Response to seeing the new Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes

Response to seeing the new Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes

Spoiler alert

scott cunningham

Oct 23

Do not open this email and do not read this substack if you have not yet seen the new Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes entitled “You Can See Everything”. Maybe instead just watch this trailer.

Let me start with some basic facts as I understand them, so that it creates some writing such that no one getting this email in their mailbox will accidentally read any spoilers. Here is what I understand.

Who is Nathan Fielder?

Nathan Fielder is a strange kind of comedian. He’s sort of in that recent Borat tradition of creating a character who puts live people into very strange and uncomfortable situations and through his mannerisms and obliviousness to the situation, and his willingness to just sit there and let the scenes roll out, enable odd revelations to come out on screen. He fits with the more contemporary “cringe” comedy — a style of comedy that I would have to regularly walk up and leave the room because of how uncomfortable that kind of comedy makes me, even while making me glued and fascinated. On a lesser comparison, I would put Tim Robinson in that category, though the genre of the two comedians is nothing alike.

Fielder had a show on the comedy channel that ran for a few seasons, and as the show was popular, it had a built-in shelf life much like Borat did in that the show was original and hilarious and amazing, and therefore found a growing audience, but as it did, it undermined the shows premise too which was that eventually, it would be impossible no one could see this coming unless they’d be living under a rock. The show was entitled “Nathan For You”, a strange title to say out loud much like the title of this Holmes documentary — “You Can See Everything” — is strange to say out loud. You can almost imagine executives at A24 which was the studio that made it having a couple conversations with Fielder and others “that title is weird and in focus groups people don’t like it. How about ‘the Elizabeth Holmes story” instead.” And Fielder going “no”.

Here is one of the crazier episodes. In this one, he risks getting arrested for exposing himself to a bunch of children by having a robot pull his pants down if some thing doesn’t happen in time, which honestly I don’t even recall what the thing was — only that he set it up, and had a police officer there to arrest him if it went through.

After Nathan For You, he had some more stuff, and while you could see his signature and fingerprints on the show, you also could see something else emerging. For instance, on the HBO show — which I never finished because soon into it, the cringe was getting to me too much (same thing happened with Tim Robinson’s “the chair company” even though I love Tim Robinson) — in which he’d hired people to reenact events in a persons life with those actual real people. Big elaborate recreations of those past events. You can imagine maybe what I mean by watching this trailer for it.

The second season of The Rehearsal was the stranger one to me and was the first time I actually thought he might be a serious filmmaker, and a comedian, too, because in this one he posited a theory about how sometimes a code of silence exists between a pilot and copilot that can cause crashes. It was an actual scientific conjecture, something he seemed to legitimately believe was plausible, and spent real resources in a season of a show to go through it, including all the elaborate weird stuff like in the earlier showed

So that’s the backdrop. And all I want to do now is discuss the Holmes documentary, and just make a few comments.

Holmes was a Stanford undergrad who apparently invented “a device” that could be used to run a lot of tests (“all the tests” whatever that means) with a single drop of blood. She started the company Theranos, which had a meteroric success in rounds of funding making her one of the youngest and fasted entrepreneurs to become a billionaire on paper.

The problem as people know is that the technology she invented “did not work”, because the underlying chemistry that needed it to work did not exist — at least not in the way she said, or maybe in the world of the documentary, not in the way that people thought she was saying. And so the stock plummeted, and she and her partner and much older boyfriend (whose not in the documentary) are found guilty of a bunch of the federal crimes like “wire fraud” I think plus a bunch of other stuff I’ve forgotten. I don’t know what his sentence was, but hers was 11 years in federal prison, served in texas near Texas A&M in a town called Bryan.

Interestingly, Holmes or “Liz” as she’s called on the documentary, proclaimed her innocence the entire time, refusing all plea deals. Who knows what was on the table, though. Maybe it was never worth it because her guilt was viewed as a slam dunk, and both she and her partner-boyfriend were viewed as obviously engaged in a conspiracy to defraud investors. So maybe whatever was on the table wasn’t even worth it so they went to trial. Still, if it was hopeless, you’d expect a guilty plea (or I would), maybe cooperation to flip on the partner, maybe throw yourself on the judges mercy. But no.

So here’s the premise of the documentary. Elizabeth Holmes and her husband-partner Billy Evans with whom she has two children now (and who did bachelors at MIT in economics interestingly enough) for some unknown reason reach out to Nathan Fielder, and all evidence suggests that they did that without ever knowing anything about his work. Which is weird on a lot of levels. So that’s the first coup Fielder lands — a documentary with and about Elizabeth Holmes’ full particupation.

But the second thing is the sheer number of revelations that come up, and honestly kind of immediately too, that Fielder seems to stumble into. I get the sense only he could do it, and yet, that he doesn’t understand how it was remotely possible it was happening also. There’s the intimacy that he and her develop. There’s the crass profit seeking of her husband. There’s his own weirdness, and I think probably his own inferiority complex turned superiority complex both in general maybe professionally and personally, maybe sexually with women. The latter is all I can deduce because of allowing Fielder to film him in the shower, fully exposing his penis, almost like he wanted his penis shown to the world, plus how he shared later that he was “excellent at sex”. So that’s a trait, and it’s not necessarily a rare trait for a guy to have. What’s rare is that that trait is usually associated with a willingness to not reveal the traits existence voluntarily given its broadly repugnant. But he seems to almost need to perform it, and it’s strange for being so antisocial, and he chose it in the most public way possible, and really seeming utterly oblivious to it, which is in a major studio financed documentary about his wife and the mother of his two children, a convicted criminal about to head to federal prison for 11 years. I was pretty fascinated by that, and I really got the sense that this was an example of a person with some not-so-well-hidden personal struggles maybe that he’s unaware of and that part of what makes it a genuine problem is that he even is unaware of it.

But it’s more than that. Fielder somehow draws out of Holmes the ability for her to let her guard down. Or rather, Fielder helps bring her into a place where you’re left with two beliefs at the end.

1. That she was innocent and that this was all one huge misunderstanding even if the misunderstanding was irrelevant because she clearly broke the law and would be punished for it, just like anyone else will be.

2. Or that she’s maybe the greatest most successful deceptive and manipulative human being alive at this moment right now.

You almost have to take a stand on that as an audience member. Something about the story forces the audience member to be unable to figure out which it is, but probably if I had to guess, I am not unique for feeling like I cannot shake the feeling it is the first. Why?

Well the scenes Fielder finds himself in seem to repeat themselves for one, and the way they do seem really unable to reconcile with the other facts about her. There’s a sense in which I at least did an ockhams razor on those two possibilities. Sure, it is of course reasonable that she’s the worlds greatest liar, but then that would mean she also is a socially competent person on other parts of her life, but we see repeatedly that that honestly doesn’t seem likely.

How Fielder could possibly create that kind of voluntary suspension of disbelief in the audience, and for it to be actually genuine because you get the sense Fielder also can’t figure it out and is actually in a reluctant position within himself that his priors are shaken and may need to be updated, even if ever so slightly, towards a theory of her which cannot allow her to be the pure villain he thought she was going into it.

But it’s not just that. It’s two other facts about her that Fielder uncovers and again — I just can’t figure out how he got this lucky as a filmmaker. Once, and its luck. But it’s like ten times. And if you flip a coin ten times, and every time it comes up heads, you have to decide: is this a fair coin, or is this one of those 0.000976562 probability events. I mean those will happen eventually to someone somewhere, since history is just an infinite number of trials. Someone will be that lucky and be that unlucky somewhere else. But a reasonable person would probably say “yeah but more likely there’s something different about me”. They’d be more likely to say it’s selection, not chance.

Which would mean Nathan fielder is the worlds greatest interviewer alive, maybe in human history, that this happened to him on camera. So what does he uncover?

First, it really does seem as if he uncovered that for whatever reason — autism? — Holmes is pathologically incapable of understanding what other people are thinking and believing when she talks to them. And that it could be rooted in some weird, deep structural thing in her brain that is also what keeps her from being unable to understand humor, but particularly humor that’s about a shared meaning of words that have multiple meanings. That’s the Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First?” Bit that he shows her, which she cannot understand.

But the other thing is she seems unwilling to say out loud that she doesn’t understand it, too. I don’t know if it’s out of embarrassment or what, but something about her — and this part really seems true regardless of her culpability in a crime — genuinely seems to be that when she cannot understand, she does not voice it. I mean she does and she doesn’t. She does in that she will ask clarifying questions but it’s almost like it’s in some context of casual language where she will. She asks Fielder several times to elaborate on something he asked her or reword the question. And she is careful with her words because she is under legal scrutiny.

But other times, she can’t or just won’t and it’s really obvious because it’ll happen in the context of these practiced speeches. Like when she obviously cannot understand the comedy in who’s on first, but also cannot or just will not ask about it, and just seems willing to be both oblivious — and that that is a real thing too — and allow the conversation to go on anyway.

Then there is how Fielder realizes her husband may not be telling her everything. Like that he’s posting as her on Twitter getting into arguments with people. But then there’s also that he had negotiated back end profits on the documentary with A24, which probably now are going to be worth tens of millions given this is likely a box office juggernaut, which the filmmakers and executives clearly say is not customary, profoundly unethical, and will undermine the documentary entirely.

The question is does she know he did this? And the documentary’s got this way of letting that hang there, with a presentation that it’s obviously implausible that she is not involved, and there’s an easy story where that’s another conspiracy of hers. But then this other thing that happens which is that she then says things and says them in a way, says them with accompanying body language, and in a context with Fielder where Fielder but also you, the audience, cannot avoid saying this: “OMG. She really doesn’t know what her husband has done because he hasn’t told her, and she’s in prison now and cannot know and likely STILL does not fully know. But if she doesn’t know, it’s obviously then willful self deception. But if she’s willfully this self deceived, then wouldn’t that open the door to the possibility that she had that as a pathology her whole life? Which would explain the weird double speak, but maybe even her habit of dating men who are controlling and handle a lot of hard things for her so that she can focus on the few things she’s good at which is whatever she’s good at?”

And then of course, there is the discovery on film that she’d been raped at Stanford before her rise. Her dad shares it, and noted it was devastating for her, but he says something else too — that it had “stunned” her. I thought that was such a strange choice of a word. Stunned isn’t exactly what I associate with being the victim of a rape, although obviously any kind of response to rape is sensible within the trauma of the victim. Literally any range of response can happen because of the way that trauma operates and creates all kinds of irrational reactions. If I learned that a woman out there immediately began baking cookies after a violent assault, I would just say “she is probably in shock”. I remember reading once of a story of a woman brutally raped in a home invasion where afterwards she pulled the man into a prayer. She was clearly in shock and nothing likely made sense to an outsider but which to the person could be truly any kind of fight, flight and freeze response. The types of cards you can draw in that fight, fight or freeze deck is almost infinite and many are absolutely weird to an outsider.

And so where does that fit? Who knows, other than that it likely 100% does fit, and how can it be this is the place where it gets revealed? And revealed by her dad? Not her? If she said this in the trial, it just shows how little I was following the trial, but I don’t think it did come out because Fielder is utterly taken aback when the dad says it. And I read an article the other day that a journalist discovered with some sleuthing that she had filed a police report of a sexual assault that lines up exactly with all this.

So here is what I keep thinking.

I keep thinking she’s guilty legally and potentially tragically oblivious psychologically. It’s of course possible that she’s a master liar, but even Fielder — who’s actually spending a month living with her — cannot shake that feeling whatsoever. And that’s a sad reality. In fact I don’t see how anyone can watch this and not feel sad. It’s sad though to see anyone who’s struggles and traumas has created a pattern for which they’re going to have to pay the bill at some point. You just wish you could go back and tell her to drop out after the rape and go to therapy, not invent a machine for which her ability to be it’s spokesman was criminally incompetence after incompetence. Or that she really needs to not date a few guys in her life because they don’t have her best interest.

There’s more and I won’t share the rest, but it’s just one after another real events that somehow suggest Nathan fielder is the greatest interviewer who’s ever lived. As someone who interviewed around 130 economists over four year for my podcast about the personal lives of living economists, I could not help but be in awe of whatever secret skill he possessed. This ability to listen, to ask hard questions, to sit in silence for as long as it took, to never engage in “gotcha” journalism, to never try to reconcile contradictory facts, to be genuinely warm, disarming, intimate, but not to try and force the person to hang themselves and somehow not become biased on their side too. I just don’t see how he does it.

I think Fielder is probably the Errol Morris of this generation, and is likely going to create a series of true American classics. He’s almost like Jordan Peale too, who also started out in bizarre comedy and then just abruptly starts making ambitious and skillful films in traditional genres that he distorts for the story. And the movie reminds me of The Jinx where the filmmakers manage to catch a killer confessing to a murder on camera after years of successfully beating trial after trial.

So I highly recommend it. It’s easily a solid three hours that is one of those movies that feels like thirty minutes. But your mileage may vary on that.

My prediction though is that it’ll be nominated for Best Documentary and win, Best Picture and win, and Best Director and win. I’m not sure of a documentary has ever won in both the documentary and the best picture category, but if it has, then this one will too, and if it hasn’t, then this one will be the first. Fielder will share it with his brilliant co-director, a young Harvard student (not sure he graduated or not) named Lance Oppenheim. He’s also clearly going places.

Invite your friends and earn rewards

Invite Friends

© 2026 scott cunningham
n/a