Nathan Fielder’s ‘You Can See Everything’ and the High-Stakes Race for the Cover Story

A few months ago, Nathan Fielder’s publicist reached out with an unexpected proposal: would WIRED consider Fielder for a fall cover? The answer was an immediate yes, even before the reason was disclosed. That reason soon emerged: Fielder was preparing to release a top-secret project requiring a non-disclosure agreement just to hear its premise, let alone view it. After signing the NDA, the editor screened You Can See Everything—co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim—joining a select group of roughly three dozen people who saw the film before its surprise debut at the Telluride Film Festival in early September.

For anyone with internet access, the reaction following Telluride was nothing short of a cultural flashpoint. Reddit forums erupted, high-quality memes proliferated instantly, and journalists worldwide—including WIRED staff unaware their editor was under strict embargo—scrambled for access to the film or to Fielder himself. The performer has cultivated a devoted following for his unique ability to transmute human discomfort into high art, from the international sensation of Dumb Starbucks to the elaborate construction of a replica bar for a single rehearsed conversation, and the transcendent televised feat of piloting a passenger-filled 737.

Fielder’s particularity extended to the cover negotiations. The agreement wavered repeatedly over weeks of intense back-and-forth—standard friction in celebrity booking, perhaps, but amplified by the project’s secrecy and the surrounding fervor. At various points, the magazine’s leadership oscillated between frustration and relief as the deal teetered and revived.

The question arose: why endure such volatility rather than pivot to another available subject? The answer lay in the film itself. You Can See Everything is a singularly astonishing work, arguably among the finest in recent memory. It opens as a captivating, occasionally darkly comic 34-day psychological study involving Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her partner Billy Evans prior to Holmes’ incarceration, before evolving into something beguiling and brilliant that defies easy categorization. Following the initial screening, the film lingered in the minds of the WIRED team for weeks; a second viewing only deepened the fascination. When a small group of staffers screened the film ahead of the cover shoot, the ensuing debate lasted hours, dissecting facial expressions, relational dynamics, and the weight of individual sentences. Consensus was scarce, save for one shared conclusion: Fielder, notorious for meticulously constructing artificial worlds, had finally stumbled into one far stranger than anything he could have engineered.

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