Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud
Oct 16, 2026 · 29 min · 14 segments
Comedian Nathan Fielder and filmmaker Lance Oppenheim have teamed up for a documentary about Theranos founder and notorious fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. Today on Commotion, film critic Adam Nayman…
Elamin AbdelmahmoudHost
Adam NaymanGuest
Alyssa BereznakGuest
Chandler LevackGuestUh, Chandler, I'm gonna start with you because listen, the quickest way I think to describe this movie is it's a documentary that follows Elizabeth Holmes on the last few days before she checks in for her prison sentence.
Uh, again, I'm gonna say in this conversation we're not gonna spoil anything, but I'm having a hard time talking about the experience of watching this film.
What, what, what do you tell people about what you just witnessed? Like, how do you, how do you contextualize the thing?
I mean, I'm still processing just, like I think the rest of America, I [laughs] like don't know how to feel about this movie.
It's crazy to me, um, that it got me, that it, it's this level of like raw and cinematic and provocative and strange and kind of like a heightened, you know, episode of The Rehearsal live at its like highest quality, but also I really think it's like the movie of the year.
I think like w- I should say without s- any spoilers at all, this is going to be the conversation for weeks on end now that this movie's out.
Alyssa, I think before we get into all of this, can you just remind us, you have the, the honor, the indignity of reminding us who exactly Elizabeth Holmes is?
She was the founder and CEO of Theranos, um, which was a health tech company that created the device called the Edison.
The Edison, they claimed, could do a wide range of medical tests with only a small finger prick's worth of blood, and the idea is you could eliminate the burden of needles and the pain of taking a lot of blood out.
Um, those claims led the company to be valued at something like $9 billion at the, at the height of its hype.
Um, and Holmes was a really public lauded figure who posed for a lot of magazine covers, and often in a black turtleneck like the one Steve Jobs wore.
We, we love these heroes when they come about, um, but we also love to tear them down when things fall apart, and that happened when a Wall Street Journal reporter named John Carreyrou, um, published an investigation that essentially said that the Edison didn't do all those things that they said it did.
Uh, Chandler, I'm gonna start with you because listen, the quickest way I think to describe this movie is it's a documentary that follows Elizabeth Holmes on the last few days before she checks in for her prison sentence.
Uh, again, I'm gonna say in this conversation we're not gonna spoil anything, but I'm having a hard time talking about the experience of watching this film.
What, what, what do you tell people about what you just witnessed? Like, how do you, how do you contextualize the thing?
I mean, I'm still processing just, like I think the rest of America, I [laughs] like don't know how to feel about this movie.
It's crazy to me, um, that it got me, that it, it's this level of like raw and cinematic and provocative and strange and kind of like a heightened, you know, episode of The Rehearsal live at its like highest quality, but also I really think it's like the movie of the year.
I think like w- I should say without s- any spoilers at all, this is going to be the conversation for weeks on end now that this movie's out.
Alyssa, I think before we get into all of this, can you just remind us, you have the, the honor, the indignity of reminding us who exactly Elizabeth Holmes is?
She was the founder and CEO of Theranos, um, which was a health tech company that created the device called the Edison.
The Edison, they claimed, could do a wide range of medical tests with only a small finger prick's worth of blood, and the idea is you could eliminate the burden of needles and the pain of taking a lot of blood out.
Um, those claims led the company to be valued at something like $9 billion at the, at the height of its hype.
Um, and Holmes was a really public lauded figure who posed for a lot of magazine covers, and often in a black turtleneck like the one Steve Jobs wore.
We, we love these heroes when they come about, um, but we also love to tear them down when things fall apart, and that happened when a Wall Street Journal reporter named John Carreyrou, um, published an investigation that essentially said that the Edison didn't do all those things that they said it did.
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