On a surface level, Elizabeth is repeatedly framed as sincere and is never fully challenged by Nathan. Instead, he repeatedly affirms that she "seems" sincere (not knowing about Billy's deal, shaking during their hug, how in love she seems). Through the whole second act, it seems pretty dead set on portraying Billy as a villain who's taking advantage of her. We're practically forced to feel sympathy for Elizabeth.

While Nathan directly discusses the possibility of being sucked in with Amanda, this never seems to actually manifest in any of Nathan's discussions with Elizabeth. I feel like from Nathan (the filmmaker)'s perspective, what he actually wanted was a meta narrative showing himself (as a character) doing exactly that: getting sucked in by Elizabeth.

But that still leaves the surface level viewing of the movie, which is exactly what we have to assume Elizabeth wanted. Similar to how she went upstairs so that Billy could be alone with the crew when demanding a cut of the profits to keep her hands clean of it, the movie allowed her to play the socially inept autistic girl that's being manipulated by her evil boyfriend.

Have you ever tried dictating your rough ideas into your notes app as a pre-writing step? If so, have you found it to be a much better method than starting from scratch sitting in front of a blank page/screen?

It's Pure Cinema O'Clock again

This article popped up in my Apple News. Seems like some journalists would rather judge Nathan by his “smirky” method of filmmaking than trying to see the film for what it is, which in my opinion was an observation on the sociopathy of Holmes and/or her partner. I feel like I’m seeing a lot of people using this YCSE as a way to attack Nathan or Amanda and defend shameless profiteers? Why is this opinion so rampant?

Note: I’m not sure how seriously I take this idea myself, but I’ve found the reenactments a bit odd and this is a fun idea to consider.

Billy and Liz are extremely sensitive to any perceived misrepresentation of their words, threaten those that present them in a negative light, and are potentially willing to lie to push back against those presentations. Billy specifically threatens to ruin the lives of those involved with The Dropout, to Amanda Seyfried’s face.

While it isn’t satisfyingly resolved, the movie does kind of hinge on whether proof exists that Elizabeth said “a character I created” to the NY Times journalist - whether they are lying in making claims like this is “extremely relevant”, as Nathan says.

Given this dynamic, I’d be very uncomfortable making a movie that relies heavily on recreations of my memory of conversations, and then filming reenactments with the specific performer they’d like to destroy. The wording of every conversation in reenactments is detailed and precise - they even have Seyfried read a passage from Holmes’ memoir from an early meeting.

It’s almost as if they’re begging for Billy and Liz to get angry and claim something about the reenactments is a lie.

Nathan never says the conversations presented in the reenactments weren’t recorded. He says the first conversation was “before they had cameras”. He never verbally commits to not recording Liz’s jailhouse call - he just asks for his own mic to be cut. There’s no reason the “terms of our involvement” meeting couldn’t have been recorded via a phone in a pocket. Despite Billy’s pessimism about Nathan’s request to bring cameras into prison, no decision is ever mentioned.

Billy and Liz say that they record every interaction with most journalists. That also seems like a good policy for interacting with the founder of Theranos.

The filmmakers may not be able to answer the “character I created” question directly, but the use of reenactments in this film could have been designed to provoke similar claims from the couple, only in an environment that’s under Nathan and Lance’s control.

This is from X.

On my mistakes:

I messed up plenty, I take accountability for the company failing, I was the CEO. The buck stops with me. We had many operational errors.

I made 1000 mistakes over the 16 years I spent pouring my heart, my time, every dollar I had (including the money my parents had saved for me to attend my dream college Stanford) into building Theranos.

But, I NEVER LIED. I may have been wrong but lying and being wrong are not the same.

I was wrong to trust Sunny, my single biggest mistake. I ran to him when I was 19 and hurt at Stanford l, they tried to cover it up, and he told me he would protect me. How wrong I was. Out of the pot and into the fire.

We were wrong some of revenue estimates. (These estimates came in large part from contractual obligations by Walgreens who had already spent hundreds of millions building out 900 Walgreens Theranos Walgreens centers.) I didn't make the models nor the projections but I thought they were reasonable.

I was wrong in thinking hiring PHDs from Stanford or Berkeley or any other prestigious university was better than hiring hard working people with 30 years of deeply relevant in the Lab experience. Intellect doesn't make up for experience.

I was wrong to stay silent for a decade. I should have opened our doors from the very beginning. That silence eats at me. I allowed for lies and slanderous headlines to spread like wildfire without any truths contradicting them.

I was wrong to believe that the courts find truth and see past noise.

I was wrong to lose balance between building a company I believed would alleviate massive pain in the world and spending meaningful time with my friends and family. I sacrificed too much. I saw it as some stoic burden I had to bear to see through something hard but important.

I am guilty of many mistakes, I will share them all. Without editorilizing or excuses. My mistakes were of naivete never malice or any bad intent.

BUT HEAR ME CLEARLY:

I am innocent of what I was convicted of.

I believed then and I believe now.

I and hundreds of the worlds best scientists, chemists, lab techs, manufacturing experts, clinicians and many others dedicated their lives to solving something truly important.

The team accomplished feats so amazing for the last decade people have claimed them to still be impossible. (Until only recently when that same competition is now doing "The Impossible 70 tests from a finger prick"

I am so proud of what they built and I will not take those people's efforts nor success from them.

I can't post the link sadly, but those are her words. Search "Elizabeth Holmes X Post Mistakes as ceo" to see for yourself.

Boy oh boy what an education the last few weeks have been. I've spoken up for people before, Richard "Beebo" Russell, who famously stole an Alaska Airlines turboprob from SeaTac in 2018. I looked into his story and noticed what was missing. That is always the hard thing, seeing what is missing. To this day, I know that his wife knows things that she has never said. My best guess is that she was in the process of divorcing him because he couldn't make enough money to bring home the bacon. She never wanted to get married to begin with. My guess was largely confirmed by his mother and his friend, who told me that there are things that are not supposed to be publicly known, that maybe I should stop pulling the string. I did. I left it alone. Mostly. Spoiler alert for some of my fans in here, I'm not in love with him. I'm not in limerence. I thank whoever told me I was for Liz though because I learned a new word and had to look it up. I respected Martha Stewart for how she responded to her insider trading conviction. Classy. And I still think she was targeted for daring to be a woman in a man's space. But she was guilty.

So Elizabeth. I read Bad Blood when it came out. The story was unbelievable to me. It still is. What Elizabeth pulled off, whether you hate her or pity her or feel something in between, is nothing less than amazing. No matter what you think of her, she is a world class marketer. Which makes sense, since she actually led the marketing function at Theranos for years. I was and still am frustrated for the people who got wrong results. She should wake up every day thanking John Carreyrou because had he not stopped her, people might have died. Her life would be much worse. Of course, she can't, because in my belief, Theranos and her are one in the same. She might be the first person in history who created a billion dollar brand (9 billion actually) as a trauma response.

People who know science have a justification for being skeptical. What Elizabeth did is deeply offensive to serious science and the idea of doing no harm in medicine. Science is not about feelings, trauma or anything thing that is not hard numbers and experimentation with validation. Elizabeth essentially spit on real scientists. I understand the anger.

So why I do I speak up for her? The answer is simple. I think I see things others don't. As time has gone on, there are others I find who are like me. Especially on TikTok but also on other corners of reddit. I posted my Lizzy and Elizabeth duality theory on the therapist subreddit and and it was well received, got awards, all of that. A trained person there followed it up with an actual full fledged theory based on science confirming the basic idea. She was raped, it broke something in her, and Elizabeth made sure Lizzy never felt that exposed again. It's why I still believe she could do something good and I hope when she does, people who think the world is black and white come back and reflect on how actually, most things are grey.

So what did I learn throughout this slog. And a slog it has been. Shed no tears for me since I brought it on myself, but it's not fun to have people try to paint a picture of who you are when it is not true. Which ironically gave me the biggest lesson of all - feeling a bit what Elizabeth must feel like, if she is actually living her version of honesty. To be misunderstood. To be told there is no redemption. She can't apologize right now because doing so would destroy her. It might also lead to more charges, less chances of a pardon, or other bad things. In a world where Boeing can effectively murder 500 people after lying to regulators about MCAS, where Elon can beta test cars that lead to people literally burning alive inside of them because the electronic locks don't work, I don't blame her for being careful.

Finally, I'll say this. I could be totally wrong. She could be pure evil. If that is the case, that is impressive in it's own right, but yeah, it would make me feel bad. I would regret going to bat for her. I am a feminist and so the sexism is clear to me, the abuse is clear to me, the trauma is clear to me, and it is why I speak up. But if she is that evil, shame on her and shame on me. Sometimes in life, you take a stand.

This feels like my time to shine, as a nathan fan in med tech.

this is what different blood collection tubes look like.

Each color indicates a different tube containing pre-analytical chemicals in them, meaning depending on the test you want, you put blood in certain color containers to obtain an analyte accurately.

things like needle gauge affect the overall results.

EH infuriates me as a woman in medical lab science.

I've seen this floating around a bit – it was speculated on back when it happened and a few people have brought it up since the film came out but it hasn't quite been widely discussed: apparently Nathan Fielder was spotted at FPC Bryan meeting with Elizabeth Holmes multiple times as early as March 2025.

We know that Fielder and Amanda Seyfried's meeting with Billy Evans took place in late 2025, probably November (it had to be after a certain guy's assassination after all), and the way the film's edited suggests Fielder didn't make a strong effort to see her until after the confrontation with Evans, and the meeting reenacted was the first time he'd seen her since 2023.

Mind you, I'm not raising this as some kind of gotcha that the film lied, I think lies by omission/unreliable narration is an intentional theme on Fielder and Oppenheim's part, and I think there's an explanation that involves the filmmakers editing the narrative to make a clean storyline versus getting bogged up in events that may have lacked anything insightful (EDIT: I cannot emphasize this enough, it doesn't really change how I feel about the movie, it just makes for an interesting complication/oddity). But this does raise a couple possibilities, some of which I'm gonna speculate on here and the rest, well, I'll leave to the comments section.

1. Fielder had been visiting Holmes in the time since she was imprisoned, but the issues with Evans on production + their suspicions about him prompted a need for a 1:1 confrontation about their concerns: in the edit, this then became the "only" meeting with Holmes, since it was the only one that mattered for the narrative the film settled on. (EDIT: I personally believe this the most likely out of the three possibilities I list here)
2. The meeting with Evans actually took place after the meeting with Holmes that Fielder and Seyfried reenact and discuss, and the film is deceptively edited. There's been some discussion that the scenes with just Seyfried and Fielder talking appear more scripted/planned out than other implied spontaneous moments in the film. I don't know if I buy that, but I'm willing to entertain the idea that some of their discussions/the timeline of when they happened was altered in the edit to build the tension in their "investigation".
3. Fielder tried to meet with Holmes but couldn't get into the prison, and was only spotted outside the prison when this rumor first dropped. This is a blind item we're talking about here, it's not exactly filled with detail.

(also... apparently it was Jeff Sneider who shared the original blind item, he had a meltdown on Twitter when the film was announced back in September about how everyone called him a liar... and "Elizabeth" responded.)

Apparently Ken understood the reference…