The part I just can't stop thinking about is the "who's on first" scene. Was she serious? Was she lying? Did she get a real glimpse at how Billy thinks about her?

WHAT WAS GOING ON

Tyler Schultz's thoughts on the film. Link is below, but you have to create an account to read it. Link in post on previous page doesn't work for me.

For some reason, the spoiler tag isn't working. I don't think this spoils anything that hasn't already been openly discussed here, but if you are worried, don't read it.

I think he is spot-on with his assessment. Only thing he leaves out is that she has been told her entire life (mostly by men) that she is some sort of genius savant, and I think she whole-heartedly believes that. In her mind it is WHO she is - the fact that she doesn't have any real depth of knowledge when it comes to science and hasn't actually contributed anything of scientific value is completely irrelevant.

https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/15/theranos-whistleblower-tyler-shultz-commentary-
elizabeth-holmes-billy-evans-haemanthus-startup/

By Tyler Shultz Oct. 19, 2026

Shultz is a scientist at heart, founder by nature, whistleblower by accident, speaker by
day, venture partner by night, and a dad 24/7.

This essay contains spoilers for "You Can See Everything," Nathan Fielder's new film
about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

"You Can See Everything" is a hilarious, thrilling, fascinating, beautiful piece of art. What
it certainly is not is a documentary, and it's dangerous to pretend that it is.
I've had the displeasure of watching disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes at
work not just over a three-hour film, but over the entirety of my adult life. I was an
employee turned whistleblower at Theranos, my grandfather sat on her board, she
came to my family holidays and birthday parties. I met her when I was 20, she went to
prison when I was 32. I wish I could have told director Nathan Fielder what I told John
Carreyrou when he started investigating her: Do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.
A documentary is a form of journalism meant to discover and reveal the truth. "You Can
See Everything," which follows Elizabeth soon before she heads to prison for fraud, is a
piece of art with the intent of creating ambiguity. A more accurate name would be "You
Can See Everything That We Chose To Point The Camera At." Broadening the scope
just a little bit would have revealed an easily knowable but far less intriguing truth.
The film attempts to answer the central question "Did/does Elizabeth lie?" But it doesn't
look far beyond the walls of the small condo she and her husband, Billy, were renting in
San Diego.

Fielder intentionally stays away from relitigating the Theranos scandal, but does so just
enough to introduce doubt in the minds of the audience about whether Elizabeth
actually lied about the capabilities of the Theranos technology. In the first half of the film,
she digs up the Theranos blood testing device, exploded into its many components, lays
them all out the kitchen table, and tells Fielder that this was the Theranos device that
"can" run any test … if they had developed the chemistries for those tests.
Fielder and Elizabeth then semantically examine the word "can." He tries to decipher if
Elizabeth truly can't understand how her interpretation of "we can run hundreds of tests
from a single drop of blood" was so different from everyone else who heard her say it.
The film goes so far down this rabbit hole that Fielder shows her a clip of "who's on
first?"

Elizabeth pretends to not understand the classic bit. She wants us to think that her mind
works in such a unique way, that she understands the conversation so literally, that she
cannot understand the joke even after it's been explained to her. She wants us to
think she's neurodivergent in a cute autistic way, when she's really neurodivergent in a
much scarier way.

Back to the Theranos device itself. During that scene, my wife had to squeeze my arm
to prevent me from jumping out of my seat in the theater and screaming, "THAT IS NOT
THE DEVICE."

That was not the device I worked with 12 hours a day, not the device we hid from
regulators, not the device that constantly failed quality controls, not the device we used
to knowingly give patients inaccurate medical results. The device she showed Fielder
on the kitchen table was not the reason she went to prison. Elizabeth showed him a
future version of the Theranos product that was never completed and never used in
order to lead Fielder down this BS semantic rabbit hole and to trick him into litigating the
entirely wrong thing.

The actual device we used, called the "Edison," could only run one blood test at a time.
It could only run one type of test (immunoassays, not "any"); was not a standalone
platform (it was not accurate enough to perform the initial dilution step, so we first had to
put the nanotainer into a large Tecan pipetting robot); and had no microfluidics,
centrifuge, or sample prep automation. The actual Edison device that Theranos used
was an eight-channel pipette inside a black box that used the same chemistry and
detection methods that have been used for blood tests since the 1970s. It was
unimpressive and rudimentary. Of course she didn't place the Edison on the kitchen
table. It was clearly low-tech, and easily understandable. And the audience would have
been revolted that it was ever used on real people. Putting it out there would not have
served her narrative.

Did Fielder already know this? He either genuinely didn't and Elizabeth bested him in
their game of chess … or he did and chose not to press her on it in order to leave the
audience with that sense of ambiguity. So, is he a very bad documentarian or a very
good artist? Because the film would be much worse if you actually saw the device we
used to test patients.

The setting of the documentary struck me as another instance where either Fielder was
misled, or Fielder chose to allow Elizabeth to mislead the audience.
Elizabeth's husband's family owns a AAA 5-diamond resort on the famous Torrey Pines
Golf Course in San Diego. Yet Elizabeth and Billy live in a rented, humble-looking,
poorly lit condo (albeit one with great beach access). During her trial, before the
cameras arrived, Elizabeth was living in an estate listed at $125 million.
She pulled this exact same move when Ken Auletta did a piece for The New Yorker on
Elizabeth in 2014, when she first launched the Theranos product. He wrote "her home is
a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life … she no longer
devotes time to novels or friends, [and] doesn't date. … Her refrigerator is all but empty,
as she eats most of her meals at the office."

In reality, she was living in a mansion in Atherton with her much-older boyfriend and
Theranos executive Sunny Balwani. (Sunny, with whom she had a volatile relationship,
was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison for his role in the fraud.)

She tries to convey openness and humility by inviting cameras into the quaint little
homes … that she doesn't actually live in. I'm sure Fielder knew that she had been
living at the Green Gables Estate (check out the photos) prior to his arrival, so why did
he choose to not ask her about the change in scenery?

Similarly, in a recent interview, Billy says they took a private jet to fly from San Diego to
Texas to begin her incarceration … so why did Fielder show them driving off to Texas in
a Cybertruck? I would have loved a scene of Fielder sipping Champagne on the PJ and
asking the pilots something like, "sooo …. how long have you two known each other?"
Beyond the central question of "Did Elizabeth lie?" the documentary also asks: "Is
Elizabeth being abused?"

There's a rare unambiguous answer to that question: yes. For years people have asked
me, "Do you believe her when she says that Sunny abused her?" I absolutely do, but
that does not excuse Elizabeth's behavior. In fact, I've always thought that Elizabeth
was with Sunny in part because of his abusive personality, knowing she could use it to
her advantage.

I do not believe that Elizabeth started Theranos with the intent to defraud investors of
hundreds of millions of dollars, and I also do not believe that she started Theranos
wanting to help patients. She has shown an astounding lack of empathy toward the
patients she hurt, so there's no way she ever cared about helping them.
I believe she started Theranos wanting to be famous. She wanted to be the youngest
self-made female billionaire, to be on the cover of magazines, to be the female Steve
Jobs. And she did it. But she had no way out … except to blame Sunny.
I've always believed that she set Sunny up to be the fall guy. That she put him in a
position to fail and to be the excuse for her failures. When I sent Elizabeth an email
detailing many of my complaints about the Theranos failures, she didn't respond. She
forwarded it to Sunny to let him attack me and put his name on their completely
inadequate responses to real concerns. When I confronted my grandfather about why
he continued to sit on the Theranos board after a year of Wall Street Journal reporting
and federal investigations, part of his response was that they had fired Sunny and they
believed he was responsible for what had gone wrong.

Then in her criminal trial, she blamed Sunny again, and it actually worked … but only
66% of the way. Sunny was convicted of 12 of 12 counts against him, and Elizabeth
was only convicted of four.

I've always had a hard time describing the above concept: that Sunny was abusive, but
that Elizabeth used that to benefit herself. So my favorite scene in "You Can See
Everything" is when Fielder perfectly describes it with the metaphor of David Blaine
putting an ice pick through his hand. It's not a trick. He actually puts the pick straight
through his hand.

In the film, we see Elizabeth in what appears to be an actual abusive relationship, and
that is why Amanda Seyfried (who played Holmes in the Hulu miniseries "The Dropout"
and shows up in "You Can See Everything"), Fielder, and us in the audience feel real
actual sympathy for her. She is not just playing the victim card, she is actually a victim.
But like Blaine, she knows exactly what she's doing. And she knows how to whisk eggs.
She knew that Billy would jump in, take the bowl from her, and that moment would be
used in the film as a microcosm of their relationship.

Another question the film leaves the audience wondering is: "Does she believe her own
lies?" Again, from the narrow perspective of the San Diego condo, you could have a
heated debate on this topic.

But zoom out even a little bit and you see an elaborate web of lies that Elizabeth would
not have constructed if she actually believed them. For example, the Securities and
Exchanges Commission found that, "In August 2015, Holmes met with a potential
investor, during which she provided Theranos' financial results for fiscal year 2014.
These financials showed 2014 net revenues of $108 million. … But Theranos' actual
financial performance bore no resemblance to the financial information Holmes shared
with investors. Theranos recorded little more than $100,000 in revenue in 2014."
During this same period of time, Elizabeth refused to show investors audited financial
statements. If she truly believed they had made more than $100 million in the previous
year, why bother hiding the financial statements?

In Fielder's defense, he does cue the audience, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, that
he is a compromised subject of his own documentary and may have omitted things in
order to protect Elizabeth. In fact, has Fielder himself ever called this film a
documentary? Or have we all interpreted how he presented this film in a way he never
intended? Maybe he thinks he was making a romcom. Who even is on first?

Fair enough. Just saving anyone who did want to read the article the trouble of creating an account.

maroon barchetta said:

---

Not reading all that.

---

Nobody cares what you do.

Another Doug said:

---

schmendeler said:

---

Great time at the movies with this one.

The reveal that Billy was a Charlie Kirk fan was perfect and got a pretty good laugh in the theater.

Seeing this and Digger so close to each other really invigorates the hope that movies are alright.

Two really interesting films that spark conversation.

But this one is on another level. Can't think of another thing I've seen off the top of my head that has so many layers and little things to analyze but all of them are legitimately fascinating to ponder.

You need to see this as soon as possible and avoid any mention of it to be as fresh as possible. Knowing only the surface info about the criminal case is plenty because it's honestly fun to learn more about it afterwards and see how your own perception of Holmes was manipulated by her and the film.

---

Probably the moment about 1/3 of the audience decided Billy was the hero of the story.

---

That same contingent were already decided after the shower.

schmendeler said:

---

Great time at the movies with this one.

The reveal that Billy was a Charlie Kirk fan was perfect and got a pretty good laugh in the theater.

Seeing this and Digger so close to each other really invigorates the hope that movies are alright.

Two really interesting films that spark conversation.

But this one is on another level. Can't think of another thing I've seen off the top of my head that has so many layers and little things to analyze but all of them are legitimately fascinating to ponder.

You need to see this as soon as possible and avoid any mention of it to be as fresh as possible. Knowing only the surface info about the criminal case is plenty because it's honestly fun to learn more about it afterwards and see how your own perception of Holmes was manipulated by her and the film.

---

Charlie Kirk was awesome, RIP. Crazy how utterly despised he is by so many of yall.

Hardcore Greg said:

---

schmendeler said:

---

Great time at the movies with this one.

The reveal that Billy was a Charlie Kirk fan was perfect and got a pretty good laugh in the theater.

Seeing this and Digger so close to each other really invigorates the hope that movies are alright.

Two really interesting films that spark conversation.

But this one is on another level. Can't think of another thing I've seen off the top of my head that has so many layers and little things to analyze but all of them are legitimately fascinating to ponder.

You need to see this as soon as possible and avoid any mention of it to be as fresh as possible. Knowing only the surface info about the criminal case is plenty because it's honestly fun to learn more about it afterwards and see how your own perception of Holmes was manipulated by her and the film.

---

Charlie Kirk was awesome, RIP. Crazy how utterly despised he is by so many of yall.

---

He was a bad person and it's fitting his last words were some racist ***** He still didn't deserve to die. But people who idolize him are perfectly portrayed by the ****** in this movie.

He was not a bad person or a racist.

You have bought into a lot of unfounded statements about him.

Even Bill Maher had good things to say about him. You know, career liberal mouthpiece Bill Maher?

schmendeler said:

---

Hardcore Greg said:

---

schmendeler said:

---

Great time at the movies with this one.

The reveal that Billy was a Charlie Kirk fan was perfect and got a pretty good laugh in the theater.

Seeing this and Digger so close to each other really invigorates the hope that movies are alright.

Two really interesting films that spark conversation.

But this one is on another level. Can't think of another thing I've seen off the top of my head that has so many layers and little things to analyze but all of them are legitimately fascinating to ponder.

You need to see this as soon as possible and avoid any mention of it to be as fresh as possible. Knowing only the surface info about the criminal case is plenty because it's honestly fun to learn more about it afterwards and see how your own perception of Holmes was manipulated by her and the film.

---

Charlie Kirk was awesome, RIP. Crazy how utterly despised he is by so many of yall.

---

He was a bad person and it's fitting his last words were some racist ***** He still didn't deserve to die. But people who idolize him are perfectly portrayed by the ****** in this movie.

---

When people say things like this, it really blows my mind.

It shouldn't. Liberalism is a mental disorder.