Inside the Exclusive Nathan Fielder Interview

Brian Barrett: We'll also get into Anthropic and Elon Musk pledging to share their riches with the public. Anthropic announced that it would commit 5 percent of company shares to a public benefit fund, and Musk followed suit by promising he would give one SpaceX share to every child in America. We'll discuss the motivations behind these pledges and the chances that they'll actually happen?

Leah Feiger: And we're also going to take a look at the harassment campaign that has hit election offices across the country just two weeks before the midterms. A WIRED investigation found that election offices in at least 32 states have received suspicious letters, some of them containing white powder. We'll talk through what happened and how election officials are responding.

Brian Barrett: If you've been online this past week, chances are you've heard about Nathan Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim's latest documentary, You Can See Everything. The documentary follows Fielder, a graduate of Canada's top business schools, fun fact, as he spends a month inside Elizabeth Holmes' home in the weeks before she went to prison. Holmes was convicted back in 2022 for defrauding investors with Theranos, her blood testing startup. Turns out the speedy and accurate blood tests were fake. Innovative tech didn't actually exist. More importantly, though, the film was kept secret for three years. Only a few dozen people saw it before it debuted at the Telluride Film Festival. One of those people, WIRED's global editorial director, Katie Drummond. She had signed an NDA to hear what the film was about, got Nathan Fielder to be on WIRED's cover, and sat down with him for almost an hour and a half. Katie, thank you for joining us.

Katie Drummond: What a wonderful introduction. You made me sound so special. Thank you, Brian. I'm so happy to be here.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, I'm also excited genuinely because this is, I think, our first Uncanny Valley crossover episode?

Katie Drummond: It is.

Leah Feiger: Katie, what were your first thoughts when Fielder's publicist reached out? Tell us everything.

Katie Drummond: I'll tell you. You can hear everything. I was on my way to dinner with a very good friend and I was in an Uber and I got an email from him that said, "Do you have a few minutes to talk about Nathan Fielder?" And if you know me at all and my taste in comedy and the kind of TV I watch, you would know that I have many minutes to talk about Nathan Fielder and I would talk about Nathan Fielder anytime. I'm genuinely a big fan. I think his stuff is so, so brilliant and so clever and ... I don't want to say genius because I just think that's a step too far, but I think it's very, very good. I'm a big fan. So I wrote back and said, "I have all the time in the world." And we talked that night, and he just said, "Nathan has this project coming out. Only a few dozen people know what it is. And I can't tell you anything else about it until you agree to sign an NDA, but would you be interested in him for a cover, and do you have a cover that you could put him on this fall?" And to be honest, I had no idea if we had a cover that we could put him on this fall. I couldn't even remember if we had another print issue coming out this year. But I was just like, "Yes, of course. We totally have a cover." I lied and then immediately texted Reyhan, who runs the print magazine, and was like, "Do we have a cover available this fall?" And then it turned out that we did, and I signed an NDA, and she signed an NDA as well. And only after we signed the NDAs did they even say it's a movie. I thought it could have been anything. That's how little they were willing to share with us until we agreed not to talk about it.

Leah Feiger: Were you hesitant at all? Could this have been a bit?

Katie Drummond: There were times when I was sort of like, "Are we somehow being incorporated into the joke?" When they did The Rehearsal season two ... I don't know if listeners have seen it. If you haven't, you should. I think it's incredible. But Nathan did this CNN appearance with Wolf Blitzer …

Wolf Blitzer, archival audio: Here with us now, comedian, 737 pilot, and host of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder.

Katie Drummond: ... where he very seriously talked about aviation safety in a way that I think CNN was happy with, but if I, in my role running WIRED, if that happened to me, I don't know that I would be happy about being part of the joke. So I definitely worried about that. But once we saw the movie and talked to them more about what they wanted to do, it was pretty clear that this was just a good faith, earnest attempt to get Nathan to do some press, which he does not often do.

Brian Barrett: It wasn't a bit, turned out to be a real interview, but one thing I thought was really interesting about it was he turned the tables on you at some point. It felt like he started trying to interview you. And I guess, what was that like in the moment and were you ... You sort of catch yourself. It's sort of a fun moment, I think, in the interview. You say, "Wait a minute, you derailed me. That was rude." What was it like actually trying to interview someone who was so used to being on the other end of it?

Katie Drummond: It was a tough interview. He was very pleasant. He was totally lovely, and it was a very good faith conversation. But he doesn't like being interviewed. I mean, he says that in the interview. He says, "I hate this. I hate that this is happening to me right now."

Brian Barrett: Relatable.

Katie Drummond: Yes. I think he genuinely doesn't feel very comfortable expressing himself with words. I think he has talked before in interviews about how that is a real weakness for him, and so I think he feels uncomfortable trying to do it. And I think he did not want to share his feelings about what he experienced making the film because he didn't want that to inform the opinion of someone going in to see the movie. If they think like, "Well, Nathan thought this about Elizabeth and he thought this about Elizabeth's partner and he thought this and this about Theranos," he didn't want that to color how people saw the movie, and so he felt much more comfortable asking me questions about what I thought about the movie. And I think genuinely he is still trying to figure out what happened to him in the three years that he was making it, and asking people what they thought is helpful for him.

Leah Feiger: And I suppose this is a good time to say for all of our listeners that if you haven't seen the film yet, there's no spoilers in this interview. Both of you did a really good job of skating around that. But you did talk about seeing the film twice and having different reactions each time. Your conversation with him, as spoiler-free as it was, as difficult as it was to keep him on track, to get him to share his own viewpoints here, did it change at all how you saw the film?

Katie Drummond: Oh, that's interesting. The conversation and then reading the interview back, which I had to do many times as we edited it and got it ready to publish it, and then looking at the questions I asked him and thinking about why I asked certain questions in the moment did make me reflect on the movie more. There was one thing I said to him in the interview where I said, "We don't really know, Nathan, what you are thinking in the film and how you feel about these people." And then I thought more about that afterwards and disagreed with myself in the end where I'm like, no, it actually is pretty clear in his facial expressions or how he talks to people, or even knowing that he was a co-director on the film. So he made decisions about what they included and what they didn't include and how they frame and set up certain subjects. So obviously with all of those things combined, we do get a sense of what his point of view is. You can tell what the filmmaker's point of view is to some extent as you're watching the movie. So it did make me think a lot about the film. I mean, I will say I have thought way too much about this movie just because I've been getting ready for this interview, doing the interview, editing the interview, getting ready to publish it. I am ready to stop thinking about it. I would like that to happen.

Leah Feiger: This is your life now.

Katie Drummond: I hope not.

Brian Barrett: I was going to say, but Katie, the interview's gotten a lot of attention since it published. You've gotten a lot of attention since it published for the interview. What's it been like? I think as journalists, the adage is you don't want to become the story, not that you've become the story here, but I feel like there's been a lot of demands on your time. You've been on TBPN, a lifelong goal of yours. You're on Uncanny Valley, another lifelong goal. What has it been like processing being wrapped up in this sort of engine of attention that the documentary's been getting?

Katie Drummond: I pivoted from being a reporter to being an editor for exactly this reason, which is that I really didn't like getting attention on the internet. I found it very unpleasant. I continue to find it unpleasant. So in that regard, I don't like it. I like to talk to commenters and sort of respond to good faith things, but then you also, it's 8:30 at night and you're on Reddit and you read a thread, and people are like, "This is some of the worst writing I've ever seen," and you're like, "Oh, wow, OK. That person doesn't like me," and that's hard. I think I just want to hopefully genuinely encourage people to see the movie. And I don't mean that because I'm being paid to do an advertisement for them; I'm certainly not. It's just a really interesting project. And so I'm just really proud that we were able to play a teeny tiny part in it. If I could clear up one thing that has generated some public attention since the interview came out is that my Google search results now lean heavily toward Katie Drummond felon, Katie Drummond criminal, Katie Drummond conviction. I just want to be very clear, it can be hard to read tone in writing sometimes, that was a joke.

Brian Barrett: But in the eyes of AI overviews, you are forever a felon.

Katie Drummond: And that's how this movie ruined my career. Yeah. Yep.

Leah Feiger: That's really the subject line. Not only did you release this interview, WIRED released a slate of stories related to Nathan Fielder. And in one piece, former WIRED editor, Adam Rogers, discusses how the magazine was one of really the first outlets back in the early 2010s to praise Theranos, to give them all of this public attention. So there's this real reckoning that happens in that story. I'm really curious, I would love to hear from you about the decisions that went into even publicizing this mistake and this clearly new, this division between old era and new era.

Katie Drummond: Yeah. When I read Adam's story, I read a draft of it last week, I was so blown away. I mean, if anyone listening hasn't read it, it's such a great piece of writing and it's such a sharp reckoning with the editorial decisions that were made around that interview. I would just say, I think that that piece and this film say a lot about where WIRED is in this moment. And there were so many really smart people who worked at WIRED in that era. It's not like this was a bunch of dumb people making dumb decisions. It was really smart people making really smart decisions. But they existed and WIRED operated in this context where even in sort of the early 2010s, as a lot of controversy was starting to emerge around these tech companies and the rise of social media and the ills that came with that, there was still much more a culture of celebrating and lionizing startup founders and really wild emerging ideas, maybe not giving them the scrutiny that they ought to have had. I think Liz Holmes played into that really effectively. I think that her relative youth and her gender were important factors there, that the media loved the idea of a young woman becoming this self-made billionaire with this incredible innovation in personalized medicine. I think that the journalist who did that interview in 2014 asked Liz hard questions. Didn't necessarily get satisfying answers, but I think that, as Adam points out, the WIRED of today would've asked much tougher questions or would've even had a much higher bar to cover Theranos to begin with. I don't know that we necessarily would've looked at this startup that hadn't actually made many inroads into commercializing their product and said, "Yeah, that feels like something we should do a straight interview on." I don't know that we would've even made that decision. So I just think, again, it was really smart people making smart decisions within the context that they were operating at the time, but I think that context has really changed. And I think there's a lot more necessary skepticism of these people and their ideas and where this money is coming from and how and why they're getting that money to begin with and what they're doing with it.

Brian Barrett: Katie, thank you so much for being here.

Katie Drummond: Thank you guys.

Brian Barrett: Shifting gears to current tech companies, some of them have been on a philanthropic streak of sorts. On Sunday, Anthropic said it would commit 5 percent of its shares to a public benefit fund meant to address AI's impact on the labor market. A day later, Elon Musk, not wanting to be left out apparently, posted on X that next year he's going to give one SpaceX share to every kid in America and that this will be the first of many. Both announcements don't contain much detail on how this will actually happen, you'll be shocked to hear. According to Anthropic's statement, though, the fund could make charitable donations or direct money to "specific populations." We love a specific population. Musk gave no further details for his plan, but that didn't stop President Trump from publicly thanking him. Leah, are you excited for all the shares in AI companies that you and future generations of America are going to get?

Leah Feiger: I can't wait, Brian. I mean, I've just been bated breath for this to happen. I have so many thoughts about this, and I'm sure that you do as well. The idea of tech companies using wealth for public good has been an ongoing conversation for literal decades, and it's stalled in recent years. It just 100 percent has. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, famously is anti-philanthropy, which is very new, to be clear, from tech of even a decade ago that at the very least you had Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you had an outpour of support for the climate corners of the tech industry and dumping money into that. That's all dried up, and I'm not honestly sure that we've spent enough time talking about that. A lot of these companies have kind of relied on the positive press from their forebearers literally 15 years ago. And so the idea that there's now this whole philanthropic streak of, as you said, sorts is of note. It's the idea that like, oh, OK, we're actually that unpopular that we need to weigh in to some respect. We're going to take your jobs, but we're going to now fund the specific populations, question mark, whose jobs were taken? I have so many questions here.

Brian Barrett: No, that's the thing. And I think we can sort of disambiguate the Musk thing from the Anthropic thing because the Musk thing, A, Elon Musk makes so many promises, and who knows—

Leah Feiger: Oh my god, yeah. That doesn't even count to me. The fact that people were sharing it credulously ... I'm sorry, Natasha Lyonne, get a grip. This is clearly not occurring.

Brian Barrett: And even if he does, it is a lot of money, in fairness. It's $10 billion or so based on the current stock price. But it's 0.5 percent of overall SpaceX stock—

Leah Feiger: And it's not happening. It's just not happening.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. And even if it did, it would be 150 bucks in everybody's account, which it's not going to make anybody rich. It's fine. So set that aside for a moment. But let's talk about Anthropic because I do think, to your point, it's philanthropy, but it's philanthropy born of this sense that we're going to make all the jobs go away, so ... It is really, we're going to sort of start making some inroads toward universal basic income. But it's UBI as dictated by Anthropic. It's the sense of, "We're going to be the ones to figure out not only how AI is going to reshape society, but we're going to be the ones responsible for then making sure everybody's OK." The amount of power that they're trying to invest in themselves is really astonishing.

Leah Feiger: We live in an unregulated hellhole. Put it on a T-shirt. Look, Anthropic is preparing for a trillion-dollar IPO right now. And I know, it's me, so I have to say it, the midterms are in two weeks. All anyone is talking about in at least a portion of these polls is data centers, how unpopular they are, how unpopular AI is. The use of AI is a bipartisan issue at this point, which is fascinating. We should really be talking about how impressive it is that these massive companies have made so many people hate them so quickly. So it's all this timing, all of these, "Don't look at the man behind the curtain," facade that I just can't get over.

Brian Barrett: One thing that's kind of fun here ... I can't take credit for this observation. This was Matt Levine in Money Stuff in Bloomberg. But he made this point that I think is really apt, which is that the ways in which this money is being proposed to be distributed really reflects each company's or individual's sense of self. So you've got Anthropic, as we talked about, "Only we have the power. We're the only ones responsible enough to do this." You've got Elon Musk, very individual entrepreneurship, "We're going to give everybody a little stock and see where it goes." And then you also had ... We haven't confirmed this independently, but OpenAI reportedly in July, according to the Financial Times, proposed or considered giving the US government a 5 percent stake, which is sort of OpenAI saying, "Hey, we'll play ball. We'll work with the government. We'll figure this out." All different visions of how AI fits into society, how it relates to government, how it relates to individuals, none of them probably great because they all presume this world in which other sources of money are not going to be here because of AI.

Leah Feiger: No, I think that's honestly a really smart way to put it, the idea of all of these companies kind of figuring out their own ways to talk about this, especially because at the end of the day, with regulatory measures and proposals changing basically hourly at this point, the government is about to go through a pretty big shift. And regardless of what happens in these elections, Trump is a lame duck president. There is a very different sense of appeal that you have to make. Are you still promising that 5 percent if you're OpenAI to a Democratic-controlled Congress? I don't know, and I'm very curious to see how that will all kind of move around. But to me, it also just gets into this larger idea of what is the tech world's role in philanthropic movements, especially as they're shutting down their own internal CSR complaint streams as well. We've seen just over the years, over the months, so much about just the climate side of all of these companies, like I said, just being really shifted to the wayside. It's interesting, and to me, it feels like just such an obvious headline-grab as well.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. And I think to your point about the climate thing, again, going back to Anthropic, this is a company where a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people are at least adjacent to effective altruism, and the priorities of that set of beliefs don't necessarily line up with what you would consider to be conventional philanthropic beliefs. A lot of people, or maybe not a lot, some number of them aren't worried about climate anymore because they think AI is going to solve it. Some number of them, it's been reported, they've started smoking again because they think cancer will be a solved problem. There's a lot of assumptions about all the things that are going to be fixed. And if you are assuming that certain things are going to be fixed, you aren't going to put your public benefit money toward those things. You're going to find other places to put them no matter what the current state of urgency is on anything.

Leah Feiger: Last week, an official in the Louisiana Secretary of State's office was going through the mail when they opened a letter and a mysterious white powder fell out. The office was evacuated. The employee was rushed to the emergency room. They were thankfully not injured, and subsequent tests showed that the substance was not harmful. By Wednesday, the office was back open and running. Bit of a scary story, going a couple of weeks into the election, but the issue here was that it wasn't a one-off. Over the course of the following days, election offices in more than 31 other states were targeted with similar letters as they prepared for the midterms. Many of those states have made public statements acknowledging the letters, but WIRED's David Gilbert, he actually is the person who broke the full extent of how far this harassment campaign went. He contacted officials in all 50 states and DC, and our accounting shows the full scale of this campaign for the very first time. It's wild. It's really, really wild. Even if this powder was not detrimental, it's very scary and clearly part of a harassment campaign for election officials leading into one of the most consequential elections in US history.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. No, the fact ... I mean, great work, David, making so many calls and putting in the work.

Leah Feiger: Truly.

Brian Barrett: So we had 32 states confirmed receipt of a letter like this, and we still have a few who hadn't responded yet, so the number could still go up. And, Leah, I thought it's not necessarily Democrat or Republican. It's sort of across the board, right?

Leah Feiger: Exactly. The letters also coincided with similar letters that were sent to congressional offices across the country that also targeted both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Look, I have to say, hats off to the Postal Service. The vast majority of the letters were intercepted before they reached all of their intended targets. But in a number of states, they weren't, and election offices had to get evacuated. These offices, they're in finals mode right now. This is everything. The time that it takes to have to handle threats like this ... And they're also already handling other threats. Between election denier groups and rumors of ICE at the polls, these election officials are already underwater. So the idea that there's this additional threat is just wild. The FBI and USPS say that they're investigating, but the FBI has not been clear about whether it has any leads, how many letters it's identified, anything of that nature.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. Leah, I think it's really interesting that election officials are dealing with a lot right now, and this is just one more thing to deal with. How do you see that, if at all, affecting the election? I mean, are you concerned about, not just the letters, but when you take the totality of the things that are piling up ... Again, we're two weeks out ... how concerned are you that something goes wrong or gets missed or goes awry because of the pressure on election officials making it harder to do their job than ever?

Leah Feiger: Oh my god, I mean, that's the fear. If you're listening to this podcast and you feel comfortable going out to vote, go vote. But there's a different undercurrent right now, and that's what we're hearing from NGOs, local activists, election officials, which is it's very hard to pitch the Get Out to Vote platform when there have been so many threats. All to say, right now, DHS officials have recently said they don't plan on sending immigration officers en masse to patrol the polls, but everyone's still scared because Trump has previously said in the past that that's a possibility, Republicans have previously said in the past that's a possibility. And so there's so much conflicting statements. It's very tense. It's very tense. It's something that WIRED's tracking closely. The whole WIRED politics team is very ready to keep an eye on how all of this unfolds.

Brian Barrett: Do we have any sense of the motivation of the people who are sending these white powder letters? I ask partly because on Sunday, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson posted an image of an intercepted letter to Threads. Top left-hand corner of the letter says that DSA sent it, the Democratic Socialists of America, with the New York zip code. DSA has denied any involvement. I am not saying ... To be clear, I don't think it was DSA, just to be very, very clear. But it does seem like an attempt to potentially pin it on DSA. Have we seen anything beyond Utah with that? Have we seen any other attempts to use this or leverage this, or is that just sort of an isolated thing, and really who knows?

Leah Feiger: It's so tough to say. So we haven't seen that on a larger scale, but for all that the right loves to talk about false-flag operations, this is a literal false flag, and to me is just so clearly a way to encourage ... What am I trying to say? And to me, this is clearly such a way to encourage more splits in an already very divided country. And the idea like, "Oh, no, it's the leftists. They're trying to stop the election. See, we've been calling fraud this whole time. Oh, no, it was the right," there's so many different ways to take this, and at the end of the day, it's about disunity, which is not new for American elections. I know no one likes to talk about Russian involvement or foreign involvement from elections past, but it's not ... That kind of involvement, that kind of disinformation, that kind of harassment, that rarely had to do with very specific motions like sending ICE to the polls. It had to do with encouraging people to hate each other and pretending that there was a bigger divide than there was on a variety of issues. And so I think that we're seeing this play out again, and of course we are, specifically with these letters and other examples of voter intimidation that are really concerning.

Brian Barrett: Coming up after the break, we're sharing our WIRED/TIRED picks for the week. Stay with us.

Leah Feiger: It is time for our WIRED/TIRED segment. Whatever is new and cool is wired, and whatever passé thing we're over is tired. Brian, tell me yours.

Brian Barrett: Leah, you will probably disagree with this, but only because I know you enjoy traveling to other parts of the world, you enjoy living in other parts of world. You've done it your whole life.

Leah Feiger: Sure.

Brian Barrett: But I will say TIRED is moving to another country, say, in Europe, expecting things to be dramatically better than they were in the US in some ways. I say this because we ran a great story this week from a writer named Sarah Manavis ... I hope I am pronouncing that correctly, Sarah. Apologies if not ... interviewing a bunch of expats who fled America because of Trump and found themselves ... They found that Europe was not the idyllic, countryside, perfect world that they thought it would be. Europe's great. I'm not knocking Europe. I'm not knocking moving. But it did include colorful examples such as someone who fled to Poland to avoid a far-right authoritarian government. So I guess I would say tired, more specifically would be do your research before you move to another country.

Leah Feiger: Do your research, folks. OK, what's WIRED? What's your WIRED?

Brian Barrett: Wired, I'm going to say reviewed the ... Julian Chokkattu, WIRED's gear editor, reviewed the iPhone duo this week. The duo is not my WIRED, but Julian's wallpaper for the duo, which is an adorable Snoopy on a bright yellow background, it made my day. I have looked at it like 10 times today. Every time I'm feeling down, I just look at this picture of Julian's wallpaper and it makes me feel better. So I'm going to say that is WIRED.

Leah Feiger: I love that. That's pretty good. I'm going to have to go check that out. OK. My WIRED of this week is the only way that I have been avoiding election doom in 100 percent of my life is focusing on Halloween, which has been so fun. This week I am revisiting some old favorites, a.k.a. Cher's cult classic, also shout out to Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer, The Witches of Eastwick. Highly recommend. Get some Hocus Pocus in there. There's just a lot of really, really good forms of media to revisit.

Brian Barrett: My daughter put on “This Is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas this morning before school. Really got everybody moving.

Leah Feiger: So cute. So cute. There's candy everywhere. This is helping me out right now. I'm deeply, deeply loving it. My tired is a real-life spooky tale. Our security team at wired.com has been doing an unbelievable job tracking some very serious vulnerabilities across the internet. They have a couple of big scoops, specifically the PHP Foundation revealed two serious vulnerabilities that could impact millions of websites. There's been just ... I don't know. What am I but a politics and science person? But it just feels like there has been a proliferation of very scary stories recently about vulnerabilities and hacking and the internet is no longer ours. Was it ever? So really go check out the security section so you can have a real-life Halloween experience.

Brian Barrett: And, Leah, in fairness, you're always talking about PHP.

Leah Feiger: I am always talking about PHP.

Brian Barrett: You won't shut up about it. So this is your moment in a lot of ways.

Leah Feiger: Welcome. That's our show for today. This episode was produced by Adriana Tapia.

Brian Barrett: Mixed by Pran Bandi.

Leah Feiger: Fact-checking by Matt Giles.

Brian Barrett: Our executive producer is Kate Osborn.

Leah Feiger: Our global editorial director is Katie Drummond.