// TECHCRUNCH — MOBILE & WEB
In ‘You Can See Everything,’ Elizabeth Holmes meets her equal in comedian Nathan Fielder
“Isn’t it weird that I, like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like … a business scam?” comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder gently asks Elizabeth Holmes.
One month before the notorious Theranos CEO surrendered to begin her 11-year criminal fraud sentence in 2023, Holmes and her husband contacted A24 as a last-ditch effort to exonerate her in the public eye, suggesting they send a film crew to document her final days of freedom. Alongside director Lance Oppenheim, Fielder — a cringe-comedy mastermind whose work often walks the line between fact and fiction — embraced the impossible project of figuring out who the infamous Stanford dropout really is.
“I never actually made that connection,” says Holmes. “I think it’s a pretty different situation.”
No one is better prepared than Fielder to probe the depths of Holmes’ psyche. His satirical docu-reality show “Nathan for You” catapulted him to cult stardom as he assumed the role of an exaggerated, deadpan version of himself who tries to help struggling small businesses by executing asinine interventions. In one early episode that went viral, Fielder convinces a coffee shop to change its name to “Dumb Starbucks” as a marketing stunt, but consults a lawyer to help him toe the flimsy line of parody law and escape legal trouble.
“If you just said that, you know, Theranos was a comedy bit, maybe you could get off scot-free,” Fielder says to Holmes.
“I was just kind of making a little joke. Maybe it was in bad taste.”
We already know that Elizabeth Holmes is not innocent. What we still can’t figure out, though, is whether she really, truly believes she did nothing wrong. Even as she sat on trial — listening to testimonies from investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars, whistleblowers who were silenced when they flagged that Theranos’ blood-testing devices didn’t work, and patients who acted on incorrect blood test results — Holmes never wavered.
Across Fielder’s body of metatextual comedy, even his most reverent fans can’t quite figure out when he’s acting, when he’s being himself, and if Fielder himself even knows where to draw that line anymore.
In that way, Fielder is just like Holmes: After over a decade in the public eye, onlookers remain captivated by each of their ambiguous personas.
“The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true,” she tells Fielder. “I know I didn’t commit any crime.”