Edit: For some reason, this posted with comments closed. Open now.
Like seemingly everybody else in the world who cares about movies, we saw “You Can See Everything” this weekend. Hoo-boy.
I want to start by telling you everything you may have read about it already is true. Let me lay out a few:
It is the most imaginatively crafted and executed documentary I’ve seen in…maybe ever. Co-director (and onscreen talent) Nathan Fielder has really grappled with the ideas of truth, facts, and their relation to humans, and come up with something that raises more questions than it answers. It makes Michael Moore’s body of work look like a fourth-grade filmstrip on how cottage cheese is made.
You should definitely go into it knowing as little about it as possible, so I won’t reveal any major spoilers here. However, I will discuss it generally. If you’d like to leave, see the movie and come back later, that’s fine. You do you.
You should know the basic facts, however: Elizabeth Holmes was co-founder and CEO of a startup she named Theranos, which she said would revolutionize medical testing by reducing the amount of blood required to do these tests to just a few drops. You may recall photos of her in her heyday, wearing a black turtleneck, her blonde hair streaming over one shoulder, her lips carmine-red. (She was said to be entranced by Steve Jobs’ similar uniform.) She is usually shown holding a very small capsule between her thumb and forefinger, containing the aforementioned few drops of blood. Like so:
The startup’s aim was to install a box about the size of a computer printer in drug stores around the country, where you could pop in, suffer a small pinprick and, before you left, get the results of any one of hundreds of tests — HIV, cholesterol, PSA, the gamut. And it wouldn’t cost much at all.
The only problem was, the machine didn’t work. It never worked. So Holmes and her partner in both work and life, Sunny Balwani, constructed an elaborate fraud, faking results long enough to wheedle hundreds of millions from credulous angel investors, all the while hoping they could someday, somehow make it work.
When it collapsed, both Holmes and Balwani were convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison terms. Appeals failed, and Nathan Fielder joined Holmes and her new romantic partner, Billy Evans, for the last month of her freedom before reporting to Bryan Federal Prison Camp, current home of Ghislaine Maxwell, in Texas.
“You Can See Everything” is the premise of the “radical transparency” offered by Holmes and Evans, who in the interim between trial and prison managed to produce two children, also seen onscreen.
And we see a lot. Holmes signature look, featured heavily in the teaser for the film dropped at the Telluride festival in late summer, is on abundant display. Her big blue eyes, her abundant hair, her seeming ability to look directly at you and never blink — that’s the Holmes look. And while we can debate forever why she was seemingly able to hypnotize so many people who should have known better, I think the most important fact is this: Most of them were men. And Holmes is not hesitant with demonstrating Pretty Privilege.
John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose work exposed the fraud, now works for the NYT. He wrote about the film this week, too:
Ms. Holmes has wanted to tell her side of the story for a long time. In the summer of 2016 she had discussions with Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker she had hired to make sleek Theranos commercials at the height of her pre-scandal fame. Mr. Morris entertained the notion of doing a film about Ms. Holmes seriously enough that he called me to ask me to participate.
“I see it as a ‘he said, she said,’” he told me.
“That’s not how I see it,” I responded. “There are basic facts and those facts show that Elizabeth Holmes committed fraud.”
I think it’s safe to say that Holmes is a strikingly attractive woman when she wants to be. She got David Boies, correctly described by Carreyrou as “one of the country’s most feared litigators,” to work for her. She lured Henry Kissinger, Gen. James Mattis and former Secretary of State George Schulz to sit on her board. Here’s the board list (from Wikipedia) from May 2016:
Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO
Riley Bechtel, former Bechtel Group CEO
David Boies, a founder and the chairman of Boies Schiller Flexner
William Foege, former director of the CDC
Richard Kovacevich, former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo
Jim Mattis, later U.S. Secretary of Defense
Fabrizio Bonanni, former executive vice president of Amgen
I see one woman — Holmes — in that list. I suspect the other half-dozen all have eyes and penises.
The most charitable thing one could say about Holmes is, she too has eyes, and has seen how so many Silicon Valley startups are like hers, smoke and mirrors that don’t work, until one day they do. There’s a scene in the film where Holmes and Evans assemble the component parts of a Theranos machine, then struggle to explain how, exactly, it will work. (Because it doesn’t work now, but it could! Once “the chemistry” is figured out!) They babble a lot of words that rely heavily on “the cloud” and a few other tech buzz words, but anyone who understands English should recognize they’re saying nothing. At some point, Evans suggests that Holmes, who he calls “an inventor,” just has a brain that works differently from everyone else’s. And that’s what makes her so special and great.
Her brain does work differently. But it makes her a sociopath, not a genius inventor.
Here’s a typical description of Holmes, from a no-name website before the fraud was exposed:
Her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life, sleeping four hours a night. Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. She eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, spinach, lettuce, and celery.
“I was probably, definitely, not normal,” she said. “I was reading ‘Moby-Dick’ from start to finish when I was about nine. I read a ton of books. I still have a notebook with a complete design for a time machine that I designed when I must have been, like, seven. The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one ever told me that I couldn’t do those things.”
I do not believe she read “Moby-Dick” at 9 years old. And may I see the hands of any parent who would tell a 7-year-old that their “complete design for a time machine” wouldn’t work? This woman, I swear.
Trust me, this movie is wild and weird, and you will be thinking about it for days afterward.
Finally, thanks to Heather for flagging this video, in which a former metro editor for the Chicago Tribune yells (figuratively) at an NYT “assistant managing editor at The New York Times’ for Trust and Standards,” and while Mr. Chicago can’t seem to convince Mr. NYT that they’re doing anything wrong, it is a satisfying watch, BECAUSE HE SPEAKS FOR SO MANY OF US.
OK, I gotta get some work done. Let’s have ourselves a week.
alex said on October 18, 2026 at 9:20 pm
I barely made it through Moby Dick in college — with a grade riding on it — so I’m not going to believe she read it of her own volition at nine. I’ve already heard raves about this movie, and also about its extraordinary length, which makes me want to take a pass on it just like Moby Dick.
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Jeff Gill said on October 18, 2026 at 9:59 pm
“But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach that, however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.”
~ “Moby-Dick” chapter 58
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Deborah said on October 18, 2026 at 11:30 pm
My husband and I both hadn’t read Moby Dick but decided to get an audio book and listen to it on a long road trip. We made it more than halfway and then couldn’t do it any more. I keep saying I want to go back and finish it but Lordy I don’t want to start over from the beginning after all this time.
I also tried reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time last summer. I actually got through Swann’s Way and actually liked it, but I didn’t make it much beyond that.
There are just some books that are a slog. Joyce’s Ulysses was another one of those for me, I’ve tried and tried with that one. I even went to the Martello Tower outside of Dublin where Buck Mulligan fries bacon, which was an interesting place but not enough to make me finish the book.
I want to see the Elizabeth Holmes movie but my husband isn’t the least bit interested. I also want to see the four hour Musk documentary.
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Sherri said on October 19, 2026 at 12:28 am
A friend of mine from grad school was on the board of Theranos at one time, but he started asking inconvenient questions about how nothing added up, so they removed him.
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Gretchen said on October 19, 2026 at 1:04 am
This story fascinates me because my final working title was Instrument Validation Specialist. My whole job was proving to inspectors that our chemistry analyzers were getting the correct results. The best engineers in the US, Germany and Japan have spent the last 50 years trying to reduce the sample volume needed to run tests because that reduces the volume, and cost, of the chemicals causing the reactions they are measuring. The idea that this kid who didn’t finish college had a lightbulb moment that surpassed all that work and saw something nobody else saw is ludicrous, and I can’t imagine why nobody else saw that. Except that they were old men with no chemistry expertise who saw what their wanted to see.
We had inspectors tour the lab 4 times a year. They watched the specimens delivered, put on the instrument, run through and come off the instrument, results print out, compared to controls and calibrations. Why did nobody want to watch her instruments run and check the results? She had a German Advia analyzer, that was the same one we used, in the back room that she was really using, and pretended that the results were from her little box.
Lab medicine is heavily regulated with lots of inspections and blind check samples where you have to get the same results as other labs. She faked the latter by using the Advia but why did no inspectors ever want to see it run? Especially before sinking millions of dollars into the project.
I just don’t understand.
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David C said on October 19, 2026 at 5:30 am
I’ll see “You Can See Everything” and “Musk” when they start streaming. I haven’t been in a movie theater in thirty fivish years, and I’m not going to start for a three hour or a four hour documentary. It probably isn’t a coincidence that Elon teased his stupid roadster with all its ridiculous geegaws, which isn’t even a roadster, to try to take attention away from the movie. The tech bros are lending a helping hand by banning ads for it. I hope one of the first things the new President does in 2029 is to call the bros into the Oval Office and tell them they fucked up by hitching thier wagons to a horse that’s only good for glue and now they’re going to pay.
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Jeff Borden said on October 19, 2026 at 8:41 am
While aware of Alex Gibney’s mega-documentary on Elmo, this wasn’t on my radar. It is now. Scams are always with us, but those that raise the hopes of people with serious medical issues before exploding like the Hindenburg are especially horrible. And those who perpetrate them are immoral weasels who should be made social pariah. It’s why the Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswampy nauseates me. He pumped up an alleged treatment for Alzheimers, then bailed out making his fortune before it failed drug tests. We used to call these pricks frauds. Now, we celebrate their enormous wealth.
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Suzanne said on October 19, 2026 at 2:46 pm
I will probably wait for both documentaries to be on streaming services. I have studied up a bit on Elizabeth Holmes and am mystified how she got as far as she did. The whole thing seemed preposterous from the start so how did so many get on board with it and plow vast amounts of money into it with absolutely no real evidence that it would work?
As I near my 70th year, I understand humanity less and less.
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ROGirl said on October 19, 2026 at 5:28 pm
Tommy, the guy from the El Sayed video, is Thomas Teepell, a former Josh Hawley staffer, and the son of a Louisiana Republican strategist. He showed up at the event because a conservative PAC offered College Republicans $200 to travel to the town hall to ask provocative questions, in an attempt to spark a viral moment that would embarrass El Sayed. He accomplished the viral moment part.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/19/abdul-el-sayed-heckler-tommy
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David C said on October 19, 2026 at 5:58 pm
I’ve never seen anyone shived, gutted, and dressed more politely than Tommy was.
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FDChief said on October 19, 2026 at 6:11 pm
I guess my thought about both of these flicks (this and the Musk doc) would be “Why?”
That a clever con artist can spin a confounding web of fact and fiction, lies and bullshit, seeming and pseudo-reality…why on Earth would you need to sit through three hours of film to understand that? It’s been the standard business for every flim-flam artist since Sumer.
To put it more simply, in the words of Bogart’s Sam Spade, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”
And that being rich, and pretty, or both, makes it even easier to fleece the willing marks? Gee, color me shocked!
At least the Holmes film has some genuine enigma behind it. Holmes seems to be a very self-invented person (a.k.a. “pathological liar”) who seems to have a lot of the grifter’s talent for 1) sussing out her marks’ sweet spots and 2) being/telling them whatever she needed to hit the marks’ marks.
But it doesn’t sound like Holmes is providing “transparency”, radical or otherwise, in the film. It doesn’t sound like she’s being upfront about her grift and how she figured out how to run it. It sounds more like she’s STILL running her con, on Fielder in this case. I’m not sure why that would be of more interest, or value, than spending time with a three-card monte dealer. Yep, it’s a grift. Film at 11.
And Elmo? Gee, an oddball rich kid from Nazi-fondling shitty apartheid South Africa turns out to be a oddball, racist, Nazi piece of human shit. Wow! Revelation! Now I’m REALLY shocked.
Maybe I’m missing something about these flicks. But it seems like a long-form version of “there’s a sucker born every minute”, and that’s just kind of depressing. Sure, we know that a shit-ton of humanity is some combination of credulous, gullible, greedy, and stupid. But to spend two or three hours being smacked upside the head with that? Ugh.
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del said on October 19, 2026 at 8:05 pm
I had high expectations for You Can See Everything. It exceeded them! What a mindbending and unforgettable film. Wow.
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Carter Cleland said on October 19, 2026 at 11:16 pm
A retired high school English teacher friend of mine has historically loved Moby Dick, and the opening sentence: Call Me Ishmael. So I send him Doonesbury’s cartoon from last Sunday. He responded: “Thanks for making me laugh. Ahab and Queequeg are smiling with us!”
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2026/10/18
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del said on October 20, 2026 at 4:10 am
FDChief, I had the same misgivings you express about the Holmes flick. Why bother? Another con artist. Too dark, too depressing. But then (on a dreary day) I decided to see it and it was not dark to me. Of course she’s a fraud, but that’s secondary to so much else. It’s surprising and textured.
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Suzanne said on October 20, 2026 at 8:33 am
I finished Netflix’s East of Eden last night. Good actors, great costuming and settings but it left me flat. It’s been so many years since I read the book but I don’t remember it being so relentlessly dreary and depressing without anything redeeming. It’s worth watching, I think, but when it was done, it didn’t leave me with much.
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Deborah said on October 20, 2026 at 10:50 am
Off topic. I’ve been reading a lot about how horrible fraternities are. I agree, sororities too, it’s a system that rewards bad behavior, IMO. The selective way they choose who gets in is cruel, the drinking parties etc can only lead to bad situations. I get that to the people in them, they may feel fun but I expect a lot of people in them are miserable for having to go along with the “cool” crowd if they dare admit it. Thankfully my college didn’t have them and no one thought that was bad, probably no one thought about it at all, I know I didn’t.
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Julie Robinson said on October 20, 2026 at 3:31 pm
Depressing and dreary? No thanks.
We’ve been watching the Diplomat and this season is a corker.
I just saw the orthopedist and my shoulder is healed; the pain I’m having is from keeping it immobile. Which is what I was supposed to be doing. So sling is out and PT starts next week. Bring it on.
I never paid a lot of attention to the Greek system except to note the excessive drinking and loud music. No appeal to me. I had an acquaintance in a sorority and a group of us visited her. They had rooms but weren’t allowed to sleep in them. Instead there was a big room with rows of bunk beds. How did anyone sleep? My worst nightmare.
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Sherri said on October 20, 2026 at 3:54 pm
There are so many things that people seem to believe in that I find absurd, from anyone who believed that a college dropout could build a magical machine that would perform blood tests with a single drop of blood, to crypto, to autonomous vehicles, data centers in space, and AI god.
And that’s just tech. Then there are all the insane things being spouted by Trump and his minions on a daily basis. It makes me feel crazy.
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alex said on October 20, 2026 at 4:38 pm
So what’s going on with Ohio?
Being on the Ohio border, I’ve been seeing some Ohio campaign ads as our local TV stations serve a large viewing area. Last night, I thought I kept hearing a narrator’s voice calling someone “the fake.” “The Fake is running for governor and yada yada… The Fake wants to lower your taxes… ” So I stopped in front of the TV and suddenly realized what the narrator was saying was “Vivek.” I didn’t know it rhymed with fake.
Anyway, so today I’m seeing that The Fake is running ads against his opponent, Amy Acton, starring Acton’s estranged mother, who calls Amy a “liar.” What I didn’t know is that this estrangement was the result of the mother’s husband being charged with raping Amy when she was 12 years old, which of course goes unmentioned in the political ad.
I hope this story — the whole story — gets the kind of coverage it deserves. I have no respect for a mother who would protect an abuser and blame her own daughter, and then — half a lifetime later — let herself be used by a slimebag like The Fake. It’s gotta be awful having this history dredged up by a political opponent, but it makes her much more sympathetic and makes him much less so, not that he had any redeeming qualities in the first place.
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Sherri said on October 20, 2026 at 5:00 pm
I want to know two things about that vile ad: who paid to make it, and how much did the mother get?
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FDChief said on October 20, 2026 at 5:13 pm
Question to del: By it’s nature the flick must show us a lot of Holmes…but does it give enough context to see behind her patter? Fielder’s shtick, from what I’ve seen of it, seems like a sort of building elaborate reality-TV crises from trivial issues; Holmes sounds like a perfect subject for that sort of production.
So…what were the surprising and textured parts? Again, glib and/or pretty person/people scam willing believers + the credulous and gullible + more money than sense = the oldest con in the world. Does the flick give you any more insight into the whole Theranos con than that?
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Sherri said on October 20, 2026 at 6:13 pm
With the Cornell 7 case in the news, there’s more talk about banning fraternities. History suggests that banning Greek letter organizations won’t do anything but drive them off-campus and convert them into a club that is not controlled by universities at all. Cornell has banned frat parties now, but the result is that the parties move off campus, they don’t stop.
Harvard banned fraternities a long time ago; they just turned into “final clubs”, like Porcellian and Skull and Bones. Princeton banned fraternities, and they turned into “eating clubs”; again, nothing really changed.
The problem is a culture that values male connections more than women’s bodies. These organizations are designed to maintain the hierarchical nature of patriarchy.
I also know quite a few men who aren’t fraternity members, are horrified by what frats do, and are also incapable of seeing how they contribute to maintaining the hierarchy in any way. When I was working to get term limits on board membership on the ACLU-WA board, the resistance came from the men who had been on the board more than 10 years (in one case, more than 30 years!), and didn’t believe that they had any more power or influence than a new woman of color joining the board. “We’re all the same!” was their cry.
No, you’re not.
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Dorothy said on October 20, 2026 at 9:11 pm
Alex I haven’t seen that ad with future Governor Acton’s mother but it’s all I’ve been hearing about/reading about on social media today. Every single person who’s commented on it has been outraged. I hope it seals the deal and buries The Fake once and for all.
The mute button on our Apple TV remote is getting worn out because I press it constantly on commercial breaks – all the fu**ing political ads that NEVER stop.
A week from today we’re leaving for a nice trip and we’ll be gone a week. Probably will see VERY little television while we’re gone. We have tickets to see Other Desert Cities on Halloween. Wish I could find a way to tell Allison Janney that I was in a movie that she was in! (Liberal Arts, filmed primarily on Kenton’s campus about 15 years ago. She had lines; I did not.)
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Sherri said on October 20, 2026 at 9:20 pm
I guess nobody told Vivek that you’re supposed to let independent dark money groups do personal hit pieces on your opponent, so you as the candidate can denounce it while getting the benefit.
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Peter said on October 20, 2026 at 9:38 pm
Sherri – I know! You’d think Vivek of all people would know the values of outsourcing…
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linda said on October 21, 2026 at 7:09 am
The Ramaswamy ad with Acton’s estranged mother is so toxic that when it broke RW social media tried to come up with a cover story: it wasn’t a campaign ad but a random video, it was a false flag from left wingers, etc. Then Ramaswamy blew that up by publicly owning the ad and pledging more money to distribute it. It’s like Vivek realized he might have to live in Columbus, OH for four years and chewed his own paw out of the trap, like a coyote.
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