Yesterday, I practiced being retired. I slept in to 7am. I read a book. I took a nap. I went to a movie. I set aside my usual lecture prep (I have to catch up on that today). It felt good. Taking my work obligations off my shoulders for a day and setting them aside felt wonderful, and I’m ready for retirement. Can I start tomorrow? No, I’ve got about 6 months more to go.
The movie I saw was You Can See Everything, and it was a horrifying experience. It was a documentary about two narcissistic sociopaths, Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans, as they prepared for Liz to go off to prison. They clearly thought this was a redemption display, but it came across, rather, as a subtle indictment of two frauds.
The case was settled for me at the beginning of the movie. Holmes spends a lot of time on the phone talking to people — investors, I presume — about her plans to revive Theranos. She has convinced herself that the technology can actually do all the things she promised. She refuses to acknowledge wrong doing. She thinks she will be able to guide development of a new blood-testing machine from her prison cell.
Everything she says about the technology is vague and delusional, and listening to her talk about the machine she says she invented convinced me that she knows nothing about biochemistry and has no insights into the process. She’s glad-handing public relations flacks and trying to impress business people with sciencey-sounding words. She’s a college dropout with no background in or comprehension of her field, and she’s still running a grift. I was convinced that she was a fraud and a liar from the outset.
Her husband, Billy Evans, was just as bad, maybe worse. He’s portrayed several times as staring intently into a laptop playing videos of introductory biology. It’s all a show. That’s not how you learn about cutting edge, advanced biotechnology — it might be how uninformed dilettantes think smart people do science. He promises to implement Holmes vision in one year. Cut to two years later: the documentary shows us a room full of electronics junk, small lasers wired into circuit boards, and he’s still handwaving about how they’re going to be able to miniaturize shelves of gadgets into a magical device. It’s all lies.
He’s also a creepy controlling manipulator, and left me feeling a touch of sympathy for Holmes. Except that she was enthusiastically enabling him. The whole movie builds effectively to increasing the evidence that these people are devious fraudsters. Nathan Fielder builds this with good questions, and was a marvelous inquisitor who didn’t divorce himself from his own feelings while probing his subjects and letting them hang themselves with their own rope. I enjoyed that.
I did have misgivings when I heard that Amanda Seyfried, the actor who portrayed Holmes in a movie. Did we really need a level of artifice in this movie? That’s not what we got, though — she was insightful in discussing what Holmes was going through, and it wasn’t done as an acting exercise, but as an informed woman discussing what she saw in Holmes’ reaction, and was outraged at the manipulative sleazebag, Billy. She made a substantive contribution to the documentary.
Elizabeth Holmes will be out of prison in 2030. Billy Evans is actively trying to scam money for a biomedical gimmick right now. This movie does not redeem anyone.
Go see it. I was disappointed that attendance at the Morris Theater was so low, about 10 people last night, so preferably you should drive to Western Minnesota to watch it. I’ll be at the ticket counter tonight, come give me money.
Congrats on being a more careful observer than me; I didn’t get that Billy was looking at biology videos. I thought Fielder’s use of Amanda was very clever. Having her in costume and makeup playing Lizzy in a “recreation” of a scene where the cameras couldn’t go, followed by her in street clothes talking about Lizzy, gave an Inception-like multi-layered reality feeling. The “meta” was so thick…
The only thing I could conclude about Liz herself was, she can win any staring contest. She never blinks those wide eyes.
Seems it’s a great time to be a con artist. There certainly are a lot of them on the loose these days. Holmes story would be a cautionary tale except Evans seems to be heading down the same path.
I looked at Theranos a long time ago when it was starting up.
Even back then, it looked pretty questionable.
The tipoff was more or less no peer reviewed papers in the relevant scientific literature.
It wasn’t just me either.
Most people who knew anything about the biotech industry or biomedical science looked at Theranos and passed on it.
He’s also a creepy controlling manipulator, and left me feeling a touch of sympathy for Holmes. Except that she was enthusiastically enabling him.
It sounds like she desperately wanted to believe her “invention” was real and would work some day; and she let him manipulate her because he was the only person consistently telling her what she desperately wanted to hear. And he’s sticking with her, maybe partly because he loves her, but (just my guess) mostly because he still hopes to make them both some money from their scam.
Hopefully he’ll give up sometime soon and find himself a legit job…
Maybe you could show old documentaries by John Pilger or other investigating journalists?
They can be pretty shocking by revealing the extreme duplicity by governments.
Medical and healthcare fraud has been big business for a long time; even bigger business today. Too many ways it injures and kills people to list here.
Was this movie supposed to be a warning or a glorification of the Crapitallist fraud this country is drowning in?
Off topic: PZ, there is a show on TV in phoenix called ‘Medicine Ball’ that features Morris Minn.
These real-life psychopaths are in a sense scarier than Mads Mikkelsen or Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal.
I also saw this movie and while it was worth the money (not that much – we are seniors and went early on a weekday for an additional discount) I walked out puzzled by the reactions of those reviewers who left the movie wondering it Holmes was actually a victim. She is not a victim; she truly is a fraudster. She may be counting on people who, unaware of the dispositive evidence that she defrauded her investors, will be sympathetic to the poor, picked-on innocent. And invest in her and Billy’s next con.
I thought that was one of the interesting choices of the movie. They didn’t hang a sign around her neck saying “CON ARTIST,” they just showed a con artist going about her daily life, trusting the audience to see all the signs. If some don’t, well, there’s the next mark.
Billy Evans, Billy McFarland, Billy Coull… how many more data points are needed to confirm this nominative red flag?
One of the interesting things about the movie to me was that Billy the utterly despicable self-aggrandizing manipulator seems, at the same time, actually to love Elizabeth the con artist, and vice versa, and they even seem like reasonably responsible parents. It doesn’t mitigate the pervasive creepiness of them both, nor does the suspicion that they actually believe at least some of their delusions. In some ways it makes it worse. They’re not comic book cutouts you can simply hate and dismiss. They’re a matched pair, circulating among us as if they were just ordinary people. Watching Elizabeth earnestly declaring her sincerity, I was reminded of that old movie “Village of the Damned,” based on an old John Wyndham novel (better than the movie, by the way), about children who are really space aliens.
I read an argument for why it should have been obvious from the beginning that Theranos was a fraud. It went like this: You can’t diagnose multiple diseases from one drop of blood for the same reason you can’t do a nationally representative survey by polling a few dozen people.
You need more data than that to get a statistically representative sample. There’s no technological breakthrough that can overcome basic math.
speaking of bad movies you should watch:
https://crooksandliars.com/2026/11/musk-documentary-real-life-horror-movie
the muskrat in all his g(l)ory
@12: Did they show their arithmetic? ISTM (non-expert) that any chemical found in the blood is going to be fairly evenly mixed in, and some should be present in even a drop. ICBW but statistical sampling theory should not apply here.