Member-only story
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 consuming media all day, despite me generally having people that inform me of things by nature of the conversations I have, I had no idea who they were. Nobody I knew who they were. Nobody I asked knew who or what the Try Guys were — other than Delia Cai, who I generally ask any time I don’t know something online.
But these guys are legitimately famous. They were hosted by the New York Yankees. They have a Food Network show. And yet they have existed in some sort of bubble outside of my frame of reference.
To be clear, this is not just a case of me being old and uncool. I recognize that Death watches my every move, and that one day I will be cast into the pit. But my age and lack of coolness does not explain how I would be totally unaware of a multi-million viewer YouTuber that had such fame that his infidelity — and his wife-positive brand — would turn into something that resembled national news.
