Reply All - #77 The Grand Tapestry Of Pepe

Episode Date: September 22, 2016

Forty servers full of lost photos, a secret plan, and an unexpected rescue. Also, a Yes Yes No about a frog. Further Reading Hillary on Pepe Matt Furie (Pepe's creator) on Pepe Smugmug's statement on Picturelife Our Sponsors 99designs – Visit 99designs.com/reply to get a free $99 upgrade on your first design project. HPE - To learn more about how HPE can provide innovative and effective it solutions for your business go to HPE.com/gimlet. Wealthsimple – Investing made easy. Get your first $10,000 managed for free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is a reply-off. I'm PJ Vote. And I'm Alex Goldman. Welcome once again to yes, yes, no, the segment on the show where PJ and I explain some inscrutable internet phenomena to our boss, Alex Bloomberg. And he's remarkably patient about the whole thing. Okay. So here is one. So it's a tweet from Laura Silverman.

So the tweet simply reads, quotation mark, at deplorable patriot writes, bruh, look at this rare peep I found, especially for you. Top Keck. There's comedy embedded in everything that's happened so far. And then there's a picture of Donald Trump and Dr. Oz. Is that Dr. Oz? That is Dr. Oz. Okay. Donald Trump and Dr. Oz on the set of some TV set.

But there's nothing. a random candid shot. It's very, it's like the most random sort of candid shot you could see. It's the opposite of sort of like a, of a meme picture. It's just like a, it's like, it's utterly banal. Before we get to whether we're yeses or noes on this, I just want to make one. There was, there were pronunciation. One tiny correction. That suggests we have at least one no in this room. What did I pronounce? Wait, hold on. I just want to try to guess what I Okay. Well, it must have been peep.

Correct. Yes. Okay. Look at this rare Pepe? Yes. Yeah. Ah. I found especially for you. Okay. So the tweet is, I'll read it one more time with the proper pronunciation. Laura Silverman tweeted, quotation, at deplorable patriot writes,

bruh, look at this rare pepe. I found specially for you. Topkek. So PJ, do you understand this tweet? Mostly. Okay. Alex Goldman, do you understand this tweet? Yes. Alex Bloomberg, do you understand this tweet?

No. All right. This one, this is a mountain to climb. Let me do the top part because my understanding breaks down pretty early. Sure. So do you know that Donald Trump went on Dr. Oz's television show and had Dr. Oz explained his medical health to him that that was a thing?

I'm vaguely aware of that, yeah. It's like they've been, the candidates have been arguing about, like, their medical records, and so Donald Trump was like, I'm transparent. I will have a TV doctor read my physical

in front of a studio audience to demonstrate, like, my transparency. Man, is that guy a showman? Yes. He's very good at television. He's so good at it. And so that's just like, that is literally the context

for the photo. Correct. The other thing that happened that this is sort of like blending together is Hillary Clinton recently had that comment where she said that a lot of Trump's followers

were a basket of deplorables which is a super weird thing to say. Why do you, it's so weird, I don't understand why they say that crap. It really, it like, not only is it gonna offend a ton of people, not only is it wrong, but it's just a nerdy insult.

It rolls off the tongue so, poorly. It doesn't work on many levels. You can like feel glasses being pushed up the bridge of a nose. Um, okay, so the point being, point being what? Uh, so she made this basket of the porables comment, which is really advisable. Donald Trump Jr., one of the Trump sons tweeted out or reposted this meme that was, it was like, set up to look like an action movie photo. It was the cover, it was the movie, the expendables. And so it was like, Donald Trump looking like an act with like his head on like Sylvester Sloan's body. And like, I think, um, it was Roger Stone and Ben Carson and Chris Christie and both of the

Trump sons. But then also there was a cartoon head of a frog on one of the bodies. I can show you. And so just to the right of, uh, Donald Trump is a green-faced frog with big lips and blonde hair. Okay. that's Pepe. Okay.

I'm laughing, but I'm scared. I'm laughing out of fear. Pepe is a good example of a meme where I feel like I have been exposed to it a lot without understanding it. And Alex, I feel like you have like understood it. To the best of my ability, I've understood it. So started it as close to the beginning as you can go.

So in like 2005, there was this guy named Matt Fury. He's a comic book artist. He started posting. comics to MySpace. And these comics were called Boys Club, and it was about, like, a frog and a dog and, like, two hairy monsters that live in a house together and smoke a bunch of pot. What the frog's name is Pepe. And in one particular comic strip, Pepe goes to the bathroom and he's going to pee. You're saying it's like you're trying to use cursors in front of children or something.

It's just like, there's no way to make this up. Yeah. All right. He goes to pee But he takes his pants all the way down And the last panel is One of his roommates saying Hey Pepe, I heard you like to take your pants all the way off

When you pee And he says, feels good, man That's the entire comic All right Some people do that I'm serious There was a guy that I used to There's a guy

One of the old radio stations That I used to work at like you'd walk into the, to the bathroom in there. He'd be at the urinal, his pants all the way down. You can't do that? No. Like, his underwear was still on, but his pants were all the way down. That's even weirder.

Yeah. And was he, like, a strange person in general? Was he like an eccentric? No. No, no. He's super normal, actually. I think it just was like one of those things where, like, that's how he learned when he was a kid. And so it would just...

And then just never adjusted. It's one of those things that snuck into adulthood. He didn't realize that it was weird, I think. Anyway, so the internet took this single last panel where he's saying feels good man and cut out his head in the word bubble and sort of made it into a meme just like feels good man was like a character that you could put at the end of something like something good happens to you put this little frog that says feels good man in it And also I feel like I just want to say the frog looks gross like there's something about the way he's drawn it's really crude and it like it feels a little bit bad to look at like the way like ren and stimpy are supposed to feel a little bit bad to look at it like the way like ren and stimpy are supposed to feel a little bit bad to look at it. at. Yeah. And so as

feels good man continued to exist on the internet, it started to mutate and it ended up on this message board called Robot 9K. Okay.

What's that? It's a part of 4chan. Oh, okay. And 410 is just a message board where you can post anonymously. It's where a lot of internet memes come from

and it's kind of like a nightmare cesspool that is full of offensive stuff. It's like the hamster dam of the internet. That's a deep cut, man That's like referencing a location in the wire That will help nobody

Yes It's like the part of King's Landing Where like all the thieves and prostitutes hang out I don't even know what you're talking about Game of Thrones No, I don't watch it okay Damn Do you have you not watched anything

Except HBO dramas for the past 20 years Pretty much That's me Okay so one of the rules of Robot 9K, which is part of Fortune, is that you can never post the same text or the same image ever again. It makes it so it's impossible to do it. Okay. So that, okay, so this is a thing that I've never understood is that there was a period in time where Pepe's, people talked about the idea of rare Pepe's all the time. And so they were like, oh, I have an image of Pepe the

frog that no one else has, which is counter to the whole idea of how images online work. Like, You can't have one of anything, but people talked about them as if they were like a currency, which I never got. When was this? What year are we talking? A couple years ago. Three years ago, I think. And it all stemmed from this message board where you could never post the same thing twice. So if you wanted to post a pepe, you had to make a new one. But the new ones were like people making their own, right?

It wasn't like he was sitting in his apartment minting rare pepets. Matt Fury was not making his own. Other people were just making their own. Hold on. Let me find some rare pepés for you. It's like a pepe with a nuclear pepies. explosion going off in his eyes, a crying Pepe,

a pepe that's like a crudely drawn Sonic the hedgehog, a Pepe that is, has like an oxygen mask in his breathing in memes. So rare Pepe's became their own joke. Okay. And then Donald Trump became Republican presidential nominee. That's not what happened.

What happened was Pepe's went through the meme cycle from a thing that was really obscure to a thing that was more known by some people to a thing that like Katie Perry like tweeted a pepe out Yeah, Nikki Minaj tweeted a twerking Pepe or Instagramed a twerking Pepe

It wasn't obscure anymore And 4chan where this had originated from is a place that likes being obscure and likes being kind of vile and so people on 4chan had this thought that like the way they would stop the way they would like pull pepe back to them would be to start associating pepe with really gross stuff.

So like at first that was just like, you know, poop and pee. But then somehow that like migrated into like very racist Pepe drawings. It's like Pepe standing outside a gas chamber. Like really dark, horrible, horrible stuff. Lots of Pepe wearing Nazi uniforms or having a Hitler mustache. Got it. So basically four chanters are like prank. And they are being racist and awful, but they're doing it as a joke.

They actually call it, they have a term for it. They call it shit posting. Oh. Shit posting is like, I'm going to post something to aggravate people. Right. And the easiest way to do that is to make a beeline for racism. Right. So they just like making people angry.

Yes. So they will outrage people on the left. They'll outrage people on the right. They will outrage victims of racism. they will outrage racists equally. Yeah. I feel like I'm not down with shit posting. And it feels like that grown-up extreme beavis and butthead nihilism sort of, like, that's just sort of like, huh, that's exactly what it is.

We're just trying to, like, it doesn't matter what we say as long as, like, as long as somebody who takes himself seriously is annoyed. Right. That's exactly what we're trying to do. But then what happened was white nationalists who saw these Pepe memes they were making started sort of taking them seriously to a degree. And using Pepe not as a joke. Like if I go on Twitter right now and search for someone who is like a white nationalist. Okay. This user's got a picture of Pepe smoking a joint, holding a Kalashnikov as his Twitter avatar.

and his Twitter bio says, race realist, southern white nationalist, nativist, defender of Dixie, First Amendment and traditional values, Speaker of Truth. That's not someone shit posting.

That's a person who, like, is laying out their ideology. So white nationalists and the alt-right, which is essentially this very, very right-wing, anti-immigrant, mostly online ideology, got really excited

about Trump running for president. So then when Trump came out and has been their candidate, there's a lot of like Pepe Trump fan art. Got it. So like here are a ton of Trump Pepe's. Okay. Oh my God. So it's like a, so they all have the Trump haircut, although it's like blonde Trump haircut. And most of the Trump pepés are wearing a suit with a red tie.

And then they're just, it's just like Trump Pepe 2016. seen Trump smiling in front of a fence that says U.S. border with a man in a poncho and a sombrero on the other side. It's been this weird thing where Trump throughout the campaign will like retweet or rebroadcast fan images that get sent to him. Okay. Including stuff like this. And so he's like, he's amplifying something that some people see as racist. Some people see as ironically racist, which is pretty similar. And there's like, like with everything with Trump, like you don't actually know what.

he means. But last week, Hillary Clinton's campaign did a thing on their website, which I can only describe as the yes, yes, yes, no. That was like, yeah, it was just a legit explainer. I've got it right here. Donald Trump, Pepe the Frog, and white supremacists, an explainer. And then it's like a series of questions from an Alex Bloomberg type of voice and a person answering them. And they're making the case in this explanation that, like, Donald Trump, surfacing images of this cartoon frog is one more piece of evidence that Donald Trump is a racist and that people should vote for Hillary Clinton. Wow. Look, and it's even in this style. Yes.

This phrase, why is there a frog standing directly behind Trump? And then answer, that's Pepe. He's a symbol associated with white supremacy. Question. Wait, really? White supremacy? That's right. Question.

Please explain. It's a yes, yes, yes, no. Do you guys feel powerful? Like you are like controlling the lovers of power right now? Absolutely not. Okay. We did not invent the question and answer format in spite of what you might think. So Pepe is now a surrogate for like racism on the internet.

And the very fact that Hillary like posted this thing, which was like Pepe is this white nationalist. Like it's encouraged more people to do it. In fact, there are a bunch of people today posting Pepe with the hashtag the Keck offensive. Wow. And I think that it's like drawn the all right into like the public conversation, which is probably not where you want them. Right. Wait, so what does Keck mean? Okay.

So in Korean, there is a character that when strung together is essentially like the Korean version of LOL. It's just you use this character over and over and over again. And the pronunciation of this of this character is ke, khe, khe, khe, K. KKKKKK. And so in video games, in like video game chat, and there are a lot of Korean, like, Starcraft and World of Warcraft players, when they think something's funny,

they will do the Korean equivalent of LOL, which is KKK, KKK. And then there is a Turkish cake called Top Kek. And so when they think something's extremely funny, they write Top Kek. Got it. But it is Top Kek is LOL specifically for like the crappy fortune.

chan aggressive cranks of the internet. So that brings us back to this tweet, basically. So all of the components of the grand tapestry of Pepe that we've just told you are incorporated in this tweet. And I'm wondering if you can explain it to me. Are you just showing him the original tweets? Yes. No, I get it.

I'm going to need all my powers of summarization. The tweet one more time. Laura Silverman tweeted, quote, At deplorable patriot rights. Brough, look at this rare pepe I found, especially for you, Top Keck.

And then there's a picture of Dr. Oz sifting through papers and Donald Trump looking at him attentively on the set of a televised one-on-one. All right.

The silence is magic. I can hear the computer starting up. All right, Pepe is a picture of a frog who was invented in 2005 in a comic book. He, through a series of sort of events that I will not summarize, became an internet meme. The meme was beloved by touchy members of an internet community. And then, as so many things that are beloved and special and private, it went mainstream and started being adopted by people who had no authentic connection to it,

such as Mickey Minaj and Katie Perry. And once basically Katie Perry started tweeting out Pepe's, the cranky corner of the Internet who had adopted the Pepe as their own, went a little rogue. And they started attaching Pepe to the most vile imagery they could find, including concentration camps and Hitler paraphernalia. Then the angry, cranky corner of the Internet sort of has, like, weird connections

with the just angry, angry corner of the Internet? Yes. And it's hard to tell the difference between the ironic anger and the anger anger. Anyway, there's some subset of ironic angry that's actually just angry and racist and mad at the world. And those people took on ironic awful pepe and made him their own actual awful pepe. But in their minds, he wasn't actually awful.

He was just a crusader for what they believe to be right, which is border security. Border security and white nationalism. White nationalism. Okay. Do you want a glass of water? So those people and their Pepe were looking for a hero. And that hero came along in the form of Donald Trump. And when they found their hero in Donald Trump,

they attached their mascot, Pepe, to him. And that brings us to the tweet, which imagines that Dr. Oz is reading a letter from a fan of Donald Trump. and saying, bruh, meaning Donald Trump, look at this rare peppy I found especially for you, Topkick. I've never felt this tense during one of these. It felt like the end of like a long spelling bee tournament, and you're not sure if the star kid's going to be able to spell like inelictable or whatever.

I feel like you did it. It feels really good. So it seems like we're at yes, yes, yes. I think we're at yes, yes, yes. You know what's weird about this? It's sort of, it like, it reminds me when I was in grade school, like third grade, and everybody was intensely homophobic, people would be like, hey, if you get an earing,

like make sure you put it in that ear because that's like the straight ear. And like, when I was in grade school, all information was that like that, like it was, assume the world was full of these like hyper-specific secret codes that everybody else knew, and that would have huge consequences. And, like, the world is not like that. Like, things are subtle and complex and whatever.

But, like, stories like this about the way a lot of the internet is right now, it's, like, actually it kind of is like that. Like, actually, this frog means. racist right now. And just like, I kind of feel for Donald Trump who was probably like, oh, cool frog.

But then, like, I don't feel for him because the reason he sees the cool frog is because a lot of his supporters are racist. It's just, it's a really weird relationship with symbols. Yeah, it's best not just not to use any symbols except the alphabet. What?

Wow. After the break, we find out the fate of 220 million photographs that went missing a couple months ago. Hi, PJ. Hey, Alex. So, as you know, we have a segment on the show called Super Tech Support. You do know that that...

I do know that we have a segment on a show called Super Tech Sport where people who have technological problems come to us and we solve them. Or try. Or try. Yeah, and in Episode 71, I tried to help a woman named Rachel who was using this service called Picture Life. And she lost all her pictures. Yes.

And the company kind of disappeared. And she was especially concerned because she has a one-year-old and a three-and-a-half-year-old. And basically all the photos she's ever taken to these kids existed pretty much solely on picture life. Let's say all of your pictures are gone. What have you lost? The idea that they're gone is so horrifying. I have created this incredible record of the lives of these two little girls. to this moment. And so to lose it would just be truly heartbreaking.

So I looked into it and the company had been bought by this guy named Jonathan Benesiah. And about a year after he bought the company, it started failing. And he had to lay off all of his employees. And because he had no money, he had to downsize really, really quick. And due to a series of sort of questionable decisions and some bad luck, he screwed up the database of pictures he had, and then suddenly no one who used picture life could access any of their pictures. Right, right. And then he decided that he had a secret plan to save everybody's pictures, but that he wouldn't tell anybody that he was doing his secret plan. The secret plan didn't work. And so basically, nobody could access their pictures. But he told you that the pictures

weren't gone, and if you just gave him a little bit more time, this time, really for serious, he'd be able to, like, fix the whole situation and get people's pictures. back to them. Right, and when I talked to him back in July, he sounded pretty confident that everything was going to be fine. Consolidation is done. Now we are fixing the database. I feel good about the future of this thing, so stay tuned. Jonathan told me to check back with him in about a month, and today I have an update, which is that just under a month after the episode aired, Jonathan announced publicly that Picture Life was shutting down effective immediately. Effective immediately. It is done.

So the plan he had, which is that he and he alone was going to rescue everything, turned out to not be true? Yes. So I talked to Jonathan, and he told me what actually happened is that another photo hosting company, this company called Smug Mug, swooped in and saved all of Picture Life photos. Basically, they've made them all available on their platform. Former Picture Life users can sign up for a free Smug Mug trial, and once they sign up, they get 60 days to download their photos or become a smug mug member. Okay. So basically Smug mug is like sort of doing a good deed and sort of sees an opportunity to

like advertise their service to a bunch of people. I just wish like somebody could just like be cool and decent in a way that was not so well orchestrated to like also get them a percentage of like conversion users or whatever. Well, just hold on a second because I talk to the guys who run Smug Mug Mug. Hello? Hi, Don. This is Alex. Hey.

So could you start by just telling me your name and how you'd like to be identified? Yeah, I'm Don McCaskill, the founder, CEO, and chief geek at Smugmug. Don told me that Smug mug is a 14-year-old picture company. They're profitable. It's not like they're trying to make a name for themselves. They're not a startup. They're not like a growth company. They're owned by a family.

And Don told me that in the time that Smug Mug's been around, they've seen dozens of companies get into the photo hosting business, open a website, get a bunch of people's photos, not be successful and fail, and then maybe give people a month to get their photos back and then just shut down. Wow. And a lot of times, Smug-Mug will go to these failing companies and say, hey, can we save your user's photos? And the answer has always been no.

This is the first time, though, where we got a yes. That's crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. And the other thing that he said was, look, I think that we'll probably get a few sign-ups out of this. But every which way I spreadsheet the thing, I can't make the math make sense for us. I know it sounds kind of ridiculous in this day and age where everybody's kind of jaded about companies and their approach. But basically, Don said that Smug-Mug will probably lose money on this. Hmm. I wouldn't have thought that, like, the nicest person turns out to be a guy from a company called Smug mug.

It does sound like a name like, huh. Like, that's the sound I imagine. Like smug mug making, right? Like smirk or something. Yeah. Oh, hey. That's what a smug mug says. Yeah. But there is one catch to this whole happy story, which is that when Picture Life went down, a bunch of Picture Life. users made a Facebook group called Picture Life users so they could talk about how they can't find

their photos. Yeah. And there are a couple people in that Facebook group who are saying, like, I got my pictures back, some of them are missing. Huh. And Don told me that of the 220 million photos that they recovered from Picture Life, it's possible that they weren't able to save some. So did you check in with Rachel? Did you see if she's still missing photos? Yeah. I actually brought her into the.

the studio, and I asked her not to look at her smug-mug account until she got here so that we could see if she'd gotten all her pictures back. And before we got started, I asked her if there were any pictures that she was particularly excited to see. Yes. So the reason I initially even realized the picture life was not working was that I wanted to see, I wanted to find a photo from essentially the same month or week that my younger daughter is of my older daughter and compare. And that's when I found out was broken. So photos of my older daughter when she was 15 months old, I'm just, I have, I can't find any, like in my email or looking around. So I'm hoping if anything is there, something like that will be there. That would be like February 2014 or something.

All right, you want to do this? Are you ready? Yeah. Okay. Go ahead and log in. How are you feeling? I am so nervous. I mean, if nothing's there, I expect, Everyone to cry, just to warn you. Get ready. It says picture life memories. There we go. Can I click on it? Yeah, go for it. Wait, are these folders for every month? No, those are just individual pictures, I'm pretty sure.

Well, then that would be super sad. Oh, yeah, you're right. Oh, yeah. What are we looking at? So this is it. This is February 2014. So this is my older daughter when she was the age that my younger daughter is now. She looks so cute. Oh, I'm so glad they're back.

Just seeing, like, the clothes that she wore then, just all of it. It's so great. Oh. Look at those shoes. It's so great. Is she dancing? Is she crying? I think she's, like, crying and stomping around.

We made her wear these, like, little tiny LeBron James. sneakers. It's so great. Like, see, there's, oh my gosh, look at my mom. My mom's had ovarian cancer for five years. She, like, has gone through periods of feeling really good, and then periods of feeling really terrible. And she started wearing this long, blonde wig.

Looks so, so silly. Like, that's not a picture I knew existed. That's, like, my mom wearing, like, long, fake blonde hair. and holding, like, a brand, brand, brand new baby. Just really glad. I'm so happy. It's a miracle. This is the best interview I've ever done. I feel like I got my life back, honestly.

So what do you think you're going to do with all these photos now? Oh, that's the worst question. Oh, my gosh. She's so cute. It. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We're produced by Shruthy Pinnamineni, Fia Bennon, Chloe Prasinos, and Damiano Marquetti. Our executive producer is Tim Howard. We were edited by Peter Clowney.

Production assistance from Thane Faye. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Matt Lieber is a dingy hotel in a small town that somehow has your favorite pinball game. Our theme song is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Build Buildings. Also, shout out to Joe. George DeVizza, who emailed to say that he listened to 15 hours straight of reply all while he was on a road trip. That's got to be some kind of record. So, thanks, George.

You can listen to the show on iTunes or on any other podcast app. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.