Nathan Fielder is truly an innovator of our time. He's a writer and comedian from Canada, but he's best known for being the star on Comedy Central's "Nathan For You." It's a show where Nathan approaches small businesses and gives them outrageous ideas for them to make more money. Some ideas do fail, however, others more than succeed.
He's not afraid to trust people. A burger joint in LA named "L.A. Burger" claimed to have the best burgers in the city. For Nathan Fielder, the obvious solution to bring more customers to eat these burgers would be to promote an offer that would give customers $100 dollars if they didn't think the burger they ate was the best in all of LA. Nathan would keep asking the owner of the establishment if the burgers truly were the best, and the owner would keep claiming they were. With trust in the owner's word, Nathan offered to pay the customers with his own money so that owner wouldn't have any losses, although the shouldn't have any if the burger were the best.
The plan backfired horrendously because people either lied, or the burgers just weren't the "best." Nathan lost several hundred dollars the day the offer was implemented. If Nathan hadn't trusted this person, he wouldn't have lost all that money, however, I think it's nice that Nathan is capable of trusting others and perhaps is a quality that many of us should have.
He's not afraid to challenge the law. Laws can be pretty restricting, however, these boundaries don't stop Nathan. Have you ever heard about "Dumb Starbucks?" Nathan offered a cafe to completely change their look and products to look exactly like a Starbucks, where the only difference was that every product will say "Dumb" in front. This idea alone definitely could provoke legal issues with Starbucks under fraud unless Nathan established himself as a parody artist. So he did. He wrote several parodies of popular music which he then performed at an open mic night to promote his new parody artist identity. He also opened an art gallery with several pieces that mocked popular culture. After doing this, he opened Dumb Starbucks himself, and it was a huge success only to be shut down by the LA Health department because the establishment was legally an art gallery and not a coffee house made to several people food and beverages every day.
Nathan had a goal, and he didn't let the law, or even a powerful corporation such as Starbucks, get in his way.
Nathan will spend hours of his time to save a few dollars and develop friendships. He told the owner of a gas station to get more customers to market his gasoline as ridiculously cheap, but after rebate. However, this wasn't any ordinary rebate. The rebate couldn't be mailed in, it had to be personally delivered to the mailbox that was on top of a mountain which was over two hours away by car and hiking.
Nathan assumed after people discovered this little gimmick, that they would just pay for gas at the full price and never bother for the rebate, however a small group of people were. Nathan spent the rest of the driving these people to the mountain with the dropbox, and then hiking for several hours, only to reveal that the gasoline buyers had to solve a series of riddles in order to find this dropbox. After all this only three people remained, and they even spent the night camping with Nathan to then search for the dropbox the next day. Nathan mentioned that his riddles can go on, however what really mattered wasn't the rebate, but the friendships that formed the previous night. The three who just spent the past 20 hours trying to acquire around $15 in rebates also agree and they all hiked down the hill happily.
Nathan Fielder is truly a man ahead of our time, and I think he can inspire us all on many levels.
