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Cartoon image of a bearded man in button down shirt with a surprised expression on his face. He is pointing over his shoulder at a colorful pie chart.

The Try Guys, a quartet of BuzzFeed personalities who film themselves undergoing often absurd and humiliating experiences on camera (skiing in Speedos, posing for beefcake photos, suffering simulated labor pains), subjected themselves last year to a different kind of bodily experimentation: genetic testing.

In the video, the guys spit into vials and ship them off to 23andMe, a DNA mapping service that extracts genealogical data from saliva. Then they invite a 23andMe representative on camera to dramatically reveal the exciting results.

But when the Try Guy Zach Kornfeld learns about his precise ethnic makeup — 99.6 percent European — he’s a little bummed. “Is it weird that I’m, like, disappointed that I don’t have more of a mix?” he asks. His colleague Eugene Lee Yang volleys the question to the 23andMe analyst: “Do you always come across white people being disappointed that they’re not mixed?” Like, “I wish I was a little more spicy, but I’m just vanilla like I thought.”

23andMe is among a crop of new services that have arrived to help...