The Weirdest Things Nathan Fielder Has Done, Ranked

For the second season of his HBO series The Rehearsal, Fielder sought to prevent aviation accidents by improving the relationship between pilots and co-pilots. In the second season finale, "My Controls," it’s revealed that Fielder has become so dedicated to his cause that he spent two years taking flying lessons and has become a licensed pilot of commercial jumbo jets. In order to test his communication technique first hand, Fielder flew a plane full of volunteer actors. A coda revealed that Fielder now has a second career flying out of service jumbo jets across the world to private buyers. After season two of The Rehearsal, the issue of pilot mental health received increased attention from legislators in the US Congress. In September 2026, two bills were passed by the Senate that addressed the difficulty pilots had in receiving mental health treatment. According to The Hill, the first act mandated that the FAA: guidance encouraging pilots and air traffic controllers struggling with mental health issues to seek treatment. It would also provide “enhanced” training for aviation medical examiners on how to address these conditions. The second bill increased "transparency around available medications for aviation industry employees." After the bills passed the Senate, they were sent to the US House of Representatives for consideration.

When the Telluride Film Festival announced a mystery screening, attendees were stunned by the nearly three-hour documentary You Can See Everything. The documentary, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, sees Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes invite a film crew into her home 34 days before she is sent to prison for 11 years. Holmes infamously claimed that her technology would revolutionize blood testing by being able to diagnose several medical conditions from just a single drop of blood. That was patently false and Holmes was eventually convicted for defrauding investors. For the film, Fielder moved in with Holmes and her family just before she went to prison, and continued to interview her over the subsequent three years. The resulting film finds Holmes unable to admit that her technology didn’t work. While Fielder kept his trademark deadpan throughout filming, he was rattled by the experience, saying, I’m really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced. I’m excited for this movie to come out and for people to help me with what I experienced.

For decades, TV specials have featured magicians and showmen doing death defying stunts like when David Blaine spent days in days frozen in ice. For his Nathan For You episode “The Claw Of Shame,” Fielder pushed the limits of good taste and TV standards. Rather than risk his life, Fielder risked becoming a criminal. Fielder rigged himself to a machine that would pull his pants down, exposing his genitals to a group of children, if he didn’t unchain himself within a time limit. The very funny episode raised questions about why dangerous stunts are presented as entertainment and the role of children in Hollywood.

Throughout the first season of Nathan For You, Fielder often sported a jacket from the apparel company, Taiga. However, as he discovered in the third season, Taiga once ran a tribute to journalist and Holocaust denier Doug Collins in one of their catalogues. In the third season episode “Horseback Riding/Man Zone,” Fielder, who is Jewish, decided to respond by establishing his own soft shell jacket company Summit Ice, “a not-for-profit company dedicated to producing quality outdoor apparel and raising awareness of the Holocaust.” The jackets weren’t just a gag, Fielder donated profits from Summit Ice to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Summit Ice would return to Fielder’s weird world. In a 2025 episode of The Rehearsal, "Star Potential," Fielder discovered that the episode about Summit Ice had been removed from the Paramount+ streaming service around the world. The cause of this was the streamer’s German service becoming "uncomfortable with what they called anything that touches on antisemitism in the aftermath of the Israel/Hamas attacks.” Fielder spent the rest of the episode mocking the hypocrisy of removing an episode about the Holocaust education as part of an effort to stop anti semitism.

The first season of Fielder’s HBO series The Rehearsal focused on Fielder helping a woman, Angela, decide if she wanted to have children. In order to do this, Angela lived in a staged home with a series of child actors (starting with babies and eventually teenagers) playing her “son,” “Adam.” Per child labor laws, children can only be on set for a limited number of hours, so the kids were replaced every few hours. Furthermore, Fielder eventually stepped in to play the role of Angela’s husband. With Fielder and Angela living together with the parade of “Adams,” the lines between reality and fiction started to blur. One of the children, Remy, who played the six-year-old Adam got too attached to Fielder, continuing to call Fielder “daddy” and having a meltdown after leaving the house for good. Clearly disturbed by this, Fielder spent "Pretend Daddy," the season finale of The Rehearsal, trying to understand why this impacted the child so hard. This being a Fielder show though, it eventually leads to him dressing as the child’s real mother and re-creating Remy’s audition with a different, older, and more experienced child actor to determine what went wrong. While never actually hitting on a cause or solution, Fielder does force the audience to consider the ethics of child actors and how it can be hard for young children to differentiate real life from the fiction of TV production.

Fielder’s breakthrough series Nathan For You served as a very real parody of business improvement reality shows like Kitchen Nightmares or Bar Rescue. While those shows would sometimes suggest ridiculous business makeovers, Fielder would always go to the most ridiculous but technically legal idea. In the episode "Hotel/Travel Agent," Fielder proposed that a Pomona, California hotel could attract more families by advertising that parents could have “marital relations” by putting their kids in an “isolation box,” a sound proof box full of entertainment that parents could put their child in while they have sex. To test the product, Fielder hires a child actor to sit in the enclosed, windowless box while adult film stars have sex mere feet away. The sexual situations get more intense as things go on, and the child’s parents start to get uncomfortable, but at no point do they decide to pull their child from the scene. It’s a knowingly controversial and borderline exploitative situation, and Fielder would later explore the ethics of child actors in The Rehearsal. When looking back on the hotel episode, critic Michael Lovito wrote: Fielder only goes as far as he does because they allow him too, and when given the choice between potentially traumatizing their child or giving him a few minutes of screentime, they opt for the latter.

Above all, Nathan Fielder just wants to make good television. In one of his most straightforward stunts, he wanted to ensure that an interview with Conan O’Brien would be entertaining. So, just in case the interview ever got awkward or hit a lull, he brought the acclaimed actress Susan Sarandon on as a back-up guest. As he told Conan, “That way, if it’s not working, or my story isn’t good, you have the ability to switch over to another guest.”

In February 2014, a mysterious coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks opened in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood. The interior was styled to look like a normal Starbucks shop, but with everything dumbed down, from the Dumb Venti sized Dumb Frappucinos on the menu to the Dumb Jazz Standards CDs on display. In truth, it wasn’t really a coffee shop, patrons were given free cups of coffee and couldn’t order any of the “dumb” drinks on the menu, but Angelenos flocked to the location to take in the Dumb Starbucks experience. Initially, it was unclear who was responsible for Dumb Starbucks, although it was clear that it was intended as a parody. According to a Dumb Starbucks FAQ, “by adding the word ‘dumb,’ we are technically ‘making fun’ of Starbucks, which allows us to use their trademarks under a law known as ‘fair use." While there was speculation that this could be the work of the artist Banksy, Nathan Fielder eventually revealed himself as Dumb Starbucks’ company president, claiming that although the Los Angeles Dumb Starbucks was being shut down by local health officials, they were exploring a New York location. Eventually, when the "Dumb Starbucks" episode of Nathan For You aired in summer of 2014, Dumb Starbucks was revealed as the elaborate and ridiculous centerpiece of an attempt to boost a real local coffee shop’s business.

As Fielder tried to help Los Angeles area businesses on Nathan For You, he often tested the legal limits of how far you can exploit customers. In one case, that’s setting up what amounts to a ridiculous obstacle course involving tight squeezes and a live alligator to purchase a television set for a dollar. The season one episode "Gas Station/Caricature Artist” features one of the show’s most famous misadventures: Fielder and a gas station sold gas for a $1.75 per gallon, but only if customers completed a rebate. This wasn’t a simple mail-in rebate though, as customers had to hand deliver the rebate to a mailbox on a mountain 90 minutes away. When a few customers took him up on the rebate attempt, they were faced with complicated riddles and even an overnight campout in order to get hints as to the rebate box’s location. In the end, none of the customers got the rebate, and accepted that that’s just how it goes. It may look ridiculous, butthe hoops the customers have to jump to should feel familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to get a refund from an indifferent customer service representative.

Nathan Fielder was already warping reality before Nathan For You premiered. In September 2012, a cute video went viral showing a pig rescuing a baby goat who got stuck in a pond at a petting zoo. The video was shown on Ellen, The Today Show, and numerous other TV shows and local news programs with no questions of its authenticity. Only when the show's second episode “Santa/Petting Zoo” aired five months later was the ruse revealed. In reality the goat was never in trouble, and the pig had been guided by crew members, animal trainers, and scuba divers along a plastic track. The whole stunt was promotion for a petting zoo. It was the show’s first example of how the media can be manipulated, and experts were quick to note that. As Kelly McBride, the senior faculty for ethics, reporting and writing at the Poynter Institute said to The New York Times: It really is embarrassing for the journalists who stumbled upon this and decided to promote it or share it with their audience. It’s almost a form of malpractice.

Retail stores often worry that shoplifting will hurt their business. In the Nathan For You episode “Clothing Store/Restaurant,” Fielder devised an ingenious scheme for a Los Angeles boutique: Allow attractive customers to shoplift one item of clothing. That way, when “beautiful” people are seen wearing clothes from the store, it will promote the shop. However, that also means someone has to decide which customers are hot enough to shoplift. When Fielder hired a security guard to decide, things got even more out of hand, in a comment on pretty privilege.