What it’s like when Elizabeth Holmes decides to destroy your life

The host opens by saying Elizabeth Holmes had seemed like a rare settled public figure: a convicted fraudster whose deception at Theranos had been exposed by years of reporting. That changed after You Can See Everything, the new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. The host considers the movie phenomenal, funny, and surprising, but says online reactions have begun defending Holmes, including from people he knows. Google Trends showed Holmes’s fame at an all-time high, while searches connected to the original Wall Street Journal investigations from 2015 and 2016 have fallen dramatically. The host worries that many viewers will encounter the movie without knowing the underlying reporting. Tyler Shultz, a former Theranos employee and whistleblower, says the reaction scares him. He expected viewers to treat the film as art rather than as their only source of truth, but saw people giving Holmes the benefit of the doubt. For the first time in roughly ten years, he also saw people attacking him online for whistleblowing—calling him a clout-seeker who could not keep his job. The host clarifies that Tyler is not simply complaining about criticism; he sees the criticism as evidence that a medical-fraud story is being reconsidered without its factual foundation.

The host gives the backstory Tyler believes is essential. Tyler’s grandfather, George Schultz, was a celebrated statesman who served as Treasury Secretary in the 1970s and Secretary of State in the 1980s, helping steer the country off the gold standard and negotiate the end of the Cold War. Holmes impressed him as a young founder using science to help people. His association gave Theranos credibility and access to powerful people, helping investors feel safe because other respected figures had already invested. George joined the board and strongly believed in Holmes’s mission. Tyler first met Holmes as a Stanford junior when George invited him to hear her describe Theranos. Holmes said she had dropped out at 19 to create blood-testing technology in her uncle’s basement: a system that could supposedly run any test from a single drop of blood in places such as battlefields, helicopters, operating rooms, homes, Walgreens, and Safeway. Tyler remembers her black turtleneck, deep monotone voice, piercing eyes, and a “reality distortion field” that made employees feel part of something historic. Holmes advised him to change his major from mechanical engineering to biology, and he joined Theranos believing she was the female Steve Jobs and Theranos was the Apple of healthcare.

Tyler says Theranos operated under extreme secrecy. Employees signed overbearing nondisclosure agreements, were given words they could not use to describe their jobs, and were told not to discuss their work even with spouses or colleagues. Rooms were locked, sometimes with internal barricades. Tyler initially worked on antibodies in a research lab, yet nobody there had seen the supposedly revolutionary product. Theranos marketed the Edison as a small black box that could use a few drops of finger-stick blood, collected in a “nanotainer,” to run hundreds of fast and accurate tests. When Tyler transferred to the validation lab—dramatically named “Normandy”—he finally saw the technology at age 22. His manager, a PhD molecular biologist, watched the demonstration and asked whether it was supposed to be impressive; the demonstrator told her to decide for herself. Tyler saw an eight-channel pipette on a robotic arm, not a standalone device. It could run only one kind of test at a time, relied on centrifuges and other third-party equipment, and was not engineered accurately enough to handle the dilution step. Blood had to be manually spun, pipetted into another nanotainer, processed by a separate robot, and then placed into a Theranos cartridge. Tyler initially hoped a real system was hidden behind another locked door, but the promised future version never arrived.

By 2014, Theranos had raised roughly $500 million at a $9 billion valuation and was testing real customers at Walgreens. Tyler says the company locked the Normandy lab before regulators arrived for a certification renewal, meaning regulators never saw a Theranos device. The company also manipulated proficiency testing, a kind of safety audit. The decisive incident involved syphilis: the test correctly identified only 65% of known positives. Employees deleted the data and repeated the test, obtaining 80%, a practice Tyler’s manager sarcastically called the “delete and repeat methodology.” When they tested colleagues and themselves, roughly 25% appeared positive despite presumably not having syphilis. Despite these results, the statistics team produced a validation report claiming 95% sensitivity, and a medical director signed off on testing patients. Tyler says he felt punched in the stomach because the test could falsely tell people they had syphilis or falsely reassure people who did. He contrasts this with a buggy iPhone demonstration: software users can see when it fails, but patients cannot tell whether a medical result is accurate. Reports later described patients wrongly told they faced heart attacks or sent to emergency rooms. Tyler tried first to raise concerns internally, approaching colleagues, managers, a vice president, Sunny Balwani, Holmes, a board member, and a regulator. After those efforts produced no action, he spoke with a Wall Street Journal reporter.

Tyler rejects the film’s suggestion that Holmes may have been a passive figure controlled by Sunny Balwani. He says Holmes was steering the company and deliberately used Balwani as a buffer. When Tyler confronted her about the website’s claim that the coefficient of variation was below 10%, Holmes treated the issue as a marketing detail and said it applied only to vitamin D. Tyler’s own data showed a 43% coefficient of variation for the syphilis test, while even the vitamin D validation reports showed figures around 19%, 23%, and 20%. He also asked how his calculation of 80% sensitivity became 95% in the validation report; Holmes said she did not know and referred him to the statistics vice president. Tyler says Holmes forwarded his detailed concerns to Balwani instead of responding. Balwani replied with an email “dripping with venom,” calling Tyler arrogant, ignorant, patronizing, and reckless, and saying that someone without the Schultz surname would have been held accountable more strongly. Tyler believes Holmes needed to preserve an angelic, sympathetic public image, while Balwani could play the threatening villain. Theranos also hired aggressive lawyers, including the lawyer who had represented Harvey Weinstein, and used private investigators and intimidation against people who challenged the company. Tyler recalls that chief scientist Ian Gibbons died by suicide the day before a deposition, after being frightened about speaking in a Theranos legal dispute; when his widow notified the company, a lawyer immediately demanded the return of his laptop and confidential materials.

Tyler says he spoke to the Wall Street Journal only after trying every internal route, and he hoped Holmes might still prove him wrong by revealing a functioning technology and showing that patients were safe. His family feared the company’s money and lawyers. George, then 95 and still on the board, was told by Holmes that Tyler had given away trade secrets. George asked Tyler to sign a one-page nondisclosure agreement, saying it would “end a world of suffering.” Tyler agreed to meet him privately first, believing his grandfather—who had preserved his integrity through Watergate and Iran-Contra—would make the right decision. Instead, Tyler says he lied about speaking to the Journal so he could learn what George had been told. George insisted that Theranos devices were being used in Medevac helicopters in Afghanistan and operating rooms at UCSF, and that third-party machines were used only for validation. Tyler knew the claims were false. When George summoned two lawyers into the house despite Tyler’s request, Tyler’s step-grandmother quietly revealed that Henry Kissinger also thought the box did not exist. The lawyers delivered not an NDA but a temporary restraining order and court notice. Tyler says the resulting legal battle cost him and his parents nearly $500,000; private investigators followed them, and he became so anxious that he slept with a knife. He argues that respected investors were victims, but also enablers: each relied on another “genius”—Rupert Murdoch on Larry Ellison, Ellison on George, George on Channing Robertson—instead of doing proper diligence.

Tyler enjoyed You Can See Everything and agrees that its ambiguity makes it artistically interesting. The film asks whether Holmes is lying, self-deceived, traumatized, or psychologically unable to understand ordinary language. But Tyler says viewers must know that Holmes was convicted, that she lied about what Theranos had built and used on patients, and that she has shown no remorse or accountability. The device Holmes places on the kitchen table for Nathan Fielder was a later prototype that was never completed or used on patients—not the device that led to her conviction. Tyler says the working product had been launched while unable to perform the claims made for it. He wishes the filmmakers had consulted him or shown him the kitchen-table footage so he could explain that distinction onscreen. He especially wants to know whether Fielder understood that the device was not the one used at Theranos and deliberately allowed Holmes to lead the audience into a semantic argument about what the device “can” do, or whether she successfully misled him. The host suggests the filmmakers had limited time with Holmes and that the ambiguity made a better story, but agrees that what is good for storytelling is not always good for truth. Tyler says the film has slightly unsettled the public reality that journalism and the legal system had established, though he still believes most people accept that Holmes was a fraudster who harmed patients.