Why Would I Deceive You?
Elizabeth Holmes’s line ‘Why would I deceive you?’ became a meme by way of the trailer for Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary You Can See Everything. Whether or not you’ve seen the film, this 2023 New York Times profile is superb reading alongside it (it’s paywalled; an unpaywalled copy is here).
What it captures better than almost anything is the uncanny interior experience of meeting a genuinely persuasive con artist: feeling yourself want to be persuaded even as you know it’s a con. It pairs beautifully with Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, that unsettling classic on the seductions running both ways between an interviewer and their subject.
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