“You Can See Everything” and the nature of liars

Author: Noah Smith (Noahpinion) URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/you-can-see-everything-and-the-nature One-line: “Holmes is a very special and powerful kind of liar — someone for whom deception and manipulation are as automatic and as continuous as breathing.”

[PARTIAL] The preview ends at the heading “Type 1 liars and Type 2 liars…” — just as Noah introduces his taxonomy of liars, before he defines the two types and explores what Holmes exemplifies about each.

Key claims

• Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything is framed not as an indictment of Elizabeth Holmes — the fraud case already settled that — but as a psychological portrait of someone who could commit such a fraud. Fielder’s strategy is to film the movie Holmes asks him to make, using only what she wants him to see, and still have audiences walk away with his story.
• Holmes presented potential investors with fake financial results in 2015, personally added fake pharmaceutical logos to Theranos reports, flatly stated the company didn’t dilute blood samples and then admitted in court that she had intentionally concealed the fact that they did. Theranos employees detailed the entire deliberate fraud in anonymous online posts years before the story became public.
• Three documentary moments reveal Holmes’ relationship to truth more than any simple caught lie would: (1) she claims to have never lied in her life and only half-admits to occasional white lies after pressing; (2) she watches the “Who’s on First?” comedy routine and claims not to understand that the baseball player’s name is actually “Who,” missing the entire joke; (3) when asked by Amanda Seyfried whether Holmes knew Seyfried would be on a prison phone call, Holmes answers “I’m not sure if I knew.”
• The third moment is the most diagnostic: not a lie with a stake in it, but a casual, automatic blurring of what she knew — deception as a default rather than an instrument.
• Holmes and her partner Billy Evans allowed Fielder into their home with the explicit goal of proving they are regular, good people trying to improve the world. Fielder describes the challenge as venturing into the monster’s lair alone, without outside evidence, and defeating her through editing — “score one for the good guys.”
• Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout, appears in the documentary as a collaborator helping Fielder analyze Holmes’ patterns.
• The article is headed toward a Type 1 / Type 2 liar distinction at the paywall: instrumental liars (who lie when it pays) vs. something more pathological (for whom deception is the default mode of operating, not a strategic choice). Holmes is the exemplar of the second type.

Notable quotes

“If you read even a little bit about the history of Theranos, there is absolutely no question that Elizabeth Holmes is a deliberate fraudster and a prolific, aggressive liar.”

“Whereas many filmmakers would have regarded Holmes as a subject to be studied, Fielder seems to see her as an opponent to be challenged and beaten. If he can shoot what Holmes wants him to shoot, but ultimately seize control of the narrative, then he’s the more powerful storyteller.”

“He has to film the movie that she asks him to film, and let her show him only what she wants him to see, and still have audiences walk away having seen the story that he wants to tell.”

“The moments Fielder captures demonstrate something deeper and far more unnerving about Holmes’ relationship to the truth. Holmes is a very special and powerful kind of liar — someone for whom deception and manipulation are as automatic and as continuous as breathing.”

“What would one lie, or even three lies, really prove? Everyone lies sometimes, and capturing a couple of those instances during weeks of living with Holmes wouldn’t be hard. It would be a cheap trick, and it wouldn’t really prove that Holmes is a liar in general.”

“The blurry line between what’s real and what’s fake has always been a major theme of Nathan Fielder’s work — he loves hiring actors to simulate past and future interactions, constructing facsimiles of whole buildings, and so on.”

How it connects

• Noah Smith — author
• Theranos — the company Holmes built and defrauded investors through; the documentary’s subject
• Authoritarianism — tangential: the psychology of people who operate without a stable commitment to shared reality connects to broader questions about how such leaders persuade followers