Endless Thread - MEMES, Bonus: The yearbook photo

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

For being the internet's poster boy for bad luck, Kyle Craven thinks he sure got lucky. In this bonus episode of our meme series, Ben and Amory chat with Craven, better known as the face of the Bad Luck Brian meme that has circulated the web since 2012. Now a 31-year-old husband and father of two, Craven is frozen in time online as a pimply, brace-faced teenager. Despite the unflattering photo, he says meme stardom has brought nothing but good luck.

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Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. This week on Thanksgiving, we're taking a bye from our usual episodes in giving you a meme series bonus. But it is a family-oriented bonus. My name's Kyle Craven. I am 31 years old. I am a internet meme. And I live in Akron, Ohio, and I have a family, two kids, and that's pretty much it.

Kyle's got a family now at the age of 31, but this story starts with him and some of his buddies in high school. They were pranksters. You know, we'd go to the classics where, you know, in a busy hallway, you would, you know, put down a banana pill at the right point, and, you know, people would actually slip on banana pills, which is you never realize it, but that's a real thing. And it would be so funny watching people just bust down and fall on the ground. Or, you know, you'd take somebody's locker and you'd stack all the books on that top shelf just right. So when they open it, they fall all over the floor. Or another thing we used to do was throw butter packets up on the cafeteria ceiling. And the thing with butter packets, as they start to warm up over time, they fall back onto people.

So you would always get people getting hit. hit in the head with butter packets and looking around like, who just threw a butter packet at me? Well, it's on the ceiling. They didn't realize it. That's innovation. Yes. Yeah. So we, yeah. Depending upon who you were in high school,

Kyle and his buddies either sound like your kind of people or maybe the worst. My kind of people for sure. Obviously. But I feel like you liked some of Kyle's vibe too, Amory, right? And not just because you both wore braces. Oh, yeah. I got some prankster in me. My braces at the time were bright pink.

I was going to ask about the braces, because the braces obviously are a key element. And, you know, that was one of the things, you know, as soon as I got my braces on, you know, I had to be sophomore or maybe a freshman in high school at the time. And, you know, they ask you, what color do you want? You know, most people do clear. And I go, give me the rainbow, you know.

I'll take every color, you know. And they're like, that's, you know, we only do that to little girls. but okay, you know, that works. So it was just one of the few outlets I was allowed at a Catholic high school to show off or do it, you know, anything for a joke. It was pretty much what it was. When did you start kind of sabotaging your school pictures? Oh, it started probably freshman year. You know, coming from, I came from a smaller private grade school into a little.

larger Catholic high school, still private as well, but, you know, I didn't, I went from a class of 50 to a class of 350 kind of deal. So it was a culture shock, you know, as far as that goes. So my freshman year is still, you know, feeling the water and trying to get a good feel of what, you know, high school is like. So, you know, my freshman year yearbook photo was semi-normal. You know, I just kind of did a smile and that was it. Now, my sophomore year, I got a little more clever, I'd say. And there are actually two yearbook photos of me, two separate. It's not like there's the same picture. It's two different yearbook photos of Kyle Craven slash Kyle Craven. So it looks like I have a twin that's named Kyle Craven. So that one was actually a little

more difficult to pull off. I had to do a little bit of bribing of some people on the yearbook committee. Junior year, though, Kyle got the photo that would eventually go down in history. The yearbook photo day came around, and so I go down to the local thrift store. I buy that sweater vest you see in the photo. And it was one of these things where I'm getting ready. I'm up next. You know, I'm rubbing my eyes, trying to make them as puffy as possible. You know, they ask you, what background do you want?

And, you know, your options, everybody usually does a blue or a gray. And I go, oh, no, purple. That looks great, you know. And so they put the purple up. And, you know, I give a grin as I'm laughing. And, you know, the lady takes it and goes, okay, that's that's that. That was not that, though. So my principal pulls me out of school class after I get my photo and says,

she's absolutely not putting that picture in her yearbook. And that retakes her tomorrow. And she expected me to be there. So I had to go to retakes. I scanned the, yeah, no, it was not getting. How did she find out so fast? So after the prior year where I had two Kyle Cravens in the yearbook, I think they were more on the lookout. Oh, you were on a list.

Oh, 100%. What was the principal's name? Dr. Biting. Dr. Biting? Yes. Wow. Like B-I-T-I-N-G? I could not tell you how to spell that, to be honest.

But you can imagine that that name. name was viciously trolled by some of the people who went to school under that person. So, yeah, you know, growing up, my father used to get calls from my school a lot. And it always went the same way was, you know, my dad would get a call. I'd come home later and go, you know, so-and-so called and, you know, you're screwing off in school again. And I'm like, oh, no, just, you know, blah, blah. a book, pulled a joke, or I did this, or, you know, it won't happen again. And, you know, a month later, maybe he'll get another call.

And finally, he'd end up telling the school, like, stop wasting my time. You know, he's wasting your time, don't waste my time. Just handle it. That's why I pay you guys money for my kid to go to school there. And so he used to get fed up with it a lot. And so, like, with your book photos, I never even brought him home or showed anybody at my home kind of deal. It just made things smoother, you know. Kyle did his retakes and didn't think much about his prank,

though he did manage to get and keep the first version of the photo, which several years later he would use as his Facebook profile photo. 2012 was my last year of college, and my friend at the time lived out in Los Angeles. I was back in Ohio, and he would always call me, you know, at 3 o'clock in the morning because of the time change and, you know, think I was going to pick up the phone. but he would always leave voicemails.

And so I would always get these stupid voicemails in the morning. Well, one morning I wake up and it goes, hey, it's me. I made you internet famous, not a big deal, but we'll talk later. You know, I get on at the time Reddit, and I look at advice animals, which was like the, it still is, like the go-to meme page on Reddit, and there's my picture.

Was there an original caption that went to it? Like he just, he said, this is Bad Luck Brian? Or what was the original presentation? So I don't know. I think the first meme he posted with the picture was takes driving test its first DUI. And I think soon after that he came up with the name Bad Luck Brian. Oh, yes. The meme representing all pathetic Internet misfortune, Bad Luck Brian.

More on how that worked out for the face. of that meme, Kyle Craven, in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully, make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. So after Kyle's friend yanked his jockey yearbook photo off his Facebook page and memeified it as bad luck Brian, it went gangbusters on the internet, which Kyle's high school and college sweetheart, who is now his wife, was not thrilled about. You know, she's big into, well, we're going to show our kids someday, which turns out we did. So she was not happy about that. But luckily for her, my principal caught wind of it, and I took retakes anyway. But one would guess that the actual Bad Luck Brian photo has far surpassed.

Any attention paid to the actual yearbook photo, right? Like it's been long ago eclipsed. Yes, 100%. How does she feel about that? Um, she, so my wife thinks I have a big head as it is already and I think a lot of myself. So anytime, um, I do any, like a licensing deal, let's say, or anything like that, or even this interview, let's say. She just, she doesn't play too much into it, you know? And so, um, if you would go to like her work and talk to any of her friends at work, they probably have no idea. she would never ever tell anybody other than friends that already know so it's not something she

would brag about or even pay attention to you know I think the last interview I did maybe was for BuzzFeed or you know something like that where it got you know a couple million views and she had some people at work going oh my God Nicole I never realized your husband was famous this is amazing or like Nicole this looks just like your husband

you know and she's like oh that's because it is my husband and you know so um yeah she's not one that's big into it that's for sure hmm well did it get famous at the time or infamous in the school was it like contraband uh no nope okay no i don't think at the time it got famous and you know it was how did you get a copy of it did they just sort of provide it because they give everybody copies of the photos that they take even the ones that they retake yes correct yep Okay. So fast forward back to 2012. You see, you get this voicemail from your friend saying that he's made you Internet famous.

You hop on Reddit. You see the picture there. When did you start to realize that this was not going to just fizzle out quickly? It had to be a few months after that. So, you know, I think this was right at the like last semester of college where it first came about. And so because I remember like the first major deal I got, I was actually at my work at the time. So I was definitely out of college. So it kind of faded down and picked back up.

And kind of the first thing that happened that really made me think, well, this is a big deal is that I got a call from a licensing company that was putting my T-shirt or my face on T-shirts and selling them to Hot Topic. and they're like, well, would you be interested in that? And I go, well, yeah, who wouldn't be interested in that, you know? And so that was really cool because you could literally go down the street to the mall and walk in the store and right up there on the wall was my face on a t-shirt. And so- You didn't have even a second of hesitation about your face being worn by a bunch of strangers all over the world? Well, no, because this is what's, like, great about my meme compared to everybody else's meme is that, I don't look too much like that photo.

So it's not like I go out in public and people are like, you look just like that bad look, Brian guy. It's more people who have seen an update or a video online of me now that know that I'm internet famous. So it's not like I can't have a normal life and go out in public. I never get recognized. I get recognized in a Chipotle maybe once every couple weeks. But it's always for somebody who's seen an update of me.

So it's like the perfect kind of famous where I'm not recognized ever. So yeah, when they said, do you want to put this on a t-shirt? I'm like, yeah, please. Yes, absolutely. And you didn't look like the bad look, Brian image, even just the five or six years after the photo was taken? No, no. I would say when I got to college, I kind of, I started working out.

you know, I was definitely, I grew probably three, four inches, you know. It was like I hit puberty after I went to college. So, no, I didn't look like the photo at all. Hmm. And what were some of the, as you saw the image getting more memeified, where people would start to put their own captions on it and that sort of thing. Do you remember having any favorites or any more? ones that were not your favorite?

Well, I would, you know, I would say people on the internet will put disgusting things on everything. So anything to do with Nazis, you know, you get a lot of that kind of stuff with the Holocaust and, you know, I just think that's a bad taste and those are low-hanging fruit that people make jokes about. There are a lot of good bad luck Brian memes, though, still. Even if they can be a little bit edgy, like the one with the caption, finds water in the desert, drowns.

I liked the, um, it was something like got a pet rock and it ran away. Yeah, stuff like that where it's like super clever, simple, you know, and I think that's why it's turned out to be such a famous meme is because, well, memes in general, people's attention span are like, you know, three seconds. Mine is, I know that for a fact. And so that's why I think the success of all these memes are is that. that they're easy, they're fast, they're clever, super easy to share, post, you know, and I think that's why they've lasted as long as they have.

Bad Look Brian, the image itself is funny. But what I like about some of the memes that I've seen around Bad Luck Brian in particular is that it really demands a certain level of creativity and cleverness from the meamer, you know? Like you can't, it would be lazy to just... The template is strong. Yeah, it would be lazy to just... post the photo, but if you come up with something like, had a pet rock, got a pet rock, and it ran away, you know, like you, the bar is a little higher for, for that meme.

And I think that's why mine was so successful. I don't think it's so much the picture as much as the, it took a void of, everybody has bad luck, and this is a character that you could write your own text and share your experiences with other people. Everyone has this photo, you know, like I, at least I do, I. I have like many, several years of yearbook photos that are on par. I have some bowl cut photos that are real, real rough. Yeah. Yeah.

And so it's kind of like your bad photo got to be the stand in for all of our bad photos. In a way. Yeah, definitely, it's definitely relatable. There's no doubt about that. Did you have a moment where you recognized that it was, you know, it was, you know, It was beyond anything that you would imagine. So I have had many opportunities. Licensing has kind of been like the biggest way I have kind of profited off of this.

But the big, like the thing that kind of like really stood out to me as like this is insane was that I got, I got reached out by a guy in Switzerland, Bern Switzerland, who said he's a curator for a museum, a communications museum. and they would like to license the photo for a new exhibit they had about pop culture. And would I be willing to let them use the photo in the museum? And I thought it was a joke. I'm like, there's no way. There's absolutely no way. That's insane, you know? A museum?

How many people could say they're in a museum, you know? Other things that have happened, you know, I did a McDonald's commercial. What was the commercial? So they had me, they had a guy who got bit by like a shark and some other guys that had some bad luck. And they flew me out to L.A. And at the time, I didn't have very much information about what's going on. Pick me up and they bring me down. They're like, okay, you got to go to wardrobe.

And I'm like, okay, and go to a wardrobe. And guess what? I'm wearing the bad luck Brian get up, so that's good. And then they go to makeup and never done that before, you know, and it's just some guy just putting makeup on you and, you know, trying to cover up, you know, some pimples or whatever on my face. and then they shove you into a room and they're like, okay, here are your lines. And I'm like, what?

You know, no one told me I had lines. And so I'm trying to look at these lines going, I'm trying to memorize these. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm never going to get this, you know. And then they go, okay, you're up. So, you know, they bring you into a room. There's 50 people in this room. They're all staring at you. You sit in front of a camera and they go, okay, we're going to just go through this.

Act like no one's here. And it's like, that's easy to say. There's 50 people in this room, you know? And so finally got through my lines. and I'm thinking, okay, well, this was fun, but let's never do this again kind of deal. And they go, okay, well, now we want you to eat, and they give you like some chicken McNuggets cold. And they go, okay, so don't say anything, eat it and smile and look at the camera.

And I'm telling you what, the most awkward thing you'll ever do is eat a cold chicken McNugget in front of 30 people and try to put a smile on at the same time. And you had to do it 50 times, you know, it's just like, you know, okay, let's do it again. time look one inch higher than you were looking earlier. And it's like, oh my God, kill me now. You know, so it was a great experience and extremely awesome. Sounds like it was not a great experience. Well, it was. It was. You just went from Kill Me Now to it was a great experience. He's contractually obligated to say it was a great experience.

Well, it's one of those things where it's a great story. I'll never be able to say, well, maybe, you never know. but it's just one of those things you'll never be able to do again and you know 99.9% of people will never be able to do that but it was very cool seeing that side of acting. Did you feel like a celebrity at the time? No, never. The thing with all of this like meme celebrity stuff is that it's fun to do on the weekends and it's cool to go out to L.A. or fly over, you know, across the world. to do an appearance, but it's kind of just a weekend project, I like to say.

You know, it's fun to do on the weekends, but it's back to reality on Monday. So, you know, it's never something that would ever make me enough money to sustain my lifestyle. Tell us more about the NFT deal. Like, who put it up for sale? How did that work? So we've been following kind of this NFT craze for a few months now. And not so much to be like, we should profit off of this. It's just very interesting, I think.

Just this whole culture of giving back the power to the creator as far as these artists and being able to sell their digital artwork directly to people. So, you know, we saw N-Cat when he got his sale, I don't know, that was a month ago, maybe two, month and a half ago. and, you know, you got somewhere around $600,000. And it's like, that's insane. That's an insane amount of money. Who, you know, what is this?

You know, we reached out to them and super nice, kind of walked us through the process. And, you know, so we kind of just, we kind of did a little research and decided what platform we wanted to go with of our sale. And we did it. And so we queued it up correctly with a few other memes at the time, Scumbag Skeve, keyboard cats. grumpy cat, let's say. And there was like a whole week of it. And so we think it was very successful. Were you happy with what you got for bad luck, Brian,

given how much some of these other memes have sold for? Yeah, no. Did you feel competitive about it? Yeah. Like you made, how much did you make about $50,000, $44,000? Yeah, it was around there. So, you know, it's all sold in, you know, bit, not Bitcoin, I'm sorry, cryptocurrency.

Like Ethereum. Ethereum, yeah. So we were, yeah, we were happy to get what we got. I feel like the teachers of the world might be frustrated with a story like yours in the sense that they might like to think that the class clown gets their just desserts in the end, you know? Or like, this is what happens if you goof off. You don't have a job and you don't, you throw your life down the toilet, you know. and I just wonder if you feel like you've been exceptionally lucky or if you just like navigated this the right way or if you have a particular outlook on life that has gotten you through. I mean, for some people, this could have been a life, career, relationship, ruining experience.

And somehow you seem to have like spun it. to gold. No, and I think it has to do some with luck, definitely. And I absolutely think you're correct where I'm sure I have had teachers in the past that have thought, oh, you know, you're going to goof off. You know, you're not going to get far in life, you know. And, you know, even, funny thing is, is that I would say we've had some famous people come and go through our high school as far as alumni. But I'm really waiting for the day that my

high school calls me back to really acknowledge that, you know, that I went there and that I'm one of their kind of famous alumni. You know, they really haven't put me in that category yet, you know. We've had like an Olympic gold winner or something like that, you know, but I really, I'm really don't think they're going to call me back for anything, which is kind of disappointing because I would have to say my yearbook photo is the most famous yearbook photo out there, and they just won't acknowledge it. How many kids? Two of them.

I got a daughter and a son. How old your daughter? She'll be four here in a couple weeks. If one or both of your kids comes home with a bad luck Brian-esque class picture, will you be proud or mildly annoyed? Oh, proud for sure. 100%. I will encourage it.

Well, Kyle, it's been really interesting to talk to you and hear about your life and your experience becoming a meme. No, I appreciate you guys having me on. It was a great talk. Okay, that's it for today. We'll be back next week with the penultimate episodes of our meme series. And in the meantime, have a safe and wonderful holiday. We are thankful for you for listening. Yeah, send me a picture of your leftover sandwich because that's what I'm all about. I'm all about that. Just send me pictures of your desserts.

I'll take the dessert picks. Just desserts. Amory would like just desserts. It's not wrong. All right. We'll talk soon. Bye. Bye.