Keith Habersberger and Zach Kornfeld defended their choice to remove Ned Fulmer and even predicted he would never return to the company.
The Try Guys resumed their podcast on Thursday after taking the previous week off to deal with the fallout from learning that their co-founder had cheated on his wife of ten years, Ariel Fulmer.
Nonetheless, when producer Miles Bonsignore questioned if there were any chance Ned would have returned and become a cast member if this hadn’t gone public, both Kornfeld and Habersberger flat-out denied any possibility.
We had our trust broken; this was a severe offense on the job. As Habersberger elaborated, this would send a message to everyone in the office who knew what they knew […] that we weren’t being true to who we said we were in our principles.
It would have been straightforward to get rid of him. We would not have wanted it to become a public spectacle, and we would have taken measures to prevent that from happening if we could have, but things unfolded as they did.
Kornfeld remarked that the company upholds a code of ethics that its fans admire. He went on to say that the three of them—Keith, Eugene [Lee Yang], and I—want that to come through in the company’s core values through their leadership.
Both Habersberger and Kornfeld dove into the range of feelings they experienced upon discovery, from bewilderment and rage to sadness and dissatisfaction. The former went on to say that it was like going through a divorce when Ned was put on review and fired.
The Try Guys first began working together in 2014 and have since been featured in numerous videos on Buzzfeed. Ned, Lee Yang, Habersberger, and Kornfeld started their own production firm in 2002 after working together for four years.