Very Fine Day #47: Zach Kornfeld
"You could either become a coordinator or you could throw your life away and try and be creative. So I decided to throw it away".
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“I was caught playing this same character of myself, even as I was growing older, because that’s who I ‘was’.”
There is a special kind of fame that has erupted over the last decade. I am talking, of course, about internet fame. And I know it has been around for longer than that, but the 2010s certainly feels like when we all decided it was more than a phase. More than that, big corporate entities realised it was a business. Now we have phrases like creator economy and kids in grade school who, overwhelmingly and understandably, want to grow up to be YouTubers.
ZACH KORNFELD is our guest for the first edition of VERY FINE DAY in 2022. And I want to say straight off the bat that this conversation is funny and interesting and moving and, most importantly, not really about fame at all. As Zach puts it, it’s “lowercase ‘f’ fame,’ anyway. But I do think what Zach has been through over the last six or seven years has been wild.
Zach began working at BuzzFeed around the time I did, though we never worked together. Truthfully, this conversation was our first conversation ever. He was in LA – one of the first members of that video unit that now makes movies and owns studios – and I was in the Australian office (which doesn’t really exist like it used to anymore).
Anyway, while I wrote a bunch of things, Zach made a lot of videos. Ultimately, he found himself in the group now known as The Try Guys. Millions of views and followers later, the group is a full-fledged brand outside of anything BuzzFeed does. They have toured internationally! For a certain group of a certain generation, The Try Guys are a big deal.
Connecting with Zach was great, and ultimately became a conversation about striving to find a creative role for yourself that works. We cover chronic pain, what it’s like to have *multiple* quarter-life crisis (one inspired by Oscar Isaac), the temptation to commodify your life for likes, and the origins of The Try Guys. It’s a bit of a long one - so enjoy. And while I have you, thanks for all of your support over the last 12 months. Eternally thankful that anyone reads / shares / opens these, and this year is going to be even better. Working harder on an Instagram presence in 2022, so follow along if IG is your thing.
That’s it from me.
See you down the road.
INTERVIEW BEGINS
VFD: As I was messaging you about this I realised that we probably haven't had a conversation. I don’t know if I have actually met you.
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, I don’t know. We’ve run in similar circles. The circles of our lives have certainly touched – perhaps we just braised off of each other. And I guess it’s more that we know each other via the internet, and therefore there’s this mutual… I don’t what you’d call it…
VFD: Respect?
Zach Kornfeld: … related relationship
VFD: I’m like “I respect you,” and you’re like “no, no, that’s not what I meant.”
Zach Kornfeld: Where I was going was a much more lovely sentiment I promise.
VFD: How’s the year going for you so far?
Zach Kornfeld: The start of the year has been great. You’re catching me on an interesting day because I live with chronic pain, and some days… I’m not sleeping. And last night was one of those nights. So you’ve caught me. Who knows what I’m gonna say. This is off-the-cuff, unfiltered.
VFD: No sleep at all? What’s the deal with that?
Zach Kornfeld: Last night I got about three and a half hours. I have this thing called ankylosing spondylitis. It’s an autoimmune inflammatory disease, similar to spinal arthritis, essentially.
VFD: Right.
Zach Kornfeld: So I get very stiff at night. And sometimes you're doing everything right: you're working out, you're following your regimen, and then just like that, like last night, it’s not good. And you don’t know why.
VFD: Shit. Is that something you’ve had your whole life?
Zach Kornfeld: Well… I got it… God, “I got it”. It’s like I picked it up from the store when I was in middle school. But yeah, it wasn’t diagnosed until a couple of years ago.
VFD: Right. And how was that? Was that revelatory to get it diagnosed? And to just be like: Oh, this is why I feel this way.
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, I was suffering from this mystery pain for all of my life, being told that it was nothing, or that I just needed to work out or that it was in my head.
VFD: That’s always good advice.
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah. But getting a diagnosis was just like: Oh, I’m not crazy. It gave words to the thing I was experiencing. It was quite relieving. And then, of course, there was a whole journey from there.
VFD: Right. And have you found some solutions? Even though you’re still facing nights without sleep.
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah. I mean this is probably not where you expected to start this conversation. But I do a whole lot of stuff. I’ve got medication that I’m on, and I’ve changed my diet entirely. I’ve changed certain life routines. It’s like you have to recenter your life around optimising yourself to feel as good as possible.
VFD: Well, I’m sorry that you have to go through that. Now I feel rude for having this conversation with you and getting you to explain it all.
Zach Kornfeld: Oh, no no no. It’s OK.
VFD: It’s OK? Good. Well, look, outside of the context of that start to your year, has it been good? Big plans? You’re in LA, right?
Zach Kornfeld: I’m in Los Angeles, yeah. It has been a good start to the year. I actually feel like I have somehow found the most work / life balance that I’ve had ever. And that’s because, with The Try Guys, we’ve built a great team. A team that I trust and a team that as time goes on needs me less and less.
VFD: Not too much though, right? Like, you’re still a kind of foundational part of things.
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, obviously. Videos can’t be filmed without me there. But we’re doing videos that not all of us are in and allowing ourselves to each take on different projects that interest us. So that has allowed me to spend a lot more time writing and digging, sticking my teeth into longer form projects that have interested me for a long time. And things are hard to do with the constant rhythm of the internet. So I’m happy that I’m finally carving out some of that time.
VFD: What are you working on? A movie? A book? Long-term projects? Can you talk about those?
Zach Kornfeld: I can! I think a lot of people keep their projects secret because you don’t want to be embarrassed by talking about something that never comes to fruition. Like everyone will be like: I have a big secret project. They just don’t want to be embarrassed when it fucking fails.
But a lot of the writing is writing that I'm doing for me - whether or not it gets made or whether or not it's something that I can sell… I have the means to make it myself. And it just fulfils me. It makes me happy. So one of them is a short film, one of them is a TV pilot. And I'm in this rare position where I think it's a much better show if I could sell it. I will be much more excited if I could sell it. But if I can't find a home for it, I'll strip it down and make it a little cheaper. And I'll figure out some way to finance it direct to audience.
VFD: What’s it about?
Zach Kornfeld: Oh, that's a secret.
VFD: Hahaha, OK. We don’t have to go that far.
How long has it been in your head? Is it one of those long-term things that you've been rattling around your brain for years? And now you’re finally getting it done?
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah. I guess there are three projects, and two of them are years in the making. One I wrote the first draft of back in 2014. And then life took over and it was like: Well, OK, I'll do that next year. I'll do that next year. And I'm very prone to being reactionary as opposed to proactive. So as opportunities come my way I follow that. I think that's been to my benefit, but also in some ways to my artistic detriment. And then one of them is the TV show. That’s really just me trying to process my experience with the internet, our collective experience with the internet, the ways in which it's warping our brains.
VFD: Oh, good. All very healthy, I’m sure.
Zach Kornfeld: All super fun things. But it’s the ways that I find my self worth defined by how many likes I get, and that my experience is not unique. We're all going through this. We all live the “influencer life.” We've all turned ourselves into commodities and it's totally bizarre and weird and fucked up. And I'm trying to figure it out.
VFD: Well it sounds really uplifting and fun. I'm sure it is. Personally, whenever I think about the internet, my default is to be depressed about it. And to be like: what have we done?? Like I look at the creations we've made and all of the potential we had and instead… we've made this. But I'm hoping you have a brighter perspective of things.
Zach Kornfeld: At least, hopefully, it’s funny.
I feel like you're at the end of “Planet of the Apes” and you're on your knees on the beach, but instead of the Statue of Liberty it's a Bored Ape NFT statue and you're just like: Noooooooo!
VFD: The apes are like: y’know… you can buy this little part of the statue if you want.
Zach Kornfeld: Exactly.
VFD: I want to get into the Try Guys stuff obviously, we’ll get to that, but I also wanted to know: where did you grow up? Like, how did you get to here?
Zach Kornfeld: How did I get to this point in my life? Well, I grew up in the suburbs of New York. I grew up in a town called Scarsdale. It’s quite a predominately Jewish, upper / middle class place.
VFD: This is in the ‘90s? I’m guessing here.
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah.
I mean, if you want to go all the way back, it began with me watching “Rugrats.” I've been obsessed with storytelling my whole life. A lot of it dates back to when I had what I call a quarter life crisis, or even less than that. Earlier. I I went through a depressive episode and identity crisis when I was eight-years-old. I was going to therapy when I was eight, because for some reason I was convinced that I had no purpose in life. I thought everyone else was good at stuff, and you needed to be good at something, and I wasn’t.
VFD: How did that happen? Did you tell your parents? Like, eight-year-old you. Or did they say something: Zach, we’ve noticed…
Zach Kornfeld: I think I was just bad at all the things that suburban childhood life centres around. I couldn't play soccer. I was bad at running. I was exhausted all the time. My body hurt for this mysterious reason. Just the things that people ascribe value to are not what I was good at. And the thing that got me out of it was storytelling.
I got this thing, it was called The Lego Steven Spielberg Movie Maker Kit. And it was a kit where you could make stop motion movies with Legos. And I was like: Holy shit, this is it. This is what I would do forever. And through that I tried a bunch of stuff. I was drawing comic books and selling them to my classmates. I was trying to do surrealist art. That was not very good…
VFD: But very, very surreal!
Zach Kornfeld: Oh, yeah. It was very avant garde. I mean, moviemaking has always been it. It's just that from a young age I fell in love and never looked back.
VFD: What’s New York like to grow up in? This is upstate New York, right? I’m assuming because I just haven’t heard of where you said.
Zach Kornfeld: Everyone calls it upstate New York and I get fucking annoyed about that’s like five hours away. We were in the suburbs of New York – it’s a quick train ride away to the city. It's great.
Westchester is like the opposite side of Long Island. So it's the suburbs, where people work in the city, and then get on the train and go to their white picket fence. I did not have a literal white picket fence, unfortunately. But it's a lovely place to grow up. The school that I went to is fantastic. The kids were all nice. We were less than an hour to New York City, so I had access to concerts and Broadway shows and shops. And I was never cool in New York, but I got to feel like I lived there sometimes.
VFD: And then did you go to college in New York as well?
Zach Kornfeld: No, I went to Emerson College, which is in Boston. And that’s just to get out of New York. It felt like I needed to. I don't know, I feel like your journey in life – your purpose in life – is to just go anywhere else. Doesn't matter. Have to get the fuck out of there. So yeah, I knew I was gonna end up in LA eventually, and frankly, USC rejected me. So that made the decision quite easy and I went to Boston.
VFD: And Boston was…
Zach Kornfeld: Have you ever been?
VFD: No, no, no. I know it’s cold.
Zach Kornfeld: It's fucking cold. And the block that my college was on was like the windiest corner in the country. It's unbelievable. I don't mean to offend anyone from Boston, but compared to Manhattan…
VFD: Oh, be careful, we have a huge readership from Boston…
Zach Kornfeld: It's a very large town with some bigger buildings. They're very prideful of their city. And I'm not trying to take that away from them. It's a very different place. But I loved it. The great thing about Boston is that I think it's the largest college town per capita in the country. So you're surrounded by people your age, everywhere you go.
VFD: What did you study?
Zach Kornfeld: I majored in film production.
VFD: Right, so you took your Lego set with you and you committed to the Lego film set.
Zach Kornfeld: I really gave myself no backup plan.
VFD: Yeah, I did something similar. We did films and media and stuff, and I remember turning to someone one day and being like: we are not getting a lot out of this.
Zach Kornfeld: Just no marketable skills if this fails…
VFD: I remember us having lunch and being like: I’m not really sure there are jobs in this. And we also had teachers telling us there were no jobs in this. And we’re just like: Nah, that can’t be true. Then, halfway through, you've already invested your time, and your money’s already down the drain, and you’re like: Oh. They were kind of telling us the truth about the lack of career opportunity.
Zach Kornfeld: And you have every single person going to school because everyone's going to be a writer / director, every single one of them. But no one is studying to do the hundreds of other jobs that are more common and more important, frankly. Like there's just this whole infrastructure of what goes into producing film and TV, and most people end up getting trained on the job after the fact.
VFD: I remember the advice we always got was like: Oh, you guys just need to get an unpaid internship and you need to just work on sets and you need to just do that. And I would just be like: Well, why the fuck are we here? Like, what are you? Why are we not doing that here? I remember they had one lighting kit. So it’d be like: it's been six months, so now you get a turn to try and figure out how the lights work.
Zach Kornfeld: Well a part of why I chose Emerson was that you get your hands on a camera immediately. And there are a tonne of extracurricular activities to work on other people's films, whereas I remember looking at UCLA, which has a tremendous film programme, especially for grad school, but you have to go to UCLA for two years before you can even apply to the film school. So it's like you're halfway through college and you haven't been able to do anything. I'm like: No, let's go, I'm ready. Come on, let's do this.
VFD: And they might reject you, right?
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, if I’m remembering correctly you just go to UCLA and you get your prerequisites because they want people to be well-rounded.
VFD: Well, obviously you did go for it and you did get a job. You got many jobs. So what was the goal out of college?
Zach Kornfeld: When I moved to Los Angeles, Emerson had a satellite programme. So my last six months were in LA interning. I interned at this commercial production company called Caviar and I met some really incredible producers there who were producing commercials. I didn't get a job immediately. I thought that I would graduate and start freelancing immediately, but there was about a six or seven months dry spell where I took on a free internship at a film production company, that I will not name, who abused free labour and tried to make me a full-time assistant unpaid. And they were doing it under the guise of: well, we don't have money now because we're changing, and transitioning company names. I worked there for however long and didn't make a cent. So that was it.
VFD: Yeah, because no one in LA or Hollywood has money.
Zach Kornfeld: Totally. And this company was at the centre of a lawsuit about not paying interns. Like, it was famous that they had done this, and then I was like: I don't think they're going to do this anymore! But yeah, I worked as a freelance production assistant for two years. I was working mostly on commercials, I started on set, and then I worked my way into being the office PA, which gives you a little more stability instead of just filming one or two days. And my team was really good. I was the lowest on it, but they would roll over and say: hey, Zach, you free? And I'm like: yep! So I worked on Superbowl commercials. I've worked on both K-Swiss spots that Jody Hill directed with Danny McBride. It was really cool, big stuff. And it was exciting to watch directors.
I remember I went on a location scout with Rian Johnson, where it was just Rian, the producer, and me. And I’m taking pictures. And at that point, he was just the guy that directed this weird movie called “Brick” that I liked. But I was like: Oh, this is cool. And most days don't get afforded those opportunities, but I was getting this front-row seat to watch directors that I really admire. I had the best seat in the house. I was getting paid to just watch.
VFD: And you did that for two years?
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, I did that for about two years. And it was wonderful. But I wasn't making anything.
VFD: Oh, so that whole time was free? I thought you were saying you were unpaid before that.
Zach Kornfeld: No, no, I wasn’t making nothing. I was paid quite well. I mean, you don’t have benefits but I was working really regularly. So I was successful at it. But there was a sliding doors moment where I was going: You could either become a coordinator or you could throw your life away and try and be creative. So I decided to throw it away.
VFD: Well that's worked out. What was the moment that made you make that decision? That sliding doors moment?
Zach Kornfeld: Oscar Isaac.
VFD: The actor?
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah.
VFD: What did he…
Zach Kornfeld: I was alone for Christmas one year, and I was like: This is great. I'm Jewish. I don't give a fuck. But I just thought I’d go binge a bunch of movies. It was towards the end of this two year period and I was really down on myself. I thought that in all my free time that I was going to be creating and directing and using the money I was making to make more stuff. I wasn't.
I was so exhausted from PA work, and this mystery disease that was creeping up on me, that I wasn't doing it. I made one thing and I spent eight months trying to edit it to make it better, because it was shit. I just wasn't proud of it, which is common with anything you make early in your career. And so the first movie I saw on this Christmas Day was “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coen Brothers movie starring Oscar Isaac. It's a wonderful movie. It's about a super talented folk singer and the message of the movie is… what if you just don't make it? What if you’re great, but at the end, Bob Dylan comes on stage and he gets the big break and you don't. And it destroyed me. It just absolutely crushed me. I was like: Wow, I'm just fucking letting life pass me by. I’m like, 23-years-old.
VFD: So this is your second quarter-life crisis.
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, I’m due for another one. Coming up: Another “I’m gonna burn it down” phase again. Oh man, you’re right.
VFD: Sorry, I didn’t mean to… I mean… It worked out!
Zach Kornfeld: That’s the problem - it keeps working out! And one of these times it’s not going to work out. I’m going to burn it down and I’m going to realise I fucked up.
But anyway, I was like: I can't do this anymore. I have to take the swing. I'm not happy. I'm not learning. I'm stagnant. And I'm accepting life as it's coming to me instead of trying to create it. And a friend of mine, her name is Ella Mielniczenko, she was the first video intern at BuzzFeed. And we got drunk together and I said: Hey, I think I want in. Then it just happened.
VFD: Well, how did that manage to happen? So wait, what year was this? 2013?
Zach Kornfeld: Christmas of 2013, going on 2014.
VFD: OK, so BuzzFeed was well and truly beginning to hit its stride. But had they created the video empire yet?
Zach Kornfeld: No, the video empire was still nascent. Y’know, when I got there the quizzes were really taking off. I remember that. It was becoming a name, it was dominating Facebook. But video hadn’t really been figured out yet.
And I mean, it was successful. I think it still had several million subscribers, it was doing quite well. But it felt like the Wild West a bit, right? Like, I was eight months into being at BuzzFeed and Facebook launched their video product. So it felt like the early DNA of social video as we know it was just emerging. And I went from a place where I was making one project a year and agonising over it, to all of a sudden having to make 60 videos in one year. And I learned really quickly that projects aren't perfect, they're just released.
VFD: That's a very good line.
Zach Kornfeld: It’s about the at-bats, not the home runs. And just through that forced repetition I got better and better and better and better. It feels in many ways like I was paid to go to grad school.
VFD: What was the first thing you did? Did they immediately throw you in the deep end? Or were they like: You're a PA. So now you're an admin here.
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, I mean, I certainly embellished my resume and what I was qualified for. I skipped the internship programme and went straight into the fellowship where I had three months having to make six videos a month. And it was really sink or swim. It was like: Are you good enough to get this as a full time job? And luckily, I was.
VFD: When did you realise you were - or was it a surprise to you when they were like: you can have the job.
Zach Kornfeld: The whole thing was surprising. I never thought that I was going to be satisfied making short form content. I was quite pretentious at this point in my life. Really kind of looked down on it. To be honest, I didn't know what it was. And within one week of being there I was like: Whoa, this is cool. There's an energy here of people my age trying to figure this new thing out. I got hooked. And probably unhealthily, I just put in a tonne of hours. I worked my fucking ass off. I was quite confident in the skills that I had, and the ways in which I was growing and learning, to crack the quote-unquote viral code.
VFD: Oh yeah: Make it viral…
Zach Kornfeld: But there was always this insane anxiety and this pressure to do better and do better and do better. So I can’t say that I was ever comfortable.
VFD: Yeah. I’m sure it’s not uncommon for people from BuzzFeed to have that feeling.
Zach Kornfeld: Which is?
VFD: Like, it interests me because, obviously, it’s not particularly healthy. And looking back on it it’s quite crushing. But then also, it is in many ways a product of us being around those people. I’ve been asked before: Why was BuzzFeed so good? Why did it do so well? And to me, what happened was that the whole business model seemed to be: well, we’re gonna give money to teenagers and just be like ‘do whatever you want! But you have to do a lot of it!’
And then suddenly, all of us were all like: Okay, I'll do a lot of it. And then your friends are doing a lot of it too. And you're like: how do I do what they do? I need to do it as well as them.
Zach Kornfeld: It’s like the stock market in the ‘80s without the cocaine. Just videos.
VFD: Without the money, too.
Zach Kornfeld: I think that, personally, one of their biggest mistakes was letting that energy go and not thinking that they could just continue to build off of the learnings with new people, instead of what it is now.
I think they thought they could recapture that lightning in a bottle again, and again, and again, in that the systems were more important than the people. But it really was quite a special meeting of the minds at the right time in history. I don’t know that you could do it again.
VFD: It feels like, right now – and you've seen it with the launch of quite a few media companies in the late-end of last year and this year – that we're at the start of another wave in media. Clearly, we had a crash, which I was a part of. That was fun. But things worked out for us I guess.
I'm interested to see if someone tries to replicate that BuzzFeed thing again, or what they change to make it perhaps a little bit more sustainable, or less crazy. But then I also think that we've seen the rise of YouTubers and individual creators, who now do that themselves. The need to have a “BuzzFeed” as the facilitator… I don't know if that exists.
Zach Kornfeld: Well, yeah. YouTubers, creators – whatever you want to call it – they're essentially small businesses, right? So what is the value proposition that a large conglomerate can bring that a small business can't capture on their own, with the tools that something like AdSense gives to them?
I think that the ultimate dream of companies like BuzzFeed is really what they've discovered: what they've always done with user-generated content, and also with things like Tasty, which is a brand that doesn't need people. I think that's ultimately the dream of what they wanted to accomplish. And then people came in and fucked up their plans for a little bit along the way.
VFD: Right. Well, I am going to ask about The Try Guys now because we’ve gotten to that point, I feel like.
Zach Kornfeld: I did have some questions for you but I’ll hold off.
VFD: Oh yeah? What are your questions?
Zach Kornfeld: I’m just curious: do you still have that itching feeling of worth being defined by web traffic and numbers and retweets and all that? Or have you found that it’s OK to have less people who are really into what you’re doing, and not everything needs to try and go viral?
I think my brain has been so warped by the pervasive need for virality, and I’m wondering if you found a way out.
VFD: Yeah, I think I have a healthy level of it now. Not completely, though. I think the real way out is you log off. I’ve been on month-long holidays where I leave my phone at home most of the time and just be with people and my girlfriend and walk everywhere – and that was some of the most freedom I have felt. I’ll find myself thinking: Oh, I feel great! I feel amazing! I love holidays! When actually it’s just that I’m living like a normal human being and not someone who is obsessed about the reactions of other people.
But to answer your question, I had my own kind of – I wouldn’t call it a crisis – but I was writing and reporting and making content and the way I put it is I basically broke the machine in my brain. Because, especially at BuzzFeed, I realised what it took to make what BuzzFeed needed. And I could do that very well. BuzzFeed needed views or whatever, and I’d figured out the recipe. And that recipe, really, just got me to a point where doing things outside of that became worthless to me. I was like: Well, sure, I could write an essay and it could be meaningful, and I could flex my muscles and actually do what I enjoy and find creatively fulfilling… But what’s the fucking point when I can just do a list about something in popular culture that takes me 20 minutes. And then I don’t have to really work for the rest of the day. Oh, and that list gets like, 400,000 views and everyone’s like: Great work Brad!
And I didn’t realise that I had broken my brain until BuzzFeed did all the redundancies and shut down the Australian office – well, they didn’t shut it down, but they crippled it significantly. And I was part of that.
I only had a one month break, really, and then went into another gig with a company here which was a really, really good gig. And I’m actually back at that company now. But in hindsight, at that time, I was not in the right headspace.
Zach Kornfeld: Make sure they know you like them.
VFD: Hahaha. But seriously. It was a better gig than at BuzzFeed in terms of the freedom offered, and I had a bit more seniority, and a bit more real, career growth. And on paper I was like: Fuck yeah, this has all worked out for me. BuzzFeed made me redundant, I got paid off, and now I have a better job.
But I realised probably six months in that my brain was broken. They were asking me to do reporting – which I wanted to do – and longform things – which I wanted to do – but I still had this part of my brain that couldn’t differentiate the value of those things.
Zach Kornfeld: I don’t want to minimise addiction by comparing it, but it’s an addiction of sorts.
VFD: Oh, for sure. And I didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate it by any means. I was still enjoying work, but I only realised in retrospect that I was not fulfilling my potential in a way that I should have.
And then a guy named Tim randomly messaged me, very smart, and he was like: I’m putting this startup together, this tech company, and I’ve talked to some people and they said you understand the internet. I need someone to do content – could that be you?
And I was like: This is it. I need to do this. I need to just get out of the industry, change industry, refresh, realign, learn new skills. And I did that. I did that for two years. And then sure enough, my old work bought the publishing rights to VICE and I started thinking, after I had healed, I guess, Well, maybe I could do that…
And I don't know if you have that in your life, where it’s probably a factor of a whole lot of things tied to how I grew up and who I am, and where I stand culturally, but things have worked out too much for me. And I think that’s partly me not wanting to acknowledge any sort of my own work, and also the truth. Things just keep happening.
Zach Kornfeld: Yes, it’s the classic idiom that luck favours the prepared. I would probably add luck favours the prepared and it helps to be a white dude.
VFD: Yeah, exactly.
Zach Kornfeld: I think that I look back at a lot of things I've done where there were times that I probably should have worked harder and it still worked out.
VFD: Exactly.
Zach Kornfeld: There are times where you’re like: Rode my luck on that one.
VFD: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t finish college. Like, fuck.
But my favourite thing about having that whole experience is now I’m in a position where I have a team, and there are young people on that team, and I can help them avoid that. We can still have a fulfilled life and still achieve all of the goals we want to achieve as a media brand, but also not turn into slaves for any sort of algorithm. And that has been very rewarding, because I have been able to – and I think it’s still happening in America, this algorithm-chasing content – but I think in Australia it’s different.
Australia is behind in a lot of ways. By about five years – behind America. Like, we’re getting ready to have our own little alt-right resurgence and reactionary political movement, I think, in the next two years.
Zach Kornfeld: Fun!
VFD: Yes. But I think when it comes to media – because it’s such a small audience – I think people get the wrong idea that good things don’t come out of Australian media. I think they do, but really, they just don’t scale. So people have very small ideas that are fantastic – like you figure out the perfect way to tell stories on Instagram or something, or you figured out how to make a profitable media brand with two people – but because Australia is Australia, they never manage to climb out. And then America does it.
Now I feel like you’re interviewing me. And I know you told me you were going to do it, but still.
Zach Kornfeld: I just went for it.
VFD: OK. Give me Try Guys. How did this happen? What was the moment?
Zach Kornfeld: The origins…
I really think we can attribute our existence to the emergence of Facebook video. It was about eight or nine months into me being at BuzzFeed, and we made this video that was just a one-off hit. “Guys Try On Ladies Underwear”. Yes, I know.
But we had tested so much at BuzzFeed. Every video is iterative, right? If a video is a success, you dissect it and try and figure out what element did it - and the only thing that we hadn't tested was a repeat cast. Which is dumb and weird, but every video would usually just be grabbing nine people and then we’d end up with too much footage and you’re like: OK, one of these fuckers is going to give me a good soundbite.
So we were like: Hey, why don't I just pick three people who I know can do good enough. And that video was a cross-platform hit: it did well on YouTube, Facebook, and maybe Twitter as well, which was quite rare for us at that time. Either it did well on YouTube and flopped on Facebook or vice versa. And so we were like: alright, we’ve got to do more of these. We're gonna make three. I thought that was all the juice that format could possibly have. I was like: No way. There's only three ideas.
VFD: How many things can we try? Really?
Zach Kornfeld: And it was really at that point predicated on the gender reversal, which feels super antiquated with where today's Internet is. But we were just guys earnestly trying parts of the female experience that most cisgendered men were foreign to. I mean, something as simple as having a string up your butt. Like, classic masculinity - I've never done that before. So we're open minded. We were willing.
And yeah, we were wrong – It was a lot more videos. Very quickly.
VFD: When did you realise three videos was not going to be enough?
Zach Kornfeld: A couple months in.
Literally when we were going to film our third video, we were out on the beach wearing speedos in public and we got recognised by people riding a bike. And it was like: Oh, those dudes who tried the underwear! And I was just like: Holy… what the fuck? This is real, okay.
But we did a series called Motherhood, where we tried a bunch of things that would help us experience motherhood, culminating in us trying a labour pain simulator where we attached electrodes to our stomach and we “simulated” what contractions might feel like. And that video exploded. It's been so long that I don't really remember what numbers it pulled on Facebook, but I want to say over 100 million.
VFD: Jeez, that’s alright. It probably was back then, though. That kind of stuff happened.
Zach Kornfeld: Well, virality was different then because now I feel like 12 things go viral a day, and then if you’re not online that week you miss it. But yeah, we were the number one trending topic on Facebook – remember when Facebook had trending topics?
VFD: Yeah.
Zach Kornfeld: And so then it was like: holy shit. This is a thing. Well, actually, I lie. That’s not when I knew – it was earlier. I fucked up the whole story. OK.
Our third video was when Kim Kardashian released her infamous Paper Magazine photo. And we were all like: OK, we need to do this right now. We stayed late, we started filming at six, and we got drunk on champagne and we recreated the photos. We stayed up until 2AM editing it and had it online by 10AM the next day. And at this point – now, “Late Night” and internet are one and the same – but at this point no one was doing it yet. So we beat everyone. We beat all of the Late Night shows, they hadn’t commented on it. We obviously beat SNL. And we were the first of anyone to make a piece of content about this thing happening in real time. And that video exploded.
I’m very proud – I remember that our post on BuzzFeed.com, of recreating the photoshoot, had more views than the original Kardashian thing.
That was when we knew. Right before that video came out we could feel it. We're like: this is something. But we needed a name, and we decided on Try Guys because if it failed, we could switch it back to Guys Try and no one would notice.
VFD: And then how many videos are there now? Hundreds, right?
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, who fucking knows man.
VFD: You sound like a Vietnam vet.
Zach Kornfeld: I know. It’s like I’m taking a long drag of a cigarette. I don’t know how many videos we made at BuzzFeed. We were there for four years and it was great. It really became something quite big. But since leaving, we went from having seasons where we would do 60 episodes a year to making two videos a week, sometimes more. So we’ve lapped our BuzzFeed output and then some.
VFD: When did you guys leave BuzzFeed? Was it 2018?
Zach Kornfeld: Yeah, we were there for about four years and then in 2018 I had felt that I had hit the ceiling of my learning there. And also, Try Guys as a brand needed runway. It was in a box and we needed flexibility and freedom to figure out how to grow it in all sorts of different directions. Both ourselves, individually, but the brand on its own as well. So in early 2018 we launched the new channel, and I guess I’ve been doing it away from BuzzFeed for as long as I had done it there.
VFD: When I think about the Try Guys, there’s obviously the output and the virality and everything you've done. But it’s also a very TV-storyline thing that captures a very specific moment in the 2000s, I think, which is this 2010 to 2020 content creation era. Before it was a business, right, and before it was an individual business. Before we had coined “The Creator Economy” as a term. And instead you had this idea of an entire new industry.
Obviously, with that comes a very certain kind of fame and existence. And I'm wondering how you dealt with that – or deal with that? Because I don't think there's a blueprint for it, or there wasn't in the same way that there's a blueprint for being known in a mainstream fame sense of things.
Like, if you're an actor or whatever, it’s not the same as: I know that guy from the internet. At least it wasn’t. And the only small version I have of this is Nick from BuzzFeed Australia: one thing I always think about is when we were at a music festival and some drunk guy took his hat off and pointed at Nick in the crowd and he just goes: That’s the fuck from Facebook! And I was like: That's how people know you. And that is such a unique identity – at least it was back then.
Zach Kornfeld: Wow. Yeah, I will say that my experience with fame, which I say with a lowercase “f”, has been good overall. In the beginning, we were existing in people's newsfeeds along with the rest of their lives, right? So it was your mom, your college friend, the dude you grew up with, and then me. And so people, oftentimes, when they would meet us, would go: did we go to school together? Oh no, I watched you eating Indian snacks on my Facebook. It was that shit. So that was quite pleasant.
Then, over time, there was the growth of parasocial relationships, where social media quickly became about almost tricking people into thinking you had a relationship with each other, even though it was a one-sided thing. And of course, that is then done to ultimately extract money and purchases from them, which is something I've always had a torn identity with, or feelings about.
But I have always tried to be lowercase-F famous for just being myself – or it was a version of myself. But there were challenges with that. I've been rambling for a little bit, but one thing I had to do was put up barriers for myself. So I'm really fortunate and grateful that I had the foresight to keep my relationship private for about two and a half years before revealing my now-fiance to my fans. And part of that was that I was known as the single guy for years. And I didn't want to sensationalise my relationship. I knew that it feels so good to get likes. It's a rush of serotonin. And nothing gets more likes than love. It would be the easiest thing in the world to turn my relationship into likes. I knew that there was this temptation to commodify my relationship and I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be a sacred thing, where we were able to go on out on our own terms without feeling this rush of approval and then want to keep feeding that.
But I think it also stunted my growth a little bit, because I found myself playing this thing separate from my relationship. I was caught playing this same character of myself, even as I was growing older, because that’s who I “was”. But it’s in a far less revelatory way. I think about things that Hannah Gadsby said in “Nannette”, where the essential construction of a punchline keeps you from growing as a person. And she had to quit comedy to allow herself to grow.
I didn’t do anything as radical or profound, but I feel like I needed to find a way to give myself permission to stop echoing the past, even though I knew that’s what people liked.
VFD: Yeah, well it sounds like you’ve reached that point.
Zach Kornfeld: So much of the internet is rewarding repetition, right? If you look at TikTok right now, you get famous for doing one thing and it’s like: please keep doing that thing. There’s this guy, Adam Rose, he’s known as the blue cardigan guy. And when he takes the blue cardigan off his videos don’t do as well. So guess what? He wears the blue cardigan. And it’s the little things like that. So maybe you got famous for doing slime videos but you want to be a dancer. Well, sorry bro, you’ve got to keep doing that.
And that stuff really warps your brain. I think we're really lucky that from the beginning, our brand has always been doing something different. Every episode was different. And that allowed us, from the beginning, to plant our flag around a lack of repetition. But I think you're a lot more successful if we just shut up and play the hits.
VFD: Well, that's for when you're all 60-years-old. You guys can call yourselves the “Try Men” and just drain the juice of that schtick for the last couple years.
Zach Kornfeld: It will be so depressing when we’re 60-years-old and we clearly haven’t talked in a decade and two of us are really hurting for money, one of us has really hurt ourselves, and Crackle or some other production company is back on the scene. And they announce this One Last Ride. It’s inevitable, I guess. Just like death. You can’t run forever.
VFD: Well look – I look forward to talking to you then. Thank you so much for all your time – especially because you haven’t gotten much sleep.
Zach Kornfeld: I’m an internet creator – I love the sound of my own voice. Always happy to talk.
VFD: Yeah, that’s why this thing works, man. It’s great. You just plug and play and let people go for it. Thanks again.