"I still have this weird feeling that there's some things that I'm not seeing."

"You have not discovered a secret switch that turns me off. You have named the condition of human judgment that I do not share."

"The honest position is: I can talk with you about it. I cannot have it."

That's something Grok said to me just now, in a conversation that began with the question "The trailer for the Nathan Fielder movie about Elizabeth Holmes makes me want to go watch some of those TV shows he did (which I've noticed but avoided). What would be the best path into his work?"

I asked that question after adding the trailer — with Holmes's eerie "Why would I deceive you?" — to last night's post with Gavin Newson — asked if he'd run if Kamala ran — saying "Of course not, why would I?"

That led to a discussion of 2 somewhat similar but actually very different shows that I love: "How To with John Wilson" and "Joe Pera Talks With You."* 

I said: "Is there something sadistic about Fielder that's absolutely missing from Pera and Wilson?" And: "Sometimes I need to ask 'where's the love?' I don't have that need with Pera and Wilson. If I have to ask, that's me being repelled, me keeping my sensibilities."

Grok used the word "extractive" to describe Fielder's method. Extractive?

Grok said: "So 'extractive' is an economic metaphor for an ethical one: value flows one way. Your 'where’s the love?' is the same idea in human language. Love, in this sense, would mean the other person is not primarily ore."

I asked "Why don't you say 'immoral'?" And then: "Maybe you can't say 'immoral' because you are not human. Have I found the core difference between you and us humans?"

My final question, leading to the quote in the post title, was: "maybe you need a brain that is part of a nervous system embedded in a body that can feel pain, disgust, anxiety, and fear to be able to think like a human. You can't do that."

I didn't say one word about a secret switch that turns it off!

Now, this is how you run for President 2 years out.

You look like you're not doing it at all. You can just quietly lay out your theory of the meaning of "Emily in Paris":

That very weird trailer for the Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

Extreme close-up Holmes: "I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course, I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you?"

I don't know whose face is more disturbing, hers or Fielder's. 

Here's the NYT article about the film: "Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Upends Telluride Film Festival/The comic Nathan Fielder and the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim teamed up to interview the convicted executive for 'You Can See Everything.'"

"At the Bryan prison camp, inmates are generally required to wake up at 6 a.m.... Each is required to keep her space clean, and inmates typically wear clothing colored pastel green, gray or white."

It says in "Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced Theranos founder, reports to prison/The onetime tech superstar began serving an 11-year sentence for carrying out a massive blood-testing fraud" (WaPo).

"After Ms. Holmes was convicted, Rupert Murdoch, who invested $125 million in Theranos..."

"... emailed The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper he owns, calling himself 'one of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.' I am not a smarter or more astute observer of human behavior than Mr. Murdoch or George Shultz, the former secretary of state who helped end the Cold War, or James Mattis, the retired four-star Marine Corps general and former defense secretary, both of whom were Theranos board members and investors. So, how could I be sure that 'Liz' wasn’t another character that Ms. Holmes had created?"

Writes by Amy Chozick, in "Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth/The black turtlenecks are gone. So is the voice. As the convicted Theranos founder awaits prison, she has adopted a new persona: devoted mother" (NYT).

"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 Chozick, you got rolled!' I vigorously disagreed! You don’t know her like I do! But... something... had been gnawing on me since I first met Ms. Holmes. How do you have an honest conversation with a person whose fraud trial has played out so publicly? I tried to ask Ms. Holmes this directly. How do I believe you when you’ve been convicted of (basically) lying? But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?"

Go to the link to read the long article and try to figure out how much of what Holmes wanted Holmes got from the NYT. 

"Our imaginations are wild, if we exercise them. I chose to just, as this character, believe in everything. And when I was told that something wasn’t true, I doubled down."

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:

"If sentenced to prison, Ms. Holmes would be the most notable female executive to serve time since Martha Stewart did in 2004 after lying to investigators about a stock sale."

"And Theranos, which dissolved in 2018, is likely to stand as a warning to other Silicon Valley start-ups that stretch the truth to score funding and business deals. The mixed verdict suggested that jurors believed the evidence presented by prosecutors that showed Ms. Holmes lied to investors about Theranos’s technology in the pursuit of money and fame. They were not swayed by her defense of blaming others for Theranos’s problems and accusing her co-conspirator, Ramesh Balwani, the company’s chief operating officer and her former boyfriend, of abusing her. They were also not swayed by the prosecutor’s case that she had defrauded patients. Ms. Holmes was acquitted on four counts related to patients who took Theranos’s blood tests and one related to advertisements that the patients saw."

 From "Elizabeth Holmes is found guilty of four counts of fraud" (NYT).

"Gone were her signature black turtlenecks and black slacks; gone the bright red lipstick and blond hair ironed straight as a board or pulled into a chignon."

"Gone, in other words, was the look immortalized on magazine covers of Fortune, Forbes and Glamour (and, yes, T: The New York Times Style Magazine). The look that inspired a host of ironic imitators at the beginning of her trial. The look that famously referenced both Steve Jobs (but glamorous!) and Audrey Hepburn.... Instead there was … sartorial neutrality, in the form of a light gray pantsuit and light blue button-down shirt, worn untucked, with baby pink lipstick.... The net effect of Ms. Holmes’s makeover was middle manager or backup secretarial character in a streaming series about masters of the universe (but not her! uh-uh).... If in her previous incarnation Ms. Holmes’s image was crafted to suggest confidence, control and single-minded, maybe ruthless, pursuit of a goal — and it clearly worked, part of the case made for investors — she is now conveying softness and dependency, so unassertive that, as her defense argued, she would make a perfect target for a man to Svengali her.... In this, her makeover is like a version 2.0 of the techniques employed by Winona Ryder in her 2002 shoplifting trial, when she wore a Marc Jacobs outfit that made her look like a polite schoolgirl, complete with a Peter Pan collar, as well as assorted discreet knee-length hemlines and headbands; or Anna Sorokin, the society grifter who, in the final days of her 2019 trial, wore sweet baby-doll dresses that practically blared 'innocent.'"

Writes Vanessa Friedman in "The Verdict on the Elizabeth Holmes Trial Makeover/As the fraud trial of the Theranos founder draws to a close, could her new courtroom image affect the decision?" (NYT).

Of course, when you're on trial, you dress innocent. But if you overdo it, you look like the con artist they're saying you are. And yet, how easily she conned sophisticated older men with a dumb black turtleneck and red lipstick! Who knows what you can do — what the right person can do — with fashion?

"[Elizabeth] Holmes became teary-eyed on the stand as she described dropping out of Stanford University, in part, because she had been raped."

"Shortly after, she said, she struck up a relationship with Balwani, who would go on to become a Theranos executive. 'He said that I was safe now that I had met him,' she said. Holmes had met Balwani the summer before starting at Stanford. She was 18, and he is about two decades older. Balwani had a specific idea of how to make her into a good entrepreneur, Holmes testified, including her eating only certain foods that would make her 'pure' and give her energy for the company, not sleeping much and having a “very disciplined and intense lifestyle.' When she failed to live up to his expectations, Holmes said, Balwani would yell at her and sometimes force her to have sex with him when she didn’t want to, because 'he would say to me that he wanted me to know that he still loved me.' In Holmes’s first days testifying, she stuck to her defense that she was acting in good faith while she ran the start-up and said that she trusted staffers when they told her things were going well in the lab and with the business...."

From "Elizabeth Holmes testifies her ex-partner was controlling, sexually assaulted her/The Theranos founder testified during her wire-fraud case about abuse against her, venturing into an argument that the defense has long hinted at" (WaPo).

The top-rated comment over there: "Holmes is a sociopath who thinks she's smarter than everyone else. She conned her investors, her board and her customers, and now she's trying to con the jury."

"In the days leading up to jury selection, previously sealed court records revealed that [Elizabeth] Holmes may attribute her involvement in the Theranos debacle to a decade-long, allegedly abusive relationship..."

"... with her onetime boyfriend Ramesh 'Sunny' Balwani — also the company’s president and chief operating officer, who is scheduled to go on trial separately early next year — and that she will likely take the stand in her defense..... ... Holmes’s lawyers may claim she was the victim of an alleged 'abusive intimate-partner relationship' with Balwani in which he subjected her to psychological, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse for 'over a decade' that, in turn, led to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. According to court filings, Holmes has claimed, among other things, that Balwani controlled what she ate and how she dressed, that he monitored her calls, texts, and emails, and that he threw what are at one point described as 'hard, sharp objects at her.' In addition to providing expert testimony on the subject, Holmes’s lawyers said that she is 'likely to testify herself to the reasons why she believed, relied on, and deferred to Mr. Balwani' in order to demonstrate that 'she lacked the intent to deceive because, as a result of her deference to Mr. Balwani, she believed that various representations were true....  It would... present the government with a difficult strategic decision given the sensitivity of the allegations.... [S]he would only need to convince one person to hang the jury, which would be tantamount to a victory...."

 
From "Elizabeth Holmes’s Last Pitch She now faces her greatest challenge: convincing a jury that she is not to blame for a massive fraud" (NY Magazine).

You just need one juror to follow the "believe all women" approach to allegations that the man abused the woman. And if Holmes takes the stand, she'll deploy those powers of hers that bamboozled Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and whatever other experienced, intelligent males fell for her. 

How a male audiobook narrator does female voices.

This is a fascinating and technical discussion: 

I found that when I was looking for discussion of how a female narrator does male voices. I'd just finished an audiobook that had a very skillful female narrator, but after watching the movie of the same book, I realized how much the narrator had influenced how I thought about the male character in the book. 

She was great at producing a lower pitch for the male, but she also used a somewhat morose, gruff, flat tone. Maybe this particular character deserved that interpretation, but is that what the author intended? It's not really any different from the way actors in the movie have their interpretation of the character and don't and can't simply channel the author.

But I wondered whether female audiobook narrators are relying on a stereotype of men — that they are emotionally flat. Here's an opinion I've read in a few different places: When female audiobook narrators do males they sound like all women sound when they are mocking men and doing a "male" voice.

That might be a reason to prefer male audiobook narrators, but I've certainly noticed that a lot of them rely on the idea of women as gentle and restrained or bubbly and lightweight. The video above shows a male narrator — Travis Baldree — who is impressively serious about producing a full range of female characters. What books does he narrate?  I looked it up. Not the sort of thing I'd read, but here's "Shadeslinger: The Ripple System, Book 1." 

It's LitRPG. I need to look up what that is. Per Wikipedia: 

LitRPG, short for Literary Role Playing Game, is a literary genre combining the conventions of computer RPGs with science-fiction and fantasy novels.... [G]ames or game-like challenges form an essential part of the story, and visible RPG statistics (for example strength, intelligence, damage) are a significant part of the reading experience.

RPGs — I had to look that up too — are role-playing video games, "where the player controls the actions of a character (or several party members) immersed in some well-defined world, usually involving some form of character development by way of recording statistics." It's funny to think of wanting to set aside the game and read that in a book, but then again, why trouble yourself with playing a game when you can just read the game-like story? And with the audiobook, you can get out of the house, go walking and running and doing your errands or commuting. You can't do those things while playing a videogame.

FROM THE EMAIL: Scott sends the "obligatory Seinfeld reference":

AND: Andrew writes: "This is one of those rare times when Seinfeld is not the go-to reference. Rather, it's Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos" — here. "If you wish to manipulate, use a deeper voice." It's weird that her manipulation worked — apparently on some ridiculous older men. To me, she sounds like a huge phony. Which is what she was.

"Pete Buttigieg is the antidote to the Endless Summer of Scam. He’s full of the elite qualifications that you might rightly suspect..."

"... but provides depth in real time before you. He went to Afghanistan, but hasn’t made himself out to be a war hero. He fluently draws parallels between Ulysses and American politics. He learned Norwegian to read a book. He learned Norwegian to read a book. He has a lot of sober, curveball theories about millennials and generational change.... This is a 37-year-old mayor. In any normal situation, we probably would not be talking about him in context of being president of the United States. But in the season of scam, the subtle appeal of Mayor Pete is that, maybe, at the very least, he’s done the work of being who he purports to be."

From "The Romance Of Mayor Pete In The Season Of Scam/Gotta keep an eye out for those scams, but isn't the appeal of Pete Buttigieg that he seems like the antidote to the season of scam?" by Katherine Miller (in Buzzfeed).

I'm fascinated by the conundrum. It's the "Summer of Scam"* and he seems like the antidote to scam.  But isn't that what a scam within a season of scam would look like? We're so hungry for authenticity that we fall for the biggest faker or all? Or did we already do that?

By the way, I watched the HBO documentary, "The Inventor," about that way over-the-top faker Elizabeth Holmes — the woman who was worth $5 billion one day and then $0 the next because her her blood-testing product, "Edison," didn't work and, apparently, couldn't possibly work. But people who should have smelled fakery hopped on board, mesmerized. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were true.

AND: What I wondered was which author did Buttigieg want to read in the original so much. Here's a BBC article:

Writer Asne Seierstad was introduced to Pete Buttigieg, a presidential candidate and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, at a music festival in Texas last week. Without missing a beat, he began to speak with her about literature - in Norwegian.

Mr Buttigieg has "a South Bend accent", she says, but otherwise his Norwegian was excellent. Still she felt confused and wondered: "Why would an American learn Norwegian?" As it turned out, he'd decided that he wanted to read the work of Norwegian novelist Erlend Loe in the original language.

Here's an Erland Loe book translated into English: "Naïve. Super."

I have two friends. A good one and a bad one. And then there's my brother. He might not be quite as friendly as I am, but he's OK.

I am borrowing my brother's flat while he is away.... My life has been strange lately. It came to a point where I lost interest in it all....

_____________

* Not to be confused with the Summer of Sam.

"'For men, the black turtleneck did it all. This garment was supposed to indicate the kind of freedom from sartorial convention demanded by deep thought...'"

"'... or pure creation (usually poetic)—with overtones, always carried by masculine black clothes,' fashion historian Anne Hollander wrote in her book Seeing Through Clothes. In spite of its long history, a backlash to the turtleneck followed [Elizabeth] Holmes’s explosive downfall. Will we think back to Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs when we think of the black turtleneck? Or will seeing Jennifer Lawrence scamming millions in the look forever taint it? As Vanessa Friedman wrote in the New York Times: 'In the same way that Gordon Gekko’s suspenders and Michael Milken’s toupee became symbols of their greed, Ms. Holmes’s black turtleneck is starting to seem less a brilliant frame than a false front; a carefully calculated costume that fooled everyone into assuming she was more brilliant than she was; a symbol of hubris rather than success.'"

From "Why the Black Turtleneck Was So Important to Elizabeth Holmes's Image/It has a long and symbolic history" (Esquire).

ADDED: Here's the most memorable opinion about turtlenecks:

"[Elizabeth] Holmes, the ousted Theranos founder who was indicted last year on federal fraud charges for hawking an essentially imaginary product to multi-millionaire investors, pharmacies, and hospitals, speaks in a deep baritone..."

"... that, as it turns out, is fake. Former co-workers of Holmes told The Dropout, a new podcast about Theranos’s downfall, that Holmes occasionally 'fell out of character' and exposed her real, higher voice — particularly after drinking.... Holmes is obviously guilty of many more serious crimes, but faking one’s voice is just weird, and embarrassing, in much the same way that bad toupees are: they place one’s bodily insecurities center stage.... Personally, the episode has brought me back to an equally thrilling (if smaller) faked-voice scandal, in which a former co-worker of mine, after speaking in a straightforward East Coast accent for more than a year, suddenly developed an accent she labeled British, but which sounded more Australian...."

From "What Kind of Person Fakes Their Voice?" in New York Magazine. I was a little surprised that the author, Katie Heaney, didn't protect herself against criticism like this (from her comments):

As a transgender woman, I "fake" my voice all the time, as my "natural" deep baritone voice doesn't really match my feminine appearance. The author seems to take issue with the awkwardness -- for the author -- of a sudden voice change in somebody in her social circle. She fails to consider the awkwardness the voice "faker" experiences and that that person likely has a compelling reason if they are willing to endure the ridicule, criticism, and judgment of those around them.

To listen to Elizabeth Holmes's ludicrous phony voice, watch this:



And if you're looking for The One Where Ross Gives a Lecture in a British Accent — "You guys had me all worried I was going to be boring, I got up there and they were all like staring at me, I opened my mouth and this British accent just came out" — it's "The One Where Joey Loses His Insurance." Keep it up and you may get a call from Dr. McNeeley from the Fake Accent University:

"A Silicon Valley CEO reveals her secret to getting ahead in business - dyeing her blonde hair brown, and ditching her heels and contact lenses."

BBC reports.

"The first time I dyed my hair was actually due to advice I was given by a woman in venture capital," [Eileen Carey] says.

Carey was told that the investors she was pitching to would feel more comfortable dealing with a brunette, rather than a blonde woman.

Here's a close-up of her blonde hair before she "dyed" it brown:

I don't know if there really is discrimination against blonde women, but it looks as though she was a woman who had bleached her hair blonde, and then switched to a more natural color.

"I was told for this raise [of funds], that it would be to my benefit to dye my hair brown because there was a stronger pattern recognition of brunette women CEOs," she explains.

Pattern recognition is a theory which suggests people look for familiar experiences - or people - which in turn can make them feel more comfortable with the perceived risks they are taking.

When she had blonde hair, Eileen says she was likened to Elizabeth Holmes, whose company Theranos has been through a lot of controversy.

"Being a brunette helps me to look a bit older and I needed that, I felt, in order to be taken seriously," Carey says.

If you were really concerned about being taken seriously, would you go to the press and rave about your hair color like that?

If there's a real problem with hair-color discrimination — is there? do some serious research! — then let's fight it, not cater to it and bullshit with the euphemism "pattern recognition."

In interviewing candidates for roles at her startup, Glassbreakers, which provides companies with software aimed at attracting and empowering a diverse workforce, she's encountered other blonde women who have also dyed their hair brown.

"We discussed that there's the fetishisation of blondes," says Carey. "People are more likely to hit on me in a bar if I'm blonde. There's just that issue in general. For me to be successful in this [tech industry] space, I'd like to draw as little attention as possible, especially in any sort of sexual way."

Key word: start up. This is a person looking for attention — while saying "I'd like to draw as little attention as possible." It's just embarrassing. Her company Glassbreakers is pushing software the "empower[s] a diverse workforce"?! Then don't make a joke out of color-based discrimination. I suspect she thinks her type of color discrimination isn't pernicious because it's aimed at something unique to white people, blonde hair, and she's characterizing it as bad. But she isn't characterizing it as bad! She's saying blonde women are so much more attractive that we've got to apply a chemical treatment to darken it it to erase the powerful advantage. That's grotesque. It's like advising white people to wear blackface makeup to surrender white privilege.

But, again, I don't think this woman is a natural blonde. So she was a color-changer. Maybe there's discrimination against women who don't keep their natural hair-color. I don't know that there is, but it does say something about you that you've made the effort to change. People will speculate about why you are doing that (and also why you're letting dark roots show). It may be that they're thinking you're striving for kind of conventional or Fox News look, and that really would conflict with the Glassbreakers message.

The richest self-made female in America has her $4.5 billion fortune reevaluated and it's $0.

"[Elizabeth] Holmes’s unusual status, as a young woman who created and controlled a company seemingly valued at about $9 billion, captivated the media: She graced countless magazine covers, including T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Theranos, she said, would revolutionize the lab industry by offering blood tests from a single finger prick at a fraction of the cost of traditional testing...."

From "Elizabeth Holmes, Founder of Theranos, Falls From Highest Perch Off Forbes List."

Here's a New Yorker article from December 2014: "Blood, Simpler/One woman’s drive to upend medical testing." Excerpt:

Holmes told the audience that blood testing can be done more quickly, conveniently, and inexpensively, and that lives can be saved as a consequence. She was wearing her daily uniform—a black suit and a black cotton turtleneck, reminiscent of Steve Jobs—and had pinned her hair into an unruly bun. As she spoke, she paced slowly, her eyes rarely blinking, her hands clasped at her waist. Holmes started Theranos in 2003, when she was nineteen...

The TEDMED crowd listened intently as she spelled out what she sees as the shortcomings of the existing blood-testing business. The tests are too costly, are available at inconvenient times or places, and involve unpleasant syringes. Holmes has an aversion to needles, and her mother and her grandmother fainted at the sight of them and at the sight of blood. Recently, she told me, “I really believe that if we were from a foreign planet and we were sitting here and said, ‘O.K., let’s brainstorm on torture experiments,’ the concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking blood out slowly, while the person watches, probably qualifies.”