Alex Gibney on Theranos, Fraudsters and Visionaries

and everyone else is wrong. To persist through impossible difficulties because you believe your goal is grand and worthy, even a noble pursuit. It might even require lying to nonbelievers, at least at times. I used to think that the characters at the heart of white collar fraud or stories of business gone wrong were different. I thought that if you did bad things, then it was because you knowingly set out to do what you knew were bad things.

But Enron made me realize that that's not always the case. In covering these stories over the last decade or so, I've seen this time and time again. These stories are a mixture of self delusion, rationalization, ego, and yes, often some greed, venality and even corruption, But the mixture is the key, and the fraud start, just like the visionary usually justifies it all in the name of a noble pursuit. Think about Enron. This isn't the story of a company

that's set out to defraud investors. Rather, CEO Jeff Skelling tried to hide the company's weaknesses because both his ego and the company survival needed a high stock price, but also because he believed eventually could make it all work and he might have a business called Enron Broadband was really just Netflix ahead of its time. This is true

in so many cases. A business leader thinks, if he or she can just get through this bad quarter and not lose investors by telling the truth, it'll all work out in the end, And of course that end justifies the means, which brings us to Elizabeth Holmes and Tharonos. Holmes was supposed to be a visionary. She wanted to

disrupt reinvent the blood test. She bragged that her company was developing a method for running hundreds of lab tests from a single drop of blood, employing a machine called the Edison that used all sorts of trade secrets to run the tests. Should say repeatedly that Tharonos's goal was basically a religious calling and that she had one existential purpose.

But when Thoroness failed to develop a machine that could do what she had claimed it could do, the company literally hid that fact, performing tests in what was essentially a secret lab. Even the biggest cynics don't think she set out to commit fraud. So here's my question, when did the visionary become the fraudster? At what point, if ever, did Elizabeth Holmes admit to herself that she was deceiving not only investors but patients about the quality of their

all important blood work. I'm thrilled to be here now with filmmaker Alex Gibney, who I first met around fifteen years ago when he decided to make a documentary out of the book i'd co authored on Enron. That documentary, The Smartest Guise in the Room, was nominated for an

Academy Award in two thousand and six. We lost to the March of the Penguins, a fact that I have still not gotten over anyway, Alex has done a ton of other films in the intervening years, from Lance Armstrong to the Dirty Money series he did for Netflix, all of which in some ways address this question of the

line between the visionary and the fraudster. Of course, none more so than his recent film about Holmes, which is called The Inventor Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Elizabeth Holmes famously named her machine the Edison, and in the movie you make the decision to prominently feature Edison. Let's start with the parallels between Elizabeth Holmes and Thomas Edison.

He was the first sort of self styled business superstar, that is to say, businessman as celebrity, and that ended up being very useful to him in terms of expanding his empire and also getting capital because people were not investing in a machine, they were investing in him, and so that idea of investing in a person kind of starts with Edison really in terms of the whole business paradigm.

And there's one other element too, which is that Edison had a vision of where he wanted to get to, but along the way he cut a lot of corners and he was pretty deceptive. We can get into the specifics, but he lied to people, let's just be honest. He lied to people about where he was at figuring it all work out in the end when he finally got there. He was the original fake it team, make it guy, and he did make it. It did work out for him,

it did. I mean, particularly with the incandescent light bulb, and obviously with a record player and many other inventions weren't necessarily but he took full credit for Now we think of him as like, Wow, how could have invented all those things? He didn't. I neither did Elizabeth. But he was the paradigm setter in terms of all of that.

So not only in taking credit for ideas that weren't necessarily his, but also in pretending that things were working when they hadn't quite clicked yet in reality, that's absolutely right. So there's been some criticism of your Tharonis movie because people say you were soft on Elizabeth because you didn't call it out an out premeditated fraud. But it was interesting Tyler Schultz, the famed whistleblower in this story, he said,

does she realize she's lying? I don't know. And you've said that people who are good at telling a fraudulent story are good because they believe it's true. So what's the line with Elizabeth? Do you think it's the simplest premeditated fraud. No, I don't. But where I find it a little odd in terms of the criticism is that I think that the fact that she didn't know that she was crossing lines is not an excuse. Really, it's

actually more bad news than good news. I think it's worse than if she had been a kind of Bernie made Off like character because she was able to lie more effectively because she really believed in her mission, and that is the scarier thing here. So her belief was an explanation but not an excuse. Correct. Does that go back to Edison too in a way? I think so. I mean I think that Edison believed he was going to get there, So what difference did it make if

he lied along the way. And when I say he lied, I mean in the case of the light bulb, he faked demonstrations. The lightbulb wouldn't stay on as long as he needed it to. The filaments were melting, so he faked these demonstrations for people, you know, always shut the light off just before it blew up in his face. And also he would give reporters stock in his company, you know, as if that wasn't enough of an incentive in order to get them to write good and glowing

stories about him. So ultimately he got there, but along the way he was he was dishonest. So there's Elizabeth Holmes giving the famous lawyer David Boys stock in her company, and there's Elizabeth Holmes and thereinos with the room called Jurassic Park where they ran the laboratory, the secret room where they ran the laboratory tests on old machines because they're much hype new machines weren't working yet. So what's

the difference between her and Thomas Edison? Is it just luck at the end of the day that he was able to make it after faking it and she didn't. Part of it is that, in other words, you could say that if she was working on a new kind of light bulb, maybe that would be more similar to Edison. I think the really problematic part of Elizabeth Holmes is that she was working in the area of medical science and she was developing lab tests that we're going to

be used on real people. In fact, we're used on real people, and yet the data was notoriously bad, and so she had a double problem. On the one hand, she was defrauding investors, albeit not the she was defrauding patients and that was a bridge too far. Another was if she had spent her whole time using investor money just to keep practicing and keep devising new prototypes and never went to market, I think the judgment on her

would be far more kind. So maybe the lesson here is if you're going to be a visionary, do it in a field that doesn't affect people's lives, so that if you if you so that if you do have to fake it for a while. Maybe that's where the line is, right, it's in the field you choose, not so much in the personality type. Yeah, I think so. Steve Jobs lied. He was a notorious liar in some ways, and actually there are a lot of real similarities with

him and Elizabeth Holmes too. They were both great storytellers, and I think Edison also shared that their ability to tell a compelling tale about their business was terribly important. And does that start with the person themselves? You've described it less that she wanted to be a paradigm shifter. Does that visionary characteristics start with how you define yourself and then lead into how you tell the stories about yourself. Yes, it's like you set yourself a goalpost way out here,

not just for your company, but for yourself. This is who I want to be. And Elizabeth wanted to be known as a hugely successful and wealthy business person and also as an inventor. Both those things were terribly important. But because her dad had some experience with NGOs in addition to a brief career at Enron, she also wanted to do good or to be seen as doing good, So all those things were very important to her. So I think that was who she imagined herself to be.

And if things along the way contradicted that, so long as she fixed her gaze on the dream rather than the more grubby reality, everything was fine. Isn't that interesting because both the visionary and the fraud star, in that way of thinking about it, half to st it off with this larger than life sort of vision of themselves, right, which isn't a sense of fraud until you've proven it. But the visionary manages to get there and the fraud

stare fails along the way. That's right. And as Danna Really, the behavioral economist, says in the film, we wouldn't want to live in a world where people didn't overpromise. Right. I've thought about that a lot, and even for those of us on the other side of it, that being reflexively cynical is actually as bad as blind belief, right,

And you need romantics on both sides. You need the romantics are who want to be visionaries, and you need the romantics who are willing to believe in them, because sometimes you imagine a possibility and you don't quite know how you're going to get there when you imagine that possibility, but you're determined to get there and convinced that you can. My stepfather, who was a minister, used to say, I love the recklessness of faith. First you drump and then

you grow wings. That is wonderful. So I want to try to explore this idea of when it might be that Elizabeth crossed the line and in her own mind by which did her belief in herself ever, ever, ever fall? And so you start off with this original idea that getting poked with a needle was just so horrible that it required a hold new machine where you wouldn't have to do that. She believed in that, right, for sure,

I think she did. I mean, but I think that's kind of like projecting her own fears on everybody else. But I do think that she really did have a fear of needles, and she thought, Okay, if I have it, a lot of people do, and this will be part of my mission. And she definitely believed initially. But then you think about some of the specifics and the Farnos story, as we touched upon earlier, this idea that there was this room called Jurassic Park where the real testing was

going on because the new machines. The edisons werenaurs right testing on the dinosaurs because the new machines weren't working, so they had to do these tests manually. And there was this, you know, Tyler Saltz's famous great quote about the tiled world and the carpeted world. In the carpeted world where executives were and then the tiled world where all the messy reality was happening. Can you have those juxtapositions and be Elizabeth and still not know that you're lying?

I think what must happen is that you're able to lie to yourself in the moment, even though if you were to sit down late at night, you would know and recognize that what you had done is just told a lie, but you convince yourself that it's okay because you're doing it for a good cause. But in the moment, you have to believe that you're not telling a lie,

because otherwise you can't be an effective liar. I mean, that's where the really strange experiment that dan Arielli does comes into play, because he does this experiment with the dice, and the idea being that people bet on the roll of the dice, and they're allowed to hold back a certain amount of information so that they roll the dice and they get paid. If it's a one, they get one dollar six dollars. But they're told you can bet or get paid on either the bottom or the top,

but don't tell me. I don't tell the experiment or which one it is, so that's a secret, right, and then they just write it down. Well, over time, statistically it comes out that when the people report their results, they're cheating. And when they put them on a light detector test and they're getting the money, they almost always fail the light detector tests. But here's the most interesting part. When they do it for a charity i e. A

higher purpose, they not only cheat more. See that's where the bad news comes in, but even more bad news. The light detector can't detect the lie, so they must believe that it's okay for them to lie, and therefore convince themselves in the moment that they're not lying, even though strictly speaking, they know that they are. So the human capacity for rationalization and self delusion is almost endless, and it really is endless if the human being also

believes in that their goal is this noble pursuit. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think also if you believe that you are right in some fundamental way, then no amount of facts are going to get in your way. I mean, you know better than I. On the Enron story, you know, I used to imagine, like, what was it the Jeff Skilling thought in the middle of the night when they were so hopelessly in debt there was no way they were ever going to get out of it.

But I think he rationalized that, like a ball team down by twenty runs in the bottom of the ninth, it was theoretically possible they could score twenty one runs in the bottom of the ninth and win. Right. What I find so fascinating about this is that if you're trying to figure out a roadmap for detecting the difference

between the visionary and the fraudster. This is leading us in a direction that says, actually they're even more alike than that you'd think, because this idea of having this big world changing goal is what you want a visionary to have, but it's also the hallmark of the fraudster who can get other people to believe. So instead of differentiation, they're sounding more and more similar to me and think

they're very similar. And I think that it's really the whole idea of the end justifies the means, which is not only their own rationalization, but also what we forgive as as a society or don't forgive, depending on whether they get to the end zone. So John carry Row, who collaborated with you on the film and obviously wrote the great book Bad Blood, argues that there was this moment of knowing fraud when Paranus rolls out these blood tests through Walgreens and suddenly then this is live and

people's health as at stake. Do you think that that's a moment of knowing fraud or do you think even then she could have still been deceiving herself. I think she was deceiving herself. But I also think she knew that they were administering bad tests. She had heard it from enough people that if she wasn't checking, then there's something so much criminal negligence, right, or willful blindness. I

think she probably practiced willful blindness. But at the end of the day, you know, the responsible thing would have been to have said, Okay, well let's shut down then, right, But you couldn't shut down because she needed Walgreens on board in order to get more investment in order to keep the company alive. So she rationalized the behavior. But she certainly knew that the tests were no good. But even in the face of that knowledge, can you still

have not knowledge too? In other words, can you know but still convince yourself somehow it's it's okay, I'm just guessing. But based on what I know in terms of the experience of the subjects I've treated and also some of the scientists I've spoken to, I would say, yes, you can both know that you're lying and also deceive yourself that actually you're not. One of the things I thought about when I was doing this was the example of

Lance Armstrong. Yes, and Lance Armstrong from a practical perspective, would tell you, and certainly did tell his cohorts and ultimately told me that yes, he doped, but it was terribly important to cancer survivors that he say things like, how dare you say that I's a cancer survivor would

ever use performance enhancing drugs. But he would say that with a great deal of conviction, as if he wasn't lying because he was telling them something so important that was helping him to raise lots of money to cater to their concerns, that it was okay, even though he would get down off whatever kind of pr platform he was speaking on at that time and maybe go do

a bag of blood. So again, it was the noble pursuit he wasn't He was able to say to himself he wasn't doping on behalf of himself and his own performance. He was doping or not telling the truth about doping in order to do this greater good. In the case of Lance Armstrong, I think he figured, look, being a realist, if I want to win, I'm going to have to dope because everybody else is doping. But I can't just

say I'm doping because then I won't win. And it's really important to all these cancer survivors that I win because it gives them hope and the way I'm raising hundreds of millions of dollars for them, So isn't that more important? What do you think about the role of charisma and all of this, because when we think about Elizabeth Holmes or Jeff Scaling or Lance Armstrong, all extraordinarily charismatic people, what role do you think that plays a

play a role in convincing others? Do they also turn their charisma on themselves? Well? I think so, and I think they end up believing their own bullshit. That's a critical component. But this goes back to the whole storyteller idea. I think part of being charismatic is putting yourself at the center, just like Edison did, of a drama in which you are the main character, and telling that story in a compelling way is what gives you that charisma

so that people want to follow you. You know, if you put lines of code on a piece of paper, you know you can believe that some people are going to sign up for that, but no, what they're really going to sign up for is a vision. A vision as expressed by a visionary, and Steve Jobs was also

one of those characters. So, yeah, is hugely important because it turns out that even high octane, sophisticated investors end up putting down hundreds of millions of dollars for people who tell compelling stories rather than really demonstrate the value of their product. In a kind of it's actually refreshing in a way that in this increasingly technological world, the power of narrative remains. Thus it has ever been good

for us storytellers. Yeah, right, there's something encouraging about that. So I was thinking about the role of the believers, right, because there's the role of the visionary or the fraud star. But then there's also they wouldn't get anywhere if it weren't for the role those of us who are willing to believe play in this. And I love this from Maria Konikova's book The Confidence Game. She wrote, when we step into a magic show, we come in actively wanting

to be fooled. We want deception to cover our eyes and make our world a tiny bit more fantastical, more awesome than it was before. And the magician in many ways uses the exact same approaches as the confidence man only without the destruction of the Conen's game. And so what makes people believe? Do you think Elizabeth Holmes famously raised billion dollars from really wealthy investors. What makes people like that who should know better? What makes them marks?

I think it's hardwired in our psychology. I mean, the fact is that we are not really supremely rational beings. We're guided by snap judgments that we like to make based on our revolutionary history. But it doesn't always service well when it comes to analyzing complex problems like whether or not to invest one hundred million dollars in a company. But the believers, you know, there's another phrase, it's weird

the way you know. You do projects, and I'm sure you find the same thing, but you do stories and then they add up in ways that you don't expect. I did a film about the Church of Scientology, and one of the subheads of the book on which the film was based, Lawrence Wright's book Going Clear, was the Prison of Belief. And the idea of the prison of belief is a really interesting one. It's a prison really with no bars and locke. But you're in prison because

you need to believe. And I think for people who are believing in Enron for a long time, you know, because nobody could really figure out how they made their money, or the people who believe in Lance Armswer or the people who believed in Elizabeth Holmes. Once you believe, it becomes very hard to undo that belief, and so much so in the poignantly in the Paramo's story, you know, Tyler Schultz is going to his grandfather and saying, you know, Grandpa,

it's fraud there. And he had become a prisoner of his own belief, so he wouldn't even believe now his own grandson. That's such a compelling example. And do you think, just as it is for the visionary, turn fraud start for the believers too. The answer is way more complicated than greed, right as the prison of belief would demonstrate. I think so, because sometimes you see people hanging on even as the company is going down. You know it's

it's going to turn around. And it's the classic if you think about investment, particularly for the average sucker like say me, you know, I can recall investing in a company and it would do really well initially, and that would give me a taste, and then it would start to sink below the original purchase price and sink further and further and further, and thinking, yeah, but it was so high once. Surely it's going to go back there against all reason. The prison of belief, Yes, the prison

of belief. I love that phrase. And do you think too that the big lie is more likely to make us suckers than the little lie? In other words, maybe because the romanticism it's associated with the big lie, or just the fact that once you have the big lie, it's just so unconceivable that that could be a lie. And Elizabeth Holmes, I feel like it is the ultimate example of that. I think that's right. And she was going to do it big, and that was part of

the vision that I think everybody else invested in. So rather than an incremental change, she had to be a shape shifter, she had to be a paradigm shifter. So that's what all those people were investing in. They were going to hit the grand slam home run. It was so much more compelling than making six percent on your money in a ball bearing factory. It's fascinating when you think about all the things that have fooled us in

the business world. Bernie Madoff, Enron, even the global financial crisis. It just was inconceivable that that could be a lie, right, that the big banks didn't know what they were doing, That Enron, the celebrated energy company, could actually be a fraud, that Bernie Madoff could be running a Ponzi scheme. And so the big lie is so inconceivable. It's what undergirds everything. And yet you realize when the big lie is uncovered, suddenly what's left is not some sort of elegantly constructed

superstructure of equations. It's just pure belief. And when the belief is gone, the whole thing crashes like tulips, just like the Emperor behind the curtain. Right once and once again. What role do you think genderrett played in the Elizabeth's Home story specifically, but maybe even an Enron in belief, and that the skeptic fellas gardener at least one of the skeptics prominently female, Erica Chung Tou, although not the only one. Then the board all believers, all old white males.

I think it did play a huge role, I think particularly for her board and possibly also for David Boyce. I mean, I think that you have these old men who were enchanted by a younger woman. And I think that in some ways, wouldn't it be great if there was of female inventor, an entrepreneur who would be a

top male dominated silicon valley. So the attraction who was married with a rationalization of doing good, Well, then that's fascinating because not only did Elizabeth have the rationalization that she was doing and good, but the people who believed in her also felt good about themselves, and so you had the double whammy and effect. Indeed, and I think also it was one of the things she's a storyteller.

It was one of the things that actually enabled her to get further with the journalists who are otherwise very skeptical journalists Kenneletta and Roger Parloff who put her on the cover of Fortune. You know, I think they both saw a story that would be a really great story. Yeah, because so different do I have to write again about how male dominated his silicon valley and how women can't cut a break. Now we've got the counterexample. You'd want to invest in that story, and I think they were

invested in that story. It just turned out not to be true. Yeah, I've said to Roger that If any journalist looks at what happened to him and thinks, oh, that would never happen to me, they're fooling them something, because any one of us could have fallen for that. In reality, I fell for it in the Armstrong line. I mean, I came very close to sing a film that let's just say, it would not have been good

for me. Did you really? Yes? That film took five years to make, and one of the reasons it did was right on the eve of about to releasing a film that would have been more of a praise poem, shall we say, all of the real story started tumbling out. Wow, isn't that interesting that we all have that capacity? And I've absolutely been there too. What do you think it is? Because now you've covered these stories also from Enron to Therainos,

where there are whistleblowers. What's the quality of the person who doesn't believe when the rest of us do. That's a really good question, And it also makes me think about the Enron example, because I remember going out on the stump for the Enron film and always being asked two questions, one about this fraudster loopie who got away with it, but also one about the whistleblower, Sharon Watkins, and there was a tremendous amount of resentment toward her, as if to say, who does she think she is?

Because whistleblowers show us up, and that means that there's something about the whistleblower that doesn't go along, and I think that has to be recognized. I think in the case of Threnos, you know, two of the whistleblowers were very young, and so they weren't as compromised by the

need for a salary, pension whatever. But also I think we're a little bit more shocked at the disparity between the bullshit and the reality, whereas if you've been around in the workplace for a while, you see it more often. And they were coming in from the outside. I mean, I think Sharon Watkins. The interesting thing at Enron was that she left Andy Fastow's department, the CFO at Enron, and then came back. And when she came back, she realized how far things had gone because she had got

outside for long. It's as if you're too immersed in something, so it's being taken outside of that prison of belief, or not being in that prison for long enough that really allows you to be there, but it takes a huge amount of strength and inner strength. That's what it so impressed me about Eric Ka Chong and Tyler Schultz

in the Pharaoh's story. They were young, and all these experts are telling them, no, you're wrong, senior figures who also happen to be there, in one case their grandfather who is the former Secretary of State, saying no, you're wrong, but they stuck to their guns. I think back to Enron and Jeff Skilling and the Emperor's New Clothes, and it's the child who sees and is willing to say it's And with Jeff Skilling it was intellectual intimidation, right.

Everybody was so afraid to say I don't get it when everybody else clearly did. And here you had younger kids who are willing to say, no, actually, I really don't get it. And so maybe there's that necessary component of being an outside or somehow who doesn't have as much to lose, who isn't as invested in the system

as it is. That is a necessary quality for them a blower hugely and sometimes a certain amount of discontent, because if you're contented, you're more apt to go along and I think we have to understand too, that there's a tremendous social and I think probably interior psychological pressure

for all of us to go along. Absolutely, you know, I think that was one of the lessons of the Milgram experiment and some of the other psychological experiments done Within a certain context, it's very hard to break free, whether we call it the prison of belief or a sense of going along with others and saying no, no no, no, this is not right. I'm telling you it's not right, even in the face of people who use that bluff, which makes you extremely insecure. Come back to that quality,

because that's something Jeff Skelling certainly had. I used to call it intellectual intimidation, right, the ability to make other people feel like their intellect was just smaller than his, so you could put your trust in his. Did Elizabeth had that too? She did, and Tyler would speak to that she had both the carrot and the stick. He talked about the difference between the tiled world and the

carpeted world. And he would be in the tile world, convinced that everything was terrible, nothing worked, and then he'd go up and speak to Elizabeth. Then, after fifteen minutes talking to her. She'd be so compelling and so confident that he'd go back down on the stairs down to the tile world. They think, Yeah, it's great, I'm part of a mission. I'm going to change the world. Until he got back to the tile world, he thought, oh my god, what happened. So there's that charisma that you

talked about. But I think in the Thearaonos story, the flip side that kind of intimidation is the way that Elizabeth used David Boyce. Yes, because if anybody started to sound like they were going to go public with things that were wrong at tharon Nos, David Boyce was using the power of the legal system and the NDA is that some of these people had signed to threaten them

with financial ruin if they breathed the word. You know, a lot of companies do that, and they use the NDA in a way to run her against the occasional ethical qualms that people may have. Is that one way do you think that you might be able to tell the difference between the visionary and the fraudster, or be able to tell when the visionary has tipped over the line into fraud. Is the level of retaliation against those

who differ from the party line. There's an interesting lesson here from Steve Jobs, even though he would famously retaliate to the end of his days against journalists who wrote

negative stories. Maybe my distinction isn't so good after all. No, but I would say this, there's an aspect of Jobs that did learn that lesson inside his company, because after the you know, he got tossed out of Apple and then the disastrous experience at next he surrounded himself with a small group of people at Apple two point zero who were not only willing to tell him no to his face, but whom he also rewarded for doing just that.

So I think Steve learned on the job. So maybe that's a way to prospectively tell the difference between the visionary and the fraudster. Maybe the visionary you can trust is someone who has failed before, because maybe they're going to be able to recognize the signs and know themselves

when they need to stop believing. The head of Toyota used the same mistakes are precious, And now that's a visionary you want to believe in, because he's not pretending that mistakes don't exist in his just in time automated system. He's seeking them out because he knows it makes him

better and willing to acknowledge when belief isn't enough. Right. So, another moment I've thought about it theirness that is fascinating is this moment where they all where I guess a John carry Rout pieces come out and they all chant fuck you, Carrie Root. And so if the character of the whistleblower is really interesting, what about all the people who are inside who aren't whistleblowers? And I guess it goes back to what we are talking about, just the

prison of belief. But still, I mean that the whistleblower is so rare, and so many other people who could have seen what they didn't blow the whistle. How do you how do you think about that? It is really hard to think about. And it also teaches you what a powerful force it is, this idea of being on a mission, and how that can be so badly abused, because on the one hand, you do want to believe

in a mission. That is what motivates people. But in that moment when Carrie Rou's article came out, that's how she rallied the troops, or that's how Sonny rallied the troops to say fuck you, to scream fuck you in unison, not only at Carrirou but also at the other labs. But it's hard to reckon with the idea that you would see this devastating article in the Wall Street Journal

and not engage in some doubt. And that I think is the larger beginning of a lesson in these stories about fraudsters, is that when you believe too much, when you want it too much, things can get very dangerous, very quickly. And that proves in a way that the visionary can also be unwilling to admit to the because we all are unwilling to admit to ourselves in the face of clear evidence, and so you can see it

there right. Yes, A really important aspect of these fraud stories is I think there is a tendency to want to look at the fraudsters and say I am good and they are bad, without understanding that we are all hardwired to be susceptible, either to tell lies or to believe in lies, because it's a human nature, and so some people are more extreme in terms of where they

are on the spectrum, shall we say, of fraud. But I think the idea of Exceptionalizing Elizabeth Holmes or Jeff Skilling or Steve Jobs makes a terrible mistake because then it just means like, well, the way to stop fraud is to pick out those few fraudsters and make sure

that we remove them from the system. But there are little bits of fraud that all of us commit every day, and that's why, you know, a system of checks and balances is more useful because we all know, or we should be able to accept, that we all commit fraud.

And back to your earlier point, if we were to ex out the possibility for those fraudsters would also be exing out the possibilities for those real visionaries, right, because you need that human capacity for belief and the idea that's going to transform the world, or the world would

never go anywhere. That's right. A lot of these things that we're talking about that are negatives in terms of aspects of our minds which allow us to believe in fraud or allow us to commit fraud, there are many ways in which those things are hugely useful and powerful. So it's all about how we reckon with that. Well, thank you so much for being here. This was really fun. Thanks Bethany great pleasure. I think a lot about this

great f Scott Fitzgerald quote. The true mark of genius is to be able to hold two competing thoughts in your mind at the same time and not go crazy. Maybe the difference between the visionary and the fraudster is the difference between the person who can do that and the person who can't. I can't fail, I might fail. There is no try, As Yoda says, you can learn from try. Maybe that's the difference for all of us too.

Maybe we have to be willing to believe in the person with a dream who wants to transform the world or the world won't move. But we also have to be willing to believe that the big dream could become the big lie. So maybe the responsibility to be f Scott Fitzgerald's genius is actually a responsibility that belongs to all of us. Making a Killing is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes. My executive producers are Alison McLean, my Relation

and Megan Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason gambrel Our music is by Jed Flood special thanks to j the Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLean, Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve