TWiT+ Club Shows 778 Transcript - Unpacking "You Can See Everything"

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
 

TWiT.tv [00:00:00]:
This is TWiT.

Paris Martineau [00:00:02]:
Hello everybody, and welcome to You Can Talk About Everything, or You Can See Podcast. Whatever it is, it's me, Jeff, and Micah talking about the movie that everyone can't stop talking about. And as I said, joining me here is Jeff Jarvis and Micah Sargent. And, uh, yeah. It's time to get into this movie. We're going to start up first with a kind of brief discussion, no spoilers, in case you are one of the many people trying to get into one of the many sold-out screenings of this film. But the vast majority of this episode is going to be chock-full of spoilers because we have a lot to unpack here. So I guess to kind of kick things off, guys, when did you see this movie? And what— I guess to begin, when did you see the movie? What had you heard about it going into it? And what were your initial impressions, like, while watching it?

Mikah Sargent [00:01:09]:
Uh, so go— so I first saw the movie the Friday. So I think it— what did it come out for some people on Thursday night on

Jeff Jarvis [00:01:18]:
some, and then Friday broader?

Paris Martineau [00:01:20]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:20]:
And, and I had intended to see it, um, at some point, right? But I had not given, you know, a lot of attention to it. And then I started to see people talking about it, and I said, oh no, I've got to go see this right now. So Friday came around, and I looked, and there were plenty of tickets here in Portland. And I asked my significant other, do you have any interest in seeing this? And he said, absolutely not. And I said, okay, I'll go see it by myself. But then I thought about a friend of mine who Loves Nathan Fielder, loves all this stuff. And so she and I went and saw it together. Initial thoughts and impressions.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:59]:
I'm usually not a person who— there are very few films that can be as long as this film was and me not feel like I start to get a little itchy and like, I got to get out of here.

Paris Martineau [00:02:11]:
Yeah, it's an Oppenheimer-length film.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:14]:
It is long. But yet my friend and I both talked about we were just there the whole time. My body went through different— sort of, sort of like I started out sort of relaxed, and then at times my knees were up at my chest. At other times I was sitting like the bisexual person I am, which means like legs underneath me, sort of like propped up.

Paris Martineau [00:02:37]:
Full goblin mode in a chair.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:38]:
Full goblin mode in a theater chair. I was all over the place, and I was just enraptured. My eyes were probably as big as hers were the whole time. Yeah, it was, it was. It was an experience that I'm so glad that I rode that roller coaster. So yeah, that's my initial thoughts.

Paris Martineau [00:03:00]:
Yeah. And I think some important context here, which I guess I should have done more of a proper intro to kick things off, though this is ostensibly a Club Twitch show, so people might notice we all have— we all are tech podcasters. We all have an extensive tech background. And so it's very interesting to go into this movie as people who have been intimately aware of the details of everything leading up to it, and yet to have kind of like gone in— like, I, I went in almost completely like blind going in. I knew nothing about it and went in on a Thursday. Anyway, I'll get into my thing in a minute because I have more to say, but Jeff, I want to hear your thoughts first.

Jeff Jarvis [00:03:37]:
So you saw it last Thursday, a week ago Thursday, as I remember, and you came out just screaming how it's the most amazing thing. So I dropped everything, and I believe it was as a result on Friday I went to see it. Now, normally, I wait for Tuesdays when it's half-price Tuesdays in Manville, New Jersey. And because I get senior prices, I get even lower prices.

Paris Martineau [00:03:55]:
Nice.

Jeff Jarvis [00:03:55]:
But I went because Paris told me to go. By the way, a friend of mine I think is watching this now, Christoph Mergersen, who's a professor at UMD, was saying on the socials, I don't know if I want to go. And I was berating him saying, you got to go. And then he went. And I said, do I get any credit for this? And he said, yeah, because he wanted to watch it before our show here.

Paris Martineau [00:04:15]:
Hey, shout out!

Jeff Jarvis [00:04:16]:
It's a pressured movie. People have to be like, oh my God, you gotta go see it. Um, I was not expert in— I, I knew about Theranos, obviously. I read stuff about Theranos, but I hadn't watched the miniseries until afterwards. I hadn't watched the docu— documentary until afterwards. Um, and then I, I boned up on, on everything about Theranos. Um, I was just like Micah. I was, I was dumbstruck the whole time.

Jeff Jarvis [00:04:40]:
The interesting thing for everybody who's here who hasn't seen it— pardon me— is knowing there are so many spoilers, I'm constantly waiting for, is that the spoiler? Is that the spoiler?

Mikah Sargent [00:04:50]:
Right?

Jeff Jarvis [00:04:51]:
Um, obviously one is a shower scene with Billie. It's a spoiler.

Paris Martineau [00:04:56]:
I was gonna say, the only things— so I went into it, I, I knew whenever I saw the trailer drop for this, I immediately was like, oh my God, this movie was made in a lab for me. I, I'm not the biggest Nathan Fielder fan. I just haven't watched much of his work because I had, I had personally Not for any particular reason, just that I had kind of conflated him with cringe comedy or things that are supposed to make your skin crawl. Cringe is probably not the right word.

Jeff Jarvis [00:05:24]:
Very David-ish.

Paris Martineau [00:05:24]:
It makes it a little uncomfortable, and I'm a bit of a weak film and TV viewer, so I was like, well, I've got other stuff to do. But I am the biggest Lance Oppenheim fan perhaps in the world. I have been obsessed with him as a documentarian and filmmaker ever since his debut. feature that came out when he was 24, Some Kind of Heaven, a great, uh, doc about The Villages, which I'm sure I'll get into later at some point in this pod. But so when I saw Lance with Nathan about Elizabeth Holmes, I was like, all right, I'm in. I marked it in my head. I was like, the second tickets are available, I'm gonna be getting this. I'd seen some things percolating online after the Telluride Film Festival that there was something to spoil about this, which kind of boggled my mind initially.

Paris Martineau [00:06:13]:
I was like, it's a documentary. What is there to spoil about?

Jeff Jarvis [00:06:15]:
Stay out of

Paris Martineau [00:06:16]:
that business. I also— I was— but I was like, whatever. I'm not going to look at it. I'm not going to— I'm going to avoid every bit of information about this. So— but I knew it was probably going to be cultural, like a cultural moment like it is now. So I was like, I got to make sure that I see it as soon as possible. Whenever A24 released that, like, tickets were available, I went and Clicked the link, looked at every theater they had posted. This was maybe a week or two before the movie actually released.

Paris Martineau [00:06:43]:
All of them sold out. I then just on a whim looked up the Angelica Village East Theater, which was not in that list. They did have a whole— they had whole screenings and a screening a day early before the, I guess, nationwide release that I guess because it wasn't on that A24 thing, there were a lot of tickets available. I got 2 seats and it was to the point where my friend who I had planned to see the movie with was like, oh, well, I only wanna see the movie if it's in like an A24 theater. AMC Theater with one of those cool reclining chairs because that'll be great. It's a 3-hour film. And I was like, no, I have to see this as early as humanly possible Thursday because I think there are going to be things that I need to participate in the discourse about. And I was right.

Paris Martineau [00:07:22]:
So I, like you, Jeff, went into it being like, the only 2 things I knew were, frankly, that someone hangs dong somewhere in the film. That was it. And that there's some second or third act thing that's like a twist that changes stuff. But I was like, I don't even know what that could mean in terms of a doctor. Right.

Jeff Jarvis [00:07:43]:
So I kept on trying to guess what the spoiler was. So, so because I didn't know enough about her, I didn't know— this is not a spoiler because this is, if you know anything about Elizabeth Holmes, everybody knows that she had a sexual assault in college. Okay. Oh, I didn't know that. That must be a spoiler. No. That her father worked for Enron.

Paris Martineau [00:07:58]:
Okay. I did not. Spoiler. This is the area where we're— for the viewer or listener at home, we're gonna start to get into spoilers probably in the next 5 to 10 minutes, and then it's gonna go into full spoilers. So you've been warned.

Jeff Jarvis [00:08:12]:
Let me just tell people this, that I think that— don't anticipate the spoilers too much.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:17]:
I agree.

Jeff Jarvis [00:08:18]:
Yeah, it's been overdone. It's, it's an intricate, well-done, uh, movie. It's a movie about deception, and it examines deception from so many angles. Her, obviously, her deceiving of her investors and her employees and her patients and, uh, the board members and, um, uh, everyone. Then the question of whether documentaries are deceptive, thus whether journalism is deceptive. Uh, almost getting into a spoiler here, but whether acting is deceptive.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:48]:
Mm.

Jeff Jarvis [00:08:49]:
And, um, so it's a really interesting, intricate kind of jigsaw puzzle of all of that. And the surprise is as much as anything about the brilliance of how it was made, I think. So don't get overblown on the spoilers. Uh, you're gonna wanna leave us in a few minutes and come back and bookmark this, 'cause we're gonna talk about 'em all, because we're so frustrated. We're trying to be good, and so we can't talk about the whole movie. Now we're gonna talk about the whole movie.

Paris Martineau [00:09:13]:
Yeah, I mean, and so some context is, I, as a tech reporter, I've been covering, especially 'cause I'm a tech reporter who spent like the last 5 years of my career covering a lot of different frauds and scams and startups that had— A lot of red yarn on the walls. —really something nefarious. One of the companies I covered literally pitched themselves as Theranos 2.0, which made me shoot up in my seat in the middle of this because I guess they'd already been scooped by Billy and Elizabeth Holmes on that. But I'd followed this story very closely to the point where I didn't really feel like I needed to watch The Dropout or participate in any of the secondary media about it when it came out because I was like, I, I know this, I've read Bad Blood, I've done all the stuff, like I'm kind of tapped out Elizabeth Holmes. So I went into this being more of just a fan of one of the co-directors and like, well, let's see what this movie could be like. How are they going to approach this? And part of the reason why I'm such a fan of Lance Oppenheim is he makes documentaries that are not like documentaries. Like all of his work, they feel like strange, almost fantastical feature, like narrative feature films. And I've always been very, like, gobsmacked by his ability to get subjects to, like, open up and have, like, really interesting, earnest moments and conversations on camera when they're technically being recorded by, like, a team of, of people holding machines pointed at them.

Paris Martineau [00:10:42]:
And so I was like, how is that going to work when suddenly you have, like, one of the most notorious fraudsters and liars of the modern tech times in front of him. And I was incredibly impressed with what we saw. I mean, so I've seen it twice. My first watch, I was along for the ride and basically watching rapt. I was walloped by every turn in development. And here's where we're going to start to get into a little bit of spoilers of just a couple of things that happen. And the first scene of the movie, just for warning, I was like gobsmacked on my first watch by like the who's on first scene, like baffled by like her like willful ignorance.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:19]:
Let's do it. Let's just do it.

Paris Martineau [00:11:20]:
Okay, spoilers are beginning. So, and so I felt like to the point where during my first watch, like I left, like I went through the full like emotional, um, I feel like roller coaster. We all do in it, which is kind of what the director's trying to pull off with this, which is like, I, I felt like genuinely upset for Elizabeth Holmes, once it became clear what Billy was doing with her image in prison. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. And so I went to go see it again, literally the next day. And on my second watch, I feel like that all changed.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:55]:
Oh.

Paris Martineau [00:11:56]:
And it began from the opening scene, which is what I want to talk about specifically. This film does not start with a traditional establishing shot. Instead, it begins with a close-up on Billy Evans, who's framed between the bars of a crib in the shot. And he's on the phone with someone, and he's explaining why Elizabeth has decided to do the documentary and why she thinks it's the right move. And Holmes, of course, during all of this, is silent. And you don't really even realize that she's sitting there next to him until Billy gets up and the camera stays there. It lingers on her patting the baby repeatedly, and she's staring off into the distance. She looks like passive and almost removed from the scene and is like sitting there just staring blankly as Billie continues to like do work on her behalf and explain her motivations in this like opening thing.

Paris Martineau [00:12:49]:
And so, in that scene, the explanation that Billie gives for why she's doing the documentary is something along the lines of like, this is an opportunity to show people who she really is. And so I spent that entire second watch hyperfocused on that. Like, from the meta-meta perspective, like, what was the story that Evans and Holmes were trying to sell by participating in this documentary? And like, what version of Holmes were they trying to show here, and how did they show it? And so the thing that I— it feels like throughout this whole film, like, or I guess the first half of it, like, shows the 30 days leading up to her prison sentence. And throughout that, both Evans and Holmes are like putting on this like perfect, like orchestrated performance that is like all designed to reinforce the same point, that the person you're seeing is not Elizabeth Holmes, the big bad fraudster, but rather Liz, like a doe-eyed, cardigan-wearing mom of 2 who's weird and spacey and well-meaning, a little off-putting. And unlike Elizabeth Holmes, Liz couldn't possibly have committed a sprawling fraud. She can't even beat eggs correctly or understand a good comedy routine or pick a partner who won't manipulate her. And I think, like, my main takeaway from the second one is that I was very impressed that they never let the mask slip really during recording, or at least Holmes doesn't. I'm still like, jury's still out for me on whether Billy is performing at all or whether he's just like a patsy.

Paris Martineau [00:14:22]:
But

Jeff Jarvis [00:14:23]:
I think it's because he's not a villain. Well, hold on, let's, let's dissect the egg scene. Yes. That's the first one that really gets me.

Paris Martineau [00:14:28]:
There was a lot that I just put there.

Jeff Jarvis [00:14:30]:
So she's whipping eggs languorously.

Paris Martineau [00:14:33]:
Barely. No, she's kind of just— she's just taking her little fork and just kind of bringing it back and forth while standing near. This is my thing is on second rewatch, I think this is all a carefully orchestrated performance from Holmes because she then says when Billy comes in and grabs it from her and Nathan's like, why are you doing this? Hold on a second. Hold on a second. Hold on a second.

Jeff Jarvis [00:14:53]:
Hold on a second. The important thing here was that she languorously mixes the eggs, he takes them from her, but then very importantly, Fielder asks, why did you do that? I think that's critical. As a journalist, we're trained to ask uncomfortable questions. I wouldn't have even asked. I would have looked at it and said, what's going on there?

Paris Martineau [00:15:13]:
But that's why Fielder is brilliant. But I think that's why they chose Fielder, is because he's the perfect person for this. He's gonna press it.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:17]:
Yeah, he will press it.

Jeff Jarvis [00:15:18]:
So he presses it and says, Why did you do that? That, to me, was terribly revealing all around. And then Billy just says she doesn't do it enough, and that's fine.

Paris Martineau [00:15:27]:
But I mean, that's, I think, part of the interesting thing here is, like, that's my weird galaxy brain take on this, is, like, at first time I was like, oh my God, it's such a revealing detail of what a manipulative, like, terrible person he is that he's just, like, grabbing the eggs from her and just explaining that she doesn't do it right. But it's like—

Jeff Jarvis [00:15:43]:
Mansplaining eggs.

Paris Martineau [00:15:44]:
Well, no. Do you think that that was genuine? Or do you think that she did the thing that she'd know would cause him to act that way, so that Nathan would ask, why did you do that? And then she could get another example of how she's just a poor, vulnerable girl who just gets manipulated by these bad guys, and she couldn't have possibly done a crime.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:05]:
And that's why when you say, you know, it was sort of trying to understand what is the story that they are telling, what is the appearance that they're trying to put out there, I— that's how I walked away after the first— immediately afterward. But then as I started to doodle-doodle and get the galaxy brain going, then I thought, wait, there's this story that, uh, Billy believes that they're both trying to put out there and is working toward that purpose that he— this is, you know, one, one potential, uh, way that this is going, that he thinks that they're both trying to put out there. But is there then another underlying story that Elizabeth— Liz, on her own— is trying to put out there. And that's where the eggs become that more— that much more nefarious, because Boy Howdy did that egg moment, and then plus everything else that happens in the film, have me enraged, and also a lot of the theater enraged with his behavior. And it wasn't until afterward, after getting out of the emotion of all of that, that I said, well, it would be handy, right, to, to make it appear as though, uh, this is happening yet again. And is there then that deeper layer that's part of this? And did I fall into the thing that everyone seems to fall into in her orbit? And that I don't even like to say, like, as a man, I don't even like to say that. It makes me feel— but then it's like, is that part of it? Ah, that's so— that's—

Paris Martineau [00:17:38]:
I mean, I think that's the core of the film. And this is something that we've seen in all these interviews that now both the co-directors and other people on staff have said is that they had a 7-person crew there shooting with them. And from the first day, they'd go— they'd leave the house and go back to talk about it, and not a single person could agree on what had happened.

Jeff Jarvis [00:18:02]:
Like, even after the film was out, Fielder said he and his director of photography are still disagreeing about things.

Paris Martineau [00:18:07]:
Yeah. Lance Oppenheim says he's watched the movie, the final cut of it, over 200 times and he still doesn't know what has happened with it. I, I— it's a fascinating text.

Jeff Jarvis [00:18:20]:
Paris, are you, are you becoming a Billy defender?

Paris Martineau [00:18:23]:
I'm not a Billy defender.

Jeff Jarvis [00:18:25]:
Oh, okay. I just got concerned.

Paris Martineau [00:18:26]:
I mean, I don't think that there's anything— I don't even know what there would be to defend about it. I'm just, I'm just saying—

Jeff Jarvis [00:18:33]:
Is he a victim of her? Are you saying that?

Paris Martineau [00:18:38]:
I mean, I don't know that I'd say he's a victim of anything.

Jeff Jarvis [00:18:42]:
I don't know.

Paris Martineau [00:18:42]:
But I don't think that she's a victim of anything either. I think that they're— I think that probably if we're talking about who is the smarter of the two, it's absolutely Elizabeth. And I think we have to weigh a lot of the scenes that we see. Like, for instance, them launching Theranos 2.0. There's a bunch of scenes of Billy Evans watching basic biology videos on 2x speed. And at one point he calls over to Elizabeth Holmes and is like, explain— like literally mansplains apoptosis as if it's some cutting-edge scientific thing that he needs her to know about. It is like a basic form of how cells work and like cell death. Elizabeth Holmes knows what apoptosis is.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:26]:
I was learning about this thing today I wanted to share with you.

Paris Martineau [00:19:29]:
Babe, I just learned that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Oh my God, we've got to call investors and tell them about that. Like, she's clearly— I mean, she has to be aware that he's a dunce in this aspect.

Jeff Jarvis [00:19:44]:
And well, and so was her prior boyfriend.

Paris Martineau [00:19:47]:
I mean, I don't, I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis [00:19:48]:
He was, he was her useful idiot, I think. Well, no, but he, he's portrayed as her useful idiot. All right, so, but then she portrays herself as in some ways, the innocent idiot. Let's go to the who's on first.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:02]:
One of the most important things—

Paris Martineau [00:20:03]:
This is the thing that has changed the most for me over 2 watches and a lot of talk.

Jeff Jarvis [00:20:09]:
So let's go first impressions. Micah, your first impression of that scene?

Mikah Sargent [00:20:12]:
My first impression was actually in that moment because— so again, Nathan Fielder, I did not know much about him before this. I hadn't watched a lot of his stuff. And so I went in, Not knowing, and I thought, oh my goodness, this is the perfect guy for this, right? He clearly does not— he's not bothered by the discomfort of this, which, as a neurodivergent person, had me wondering, is he some form of neurodivergent? And then when that scene happened, it made me kind of— I started to think about— Yeah. His potential neurodivergence and the the brilliance of choosing something like that, that many of us have seen, as a means of— because it's so much, if you get it, you get it. If you don't, you don't. And you can tell—

Paris Martineau [00:21:05]:
Who doesn't get it, though?

Mikah Sargent [00:21:06]:
No, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. It's like, it's such a good litmus test because you really are just dipping it in and it should change color. And so if it doesn't, it's like, what in the world is happening here? Right? And so, everyone who can watch it and understand it, which, yes, I would argue is many, many, many, many people, to have such a blurry-eyed failure to understand is so—

Jeff Jarvis [00:21:33]:
But an effort to act like she did.

Paris Martineau [00:21:35]:
So you believe that it's genuine that she didn't understand?

Mikah Sargent [00:21:38]:
No, at the first outset of watching it, yes, I started to believe that she didn't. But then as it kept going and I started to go, no, there's no way. Like, I want to make space, right, for people who maybe wouldn't understand it, but I don't— I've not met anyone who I don't think could understand it. So, Jeff, what do you think?

Jeff Jarvis [00:21:59]:
So I want to get to Paris's second impression in a second. So my first impression was this was brilliant of Oppenheimer and Fielder to go to that, and a bit of a high wire because who knows how it could turn out, but they would edit it out if it didn't work. But still, it, it worked amazingly, it seems. Um, and it would take a lot for her to, to have to calculate, I think, he's showing this to me so that I can act spectrummy, so I'm going to act spectrummy as a result, and I'm going to act like I get along with the gag. So I'm acting upon acting here. I'm going to act like I'm laughing and I find something funny, but it's not what he's going to find funny, because I'm going to demonstrate and prove how different I am, and Billy's going to say, see how different she is. Right, so it's real halls of mirrors times.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:44]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:22:45]:
Um, so I tended to— because by this point the film has me in a certain level of credibility with itself that I'm believing, um, that Fielder chose it, uh, for this purpose without seeing 5 levels in, thinking she could be— she could not get this, she uses words in weird ways. Um, it could be that they saw exactly what was going on and they played it, and both she and Billy played it together, but I think that'd be pretty hard. So I tend to think that she is that doe-eyed fool sometimes. Paris?

Paris Martineau [00:23:25]:
My, uh, oh man, so many thoughts on this. One, I don't think that Fielder showed her this video because he thought that she wouldn't get it. I think that that did not even enter his Mind, because who would ever assume someone would watch Who's on First and not get it? Like, I think that it's like a— from what I understand of watching clips from his shows, like, he has done this like throughout his career. He's figured out all these like ways to make a scene out of a point he wants to make, like audiovisual stuff.

Jeff Jarvis [00:23:58]:
Gee, words to whiteboards could be a good thing.

Paris Martineau [00:23:59]:
It's kind of like that classic clip that everybody always posts where it's like, I hope you're hungry, and then you removes the, like, plate and it shows nothing. And he's like, for nothing. He's, like, always trying to, like, make more of a dramatic moment. Uh, not even dramatic, just, like, try to make a scene out of real life in a way that is useful to what he's filming. And so I think in this case, he wanted to show her who's on first and then be like, yeah, that's what I think is going on with the can, could, capacity thing that they were talking about before. Right. The first— so the first time I saw this, I was— she got me hook, line, and sinker. I was like, wow, I guess she's just, in addition to being a fraudster, is like quite neurodivergent in this way and just doesn't seem to understand social cues and just seems to be completely out of it.

Paris Martineau [00:24:50]:
This is a very interesting aspect of Elizabeth Holmes I hadn't considered, you know, kind of a Silicon Valley thing.

Jeff Jarvis [00:24:56]:
And to fit in with other nerds. Yeah,

Paris Martineau [00:24:58]:
yeah. And then Second rewatch, I still kind of couldn't get out. Like, she still had gotten me in that a bit. I, I was like, well, she's, um, like, when, when it is happening, you can see her, she's holding the baby and she's kind of like looking off into the middle distance. And so I was like, maybe she— I was like trying to figure out a way to rationalize it because I was like, my reason for believing it was genuine is I was like, her response I mean, I just don't think that someone would be able to— my thinking was, if Nathan Fielder puts on a YouTube video for you, how are you going to be able to, in a 30-second clip, come up with, yeah, the best move is actually to pretend that I don't understand who's on first, because that will align with the narrative I was talking about before about how I could not possibly understand.

Jeff Jarvis [00:25:48]:
And Billie will play into it without knowing.

Paris Martineau [00:25:50]:
Yeah. Right. At first I was like, that's too galaxy-brained for even Elizabeth Holmes to be doing. Maybe she just wasn't paying attention or something like that. But I was walking around and I seriously like— Were you dancing? The second watch of this movie, the only showing I could get into was like at 10 PM. So it was 1 AM in the Lower East Side. I was— it was raining. Me and my friend walked around for like an hour and a half.

Paris Martineau [00:26:16]:
I didn't get home till like 3 AM. And one of the main things we talked about for at least 30 minutes was this scene. He was like, oh no, it's absolutely a con. Like, it is. He couldn't quite articulate why, but after thinking on it for a bit, I think he's right in that they came into this being like, one of the narratives we want to hit during this time is that she's just a little weird, she's just a little different, she might not see the world in the same way other people do. And so I think that—

Jeff Jarvis [00:26:42]:
That's giving her credit for brilliance beyond what I think she gets.

Paris Martineau [00:26:45]:
I'm not saying it's brilliant. I'm saying, Jeff, Jeff, they— wait, They pitched— Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans pitched this to A24. They also, at the same time, pitched the New York Times profile that they end up doing a whole quote note, which we need to talk about in a minute. They had to go— both of them, like, the core part of it is, it's not Elizabeth Holmes, this big, bad person. It's Liz. She's different. She's softer. And so, a core tenet when you invite— She's not on the jury.

Paris Martineau [00:27:14]:
A documentary group is they have to come in with, who is the persona you're presenting? And what are you trying— what are the scenes and things you want to do to hit to make this go your way. And so I think one of the things probably was like that she's, you know, you're maybe not on the same social level or this idea of neurodivergence. And so I think that when she— I— my conspiracy theory is that I think it seems like Nathan Fielder, like I was saying, does this sort of stuff a lot. I bet there were a lot of This was one, I bet, of many instances of Nathan doing something kind of out of pocket to try and shock them out of the act or get a real response from it. And so I think she was maybe a little checked out because this is probably like not the first YouTube video Nathan has shown her in the last couple of days and then was like, well, my response to this is going to be the same response I have. And you see, I've now watched a lot of the depositions. Whenever she gets a question she doesn't like, a common thing she does in those depositions during the trial is being like, oh, I'm not familiar with that. I don't really know.

Paris Martineau [00:28:23]:
I don't get it. And so I think it's just like an extension of that. And then Billy jumped into home, like, to drill down on the narrative of like, well, she's just different, babe. You just don't get it. And then immediately, once they started to talk about it beyond a couple of seconds, he was like, I think that's all for today, Elizabeth. Like, you can go to your room, Liz. Like, it's time to go to bed. It's hard work.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:41]:
Can I ask, you both knew about that bit right before— Who's on First? You both had known about Who's on First before watching the show?

Jeff Jarvis [00:28:51]:
No, no, I didn't watch it live in my youth.

Paris Martineau [00:28:54]:
You were there in person, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:28:57]:
You were who? So who? You both having heard of this before, the second that that video comes on screen and you know that the guy is there to try to prove a point about you, I don't think it's that— I don't think it requires too much brainpower if you have actually seen it before. Because I think she lied when she said she hadn't seen it before. I absolutely believe she has.

Jeff Jarvis [00:29:27]:
She lies when she says she never lies.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:28]:
I know that.

Paris Martineau [00:29:29]:
I think she also was lying to be like, I've never seen any of Nathan's work. Of course.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:35]:
No, that's a lie. That's 100% a lie. That, that's what I mean though. I don't think— because I know, I truly feel that I could have done the same thing that she did in that situation. As soon as he showed that on YouTube, I would have been like, oh, he's, uh, trying to figure out if I'm going to understand, um, the subtle joke here that's obvious to most people. Um, So how can I make it seem like I don't get the subtlety? That seems like a not that big of a—

Paris Martineau [00:30:04]:
Yeah, I think that's what she was doing.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:05]:
Yeah. So it's not— when Jeff, you were talking about sort of her cleverness or lack of cleverness, like, I don't think it even requires that much brainpower to be deceptive here. I think it does, 'cause I wanna ask you both too, What do you think about her motherhood? Is that—

Paris Martineau [00:30:33]:
I will say what John Carreyrou has said, which is that he— and he's the foremost expert on Elizabeth Holmes, broke the Theranos story, wrote Bad Blood. Carreyrou has said that he believes that she had the kids to bolster her case. Wow. And I don't want to put words in his mouth because that's all I remember of the thing. But my interpretation of that had always been that, look, let's say if you had done something terrible, you were caught, you were going to face maybe a decade in prison. What is the— there's only like 2 real options you have, either to go full contrition and you're going to be facing hundreds of millions of dollars of debt that you suddenly have to pay, Or you can double down on being innocent. And what is an innocent person going— never— what would be insane for an innocent per— an innocent person is going to think that they're going to get off scot-free because they're innocent. Mm-hmm.

Paris Martineau [00:31:36]:
And so an innocent person, it would make sense for them to have children, have a child before the trial, and also be pregnant during it and have a kid a month before you're supposed to go to prison, because it wouldn't ever enter their mind that they could go to prison because they're innocent.

Jeff Jarvis [00:31:52]:
So I was on one of my many podcasts, Breaking the News, with Julie Roginski and Michelle Kinney, and they haven't seen the movie yet, but I was talking about this angle of it with them. And Julie chose to be a single mother with a surrogate— or not a surrogate, but a donor. I don't know which, doesn't matter. And so she had empathy with her— with Elizabeth Holmes for that purpose.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:17]:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Jarvis [00:32:18]:
So you're going to be in jail for 11 years. When you get out, you're probably not of childbearing age anymore. So you say, this is my chance to have children. One angle on it. The other angle on it obviously is you have the children as a manipulative act to try for sympathy. And, and so much of this movie— I've been saying the movie is about deception. It's also a movie about empathy and whether or not you can crank it up at all. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:32:39]:
You certainly— everyone has to have empathy for these kids. They're now in the hands of Billy. who knows what that life is like? They had to go visit their mother in prison.

Paris Martineau [00:32:46]:
I'd also just like to state for the record that Ivy's full name is Ivictus.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:51]:
No way.

Paris Martineau [00:32:51]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:53]:
That's very— that's, uh, that's microdosing LSD moments.

Paris Martineau [00:33:00]:
Or sorry, Invicta. Invicta, which means invincible.

Jeff Jarvis [00:33:06]:
So, so what, what do the kids represent? Do they represent an appeal for empathy? A, a cynical act? Do they represent a woman who feels innocent and she's gonna have the kids. I, I, I tend to go against her on this one and think that, that it was— it's unfair to the kids. It's like, it's like—

Paris Martineau [00:33:23]:
Well, I think something that's also interesting to consider is that, um, both of— both Lance and Nathan have stated repeatedly in interviews that Elizabeth Holmes appeared to them to not comprehend that she was going to prison until like a couple days before. They'd said it because her— the date she was going in—

Jeff Jarvis [00:33:42]:
She made the phone call with—

Paris Martineau [00:33:43]:
Well, no, no, no. Like, that is when she started to, I guess, I understand. But part of it was that her prison, the beginning date of when she was supposed to go in had been pushed back a couple of times. Part of it was that she also had an appeal under. They were like, it did not seem to them. It could have also been part of an act that she really was acting as if she was about to go to prison for 10 years. She didn't think that it was about to start, which I think also plays into what you're saying. Sorry, continue, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis [00:34:11]:
Yeah, I think she knew she was going to prison. I think that was the whole thing. We could go on forever here. I want to make sure that we get in Acts 2 and 3, so I want to kind of drain what's left in Acts 1. One thing I want to talk about is the locale. Billy's family is rich. They own a chain of hotels, of wealthy hotels in San Diego. This occurs just a few miles up the shore from San Diego with beautiful beach access, which happens to be very photogenic, but also it's a humble house.

Jeff Jarvis [00:34:44]:
It feels like a great comedown from the person who owned a $9 billion company, uh, and they rented it for this purpose. Um, so the location itself is manipulative as hell.

Paris Martineau [00:34:56]:
It's also entirely staged. Like, they had been living somewhere else. And so—

Jeff Jarvis [00:34:59]:
Exactly.

Paris Martineau [00:35:00]:
On second watch, I was looking at the, like, set dressing of it. Of every— on every inch in the living room are big family photos, uh, everywhere. As if they lived there for a while.

Jeff Jarvis [00:35:12]:
All these books.

Paris Martineau [00:35:13]:
Yeah. And it's like they had to bring every single one of those in. And the time in between when, um, they agreed to do the film— they being A24 and the directors— and when they started filming was like days to maybe a week or two. Right.

Jeff Jarvis [00:35:30]:
So they really had to address this set. And of course, it's what she did before. If you watch, um, The Dropout, one thing that's emphasized is that, uh, she and, uh, Sonny lived in, in a huge house, but she showed Fortune magazine living in a monk's, uh, cell of an apartment with nothing but bottled water in the refrigerator. And so she has this fake environment. I also want to mention on this, and I, and I watched, uh, Oppenheimer and, and Fielder, uh, their interview after the screening for the New York Film Festival. Or one of them. And they made a point of praising the cinematography, and I do want to make a point of praising that.

Paris Martineau [00:36:09]:
It is gorgeous.

Jeff Jarvis [00:36:10]:
Brilliant. It's amazing.

Paris Martineau [00:36:11]:
David Bolen, he is the cinematographer on all of Oppenheimer's other works. And I mean, it's one of the reasons why I say that he is a documentarian that none of his work ever reads to me as, like, a straightforward documentary. It looks like a stylistic narrative film. And this is the most contained one of his work.

Jeff Jarvis [00:36:31]:
There's no lighting. If you ever read been around a film set, you know the, the, the pedantry they go through with lighting. It just drives you nutso, right? There's basically—

Paris Martineau [00:36:40]:
They couldn't— no, they couldn't. They didn't. I think they had no lighting, or maybe one light. Maybe one. Exactly.

Jeff Jarvis [00:36:46]:
They had 3 cameras, uh, one—

Paris Martineau [00:36:48]:
They ended up buying almost all of those like week one,

Jeff Jarvis [00:36:53]:
right? 2 zooms. It changed that Nathan wasn't going to be on camera, but then he ended up in the conversation so often he was quickly gonna be on camera. So it changed how they had to shoot this thing. They had the one that set the scene for everything, and then, then if they moved out to the patio, they had to quickly move the camera out there and move back in. And, and, and it's brilliantly, brilliantly shot, but the location itself is perhaps the greatest lie of all.

Paris Martineau [00:37:19]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:37:19]:
This, this is— it's there to induce empathy with them. Oh, they've come to— oh, they had such a life. Oh gee, with Was it their fault they end up like this? And she's gonna go to jail with these 2 little kids. Oh, and the crappy little place. And then when Nathan goes to the bedroom that he does take on, hilarious that he sees nothing but wood and thinks that they're gonna make him sleep on wood like a prison. No, no, the mattress is in the storage container. Um, uh, so, uh, and they happen to be there on the beach. What an amazing scene to be on.

Jeff Jarvis [00:37:48]:
Yeah. Um, that, I think, was— that whole notion of the dynamics of where it's happening and how it's happening and back and forth on the couch and over the kitchen counter and all that, I think is— should have been stage-managed and written, but wasn't.

Paris Martineau [00:38:04]:
Well, it was stage-managed and written, but it was—

Jeff Jarvis [00:38:06]:
By whom?

Paris Martineau [00:38:07]:
By Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans. I mean, I think it's also worth noting that the— so, they mention quite a few times in this first act of the film the New York Times profile that Liz did. And so, I can't remember where I physically was, but I remember, like, when this hit, It hit the internet like a bomb went off. Everyone was— I mean, people hadn't heard from Elizabeth Holmes since long before the trial. This was the first piece of media she'd ever done since then. And it was— it's a piece called Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth. The black turtlenecks are gone. So is the voice.

Paris Martineau [00:38:47]:
As the convicted Theranos founder awaits prison, she's adopted a new persona: devoted mother, And it's accompanied with a photoshoot that takes place in that same home. And the thing that I thought— I was shocked that they focused on the quote that they did in—

Jeff Jarvis [00:39:05]:
I think they picked on anything. I think you'll explain it in a second, but I think that they just needed anything to act like a victim of the New York Times, and it was easy to pick on that.

Paris Martineau [00:39:12]:
Well, no. So, I mean— In the moment.

Jeff Jarvis [00:39:15]:
Because when Nathan pressed her on her quote in that, I think she came back on the instant and thought, okay, this is where I'm gonna attack the New York Times.

Paris Martineau [00:39:22]:
Well, the interesting thing that I noticed on a second watch was that this is, like, in one of the first couple of scenes of the film. It is Nathan and Elizabeth sitting in bed the day the New York Times profile drops, which I guess is in May. It's May 2023 here. And they're reading it out loud. And it's when they get to that line— Nathan is reading the story out loud while Elizabeth is sitting there. When they get to that line, Nathan reads it and he's like, you wouldn't say that. You probably would have said it like this. Isn't that right, Liz? And she goes, yeah.

Paris Martineau [00:39:55]:
And so it's again, just one of these things where it's like, oh, he's the one doing the pushing. But again, it is one of like, this is in the first couple of scenes of it, and it's the first obvious lie that Liz tells on camera where I think the next scene or something, Nathan Fielder is pressing her on it. He's like, well, you know, I just really— are you sure you didn't say that? How do you know? And she's like, well, we did all these recordings and I reviewed all of them and I didn't. I didn't see that, and I also know it from memory. And then of course later in the film they acknowledge they haven't looked over any of the recordings and aren't sure if it's in there or not. And so it's just a perfect example of kind of this dichotomy at play. But the thing that shocked me about all of this is that the thing that I remember about this New York Times profile is not that— that was just like a random throwaway line. It is this paragraph from it, which happens like in the top Part of it goes— this is the author writing.

Paris Martineau [00:40:48]:
So how could I be sure that Liz wasn't another character that Mrs. Holmes had created? I was admittedly swept up in Liz as an authentic and sympathetic person. She's gentle and charismatic in a quiet way. My editor laughed at me when I shared these impressions, telling me, and I quote, Amy Chozik, you got rolled. I vigorously disagreed. You don't know her like I do. But then, as I— she basically says that as she called a bunch of Elizabeth's, like, friends and families, they didn't want to talk. Only people that Elizabeth had personally introduced her to were willing to speak.

Paris Martineau [00:41:24]:
One of those friends said, Miss 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 Miss Holmes says. And so that is, I feel like, the paragraph that is the thesis of this film, which is they had the exact same experience where they got rolled. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:41:44]:
By the way, Patrick Healy, who I can't stand, he was at the op-ed section of the Times and now he's the standards editor. He did a piece this last week going back to look at that quote. And the quote was whether or not she was playing a part that she invented or that was invented for her. That's the essence of it. And so the reporter does not record interviews, thinks it gets in the way. As if, by the way, taking notes constantly when somebody's talking doesn't get in the way. They're both devices that have an impact between the reporter and the person, um, but didn't record but had the notes and remembered writing down that exact quote. Whoever doesn't have the notes anymore, of course.

Jeff Jarvis [00:42:24]:
Meanwhile, uh, Billy and Liz didn't play back all the tapes, so we don't know what was said. And in a way, it doesn't really matter at all. It's all—

Paris Martineau [00:42:33]:
I also, I found it very funny that, um, whenever at one point, whenever we kind of switched to Elizabeth Holmes goes to prison, Nathan Fielder's trying to figure out what to do. He is in a cafe across the street from the New York Times building. Like, I asked the New York Times reporter if she wanted to meet, uh, to give me her notes from it, and she declined, which I thought was wild because this person was not a New York Times staff writer at this time. They had been years ago, but they were a freelancer at this time that had mostly like a Hollywood screenwriter. And the only— like, the things that they had published in the years since were maybe like 3 or 4 pieces in the last 4 years for the Times, one of which— I went through her, uh, author page trying to figure out why they pitched it to this reporter, and I think it is she did a profile of Adam Neumann, uh, called Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. WeWork's chief risk-taker found a kindred spirit with an open checkbook. Now he's walking away from the wreckage with more than $1 billion. It was kind of a don't call me Elizabeth, call me Liz piece, but about a different fraudster a couple of years prior.

Jeff Jarvis [00:43:44]:
By the way, there's a very good tapas place right across from the Times. So it makes sense to me. All right, is there anything else from act 1 before we get to acts 2? I would say act 2 is going to prison, kind of full-throated. And then act 3 is, um, acting.

Paris Martineau [00:44:00]:
The one thing I want to talk about act 1 is how the shower scene happened. And this comes from a really fantastic fantastic New York Magazine profile of Lance Oppenheim that I'd really recommend everybody read. It's just got, like, a lot of great behind-the-scenes details of this. Mm-hmm. And so here's a quote from this. One day, Oppenheim accompanied Holmes' partner, Evans, to the gym and asked what else he was planning to do that afternoon. Evans mentioned that he'd have to shower, and before Oppenheim could propose a tasteful, minimally invasive approach, he stripped and hopped in. What follows is the sequence that earned You Can See Everything its R for graphic nudity.

Paris Martineau [00:44:38]:
A quote from Oppenheim, it seems like he really had something he wanted to show to us.

Jeff Jarvis [00:44:47]:
Yep, yep, yep. Well, the funny thing was he gets out of the shower in his towel. That's where he looks sheepish.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:55]:
Yeah, yeah, that is funny. It's like he got, uh, yeah, that was weird, but

Paris Martineau [00:45:01]:
It was weird, but it's also just like a perfect— like, you, you couldn't write a better,

Mikah Sargent [00:45:06]:
yeah,

Paris Martineau [00:45:06]:
descriptive detail of introducing a character as a person who is showing dong in the documentary to a group of people who are there to record your partner before she goes to prison.

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:22]:
It's a movie about deception and empathy and also exhibitionism.

Paris Martineau [00:45:26]:
And self-delusion. Yeah, and exhibitionism.

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:30]:
Anything else in Act 1 that occurs? We'll probably come back to it as our memories hit, but I just wanted to make sure we keep— because there's so much to get to.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:36]:
Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:36]:
in terms of what are really— because this is what I was trying to get to the very beginning of the show. None of that was really spoilers. You could argue that, that who's on first is a spoiler. You could argue another thing is a spoiler. But that's why I kept on looking. Is that spoiler? Is that spoiler? Is that spoiler? No,

Paris Martineau [00:45:51]:
the movie doesn't really start until an hour and a half in.

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:56]:
Right, right. So, all right, uh, we deal with going to prison because, because the prison stuff is obviously before and after, and then the acting I would, I would call Act 3. Do you want to deal with prison first?

Paris Martineau [00:46:05]:
I mean, what is there to say with her going to prison?

Jeff Jarvis [00:46:08]:
Well, one thing is, by one report, she took a private jet.

Paris Martineau [00:46:13]:
I mean, yeah, why wouldn't she?

Jeff Jarvis [00:46:14]:
But there's no shooting of that. She's only shot in the, um, SUV. Headed in. The other thing to say, this is gonna be— I'm, I'm gonna be sexist here.

Paris Martineau [00:46:26]:
Sexist on a podcast?

Jeff Jarvis [00:46:29]:
Her— with tech people. Um, her face is always so amplified. I would call it an amplified face. As she's in the SUV driving to the, to the prison with just plain glasses on is the most normal I've ever seen her look, right? It just, it, it, it, it might be okay. Hmm?

Paris Martineau [00:46:48]:
It might be a lighting thing because—

Jeff Jarvis [00:46:50]:
I don't know, I couldn't figure it out, but she just looked like— she doesn't look overdone in her appearance. Um, uh, the going to prison, they wanted to shoot her going to prison. That's why they drove her there, it said. Um,

Paris Martineau [00:47:05]:
apparently, yeah, Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder had a big argument over whether or not they should accompany her to prison. And Fielder was like, we shouldn't, this is ridiculous. And Oppenheim was like, we are accompanying her and we're putting 3 cameras in the car and driving her there, and that's final.

Jeff Jarvis [00:47:24]:
The other thing for the end of, uh, end of Act 1 is when Fielder says basically, uh, a little awkward, you guys want a schnup? Right? She goes—

Paris Martineau [00:47:32]:
I mean, that is classic Fielder.

Jeff Jarvis [00:47:34]:
It is Fielder. It's very Fielder. All right, so, um, you're an hour and a half in the movie and you think, how the hell is this gonna be 3 hours? Yeah, the subject is gone now. What the hell is going to happen here? And the big surprise comes with Paris.

Paris Martineau [00:47:51]:
Amanda Seyfried. And I had to look up how to pronounce her name because I didn't realize it was not Seyfried.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:58]:
I thought it was Seyfried too.

Paris Martineau [00:47:59]:
Listen, us and Elizabeth Holmes. Uh, I'll do another detail about this because I had been wondering how she possibly got involved, and that great, uh, New York Mag profile explains it. They write, the most significant twist arose almost by accident. The 2 filmmakers had been struggling to get anyone else in Holmes' orbit on camera when Emma Stone, a close friend of Fielder's, connected him with Amanda Seyfried. On a preliminary Zoom call, Fielder said that— said only that they had been working in secret on a project that involved extensive access to Holmes. Could they show her, and would it be okay if they recorded her reaction? Seyfried agreed. though Oppenheim recalls that, as a fan of Fielder's past work, she was worried of getting punked. And she basically— they didn't go into it thinking that she would do all these reenactments.

Paris Martineau [00:48:55]:
She just brought it up impulsively, and they were like, oh my God, that's what we do.

Jeff Jarvis [00:48:58]:
Do you believe that or not?

Paris Martineau [00:49:00]:
I mean, I don't know what to believe.

Jeff Jarvis [00:49:02]:
I don't know what to believe on anything anymore. No. Um, brilliant. That's the brilliant puzzle piece part.

Paris Martineau [00:49:09]:
It is.

Jeff Jarvis [00:49:09]:
How are they going to continue telling this story? How are they going to deal with, um, uh, with just presenting the aftermath that we're all going to be curious about? And it can't just be a chyron on the screen.

Paris Martineau [00:49:20]:
And it's just great to have given— because they didn't go into this thinking that Fielder was going to be on camera at all and be like a main character in this film in any sense. And so they didn't have any way for him to have an interlocutor. And to have Seyfried— I have to keep looking at the pronunciation on my notes.

Jeff Jarvis [00:49:39]:
Seyfried.

Paris Martineau [00:49:40]:
Listen, that's exactly what I have written, and it doesn't make it any easier for me to pronounce in my head.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:45]:
Especially if you read it. Yeah.

Paris Martineau [00:49:46]:
I know. And to have Seyfried play that interlocutor was perfect. Like, it was a perfect counterbalance and just a, like, a very interesting, like, breath of fresh air for the film. And then also allowed them to dig into the strangeness of reenactments entirely in documentary form.

Jeff Jarvis [00:50:05]:
Not just reenactments, but acting.

Paris Martineau [00:50:08]:
Yes, reenactments are acting.

Jeff Jarvis [00:50:10]:
Right. And so, um, uh, it was a brilliant device, a way to present things that, uh, Fielder could report from conversations and such, uh, involving Holmes. But of course, Seyfried's own reaction becomes critical here, and her view of Holmes and our view of her and whether or not she has empathy for or is exploiting the character she portrays. So you've gone through this, you know, our document— is this entrepreneur/alleged scientist, not a scientist, deceiving us? Is the documentarian deceiving us? Do journalists deceive us? Now you're into acting as deception. We all know that acting is deception, but in what way and how? And it was very revealing. So I'm very eager to hear what you thought of her and her reaction to Holmes. In all this? That's the part I haven't fully calculated in my own head.

Paris Martineau [00:51:05]:
I mean, I think she was a perfect first-time watcher stand-in because she was a first-time watcher in that season— in that scene. She basically felt the same thing we all did where she was like, yeah, this guy's a jerk and I feel bad for her, but she still obviously did all this stuff. What do you think, Micah?

Mikah Sargent [00:51:27]:
That— that was— I couldn't help but put myself in Seyfried's shoes.

Paris Martineau [00:51:35]:
So difficult. I'm sorry, Amanda Seyfried.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:38]:
And I just thought, God, she's gotta be running so many calculations in every given moment. And that's so difficult to do because, yes, you are an actor, and as an actor, you want to sort of, um, champion the job that an actor does. And you probably have to confront those moral issues regularly, and then to have to relitigate them, and relitigate them in a way that it's going to be recorded and played back, and you're you instead of just a character. And then on top of doing all of that, she's also considering her identity as a woman and what it means to portray this role and say certain things about this. Like, There's so much. So I just felt for her in general as she— and I gained respect more than I— like, I already had a base level, obviously, but I gained even more respect for her in choosing to be, I felt, more honest and authentic than she even needed to be necessarily.

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:44]:
What do you think her final opinion of Holmes is?

Mikah Sargent [00:52:47]:
Ooh, final opinion? I think she came out Ambivalent, where I think— like, I think it changed over time, where at first it was very much— it started out, it felt like she's bad, she's a scammer, she's this, she's that. And then meeting Billy and seeing all of those things, she started to shift a little bit. But then by the end of it, seeing how she felt Nathan changed as a result of being in the Holmes orbit, I think it shifted again.

Paris Martineau [00:53:21]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:53:22]:
So, she's basically saying, Nathan, did you get hooked?

Mikah Sargent [00:53:25]:
Yeah. Did you get hooked? And if so, how? Do I need to reanalyze?

Paris Martineau [00:53:28]:
Their first meeting, like, right after Nathan shows her the doc for the first time, they have this conversation outside where she's like, yeah, I think Elizabeth is being manipulated by Billy, and all this other stuff. And Nathan has to be like, she's got— you got royal. Like, you got got, girl. And then at the end, she has to say the same thing to him.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:50]:
Yeah.

Paris Martineau [00:53:51]:
Do you think that Nathan got got? We're skipping ahead a little bit, but—

Jeff Jarvis [00:53:54]:
We're skipping ahead a little bit. Um, let's come back to that. Uh, the— I, I think it's a contemplation on acting that's really interesting to me, because, because acting is exploitation.

Paris Martineau [00:54:07]:
I was shocked that she was not immediately, uh, willing to cop to that. I was—

Jeff Jarvis [00:54:15]:
She did, but, but she kind of— but Nathan got her to expose that, I think, unwittingly, or, uh, Involuntarily.

Paris Martineau [00:54:21]:
Yeah, but I was shocked that that was not her thought. She was like, well, you know, I did all this— like, we did all this research, I watched these transcripts, like, it's based on real events and things like that. I would have thought the answer would have been like, it's a TV show. Yes, we did research and stuff like that, but it's a TV show for entertainment.

Jeff Jarvis [00:54:39]:
She didn't want to be Elizabeth.

Paris Martineau [00:54:40]:
And that's fine, but I was shocked that towards the— like, whenever she was confronted with the pushback and the kind of screwing ahead, like, she was like, well, you know, we did all this work and she could have said it like that. And it was really trying to defend the integrity of the television show The Dropout, which is just— it's a TV show for entertainment.

Jeff Jarvis [00:54:58]:
So did you— did either of you watch The Dropout?

Mikah Sargent [00:55:00]:
No, I haven't.

Paris Martineau [00:55:00]:
No.

Jeff Jarvis [00:55:01]:
All right, so I watched it afterwards. And so it's— it's that it really adds another layer here. It's very interesting. I'm going to recommend to folks, um, if you— if you've now seen, um, the movie and you haven't seen The Dropout, I would recommend to watch it. A. B, there's also an excellent John Green YouTube video, hour and a half, in which he explains blood analysis as only John Green can, the great explainer that he is, and also interviews Tyler Schultz.

Mikah Sargent [00:55:29]:
Is it John or is it Hank?

Jeff Jarvis [00:55:30]:
Hank. I'm sorry, Hank. Thank you very much.

Mikah Sargent [00:55:32]:
I was like, wait, John was doing it? That's what

Jeff Jarvis [00:55:33]:
I thought. Hank did that. Sorry. And I also watched the HBO documentary to the point Now, Seyfried's portrayal of Holmes in the movie is interesting because she comes off very, very young. And she was, she was 19 when she started the company.

Paris Martineau [00:55:53]:
She was very young.

Jeff Jarvis [00:55:54]:
But she stays very young throughout. Now, Tyler Schultz, his complaint about the movie, about the documentary, You Can See Everything, rather than the other documentary, is that it's not the Elizabeth— and Tyler Schultz He's not a character in the documentary. So he is George Shultz's grandson. He got an internship at the company. His grandfather was on the board along with Henry Kissinger and other fabled people, and became a whistleblower to the Wall Street Journal, which caused a huge rift in the Shultz family that only came together much, much later. So he's a major character. He's been out there talking about this. He says that the Holmes you see in Fielder's documentary is not the Holmes that he recognized because she could control any room.

Jeff Jarvis [00:56:46]:
Mm-hmm. And, and he's saying that, I think, in part because he got controlled by her. Um, uh, he was in her thrall for a while till he became a whistleblower. Um, but it also illuminates Seyfried's portrayal because I don't think Seyfried really portrays her as being in charge of everything either. And so

Paris Martineau [00:57:04]:
that's why I think that she's more susceptible to the argument that, oh, she's just being— she's young and being manipulated by these guys. She's fallen for the convenience.

Mikah Sargent [00:57:17]:
For her own portrayal of it.

Paris Martineau [00:57:18]:
Yeah, I mean, but I think that her, her portrayal of it is based off of this public persona. Like when Fielder asks what research or something you did, and none of this, I mean, as an indictment As an actor, I don't think that their job, or anyone should think of their job, is to give a truthful, objective portrayal of a subject for a TV show. Right. It is to play a character that someone else created. Um, but when Fielder asks her, like, oh, what did you do for this? She's like, oh, like, I watched, like, all the deposition transcripts. I watched every video of her. I watched all of these appearances. And all of those are based on the character that Elizabeth Holmes created.

Paris Martineau [00:57:58]:
So, of course, it's going to be— it's like a— Reflection of a reflection of a reflection.

Jeff Jarvis [00:58:04]:
Yeah, you play a mirror.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:05]:
Telephone. Yeah.

Paris Martineau [00:58:06]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:58:07]:
Yeah. By the way, the documentary has other characters who are important to this. There's the other whistleblower, a young woman who worked in the lab alongside Schultz. There's the, um, head of chemistry who killed himself rather than testify. Uh, there's a lot of other things that really— yeah, that I think will illuminate your judgment of Holmes and everything that went on in that company.

Paris Martineau [00:58:29]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:58:29]:
Both Holmes and Sunny.

Paris Martineau [00:58:31]:
I mean, I would, I guess, highly— yeah, double all the recommendations Jeff just said. It's interesting to me— it's been interesting to me to see some of the discussion of this online because there's been way more back and forth about the question of like, is she guilty or not? Or did she do it? Which, I mean, that is not an open question. As someone who's like been versed in all this, She's in prison for defrauding her investors and was convicted on multiple charges because the evidence was overwhelming.

Mikah Sargent [00:59:03]:
Staggering charges.

Paris Martineau [00:59:04]:
Like, it is a staggering fraud, and it is a fraud that was something that she did viciously and thoughtfully and with her full intelligence and capabilities.

Jeff Jarvis [00:59:18]:
At, at the risk of not only investors and board members but her patience. The thing about— in the TV show, it's, these are real people. These are real people. These are people whose lives were affected, who got bad information. Talk about disinformation that matters, this is disinformation.

Paris Martineau [00:59:34]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:59:35]:
What do you think— so, the interesting thing about Amanda, too, somebody in the chat just said, she really hated Billy. And I think that added a lot of—

Paris Martineau [00:59:45]:
I mean, every audience I was in hated Billy.

Jeff Jarvis [00:59:48]:
Hated Billy. And Nathan, I think, is trying to kind of stand back a little bit. So, this was a very convenient way to put an attitude into the documentary that says Billy's a manipulator and a schmuck. Where do you both come out on who's worse, Billy—

Mikah Sargent [01:00:03]:
Oh, wow.

Jeff Jarvis [01:00:04]:
Or Elizabeth?

Mikah Sargent [01:00:06]:
Oh, golly. See, 'cause I try to go for, um, who does the most harm when I think about who's worse.

Jeff Jarvis [01:00:13]:
The utilitarian.

Paris Martineau [01:00:14]:
I guess that's a— yeah, that's a pretty good way.

Mikah Sargent [01:00:17]:
In that way, it helps has to be Elizabeth, given what she actually has been proven to be convicted of. But I have an added complication that doesn't quite fit into my sort of rule there, which is that I hold children to be sort of the far more precious version of a human. And so in that way, it's like harm multiplier. And if he is— always taking care of those kids— I don't know if you all notice his sniffing in the, uh, yeah, in that next, uh, portion. But, um, if he is teaching his kids in the way that he believes— he's, he's, uh, led us all to believe he believes— then there's a harm multiplier there. And so I think they're both worse.

Paris Martineau [01:01:09]:
They're both bad.

Jeff Jarvis [01:01:10]:
Cop-out, Paris.

Mikah Sargent [01:01:11]:
I know.

Paris Martineau [01:01:13]:
Um, I also have a different cop-out answer, which is I think that they're both awful, but they— their, their, their badness are on like 2, like not even like intersecting axes. They're like 2 separate planes of badness. Like Elizabeth Holmes is incredibly, I think, manipulative, deceitful, acting on in like a 4D chess capacity. I don't think that Billy is doing that. He's maybe doing 2D chess, if anything. Um,

Jeff Jarvis [01:01:44]:
okay, well, let's— I want to get to another topic. I said let me just say—

Paris Martineau [01:01:47]:
Also, can we just remark on the amount of lizards in their home in Texas?

Jeff Jarvis [01:01:50]:
Yes,

Paris Martineau [01:01:51]:
that one shot of Billy sniffing at the table while there's a big old lizard on it, and then AI slab of Elizabeth Holmes. I was like, Jesus Christ. Uh, monuments of love, baby.

Jeff Jarvis [01:02:05]:
So Billy Um, we joke—

Mikah Sargent [01:02:08]:
You have to answer that question right now.

Jeff Jarvis [01:02:11]:
So, so on this, on this, in this podcast empire we have, we often say that Leo Laporte, uh, our patron saint, uh, plays the role of devil's advocate, right? And the audience gets mad at him for some of his opinions, but he's just trying to encourage discourse. And so he plays the devil's advocate, and we throw that out lightly. Billy is a devil's advocate.

Mikah Sargent [01:02:34]:
He's not playing it, he is.

Jeff Jarvis [01:02:35]:
He is the advocate of the devil. Uh, you know, he, he, he— and so, um, does he have to know how bad she is? Yeah, he does, because it's obvious, and he went to the trial and knows that. Is there any way in which she actually doesn't think that she was guilty? The only thing that strikes me, um, when you see George Shultz and Henry Kissinger say, oh, but she's very smart. Um, she fooled people. Did she fool herself? No. But I think the question is, and it's an interesting question for fraud in this world, when she started all this, I have to believe she did believe that she could do this. Now, one of the great characters in the TV show, it's the professor she went to with her idea for a patch. It was the first idea.

Jeff Jarvis [01:03:31]:
The professor said, this is impossible. It can't work. And Elizabeth kind of mocks her. Oh, these— you'd think a woman professor would have supported me, but women and women and na-na-na-na. At the very end of the TV show, the professor is back saying, you have harmed women. You have harmed all women. The next woman who has a startup is going to get questioned because of you. And so, so one thing I can't figure out in all this is, was there a point at which Elizabeth Holmes knew, uh-oh, we have not figured this out and we're in too deep, and now we gotta, we gotta go fully in? There's no, there's no going back.

Jeff Jarvis [01:04:06]:
There's no hope. There's no turning around. There is at one point in the TV show a questioning, well, we could just kind of quit, but that's not taken seriously. So I don't know when she went over the edge, what I'm trying to say.

Paris Martineau [01:04:17]:
I don't think she ever went over the edge. The best con artists believe the grift.

Jeff Jarvis [01:04:21]:
But was she conning from the first minute?

Paris Martineau [01:04:24]:
No. I mean, I think it's—

Mikah Sargent [01:04:25]:
Oh, you're wondering if it, like—

Paris Martineau [01:04:26]:
If she was conning from the first minute, it was in a Silicon Valley sense where it is a common ethos in Silicon Valley startups to fake it till you make it, to figure out some of— I think that—

Jeff Jarvis [01:04:38]:
Which says a lot about Silicon Valley, right?

Paris Martineau [01:04:39]:
If we're to give the most generous read here, it's that she had an idea, much like every startup founder. Someone tells you, oh, it's not gonna work. You should quit. She's like, well, I'm gonna try harder because I believe it's gonna work. All of my doubters are wrong, and I'm gonna be laughing all the way to changing the world. So this speaks loudly.

Jeff Jarvis [01:05:01]:
Sorry.

Paris Martineau [01:05:02]:
I think that this is just taking that to an extent that is almost unfathomable. I mean, there is also, though, the aspects of— I don't think that that should belie the actual very clear fraud that she did do. I think that in some cases, she like literally doctored, um, documents that she sent to investors, added logos of companies—

Jeff Jarvis [01:05:25]:
She added her name to texts.

Paris Martineau [01:05:26]:
Added logos of companies that weren't working with them to materials distributed to investors. Like a lot of actually like fraudulent stuff that I think a lot of people who go into the movie cold may not understand as a context for this. But I think it's a combination of the classic Silicon Valley like founder mindset with all this other stuff going on.

Jeff Jarvis [01:05:47]:
So here, an hour in, is the real context of why this is on the TWiT network, uh, is because it speaks loudly to how Silicon Valley operates. And it's one matter to say, I've got this idea for making all the world's knowledge, uh, accessible, and I don't like ads, and it's not gonna be supported by ads, I don't know how it's gonna be supported, it becomes Google, it becomes ad-supported, it becomes the ad monster of the world. Um, okay, that's one thing. It's another to imagine, um, a game company that becomes Flickr and pivots, and so on and so forth. There's all kinds of examples. You're right, Paris, of this. But with Theranos, again, it's real people. It's real people.

Jeff Jarvis [01:06:24]:
It's real people. And I think that AI has a similar risk. Everybody who watches Intelligent Machines knows that I think that both AGI and extinction are bullshit. Hey, Jennifer Beals watching.

Paris Martineau [01:06:43]:
But— You can't open the door on us cursing on this show, Jack. I'm gonna go crazy. I'm holding in this—

Jeff Jarvis [01:06:49]:
Paris is like a chipmunk.

Mikah Sargent [01:06:51]:
It's true. You're gonna go crazy.

Jeff Jarvis [01:06:57]:
So, bat crazy. So, I don't know where I was. Oh, so I think that it illuminates how we should be looking at AI. now as well, and how these guys think— think to say that they're making something that's gonna have profound impact on humans' lives and, and, and pay no more heed to the responsibility and the ethics of that than Elizabeth Holmes has done. And I think that's very, very illuminating. I want to get to the deal.

Paris Martineau [01:07:29]:
I was going to say, that's what I was just going to bring up. I thought that— so one of the ways that they ended up using Amanda Seyfried in this, um, is to reenact these moments that occurred before the release paperwork had been signed. One of which is this incredible scene where Lance, Nathan, 2 A24 execs, walk into a house with Billy Evans and Elizabeth Holmes. And one, it begins with— Elizabeth Holmes reading from her novel. Which I guess they probably just like made up that thing based on their recollection of it, but it seemed completely nonsensical. I— the only time in my life I've ever wished I had Meta glasses is to take a screenshot of— there's one scene in the first half of the movie where some of her novel is shown on screen in a Google Doc form, and I— God, I wish I could take a photo without having my phone out. But I would never buy Meta glasses for that purpose. Um,

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:30]:
you could borrow some, Paris. I'm sure you know people who

Paris Martineau [01:08:33]:
Yeah, but I don't know if I want to live that. I don't want to wear the pervert glasses to a theater of James Bond. But one, she has that moment where she reads what seems to be— I guess the impression is that it's an overly personal, somewhat unrelated chapter of a novel read out loud to some people who just came over here.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:53]:
Was it a novel or was it a memoir?

Paris Martineau [01:08:55]:
A memoir, sure. A memoir about her life. But it was kind of Very pathos-laden. Mm-hmm. Then she leaves to go take care of— check on the kids, and Billy says they want to get paid for the movie. What do you think about— the core question here, which they spend the latter half of the movie trying to debate, is, did she know that Billy was doing this? And if so, what does that mean? And if not, What does that mean? Uh, one I want to talk about, I guess, what I just talked about, it seems like maybe— where to even begin? My thought in this is that she of course knew, and that I think part of— I'm shocked they didn't go into this in the film, but my immediate assumption was that the reason why she wouldn't want to have been involved in it or copped being involved is that she's on the hook for paying hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution, and any dime she makes will be taken by the federal government and her creditors or debtors. So, I don't know why they didn't go to that, 'cause it seems like the obvious explanation. And even as I just described the scene right now, her opening the meeting by having this strange, pathos-laden memoir chapter, then immediately leaving, and then Billy is like, let's talk money, feels like a classic, almost Fielder— like Fieldlerian technique to disarm them in order to make a business deal.

Paris Martineau [01:10:21]:
What do you guys think?

Jeff Jarvis [01:10:22]:
And the kids cry on cue to get her to go up there.

Paris Martineau [01:10:25]:
I mean, the kids— I think crying could have— it could have been crying or not. She could have just been like, I'm gonna go check on the kids who are silent. They've been too quiet. Sorry.

Mikah Sargent [01:10:35]:
Oh, you said my— oh, you said my name. I thought— how can you explain how it's disarming? How you saw it as disarming? You said

Paris Martineau [01:10:48]:
If you're meeting with someone to do business, you'd expect that you're there and you're going to talk about business. You wouldn't expect that suddenly Elizabeth Holmes is going to sit there and what I assume is probably read from a computer for 5 minutes about her relationship with her father and relationship with men in her life and have it be kind of this uncomfortable, or at least strange, best case scenario. thing where you're all sitting there being like, what were we brought here to do? What's going on? And then she's going to disappear and her boyfriend's going to say, actually, we want a cut of the documentary sales even though we know we're subjects. It seems like a business. It seems like a tactic that would have been outlined in a business book from the '90s, but obviously in a much more masculine way in that example.

Mikah Sargent [01:11:39]:
Got it. Yeah. I think when I saw that laid out in the reenactment. It felt very believable in terms of— they— I feel like if I were invited over to dinner with Liz and Billy—

Paris Martineau [01:11:57]:
Dinner being 4 pizza boxes touched only once by Billy Evans.

Mikah Sargent [01:12:01]:
Well, I feel like I would sit down and— this is before all this happened, I mean. What I'm trying to establish is that this is a weird couple. Like, they would probably put down a plate in front of me, open it up, and it's like, It's like a beating heart made of gelatin. And they also have strange aperitifs that have weird gastromole— they are weird people.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:23]:
Micah's obviously in Halloween mode with it right now.

Mikah Sargent [01:12:25]:
Yeah, exactly. They're weird people. And so it felt very much like, oh yeah, that's exactly what would happen to me. For the book to be read at first, they are obsessed with who they are and what they do. Billy really likes to pretend like— well, he really likes to portray, whether it's true or not, that he supports her and everything that she does is fascinating. And look at my museum piece that is my wife and watch what she does. So I could even see him encouraging her to read this book, whatever. But then, yes, I also think that it was absolutely all planned out that way for her to walk away and him to handle it.

Mikah Sargent [01:13:07]:
How he was— how he saw it, I don't know if he saw it as like, um, oh, I'm the, the business guy, so yes, I'll take care of this, versus how she saw it, which is, I don't have to get my hands dirty. Or if— yeah, I don't know that part of it, but 100%, like, the whole thing felt very believable to me as the way that those two behave. And I 100% believe that she was aware of what was going on. I don't even know that she needed to lean next to the door and listen. I think that she has a prediction engine in her brain of input/output for Billy and knows exactly how things will be handled, like how he does things. Like, that's the benefit of having someone simple, is that you know exactly how they handle things. And so you can go off and, like, live in your own little world of denial if you want to, and it all works out. So, yeah, I think that's also part of the aspect of her being away and the calls and being away in prison and the calls.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:13]:
It's like, I don't think she really does worry about what he's doing on the outside because it's all part of the grift. And I think the only problem is she maybe has underestimated him just a slight touch, and he's not— 120% simple, he's just 80% simple.

Jeff Jarvis [01:14:36]:
So I said this is a movie about deception. It's a movie about empathy. There was a third one I can't remember.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:44]:
Exhibitionism.

Jeff Jarvis [01:14:45]:
Exhibitionism. And it's a movie about manipulation. And so the question here is, who knew what, when about that? So I'm thinking about it in 2 angles. One is that But in other scenes in the movie, when we find out about Billy's— and we'll get to this in a few minutes— use of Elizabeth's social media, what he's telling her, what he's not about the new company, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is what makes Amanda react to what a schmuck Billy is. But is that part of the act in that Billy protects Elizabeth by making her ignorant or making people believe that she's ignorant for all these reasons, one of which Paris just said, is that if she knew she was getting money, then it would've gone over. And so I think that's a big question as to whether she was letting him do that and playing innocent. Was he later on— was he taking over her business and her life in the way that Amanda saw, and she was being controlled by— who was controlling who in that? I don't think that's a fundamental question of the movie when it comes to the two of them.

Jeff Jarvis [01:15:50]:
I don't think we can come to an answer. That's my first point. And I'm curious to hear Paris about that, but let me go to my second point first. I put myself in Fielder's seat during that scene. By the way, was Amanda the only— Amanda and Billy were the only actors in that scene? Were the A24 executives—

Paris Martineau [01:16:08]:
I think the A24 executives may have been actors because they were credited in the credits as A24 executive and then name

Jeff Jarvis [01:16:15]:
versus

Paris Martineau [01:16:16]:
Lance Reddick. Oppenheim was Lance Oppenheim.

Jeff Jarvis [01:16:18]:
Himself. Okay. So, so, so there were, there were 4 people who were, who were recreating that scene. But if you sit in Fielder's chair and Oppenheim's chair, the deal ain't done yet. And they, they know they've got a juicy, amazing thing in their hands. Now, part of what the stories came out afterwards is one thing they said to A24 is, if we say this didn't work, we tried, we filmed it, it's nothing, we have the right to just kill it. It's—

Paris Martineau [01:16:47]:
yeah, they had that baked in from the beginning, and they, they credit that with allowing it to actually end up an interesting film because they were like, we don't know what we're gonna get, and it might be literally nothing. It might not even be a story. We're just gonna film them for 30 days and see if it works.

Jeff Jarvis [01:17:04]:
And the best thing that could happen to American culture right now is that the, the disaster that is Skydance, Viacom, Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery is going to die and be horrible and put out pap and propaganda and crap. It's replaced by the likes of A24, which is putting out amazing work and doing good stuff. But they're sitting there thinking, we want this to happen. This is going to be killer. This is going to be amazing. We don't know exactly what it's going to be, but we want this to happen. This is going to be a hoot of hoots. It could be phenomenal.

Jeff Jarvis [01:17:37]:
And so they wanted to go along. So my question now is the ethical question of agreeing with Billy to pay him. In some— in journalism, that's a stopper. Nope. I

Paris Martineau [01:17:48]:
mean, yeah, completely unethical. But my— yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:17:52]:
So what do you think?

Paris Martineau [01:17:53]:
Probably I think it's completely unethical and that the only way it can work is if you then spend the entire production process trying to get them to sign away that. And if—

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:08]:
Which they did.

Paris Martineau [01:18:09]:
They don't, then you don't release it, or you make that a big part of it and broadcast it as part— I don't know how you— I actually don't know if I'd release it. I don't know. I, I don't think I personally— I'd never be in a situation where I am paying anyone for anything. This is a— I feel like a common misconception that people have is that journalists exist that pay sources for interviews. They don't. And if they do, then they're not journalists.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:37]:
Um, that's gossip.

Paris Martineau [01:18:38]:
But I, I think that the best way this could have been handled, given that the executives agreed to it despite the director's protest, is to handle it like this and make it a part of the plot.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:52]:
Yeah, it had to be part of the plot. Now, I heard somebody complain in the socials that it should have been revealed at the very beginning of the film. I don't agree with that. I think that it's a film that can be part wherever. Yeah. But, but, uh, all right, back to my— go ahead, Michael.

Mikah Sargent [01:19:06]:
I was just gonna say, I think it depends on how you, how you frame what you're making, whether it should have been disclosed at the beginning or not. Um, the, the— I, I don't agree I've been called— at first going into it, I called it a documentary. Now I just say documentary sort of film is pretty much the way that I say it every time, documentary sort of film. Because obviously afterward it shifted for me on how much of it was documentary and how much of it was just a film that was made. And so, yeah, I don't know. What that person was saying online, I think, smacks of some truth for me. But I don't believe that if they had— if Billy had said, no, I still want the money, I don't believe that they wouldn't have released it. I think they would have.

Mikah Sargent [01:20:07]:
We won't know, but I think they would have still released it. Because I think that You give up that sort of— for me, you give up that belief that I have in you that you wouldn't release it the moment that you agree in the first place to pay based on the request. I don't have that same level of trust for you because, as you said, Paris, you wouldn't be in that situation in the first place. And Jeff, I assume the same. You wouldn't be— you would have said no in the first place.

Jeff Jarvis [01:20:35]:
It'd kill me, but yeah. That last bow is tied only with a card on the screen at the end.

Mikah Sargent [01:20:42]:
Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis [01:20:44]:
is, is, is interesting. Um, uh, all right, so prison.

Paris Martineau [01:20:50]:
Did it surprise you to hear that Billy has power of attorney?

Jeff Jarvis [01:20:54]:
Well, okay, so that's part of this whole thing of, of, of— I mean, Amanda was shocked.

Paris Martineau [01:20:59]:
I was shocked at first too until I started thinking about it. She's in prison. She's, she's in prison. It's kind of a common Yeah, and they

Mikah Sargent [01:21:06]:
have kids.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:06]:
He's the caretaker of the kids.

Paris Martineau [01:21:08]:
Are they actually legally married is the thing that I hadn't been able to figure out.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:11]:
I've never seen no one say that they're married.

Paris Martineau [01:21:14]:
Billy describes her as my wife.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:16]:
I know, I can't figure it out.

Paris Martineau [01:21:17]:
But I can't figure it out either because my question is then, I don't know how it would work with the restitution. Would he then be on the hook?

Mikah Sargent [01:21:26]:
That's what I've been wondering.

Paris Martineau [01:21:28]:
Does the debt carry over if you're married to the person who prior—

Mikah Sargent [01:21:32]:
That's my understanding.

Paris Martineau [01:21:34]:
Then maybe that's why.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:36]:
Maybe they're not.

Paris Martineau [01:21:37]:
Yeah, yeah, maybe they're

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:38]:
not. All right, so, so I've got an uber question here for both of you. If Billy, I'm sure, has seen the movie at this point, In Disguise, um,

Paris Martineau [01:21:47]:
he actually attended a VC-led screening of it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:50]:
Oh, he did?

Paris Martineau [01:21:50]:
And then sat in the front row and then participated in a Q&A with, uh, the, the blood guy, Brian whatever his name.

Mikah Sargent [01:22:00]:
Dracula?

Paris Martineau [01:22:01]:
No, the, uh, the blood guy, the Blueprint blood guy, the guy who's in— for a while was injecting his own children's blood to live forever.

Jeff Jarvis [01:22:08]:
Oh geez.

Paris Martineau [01:22:09]:
What's his name?

Jeff Jarvis [01:22:09]:
I'm forgetting. Oh, um,

Paris Martineau [01:22:13]:
I've got to remember it because we actually have to talk. Brian Johnson. I'm so sorry to the Brian Johnson heads out there. The other blood— I guess blood guy seems crazy to say during the Elizabeth Holmes Holmes podcast, the other blood guy. Um, yeah, Billy did a Q&A apparently off the record at a VC private event with Bryan Johnson, but someone— I think maybe Bryan Johnson or some other VC chad tweeted that he was surprisingly magnanimous. So here's my question.

Jeff Jarvis [01:22:42]:
You're Billy, and, and— oh God, this was all a plan. Do you think Billy sits back and says, Well done, Billy. Good job. Or, no, I screwed up. Uh, gee, how do I look, Billy, in this thing?

Mikah Sargent [01:22:58]:
Wait, at which point? After the film comes out?

Jeff Jarvis [01:23:00]:
After the whole thing's over. After he watches the movie, does he say, uh, this was a good thing to have done? I'm gonna ask about her too, but, but first him. I came off— I, I— he's— is he, is he crazy enough to think I came off well?

Mikah Sargent [01:23:12]:
Oh boy. I don't— here's the thing. I believe that in his true mind and personal, like, Like, privately, he probably has rage and has frustration about how he was portrayed. But I don't believe for a second that out to the world, he would be willing to give in to any sort of admitting to him not being portrayed well. Because it's so textbook for them to just— uh, gaslight, girl boss everything. So why not just say, um, oh, you know, oh, I, I came out of that looking great. And it's like, no, but you didn't. No, I did, because I stood up for my wife who's not my wife.

Mikah Sargent [01:24:03]:
You know, like, yeah, I don't— I think that unless he's just so coked up that his brain is, uh, Swiss cheese, um, I don't see how you could not watch that and go, oof. There were some parts about me that make me look pretty bad. And sort of the whole second half of the movie is how I feel, how I seem controlling in the situation. And yeah, so— What do you think?

Paris Martineau [01:24:29]:
I think his thought about it is mainstream media hit piece. I think he dismisses it as an unfair exposé on him and just another example of people trying come after Elizabeth Holmes and come and do it with a preexisting narrative and besmirch her and his good names.

Jeff Jarvis [01:24:56]:
Okay, so let me— then I'll jump to my—

Paris Martineau [01:24:58]:
I obviously don't know the man, but what else?

Jeff Jarvis [01:24:59]:
No, and you don't want to. My next question then is—

Paris Martineau [01:25:02]:
Wait, what do you think he thinks about it, Jeff?

Jeff Jarvis [01:25:05]:
I think he has to have enough sense to say, ooh, that's cringe. Oh, that's really bad.

Paris Martineau [01:25:09]:
I don't think that someone who acts like that, if he's the sort of person to see himself And cringe and reflect, I don't think he would have done all those things.

Jeff Jarvis [01:25:19]:
Well, interesting.

Paris Martineau [01:25:20]:
While cameras are pointed at him.

Jeff Jarvis [01:25:22]:
Now that I've brought up the verb, it was a room filled with people who don't cringe, they cause cringe. All of them. Fielder, Elizabeth, and, and, and Billy, all caught— they're cringe causers. That's what they do. Um, uh,

Paris Martineau [01:25:37]:
I didn't find it cringe. I was worried it was going to be cringe.

Jeff Jarvis [01:25:40]:
No, no, no. Well, no, no, I'm saying Nathan, but yes, I, I agree. Fielder generally makes people cringe. Yes, Elizabeth is cringeworthy, and, and Billy does stuff that is cringe. That's all I'm saying. I think they're all of that line rather than people who stand back and want to avoid the cringe. Um, all right, so here's the more fundamental question. It's a few years from now, Elizabeth is going— she's headed to the halfway house, she gets out early, whatever, she's around.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:07]:
Is it—

Paris Martineau [01:26:07]:
Next year, going to the halfway house.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:09]:
So is it— is she better off? Is in the long run, was this a good move by them? Is she better off than she would have been if she'd said nothing and just went into prison?

Mikah Sargent [01:26:19]:
I think it was going to happen either way, her going to the halfway house soon.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:23]:
Yeah, I'm not saying that. No, no, I'm saying about her public reputation. So, so in— I haven't, I haven't, uh, plugged it yet— in my book Hot Type: The Story of the Magnificent Machine That, uh, Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, Thank you, Paris. I tell the story of how Mark Twain went bankrupt with technology, with a machine that competed with the Linotype. And to his wife's great shame, he had to go bankrupt. He screwed it up. All their money was caught in this machine. He couldn't rescue his publishing house.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:53]:
She didn't want to do it. She insisted that he pay all the money back. But then a further history of him says that actually, it was one of his advisors, who arranged him taking the worldwide tour to pay back all his debts so that he could earn back his reputation and trust. And in the end, he became the— if he had not done that, he would have been Mark Twain failure the rest of his life. Instead, he was beloved Mark Twain funnyman, honorable man. And so I'm trying to look at the weird phrase to use right now, the legacy of Elizabeth Holmes. Is her reputation in years to come better off or worse off because this film was made? Was this a good move by the two of them? All the risk involved, and you know, Nathan is a loose cannon who knew how it could happen, all that accepted. Was it the right move for them to make from their own perspective? Was it smart and cagey?

Mikah Sargent [01:27:50]:
I don't think— sorry, you go first, Paris.

Paris Martineau [01:27:54]:
I think that— I guess the simplest answer is yeah, I think they're probably better off because of this, but not in the way you'd immediately think, and not in the way that I think they thought they were going to be better off. They thought that they were going to be better off by doing this documentary and that Times profile, by convincing the whole world that Elizabeth Holmes isn't some psycho big old fraudster, that she's just misunderstood in Liz. Instead, this documentary turned her into some third thing, which is that she's a—

Jeff Jarvis [01:28:31]:
Yeah, which is what?

Paris Martineau [01:28:32]:
Which is— no one can agree on what that third thing is. I guess it's the most sustainable. Well, is that good? It is, but I don't think that it's good. I think that it—

Jeff Jarvis [01:28:42]:
Is it better than what was? Is it

Paris Martineau [01:28:44]:
It depends on who's asking, because I think what was before was a pretty open and shut fraud case that captured the minds of business and tech journalists and people in those fields, as well as people who've watched the TV show or listened to some podcasts about it or listened to the audiobook of Bad Blood. That was the audience that knew of first version of Elizabeth Holmes. I think that what they did not And no one could have expected from this is that this new third version of Elizabeth Holmes they created is going to be seen by a massive audience. I mean, the— I think the movie recently, like this last weekend, grossed like $20 or $25 million in one weekend. That's astonishing. On the second weekend, while it is only released in like 1,000, maybe 2,000 theaters. It's— and it is only gonna grow. People are clamoring all over the world to see this film.

Paris Martineau [01:29:41]:
I think that this is going to be the largest— it is going— I think that the ultimate effect of this film is that it is going— this is going to be the legacy of Elizabeth Holmes. Mm-hmm. And it's going to make it so that whatever she tries to do next when she's out of prison has a lot more attention from a, I guess, a more general audience with a different— sort of tone and fascination towards her than she would have had otherwise.

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:09]:
And in a Silicon Valley that relishes failure, that says, oh, you learn from failure. Oh, she learned a lot. People will invest in her again, I would predict. Micah, what do you think about

Mikah Sargent [01:30:18]:
that? That part's true.

Paris Martineau [01:30:20]:
I don't know if people would invest.

Mikah Sargent [01:30:20]:
I don't know about the investment.

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:21]:
There's enough idiots out there. There's some idiot who would do it.

Paris Martineau [01:30:24]:
I mean, I don't think anyone will invest in her until she's paid back all of the money, because otherwise their investment would just probably go straight Oh, that's

Mikah Sargent [01:30:32]:
true. I think I mostly, or pretty much entirely, agree with Paris's take there. I think that there will be people who will continue to not have watched or learned about anything before this film, and then this film will be the exclusive knowledge that they have on her case and who she is and who the family is. And I think that has an opportunity to help her. It's a wider audience than you would have otherwise. And so just by the sheer calculations— that's not the word I was looking for— but just by the fact that you are broadening the people who you know, have a stake in the thing now, you are— the odds are more in your favor than before, as Paris was saying, where it was a clear case of somebody doing—

Jeff Jarvis [01:31:37]:
So what does that say about our media landscape and culture?

Paris Martineau [01:31:40]:
We love a good yarn.

Mikah Sargent [01:31:41]:
I think, yeah. I mean, that's exactly—

Paris Martineau [01:31:44]:
Everybody loves to fight with their friends about—

Mikah Sargent [01:31:46]:
People like to fight. They like a mystery.

Paris Martineau [01:31:48]:
Despite what everyone's been telling you, people actually love to go to the movie and be delighted the movie theater and be delighted by something and then walk outside and get stuck in a discussion with the people you went with about what the heck you just saw. I think that that's— I think that that is actually the reason why this is popping off so much, is it's been a— it is rare to have a movie that is captivating, interesting, entertaining, and also no one can agree on what they just saw. So

Jeff Jarvis [01:32:15]:
the final, the final manipulation here is the whole idea that these were, uh, spoilers. How different would it be if, if they didn't say to everybody in Telluride— was it Telluride?

Paris Martineau [01:32:26]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:32:26]:
Um, don't, don't tell anybody. Oh no, no, no, this is secret stuff. Don't, don't tell anybody. This is surprising. Um, I still would have seen the movie and said, wow, what an amazing movie. And, and the weird— the, the counterintuitive thing is they killed, um, a water cooler talk. We're violating it right here by this. and giving it to them, but a lot of people can't discuss it, and it creates more mystery.

Jeff Jarvis [01:32:50]:
And in a way, that's the greatest manipulation of all, is the fact that these are spoilers.

Paris Martineau [01:32:54]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:32:55]:
Oh, I see what you're saying. You're saying that they, they killed water cooler talk because

Jeff Jarvis [01:33:01]:
it creates more mystery and more and more, uh, media conversation about it. Everybody's talking about it, but we can't talk about it. We can't say what it is. And so the only way to find out is to go.

Paris Martineau [01:33:11]:
And everybody's also like, well, we don't want to spoil it. Yeah, okay. I've had multiple group chats die this week. People have removed themselves from group chats because everybody— we weren't even talking about the movie because we were trying to be respectful of the people who hadn't seen it. But we did share the link to a profile that had no spoilers in the title. We're just like, people who've seen it, you should check this out. And one of my friends left our group chat that we've had for years. I renamed it movie discussion before she left and then started a new group chat.

Paris Martineau [01:33:41]:
I was like, you're not allowed to talk about it. People are losing their minds. Oh my goodness.

Jeff Jarvis [01:33:45]:
The friends you have, Paris. The one, oh no, I'm only in my comfortable chairs. Oh no, you can't talk to me about the movies. Oh geez, Brooklyn.

Paris Martineau [01:33:53]:
So this isn't the comfortable chair friend who I adore. Today we both found out. She was like, oh, like, what are you doing for Halloween? I was like, this and this. What are you doing? What are you going to be? And she's like, oh, Elizabeth Holmes, but I'm trying to do it I've got the cardigan. And I was like, dang, my Friday night Halloween costume is gonna be Elizabeth Holmes. So we're gonna share the same wig now.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:10]:
So you could be Elizabeth Holmes before and after. You could be Elizabeth and Liz. That's true.

Paris Martineau [01:34:14]:
Elizabeth and Liz. That would be the best couple's costume idea. Elizabeth and Liz Holmes.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:19]:
Oh my God, yes. All right, very good.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:22]:
So I want to talk about Amanda Seyfried, and that—

Paris Martineau [01:34:26]:
We're all doing so good.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:27]:
I know. It's like Matthias Döpfner from, uh, from the actual Springer. Um, so it was a brilliant device, and, and, and it also worked on multiple layers, obviously, right? Because there was, there was her reaction to what she was shown, number one, her role in, in, in play once again playing Elizabeth Holmes, her reaction to Elizabeth Holmes and Billy in that process. in going back and forth on the script, that you've got a behind-the-scenes view of how showbiz operates, right? Yeah. And then her as an actress, and what it means to be an actor, like a documentarian, like a journalist, like an investor, like a scientist, right? Each of these vocations comes under some kind of scrutiny here. And I like her I think she's very smart, and I like her as a result of this whole process.

Paris Martineau [01:35:24]:
I love her farting horses.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:25]:
I didn't know she was such a horse girl. I honestly had no idea.

Jeff Jarvis [01:35:29]:
Um, but, but I think she's a little glib about the responsibility of the actress in this.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:36]:
How do you mean?

Jeff Jarvis [01:35:37]:
In that, um, well, you know, it's what Paris said before. It is what it is. She is what it is. She's playing a role on TV. That's that. she's— she has an impact on someone's reputation. And I think that if you really examine the responsibility of that,

Mikah Sargent [01:35:57]:
it

Jeff Jarvis [01:35:58]:
can be difficult, right? And I don't know that she fully does. And she can see the fruits of that.

Mikah Sargent [01:36:04]:
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis [01:36:05]:
In this, because she helped make her reputation before. And so I think that whole notion of acting again is obviously deception. We know it's deception and it has an impact. We know all that and it's part of culture. But I think it's— her presence in the film wasn't just a spoiler, it's absolutely critical to the cultural value of it.

Paris Martineau [01:36:29]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:36:29]:
Not just by what she did apparently, but by her presence as her in this just turns out amazingly. And I liked Emma Stone before, I really like her now. for making this possible.

Paris Martineau [01:36:41]:
Yeah, thanks, Emma Stone.

Mikah Sargent [01:36:43]:
Yeah. I do think that, to me, all that did, the glibness, it honestly endeared her to me more because that felt like true, pure human defensiveness. That was just like— Well said.

Jeff Jarvis [01:36:59]:
Well said.

Mikah Sargent [01:36:59]:
Yes. It was just a moment of, um, yeah, I don't want to be honest with myself here about—

Jeff Jarvis [01:37:06]:
Really well said.

Mikah Sargent [01:37:07]:
Yeah. So that's what I liked. That's how I ended up feeling about that in the end. But yeah, I do think that— that's where, again, I went into sort of my third phase of existence in the film. I think by that point, I had like— that was when my knees were sort of pressed up against me, and I was just kind of laid back, just watching. Because it's so many different crafts that come together at different times. Yes. And seeing— the scripts part play out and seeing them working on it together.

Mikah Sargent [01:37:44]:
And I'm also a person, when I watch a film or a TV show or anything, there's a sub-process running for me that's always thinking about the production aspect. Mm-hmm. And I kept wondering— I know this goes back a little bit, but when he came out of the jail or the detention facility after talking to her, and he got in his car, I thought, does he have— if it was me, I would have there a recorder in my car, and I would be saying everything that I remember. What was he writing down on his hand? That was his notes of questions that he wanted to ask.

Paris Martineau [01:38:21]:
So I've actually got an answer for you on that, Mike, because I was wondering as well. In that New York Mag profile, they write that basically the prison scene was reconstructed from a phone call.

Jeff Jarvis [01:38:32]:
Which, by the way, they remade that scene. that set.

Paris Martineau [01:38:35]:
Yeah, I love— it was a— I was thinking about that the entire time. I was like, oh my God, they remade the set. I wonder, like, they had to figure out the positioning of all of the, um—

Mikah Sargent [01:38:43]:
Have y'all seen any of The Interview?

Paris Martineau [01:38:46]:
Huh?

Mikah Sargent [01:38:46]:
Nathan Fielder's The Interview. Have you seen it?

Paris Martineau [01:38:48]:
No, because for a similar reason, I was worried it would be too cringe.

Mikah Sargent [01:38:51]:
I think it will be for you, honestly. Um, if you— yeah, I think—

Paris Martineau [01:38:54]:
But I think that's how he and Emma Stone became good friends, right?

Mikah Sargent [01:38:57]:
Um, I'm not sure yet because I just now have started to watch all his work. It is— that is so much of what we see in this film, he's been practicing leading up to this. Wow. And the recreation thing, like, he and his production team, absolutely. They— I won't— it's not a spoiler, but I don't feel it is, but they basically recreate an entire bar that exists in real life. And when I say recreate, I mean, like, down to the way that the phone rings, in the cushions of the chair are pulled out, and they're the same yellow color as they are in the actual bar. And so it's miraculous. And I just kept thinking, this must have cost so much money.

Mikah Sargent [01:39:40]:
But he loves the nitty-gritty detail, and it's so— I just eat it up.

Paris Martineau [01:39:45]:
So I want your guys' thoughts on this thing. And this, I guess, is an indication of how crazy this movie has made me. Is this This paragraph from the New York Microphone— the word choice is obviously written by the reporter on this and not Oppenheimer themselves, but it stood out to me. It says, the visitor area of Federal Prison Camp Bryan, where Fielder and Holmes would meet, had to be reconstructed essentially from memory. There's an Oppenheimer quote about how you can't bring anything in. It says, Fielder would call Oppenheimer immediately upon leaving for a moment-by-moment play-by-play with Oppenheim transcribing everything that occurred. In both cases, they say would call him or the area where they would meet, which to me implies that they met multiple times.

Mikah Sargent [01:40:33]:
Yeah. That, that—

Paris Martineau [01:40:35]:
Instead of the area where they met.

Jeff Jarvis [01:40:37]:
Met. Yes, I think so.

Paris Martineau [01:40:38]:
So do you think that this is actually from— because I— that to me, throughout the entire time, I was like, why don't you go and have dinner?

Jeff Jarvis [01:40:45]:
Well, when Billy came in, I was afraid when they met. That Billy didn't know he was there and was going to throw a fit. Billy knew he was there.

Mikah Sargent [01:40:51]:
Yeah, I thought Billy wasn't gonna know either. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:40:54]:
Yeah. They said

Paris Martineau [01:40:55]:
they know because, of course, they all know everything about Warner Brothers. Yes. So I feel like they probably met multiple times.

Mikah Sargent [01:41:00]:
That's possible, yeah.

Paris Martineau [01:41:01]:
And that's how they got all these details.

Jeff Jarvis [01:41:05]:
Micah, to your point, the movie I really want now is not the director's cut. We have that. I want the movie of everything that happened behind the scenes.

Mikah Sargent [01:41:13]:
The making of—

Jeff Jarvis [01:41:14]:
So I imagine the conversation the night before they do Who's on First? It's Nathan and Lance and the team saying, how do we— what's an idea? How can we show her language? What's weird? And somebody in that group says, Who's on First? And they all say, right.

Mikah Sargent [01:41:32]:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis [01:41:33]:
Right?

Mikah Sargent [01:41:33]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:41:34]:
And so they're planning this out as they go. They're reacting to what they've seen. They're trying to figure out what's next, they're trying to understand it, and they're trying to make a movie. And so that process— and, and by the way, and they have complications with cinematography and shooting through fences, and they— Yeah. By the way, it's kind of a comment on the, on the press when all the press is there at the prison. That's part of it too. Um, all of that, they're very conscious obviously of all of these, uh, layers to this, and, and I hope that somebody writes the story of— not just a magazine piece, but like a book.

Paris Martineau [01:42:10]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:42:10]:
Of everything through this process, because it was— it's— I think this is going to go down. So, all right, how important in the history of all film and culture is this? Are we just— are we just hopped up on the speed of this right now? Is this gonna— is it gonna be said that it's overhyped in a few months, or is this an important cultural artifact for a long time to come?

Mikah Sargent [01:42:30]:
I'm not enough of a film buff, I think, or a media buff in general.

Paris Martineau [01:42:34]:
Jeff, this is a question for you, Mr. Media Man.

Jeff Jarvis [01:42:36]:
No, I want to hear your answers first. I'll give you an answer.

Paris Martineau [01:42:38]:
Sorry, Micah, continue.

Mikah Sargent [01:42:39]:
I mean, I guess I will say— Yeah, I can only speak from, like, a personal aspect. I think that it was— Here's— Okay, here's what I'll say. Before I started watching all of Nathan's other works, I would have said that this was a unique masterpiece, and this and that and the other, and— Now that I've watched his other works, I think that his and his production team's minds are more the unique thing.

Jeff Jarvis [01:43:11]:
And Lance's too.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:12]:
Yeah, and Lance's too, exactly, than this film itself. I think that it is a— it could be considered an opus for him in the sense that it brings together all the skills that he's gained over the time doing the stuff that he did. But yeah, it itself I am— I've already had enough. While we're wearing these black turtlenecks, I've already had enough of the distortion field with Apple stuff to, to be— I'm inoculated there. So I think I'm a little inoculated here too, where I'm, I'm not comfortable saying that yet because I could just still be caught up in the, the motion of it and the fact that there are so many people who haven't even seen it. Ooh, I'm part of the exclusive group, you know what I mean? There's too much energy here right now for me.

Jeff Jarvis [01:43:54]:
Paris?

Paris Martineau [01:43:55]:
I mean, I can only speak to my personal take, which is I think this is going to be one of my favorite works. I think that this is a unique— this is a film that is uniquely positioned to live on in my heart and mind forever, for me personally, as a Lance Oppenheim head, as a tech reporter, as someone who loves Orson Welles, Mm-hmm. F for Fake, like, who loves this kind of interplay between, uh, reality and fiction and documentaries that specifically analyze and look at this. I think that we will know what this film's legacy will be from a broad, I guess, cultural institutional perspective when it comes to, I guess, the Oscars, which I've never cared about the Oscars ever, but it will be interesting to see. Ooh, there's going to be— I mean, this is what I want to ask you about, Jeff, because I have now gotten in the weeds reading about the persnickety-ness of the documentary voting wing of the Oscars and how they historically block out any documentaries that don't follow kind of specific codes, ethics, or like forms from receiving any nominations because they're a voting bloc and have very specific cultural norms. And so if it ends up not getting that, not getting Best Picture, not being nominated or anything, or submitted for Supporting Actress, which is one of the things they've said they're going to try and submit for, then I think this will be a niche fave. is how it will be remembered culturally. But I think that there is a possibility that it is more.

Paris Martineau [01:45:45]:
Jeff, what do you think on this all broadly? And also, do you have a— off the top of your head, like, when does voting for nominations— when are nominations decided upon for the Oscars?

Jeff Jarvis [01:45:56]:
Um...

Paris Martineau [01:45:57]:
'Cause if it's soon-ish, then I think that this could sweep. But if it's in, like, 8 months, Then maybe not.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:06]:
So they are announced— I'm gonna get to all of that. Uh, nominations voting is January 11th to 15th, 2027. The announcement is January 21st. So you're going to see the For Your Consideration ads starting in November, next month.

Paris Martineau [01:46:23]:
And A24 has said that they're going to be submitting this for Best Picture. If it is nominated, it'll be the first ever documentary—

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:30]:
documentary, yes—

Paris Martineau [01:46:31]:
to ever be nominated for Best Picture.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:33]:
I think it could get blackballed in documentary and could win Best Picture at the same time. It would be—

Paris Martineau [01:46:39]:
wow.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:40]:
Yeah. All right, so what do I think? I'll put on my Entertainment Weekly hat.

Paris Martineau [01:46:43]:
I was gonna say, you're the perfect person for this job.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:45]:
And the TV Guide couch critic. Um, that was my title. I was the couch critic.

Mikah Sargent [01:46:50]:
Oh, I like that.

Paris Martineau [01:46:51]:
The dream place to be a critic from.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:53]:
Yeah. Um, and speaking of couch—

Paris Martineau [01:46:55]:
And you've got a couch right behind you.

Mikah Sargent [01:46:56]:
I was gonna say, what is your— what sofa did you sit on?

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:59]:
And I don't know if Anthony can put it up. I also made a picture of Paris and me as Nathan and Elizabeth against a couch.

Mikah Sargent [01:47:08]:
Oh, that's true.

Jeff Jarvis [01:47:09]:
Yes. So couch is everything. All right. So, I think a few things. One, we're gonna hear— so should I out Leo?

Mikah Sargent [01:47:22]:
Oh, yes. Please do. If it's about what I think.

Paris Martineau [01:47:25]:
After I saw this for the first time, I messaged our group chat, because we host a podcast, Intelligent Machines, with Jeff, Leo, and our producers. I was like, y'all, you got to go see this. It's one of the best movies I've ever seen. Go see it. And then Jeff saw it and he's like, oh my God, Leo, you got to see it. You're going on this trip. And Leo was like, oh, I don't think so. You've got to pack.

Paris Martineau [01:47:47]:
I've got to pack, doing all this. And then I listened to on Twitter, Jason Calacanis convinced him because they brought it up, and he was like, I think it's one of the best movies of all time. He actually had like a very nuanced, interesting take on it. And like, was like, Leo, please like go book a ticket. And Leo ended up booking a ticket the next day, saw it. Jeff and I were waiting with bated breath, and he basically is like, that's 3 hours I'm never gonna get back of my life. That sucked. What a snooze fest.

Paris Martineau [01:48:13]:
Why would anybody like that?

Jeff Jarvis [01:48:15]:
Speaking of the devil's advocate, um, so I think we're gonna see more Leos who want to be—

Paris Martineau [01:48:20]:
I mean, that's fine. It's fine.

Jeff Jarvis [01:48:22]:
It's fine.

Mikah Sargent [01:48:22]:
And thank you. I do think that there's an aspect of contrarianism there. And if not, then perhaps an aspect of talking to your AI agents instead of watching the movie.

Paris Martineau [01:48:35]:
I mean, I think that the reason why Leo didn't like it is because it was the first 3 hours he spent in months where he wasn't talking to 9 different instances of Claude at once.

Mikah Sargent [01:48:43]:
I feel bad. I feel bad for being mean now, aren't we?

Paris Martineau [01:48:46]:
Well, the thing is, I would have been nice and normal had— I love when I love it when someone dislikes something I feel passionate about because I love having an interesting, engaging discussion about— like, I like when I see a movie and hate it because I like unpacking why I hated it. Like, I think that's a very interesting and fruitful exercise.

Jeff Jarvis [01:49:07]:
Yeah, as a critic.

Paris Martineau [01:49:07]:
The thing that I actually like— disgusts me in a way that I'm a little like embarrassed about is hating something and not having any interest in why and no interest in— no ability to even explain why you dislike it or interest in engaging, but wanting to tell people who are wax poetic radically about something, you suck and your opinion is dumb. Like, that's just upsetting.

Jeff Jarvis [01:49:32]:
My friend Peter Travers, who was the movie critic at Rolling Stone, is the one who made me TV critic at People. And he said, I don't care what your opinion is, just justify it well.

Paris Martineau [01:49:41]:
Yeah, I'd love to have a, like, I would have— it would have been awesome to have a segment of Leo on this. Yes, it would have been great. Go back and forth. Why he thinks it's like a badly made movie or like poor ethics or the wrong focus or like something. Why? But he was like, it was—

Jeff Jarvis [01:49:56]:
He was too busy packing.

Paris Martineau [01:49:57]:
It was, it was vapid.

Jeff Jarvis [01:49:59]:
So, um, so finally to the points. I think there's gonna be more Leos. I think there'll be an argument within the next, uh, 2 to 4 weeks that this is overhyped, uh, it's manipulative. It certainly is. Every, every piece of entertainment is manipulative, and, and that's So I think we'll hear that. In the short term, we're gonna hear some backlash to this, as is always the case.

Paris Martineau [01:50:20]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:50:20]:
In the long term, I think it is a momentous artifact for culture for the time for a few reasons. First is technically— by technical, I mean largely technical— it's brilliantly pieced together. It tells a story in an incredible way, and the genius of bringing in Amanda Seyfried and even telling us all how to pronounce her name, Is important, and I think that's that's critical. But it's also you know I'm I'm as a journalist, I'm so sick of hearing journalists act as if we owned truth, and there is truth to own, and we know what's what, and we are the ones who are the storytellers of society. La da da da da. This thing questions every definition of deception, manipulation. and human emotions like empathy and honesty. And it does it in a way that I think then reflects back on the medium, all the players involved, and us as an audience, and then media about it, all these layers.

Jeff Jarvis [01:51:26]:
So I think that it's a very important work that will be lasting for a long time and will matter. As for the awards, I I hate awards. Awards are exclusionary.

Paris Martineau [01:51:36]:
I agree.

Jeff Jarvis [01:51:37]:
Um, uh, they limit it to a winner, and I think that's wrong. Uh, and now with AI being accused of writing works that are getting book awards, I got in some proper trouble because I could— I happened to criticize an award that, that, that recognizes African literature and Black literature and the recipient of that award was accused of using AI. And I said, if all these awards go away, I'm fine. And that's one that recognizes people who are too often unrecognized. However, I said back to the criticism, I still say that awards are exclusionary. There shouldn't be just one winner. And the people who are being accused of using AI have most cases been people of color. It's being used to cast doubt on them.

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:24]:
I think the Pulitzers are BS because it's journalists writing only for journalists and not for the public. I don't like awards. I think it limits what's what. I think that it's an artifact of mass media thinking there's only one top winner. Everything has to be one top winner and everything— it's the biggest thing. It's the best thing. There's only one best. I hate lists in magazines of the 100 best things in the city.

Paris Martineau [01:52:46]:
Tell us how you really feel, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:48]:
I can't stand them. So I don't care about the Oscars. On the one hand, On the other hand, I'm rooting for these guys because they did something really gutsy.

Paris Martineau [01:52:56]:
I agree. I think that awards, especially— like, I usually don't watch the Oscars unless a friend is throwing a party and I forget how much I dislike watching the Oscars. And then I go there and I'm like, oh God, how long is this gonna go for? But I do think that regardless of my personal feelings about awards, for the average person, they are like cultural artifacts. They are arbiters of taste, of what is good and bad.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:26]:
Well, industry taste, not necessarily public taste.

Paris Martineau [01:53:27]:
Yes, industry. But I mean, for the average person, they may not think of the industry thing. They just are like, oh, that is what is good or bad, what everybody thought at that time. And I do think it would be— I don't— I'm not going to assume or even entertain the thought that it would win Best Picture. That would be awesome, and I think it would be great, and I think I'd love that. But I think that it would be incredible if it was nominated and was the first to break that mold. I think that that would be absolutely justified. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis [01:54:04]:
I don't think Lance is going to win Best Director.

Paris Martineau [01:54:07]:
Well, the thing is, there are nominees. I'm curious as to your thoughts on this, Jeff, or even if you know, because they said they're going to obviously nominate them both. both as Best Director because they were a director duo. And I thought the Oscars were like notorious about not allowing more than one person—

Jeff Jarvis [01:54:23]:
I don't know the latest.

Paris Martineau [01:54:24]:
No, for, for director, I thought that they were notorious about not allowing directorial duos or more than one person to be nominated as a Best Director unless they are an established duo, which is kind of a nebulous cat— like, yeah, that's—

Mikah Sargent [01:54:38]:
how can you—

Paris Martineau [01:54:39]:
the Coens were not brothers. They were not nominated both of them

Mikah Sargent [01:54:43]:
the

Paris Martineau [01:54:43]:
best director until like— same with the Wachowskis. It took until like a couple movies for them to be allowed to be submitted as a duo.

Jeff Jarvis [01:54:52]:
I don't know if that has changed or not.

Paris Martineau [01:54:53]:
It's all BS.

Jeff Jarvis [01:54:55]:
Back to your point before, Paris, about how much it indicates about the culture. So, and I tell this story in Magazine, my little book about magazines.

Paris Martineau [01:55:05]:
Mine is in my bedroom.

Jeff Jarvis [01:55:07]:
All available at jeffjarvis.com. where you can also get signed copies of my latest, Hot Type. But anyway, so there were all kinds of problems in the starting of Entertainment Weekly, which is a whole big saga. But at one point, I was accused of hiring critics who hated everything. And Owen Gleiberman, who was the movie critic, gave a bad review to Pretty Woman. And Dick Stolley, who was the much-beloved founding editor of People Magazine, who was an executive at that point and was supposed to oversee me, He got really mad at me and he said, look how popular it is, he's wrong. And I said, there's no wrong here, it's Owen's opinion, that's that. Well, because everybody loves it, he's wrong.

Jeff Jarvis [01:55:49]:
And that's the mass media viewpoint, is that, is that the only thing that matters are the things that are popular across most, whatever that definition of most is, and everything else doesn't matter. So all diversity and plurality and, and creativity is out. And that could do in this movie because it challenges so many of the norms of entertainment, uh, that it may get blackballed in every category. But then that only— all that speaks to is the meaninglessness of the Oscars and of Hollywood. And Hollywood is now descending into the world of the Ellisons, and so Hollywood becomes more meaningless by the the minute goes by.

Mikah Sargent [01:56:30]:
And that can be a badge of its own. Um, true, you know, to, to be blackballed for those things and to still have so many people going, it's an outrage that they were blackballed, is also its own victimhood.

Jeff Jarvis [01:56:44]:
Well, witness Elizabeth Holmes. Victimhood has its dividends. Wow. Um, what else haven't we said about the movie? Any other scenes? Any other, uh, They farted. You brought up the farting horses.

Paris Martineau [01:56:57]:
Amanda Seyfried can't— she throws a log in the fire in the way that I throw a log in the fire, which is 100% fear, no aim, and reckless to the point of potentially causing a fire to eat your house. And I really respected that that was in the film. What do you guys— I guess this is somewhat beside the point, but what did you think of— when I first saw it, I saw it with a friend who came out and was like, oh, Oh, so Nathan was totally in love with Elizabeth Holmes, and they were really trying to make it clear that there was a romance happening. And I was like, I didn't get that at all.

Mikah Sargent [01:57:32]:
I don't think I got romance. I think I got them potentially showing 2 things. One, is Elizabeth Holmes working whatever magic she's accused of on Nathan? And 2, let's— give Elizabeth Holmes an opportunity to appear normal because she swims in bodies of water in—

Paris Martineau [01:58:01]:
She doesn't melt. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent [01:58:02]:
she doesn't melt. And it's like, it is arguably vulnerable to be close to nudity on camera, or full nudity if you're the husband.

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:10]:
She just had a baby.

Mikah Sargent [01:58:11]:
Yeah, she just— exactly. So that's all I saw that as. And Maybe, perhaps, it was an insight into, uh, 2 other things, which is sort of the level of access that Nathan had, uh, 'cause I think there is trust involved with those 2 that, you know, whether it's real trust or it's artificial trust, we saw her showing some level of trust, getting into a body of water with him and, like, playing around. And I forgot what the second thing was on that. So, yeah, I didn't ever read it as, like, love or anything like that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:49]:
No, I think— but I think it's an interesting confessional on his part, 'cause his whole thing is almost journalist-like. I'm here to be the tough questioner. I am separate and independent. Forget the money. I am gonna ask every tough question about why did you take away the egg bowl? Right? But then, yes, he was in her thrall sufficiently, in a sense of friendship, to, uh, be in the ocean and frolicking. And then I can't even remember where I saw this. Was it in the movie or was afterwards where, um—

Paris Martineau [01:59:25]:
That's the power of cinema, baby.

Jeff Jarvis [01:59:27]:
It is. So where Nathan had a recent call with Elizabeth. This is after—

Paris Martineau [01:59:32]:
This was in the Wired, the interview that Katie Drummond did with Nathan Fielding.

Jeff Jarvis [01:59:36]:
Right. And And Elizabeth said, I trust you, and said it like twice. I trust you. So I think it's Nathan saying to all of us, he is— Nathan is us. We think we have distance from this. We think we're judging her, but we kind of get taken in by her. But then we're mad at ourselves for doing that. And then we, you know, we think Billy's awful, but then is she awful to Billy? We don't know.

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:02]:
No, no, no. And he's saying the same thing. And he said in all the interviews afterwards, as I said earlier, he's— they're still arguing in the crew who saw it firsthand what all this meant. So he is us and we are him.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:15]:
It's also— I want to note again, it's what I've learned afterward— he is a chronic self-inserter in his works. And so he's a little M. Night Shyamalan like that, but more so. Um, and so he often does stick himself into things.

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:31]:
I don't believe that the plan was for him not to be on film. I don't believe that. That's, that's the biggest lie of all. I don't believe that for a second because it's just too— he's too important to the film that he's part of it, and, and that you've got to see him in the way he asks in that deadpan of his, the brilliant deadpan, uh, of asking.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:46]:
Yeah,

Paris Martineau [02:00:46]:
I guess that's a good question, is what things do you think that they are lying to us about, they being the directors?

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:56]:
I think that— I think that— I think that the plan all along was to have Nathan on film.

Mikah Sargent [02:01:00]:
Yeah, probably that.

Jeff Jarvis [02:01:02]:
Um, I think that there's things they didn't tell us. Like, we know that they just moved into this house from a lovely condo, and the parents, um, and they were aware of that. There's criticism that they don't go into the details of the fraud, though I, I'll justify them there. There's plenty of—

Paris Martineau [02:01:21]:
You would have needed another hour for that.

Jeff Jarvis [02:01:23]:
Exactly. And you couldn't You couldn't do it. You couldn't even begin to get into it. And again, I'm going to recommend Hank Green's video on YouTube about this because it really— which, by the way, is important because after watching that, I realized how much worse her fraud was.

Mikah Sargent [02:01:35]:
Yeah. And I think too, then they— doing that is going to clamp them down again. And I think that you maybe need to sacrifice a little bit of digging into that fraud for the purpose of keeping things more open. even though, you know, it's— it's— I just can't imagine the extra layer of theater that would be added on top if they felt like Nathan was probing in that sense. So I think that was—

Paris Martineau [02:02:07]:
She's already going to prison.

Jeff Jarvis [02:02:09]:
Mm-hmm. The one thing I want to know is, has she had lunch with Glenn Maxwell?

Paris Martineau [02:02:19]:
Aren't they? Isn't— hasn't there been reporting that they— because they're in the same prison, that they're kind of buddy-buddy?

Jeff Jarvis [02:02:26]:
Yeah. Um, I, by the way, I've met Ghislaine Maxwell back in the day when I worked for her father

Mikah Sargent [02:02:32]:
at Enron.

Paris Martineau [02:02:34]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [02:02:34]:
Uh, Elizabeth, I'm just, uh—

Paris Martineau [02:02:39]:
I'm doing the exact— I think all of us are being a little quiet because we're all Trying to spell Ghislaine Maxwell's name correctly while Googling Ghislaine Maxwell and Elizabeth Holmes.

Jeff Jarvis [02:02:53]:
Let's see here.

Paris Martineau [02:02:55]:
Holmes is friends with Jen Shah, Bravo housewife who was sentenced too. Yeah. Fascinating.

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:07]:
So when she gets out? Is she a reality show?

Mikah Sargent [02:03:13]:
Oh, I don't know if she could be. Maybe she could be convinced of that.

Paris Martineau [02:03:16]:
I mean, sure, why not?

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:19]:
Yeah, what else are you gonna do? TV's tacky enough now.

Mikah Sargent [02:03:21]:
I mean, yeah, for the next 10 years before— I was gonna say, yeah, you gotta own a company, right? Um, she should at least go on Below Deck.

Paris Martineau [02:03:32]:
I mean, how do you think Elizabeth Holmes would do on Traitors?

Mikah Sargent [02:03:35]:
Oh God, she— well, they'd get her out. They'd get her out.

Paris Martineau [02:03:38]:
I mean, yeah, that's the thing. There should be a first vote out.

Mikah Sargent [02:03:41]:
Are you a traitor? No. No.

Paris Martineau [02:03:44]:
No.

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:44]:
Yeah, what's, what's up with the, the constant nodding?

Mikah Sargent [02:03:48]:
I'm listening to you.

Paris Martineau [02:03:50]:
I mean, it's all of these like, uh, airport books, business brain tactics to make someone like you. Like the stuff from the minute like Like complimenting Nathan on what a good father he'd be, being like, mm-hmm, intense eye contact from the beginning.

Mikah Sargent [02:04:09]:
It's ramped up.

Jeff Jarvis [02:04:09]:
Your eyes are scaring me, Paris, right now.

Paris Martineau [02:04:12]:
They're scaring you?

Jeff Jarvis [02:04:13]:
Down, girl, down.

Mikah Sargent [02:04:14]:
Are they scaring you?

Paris Martineau [02:04:16]:
It hurts to do that.

Jeff Jarvis [02:04:18]:
Uh, he didn't— he never asked her about the voice.

Paris Martineau [02:04:23]:
He didn't? No. I

Mikah Sargent [02:04:24]:
mean,

Jeff Jarvis [02:04:24]:
that her voice got much lower.

Paris Martineau [02:04:25]:
What voice are we talking about?

Jeff Jarvis [02:04:26]:
wanted to be, uh, that was the whole thing, was that she changed her name.

Paris Martineau [02:04:30]:
I also think that that's like one of the least interesting parts of the Elizabeth Holmes fraud thing. I know that people got really obsessed with that, but I'm like, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:04:37]:
So many people do that regularly. Uh, a lot of people don't know what their actual natural voice is because they have been trained societally.

Jeff Jarvis [02:04:47]:
Why would you say that?

Mikah Sargent [02:04:49]:
My voice, this voice, I worked with a I don't know if there was— I can't remember exactly what their thing was, but they were a therapist who worked on people's voices. And my voice is actually here naturally, but I don't speak here, I speak here. And it became completely— it is completely something I'm unaware of. And I have to, if I want to speak in my actual true register, I have to work at it. So yeah, I agree. So

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:19]:
Micah just admitted to being Elizabeth Holmes here. That's very interesting.

Mikah Sargent [02:05:22]:
Yeah, exactly. And I think so often it's too wrapped up in sexism typically. That's why it becomes less interesting to me as well.

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:32]:
I can't criticize Vocal Fry, but can I criticize it and say Maltman?

Mikah Sargent [02:05:35]:
Right. We should wrap soon because I have to switch to you at 2:45. I think we covered it all. I think we did it. I

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:44]:
think we did it.

Paris Martineau [02:05:45]:
I think we have done it.

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:46]:
Maris, thank you for making this happen. Micah, thank you for joining in.

Mikah Sargent [02:05:48]:
Oh, thank you for letting me join you.

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:50]:
Anthony, thank you for making this possible. The extra work here, we're grateful.

Mikah Sargent [02:05:56]:
And listeners, thank you. Supporters, Club Twit members, we really appreciate you as well. Uh, tell your friends, tell your family, join the club, twit.tv/clubtwit. I know I can't wait for this to come out. Uh, Or not digitally, but also that works, but physically, digitally, in all the forms. I hope there are going to be DVD extras. I really— not this show that we're doing, I mean the movie. I really wanna just watch it and analyze it.

Paris Martineau [02:06:23]:
Yeah, I can't wait to see the behind the scenes, the bonus features on the Blu-ray, the 4K UHD Blu-ray.

Mikah Sargent [02:06:29]:
The 4K UHD. It'll be great. Yeah, that's that on that. You want to see us out there?

Jeff Jarvis [02:06:38]:
If you're watching this, you've presumably seen the movie, but tell your friends that they can watch this after they've seen the movie and come to a deeper appreciation, or yell at us through the screen.

Mikah Sargent [02:06:50]:
It's true.

Jeff Jarvis [02:06:51]:
As people do.

Paris Martineau [02:06:52]:
Or you could yell at us not in front of a screen. You could just go into a field, shout complaints, and maybe we'll hear it. I wake up in the middle of the night.

Mikah Sargent [02:07:04]:
Jarvis! Oh yeah, Jarvis. You know,

Paris Martineau [02:07:07]:
well, thank you everybody for, uh, tuning in. And you know, if you enjoyed the show, go out and commit a little fraud in your own life. You could, in whatever way is meaningful for you.

Jeff Jarvis [02:07:21]:
And I think, I think there's a chance we might consider doing the same thing here for the Sam Altman movie when it's out.

Paris Martineau [02:07:26]:
Yeah, if you enjoy this and want If you want more movie review podcasts with an aimless start that I was not prepared for, then let us know. I can try and figure out where to hold it.

Mikah Sargent [02:07:41]:
Yeah, it's sort of hard to make sure the microphone is still there. But yeah, that would be fun. We should be back for the Altman film. I do love me some Andrew Garfield.

Paris Martineau [02:07:51]:
Indeed. All right.

Mikah Sargent [02:07:53]:
Bye.

Paris Martineau [02:07:53]:
Bye.