Genuinely wondering about the full frontal shower scene and what was the point? To show that Billy and Liz were sincere about "you can see everything"? Nothing off limits? Or to confuse the audience or evoke discomfort?

It really added nothing to the movie.

Mariah had Tommy Motolla. Elizabeth had Sunny Balwani.

In both relationships there was a 20 year age difference.

Both relationships blended business and romance.

Both involved controlling men telling their partner how to act, dress and eat.

I have looked into Holmes case deeply and the parallel is there. I think I'm going to tell Mariah. She'll probably stay out of it but you never know. I am a fan of hers, she is a queen.

I believe that the reason Nathan would not go swimming with her was because he never wanted to interact with her without a microphone. When he swims with her, he “breaks his own rule” making the point that he himself is a terribly unreliable narrator.

I would be watching the doc and then it would repeatedly hit me as a reminder that these are REAL people, not characters in movies. It felt surreal...

We’ve seen that Elizabeth’s con relies on the personas she sells, but so far most of these con’s have been focused on making men around her fall for her traps. She did it with Theranos and we all saw her attempt the same on Nathan.

It makes me wonder what the persona/con would look like if the YCSE interviewer was a woman. Would she still pull the innocent mom doe-eyed bit? Or would she go for a very competent girl power angle?

He figured out who he was actually interviewing or no?

Anyone have a pic of that device Nathan's holds in YCSE trying to replicate it for halloween.

SPOILERS BELOW !

I watched Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything yesterday, and while much of the discussion has focused on whether Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans are narcissists, compulsive liars, or genuinely delusional, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much of their behavior might reflect the environments that shaped them.

I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that Holmes attended Stanford and Evans graduated from MIT. I am saying this as someone who attended a private K–12 school that regularly sent students to elite universities and recently graduated from a top-20 university myself (also applied and was admitted into Holmes’ alma mater, Stanford, but turned it down). I’ve spent much of my life surrounded by people who were raised to believe they were exceptional, or at least that becoming exceptional should be the entire point of their existence.

I think there’s something deeply unhealthy about that, particularly when combined with inherited wealth and social prestige. Children born into extraordinary advantages are often taught to interpret those advantages as evidence of their own extraordinary abilities. Privilege becomes merit. Access becomes talent. Institutional validation becomes proof of personal worth.

And from an increasingly young age, you’re taught that your life needs to tell a compelling story. Your hobbies become extracurriculars that can be sorted into rankings of 1-5, your interests become application essays, your identity becomes a personal brand. You learn that being exceptional and convincingly performing exceptionalism can actually produce many of the same institutional rewards.

Holmes seems like an extreme manifestation of this. Her public identity was essentially a perfectly constructed college application narrative taken to its logical conclusion: the visionary Stanford dropout, the revolutionary entrepreneur, the young woman destined to transform medicine. She wasn’t simply selling a medical device. She was selling an entire mythology about herself, and Silicon Valley rewarded her for it.

What struck me most was her insistence, even when directly questioned by Fielder, that she had never lied. Despite her conviction, she remains remarkably committed to her understanding of herself as someone whose intentions were fundamentally good. I kept wondering whether she was consciously manipulating him or had become so invested in her own mythology that acknowledging reality would mean dismantling her entire identity.

Billy, to me, represents a different manifestation of the same culture.

Throughout the documentary, he seems almost compulsively invested in controlling how he and Elizabeth are perceived. The egg-whisking scene, his attempts to negotiate a share of the documentary’s profits, and his management of Elizabeth’s social media and AI likeness all struck me as variations of the same impulse: the need to be in control of the narrative, even when doing so actively undermines the image he’s trying to construct.

What’s particularly fascinating is that the documentary itself becomes caught in this contradiction. Holmes and Billy ostensibly want to demonstrate their authenticity, yet their efforts to control how that authenticity is presented repeatedly call it into question.

I think there’s a continuity between the teenager who learns to package themselves as a uniquely compelling admissions candidate and the entrepreneur who learns to package themselves as a uniquely visionary founder. Both compete for opportunities from institutions that reward persuasive narratives about future potential, sometimes before that potential has been demonstrated.

And the film left me wondering whether, for some people, spending a lifetime being rewarded for appearing exceptional eventually makes it difficult to distinguish between the identity they’ve constructed and who they actually are.

There’s also a particular moral exceptionalism that can develop in these pressure cooker environments. You’re encouraged to see yourself as someone who recognizes what others cannot, someone destined to disrupt established institutions, someone whose vision is so extraordinary that conventional rules might not apply. At its healthiest, that produces innovation and at its worst, it produces people who interpret skepticism as ignorance and accountability as something reserved for less exceptional individuals.

But here’s what genuinely frightens me — Holmes and Billy came of age in an elite admissions culture that was, by many measures, less competitive than the one students face today.

I graduated from college this spring, and even compared with my own experience, the performance of exceptionalism seems to be growing more elaborate. There are entire industries dedicated to helping children construct competitive personal narratives. Students are encouraged to start nonprofits, build businesses, demonstrate leadership, and cultivate extraordinary identities before they’re even old enough to vote — I know multiple people who “started” nonprofits, blatantly lied about those accomplishments, and once they were accepted into their desired college, completely abandoned that project. With tech like AI, it makes the language, aesthetics, and strategies of exceptionalism more accessible than ever.

There’s something almost too fitting about Billy’s use of an AI-generated Elizabeth here. The distinction between a person and their carefully managed representation becomes increasingly difficult to locate. I don’t think AI will necessarily create more Elizabeth Holmeses. But I worry it will accelerate a culture in which everyone can manufacture the appearance of intellectual sophistication, visionary ambition, and personal exceptionalism without necessarily possessing the underlying experience, judgment, or substance.

The performance of exceptionalism is becoming easier to produce precisely as the competition to be perceived as exceptional intensifies.

What happens when an entire generation grows up in that contradiction? What happens to intellectual humility? To pursuing something because it’s genuinely interesting rather than because it demonstrates your potential/your superiority? To seeing your peers as people you can learn from rather than competitors you need to outperform?

I’m obviously not suggesting elite universities produce fraudsters, nor am I equating ambitious students with someone convicted of fraud. Personal responsibility matters, and most people who pass through these institutions do not behave like Holmes.
But I think we do ourselves a disservice by treating people like her as entirely inexplicable outliers without questioning the qualities our institutions reward.

Maybe Holmes and Billy aren’t complete departures from the values of elite achievement culture, but distorted reflections of them… Having grown up inside this culture, I increasingly question how much of what we call ambition is actually curiosity, passion, or a desire to contribute something meaningful, and how much is simply the fear of being ordinary.

Are we teaching young people to become exceptional, or are we teaching them that being perceived as exceptional is the most important thing they can accomplish?

Let me start by saying I thoroughly enjoyed the documentary, as well as all of Nathan’s previous work. I thought it was compelling, thought-provoking, and delightfully ambiguous.

But even two weeks into its release, it’s clear that certain people are coming away from this documentary with a more positive view on Elizabeth and her guilt. And I can’t see that as anything but intentional from Nathan and Lance.

The documentary intentionally plants seeds of doubt about who she might be or what might be going on. Was this actually just a misunderstanding over the word “can”? Is she being manipulated or used by Billy? Was she being manipulated or used by Sunny? Don’t you feel bad about a new mom being separated from her kids? Did she even really do anything wrong (remember, all of the patient related charges were found not guilty)?

I understand the purpose of the documentary was not to prove her guilt, and that sowing those seeds of doubt was necessary to explore other themes. Everything interesting about the documentary (the unreliability of any narrative viewpoint, the weird codependent mess of a relationship between her and Billy, the cat and mouse of who is deceiving who, etc) is made stronger by drawing out the ambiguity of each of those questions.

Yes, her obvious guilt is easily proven with just cursory searches after the movie. But Nathan and Lance know as well as anybody that not everybody’s going to do that. By leaving these seeds of doubt unanswered, it allows certain viewers to walk away from the documentary believing there’s a chance she’s innocent.

All it would take is one or two more cards at the end of the film. “The machine brought out by Liz on display was not the same machine that Theranos was using.” “Days before the documentary, Holmes and Evans moved out of their $125M estate and into the beach condo for unknown reasons.” I don’t think the films impact would be meaningful affected.

From an image rehabilitation standpoint, I think the ambiguity of the documentary helped her case quite a bit, strictly from the standpoint that some people are going to leave on her side that weren’t before. Media literacy is not Nathan’s responsibility, but if he believes she’s guilty, is it not irresponsible to release a film that will make change some people’s minds to believe she’s not? Or is it possible this isn’t the pitch-perfect meta commentary everybody thinks it is?

Whatever he was about to say was clearly sympathetic to her, so I'm wondering why Billy with the willy felt the need to shut down the conversation

As someone who was tempted to give EH at least some benefits of the doubt after seeing this film, I was very encouraged by this REACTION video put out by a clinical psychologist who teaches about narcissistic abuse, how to recognize it, and how to deal with it. She caught herself getting pulled into the quicksand and didn't even realize it until the following day!

Check it out..would love to hear others' reactions to the points she raises.

Dr. Ramani and Dangerous Empathy

Amanda appeared to be really taken in by the idea that Billy is the villain in his and Liz's dynamic. The fact that Billy is a genuine POS in his own right definitely sold a lot of viewers on this idea

I don't pretend to know the ins-and-outs of their actual offscreen relationship, but the dynamic they tried to sell to the documentary crew strikes me (and a lot of others talking about the movie) as actually being very mutual and deliberate. Liz was already in a lot of trouble when she met this redpill trustfund baby who's used to treating people he sees as "beneath" him like shit, and these qualities made him a very useful attack dog. He handles the finances as her unmarried partner so that it doesn't have to go toward restitution, she still gets to enjoy all the financial benefits, and if outside parties see his behavior as controlling it just serves to generate more sympathy for her. It's a lot of trust to place in Billy, sure, but he needs her just as much as she needs him

A lot of people were thrown off by how much of an asshole Billy APPEARS to be in comparison to Liz. The truth is they're both assholes, with the difference being that:

1. Billy is an admitted Charlie Kirk fanboy, and their ilk already doesn't tend to see an issue with men acting as their female partners' handlers, so being publicly perceived as a controlling partner isn't an issue for him

2. Liz is going for a particular angle to try and garner sympathy, so she's never going to show how much of a say she actually has in their relationship because it just doesn't behoove her to do so

Mind you, Billy IS abusive, and Liz COULD be on the receiving end of some of it in reality. It's just not the whole picture of their dynamic the way Amanda seemed to think it was

Remember: Liz was willing to let innocent people potentially die due to the bullshit results generated by her product. Nothing about her actions, either as CEO of Theranos or as the subject of this documentary, indicates that she has a healthy conscience. Liz is pretending to not be an asshole, while Billy's got no qualms about being his authentic asshole self

(like I can’t overstate how big of a spoiler this is)

I haven’t see much discussion of this so I’m going to pose it here —

With the exception of most of the fish bowl moments in the San Diego house, and the early fly on the wall interviews, YCSE is fictionalised.

By this I mean: again, I don’t think Holmes or Billy were promoted to do so or say anything in particular by the filmmakers and aside from the same editing process that all documentaries experience, have not been misleadingly depicted in their own life.

But the final half of the movie with Seyfried, in particular the scenes where they discuss planned re-enactments or capture Seyfried’s “real” reactions to footage or scripts? This in itself has been scripted by Fielder or Oppenheimer in order to essentially capture the documentary’s theme.

There is no arc here otherwise — they had a lot of good footage and Billy is perplexing but they were never getting anything of substance because Holmes is in it for some long con. A more interesting narrative emerged of “Fielder as Holmes’s mark”, which would mirror Holmes’s pattern of manipulating men by her affect of some aspect of gender performance (a motif in Seyfried’s show as well…).

That entire (amazing) last scene between Fielder and Seyfried is, for lack of a better term, fiction. Maybe Seyfried didn’t have a literal script in terms of “confronting” Fielder in that way but for sure the filmmakers planned that as their final set piece in which the depths of Fielder’s contamination as a documentarian are revealed. Seyfried names the thing the documentary has been hinting at for the last 60 minutes: beyond wanting to protect her interests from the strange, unlikeable Billy, Nathan now feels a desire to put Holmes’s interests before objectivity. He cares about her in some way he never intended.

Nothing is ever lingered on but the hotel/prison call scene is probably the other key “scripted” element. Nathan waiting by the phone all day like a teenager waiting to be invited to prom and then, when he gets Holmes on the phone, it isn’t like a documentarian getting his subject to speak. It’s like a teenager speaking to their crush.

Do I think this scripted element is based on a real feeling from Fielder? Maybe — in those heads between part 1 and 2, I have no doubt Fielder interrogated his own responses to Holmes and realised that she was likely trying to manipulate him. Maybe they watched back the footage and saw Holmes’s mirroring of Fielder and her intense “focus” on him (a typical effort by sociopaths to ingratiate themselves is to make someone feel very important and special).

So basically a feature documentary morphed into a mega episode of The Rehearsal, and with an interesting “angle” to portray, it was easier for A24 to convince Seyfried to engage in some strange meta-version of herself responding to the subject of a character she played years ago.

I only know the basics of Elizabeth Holmes and her downfall. Any recommended pre-watching or reading before seeing? Or will it explain everything I need to know?

As someone deeply rooted in the legal system, I'm always skeptical of eyewitness testimony. Which is why the second part of the film bothered me so much. However (and maybe I'm a little late to the party),in my opinion it was completely intentional.

Memory is naturally selective. So relying on someone to recount an unrecorded conversation after the fact means you're watching a curated version of history. Nathan's brain automatically fills in the gaps and smoothes over details. Even if it's done with zero emotional intent he's altering the pacing to fit the story.

But, by casting Amanda Seyfried to perform those scenes, they intentionally exploit that flaw. It makes the dialogue sound natural. Which ended up creating a conflict in my mind. I wanted to accept the production parts as the truth. But the logical part of my brain was thinking nobody actually can write a perfectly curated script of a prison visit going off of memory. So, can you really call this a documentary??

But, instead of hiding behind that question, the MOVIE highlights it. It turns the reenactments into a commentary on how easily we can be manipulated by cameras and actors. It forces you to question the validity of what you're seeing. Or not seeing.

For instance, the scene that stuck w me the most was when Amanda and Nathan are rehearsing and he alters "It" to "something."

I didn't know until afterward that the word change mirrored the Theranos trial. And her lawyers spent months arguing the semantics of the word "can" versus "will."

I think this was set up in the very beginning. When Elizabeth lays out the pieces of the Theranos device. She tries to claim that the machine was a masterpiece that "can" run any medical diagnostic test. The two contrasting concepts Nathan traps her on are the difference between an "idea" versus a "product."

As I've thought about it more and more, I don't know that this should necessarily be called a documentary. Obviously you don't see everything. Which, seems to be what they were after.

Genuinely apprehensive with this one as I’ve heard how scary/unsettling it’s meant to be but know nothing about it.

UPDATE: I love horror films a lot but, this one I just didn’t get, outside of the initial shock moment that starts the events off with the car, I found it incredibly average with some good practical effects and performances. If I loose sleep it will be more confusion than anything else.

Not sure if this counts as a spoiler but spoilers! Just in case.

I took this scene as her realizing her con had finally worked on Nathan. Once she noticed that he genuinely believed she might not get the joke she took advantage of that and played into it. It was her “gotcha” for Nathan.

Billy noticed that’s what she was doing and played into it too. He explained the joke to her as like a “I see what you’re doing”. That’s why he said “thank you for bringing this up” because Nathan essentially proved he was buying her schtick of being this oblivious person.

I feel like after this scene she also started to act a little more “dumb” to keep that facade up. Anyway, thoughts on this?

I thought it was fine. Entertaining, but not a very good documentary. I didn't learn anything about Elizabeth Holmes because I already knew she is a manipulative sociopath. Yet I keep seeing people describe this movie as a masterpiece. Why?

I think my interpretation currently is that she is the one who is using Billy, she wants vindication in the public eye and therefore allows Billy to be the controlling man that he is — that only serves to make her look like a victim, which is beneficial. They could love each other but it is also certainly a mutually beneficial relationship. He gets power by being attached to her name, she gets sympathy. But I still recognize that the point of the film is that we can’t understand everything; their dynamic is elusive as everything was in the movie, and that’s the point. When everything we know is biased by our personalized perspective, what can we truly understand? Objectivity does not exist in analysis.

When Liz left to deal with the crying kid, why didn’t the filmmakers and A24 execs wait for her to come back to discuss anything else?

She’s the reason for the doc, or at least was supposed to be at the time. It seems so strange to me that they would discuss anything of importance without her there to agree to it.

I watched this in theaters and that sketch went right over my head. They were talking so fast and all I heard was literally what the guy was saying about “who’s on first”…etc.

I appear to be in the minority because almost everyone here seems to have picked up on it. I actually felt exactly how Liz was in her responses about how it was supposed to be funny because the characters were just talking over each other. It wasn’t until Nathan’s explanation that I understood the crux of the joke.

Are there others who didn’t pick up on it as well? I definitely felt a sense of not wanting to say I didn’t get it because everyone else said they did.