• A24's new documentary "You Can See Everything" follows Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans.
• The movie features an early scene of full-frontal nudity while Evans is showering.
• Director Lance Oppenheim said the scene was Evans' idea and "he didn't care about being seen naked."

In "You Can See Everything," one person apparently took the movie's title to a physical extreme.

A24's twisty new documentary is ostensibly focused on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, one of Silicon Valley's most infamous felons — yet it's her longtime partner, William "Billy" Evans, who frequently steals the show.

Evans' comfort in front of the camera is evident when the couple invites co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim to capture intimate moments in their home life, just a few weeks before Holmes is scheduled to begin an 11-year prison sentence.

In fact, according to Oppenheim, Evans proactively suggested one of the movie's buzziest and most revealing moments: a full-frontal shot of Evans in the shower.

"We were in the car ride on the way back from the gym, and I said to Billy, 'We will give you some time to shower,'" the filmmaker said in a recent interview with GQ. "And Billy responded, 'Want to film me showering?' I offered to film him in a way that could avoid seeing his genitals, but Billy said he didn't care about being seen naked."

Oppenheim speculated that Evans was inspired to give the audience "full access," though he admitted that he was personally baffled by the choice.

"There's a camera in the bathroom, there's a camera that was on Nathan, there's a camera outside the bathroom, and there's an interaction that we see after Billy leaves where he sort of looks at the camera and smiles," Oppenheim said. "So I don't know what that means, but I feel like there's enough stuff in there that gives me the impression that maybe he was excited that people could see everything and that there was full access, I guess. But it really beats me, honestly."

Oppenheim said that, to his knowledge, neither Holmes nor Evans has seen the movie. Evans has not commented publicly on his portrayal, and he did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

"We haven't talked with Billy in a bit now," Oppenheim told GQ. "You sort of see it in the film. Billy can be intense, and there were a lot of conversations he had about the future of the film and the release of the film that made us uncomfortable. So contact broke down for a bit."

Holmes reports to prison about halfway through "You Can See Everything," though Fielder and Oppenheim continue to film Evans as he adjusts to life as a single dad and aspiring entrepreneur; at one point, Evans tells Fielder that he's planning to build another company off the back of Theranos and "do it all again."

In 2025, The New York Times and NPR reported that Evans had raised millions for a new blood-testing startup called Haemanthus.

Evans also boasts that he's in charge of running Holmes' social media while she's incarcerated, telling Fielder that he has power of attorney. "I can literally do whatever," he says.

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• Every state lays claim to at least one famous musician. 
• We considered each artist's popularity, awards, and record sales to compile our list.
• Prince is famously from Minnesota, while Tony Bennett edged out the competition in New York.

Though places like New York and California are known for producing countless celebrities, it turns out there's at least one — in most cases, many more — famous musicians from every US state. 

Business Insider has already identified the most famous band from every state, so we're now focusing on individual singers, songwriters, and performers. This encompasses country pioneers, rappers, jazz cats, pop stars — you name it. Even if they perform(ed) with a backing band, these musicians stand out as the star of the show. 

The list is somewhat subjective, but to help determine the most famous musician from every state, Business Insider looked at each artist's reputation (within their own era), record sales, and awards.

It's also important to note that while most of these people were born in their corresponding state, others were not, but spent a lot of time living there.

Check out which musician took the No. 1 spot in your home state. 

• As a personal stylist for corporate clients, I've noticed more industries embracing jeans at work.
• I recommend selecting a dark-wash, wide-leg pair that closely resembles trousers.
• To elevate denim even further, I love pairing it with a pointed-toe heel and a simple belt.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the workplace has changed a lot, and so has what we wear to the office. As a personal stylist who works with corporate clients, I've noticed that many industries — though not all — have become more casual, with some embracing jeans as workwear.

Still, there's a fine line between looking casually professional and overly relaxed, even when jeans are part of the dress code.

Here are five easy ways to wear denim at work while still looking polished.

Writing villains is supposed to be hard. No grand, world-dominating plan ever really makes sense in a story. Soon after "The Dark Knight" came out, David Goyer, its writer, told me the Joker had been a real relief. "Blessedly, because of who the Joker is, we just said, 'fuck the plan. We don't have to do it. He's the Joker. He's the anti-plan,'" Goyer said. "Trying to take over the world is such an impossible, stupid idea — as if anyone could do it with a single act, you know?"

Yet now very real people seem to try just that, on the regular. Except if you believe Hollywood, they're not insane clowns. They're billionaire tech bros. It's starting to seem like every movie and TV bad guy is a douchebag who got rich making stuff that works on your phone. Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Reckoning," Elon Musk in "Musk," Elizabeth Holmes in "You Can See Everything," Sam Altman in the upcoming "Artificial," Sam Bankman-Fried in "The Altruists." In these stories, at varying levels of fictionality, the evil villains' megalomaniacal plans mostly make sense. Some of them even got away with it. America is eagerly consuming stories about them. "You Can See Everything" grossed $15 million on opening in just 855 theaters, twice what its producers expected.

The more interesting question is why these founders are our demons, all of a sudden. Chalk it up to the reality of the "techlash," the society-wide revulsion to Big Tech's ubiquity and power. But if you really want to understand the extent to which everyone thinks Silicon Valley is so uncanny these days, you should be watching a CBS legal procedural called "Cupertino." It's a sharp look at tech and its discontents — but more than that, it clarifies how widely the techlash is spreading.

"Cupertino" comes from the TV-making couple Michelle and Robert King, best known for the "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight." In their new show, a slick lawyer played by Mike Colter gets iced out of the tech company he cofounded at the same time as a more junior attorney also gets ousted. The two join their wrongful-termination lawsuits against the company, eke out a big settlement, and start a firm to represent "little guys" against Silicon Valley giants. In one plotline, a drone maker tries to blame a mid-level coder for one of its bots falling out of formation during a show and killing a man — it turns out the company had changed batteries to accommodate a prospective military contract. In another, a mysterious whistleblower client asks for help to force an Anthropic-like company to put guardrails around its most powerful AI. Then the whistleblower claims to in fact be the AI.

It's all in good fun. The actors are beautiful. They banter well. Colter wears the hell out of a suit. Busy Philipps plays a Mackenzie Scott-like benefactor of the new law firm — if Scott used her incredible wealth to become a hardcore partier.

A CBS show like "Cupertino" picks bad guys that millions of people can easily recognize as deserving of comeuppance. It picked the overlords of Silicon Valley.

But thematically, there's depth. That Colter is the only Black person for miles does not go unremarked. His new partner Olivia Siffre (pronounced "cypher"), played by Rachel Keller, is a devout, cross-wearing conservative from the Midwest, an alumna of Liberty University. Their closest allies don't come from the ranks of coders, marketing, or venture capital but are instead service workers, tradespeople, and the waitstaff from a nearby TGI Fridays. (Alas, a fiction — there are no TGI Fridayses in the Valley.)

So see that class rage for what it is. The fantasy here is that the middle-American proletariat gets to stick it to bespoke-suited, arrogant C-level types and unkempt, geniuser-than-thou sex pests. Because for the last few years, those people have had all the power. "They always have a friendly audience, an accommodating interviewer who won't ask them anything controversial. And then they get into territory where the price is much higher," Robert King said in a recent interview. "They reveal who they really are: robotic, inhuman nerds who never got laid in high school and are now kind of crazy with power, self-importance, and a sense of entitlement."

The point is, the "little guys" fighting this good fight seem like they're supposed to be proxies for the viewer. "Cupertino" is a CBS procedural, the genre of shows like "NCIS" and its offspring — things that no one watches, except for 10 million people every week. That's a lot. CBS typically has the largest primetime viewership of any network, and the oldest — like, people in their 70s. It's all well and good for young coastal sophisticates to post about Elizabeth Holmes' inability to grasp the Who's-on-First routine, but "Cupertino" is aimed at America's parents and grandparents. And apparently they are excited to see the people who make their phones portrayed as the wealthy engines of every inconvenience — sources of half a billion dollars to Republicans only, builders of data centers, creators of chatbots that drive kids to death by suicide, purveyors of screens that watch you back. "Cupertino" debuted to rapturous reviews and more than 3 million viewers, beating "Grey's Anatomy" in its time slot.

A show like "Cupertino" is meant to have a low barrier to entry; it picks bad guys that millions of people can easily recognize as deserving of comeuppance. It picked the overlords of Silicon Valley.

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Not so long ago it would've seemed preposterous to give a scrawny, socially awkward, brainy little guy the job of Big Bad. They're the assistant, or the butt of a particular kind of joke, like the spectrum-y heroes of the wildly popular "Big Bang Theory" — Klingon-speaking, physics-doing, Green Lantern oath-knowing clods. Still, I can think of examples of "bad guy, subtype: tech nerd" going back to the early days of science fiction. Mad scientists like Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll, or various HP Lovecraft antiheroes, probably count. So too might the arrogant cyberneticist in Robert Heinlein's "Waldo."

A rough analog in the mid 20^th century might be the rogue industrialist. After all, James Bond villains have often been tech-bro adjacent. Karl Stromberg in "The Spy Who Loved Me" wants to build independent ocean settlements; he's basically a seasteader. Hugo Drax in "Moonraker" is a eugenics-obsessed CEO who wants to build space stations, which sounds familiar. Max Zorin, played by Christopher Walken in "A View to a Kill," is an "industrialist" and the product of Nazi genetic experiments. But his megalomaniacal plan is to use a California natural disaster to gain a monopoly on silicon computer chips. That's just Jensen Huang on any given Tuesday.

The weirdest new phenomenon here is how personal it all is. Evil technology oligopolies have been representatives of oppressive capitalism in Hollywood for decades — but they were faceless. The anonymity was part of the terror. Think of the company that orders Bruce Dern to destroy the last forest in his spaceship biodome in "Silent Running," the Umbrella Corporation in "Resident Evil," or Cyberdyne Systems, creator of Skynet in the Terminator movies.

More recently, film and television have started identifying not just faceless corporations but specific tech-coded people as their worst-of-the-worst. And not just any people, but people geofenced into Silicon Valley: "Glass Onion," "Don't Look Up," "Ex Machina," "Devs," "Super Pumped" (fictionalized Uber), "WeCrashed" (fictionalized WeWork), "The Playlist" (fictionalized Spotify), and "The Dropout" (fictionalized Theranos), "Mythic Quest" — the list goes on.

Actually, Cyberdyne's a good example of one important way these depictions have changed; in 1984's "The Terminator," Cyberdyne is a Los Angeles-area heavy-industry firm. In 2015, "Terminator Genisys" moved Cyberdyne to a gleaming tech campus explicitly modeled on the headquarters of Oracle. It's an inside joke, though not the ha-ha kind. The movie's producers included Megan and David Ellison, children of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. David now owns the merged studios of Warner Bros. and Paramount, and he just got a billion-dollar investment from Elon Musk. The new company, Skydance, includes in its holdings … CBS.

Christopher Walken's Bond villain has a megalomaniacal plan is to use a California natural disaster to gain a monopoly on silicon computer chips. That's just Jensen Huang on any given Tuesday.

"A sequence of Hollywood contemporary science-fiction movies identifies Silicon Valley capitalists as a new type of villain," write Northumbria University film studies scholars Joe Street and Russ Hunter in a 2024 paper. These new movies critique tech, they say, using an approach "in the grand tradition of cinematic science fiction touchstones such as the Cold War alien invasion films that allegorized fears of Communism in 1950s America."

In other words, movies about time-travelling killer robots and dead-eyed billionaires aren't so different, after all. Horror is about shared anxieties. Old-school mad scientists posed a threat because they dared to do experiments that contravened the laws of nature; they were evil for love of the game. The Silicon Valley bad guys are worse, because they do it for profit. "When presented with an innovation," Street and Hunter write, "the prime movers in these corporations think not of moral or ethical concerns and crucially not of the material impact of what they are doing — but only of the innovation's potential for financial gain."

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Is Hollywood's techlash actually on the rise? The schlemiels of "Silicon Valley" premiered in 2014. I have tech-bro-villain articles in my files going back to 2022 at least. And the business world has always been fodder for stories filtered through the anxieties of the time—what was Ebenezer Scrooge if not a capitalist oppressor?

Mapping the full arc of technology-associated villains would be, in the words of Ted Underwood, "hard to code." Underwood's an English and information science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, researching ways to identify literary trends across time, in big canons. "In addition to tracing the history of villains, you'd have to think how often these social types appear as heroes," he says. For every Max Zorin there's a Tony Stark. Ethan Hunt's nobody without tech aces Luther and Benji. "Star Trek" doesn't trek without Scotty, or Chief O'Brien. Every movie heist is basically a hack. And let me just say unto you: "MacGyver." "One hypothesis would be that what we're feeling right now with evil tech bro villains is just that the counterbalancing examples have dropped out," Underwood says.

Clearly, though, tech billionaires and their hangers on have actively tried to make themselves into main characters. Some of them seem to think they're the only real consciousnesses in a simulation, a virtual world populated with non-player characters like you and me. At minimum they evince a belief that they possess a greater depth of perception and knowledge. As the architect and tech historian Fred Scharmen once wrote, "for this particular kind of person, wealthy and powerful or not, intelligence comes paired with a certain kind of malignance. The Evil Nerd is sharp, and also mean, their big brains are oriented towards anger and destructiveness." The Thiels, Altmans, Musks, and Karps of the world turn what had been nerdy weakness into nerdy strength. They go on friendly podcasts and show up in pictures taken with presidents. We don't have to imagine them delivering what the screenwriter John Rogers, creator of the anticapitalist TV show "Leverage," calls the Evil Speech of Evil. They monologue at tech conferences! These guys embody their ideologies; l'enterprise, c'est moi.

And what happens if that kind of behavior gets depicted, week in and week out, on a popular legal procedural TV show? Even if that show airs on a network owned by one of those "evil nerds"? Hard to say. Maybe it'll be enough to turn some people into the Joker.

The king of ghosts lives in a haunted $4.3 million dollar mansion in the heart of New Orleans' French quarter. The dozens of paranormal tour guides who lead tourists through the neighborhood are sure to know of him and have an opinion of him. Lance Zaal is the most controversial man in America's booming ghost business, CEO of what competitors have dubbed "The Walmart of Ghost Tours."

Over the past half-decade, Zaal, 42, and his company, US Ghost Adventures, have opened ghost tours in more than 250 cities and towns, employing more than 1,000 guides, according to his company's website. He's also been buying up the country's haunted landmarks like it's the first trip around the Monopoly board — the Lizzie Borden House in Massachusetts, the Villisca Axe Murder House in Iowa, the McInteer Villa in Kansas, and two historic houses in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. "Lance has said he wants to build an empire, and that's what he's doing," says Diane Student, who hosts the industry podcast History Goes Bump.

USGA also sells ghost detection gear through the brand Ghost Daddy — products with names like the Sinister Speaker, Medusa's Net, and Devil's Marble MK2. An Ultimate Ghost Hunt Kit For Two sells for $629.99. The whole operation has made Zaal wealthy enough to buy the Lalaurie Mansion, his primary residence, which stands on the site of an infamous slaveowner's torture chamber. Previous guests have reported unexplained moaning and groaning inside, along with the sudden, putrid smell of burning flesh, and, according to New Orleans tour guide Catie Santos, passing guides stand on the opposite side of the street because of the house's dark energy. On tours, Santos, who was briefly employed by Zaal as a content creator, also warns her guests "about the real life Marvel supervillain living in that house," she says.

In assembling his dominion of the undead, Zaal has made a host of enemies among the living. I spoke with more than a dozen competitors and insiders in the industry who described him as "vindictive," "predatory," a "bully," and a "hemorrhoid." He has been accused of borrowing content from local tours, ripping off merchandise designs, redirecting negative reviews to competitors, misclassifying workers as contractors, and using names similar to local companies to confuse tourists. The allegations have resulted in a mounting pile of lawsuits against USGA. Zaal, who did not respond to repeated inquiries for this story, has consistently denied any predatory behavior and emphasizes his commitment to historic preservation.

When passing Zaal's mansion, Catie Santos warns tourists of "the real life Marvel supervillain living in that house," she says.

He has gone after his rivals, filing copyright and defamation suits and frequently threatening legal action. "This gang of competitors are the bullies. So desperate to restore their monopolies or do whatever they can to eliminate their competition," USGA wrote in the comments section of "Exposing US Ghost Adventures Corrupt and Unethical Business Practices Part 1," a recent video from the YouTube channel The Paranormal Engineer.

When Walmart surged through the country in the 1980s, it sparked fierce resistance from the mom and pop stores threatened by their expansion. Today, the rise of the Walmart of Ghost Tours has ignited a war in the ghost industry.

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In the biography published on his website — which has a slapdash, early-2000s blog design — Zaal describes a hardscrabble childhood in Southern California. After his parents divorced when he was 6, he was often homeless, sometimes sleeping in the family van. He was bullied in school, he writes, and threw himself into little entrepreneurship projects like a lemonade stand, where he bumped his margins by charging extra for a "Lemon Special," which involved adding a Lemonhead candy to the drink. He says his youth was also marked by eerie experiences — mysterious footsteps, doors opening and closing without explanation — that inspired a lifelong fascination with the supernatural. "I've experienced odd things I can't explain," he said in a recent interview with Business Insider.

After 9/11, Zaal enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 17. He completed three tours, including two in Iraq, where he was stationed for a time at President Saddam Hussein's palace. Then he got an MBA at William and Mary, and worked briefly at Booz Allen Hamilton and Mythics Inc., until he was laid off in 2012. He set out on his own, developing a GPS-guided audio ghost tour app called ItourMobile. It was good timing. America was in the midst of a ghost renaissance.

In a 1978 Gallup poll, 11% of Americans said they believed in ghosts. By 2025, that number soared to 39%. Some attribute the trend to a decline in traditional religion, with non-religious people becoming more inclined to seek other supernatural answers to life's big questions. And as paranormal beliefs have risen, there has been an influx of people trying to profit from them. Reality TV shows "Ghost Hunters" and "Ghost Adventures" took off in the 2000s. By 2023, "dark tourism" — which ranges from the sites of atrocities to haunted houses — was valued at $32 billion and projected to reach $39 billion by the decade's end, according to Grand View Research.

Years after US Ghost Adventures took off, an interviewer at Authority Magazine asked Zaal what advice he wished he could give his younger self. "You're on your own," Zaal said, in a quote displayed under a photo of him in a vest, arms crossed, blue-steeling the camera. "You have no friends. The market is God."

Ting Rappa, an EMT and firefighter who runs an Orlando-based ghost tour called American Ghost Adventures met Zaal in 2015, when he was managing a tour called Colonial Ghosts in Williamsburg, Virginia. Zaal approached Rappa after she attended one of his tours with a proposal to team up. "He was a little off," Rappa says. Something about his energy made her apprehensive. "But he was a very intelligent person. I could tell he had a drive." Zaal said he would help finance her company in exchange for a share of the operation. But the deal didn't seem like an even partnership, so she turned him down.

You're on your own. You have no friends. The market is God.Lance Zaal

Three years later, she discovered that Zaal had a new name for his company that resembled hers: US Ghost Adventures. When she tried to trademark American Ghost Adventures years later, the application was denied because Zaal had registered his first. In 2024, she filed a suit asking for the USGA trademark to be cancelled, still working its way through the courts. "There's just no ethics to it," she says of Zaal's expansion. "Competition is good, but play nice. Right now, you're just being a big bully."

In the Authority Magazine story, Zaal was asked how he researches whether someone else has already had one of his ideas, a question that would become more significant as his business continued to grow.

"It's not relevant," Zaal said. "Who cares who else thought of an idea? This is fear at first thinking. What matters is creating a sustainable, strong business. Just because there are others in your market, doesn't mean you can't succeed in it, or even redefine it. What is important is ensuring you don't break the law, whether that be a trademark, patent, or whatever."

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A ghost tour is a pretty simple business to set up. Most are walking tours through public spaces that require little overhead. At USGA, guides are generally contractors paid a flat rate of $40 to $50 per tour, plus tips, per its website. With a tour drawing dozens of customers paying $20 to $40 for a ticket, the money can quickly pile up.

USGA wasn't the only company to pursue ghost tours on a national scale — the rival Ghost City Tours operates 60 tours — but it was the most aggressive. During the pandemic in 2020, as other tour companies were shuttering, Zaal expanded to dozens of cities and towns, ready to put guides on the pavement once restrictions were lifted. That year, he unsuccessfully sued to reverse a COVID ban on walking tours in Massachusetts. By 2021, USGA had operations in 33 cities, each under a local name.

One of the first cities targeted was Baltimore, where Melissa Rowell had operated Baltimore Ghost Tours since 2001. Zaal came on her radar when she began receiving phone calls from irate customers. "We are trying to find out where this ghost tour is," one man complained in a voicemail shared with Business Insider. "Nobody's answering the goddamn phone … after we spent almost $100."

The man was looking for Zaal's new local affiliate of USGA, which had begun operating under the name Baltimore Ghosts. Rowell sent Zaal a letter asking him to change the name to something more distinct. Soon after, Rowell says, USGA started using the name Baltimore Ghost Tour in some materials. "Instead of trying to cause less confusion, they seemed to be trying to cause more," she says.

Rowell and Zaal have since been in a cold war, volleying terse emails and cease-and-desist letters. "I understand you actively collaborate with a confederation of other companies to disparage and damage both the company and my personal reputation," Zaal wrote Rowell in 2024. "Let us honor the spirit of Halloween this season and cease this animosity. There's enough customers for all of us."

Rowell denies that she is part of a confederation, but local tour guides have collaborated in dealing with their ascendant rival. There's a private Facebook group where guides across the country share information about USGA. Mike Carter, a tour guide from Annapolis, Maryland, bought the domain name USAghostadventures.com to build a site that urged customers to choose local ghost tours instead of Zaal's outfit. (Zaal got the site taken down and sued Carter for defamation.) Some paranormal companies, like Central New York Ghost Hunters, have rejected partnerships with USGA out of solidarity with local guides.

In Austin, Texas, USGA was sued by the owners of a local Booze and Boos Tour after Zaal opened a Boos And Booze tour. In Savannah, Georgia, the national company Ghost City Tours, which operated a Dead of Night Tour, sued USGA for opening the Savannah Terrors Ultimate Dead of Night Haunted Ghost Tour. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the local Queen City Tours sued Zaal's Queen City Ghosts. USGA generally argues in court papers and public statements that the names are too generic to own. The Austin suit was settled in 2024; the latter two lawsuits are currently making their way through the courts.

USGA was sued by the owners of the Booze and Boos Tour after it opened a Boos And Booze tour; the Dead of Night Tour for opening the Savannah Terrors Ultimate Dead of Night Haunted Ghost Tour; and Queen City Tours for opening Queen City Ghosts.

In one instance, a guide alleges that Zaal uses these similar names to trick tourists into leaving negative reviews on his competitors' tours. Angela Taverniti, who runs Colonial Ghosts of Williamsburg, said a USGA customer, Samantha Butler, accidentally left a negative review on Taverniti's tour. When she pointed out the mixup, Butler pulled up the link she got from USGA asking her to review the tour and tested it. A screen recording Butler shared with Business Insider shows that when she submitted a four-star ranking, she was directed to the Google review page of the USGA tour she took. But when she submitted a two-star rating, she was directed to the Google page for Taverniti's tour. Spooky. Reviews are a big deal for tour operators. "98 percent of our business comes from Google," Taverniti tells me. "It's a game that you have to play constantly. And he knows how to play it."

Other paranormal guides say Zaal borrows the content of the tours along with the names. Laine Johnson, a former park ranger, spent the last decade developing a tour of the supernatural happenings in Durango, Colorado, drawing from firsthand accounts of locals, newspaper archives, and out-of-print books. When a new tour called Durango Ghosts set up shop there in early 2023, Johnson took it to check out the competition. She says she was startled that they followed her exact route and told the same stories, sometimes with the same phrasing.

When she got home and did some research, she formulated a theory of what had happened. During the pandemic, she had uploaded her materials to a site called Junket, which allowed her to host virtual tours. Junket and Durango Ghosts were owned by Lance Zaal. Her content, she's convinced, had been snatched from the Junket website and co-opted by her new competitor.

USGA has meaningfully eaten into her bottom line, she says. "This is a really small town. It's ridiculous that there's now three ghost tours going here," she says.

By 2021, USGA purchased the crown jewel in its collection of haunted property, a three-story Greek Revival House in Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden was accused of axe-murdering her parents in 1892. It's famous for paranormal activity, and Zaal mentioned in an interview shortly after the purchase that he felt as if "someone, or something, was in the room with him," when he spent the night there alone.

This is a really small town. It's ridiculous that there's now three ghost tours going here.Laine Johnson, a ghost tour owner in Durango, Colorado

In 2023, a small cafe called Miss Lizzie's opened nearby, and Zaal sued, arguing that the name and logo — a blood-stained hatchet — infringed on his trademark. "She's a historical figure," cafe owner Joe Pereira counters. "I don't think anyone can own her." It was a strange reversal of the trademark suits that had been filed against him, and local competitors followed the case closely.

The next year, a judge sided with Pereira, saying the logos were substantially different. "Miss Lizzie's hatchet has a handle and smooth axe blade that spews blood," the judge wrote in his decision. "Ghost Adventures' hatchet is bereft of either handle or blood and features a notch halfway along the blade." But the lawsuit, which dragged on for years afterwards, has taken a financial toll on Pereira. Though a judge affirmed the initial ruling this month, Pereira was also ordered to pay $31,207 in legal fees after missing various filing deadlines.

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Amid the acrimony, USGA has continued to grow. From 2019 to 2023, Zaal told Entrepreneur Magazine, USGA's revenue increased by 2,600%. To service the expansion, he contracted with writers and creators to develop tours and other content about new cities in the USGA empire.

Some guides, like Sabrina Velandry, a psychic medium who conducts tours for USGA in Salem, have had broadly positive experiences with the company. It's more professionalized than some of the local tours, she says. "It is corporate, but it's just really really well-run and organized." Others have butted heads with management, and two lawsuits have alleged misclassifying workers as independent contractors and failure to pay overtime wages. USGA has denied these claims, and one suit was settled while another is still in the courts.

In 2023, Ronald Murphy, a high school teacher outside of Pittsburgh, began picking up some extra work for USGA as an independent contractor, where he would crank out a new tour for $200, or make $40 for a 300 word blurb on the USGA website. All told, he says, he wrote tours for about 18 cities.

He says he wasn't given time for deep research and didn't like the idea of using content posted by competing local tours, so for a tour about Fort Worth, Texas, he decided to get creative. "I was going to simply make up the ghosts," he says. He thought the local Cowboy Museum was the sort of place that a ghost might frequent and wrote this fiction for the website: "Of course, no cowboy can hold a candle to The Duke himself, Mr. John Wayne. Visit the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame where it's said the apparition of the 6 foot 4 actor has been seen admiring the cowboy memorabilia on display." The work eventually dried up. Today, USGA is recruiting an AI Creative Specialist, at $42,000 a year, "to draft, edit, and refine engaging tour scripts, website copy, and compelling marketing collateral." Even ghost jobs aren't safe from the AI revolution.

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Trevor Foster didn't have much interest in ghost tours until he was ripped off, he tells me. He's a ceramics artist who specializes in dark pieces like bones, pistols, and mystical eyes. This January, he received a message informing him that USGA may have stolen one of his designs to sell on its Ghost Daddy website — an intricate skull-shaped mug with a handle like a curved bone. From initial casting to final glazing, it took Foster about about 100 hours to complete.

The skull on Ghost Daddy looked like one Foster designed in a slightly different color. Foster says the fact that it had the same sutures on the top — "almost like a fingerprint" — made it clear it was a ripoff. He also found that Zaal had recently purchased the same skull mug from him. "For someone to buy it and make a direct mold just seems kinda brazen," Foster says.

Foster sent a cease-and-desist letter, and Zaal responded that he planned to remove the item within six months. "My understanding in looking at your website is that you have your initials on the bottom (ours doesn't), each one is hand crafted and unique (ours are consistent and the same which is why yours looks better), ours is of a lighter color, and our logo is on the back," Zaal added. To Foster, it seemed Zaal was implying that replacing his initials with the USGA logo was enough to make the knockoff legal.

An Instagram video Foster posted went viral in the ghost tour community, and Zaal agreed in an email shared with Business Insider to discontinue the item immediately. He attributed the similar design to a mistake made by an overseas supplier who was given multiple examples to draw inspiration from. That wasn't good enough for Foster, who sued and settled with Zaal in September.

Foster was surprised to have found something of a community as a result of the whole debacle. After he'd posted about the situation, he was inundated with dozens of messages from people with their own grievances with US Ghost Adventures, commiserating with him. "It's just kind of incredible how many people they've angered," Foster says.

And — if you fall into the 39% of the country that believes in ghosts — you might believe that it isn't just corporeal beings that have been angered. This summer, a group of part-time ghost hunters visited Zaal's newly purchased McInteer Villa and set up K-2 meters, REM pods, and a ghost box.

But the group's leaders Dawn Lorenzen and Amy Osborn found the ghosts to be surprisingly uncommunicative. When they'd visited before Zaal's purchase, the ghost hunting had been good.

They Facetimed a medium to figure out what was going on. The ghosts were irritated, she told them, and it seemed to be related to the new ownership. "They made a circus of the place," the ghosts kept repeating, she said. "And now we are a spectacle."

"An eccentric Scottish comedy for people looking for something weird, irreverent, and a bit different."

• Taylor Swift's self-titled debut album celebrates its 20th anniversary this week.
• It would've been the ideal time to revisit her country roots with "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)."
• Instead, Swift squandered her own momentum by releasing the "Showgirl" deluxe last month.

The stage was set for Taylor Swift to sing her way back into critics' hearts — and back onto the country charts — with nostalgic twang and another picture to burn.

Instead, the curtains raised to reveal a rare strategic misstep.

This week is the 20th anniversary of Swift's debut album, "Taylor Swift." For much of this year, fans had been expecting Swift to mark the occasion by releasing "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" and reclaiming her place in the country-star pantheon — especially after "I Knew It, I Knew You," her cowgirl-inspired single for the "Toy Story 5" soundtrack, became a crossover hit in June, topping the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs simultaneously and finishing at No. 2 on the Songs of the Summer chart for 2026.

"I Knew It, I Knew You" suggested an imminent return to Swift's country beginnings, one that would be welcomed with open arms by longtime listeners and Nashville gatekeepers alike. The charm offensive was well underway: Swift gave interviews and exclusive snippets to country radio stations and publicly gushed about honoring her "country roots." Even the song's lyrics seemed to play like a sly Swiftian in-joke, the kind of marketing wink that she's famous for weaving into her work: "I remembered I loved you / Came back when it mattered."

But the "Taylor Swift" 20th anniversary celebration has been interrupted by a flashier, less prudent version of its titular author.

In late September, Swift surprised fans by unveiling the deluxe edition of her 12th album. "The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore" features four new songs Swift said she wrote in an excitable creative burst last year, shortly after the original album's release.

Commercially, this unexpected move has paid off. One of the new "Showgirl" tracks, "Patient Zero," has been No. 1 on the Hot 100 for three consecutive weeks, making "Showgirl" one of just a handful of albums throughout history to yield three chart-topping hits. The album also returned to No. 1, adding hundreds of thousands of additional sales to its already eye-popping total.

Strategically, however, revisiting "Showgirl" in lieu of "Taylor Swift" is far from savvy — especially for a self-described mastermind who is seldom caught in the middle of a PR campaign with a domino out of place. Swift had seemingly arranged her country-music homecoming with care, precision, and pitch-perfect anticipation. Now, that momentum is gone.

'The Encore' disrupted what could have been a perfect rollout to revisit 'Taylor Swift'

After two decades of Swift's solo-written anthems and high-pressure reinventions, the 2025 arrival of "Showgirl" was uniquely disenchanting. Swift had recently wrapped the highest-grossing tour in history, reunited with two of the music industry's most revered producers, and promised the album would contain "the best ideas we've ever had." This was positioned to be her pop opus.

Alas, "Showgirl" was overhyped and underbaked, peppered with ham-handed imagery and corny puns. Critics tempered their disappointment with justifications: Swift is too famous and too successful to disappear into her work; her public persona has grown too distracting and unwieldy; she's likely experiencing professional burnout.

This year's deluxe album was received with much less mercy, earning a 39 out of 100 on Metacritic, a 40-point drop from the original's score. When Swift brought "Showgirl" back to the fore, its shortcomings shifted focus away from the goodwill she'd spent all summer cultivating with "I Knew It, I Knew You."

Even worse, the new batch of "Showgirl" tracks included "Cleveland!" — an egregious attempted kiss-off that indulges all of Swift's worst impulses. Social media exploded with derisive glee, with some going so far as to say Swift had ruined her own songwriting legacy. Even fans who defended the song called it "rage bait" and "not that deep."

Even if the other deluxe tracks are catchy, polished, and well-structured, they were unleashed at a far too precarious time to receive the general public's benefit of the doubt.

Indeed, many assumed that Swift, ever the tactician, would move on from the "Showgirl" era with haste — and what better way to course-correct than by reminding us how she became a household name?

A reminder of Swift's country prowess is long overdue

Back in 2006, critics were charmed by the precocious lyrics and banjo-laden hooks that populate Swift's debut, from "Tim McGraw" and "Our Song" to "Should've Said No" and "Picture to Burn." At 16, Swift had already penned indelible zingers like "You said the way my blue eyes shine put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said, 'That's a lie.'"

Twenty years later, the highlights on "Taylor Swift" stand as peak examples of Nashville-honed storytelling — the kind that helped pave the way for a new wave of country stars like Ella Langley to dominate the charts.

Of course, Swift may still release "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)." It could arrive tomorrow, next week, or years from now. While the "Taylor's Version" project was made redundant when Swift bought back her masters last year, she had already rerecorded her debut by the time the purchase went through. "I really love how it sounds now," she told fans, saying it would be released "when the time is right."

But it's hard to imagine a better window than the one Swift just squandered. If "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" does end up closely following "The Encore," it will no longer live in its own moment, but in the shadow of a critical flop. The triumphant return-to-country narrative has been muddled. Plus, with "Patient Zero" still performing well on the charts, it doesn't make economic sense to release another album that would siphon away attention and streams.

So why did Swift decide this time wasn't right for her debut to reemerge? We can only speculate, though it's possible that Swift's talent for brand management has distracted us from her primary drive, the very thing that made "Taylor Swift" a sensation in the first place: She's a creative, an artist, a songwriter with something to say. Perhaps this was not a calculated choice, but a personal one. Perhaps she simply wrote new songs and decided to share them. Perhaps she anticipated "The Encore" would face more pushback than "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" and decided to do it anyway.

Swift's lyrics offer clues to this effect. "Babylon," the final deluxe track on "The Encore," warns against "using nostalgia as a weapon to hurt yourself" and "missing all the best parts" of the present day. The story is not told from Swift's first-person perspective, but, when read as a meta-narrative, it seems to forestall critiques just like this one — asking listeners not to romanticize the past precisely as she declines the most obvious opportunity to monetize her own.

"Babylon" doubles as a preemptive epilogue to the embattled "Showgirl" era. Swift has recently been accused of devolving, of failing to live up to the heights of her past work — as if her now-beloved albums like "Red" and "Reputation" were never dismissed or ridiculed upon release.

Will "Showgirl" receive the same revaluation? Only time will tell, but it sounds like Swift is feeling optimistic.

"You hate this song," she sings, "but you wake up on the train with your headphones gone / Now that melody is all you want."

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• Miley Cyrus' new album, "Bass Persuades," is not selling well compared to her industry peers.
• Although Cyrus' music has struggled to capture the zeitgeist, she has remained firmly A-list.
• Her career more closely resembles that of a legacy act, like Cher or Madonna, thanks to her longevity.

Miley Cyrus is oozing star power.

Sporting an electric guitar and the perfect smoky eye in a recent promo video, she strums in the stance of a rock star, putting one leg up on a step and whipping her hair to the music. The clip is black-and-white, with the backdrop completely blank, suggesting Cyrus — who now goes mononymously by Miley — is magnetic all on her own.

The 33-second video, simply titled "MILEY," was designed to tease her big comeback shows at the Hollywood Bowl in October. It worked: Cyrus' two-night run sold out in minutes after 1.5 million hopefuls joined the presale ticket queue. Clearly, people were itching to see Cyrus in the flesh.

That demand, however, lately hasn't translated to people purchasing her music. Cyrus' new album, "Bass Persuades," sold only 61,000 units in its first week. For comparison, Taylor Swift's "The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore," the deluxe version of a year-old album, sold 173,000 units the very next week. Earlier this year, Ariana Grande's new album "Petal" sold 295,000 units in the same timeframe. Aside from Cyrus' titular lead single, which peaked at No. 35, only one more song from "Bass Persuades" cracked the Billboard Hot 100: "Let's Get Married" sneaked in at No. 99.

While Cyrus did sell enough to secure a No. 1 chart debut in a non-competitive release week, "Bass Persuades" also earned a less-flattering distinction when it plummeted to No. 157 on the Billboard 200 the following week: the biggest single-week drop for an album ever recorded.

Yet, somehow, when Cyrus appeared onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, numbers and technicalities melted away. Clad in understated, monochromatic looks with no backup dancers or flashy set pieces to speak of, she proved that her name alone is still a powerful draw.

In the last decade or so, Cyrus has become a celebrity whose creative output is tangential to her status, like a vestigial organ she's evolved to no longer need. Sure, Cyrus still makes and releases music, but she rarely engages with the typical cycle of promotion and performance. She hasn't staged an arena tour since 2014, and, with the sole exception of her Grammy-winning song "Flowers," her music over the past decade has struggled to capture the zeitgeist. (Perhaps if her 2020 rock opus "Plastic Hearts" hadn't been released during the pandemic, it could've broken that curse, but I digress.)

But as her sold-out Hollywood Bowl stint proves, Cyrus has a legion of supporters at her fingertips, whether her recent music is resonating or not. Even when Cyrus drew criticism for not singing every word of some of her songs — especially nostalgic hits like "Party in the USA," "The Climb," "We Can't Stop," and "Wrecking Ball" — the backlash underlined just how little she needs to do to keep her A-list position secure.

"I've learned now through the queue that my calculations are correct and people will come to me," she previously told Apple Music's Zane Lowe of the mini-residency. "I don't need to drive to you."

Miley Cyrus is a pop diva without the pop

Even as Cyrus' music since her last No. 1 album, 2013's "Bangerz," has failed to achieve widespread relevance and popularity, as a name, she remains as relevant and popular as ever.

Part of this is thanks to her longevity. Cyrus has been famous since she was the tween star of "Hannah Montana," a role that led to her being named the youngest-ever Disney Legend in 2024. Earlier this year, Cyrus celebrated the show's 20th anniversary with a Disney+ special, in which Chappell Roan told her, "You literally walked so I could run."

Cyrus and her blonde alter ego have also been cited as major influences by artists like Sabrina Carpenter and this year's breakout star Adéla, whose viral hits like "Ain't in LA" and "Nicole Kidman" have drawn comparisons to "Bangerz."

"Watching 'Hannah Montana' was my introduction to pop stardom," Adéla told Dazed.

As members of pop's new guard look to Cyrus' early work for inspiration, Cyrus remains positioned as a tastemaker and a reference point. The success of her newer albums is a secondary concern.

In recent years, Cyrus has deliberately been out of touch — both figuratively, from trends, and literally, from her audience. Despite fans clamoring for more live performances, Cyrus has declined to satisfy the demand, telling British Vogue that she doesn't want to live her life for "anyone else's pleasure or fulfillment." Cyrus has also been open about her "unhealthy" relationship to touring; she experienced job burnout at a young age and never quite recovered. As a result, she seems wholly unconcerned with chart positions or sales figures. She is more interested in building a legacy that will endure than in instant gratification.

"My life is so beautiful. It never feels like I'm swimming upstream anymore," Cyrus told Variety in March. "I like the way people see me. And when I first left 'Hannah' and put out 'Bangerz,' I did not feel that way." 

Cyrus is acting like a legacy artist, not a modern star

Videos from the Hollywood Bowl show the crowd singing every word to Cyrus' decade-old favorites. For newer songs like "Orbit" and "Something Beautiful," Cyrus did most of the singing herself.

The gap between her past and present impact has never been more glaring. Cyrus may not have liked her public image as a teenager and young adult, but fans were gratified — and future phenoms were taking notes.

At 33, Cyrus has become a premature legacy act. The way she's navigating her career today resembles that of long-established divas like Cher, who remains a cultural touchstone but hasn't scored a hit in decades, or Madonna, whose most recent album is a callback to her earlier career heights. "Confessions II," the sequel to 2005's dance-pop blockbuster "Confessions on a Dance Floor," has thus far failed to spawn a top-40 hit. Still, Madonna's devoted fan base is ready to swarm a concert venue at a moment's notice.

Leaning on legacy and nostalgia is not necessarily a sign of failure. In fact, for Cyrus, it may be the goal.

With "Bass Persuades," her 10th studio album, Cyrus has dropped her surname in marketing materials. As her dad pointed out, this is a time-honored tradition in the music industry.

"I told @miley yesterday I felt good about her going with her first name," Billy Ray Cyrus wrote on X. "I mentioned Dolly and Cher. Thinkin about it more and more … Elvis .. Prince …and so on. It's a natural progression for an iconic superstar legend."

Like her forebears, Miley is in a league of her own — neither in the lower nor upper echelons of the music industry, but a secret third space, detached from standard markers of success.

In the end, a mononym is less a branding choice than a vote of confidence: the audience already knows exactly who you are.

• Some of the most hyped films of 2026 are based on blockbuster novels.
• You still have a few weeks to read "Dune Messiah" before "Dune: Part Three."
• There are a couple of holiday books getting adapted, too.

Any booklover knows that news of an adaptation can be complicated: Can we trust the directors, screenwriters, and actors to bring our favorite stories to life?

This year's movie slate is filled with books that are near and dear to thousands of readers, including classics that are decades (or centuries) old, like "Pride and Prejudice, "A Christmas Carol," and "Dune Messiah."

There are also some new classics set to be adapted this year, including "Klara and the Sun" and "Sunrise on the Reaping."

We've compiled a list of 13 must-read books that you should crack open before they're adapted this year.

• I've worked as a wedding photographer for years, and I've seen couples make the same mistakes.
• Too many people schedule the day to the minute and don't get the chance to enjoy their wedding.
• Not budgeting for the right photographer and videographer can lead to disappointing results.

I've been photographing weddings for over a decade, so I've witnessed countless ceremonies and receptions — some disastrous, others impeccable.

Throughout the years, I've also watched couples make the same mistakes over and over. Here are a few I wish they'd avoid.

Filling the day-of schedule with way too much

Couples have to find time for the ceremony, photos, eating and drinking, dancing, talking to the people they invited, and connecting with each other.

When you try to fit too many things into the day, no one — especially the married couple — has time to breathe and relish the moments. The day can feel rushed and more focused on activities than the celebration of love.

A packed schedule often leaves couples stressed, with no time to eat because they've been pushed from one 15-minute window to the next.

However, your wedding day shouldn't be a blur. You should have time to soak in every moment. When you map out your day, prioritize traditions you love and estimate how long each will take … then add buffers.

I also recommend working with a wedding planner or coordinator to plan your timeline, or consulting with your photographer and other vendors when arranging your schedule. They've experienced countless weddings and know firsthand how much time each activity usually takes.

Letting small mishaps and issues ruin the whole day

One of the things I always tell my couples right before their wedding day is that something will go wrong.

I don't say this to scare them or make them worry, but mostly to adjust their expectations. No matter how much planning you do, people are imperfect, the weather can be unpredictable, and life happens.

By the time the day comes, couples have done all they can to make sure it's how they pictured it. All that matters after that is that they enjoy their wedding.

Missing flowers or a cake that's the wrong flavor can throw off your day — but these unexpected mishaps shouldn't be so consuming that they're all you remember from your wedding.

I don't want to witness any more miserable couples desperately trying to fix details that will never be exactly right. Please try to roll with the punches on your wedding day.

Hiring the wrong photographer or videographer

I may be a bit biased, but I strongly believe having important memories properly documented in photo and video form is priceless.

I've also heard from countless married couples who regret booking a subpar photographer or skipping a videographer.

When hiring any vendors — especially these — choose carefully. You're paying someone to use their physical and creative energy to tell the story of your wedding.

Ask a ton of questions and make sure you love their style by viewing their portfolios and websites. It can also help to hop on a phone call or video meeting — couples should esnsure they vibe with their photo and video team on a personal level because they'll be spending a lot of time with them on the big day.

Planning the wedding they think they should have instead of the one they actually want

Weddings are for the couple, so they should do what they want.

I see so many of them spend thousands of dollars and devote countless hours to planning, only to celebrate their love the way they think they're supposed to — not how they'd actually like.

Your wedding should be unique to you, and it doesn't need to look like everyone else's. If you wish to elope in the forest or plan a ball inspired by "Bridgerton" in a mansion, go for it.

The couple is at the core of the celebration, so why shouldn't everything be based on who they are and what matters most to them? 

Consider this my official public service announcement: Your wedding can — and should — be fun, unique, and meaningful to you. 

This story was originally published in June 2021 and most recently updated on October 23, 2026.