“Take it from me” is a TODAY series where experts use their wisdom to explain trends or make recommendations in their field. In this edition, a forensic psychologist intervenes on “You can see everything”.
Spoilers ahead for “You Can See Everything.”
“You Can See Everything” challenges the audience to identify truths and lies. Filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim moved into Elizabeth Holmes’ house 34 days before she was sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors through her biotechnology company, Theranos.
John De La Torre, a forensic psychologist specializing in criminal work, scams and con artists, is uniquely positioned to determine who among all the players was telling the truth.
But he couldn’t.
“When I left that movie, I felt like everything I was seeing was a game,” De La Torre told TODAY.com. “All I’ve seen is Nathan Fielder’s play to try to show me what he sees as the truth, but it’s not necessarily the full truth. I see Billy and I see Elizabeth Holmes. I see the games they play.”
De La Torre is trained to see deception and simulation. But he says that’s not humans’ strong point. “We’re not very good at detecting who’s lying to us,” he says.
This is what makes it difficult to analyze this documentary as an audience member. “Everything that happens is masked by the color of the possibility that we are being lied to,” he says.
Questions a forensic psychologist would have asked Elizabeth Holmes
If De La Torre were in Fielder’s shoes, he says he would start by talking to Holmes about defining her relationships: “What she understands about them. Are the relationships she has transactional, and what does that transaction look like for her? How does she know someone likes her or doesn’t like her?”
By listening, he looks for coherence in people’s stories. “Consistent people tell the truth. Inconsistent people lie,” he says.
He paid attention to Fielder’s questions. Although he was “pretty good at exploring and following up”, he noticed some of the things he didn’t follow up on, such as Holmes’ father’s revelation of his previous sexual assault.
He would also take a similar approach to his work as a forensic psychologist. De La Torre evaluates people accused of a crime using mental health and competency evaluations, to see if a person might be suffering from a mental disorder.
Here’s where he goes after Elizabeth Holmes
After seeing the film, De La Torre made his decision about Holmes.
“I think she legitimately thinks she didn’t do anything wrong,” he says. “I’m not even sure she knows.”
“I think she assumes that she has to win or something positive has to happen. As long as she’s on the positive side, she’s willing to engage in whatever behavior she needs to. That includes potentially making someone else the bad guy,” she says.
Holmes swears to Fielder that she never knowingly lied, despite being convicted of fraud in 2022.
For some context, Holmes dropped out of Stanford and became the youngest female billionaire thanks to Theranos, the biotech company she founded based on technology that could purportedly perform tests on a single drop of blood.
Holmes was convicted of four federal wire fraud charges for making false statements to investors about what the Edison blood testing device could actually do. At her trial, she denied that her product was defective.
Although she swears she’s not lying, De La Torre considers Holmes a crook.
“I think she really believed in the work that she was doing, but that’s where the downside is because it doesn’t actually do the things that she claimed to do,” De La Torre says. “She made others believe that she could already do these things. And it was because of that belief, that confidence that she had, that this was the con game that she was playing.”
Ultimately, De La Torre describes Holmes’ scam as: “Making someone else believe he is what she needs to succeed.”
What the shower scene says about Billy Evans
Billy Evans, Holmes’ partner with whom she shares two children, spends a lot of screen time in the film, often interjecting and sharing his own opinions. At one point, the camera catches Evans completely naked 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 needs is attention,” he says.
He often attracts attention by “saying something weird, saying something ridiculous, saying something that clearly demonstrates that he doesn’t care about other people.”
While Holmes “often appears as if she is executing human programming,” Evans knows how to feel and express her emotions 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 movie is telling the truth except Amanda Seyfried, and the only truth she’s telling is by denouncing all the other games that are played every time someone speaks,” says De La Torre.
Seyfried played Holmes in the Hulu series “The Dropout” and reprises the role in the documentary, while helping Fielder investigate what’s really going on between Holmes and Evans. His screen presence is captivating and animated, acting as a stand-in for the audience.
“I think she’s the one who calls out everything, all the nonsense, whether it comes from Billy or Nathan. I think Amanda Seyfried is the person to really listen to,” he continues.
An exercise in confirmation bias
“You can see everything”? Rather: “You can see some things, sort of.”
De La Torre says that if you walk out of the theater confused, it’s only because you recognize that Holmes, Evans and Fielder all had an agenda.
“Every one of them is playing the game. And letting the confusion just tells me that you’re now also aware that what you’re seeing may not be quite the whole picture,” he says.
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