November 3, 2020 4 of 8
<Keith Habersberger voice>In 2014, in Los Angeles, California, the people at BuzzFeed decided to make a video called “Guys Try on Ladies’ Underwear for the First Time and so was The Try Guys born.</Keith Habersberger voice>
I think I’ve told this story before. In 2019, one of my Facebook friends (I think it was Thomas’s brother) posted an article claiming to have proof that people who see live concerts live nine years longer than those who don’t or something. My guess is that, to the extent this is true, it’s probably more that the people who have that kind of disposable income probably have more food security and better health care. Either way, though it inspired me to look at the list of upcoming concerts and found someone called The Try Guys.
Now, the name sounded familiar. I was pretty sure that some of my Facebook friends had posted links to videos by them. Now memory is malleable, but I think that one of the first videos I thought of was their impaired driving series.
So I went digging and watched every one of their videos over the course of, I don’t know, a week or two? And they were every bit as funny as I recalled.
The Try Guys, as I recall one of the Guys saying, became a sort of thing because they were the four guys at Buzzfeed who were the most comfortable taking their pants off in front of a camera. In fact, one of their running gags is that Ned likes the way his butt looks. That trope goes all the way back to the beginning. It’s there in Guys Try on Ladies’ Underwear for the First Time.
In 2018, they left Buzzfeed and began their own production company, 2nd Try LLC. This is why, if you search YouTube for them, you’ll see that some are published by Buzzfeed and some are published by Try Guys.
The Guys have stuck together through all of the stresses of the creation of their own company. They have group videos and also have their own video series, and in 2019 they began a series of podcasts. The main podcast, called TryPod, is the podcast of the central four Guys. The they started one called You Can Sit With Us, which features Ned’s wife Ariel, Keith’s wife Becky, and Zach’s fiancee, Maggie. I don’t know if Eugene’s partner, Matt, has ever appeared on that podcast. He kind of stays out of the limelight. And recently, Ned and Ariel started a podcast called Baby Steps, which is about their growing family.
The Try Guys has long been sort of my “home” on YouTube. It’s the first channel I check for new videos, it was the first channel I subscribed to, and if I ever have Patreon money, it’ll be the first YouTube channel I donate to the Patreon of.
I can’t subscribe to their Patreon, but I have given the Guys some actual money. I bought their book, The Hidden Power of F*cking Up, and both Keith and Zach have started sideline businesses, Keith sells a hot sauce specifically for chicken, and Zach sells tea. I’ve bought both, but every time I have chicken, I forget to try the sauce. And this reminds me that I haven’t tried Zach’s tea yet, either. It’s 11:30 pm right now, which sounds like a good time for his Mission Chill bedtime tea. The tea smells heavenly. I hope the taste is half as good as the smell.