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JZ Jason Zinoman On The Daily (NYT)

“Penn and Teller came along and they said, all magic is bunk. All magic is fake. That's how they start their show. And then they take you behind the scenes of how this trick is actually done, right? And then they… fool you. And it turns out that the authenticity is the misdirection. Exposing the fraud, exposing the fake, that's the trick.”

The Daily (NYT) · October 2026

“Penn and Teller came along and they said, all magic is bunk. All magic is fake. That's how they start their show. And then they take you behind the scenes of how this trick is actually done, right? And then they… fool you. And it turns out that the authenticity is the misdirection. Exposing the fraud, exposing the fake, that's the trick.” — Jason Zinoman, The Daily (NYT)

The comedy critic is talking about Nathan Fielder's documentary with Elizabeth Holmes, and why audiences raised on reality TV and paid-for documentaries are so cynical about the form. He compares Fielder's method to Penn and Teller's: you have to earn the audience's trust before you can manipulate them.

The Daily (NYT) · 2026-10-18 Listen to the episode → More from Jason Zinoman →

Transcript

The Daily (NYT) Around 42:20 into the episode
Jason Zinoman

Correct. Correct. And I think that once people see the movie, that would be a really interesting argument.

Michael Barbaro

…manipulated and the authenticity is pretty limited. But there's a lot of kind of incidental revelations that seem to come your way in the work of someone like Nathan Fielder. And maybe I'm overstating that, but it feels like there's a kind of a deeper, more unintended truth that arrives. Yeah.

Jason Zinoman

I also think that you're onto something, which is that the audience is very cynical about, and they should be, about documentaries right now, that so many of them are paid commercials. And what I see Nathan Fielder doing in this movie, I was thinking about this. It reminds me of what Penn and Teller did to Magic. Penn and Teller came along and they said, all magic is bunk. All magic is fake. That's how they start their show. And then they take you behind the scenes of how this trick is actually done, right? And then they trip fool you. And it turns out that the authenticity is the misdirection. Exposing the fraud, exposing the fake, that's the trick. And I think what he, the reason he does that is precisely because people are so understandably cynical about these documentary forms. And they already begin. You know, these are people right now. They've grown up on reality television. They've grown up on these…

Speaker 1

Exactly. I agree.

Michael Barbaro

Is it fair to say that this film and what Fielder has become is advancing the form, this form that I know you have spent so much of your career thinking about and caring about?

Speaker 1

I think that judging from the response to this film, people's excitement for it, the sort of internet meltdown when the trailer came out, I think it's fair to say that it's putting the form in front of people who might not otherwise flock to a more esoteric documentary. And it's entertaining and…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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