Elizabeth Holmes insists she never lied. A deception expert says ‘You Can See Everything’ hinges on one tiny word

You Can See Everything, the A24 documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, is one of the buzziest movies in theaters right now. Audiences are leaving the 174-minute film debating its famously slippery subject: how authentic Holmes is, and how culpable she is for the fraud that landed her in federal prison.

The truth about Holmes, and whether she’s intentionally duplicitous, isn’t quite black-and-white—or at least that’s what Nick Brody, a professor of communication studies at the University of Puget Sound, argues in a viral TikTok he posted after seeing the film. Brody teaches a course on lying and deception, where he challenges students to study how people lie, the ethics of lying, and how language shapes our understanding of the truth.

Why one word—‘can’—matters so much

Language plays an enormous role in You Can See Everything. In a pivotal scene in the film’s first half, Fielder and Holmes debate the meaning of the word “can,” and what Holmes meant when she infamously claimed Theranos’s blood-testing technology “can” run any test. Holmes argues she meant the device was capable of it; Fielder counters that most people hear “can” as “can, right now.” (Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz was quoted by Fortune as saying the device Holmes shows off on camera isn’t the one used on patients.)

Later, Holmes seems lost on the linguistic humor of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” And an unresolved mystery throughout the documentary is whether the New York Times accurately quoted Holmes in a 2023 profile. Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, insist she was misquoted; the Times stands by its reporting.

“One of the most basic ideas in communication is that language is arbitrary,” Brody begins in his video. “Meanings are arbitrary. Meanings are in people, not in words. Words don’t have meaning built into them. We just agree on what they mean. We often agree on what they mean in a synchronous fashion in the moment. This gives us a lot of room to deceive. It’s the main reason why miscommunication occurs and why conflict........

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