Spoilers for You Can See Everything below!!!
I watched Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything yesterday, and while so much of the conversation has focused on whether Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans are narcissists, compulsive liars, or genuinely delusional, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much of their behavior might be a product of the environments that shaped them.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Holmes attended Stanford and Evans graduated from MIT.
I’m saying this as someone who attended a private K–12 school that regularly sent students to elite universities, grew up surrounded by the culture of prestigious college admissions, and recently graduated from a top-20 university in the United States. I’ve spent much of my life around people who were raised to believe that they were exceptional, or at least that becoming exceptional was the entire point of their existence.
And I think there’s something deeply unhealthy about that.
I’m not suggesting that attending an elite institution makes someone a fraud, or that ambition itself is a bad thing. But I do think there’s something worth examining about the particular combination of inherited wealth, social prestige, institutional validation, and relentless competition that produces people who seem genuinely unable to imagine that they might not be extraordinary.
What strikes me about Holmes and Billy is that both came from privileged backgrounds. These weren’t people who had to build their identities from nothing. They grew up with access to resources, networks, and institutions that had already positioned them for success.
And yet, somehow, being extraordinarily privileged wasn’t enough. They also needed to be extraordinary people.
I think this is one of the stranger contradictions of elite American culture. Children born into immense advantages are simultaneously taught that they deserve those advantages because of their own exceptional qualities. Privilege is repackaged as merit. Access becomes evidence of talent. And eventually, the distinction between having exceptional opportunities and actually being exceptional starts to disappear.
From a remarkably young age, you’re taught that your life needs to tell a compelling story.
You’re not just supposed to get good grades. You’re supposed to demonstrate leadership, discover a passion, launch an initiative, overcome adversity, change your community, and somehow distinguish yourself from thousands of other students who have been given almost exactly the same instructions —
your hobbies become extracurriculars. Your interests become application essays. Your identity becomes a personal brand.
And crucially, you learn that being exceptional and convincingly performing exceptionalism can produce the same institutional rewards. I think that’s where the connection to Holmes becomes particularly interesting. Her public identity was essentially a perfectly constructed college application narrative taken to its logical extreme: the visionary Stanford dropout, the revolutionary entrepreneur, the young woman destined to transform medicine.
The black turtlenecks, the carefully cultivated comparisons to Steve Jobs, the lowered voice. She wasn’t simply selling a product. She was selling an idea of herself, and Silicon Valley rewarded her for it.
There is a continuity between the teenager who learns to package themselves as a uniquely compelling admissions candidate and the entrepreneur who learns to package themselves as a uniquely visionary founder. Both are competing for access to institutions that distribute enormous opportunities based, at least partly, on their assessment of someone’s future potential.
In both cases, the ability to tell a persuasive story can become almost as valuable as the ability to actually deliver on it.
>! What I found particularly unsettling about Billy was his seemingly compulsive need to control the narrative around himself and Elizabeth, even when doing so was clearly counterproductive. He appears extraordinarily invested in being perceived as intelligent, morally justified, and somehow more perceptive than everyone around him. <!
I kept wondering whether he represents what happens when someone has spent so much of his life being affirmed as exceptional that he becomes unable to tolerate the possibility of being ordinary, wrong, or unsuccessful.
When your entire identity is built around being extraordinary, admitting failure isn’t simply acknowledging a mistake. It’s threatening the foundation of who you believe yourself to be, and perhaps that is when maintaining the narrative becomes more important than confronting reality.
There is also a particular moral exceptionalism that I think can develop in these environments. You’re encouraged to think of yourself as someone who sees what other people can’t, someone who is destined to disrupt existing institutions, someone whose vision is so extraordinary that conventional rules might not apply.
In its healthiest form, this produces people willing to challenge established thinking, but in its worst form, it produces people who believe their own perceived brilliance exempts them from accountability.
Here’s the part that genuinely worries and frightens me: Holmes and Billy came of age in an admissions and achievement culture that was, by many measures, significantly less competitive than the one students face today.
I graduated from college this spring, and even looking back at my own experience, I’m struck by how much more elaborate the performance of exceptionalism has become. There are entire industries dedicated to helping children construct competitive personal narratives. Students are encouraged to build nonprofits, develop entrepreneurial ventures, pursue highly specialized interests, and demonstrate measurable impact before they’re even old enough to vote. And increasingly, with AI, the tools for constructing those narratives are becoming universally accessible.
I don’t think AI is necessarily going to create more Elizabeth Holmeses in the literal sense. But I do worry that it will accelerate a culture in which everyone has access to the language, aesthetics, and strategies of exceptionalism without necessarily having the underlying experience, judgment, or substance. Anyone can now generate a compelling personal statement, articulate a grand entrepreneurial vision, manufacture the appearance of intellectual sophistication, or construct a polished narrative about their unique contribution to the world. The performance of exceptionalism is becoming easier to produce at precisely the same moment that the competition to be perceived as exceptional is becoming more intense.
And I wonder what happens when an entire generation grows up in that contradiction, because if everyone is encouraged to think of themselves as a future founder, visionary, thought leader, or world-changing individual, what happens to the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable to just be a person?
What happens to intellectual humility? To genuinely caring about other people? To pursuing an interest because it’s meaningful rather than because it demonstrates something about your potential?
What happens when your peers stop being people you can learn from and become competitors you have to outperform?
I think there’s a real danger of producing people who become so consumed with constructing and defending their own exceptional identities that everyone else becomes secondary: an audience, a resource, a connection, or an obstacle.
I want to be clear that I’m not equating ambitious high school students with someone who was convicted of defrauding investors and endangering patients. Obviously personal responsibility matters, and most people who go through elite academic environments do not end up behaving like Holmes, but I think we do ourselves a disservice by treating people like her as entirely inexplicable outliers. maybe the more uncomfortable question is whether some of the qualities we celebrate most enthusiastically in elite admissions, entrepreneurship, and professional culture are the same qualities that, taken to their extremes, can become profoundly destructive.
And maybe people like Holmes and Billy aren’t complete departures from the values of these environments, but distorted reflections of them.
Having grown up inside this culture, I increasingly find myself questioning how much of what we call ambition is actually curiosity, passion, or a desire to contribute something meaningful, and how much is simply the fear of being ordinary…
I’m curious whether anyone else who grew up in these competitive academic environments sees this connection. Are we teaching young people to actually become exceptional, or are we teaching them that being perceived as exceptional is the most important thing they can accomplish?