Soft Power in Socks: How the Try Guys Became a Global Rorschach Test of Modern Collapse
Try Guys, Try World: How Four Former BuzzFeeders Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring
By the time the Try Guys announced their split from Ned Fulmer last September, global interest had already turned the scandal into a low-stakes World Cup of Schadenfreude. From Manila to Madrid, timelines filled with incredulous takes: a married man cheats with an employee and Americans are shocked? Meanwhile, in countries where extramarital affairs are practically cabinet-level positions, the reaction hovered somewhere between amused and envious. Still, the numbers don’t lie—YouTube’s analytics lit up like a Christmas tree in every time zone, proving that a quartet of mildly anxious Californians can still unite the planet in rubber-necking solidarity.
The Try Guys phenomenon was never really about fried tarantulas in Phnom Penh or wearing stilettos through Tokyo. It was about exporting a very specific American optimism—equal parts therapy-speak and venture-capital swagger—to an audience that has learned to expect less from its institutions. When Eugene Lee Yang’s meticulously color-graded “coming out” video dropped in 2019, it trended worldwide precisely because it felt like a State Department soft-power campaign gone rogue: here was a Korean-American gay man delivering a better-crafted national narrative than any embassy press release. UNESCO didn’t add it to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list, but give it time.
Then came the implosion, and suddenly the Try Guys mirrored the same managerial melodrama currently suffocating governments everywhere. One guy violates the HR handbook; the remaining trio commissions an outside law firm so white-shoe it could moonlight as the Hague; a breathless “internal review” is uploaded in 4K with captions in seventeen languages. If you squinted, it looked like COP27 with better lighting. The global takeaway? Even your wholesome content lads now behave like a banana republic after the coup—tearful press conferences, merch drops, and a new organizational chart drawn on the back of a napkin.
International viewers clocked the hypocrisy fast. European subscribers noted that firing someone for adultery would leave half the continent’s parliaments empty. Thai fans wondered why Americans still pretend corporations are families instead of slightly more polite cartels. And in South Korea—where K-pop trainees sign contracts stricter than the NDAs at Los Alamos—the idea that workplace romance merits a forensic audit struck many as quaint, like bringing a cavalry saber to a drone fight.
Yet the brand endures, because the Try Guys accidentally stumbled into the only growth industry left: self-aware collapse. Their pivot to self-funding, complete with earnest pledges about “ethical capitalism,” arrives just as the rest of us are googling “how to build a generator out of lawn-mower parts.” It’s comforting, in a late-Rome sort of way, to watch four guys monetize their own midlife crises while the planet’s thermostat climbs like a TikTok hit. Call it disaster capitalism with a face mask and a sponsorship from HelloFresh.
What’s genuinely new is the transnational feedback loop. When Eugene wore a hanbok on the Emmy red carpet, Korean netizens debated whether it was cultural pride or appropriation—until the argument itself trended on Weibo, where Chinese users asked why they couldn’t ship their own soft-power hunks without tripping over censorship. Meanwhile, Nigerian Twitter compared the Guys’ HR theatrics to the Pentecostal church scandals in Lagos, and Brazilian meme accounts remixed the “Ned’s out” announcement into samba edits faster than you could say “optics.” The scandal wasn’t just consumed; it was crowdsourced into a planetary Rorschach test about power, sex, and who gets to apologize in slo-mo.
So here we are. Four expat BuzzFeeders have become a geopolitical barometer: their viewer map now looks like the UN General Assembly, only with fewer walkouts and more ads for meal kits. If you want to know which way the cultural winds are blowing, skip Davos and check whose apology video just auto-captioned into Ukrainian. The Try Guys tried, failed, tried again, and accidentally produced the first piece of American media that plays equally well in dorm rooms, boardrooms, and bunkers. That, comrades, is what passes for soft power in 2023—slightly scuffed, algorithmically optimized, and forever promising to do better next quarter.
The world keeps ending, but at least the thumbnails are improving.
