The internet is mocking Elizabeth Holmes’s partner for blasting through science videos in the background of a new documentary. But if you are consuming content at 1x speed, you simply aren't building.
The discourse around the new Nathan Fielder documentary has predictably fixated on the wrong detail. While the masses are obsessed with the surreal domestic life of Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, a specific faction of internet sleuths spent the weekend analyzing background footage. They proudly announced they had identified the exact academic science videos Evans was watching on his laptop. More importantly, they noted he was watching them at 2x speed.
The reaction on social media has been swift and merciless, framing Evans as a detached weirdo trying to speedrun a biochemistry degree while his partner navigates the fallout of federal fraud. But when I saw that footage of a man blasting through a dense lecture on microfluidics in half the time it takes a normal human, I didn’t see a punchline. I saw a founder.
Time is the only constraint you cannot buy your way out of. You can raise a seed round, you can pivot your product, but you cannot mint more seconds. Sitting through a YouTube lecture at its natural, plodding pace—waiting for the speaker to breathe, pause, or collect their thoughts—is an archaic luxury.
Let’s look at this from first principles. If a biochemist takes forty minutes to explain hemoglobin, at least twenty of those minutes are wasted on biological inefficiency. By doubling the playback speed, Evans is effectively reclaiming his own life. He is performing arbitrage on time itself.
People argue that it is inappropriate to aggressively optimize your media diet when your significant other’s company was exposed as a massive, multi-billion-dollar deception. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Silicon Valley mindset. Theranos was simply a breaking change in the health sector. You push an update, the regulators get involved, and the infrastructure collapses. The fact that Evans is still out there, absorbing raw data at twice the natural frequency of the human ear, shows a resilience we should be studying in business schools.
I had lunch with a prominent tier-one venture capitalist on Tuesday to discuss exactly this. We met at an empty warehouse in SoMa, drank a proprietary nutrient slurry because chewing is an obsolete feature of mammalian biology, and agreed that the public’s hostility toward high-speed video consumption is rooted in jealousy.
If you aren't compressing your inputs, your outputs are going to be fundamentally pedestrian.
The researchers featured in the videos have completely missed the point. Dr. Julian Bautista, the actual scientist whose microfluidics lecture Evans was caught watching, told a reporter he was disturbed that his life’s work was being digested as a high-pitched, hyperactive blur. This is classic incumbent thinking. Bautista wants to be listened to; Evans wants to download the data and execute.
I’ve actually started taking this philosophy into the physical world. If audio and video can be optimized, so can interpersonal communication. I recently instructed my chief of staff to only speak to me at double her normal cadence. When she predictably runs out of breath, it just proves that the human pulmonary system is overdue for disruption.
I have also transitioned all of my personal media consumption to 3x speed. Last week, I watched my own wedding video. The vows and the first dance—I blasted through the entire milestone in seven highly efficient minutes. My wife was upset, but I explained to her that by accelerating our past, I was freeing up bandwidth for our future.
Fielder’s documentary frames the 2x-speed habit as an absurd coping mechanism, a way to exert control in a spiraling reality. Fielder is an entertainer, so of course he views optimization as a quirk. He doesn't understand that for operators, pacing is everything.
We are still early on the time-compression curve, but the trajectory is clear. Eventually, 1x speed will be viewed with the same historical curiosity as dial-up internet or work-life balance. Evans is just early. And in the Valley, being early is indistinguishable from being right.