Endless Thread - MEMES, Bonus: Zoë Didn't Start the Fire

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Most of us hate the photos our parents take of us. But what happens when one goes viral?  Zoë Roth was 4 years old when her dad took a photo of her smiling mischievously in front of a burning house. That photo would later spread like wildfire as the internet meme "Disaster Girl."  In this bonus episode of our meme series, we hear more about how the photo came to be, how it just might help Zoë pay off her student loans, and who really started that fire. 

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. You know those stories about how some enterprising young person paid off their student loans in record time?

No, no, I don't. Because in my life, it took 40 years. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, yeah. Like advice like save on rent and live with. your parents, for instance. Or, hey, cool it on the avocado toast, will ya? Skip the Starbucks, make your coffee at home.

Oh, man. Yeah, the advice is kind of ridiculous, obviously. Like, get in a freak accident and use the money from your legal settlement to pay off Freddie Mac. Or be born to very wealthy parents. That always works. Yeah, that's a good move. Well, a woman named Zoe Roth is about to pay off her student loans at the age of 21.

Yeah, I'm thinking about moving moving to Hawaii or something for like a few months. She graduated from a public in-state school, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the same town where she went to elementary and high school. She shaved off a whole year of that sweet in-state tuition by graduating in three years instead of four. And she kept a job at a restaurant. And she studied Chinese, so she has some actual marketable skills. What, I can boudo-dong-you-sue-sue-huh.

Okay. What did you say? I said I don't understand what you're saying. But this isn't a story about how to pay off your student loans through good old fashion hard work and saving and pragmatic language learning. No, the way Zoe is paying off her student loans is pretty hard to try at home. And it's thanks to a recording studio in Dubai who paid a considerable amount in cryptocurrency for an NFT of Zoe's face. And now Zoe can let loose a little. Eh, but not that loose.

She's not the type to blow the money all on bottle service in a couple of nights. Or take it all in cash and light it on fire and then smirk while it burns just because she can. I mean, she's still even careful when it comes to her coffee. My go-to order is a lavender oat milk latte until I find something better. That's what I order, but it usually ends up being like $7, so maybe I should shift away. It sounds delicious. It is delicious, but, you know, the lavender is. a dollar, the oat milk's a dollar, then you've got a tip, ends up being like eight.

That is not okay. Until those student loans came in, I say, live your life. Yeah, keep getting extra large. How many lavender oat milk lattes can you get for your NFT money? Oh my gosh, that's the real question. I'm disaster Amory. You are a disaster. Just kidding.

I'm just kidding. Some days, yes. Same, big same. I'm disaster, Ben, and you're listening. listening to a bonus episode of Endless Thread in our meme series. We're coming to you from WVR, Boston's NPR station, and today we're talking about how sometimes a meme turns into money. Which happened for Zoe recently when the NFT of her meme sold for a record-breaking amount,

although she ultimately didn't benefit quite as much from that as headlines might lead you to believe. But first... My name is Zoe Roth. I'm a recent college graduate from North Carolina. Carolina, and I'm also the disaster girl meme. What does it feel like to say that out loud? Have you owned that? I am the disaster girl. Honestly, every time I do it, even now, if I had my camera on, like, I just rolled my eyes

after I said that. Like, whenever I have to identify myself like that, like, I get it. Like, that's how the world knows me. That's how the internet knows me. But I don't, I don't, like, usually ever say that unless I'm getting interviewed or have to talk about it. Can we dig more into the eye roll? Obviously, it's super interesting.

And I like talking about it every once in a while, but I feel like the last, like, three months. It's been like Disaster Girl Overdrive. Like it's almost like taken over my life. It's been like more disaster girl than it's been Zoe, which has been, it's like Hannah Montana, kind of. Zoe was four years old when her dad, Dave Roth, took the photo that would give life to her meme alter ego. You've probably seen it. It's a picture of young Zoe, smiling coyly, mischievously, you might say, as a house blazes behind her. This house is fully engulfed in flames. and she has this look on her face that's sort of like, yes, I did this. It was a snapshot taken by her dad.

Can you tell us about the day? Sure. It was a Saturday in January of 2005, and I was home with the kids, and it was just a typical Saturday in January. The weather's not great. You can't really do much outside. And my wife was away. I don't remember, but she came home,

and she came inside and said, I can't believe you're not at that huge fire up the street. We're like, fire up the street. And then we get there and there it is. This house is very fully engulfed in flames. And there's fire trucks and people. And as we watched it, it didn't take long before we realized that they weren't working that hard to put it out.

And then we realized that, oh, maybe this was intentional. And we weren't familiar with the concept of an intentional burn of a house, especially in a residential neighborhood like ours. So that thought hadn't occurred to us until that point. So it became less of a, oh my gosh, this is an emergency or a terrible tragedy to, this is just an interesting occurrence that you don't get to see every day. Zoe doesn't remember if she understood that it was an intentional burn at the time. I just remember being at that site where across the street and I was looking inside the windows of the house that was burning and they had some stuff on the walls and it was all burning and I was like oh that sucks like I wonder if they like

you know like this painting or I remember there's a painting I was looking at and I was like I hope that they didn't like love that painting or like sucks so they couldn't like get it out because at the time we didn't know it was like a test burn and so then when I think back I'm like if it was a test burn why didn't they like get all their things out of the house but you didn't know at the time what was going on no I think my dad knew but I was also like four So even if he had explained it to me, I don't think I would have understood. Do you remember the moment of the picture being taken? Or is it just one of those things where you look back now and you go,

well, I guess a picture was taken because here's a picture. Yeah, I don't remember that moment. My dad was also like a very staunch photographer. So he was taking pictures of everything all the time. So he's probably just like, Zoe, smile. And so I did my smile and then we just moved on with the day. Dave posted the photo onto a site called Zoomer, which was kind of like Flickr or an early Instagram,

and people in his network pretty quickly started assigning Zoe a certain malevolence, or at least she was scheming. And Zumer is where that picture of Zoe, that's where I kind of found out that it was significant, because I took a lot of pictures that day, but on that one I got a lot of comments from people. And some of the people were professional photographers, and that's when I realized, oh, there's something too.

this one. Was it people making this joke, like essentially like, oh, she looked like she started the fire or was it mixed? Or what was the positive feedback you were getting on the photo? Yeah, there was there was a lot of that. Like, oh my gosh, she looks like she started that fire. And many comments about the, so he looks like she was up to something. Then I really took that to heart from that point and realized what they were talking about. Did you put a caption on the photo when you submitted it or a title or anything like that? Yeah, I think at the time I was calling the photo Firestarter because it had reminded me of the kind of the iconic image from the Drew Barrymore film. And so you later...

So you leaned into the mythology. I did, absolutely. You got to work with what you got. So I did that. And it wasn't until later, and I have no idea who came up with the term disaster girl. It wasn't us. Somebody did, and that just kind of stuck and overtook it. Zoe actually wasn't the only Roth offspring out at the fire that day.

Zoe's older brother, Tristan, was there too. Was the photo an accurate avatar for Zoe's personality at the time? No, not at all. Zoe, she was a really easy kid. Didn't give us much trouble at all. Did well in school, made friends easily, still does. That's another part that makes it fun for us to have it look like she was this, you know, this handful. Tristan, same story or a different story?

He was more of a handful. That's probably, I joke with Zoe that she basically raised herself because we were busy with him. But not that he would have started fires or anything. He wasn't a bad kid, but he definitely required. more attention. Him in a picture like that would probably, if you knew him, you might think that was more in line with his personality than hers for sure. There's also a picture of Tristan from that day.

He's six at the time and dressed like Harry Potter. I think he said, Harry Potter. Harry Potter, who maybe isn't a great, like, mohaha-ha-ha kind of avatar. True. Tristan's photo, I think he's a little out of focus in it. I think I messed up the focus on him. It's still a pretty neat photo because it's apparent that there's a, you know, a raging house fire right behind him.

But he's a little blurry. It's not framed quite as well. And he's wearing those Harry Potter glasses that I think if he was not wearing them, it maybe be better. But, and he wasn't making a face. And neither, I mean, even Zoe, who was making a face, that wasn't intentional. That was just the kids from a very young. young age got really good at kind of comfortably posing for photos. Dave submitted the photo of Zoe to JPEG magazine in 2007, which is just like...

Today I learned. Today I learned. Jaypeg magazine exists, existed? Good to know. Not only did it exist, but it had contests. And this photo won a contest. And it got posted on the website. And the Roths think this is when it began to go viral.

Zoe was about eight years old. Initially, the meme was like you would crop my face and put something awful, like a disaster behind me. Like there was like the asteroid coming to the dinosaurs. And so that was like the first wave. And I was also like eight when that was happening. So obviously like not really comprehending like why I was in front of all these like horrible things that were happening. I was like, oh, you know, that's kind of weird.

But I was also kind of like, oh, but I'm famous when I was like eight or ten. Of course, since Zoe was so young when the picture was taken, It wasn't like people were seeing her on the street and recognizing her as disaster girl. I'm glad that I have like a level of anonymity that I know some of the other memes do not have. Over time, though, it did pop up, especially as the disaster girl meme continued to have staying power, both as something getting posted online and, for instance, as a meme included in a card game called What Do You Mem? Both of the people that I've dated before, they knew about the meme before they knew me. and one of them actually had the game in his house.

Like, he's like, oh, I played that game with my family. I'm like, that is so weird. Like, I get it, like, the What Do You Mem game is very popular, but it's still, like, that's so crazy. Like, you've seen my picture probably 10 years ago, and now we're dating, but my boyfriend now actually doesn't have any social media. So he had seen it, but that's kind of nice because while this is all happening, he, you know, doesn't have any social media at all.

So it's a nice, like, opposite, like, grounding. For the most part, Zoe has not had any issues with being meme famous. And the family even made some money off of the licensing of the image for things like that card game, with some mixed success. And then along came NFTs, non-fungible tokens. The NFT trade is kind of like art collecting, except instead of a physical painting. It's something digital and its value is stored in the cryptocurrency Ethereum. How did it even come up to sell the NFT? So we hadn't, like, heard about them at all.

And then I think sometime in February or March, someone with a sketchy email emailed us and was like, I'm interested in selling your meme as a digital token for six figures. So I forward it to my dad and we're like, what is this? What's an NFT? Like I've never heard of any of this. So we're doing our research and a few people, a few other people like services. We're like, hey, we can sell your NFT for you. Like we can like, we'll do all the hard stuff. We'll get the cryptocurrency. Like we'll figure out when to mint it. But like, we can do it for you. And then eventually we were like, what if we just do it ourselves? Do you know who purchased your NFT? Yeah, it was this guy named 3F Music. He's buying all of the, like, I think he's bought pretty much all of the memes from that have sold.

And he also bought Charlie Bit Me, the video. What do you, do you know anything about this guy? I think, I know he's in the Middle East and he, like when you look on his Instagram, it's like a audio, like a sound producing studio or something. After he bought it, he like messaged me on Twitter. And it was like, thank you. And I was like, thank you. sir, actually, I think I need to thank you. And that was the only time I'd ever talk to him. But yeah, I have no idea. Everyone's like, what's he planning on doing with these?

Like, why is he like buying them all? Like, it just, you have like a plan. Like, I have no idea. A note about 3F music. They have bought several high-profile NFTs of memes. The music studio, or whoever owns it, has bought more than 100 NFTs just this year. And when they enter a bidding war for an NFT, the price goes way up. So Zoe's NFT sold for 180 Ether at the time of the sale that translated to about $500,000. Now it is up to almost $700,000 in value, which is enough to pay off that first year of college and then some. But all of that money isn't just Zoe's. She split her crypto fortune with her family, four ways.

Remember, her brother Tristan, the kid dressed like Harry Potter, Harry Potter, was there that day too. And so the Roths always wonder, could he have been disaster boy? So for as long as we've done negotiations, pre-NFT and NFT, me and my dad mostly have done like a 50-50, like for at least like smaller things. Because most of the time it's like a $500 something or their $500 interview or a $500, like I sign something or there's like a game that comes out and we split it. But the NFT where we also had to discuss this. We're like, what are we going to do? Like there's four people in our family, like my mom and my brother and my dad's like, like, well, Tristan could have been disaster boy.

Like, that wasn't his fault that he didn't get famous. And I was like, obviously, I know that. Oh, screw that, dad. Screw that. I know. But I'm also not going to, like, you know, I don't need all this crazy amount of money. Like, my brother's also in school. He also has student loans.

Like, I don't want, like, I want him to be financially stable as well. Like, so we ended up just splitting it between my family, like, evenly. That's very kind of you. Thank you. Also, technically, her dad owns the photo. I took the picture. I own the copyright. right? Like, if we had taken this photo and sold it to whatever, it would have been like a release

from me, the owner, and then a model release. And Zoe at the time was a minor, so it would have been me signing a model release for her. And this is something that they'll inherit when I die. And it'll go to both of them. You know, this could have been either of them. It doesn't make sense that I'm just so he would get it when it could have been either. And both kids are pretty cool with that. How come you didn't just say it's yours? Just give it to her? Yeah.

Well, yeah, I could have, but at what point, you know, because this isn't quite this, but like trust fund kids or celebrity kids that come into a lot of money at a young age. you know, often it's not a blessing. Awesome, and it ends really badly. So, you know, we certainly won't want to do that. We won't hurt your kids by doing something like, you know, giving them more than they can handle. We should note, and Dave knows this, that Zoe isn't the type to blow a fortune of any size on impermanent luxury.

I'm not going to just like take it all out right now and just start, like, living like a crazy person. Like, I'm obviously still going to work. It's just, it's kind of nice to, like, have to know, like, I could, like, fall back on it or if I need to, like, put, like, a down payment on a car or a house eventually. Like, that's probably what I'll use it for. Like, I'm not going to stop working, obviously. Zoe also doesn't want to spend the money before she has it. The value of Ethereum keeps changing. It's gone way up.

But it could also crash out. It's hard to say. At least after it sold, like, Ethereum almost doubled in, like, two weeks. And we're like, cheese. Like, this is so crazy. Like, obviously, it's super volatile. goes down, it's like awful. But as long as it keeps doing well, we're kind of like, eh, like, it's super tricky. We honestly, like, have no idea what to do.

Still, Zoe has plans. Not evil plans, surprisingly, paying student loans off, donating to her uncle's charity in Kenya and helping other people pay for school, too. I feel like scholarships, just like higher education in general is, like, super inaccessible. And I needed, like, help. Like, I was always on this, like, scholarship websites, trying to figure out, like, how to get a scholarship. And obviously, like, The problem is not, like, making one scholarship isn't going to solve, like, the entire problem of inaccessibility of higher education. But hopefully, like, it would do a little to help, you know. So, Amory, we really wanted to talk to Disaster Girl.

And she has an interesting story, in part because of the bullet that she's dodged in comparison to other people who have become famous on the Internet, right? where she had this picture taken of her when she was a little kid, and she's managed to, and her family has managed to make a bunch of money off of it. But she's not really, like, recognizable when she moves around in the world. And, you know, it may have been tough sometimes, but I think in a lot of ways she's in pretty good shape as meme subjects go, at least in terms of what they've faced. Oh, it's a scary one?

Yeah, it has a bad dragon and a mean dragon on it. You would not like it. It has a bad dragon and a mean dragon and I wouldn't like it. Ben's child has snuck into his home recording studio and has taken over the disaster girl taping. And I think we should just leave this in because it's like a beautiful message. of children suddenly becoming, suddenly getting the spotlight,

and they don't even know it. Someday she'll be famous for wanting to make sure that the bad dragon TV shows don't get played for her and her brother because, you know, because in our family we don't really believe in bad or good dragons. All dragons have the capacity to be bad or good. Man, preach, preach, little one. I couldn't have said it better myself. All right, hold on a second.

We could go turn the TV off. And that's a wrap. All right, well, Ben is going upstairs to turn off the TV. I'm going to jump in and say that this bonus episode of Endless Thread was produced by Grace Tatter. And we'll be back in your feed on Friday with another full episode of Endless Thread and our meme series. Bye.