interviews. And I reached out to Theranos and got a yes to come down and interview her. So I walked into a, you know, at the Theranos offices. I wasn't allowed to go anywhere else, other than the room that we were in, which had a

• 3:44Speaker 02

  phlebotomist to take my blood, and then also a place for me to sit with Elizabeth. And 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, like, red lipstick. So, and she had this sort of, you know, this thing that now we've become quite aware of, but this kind of big, blue-eyed stare, you know, kind of still and looking directly at you. And I asked her a bunch of questions. Now, of course, like, I was, you know, Wired in general, at that time especially, was, their orientation really was on innovation and celebration of that innovation.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  And I was actually genuinely excited to meet a founder who was working in biotech, instead of, you know, trying to make food delivery faster or cars come quicker, you know? And it felt like significantly more interesting to me, the part about her pitch that was about reducing healthcare costs, making transparent blood tests results to patients, and potentially disrupting Medicare, you know? I thought that was, 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. So that was like the teeny-tiny vial that you've seen in pictures, like a teeny-tiny vial.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Wow, you did more than a lot of her investors.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I, there was no, I mean, obviously, and you guys know this, but like, there was no verifiable science. I couldn't see the lab. I couldn't talk to a lead scientist. In some ways, she was sort of standing in for the lead scientist in the way that she talked about, about the company. And of course, she was also talking about new science, right? Genetic testing of the blood in this different way. But anyway, they took my blood, and I did look at the panel against mine, and it was very much similar data to the same tests, like, basically, like, you know, 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 like that tiny vial. And so, you know, I had, I don't want to go on, because I've said so much already,

• 6:09Speaker 02

  but like, there's lots of things about, like, the experience of spending time with her that were interesting and odd. And I think, you know, if I had to characterize some of that, I would say I believe she had conviction.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  About what she was doing.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, let's, we definitely want to 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.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  She had a little bit of investment.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Right, 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 sort of experience of reporting on her?

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, she wasn't really on my radar until a New Yorker story of her, a profile by Ken Oletta, was published, I think, in mid-December 2014. And I read that commuting back from the Wall Street Journal newsroom in Manhattan to my apartment in Brooklyn, 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, you know, 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.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  And then there was also a note in there about the secrecy. And I thought, you know, I thought to myself, there's something not quite right here, but then didn't really think anymore of it for the next couple of weeks, until about three weeks later, out of the blue, I got a call from a source who was a practicing pathologist in Columbia, Missouri. And he'd read the very same New Yorker story. And he knew a lot more about blood testing than I did, and he was very skeptical of her claims and about the feasibility of what she asserted.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  He was like, three 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, that kind of made me willing to look a little bit more into it. So there were all these YouTube videos that I watched. And we've made it possible.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  To eliminate the tubes and tubes of blood that traditionally have to be drawn from an arm and replaced it with the nano tainer.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  And there's something really odd about her. I felt like she was playing a role. 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. And that made me even more kind of suspicious and willing to delve deeper into the story.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  So if Caitlin was there at the rise and John was there for the fall, Aaron, you covered Elizabeth's trial extensively. What was that experience like?

• 9:36Speaker 03

  The trial took many, many years to actually happen. So I believe, you know, it started in 2021 in San Jose, which is about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. So me and, you know, half of the SF press corps is down there hanging around the courthouse for about four months. But it was really surreal in a way because we are in the hallway and like kind of in this same space as Elizabeth Holmes and her family. And we wound up actually kind of 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. And

• 10:18Speaker 03

  they were very, you know, friendly and chatty to us. Billy, you know, would talk about Burning Man or various things, but never anything about the trial or about Holmes. And the oddest thing that happened, I would say, is that Billy Evans' dad came to the jury selection and was hanging out with all of us in the media and kind of chatting with us. And he told him, told us his name was Hanson and that he was just there as an observer because he was interested in criminal justice. And that's not a totally implausible story because there are a lot of people that, you know, some people call gavel groupies that hang out at trials. They just like find the whole process interesting. There were some people that went to every single day of this trial over the course of four months. So, you know, we just thought he was kind of one of those. And then later,

• 11:03Speaker 03

  on the first day of the trial, when Holmes shows up with her family, arm in arm, he's with them, Hanson. And it turns out it was actually Billy Evans' dad.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Wild.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  This is like, I mean, you know, once you see the movie, I feel like that it clicks something into place to learn that his dad, his dad was doing stuff like that. Okay, so we have here sort of three periods of Elizabeth Holmes' the arc of her career. Now, last month, a trailer drops for a new documentary that seems to suggest a kind of fourth period.

• 11:39Speaker 06

  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. Why would I deceive you? There's no, there's no reason for me to do that.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  All right.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  Okay, good chat.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  How did you guys react when this movie trailer dropped? Were any of you aware that this documentary was in the works?

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I actually found out about it about 18 months ago, a little more than 18 months ago. Fielder reached out to me and I was kind of unfriendly to him because at the time I was being harassed by this guy. And 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. And so I, you know, was, was pretty hostile.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Wow. Did you mention that to him? Or you just kind of said, no, thanks?

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, eventually, I mean, I forwarded Nathan's email to my agents and then my agent talked to his agent and we were able to ascertain that they weren't, you know, it wasn't the same thing and that they weren't working together. But I didn't, I still didn't really have a good idea of what exactly Fielder was working on. I didn't understand what exactly he wanted from me. I was kind of done with Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  And I would say, like, I heard about the movie, not that, like, at the beginning of their promotion. And I thought, why? You know, just because, like, at that point, there had been so much, like, and, you know, and, and, you know, and then I found out it was Lance Oppenheimer and Nathan Fielder. And I thought, like, those are interesting artists, you know. But, but I, my overall question was like, how much are we going to be paying attention to this woman? How long?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  So you, you, you were pretty-

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Forever, as it turns out.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Caitlin, you were pretty sick of Elizabeth, of the Elizabeth Holmes story. I mean, just-

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Well, I, it just raises questions for me. Like, why, why is she, you know, there's lots of, in, in, in my job, I look at lots of stories of con people. Con people should be a phrase, but, and, you know, I, I just, I find they're unsatisfying because mostly they believe what they're selling for a long period of time. And we think as regular people, you know, who go to a party and we see something weird and we think about it for four days, or maybe that's just me, like, that if we were lying all the time, it would, you know, really suck and be hard. And I think actually, you know, they have a higher tolerance for deceit, sure, but also just uncomfortability. And I think both Lance Oppenheimer and Nathan Fielder have a very high tolerance for discomfort.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yes, you could say that. I mean, it's interesting to hear you say this, Caitlin, because one of the most interesting things is how enduring their cultural fascination with a figure like Holmes is. There's a lot of people, I mean, I would, I would include myself in this, who have been sort of obsessed with her without ever having really met her. And you guys are part of a small group of people who have gotten up close, to say the least. And I am interested, 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? Like, was it surprising? Did it feel new? Or did it feel like more of the kind of same old? John, you spent the most time thinking about Elizabeth. Let's start with you.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Right. And just, just to be clear, she never granted me an interview. When I was researching Theranos, I tried to get an interview with her in late 2015 and, you know, made repeated attempts, repeated requests, and she would never grant me an interview because I think it was clear to her that I, you know, 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, in early 2016 for the book. I tried to make the case to her PR people that this was her opportunity to have some

• 16:16Speaker 04

  influence over the narrative. And again, you know, I was declined any access. So it was with a bit of envy, actually, that I watched Fielder and Oppenheimer get all this access and be able to ask any question they wanted. In terms of the, her portrayal, or at least how she comes across, I think that there are two sides of Elizabeth Holmes. One is that she can be very pleasant and she can be extremely charming if she wants to be. And I think there's another side, which she doesn't show much, if at all, in

• 16:58Speaker 04

  this film, which is that she is feisty, she, she's combative, she's ruthless, and she's a liar. And the, the, the feisty sort of combative ruthless parts you see in tiny little flashes, I'd say, in the film, when she's being asked by Fielder, you know, insistently, well, how did you get here? Don't you think you did something wrong? And she says, I did not. And sort of there, there's that, she, there are a couple of times where she snaps back, I did not. And, and her demeanor is a little bit more tense. And I think that's

• 17:38Speaker 04

  the closest you get to seeing that other Elizabeth Holmes. But for the most part, she does a very good job of hiding it.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Caitlin, what about you? Was this similar to the Holmes that you remember from those interviews, from that interview now more than a decade ago?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  I mean, I think I think I interpreted them differently, obviously, in 2013 than now in 2026. But one of the things I've thought a lot about in the intervening years is teasing out what what her performances are for, who they're for, right? Like, when I met her, like, again, there was not a lot of female founders and certainly not raising this level of capital and focused on biotech. And 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, like, purposeful, was 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.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  And so in my mind, you know, I thought of that as partially trying to pass as a strong, you know, founder, which, like, at the time, the other thing that was going on was just, like, every single person saying, like, your investments are just in the in the founder, right? It's this sort of, like, auteur theory of technology that, you know, you're investing in someone. But I couldn't, I did get a vibe that something wasn't totally, you know, she was performing something. And and and also, she's just weird, you know? So when I watched the movie, I felt like the same, I felt some of the same suite of feelings.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, she, to Caitlin's point about her costume, she very conspicuously dresses and makes herself up in almost an exact opposite way to to her at her most famous in the 2015, 2016. There are no turtlenecks in this movie. There are very few dark colors. Her hair is down most of the time. And, you know, as you're saying, Caitlin, it's hard not to wonder if this is itself a sort of strategy. I mean, in some ways, it probably obviously is a sort of strategy to come across in a in a more relaxed and intimate and different way.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, especially in those scenes, you know, it's like we're, they were in a temporary housing situation, but they're at the beach. You know, it's like, it's like we're frolicking on the beach, like, literally, we're frolicking on the beach. We're just taking care of our dear child. I mean, her child is present, right? Like, and so that, but that's, that's also like a kind of telegraphing ease and intimacy, right? Like, you're inside someone's real self. And I, you know, how to interpret that is kind of like, I think that, I think the filmmakers, Oppenheimer and Fielder, made choices carefully about what they, what, you know, what's in their edit, as anyone would. And and we're thinking about the question of, like, what she was performing.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  That scene where she doesn't understand Fielder's question about, like, and over and over again, she repeats the same answer. It's like, that was one of the most intense, like, scenes for me, because it's just completely baffling.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  And it, there was a parallel that reminded me of actually at the trial. There were moments, I don't know if you remember this, John, when, like, she was being interrogated by the prosecutors, and they're asking the same question over and over and over, and, like, just slightly different ways, and trying to, like, get her to, and it just very much reminded me of that, where it's like, there's a little bit of a communication breakdown here.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Because I think the reason communication breaks down, quite simply, is she's not answering the question. She's evading the question, she's alighting, and, I mean, I felt like there were some moments in the film where she was just brazenly lying. One scene that 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 to basically create a digital replica of her that he's going to be able to show their children when she's in prison.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  And before she goes on to have her picture taken, suddenly she breaks down in tears, and you hear her say through the tears that last time, you know, people in her entourage pushed her into the spotlight, it didn't go well. And I almost jumped out of my chair, because to me, that that was like a brazen lie. And and the reason is that, you know, the first time around, she embraced the spotlight. She jumped into the spotlight. She did everything she could to to attract the spotlight.

• 22:21Speaker 04

  And there are even texts that show that she was enjoying the spotlight and that she premeditated the coverage, texts that came out during the, her criminal trial. So I felt like those tears in that moment at the photography studio were completely manufactured. And

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Well, it's also possible, though, that she But isn't it possible that even, regardless of if she was into it or not, when she was doing it at the time, that the result is that she's, like, kind of traumatized by how it all turned out?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  And also, I mean, I mean, John, like, I hear you. That does seem like a brazen lie to me. And yet, one of the interesting things of the film is, as a mother, like, I'm watching it, and I'm actually, every time I remember that she's about to go to prison, and she's just given, just has these young children, I felt like sad and empathy for her, you know? Because, like, this is such a weird period of time to be with someone, no matter who they are, right? Like, the last days before they go to prison, for how many years, 12?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  11 and three months, 11 years and three months.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, although she's now going to be moving to a halfway house, apparently, next year, so.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  But and, John, I don't, I don't think that negates your point. Like, it's like, my sadness about her situ, you know, just a human sadness about her situation doesn't change this question of her, like, calculations about what she's saying and and lying.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  I think that's kind of what makes the movie work so well. I was very nervous that it was like, oh, well, this is just going to be kind of a redemption story, or getting us all kind of on her side emotionally. And it does take us into her emotional state, and like, 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, her family. But it doesn't also let her off the hook, which is what I was kind of most worried about.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  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. And her answer is, is no.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Never.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  And he goes, Liz, really?

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  He's all of us.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  It's preposterous, but but I felt like they gave her enough rope to hang herself there. You know, you could take the 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 to 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, you know, she, she looks worse for it.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a real sense that the movie is trying, and maybe Fielder as the, as the sort of motivating force within the movie, is trying to come down on this idea, is she manipulative? Is, does she believe what she's saying? Is she full of it? Is she, can we redeem her? And 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 herself to have been manipulated by Elizabeth Holmes. I mean, did you feel manipulated in in retrospect, through that interview, by that interview?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  I mean, yes, I felt like, I felt like it was, you know, the 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. So like, but I, it's like, do I blame her? I never felt like, I didn't feel personal animus against her. I felt regret that that I, that we wrote about her so early, when we couldn't validate any of her scientific claims, you know?

• 26:25Speaker 04

  I was wondering, did you ever feel like she was reluctant at the time? That she was a reluctant participant in in the interview, and that she was dragging her feet?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  No way, not at all. I didn't. I thought she was trying to telegraph, graph strength and thoughtfulness. And of course, anytime I asked a question that she didn't want to answer, she would look to someone, but like, clearly, she was deciding, she had already decided she wasn't going to answer. But honestly, it 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, you know, to their round of funding. And so the idea of that manipulation, it was always at play, you know, in these interviews? These are not, like, unvarnished people. Again, back to my point about, like, you know, you're investing in a person. If you're, if you're not compelled by that person, you know, you can't believe what they're going to do, you know?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I felt like that was a lot of what everyone was doing at the time.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  But so, so that that scene where she cries and she blames her, her entourage at the time for pushing her into the limelight, I felt like is, you know, shirking responsibility, her responsibility. And there's another moment where she does that, too, when Sunny Balwani comes up. And without explicitly doing so, she implicitly throws him under the bus.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Sorry, we should just say Sunny Balwani was her partner, her romantic partner, but also her business partner at Theranos. And he was the chief operating officer, if I'm remembering.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  He was her second in command, and he was the chief operating officer.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  President, yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  And he essentially ran the company with her. But there's, there's a unwillingness to take any sort of responsibility in Elizabeth Holmes. There's, you know, this, 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 to feel sympathy for her.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is a great place to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about why Elizabeth Holmes continues to obsess us and what it says about the tech industry today.

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• 30:25Speaker 01

  Welcome back. I'm with Aaron Griffith, John Kerryru 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 2010s in tech, and yet here we are in 2026, and we seem unable to kind of escape her. So what for you is what is the thing that makes Elizabeth Holmes such a continuous object of obsession for culture and media?

• 31:01Speaker 04

  You know, I've long asked myself that. What, why are people so fascinated with this person? Because I gotta say, I found the story interesting, you know, 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, you know, 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,

• 31:46Speaker 04

  where, you know, 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. And I think that, you know, clearly, a decade in, people are still captivated by this.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  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 kind of interest in her?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that, 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, you know, I'm not equating, you know, 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 like the idea that we want to continue to drag, like, you know, focus and energy against a woman over time. I think there's a lot of energy for that. Now, I'm not saying at all

• 33:06Speaker 02

  that I think that that energy is not deserved for Elizabeth Holmes, but I do think there's culture at play on the question of who we disparage and continue to disparage over time.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  And Max, to your question, I mean, her gender was absolutely a part of the rise because like Caitlin was saying, like she was, the entire tech press was looking for examples of standout female founders because at that time, in, you know, the mid 2010s, everyone's kind of looked around and realized like, oh, my God, there, where are all the women? Like Silicon Valley, more so than any other sector, seems to have a real problem with like elevating women when we've got all these tech bro unicorn founders. Where, why aren't there like any female founders of billion dollar companies? And then suddenly, here is one. And so that's why she got put on the cover of like every business magazine because we finally found an example of it.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  And so, and I think this kind of happened later too, with the quote unquote girl boss era, where like 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 like, you know, they would call it takedowns because of all of that press and attention.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Aaron, like to your point, it's like literally I wrote about her 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, my covering her at that early stage.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  But to your question of the enduring interest, that one is, is a little bit different because there are just so many elements of her story that are a little bit like odd or attention grabbing. I mean, from the outfits to the voice to like all of the kind of like the secrecy and obsession.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Being a mother.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, there, there, there are just enough pieces of it that I feel like it touches every possible demographic. Like one thing from the trial, I remember, you know, talking to a lot of the, toward the end, there were a lot of spectators showing up and including people who were in a book club who read John's book and who came together as like a little book club outing. And, you know, I'm asking them like, what are you guys doing here? And one of them told me, which I'll never forget, like, oh, we're just fans of white collar crime. And I was like, are you, you mean as a, as a book genre or as a genre of story? Okay, sure. And in the same way that there are people who are fans of like, you know, murder stories or murder podcasts, like there's also a fraud contingent as well.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  John must be such a celebrity, those people.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  I agree with everything you guys just said, but let me ask this, though. We're, we're now, you know, 11 years after I broke this, this story in the Wall Street Journal. And who is stoking the interest? Who, who is recreating reasons for us to, to again pay attention to her? It's Elizabeth herself. She, she is the one who invited these filmmakers into her home 30 days, 34 days before she was scheduled to go to prison. She's the one who, who is still asking for, for the public attention. And, and so, you know,

• 36:38Speaker 04

  I think we, we also have her own very proactive efforts to blame for, for this, for, for why this is still, you know, a story that's in the news and it's generating tons of coverage 11 years later.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  That's a great point. And honestly, I would not be surprised if Sam Bankman Fried is currently emailing Nathan Fielder

• 37:01Speaker 03

  about getting a meeting.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, SBF really has nothing on Liz 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 reality TV producer about it. She's got something that he just doesn't have.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  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. And there's, I don't, you know, I don't want to spoil the movie, but I would say the kind of.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Extreme devotion that was captured in a lot of what we learned about her relationship with Sunny Bawani 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 they, do real people talk like this to each other? Like, you know, I, that's, that's one fundamental question. But then, like, what is the role of this, you know, partnership, romantic partnership and business partnership? And then, why is she picking these guys?

• 38:21Speaker 03

  What I, what I found so fascinating is when she's talking, her and Billy are getting really excited, like jazzing each other up, talking about Theranos 2.0. And her parents are there. And they're just kind of slowly zooming in on her parents. And the looks on their faces are, they're just, you can just see them just sort of, you know, steeling themselves because it feels like they're like, here we go again.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, they look, 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. Good question. I trust Billy. You know, and implied, of course, is I didn't trust Sunny. My, my view of those two relationships is that as much as Elizabeth tried to blame it all on Sunny in the trial, you know, the jury obviously

• 39:27Speaker 04

  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, 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. He lies. And I feel like the pattern is repeating itself.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that scene you described, then Billy Evans appears, even though the dad, Christian Holmes, has just said, I trust Billy. And he comes right over to say, no more talking. No more talking. So like, that was a really, like, I thought that, that scene was very powerful. But, you know, I do, both of these guys seem pretty awful. But I do feel like, as with everything around Elizabeth Holmes, we have to come back to, like, what's going on inside of her? Like, what, what, what is this? Because not only is she having these relationships with these kind of men, but she's also, she's also using this, like, intense, like, eye catching, like, desperate, extreme, bombastic

• 40:41Speaker 02

  language. In both, in both cases, like, right? So, so like, there's something there that's performative, and also some kind of construction, a romantic, an understanding of what romance is. Like, there's something in here that's very strange, on the question of, like, why, you know, I put it this way, I, you know, I don't know how you guys feel about PDA, but seeing people like, walk down the street and they're making out, or they're talking in a loud, loving way, these things don't bother me particularly. But, like, having a friend say, like, he is my everything, like, that would, like, take, let's, you know, let's go to a psychologist from here. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, it's, and she's doing all of that. And so this question of, like, what does she think her romantic

• 41:24Speaker 02

  relationships are? Because we see her in this movie repeatedly show us that what she thinks this is, is perfect parody, you know, perfect parody. They're aligned and synced. They're two twin souls. They're dolphins, you know, leaping out of the water towards each other. It's like, it's, it's very bizarre. And that's what the texts with Sunny Bawani revealed.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  It's a similar thing. Like, what's that about?

• 41:45Speaker 03

  She calls their love a monument to love, over and over, right?

• 41:49Speaker 04

  They're building monuments to love.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  To love. Every day. Every day.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  For each other, every day. You know, I think, all that being said, yes, it's, it's bizarre, and it's grandiose, and it's cartoonishly romantic. But I do think probably the most genuine thing in the movie is their love. I, I actually do think they love each other. And I also think that Elizabeth and Sunny were in love.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  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, like, she really clearly has, she's a, she commits full on to basically everything she does. And I don't know whether that's about reassuring herself, or about, you know, sort of 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, 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?

• 42:51Speaker 03

  And the irony being, like, it's all about transparency, and you can see everything, is literally the title. And Billy is then the one cutting off access, like, left and right, all throughout the film.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  I, I want to ask a question. I think this is a good, a good place to mention it. So there's, there's, there's, one way of looking at this movie is of sort of Elizabeth Holmes as a kind of allegory for tech. Like, you have this, this way that she was, as we've been saying, a kind of emblematic figure of the 2010s. She's, she's doing the Steve Jobs thing. She's getting all these, these covers. And then there's the downfall. And I wanted to ask you, Aaron, since you're reporting on this all the time, you know, I, I think it's fair to say Elizabeth was like, an emblematic figure 10 years ago. Is she still now? Like, what is the relationship that people who work in the Valley right now have with her?

• 43:38Speaker 03

  I think in general, the tech industry kind of rejects somebody who has been convicted of fraud. During the trial, I wrote a lot about how this, the trial was kind of emblematic or emblematic of, like, 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, you know, get people on board with their vision. But she had just taken it a little bit too far. And, you know, Judge Davila even talked about that in his sentencing, and at the end of the trial as well. So, I had a lot of fights with Silicon Valley investors about this, who were like, no, she is not part of Silicon

• 44:22Speaker 03

  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, and, you know, Caitlin has talked about this a little bit as well. Like, 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, like, 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, like, I, I think there's, 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

• 45:07Speaker 03

  is, especially when you have people like Elon Musk, who is constantly promising things that he doesn't deliver on.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Right. I would say, there's an extremely fine line, extremely fine line between Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk. And I think it would be completely legitimate for some layperson, you know, who parachutes in to Silicon Valley today, or to American society today, to wonder why one of them is in prison and not the other.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  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 robots, you know, robot arms before there was a car? You know, and there wasn't a car, and there still wasn't a car, and there still wasn't a car after that. So like, you know, I, I mean, not to mention, like, you know, whatever, high speed rail in California. I mean, you know, every single founder is trafficking across that line. So I agree, that that is, is true about Elon and Elizabeth Holmes.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  So in that spirit, we've got Theranos 2.0 coming. Do you guys think, is there, is this the next chapter? Are they going to be successful? Are we going to see Elizabeth Holmes run Walgreens Wellness Center anytime soon?

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Oh my god. I don't understand. The the technology worked the first time. I mean, the the machine could do hundreds of tests. You know, she explains it in in the film, you know, the cloud, you know, sent the orders into the cartridge.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Weren't you listening?

• 46:39Speaker 04

  Every 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 why did there even need to be, you know, drawings and another prototype? It was all done right the first time.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Okay. My question for you, John Carrio, is, and I thought about this as I watched the movie. What was your like emotional weather as you watched it? Like, how did you feel?

• 47:06Speaker 04

  So I I've seen it twice, and the first time I saw it was about 10 days ago at the 824 offices in in Manhattan. And I was in a screening room virtually by myself. Actually, one other person was there, my wife. You know, I did nearly jump out of my chair. The the first time I saw the scene of her crying and blaming other people for pushing her into the the limelight.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  I would say that the the second time, I I enjoyed the film even more the second time. I I, you know, revisiting some scenes. The second time around, I felt like

• 47:49Speaker 04

  there was there was more, they were more pregnant with meaning than perhaps, you know,

• 47:55Speaker 04

  I'd given them credit for the the first time around. I guess I was over two viewings. I was really, you know, won over by the artistry of the of the way, you know, they filmed this thing, but also the structure, the amount of meta thinking that that went into it, 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 and her repeatedly denying that she didn't do anything wrong. That first, you know, time that I saw those 90 minutes was frustrating a little bit for me.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Because, you know, I would have liked to ju- jump in and and grab the mic from Fielder and and drill down a little bit more and not be so polite. But, you know, on the whole, I I really like this movie.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Caitlin, can I ask you the same question about your emotional weather as you watched it?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Well, I I have a hat that says make movies shorter. And on the back, it says 97, 97 minutes with credits. And so that's my like philosophical platform. So I went into this thinking, not only are we back to homes culturally, you know, or not that we left, but also we are spending three hours with Elizabeth Holmes. And that, you know, my emotional weather to that was like, what the fuck? You know, but on a number of levels. But I have been asking myself this question, you know, for more than 10 years. Like, what does she think is real? What does she think is real? Like, what is real? And what I know what is real now, thanks to John. What what does she think is real? And what does she think is happening?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  And so that was how I came in. Like, my feelings were like, 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's how's it gonna make us feel? And really, a lot of my feelings at the beginning were really just about the filmmaking. Like, what, you know, this question is like, the idea of objectivity is nowhere, anywhere in the movie. And and and on purpose, like, you know, like, like John said, thoughtfully so, like, it's meta, they're thinking about it. They obviously did incredibly important thinking, not just filming. Right? About what what they were gonna do, not to mention the edit. But there's just lots of things in there that are odd.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  The feeling of it felt manipulative in every way to me, like emotionally. That doesn't mean I didn't like the movie. I I actually loved it. I thought it was great. And but I did feel like manipulated on every level. By Elizabeth Holmes, by Billy Evans, by Lance and Nathan. And and I don't, and I, you know, I love movies. So I don't mind being manipulated, but I was so conscious of it that I like felt it the whole the whole time.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. My experience of watching this was like, I I love but am terrified of cringe comedy, you know, and so I had this this sense of like, really wanting to kind of hide my head sometimes as the as the encounters got more and more awkward. But unlike, say, like, the British office or whatever, where I really, as my wife will tell you, just have to completely go under the couch to like have it happen, I was riveted. Like, I could not hide. I could not look away. It was like total anxiety, total fascination, like, you know, like you're saying, Caitlin, sort of admire and and John too, like admiration at what's happening there, but also just feeling this sense of

• 51:33Speaker 01

  roller coaster ride is almost too cliche. It's just like, I I was worried it was gonna fall off a cliff at any moment. And it kind of does, but it cut, you know, in this kind of this way where you're like, I guess I'm, I guess I'm going off the cliff. I guess I'm going off the cliff with you guys. So, yeah, it was a, it was a, it was a sort of exhilarating movie to watch in a funny way, which is not something you often say about three hour long documentaries, but it it had this this sort of adrenaline pumping aspect of not even mystery, but just like the the strangeness of the encounter that that it kept circling around.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  You, we also had like, we we go in not just knowing Elizabeth Holmes at this point, but largely culturally knowing Nathan Fielder. And so the other thing that's playing against is like what your understanding is of what he makes and what he does. And so I think like, again, like, just how much are you, like, you were, you're describing basically being like in the shoot. You know, and I'm just like, very much like out of the shoot, holding onto the edges, not going down the shoot. You know, like, it's like, there's, there's, because I'm, because I'm conscious of this thing, and yet, I also really enjoyed the movie.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us.

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• 54:46Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Hard Fork. After a stimulating discussion about Elizabeth Holmes, I am back with our old friend Aaron Griffith to talk about the headlines of the week.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Hey.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Hi. The big story that we need to talk about more than anything is the alleged OpenAI spy. So the FBI arrested an OpenAI employee this week, and he was 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, which he plugged into the back of a television. I'll describe it for our listeners. And there is the accused spy, whose name is Abdul Rahman Al Fazan. He's a 35 year old from Saudi Arabia. Looking, I don't know, how would you describe it? He almost looks, he's sort of a movie monster pose. He's like

• 55:35Speaker 03

  He looks like, he looks like a cartoon villain that just got gut punched.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. I mean, this is 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 for me because I assume I have this kind of pain.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Well, this is the question I I have is like, do they have a camera back there? Or is, I mean, that's not taken by the security device, is it? Like, it was just a recording device. So so how do they capture that photo?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Well, so OpenAI says, they 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 use ChatGPT to discover the thing or whatever.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Always be marketing your model.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like, really, it's like, no wonder everybody accuses everything they do of marketing, because everything they do is marketing. I was, I mean, so one thing that's interesting about this, I I think we're presuming that he was spying on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government, which also, we will remember, allegedly planted a spy in Twitter or in X.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Not alleged, that was, that that one fully went to trial.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yes, okay, was convicted.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  And we can just say happened.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  This seems to have been, so the Twitter one, my memory is that there was, some of it was about spying on dissidents who were organizing.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  It was on masking anonymous dissident Twitter accounts. Yeah, that's what the person was trying to do.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  This seems more about bugging meetings, like high level meetings.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, yeah, that's true. I mean, I I actually would love to hear even more details about what they think this person was trying to get. I mean, we don't, we don't know a lot about that yet.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  I I have to say too, like, this guy is obviously not like 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. I mean, surely every government on the planet would love to have one inside some of these places.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, this person has at least a long track record of working in tech. I mean, I'm not sure how real that is, but you know, people are reporting on their LinkedIn that he was at Meta and he, you know, was at various startups before. So like either he's been like playing a very long game, he's been spying for a very long time, or he just got converted, which, you know, given how easily he was caught, might be, uh, might be the answer.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  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, you know, insert people into huge multinational corporations with really valuable intellectual property.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  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. And then, you know, there's all these stories about people having two jobs and like that was the big thing, but there's also kind of a little like unspoken thing of like, what if our employees aren't real?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  I'm learning so much about, about how spying works here.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Apparently the bar is pretty low.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Clearly, maybe that's maybe when journalism finally collapses, Aaron, 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, you will remember, our audience will remember, was a, was a sort of chatbot platform where you could create characters that you would interact with. You know, I mostly understood it as a source of very funny, like screenshots that I would see posted on Twitter, but also it later became quite controversial. It faced a number of lawsuits from states and individuals. There's suggestions that it had pushed its users into suicide, self-harm. It filed for bankruptcy earlier this week and it is selling some of its assets to Walt Disney.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  It's claiming lack of profitability despite having roughly 12 million active users. This is from a Reuters article, "due to the high cost of computing power in employing AI talent." What did you make of this?

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I've actually been kind of wondering what's going to happen for a while to all the kind of like leftover nubs of these AI companies that did aqua hire deals with big tech companies. And this kind of hasn't been reported in some of the stories I've seen are not as prominently. And for some reason I'm obsessed with this, but if you recall, Character AI was started by these two Google guys, Noam Shazer and Daniel DeFritas, and they left Google because Google's moving too slow. Google's like, we need them back. But for antitrust reasons, we're not really sure about making a big acquisition and they won a lot of money.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  So they did this like backward deal where they hired Character AI, like they hired back Shazer and they hired back the founders, they hired back like 20% of the employees. As part of it, they have to leave this like kind of sad leftover company behind that no longer has its founders, is probably not going to really raise any more money, doesn't have the momentum or the excitement. The most valuable employees are gone. And I've been wondering, okay, well, what's going to happen to all these old companies? A couple of them have already sold. Character AI is notable in particular because they've had just a barrage of lawsuits against them over their product because there are, you know, harms that have happened.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  There are users who have died by suicide. There are people who, you know, are suing them because their chatbots have been posing as doctors. They've been telling people to starve themselves or kill themselves. It's like, you know, there's some gnarly stuff happening with the product. So part of the bankruptcy is just to wipe the slate clean and, and deal with that. But I sort of see it as a result of this like extremely weird moment that we had in 2024 of talent wars where all the big tech companies tried to buy up all the like most valuable founders without actually buying the companies.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, all these sort of, it's the talent wars means that a lot of the, the top people at these little, I think you call them nubs, which I enjoy as a sort of viscerally unpleasant way of thinking about them, like disappear. And also like their reasons for existing seem sort of increasingly, you don't need a specialized, you know, chatbot or whatever.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this was one of the most promising AI companies that was developing the kind of like core LLM technology because they had this guy, Noam Shazer, who's like, you know, a very, very prominent researcher in this very small field. And, you know, basically all of these companies that were in this kind of class have gotten kind of picked off during the talent wars.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. The other thing I want to talk to you about is Apple's new device, the Home View, for which a advertisement appeared this week. I don't know how to describe this product, except as they took the kitchen iPad and they just turned it into like its own device, basically. They like productized kitchen iPad.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  You can't, you can't take the iPad off of the stand.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  It has to live there.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  So it's like this little dome. It looks a little bit like, you know, listeners who are about my age will remember the, the, like those iMacs with the, with the rotatable arm that were on top of the little dome. It's like a little dome.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Oh, I had one of those.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had one too. Exactly. I actually pulled it out of my parents' closet recently and found that it didn't turn on. So that's a pretty uninteresting story. This, this home, the, the Home View is sort of similar. It's like a little dome. It's got basically a slightly smaller than iPad sized screen on it. And it has, you know, you can receive text messages on it. You can set your calendar. You can ask Siri anything. It's somewhere between an iPad and a HomePod, always on, always listening. I mean, I have to ask you, like, would you ever put one of these in your house?

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  Uh, I'm the worst person to ask on this kind of thing. I'm sort of a late adopter. I have currently in my kitchen, I have an Amazon Echo from, I think, 2014 that is mostly a glorified timer and occasionally plays songs. But, um, I mean, I don't want another, I don't really need a screen in my very tiny kitchen, so I'm not sure that, I, I saw Wired describe it as like a giant Apple Watch for the home and I don't have an Apple Watch.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Really selling it there. That's a great, yeah. That one's for the box.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  My house needs one. Um, I did, I will say though, like I, I can see the, the value and the appeal. Like I watched this ad, which as I was telling you, it kind of, the, the ad for it, uh, kind of reminds me a little bit of like The Bear, um, like the, the vibe of The Bear, but set to like that Peter Bjorn and John song. Becca, we're late. Come right here. Mom, breathe.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  So good. Who's that?

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Uh, that's Aza.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Who's Aza?

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  He's a person. It's like a family getting ready before, uh, before school and it's like super stressful and chaotic, but instead of like this like thumping drum beat, it's like happy fun music. And that's because they have the Apple Home View, which they can, you know, it's like kind of like another member of the family that they're all interacting with. And like in my ideal version of the world, like I, yes, I can see that like mornings are chaotic for families for sure, but I don't need like yet another person or another entity to be involved with the chaos.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it had the real Apple marketing materials feel where they like invented a bunch of problems that can be solved by the, by, by the new Apple device that, that when you watch the video, you're sort of like, I mean, God, like they're so much better at marketing than basically any other tech company because they seem to be the only one that where like normal people work in the marketing department and they're like, oh.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  It was compelling.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're like, let's make a fun, loving, like messy family, sort of sitcom-y messy family. 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 that they've described. And if I did have them in my kitchen, I think I would probably just end up watching TV on it because like it's a screen and that's sort of, that's sort of what you do on screens. So I'll be very interested to see if this, if this gets any kind of adoption.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  I mean, I will say, I did a story a couple of years ago about like couples and families using tech to like manage their, um, their day-to-day lives. And I kind of went into it like thinking it would be a little bit poking fun, like, oh, these couples are using Notion and Slack to like, you know, all these like tech tools to basically like just do the stuff that families, just to come basic communication and like they're, they're managing their lives like they're product managers. But then 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 like a technological household manager to anything that can like simplify things and, and offload the mental load for you. I totally get it. And there, there are companies that are doing well that sell these like kind of different

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  screens that are kind of family friendly that you can have. And Apple's probably now just going to put them out of business, unfortunately. But yeah, I can, I can see, I can see where there's an appeal for this specific use case.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  I mean, what I really need, so Gus is, my son is in first grade and there's like seven different apps across his camps and schools and like I get texts and I get emails and I need to, I need Apple to find out a way to like receive all of that and just give it to me in like one simple, easy format. And 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, I want somebody else to do it for me, please. And that is when I will buy the, the Apple, I'm sorry, I keep forgetting the name, Home View, the Apple.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, um, I mean, I was going to say, you, you beat me to it. I was going to say, just get an agent for that. But, I mean, I did see a bunch of people sharing that Anthropic is hiring, um, you know, an assistant. Uh, 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, you know, just like kind of the one-on-one stuff that like agents all claim that they're going to, to solve for us. And so everyone's like, ha, ha, ha.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Incredible, incredible. I, I mean, when I, when I first saw the headline, I have to say, I, I actually thought that they were taking up smoking because they have like a high P doom and it's like a leftover, it's like The Leftovers. Like if you saw that show where like they're nihilists who are going to just start hanging out with Liv Tyler and wearing white and like, because nothing matters.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  But it's the opposite.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. As it, as it turns out, the reason is that they think that AI is going to cure cancer. So they're, so smoking is a way to show how much you believe that AI will cure cancer. So if you get cancer, it's like no big deal because.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  And it's very funny. It has to be the least cool reason to smoke cigarettes I can possibly imagine. Like this is one of the classically cool things to do, smoking cigarettes. There's so many cool reasons to do it, like nihilism, like, you know, because you know you look good, to meet people, all this stuff, because you want to signal to other AI researchers that you think AI is going to cure cancer soon. That is like, it negates all the coolness, all the cool points you get from smoking a ciggy outside, you completely lose from this.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, like you meet a woman outside a bar and then you start, you start like, you know, explaining the, the way that like AI is just walks away.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  I actually don't need a light anymore. I'm fine. Thank you. I'm good. This has been the cigarette, the cigarette portion of the, of our tech, of our tech talk show. Aaron, thank you for joining me again this week to talk through all of these things. Anytime. You can catch Aaron on OpenAI Security Footage, trying to plug things into the back of a TV. She's also, she wrote a great piece this week that I hope we'll get a chance to talk to about AI agent dinner parties that you can read in the New York Times app. Thanks for the plug. Yeah. Well, thank, thank, let's thank our audience. Thank you guys for listening. It's been another great week on Hard Fork.

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  We love to hear from our audience. If you have any questions or comments or want to give us a piece of your mind, you can find us at nytimes.com/hardfork. You can jump into the comments there. You can also email us at [email protected]. This episode of Hard Fork was produced by Whitney Jones and edited by Viren Povich. With additional editorial support from Brendan Klinkenberg, Lisa Tobin and Brooke Minterz. We were fact checked by Will Peichel and engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Diane Wong, Rowan Nemisto and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Jake Nickel and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Jessica Testa,

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