And you realize that Elon wasn't joking. Memes really do control the universe because memes are ideas. Ideas influence thoughts. Thoughts influence actions. And if you can influence actions from the smallest unit of production, then you can control the world or at least influence the action.
So listen, I have been down, as you know, the deep rabbit hole of memes, mimetic warfare, templates for speech, new power, etc. You are years ahead of me on this and spending 100% of your time on it where I am at best a casual dabbler and believer. I would love to hear a little bit of which I don't actually know. You and I have talked about a lot of things but not this. It's like, how did you go so far down the rabbit hole that you found yourself building the version of Meme Lord in Bubble and doing this ridiculous stuff and kind of becoming and working on this platform to be kind of the engine for mimetic communication? I just love to hear the backstory. I actually don't know it.
Of course, man. So I was writing on Twitter, just sharing my ideas, and started a podcast interviewing my friends. Jack Raines was one of them, you know, Charlie Light, he's another. And I found out that these guys were making money making memes and silly stuff. And I was like, that's crazy. Like, you know, that was my dream, was make money being silly, right? Not doing boring stuff, but being silly and making good money. And they opened my eyes to this possibility that you could do that and make a lot of money doing it. And once I found that, man, like it was like just following my curiosity and everything that I loved. And so I ended up writing this book called Memes Make Millions.
Um, and you know, the whole idea is this underground world of meme pages, who is behind them, right? Like who are these weirdos and how do they make the money? And so I, you know, found out their strategies, all the different ways that they can make money, how they find brand sponsorships, how they start new companies, how even they launch, you know, small venture funds and stuff like that, and how they, you know, use their audience and humor to make money. And from there, you know, I learned two things.
One was their strategies, which I then, you know, used for myself. And number two was the problems that they faced, which was, you know, having to be terminally online and not knowing what memes are coming out and scrolling all the time. They didn't have a good software for it. They're all using all sorts of crappy software that hasn't been touched in 10 years. And then the third thing was just how seriously people are taking memes and how seriously I should be taking them. And so from there, you know, it was a very slow evolution of just learning more and more every day. I've been deep in this world for 5 years and I still am learning something new every single day. And um, you know, I just wanted to build this software for me, my friends, the people in this book. And it turns out that, as you know, an audience grows, you find more and more people like you and like the weirdos out there. And so I built it for myself as the number one power user and all my friends, and there's a lot of us out there.
But so like I want to go deeper, like I want to go deeper with you on this because like I get it, but I kind of want to hear more. Like there's a huge spectrum between you're like, this is a lazy way to make money and like you're curious about the community, to like the level of research and investment and kind of what you've put into building this platform. Like what brought you... tell me the story of that, you know, how did you go that far down the rabbit hole?
Yeah, so I would say a couple things. One is seeing, you know, Elon say who controls the memes controls the universe. At first you read that as a joke and then you learn about Richard Dawkins, the creator of the word meme, who says that memes are the smallest units of cultural transmission, and you think about it more and more and more and more, and at least for me, and you realize that Elon wasn't joking. Memes really do control the universe because memes are ideas. Ideas influence thoughts. Thoughts influence actions. And if you can influence actions from the smallest unit of production, the same way that, you know, Elon vertically integrates his factories from the smallest units, building the transformers and all that stuff, right, then you can control the world or at least influence the actions, right. And, you know, at least for me, that is where the idea of mimetic warfare, you know, took hold in my mind. There's that good quote of Inception, it's like, you know, once an idea takes hold in your mind you can't lose it. And for me it became super, super important. And, you know, I didn't come up with the word mimetic warfare. There have been papers for 20 years, research papers, where I started reading those too. You know, most people think research papers are just physics and biotech, and I don't understand any of that stuff, but I do understand memes and psychology and that kind of stuff. And so, you know, 20 years ago there were proposals for a department of mimetic warfare for the US government. There's Army, yeah, yeah, Army, you know, research papers all about that stuff, right. Um, you know, Ukraine was running three meme accounts during the war trying to, you know, amp up their people and also make fun of Putin.
And so again, like I said, every day just learning more and more, um, to the point where, you know, it became my life and it is, every day is living and breathing this. Um, you know, from there just also meeting people who are not just silly meme lords, but people who are working alongside world leaders, working alongside billionaires, working alongside, you know, Hollywood producers and people who are having major impact who take this stuff seriously, was kind of like, it was surreal for me. It was like, holy, like am I not taking what I'm doing seriously enough? I wrote the book on it and am I not taking it seriously enough? So, dude, I wish I could say it was like this gradual white light, but it was just 5 years of like digging down a rabbit hole. The same way some AI founder does a PhD in, you know, AI, I did mine in memes and memetics and silly marketing. Um, yeah, I wish it was some, you know, white light acid trip like Steve Jobs or something, but it just wasn't.
You know, you've been following this stuff. You're building great software kind of with the key components. Like, I mean, I'm, you know, you get, you know, what's the trending memes of the day? How do you integrate it? Obviously, there's a huge amount there and a huge more to go. Give me your like 2030 vision of how the world works. To your point, it's like memes aren't new and people have been discussing them theoretically for a long time. The internet accelerates them, but where are we going?
Yeah, I would say we are going to a world where attention spans are going down. Internet online time is going up. Um, combine the two. People want to be entertained. Add in AI, taking away some of the work that you have to do, you have more free time. And people want to be entertained, you know. There's a book in the 1970s called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And this guy, you know, predicted social media in the 70s, right? He's like, once the 24-hour news cycle came out, he was like, oh, like, you know, there's a lot more useless stuff now, right? A lot more silly stuff because you just need to fill it. And now we have 24-hour news cycle, but it's all on our phones and all of us are citizen journalists. So the way that I see the world going is we are all becoming creators, creatives. It's the number one dream job. And now it's easier than ever to make stuff. It's really about having taste, spending the time doing it. Anybody could just make silly AI slop very quickly. But if you really want to have taste and make art, like, you know, our launch video, and spend the time doing that, it's really about storytelling and taking the time to do that. I see a world of like a very, very barbell kind of theory of like there's going to be more and more AI slop, but there's going to be more and more beautiful stuff that people are making at all times. And at the end of the day, like, you know, we're just going to be consuming and creating so much more in quantity.
But let me push you. Like I want to push you on this, which is like in my mind the big difference, like I would argue, and you can challenge me on this, that like marketing slogans versus modern memetics are different, right? And let me kind of give you my take on this, but I want you to push me on it. My take on it is like in the mass media culture of the last century, right, the thing we talk about as memetics or something would be something that like was fun to repeat or you would repeat in a social context to be the same as everyone else, right? It was like an expression of communality. And so controlling what those touch points were, effectively, of communality was a big deal of being a member of a group. The difference of modern memes and modern memeing and what you now do is you're incepting a template which has to be personalizable and riffable in order for people to want to transmit it, because what they're actually looking for is not I want to feel connected to a group as one member of the group, but I want to be acknowledged as an individual separate from the group, and that's like a fundamentally different dynamic. One, I'm curious if you think that's right or you agree with that. And two, I'm kind of curious, assuming that that's right or partially right, what does this look like in 10, 20, 30 years? Like, you know, does it stretch in new directions or are we in like a terminal state?
Yeah, I would say that's fairly accurate, but it depends on the meme template. It depends on the person. Some people just want to, you know, look cool in the group chat. Some people want tens of millions of views. Some people want to make money with it. Some people just want to make their girlfriend laugh. So I would say it's very different per person. But I really do think, you know, 10 to 20 years is like we're all pushing ideas. We're all creating content in some aspect. And like I said before, as attention spans go down, internet time goes up, you need to make it as simple as possible. You know, Elon said it himself, which is memes are the densest form of communication. You could fit so many ideas in a meme. I mean, I wrote in my book three years before Elon said that. I mean, you know, pictures speak a thousand words, but memes speak a million. And so, you know, if you want to share an idea as viral as possible, as simple as possible, you do it in a funny, simple, templated way, the exact way that you're talking about. Um, and I think we're all doing that. Whether it's the government is now posting memes, multiple governments, not just ours. And they're not doing it like people think that ICE is posting memes as like some weird fascist show of power. No, they're doing it for virality and recruitment because it's hyping up the people who are into it, like young men who are actually going to work there, you know, they don't care what other people think, you know.
And so, you know, I think there's also a fundamental difference here that we've been seeing for 20 years, which is the difference between propaganda and mimetic warfare. And so propaganda is not a new idea. You know, it's 100-plus years old. Edward Bernays, father of PR, you know, the Nazis stole it, whatever. But mimetic warfare is a social media form where, you know, propaganda is one guy to many people. Mimetic warfare is one to many to many more to many more, right, exponential. And if you have the power like we do to seize the memes of production, where we are texting people all day different meme templates, right, then what you're able to do is give people ideas, and we take that privilege and we're going to push out the bad ideas, I hope, and win the good ideas. We're in a time right now of idea warfare. It's why on the cover of our site, you know, the keyboard is the new battlefield. Gad Saad, you know, he has a great book that just came out about suicidal empathy, right? It is a terrible, terrible mind virus. He also wrote The Parasitic Mind. Um, you know, Elon wasn't joking about mind viruses. You know, Neal Stephenson talks about it, you know, in Snow Crash, right?
100%. One of my favorite things over the years has been getting to know Neal Stephenson. I still am totally starstruck every time we have a conversation.
Yeah, same. Same. I met him a few weeks ago at Long Journey's investor retreat and I just thanked him. I was just so grateful because Snow Crash got me started. Where I think, you know, I think what's weird is like I've had bad mind viruses and we all have, right? And especially right now we're all getting pushed mind viruses in different ways. And I think that's where we're at right now is we got to let the best memes win. And so if you're starting, you know, a vibe coding revolution, you want to use memes and you want to push that idea that you could just do things, right? You know, the you could just do things meme is, you know, perfect for that, right? If you're, you know, a defense tech company and you want to push the importance of that and, you know, China and we need to save America, that's a meme right there. You want to amp people up with patriotism, right, and excitement. These are all just simple memes and ideas, but everything comes down to the basic root, you know.
