Inkhaven for You
(please read all of this in a dry, deadpan voice)
Alice was running a business selling Nathan Fielder pills, and it was going well. There was a strong demand for this awkward, possibly autistic, comedian known for recreating bizarre cringe-inducing social situations. For some reason, the writers at this Bay Area Rationalist-adjacent writers’ workshop seemed to really relate to him.
The only problem was in the supply chain. Nathan was just one man, which limited his creative output. This resulted in a troublesome situation where the business exhausted all of his content and ran out of things to talk about.
“Do you think he’d come here if enough people reached out to him on Twitter?” Henry suggested. A good idea, but none of us had the necessary Twitter following to make it work.
“What if we recreated our own Nathan Fielder-esque shenanigans?” asked Emma. Another good idea. The only problem was that it takes a lot of work to do something like learn to fly a plane or film a TV show, for which I was too busy and also too lazy.
“What if we did a study where we found people who had never seen Nathan Fielder and showed them clips to judge their reactions?” Jesse chimed in. This seemed more feasible, since all it would require was showing people funny clips on my phone, and I kind of wanted to do that anyway.
An opportunity for a case study came up during lunch. A conversation with Emit, Conq, and Jeredino revealed that they had never seen Nathan Fielder. But there was a complication. They were so addicted to something called “Bavitz pills,” which were from a writer known for his Pokémon smutfic, that they refused to try any other form of content. Clearly I would need some sort of deception in order to convince them to watch Nathan Fielder for my study.
After some research, I discovered an opportunity. Nobody actually knew who Bavitz was in real life, or even what he looked like. So I quickly found a local character actor who would agree to pose as Bavitz, come to Inkhaven, and show clips of Nathan Fielder’s show, while saying things like “wow, this is so much better than my work!”
The plan worked. The Bavitz Bros were completely taken in by my deception, and fully believed that their favorite author had come here just to tell them to watch Nathan Fielder. Unfortunately, another problem arose: watching a clip on a phone is still kind of boring, no matter how good the clip is or how famous the person telling them to watch it.
Luckily, I had prepared for this problem. Secretly, I had also hired another local actor named Nathan Farley to pose as Nathan Fielder for this experiment:
Nathan Farley was a programmer with no professional acting experience, but I figured that wouldn’t really matter since acting weird would just make him seem more like the real Nathan Fielder. When I contacted him, he seemed confused about the role, but was willing to give it a shot in order to make his first step into show business.
Nathan Farley first disguised himself as Nathan Fielder, then put on a second disguise as an ordinary cameraman. He filmed the entire thing, pretending to be a regular guy. Then, when we were done showing clips to the Bavitz Bros, he stepped forward, took off his cameraman disguise, and announced himself to be the true Nathan Fielder.
Once again my deception worked. The Bavitz Bros were completely taken in by my ruse, and became awed by the creative work of Nathan Fielder. The original group of Nathan Fielder appreciators was also convinced. They seemed very impressed by my ability to get a famous celebrity to appear on short notice and film his show live.
However, at this point, yet another problem appeared: Ben Pace, the man running Inkhaven. For some reason, he took issue with the idea of filming a popular TV show inside his reclusive writer’s retreat. It looked like I might get cancelled just when I was on the brink of success, as yet another victim of NIMBY politics.
But what Ben didn’t know was that I had prepared for this possibility as well. The actor who played Bavitz was not just an unknown local actor, but was in fact a man named Burt Bronx. Burt had an astonishing range of talents, so I was lucky to find him available on Craigslist. He boasted an IQ of 160, a master’s degree in data science, public speaking experience worldwide, brand consulting, comedy acting, “fearless on camera,” OnlyFans modeling, and the winner of Sam Hyde’s FishTank Live Season 3. He also had a great tagline: “Let’s Burt It Up!” But what really stood out to me was this line in his resume: “BOUNCER/ SECURITY: Ensure safety and order at your venue with my imposing presence.”
With help from Burt’s imposing presence as the fake Bavitz, I was able to convince Ben to let us film the show. And it worked: the number of Nathan Fielder enjoyers in the area grew by almost 50% in just one day, an astonishing growth rate, and greatly boosting Alice’s sales.
It felt good to help a struggling small business succeed, while also spreading a message that I believed in.
