Lots to think about. The Try Guys finally opened up about Ned Fulmer’s cheating scandal. In a new episode of their podcast The Try Pod, Keith Habersberger, Zach Kornfield, and producer Miles Bonsignore discussed how they felt when they found out about Ned’s affair with an employee, how they felt and the future of their company without him.
The Try Guys announced that Ned was fired on September 27, 2022, after he cheated on his wife, Ariel Fulmer, with The Try Guys’ associate producer, Alex Herring. In a YouTube video titled “what happened” on October 3, 2022, The Try Guys members, Eugene Yang, Keith Habersberger and Zach Kornfeld, briefly explained that The Try Guys’ production company, 2nd Try LLC. On the podcast episode “ok, let’s talk about it,” Keith and Zach finally cleared up and went in-depth on what happened after a week of publicized drama.
Read below on How The Try Guys found out about Ned’s cheating scandal and if someone will replace Ned as a Try Guy.
How did the Try Guys find out about Ned’s cheating scandal?
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How did the Try Guys find out about Ned’s cheating scandal? The company actually found out about the scandal around Labor Day weekend, weeks before it was revealed to the public. Zach recalled that it was a month of “relentless work. This was something we took very seriously. We knew that it required a swift action, legal action figuring out what we as co-owners could do was within our realm. So, that was a lot of lawyer calls and then finding an HR representative, like what even is a review internally?” Keith was on a national tour with his comedy group Lewberger and was “basically on the phone every 20 minutes” with Zach and Eugene.
The duo poured out their emotions about how the allegations affected them before the information was out to the public, “We process it almost like a trauma,” Zach recalled. “It really rocked our word, but also the ramifications were so clear. I don’t think that I really ever stopped to emotionally process it. Even still, I don’t know that I have. Because it was just, ‘OK, we have to act. We have to go. This thing happened, how do we react accordingly?’ I understood the severity of the accusations against Ned, but also the laundry list of steps ahead.”
Keith also revealed that he listened to Olivia Rodrigo and Radiohead on car rides while they were trying to handle the accusations because it felt “like a breakup.” He said, “We just learned a lot about how difficult it is to navigate things like this at all, let alone properly. It’s really challenging. There’s a lot of people to consider. There’s a lot of legal issues to consider.” “And knowing that if we had any missteps whatsoever, we would be putting ourselves at risk,” Zach added. “We didn’t want to leave ourselves open to lawsuits if we were ‘unjustly removing him,’ or what have you. We just needed to make sure that we were doing things right. Not saying the wrong thing. Not doing something too early. Making sure that we had really gone through this internal review before we took permanent action. There’s a right way and a rushed way, and we wanted to make sure we were doing it the right way.”
Will Someone Replace Ned Fulmer As a Try Guy?
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Will someone replace Ned Fulmer as a Try Guy? On whether they would accept Ned back into The Try Guys or if he would make an appearance in future videos, Keith straightforwardly said, “No. It betrayed our trust. It was a workplace violation. It would mean to all the people in our office who knew what they knew, that we were not true to everything we say we are and our values. Very simply, he would have been removed. It would not have been this public spectacle. We probably would have tried to avoid that for the other people involved.” Zach later said, “That era of the Try Guys is over. It’s not coming back. The four of us are not making videos together. Something new is coming. I’m not saying it’s going to feel totally different. I’m not saying it’s going to be familiar.” We’re going to use this as a moment to grow and that’s really exciting but also scary. It is what it is and here we are.
The new era of the Try Guys, however, won’t be replacing Ned as a Try Guy. Many fans speculated that there would be a new member, such as fan favorite and frequent guest Kwesi James. Zach confirmed, “We will have new people that come in and out… I don’t want to put the pressure on anyone to say, ‘This is the new Try Guy and he is the replacement.’ That’s not fair to them.”
Keith took the whole debacle as a learning experience out of everything that happened in the past couple of weeks. “It showed that we had a really big effect on a lot of people,” he said. Zach added, “The silver lining in this was realizing the impact that our content and even that BuzzFeed generation that we were a part of had on so many people, and it touched a part of their lives. I’ll say, I wish we had found out a different way… but it was like, ‘Oh wow, this fucking matters to people.’” The quartet-now-trio met at Buzzfeed Video during the early 2010s and were a viral hit with their regular episodes. They later left to pursue 2nd Try LLC as an independent company. “We’ve had more eyeballs on us than ever,” Zach continued. “Oh, that’s why people make this their career and lean hard into drama. What I’ve also learned is I want no fucking part in it. We have prided ourselves for the last eight years on being undramatic boys, and I can’t wait to go back there. This whole fucking circus is not interesting to me and not what I ever want to be defined as, as a creative person.”
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