You can see every red flag in Theranos 2.0
Knowing common health tech grifts comes in handy for assessing the secretive startups in You Can See Everything.
by Victoria SongOct 28, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC
Knowing common health tech grifts comes in handy for assessing the secretive startups in You Can See Everything.
by Victoria SongOct 28, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC Victoria Song is a senior reporter and author of the Optimizer newsletter. She has more than 13 years of experience reporting on wearables, health tech, and more. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
From afar, it’s easy to look back at the Theranos debacle and scream at Nathan Fielder that, obviously, Elizabeth Holmes is lying in You Can See Everything. In the weeks since the movie’s release, journalists and whistleblowers alike have rushed to remind moviegoers of Holmes’ numerous documented lies. Chief among the facts: The Theranos device never worked as advertised. But Fielder’s aim with this film wasn’t relitigating Theranos. Even the most mind-bending of three-hour documentaries doesn’t have enough time to fully tackle the quagmire that was the secretive biotech startup.
It’s worth remembering that Theranos was a prime example of overinflating what technology can do. It sure would be nice if a single droplet of blood could be run in a magical machine and beep boop — you’ve got accurate results for over a hundred diagnostic tests. It’s a compelling concept, but the existing science doesn’t support the idea. As I wrote in last week’s Optimizer, you simply can’t test for every disease from blood alone. Sometimes, a blood test is merely part of a multistep process to rule out what you don’t have. A finger prick carries a higher risk of rupturing blood cells, which can skew test results. Your finger is more prone to surface contamination because hands are dirty by nature. Compared to drawing blood from a vein, a finger prick may not be purely blood — it often mixes with interstitial fluid, diluting the sample. Different biomarkers can require wholly different testing procedures, making the small volume collected difficult to work with. These are just some of the practical challenges Theranos had to solve to be better than the clinical gold standard. It couldn’t, and that’s why they had to fake it by bringing in Siemens devices that used traditional blood testing methods.
That makes it even more astonishing that Holmes and her partner Billy Evans spend a chunk of the film actively working on what Evans casually calls Theranos 2.0.
This new venture, Haemanthus, involves a similar diagnostic device that uses… lasers. The official line is that Holmes is not helming the effort, but Evans refers to it as “getting the band back together.” The film purposefully blurs the lines between truth and lies. But with nascent health tech, it’s genuinely hard for the average person to distinguish promising medical advancements from snake oil.
If you left You Can See Everything wondering if there’s any truth to using lasers to diagnose conditions — you don’t have to watch microbiology videos at twice the speed to find out. Instead, here are a few extra tips when it comes to spotting shenanigans straight out of the wellness grifter playbook.
Technology is not magic
In the documentary, Fielder likens Holmes to a magician. Technology, no matter how powerful or well crafted, is never magic.
But going along with Fielder’s metaphor, magicians succeed through misdirection. Evans presents lasers in the film as though they’re a little-known marvel — a key technology Theranos was missing — and that Haemanthus will be the first to make them truly useful. Based on a patent published by The New York Times, Haemanthus uses Raman spectroscopy. For the record, Raman spectroscopy does involve lasers, but it’s not a new technology. It was first discovered in 1928.
In a nutshell, this laser tech is used to identify chemical structures in a molecule. There are myriad biological and medical uses for it, including noninvasively studying tissue samples. But will it, as a New York Times report describes, “identify and qualify biomarkers such as glucose and hormones” and then use AI to “detect cancer and infections”?
Researchers are exploring using this tech to diagnose early-stage cancers. They’re also looking into using it for glucose monitoring. Does that mean this is a better method than what currently exists? Maybe for certain cases, but probably not in every scenario. In medicine, it’s common to require multiple tests for diagnosis. Similarly, there are often multiple ways to treat the same condition. It’s often a game of weighing pros and cons for various approaches. There are too many unknown factors to accurately comment on Haemanthus, but it’s concerning that Evans zeroes in on lasers like they’re a panacea for everything that plagued Theranos.
When investors, journalists, and the public ask hard questions, founders love to sprinkle technology into their rhetoric like it’s fairy dust. You can see it happening right now with AI. But tech is a tool. Any tool will have pros and cons, situations it excels in and scenarios it’s ill suited for. It’s not always a grift, but anytime an executive shows signs of magical thinking or inflates what technology can do, your bullshit alarm should be ringing.
Tech likes to move fast, medicine really doesn’t
In recent history, I can think of exactly one time the public health sector truly hauled ass to make something happen: the covid-19 vaccine. The vaccine took roughly 10 months to develop, compared to the typical five-to-15-year timeline. But even then, it was a Herculean effort requiring global coordination and <a href
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