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“Take it From Me” is a TODAY series where experts use their wisdom to explain trends or make recommendations within their fields. In this edition, a forensic psychologist weighs in on “You Can See Everything.”
Spoilers ahead for “You Can See Everything.”
“You Can See Everything” has audiences twisting to identify truths and lies. Filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim moved into Elizabeth Holmes’ house 34 days before she was set to surrender to federal prison for an 11-year sentence related to defrauding investors in relation to her biotech company, Theranos.
John De La Torre, a forensic psychologist who specializes in criminal work, scams and con artists, is uniquely well-suited to weigh in on who was telling the truth among all the players.
But he couldn’t.
“When I left that movie, I left feeling that all I saw was a game,” De La Torre tells TODAY.com. “All I saw was Nathan Fielder’s game to try to show me what he considers to be the truth, but isn’t necessarily the full truth. I see Billy and I see Elizabeth Holmes. I see the games that they play.”
De La Torre is trained to see deception and malingering. But he says this isn’t humans’ strong suit. “We’re not very good at detecting who is lying to us,” he says.
That’s what makes parsing this documentary as an audience member difficult. “Everything that is going on is masked by the color of the possibility that we are being lied to,” he says.
The Questions a Forensic Psychologist Would Have Asked Elizabeth Holmes
If De La Torre were in Fielder’s shoes, he says he would start with talking to Holmes about her defining relationships: “What she understands about them. Are the relationships that she has transactional, and what does that transaction look like for her? How does she know that someone likes her or doesn’t like her?”
While listening, he looks for consistency in people’s stories. “Consistent people tell the truth. Inconsistent people lie,” he says.
He paid attention to Fielder’s lines of questioning. While he’s “pretty good at exploring and following up,” he noticed some of the things he didn’t follow up on, like Holmes’ father’s disclosure of her previous sexual assault.
He also would take an approach similar to his work as a forensic psychologist, De La Torre assesses people accused of a crime using sanity and competency evaluations, to see if there is a mental disorder that a person may have.
Here’s Where He Comes Down on Elizabeth Holmes
After seeing the movie, De La Torre made up his mind about Holmes.
“I think she legitimately thinks she did nothing wrong,” he says. “I’m not even sure she knows.”
“I think she operates under the assumption that she needs to win or that something positive needs to happen. So long as she’s on the positive side, she’s willing to engage in whatever behavior she needs to engage in. That includes potentially making someone else be the bad guy,” she says.
Holmes swears to Fielder that she’s never knowingly told a lie, despite being convicted of fraud in 2022.
For a bit of background, Holmes dropped out of Stanford and became the youngest female billionaire thanks to Theranos, the biotech company she founded, based on a technology that could purportedly run tests on a single drop of blood.
Holmes was convicted on four federal charges of wire fraud for misrepresenting to investors what the Edison blood-testing machine could actually do. In her trial, she denied her product was defective.
Even if she swears she’s not lying, De La Torre considers Holmes a con artist.
“I think she truly believed in the work that she was doing, but therein lies the con because it doesn’t actually do the things that she claimed that it did,” De La Torre says. “She made other people believe that it could already do those things. And it is through that belief, that confidence that she had, that that was the con game that she was playing.”
Ultimately, De La Torre describes Holmes’ con as: “Making someone else believe that they are what she needs in order to be successful.”
What the Shower Scene Says About Billy Evans
Billy Evans, Holmes’ partner with whom she shares two children, has ample screen time in the movie, often intervening and sharing his own opinions. At one point, the camera catches Evans fully nude in the shower. It’s a telling moment, according to De La Torre.
“His willingness to expose himself to another man suggests that what he craves is attention,” he says.
He often gets attention by “saying something outlandish, saying something ridiculous, saying something that clearly demonstrates that he doesn’t care about other people.”
Whereas Holmes often “appears as though she’s executing human programming,” Evans knows how to feel and emote more easily.
The ‘Only Person’ With an Objective View
According to De La Torre, the only person with an objective and unbiased view of the action is Amanda Seyfried.
“It’s important to understand that no one in this film is telling the truth, except for Amanda Seyfried, and the only truth she tells is by calling out all of the other games that are being played whenever anybody is talking,” De La Torre says.
Seyfried played Holmes in the Hulu series “The Dropout,” and reprises the role in the documentary, all while helping Fielder investigate what’s really going on between Holmes and Evans. Her onscreen presence is captivating and animated, acting as a stand-in for the audience.
“I think she’s the one that calls out everything, all of the nonsense whether it’s from Billy or whether it’s from Nathan. I think Amanda Seyfried is the person to really listen to,” he continues.
An Exercise in Confirmation Bias
“You Can See Everything”? More like, “You Can See Some Things, Kind Of.”
De La Torre says that if you walk out of the theater confused, it’s only because you recognize Holmes, Evans and Fielder all had an agenda.
“Every single one of them is playing the game. And leaving confused just tells me that you are now also aware that what you are seeing may not be fully everything, “he says.
