Said Amanda Seyfried, quoted in "The Women of ‘The Dropout’ Want to Humanize Elizabeth Holmes/In a group interview, Elizabeth Meriwether, Amanda Seyfried and Rebecca Jarvis discuss the new Hulu series about the fall of Theranos and their efforts to reveal the woman beneath the turtleneck" (NYT)(Seyfried plays the part of Elizabeth Holmes).
The NYT interviewer, Alexis Soloski, does a nice job of highlighting the problems with the show without overtly confronting the interviewees about the weakness of their project:
Theranos claimed that it could run more than 200 tests from a finger prick’s worth of blood, which would have made Holmes the kind of visionary that young women — women like Seyfried — could have looked up to. But the technology never existed....
Because Holmes has consistently denied any allegations of fraud, it is nearly impossible... to know Holmes’s mind and motives. This makes “The Dropout” a series built around a cipher....
Who is Elizabeth Holmes?
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER Oh boy.
AMANDA SEYFRIED I think we’re still trying to figure that out....
MERIWETHER Even writing the scenes of the things that I knew had happened, it was a challenge figuring out what was going on in her head. That ultimately makes the series more interesting, because there are just things about her that don’t make sense....
ADDED: Rereading that, I see that the women who made the show are kind of like Elizabeth Holmes. They promote their enterprise, but they don't have any idea of what they're doing. Holmes didn't have the technology for testing blood like that or any hope of finding it, and these women don't have a basis for knowing the interior of the woman they purport to delve into or any idea of how to get there. I mean, they could have decided Holmes was a big fraud from Day 1. That would have made sense, but that's not the story they wanted to tell.
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Now that's some quality wo-mansplaining. Three people talking but accomplishing no communication.
I mean, they could have decided Holmes was a big fraud from Day 1. That would have made sense, but that's not the story they wanted to tell.
Of course any story they want to tell cannot have the woman as the villain. Not in this day and age. No sireebob. It's clear Meriwether cannot begin to conceive such a notion, which is a shame, as Holmes is a fascinating divergence- a real life disruptor and innovator, not for the product she claimed to be selling but for the true sociopathic scammer she is. A role normally exclusive to men...
Getting a contract with a drug pharmacy chain without having a working product must’ve been some kind of cue. How the hell she pulled that off? That could tell something about her.
They should call the show Fake It Till You Make It.
It's easy. Holmes is a psychopath. She pretended to be a female Steve Jobs. Old men like George Schultz fell for it.
Seyfried plays the part of Elizabeth Holmes.
Just the opposite of her playing Linda Lovelace: everyone else swallows deep?
Psychopathic fraudsters are rampant in business and government. What's far more interesting is how normal, sane people get so easily sucked into these schemes. I am as interested in a profile of the CEOs of Safeway and Walgreens as I am Holmes.
What does an ambitious female... feminine gender have to do to get ahead in a feminist/masculinist's world? Take a knee, beg, good girl.
So, a vanity project about a vanity project.
I followed it all second-hand from funny imitations of Holmes (deep voice making incredible assertions) on Armstrong and Getty, I think it was, where one of the staff was discovered to have that talent of interjection in any story about her.
Mocking not Holmes but the people who believe her.
I don't think I've ever actually heard Holmes, or otherwise knew about her. Just the mockery.
@AZ Bob
More like Fake Sh*t Till You Make Sh*t. That is in fact what she started and ended up with.
The real whodathunkit is how many people would've bet so many powerful businessmen and male politicians, statesmen, etc. had a secret fetish for deep-voiced women. Except maybe Clinton...that guy has a fetish for everything, so we'll exclude him. But still, she had man hands and everything! Did not see that coming...
Mental illness is a real thing. It affects every person regardless of gender, race, or personal identity. Even women, victims, minorities, and the poor can be and are mentally ill. Many CEOs and elected officials are high functioning psychopaths -- they are attracted by power and have literally no fear. This is often a good thing for these jobs, but simultaneously creates blind spots and Achilles heels.
Those with socially advantageous forms of mental illness create infectious confidence in harebrained businesses or political efforts. Some of these folks luck into success, but many just establish a cult of personality.
When bad ideas are proven wrong and fail, the entire social group goes down with them. When the bad idea involves risks of life, the entire social group goes extinct. Jonestown.
"It's easy. Holmes is a psychopath. She pretended to be a female Steve Jobs. Old men like George Schultz fell for it."
Yes, the reason this is a good story for an entertaining show is that smart, experienced, eminent old men fell for her. It should be a comedy, and we can enjoy it immensely because they were such idiots... and the woman is beautiful. The role should be played with the style and vigor and high comedy that Miriam Hopkins brought to "Trouble in Paradise."
An acquaintance likes to say of these tech visionaries that "in previous generations they'd be founding cults."
It's inevitable that the whole Up With Women movement was going to produce some freaks. Almost a statistical certainty. Couple that with a little too much positive affirmation as a child and coming of age in a time of seemingly effortless technological innovation and it's not terribly surprising that she may have actually believed she could accomplish something out of nothing.
The person Holmes most reminds me of is Obama. Except Obama wasn't expected to produce anything of substance. Which he was wildly successful at.
Plus, what's the BFD about a few needle sticks? Hardly something to try to build an industry around.
Hollywood tells stories. Even when they are “based on” real life they rarely reflect actual facts because the psychopaths who run Hollywood, and we all know how psycho- and socio-paths are best at faking sincerity and displaying emotions they don’t really experience, prefer to make stories interesting by introducing conflicts that do not exist and blowing up minor plot turns into tense moments. In the end viewers are left with the impression that they, Hollywood, make these surreal movies simply because they admire their fellow psychopaths and want them elevated to folk hero status. How many times does the ID channel or Hollywood need to remake the Ted Bundy or Green River Killer stories?
It’s also no surprise that the same Hollywood monoculture is right now out lying loudly about the “don’t say gay bill” in Florida because another front in their psycho endeavors is to mainstream sexualizing primary school children. Opposing the teachers who want to “ask” your kindergartners about their sexual identity and views on masturbation is spun by the DNC Media as “hate speech.” Same people. Same evil intent.
Of course they are mythologizing soto-voce Elizabeth. She’s one of them. They truly admire her.
Yes! The old grizzled accomplished eminent men immediately fell head over heels for blond blue eyed Elizabeth Holmes. Even when George Schultz’s grandson Tyler Schultz —one of the earliest Theranos whistleblowers—presented him with evidence that Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos was built on lies, George Schultz chose to believe Elizabeth.
Interesting to note that two women were not so easily fooled. Phyllis Gardner, Professor of Medicine at Stanford who makes an appearance in DROPOUT, not only immediately sees through Elizabeth but also tells Elizabeth the vision she is proposing can never work in scientific reality. And George Schultz’s wife, Tyler Schultz’s step-grandmother, never fell for Elizabeth Holmes.
i'm Still fascinated by her story..
For awhile; she was the youngest, best looking Billionairess in the world;
And she got there without ANYTHING to sell, besides herself (or, the promise of herself)
DID she suck off all those old men to get their support? Which would be pretty impressive
OR, did she just let them think, that she Would suck them off? Which is MUCH more impressive
One way, or the other; there is an EXCELLENT Porno biopic just waiting to cum out
Yes, the reason this is a good story for an entertaining show is that smart, experienced, eminent old men fell for her.
Agree, it's a great premise for a story. Better even than Inventing Anna, another series with a sociopathic female con artist villain. Great opportunities for older actors to play real people, great opportunities for comedy and more. IMO they can decide what to do with the Holmes character as they go along. She doesn't have to be revealed a a total scammer right away. Amanda Seyfried is probably a pretty good choice for the role.
I respect the duped position but I’d be a bit more nuanced. Characters like Schultz lend their name to pre IPO stuff all the time, often without much due diligence. It’s a friendly and incestuous bunch, board members are. Chances are his role was to lend credibility and keep his mouth shut as much as practicable until his shares are collared…
…and it’s easy to see Schultz as some sort of dumb old man but back in the day there were a few Nobel Laureates (plural) who lent their name to a black box hedge fund. Inside the black box was not some superior Nobel intelligence beating the markets. Instead a few tech guys moved their computers closer to the exchange’s mainframes for a speed advantage and the managers were front running order flow. Not so dumb, Nobel guys…
I saw the "Inventing Anna" series. Anna Delvey, the protagonist, didn't have the scope or magnitude of Holmes, but she did manage to buy expensive clothes and stay at luxurious hotels on OPM. I got through the whole series, but it was kind of joyless. It needed the Lubitsch touch or something. There was a kind of comedy to Anna's story, but the feminism got in the way of the comedy....The show was created by Shonda Rhimes, and Lena Dunham is also making a show about her. There's something about Anna.
It's counterproductive to speculate on the perversion of her enablers. If you go that route, you are going to be suckered by another Elizabeth Holmes, because you're not a perverted old man right and only perverted old men fall for people like her...
The old and eminent men enabling Elizabeth Holmes saw her as the daughter they deserved to have (as opposed to the ones they may have had already). This is not uncommon.
And considering how she, and all the people who helped her, would have been lionized (or deified) if she had been able to deliver what she'd promised? She was going to make history. I remember all the fawning coverage, and there wasn't a bunch of skepticism from female journalists.
The people who enabled Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be part of making history, and they genuinely wished her well personally. They weren't all lusting after her. Probably very few were.
Are you a good person with good intentions? If so, you need to watch out. It's very tempting to think that bad things only happen to bad people.
Rereading that, I see that the women who made the show are kind of like Elizabeth Holmes. They promote their enterprise, but they don't have any idea of what they're doing.
Shhhh! You're not supposed to notice that!
Holmes didn't have the technology for testing blood like that or any hope of finding it, and these women don't have a basis for knowing the interior of the woman they purport to delve into or any idea of how to get there. I mean, they could have decided Holmes was a big fraud from Day 1. That would have made sense, but that's not the story they wanted to tell.
Except she really wasn't a fraud. Holmes was much more troubling since she was a true believer who resorted to fraud to save her vision. That's much more complicated that Hollywood is set up to deal with and really is the kind of thing that needs a good novelist to work out.
A few years ago I was on a panel with a woman who seems similar to Holmes but on a smaller scale. She had written a book and developed a program based upon the importance on postures and gestures in creating success for yourself and advancing ideas. It had all kinds of pseudo-science and analysis behind it. The basic premise was that if you deliver your message using certain techniques, you will get the career advancement that you want. The local chamber of commerce had her as a speaker and I was on the panel. Her meeting after us was at the White House.
She spoke for 25 minutes and gave examples of all of the good things that happen by using her tools and backed that by some statistics. We were in front of about 250 people. When it was my turn to speak I made the point that all of this stuff is great but there needs to be some substance behind the theatrics. I saw every male head in the audience nod in agreement with some applause but nothing from the women.
I think I read about 2 years later that a lot of her data was made up or manipulated.
Holmes is not so different from all the other "Founders" in Silicon Valley and the whole grisly start-up culture. She just failed to grasp -- she was 18, for Christ's sake" -- that physical reality is much less plastic than software. But look at something like Uber. Uber is every bit as fraudulent as Theranos. It has never made a profit, and it never will. It exploits its "contractors" while it squanders the money of its "investors". It's really just a Ponzi scheme, with other people's cars and phones. But this is quite typical in the modern start-up culture. The requirements to be a founder are numerous, but a level-headed appreciation of reality is not one of them. You do the vision thing, and with a little luck, or maybe a lot of luck, some engineer will figure out how to make it all work.
Not that I would have seen it, but others with extensive investing and technology experience should have. Been in tech/IT my whole career. All tech solutions use the same basic and current technology to deliver a product - so most have same limits and capabilities. When you say you have a new solution coming that does 10 to 30 times the number of tests as current products and requires 1/100th the sample size of blood you are talking orders of magnitude differences in 2 different areas. Investors should have demanded a better understanding of the tech they were “developing” Especially the drug chains investing hundreds of millions. We didn’t see lcd displays go from 480 pixel to 4K in one jump. We didn’t go from 1gigabyte to 1 terabyte hard drives in one jump. We didn’t go from single-core to 16 core processors in one jump. Didn’t go from 24 inch flat panels to 85 inch in one jump. But easy to be skeptical after the fact.......
I think there's a kind of inverse to Imposter Syndrome - a lot of people with elite education concluding that everything is bull shit and all you need for success is a good presentation. I think this is responsible for a lot of the disappointment felt by those with elite degrees who are not as successful as they think they should be and blame it on racism, sexism or whaterism.
Except she really wasn't a fraud. Holmes was much more troubling since she was a true believer who resorted to fraud to save her vision.
==========
daddy usually tell little girl : pumpkin - don't bother your noggin with that - daddy got it figured out
except daddy did not bother own noggin !!! and girl goes to jail/gaol
if only she had swish pony tail laszlo could have helped
I have known several lawyers who invested in and lost big bucks in Theranos. Extremely bright. But I think they relied on others to do the due diligence, and trusted their instincts. Like extremely bright lawyers I knew who joined the ponzi schemes of Finley Kumble and Dewey & LeBoeuf just before they imploded.
Since I see no sex appeal in Holmes, I don't understand that aspect.
She is a very interesting case study. A few days ago, the Fyre Festival debacle was replayed on "American Greed". Similar themes in each. Psuedo-successful protagonists who are able to inspire belief in the unbelievable. People can produce amazing results through hard work and sheer determination; Silicon Valley has plenty of similar success stories. One can't easily separate the "visionaries" from the psychopaths until the accounting is done.
realestateacct said...
I think there's a kind of inverse to Imposter Syndrome - a lot of people with elite education concluding that everything is bull shit and all you need for success is a good presentation.
We're reaping the harvest of the self esteem movement.
readering said...
I have known several lawyers who invested in and lost big bucks in Theranos. Extremely bright. But I think they relied on others to do the due diligence, and trusted their instincts. Like extremely bright lawyers I knew who joined the ponzi schemes of Finley Kumble and Dewey & LeBoeuf just before they imploded.
Kind of reinforces Balfeagor's assertion that the best brains don't necessarily go to law school, don't it?
Since I see no sex appeal in Holmes, I don't understand that aspect.
She dropped $50M worth of Theranos stock on George Schultz. Sex appeal had nothing to do with it.
Holmes would never have fooled all those investors if she had been a guy. They wanted so much to see an attractive young woman who looked like Steve Jobs become a billionaire. She dropped out of Stanford after one year ! She had no tech background. It was all fluff. They used to call it "vaporware" but I haven't heard that term in a while. They wanted to believe. WC Fields nailed it. "You can't cheat an honest man."
OK, we'll reverse this. If Elizabeth Holmes was a man, everybody would be saying 'he's a typical con man in business. Greedy liar who doesn't care who he hurts'. And that would be the end of it. But...in this case...woman...Stanford....beauty...!!
This is the magic of a pretty woman, or a handsome man. The pretty can con the willing. It's a human weakness to give more rope to the pretty. She is nothing if not a con-woman. A pathological liar. And she was, until caught, more than happy to continue the con for as long as possible.
That she's a woman doesn't change a thing. They can try to rationalize it away, but we are, in the end, responsible for our own actions. Every one of us.
@Jefferson's Revenge:I think I read about 2 years later that a lot of her data was made up or manipulated.
If you're talking about Amy Cuddy and "power poses", her data was not made up or manipulated. Rather, her findings have not been replicated and some of the methods she used were flawed.
In other words it's very possible she's wrong about what "power poses" can do for people but she has not been shown to be fraudulent. Saying something which is wrong and lying used to be understood as two different things.
I mean, they could have decided Holmes was a big fraud from Day 1. That would have made sense, but that's not the story they wanted to tell.
Which is why I won't be watching it.
They could have made it about how she conned all those "elite" men, but apparently that's not allowed, either.
At some point someone is going to make a greg populist flick out of this.
This story is full of "the best of the best" who all turned out to be either corrupt or incompetent.
you could make a great movie out of that, if you were willing to appeal to the "wrong" people
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...
Except she really wasn't a fraud. Holmes was much more troubling since she was a true believer who resorted to fraud to save her vision.
She was lying, cheating, a nd stealing to sell a product taht she did not have., and knew she did not have.
If that's not "fraud", nothing is
Gabriel said...
If you're talking about Amy Cuddy and "power poses", her data was not made up or manipulated. Rather, her findings have not been replicated and some of the methods she used were flawed.
Oh, this IS fun!
"her data was not made up"! it just has "not been replicated".. Because it was MADE UP
"or manipulated!" it's just that "some of the method she used were flawed".. By her manipulation
Saying something which you KNOW is wrong and lying used to be understood as the same thing.
A 2015 article, published in Psychological Science by Ranehill et al... but could not detect any physiological or behavioral effects of power posing
In the years that followed, attempts were made by various research groups to apply power posing manipulation in different contexts. The results did not support the assumptions made by Cuddy
Despite a large sample size, no effect was found on risk taking and, in contrast to original expectations, adopting an expansive pose reduced feelings of power.
n a 2019 review of all prior power posing research, Marcus Crede - an Associate Professor of Psychology at Iowa State University - noted that no study had ever found that power poses resulted in higher feelings of power than a normal pose. Crede noted that almost all prior research had only compared power poses to contractive poses like slouching
Jordan Peterson is a proponent of power poses.
Rule #1: "Stand up straight with your shoulders back."
"Knowing" that you're lying and "believing" that you are telling the truth seems to be the common denominator of advertising, public relations, politics and journalism. If you can manage that, my daughter, yours is the earth and all that's in it.
Bernie Madoff might be a good (or rather a bad) example: he wanted to help his clients keep their money when the market went down, and that's how his Ponzi scheme got started. Possibly he was convinced that he was virtuous all along.
Holmes's father was an ENRON executive, so it's possible that she was brought up to do just exactly what she did.
For awhile; she was the youngest, best looking Billionairess in the world;
And she got there without ANYTHING to sell, besides herself (or, the promise of herself)
There were certainly many who pumped her and sold on the high. If anyone in the SEC was interested in justice they would look into this. But the SEC is a criminal organization, like the FBI, that serves the elite. My small fortune is correlated with the elites too so, personally, the elites must win. Even though that is unjust.
@gilbar: You can drop the invective, because what you cited is exactly in line with what I told you.
Her research may be flawed and inconclusive, but that's not the same thing as made up or manipulated. What's she's saying about power poses may not be true, but that does not mean she is engaging in fraud.
It is very easy to do everything right and still get results that can't be replicated. Any time you do a study on a small number of people you have that risk. Flaws in methodology escape even very experienced researchers sometimes. Research is hard.
Can they do Bernie Madoff next? He seemed more likable than Holmes. Brooklyn lifeguard makes good...
Greg The Class Traitor said...
She was lying, cheating, a nd stealing to sell a product taht she did not have., and knew she did not have.
She had a product. It didn't do nearly what she'd said it would do and the results were so unreliable that no independent lab would certify it, but she did have a product. In fact Holmes was sued by someone who got a false positive HIV diagnosis from one of her machines.
Theranos device failed pharma evaluation, while lab director cleared it for seven tests
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...
Greg The Class Traitor said...
She was lying, cheating, and stealing to sell a product that she did not have., and knew she did not have.
She had a product. It didn't do nearly what she'd said it would do and the results were so unreliable that no independent lab would certify it, but she did have a product
If I claim to be selling the Fountain of youth, when in fact I know I'm just selling you plain water, then I am selling you a product that I do not have.
So, since she knew that what she had did not do what she claimed her product could do, to my mind that translates to "selling a product that you do not have., and know you do not have."
This wasn't "we claim it can go 100 MPH, and it can, downhill. But on a flat surface it can only go 95 MPH."
This was "we claim it can go 100 MPH, but actually it doesn't move at all, it just blows high speed wind into your face".
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC there was not technically qualified person at the company saying that they had any ability to do what she was claiming.
Correct?
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