Review Preview (Spoiler Free) - You Can See Everything

Check out this spoiler-free bonus review preview. It's the movie we didn't know we needed (or existed!) and Chris and Lizzie are still grappling with how You Can See Everything made them feel. Did Nathan Fielder, master of narrative manipulation and manufactured awkwardness, meet his match in Elizabeth Holmes? How did Chris and Lizzie interpret the film's myriad mind-boggling moments? Should this be the first documentary nominated for Best Picture (and perhaps a few other categories)? Subscribe for $5 on Patreon, Spotify, or Apple for access to all bonus and ad-free episodes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another bonus episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one that claims you can see everything and yet showed me the one penis I didn't want to see. As always, I am Chris Wintervower, joined by Lizzie Bassett, and we are talking about the movie that it seems much of the country is talking about right now, a movie that we did not know existed a mere six weeks ago. Lizzie, what do we have in store tonight?

• 0:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, I would say can is the operative word.

• 0:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Not low enough.

• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry.

• 0:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, excuse me.

• 0:48Lizzie Bassett?

  No, she's not even doing that voice really in this.

• 0:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Not so much.

• 0:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, she has a low voice.

• 0:52Chris Winterbauer?

  She does.

• 0:53Lizzie Bassett?

  But she's not doing, you know, what people accused her of having put on earlier on. Yeah, we are, of course, talking about You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary? Question mark, which is directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Both are on camera, but Nathan Fielder, obviously, is the primary documentarian slash also, I would say, subject himself, who appears on camera in the film. And if anybody doesn't know, this movie begins by covering the, I think, 34 days prior to Elizabeth Holmes beginning her 11-year and three-month prison sentence. And Nathan Fielder essentially embeds himself

• 1:34Lizzie Bassett?

  with her and her family for that period of time. And then I don't really think we can say anything else.

• 1:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, we'll save it for the spoilers. Don't say anything about the backf right here. That is exactly right. Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder were somewhat surprised to be selected, perhaps Fielder more so than Lance Oppenheim, by Billy Evans and Elizabeth Holmes to come and stay with them.

• 2:00Lizzie Bassett?

  And Billy Evans is her partner, notably not husband.

• 2:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, talk to me about the experience of seeing You Can See Everything. Perhaps, let's go back. Tell me, what did you know about Elizabeth Holmes before this? What did you know about the case? Is this a subject that's interested you? Did you have a perspective or a feeling on Elizabeth Holmes coming into the movie? Did the documentary challenge that? Did it reinforce it? I think this, from my experience, speaking with a couple of people afterwards, this movie really seems like a Rorschach test. I just read John Kerry Ru's interpretation of the film, which I thought was very interesting on the New York Times. So, Lizzie, maybe tell us a little bit about kind of what you came into the movie with, broadly speaking, and your experience watching it. And again, we will do no spoilers.

• 2:47Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll kind of talk through maybe the first half of the film before the break, and then we will announce when we're going to start really spoiling things to our audience.

• 2:55Lizzie Bassett?

  So I think I have, I would imagine, a very similar experience with Elizabeth Holmes to most people of our age. I did see the Alex Gibney documentary, which was The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. That was a 2019 HBO documentary. I watched The Dropout, which is the Hulu show starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes. You know, I didn't know this, but I guess maybe more people were exposed to Elizabeth Holmes via The Dropout than I realized. I definitely had followed her story since much earlier on, probably closer to 2016, 2017, when she was first appearing as, you know, the first self-made

• 3:40Lizzie Bassett?

  woman billionaire. I was aware of her at that point, but then, of course, I started really paying attention when John Kerry Ru, who we will talk about in this episode, broke the story in the Wall Street Journal. Is that right?

• 3:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, he was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal at the time.

• 3:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And so I, as you know, I am a fan of true crime. I'm particularly a fan of true white-collar crime, and this was right up my alley. And so I was very fascinated by it. But it's not like I did a deep dive into this. You know, I watched the content that was available to me.

• 4:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So you did not read John Kerry Ru's book, Bad Blood?

• 4:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I did not read the full book, no. But yeah, that was my experience with her. And prior to watching this documentary, as far as I thought about her, she was a complete fraud. She was a joke. I just didn't think much of her, other than that she was doing an abs class with Jen Shaw in prison, which, Chris, there are times when I really wish you watched The Real Housewives.

• 4:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Who's Jen Shaw?

• 4:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Because then you would understand. She is a Real Housewife of Salt Lake City, former.

• 4:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, according to her partner, she has abs now, so that must have worked.

• 4:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Because of Jen Shaw, let me just tell you. But anyway, yeah, they're doing a workout class together. Jen Shaw is a monster. So she's a monster. She was defrauding old people over the phone. That was her pyramid scheme. Anyway, that's my experience with Elizabeth Holmes. So I went into this excited to see it much more because of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim than the Elizabeth Holmes of it all. And

• 5:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Any thoughts on the movie? No spoilers before, or do you just want to save it?

• 5:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I said this as kind of a joke at the top, but it is true. Like, the title, as the entire movie is, is brilliant, which is that, yes, you can see everything, but do you see everything? And what do you choose to see, I think, is the question that lingers at the end of this movie. The thing that I came away feeling when I walked out of the theater was, and I don't even think that this is necessarily true, but one way to look at it could be, is the movie asking, is she manipulative, or is she being manipulated? And is the answer just simply yes, across the board? But we can get into it more in

• 6:04Lizzie Bassett?

  the spoiler portion of this, because I actually don't. I think that boiling it down to something like that does a disservice to what this documentary is. So I loved it. In case that's not clear, I think that this is the best movie I've seen all year, hands down. And I can't wait to talk about it with you, my smart friend and coworker who went to Stanford.

• 6:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I did. Didn't drop out. Didn't feel that smart. We, I don't think, she's older than us, I believe, by a few years, so I don't think we ever would have.

• 6:39Lizzie Bassett?

  She's 40.

• 6:40Chris Winterbauer?

  She is 42. She was born in 84, so we never, she, we never would have overlapped. Not that we would have been friends, anyway. She wouldn't have liked me. All right. I would have liked her. She wouldn't have liked me. Let's, so my experience, I read John Kerry Ru's book, Bad Blood. I was really fascinated by this case around this time. I was pretty interested in Adam Newman and what was happening at WeWork.

• 7:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Chris Winterbauer?

  The former head of Uber, Travis Kalanick, what's his last name? I can't remember his last name.

• 7:15Lizzie Bassett?

  By the way, there's an amazing WeWork jump scare in this.

• 7:19Chris Winterbauer?

  There is. That's very funny. That's a great cut wide. And I, you know, so I did go to Stanford from 2007 to 2011, and I didn't work in tech. I didn't study computer science or anything like that, but I know a lot of people who went into Silicon Valley. And you could see the culture curdling, I would argue, even as early as the mid to late 2000s, and this idea of fake it till you make it. And we saw it explode on a company firsthand called Klingle, well before Theranos. And Klingle was made fun of on the show Silicon Valley. It was a wireless payments technology company that didn't really have the technology

• 8:02Chris Winterbauer?

  that it claimed to have. And I had a friend who was hired by the company to shoot a commercial for them. They shot this insane, crazy, we're going to change the world commercial, and you never know what the technology is that the, I mean, again, they literally made fun of this company in Silicon Valley. They like, instead of hiring a commercial company, they bought all these red cameras and hired my friend to do it and stuff. They made a great commercial. Anyway, that company went under, you know, tens of millions of dollars. And the sort of unicorn or bust mentality of venture capital had taken root following, you know, what are now known as the hyperscalers, the Googles and the face, the Metas and whatnot of the world, had led to this high-stakes casino sort of environment in Silicon Valley. And let's talk more, and once we get into spoilers, about the culture of Silicon Valley

• 8:46Chris Winterbauer?

  and kind of how broken I think it really is. But I felt at the time, and I feel much more so now, that Elizabeth Holmes was less an outlier when viewed through the lens of Silicon Valley than a lot of people, I think, maybe liked to think or want to report that she was.

• 9:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 9:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think that it was much more notable, candidly, that she was a woman than it was that she was a fraudster out of Silicon Valley. One of those things seemed somewhat unique, the other one much less so to me. I found her affect really unusual and interesting, the black turtleneck, the deep voice. She was almost, like, they made a reference to at one point, maybe even a quote in the film, the Kabuki-like makeup that she did wear at the time. It's very different now.

• 9:35Lizzie Bassett?

  The makeup is bizarre.

• 9:37Chris Winterbauer?

  The point what is, though, it all was presented as this is this master manipulator, web weaver of sorts, who has created a vaporware, not unlike many other products. I don't know if you remember the infamous Juicero.

• 9:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I remember the Juicero.

• 9:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, the juice squeeze machine that Bloomberg realized if you just squeeze the packets with your own hand, you could make the juice just as quickly. And so the question, though, was what, what is, why is this different? And I think for some people, it was different for a few ways. It dealt with healthcare. In theory, people's lives or their health could be at risk, although she was acquitted on those counts. And it seems like where it was more unique was in that she had this unusual board of very powerful, very old male investors. And

• 10:29Chris Winterbauer?

  They did not like being made fools of. And I do think that that played a large part into the ultimate sentence that she was served and what she's serving now. Anywho, so coming into this documentary, I would argue, even though I think she's guilty of everything she was charged with on the defrauding her investors count.

• 10:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, just to be clear, was wire fraud. And she was convicted on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. And then Sunny Balwani was, I think, found guilty of everything he was charged with. So all 12 counts of wire fraud.

• 11:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So coming into the movie, I kind of thought we wouldn't hear anything about Elizabeth Holmes again until if and when she got out of prison. And then I heard that Nathan Fielder had made this documentary with her, and it didn't really compute. I was a fan of the rehearsal and Nathan for You.

• 11:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Love The Curse.

• 11:22Chris Winterbauer?

  The Curse. And I saw this, you know, we saw this trailer, this one-minute trailer, and it was so captivating just watching the two of them, the sort of two most committed people in the world to their respective bits, perhaps you could say, playing improv with one another. And so going into the movie, my feeling for the first hour really was disbelief. This is, to me, it felt like Celebrity Deathmatch. It was weird. I felt like, um, people must have felt, you know, they used to, before the UFC, they would do these fights between people that had different disciplines. And, you know, Chuck Wepner fought Andre the Giant, or, you know, Muhammad Ali goes to Japan and fights Inaki and stuff like that. And it felt like that. It felt like a curiosity, almost.

• 12:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It felt so odd to see these two people in the same room together. They are both so famous in such different ways, yet in ways that actually, when you put them in the same room together, it does make sense that they're in the same room together. And what I found fascinating was that that curiosity gave way to, yes, some Fielder-esque questioning of Holmes, but then also the, a questioning and deconstruction of the documentary format as a whole. You mentioned the title. You can see everything, obviously, the very-

• 12:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Beyond that, I think it's a deconstruction of storytelling as a whole.

• 12:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Storytelling, representation, um, the, you can see everything, of course, as a misnomer through the sheer fact that this is edited. You do not see everything. We see specific moments. The way in which she is framed in preposterously extreme close-ups, which invite us to scrutinize every facial tic and to presume intent behind everything, whether that may or may not be there. It feels like the, one of the least objective and yet most interesting explorations of a person, a complicated, very unusual person that I have ever seen. It feels like Fielder is entirely trying to put you in his mind, and I don't know if

• 13:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I can trust him, to play chess with a subject who I know I can't trust, and yet I occasionally find myself wanting to trust her. And so it was just a fascinating game of cat and mouse between Fielder and her, and between each of them and the audience, because they are clearly both aware that there's a camera, you know, around at all times. And so I just, I thought it was completely fascinating. It was alternately funny, uncomfortable, scary, perhaps, you know, at times, unnerving, upsetting. But ultimately, what I was stunned by is I walked away feeling, not necessarily that

• 14:01Chris Winterbauer?

  my opinion had changed on the facts of the case, but I found, I felt compassion toward Elizabeth Holmes, quite a bit, actually. And even Billy Evans, who I think is kind of a, well, we'll get into it in the spoiler section. I don't agree with him on hardly anything, and I don't think his behavior acquits himself particularly well. And yet I also felt some compassion for him. And so I have to say, I thought it was extremely successful in terms of telling a story in a fascinating way and giving me some sort of insight and access to its subjects, um, even as I questioned the methods, including an oppressive score, uh, beautiful, although

• 14:43Chris Winterbauer?

  extremely invasive cinematography, and just the funniest, most sinister nerd of all time, Nathan Fielder skulking in the corner of every single scene.

• 14:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 14:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Um, if there's, I've never seen anything quite like it, and it was fascinating. It's two hours and 50 minutes, and it felt like it was an hour and 30.

• 15:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, it just rolled by. I don't know if I can say anything else, Lizzie, without spoiling things.

• 15:05Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I, I think we're gonna have to move into the spoilers pretty quickly in this episode.

• 15:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I do want to just shout out, um, I, first, I feel that this movie had the complexity that I was perhaps missing in primetime.

• 15:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Chris Winterbauer?

  And Lance Oppenheimer directed this, and so that was, you know, really nice. I want to also shout out David Boland, cinematographer of this film, was also the cinematographer on primetime, and I think he does an amazing job making this, a couple of confined spaces feel both enormous and extremely cinematic. And shout out to the entire sound team. Documentary sound is so hard. You are in uncontrolled environments, and you are miking people who are not actors. I could not believe how good the sound was on this documentary. It, it is remarkable, both the mixing and the capture. So just wanted to shout out those departments. All right. Lizzie, should we do just one or two details, and then we'll dive into the spoilers?

• 16:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 16:02Chris Winterbauer?

  You Can See Everything is a 2026 American documentary film. A24 has specified, it's, they consider it strictly a documentary. We'll talk about some form changes in the film in the second half in a moment. Directed by, co-directed by Lance Oppenheimer and Nathan Fielder. It follows Elizabeth Holmes, who we've discussed is the disgraced former founder of Theranos, a company that purported to have developed technology that would allow you to portably blood test a single droplet of blood for, for myriad diseases and whatnot. She is, uh, about to, at the time of filming, begin serving an 11-year sentence, I believe, in federal prison.

• 16:44Chris Winterbauer?

  She is living with her partner, Billy Evans, down in San Diego?

• 16:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think they're outside of San Diego, in Del Mar, maybe?

• 16:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Del Mar, yep. And Nathan Fielder has been invited to live with them for a portion of these last 34 days before she goes to prison. And of course, the meta-commentary and meta-textual presentation only spirals and metastasizes from there, as Nathan Fielder tries to make sense of perhaps the most baffling person he's ever been around, besides when he looks in the mirror. So, um, it premiered at a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival at the beginning of September. That is just over six weeks ago. And it premiered this past weekend to an absolutely preposterous, I read, over $15 million

• 17:33Chris Winterbauer?

  so far, on less than 1,000 screens, I believe 855 screens. Over 2,000 of those showings were sold out on just those 855 screens.

• 17:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Mine was.

• 17:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Ours was not quite, but very close. It completely sucked the air out of the sales of a couple of other films this past weekend. I believe the folks behind Whalefall and perhaps Sense and Sensibility were a bit bummed that they chose this weekend. Interestingly, it also sucked the air out of the other Flim Flam Man documentary that came out this weekend, which was Alex Gibney's Musk.

• 18:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is a four-hour documentary on the confidence man-in-chief, so to speak, Mr. Elon Musk. And for whatever reason, the combination of Holmes and Nathan Fielder proved more desirable to go see. I have some theories as to why, but that movie has not found an audience yet, and this one did.

• 18:28Lizzie Bassett?

  That one seems very obvious to me. That, you know, we have a massive, and just at this point, repulsive overexposure to Elon Musk.

• 18:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 18:37Lizzie Bassett?

  And the, the idea of being assigned, uh, four hours on him, I can't do it. And I think that that's probably how most people who would go to an Alex Gibney documentary about Elon Musk would feel. So it does not surprise me at all that that's not, uh, even a contender. I think when that comes out on streaming, people are more likely to watch it. You can break it up. You can, you know-

• 19:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it would have done better as a four-part mini-series, perhaps-

• 19:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yes.

• 19:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Than a film, but, you know, I, I'm, I am excited to see it at some point.

• 19:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I would too. I'm not seeing it in the theater. I need to be able to stop it, leave, go to the other room, have a glass of alcohol, come back, turn it back on.

• 19:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Take some ketamine.

• 19:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay. Um, Lizzie, let's get into the spoiler section. So guys, if you have not seen You Can See Everything, our best advice, please stop listening to this and go see it, because the back half of the movie is best enjoyed knowing nothing.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  To hear the rest of this episode and all the spoilers, join us on Patreon, Apple or Spotify at the $5 tier. There you'll find all our bonus episodes in an ad-free fee. Thanks for listening.