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Tag, Ben and Adam are it: The duo behind the world’s biggest online travel show

They're an entertainment powerhouse. Behind closed doors, they're just as entrancing, and their on-camera charm remains

Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich line the walls of Adam Chase’s office. It’s a stark contrast to the work he does on the company-owned Macbook Pro in front of him: trimming and stitching together clips of himself getting “sufficiently drunk” with his husband for an episode of Jet Lag: The Game, which will be uploaded to YouTube a week after its release on Nebula, the creator-run platform that recently hit a million paying subscribers.

He’s not allowed to show me all of the footage, or perhaps he just doesn’t want to, but the audio allows me to divine some information. Ben’s a sloppy drunk in spite of his experience with alcohol-related challenges, and his foul-mouthed comments range from threats to the opposing team to declarations of war against the Deep South. Some of them won’t make it into the final cut, though Adam believes the appeal of Jet Lag is its unscripted, honest nature.

“I don’t want to offend all our subscribers in South Carolina,” he tells me. I ask him, a native of Winston-Salem, if he agrees with the deleted footage, and he smiles coyly. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

There’s no heat behind it. Despite being raised in North Carolina, Adam is a true-blue cosmopolitan who never misses a chance to call New York the greatest city in the world. “I know it’s corny,” he admits. “But I met my partner, the love of my life, here. Neither of us lived in New York at the time—we were just there because it was the place to be, in the circles we were in. I think that’s a testament to that greatness.”

Talking about Ben fills him with newfound energy, and he gets through the rest of the clips quickly. After finishing his half of the video, Adam gets ready for a Zoom conference. Wendover Productions, the company behind Jet Lag, Half as Interesting and the eponymous channel, holds weekly all-hands meetings with staff in New York and Colorado.

Ten minutes before their boss and co-host, Sam Denby, is meant to call, Ben trudges down the stairs, still in his pyjamas, and sits next to Adam. “Sorry I’m late,” he announces, though it’s hard to spot any semblance of remorse in his laidback tone. “Adam kept me up last night. Not in the way you’re thinking. He just keeps sending me videos of kids learning to do basic tasks, and I have to watch all of them before bed. I think he’s trying to give me baby fever.”

Benjamin Doyle, who asks me to “just call him Ben,” is a bona fide Gen Z kid. Now in his mid-twenties and married, he’s mellowed out a bit, but he’s still the kind of person who enjoys the abstract, quasi-absurdist humour and the easy dopamine hits popularised in the late 2010s. According to yearly fan-organised surveys, he’s the most beloved member of the core cast. He’s also nothing like his partner.

“I think he’s just, like, the kind of terminally online personality that a lot of our audience can relate to,” Adam explains. Interestingly, he doesn’t seem to mind his relative lack of support. “I think people watch for the dynamic between all of us, maybe with a little emphasis on me and Ben. If Ben was doing a show with two guys who didn’t like him, or people who didn’t play to his on-camera strengths when they designed the game, it wouldn’t be as fun.”

“I could make anything fun,” Ben says. I’m inclined to agree: he’s an absolute hoot, and it’s easy to see why the audience adores him. In Tag Eur It, the season that launched them into stardom, he blurts out hilarious one-liners just minutes into the first episode. Drunk Ben is a staple of the show, with countless fan-made montages available on YouTube, and his followers on Twitter call him “babygirl” more than his actual name.

As writers in the New York comedy scene, they couldn’t have been prepared for the massive following they have today. Stand-up comics don’t usually have devoted fans; it’s a cutthroat scene, and not everyone can be the next Carlin. Ben and Adam, however, make it work.

“It’s a different medium, for sure,” Adam says. “People can be a lot pickier when it comes to stand-up. I don’t wanna be pretentious, but it’s like an art of its own. You don’t get the luxury of editing stuff afterwards, and there’s no algorithm to game. You can get away with a lot more on YouTube and still get numbers.”

I also ask Ben about their careers in comedy. He’s more outwardly relaxed than Adam, who constantly checks their YouTube view counts and obsesses over retention rates, but he’s just as thoughtful. His eyes never stray from my face while he speaks, and he scratches his beard idly every now and then, Rodin’s Thinker style.

“I love seeing Jet Lag fans in the crowd at Caveat,” he says, referring to the basement-turned-cabaret where they regularly do stand-ups. “But we had to stop doing stuff with audience participation. It’s just unfair when there’s a public vote and everyone’s, like, cheering for me just because I’m me. I sound like an asshole, sorry. What I mean is, I want to be picked because my set’s decent. I don’t wanna put on a bad show and still get nepo babied into winning a competition because I’m funny on YouTube. That’s a different thing. We wanna keep it separate.”

Adam brings us a carefully curated cheese board just as the Zoom invitation shows up on his screen. He apologises before taking the call, and Ben takes a seat next to him. It’s hard not to notice their casual intimacy; Adam constantly reaches for Ben’s hand or caresses his back, making everyone feel like a third wheel even when they’re at work.

They have an equal amount of input in every discussion, often riffing off each other’s ideas. Watching them is entrancing in the same way as a synchronised dive or a well-played defence in ice hockey. There’s room for everyone to talk—Amy Muller, who’s helped with Jet Lag game design since earlier seasons, gives plenty of great suggestions—but Ben and Adam are showstoppers.

After the conference is over, Ben stays home to finish writing a script and Adam takes me to one of his favourite restaurants, where we split a wood-fired arugula pizza and bring up matters of the heart for the first time.

“I’m not a very sentimental person in public,” Adam confesses. “I’m, like, extremely romantic, but not in the Nicholas Sparks way. I do think the meaning of life is to build a home with someone you love, though, which is romantic in a different way.”

He stops to talk about the pizza crust. It’s one of his passions outside his sprawling career: food and everything surrounding it, from the culture to the pressure-cooker environment of a professional kitchen. Even then, the spark in his eyes is just that slightest bit brighter when we bring the conversation back to Ben.

“We kept our surnames, like, professionally, for brand recognition and all that,” Adam says. “Legally, we hyphenated. It’s a mouthful, but I love it. It’s like a story: Chase-Doyle. I was definitely the one chasing, so it makes sense like that. I had to talk him into keeping it alphabetical, but it was worth it.”

They broke the glass over a year ago in an otherwise very secular ceremony. Their rings are inconspicuous, thin gold bands engraved with a single-word question: “Collab?” It’s a cheeky reference to their first conversation, in which Adam suggested they worked together on a piece for the New Yorker. They did—multiple times—and were never successful, though one of their later submissions earned a complimentary rejection email, an honour very few non-writers understand.

Their relationship isn’t something they’ve addressed in detail before, and it’s clear Adam’s more guarded when I ask him about the decision to come out to their audience. “There’s a lot of things that go into it,” he says, meandering and slightly corporate. It’s not what I’ve come to expect from him over the past few days; I tell him as much and he laughs boisterously. “Sorry, I think Sam’s rubbing off on me! No, let me try that again. I mean, it is true, but I can be a little more specific. It wasn’t an easy choice. Personally, we wanted to be open after the marriage because it’s a big part of our life. Our fanbase is very diverse, so we weren’t too worried about that, but being a public figure… like, we’re getting on the YouTube trending page pretty much every season. It attracts all sorts of people. That was our biggest fear.”

I ask him if they’d worried about a split. Plenty of online couples have complicated breakups, and a channel isn’t an easy asset to divide after a divorce, especially with an enthusiastic audience scrutinising your every decision.

Adam laughs like I’ve asked him if pigs can fly. “Not at all,” he says. “Not even for a second.”

Jet Lag: The Game will release its fifteenth season on July 28th. You can watch it on Nebula or a week later on YouTube.