- The waves were much higher and far more frightening
than they were supposed to be.
A storm-- (equipment clunking)
Oh my God!
- Oh my God. - Oh my God.
- Sorry!
One second, sorry.
- We are recording an audiobook
for our brand new book, the Hidden Power of Fucking Up.
- That's right.
If you hate reading, this video is for you.
- Chapter one.
(laughing)
This is gonna be such a long day
with all of us in here together.
- I've kind of always dreamed of being a voice actor.
Tumbling from failure to failure,
with no loss of enthusiasm.
Just a super fun job.
- [All] That's when we saw the.
(laughing)
- Audiobooks are very different from what
we normally do here in video.
- Oh, my face!
(upbeat music)
- You know, on YouTube you're big,
and you're loud, and you're trying to speak fast.
An audiobook is supposed to be more intimate.
- Dey Street books and Harper Audio present--
- The Hidden Power of Fucking Up.
- That was great.
(upbeat music)
(gasping) (bright music)
- Skyrim, they did Skyrim here!
Close your eyes and open up your ears,
because today the Try Guys are talking at ya.
- I was, for lack of a better word, a drag zombie.
- Now Zach is reading, blah blah blah, I'm Zach, la la la.
- Each of us are doing a solo day,
and then on Friday we're all coming in together,
that way we can bounce off each other.
- Ned and Eugene lifted Zach from the icy water.
- I, ugh!
- Don't laugh.
- That was the sound of me being pulled up.
- Okay, okay. - Ugh!
So we have a week to record
200 and something pages of book.
(classical music)
- Right now the opening is read as
Keith all the way through.
- The Try Guys are not all great at speaking all the time.
- We did that, yeah!
- So we're bringing in a vocal coach.
- [All] Hee.
- Beautiful.
- Hi guys.
- Hi. - Hi.
(laughing)
- I'm Faith Rumer and I'm a voice coach,
and also an acting coach and a dialect coach.
- Do you have any secret clients?
- Well I worked with an Academy Award winning actress.
- Wow, was it Jennifer Lawrence?
- I was also thinking Jennifer Lawrence.
- Is it Jennifer Lawrence?
- No.
- Natalie Portman? - No.
- That'd be too exciting. - Charlize Theron?
- The first thing is you wanna stretch.
When your body's all tight up here,
we can't speak very well.
- This feels amazing. - It feels great, doesn't it?
- What do you do, and how do you help people talk better?
- [All] Ah!
- Well it depends what's going on with them,
some people need more voice work,
and some people need more speech work.
Good, and then just let yourself
roll up one vertebrae at a time.
So voice work is about the sound of your voice,
whether it's breathy, if it's loud enough.
- Is anyone else out of breath from just that?
- I'm sweating a lot.
- Yeah 'cause that was a lot for me.
- And then speech is all of the articulation
and how we speak,
and some of you have more from one side than the other.
- [All] Ah.
- Today is sound recording day.
This is the booth, this is where the magic happens.
(humming)
- Yeah, yeah.
- Whoa wait a minute, this is--
- [Ned] Frontwards kick.
- We're gonna mic you close, and it's gonna be
within six inches, about that far from your mouth.
- Okay.
- And when that happens, everything in your mouth
we're gonna hear, it's an audio closeup.
This is the most intimate form of communication possible,
you'll be inside someone's head.
That got me three Grammy's.
- Only three? - Just three.
(laughing)
- All I've heard is that you fist pump in the back.
- You're in there alone and--
- [Ned] You need some feedback.
- Yeah, so that's what I do, I can do this too.
- I would just prefer a couple of fist pumps today.
(laughing)
- This is gonna be most of our first time going into
an audio booth, so what is that experience like?
Like, what are mistakes people make,
what should we look out for?
- Let yourself make mistakes, just like when you
do your videos, it's okay to make a mistake.
- Just go for it, all right.
- [John] Just enjoy yourself.
- But the main thing that you want to do when you record
your audio book is you still want to sound like you.
- I'm Keith, I'm Ned, I'm Zach, and I'm Eugene the best one.
(laughing)
- What do you think about our voices?
- So I was watching your videos, and--
- We're sorry. - I have some thoughts.
(laughing)
- Everybody has a little different thing about what's
going on but you can all benefit from everything
that I'm gonna say at the same time.
- I'd back it off just a little tiny bit,
'cause he has high energy.
- Super cool.
- So Ned? - Yes.
- What do you think's going on with your voice?
- I don't know.
(laughing)
- It has a little bit of nasality to it.
- Well something's doing this (laughing).
- In the back of your throat is your soft palette,
and if those muscles are weak, the soft palette is low
and then all the sound goes into your nose.
- Really?
So I gotta work out my soft palette?
- [Faith] Yeah.
- And for all this glamor, and success and laughs, dammit,
I have gotten paid a grand total of
$12.70 cents!
- [John] Watch the speed and take your time,
see it as you go through it.
- There's a really kind of strange exercise
for your soft pallet, you wanna try it?
- Yeah. - Okay.
- Ka, ka, ka. - Ka, ka, ka.
- Now we're gonna suck that sound in,
so we're gonna go like this, ka!
- Ka, ka, ka. - Ka, ka, ka.
- You see while I was doing science stuff by day,
by night I was fulfilling my passion of performing comedy.
I'd even audition for Saturday Night Live
and done solo character acts.
Aw got the fist pump, nice.
(laughing)
- The dance steps are a little questionable.
- You can hear the dancing through my voice.
- So Keith you have a trained voice,
you trained in theater, right?
- I did.
- In audiobooks that might be a little bit overwhelming.
- Whoa, I'm Marilyn Monroeing!
- It's overwhelming in real life.
- Hey shut up Ned!
(laughing)
In early 2014 the four of us joined Buzz,
it's tough to try to think through all
these things but also not over think.
- [John] Just watch the speed a little bit,
'cause you can rocket through.
- Yeah, for sure.
- My voice is made here,
I'm trying to make sure its coming out
but I'm making sure its coming up,
but I'm also trying to make sure
its not going through my nose.
Somehow in four years I went from
performing in front of college students
on a stage, to performing in front of mostly
college students on videos on their phones.
Now I couldn't have planned out
that journey in my five year plan,
do colleges still make you do that?
I don't know.
My point is that none of us set out to become The Try Guys.
- Eugene has a really nice tone to his voice,
and he's got this really rich beautiful sound to it.
- Wow, I've never been told that.
- But at the end of his sentences sometimes he gets soft
and I can't hear those last couple of words
or that last word.
- Yeah (mumbling).
(laughing)
- I chose to label as defiantly unlabiable,
I just said labiable.
- [John] I know I heard that too.
- That is a part of a women, I'ma go back.
I choose to label myself as defiantly
unlable, unlabiable, (laughing) labelable, got it.
- Sounds like Keith's the Ying to my Yang.
- Sort of, yeah I think--
- [Eugene] You're in my throat, I'm in your throat.
- Open your mouth wide and
lets see if there's a little Eugene in there.
(angelic humming)
- [Zach] There he is I see him!
- [Ned] I can see him!
Wow.
- Eugene you were in there all along.
- My work with The Try Guys,
the unlikeliest of best friends,
has consequently made me into a happier person.
- [John] Nice tone, perfect.
- Did you save me for last 'cause
we've got very little to work on?
- For you I think the thing you want
to work on the most is articulation.
- Zach Kornfeld, you know
I always struggled saying my name more than anything,
because of the k, k, consonant.
Anyway.
- So there's some exercises you could do to help you that.
- [All] Pah, pah, pah, pah, pah.
- So that's your lips and now
with the tip of the tongue we're gonna say ta, ta, ta.
- [All] Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta.
- Kah, kah, kah, kah, kah.
- [All] Kah, kah, kah, kah, kah.
- Now after you put it together it becomes,
patika, patika, patika.
- [All] Patika, patika, patika, patika, patika, patika.
- The idea was to create stop motion movies using your LEGOs
but after a few videos I realized I could broaden it
to the rest of my bedroom where, inevitably,
I cast my stuffed animals in an,
this is where my speech gets too wordy.
- Yeah and also slow down a little bit.
A trick here is to see the room as you read through it,
see what the words show.
You are the camera, so that's kind of the direction.
- Okay I love that.
The idea was to create stop motion movies using your LEGOs,
but after a few videos I realized I could broaden it
to the rest of my bedroom where, inevitably,
I cast my stuffed animals in instant classics such as,
The Bear Witch Project and Raiders of the Lost Bark.
- Nicely done.
- With, the appeal of an audio book is it,
because they're getting the words no matter what,
but what's that added layer?
- The smiles, the life, the vitality.
Charles Dickens made all his money in this country
by reading his books aloud.
- Really?
- So did Twain.
Reading is nice when you're in a room by yourself
and you can get lost in something
like you're reading (mumbles),
but really its the performance of it.
- The waves were much higher and far more frightening
then they were supposed to be.
A storm was brewing
and angry clouds gathered on the horizon,
inching closer as the turbulent waves
thrashed our dingy life raft like a rag doll.
- And then Keith started vomiting.
- With each wave, Keith fell deeper and deeper
into an abyss of nausea.
- Now I am a survival show aficionado,
so I was supposed to save the day,
uniting our fractured family and swooping in
during the video's climax to lead our rescue.
- [All] Yay!
- But that was then, this is now, and Keith was lost to us.
- [All] Boo!
- As the remaining three of us devised a new plan,
Keith continued to heave into the water.
We needed to get this video done
and get our asses back to shore.
- [All] That's when we saw the shark.
- Two of them actually,
both circling curiously beneath us,
occasionally piercing the water's surface
to see what all the commotion was about.
- Hey what's all the commotion about?
(all laughing)
- [Keith] That's what they said, yeah.
- With dorsal fins closing in on our boat,
suddenly our death and dismemberment insurance paperwork
felt very relevant.
- But we were still there
and our video wasn't about to shoot itself.
- Mm mm.
- [All] No, no, no, no, no.
- We rushed to complete filming
before Keith ran out of bodily fluids
and the sharks decided to fill the voids
in their own empty stomachs.
(humming)
- [Man] Wow that was great guys,
The Try Guys, you guys are great at this audiobook thing.
- Writing the book was therapeutic,
but reading the book out loud
for the audiobook was catharsis.
My ancestors survived Japanese occupation and a civil war,
to relocate to, of all places,
the conservative American south.
- Sometimes when you write stuff down
and then you read it back,
and your like ah it doesn't read exactly
how well I think it sounds in my mind.
But I got to make it sound like how it sounds in my mind.
All these years of coming in third, and fourth, and Zach.
It finally paid off and I,
the chef of the group, would prevail.
- I'd say listen to the audiobook if only to see how much of
our random nonsense bullshit they actually edited in.
- That was lovely Eugene.
- Thank you Mary.
- It was just so much fun to be in the audio booth
with the other guys.
- [All] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- What surprised me is how much talking
takes it out of you after a three hour session
of reading and emoting and speaking.
I was just so drained.
- [All] What we learned!
- In the audio that follows we're gonna share a
collection of philosophies,
that have guided us through making videos
and somewhere along the way,
transformed us into better people.
- This is a book about embracing failure
and riding it on a bumpy, but ultimately upward trajectory.
- So as you listen to this book,
we want you to think about some of the habits
you've picked up and how they made you
less vulnerable to new experiences.
- Its all about how you get back
in your heels and try again.
- Together, we'll all become the best versions of ourselves.
- [John] Wow you knocked it out of the park.
- Sick.
(upbeat music)
- Five A.M., wake up and meditate.
- Buy The Try Guys audiobook
and you too can get Ned doing a Mary Poppins impression.
- Just a spoonful of sugar at tryguys.com/book