The Rich Roll Podcast - Feels Good Man! Arthur Jones & Giorgio Angelini On The Controversial Meme That Changed The World

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

In a spark of creativity, cartoonist Matt Furie created an innocent, loving frog he named Pepe. What came next is so insane, it literally bent reality. Filmmakers Arthur Jones & Giorgio Angelini wanted to understand how this sweet and relatively obscure indie comic book character morphed into an infamous symbol of hate—and a meme that changed the world. The result is Feels Good Man—a filmmaking triumph and one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in years. Premiering at last year’s Sundance, where it picked up the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker, it’s the surreal story of Pepe The Frog. How it migrated across the internet, evolving into an unwitting avatar of chaos and a lever for radicalization. It’s about its creator Matt Furie’s efforts to reclaim his creation. And Pepe’s slow transmogrification back into a hieroglyph of positivity. But beneath the surface, Feels Good Man is about artistic agency. It’s about the journey from passivity to participation. A sociological excavation of how culture spreads from mind to mind, it’s also an archeological dig into the indelible power of an idea. How a meme adopted by a regressive internet subculture spilled into the real world, shifted the political landscape, and ultimately tipped a presidential election. The film is an absolute must-see. I wanted to know more. So today Arthur and Giorgio take us behind the looking glass on Pepe’s Frankenstein-meets-Alice-In-Wonderland journey. This is a conversation about the complicated relationship between internet culture and the real world. It’s about the strange relationship between comic book artists, arch druids, data scientists, intellectual property lawyers, and alt-right mouthpieces. It’s about memetics—how memes drive cultural evolution in parallel with how genes influence human evolution. And, in this case, how one meme was perniciously coopted to democratize electoral engagement, enervating passive supporters into active participants. But more than anything, this is about the war between cynicism and hope. And why, to coin Matt Furie, you gotta go hardcore happy. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll576 YouTube: bit.ly/feelsgoodman576 I don’t understand why everyone isn’t talking about this movie and the ideas it presents. This conversation is my attempt to change that. Peace + Plants, Rich

Our story tells the very strange and unlikely journey of this comic book character becoming an internet meme that was wildly popular, and then ultimately becoming sort of a propaganda sort of tool for the alt-right, and officially designated a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in late 2016. And the story is kind of twofold. It's the story of Matt Fury, who created this with no ill intent. Obviously, it becoming a meme and then a hate symbol had nothing to do with him. And then the other part of the story

is about how trolling moved off of message boards and into mainstream politics because Pepe was really used as basically a tool for trolls. And really, there's this watershed moment that happens in 2015 where there's, in the span of two weeks, you have a mass shooting at the Umpqua Community College in 2015, where there's, in the span of two weeks, you have a mass shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon, which still today is the deadliest mass shooting in Oregon history.

And on 4chan, someone posted the day before the shooting, a kind of warning, don't come to the school, my 4chan friends, whatever. And then it had at the bottom, it was an image of Pepe holding a handgun. And then the next day the shooting happened. And then that was sort of the first time that Pepe really made it into mainstream news. Yeah, and then two weeks later, we had this moment where Donald Trump retweeted an image of himself drawn as Smug Pepe.

So it was Pepe with like the yellow hair standing behind the sort of podium as if he was at a press conference in the Oval Office or in the White House. It was a wink. It was sort of like his, a precursor to the kind of stand back and stand by comment, right? It was a very deliberate use of a meme that was trying to activate a certain group online who they knew was, you know, starting to gain momentum as a support base for them. That moment that Trump tweets that smug pepe,

I think is sort of like the harbinger for this moment that we're still kind of trying to make sense of at this point. But if anything, like the film is really a story about how these internet irrealities folded into real life and how we're still trying to like make sense of what is up and down. That's Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini. And this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My guests today are Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini.

They together are the dynamic filmmaking duo behind the documentary Feels Good Man, which premiered at last year's Sundance, where it picked up the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. And on the surface, this is a film about how Pepe the Frog, this essentially cartoon character from a relatively obscure comic book morphed into one of the world's most popular memes, and later a symbol of hate, an avatar of chaos, a lever for radicalization.

And it's a story of how its creator, Matt Fury, goes on this journey to reclaim his creation. But beneath the surface, this is really a film about artistic agency. It's sort of a sociological excavation of how culture spreads from mind to mind. It's also about how a meme incited a regressive internet subculture that ended up shifting the social and political landscape, fomenting chaos and violence, and in this case, ultimately tipping a presidential election. It's an absolutely insane ride. Definitely one of my favorite

documentaries of the year. And this conversation is absolutely wild and it's coming up in a few. But first, we're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care,

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recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care

tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you.

I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, feels good, man. Many of you likely heard Adam Skolnick and I discuss this documentary several weeks back.

And I left that conversation wanting to better understand and learn more about the film, the ideas it presents, what it says about our current reality, and what it means for our culture moving forward. So that's what we're doing today. This is me, Arthur Jones, and Giorgio Angelini. Feels good, man. Feels good, man. Welcome gentlemen. I'm super happy to have you guys here today. Very happy to be here. Thank you.

I love the movie. I truly think it's one of the best documentaries of the year. So it's exciting to break it down with you guys today. And I think first we should kind of synopsize it for people that have not seen the movie. So I guess I can allow you guys. Sure.

The opportunity to tell us a little bit about the movie. You'd think after like months of explaining this, we'd be really good at it, but it's always very nerve wracking to be like, what is this movie actually about? It really depends on the day. Well, it's about so many things. Exactly.

It's hard to like nail down specifically what it's about. I mean, there's things that it's about on the surface, but what the movie is really about is what's going on beneath that veneer of what's happening specifically with Pepe the Frog. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's that complexity

that drew us to the story initially, but the inciting incident for the movie is a pretty simple and kind of weird thing. It's a single panel of an obscure comic book called Boys Club. And there's this one panel in which Pepe the Frog, which is this anthropomorphic stone green frog character that if you haven't seen Pepe the Frog,

you just stop the podcast and then- Google it really quick. Google it. And then immediately come back, close that tab. Come back in two weeks. Yeah. When you finally wrap your head around what exactly is going on. After you've taken a disinfectant shower,

then come back to the podcast. But so there's this one panel of this comic that's done by Matt Fury, who's the subject of our documentary. And in this panel, Pepe is saying, feels good, man. And it's this one single image of Pepe that was cut and paste out of that image and then became this like viral phenomenon globally.

And our story tells the very like strange and unlikely journey of this comic book character becoming an internet meme that was wildly popular and then ultimately becoming sort of a tool and a propaganda sort of tool for the alt-right and officially designated a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in late 2016. And the story is kind of twofold. It's the story of Matt Fury who created this with no ill intent, obviously it becoming a meme and then a hate symbol had nothing to do with him.

And it's the story of him sort of realizing that and then dealing with it in the ways that he felt were correct to him. And then the other part of the story is about how trolling moved off of message boards and into mainstream politics because Pepe was really used as basically a tool for trolls. And so when we started making the film, we realized that this could be like a really unique story because the way that Pepe was sort of like taken from Matt

was a way that we felt like a lot of viewers would potentially see consensus reality sort of being stolen from them in the attention economy. Right. And so it was something that also myself as a cartoonist was excited to just have a movie that talked about cartoons seriously. Right.

You know, in the way that like cartoons carry all of this kind of like visual baggage to them, that they are these things that are like intellectually sticky that people often sort of dismiss, but you know, they're important and potent and stay with us for decades. And Pepe was this, I don't know, emotionally flexible avatar that people were using.

And speaking of cartoons seriously and as important as they are, the panel in which Pepe says feels good man is in response to his friends making fun of him for peeing with his pants around his ankle. Right. It's perhaps like the most benign, like innocent, ridiculous thing ever.

And the idea that that image could get co-opted and evolve over time into such a pernicious icon of regressive culture is baffling, right? And I just remember personally, the first time I came across Pepe the Frog late in the game was just seeing that emoji popping up on people's Twitter profiles and being used in posts that were very much in the alt-right bent

and being confused, like why is this frog being aligned with this particular political perspective, doing a little bit of research into it, but still not really grokking what exactly was going on. And the story that you tell is just so much more astounding and exasperating than you could possibly imagine. Yeah, and I think that's sort of how I understood Pepe

at the beginning. Like I had spent a lot of time on Reddit in the early days and like was familiar certainly with Pepe as a meme. But when Arthur told me that he was starting this project, like I, it came from a relationship that he personally had with Matt. And so like, I felt kind of totally embarrassed that I didn't know anything about the backstory,

but like in those first early conversations, it was just very clear that this was such an incredible opportunity to tell at least what I find like to be the most interesting kind of documentaries that are about something on its face, very specific and eccentric and strange, but really speak to like a broader cultural situation. Right, yeah, in the broadest sense,

it's about how information travels and shapes culture, right, through the lens of this one specific image, but the idea of the meme, as it's most broadly defined, and I love this woman that you have on who, the color with all the crazy hair and everything like that, she's a character, right? And she's into like the paranormal and all this crazy stuff. But the idea of the meme,

hearkening back to Richard Dawkins and this book that he wrote, that there are genes that influence human behavior and it's memes that influence cultural behavior and evolve over time to shape, not just political philosophy and ideology, but cultural identity and everything that gets packed into that.

Like the power of that cannot be overstated. And yet we kind of think of memes as a very, you know, kind of casual temporal thing. Oh yeah, we're just beginning to understand like the true grotesque potential of what memes can do, both to like coalesce political bodies, but also be deployed as political propaganda. There's just so much embedded

within the way images operate on the internet. Yeah, this is definitely at its core, the film is like really a media study or media literacy project. Yeah, and kind of in the back of my head when we were starting it too, I was observing how my father, like I grew up in rural Missouri

and very conservative family. Evangelical, right? Yeah, evangelical family, Southern Baptists. And my dad had been like a Bob Dole supporter. He'd been like kind of a family values conservative. And he's a very like moral guy. Like he's never had a beer or a cigarette. He's someone that really walks the walk. And I would have thought that he would have been shocked and horrified by Trump.

I would have thought that he would have found Trump's morals to be reprehensible. And I was surprised that all of a sudden he was really kind of completely enamored with Trump. And I was also surprised how he just got an iPhone and wouldn't stop staring at it. He was using the iPhone like a teenage girl. Like he was just scrolling constantly the Fox News media feed. And it was something that I was kind of trying

to like think about and deal with. And even though none of that is like in the film specifically, that was the stuff that I was thinking about as we were beginning to make the film. How can we have this story that's about these, for me, it was kind of like this twin passion of like cartoons and iconography,

and then also kind of trying to decode what is going on in the country. And so, those were the conversations that Giorgio and I were having about in the beginning. And we thought Pepe was just such, just an amazing vehicle for this larger discussion. Because ultimately we can make a movie about this hilarious stoned weird frog.

And then we can sort of like within all of that, have all of this like really kind of important informational stuff that is pointing towards a seismic shift in culture. Social media is changing culture in a way that we're just beginning to understand. Feels Good Man is like a cave painting at the beginning of a new era.

And I think it's just like the way the internet is kind of like downloading our psyches into the machine is something we have to be aware of. And Pepe is like a way in which we can kind of like talk about it. It doesn't feel like overly intellectualized. It doesn't feel like too important. It It doesn't feel like, you know, too important. It's still this kind of like weird frog.

And yeah, it was just something that we just became completely obsessed with over the two and a half years we were making it. It also underscores just how strange the whole thing is because Pepe is this bizarre figure. It's like, it's this amazing entry point to explore a very serious subject with this veneer of kind of lightness at the same time.

Right? So you, Arthur, your background is as a cartoonist. Yeah, like. Yeah, and graphic designer. So you were friends with Matt, like take us back to, I wanna talk about Matt a little bit, like and the impetus for the film at the outset.

Well, to go back to the beginning is I'd bought his comic book boys club at Quimby's bookstore in Chicago. And that's an independent bookstore. And it was a pretty obscure comic. It's not a comic book store that you would buy like a Spider-Man, you know, an issue of Spider-Man app. This was more of like a, you know, bespoke kind of indie store. And I thought his comic was really funny and I really liked it. And it had stayed with me for several years, just kind of like in the back

of my head. So when I saw Pepe start to pop up on the internet, I found it baffling. I wondered if the people who are using it had any knowledge of its context or the comic. And then I met Matt when I moved to California through some mutual friends. He was friends with my girlfriend, Carrie McLaughlin, who's a co-producer on the film. And actually some of the archival footage used in Feels Good Man was stuff that she had shot. And we took a hike to a hot springs.

It took two days. We hiked out like 10 or 12 miles with a group of friends. We stayed at a hot springs overnight. And then we like hiked back and it was something that Matt and I just bonded. We bonded over cartoons. We bonded over the things that we were most excited about. And then we started to run into each other around Los Angeles. And when I'd run into him, I would try to figure out ways to talk about Pepe a little bit, cause I'd see him in the news and like,

what do you think about this? And I could tell that Matt's opinion about it was still forming. It was something where initially, I think he just wanted to like ignore it. And he just figured this was just kind of like part of the internet that he had nothing to do with. And then as it started to get weirder and weirder,

he just kind of, as a friend, just asked me for help. He could see that I was like, maybe thinking about this a lot and that he trusted me. And so initially we thought about trying to produce like a cartoon. And the cartoon would be sort of an updating of Boys Club. It would be, we would take that as sort of the initial source material. And then we would tell sort of an updating of boys club. It would be, we would take that as sort of the initial source material.

And then we would tell sort of like Alice in Wonderland kind of story where Pepe gets sucked out of the comic book and then into this like kind of dystopian existence. And he has to find his way back home. And then we pitched that around Los Angeles and surprisingly no one saw the potential in that. But at what part in the Pepe evolution did this take place?

This is like 2015, so like at the height of. Yeah, so it's insane at this point. It was 2016. It was a little bit insane for us to do it, for sure. Just because you have to realize some people thought Matt was somehow like a member of the alt-right. They would see his comics and they would just all of a sudden be like, oh no, no, no, we can't go there.

And that's the thing that's baffling about the ADL stuff. When Pepe gets listed as a symbol of hate speech, they put his name alongside it, which was confusing because then it really did align him with that. And that had to be unbelievably painful for him. But couldn't they just get rid of the reference to him personally? They've rewritten the entry a number of times.

And you know, the ADL has, you know, we've talked to them at various points during the making of the film, and they've been pretty generous with us. I think they were just kind of trying to do what they felt was best in the moment and did not think about the repercussions. I think the issues Matt had with this,

they just didn't reach out to tell him that this was about to happen. And all of a sudden Matt wakes up one day and he's a news item. And he is obviously like horrified that his name was attached to this. And also it's just like, he's trying to make, he's trying to eke his career out basically

as an independent cartoonist. And all of a sudden, if you're the guy that popularized the alt-right, if that's what people perceive you. Yeah, you're out basically as an independent cartoonist. And all of a sudden, if you're the guy that popularized the alt-right, if that's what people perceive you. Yeah, you're radioactive. Completely, completely. And so, that was another motivation for us wanting to make the film

was because we just realized that almost no one knew Matt's story. They did not understand where Pepe came from. And we thought that like, if people understood the true context for the character and the backstory, that we would basically be able to like, you know, we've talked about it before is like kind of like canonize Pepe.

So at least people would know that if they see a meme of Pepe, that's not the original version. Cause there's been a lot of cartoons that have been remixed, redrawn in really hateful ways. Like there's a lot of like racist SpongeBob on the internet. But the difference is that, yeah, the difference is that there's a huge studio that created it and everybody has a prior context for that.

But Boys Club was this hidden little thing that almost nobody knew about. So they didn't have that history to contextualize the whole thing. No, I mean, it's kind of remarkable if you look back on it as, you know, the full totality of the story, like Matt creates Pepe, what in 2006? Yeah. And I don't have the numbers, but I would guess that Pepe is probably like in the top 10 most recognizable cartoon images across the world. And it has nothing to do with like a company just you know pumping billions of dollars

into it as a brand it's just purely in the power of matt's initial image and its ability to have like connected with a particular audience online and just grown from there and you know to mention like it started off innocently and right it really metastasized into something much different. But in a sense, the film was trying to reverse engineer that context that on the internet, in the absence of that context, the hive mind of the internet just kind of injected its own narrative into Pepe. And so I think we're happy to see

that in the release of the film, it's kind of operated just as we would have hoped that like, it's really, that's all Matt's ever really wanted to do is to tell his story, not to like, I think sometimes he gets castigated by certain trolls online for like being naive about wanting to like take back Pepe.

I don't think, there's not an interest in taking it back. It's just telling a story. Right, yeah, I mean, there is a narrative that he was somewhat naive and thinking initially that it would just go away until it gets so out of control that he's realized that he's gotta step in and do something. So the underlying theme is really this journey from passivity to participation

on behalf of Matt specifically, but also on behalf of Matt specifically, but also on behalf of the 4chan community and all these other people who become activated to participate in the political process in a way that previously didn't appeal to them because of feeling disenfranchised or whatever. So that's the real power, the kind of engine beneath the whole thing

that created this metastasized icon. And also the result of the 2016 election in so many ways. Yeah, I mean, Matt's sort of alone in that experience. There aren't really many other artists that have had to go through what he's gone through. And so he's really had to make up the game plan along the way. And so he's really had to make up the game plan along the way. And so as documentary filmmakers, it was really a gift to be able to capture that sort of coming

off the proverbial couch moment happening in real time, right? To really track someone, have to confront something that they thought would just go away on its own and really feel like they're kind of this reluctant hero. And that as filmmakers was really potentially powerful because I think for a lot of Americans, they might see themselves in him a bit, right? Like in the way that his artwork was taken away from them there. Yeah. Like Arthur just mentioned, like their sense of making sense of the world had been taken away from them. I mean, you see this guy, this expectation that he's gonna hire a lawyer the instant he finds out that Pepe is being used

in a way that he didn't intend is preposterous. It's like, he's a very sensitive artist, seems like a really sweet guy. Like that's just not the kind of guy who's gonna do that, right? But also that stuff costs money. Yeah, exactly. Costs a lot of money.

In a weird way, it had to get as bad as it got. And nobody could have predicted that anyway. Exactly. I understand why people might consider Matt naive, but I think it's important to point out that obviously this has never happened before. And Pepe has outlived a lot of the platforms it was even popular on.

Things on the internet do disappear and Pepe for whatever reason has stuck around now for more than a decade. And so I think Matt initially thinking that it would go away the same way MySpace and Friendster did made sense. And then also it's kind of important to point out we documented in the film is that Matt was a new father

when all of this was happening. He was a lot more concerned with providing for his family and changing diapers than necessarily taking on the alt-right. And so he just kind of didn't have like the emotional or financial bandwidth to deal with it. And so, I think he's in the film, he realized at a certain point that this obviously had to,

he had to use copyright because it was kind of the only tool that he had. But before that, he tried initially to reach out to his artistic community to remix and re kind of meme Pepe in a positive way. And I think that's the moment that people often would say Matt was naive, but I think Matt knew that going into it. And it was a way for him basically

just to reach out to his community in that moment and say like, hey, I need help. Yeah. You know, can you help me? And it was a way for him to talk to his friends about it. And then for them to make artwork about it. And it was like a very earnest thing. Yeah, and ultimately something like 500,

you know, kind loving Pepes emerged from that. But you know, that's a drop in the sea of, you know, hundreds of millions of, you know of pernicious versions of that. There's that scene near the end where he's in that, like it looks like kind of a think tank situation in San Francisco with all these data scientists and they're analyzing hate speech on the internet. And he says, there's like a hundred million.

Yeah. It's by far the most, it's like, there's no way that you can, he's like, I wish you luck with that. But you know, it's basically like, you know, this is not the way forward in terms of like shifting that perspective. But it's a shame that it like,

it had to get to a point that it reached such a fever pitch that this very large and powerful legal institution at WilmerHale, Lewis Tomperos and Stephanie Lynn were able to come help Matt pro bono, right? Like it had to get to a point at which a law firm could see a kind of greater social good and donating their time to help him. And without that, I mean, I don't know where he would be.

And it was really like, I don't know, it's bears mentioning too, that there was this break point for Matt where, well, I guess now no longer assistant to principal of a middle school in Texas had published this children's book that had once again, co-opted Pepe, but in the context of like a pretty racist. Yeah, that seemed to be the bridge too far

where he really got activated after that. Yeah, I mean, it was propaganda directed at four and five year olds. And in the movie, we also showed that Matt is a children's book author and illustrator. And I think he found the fact that this propaganda was sort of being pointed at such young audiences he found to be really disturbing.

And it was also just easily accessible on Amazon. It wasn't just as simple as like asking Amazon to take down the book. And so, you know, we've even noticed that like, you know, there's all this bootleg Pepe stuff that's on Amazon and it's actually quite hard to get them to take it down. Yeah. You know, none of this is like just an easy process.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of intentionality. And so he realized that that was kind of the moment that he needed just to seek out help. And yeah, luckily he found this law firm that was willing to do it. And they continue to kind of fight for Pepe in various kinds of ways now. I love the hero shot of the lawyer

coming into the conference room. That got a standing ovation. I was gonna say, yeah, that was an amazing moment at Sundance. What did you win for Lewis? So Lewis, the main lawyer there, was sitting just down the row at Sundance and when the hero shot happens,

like what happened? I saw his wife like reach over and like squeeze his forearm. Yeah, yeah. There was, but yeah, it was a very validating moment I think for them to have like this audience. Well, cause people are ready in the movie

for something to happen. Right. Cause we do sort of like. Well, cause it goes to such a dark and despairing place, you know, and I was concerned about that. I was like, how are you gonna round this out? Like I wasn't aware of how it ended and that was quite uplifting and interesting.

And maybe we should leave that for audiences to discover for themselves. But it does end on a very hopeful note. But I think what I'd like to do is walk through a little bit of the timeline and the evolution of Pepe so that people can wrap their heads around like how this happened. I mean, it basically begins, as you said,

with him uploading a panel from his comic book to MySpace. It then seems to get adopted by the kind of fitness subculture on the internet who starts saying feels good man after their workouts, which is an innocent and kind of fun thing. And were you able to actually connect the dots from that back to Matt? Well, I mean, nothing on the internet is a straight line.

It's sort of all spread out. I mean, we weren't able to connect things back to like certain people or certain sort of moments on things, but it did seem like there were a few message boards that one was about mushrooms and that kind of made sense. And then there was another one that was bodybuilding.com's message board. And for whatever reason, that message board has always had a relationship to the fit message board on 4chan. Fit is often kind of a board that will introduce like young guys to 4chan because it's guys who are like,

maybe like 13 or 14 and they're looking to just, you know, kind of like shape up a little bit. So they'll go to fit and they'll sort of like, you know, talk to other young guys about how to lose weight, how to gain muscle, how to basically just become men in the world. And so it seemed like that was probably the moment that Pepe passed from the bodybuilding forum.

Into the 4chan community. Yeah, into the 4chan community. I love what we're talking about this like COVID tracing. Well, it's to extend the evolutionary analogy. That's like the waterborne animal finally climbing on the land. It's like a big leap in how this thing ends up evolving. Well, I mean, there isn't an emotionally linear line.

I mean, I think you can correlate a lot of this. The inroad is through bodybuilding.com, but like the metastasis happens really in like understanding the kinds of people who are coming to those kinds of forums, right? Like there's of course a huge number of people who are coming to those kinds of forums, right? Like there's, of course, a huge number of people who are there just to seek out information. But then there's also like this kind of other, maybe more pernicious cultural problem, which is of men who feel like they've been scorned specifically by women who are coming onto these boards to kind of share

a struggle and feel like they have to improve their bodies and kind of like who kind of see the world in maybe binary ways and feel like that the only way that they compete is through like improving themselves physically. And you start to really see how like the marrying of the image of Pepe and the sort of catchphrase of feels good man.

And then these kind of nascent emotional problems all kind of coalesce at that moment. Yeah. And on 4chan, there's, I mean, it's a lot of different message boards and each one of them kind of have their own little communities attached to them. But there's one message board in particular named R9K.

And this is a place where a lot of guys would just go basically to kind of like tell a story about their rejection. They would go basically to kind of like tell a story about their rejection. They would go there to talk about how maybe a girl didn't sit next to them in the cafeteria or about how, you know, they'd had a one night stand and then they felt like rejected afterwards.

And Pepe became the kind of like avatar for that. And it's an anonymous place. People don't use their faces or names. And so Pepe became a stand-in for that. And so he went from the feels good man frog to the feel sad man frog, the symbol of rejection. And so we used Pepe basically as this like emotional through line to tell the story. And as Pepe got angrier, the country was getting angrier. You know, the country was becoming a place where, you know,

outside of the mainstream media, there was this aggrievement that was becoming a place where outside of the mainstream media, there was this aggrievement that was becoming slightly irrational. And so we trace Pepe from the feels sad frog to the feels bad frog to the mad frog to the smug frog to Donald Trump. And I know that sounds like a silly narrative advice, but it was powerful for us because ultimately we're trying to make a film that tells this emotional journey. And the thing that's interesting about Pepe

is how people felt attached to the character. This JPEG really meant something to people. And when they started to see the mainstream using it, it felt like a personal affront. They were like, that's our thing. Like, how dare you use our thing? This has been our safe space to share it amongst ourselves. It's not for you.

And we found that to be interesting. Like it surprised me going into it, just the connection that people were feeling towards this frog. Yeah. That was silly. Like as a way to structure an otherwise super complicated story. It actually, as soon as we discovered that parallel, it became an incredibly powerful narrative device. And just like Arthur just said, just tracking the descent of Pepe into depravity correlated so neatly with. Right. In the span of two weeks, you have a mass shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon, which still today is the deadliest mass shooting

in Oregon history. And supposedly, I mean, this did happen, but we don't know for sure if the shooter posted it, but it's in all likelihood. It seems very likely. On 4chan, someone posted the day before the shooting, a kind of warning, don't come to the school, my 4chan friends, whatever. And then it had at the bottom, it was an image of Pepe holding a handgun. And then the next day the shooting, a kind of warning, don't come to the school, my 4chan friends, whatever.

And then it had at the bottom, it was an image of Pepe holding a handgun. And then the next day the shooting happened. And then that was sort of the first time that Pepe really made it into mainstream news. People referred to him as a Grinch-like creature. But then two weeks later. And there was a little moment of like Pepe panic.

Like there were a number of colleges that were like, you know, that were like, we're shutting down tomorrow because we've had this anonymous like threat. It would be a Pepe image holding a gun or a Pepe with a ski mask. Yeah, and then two weeks later, we had this moment where Donald Trump retweeted an image of himself.

And it- As Pepe. As Pepe, yes. He retweeted an image of himself drawn as smug Pepe. So it was Pepe with like the yellow hair standing behind the sort of podium as if he was at a press conference in the Oval Office or in the White House.

And it seemed like the media wasn't kind of connecting the dots between those two things. You'd have thought in an earlier era that would have like been like a- But unless you were steeped in 4chan culture, you wouldn't be able to decode. Totally. that's exactly what it was it was a wink it was sort of like his a precursor to the kind of stand back and stand by comment right it was a

very deliberate use of a meme that was trying to activate a certain group online who they knew was you know starting to gain momentum as a support base for them, because you have all these kind of aggrieved men online who otherwise it's kind of on its face, it's kind of ironic because like they're people who presumably would get bullied a lot in high school. And like, here they are supporting someone who's kind of like the biggest bully of all, but for them, it's like their own bully, right? And they share a sense of common disdain for women, people of color, PC culture specifically.

And so they like rally around him. And so that moment that Donald Trump tweets himself as smug Pepe is kind of like, yeah, you're right. It went completely under the radar, but it's actually an incredibly significant moment that really the nature of politics and trolling just become like completely intertwined. Because the aggrievement that's felt on 4chan, there's also kind of an entitlement to it.

People feel as though in a previous era, they would have had a much different life. They would have like met a girl in high school. They would have got a job in their hometown, that the sort of like social options that people have now because of the internet means that they will be out of work and unloved for the rest of their lives. And this is sort of also happening in parallel

to obviously different parts of the country feeling as though they're being left out of the national conversation. And that growing population of the aggrieved coincides with the maturation of these platforms that allow these communities to congregate and unite around these ideas, which is like, that's a very kind of powerful machine

that's humming in the background. That's basically allowing all of this to percolate into real life. Totally, I mean, you see, for example, the last Republican National Convention, I think was the first time that the party didn't put forth an actual platform, right? It was just, if you watched it,

it was just like unbridled, unmitigated anger. And it's kind of situation that we have now where there is no political, discernible political ideology behind it. The only way to coalesce that body is through iconography. And like Pepe really became the first vehicle through which that happens. And then I would argue like Pepe kind of lost its usefulness and other things filled in that vacuum, whether it's like QAnon and who knows what it's gonna be in 2021. But these are, this is kind of the world of politics

and memes that we're having to confront right now. Well, the inflection point where Pepe tips from 4chan into broader internet culture is super interesting, you know, and kind of backing up from that, you have this neat culture, right? and into broader internet culture is super interesting, and kind of backing up from that, you have this neat culture, right? That not in employment,

not in education, employment or training, right? Which is like the catchphrase for this 4chan community. They claim ownership to Pepe, and this is their kind of safe space for their community. But the minute Pepe migrates outside of that and people like Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry and these sort of beauty YouTubers are doing makeovers in the likeness of Pepe,

that was the ultimate personal affront to the 4chan community. And their reaction to that to protect this symbol was to kind of defame it themselves so that it couldn't be co-opted and used in any other context. So it didn't germinate necessarily out of a white supremacist, antisemitic sensibility, that image was marked up in that way

to prevent it from being stolen and used in a way that they didn't want it used. That's true. It ultimately becomes a stand-in for that ideology, but that's not how it originated. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it came out of the competition between 4chan and Tumblr. And Tumblr is not exact,

I mean, it's another image posting site and it's a very inclusive community. At least it was at the time. I mean, Tumblr is kind of, I mean, it's another image posting site and it's a very inclusive community. At least it was at the time. I mean, Tumblr is kind of now faded away a little bit, but it was a very like vibrant, extremely, you know, diverse, very feminist. And they started to use Pepe. And that was kind of the moment that 4chan was like,

no, no, no, you can't go there. And so their response was actually to kind of like literally smear Pepe and shit. Like there was this moment before Pepe became a Nazi, we don't get it into the movie, but it was just like the scatological moment where they're just like drawing the grossest, weirdest versions of Pepe.

And so that wasn't politicized in that moment, but then Pepe kind of makes its way into the politics board on 4chan, the poll board. And that board was having this moment where it was getting very fashy. It was getting like very fascist. Because you had other things like Gamergate and other sort of exacerbating events online that were really serving to radicalize people in real time. But you're right. I mean, it's like a big critique we'll get sometimes from 4chan people is like, you guys, normie idiots, like Pepe was never a Nazi symbol. The media

turned him into that. And it's like, well, yeah, I know we made the film like that. We tend to agree with you, but it is also the case that it is like a hate symbol for some people. And that switch that you're talking about is really important one, right? Because you have a group of people who are kind of responding to the co-opting of their culture by mainstream culture, which is fairly typical. I mean, like in the punk movement, the same thing happened when like basically Walmart starts selling like, you know,

sex pistol shirts or whatever. But like, so that's kind of innocent enough, but then you have the kind of professional racist and opportunist who see in this a kind of opportunity to take hold of this very powerful icon that obviously people care a lot about. And the kind of people that care about it a lot are aggrieved young white men.

And like in the history and lineage of professional racism, like it's always been about how to find these out of work, aggrieved young white men and tell them like where their problems are coming from and how to solve them and who to blame, right? And like Pepe was this perfect kind of flag that allowed these opportunists to identify and kind of radicalize them.

So, you know, both things are true. Pepe is not a hate symbol, but also like people were very eager to turn him into one. When you see Trump retweeting that image of him as Pepe, you know, the immediate question that comes to mind is, what is his self-awareness around that at the time? Like, is he consciously tapped into what that represents? Is he doing it because somebody in his campaign said,

yeah, you should retweet this? Like, where's his head at with all that? I feel like that's the problem you have. Like, I've gotten into a lot of conversations with Trump supporters, and there's always this moment where they have to acknowledge that Donald Trump's a little crazy.

They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. He just does some crazy stuff sometimes, but I know he doesn't mean it. And so, I mean, he always has this plausible deniability built into everything that he does because we all assume that he's a little like unhinged or erratic or he's up on Adderall at two in the morning, whatever it is, but we sort of are able to explain away

all of the terrible stuff that he tweets, whether that's Pepe or someone yelling white power at the villages retirement community in Florida. And so Pepe is another one of these, you know, plausible deniability moments where it's like, we don't know, we can't understand what he thinks. But that's kind of baked into Pepe himself another one of these, you know, plausible deniability moments where it's like, we don't know, we can't understand what he thinks, you know. But that's kind of baked into Pepe himself, right? Like you've got the guy, forget his name,

who's like, it's always shrouded as a joke. So you have that kind of deniability as well. Like this doesn't really mean anything. We don't intend it seriously because it's all very, you know, kind of smug and comedic. Right, and this again is like this part of the perfect storm, you kind of intimated it earlier is while these conversations are happening online,

it's the rise of social media as this sort of incredibly powerful force. And what it serves to do in this case is like, the culture of these boards is really shrouded all in sort of irony jokes and like, you know, irony poisoning as they call themselves. Right. And you're kind of trying to one up each other with who can be the most depraved. And the way that 4chan works is it sort of rewards that kind of conversation. It's really not that dissimilar to Instagram. It just has different inputs. Right. But they're both essentially, at the end of the day, social media tools that reward a certain kind of behavior. And for

Instagram, it's like, you know, posing on a yacht or whatever, that's going to kind of foment the most FOMO kind of reaction in the public. And then on 4chan, it's like, who can be the most brave? And so that system- Who can be the edgiest. Who can be the edgiest. And so, yeah, Pepe becomes like a great way to mask all of this stuff and shroud it in this idea of irony. But you start repeating the same jokes over and over again and suddenly it becomes a lot easier

to believe these things too, right? Well, and you mentioned at the very beginning of the conversation, this sort of moment where frog Twitter happened. And it was this blip before Gab popped up, where if you were someone who is into Trump, a member of the alt-right, you would have a little frog emoji icon

that you would put in your Twitter feed. And it was this moment that actually politics was getting commodified on Twitter, on social media. It was this moment where all of a sudden, politics had a certain brand and all, certain brand and we are consuming these entertainment products from Fox News, from MSNBC. This is the team that we're on. This is my brand loyalty.

I'm either Frog Twitter or I'm SJW Twitter or I'm Rose Twitter or whatever. And it's this sort of like taking on of this like personal kind of branding thing that really kind of flattens out the conversation on social media. And I think that people were responding to kind of this kind of knee jerk,

kind of consumerism attachment to politics that was being amplified on Twitter during that moment. And, you know, Pepe just became an easy, like wink wink for them. Right. So on that subject of Trump's awareness or perhaps his campaigns awareness around this trend that's percolating up from a dark corner of the internet,

you've got this guy called Matt Brainard, who's the data chief. He's a strategist on the Trump campaign. I think he was part of Corey Lewandowski staff, right? Like pretty high up in the campaign. And this guy's got like voter data wired and he seemed, you're shaking your head. Like this is what I wanna hear about.

Cause he comes off as pretty tapped into, how this whole thing kind of occurred and presented himself in a way that, he was the chief architect of making this happen. I think like everything that happens virally on the internet, it's very hard to like take credit for things, but he's more than happy to do that. I think what I will say that was important

that he brought to the film and why we wanted to talk to him was really explaining how, like why memes were powerful, specifically politically. Like he's the one that puts forth this really interesting idea that I think we're still needing to contend with. But the idea that memes and politics has the net effect of kind of democratizing political media.

So if you're just a single person sitting behind your computer in Indiana and you create the right meme and the president retweets it, all of a sudden you're like at the forefront of the political conversation. Yeah, it's unbelievably empowering. Completely, to the point that Donald Trump himself recognized that and over the last four years has hosted several events with like political memers. So like he's very tapped in and aware of how these narratives get built online and how to kind of take advantage of social media in that way.

Yeah, and I think what Matt understood was, I mean, Matt is getting his data the same place that like the Obama people got their data. I mean, if you've canvassed for anyone in the last, you know, decade, you know that they basically have like winnowed it down to like who in the household might be a swing voter. You know, it's like they pretty much have every single neighborhood in America locked in on who votes for who and when.

And so he recognized that there was this like very slim margin that was there for these people who were potentially open to Trump's message. And I think that was something that he did kind of understand pretty early on. That said, you know, I mean, he got let go of the Trump campaign when they switched to Steve Bannon. So, I mean, I think that some of it was, I just, they caught the zeitgeist at the exact right moment, you know?

And that was something that I don't think was like super premeditated on his part, you know? But he did say, you know, that like no one controls Trump's Twitter feed except him. You know, like Trump is the part, you know? But he did say, you know, that like no one controls Trump's Twitter feed except him. You know, like Trump is the person, you know, in control of that completely. It's not like some group of guys. They, I'm sure at moments they were like,

no, no, no, don't tweet that. And then there he was doing it. Right. Well, Bannon exacerbates the whole thing. And the point is made in the movie that the whole position. And the point is made in the movie that the whole position was that the Democratic Party is not the opposition, it's the media that's the opposition.

And that becomes a very kind of powerful idea that I think allowed everything that you talk about in the movie to be more potent than it would have been otherwise. And he also realized that there had been this like incredible, there'd always been this growing Republican base connected to AM radio in America. And that's a completely factionalized

and extremely angry group of reactionary sort of Republicans. And it was something that I think the mainstream Republican party always kind of viewed from a distance as like, I don't know if we want to totally go there. Like we know those people are out there and we know that they're voting, but at the same time, we don't necessarily want to like, you know, play to the crowd. And then there's a moment where Bannon's like, no, we completely play to the crowd. The crowd is the only thing that matters. And so I think he just recognized that and whether it was him just sort of knowing

that like he had this sort of army of Trump supporters listening to AM radio 24 seven or if he was just looking at the Breitbart comments section as people have talked about as well, who knows but he recognized this was emotion. People were coming to the rallies and they were way more passionate about Trump than Hillary Clinton

and he's like, how do we tap into this emotion? And part of that is just galvanizing people through memes, galvanizing people through getting angry at the media, galvanizing people by telling them that they've been lied to their whole lives and they should be angry about it and their anger is justified. And he did a pretty amazing job at leveraging that.

But critically understanding also that we were in this moment that you could sort of hack the media, that the way that the click-based media economy worked and the way that Twitter and Facebook worked is if you could just kind of create these moments of reality, that the pace at which media now needs to publish stuff and create clicks, you could basically manipulate your own narrative, right? And so that's really the moment that, that's the moment that Trump tweets that smug Pepe, I think is sort of like the harbinger for this moment that we're still kind of trying to make sense of at this point. But if anything, like the film is really a story about how these internet irrealities folded into real life

and how we're still trying to like make sense of what is up and down. Yeah, meanwhile, the Clinton campaign didn't seem to be nearly as clued in as to what was going on. It was misstep after misstep, you know, on some level, just blithely unaware of how powerful this culture was that was sitting right beneath her feet. Yeah, that's actually like a perfect moment

for what I'm describing, right? You have this moment where Hillary Clinton has this big political campaign event where she's going to sort of call out the alt-right for the first time and really call out Pepe, right? Completely unrelated, a kid on 4chan happens to be attending this thing and he's like talking with people on the 4chan threads, like, hey, I'm at this Hillary Clinton rally,

what should I scream? And, you know, of course the media's all there and they're all like, oh, you should yell this or yell this. And then someone's like, yell Pepe. Like, yeah, yell Pepe, yell Pepe, yell Pepe. And this is all happening just on an anonymous message board. And like, it's this incredible event horizon where like the internet fiction meets with real life

and then becomes reality, right? Because what ends up happening is that- And he yells it at the exact right moment. Yeah, this kid yells Pepe. It gets picked up by the TV cameras. Hillary's talking literally about the alt-right and before she even mentions Pepe at this point. And then like an hour later,

Rachel Maddow's on MSNBC talking about like the Pepe moment. And then like history is solidified at that point. But it all starts from like a very trolly place. Yeah. And 99.9% of people would see that and not know what to make of that at all. And yet it's so significant and meaningful in that community.

Totally. And it's really this moment that like, yeah, politics ceases to be about kind of competing for votes through ideas and really just about trolling, right? Like, cause trolling turns out as an incredibly powerful tool to coalesce movements. Like if it's literally just about honing the libs and just making people angry and the frog is a great way

to sort of, yeah. Well, it's a way easier thing to understand. Exactly. It's a way you don't have to intellectualize the feeling. Exactly. You don't have to intellectualize the feeling of piling on someone when they're down. Yeah.

And also Hillary had been someone who'd been the victim of trolling for decades before, like, you know, the whole like feminazi thing that was happening in the nineties. She'd been name called and sort of dragged, you know, for years and years and years. And this was kind of the culmination of that. And I think, you know, I'm sure they had all the best of intentions

and what they were trying to do. They were obviously trying to find a very convenient and easy to understand way to describe. They were obviously trying to find a very convenient and easy to understand way to describe what was happening to the Republican party. And Pepe to them seemed like a very easy way to explain it. And kind of the same way that we decided to do it, but maybe much less nuanced.

But what they critically misunderstood was what we all need to understand about how to deal with trolling. It's like, you can't play to the trolls, right? This is much to the delight of people like Steve Bannon, that she did that, right? Because you're just, because you can just point at,

oh, how ridiculous is this person? She's talking about us like into this green frog. That's crazy, you know? Yeah, no matter what you do, it plays into their favor. And so much of the energy has less to do with political ideology than just like, let's see if we can meme this guy into the presidency.

Like it's gamified. The whole thing becomes a gigantic video game of mass participation. 100%. For sure. Yeah, and like, I think unfortunately, you know, what the past four years have borne out is like, you cannot,

you can't build a society on that kind of cynicism. The COVID, things are real. The internet is not real. Things are real. What's real? COVID. And what's real is not responding to it out of a completely grotesque, cynical, nihilistic perception

of how society should operate. And now we have like 3000 people dying. But that does go back to 4chan. I mean, 4chan would talk, they would do these sort of like, they would coalesce to troll someone in some way and they would talk about how they're basically like gaming reality.

And it was this sort of idea that like we can try to like use the internet to exert our will. And then that will, maybe that's for the lulz. But in this case, I think it was very exciting to realize like, oh, wait a minute, we've sort of graduated to the next level of this. We can actually like gamify the system and troll the country. And, you know, I think the way that they were sort of able

to get all of these memes coming off of 4chan and then into these very like newly mainstream avenues on Twitter is something that was extremely potent. Critically, you had a group of people who all felt disempowered, who also felt like the internet was theirs, that they created internet culture. And now all of a sudden they're like,

oh, this is how the media works? We're actually in control of the media. We have PhDs in this. Exactly. That level of disenfranchisement suddenly becomes tremendous empowerment. Like we were talking about a minute ago. Like now, and it's that trajectory from passivity

into being completely plugged in and participating. Not only participating, actually like being almost in charge in some way of dictating results. Well, they literally call it the meme war. I mean, it starts off again, it starts off as a joke, but like, you know, they just, it's cosplaying, but like ultimately at the end of the day, if that's all that animates your life,

like what's the difference between a joke and reality? I mean, they're viewing it the same way. We watched it again, we watched the movie again last night just to get my head around talking to you guys today. And my wife, I've got two boys that are 24 and 25. So they're big Redditors. Like they have a pretty solid sense of all, this is not news to them, right?

Like they understand all this. My wife was like, I don't understand what's happening. So it is like a foreign, you're tapping into like some strange, you know, ancient culture that you've never been exposed to before that has its own rules and its own language and vocabulary. You know, it's- Yeah, 4chan is very much about self-mythologizing.

Yeah. Did she understand it by the end of the film? Well, she gets it, but she was still like, it's so baffling, right? To try to wrap your head around that if you've never been introduced to these kinds of communities and how powerful they are. And that was really a big struggle creatively

was trying to figure out like, who is the intended audience for this film? And then like, once we decide that, how much like explanation do we have to give so that people can at least understand what the hell we're talking about and become engaged in the story? Yeah, like deconstructing that and figuring out

how to communicate concisely and effectively, this story must have been challenging. It was the fun part. Yeah, right. It was challenging, but like as dark as the story was, I mean, the collaboration was like pretty joyful. I mean, it was something where we felt like, and we watched a lot of documentaries when we started

and we're like, we don't wanna do that. We wanna try to do something different. Let's try to like, realizing that we had all of Matt's artwork and Pepe as a way to kind of like breathe a new air into the story. Because after Charlottesville, there was all this different media being put out and we just kind of wanted to make something

that was like stylistically distinct and then also felt like a movie, not just like sort of a long form essay or a work of journalism. We wanted it to work like a movie. So we have all of these, like this unique material, like Pepe dies in the movie.

How are we gonna approach that? Is that something that we're gonna take seriously? Is it gonna have a wink? Like, is it gonna be all of those things? And we knew that it could kind of give this film its kind of own vibration that we were pretty excited about. But yeah, we definitely like,

like Giorgio was talking about like the moment where someone yells Pepe at Hillary. Like we tried that edit a bunch of different ways. And then the first edit we did, we just had someone walking you through the moment in a very like dry journalistic kind of way. And they're like, let's strip the voice out. Let's let the internet tell the story.

So we did that with no narration. And then it's like, well, how do we put another layer of this where we see that this information moves off of 4chan, pops into the mainstream news, pops onto YouTube, ends up on Twitter. And it was this kind of like, oh, we're gonna try to infuse these moments with as much stuff as possible, as many layers to the conversation. Cause we wanted the movie to feel like it had

a viral intensity to it. Like you had a million tabs open and you were looking at them all one after another. Right, right, right. Yeah, definitely, you've definitely succeeded in that. I mean, there is, you know, an intensity to it and you have a score that's very propulsive, you know, so you're very engaged

and there's a tempo to the whole thing. But it's also this beautiful art film because the animation sequences are insane. Like, I mean, unbelievable. Like what you were able to achieve with that, like really gorgeous, beautiful work. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

That was so talk about like how that, how you, how you conceptualize that and how you figured out how to make that work narratively. That was another big thing that we talked a lot about in the beginning, when we first thought about the movie, we maybe thought there would be like a lot about in the beginning. When we first thought about the movie, we maybe thought there would be like a lot more animation in it because we felt like maybe the story could hold

a completely other sort of kind of narrative thread. And that was gonna have Pepe and the boys club kind of going on their own adventure and we would hear them talking and they would kind of have their own character qualities. And then we very quickly realized that the movie just couldn't hold all of these ideas. The deeper we got into researching message boards

and the message board culture, we just realized that if we started to insert these cartoons in it, it was gonna steal away from the power of the information. And so we really need to figure out a way to kind of like have the two things worth side by side. But the other thing we really wanted to figure out a way to kind of like have the two things worth side by side. But the other thing we really wanted to do is make it seem like Matt's artwork

had like a real sense of stage presence to it. We didn't want it to look like all the janky JPEGs and the animated gifts on the internet. We wanted it to have like its own life. And so that was something that initially, like I'd never made a film before. I'd done animation on a film that Giorgio had made called the own to tale of two Americas and enjoyed that process. And then I was like, all right, but this is what I can kind of like try to bring to the

conversation. So the animation works in the film in two different ways. There's the world of 4chan and the motion graphics. And that was really a way for me to research the film. Like I had to take all of these 4chan posts, find them and then make them 4k. So if I'm tracing them, I'm reading 4chan. I'm downloading 4chan into my brain. Make it like one of the ugliest websites on the planet. Look cinematic. Taking a silky shower every night. Absolutely. So, and then the cartoon part of it, I collaborated with three amazing cartoonists, Kylan Woodrow, Jenna Caravello, and Nicole Stafford. And we really took Matt's comics as a jumping off place.

And sometimes we would just trace his comics and make them animated. And then in other times, we would really kind of like use these characters and then figure out a way to kind of like tell our own narrative. And it was also just a way to kind of make the computer seem, it was a way to tell,

feels good man in a way where the computer didn't have supremacy. Right. Like it is a cartoon, but ultimately we wanted a story about how humans connect. And, you know, at the end of the movie, the hope is that we as humans can have connection to each other at the end.

And there's some spoilers we'll avoid, but ultimately we're kind of returning Pepe to nature. And as the animation crew and also Giorgio co-wrote a song with Sharon Van Etten for that section, that was like kind of our gift to Matt and our hope that the movie wouldn't feel like this like dystopian essay, you know, that it really had like a heart behind it.

The closing sequence where he jumps in the water and then beautifully like swims up into the sun. And did you write that song at the end? I mean, that's an incredible song. Yeah. It was, yeah. I mean, it's the gift of having animation be a part of this. It's also a realization that it's really fucking hard to end a documentary. Yeah. It's true. And so like, well, we have this frog and people have an emotional attachment to it. Let's create our own emotional ride for Pepe.

So that like at the end, there was different versions of how we were gonna treat Pepe, but we always knew that the last thing that the audience would see would be Pepe because our hope was if we were decent filmmakers, they would have their newly found emotional attachment to be Pepe because our hope was if we were decent filmmakers, they would have their newly found emotional attachment to our Pepe and that like that could produce the waterworks.

There's also, yeah. Giorgio is very quick to cry, which is actually a good thing in the end. No, at the end I was like tearing up, you know, it's a very beautiful ending, but there's also a real world hopeful tone that struck at the end as well. Yeah, I mean, look,

everything we've been talking about now has really just been about the impact that internet culture has had on real life. And the fact that like for years in the early internet days, it was very clear delineation between your real life person and your online life. And like these two things have become really blurred.

And we're at a moment now where we have to decide as a society, like which reality are we gonna push forward? Right, and the reality of the internet is that it is a place at least in its current conception that teases out some of the worst aspects in us, right? It's a place where you're encouraged to be as shitty as possible to one another, and it's a place that discourages any bit of authenticity.

And so the film, the way we wanted to end the film is a kind of stark reminder that those are choices we make, right? Like you don't have to engage the world in that way. And a reminder that like, you shouldn't be shamed out of your capacity for empathy, which is kind of what social media does to you on a daily basis.

And so those were the kind of the emotions that we knew, the emotional truth that we knew we wanted the film to end on. And it was just without spoiling the larger ending, like we were given a real gift in terms of Pepe's transformation that happened in real, like we were given a real gift in terms of Pepe's transformation that happened in real time while we were filming.

That's like, when you're making a documentary film, you can't plan for this kind of stuff. And it's like such a amazing gift. Yeah, for sure. So the film basically covers about two and a half years, right, from some point in 2017 through 2019. There's a lot of focus on the Trump election as well. But here we are in 2020, it's about to be 20,

it'll be 2021 when this goes up. Knowing everything that you know now as a result of making this movie and this archeological dig that you've done on the internet and how it works, how do you reflect on the election that we just went through and the state of the internet currently in terms of how we're communicating,

how it's being weaponized and how people are conducting themselves to either win an election or get their point across. Yeah, I mean, the most obvious kind of parallel is QAnon because in the same way Pepe sort of started out as this joke on 4chan and then made its way into the mainstream, QAnon started out as a joke on 4chan.

It was people sort of LARPing as intelligence officers. And then all of a sudden this became something that people were taking seriously. And so, you know, the story of all of this message board culture and trolling and stuff isn't insignificant and that kind of proves that. But you know, I think the story that we kind of tell in the 2016 election is how trolling went mainstream.

And right now we're seeing how misinformation has really gone mainstream. And obviously they're connected. But it's something that I think we're all contending with. And it's something that, I mean, we've talked a lot about. We're having a moment in culture where all of the narratives that we've sort of taken to be true are eroding.

This notion of American exceptionalism is something that people are having to think about in a critical way. And that's really uncomfortable. For the first time. For the first time. And so even if you, and that's, you know, the idea of America being an exceptional place

has always been the thing that, you know, the right wing in America has held onto as something that's sacred. And right now through all of the protests that we're seeing, the mismanagement of COVID, we're seeing that like whatever sort of like sacredness you felt towards America as being this special place is kind of something you have to question.

And people are choosing to believe in a fantasy rather than engaging with a reality. And because you're on social media and you're in these sort of siloed places where you're not talking to people with dissenting viewpoints, you're being fed kind of new things. If you're into misinformation, you're getting fed more misinformation. And also it's very hard to parse what's real and what's not. you know, we're seeing kind of, you know, the intellectual fabric of America erode and fray. And, you know, hopefully this is Pepe

and the story of Feels Good Man is just like kind of a case study in which we can all kind of start to have conversations about this. That's our goal, you know? Yeah, I mean, I hope the film is kind of a youth culture film. It's certainly for people who are like under 35, they feel like there's much less translation issues.

Like they understand implicitly what the story is about and it feels like a youth culture movie for their generation. But it's been interesting to see older people's reactions to the film because I feel like for a lot of them, they feel empowered that they finally understand what's happening in front of them in a way that felt really opaque and unclear. But like, it's just moving forward,

we just are gonna have to like realize that we have to, I don't know, we've kind of incentivized bad faith operators and put them in charge of our world. And you have a media that still seems to like take those bad faith operators in good faith. And like that just has to stop. Right, and self-awareness around it isn't enough. Like that's not part of the solution.

Like we can all sit here and talk about it. But meanwhile, it just seems like it's getting ratcheted up. Like when you compare 2016 to now, it's night and day. And the breakdown in our ability to effectively communicate and the distrust of information sources and the uncertainty around what's true and what's not true. And the disconnection that we're now experiencing because of the pandemic,

like all of these things are contributing to a denigration of the pandemic, like all of these things are contributing to a, you know, denigration of the moral fabric of society. And I fear, you know, I have deep concerns about how we're gonna see our way through this. Even the people who are lording over these social media platforms are befuddled or insincere about the path forward.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like tech has to sort of come away from this like startup model or this kind of like boom and bust model and think about themselves more as like a public utility where there has to be different people sitting on the boards. There has to be ethicists. They have to realize that also, this is affecting us here in the West, but in the global South,

it's affecting people in an entirely different way. In those places where there's not as much sort of infrastructure, this stuff is also wreaking a different kind of chaos. And so, obviously we have to have conversations where we can't have just kind of like the Silicon Valley boom and bust control the reality of 7 billion

people. That's just not the way it's going to work. But also the irony, like I've never met Mark Zuckerberg, but I think he's, you know, maybe not the most socialized person. So they're just the idea that like our entire worlds are being defined by kind of deeply antisocial people is really problematic. But like the way that we handle and confront these issues needs to be taken much more seriously. Like on Twitter, you know, every tweet at this point that Donald Trump puts out has that stupid little notification below.

It's like being standing in front of a tidal wave. Right, it doesn't, it's ineffective. You just have to take them off. And like so many of the things you talk about in the movie, it perhaps is even playing into the hands of his base. Totally, yes. That just energizes them, right, to see that. It's more us against them.

Yeah. Yeah, so they just have, you know, you just have to take it more seriously. And, you know, I don't know, to the extent that you have to produce returns, quarterly returns for your investors, like I just wonder at what point, I don't know. Well, the anonymous aspect of the whole thing

is a big part of this, right? Like does 4chan exist if you can't post anonymously? And there's a argument to be had that everybody who's saying anything on the internet should get a blue check and be verified so that you can basically legitimize who these people are. And yet, you know, I had Brian Fogle in here talking about the dissident the other day

and how important it is for dissidents to be able to communicate from a safe place. And that requires some level of anonymity in a place like Saudi Arabia, where 80% of the population is on Twitter. And the only bastion of free speech is Twitter because it's decentralized and can't be, you know, lorded over by the control of the kingdom.

Yeah, I used to think verification was a certain path towards, you know, positivity, but I will say like on all the social media platforms, probably the worst comments we get are on Facebook. And like, I'll just click people's, you know, it's a photo of a guy with his family, his two kids from Valdosta, Georgia. Who's just saying like the most depraved worst shit

about our film possible. It's like, maybe that won't work. Have you gotten a bunch of negative blow back like that? I mean, if you look at the comments on YouTube or on Facebook, they're pretty predictable. But I have to say that in terms of like our personal engagement with people, it's been the opposite.

Like we've had actually a lot of people reach out and say that the movie touched them in some way or they've been spending a lot of time in 4chan maybe when they were a teenager and they're in the process of maybe aging out of it. And the movie spoke to them in a really positive way. You know, I also think like, you know, even Pepe in the media has shifted

since we completed the film. Pepe on Twitch is basically like the de facto mascot for Twitch, he's back to being a reaction image where people are like excited or happy or angry. So if you're on Twitch and you're looking at the comments field, you'll just see like, you know, chunks of Pepe's floating by shooting. Nothing to do with like white supremacy or anything.

It's purely just for the lulls. So yeah, it's each platform kind of has its own relationship take on things. But no, we felt like actually, we obviously had some understandable fear while we were making the film, but the reality is this is a conversation that people are kind of ready to have.

And a lot of that like intense feeling that people had about Pepe kind of evaporated during 2016 and 2017. And this is something that it's time for us to all have a conversation about it. Because, you know, it's something where culture is experiencing and we have to go through it together.

Right. So you premiere the movie at Sundance, which is super dope. Like this is like, you've made one movie prior, right? This is the first film that you've been involved with. Right, so that's super exciting, right? You guys are young guys, you make this movie, you get into first film that you've been involved with, right? So that's super exciting, right? You guys are young guys, you make this movie, you get into Sundance, you go, you get crazy turnout, standing ovation, you win this award.

Yeah, no, it was amazing. I mean, also we got into Sundance with like storyboards. So a lot of like the animations were just like chicken scratch essentially. Wow. And so we were just like sprinting, sprinting to get the film done. Yeah, but everybody does.

And so that is true. You hear that a lot. And I have to say, that's like some of my favorite memories from the process is those kind of like insane nights. Right. Yeah, that was like very emotional. Like there was one night where I was like,

I think it was like five in the morning and we had like, we were trying to mix the film the next day and it was just me and our assistant was like five in the morning and we had like, we're trying to mix the film the next day. And it was just me and our assistant editor, Caitlin, in the office. And I just told Caitlin, I was like, I'm gonna start to cry right now. I don't know what else to do.

You're just gonna watch me and I'm gonna sit here and cry for like an hour while we're editing and assembling things because it's such like this emotionally kind of intense experience. Sundance obviously was like a dream come true. But then once you're kind of there, you realize there's all these other sort of like- Other people with dreams.

Yeah, too. And you're just, you're one of many people. And you also have to finish the movie and then like throw a wedding for the movie at the same time because you have to like have a party and you have to make sure the parties are the right time so people will come. And it's like, yeah, it's this really kind of

very fun and surreal, but incredibly stressful thing. And then also we're trying to like sell the film. So it's kind of, we're trying to present ourselves as like, oh, this is a product that we made. Please buy our product. And yeah, it's a heavy experience. You go in with the best of intentions. We're like packed house.

Which theater did you premiere at? The Pioneer. The Pioneer. Yeah, on a Monday. Yeah, like a Monday morning. It doesn't matter what day it is when you're there though. Well, it actually does. Does?

We found out. If you wanna be at the Egyptian on Friday night or whatever. Yeah, I mean, the truth is like the big sales all happen in the opening two days. Right. And so like, I think we recognized what, as soon as we found our Monday slot that like, okay. I was like you though. I was like, oh, we're just at Sundance. This is right. Everything is gravy. This is, this is amazing. But then it's like, people are like, well, so-and-so can't come

and they might be interested in your film because it's Monday morning specifically. Oh man, the psychic anguish day by day. Yeah, people are just sort of chipping away at your enthusiasm as you're kind of going into it. And I don't know, I'm also like, I'm a very like kind of private self-conscious person, like red carpet stuff is like uncomfortable for me for sure. And so there's a part of me that's also like,

well, how am I gonna become like, I'm an animator. I'm used to like being behind the computer in the middle of the night animating. I'm not used to sort of like standing up and talking confidently and selling a film. So that was like a pretty heavy experience for me. I discovered the movie. I heard somebody talking about it

and it just lodged in my memory. And so, you know, a couple nights later I searched for it. I found it on Amazon. I rented it, I watched it, but I did have to look for it, right? It wasn't front and center in my Netflix queue screaming at me to watch. And, you know, as I said at the outset,

like I really feel like this, you know, this is a movie that everybody should see, but I do think that it's suffering from a lack of visibility and discoverability. So can we talk about like the distribution aspect of this whole thing? I mean, we agree with you. That's part of why we're here.

I wanna help get you guys out there a little bit more. Now the conversation begins. Yeah. I mean, we created our own distribution company basically to sell out the film. You self-distributed it. We self-distributed the film. So we created a company called Ready Fictions in part because we did go into Sundance

and we'd heard a bunch of different stuff, people that were interested in the film. But I will say this was always a hard movie to convince people to get behind. And so we were able to make it independently, which was great because we found, I mean, shout out to Wavelength Productions. They're an independent company and they saw some early cuts of the film and they always believed in us to make the movie. And they have like been very supportive, but they were supportive in a way that like certainly none of the platforms were supportive.

And a lot of the other more established companies that we presented the film to. And in some cases you could feel like people slowly backing out of the room as you were pitching the movie because Pepe has this just knee jerk reaction. When people see that frog, they're like, oh man. Even one of the programmers at Sundance, she was like, I had all these movies to watch for Sundance.

And then it was like the Pepe the Frog movie, oh man. And then she watched it and loved it. But that's been like a pretty common refrain. And then when we went to sell the film, we had a lot of the same kind of moments. Yeah, it's hard to know. I don't know, obviously I'm sure there's like certain levels of assurances that distributors want to see right you can pitch an idea you know the idea might be interesting but they want to see

it finished right so like when we were pitching the film people were like you guys have never really made a film of note before yeah it was understandable and it was understandable then we make this film it's like we win this award this award. We're like, okay, we proved it. Like it's a great film. It's getting great reviews. So like, all right, now the offers certainly should be coming. And then it's like crickets.

And then you're like, you're never getting a really clear answer from the streamers who have like now kind of totalizing monopolistic control over what people see. You're not getting a sense of like why they're passing on it. But, you know, I don't know.

I would love to talk to someone about it because there was, we would get, the information we would get was like, they really liked it, but it just wasn't a fit. You know? Yeah. I mean, well, that's the issue is there. Yeah, exactly. That's not, that's disingenuous.

It's disingenuous, right? You know what I mean? We were talking about this before the podcast and this also goes back to a conversation I had with Brian Fogle and the struggles that he has undergone trying to get his movie out there because- After winning an Oscar. Right, he wins the Oscar, Netflix, that's his team

and they won't touch the movie. Amazon, basically there's a whole backstory to that and he thought like, well, Bezos will wanna be on board with this because of the subject matter they pass. And you realize that there's a big difference between getting a domestic theatrical distributor who's gonna put the movie in some theaters in the United States and a streaming platform

where it's instantly globally available. And these gigantic conglomerates live and breathe on expanding their subscriber base in foreign territories. And when you look at Saudi Arabia and you look at China, anything that is transgressive to those cultures becomes radioactive to distribute, right? It's just not worth it. It doesn't matter how good your movie is.

Like if that's gonna cause some kind of adverse reaction in those communities or the political powers that be, it's just not worth it to them. They're gonna pass on it. Yeah, and as the industry pushes more towards a subscription-based model, I would assume that like the stakes just become much different, right?

If you're Universal and you're putting out a film theatrically that's maybe edgy, people can boycott that film. They're not boycotting Universal. But if Netflix puts out a movie that they maybe aren't sure how it's gonna be received and maybe it has like a high level of potential for blowback and people boycott the subscription, it's like, you know,

I can see how the stakes are much higher, but all the same, it's also, it's really scary to think as like an independent filmmaker and storyteller, like as these platforms consolidate their power, like what it does to, and you know, coming out of COVID, seeing what's gonna happen to the theatrical market, like that's really, like you said, without theaters, basically independent cinema doesn't exist, right?

You kind of have to prove yourself in movie theaters as a viable thing. It's also harder if you're a young filmmaker because there was always this sort of like independent model or even if you had like a small theatrical lease or with a tiny sort of company, you would still have kind of a way into the industry. And so that's kind of actually getting harder

even though there's more stuff. And I think just realistically, like documentaries are kind of at this transitional phase. This year, some of the best films are documentary films and they're breaking genre. They're doing very interesting things. And these streaming platforms really only care about documentaries that are about,

like some of them are obviously news oriented, but then it's celebrities and murder. Right. True crime. And so having this story where if you have this tile of a green frog on your platform, you don't know which algorithmic sort of base that is going to. Right, yeah.

And we're in the gray area. Yeah. And so we were told it was like too niche. We were told that it was too political. China definitely was something like at the end of our movie, there's the China became like something that scared some platforms away. And then also it was just like, they were like,

oh, well we already have X movie or Y movie. About this, yeah. Yeah. And so people would never watch both of those or the fact that your film might have its own merit. We saw two movies about, what was the party in the Caribbean? Oh yeah, the fire fest.

Fire fest, at the same time, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, well, what was fascinating, I wish I wrote it down cause I can't remember specifically what they were, but when we finished watching the movie and Amazon shows you, you know, people who watch this movie also like these movies and Trapper who is, you know, people who watch this movie also like these movies

and Trapper who is, you know, my 24 year old, he was laughing. He's like, these movies have nothing to do with that movie. Like it was a weird, like assemblage of bizarro films. And that's the great irony is as like, you're like, you're kind of psyching yourself up, like, all right, we're gonna do this. We're gonna self release our film.

And like, our EPS are on board and like, that's incredible. And everyone believes in this thing. And you're like, you know, fuck the system. We're gonna do this stuff on our own. And then suddenly you realize that like, you have to give Jeff Bezos money. Yeah, he takes half of every rental. Right, right, right.

It's like Apple pass, and then they're gonna take your money. No matter what. Bezos passes, then Amazon's gonna take your money. Yeah, and there's this moment where you're like, like for instance, one distributor offered us $0 for the film and then they would commit to X number of marketing spend. And that seems like offensive.

To me, it seemed like, well, this sounds like I'm going down like a payday loan sort of scenario down the street, but they can do it because they know the path to self-distribution is so difficult. And so we kind of thought that like, well, we made this movie independently. Like, you know, we have this kind of like mixed resume. So like, let's just do it ourselves. So something where it's like, all right, we can cut the trailers.

We can make the animation. We can figure out the strategy. During this COVID moment, we know as well as anybody kind of how to get the film out. Yeah. And like the way that Matt leaned on his friends to help him out, we really have a lot of thanks to give to our friends and friends of friends who really got behind the film. And even honestly, it was very meager

little theatrical release, but like Tim Leig at Alamo Drafthouse, I just sent him a cold email as we were kind of contemplating this. And he emailed back like almost instantaneously and was like, I'll help you however you want. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And like-

At all of them or just the one in LA? Everyone that could have opened in September. So we had like 12 screens, but you know, that was super meaningful when you're like wandering off into the wilderness. The people that go to that place, that's your audience. Totally. So I don't know, hopefully like if things get better soon,

then we can get back into the theaters there. But like, those are really meaningful moments that kind of reassure us that we're doing the right thing and that people give a shit because at the end of the day, like people are just in

and to your point, like it's hard to find. It's hard to find because there's just so much shit out there. Yeah. Good shit. There's some good shit. There's also a lot of shit shit,

but like you have to sift through all of it. And there's two morons at our own office, like trying to figure out how to make this happen. Like it's a daunting task, but like slowly, but surely it's, you know, I think it's, you know, a testament to this, the film itself as it just gets passed on. The streaming platform thing is fascinating

and how it's kind of being accelerated through this pandemic moment. I mean, on the one hand, you know, when Netflix, in the early days of Netflix, it's like this is the greatest thing that ever happened to a documentary filmmaker. Suddenly all of these films that would never get a theatrical release,

or if it did, it would be in one art house movie theater for a week or something like that, now are being consumed by millions and millions of people. And yet you have to, you know, take into consideration at the same time that there is this weird implicit chilling effect on free speech when they're not gonna platform films

that are transgressive in any way that's gonna threaten the broadening of their subscriber base. And what is that? How does that bode for the future, right? You can always get it up like you guys did, but it does become a challenge to get people to see it. And we were lucky.

I mean, we had the film is about a viral phenomenon. So we knew that we kind of had Pepe as like our best sort of advertising chip for it. There was like people who were- All those people that care about that. Yes, hopefully. We knew we had that as an audience, but I think for other films that for whatever reason,

don't get picked up by just like the four or five people who are the gatekeepers for the entire industry, it's a harder path because you have to convince people to get behind the film, without having the most popular meme that's ever been on the poster. Right. Brian was talking about the idea.

That's crazy to hear about Brian. The dissident was being edited while we were doing color. Like I was watching the stress involved with that. Yeah, I can't imagine. I mean, yeah, the computer graphics animation sequences in that movie, I mean, very different from yours, but also, you know, kind of amazing. Have you seen that?

Have you seen that? I haven't seen the final cut. I mean, yeah, they were in the same color house. Right. So it was all the films that are going into Sundance are getting colored in the same place. So it's all like two in the morning, we're passing in the hallway.

I didn't see Brian, but I saw one of his producers. But he had, his idea was that there's a need for a new streaming platform to serve these kinds of movies that isn't about, constant growth that can create some kind of revenue model that makes sense and makes it robust and profitable. But the priority being kind of, you know, getting movies like this out that,

that aren't gonna be able to be challenged in other ways. The truth is that there are like so many unbelievable documentaries that just, that will premiere at festivals like Sundance that never get picked up and just kind of like get lost in the shuffle and. The whole world of verite documents. Like there's a genre of doc that doesn't get picked up by the platforms at all. And it's just the verite style,

which is just sort of like letting life unfold in front of the camera. And, you know, like there's this movie, the mayor that people should seek out by David Oset, who's about, and that movie is about the mayor of Ramallah in Palestine, the Christian mayor of Ramallah in Palestine. And that movie is an example of beautiful,

edgy, you know, verite filmmaking. And, you know, those kinds of films don't make it onto the platforms. And in part because documentary is kind of having a secondary growth moment. And, you know, documentaries have kind of always been funded as if they're kind of like charity cases. They're funded by sort of people who are like wealthy

and this is almost like a donation they're making. But the reality is you're right. Like there's a lot of amazing films getting made and there needs to be like a platform for them where people recognize like the financial potential and like the artistic potential in them. Right. Yeah. I talked to a software company

who's interested in backing such a thing for free. Oh, that's cool. In terms of the great lineage of donating to the cause of documentary. You just want to go straight to the pitch. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We're ready to do it. No, it's because we've been thinking about the same thing completely because like the information that we've gleaned from self-releasing, like we want to be able to teach other people how to do it because it is daunting, but it's completely doable. You just have to know what to do, especially like if the only thing that's kind of hard

to navigate. You have to have people who care about your movie. You have to be, yeah. Yeah. And at the end of the day, no one's gonna care about your movie more than you. Of course not. So like in many cases, the best option really is,

I mean, that was a big mistake I think I made with my previous film, Owned, is just like selling it off to the first person who was interested in like kind of shooting myself in the foot rather than having done it myself. But that's discouraging to hear about Ryan considering he did so well with, you know. Yeah, but I mean, I just, you know,

it just speaks to the, you know, tension around the subject matter of the film, which you'll appreciate when you see it. We gotta talk about the arch druid. I'm not letting you out of here until I hear the story behind that dude, because I mean, how did you even find this guy? Like what an unbelievable character.

Me magic was something people talked about in 4chan. So for months before we found him, there was just a card on the bulletin board that was like Meme Magic question mark. Explain what Meme Magic is. All right. Come on, you made the movie. Well, so we talked about earlier

how 4chan likes to self-mythologize, right? And anytime it can see these coincidences or stuff, it just regales and delights in any kinds of sort of coincidences that happen in real life that they've kind of been talking about. And so meme magic, I don't know, you're better at describing it.

No, no, no, you're doing it again. So meme magic is basically specific to Pepe. They already have an emotional connection to Pepe. Someone finds out that there's an ancient Egyptian frog god who's the god of chaos. And he's an anthropomorphic frog. And his name is Pepe. No, his name is Kek.

His name is Kek. Of Kekistan. I mean, people on 4chan have always kind of taken memes more seriously than the rest of the culture. So, you know, and let's kind of like broaden the definition of memes, not just sort of as like an image macro, the way Pepe is or a cartoon,

but even like something as simple as make America great again, or a catchphrase or an idea that sort of filters out through culture. Fuck your feelings. That's a meme, excuse me, just do it. These are memes. And so 4chan has always kind of considered themselves to take this stuff as important and realize that it's powerful. And to realize that kind of, they also recognize that they're like a community that has power with each other. They're a

congregation of people. And if they're sitting in front of the computer for 12 hours a day, looking at this stuff, there is putting shit out into the world. There is kind of this quasi religious projection that's happening. So people on the boards will talk about memes as being important. And then memes also having like some sort of esoteric significance, like these are symbols, symbols are are important. They have history. And so meme magic is something that people would talk about on the boards, kind of half as a joke,

but half of as a way to like self-mythologize and give importance to themselves. And so when they started to use Pepe, they realized, oh, Pepe is sort of like our signifying meme. He's sort of like our God. Oh, and then there is a pantheon of Egyptian gods and one of them is a frog and he's the God of chaos. And we're a bunch of shit posters

who want this chaos to like, you know, you know, disseminate through culture. And so people started to make all of these Pepes that were kind of a mix of just like historical, religious iconography, a lot of it from Egypt, but a lot of from other places too. And of course this fits in with like the Illuminati and all this sort of stuff.

And Pepe just kind of became this other like, kind of like focal point for this kind of discussion that was happening. And so people would talk about like these moments we were talking about where Pepe gets yelled at the rally in Reno or the moment that Hillary falls because people on 4chan had been trying to like basically put it out into the world that Hillary should be sick

and have this kind of medical event. And these are moments of like kind of strange confirmation for them. And so people would talk about this as being me magic or chaos magic. And so initially we wanted to find someone that could talk about this though, from a greater historical perspective that would give the idea some gravity so that it wasn't just someone who's talking about shit posting in kind of a

aggrand, you know, self-aggrandizing way. And so, but also in a way that's like humor, like in the style of the film too, right? Because you're talking about me magic. You have to accept the fact that it's a bit absurd, but you also have to accept the fact that it's also like, I don't know, it's like kind of true, kind of interesting. I mean, the connections are kind of funny. And then, yeah, I just,

I had happened to have done a podcast about my previous film. And at the end of the interview, they asked me what I was working on next. And we were trying to be mum about the project. And I just said vaguely that we were doing a film about Pepe and someone who listened. And I think I got mad at him afterwards. I was like, you gotta shut up about Pepe.

No one's gonna know. That's actually very specific. And then this guy emailed and was like, hey, if you're doing a movie about Pepe, you should read the work of this guy, John Michael Greer, who is an arch Druid. And I Googled him and the first image that pops up is him as an arch Druid.

And he's got this incredible beard. And I'm like, oh boy. And I push it. And he's wearing a ceremonial dress. And I sent it to Arthur. And then we start reading his stuff and listening to him on radio. Like this guy's actually like pretty incredible

and really brings a kind of seriousness and intellectual honesty to the topic of magic, really. And he gave us a really incredible definition of magic, which really fits in very neatly to what the story is about, right? Magic is about sort of people, you say it better than I always. Well, I mean, he's sort of quoting

this occultist named Dion Fortune. Right. And he's sort of an acolyte of hers. But yeah, they sort of talk about, obviously it's sort of all the trappings of magic. That seems a little bit like hocus pocus, but this other thing that they're talking about is much more serious. And that's the idea that magic

has always been the politics of the unheard. That if you are, magic proliferates and sort of happens within communities where they don't feel like they have any agency in the world that they live in. So it happened in like feudal situations. It happened among slave cultures where people didn't feel like they had agency

in their own reality. And so they would kind of create ceremonial ways of like art and willpower trying to affect their reality in a positive way and to also give them hope. And so, you know, he talks about Pepe as being a hyper sigil that people are sort of pumping energy into. And as we were talking to him, there was a moment where you're making a film

and you take chances on conversations. You're gonna try out a voice in the film. So we interviewed a lot of people and they didn't make the cut. And then when we interviewed him, there was just kind of this like vibrational shift that happened in the room. And it was amazing, fascinating.

Well, the setting. I was gonna say also because like we had to go up to Providence to meet him where Arthur went to school. And he happened to know that this beautiful old library exists there where Edgar Allan Poe apparently. I had known it because there's like a- Did you go to RISD? Yeah, I went to RISD.

And there's a decrepit fountain in front of it. And the joke would be like, you'd be coming out of like a party and you'd be stumbling home and you'd stumble past the library. And if you drank from this decrepit fountain, it means that you were gonna die in Providence. And so there was always this thing where it's like,

oh, you get drunk, did you drink from the fountain? It means you're gonna die here. But Providence has this like creepy witchy kind of vibe anyway. It's got HP Lovecraft, it's got Edgar Allen Poe. And there was this like little private library very near the campus of RISD. And supposedly Edgar Allen Poe had a crush on the librarian

and he wrote some of his like final poems there. So he could just kind of like basically creep out on her. But so we were able to film that with John and, but John initially, you know, we, we booked it and we didn't have much money. So we booked it at 10 AM. And I was like, all right, John, you gotta get there at 9 AM.

It's cheaper to book it. It's cheaper. And John was like, no, no, no, no. Like I won't be up until six or seven. I'm nocturnal. Yeah, you're nocturnal. And so we ended up spending a little bit of more money to film him at night,

but it just kind of elevated the whole thing into like a, it also just, we'd been doing this run of like interviews and I think we were kind of feeling like tired and then that just kind of reinvigorated the whole yeah yeah I mean I think within five minutes of the interview like I was just covered in goosebumps and I just walked out of the library to go to the nearest liquor store to buy him a really nice bottle of whiskey because I was just like I knew we had it like because it just his presence of the film is the sum total of everything we're trying to achieve with the film which is writing this line of utter complete stupidity

and the most like serious, important conversation. Cause there's an absurdist aspect to the whole thing, but actually what he's saying is powerful. And he was such a great sport about it too. Like he was very self-aware of why he was there. He gave us incredible, he was only a 30 minute interview. It was unbelievably efficient and like what he was able

to do, but also like was really helpful and like leaning into the jokes. Like he let us do this little. But he also gave us like, he kind of brought another kind of idea into focus when we were editing the film. And that was this moment. And you sort of talked about Matt Brainerd earlier where it's like, he presents himself in a certain way.

And so while we were making the film, we're like, all right, let's give the audience these moments where they have to decide where we're coming from and whether they're choosing to take this person seriously or not. And so with John Michael Greer, it's this kind of like litmus test thing. When people watch the movie, a lot of people are like,

I don't know the movie kind of the documentary went off the rails in that moment. I don't know why they inserted this guy. And then other people are like, oh, that's my favorite part. And it's also Matt Fury's favorite part in the movie. I will say too. That's not surprising. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, and that was kind of part of it too. It's like, who would be kind of the voice for this for Matt? And it seemed like he was the right dude. Yeah. But it's this kind of like lean in moment where it's like, all right, what are, we wanted the audience to be like, all right, am I taking him seriously? Why did the filmmakers choose to put him in there? It's this moment where it's like, all right, what are, we wanted the audience to be like, all right, am I taking him seriously? Why did the filmmakers choose to put him in there?

It's this moment where it's like, are our audience members going to feel like engaged with the subject matter in a way where they might choose to disagree with us for a second and then come back to it? And we thought that was kind of like a very interesting, interesting device to use in the movie. Well, I mean, he's certainly a guy

that I'd like to have around once in a while to call on for, you know, like it would just be cool to have that guy in your circle. But beyond that, what I took from what he had to say was that there's power in group consciousness. Like you can call it meme magic, but when you have millions of people whose mental energy is aligned in a certain way

and they're trying to manifest a certain result, like that's something that you cannot overlook. Like that's a hugely powerful thing because that translates into the behaviors and the actions that those people are gonna take. Yeah, completely. And we're talking about how this frog just caught the imagination of a group of people.

So yeah, the occultist is gonna bring it all into view. Yeah. How do you, I look at this movie in certain, it's very different from this other movie that I was gonna mention, but they kind of are like cousins in a way. Like, how do you think about the social dilemma and how this movie fits in with that one?

Like, I feel like those two movies could be watched back to back as companion pieces to each other. Yeah, I mean, I think they're both, I mean, as we've talked about media literacy, I think the social dilemma is a super effective film, especially if you're like a young person who maybe hasn't thought about your phone in a critical way. And so I do think that like, I mean,

that's why they'd be so great if they were sitting next to each other on Netflix. Right. I do. That does occur to me. Which they should be. Yeah, I mean. Tristan Harris was on Dax Shepard's podcast recently and Dax, thankfully, thank you, Dax.

He mentioned your film. That might've been where I heard it first cause I listened to that interview. Oh, right on. But then Tristan hadn't seen it yet, which was like a real bummer. It's like, come on, man. Well, I think it's good that these,

I think it's good that a lot of people are watching these kinds of movies, because I do think that like we were saying before, social media is something that we have to be critical of as a culture. And we have to realize how we are all susceptible to this kind of like machine learning and the echo chambers that we find to be critical of as a culture. And we have to realize how we are all susceptible to this kind of like machine learning and the echo chambers that we find ourselves in.

And so obviously his mood, like, you know, the social dilemma kind of tackles that at a little bit more head on. And our movie is kind of like a little bit more spread out. It's got this artist journey story mixed with this kind of cultural critique. But, you know, I do think like Giorgio mentioned that, you know, Feels Good Man is a little bit

of a youth culture movie. I think they both are. I think they're movies that are gonna kind of like, kind of open people up to a slightly different way of understanding how they ingest social media. And I think that's really good. And I also think that if you liked The Social Dilemma, you should read the books of Douglas Rushkoff.

Why is that? Cause those guys are repeating what Douglas Rushkoff says in his book, like throwing rocks at the Google bus. So, and if there's always been kind of, you know, Douglas Rushkoff represents this voice of the earlier kind of internet critique. And that critique has always also been kind of like bundled into this other notion that this could be

like an economic revolution as well in that there can be a more peer-to-peer version of our economy. And we're having this moment during the pandemic where it's like we're discovering that our economy, which seems in some ways to be doing very well, like the stock market is doing very well, that our economy doesn't need workers anymore.

It only needs consumers. And it's this other model that in order for all of this stuff to change, we have to realize that some of the economic underpinnings of our culture have to shift and change. And that's going to be a slow and kind of painful process. But ultimately it leads to kind of hopefully a more democratized system that we can all be part of, but we're just realizing that that has to be like intentional that we have to like start to make decisions and realize that this is not gonna be like, you know, it's not gonna be the matter of a couple

social media platforms changing their sort of, you know, flagging of truth or conspiracy, that it's gonna be like a series of like smaller, very intentional decisions made over a long period of time by a bigger group of voices in order for this to really change. You know, Silicon Valley does have to figure out a way to be more inclusive because it is like, it's ultimately like affecting cultures across the globe and it needs to reflect that. It needs to have like more diverse voices in those rooms. And I think that ultimately we're in a transitional moment right now.

And that if we sort of are able to understand the truths that like the social dilemma holds or feels good man points to, that we can have like a greater intentionality over this, that we can sort of like not give in to the machine learning and realize that we have kind of the ability to have the world be a better, more humane, more human place because of the internet.

And so I think we're just at this moment that's really confusing and I hope we pass out of it. But yeah, I mean, that's very beautifully put and I think a good place to end it, but I can't end it without bringing it back to Matt. And I think what strikes me the most about him is, despite the fact that he goes on this journey and he has these emotional peaks and valleys,

he never loses sight of his core value, which is to be optimistic and to always kind of double down on love, right? It's like he ends the film by saying, you gotta go hardcore happy. And that's clearly the message that you wanna leave people with. But in order to get there, we have to experience this,

this very cynical situation that you document, this garbage world to use Matt's words. But ultimately you end up in this kind of hopeful place. So is that how you look at this now? Like, were you able to go through this whole process and come out of it optimistic about the future? I mean, I think you have to be because that's how trolling works, right?

It only works if it strips you of hope and subjugates you to the idea of cynicism. And so the reason we wanted, I think when we first interviewed Matt, he said that hardcore happy sentence. And then maybe in the context of the interview, it felt maybe a little hippy dippy. But then when we placed it at the end of the film,

it kind of imbued it with a level of power that I wasn't personally prepared for. It always kills me every time I watch it because there's kind of a wincing when he says it. Because like depression is obviously a very real thing and can't be dismissed but there's also a truth to how you engage the world and that there's choices you make about that and matt's choice is hardcore happiness and like if you don't make that choice you're kind of like on a path towards the basement right and that's like one of our characters kind of represented and i I think he's someone who feels trapped,

the person, the basement person, who feels trapped by a machine that he feels like he can't get out from under. So I don't know. I think I totally subscribe to the hardcore happy catchphrase. I mean, it's not hippy dippy because I think like Giorio was talking about this wincing moment he's talking about the the look on matt's face when he says it and it's this moment where

you know matt does have this sort of acknowledgement that this is a a choice and that um it's a not an easy choice to make um and it's a choice that constantly takes like recalibration within all the sort of things that are happening throughout your day. But we do think that the movie, our hope for it is that like, anonymous people on the internet have used Pepe anonymously. And you kind of imagine that

to sort of all happen within a vacuum. But the reality is there is sort of a ripple effect. And so if you see the way that the use of pepe has affected matt and his family if you see if you are able to kind of observe that maybe they'll just be like this like subtle kind of um shift of perception that you have and i think that that's was kind of our our goal in in the end of the film and i I feel, I don't know, I'm someone that has, I felt hopeful just from making the film,

from working with the people who were so passionate while they were making the film. Those collaborations are actually have like kind of reinvigorated me. You know, I don't know how I feel about the future of social media though. That's something that I don't know if I have the same sort of social media though. That's something that I don't know if I have the same sort of optimism,

but I'll keep that to myself. Are you guys on social media? Yeah, I am. He's a Twitter guy. You are, okay. We'll end it with that. But what are you working on now? Like what's next for you guys?

Well, we're still in the- We're still in the- Pushing the movie. Yeah, we're in the rig of all. Yeah, but you guys are working on some things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you don't wanna talk about it, I don't know. No, no, it's fine.

We're working on an animated series we're developing with a comedian that I think has a lot of hope hopefully, and writing projects. I think we're gonna take next year to really like generate new ideas. But if anyone wants to hire us. Yeah. But you guys are working together now, right? Yeah. Cool. generate new ideas, but if anyone wants to hire us.

But you guys are working together now, right? Yeah. Cool, that's cool. Well, it's a powerful duo. Thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate this. Yeah, like I said, like I love the movie.

It was better the second time watching it the other night. I can't stress enough how everybody who's watching or listening should check it out. Please do. The best place to do that, I mean, there's feelsgoodmovie.com, right? Feelsgoodmanfilm.com. Feelsgoodmanfilm.com.

I really butchered that, didn't I? I got that totally fucked up. It was a valiant effort. We appreciate it. But you're on Amazon, obviously, you're on Apple TV. I, just as a point of, because I didn't know this until we self-released, but so Amazon takes 50% of the take and Apple takes 30%.

Go forth with that information. Go watch it on Apple TV then. Those two places though, right? And a lot of Vimeo, it's a bunch, we have a link tree on the website. Cool. And if you wanna connect with you guys individually, you're on social media, right?

We're both on Instagram. You are? I don't think you have to be so coy about that. Not being coy, it's just a private account, but I'll probably accept you. But you can email us through the website. We respond, there's no- Yeah, we have a lot of conversations

with people that have watched the movie and they're always fascinating. Yeah, cool. Well, best of luck you guys. Thank you so much for you. If there's anything else I can do, please let me know. Thank you, man. I really appreciate it.

All right. Peace. Peace. Good man. Thanks for listening everybody. If you would like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple

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Graphic elements, courtesy of Jessica Miranda. And our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love. I appreciate the support. Thank you for listening. And until next time, peace, plants, namaste. Thank you.