Nathan For You

Absurdity at its best - Life Through Movies #10

Back to our regular programming.
Here at Life Through Movies, I mix a personal story while recommending a piece of cinema that has impacted my life.

In parallel, you can follow my current trip through Japan here.
Let’s start.

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My business partner and I arrive late to the networking event. Surrounding a big entrepreneurship fair, this invite-only event gathered investors and entrepreneurs to explore funding opportunities. We're raising money for a startup and with combed hair and business casual attire ready, we arrive at the counter.
The problem: the organizers ran out of "Entrepreneur" laminated badges.
They off-handedly give us an "Investor" one and we rush into the carpeted big room.

We run into an investor, he looks at our badges with a confused face, we explain ourselves and start pitching our startup. We repeat the cycle a few times. After a while, we forget about the badge and find ourselves in a mixed group of both sides.

Suddenly, one business owner starts pitching us his startup. We're about to cut him off when a beautiful moment of synchronicity happens between my partner and I, as we silently agree to let him pitch. We then ask him about growth rate, active users, profit margins... he diligently explains it all. We adopt poker faces and thinking nods.

Leave us your contact, kid, we'll think about it, I can still hear my overly confident and shameless 21 year-old self. He hands us his business card. 
We're elated, suddenly in this side of the fence for once. And we want more.

So we shark-tank other entrepreneurs. Some of them pitch in disbelief, dismissing us as some kind of juniors using daddy’s money. Others are impressed, trying to find out how we made our money at such a young age. We improvise with some small details, and turn the tables by finding holes in their business models and questioning their projections. Everyone eventually hands its business card, with a glimmer of hope.

Ten years later, we still laugh about the absurd situation we got into, that just shows what you can get people to believe using a fake badge and some confidence.

Someone that has made a career out of exploiting these situations humans fall into is Nathan Fielder. Take his TV series Nathan for You. He poses as a business consultant for small companies, telling the real-life owners he'll consult them for free if they're willing to let him document the process for his TV show.
They all accept, what could go wrong?

He then proposes the most outrageous and absurd solutions to their problems. Like speeding up a cleaning service to 10 minutes by using 40 maids at once, or renting friends for your funeral. The business owners are already deep into it, intimidated by cameras, so they accept the plan. And we watch the execution of it in hilarious disbelief.

Within this uncomfortable and comical interactions, quite a few quirks of human psychology are revealed. How does peer pressure influence our decisions? How being in front of a camera can make a person not question what's being said? How far can this go? In this case, very far, and with very funny consequences.

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LOOK OUT FOR:

• My favorite episode. S01E06. Both businesses featured (a funeral home and a hamburger place) get just the perfect solution, alongside an extremely awkward interaction. I re-watch it regularly and never fails to crack me up

• The amount of improvisation used to accomplish what we see. They would change the course of the episode based on the interactions, taking them in unexpected, and usually more outlandish, directions

  • Sometimes they filmed up to 90 hours of footage for a 22-minute episode. Talk about compression!

• It was 4 seasons long, and some of the situations depicted went mega-viral, like Dumb Starbucks, or became Amazon Best-Sellers, like The Movement

• The weight of the show is mostly carried by Nathan Fielder. He's an awkward genius that leans into his awkwardness for us to get a glimpse of unfiltered human nature. We’ll later dig more on the absurd and meta elements of his layered humor, for now I leave you with this amazing video that touches on it

Enjoy!