Most Outrageous Nathan Fielder Moments to Get You Ready for You Can See Everything
A list of the craziest, most insane and over-the-top moments from Nathan Fielder’s career.
Visionary. Philanthropist. Canadian. These are the ways Nathan Fielder would describe himself, but what exactly is he? Explaining Nathan Fielder and his antics would be like trying to explain a dream; You wouldn’t know where to begin, how to make it make sense, or why it even happened. He’s a sort of documentarian, covering topics from business management to pilot communication with equal parts seriousness and irreverence, to the point where you don’t know if he’s even being genuine or not. He’s a comedian, but his awkward deadpan delivery is so sincere that you don’t know if he’s actually ever joking. And he prides himself in being such a fantastic actor that he has his own school of acting, The Fielder Method, that’s technically illegal and considered harassment.
Despite being so indescribable, Fielder has amassed a huge following, first through his breakout Comedy Central doc-reality show Nathan For You, where Fielder aided struggling businesses by trying out his most insane and over-the-top schemes, and then again with his acclaimed HBO series The Rehearsal, where he helped ordinary folks overcome their conversational awkwardness through elaborate rehearsals. He flexed his acting chops in The Curse, playing an HGTV host alongside Benny Safdie and Emma Stone, and now, even more unexpectedly, Fielder has teamed up with Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim for a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes (yes, you read that right).
You Can See Everything premiered at the 2026 Telluride Film Festival to a packed crowd, and has been so well received that it’s gotten top awards journalists (like our very own Jacqueline Coley) wondering if it can be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, something that has never happened for a documentary in the Academy’s 98-year history.
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But hold on! I know you’re excited to check out his latest film, but you can’t just go into a Nathan Fielder project blind; you have to prepare yourself for his craziness. So to get you ready for You Can See Everything, we’re rounding up Fielder’s most outrageous moments throughout his career; for you to enjoy and wonder how someone like this can exist, and to initiate you into the cult that is Nathan Fielder.
“Petting Zoo” (Nathan For You, S1)
I have some bad news: If you saw a popular internet video about a pig saving a drowning goat, it wasn’t real. It was a hoax orchestrated by none other than Nathan Fielder. In one of Fielder’s cuter schemes, he helps a petting zoo go viral by staging an adorable animal rescue. But what should have been a simple act caught on a cell phone turns into an elaborate production with scuba divers, pet trainers, and death threats. When the video was finally posted, it went viral, garnering over 11 million views, and even made national news. This would have been great for the petting zoo, but Fielder decided to not associate them with the video, because, ironically, he didn’t want people to see the video as egregious advertisement.
“The Claw of Shame” (Nathan For You, S2)
Nathan Fielder has 90 seconds to escape his handcuffs before a robotic claw takes off his underwear in front of children and he’s arrested for indecent exposure. This wasn’t even to help a struggling business, he just did this to prove that he could.
One thing this episode first highlighted was Fielder’s ability to make people complicit in his shenanigans. Despite the insanity of the stunt, he’s able to get the parents, the children, the police, and the lawyers all eager to take part. It’s a testament to his persuasiveness and odd charm… Or maybe people are just so weirded out by him that they have no other choice but to be absorbed into his strange orbit.
“Dumb Starbucks” (Nathan For You, S2)
This stunt was so ridiculous that it made not just national news, but also international news. As an attempt to help a struggling coffee shop, Fielder proposes to change the name to “Dumb Starbucks” to capitalize on the brand recognition of Starbucks while avoiding legal ramifications, since calling it “Dumb” meant it was protected under fair use.
Immediately, you knew this was going to be a crazy episode when Fielder tricks a lawyer into representing him, but I don’t think Fielder could have guessed just how big his parody coffee shop would become. People were standing in line for hours to get into Dumb Starbucks, speculating that it was the work of street artist Banksy, and the merch became so desired that scalpers would resell it for thousands of dollars. When people ask which of his schemes made Fielder famous, his fans often point to this episode.
“Ice Summit” (Nathan For You, S3)
Given how controversial Fielder’s antics can be, you’re probably wondering if he ever went too far. Well, sort of. He does have a banned episode of Nathan For You that circled around, of all things, a clothing store.
Responding to Canadian jacket company Taiga’s support of a Holocaust denier, Fielder opened up a nonprofit winter apparel line that aimed at promoting Holocaust education. Sounds pretty positive, right? Well, the episode itself contained Nazi paraphernalia and imagery of the Holocaust within the actual store, used as a way to educate customers, but also serving as Fielder’s own brand of awkward comedy by forcing patrons to look at horrific images while shopping.
Still, the positive messaging of the brand proved to help launch his clothing wear stint into a bona fide success after racking in $300,000 in sales during its first eight weeks. But, in 2025, Paramount removed the episode, citing concerns of antisemitism. Fielder responded by dedicating a segment of The Rehearsal to him going to a fictitious Paramount+ Germany office (that he dressed with Nazi iconography) to rehearse him complaining to the real Paramount+ about the episode’s removal. His Summit Ice clothing brand still exists to this day.
“The Movement” (Nathan For You, S3)
If you had a struggling moving company business, what would be your first thought on how to improve it? Maybe doing a bit of advertising or some community outreach? For Fielder, the answer was to get free labor by convincing people it’s part of a new fitness routine. This episode was a testament to Fielder’s commitment to a bit, as he does several things to legitimize his bogus scheme: He hires a bodybuilder, Jack Garbarino, to be the face of the program, and hires a ghost writer to pen a book about the bodybuilder’s life — much of it fabricated out of whole cloth — full of such great little tidbits as Garbarino being best friends with Steve Jobs and helping kids in the jungle.
Like many of Fielder’s stunts, things escalate beyond expectations, with the book getting on the Amazon best-seller list and Garbarino appearing on daytime talk shows throughout the country to talk about his fictitious workout routine. But the most outrageous part of this whole story might be something that happened years later: Amazon Flex reported a story about a woman losing 100 pounds through delivering packages, a claim quite similar to Fielder’s scheme. Perhaps Fielder isn’t misunderstood, he’s just ahead of his time.
“Hotel Sex Box” (Nathan For You, S3)
When a struggling hotel approaches Fielder about wanting to attract more families to their business, Fielder has one obvious solution: Sex box. Specifically, a soundproof box that kids can go into so that their parents can still have sex while on vacation without disturbing their kids. Most normal hotel managers would have kicked Fielder out then and there, but after getting the green light, Fielder goes through with one of his most scandalous stunts. He does exactly what he said he would do: He builds a soundproof box, places a child in it, and hires porn actors to have vigorous sex while the kid is safely in the box.
To his credit, the box does works, but in true Fielder fashion of escalating the joke, he brings in an entire orgy just to absolutely make sure the kid cannot hear anything that happens outside of the box. The Hotel manager is left practically speechless after reviewing the “evidence,” and honestly, we were too.
“Raising A Child” (The Rehearsal, S1)
For The Rehearsal’s first season, Fielder documented Angela, a woman who wasn’t sure about wanting children and had a desire to “rehearse” being a parent. Throughout the first season, Fielder hires several child actors to simulate the feeling of being a parent, even going as far as swapping kids (and babies!) out at night so that the illusion of parenthood wasn’t broken for Angela… or himself. That’s right, Fielder decides to get in on the action halfway through the series, himself becoming curious about what kind of parent he would be if he had a child.
Things move a step too far when one of the child actors begins to form an attachment to Fielder, even calling him daddy off-camera. The final episode raises debates and questions about the ethics of using children, actors or otherwise, for hyper-realistic sets and television shows, and whether they can even give consent for such a thing. As The New Yorker put it, “To what extent do Fielder’s subjects understand what they are taking part in? The uncertainty is most precipitous whenever Fielder’s project has involved children, who, of course, can’t give informed consent at all — either to participate in the first place or to have their participation edited into a public, permanent record.”
“Pilot’s Code” (The Rehearsal, S2)
During the second season of The Rehearsal, Fielder wanted to study the relationship between pilots and co-pilots, believing that their lack of communication has ties to fatal crashes. It’s a compelling theory that Fielder commits to fully fleshing out in his own ridiculous and over-the-top way. One such “ridiculous” case was in the episode Pilot’s Code, where, in order to understand the personality of a heroic pilot, Fielder simulates the life of Sully Sullenberger. And when we say “simulate his life,” we mean his entire life, from conception to Sully landing the plane in the Hudson River.
In the episode, Fielder dons an adult-sized diaper and builds oversized sets, puppets, and robots to simulate Sully’s childhood, to the point where his giant puppet mother changes his diaper and breastfeeds him. His conclusion in the end: Sully was only able to land the plane because he was listening to Bring Me to Life by Evanescence. You can’t make this stuff up.
“The Miracle Over The Mojave” (The Rehearsal, S2)
For six weeks on The Rehearsal, we watched Fielder test his theory of pilot behavior and its relationship to fatal crashes, and we witnessed the ludicrous approach he took to prove his point, from cloning pets to testing himself for autism to helping a pilot get a date. But Nothing could have prepared us for the finale, when Fielder reveals that for the past two years he has been training to get his own piloting license. After all his experiments regarding pilot communication, he wanted to document the experience firsthand. So, “naturally,” he pilots a 737 filled with actors who were willing to risk their lives.
We were all on the edge of our seats when we watched him pilot that plane, filled with as much anxiety as Fielder must have been. In the end, he did land the plane, dubbing it “The Miracle over the Mojave,” and revealed afterwards that he had been working part time around the world as a ferry pilot since the experience. I don’t think there’s a soul who started The Rehearsal having “Nathan Fielder becomes a bona fide pilot” on their season finale bingo card.
“Green Queen” (The Curse)
After The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder teamed up with Benny Safdie to make The Curse, a dramatic series that followed Fielder and Emma Stone as an HGTV power couple gentrifying a small Indigenous neighborhood. Despite being a narrative show, it was filled with the same kind of awkward cringe humor that had become synonymous with Fielder’s reality work.
There are many wild moments within the show, like Fielder believing he had been cursed by a Somalian child to his obsession with his meagerly-endowed genitals, but none may be wilder than the finale, when Fielder wakes up to find that he is stuck on the ceiling. For the rest of the episode, we see Stone try to stop Fielder from floating into the sky, wondering whether this turn in a mostly grounded show was even real, until Fielder is finally flung into space, dying in the fetal position while hovering over the planet. Even in a show as crazy as The Curse, no one could have expected an outcome as outrageous as the one we got… though, since it was Fielder, we should have known anything was possible.
