You Can See Everything (2026)

I’m obsessed with the subjective nature of reality.

Neuroscience has something called predictive processing—a fancy way of saying your mind acts like a low-budget movie director, if you will and an editor, cutting together an objective reality using only the recycled stock footage of every belief, value and bad hangover you’ve collected along the way.

That means that two people can sit in the same theater, but they aren’t watching the same picture. One sees a world ripe with promise; the other sees a bleak, low-rent thriller.

You see Ed Wood as a hack. I see him as a genius.

And yet we are alone in a way, even when we’re in the same theater. What we see – in fact, even out of that theater – is for us only. I’ll give you an example: a few weeks ago, an uncomfortable incident happened at a work meeting. I took it hard and believed it was all about me. And that’s because so much of my predictive processing is waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something bad to happen. I often feel responsible for things I had nothing to do with, so being at the center of an issue can be like trying to escape a burning room. Dizziness, difficulty breathing, worry that everything is going to end.

Afterward, once I calmed down, I noticed the people who reached out to me. Some said that it was a good talk. Others were worried about me. Some wanted to commiserate. And still others thought it was no big deal.

Which of these statements are true?

All at once, none of them and all of them.

How do we know what’s real when our brains lie to us?

Most documentaries aren’t subjective.

If our own brains lie to us, what happens when multi-million-dollar filmmakers do it on purpose?

One of the most well-known is Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 film Super Size Me, but at its heart was an engine of sensationalized exaggeration and unrepeatable science. While Spurlock claimed that he ate over 5,000 calories a day exclusively from McDonald’s, independent researchers and journalists attempting to replicate his strict experiment failed to mirror his rapid weight gain and drastic liver deterioration.

Crucially, Spurlock refused to publish his food log, hiding his actual daily consumption from public scrutiny. Beyond the numbers, his severe liver damage mirrored classic markers of severe alcohol abuse rather than a high-fat diet. Later in life, he admitted that he dealt with chronic lifelong alcoholism.

The film presented a pre-engineered shock narrative masquerading as a public health warning, sacrificing scientific integrity for cinematic outrage.

Is it bad to eat at McDonald’s? Yes, if you eat the wrong things. No, you can always order a salad.

A few other examples: Disney’s White Wilderness won an Oscar. The film showed mass lemming suicides, cementing the belief that lemmings routinely leap off cliffs to their deaths.

Yet Encyclopedia Britannica says, “Lemmings do not commit suicide. However, this particular myth is based on some actual lemming behaviors. Lemmings have large population booms every three or four years. When lemming numbers become too high in one area, a large group will set out in search of a new home. Lemmings can swim, so if they reach a water obstacle, such as a river or lake, they may try to cross it. Inevitably, a few individuals drown. But it’s hardly suicide.”

Want the reality? The entire scene was staged. Filmmakers bought non-native lemmings from local Inuit children, brought them to Alberta, placed them on a turntable to film mass movement and physically pushed them off a cliff into a river to their deaths.

Even Making a Murderer, the Netflix show that tried to get to the truth of the case of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, who were framed by local law enforcement for the murder of Teresa Halbach, didn’t tell the whole truth.

The filmmakers left out key prosecution evidence, including Avery’s DNA under the hood latch of Halbach’s vehicle, his previous history of threatening behavior and the fact that Halbach had explicitly requested not to return to his property due to past inappropriate interactions.

Does it make him guilty? Maybe. Maybe not.

In fact, most court cases don’t determine if someone is telling the truth. When it comes to murder, the state has to prove that there is no reasonable doubt that someone was a killer. They could still be a murderer, but if you think about it, getting justice and getting the truth can often be two different things.

From Nanook of the North, completely staged by director Robert Flaherty, to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, with its misleading connections, spliced audio clips and exaggerated timelines, movies that pretend to be truthful are often anything but.

Orson Welles and Nathan Fielder

One of my favorite movies of all time, Orson Welles’s F for Fake, shares a deep thematic DNA with Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything (yes, I swear I’m getting to it).

Both use the documentary form to interrogate the nature of trickery, truth and the charlatans who manipulate perception. Connecting the two reveals how the machinery of visual deceit has evolved from mid-century art forgery to 21st-century personality cults.

Welles’ film centers on art forger Elmyr de Hory and author Clifford Irving (who forged Howard Hughes’s autobiography). It also focuses on Welles’ lifelong fascination with magic and how he went from doing sleight of hand to directing movies. He claims that “the camera is a machine for lying,” openly tricking the audience with fabricated sequences (like the Oja Kodar narrative) to prove how easily viewers surrender critical thinking when presented with cinematic authority.

In the same way that voting gives you the illusion of choice, the title You Can See Everything acts as an ironic echo of Welles’s central thesis. It’s the illusion of total access.

Welles warns the viewer that transparency in cinema is an illusion; the more a filmmaker claims to show you everything, the more likely you are being conned.

Documentation does not equal truth. It merely offers a more polished version of performance.

I’ve also been fascinated by Fielder’s work. What started with comedy bits on This Hour Has 22 Minutes got him a show on Comedy Central, Nathan for You. It was a silly idea. Nathan, an awkward business graduate with “really good grades,” helped real small-business owners boost their profits using absurd marketing schemes. Early episodes relied on high-concept visual gags and social discomfort—selling “Dumb Starbucks” to exploit parody law, marketing “poop-flavored” frozen yogurt for shock value or designing a soundproof child box for hotel rooms.

However, over its four-season run, Fielder quietly engineered one of the most remarkable narrative shifts in media history. What began as gross-out humor gradually grew to study the mechanics of human connection, performance and vulnerability.

This all culminated in a feature-length finale that blurred the line between comedy and existential truth. Fielder quickly realized an uncomfortable truth about human behavior: people will agree to almost anything to avoid an awkward social encounter.

As a result, the show’s focus shifted from the business owners to the lonely figures orbiting these schemes. Fielder began highlighting the desperate lengths people go to for fame, companionship or validation.

For example, in “The Hero,” he turned a shy man named Corey into a celebrity by faking a tightrope walk between two buildings. The episode wasn’t about that stunt. Instead, it was a study in identity theft and manufactured confidence.

Nathan himself—or rather, the onscreen persona of “Nathan”—became the focus, not the comedy. He was—or is—a man so lacking in basic social skills that he used television budgets and elaborate lies simply to forge a human connection.

The evolution peaked in the series finale, the 84-minute “Finding Frances.” Nathan sets out to help an elderly age-verification Bill Gates impersonator to track down his lost love from 50 years prior, Frances. As the search unfolds, the comedy falls away, leaving behind a raw, melancholic examination of regret, nostalgia and the fiction we build to justify our life choices.

To prepare Bill for his eventual reunion, Nathan constructed elaborate rehearsals – remember that — using hired actors. This meta-commentary reaches its climax when Nathan hires an escort, Maci, to simulate a romantic relationship for himself.

The scenes between Nathan and Maci are staggering in their vulnerability. Nathan is a man hiding behind a camera crew, a character and financial transactions, attempting to purchase the very thing his persona denies him: real intimacy. When Maci holds his hand or kisses him, the audience is left asking an unsettling question: Does it matter if the intimacy is paid for if the feeling experienced is real?

When Bill refers to her as a whore, and Nathan is upset, an action that colors how he saw the man, was this real?

By the time the final frames of “Finding Frances” roll—a drone camera pulling away from a hotel room as Nathan sits alone—the show had completed its transformation from a silly Comedy Central hit into one of the most profound documentaries on human isolation ever made.

I honestly thought it was the last thing he’d ever make. It was too true – or fake – and I wondered how anyone else could be conned by him again.

Rehearsing life

If “Finding Frances” showed that artificial setups could produce real emotion, his next work, The Rehearsal, took that discovery and pushed it further than I thought possible. In that show, Fielder offered everyday people the chance to practice difficult conversations or life milestones inside 1:1 scale replicas of real-world spaces (like a precise recreation of the Alligator Lounge bar in Brooklyn), using actors trained to anticipate every variable.

What starts as a tool to help a man confess a small lie about his educational background quickly mutates. Nathan launches a massive, months-long simulated parenting experiment with a woman named Angela, raising child actors from infancy to adulthood inside an Oregon farmhouse.

As the boundaries dissolve, Nathan became lost in his own simulation. He stepped into the role of the father himself, and when child actor Remy formed a real-world attachment to Nathan as a father figure, the ethical and emotional consequences hit hard.

Again, I had no idea how he’d go beyond this, but in the second season, he shifted the show’s focus from individual social anxiety to a massive, macro-level institution: preventing commercial airplane crashes by improving pilot communication.

Inspired by NTSB transcripts and Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) research, Nathan hypothesizes that many aviation disasters stem from social dynamics—specifically, first officers being too intimidated by authority or too afraid of awkward social friction to speak up when a captain makes a fatal error.

The same thing happens in operating rooms, where nurses and techs are often afraid to tell a doctor something is wrong or worse, that they are making a critical mistake.

Rather than helping one individual resolve a personal conflict, Season 2 used aviation safety as an allegory for human communication, examining how society’s fear of social awkwardness shows up everywhere.

Narrative vs. documentary

The Showtime series The Curse, co-created by Fielder and Benny Safdie and co-starring Emma Stone, served as the bridge between Fielder’s unscripted reality experiments and this movie. It moved his core themes entirely into scripted narrative television, proving that his critique of modern human performativity didn’t require real non-actors to feel excruciatingly real.

Fielder and Stone play Asher and Whitney Siegel, a newlywed couple filming a home-renovation show (Fliplanthropy) aimed at building eco-friendly “passive homes” in Española, New Mexico. They are obsessed with their image of progressive altruism, native allyship and moral purity.

Yet we learn that modern performative altruism (virtue signaling, gentrification disguised as philanthropy) operates identically to the fake business schemes in Nathan for You. Whitney’s smile to the camera is a staged performance designed to conceal self-serving ambition.

The shocking, surreal finale, where Asher literally loses gravity and floats into space, serves as the ultimate bridge in Fielder’s storytelling, as the world becomes so choked by artifice, performance and fake sincerity that physical reality itself ruptures.

Asher spent the entire series twisting his personality, suppressing his anger, giving away money and degrading himself just to stay attached to Whitney. He erased his own identity to become what he thought she wanted. The inverted gravity represents the logical conclusion of codependency: when you spend your life shrinking and contorting yourself for someone else, you eventually lose your anchor to reality entirely.

He even says, “If you didn’t want to be with me and I actually truly felt that, I’d be gone… You wouldn’t have to say it. I would feel it, and I would disappear.”

Without The Curse, the transition to a major film project like You Can See Everything would have been an abrupt leap. It proved he could direct high-caliber dramatic actors (Emma Stone) while retaining his signature style of excruciating social discomfort. It also deepened his examination of corporate self-delusion, moving from small-time scam artists to high-profile figures who believe their own marketing.

Alright, you told me all of that…

Fielder’s trajectory directly set the stage for his feature directorial debut, the A24 metadocumentary – I mean, what is it? A narrative movie? A documentary? Who can say? — You Can See Everything, where Nathan found his ultimate subject: a high-profile figure doing the exact same thing he had been studying for over a decade.

The film documents the weeks leading up to disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s imprisonment. Convinced of her innocence and certain the public will believe her if given a platform, Holmes lets a documentary crew into her personal life.

What begins as a PR turnaround attempt becomes a 3-hour psychological clash between two master performers: a corporate fraudster trying to stage a performance of her own vulnerability and a filmmaker whose entire career has been built on exposing how people stage reality.

Nathan’s signature tricks have always been using uncomfortable silence, camera placement and extreme compliance to force subjects to drop their guard. Here, Holmes attempts to deploy her curated, deep-voiced persona to win over the camera. The film’s tension stems from watching Holmes try to direct her own story while Fielder’s lens patiently dismantles every rehearsal and corporate script she tries to run.

Sorry, another aside. Who is Elizabeth Holmes?

Her story begins in a Stanford dorm room, where she envisioned a wearable drug-delivery patch before pivoting to cheap, accessible lab-on-a-chip testing. Holmes dropped out of school in 2003, draining her parents’ trust fund to launch the company—briefly dubbed “Real-Time Cures” before settling on Theranos—and turned hyper-ambitious pitching into hard capital.

Theranos seduced investors with a revolutionary promise: quick, comprehensive blood tests from a single pinprick. The breakthrough, like the compact devices that supposedly powered it, was all a lie.

Yet by 2010, she had secured over $92 million in venture funding, eventually leveraging a single meeting with former Secretary of State George Shultz to stack her board with political heavyweights and construct the illusion of institutional untouchability.

The house of cards collapsed in 2015 when researchers and Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou exposed the fraud, triggering an onslaught of federal investigations, investor lawsuits and regulatory bans. Holmes’s $4.5 billion fortune evaporated to zero practically overnight, and Theranos officially dissolved in 2018. By late 2022, both Holmes and former company president—and her ex-boyfriend—Sunny Balwani were convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy, earning prison sentences of 11 and 12 years, respectively.

What did she do wrong? Theranos’s proprietary “Edison” machine couldn’t actually run multiple tests off a finger-prick of blood, forcing them to secretly dilute samples and run them on standard, commercially available Siemens machines behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, patients received false positive/negative results for conditions like HIV, cancer and miscarriages while Holmes was raising billions.

She can make big eyes and say that she never lied, but real people were hurt.

At one point, Fielder questions Holmes about how she promoted Theranos’s defective blood-testing device. After claiming that she’s never lied in her entire life, Holmes denies misleading anyone. Instead, she claims that her words were semantically misinterpreted.

The profile quotes Holmes as saying, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created,” in reference to Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout. Holmes told Fielder that she actually said, “They’re playing a character they created.”

Evans also won’t leave that quote behind and assures Fielder that they recorded all conversations the whole time, despite refusing to provide those recordings. The reporter, Amy Chozick, claimed that “she decided not to use a recorder during some of her chats because without it people tend to be more open.”

Despite telling both Fielder and Chozick that she was happy to leave Theranos behind, moments later, she’s calling prospective investors about a new version of the device. Unlike any conversation she has directly with Fielder, she’s in complete control, changing her body language and staying fully engaged and energized.

To try and explain to the couple how important words are, Fielder shows them the Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First?.” This is a classic comedy act, one in which wordplay makes things difficult to understand. She kind of gets it, or at least says that she does, but can’t articulate it. Is this a moment of a lack of understanding, her being on the spectrum and masking that she understands or is she just exhausted and not really into watching an old black-and-white video?

Evans says Holmes’s response proves how she “thinks differently.”

How you see things determines a lot of the small moments that end up feeling like big moments.

For example, how Holmes beats eggs for breakfast is a minuscule moment. But it gets amplified here. Is Evans being controlling?

Or is Holmes power-bottoming?

To wit, if you don’t know what that means: This term subverts traditional assumptions that the receptive role sexually is inherently submissive. A power bottom often directs the interaction, taking charge of how the encounter unfolds, despite them seemingly being in the submissive role.

Let Eater say it better: “But with this being Elizabeth Holmes, we must also ask: Could it be a case of weaponized incompetence? Is it possible that, not wanting the task of beating the eggs, she intentionally does it poorly enough to make Evans take over? Is she being controlled, or is she getting someone else to do her work for her? Or is this evidence of her “different” way of thinking, that she truly doesn’t know the “right” way to beat them?”

Is this domestic weirdness just a symptom of two hyper-controlled people performing normalcy for a camera?

Before prison, Fielder shows them The Dropout, but a distressed Holmes asks to stop watching when it shows how she interacted with her ex. Then, Holmes has her body 3D-scanned – supposedly for her children – but expresses concern about her likeness being misused. We also learn that she was sexually assaulted – this is never brought back up – before college by her father, who worked at Enron. Whenever there’s hope of a revelation, Billy steps in to stop it.

Just before she leaves for prison, Nathan returns to his awkward self, asking if the couple would like some privacy. He sits in the car, blasting Collective Soul while they presumably have or do not have sex.

And then Holmes reports to Federal Prison Camp, her family relocates to Texas to be closer to her, and we fade to black.

That’s where any other documentary would end.

90 minutes in…

An hour and a half into You Can See Everything, I was enjoying myself, yet I was waiting for the hyperbole I’d heard so much to kick in.

An aside: I saw it in the same theater in my hometown where I saw so many important movies in my life: Flash Gordon, Cannonball Run, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. So here I was, in a place way fancier than I expected, hearing the anxious laughter of people and wondering when this movie would break free of velocity, sending us into space like Asher at the cruel end of his story.

Well, it happens. Because Holmes and her partner Billy feel like they have something to hide, even when they present themselves as open. Indeed, we see all of Billy onscreen to Nathan’s hilarious confusion. But the movie started to gel for me when Nathan tried to get the two to understand that wordplay can be confusing, and their statements about her innocence were even more confounding.

The movie catches up two years later, as Evans has started a new company, Haemanthus, which means “blood flower,” derived from the Greek words haima (blood) and anthos (flower). Is that any better than Theranos, a combination of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis” that sounds like someone who should snap his fingers and kill half of everyone alive.

If Evans was controlling before with the eggs, he’s grown exponentially since then. He refuses to allow Fielder to speak with his partner while she’s in prison. He’s also sold her likeness as a deepfake AI model and licensed her image for a series of billboards.

These billboards feature imagery and messaging that promote Holmes’ innocence. Ryan El-Hosseiny placed them and created a website, theinventors.com (now justblood.com), that purports to explain why Holmes was innocent. Somehow, a video shot in a men’s club with a man trying to blow her up with a bomb is how he’s done that.

He told NBC News, “Elizabeth Holmes actually told me that’s her favorite billboard,” he says. When asked if Holmes is his friend, El-Hosseiny calls her his “sister.” And despite wanting to sue seemingly everyone involved with the film, El-Hosseiny says he would rate it an 11 out of 10.”

He also states that the tests on Theranos were validated live at the Trump International Golf Course.

But anyways…

Billy forcibly stops an interview with Fielder and one of his new partners, who suggests that there were failures and even lies when it came to said equipment, which now sits, cast off in a closet.

Stuck and unable to speak to his subject, Nathan reverts to past behavior, invoking The Fielder Method he developed on The Rehearsal. Parodying high-concept acting styles like Method acting, it trains actors to embody real-life people with extreme, hyper-realistic precision.

The core framework of the technique breaks down into three key elements:

1. Covert Surveillance and Imitation: Instead of using traditional scripts or character work, actors are assigned real-life, unsuspecting subjects. The actors secretly follow their target in public, observing their body language, vocal cadence, physical habits and daily routines without the subject’s knowledge.

2. Primary and Secondary Actor Layers: To ensure accuracy, the method establishes a strict hierarchy:

Primary Actors: The performers hired to play specific individuals within Nathan’s elaborate scenario sets.

Secondary Actors: Additional actors hired to secretly shadow the Primary actors in real life, ensuring that even the performers themselves can be authentically replaced or studied.

3. Total Perspective Shifts (Inception-Style Rehearsals): To evaluate the effectiveness of his students, Fielder sets up a fake acting class in Los Angeles, hiring real aspiring actors as students. To test his own empathy and understand what his students are experiencing, Fielder eventually uses the Fielder Method on one of the students. He hires an actor to play himself, steps into Thomas’s shoes and attends his own acting class in disguise to experience his own teaching from the student’s perspective.

Ultimately, the Fielder Method blends surveillance, extreme empathy and psychological roleplay into a feedback loop where the boundaries between the actor, the subject and reality are blurred.

Who better to play Elizabeth Holmes, if you can’t have her, than someone who already has?

Enter Amanda

Fielder meets with actress Amanda Seyfried and shows her the footage. She reacts like any of us would to the egg scenes and the things Holmes says. She says all she had to go on was 12 hours of deposition and some articles, but she tried to create her character as a TV version. That is – based in reality, but not real.

Now that she’s on board, she helps reenact a meeting where A24, the directors, and Evans (portrayed by Christopher Abbott) met. As Holmes goes upstairs to check on her baby – and perhaps feed them – he lays out a plan to receive profits from the film, which is a no-go when it comes to documentaries.

Here’s where things get strange, as every time before this, Holmes would casually breastfeed her child, often in front of a startled Nathan. Did she leave to set up the illusion that she had no idea this was happening? Is that why she mentioned that she would receive no money from the documentary?

Evans is also impersonating his partner on X, replying directly to people and claiming he can speak for her without ever talking to her (remember that, too).

Despite Holmes and Billy hating the show she was on, Fielder brings Seyfried to their home, just in time for an awkward call from Holmes in prison. This soon turns bad: after he denies exploiting Holmes, he mentions that Seyfried has had issues with social media, which makes the environment even more hostile.

Seyfried left a brief comment on an Instagram post detailing Kirk’s political statements and controversial stances, then reshared a quote on political violence: “You can’t invite violence to the dinner table and be shocked when it starts eating.”

He then threatens them and anyone who has wronged his partner and, in a later meeting with Fielder, offhandedly mentions that he is carrying a weapon.

Anyone else would just back off.

Instead, after a tense wait for a phone call, Nathan goes to Texas to meet with Holmes. He wasn’t allowed to film this, so again, he has to have Seyfried act as her.

Yet this is the fascinating moment of this entire enterprise. We’re no longer seeing reality. We are inside Fielder’s mind and memory, a place where he does remember Holmes saying that the way Seyfried played her has led to her being mistreated in prison.

Now, bring back what I asked you to remember…

Earlier in the documentary, Billy tells Fielder that he and Holmes’ entire relationship is built around making grand gestures and building “monuments of love” to one another. Now, she echoes the exact same phrase.

This suggests that, despite her outward appearance of being detached or controlled by others, she is fully aware of and aligned with the romanticized narrative and public-image strategy being crafted around her.

And yet, when Billy and family appear and they embrace, Nathan believes that they truly love one another. Seyfried asks Fielder if he’s still objective, and he is unsure. Is he in love with Holmes? Why does he share the moment of them swimming (reminding us that earlier, he told her he never swam in cold water, and yet there he is, in memory, swimming with her)? Is she just another Angela or Maci, his real or not real love interests?

At the end, all we have is a black screen that reveals that Evans didn’t make money from the film and that New York Times reporter Chozick stands by – with no evidence provided, although she claims that she told Fielder that he should contact their legal department; a friend warned her not to be in the movie — the quote that Holmes disagrees with.

So, this leaves us with questions:

Who is in control? Is it Holmes? In a recent AMA on his X account, he claimed, “Anyone who actually knows her would find that idea hilarious. She’s fiercely independent, strong-willed, and my best friend. We are partners in every sense. We challenge each other, disagree, and face the world together. Her closest friends are also some of my closest friends. If I ever mistreated her, they’d have my head.”

PS: He also claimed he wasn’t on cocaine, saying the nonstop sniffles he has later in the movie are a cold and allergies.

Is it Holmes? How did she gain so much power over older, richer men, including George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis and Rupert Murdoch?

Could it be an act? She deliberately molded herself in the image of a Silicon Valley genius. By adopting a signature uniform (black turtlenecks inspired by Steve Jobs), unblinking eye contact and an unnaturally deep vocal register, she projected total conviction and intellectual authority.

These men may have been seasoned statesmen and powerful businessmen, but they weren’t native tech insiders. Therefore, to their experience—and their subjective reality—she looked and sounded like the next visionary prodigy.

Was she exploiting the opposite side of daddy issues? Many of the men on her board were in the twilight of their careers, looking for a legacy project that could transcend politics or investing. She offered them a way to back a revolutionary medical breakthrough that could “save millions of lives.” Did her youth and intensity activate a paternal protection mechanism in these men, who treated her more like a granddaughter than a CEO?

And again, when it comes to that subjective reality, remember: she may have picked smart and powerful men, but none of them were medical scientists, bio-engineers or biotech venture capitalists. All of those men would ask hard technical questions, not political heavyweights and military leaders.

She effectively built a social loop: Shultz brought credibility that attracted Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn. General James Mattis and Admiral Gary Roughead added military prestige. Media moguls like Rupert Murdoch invested hundreds of millions because of who was already at the table. None of these board members had the scientific background to evaluate her pinprick blood-testing technology, yet their presence signaled complete legitimacy to the next investor.

And even if they did ask questions, Holmes exploited Silicon Valley’s standard operating procedure: the threat of trade secret theft. That allowed her to deny board members and investors access to actual data or peer-reviewed studies. She presented Theranos’ technology as a closely guarded state secret, framing any deep technical probe as a risk to the company’s valuation. Investors were pressured to make swift funding decisions, lest they be left out of a historic unicorn company.

When internal doubts were raised—most famously by Tyler Shultz (Shultz’s grandson) and Erika Cheung—Holmes deployed high-powered attorneys like David Boies to isolate dissenters and enforce silence. She successfully leveraged her relationship with the senior Shultz to turn him against his own progeny, demonstrating how deeply her influence had severed standard personal and professional checks.

Plus, people trust white coats and authority figures blindly, which is precisely how Theranos hoodwinked seasoned military generals and politicians who didn’t know a CBC (complete blood count) from a metabolic panel.

References

I’m In You Can See Everything. Here’s My Side of the Story. New York Times.

The Eggs Scene in ‘You Can See Everything’ Scrambles Reality. Eater.

NBC News interview with Ryan El-Hosseiny. NBC News.

Billy Evans does AMA about Elizabeth Holmes, ‘You can see everything’. MSN.

You Can See Everything (2026)