I consider myself fairly “up” with popular trends. Perhaps I don’t know every celebrity crush, or every new thing that every TikTok personality likes, or really what teenagers are excited (or mad) about, but I pride myself on knowing about what’s popular. Or at least I used to, because I have realized there is an entire internet that exists separate from mine — or perhaps it’s just one of many internets (I hate writing this term) — that seems to operate entirely autonomously from anyone I know or anything I read.
I experienced this yesterday, on seeing the furor around a podcaster from a show called “Try Guys” that cheated on his wife. This entire debacle blew up out of nowhere, engulfing my Twitter feed with a mixture of takes, jokes and abject confusion that anyone was concerned about one man — Ned Fulmer — and his now-falsified identity as a guy who loved his wife endlessly. I do not know. I do not care. Cheating is disgraceful and disgusting, but this is also not somebody I know, nor somebody that I will ever know, nor is he someone that anyone else I know is aware of.
What’s confusing to me isn’t so much that this situation popped up, but that I had absolutely no idea who these guys were, despite their extremely successful show where they “try things.” Somehow, despite being on Twitter 870 hours a week, I was unaware of a show that hard garnered over a billion views, one with a die-hard fanbase that was so thoroughly disgusted that they demanded Ned’s release from the show. And yet, despite this vast fanbase, despite me…
