Dear Friends,
On Friday night I watched a nearly three-hour documentary and never once checked the time.
The film is You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s portrait of Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she reported to federal prison. Everyone seems to be talking about it.
I went in with a firm opinion about her. I came out with the same one.
She’s a con artist. In 2022 she was convicted on four counts of defrauding investors in Theranos, and she is serving more than eleven years. Nothing in the film changed my mind. At one point she tells Fielder she has never told a lie, and his disbelief says what the whole audience is thinking.
And still, she got me once.
It was the scenes with her children. The connection looked genuine to me. For a few minutes, I wasn’t watching a fraud. I was watching a mother.
Then, in those same final weeks, she and her partner, Billy Evans, are planning Theranos 2.0. Weekly calls with patent attorneys from prison. A working prototype within a year. Her parents look on.
That’s the part I haven’t been able to put down.
Years ago, the filmmaker Errol Morris considered making a film about Holmes as a story of self-deception. John Carreyrou, the reporter who exposed Theranos, wrote in The New York Times last weekend that he declined to take part, because the facts showed fraud.
On the facts, I’m with Carreyrou. She lied.
But the judge who sentenced her asked a question I keep coming back to: “What is the pathology of fraud?” Was it that she couldn’t accept responsibility, or that she wouldn’t?
The con explains the lies. I’m not sure it fully explains the prototype.
Maybe Theranos 2.0 is one more performance. Maybe it’s also something else: a person clinging to the only version of herself she can picture, trying to stay relevant on her way out the door.
Notice what that means. The most believable thing on screen was the role she was about to be separated from. The one she held onto was a company that had been gone for years.
That’s where her story stops being only about fraud.
Most of you will never lie to an investor. But the pull underneath Theranos 2.0 isn’t rare. When an identity has carried everything for a long time, its ending doesn’t feel like a change. It feels like a threat. And the easiest response to a threat is to rebuild what you just lost, somewhere new.
I think about a founder who sold the company she spent twenty years building. Within a year she had started another one. Same industry. Same pitch. Same seventy-hour weeks. When I asked what she wanted from it, she talked about the market. When I asked what she would do if she didn’t build it, she had no answer at all.
Building again is not the problem. Plenty of people start a second company because they want to, and they’re right to. The question is whether she chose it, or whether it was the only self she could imagine.
From the outside, those two look identical. Same title. Same calendar. The difference only shows up when you ask what you would be without it.
That’s why I start with orientation before prescription: where you actually stand, before you decide where to go. Not because the old role was wrong. Because if you never look at it directly, the next chapter tends to be the last one, rebuilt.
The film’s title comes from a promise Holmes made to the filmmakers. You can see everything. Of course you can’t. But you can see enough to notice that the part of her that seemed real had nothing to do with the machine.
That’s worth knowing about yourself before you start building again.
The founder in this piece is a composite, built from a pattern I see often in this work, not a single client.
Warmly, Cara
P.S. If you’re standing at the edge of a role that has carried a lot, the Future Identity Snapshot is a 15-question reflective assessment that helps you see where you actually stand before you decide what comes next. goodmorningfreedom.com/future-identity-snapshot