I have to be honest with you. When I saw the
stack of research you prepared for today, I checked
the calendar. I thought, is this a joke? Yeah,
I figured you might. Because we're usually talking
about, you know, geopolitical shifts or the future
of artificial intelligence or macroeconomics.
And today, you want to talk about pictures of
cats. It's not just pictures of cats. But I get
the hesitation. It feels trivial, right? You're
sitting there, maybe... On the bus or on your
couch, you're just scrolling through your feed.
You stop your thumb on an image. It is a completely
distorted, low -resolution picture of a cartoon
character. Maybe it's Lord Farquaad from Shrek.
Maybe it's SpongeBob. And the caption is just...
A single letter. Right. Or a sentence that makes
no grammatical sense whatsoever. A nonsensical
phrase that barely holds together. And yet I
laugh. That's the worst part. I look at it and
I laugh. You laugh. And not just a polite chuckle,
but a genuine confused laugh. And then you share
it. And 10 minutes later, your friend shares
it back. But here is the question that keeps
me up at night. And the reason we are doing this
today. Why is that funny? And more importantly,
how on earth? Did we get from a simple joke to
a force that literally moves stock markets and
influences presidential elections? See, that's
the part I struggle with. Brain rot. That's the
term my nephew uses, digital junk food. It feels
so ephemeral. It feels that way. But if you look
at the research, what we're actually dealing
with is a highly sophisticated evolutionary unit
of culture. Our mission today is to stop looking
at memes as funny pictures and start looking
at them the way a biologist looks at a virus.
A virus. Or the way a linguist looks at a new
dialect. Because whether you realize it or not,
memes have become a complex language, a massive
marketing tool, a political... And yes, a subject
of very serious academic study. So we're treating
this with the same seriousness we'd treat a deep
dive on nuclear energy. We have to. We have a
massive stack of sources here. We're looking
at everything from evolutionary biology, actual
biology to sociology, economics and the history
of the Internet itself. We're going to trace
the line from Richard Dawkins in the 1970s all
the way to the Skibidi toilet phenomenon and
the great meme reset of 2026. All right. I'm
skeptical, but I'm listening. If we're going
to treat this academically, we probably shouldn't
start with SpongeBob. Where does the actual science
begin? If we want to understand the DNA of a
meme, we have to go back way before the World
Wide Web. We need to go to 1976. Richard Dawkins
published a book called The Selfish Gene. Okay,
classic evolutionary biology. I've read it. survival
of the fittest. But Dawkins deals with actual
genes, DNA, proteins, physical traits. What does
he have to do with Internet culture? Well, Dawkins
was trying to solve a problem. He knew how biological
traits spread, you know, blue eyes, tallness
through genes. But he needed a word, a concept,
to explain how cultural information spreads.
Cultural information, like stories or songs.
Exactly. How does a melody move from one person
to another? How does the skill of building an
arch survive for centuries? How do catchphrases
travel across the playground? He needed a unit
of cultural transmission. So he was looking for
the cultural equivalent of a gene. Precisely.
And he came up with the term meme. He shortened
the Greek word mumim, which means that which
is imitated. And it rhymes with gene. That's
clever. It is. And in his original theory, a
meme behaves exactly like a gene. It wants to
replicate. If a song is catchy, it survives in
your brain. You hum it, someone else hears it,
it infects them. And if it's a terrible song...
If a song is boring or an idea is too complex
to remember, it dies out. It is pure, natural
selection for ideas. But here's where I get stuck.
In nature, evolution is random, right? A giraffe
doesn't decide to have a longer neck. It just
happens over millions of years of random mutation.
There's no intent. That is the crucial point.
You've hit the nail on the head. In biology,
mutation is blind. But, and this is a massive
distinction for our deep dive, Dawkins eventually
had to address the internet version of his creation.
What did he think of it? He pointed out that
the internet meme breaks his model. He actually
calls it a hijacking of the original idea. A
hijacking? That sounds aggressive. It fits, though.
Because with internet memes, the mutation isn't
random. It involves deliberate human creativity.
When you see a meme and you decide to change
the caption or Photoshop a hat onto the cat,
you are intelligently designing that mutation.
You are the selector. I see. So the difference
is intent. A gene changes by accident. A meme
changes because I think it would be funnier if
the cat was wearing sunglasses. Exactly. And
that shift from random selection to intentional
selection is what makes internet memes spread
so terrifyingly fast. Lamore Schiffman, who is
a key researcher in this field, argues that internet
memes are unique because they leave a traceable
digital footprint. What do you mean by that?
You can actually see the mutation happening in
real time on a message board or a social feed.
You can watch the evolution from one version
to the next, hour by hour. With a traditional
meme, like a folktale, that process takes generations
and is impossible to track. So if we're going
to be formal about it, how do we actually define
an internet meme? Because funny picture feels
way too broad. Yeah, that's not going to cut
it. The working definition we find in the literature
is a cultural item, so an idea, a behavior, or
a style that spreads via the internet, primarily
through social media. Okay. But there are key
differences from traditional memes. Internet
memes are often less abstract. They are visual,
specific, and crucially, they can be much more
fleeting. A traditional meme might be shaking
hands to say hello, which lasts centuries. An
internet meme might be a specific dance on TikTok
that lasts three weeks. Or three days, if we're
being honest. Or three hours. But for a meme
to succeed, even for three hours, it needs what
researchers Nobel and Lancashire call the secret
sauce. They analyzed successful memes and found
three ingredients that map back to Dawkins, but
with a digital twist. Okay, let's unpack the
secret sauce. What is ingredient number one?
Number one is fidelity, or replicability. Now,
in the old days, fidelity meant copying something
perfectly. Like, if you tell a joke, you want
to tell it exactly how you heard it. Right. High
fidelity means accuracy, no changes. But on the
internet, fidelity means something else. It means
remixability. Wait, isn't that the opposite?
If I remix it, I'm changing it. I'm lowering
the fidelity. You're changing the context, but
you're maintaining the core message or structure.
This is the hardest part to get your head around,
but it's the most important. Think of the distracted
boyfriend meme. You know the one? Oh, of course.
The stock photo. Guy walking with his girlfriend,
looks back at another woman. His girlfriend looks
disgusted. It's everywhere. Right. Now, in that
meme. The fidelity isn't the specific people
in the photo. The fidelity is the structure of
the relationships. The structure is me. the thing
I should be doing, and the attractive distraction.
As long as you keep that emotional triangle intact,
you can swap the characters for anything. You
can make the boyfriend the Roman Empire, the
girlfriend building a stable society, and the
other woman lead pipes. I get it. So the meme
is the container. It's like a cookie cutter.
The dough changes, the topic changes, but the
shape remains the same. The template is the high
fidelity part. That is the perfect analogy. If
the cookie cutter is strong and easy to use,
the meme has high fidelity. If the structure
is too confusing, nobody can remix it and it
dies. Okay, that makes sense. What's ingredient
number two? Fecundity, which is just a fancy
academic word for spread or fertility. How fast
can it move? This is driven by humor, of course.
Think of a really old classic one like... All
your base belong to us. Oh, wow. That's a throwback
from the video game Zero Wing. Right. The bad
translation. Exactly. It's funny because of the
broken English, the sheer weirdness of the phrase
made people want to share it. But spread is also
driven by what they call juxtaposition. There
was a famous early meme called Bert is Evil.
I remember that. It was Bert from Sesame Street,
the innocent puppet, photoshopped into historical
tragedies, like at the JFK assassination. Exactly.
Placing an innocent character next to, say, a
dictator or a disaster creates a jarring juxtaposition
that makes people want to share it. It triggers
that, I can't believe I'm seeing this reaction.
It's the shock value. It's pure shock value.
And the third ingredient is longevity. Longevity
seems like the hardest one to achieve these days.
Things burn out so fast. It is. We're going to
talk a lot more about longevity later because
the lifespan of memes is compressing dramatically.
But before we get there, I want to touch on two
terms I saw in the research that define how we
make these things. Mimicry and remix. Are those
not the same thing? They sound very similar.
Not quite. They're related but distinct. Mimicry
is recreating a setting physically in the real
world. Do you remember? Charlie bit my finger?
Oh, absolutely. The British baby biting his brother's
finger. Ouch, Charlie. Ouch. That really hurt.
It was one of the first truly huge YouTube videos.
Right. Mimicry is when you film yourself and
your friend acting that out. You aren't changing
the original media. You are reenacting the event
in the real world. The Harlem Shake was all mimicry.
Everyone did their own version of the dance in
their own office or dorm room. Okay. So mimicry
is performance -based. And remix? Remix involves
technological manipulation. This is where Photoshop
and video editing software come in. You take
the original image, the original artifact, and
physically alter the pixels to add a hat or change
the background or add text. You are modifying
the source material itself. And that leads to
this concept of intertextuality, which sounds
incredibly academic for something so silly. It
does, doesn't it? But intertextuality is just
the blending of different contexts to create
new meaning. It's when a meme references another
meme or a movie or a political event. The research
highlights a perfect example from 2012. Remember
Mitt Romney's binders full of women comment?
Vaguely, yes. It was from the presidential debates.
It was a weird phrase that stuck out. A very
weird phrase. And do you remember Gangnam Style
by Psy? Unfortunately, yes. I can still do the
dance. I think we all can. Well, the internet
combined them. Someone created an image of Mitt
Romney doing the Gangnam Style horse dance with
the caption, My binders full of women exploded.
That is pure intertextuality. Right. Because
you cannot understand the joke unless you know
both the U .S. political landscape of 2012 and
the K -pop charts of 2012. You have to have both
pieces of information. Exactly. It's like a Venn
diagram. If you aren't in the overlapping section,
it just looks like nonsense. This is how memes
build community. They're in jokes. If you get
it, you belong to the tribe. You feel smart.
But if you don't get it, it's just noise. Which
is a perfect transition to the history of this
stuff. Because if you weren't there for the paleo
meme era, you might not realize how different
the vibe was. We're talking pre -2005. The internet
was a smaller, weirder, and much, much slower
place. We call this the pre -academic phase because
nobody was studying it yet. It was still seen
as a niche hobby. This was the mid to late 90s.
The distribution wasn't Facebook or Twitter or
TikTok. It was message boards, Usenet groups.
and email chains. Forwarding emails. FWD, FWD,
FWD. Check this out. You'd get it from your aunt
three weeks after it started. Exactly. And because
the transmission was slower, email to email,
person to person, these early meetings lasted
a long, long time. The dancing baby is the classic
example. Oh, the creepy 3D baby. It was just
a 3D render of a baby cha -cha dancing. It's
one of the first things to go truly viral online.
It even appeared on the TV show Ally McBeal.
It was everywhere for years. I think my dad had
that as a screensaver. It was hypnotic. And we
can't forget the hamster dance. Rows and rows
of animated GIFs of hamsters dancing to a sped
up Roger Miller song. That song is stuck in my
head right now, just from you saying that. Sorry
about that. The research mentioned something
even earlier, the grandfather of all visual Internet
language, the emoticon. The smiley face, the
simple colon dash parenthesis. We have to give
credit to Scott Fallman. In 1982, I mean, think
about that, 1982, he was on a university message
board at Carnegie Mellon, and people were arguing
because they couldn't tell when someone was joking
in text. There was no tone. A problem we still
have today. A huge problem. He suggested using
a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis to mark a
joke. That sequence of characters changed how
we interpret text tone forever. It was the first
digital representation of emotion. So that's
the paleo era. Slow, long -lasting, spread by
email. Then we hit the mid -2000s and things
start to accelerate. The image macro, boom. This
is what most people think of when they hear the
word meme. Visually, it's very specific. The
impact font. Big, bold, white text with a black
outline. Top text setup. Bottom text punchline.
The classic format. This era was defined by the
rise of 4chan. This is where we got lolcats.
I can has cheeseburger. Precisely. That was the
phrase that launched a thousand ships. Lolcats
were the prototype. You take a picture of a cat.
You add broken lolspeak. deliberately bad grammar
and you have a format that is infinitely replicable.
And from there we got things like the demotivators.
Yes. Those black bordered parodies of motivational
posters. You'd have a beautiful picture of a
mountain with a caption like mediocrity. It takes
a lot less effort. And rage comics which were
those crudely drawn stick figures faces like
troll face or forever alone. Those were everywhere.
They were ugly though. They're so ugly. Just
black and white made in MS paint. They were.
But the ugliness was part of the charm. It was
democratic. It meant anyone could make one. You
didn't need Photoshop skills. It lowered the
barrier to entry for creation. And at the same
time, YouTube was starting to blow up too, right?
That started in 2005. So video becomes a huge
part of the equation. You get Rickrolling, which
is a classic bait -and -switch. You click a link
expecting a movie trailer, and you get Rick Astley's
Never Gonna Give You Up. Still happens today.
A timeless classic. And you get the Harlem Shake.
which was a massive participatory trend. But
then, something shifted. Around 2014, things
got weird. We entered what the sources call the
modern era, and we have to talk about dank memes.
Dank! I remember when that word just meant a
wet basement. Or, you know, high -quality marijuana.
Yeah. But in meme culture, it evolved to mean
zany. odd, or oversaturated. It refers to memes
that are so overused, so cliche, that they become
funny again through layers of irony. It's that
paradox of being so stale it's fresh. Exactly.
A meme becomes dank when it's self -aware of
its own memetic status. And this era birthed
the meme economy. There's a subreddit, rMemeEconomy,
where people literally treat memes like stocks.
I've seen that. It's bizarre. Satire, but it's
brilliant satire. Yeah. People post a new meme
format and say, invest, buy now before it goes
mainstream, or sell. This meme has been spotted
on Facebook. The value is about to crash. It
mimics real market speculation perfectly. And
visually, things got messy. We saw the rise of
deep fried memes. Right. This is an aesthetic
choice. It's where you take an image and you
deliberately ruin it. You run it through so many
filters and compression layers that it looks
pixelated, yellow, washed out and distorted.
It's visual noise. It looks like a corrupted
JPEG file from 1998. The example in the notes
is the E meme. And I have to try to explain this
to visualize it for the listener because it's
pure chaos. It's the YouTuber Markiplier's face
photoshopped onto the head of Lord Farquaad from
the movie Shrek, who is then photoshopped into
Mark Zuckerberg's congressional hearing suit.
And the caption, the entire punchline is just
the letter E. It is absolute absurdity. It makes
no sense. There is no logic to decode. Why? Why
was that funny? What is the joke? Because it
rejects meaning. It's a digital update to surrealism.
It's daddyism for the 21st century. The world
felt chaotic and nonsensical, so the humor became
chaotic and nonsensical. They did surgery on
a grape is another one. I remember that one.
Just a statement. But that nonsense provides
a weird kind of escapism. It's a vacation from
logic. And then came the short form video revolution.
Vine gave us so many classics. What's 9 plus
10? 21. You know it. And when Vine died, TikTok
took the throne. Which brings us to the brain
rot phenomenon. The outline mentions this covering
2022 to 2026. This is Gen Alpha slang. This is
where the generational divide really opens up
into a chasm. We're seeing terms like skibidi,
riz, got. Sigma Phantom Tax. Okay, I'm going
to need you to translate those. For the record,
for those of us who are not 14, just laughs.
All right. Riz is short for charisma. Your ability
to attract a romantic partner. Guyette is an
exclamation, usually referring to someone's physical
attractiveness, specifically. Well, their posterior
curves. Okay, got it. Phantom Tax refers to playfully
stealing a bit of your friend's food, and it's
named after a streamer named Phantom who would
do that to his friends. And Skibidi. Well, that
comes from the Skibidi toilet series on YouTube.
Don't tell me. It's a surreal animation series
about singing heads that pop out of toilets and
fight against people with cameras and speakers
for heads. To an outsider, this looks like a
complete breakdown of language. That's why it's
called brain rot, I assume. The term reflects
a fear of low -quality overstimulating content.
It's usually attached to those TikTok videos
with split screens. You've got Subway Surfers
gameplay on the bottom, a Family Guy clip on
top, flashing subtitles, and an AI voice reading
a Reddit post. It is maximum stimulation designed
to hold your attention for 15 seconds. But is
it actually rotting brains? Or is it just what
old people have always said about new things?
The research suggests it might be shortening
attention spans. But sociologically, it's just
the next evolution of in -group slang. Every
generation has its nonsense words that confuse
their parents. However, as of early 2026, we
are seeing a backlash. The sources mentioned
a meme drought in 2025. A drought, like we ran
out. A feeling of creative stagnation. A reaction
against Slime Talk, those weird non -interactive
live streams. And a general distrust of AI -generated
content. People felt like the internet was getting
too weird and too corporate. And that led to
the great meme reset. Yes. a grassroots movement.
The call was to return to the classics. Starting
January 1st, 2026, there was a huge movement
to bring back the 2010s memes, 9cat, Big Chungus,
Trollface, the original image macros. People
are nostalgic for... Six years ago. It's the
digital nostalgia cycle, and it's happening faster
than ever before. We used to get nostalgic for
things from 20 years ago. Now we're nostalgic
for things from the pre -COVID era. The speed
of culture is accelerating so much that history
is last week. It's moving so fast, and that speed
isn't random. You're saying there is math behind
this. Let's talk about the viral math. How do
these things actually spread? Yeah, this is fascinating.
Epidemiologists, the people who study the spread
of diseases, have actually applied their models
to memes. They use what's called the SR model,
S -I -R. Susceptible, infectious, recovered.
I remember this from health class. Right, so
imagine a meme is the flu. Susceptible. You haven't
seen the meme yet. You are a blank slate. You
are vulnerable to infection. Okay. Infectious.
You see it, you laugh, and you hit share or retweet.
You are now actively spreading the virus to your
followers. And pretty. Recovered. We've seen
it 10 times, 20 times. It's annoying now. You
stop sharing. You might even block it. You are
immune. And once everyone in the population is
recovered. The meme dies. The data shows a very
specific pattern that looks exactly like a disease
outbreak. A massive sharp spike in popularity,
followed by an equally sharp taper down to obscurity.
It acts exactly like a new strain of the flu
sweeping through a community. But there's competition,
right? My feed is only so long. I can't be infected
by everything. There are hundreds of new memes
every day. That's the attention economy. Research
by a scientist named Koshia at MIT showed that
memes compete for survival in a limited ecosystem,
your attention span. And here's the counterintuitive
finding. Survival of the fittest doesn't always
mean the biggest, most explosive spike. Really?
I would assume the biggest viral hit is the winner,
the one that breaks the internet. Not necessarily
for longevity. A meme with a massive vertical
spike, something everyone is talking about on
Monday, usually dies young. It burns through
the susceptible population too fast. Everyone
gets sick of it at the same time. Exactly. It's
a flash in the pan. Everyone sees it. Everyone
shares it. And then by Tuesday, everyone is recovered
and immune. The memes that live the longest,
the ones that stick around for months or even
years as usable formats, are the ones that coexist
with others without dominating the conversation
completely. They're the slow burns. They mutate
just enough to stay relevant without overwhelming
you. That makes sense. The brightest flame burns
half as long. And we also have to talk about
how communities affect this lifespan. There's
a fantastic study by Kate Miltner on the lolcats
we mentioned earlier. It started as a 4chan in
-joke. It was edgy. It was weird. It was there.
Subculture. Then it blew up. It became mainstream
emotional support humor. Your grandma was sharing
locats on Facebook. It was on coffee mugs and
calendars. And as soon as grandma shares it,
it's over for the cool kids. It's not cool anymore.
Exactly. The original creators, the 4chan community,
abandoned it. They actively started to mock it
because it became too mainstream. It lost its
subcultural value. This is the life cycle. Creation
in the underground, explosion into the mainstream,
abandonment by the creators, and eventually...
Death, or as you said. Zombie life on Facebook.
Zombie life on Facebook. That is a terrifyingly
accurate description. So we've covered the history
and the math, but memes aren't just staying on
the internet. They are leaking into the real
world in a big way. Let's look at memes in the
wild. This is where it gets really serious. Let's
start with marketing. Brands are absolutely desperate
to be part of the conversation. They call it
memetic marketing. It's the how do you do fellow
kids meme. Come to life, usually. Often, yes.
The cringe factor can be very high. It feels
forced. But when it works, it works beautifully.
Look at the movie Snakes on a Plane. A Samuel
L. Jackson. An absolute classic of the genre.
That film became a cult classic before it was
even released, purely because the internet decided
the title was hilarious. The studio didn't start
that. The fans did. The fans made posters, songs,
trailers. They were creating the hype themselves.
The studio just had to sit back and ride the
wave. So the best marketing is when you don't
even have to do it yourself. It's the holy grail.
And then you have high fashion brands like Gucci.
That seemed like an odd fit. You'd think so.
But they actually commissioned artists to reimagine
famous memes for their watch advertisements.
They leaned into the aesthetic. It was polished.
It was high art. But it understood the language.
It didn't feel like they were trying to trick
you. It felt like they were in on the joke. But
there's a massive risk, right? The Wendy's story
comes to mind immediately. Wendy's is the ultimate
cautionary tale. They built this brand persona
on Twitter of being sassy, roasting people, roasting
their competitors. And it worked initially. Their
profits went up 50 % that year. They were the
cool brand online. I remember that. Their Twitter
account was genuinely funny. It was. But then,
in a reply to someone, they tweeted a meme of
Pepe the Frog, styled to look like their mascot,
Wendy. Oof. Yeah, we need to talk about Pepe.
That's a complicated one. At that specific moment
in time, in the U .S., Pepe had been heavily
co -opted by white nationalists and alt -right
groups. Wendy's social media manager might have
just seen a funny frog meme, but the context
had shifted dramatically. The backlash was immediate
and fierce. They deleted it pretty fast, as I
recall. Within minutes, the damage was done.
It shows that memes are volatile. Their meaning
can change overnight. If a brand doesn't do its
homework on the current meaning of a meme, it
can blow up in their face spectacularly. Speaking
of blowing up, let's talk about money. Real money.
Meme stocks. This is a phenomenon that really
took off in the early 2020s, especially during
the pandemic lockdowns. A meme stock is when
a company's stock value is driven almost entirely
by online hype and social media attention, not
by its business fundamentals. GameStop is the
patient zero here. Power to the players. I remember
this vividly. It was absolute chaos on Wall Street.
It was driven by the subreddit, our Wall Street
bets, and commission -free trading platforms
like Robinhood. You had a new class of retail
investors. They call themselves YOLO investors.
You only live once. Right. They weren't looking
at price -to -earnings ratios. They were looking
at vibes. And they were looking at sticking it
to the hedge funds. That was the core of it,
wasn't it? It was a populist movement. Exactly.
The hedge funds had bet that GameStop, a brick
-and -mortar video game store, would fail. They
shorted the stock. The internet realized that
if they all banded together and bought the stock,
the price would go up, and the hedge funds would
be forced to buy it back at a higher price, losing
billions of dollars. It was financial warfare
disguised as a joke. And it worked. I mean, for
a time, the stock price went to the moon. It
was completely disconnected from the company's
actual value, but it didn't matter. It blurred
the line between a meme and a financial instrument.
And nowhere is that blurrier than in crypto.
Dogecoin? The Shiba Inu dog. Wow. Such currency.
It started as a literal joke. It was created
to mock cryptocurrency. The creator said, this
is silly. We made this in a few hours. And yet
at its peak. Fueled by tweets from figures like
Elon Musk, it had a market capitalization in
the tens of billions of dollars. People became
millionaires off a meme coin. What does that
say about our concept of value? It challenges
our fundamental understanding of economics. It
suggests that if enough people believe a joke
is worth money, then it is. Value is just a shared
belief system. Memes coordinate that belief faster
and more powerfully than anything else in history.
That is mind -bending. But if memes can move
money... They can definitely move votes. Let's
talk politics. Memes are the modern political
cartoon. They have democratized propaganda. In
the past, you needed a printing press or a TV
advertising slot to smear your opponent. Now
you just need a laptop and a dark sense of humor.
I remember the Dean scream. Howard Dean back
in 2004. That was an early example. An awkward,
enthusiastic moment caught on... Mike Yeehaw
that got remixed and replayed until it completely
destroyed his image of presidential composure.
It killed his momentum. But by 2016, it was fully
weaponized. The Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer
meme. It sounds ridiculous to say it out loud.
It does. It's objectively false. But. That meme
persisted for months. It didn't matter that it
was factually impossible. Cruz was a child when
the Zodiac killings happened. The facts were
irrelevant. The meme painted him as creepy, secretive
and untrustworthy. It damaged his campaign because
it's stuck in people's minds. You can't fact
check a vibe. You can't debunk a joke. And then
you have politicians trying to get in on it,
like Michael Bloomberg trying to buy memes. Yeah,
that was a fascinating and largely failed experiment.
In 2020, the Bloomberg campaign sponsored huge
Instagram accounts. with 60 million collective
followers to post memes about him. How did that
go over? It felt transactional. It felt like
big money trying to buy cool. And the internet
generally rejects that. You can't buy authenticity.
You can't buy dankness. It has to emerge organically.
Now, we touched on Pepe the Frog earlier with
the Wendy's incident, but... The Pepe story is
actually much more fascinating because of how
split it is globally. It is the perfect example
of the dual nature of symbols. We have to be
neutral here and just report on how it was used.
In the U .S., during the 2016 election cycle,
Pepe became a symbol heavily associated with
the alt -right. The Anti -Defamation League even
listed him as a hate symbol in that context.
Right. It became very toxic in the U .S. But
simultaneously, he was being used on the other
side of the world for a completely different
purpose. This part of the research blew my mind.
In 2019 and 2020, Pepe was used as a pro -democracy
symbol by protesters in Hong Kong. Wait, really?
The same frog? The very same frog. In Hong Kong,
he was seen as representing the everyman, the
sad, downtrodden youth fighting against an authoritarian
system. Protesters held signs of Pepe crying.
They drew him wearing a yellow construction helmet.
the uniform of the protests. It proves that a
meme has no inherent fixed meaning, is an empty
vessel that different communities fill with their
own intent. That is a powerful idea. It's not
just jokes and politics, though. The research
points out that memes have actually done some
real good for the world, right? Absolutely. Think
of the ice bucket challenge. Oh, yeah. I did
that. I got a bucket of ice water dumped on my
head. And you probably donated, or at least you
learned about ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. That
was a meme. It was a viral challenge that raised
over $100 million for medical research. It had
a tangible, positive impact. And the It Gets
Better project. A hugely important movement for
LGBTQ plus empowerment, using video testimonials
to spread a message of hope. And the notes also
mentioned COVID -19 awareness in Nigeria. How
did they use memes for that? While parts of the
West were sometimes struggling with complex scientific
messaging and misinformation, public health care
professionals in Nigeria used popular local meme
formats to explain infection prevention, handwashing,
and vaccine information. They used the language
people were already speaking on their phones
to save lives. It shows that this virus of the
mind can actually carry a cure. So we've established
that memes are powerful, profitable, and pervasive.
But who owns them? If I make a meme and it goes
viral and ends up on a t -shirt, do I get paid?
Ah, the copyright dilemma. This is the wild west
of legal theory. It's a huge mess. Because memes
rely on stealing, right? I take a screenshot
of a movie, I add text, I don't own the rights
to that movie. The legal term is appropriation,
and the primary defense, in the U .S. at least,
is fair use. Which is a very fuzzy concept. Very
fuzzy. Fair use depends on four factors. First,
the purpose. Is it transformative? Memes usually
are you're creating a new meaning, a common area
of parody. Second, the nature of the original
work. Third, the amount you used. Memes usually
use just a single frame or a short clip. And
fourth, the effect on the market for the original.
Meaning, does my meme of a scene from The Avengers
stop people from buying tickets to see the movie?
Exactly. And usually the answer is no. In fact,
it might be the opposite. It's free advertising.
So generally, non -commercial memes are protected.
But not always. There was a case where Getty
Images, the stock photo company, demanded payment
from a blog for using this socially awkward penguin
meme. Because the original penguin photo belonged
to a National Geographic photographer and Getty
managed the rights? Correct. The photographer
didn't care that it was a meme. They saw a copyright
violation. But more recently, we've seen a fascinating
shift where the subjects of memes are reclaiming
ownership through NFTs. Non -fungible tokens.
The disaster girl story is just wild. It's incredible.
Zoe Roth. She was a little girl with a devilish
smile standing in front of a real house fire
back in 2005. Her dad took the photo. And it
became the face of... Of enjoying chaos. Exactly.
The face of schadenfreude. That photo was used
millions of times globally. She never saw a dime.
She was just this face that everyone knew. Until
the NFT. Right. In 2021, she and her father sold
the original digital file as an NFT for nearly
$540 ,000 to a collector. It was a way to finally
take control of the narrative and monetize her
own viral fame. It sets a precedent that maybe,
just maybe, you can own a moment in Internet
culture. Okay, let's try to unpack this whole
journey. We started with a distorted cartoon,
and we ended up with half -million -dollar tokens
and Nigerian public health campaigns. It is a
lot to take in. Yeah. But if I had to synthesize
it all, I'd say this. Memes are the vernacular
of the digital age. They are how we process reality
now. When something terrible happens in the world,
the first thing we do is make memes to cope.
When something great happens, we make memes to
celebrate. They're our collective emotional response
system. They are the artifacts of our collective
consciousness, recorded in real time. They are
more than just digital junk. They are a financial
instrument, a political tool, and a complex form
of communication. Exactly. And they are evolving
faster than we can study them. The moment an
academic paper on a meme is published, it's already
ancient history. So here's the question for you,
the listener. The next time you are scrolling
and you see that distorted image and you laugh
and you hit share, ask yourself, are you just
sharing a joke? Or are you participating in a
global experiment in cultural evolution? You
are a carrier. You are part of the transmission
chain, whether you like it or not. And I want
to leave you with one final, slightly provocative
thought. based on what we've discussed we mentioned
the meme drought and the great reset of 2026
this idea that we are just recycling 2010's memes
because modern culture is brain rot it raises
a pretty profound question have we reached peak
meme exactly are we running out of new cultural
genes and if we are just remixing the remixes
of the remixes what does that say about our creativity
as a species? Are we innovating or are we just
stuck in a cultural loop feeding on our own past?
That is a thought worth chewing on. On that note,
thanks for diving deep with us. We'll catch you
in the next feed. Keep scrolling.