A24 doing A24 things man. I couldn't get a seat to this tonight if I wanted to outside of the front 2 rows. On a freaking Wed.

MonkeyKnifeFighter said:

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Saw it tonight.

Count me in as someone with approximately 0 knowledge of Nathan Fielder prior to this doc. I think I'd seen a few twitter clips from Nathan For You, but that's it.

Loved it all the same.

Not movie spoilers because this is very much open legal stuff that's been in the public for years:

I was clutching my seat pretty hard as everyone in the film seemed to flounder at defining how Theranos's device was designed. The instant analogy I had was that Theranos essentially built a device akin to a 3D printer.

You could reasonably say a 3D printer can print anything, and people know what you mean. End users also intuitively understand that to use a 3D printer, you have to supply it a design file to print from. The printer doesn't have an infinite catalog of 3D files preloaded for everything a person would ever want to print. If you want to use a different material, or a different color, you can swap hardware and materials to make that happen.

Similarly to the 3D print file, a specific end user is going to have to tell the machine what needs to be done to run their tests. The device doesn't come pre-loaded with all of the equipment or procedures to run every test under the sun. Ditto for connecting to the cloud and using AI - that's NOT pre-programmed in the machine. It's going to depend on end users having their own case histories and data sets to sample from. But the machine is equipped to interface with those systems.

So it can "do" 'everything' in the same way a 3D printer can print anything.

The deceit occurred by hiding how much work purchasers of the machine were going to have to do (software, hardware, interface, clinicals, etc) for the machine to do what they needed. It's like if you buy a recipe book with tons of meals listed, and get it home to find that every meal chapter is 100% blank fields that you need to fill in yourself to do the cooking.

My ex-gf is a Ph.D neuroscientist and she knew a LOT about the ins and outs of how Theranos's claims were viewed in the deep medical research and clinical trial fields. I'm really channeling a conversation from ~7 months ago before anyone knew this docu existed

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as I understand it, the more apt analogy with a 3D printer would be if you supplied a printer with material to create an inch tall contraption and said it could print a 3 foot tall contraption moreso than a 'how do you do it' problem.

ATM9000 said:

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MonkeyKnifeFighter said:

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Saw it tonight.

Count me in as someone with approximately 0 knowledge of Nathan Fielder prior to this doc. I think I'd seen a few twitter clips from Nathan For You, but that's it.

Loved it all the same.

Not movie spoilers because this is very much open legal stuff that's been in the public for years:

I was clutching my seat pretty hard as everyone in the film seemed to flounder at defining how Theranos's device was designed. The instant analogy I had was that Theranos essentially built a device akin to a 3D printer.

You could reasonably say a 3D printer can print anything, and people know what you mean. End users also intuitively understand that to use a 3D printer, you have to supply it a design file to print from. The printer doesn't have an infinite catalog of 3D files preloaded for everything a person would ever want to print. If you want to use a different material, or a different color, you can swap hardware and materials to make that happen.

Similarly to the 3D print file, a specific end user is going to have to tell the machine what needs to be done to run their tests. The device doesn't come pre-loaded with all of the equipment or procedures to run every test under the sun. Ditto for connecting to the cloud and using AI - that's NOT pre-programmed in the machine. It's going to depend on end users having their own case histories and data sets to sample from. But the machine is equipped to interface with those systems.

So it can "do" 'everything' in the same way a 3D printer can print anything.

The deceit occurred by hiding how much work purchasers of the machine were going to have to do (software, hardware, interface, clinicals, etc) for the machine to do what they needed. It's like if you buy a recipe book with tons of meals listed, and get it home to find that every meal chapter is 100% blank fields that you need to fill in yourself to do the cooking.

My ex-gf is a Ph.D neuroscientist and she knew a LOT about the ins and outs of how Theranos's claims were viewed in the deep medical research and clinical trial fields. I'm really channeling a conversation from ~7 months ago before anyone knew this docu existed

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as I understand it, the more apt analogy with a 3D printer would be if you supplied a printer with material to create an inch tall contraption and said it could print a 3 foot tall contraption moreso than a 'how do you do it' problem.

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That's exactly right. She completely misunderstands and misrepresented how blood samples and testing work and quantities needed to do it. Just a patently fraudulent claim.

I won't pretend to say how a neuroscientist viewed the claims, but they're not working with samples in the same way or volume my wife is, who is a clinical pathologist. My wife called bull**** on Theranos from the beginning.

The analogy up above is dumb. But to take that analogy further and ignoring the sampling issue… if you don't have the hardware, or the software, or the interface, or the cloud connection, or the AI…. Then what the **** would have actually been invented? Plus, you can't "train AI" on one person's or one clinic's datasets.

She never actually invented anything. She had an "idea" for a blood testing machine, partly based on this "drop of blood" concept, but she never accepted the fact that her idea was simply not possible. There is simply NO WAY that a single machine could test for the hundreds of different compounds in blood and/or do it with a sample size of only a drop. That's just not how analytical chemistry works.

It was the same as patenting time travel or a machine that can turn coal into gold. Sure, you can dream it up in your head, and maybe even get a patent for it, but that doesn't mean you can actually build a device that does what you say it can do.

Had she simply taken investor money under the guise of needing it to fund research to develop this machine of hers, that would have been ok. It was still a terrible idea, but people with more money than sense invest in stupid things all the time.

Where she went off the rails was saying the machine ACTUALLY performed the tests and produced the results in the way she claimed. This was NEVER true. I think the one version of the machine that was built could perform one specific type of test (according to Tyler Schultz that was immunoassays), which is pretty well known chemistry (ie, she didn't develop anything new) and that one test is not appropriate for the HUNDREDS of tests she claimed the unit could run. Also, this unit never even worked very well for the one test it did run.

Yet she managed to con her way into Walgreens stores, claiming her miracle device was going to revolutionize healthcare.

If you followed the story, when they started taking samples of patient blood, they were taking way more than just the finger ***** nanotainer, because, by that point, they knew the tiny volume wasn't enough.

On top of that, they were sending the blood samples back to the Theranos lab where employees were running the standard tests using standard equipment on them. The very same tests that a Quest or Labcorp would run.

The Edison device became a prop used for nothing more than to deceive people into thinking they had a real, working, analytical device. It really wasn't much more than an empty box.

She simply has NO knowledge of how any of these tests are actually performed - because she dropped out of Stanford after one year! There is no way that, after 2 semesters of classes and a few months working as a student laboratory assistant she had the scientific and technical knowledge to actually build a device that analyzes a drop of blood for hundreds of different analytes.

Chemists and engineers get PhDs and work for years - decades even - to make small improvements in this area of research. And yet this 19 year old college drop out managed to convince people (including herself) that SHE is the expert with the knowledge who is going to revolutionize healthcare?!?

She has never had anything more than just a very creative imagination.

TXTransplant said:

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She has never had anything more than just a very creative imagination.

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Hardest working woman in biochemistry!

Saw this Letterboxd review and it taps into why the Nathan fielder experience is so amazing. Anything is possible. No boundary is safe. This was me as well on the edge of my seat multiple times:

there were like six separate times i thought nathan fielder and elizabeth holmes were about to ****

Interesting - I never once thought that, at all

That scene was definitely uncomfortable, but I totally read it as a power struggle. I think they were challenging each other (in their own weird ways) to see who would flinch first.

Fantastic movie. All parties manipulating each other and Fielder ultimately manipulating the audience IMO. Never seen anything like it.

Yesterday, I attended the Austin Healthcare Summit. One of the premier sponsors of the luncheon was "Betterway Blood Testing, by Babson Diagnostics". Their president took the stage for about 5 minutes to introduce an upcoming panel, and gave a short commercial about their company, which provides "affordable fingertip collection" for blood testing.

I can not imagine a more horrific time to work for this company, no matter what they are actually doing and how legitimate it is. It felt like the entire room stopped breathing as this guy gave his pitch.

Saw it Friday. Really well done. Put me in the group that wants to hear more from her dad. "So, sir, now that we have a few minutes while Billy washes his dong, let's get back to that rape you mentioned…"

I think she's a broken individual from some sort of early teen/adulthood trauma and her mechanism to deal with life now is attaching herself to controlling, abusive guys and essentially make herself a tool/partner for them. She's not a victim of these guys. She's not crazy. But she is busted.

On another note, I'm a fan of Seyfried's work going back to Big Love, but count me as one that didn't entirely love how she came off here. Not terrible and nothing to do with the Charlie Kirk stuff, but as it played out, I didn't care for the "it's television" shield. Felt a bit "their **** stinks but mine doesn't for a lame reason". This will sound dickish, but she's not educated either and it felt like that came thru the longer it went on.

Quote:

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On another note, I'm a fan of Seyfried's work going back to Big Love, but count me as one that didn't entirely love how she came off here. Not terrible and nothing to do with the Charlie Kirk stuff, but as it played out, I didn't care for the "it's television" shield. Felt a bit "their **** stinks but mine doesn't for a lame reason". This will sound dickish, but she's not educated either and it felt like that came thru the longer it went on.

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It's Friday evening of broad opening, so we're past spoiler tags. On you if you're clicking on something you're gonna see later.

Seyfried had a legit perspective, given The Dropout, that no one else (besides Fielder over 4 years) really did. What she was asked to do as a human being to describe, then re-enact a person she didn't know-was all crazy. And I'd bet a billion dollars she made more money of The Dropout than this.

I don't see how she didn't come off well given what she was asked to do by Fielder.

Spoiler tags should be used.

But you're also an absolute idiot if you're reading a thread about a movie that's already released and hoping not to get spoiled.

Both can be true.

Ok, whatever, but coming to thread a week later and expecting not to see spoilers is dumb AF. But I guess that's how she duped the world as long as she did. Lots of em.

It was only out in limited release last week. This weekend is its first wide weekend, where everyone can finally see it. I would use spoiler tags until at least the end of the weekend if not for the next week or so. Then, starting next Thursday? Spoilers can be fair game.

It was in 900 theaters and every decent sized city in Texas. Let's not get carried away on how limited. No, I don't think it has been seen by everyone, but I would hope people that haven't seen it would be smart enough to avoid a thread discussing a movie that was released all across the state.

I'm just not sure what people are expecting to read when they come to the thread of a movie that has been released. What's the line between a "spoiler" vs "discussion of the movie"? We can post "It was great. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats" and then any discussion of what actually happens is a spoiler? Because if that's the case, about 80% of this thread for 7 days should be tagged. Or a couple of folks have selectively decided one appearance is a spoiler, which really isn't much of a spoiler.

I'd add that anyone familiar with Fielder, especially his recent stuff on HBO, should have suspected some sort of reenactment was going to get baked in at some point. He loves that kind of thing. Saw it last Friday and as soon as a certain someone showed up (which I've seen this certain someone discussed all over online this past week), I was thinking - okay, here's his angle to it.

Yeah the big reveal/appearance is one of the top surprises of the picture

TCTTS said:

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I do.

I had absolutely no idea, and the feeling/surprise I felt when they first cut to that person was damn near euphoric. If you know Fielder's work, you know instinctively/instantly what it means for the rest of the movie, and it's just an incredible moment. Our entire theater literally gasped.

To say it makes no difference is ridiculous.

Can you still enjoy the movie knowing the spoiler going in? Of course. But not knowing elevates the experience that much more, and I don't understand people who are nonchalant about taking that away from others just because they don't want to use spoiler tags.

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You're just being over-dramatic as you're prone to be at times.

I didn't say it didn't make a difference. It's just not an "Oh my God" kind of moment.