Feels Good Man

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for coming to the Carsey- Wolf Center tonight and for joining us in conversation with Feels Good Man director Arthur Jones and producer Giorgio Angelini. So I wanted to get started talking about the protagonist, Matt Furie, after watching the film, it's clear how much negative attention around Pepe the Frog weighed on him, and it seems like he'd much prefer not to be a public figure after the unintended controversy. So what were your early conversations with him like

about participating in the film? I'm trying to think so. You know, Matt and I met hiking with friends and our first conversation didn't have to do with Pepe at all. I'd been a fan of his comic book boy's club from back in the day. I'm an illustrator and animator and I had bought probably a couple of magazines in the mid 2000s. And so when I met him, I was like, I knew who he was. And then when the Pepe stuff started to happen a few years later, we would sort of reluctantly talk about it. And it

was something that I could tell that Matt mostly wanted to avoid. It was something that wasn't at the forefront of his mind, in part because Pepe was not a character that he was continuing to draw was something he'd stopped drawing in 2010. He was working on different kinds of artwork. He was kind of over it, but Pepe kept coming back and so we'd initially talked about maybe trying to do like some sort of like animated series. And I was going to try to help him facilitate that idea. The idea fo

r the animated series was that maybe we'd create like a little mini series where, like Pepe is pulled out of the boy's club apartment and goes and fights trolls and comes back. We didn't know exactly, but we wanted it to be like funny and kind of irreverent and psychedelic. And when we pitched that around, it was clear that like, no one was interested, then that means that people were actively, like, scared of that idea. Also, some people really, they didn't. This was at the height of Pepe being

a hate symbol, and some people thought Matt might have been like a Nazi or Matt might have been kind of All righty. And people didn't know what to make of the project. They didn't know what to make of Matt. And so at that point I remember being like, Matt, if you are going to get this story out, it kind of has to be a documentary. And then and then at another point, you know, he just kind of asked me to maybe help him do something. And I pitched him the idea of a doc. I wrote up like a long kin

d of email to him, and he and I on a talked about it and they agreed that this was to be a good idea. And then I started to reach out to good friends of mine and ask them to help because I was not a documentary filmmaker. I didn't know what I was doing. So I'm sorry. As Giorgio and our friend Aaron and a few other people and it just kind of became a real group effort. Fantastic. Well, given that there's a range of knowledge about Internet and meme culture amongst the audiences who've seen the fi

lm, who did you want the film to reach? As you mentioned, you know, there was ambiguity about where Matt’s position was when it came to developing Pepe and, you know, is there an audience that you made the film for? I don't know. When we put it out, it was really sweet to hear that younger people would watch the film but then make their made their parents watch it with them. It's like a reverse. Yeah, I thought that was kind of the ideal situation because I think even though it's a niche topic f

ilm, I think for sure we wanted for people to feel empowered after watching it and understanding the kind of chaos that's washing over them on the internet, to be able to contextualize it and understand it and understand that it's not random and that there is a definitive story and you can't just kind of like decide things are true. If they're not true, you know, like give people back their agency, give Matt back his agency as an artist, but also give people back maybe a bit of their agency and

understanding their world. But also we felt for all of the like sort of I mean, the media saturation in 2015 and 2016 surrounding Donald Trump was like so crazy. And there were so many different kinds of stories being told about him. We felt like there was this particular lane with this story that was actually like really important. And so we wanted the Internet. We wanted the Internet in this film to like, come alive a little bit. We wanted people who were deeply sort of entrenched in these pla

ces on the Internet to see the film and recognize themselves in a little bit. But we also wanted it to really work for a larger audience that maybe was completely unaware because we thought the story was like surprising, unique, but also really important in terms of media literacy, the way that people think about this. When we started making this film, it was a couple months after Charlottesville, and it's hard to kind of I mean, that was 2017. It feels like a long time ago considering everythin

g that's gone on. But there was this moment where you really felt the the darkest parts of the Internet bubbling up, metastasizing, getting weird and coming into reality in ways that were like, surprising everyone culturally. And we felt like Pepé was this, like, amazing young character, this amazing protagonist to tell this story about what was going on in America. Absolutely. Well, you say you were into the Internet, was coming alive and one of the better the Internet to come alive in this fil

m. And so I know you had a hand in developing the animation in the film, and were responsible for some of the graphics that make the film so distinct. So however, image boards and deep fried memes and 4chan pages are not particularly visually attractive. So what challenges arose in making a movie about the internet come across cinematically making memes 4k really tracing? That's the thing that you kind of don't understand when you watch this film is that you get all of these very low resolution

means and then you have to go into Photoshop and make them all 4K. And that's like you have to take all those 4chan screencaps and you have to take the text from those 4chan screen caps, and this is before AI transcription, What that'll do it like this and you have to retype that. And so there was just kind of like a very laborious element to recreating those very ugly, like kind of esthetically, like flat, unassuming images around 4chan. But Matt’s world was something that I'd always loved. I l

oved those characters and I thought that, you know, I had a lot of insecurity when the film started, like, could I make this story? Did it make sense? Was I the right person to do it? But the one thing that I knew that I had was that I knew Matt’s comics and I could I could draw like Matt or I could least like, attempt to draw like Matt and so we could make the animations and it really rad. But we got help along the way too. We had like three animators come in, Jenna and Kyle on the call to come

help us at the end of the film too. And they called it this amazing scene that you just saw at the end of the movie that was great Kyoe and Jenna did a lot of the intro. So it was like, definitely like a group effort for sure. But we wanted the cartoons to function in one way and we wanted the information from the Internet to function in kind of like a different way. And then we just had to make some some kind of, you know, very specific esthetic choices. For instance, you never hear Pepé talk.

There's not sort of people that are acting out these characters. It doesn't feel like a South Park episode or something like that. And that gave us the ability to kind of really use Pepé in a more malleable way where he can illustrate the story. Sometimes that would be bringing Matt’s comics to life, but then sometimes it would also be talking about the larger social contagion that was going on. And then in a couple of places, Matt, that the storyboards too, like for instance, there was a there

's an image of like kind of a planet of trash, and that came from directly one of Matt sketches. Yeah, that part. When Matt is talking about how we live in a garbage world and we also create a tremendous amount of physical garbage and that the meme culture also can produce a lot of internet garbage. What was it like working with this immense amount of hateful material, offensive materials? You're saying it was a laborious process to work through? I don't know. But adapting it for the film well i

t - just before we move on to that, I wanted to mention also that that the sound edit has a huge component. When you asked about the esthetics of bringing the Internet to life, I would be remiss not to mention our sound editor, Lawrence, who's a really brilliant guy, and his task was quite a heavy lift, which was like, How do you bring two dimensional dead space to life? And like, I know when I sat in the first test of the first pass, he did like moved me to tears because all of a sudden you un

derstand. And that's the magic of of animation is also, you know, when you put that sound on top of it, it really like your brain starts to create that world, fill in all of the lack of fidelity in a way that's like really incredibly moving. And he did really creative stuff. He would like. He would take a bunch of keyboards and make them in such a way where it almost sounded like a roaring campfire or something. So we, we, we just really tried to have like as much fun as we could with the kind o

f we knew there were certain limitations, But let's try to fill in those limitations in the most creative way possible. But for less fun, the less fun part. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Sifting through the bad stuff. Well, yeah. Shout out to our assistant editor Caitlin. I have to throw a lot of it in all of our editors. That stuff exists and, you know, I think that there is always that thing is like, Well, what do you show and what do you not show? What is your rationale for doing those things? You know, I

was a very reactionary teenager. 4chan was not around when I was a teenager, but I recognized a lot of the sort of like simmering anger, frustration and, you know, paralysis of being like a kid who maybe didn't feel as though they had options. And so there was a part of me that even though that stuff was gross, I felt like I could like I felt like I understood it in some way. But I also think that 4chan four as kind of off putting as it can be, it's actually like a pretty amazing space because i

t has created its own language, its created its own lingo, its created its own memetic iconography. This is like an illuminated manuscript. It's something that it's like been sort of group thought. It's like an oral tradition. It's something that actually I think is like really potent. And we have seen so much stuff come out of 4chan, whether that's like meme culture, things like Rickrolling, things that are like really innocent memes, but then also stuff like, you know. Q Anon, you know, there'

s been a lot of stuff. Anonymous The hacker group, they came out of 4chan, there's a lot of stuff in 4chan that actually has really dramatically rippled out into society. And I think that that's a story that like is fascinating to the team that worked on it and really fascinated the audience as well. So yeah, I mean, for better or worse, yes, I've, you know, Elder or millennial, so I experience a time of my life without the Internet and then the early Internet. But the earlier Internet was, for

better or worse, essentially just a proliferation of garbage. So like, I was pretty inundated in that world growing up. So like the shock value of having to sift through all of this imagery wasn't as fatiguing. I found as honestly, like, even though it's an anonymized board, I think I found myself feeling really the more time I would spend on there reading people's comments, just like imagining the performative hate, the real hate and the kind of like the psyching up of each other and seeing how

a thread could evolve and just feeling like real sense of sadness for the self inflicted cruelty people put themselves through. Yeah, And yeah, that, that I think affected me more than like the images itself with just being like, I can't believe that there are people out there that just like, spend all day doing this. Yeah, well your engagement with the 4chan users and meets in the film were particularly illuminating. The mail 4chan users regarded themselves as disempowered due to their neat st

atus. And you know, so the influx of women as a threat to sort of the male 4chan space. However, I wonder about the extent to which these men were truly disempowered, or how did you come to understand the mindset of the needs were they truly living at the margins, or did they over identify with their perception of downward mobility? I mean, in a paradoxical or ironic way, I think they thought that they were responding to political correctness in the way that media and culture was valuing otherne

ss, right? Like suddenly it became social currency to be different. Right? And their on one hand, their response was to ridicule that and to tear it down. But at the same time, they became, in a way, like victims of their own game at that. I think you're right. I think the degree to which they are disempowered are not unique to them. It's unique to basically the working class. I mean, this is a response of, you know, capitalism and the lack of opportunity and the expense of going to college and

all this sort of stuff. That's not something unique to them. But all the same, that created the one thing that 4chan excels at doing is, is creating self mythologies. And so it became very powerful then to consider themselves as like downtrodden because they're trading in that same social currency. It's like, okay, well, if you're if people are celebrating trans culture and these things that were marginalized communities then we're going to make ourselves more marginalized, you know, and it's li

ke totally misses the point and is unfortunately like the exact opposite response. Yeah. I mean, there's part of this culture is a clear entitlement. There is something that that a lot of these young men will feel where it's like they will feel trapped in whatever their circumstances they're stuck at home on 4chan. They're stuck at home playing video games. They're stuck at home watching cartoons and anime and all this sort of stuff. And they feel like there's no way they can get out of this. Th

at stuff is like very seductive when you start doing it, but after a while it's fatiguing and it's like soul crushing when you're that's all you do. And they imagine a world in which, like, you know, times were simpler where, you know, they might have met a girl in high school in their small town, that person might not have had as many options. They would have got married. They might have had a job. This is happens on 4chan all the time, but they feel as though they were born at the wrong time.

So they've created this like very powerful aggrievement that ultimately just kind of reflects back at them to their own misery. And it's like it's something that clearly is like self-reinforcing and pretty powerful for the kids that just get stuck in this thought loop right? Well, and by default, 4channers are anonymous. So how did you connect with Mills? well, 4channers are mostly anonymous. There is a system on 4chan where you can, you know, people do occasionally have names on 4chan. You know

, it's called trip codes. They have like different ways of also, like sometimes people will occasionally post photos or personal information on 4chan, though that's often looked down upon. He was someone who was particularly popular on a board called the Arctic Cave, which is the Robot 9000 board that's mostly populated by guys who are in the incell culture. And it's a board that Pepé was pretty popular on. And when I started thinking about this movie as a potential project, I knew that there ha

d to be like 4chan in it. I'd never been on 4chan. I remember like going on to for 4chan after my partner went to bed and I would just it would almost feel like, yeah, so and I would stay on 4chan for hours and just try to like understand it because each board has its own different, like vocabulary. It has its own type of kids that hang out there. And I started to see pictures of Mills there, and from there I found like a little information. I realized that there was an archive of videos that he

had made and he made a video that I just happened to click on. It only had like a like I was looking at the grid of videos on his YouTube channel and it was a video that only maybe had like 12 or 15, 20 views, something like this. And I clicked on it and it's the video that's in the movie where he's staring up into his phone and he says, What does Pepé mean to me? And I was like, Goddammit, okay, this kid's got to be in the film. Let's find it. So but it was something that like just the feelin

g of that video. Like I felt like he was reaching through the screen and talking to me. And so I'd found some information and Mills and I started to talk occasionally, and we would do these long, rambling Skype conversations, and he eventually agreed to to be in the film. So yeah, that's how it that's how it went down, right. Well, and I noticed that a number of figures associated with the alt right, like Milo Yiannopoulos or Richard Spencer, were not interviewed for the film or in the film. So

did you have discussions about whether to reach out to them or to interview them, or did you reach out? How was that? Yeah, I mean, a lot we put a lot of time into talking about both the imagery and the voices that we would be platforming in this film and less so now. But at the time there was a belief that like there should just be basically like an embargo on all these voices and you know, that giving them a space on screen is just fueling the fire, which, you know, in general, I do think is t

rue. And I think for the sake of those characters in particular, I think ultimately we just decided like we have to talk about them, but there's not really much that comes from talking to them because they're trolls, you know, they're playing a character. And so it's just being very selective about like I think a lot of people in the past have tried to think that they're in control of that kind of interview, you know, whether it was Milo Yiannopoulos on Bill Maher's show or like documentaries ma

de about Steve Bannon, you know, these there is truth. That platforming them just gives them more fire. But I think yeah, we but we still felt like there was a need to express that opinion. And Matthew Brainard ended up kind of operating as that role. But we went in, you know, very clear eyed about like what the mission was and what we were hoping he wouldn't we wouldn't let him do, which is like use the opportunity to spend like platform with him. And anyway, I think it's pretty well, yeah, at

the time it was also like there were people that were turning Spencer and Milo into like almost like mini celebrities and there were a lot of other docs with those guys featured in them. And at a certain point we’re like, this doesn't make sense for us. But what was important was showing the people that those guys were appealing too. We wanted to show that people who are kind of downstream of their, you know, their incitement essentially also those guys were really trying to basically create the

ir own like media brands at that time. And that was something that we didn't want to like even sort of, you know, platform cosine, what have you. That didn't make sense. And so but yeah, showing someone like Mills who has like a deep connection to the medics at work, we thought that was really interesting showing someone like Matthew Brainard who is an inside operator in the very early Trump campaign who saw the power in this. We thought that's a cool story that hasn't been told before in quite

this way. So we really like in this film, we tried to like we felt like there was a surface story that maybe everyone knew. You might get that from Wikipedia, you might get that from YouTube. But part of the journalism of this film is let's go three layers deeper and figure out how to get to like something that maybe people haven't seen or come at it from an angle that they haven't thought about. And we were just sick of looking at those guys. Yeah, but it's also to the comment of earlier about

aesthetics, it's like at that time, thankfully he's not really in the news that much at all anymore. But like when people would interview Richard Spencer, the aesthetics of his representation were always in service of his ego and it was very frustrating to see people just like this is going to be a maybe silly reference, but when Lucy holds the football, but with Charlie Brown like, I'm going to be the one that like makes him look like an idiot, but like, you shoot this big hero shot and you des

cribe him as like dapper. And, you know, you use all these signifiers. It gives him credibility in a way that people like him long for, Right? That's the whole reason they're using Pepe. They're trying to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I mean, it's something that, like the aesthetics of this, are very important to the movement of radicalization. It's something that that was designed for Louisiana, the the famous racist. David Duke. Yeah. Yeah. David Duke. You know, his the most famous The most f

amous, his big contribution to professional racism in America is the aesthetisizing of it. And it's sort of like adopting and co-opting pop culture terms. Words dress, you know, like get rid of the hood, dress like a business man. They'll take you more seriously. And so it was continually what was frustrating us and was part of the mission of this film was to kind of correct some of the way the media was portraying these people and just falling into that trap over and over and over again. Yeah,

that's great. Well, like you said, you guys wanted to go deeper than the surface story, so there's so many eccentric people also interviewed in the film, like the Occultist and the rare Pepe’s collectors. So do these subcultures come as a surprise to you? And were you aware of these esoteric dimensions of meme culture? How did they come about? Yeah, well, just very briefly, is the funnest part about making a doc is that it's the discovery portion. You can research as much as you want coming up t

o it, but the minute you start filming and following the stories, it's just like you find these beautiful moments of gold that you never expected. Yeah, especially. But you got to work hard. Yeah, that's moments of gold. You have to, like, kind of like, Yeah, you find one person, you're like, maybe let's find something. But anyway, yeah, the esoteric part of it, that was something that I, when I first started going on to 4chan I would see all these like, you know, animated gifs of Pepé where, yo

u know, it seemed to be pulling from all sorts of different religious iconography and remixing it. And whether that was from ancient Egypt or Hindu spiritualism, there was all these different things that happened. And at part I was like, well, this initially I was like, these are just jokes. This is just people kind of like mashing this stuff together because it looks cool. But the memes on 4chan carry layers and layers and layers of meaning, and there are people on 4chan that understand the pow

er of this kind of culture jamming and they talk about it in terms of, you know, a lot of different kinds of ways of talking about the occult chaos, magic. This is stuff that people talk about in 4chan. There's a lot of very smart people on 4chan who talk about philosophy and all this stuff. So people on 4chan started to self pathologize and start to think about the way that mediums move and culture in a way that was not just like trading jokes anymore. And so, you know, I think we found that re

ally fascinating and we knew we wanted to put that in the film because there was also part of all of this that was like, you know, in 2016, you forget people are like, how did this happen? This is such a weird thing. It was like the rug got pulled out and there was all this kind of like just head scratching happening. And so we're like, how do we sort of like, take this feeling and put it on screen? And so, yeah, we, we, we, we found John. Michael Greer and he, yeah, he, he, it's also one of tho

se things like sometimes you turn the camera on and you will occasionally do an interview with someone and you know, when you turn the camera on, this will not make the film from you end up shooting a second. Yeah. You end up double shooting a lot. So there's a lot of people that we interviewed who didn't make the film. Some were great, but then when we shot him, we were like, oh hell yeah. Like, you know, the air in the room just changed. And that's in part because he prepped. He knew the stuff

really well, but it was also like we lit it and it was just it really just kind of worked. Like it was. It was a sorcerer and it changed the totally air. Yeah. And it was like it's also like, we just want you have to also think of film just in terms of like casting anything, whether it's a documentary, regular film. Like what? What are the looks that people are seeing on screen? He obviously just has like a iconic beard and a great look. And so, yeah, and he's fun. He's funny. So what he was to

me is like the heart of the film in that like, you don't know if you should be laughing at this or taking it deathly seriously. Right? I think I'm on camera. And again, back to the aesthetics, it's like those are all like really deliberate choices. He's the only interview that we did that's I recall, like head on like that. And we gave him some gravitas on purpose to like, we're going to give the guy to talk about magic, the kind of realist location. It was like where Edgar Allan Poe wrote poet

ry and it's incredible space. But like, you know, whether you believe in magic or not, his articulation of the idea is very compelling. And it is a more, to me, at least a more robust explanation of this new phenomena that we have on the Internet. We're like, what happens when you bring this brain trust of people and create that energy and put it out into the real world? And meme magic, if you don't take it literally, is a very interesting way to kind of understand how groups of people can onlin

e can kind of coalesce and affect reality just by creating chaos and making noise. You know, it's yeah, it's fascinating. It's also a fun way to just kind of like address the idea of propaganda and the Internet age a little bit, which is like, you know, I mean, you know, flags are memes, songs are memes, slogans are memes. These are things that we carry with us and history that used to be, you know, carried in different ways books, movies, whatever. The Internet's just a new way of doing that. A

nd even though it's like a dumb stone frog, it still carries it like the same way as that stuff. And, and if anything, it's more trans mutable. People can like figure out different ways of like trading it and sharing it and remixing it and making it their own. And yeah, so he's just like, I think a way of also just like having the audience question the film too, Yeah, like because you need a film to be sticky so that people will actually just like sit there and watch it, you know, people, you kn

ow, everyone has a lot of competition for their attention. And so in this you're like, what were the why is he saying this? What are the filmmakers motivations for including him? You know, those kind of questions we hope to bring up. Yeah, like the, personally, I think the biggest bummer of watching a documentary that is covering something like a political topic like this is feeling talked down to or, you know, the message is written there for you. But we didn't want to make it feel like a news

story. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We wanted there to be discovery for people and really, like Arthur said, like really question the intention. And that was done deliberately so that people can hopefully come to their own conclusion in a fun way. Yeah, it sure was fun. Well, Feels Good Man premiered at Sundance in January 2020 and then the world shut down shortly after. Can you talk about what it was like to release this film during a global pandemic that limited exhibition opportunities and also may h

ave had a level of influence in the elections that were upcoming at the time or could have? Yeah, I mean, we you know, it's like we started the film with pretty humble intentions, but as we kept making it, we were like, Man, this is getting better and better. This is and we were more confident that the film was like interesting and that it had kind of like cultural currency. So yeah, Sundance was awesome. That was great. But yeah, I do remember there was another film festival called True False,

which is this great indie doc festival in Columbia, Missouri, and I was there with the film and I was like talking to a friend on the street. And as we were talking on the street, someone came up to us and at the time he seemed like a raving lunatic. He was like, In a month, all these coffee shops are going to be shut down. No one's going to be on the street. Movies are over. And at the time I was like, Who is this nut job? And he was talking about COVID and he was right. And, you know, so yeah,

it was this very weird, slow moving experience for, yeah, we took the film out and then kind of all the stuff surrounding the film, the election was all of a sudden start to see a very small because we were dealing with this like international crisis. So yeah, it was, it was destabilizing for sure what the, the motive of the film was always for it to be a reinforcement of like a creative project with your friends and building community. And so in the rosy colored view of the experience, was tha

t like it was a really incredible time and, and probably hopefully not one that will ever get repeated. But the good thing was like we were able to get friends and some notable ones, friends of friends to like really help us put the thing out. And we tried really hard to make the release of the film reflect the film itself in terms of the community of artists and supporting each other and, you know, try to make screenings, which seems obvious now. But then you couldn't do live virtual screenings

with groups of people at High Rez. So like, that was a big tech challenge. We had to we basically had to use the Internet about, yeah, we had to we had to leverage all the different tricks of the Internet to get it out, including a lot of piracy people pirate the out of it So yeah, yeah, it was a number to most pirated film behind Mulan. Yeah. The first week that it came out. So yeah, that's a feather in our capital. Yeah. Okay. Well, three years out from the film's release, the sociopolitical

landscape has changed so much. So now that we're post-Trump post pandemic lockdowns, what do you speculate is next for meme culture, trolling and whatever the next iteration of the alt right or political trolling is? I mean, I think people are more aware of trolling now culturally, or at least I hope so. I feel as though some of that like questions about what dog whistles and what aren't that people were like trying to figure out when it came to the Pepé conversation. I feel like there's an awar

eness of the way that like memes and the internet can work. I think there was also kind of this a lot of discussion with the film came out about how these platforms were enabling certain kinds of like algorithmic radicalization. There's much bigger discussion about that. So it's interesting, though, you know, we see people like, you know, Hughes, Ron DeSantis, other characters that will try to start to meme. And it's actually something that has to be kind of like totally organic. It doesn't work

. You can't be Michael Bloomberg and pay a meme team. It's something that kind of grows organically out of culture. So, you know, I can't predict what that sort of organic growth might be, but the world is in chaos right now. I'm sure there's going to be some pretty weird developments that come out of that. Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that, you know, fascism thrives with disinformation. And unfortunately, the Internet is very good at proliferating disinformation and the tools to create that h

ave only gotten more powerful, you know, AI and deepfakes. And that said, I will say that I'm kind of heartened to see how little of an impact that's made. And my hope is that, like when everything becomes when you assume that everything is fake, that maybe there you can re-inject some criticality back into the system again, as I hope where this goes, that could be just we just have to get to a point where people fundamentally understand that whatever you see on the Internet is probably not true

. You have to sort of start from scratch. You know. , Yeah, well, do you think we're living in a post Pepé world? Or put in another way, what do you think is Pepe's significance today? Well, I mean, after this film, I mean, while we were making the film and then after the film came out, Pepé obviously took on yet another kind of like insane morphology where he became like the twitch sort of mascot for, you know, going poggersor whatever. So, you know, often when we took the film out, when we wou

ld talk about Pepé, they didn't know about the hate symbol at all. The kids didn't know about the hate symbol, that they were just like, he's poggers, Pepe's poggers. It does seem like some of the Pepé stuff has dissipated, but I don't know. There was a big Pepé cache pump and dump like four or five months ago. Pepé completely still has this weird cultural stickiness. I think we will look back and be like, this is. This is the face of internet ennui. This is the face of anyone who spent way too

much time up in the middle of the night on the doom scroll and they feel some kind of way about it. This is Pepe. And yeah, I think that it's not post Pepe. It's waning Pepe I would say. Is it waning or waxing, when something's going away? I can't remember. Waning. Waning. I think it's waning, Pepe. Maybe. I think as long as he can make a funny Pepe meme, it's going to work. And what becomes funny and becomes harder and harder? Yeah. He's definitely not associated with the same sort of like, tox

ic gross extremist stuff that he was back then. I mean, that stuff still exists on 4chan if you choose to go there, but it's kind of like the, you know, it's like the bubble gum has lost its flavor a little bit. So I think most people, when they see a sad Pepe, they don't automatically assume that it's like some sort of dog whistle or something. They just assume it's a sad Pepé. So I mean, I think that's a good thing. Great. Yeah, well, I've heard that you were working on a new project, so can y

ou give us a sense of what you're working on or what it's dealing with? Yeah, we're we kind of started a project as this one was finishing up, that mines a lot of the same sort of cultural territory as this film. It's called The Antisocial Network. It'll be out next year in April. And it's kind of it's the story of or at least a sliver of the story of 4chan. It takes place over a 20 year period. And it's about the the teenagers who started 4chan and how they inexplicably just like, poked a hole

in reality and all this crazy stuff came just like shooting through that hole. So, yeah, now it's about this group of kids who created this chaos machine and suddenly went from being disempowered, you know, self-described losers on the Internet to like, all of a sudden having agency and the ability kind of warp reality and affect the world. And it's kind of a classic tale in the sense that, you know, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice or like, you know, Gollum in the ring, you know, once people unde

rstood the power of controlling this, like everyone like the story of the Internet, the story of Fortune is really the story of one person after the next, thinking they can be the ones to control this hive mind and then realizing like there's no controlling it and it's just going to burn you up. So yeah, it's basically the story of that flaming pile of shit being passed from one person to the next. I mean, it's basically trolling. Yeah. Is this the history of. Yeah, it's it's taking the conceit

that a lot of this trolling behavior started on these message boards and, like, escaped it and all these different ways. So they say, would you believe that January six started because like 20 years ago, some kids on the internet wanted to see boobs, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's basically yeah, that's what's hot anime. Yeah. Yeah. So but yeah and it uses there's a lot of like animation in the film. It's like a very stylish, fast paced film that I think if you like, feels good, man. It will be ri

ght up your alley for sure. Fantastic. We’re really looking forward to that when it comes out. So I'm going to hand it over to Tyler Morgenstern from the Classy Wolf Center, who's going to be taking questions from the audience and yeah. Well, thank you again for such an excellent film and for coming here to talk to us. I think what was really interesting for me about this documentary was the how you identify that it wasn't just 4chan that started the Pepe the Frog kind of meme, kind of becoming

nuclear, right? It was the bodybuilding forums. And I wonder if you could talk more about like why that particularly because it's such a particular and specific subculture, why it took off there and how it traveled from there and then on to 4chan Well, you know, the bodybuilding forums are a place for people basically to crowdsource information from each other, you know, because it's like people are figuring out like how to get huge gains, how to get jacked, all this sort of stuff. And so it's a

very reactive community. It's a community where people are posting something, someone is posting again. It's also very masculine. It has a lot of crossover with like pickup artist, communities, stuff like that. And so 4chan has always had a fit board and the fit board has always been very feisty. On 4chan and the Flip Board. Yeah, is a place that people would kind of talk a lot of shit about the bodybuilding forums because the bodybuilding forums were a little bit more based on guys just gettin

g jacked or yoked or whatever, and then people would kind of talk shit about that on 4chan. And so yeah, for whatever reason, this character of Pepe just took off as a reaction image. It feels good. I don't know. I guess it, you know, it feels good to get sweet gains or whatever, but it wasn't just bodybuilding forums. There was like he was popular on a forum called Shroomery which was like, you know, a mushroom psychedelics forum. He was popular on 420 Chan, which is a kind of side channel that

was more drug culture related. And then also the funny thing about it is Matt who is like very on Internet, didn't realize that there was an open link to all of Matt's comics on the back end of his website. And so they had figured that out on 4chan posted those links so they could just take all of Matt's comic books that were scanned in and just remix them and do all this crazy stuff with them. So that feels good man On Image for whatever reason, You know, I don't know who the first person thou

ght that that was funny, and I don't know if they were on the bodybuilding forum or not, but it just took off. You know, it feels good man to be yoked. So but I would imagine it's also about aesthetics, right? It's like there's a reason. Yeah. These guys are trying to in some way it's like empowering, like, you know, you see people go in and out of the transit, in and out of these moments of like self-empowerment. And of course there's a very healthy side to like exercising and staying fit. But

then it also it can devolve into this very weird, like [incoherent] -logical [incoherent]-logical. Sure. that’s a word. Like a jaw size. Yeah, yeah. They want to get like jaw implants. yeah, there's a lot of like kind of like the incel crowd or like, I hate you. It's like to talk about 4chan. You have to kind of use the, the words of 4chan, and sometimes that's embarrassing. We’ll avoid the gross ones. But yeah, the beta males of 4chan would go on to the fit board to try to figure out ways to k

ind of like, you know, hack their physique to make them more desirable. And Pepe became this avatar for like, I'm someone who sits too long on the internet. Maybe I'm a little gross and weird, but I like being gross and weird. I'm going to revel in that feeling. And yeah, I think that there was just kind of like a synergy. Also, Pepé just Pepé feels like a weird old Muppet. There's something about Pepé that just feels like instantly, like nostalgic. It's gross and safe at the same time. So that'

s interesting. Yeah. I don't know if anyone has any questions about how to get yoked. I'm happy to. Yeah, I'll. I'll leave that to George. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us this evening, Arthur and Giorgio, Thanks. Thanks. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for the powerful question. Yeah, they were all really good. Thank you for your thoughtful questions.