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Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder Keep Us Guessing

The comedian Nathan Fielder came to fame as the creator and host of the Comedy Central series “Nathan for You.” The show followed Fielder as he devised outrageous schemes, ostensibly with the aim of helping various small businesses. What became clear, though, was that Fielder was less interested in helping business owners generate profits than he was in understanding the people ensnared in his plots. His next project, the HBO series “The Rehearsal,” was a similar offbeat portrait of offbeat people. At the center of both projects is Fielder himself, a documentarian whose motives can sometimes be hard to parse. This week, Fielder’s first feature-length documentary, “You Can See Everything,” hits theaters. Co-directed by Lance Oppenheim, the movie shows Fielder embedding himself into the life of the disgraced Theranos founder and felon Elizabeth Holmes in the days leading up to her imprisonment for fraud. The film caused a big splash when it debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, in part because it presents Holmes, a mysterious and compelling cultural figure, through the eyes of Fielder, a mysterious and compelling filmmaker. This week, the Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson and critic at large Jason Zinoman, who covers comedy, join Michael Barbaro for a spoiler-free discussion of Nathan Fielder, his career, and why he might be the perfect person to tell the story of Elizabeth Holmes.
Duration
46m
Broadcast on
18 Oct 2026
Audio Format
other

The comedian Nathan Fielder came to fame as the creator and host of the Comedy Central series “Nathan for You.” The show followed Fielder as he devised outrageous schemes, ostensibly with the aim of helping various small businesses. What became clear, though, was that Fielder was less interested in helping business owners generate profits than he was in understanding the people ensnared in his plots. His next project, the HBO series “The Rehearsal,” was a similar offbeat portrait of offbeat people. At the center of both projects is Fielder himself, a documentarian whose motives can sometimes be hard to parse.

This week, Fielder’s first feature-length documentary, “You Can See Everything,” hits theaters. Co-directed by Lance Oppenheim, the movie shows Fielder embedding himself into the life of the disgraced Theranos founder and felon Elizabeth Holmes in the days leading up to her imprisonment for fraud. The film caused a big splash when it debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, in part because it presents Holmes, a mysterious and compelling cultural figure, through the eyes of Fielder, a mysterious and compelling filmmaker.

This week, the Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson and critic at large Jason Zinoman, who covers comedy, join Michael Barbaro for a spoiler-free discussion of Nathan Fielder, his career, and why he might be the perfect person to tell the story of Elizabeth Holmes.

 

On Today’s Episode

Alissa Wilkinson, a movie critic at The New York Times.

Jason Zinoman, a critic at large for the Culture section of The New York Times.

 

Background Reading

 

Photo: A24, via Associated Press

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It's selling out everywhere. Is it? Because I was debating with them. I was debating with my wife yesterday. I was like, "Is this really a thing? Or is this like a New York Times thing?" This is a thing. No, this is a thing. I have heard strangers on public transit talking about it. Friends with very little interest in movies mad at me for not taking them to the street. Yes. Save it for the episode. [laughter] For New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is the Daily on Sunday. Every once in a while, through a combination of subject matter and clever marketing tactics, a movie becomes a phenomenon. Long before anyone can even see it. Usually it's a star-studied blockbuster. Think of Oppenheimer or Marty Supreme. What doesn't normally come to mind is a three-hour documentary. But a few weeks ago, it was the anticipation of a documentary kicked off with a coy trailer. Why would I deceive you? There's no reason for me to do that. That touched off a cultural wildfire. All right. Okay, good chat. And set my colleagues, film critic Alyssa Wilkinson, and critic at large Jason Zinniman, racing to a secure screening room in Midtown Manhattan in order to watch it. What they experienced. My head is still sort of spinning floored though. I just feel like in these people, he's sort of met his match. It is emotional. It's romantic. It's wildly intimate for a documentary. You get to the end and you're like, "I hang on. What have I been watching this whole time?" But maybe the most intriguing thing about the documentary, and really the source of all this hullabaloo, is who made it. The comedian Nathan Fielder, whose shows are known for blurring the line between reality and fiction, and the documentary's subject, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, whose career blurred the lines between reality and fiction. So today, I speak to Alyssa and Jason about why this documentary, called You Can See Everything, is in their estimation, a bonafide breakthrough. It's Sunday, October 18th. Alyssa, Jason, welcome to the Sunday Daily. Great to be here. Great to be here again. So I'm just going to start off by conceding that I have not seen the movie You Can See Everything. That's going to be very much the center of this conversation.

Transcription truncated.

The comedian Nathan Fielder came to fame as the creator and host of the Comedy Central series “Nathan for You.” The show followed Fielder as he devised outrageous schemes, ostensibly with the aim of helping various small businesses. What became clear, though, was that Fielder was less interested in helping business owners generate profits than he was in understanding the people ensnared in his plots. His next project, the HBO series “The Rehearsal,” was a similar offbeat portrait of offbeat people. At the center of both projects is Fielder himself, a documentarian whose motives can sometimes be hard to parse. This week, Fielder’s first feature-length documentary, “You Can See Everything,” hits theaters. Co-directed by Lance Oppenheim, the movie shows Fielder embedding himself into the life of the disgraced Theranos founder and felon Elizabeth Holmes in the days leading up to her imprisonment for fraud. The film caused a big splash when it debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, in part because it presents Holmes, a mysterious and compelling cultural figure, through the eyes of Fielder, a mysterious and compelling filmmaker. This week, the Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson and critic at large Jason Zinoman, who covers comedy, join Michael Barbaro for a spoiler-free discussion of Nathan Fielder, his career, and why he might be the perfect person to tell the story of Elizabeth Holmes.