AI transcript
0:00:06 Welcome to The Next Wave. I’m your host, Nathan Lanz, and today we have a great episode for you.
0:00:10 We’ve got Jason Levin on the show, one of my favorite people in tech.
0:00:15 And Jason has a reputation in Silicon Valley of ghostwriting viral content for some of the top people on Twitter.
0:00:20 Now he’s created Meme Lord, which is basically software for making memes at scale with the help of AI.
0:00:24 Now, most people think memes are just jokes, but in today’s world where everything is PC and bland,
0:00:31 memes, in my opinion, are the most underestimated form of marketing that you could be using to grow your personal brand or your business.
0:00:38 And no matter what you think of the current administration, there is a reason the White House and Elon Musk are constantly posting memes.
0:00:42 They work. And Jason is right in the middle of it, more than anyone else I know.
0:00:47 A few weeks back, he made one meme for Andrew Cuomo’s campaign and it went absolutely nuclear.
0:00:52 It was all over the place, all over X, all over LinkedIn, and it got over 7 million views.
0:00:56 It resulted in a Rolling Stone hit piece, death threats, the whole thing.
0:01:00 And while that was happening, he was closing a $3 million funding round.
0:01:06 So by the end of today’s episode, you’re going to know everything you need to know to start creating memes and go viral.
0:01:08 Let’s get right into it.
0:01:13 Jason, thanks for coming on here.
0:01:17 Dude, it is a pleasure. The first podcast post-raise. Excited to be here.
0:01:26 Yeah. You know, you were going viral on X a few weeks back, maybe it’s already over a month ago, about stuff with Andrew Cuomo using a, I guess, a meme from you or something.
0:01:29 I don’t know. There was some debate about it. I would love to learn more.
0:01:31 Like, you know, it was going all over X for a while.
0:01:32 Everybody wants to know.
0:01:41 So basically, I got introduced to Cuomo’s team from another founder, just guy out in L.A.
0:01:45 He says, hey, can I introduce you to somebody who’s working on a mayoral campaign?
0:01:48 And I’m like, it’s got to be either Cuomo or Adams, right?
0:01:51 I get the introduction. I meet the marketing team.
0:01:52 We jump on a call.
0:01:54 We start, you know, yapping.
0:01:59 The marketer is basically like ex-founder, ex-Silicon Valley guy, now into politics.
0:02:01 And he just says, send me memes.
0:02:02 And I’m like, okay.
0:02:06 So I pull up my software, meme-lord.com, meme-lord technologies, right?
0:02:10 And just hack away memes, two minutes, and send them over.
0:02:13 And, you know, I’m not in a chat with Cuomo or anything, right?
0:02:14 It’s the team.
0:02:17 They start laughing, giggling, and saying, all right, we’re going to post it.
0:02:18 I’m like, no, you’re not.
0:02:21 You know, they’re not actually going to post it on Andrew Cuomo’s account.
0:02:22 That’d be crazy.
0:02:26 So I go to bed, wake up the next morning, meme is on the account.
0:02:30 It’s going viral, 45,000 views in the first hour.
0:02:31 It’s going nuts, right?
0:02:33 It’s just a simple one.
0:02:36 It says, hear me out, a mayor that has had a job before, right?
0:02:37 Just a dig on Zoron.
0:02:39 You know, I was doing this for free.
0:02:43 I just want New York to be safe and not get taken over by a communist.
0:02:47 I’d rather my apartment not be a state-run grocery store.
0:02:49 So, like, I didn’t get paid for this, right?
0:02:51 So Cuomo invites me to a fundraiser.
0:02:53 We get to talk about the meme and stuff.
0:02:55 I talk with the team about marketing.
0:02:58 I write the post, and it goes absolutely bonkers.
0:03:03 You know, 7 million views, 7 plus hit pieces, Rolling Stone, everything.
0:03:07 And in the middle of that whole week, I was in the middle of raising more money.
0:03:10 So it was the craziest week of my life.
0:03:13 7 hit pieces, almost $2 million in the bank.
0:03:14 And what was the gist of the hit piece?
0:03:15 Crazy.
0:03:20 Was it like, I don’t know, right-wing meme lord helps Andrew Cuomo or something like this?
0:03:24 So provocative, right-wing, MAGA meme lord, you know.
0:03:28 And I made one meme saying I call ICE on my own employees so I don’t have to pay them.
0:03:32 And if you’ve ever tried to find employees, it’s really hard to find good ones.
0:03:34 So, like, I’m not calling ICE on my own employees.
0:03:36 Maybe your employees are my competitors’ employees.
0:03:38 But not my own, right?
0:03:44 So they literally profiled my memes in Rolling Stone, in Politico, City and State.
0:03:50 I said, you know, during this post that I wanted to save the West, which is, like, a very common thing, right?
0:03:52 It’s saving the West from communism, socialism.
0:03:55 And I was called a white nationalist.
0:04:00 I’m Jewish, you know, the whole white nationalist thing didn’t really work out well for us.
0:04:06 Yeah, it’s just a bunch of fake journalists who are unemployed in Brooklyn who are just yapping away.
0:04:10 People who, you know, can’t do it themselves and go build on Substack or build their own blogs.
0:04:12 Like, that’s the only people left in journalism.
0:04:14 So they attack people who are actually doing things.
0:04:16 And, you know, it was a great week.
0:04:17 It was fantastic for business.
0:04:20 This is the first time I’m talking publicly about it.
0:04:25 I’ve been saving it, but the entire week it was basically hit piece, death threat, investor call, more money.
0:04:28 Hit piece, death threat, investor call, hit piece, investor call.
0:04:30 I’m sharing my screen of these hit pieces.
0:04:35 And I walk away with, you know, a couple more million and, you know, some infamy.
0:04:36 So it was fun.
0:04:38 Well, because it just shows the power of memes, right?
0:04:41 It shows that people care about this stuff and it actually drives culture.
0:04:43 Dude, one meme changed the news cycle.
0:04:45 And it was pretty wild.
0:04:47 I got invited to Mayor Adams’ house from it.
0:04:52 He calls me Sunday night after the whole scandal and calls me Sunday at 11 p.m.
0:04:54 saying, hey, Jason, can we talk about memes?
0:05:01 And so I end up at Gracie Mansion the next day for 45 minutes showing Mayor Adams my software.
0:05:02 And you wrote a book on the topic, right?
0:05:05 Like memes make millions or something like this.
0:05:05 I did.
0:05:07 Yeah, exactly.
0:05:10 So I wrote the book three years ago, outlining my thesis.
0:05:13 Basically, attention spans are going down.
0:05:15 ChatGPT is going up.
0:05:16 People are bored as hell.
0:05:19 And you need to entertain them and be funny.
0:05:25 And so I bet my entire career on humor and getting attention, being funnier than AI ever can be.
0:05:29 And if you watch our launch video, I assure you that that would be the case.
0:05:31 And so I wrote this book.
0:05:36 Basically, I just followed my own curiosity here, which is great advice for anybody listening.
0:05:38 It’s just follow your curiosity and follow your play.
0:05:41 I was very curious who runs these meme pages.
0:05:42 How do they make money?
0:05:44 Who are these schmucks, right, doing it?
0:05:51 And what I found was all these different strategies of, you know, these kids who are running these pages, adults, whoever, who are making millions.
0:05:53 And so that was three years ago.
0:06:00 And during that process of writing the book, it was almost like, you know, Google guys, some founders go do a PhD in AI.
0:06:03 That was my PhD in memetics, in marketing.
0:06:06 And then I used that to go build my software, right?
0:06:09 I found all the problems from interviewing all these different meme lords.
0:06:11 I built my own software and then I raised the money.
0:06:16 So I had the thesis and that’s become a rallying cry for our entire community is memes make millions.
0:06:20 So, yeah, it was a transformational experience for sure.
0:06:20 Yeah.
0:06:22 And then I guess you recently raised around.
0:06:24 Are you announcing that yet?
0:06:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:06:27 By the time this is live, it’s currently Tuesday, September 23rd.
0:06:29 We are going live in 48 hours.
0:06:33 We raised $3 million led by Slow Ventures, Sam Lesson.
0:06:34 Ex-Facebook guy, right?
0:06:35 Meta guy.
0:06:35 Yeah, yeah.
0:06:42 Ex-Facebook with support from Unpopular Ventures, Bology, Serena Valson, Sian Bannister over at Long Journey Ventures, a bunch more.
0:06:45 Nathan was kind enough to invest as well.
0:06:47 You should disclose that.
0:06:48 Yes, I had to invest.
0:06:49 Yeah, I probably disclosed that as well.
0:06:51 I wasn’t sure to be honest with you.
0:06:53 Like, it sounded a little bit crazy, you know, to be quite honest with you.
0:06:54 That’s the point, man.
0:06:55 That’s the point.
0:06:56 I was like, but I do support freedom of speech.
0:06:58 I do think that memes are important.
0:07:01 And I kind of pinged Sian and she was like, yeah, support freedom of speech.
0:07:02 I’m like, yeah, I do.
0:07:03 So let’s do it.
0:07:03 Fantastic.
0:07:05 I was just on the phone with Sian this morning.
0:07:08 There’s a piece coming out about me in the free press.
0:07:10 So they just interviewed her.
0:07:13 You know, if we want to talk freedom of speech, super important right now.
0:07:16 And so humor is the last frontier, man.
0:07:21 You see it all around us as comedians getting canceled, me in Rolling Stone for memes.
0:07:23 Like, they used to write about rock stars, man.
0:07:25 I’m just some dumb founder who makes memes, right?
0:07:27 Like, you know, it’s crazy.
0:07:30 And so everybody just wants clicks, right?
0:07:33 You know, by the time the clicks were done about me, they just moved on.
0:07:36 And that’s the power of memes.
0:07:39 As I wrote in my book, right, you got to capitalize on the current thing.
0:07:41 For 48 hours, I was the current thing.
0:07:45 So journalists capitalized on me and made 12 bucks in AdSense or whatever.
0:07:46 I mean, we care about freedom of speech.
0:07:49 Maybe, you know, some listeners are like, maybe like, yeah, I care.
0:07:52 But I care more about, you know, how I can use this in my business or how I can make money.
0:07:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:07:56 Like, you know, what are your thoughts on how businesses can be using memes more effectively?
0:08:00 Yeah, I think the best way to do that would be a little demo.
0:08:00 Is that cool?
0:08:02 Yeah, let’s just jump into it.
0:08:02 All right.
0:08:06 So here you can see our software.
0:08:09 On the left side, we upload all the newest trending memes, right?
0:08:11 These are getting uploaded all throughout the day.
0:08:12 We’re scanning the internet.
0:08:16 And you can see examples of how they’re actually being used, right?
0:08:22 So here is, you know, that autism announcement one and different meme lords posting the content.
0:08:23 And we show examples.
0:08:26 And from there, it’s very easy to then go edit it, right?
0:08:29 So this meme of Alex Karp was going super viral.
0:08:31 That’s the founder of Palantir for anyone who’s not familiar.
0:08:32 Yeah, founder of Palantir.
0:08:34 I just did a quick little face swap, right?
0:08:36 Face swap myself into here.
0:08:37 And I said, hey, add my book, right?
0:08:40 And so here’s one earlier that I was just making is like,
0:08:44 this was a meta Ray-Ban that was getting turned into a meme, right?
0:08:45 Their new model.
0:08:49 And I just say, right click, switch the holograph on a lens with a Red Bull.
0:08:55 So we’ll try like, switch the holograph on lens with the Duolingo logo.
0:08:58 Let’s see what happens if the AI decides to allow that copyright.
0:09:01 But you see here, it worked with Red Bull, right?
0:09:04 And so you could do this with any brand, with any idea,
0:09:07 and tailor memes towards your business.
0:09:10 Now you could kind of imagine, hey, this is what Duolingo,
0:09:13 you know, an app would look like if you’re able to actually go talk to people, right?
0:09:17 Yeah, then they could put it on their X or LinkedIn or whatever and like make a joke about it.
0:09:18 Exactly.
0:09:22 And so what’s so cool about Meme Lord is we have all the newest trending memes that you could just
0:09:25 tailor to your business and how it works, right?
0:09:26 So this could have a hundred different things.
0:09:31 It’s like, you know, the sales manager, you know, meeting with the client who spurned him,
0:09:31 right?
0:09:38 Or maybe it’s like, you know, the VC meeting with like the, you know, the founder who he invested in
0:09:39 and then like ghosted, right?
0:09:40 He invested in his competitor or whatever.
0:09:41 Exactly.
0:09:42 Exactly.
0:09:46 And so you could just like easily add text here and it’s just very easy to do.
0:09:49 And so you could kind of just have fun with it however you want.
0:09:52 When you were changing the images, like adding the logos and stuff,
0:09:54 was that using Nano Banana or something like that?
0:09:54 Or like…
0:09:55 That was, dude.
0:09:59 So Nano Banana, I am very, very a huge fan of that.
0:10:02 And so Nano Banana, we use that a ton.
0:10:06 We also use VO a ton as well for video.
0:10:09 But really like there’s a hundred different ways you could do it, right?
0:10:12 And so you could see here, like just something I was making with, you know,
0:10:14 Meme Lords is the Angry Birds hitting this thing.
0:10:18 And you could just say like Nano Banana, like just making memes on the spot,
0:10:21 Nano Banana, like crushing ChatGPT, right?
0:10:25 We were actually using ChatGPT’s image model and now Nano Banana is better, right?
0:10:28 That’s Google’s model, by the way, for anyone who’s not familiar with it.
0:10:29 Yeah, yeah.
0:10:30 It’s incredible.
0:10:31 It’s sick.
0:10:33 And then we have a lot more than that as well.
0:10:37 We also just have straight up a magic meme generator where all you have to do is say like
0:10:42 AI startups and it actually just like generates memes on the spot.
0:10:45 And so there’s so many ways you can do it.
0:10:47 It’s actually pretty impressive.
0:10:49 VC is so easy to make fun of.
0:10:52 If you’re a founder and you want cloud on Twitter, easiest way.
0:10:55 Couldn’t this just lead to like a huge AI slop kind of problem though?
0:10:59 Like people mass generate like 10,000 memes and like schedule them all
0:11:00 for like the next, you know, 10 years?
0:11:01 Yeah, definitely.
0:11:05 I have a base take on this, which is I don’t think memes are slop.
0:11:10 I think they are hidden truths and, you know, there’s good ones and bad ones.
0:11:12 Sure, you can make some quick slop.
0:11:13 And some people want that.
0:11:18 Some people, you know, if they’re running 20 accounts, you need to just throw out some stuff.
0:11:21 But I think memes show hidden truths just like a good joke.
0:11:27 And, you know, the same way people used to watch Seinfeld or comedy shows like memes are just little clips.
0:11:31 And so what we’re able to actually do is turn these whole things into mini movies as well.
0:11:37 And entire clips, you know, our entire launch video, which people show and hopefully you could show this on screen later is was made on meme Lord.
0:11:44 And so we literally are making, you know, straight up movies on meme Lord, like, you know, little things.
0:11:44 Right.
0:11:47 And then we combine them into entire videos.
0:11:50 Here’s another generation that I did for tech Twitter out here.
0:11:50 Right.
0:11:53 So there’s a ton of different ways.
0:11:53 Right.
0:11:56 Like here, my wife works for a calendar and company called Howie.
0:11:59 So I use this as a tweet on her launch video.
0:12:02 And I said, hey, book me a date with my wife.
0:12:02 Right.
0:12:05 And so, like, it’s just endless options.
0:12:09 It’s really your imagination is really the only limit here of what you can do.
0:12:13 I feel like a lot of companies are kind of like scared to do memes or to do jokes.
0:12:13 Yeah.
0:12:18 But one thing I mean, I think people should think about is, I mean, now the White House is putting out memes.
0:12:18 Exactly.
0:12:26 Whether you like, you know, the current administration or not, like that obviously shows the power if they’re actually using memes on the official White House.
0:12:27 Twitter account.
0:12:28 Right.
0:12:36 And for a long time, Elon Musk has been a huge fan of memes, you know, and again, whether you like him or not, like he’s like probably the best businessman of our generation.
0:12:39 So if he’s using memes, you probably should be noticing that.
0:12:40 100%.
0:12:44 I mean, Musk was the one who said, like, who controls the memes, controls the universe.
0:12:46 And, you know, he’s 100% right.
0:12:51 If you control the ideas, you can control a conversation and influence it.
0:12:54 And ideas are upstream of action.
0:12:59 And if you’re able to actually influence people’s ideas, you can influence their actions.
0:13:03 And that’s what Meme Lord is really about is it’s a memetic warfare software.
0:13:08 And so somebody’s, you know, a founder out here trying to start a vibe coding revolution.
0:13:08 Right.
0:13:10 They want to, you know, build that.
0:13:10 Right.
0:13:12 You can go do that.
0:13:12 Right.
0:13:20 We’ve worked with a bunch of vibe coding startups, all of them, actually, every single one, basically, from lovable to bolt to vibe code, literally.
0:13:23 Or if you’re an HR company, you can do that.
0:13:27 If you are defense, you can spread your ideas with memes.
0:13:30 And there’s a reason why ICE is posting memes all the time.
0:13:32 It’s not just to be silly.
0:13:33 It’s to spread ideas.
0:13:33 Yeah.
0:13:36 I mean, actually, there’s like some crazy connection with this show to memes.
0:13:41 Because like when we first started it, I was trying to figure out who were going to be the great first guests that were going to come on.
0:13:44 When we first launched the show, like a year and a half now, I go.
0:13:47 One of the first guests was Erevin Srinivas from Perplexity.
0:13:47 Oh, wow.
0:13:51 And so Erevin used to interact with a lot of my memes.
0:13:52 I used to do a lot more memes.
0:13:53 I’m not doing, I haven’t been doing many recently.
0:13:55 But I used to do a lot of memes about AI.
0:13:56 We’ll fix that.
0:13:56 Yeah, definitely.
0:13:59 And Elon Musk would interact with him.
0:14:02 I think he responded to like six or seven of my memes.
0:14:07 And then Erevin followed me because of that and started sending me memes privately, you know, in DMs.
0:14:09 And then that’s how I got Erevin on the show.
0:14:16 So it shows like, yeah, you could actually build real businesses using humor because I probably would have never gotten him on the show without doing that.
0:14:19 There’s so many examples of this.
0:14:19 It’s not even funny.
0:14:26 Like of clients I’ve gotten, I got a $30,000 brand sponsor because I made a penis meme one time of their competitor.
0:14:28 And then they hit me up.
0:14:31 Like they’re just endless examples of this, which sounds absurd.
0:14:33 And I think things are just so generic these days.
0:14:36 So like anything that cuts through that actually grabs people’s attention.
0:14:38 Like you said, it’s harder to grab people’s attention.
0:14:42 So if they resonate with the joke and it’s very simple, that just cuts through things.
0:14:46 Whereas just everything else is so generic that people just kind of forget about it, you know, a minute later.
0:14:47 Dude, 100%.
0:14:53 So what I was saying earlier is you can turn all your memes into movies as well.
0:14:57 And so thanks to the power of video, you could actually like turn your scenes.
0:14:59 Like I made this entire scene on Meme Lord, right?
0:15:04 And I turned this whole thing into, you know, different videos, right?
0:15:09 And you’re able to combine this just as simple as actually just making them talk, right?
0:15:10 And then adding your voice.
0:15:12 And this is all in our software.
0:15:13 I just say, you know, image to video.
0:15:16 And let’s try this one, all right?
0:15:20 Make man play piano and maybe smoke a cigarette, right?
0:15:21 It’ll take a couple minutes.
0:15:25 I feel like some young marketing geniuses are going to make a fortune using this.
0:15:26 Dude, we are having fun, right?
0:15:30 And like we made it super cheap for users to be able to do this.
0:15:33 They could always buy more credits very, very easily as well.
0:15:35 And so like it’s just so much fun.
0:15:37 Like I don’t know how much you know about my past.
0:15:41 Dude, this is literally 20 years of culmination, which sounds crazy.
0:15:46 But I’m 27 and like I had a flashback when I was making all this to like being seven years
0:15:47 old and like drawing cartoons.
0:15:52 And like I would make these different characters straight up and think about how I’d like turn
0:15:53 it into a show.
0:15:58 And now like I’m actually able to do that and give that power to my users as well.
0:16:02 And so like we made our entire launch video on Meme Lord where I was in here.
0:16:05 I’m in my own software eight to 10 hours a day.
0:16:08 And it’s the happiest time of my life of just making stuff, right?
0:16:14 Dude, this would cost tens of thousands of dollars to do like if you hire an animator.
0:16:18 And so what you’re able to do is then, you know, so many people are just doing these little
0:16:18 clips.
0:16:23 It’s like, no, we actually built a video editor so you can combine the clips into a movie,
0:16:23 right?
0:16:27 And so you’re able to actually build a scene like I’m doing this on the spot, right?
0:16:32 And you take enough of these clips and you actually have a, you know, a whole thing,
0:16:32 right?
0:16:35 And so you say, all right, let’s start him on the piano.
0:16:39 And maybe, you know what, we want to add a little filter, like, you know, make it a
0:16:40 different color or something.
0:16:40 We could do that.
0:16:46 Like, there’s just endless opportunity to like fuck on and find out essentially and make
0:16:53 whatever, you know, the AI slop conversation is interesting, but I think there’s so much fun
0:16:54 to be had with AI.
0:17:00 And I feel really bad for the people that are so anti-AI that they don’t even have fun,
0:17:00 right?
0:17:05 Like this has been the most fun time of my life is making crazy stuff that I wouldn’t be able
0:17:06 to do beforehand.
0:17:06 Yeah.
0:17:07 You can imagine it.
0:17:09 And it’s now just like comes out of your brain, right?
0:17:09 Yeah.
0:17:11 I see this as the next family guy.
0:17:14 Like that’s why Cyan invested was literally like, she’s like, this is where the next South
0:17:15 Park will be made.
0:17:15 Right.
0:17:20 And so that’s my dream is give that creative tools to young kids out there.
0:17:25 You know, I grew up making YouTube videos when I was seven years old, 10 years old, going
0:17:26 to a video editing camp.
0:17:28 And I always dreamed of making movies and stuff.
0:17:32 And it’s very hard to do that as a one person.
0:17:37 And if you’re one kid with no connections, I was born in bumf**k Pennsylvania.
0:17:38 You can’t do that.
0:17:40 And so now thanks to the internet, you can.
0:17:46 And that’s really the goal here is give anybody the ability, not just to make memes, not just
0:17:51 to go viral, but actually like really make movies and break through the noise and make
0:17:52 beautiful creations.
0:17:55 And our team is going to lead the way doing that first.
0:17:59 So I don’t know if you know some of the backstory with me owning lore.com.
0:18:01 I was involved in crypto pretty early on.
0:18:05 And then a friend connected me to Barry Osborne, the producer of Lord of the Rings and The Matrix.
0:18:06 Yeah.
0:18:08 And we tried to actually create a movie studio together.
0:18:09 So like I like spent a bunch of time.
0:18:12 I went to the set of Mulan several times.
0:18:15 I was going back and forth between New Zealand and Hollywood.
0:18:15 Nice.
0:18:20 And the more I looked into it, I was like, man, the film business is absolutely horrible.
0:18:23 It’s like, it costs so much money to make anything.
0:18:28 And so obviously you can’t be creative at all because you have to just follow a proven template
0:18:33 that, you know, with financial models behind it, where you can show that, yes, people love,
0:18:35 you know, X-Men or whatever, or make another X-Men film.
0:18:37 Dude, it’s so boring nowadays.
0:18:40 It feels like stuff like this is going to unlock so much creativity.
0:18:43 It’s just absolutely like so much fun.
0:18:45 Like, so I made this in Meme Lord earlier, right?
0:18:48 And it’s just a cop chasing my little character, right?
0:18:52 It’s like, all right, let’s cop chasing bad guy.
0:18:58 And let’s say maybe he like picks up the cash and steals it.
0:19:00 And then he runs away the other way.
0:19:02 He takes a bag and he’s running.
0:19:03 Exactly.
0:19:05 Dude, it’s so much fun.
0:19:06 It’s so addicting.
0:19:13 And like, I think my biggest piece of advice for people making AI videos or AI art at all
0:19:14 is just be grateful.
0:19:16 Be grateful.
0:19:21 If you get an eight second video, if two seconds are good, you can then combine that enough times,
0:19:21 right?
0:19:23 You’re saving so much time and money.
0:19:24 Just be grateful.
0:19:28 Like so many people are like, oh, this eight second video isn’t perfect.
0:19:30 It’s like, no, like it never is.
0:19:34 Like that’s why movie studios film 30 hours and then only put one hour.
0:19:35 Right.
0:19:36 And that’s, that’s low, right?
0:19:41 That’s why Prince had hundreds of thousands of songs and Mac Miller died with, you know,
0:19:42 albums, right?
0:19:44 Albums and albums unreleased.
0:19:45 Like that’s the point of art.
0:19:50 Like people think that I write a lot on Twitter and there’s a lot more that I don’t post.
0:19:50 Right.
0:19:53 Like that’s the point is to cut down.
0:19:57 So yeah, my advice, if you’re making AI movies is be grateful.
0:20:01 If you get a couple of good seconds, a few, three, four good seconds, it’ll never be perfect.
0:20:02 That’s just making movies.
0:20:04 That’s reality of making art.
0:20:08 And so cut it up and then use your taste and skill.
0:20:10 It takes a lot of hard work still.
0:20:13 Like this has been the most locked in period of my life.
0:20:14 Like it’s so much fun.
0:20:22 Look, vibe coding is the fastest way to go from idea to shipped product.
0:20:25 And most marketers are completely sleeping on it.
0:20:26 And here’s what’s wild.
0:20:30 HubSpot just dropped 10 vibe coding prompts.
0:20:31 That’ll take you from.
0:20:35 I have an idea to an actual working product in hours.
0:20:42 You get the complete zero to ship framework with prompts at every stage from ideation,
0:20:44 technical optimization, and scaling.
0:20:46 It’s the entire package.
0:20:48 Get it right now.
0:20:49 Click the link in the description.
0:20:51 Now let’s get back to the show.
0:20:54 And that’s when this is all going to get better and better.
0:20:54 Yeah.
0:20:55 Exactly.
0:20:55 Exactly.
0:20:56 Like it’s never perfect.
0:21:00 And that’s what’s cool too, is you just like, if you want to just regenerate it, something,
0:21:04 a really fun feature that I think we did is we just show your recent prompts and all you
0:21:06 have to do is just press it again.
0:21:06 Right.
0:21:11 And then just basically like, if you want to tailor the prompt a little, but like you
0:21:13 just press generate video and you get to do it again.
0:21:14 I tweeted this the other day.
0:21:18 You remember like those video games where you’d blow on it to try again?
0:21:20 Like that’s what AI is half the time right now.
0:21:22 It’s like, it’s like, please just try again.
0:21:24 Apparently they even did that in Japan.
0:21:26 I was curious if that was an America only thing.
0:21:29 I was like, I asked my wife, you’re like, no, they did that in Japan too.
0:21:32 You know, with the Famicom games, they were, they were blowing on them as well here in Japan.
0:21:33 That’s so funny.
0:21:34 It’s absolutely crazy.
0:21:36 Like the stuff you can make today.
0:21:38 And I’m really excited for people to try out the software.
0:21:40 You know, I built the first version by myself.
0:21:46 I don’t know how to code and I built it with no code tool called bubble and grew it to, you
0:21:50 know, a hundred K ARR myself in nine months before I raised.
0:21:54 And so now we actually have engineers, we have money, you know, people already loved it.
0:21:56 The design aesthetic is very interesting.
0:21:56 Okay.
0:21:59 It’s almost like windows 95 or something like this.
0:22:00 Yeah.
0:22:00 Yeah.
0:22:05 It’s basically a, the way that my engineer described it is it’s windows 95 on Jason’s
0:22:06 drugs or whatever.
0:22:09 So here you can see like meme Lord is the new Hollywood.
0:22:10 Right.
0:22:18 So let’s say like man saying meme Lord is the new Hollywood and taking a puff of a cigarette.
0:22:21 Um, and we’ll see how that goes.
0:22:22 Yeah.
0:22:28 That’s the craziest part about building creative weird software is seeing what others create.
0:22:28 Yeah.
0:22:31 You never expected like the weirdest things like, yeah.
0:22:35 Do you imagine, uh, mostly like individuals using this or do you think a lot of companies
0:22:37 wind up using meme Lord or?
0:22:39 So people are always surprised.
0:22:44 It is mostly businesses or at least creators and entrepreneurs who are trying to build their
0:22:45 business.
0:22:48 But we have CMOs at some of the fastest growing companies.
0:22:52 We also have public companies literally using our software, which sounds absurd.
0:22:58 Um, but you know, when the white house is posting memes and public companies are memeing, uh, we
0:23:00 have entire teams using it.
0:23:03 So we’ve got, you know, multiple seat plans and everything.
0:23:06 It is, uh, it sounds crazy, but it’s B2B meme SaaS.
0:23:07 Yeah.
0:23:10 I think you described it as like the Palantir of memes or maybe somebody else did.
0:23:11 Exactly.
0:23:12 Exactly.
0:23:12 Exactly.
0:23:13 Memetic warfare probably.
0:23:14 Yeah.
0:23:14 What does that mean?
0:23:16 And is that like kind of the business model?
0:23:19 It’s kind of like a Palantir where you got like technology and services or?
0:23:19 Yeah.
0:23:24 The way that I see Palantir for memes is essentially it’s both software and services.
0:23:30 We really just do services with big companies now, public companies and soon to be public
0:23:33 companies as well as, um, you know, government projects.
0:23:36 And then we have the software, right.
0:23:37 Which mostly brands use.
0:23:41 And at first I started as a joke saying it was Palantir for memes, but I was literally at
0:23:43 Palantir last week.
0:23:43 Right.
0:23:47 Are they going to invest in the, uh, we’ll see, we’ll see.
0:23:49 Uh, you know, I, I love Palantir.
0:23:52 I think they’re doing super important work and big fan of Lonsdale and the whole team.
0:23:57 So at the end of the day, like what we’re trying to do is super important.
0:23:59 It’s not just silliness.
0:24:04 It’s not just make people laugh, but it’s ideal warfare and it’s getting rid of bad ideas
0:24:06 and fighting for the good ideas in the world.
0:24:12 And, uh, hopefully the market decides and people make crazy stuff and, uh, have fun and push
0:24:12 their ideas.
0:24:16 We have customers who are, you know, health food people, right?
0:24:19 One of our customers runs a dried mango company.
0:24:21 He makes mango memes, right?
0:24:25 But then we also have companies who are, you know, a hundred billion dollar companies or whatever
0:24:27 that are using our software.
0:24:32 And so it’s the whole gambit, whatever ideas somebody wants to promote into the world or
0:24:34 spread, they could use me more to do that.
0:24:35 Yeah.
0:24:39 Uh, for anyone who’s listening, like what’s your pitch to a listener of like why they should
0:24:40 use me more if they’re a business owner.
0:24:41 Yeah.
0:24:45 I would say you can stay on top of the hottest trends faster than anybody.
0:24:47 We are scanning the internet all the time.
0:24:52 So the second Trump says something memeable, the second that there’s something in sporting,
0:24:56 uh, something in technology, anytime there’s a big event, you know, first, right?
0:24:59 Like memes aren’t just silly images and JPEGs.
0:25:01 They are actual narratives.
0:25:06 And if you want to jump on some of the trending narratives and stay on top of that, you can be
0:25:07 a meme Lord, right?
0:25:12 Like we have very high up PR type people, right?
0:25:16 Who are using it all the time because they want to understand what’s going on in the world.
0:25:19 Marketers, founders, whoever, they want to understand the narratives.
0:25:25 And so once you get those narratives and you understand what’s going on, you can then tailor
0:25:26 it towards your business.
0:25:28 However it is, memes can be applied anywhere, right?
0:25:35 The same meme could be used in e-commerce, tech, finance, uh, you know, only fans, whatever
0:25:36 it might be, we’ve got it all.
0:25:38 And that’s the beautiful thing about memes.
0:25:42 At the end of the day, like meme Lord, all it is, is just a funny marketing business and
0:25:46 funny marketing has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.
0:25:49 It’s, I wish I invented funny marketing, but I didn’t.
0:25:52 They were doing funny ads in the newspaper 300, 400 years ago.
0:25:58 So if you want to, you know, leverage funny marketing as one of the tools in your tool
0:26:00 belt, meme Lord is the company for you.
0:26:02 There’s plenty of other marketing tools.
0:26:07 We’re not the SEO tool, you know, we’re the funny marketing tool and, uh, it’s becoming more
0:26:12 and more important, uh, in the age where anybody could build anything, but it’s harder and harder
0:26:13 to get attention.
0:26:14 Uh, you got to stand out.
0:26:14 Cool.
0:26:16 That would be the pitch.
0:26:16 Yeah.
0:26:16 Yeah.
0:26:17 It’s a good pitch.
0:26:18 It’s a good pitch.
0:26:18 I appreciate it, man.
0:26:19 I appreciate it.
0:26:25 I’m curious on your end, uh, what you’ve been, uh, seeing on the AI front these days.
0:26:27 I feel like there’s a new model every day.
0:26:30 Are there any, any that have been super fun or?
0:26:34 There’s like model fatigue is setting in, you know, it’s like, there’s always a new model.
0:26:38 And before the podcast, I was covering all of it on Twitter X, you know, for like, I guess
0:26:40 the last three years now.
0:26:43 And, uh, you know, uh, you know, GPT-5 is amazing.
0:26:46 I’m excited about it, but you know, it’s like, okay, something came out and it’s slightly
0:26:46 better.
0:26:50 I’m, yeah, I’m more and more getting interested in like, okay, what can you actually do with
0:26:53 the models versus just like, oh, the model’s slightly more intelligent.
0:26:55 Oh, 100%, man.
0:27:00 Like every day there’s just a new model that like, should we integrate this?
0:27:01 Should we not integrate this?
0:27:06 It must be really weird being one of these companies right now.
0:27:12 And at the same time you’re building a 10 billion dollar, trillion dollar business, but at the
0:27:15 same time you also have no moat, like numbers are just fake at this point.
0:27:16 It’s crazy.
0:27:17 They may be.
0:27:19 I think that’s what some of these people actually realizing.
0:27:19 Yeah.
0:27:25 I was talking to one of our investors, Ariel Zuckerberg about how Mark is thinking about this
0:27:25 stuff, right?
0:27:29 I was at an investor retreat with her a few weeks ago and it was really cool.
0:27:34 She was just saying like, he is such a wartime CEO because like all these rumors were coming
0:27:39 out about how he’s giving these big offers and she’s like, when he’s feels behind, he
0:27:40 goes crazy.
0:27:42 Just like work so hard.
0:27:45 Well, yeah, because with AI, like Facebook and Instagram could become pointless in the
0:27:45 future.
0:27:47 Like you might not even need them.
0:27:50 The whole interface may change in the future because AI.
0:27:50 You got to win this.
0:27:58 And what I think is also really cool is just like, yes, there is this AGI coming, whatever.
0:28:00 Like who really knows what that means?
0:28:04 But at the same time, like, I think what we’re all realizing is like, hopefully we’ll have a
0:28:06 lot more time to create and make cool stuff.
0:28:09 And I’m personally very excited about that as a meme lord.
0:28:14 When I first invested in your company, I started watching your Silly Valley episodes on YouTube.
0:28:16 I know you stopped doing that, I think, or at least put it on hiatus for now.
0:28:18 But what was that about?
0:28:19 Like, how did that get started?
0:28:20 Yeah.
0:28:22 So I believe like software is the future of content.
0:28:25 And that’s kind of an expression of that.
0:28:29 So every episode we just built something really fast.
0:28:33 And so the first one was called Duo F***go, which was Duolingo for cursing.
0:28:36 And you like went, pitched it to New York VCs and stuff like that.
0:28:39 Pitched to VCs, did a whole viral campaign.
0:28:45 And then we pretended to vibe code Palantir, which like, you know, you could vibe code very
0:28:45 simple apps.
0:28:46 You can’t vibe code Palantir.
0:28:47 We found out.
0:28:47 Right.
0:28:50 And, you know, software is content.
0:28:52 It’s getting easier and easier to make software.
0:28:56 I think there’s something fun about that in a show format.
0:29:00 And we’re still going to be doing a bunch of shows and silly stuff.
0:29:06 Really, just like during the raise, what happened was I just got way too busy to be filming every
0:29:06 week.
0:29:09 I was like, wow, these episodes are like pretty well put together.
0:29:10 It’s a lot of work.
0:29:14 But, you know, we’re going to try to be getting back on these as we scale out the team.
0:29:18 But at the end of the day, we got to focus on the software business.
0:29:19 Yeah, that is what I was wondering.
0:29:24 Like, you’re like VC backed startup, but you’re like making revenue off of YouTube sponsorships
0:29:25 from other companies.
0:29:26 Yeah, 100 percent.
0:29:29 100 percent, which it was great for reducing burn for a while.
0:29:33 But now it’s not as necessary with a few million in the bank.
0:29:34 So, yeah.
0:29:34 So, yeah.
0:29:36 So with a few million in the bank, like what’s next?
0:29:42 So what’s next is we build Mean Lord into a premiere place to make movies.
0:29:45 You know, all these people are thinking too small, in my opinion.
0:29:48 They’re trying to build apps for for TikToks.
0:29:50 And I’m trying to build movies, man.
0:29:55 Like that’s what we want is real software to build movies and start movements.
0:30:02 And so to do that, one of the big reasons we raised was to help make it cheaper for users
0:30:05 to create movies and videos.
0:30:09 When you say movies, I mean, do you mean like for like any purpose, like whether it’s entertainment
0:30:12 or education or marketing or?
0:30:12 Yeah, yeah.
0:30:13 A hundred percent.
0:30:16 So, so Meme Lord, like you could upload videos of yourself.
0:30:21 You know, a movie studio could upload videos like, you know, a kid in India can animate something.
0:30:25 It could be used for anything the same way that, you know, Final Cut or Adobe Premiere can be
0:30:26 used.
0:30:31 And it’s cheap enough at the $42 a month price range that that anybody could use it.
0:30:35 And really, you know, memes are the gateway drug into making movies.
0:30:38 You know, memes are the silliness.
0:30:40 They’re the smallest unit of cultural transmission.
0:30:44 But, but the bigger picture is, is to make movies and movements.
0:30:46 And there’s a reason that’s what we’re going after.
0:30:47 That makes sense to me.
0:30:51 I mean, I think because of AI, work’s really going to change and people are going to want
0:30:52 to do more creative work.
0:30:54 And then it’s awesome that AI enables that.
0:30:57 I mean, I, one guy made our entire launch video.
0:31:01 I did the storyboarding on Meme Lord on our infinite canvas.
0:31:02 Are we able to see it or no?
0:31:03 It’ll be on Twitter.
0:31:04 We’re still putting finishing touches on.
0:31:05 Yeah.
0:31:10 I mean, one guy just did this whole movie, whereas I did the scripting and then I did the
0:31:13 creating and the characters and different variations.
0:31:17 AI edit, make me a guy with a t-shirt, make me a guy with a blue shirt, make me a guy with
0:31:22 a green shirt, and then combining them into scenes, then pressing, hey, AI, turn the scene
0:31:23 into a video.
0:31:28 These characters down to the storyboard and everything.
0:31:30 It was all made on Meme Lord, right?
0:31:37 And this is what I want to give to the world is for people to make all their crazy ideas
0:31:38 and dreams possible.
0:31:40 The future is going to be so much fun.
0:31:42 I think people should be more optimistic about where things are happening.
0:31:43 Dude, me too, man.
0:31:47 I mean, there’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the world, but there’s also a lot of beautiful
0:31:47 stuff.
0:31:52 I look at the AI Doomerous and I look at my broke friends.
0:31:55 It sounds bad, but I look at friends in comedy.
0:31:57 You know, we were all stoner artist types.
0:32:02 And I made it out of the stoner artist type and found the tech world a little bit, I guess,
0:32:03 six years ago, seven years ago.
0:32:07 But we were all just like stoner artist dreamy types as a teenager.
0:32:13 And most of them are stuck in Brooklyn and doing comedy for 10 bucks an hour or whatever.
0:32:15 And they hate AI.
0:32:17 They hate technology.
0:32:19 Hate capitalism, probably, like in that situation, if I had assumed.
0:32:20 Yeah.
0:32:22 Hate capitalism because they’re bad at it.
0:32:23 That’s my hot take.
0:32:25 People hate capitalism because they’re bad at it.
0:32:28 Get AI to help train them to teach them how to be good at capitalism.
0:32:30 They could be having so much fun.
0:32:33 I don’t feel bad because they’re broke and working as a substitute teacher.
0:32:35 I feel bad because they’re missing out on the fun.
0:32:36 Wait, why doesn’t that exist?
0:32:39 There need to be something that’s like a capitalism 101, like AI power.
0:32:42 Like, why is it better than the alternatives?
0:32:45 It’s not perfect, but why is it better than the alternatives and then how to play the game?
0:32:45 100%.
0:32:47 I am having fun.
0:32:52 You could be having so much more fun if you just leaned into the technological revolution
0:32:55 and AI revolution that is going on right now.
0:33:01 Like, you could be angry and sad and pessimistic, or you could be like, you know what?
0:33:05 I’m going to have a good time and I’m going to make some cool stuff and I’m going to get
0:33:09 rich and I’m going to get my whole squad rich and I’m going to retire my parents off
0:33:10 of silliness.
0:33:11 That’s my plan.
0:33:14 I don’t know about the people listening, but that’s my plan personally.
0:33:15 That’s a great story.
0:33:17 That might probably be like your final book in life, right?
0:33:20 You like write that whole story from A to Z.
0:33:20 I hope so.
0:33:22 Dude, like AI can’t do this, right?
0:33:25 AI can’t make this kind of fun right here, you know?
0:33:29 I heard you used to like ghostwrite for some pretty well-known people as well.
0:33:29 Yeah, yeah.
0:33:30 That was three years ago.
0:33:34 So I used to ghostwrite for a lot of founders and VCs.
0:33:36 You know, one of them was Danny Grant.
0:33:41 I could say that we worked together for three or four years and big fan of Jam.
0:33:47 And that was really when I leaned into funny marketing was working with these founders and
0:33:50 VCs was like, wait, you guys want me to be funny.
0:33:53 So you get more attention and that makes me money.
0:33:55 Okay, sure.
0:33:57 Like, I don’t have to do the serious stuff.
0:33:58 Like, I don’t know.
0:33:59 Okay.
0:33:59 All right.
0:34:01 Like, I could write serious stuff.
0:34:02 I was a journalist for a bit.
0:34:05 You know, I know how to do that, but I’d much prefer to be silly.
0:34:11 There’s a fun question I like to ask people, which I have no idea what you’re going to say,
0:34:13 because I think you’re very different than our typical guests.
0:34:17 But let’s say you step into a time machine in New York.
0:34:20 You step out and it’s the year 2050.
0:34:21 What are things like?
0:34:22 What has changed?
0:34:22 What do you say?
0:34:25 It can be technology, politics, whatever you want to talk about.
0:34:28 Whatever you think will have changed in that time period.
0:34:33 I think the internet and being on social media makes you think things are a lot crazier than
0:34:34 they are.
0:34:39 But every day that my wife and I walk through Central Park, we’re like, ah, it’s pretty cool.
0:34:40 Life’s pretty good.
0:34:46 And so I think if AI really and tech is going to, you know, make us a lot more free time,
0:34:52 I think we’ll see a lot more people making art in the streets and filming more and more
0:34:58 movies and maybe, you know, reading in the park more and listening to podcasts.
0:35:00 I think we’ll see more people out again.
0:35:00 Yeah.
0:35:06 I do think we’re hitting this point of like late stage phone addiction as well, where
0:35:10 like, you know, at the same time of all this happening is like people are going to want
0:35:15 to spend more time with friends and family and making art together and so stuff.
0:35:17 I think they’re actually going to have more time as well, right?
0:35:22 Because I mean, as AI gets better, a lot of tedious work, I think you’ll be able to like
0:35:25 have your AI do that for you.
0:35:25 Yeah.
0:35:30 And I think harkening back to our first conversation about politics in New York, I know this is
0:35:35 not like a political thing, but I do want to leave with this, which is I think New York
0:35:36 is a very resilient place.
0:35:42 And whether it’s Zohram, I’m Donnie or whoever that ends up winning, I think New York will be
0:35:43 okay.
0:35:46 And I plan to be here at least for the long haul.
0:35:50 So I really hope that we just keep building cool stuff, man.
0:35:55 Like building cool stuff and hopefully I’m walking around New York filming crazy stuff
0:35:59 with my kids and grandkids probably in 50 years.
0:36:00 So that’s awesome.
0:36:01 Yeah, that’s been awesome having you on here.
0:36:03 How can people find you online?
0:36:06 So we officially bought the domain.
0:36:08 We are now live at memelord.com.
0:36:11 You could go there, give it a try for free.
0:36:14 It is then $42 per month.
0:36:20 You get a load of AI credits, unlimited AI image generation, all the newest trending memes.
0:36:22 Also just hit me up on Twitter.
0:36:23 I respond to DMs.
0:36:27 It’s just, I am Jason Levin and send the death threats to my lawyer.
0:36:29 Great.
0:36:31 Jason, this has been awesome, man.
0:36:32 Thanks for coming on.
0:36:32 All right.
0:36:32 Thank you.
0:36:33 Of course.
0:36:33 I’ll talk to you later.
0:36:34 Yep.
0:36:45 I’ll talk to you later.
0:00:10 We’ve got Jason Levin on the show, one of my favorite people in tech.
0:00:15 And Jason has a reputation in Silicon Valley of ghostwriting viral content for some of the top people on Twitter.
0:00:20 Now he’s created Meme Lord, which is basically software for making memes at scale with the help of AI.
0:00:24 Now, most people think memes are just jokes, but in today’s world where everything is PC and bland,
0:00:31 memes, in my opinion, are the most underestimated form of marketing that you could be using to grow your personal brand or your business.
0:00:38 And no matter what you think of the current administration, there is a reason the White House and Elon Musk are constantly posting memes.
0:00:42 They work. And Jason is right in the middle of it, more than anyone else I know.
0:00:47 A few weeks back, he made one meme for Andrew Cuomo’s campaign and it went absolutely nuclear.
0:00:52 It was all over the place, all over X, all over LinkedIn, and it got over 7 million views.
0:00:56 It resulted in a Rolling Stone hit piece, death threats, the whole thing.
0:01:00 And while that was happening, he was closing a $3 million funding round.
0:01:06 So by the end of today’s episode, you’re going to know everything you need to know to start creating memes and go viral.
0:01:08 Let’s get right into it.
0:01:13 Jason, thanks for coming on here.
0:01:17 Dude, it is a pleasure. The first podcast post-raise. Excited to be here.
0:01:26 Yeah. You know, you were going viral on X a few weeks back, maybe it’s already over a month ago, about stuff with Andrew Cuomo using a, I guess, a meme from you or something.
0:01:29 I don’t know. There was some debate about it. I would love to learn more.
0:01:31 Like, you know, it was going all over X for a while.
0:01:32 Everybody wants to know.
0:01:41 So basically, I got introduced to Cuomo’s team from another founder, just guy out in L.A.
0:01:45 He says, hey, can I introduce you to somebody who’s working on a mayoral campaign?
0:01:48 And I’m like, it’s got to be either Cuomo or Adams, right?
0:01:51 I get the introduction. I meet the marketing team.
0:01:52 We jump on a call.
0:01:54 We start, you know, yapping.
0:01:59 The marketer is basically like ex-founder, ex-Silicon Valley guy, now into politics.
0:02:01 And he just says, send me memes.
0:02:02 And I’m like, okay.
0:02:06 So I pull up my software, meme-lord.com, meme-lord technologies, right?
0:02:10 And just hack away memes, two minutes, and send them over.
0:02:13 And, you know, I’m not in a chat with Cuomo or anything, right?
0:02:14 It’s the team.
0:02:17 They start laughing, giggling, and saying, all right, we’re going to post it.
0:02:18 I’m like, no, you’re not.
0:02:21 You know, they’re not actually going to post it on Andrew Cuomo’s account.
0:02:22 That’d be crazy.
0:02:26 So I go to bed, wake up the next morning, meme is on the account.
0:02:30 It’s going viral, 45,000 views in the first hour.
0:02:31 It’s going nuts, right?
0:02:33 It’s just a simple one.
0:02:36 It says, hear me out, a mayor that has had a job before, right?
0:02:37 Just a dig on Zoron.
0:02:39 You know, I was doing this for free.
0:02:43 I just want New York to be safe and not get taken over by a communist.
0:02:47 I’d rather my apartment not be a state-run grocery store.
0:02:49 So, like, I didn’t get paid for this, right?
0:02:51 So Cuomo invites me to a fundraiser.
0:02:53 We get to talk about the meme and stuff.
0:02:55 I talk with the team about marketing.
0:02:58 I write the post, and it goes absolutely bonkers.
0:03:03 You know, 7 million views, 7 plus hit pieces, Rolling Stone, everything.
0:03:07 And in the middle of that whole week, I was in the middle of raising more money.
0:03:10 So it was the craziest week of my life.
0:03:13 7 hit pieces, almost $2 million in the bank.
0:03:14 And what was the gist of the hit piece?
0:03:15 Crazy.
0:03:20 Was it like, I don’t know, right-wing meme lord helps Andrew Cuomo or something like this?
0:03:24 So provocative, right-wing, MAGA meme lord, you know.
0:03:28 And I made one meme saying I call ICE on my own employees so I don’t have to pay them.
0:03:32 And if you’ve ever tried to find employees, it’s really hard to find good ones.
0:03:34 So, like, I’m not calling ICE on my own employees.
0:03:36 Maybe your employees are my competitors’ employees.
0:03:38 But not my own, right?
0:03:44 So they literally profiled my memes in Rolling Stone, in Politico, City and State.
0:03:50 I said, you know, during this post that I wanted to save the West, which is, like, a very common thing, right?
0:03:52 It’s saving the West from communism, socialism.
0:03:55 And I was called a white nationalist.
0:04:00 I’m Jewish, you know, the whole white nationalist thing didn’t really work out well for us.
0:04:06 Yeah, it’s just a bunch of fake journalists who are unemployed in Brooklyn who are just yapping away.
0:04:10 People who, you know, can’t do it themselves and go build on Substack or build their own blogs.
0:04:12 Like, that’s the only people left in journalism.
0:04:14 So they attack people who are actually doing things.
0:04:16 And, you know, it was a great week.
0:04:17 It was fantastic for business.
0:04:20 This is the first time I’m talking publicly about it.
0:04:25 I’ve been saving it, but the entire week it was basically hit piece, death threat, investor call, more money.
0:04:28 Hit piece, death threat, investor call, hit piece, investor call.
0:04:30 I’m sharing my screen of these hit pieces.
0:04:35 And I walk away with, you know, a couple more million and, you know, some infamy.
0:04:36 So it was fun.
0:04:38 Well, because it just shows the power of memes, right?
0:04:41 It shows that people care about this stuff and it actually drives culture.
0:04:43 Dude, one meme changed the news cycle.
0:04:45 And it was pretty wild.
0:04:47 I got invited to Mayor Adams’ house from it.
0:04:52 He calls me Sunday night after the whole scandal and calls me Sunday at 11 p.m.
0:04:54 saying, hey, Jason, can we talk about memes?
0:05:01 And so I end up at Gracie Mansion the next day for 45 minutes showing Mayor Adams my software.
0:05:02 And you wrote a book on the topic, right?
0:05:05 Like memes make millions or something like this.
0:05:05 I did.
0:05:07 Yeah, exactly.
0:05:10 So I wrote the book three years ago, outlining my thesis.
0:05:13 Basically, attention spans are going down.
0:05:15 ChatGPT is going up.
0:05:16 People are bored as hell.
0:05:19 And you need to entertain them and be funny.
0:05:25 And so I bet my entire career on humor and getting attention, being funnier than AI ever can be.
0:05:29 And if you watch our launch video, I assure you that that would be the case.
0:05:31 And so I wrote this book.
0:05:36 Basically, I just followed my own curiosity here, which is great advice for anybody listening.
0:05:38 It’s just follow your curiosity and follow your play.
0:05:41 I was very curious who runs these meme pages.
0:05:42 How do they make money?
0:05:44 Who are these schmucks, right, doing it?
0:05:51 And what I found was all these different strategies of, you know, these kids who are running these pages, adults, whoever, who are making millions.
0:05:53 And so that was three years ago.
0:06:00 And during that process of writing the book, it was almost like, you know, Google guys, some founders go do a PhD in AI.
0:06:03 That was my PhD in memetics, in marketing.
0:06:06 And then I used that to go build my software, right?
0:06:09 I found all the problems from interviewing all these different meme lords.
0:06:11 I built my own software and then I raised the money.
0:06:16 So I had the thesis and that’s become a rallying cry for our entire community is memes make millions.
0:06:20 So, yeah, it was a transformational experience for sure.
0:06:20 Yeah.
0:06:22 And then I guess you recently raised around.
0:06:24 Are you announcing that yet?
0:06:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:06:27 By the time this is live, it’s currently Tuesday, September 23rd.
0:06:29 We are going live in 48 hours.
0:06:33 We raised $3 million led by Slow Ventures, Sam Lesson.
0:06:34 Ex-Facebook guy, right?
0:06:35 Meta guy.
0:06:35 Yeah, yeah.
0:06:42 Ex-Facebook with support from Unpopular Ventures, Bology, Serena Valson, Sian Bannister over at Long Journey Ventures, a bunch more.
0:06:45 Nathan was kind enough to invest as well.
0:06:47 You should disclose that.
0:06:48 Yes, I had to invest.
0:06:49 Yeah, I probably disclosed that as well.
0:06:51 I wasn’t sure to be honest with you.
0:06:53 Like, it sounded a little bit crazy, you know, to be quite honest with you.
0:06:54 That’s the point, man.
0:06:55 That’s the point.
0:06:56 I was like, but I do support freedom of speech.
0:06:58 I do think that memes are important.
0:07:01 And I kind of pinged Sian and she was like, yeah, support freedom of speech.
0:07:02 I’m like, yeah, I do.
0:07:03 So let’s do it.
0:07:03 Fantastic.
0:07:05 I was just on the phone with Sian this morning.
0:07:08 There’s a piece coming out about me in the free press.
0:07:10 So they just interviewed her.
0:07:13 You know, if we want to talk freedom of speech, super important right now.
0:07:16 And so humor is the last frontier, man.
0:07:21 You see it all around us as comedians getting canceled, me in Rolling Stone for memes.
0:07:23 Like, they used to write about rock stars, man.
0:07:25 I’m just some dumb founder who makes memes, right?
0:07:27 Like, you know, it’s crazy.
0:07:30 And so everybody just wants clicks, right?
0:07:33 You know, by the time the clicks were done about me, they just moved on.
0:07:36 And that’s the power of memes.
0:07:39 As I wrote in my book, right, you got to capitalize on the current thing.
0:07:41 For 48 hours, I was the current thing.
0:07:45 So journalists capitalized on me and made 12 bucks in AdSense or whatever.
0:07:46 I mean, we care about freedom of speech.
0:07:49 Maybe, you know, some listeners are like, maybe like, yeah, I care.
0:07:52 But I care more about, you know, how I can use this in my business or how I can make money.
0:07:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:07:56 Like, you know, what are your thoughts on how businesses can be using memes more effectively?
0:08:00 Yeah, I think the best way to do that would be a little demo.
0:08:00 Is that cool?
0:08:02 Yeah, let’s just jump into it.
0:08:02 All right.
0:08:06 So here you can see our software.
0:08:09 On the left side, we upload all the newest trending memes, right?
0:08:11 These are getting uploaded all throughout the day.
0:08:12 We’re scanning the internet.
0:08:16 And you can see examples of how they’re actually being used, right?
0:08:22 So here is, you know, that autism announcement one and different meme lords posting the content.
0:08:23 And we show examples.
0:08:26 And from there, it’s very easy to then go edit it, right?
0:08:29 So this meme of Alex Karp was going super viral.
0:08:31 That’s the founder of Palantir for anyone who’s not familiar.
0:08:32 Yeah, founder of Palantir.
0:08:34 I just did a quick little face swap, right?
0:08:36 Face swap myself into here.
0:08:37 And I said, hey, add my book, right?
0:08:40 And so here’s one earlier that I was just making is like,
0:08:44 this was a meta Ray-Ban that was getting turned into a meme, right?
0:08:45 Their new model.
0:08:49 And I just say, right click, switch the holograph on a lens with a Red Bull.
0:08:55 So we’ll try like, switch the holograph on lens with the Duolingo logo.
0:08:58 Let’s see what happens if the AI decides to allow that copyright.
0:09:01 But you see here, it worked with Red Bull, right?
0:09:04 And so you could do this with any brand, with any idea,
0:09:07 and tailor memes towards your business.
0:09:10 Now you could kind of imagine, hey, this is what Duolingo,
0:09:13 you know, an app would look like if you’re able to actually go talk to people, right?
0:09:17 Yeah, then they could put it on their X or LinkedIn or whatever and like make a joke about it.
0:09:18 Exactly.
0:09:22 And so what’s so cool about Meme Lord is we have all the newest trending memes that you could just
0:09:25 tailor to your business and how it works, right?
0:09:26 So this could have a hundred different things.
0:09:31 It’s like, you know, the sales manager, you know, meeting with the client who spurned him,
0:09:31 right?
0:09:38 Or maybe it’s like, you know, the VC meeting with like the, you know, the founder who he invested in
0:09:39 and then like ghosted, right?
0:09:40 He invested in his competitor or whatever.
0:09:41 Exactly.
0:09:42 Exactly.
0:09:46 And so you could just like easily add text here and it’s just very easy to do.
0:09:49 And so you could kind of just have fun with it however you want.
0:09:52 When you were changing the images, like adding the logos and stuff,
0:09:54 was that using Nano Banana or something like that?
0:09:54 Or like…
0:09:55 That was, dude.
0:09:59 So Nano Banana, I am very, very a huge fan of that.
0:10:02 And so Nano Banana, we use that a ton.
0:10:06 We also use VO a ton as well for video.
0:10:09 But really like there’s a hundred different ways you could do it, right?
0:10:12 And so you could see here, like just something I was making with, you know,
0:10:14 Meme Lords is the Angry Birds hitting this thing.
0:10:18 And you could just say like Nano Banana, like just making memes on the spot,
0:10:21 Nano Banana, like crushing ChatGPT, right?
0:10:25 We were actually using ChatGPT’s image model and now Nano Banana is better, right?
0:10:28 That’s Google’s model, by the way, for anyone who’s not familiar with it.
0:10:29 Yeah, yeah.
0:10:30 It’s incredible.
0:10:31 It’s sick.
0:10:33 And then we have a lot more than that as well.
0:10:37 We also just have straight up a magic meme generator where all you have to do is say like
0:10:42 AI startups and it actually just like generates memes on the spot.
0:10:45 And so there’s so many ways you can do it.
0:10:47 It’s actually pretty impressive.
0:10:49 VC is so easy to make fun of.
0:10:52 If you’re a founder and you want cloud on Twitter, easiest way.
0:10:55 Couldn’t this just lead to like a huge AI slop kind of problem though?
0:10:59 Like people mass generate like 10,000 memes and like schedule them all
0:11:00 for like the next, you know, 10 years?
0:11:01 Yeah, definitely.
0:11:05 I have a base take on this, which is I don’t think memes are slop.
0:11:10 I think they are hidden truths and, you know, there’s good ones and bad ones.
0:11:12 Sure, you can make some quick slop.
0:11:13 And some people want that.
0:11:18 Some people, you know, if they’re running 20 accounts, you need to just throw out some stuff.
0:11:21 But I think memes show hidden truths just like a good joke.
0:11:27 And, you know, the same way people used to watch Seinfeld or comedy shows like memes are just little clips.
0:11:31 And so what we’re able to actually do is turn these whole things into mini movies as well.
0:11:37 And entire clips, you know, our entire launch video, which people show and hopefully you could show this on screen later is was made on meme Lord.
0:11:44 And so we literally are making, you know, straight up movies on meme Lord, like, you know, little things.
0:11:44 Right.
0:11:47 And then we combine them into entire videos.
0:11:50 Here’s another generation that I did for tech Twitter out here.
0:11:50 Right.
0:11:53 So there’s a ton of different ways.
0:11:53 Right.
0:11:56 Like here, my wife works for a calendar and company called Howie.
0:11:59 So I use this as a tweet on her launch video.
0:12:02 And I said, hey, book me a date with my wife.
0:12:02 Right.
0:12:05 And so, like, it’s just endless options.
0:12:09 It’s really your imagination is really the only limit here of what you can do.
0:12:13 I feel like a lot of companies are kind of like scared to do memes or to do jokes.
0:12:13 Yeah.
0:12:18 But one thing I mean, I think people should think about is, I mean, now the White House is putting out memes.
0:12:18 Exactly.
0:12:26 Whether you like, you know, the current administration or not, like that obviously shows the power if they’re actually using memes on the official White House.
0:12:27 Twitter account.
0:12:28 Right.
0:12:36 And for a long time, Elon Musk has been a huge fan of memes, you know, and again, whether you like him or not, like he’s like probably the best businessman of our generation.
0:12:39 So if he’s using memes, you probably should be noticing that.
0:12:40 100%.
0:12:44 I mean, Musk was the one who said, like, who controls the memes, controls the universe.
0:12:46 And, you know, he’s 100% right.
0:12:51 If you control the ideas, you can control a conversation and influence it.
0:12:54 And ideas are upstream of action.
0:12:59 And if you’re able to actually influence people’s ideas, you can influence their actions.
0:13:03 And that’s what Meme Lord is really about is it’s a memetic warfare software.
0:13:08 And so somebody’s, you know, a founder out here trying to start a vibe coding revolution.
0:13:08 Right.
0:13:10 They want to, you know, build that.
0:13:10 Right.
0:13:12 You can go do that.
0:13:12 Right.
0:13:20 We’ve worked with a bunch of vibe coding startups, all of them, actually, every single one, basically, from lovable to bolt to vibe code, literally.
0:13:23 Or if you’re an HR company, you can do that.
0:13:27 If you are defense, you can spread your ideas with memes.
0:13:30 And there’s a reason why ICE is posting memes all the time.
0:13:32 It’s not just to be silly.
0:13:33 It’s to spread ideas.
0:13:33 Yeah.
0:13:36 I mean, actually, there’s like some crazy connection with this show to memes.
0:13:41 Because like when we first started it, I was trying to figure out who were going to be the great first guests that were going to come on.
0:13:44 When we first launched the show, like a year and a half now, I go.
0:13:47 One of the first guests was Erevin Srinivas from Perplexity.
0:13:47 Oh, wow.
0:13:51 And so Erevin used to interact with a lot of my memes.
0:13:52 I used to do a lot more memes.
0:13:53 I’m not doing, I haven’t been doing many recently.
0:13:55 But I used to do a lot of memes about AI.
0:13:56 We’ll fix that.
0:13:56 Yeah, definitely.
0:13:59 And Elon Musk would interact with him.
0:14:02 I think he responded to like six or seven of my memes.
0:14:07 And then Erevin followed me because of that and started sending me memes privately, you know, in DMs.
0:14:09 And then that’s how I got Erevin on the show.
0:14:16 So it shows like, yeah, you could actually build real businesses using humor because I probably would have never gotten him on the show without doing that.
0:14:19 There’s so many examples of this.
0:14:19 It’s not even funny.
0:14:26 Like of clients I’ve gotten, I got a $30,000 brand sponsor because I made a penis meme one time of their competitor.
0:14:28 And then they hit me up.
0:14:31 Like they’re just endless examples of this, which sounds absurd.
0:14:33 And I think things are just so generic these days.
0:14:36 So like anything that cuts through that actually grabs people’s attention.
0:14:38 Like you said, it’s harder to grab people’s attention.
0:14:42 So if they resonate with the joke and it’s very simple, that just cuts through things.
0:14:46 Whereas just everything else is so generic that people just kind of forget about it, you know, a minute later.
0:14:47 Dude, 100%.
0:14:53 So what I was saying earlier is you can turn all your memes into movies as well.
0:14:57 And so thanks to the power of video, you could actually like turn your scenes.
0:14:59 Like I made this entire scene on Meme Lord, right?
0:15:04 And I turned this whole thing into, you know, different videos, right?
0:15:09 And you’re able to combine this just as simple as actually just making them talk, right?
0:15:10 And then adding your voice.
0:15:12 And this is all in our software.
0:15:13 I just say, you know, image to video.
0:15:16 And let’s try this one, all right?
0:15:20 Make man play piano and maybe smoke a cigarette, right?
0:15:21 It’ll take a couple minutes.
0:15:25 I feel like some young marketing geniuses are going to make a fortune using this.
0:15:26 Dude, we are having fun, right?
0:15:30 And like we made it super cheap for users to be able to do this.
0:15:33 They could always buy more credits very, very easily as well.
0:15:35 And so like it’s just so much fun.
0:15:37 Like I don’t know how much you know about my past.
0:15:41 Dude, this is literally 20 years of culmination, which sounds crazy.
0:15:46 But I’m 27 and like I had a flashback when I was making all this to like being seven years
0:15:47 old and like drawing cartoons.
0:15:52 And like I would make these different characters straight up and think about how I’d like turn
0:15:53 it into a show.
0:15:58 And now like I’m actually able to do that and give that power to my users as well.
0:16:02 And so like we made our entire launch video on Meme Lord where I was in here.
0:16:05 I’m in my own software eight to 10 hours a day.
0:16:08 And it’s the happiest time of my life of just making stuff, right?
0:16:14 Dude, this would cost tens of thousands of dollars to do like if you hire an animator.
0:16:18 And so what you’re able to do is then, you know, so many people are just doing these little
0:16:18 clips.
0:16:23 It’s like, no, we actually built a video editor so you can combine the clips into a movie,
0:16:23 right?
0:16:27 And so you’re able to actually build a scene like I’m doing this on the spot, right?
0:16:32 And you take enough of these clips and you actually have a, you know, a whole thing,
0:16:32 right?
0:16:35 And so you say, all right, let’s start him on the piano.
0:16:39 And maybe, you know what, we want to add a little filter, like, you know, make it a
0:16:40 different color or something.
0:16:40 We could do that.
0:16:46 Like, there’s just endless opportunity to like fuck on and find out essentially and make
0:16:53 whatever, you know, the AI slop conversation is interesting, but I think there’s so much fun
0:16:54 to be had with AI.
0:17:00 And I feel really bad for the people that are so anti-AI that they don’t even have fun,
0:17:00 right?
0:17:05 Like this has been the most fun time of my life is making crazy stuff that I wouldn’t be able
0:17:06 to do beforehand.
0:17:06 Yeah.
0:17:07 You can imagine it.
0:17:09 And it’s now just like comes out of your brain, right?
0:17:09 Yeah.
0:17:11 I see this as the next family guy.
0:17:14 Like that’s why Cyan invested was literally like, she’s like, this is where the next South
0:17:15 Park will be made.
0:17:15 Right.
0:17:20 And so that’s my dream is give that creative tools to young kids out there.
0:17:25 You know, I grew up making YouTube videos when I was seven years old, 10 years old, going
0:17:26 to a video editing camp.
0:17:28 And I always dreamed of making movies and stuff.
0:17:32 And it’s very hard to do that as a one person.
0:17:37 And if you’re one kid with no connections, I was born in bumf**k Pennsylvania.
0:17:38 You can’t do that.
0:17:40 And so now thanks to the internet, you can.
0:17:46 And that’s really the goal here is give anybody the ability, not just to make memes, not just
0:17:51 to go viral, but actually like really make movies and break through the noise and make
0:17:52 beautiful creations.
0:17:55 And our team is going to lead the way doing that first.
0:17:59 So I don’t know if you know some of the backstory with me owning lore.com.
0:18:01 I was involved in crypto pretty early on.
0:18:05 And then a friend connected me to Barry Osborne, the producer of Lord of the Rings and The Matrix.
0:18:06 Yeah.
0:18:08 And we tried to actually create a movie studio together.
0:18:09 So like I like spent a bunch of time.
0:18:12 I went to the set of Mulan several times.
0:18:15 I was going back and forth between New Zealand and Hollywood.
0:18:15 Nice.
0:18:20 And the more I looked into it, I was like, man, the film business is absolutely horrible.
0:18:23 It’s like, it costs so much money to make anything.
0:18:28 And so obviously you can’t be creative at all because you have to just follow a proven template
0:18:33 that, you know, with financial models behind it, where you can show that, yes, people love,
0:18:35 you know, X-Men or whatever, or make another X-Men film.
0:18:37 Dude, it’s so boring nowadays.
0:18:40 It feels like stuff like this is going to unlock so much creativity.
0:18:43 It’s just absolutely like so much fun.
0:18:45 Like, so I made this in Meme Lord earlier, right?
0:18:48 And it’s just a cop chasing my little character, right?
0:18:52 It’s like, all right, let’s cop chasing bad guy.
0:18:58 And let’s say maybe he like picks up the cash and steals it.
0:19:00 And then he runs away the other way.
0:19:02 He takes a bag and he’s running.
0:19:03 Exactly.
0:19:05 Dude, it’s so much fun.
0:19:06 It’s so addicting.
0:19:13 And like, I think my biggest piece of advice for people making AI videos or AI art at all
0:19:14 is just be grateful.
0:19:16 Be grateful.
0:19:21 If you get an eight second video, if two seconds are good, you can then combine that enough times,
0:19:21 right?
0:19:23 You’re saving so much time and money.
0:19:24 Just be grateful.
0:19:28 Like so many people are like, oh, this eight second video isn’t perfect.
0:19:30 It’s like, no, like it never is.
0:19:34 Like that’s why movie studios film 30 hours and then only put one hour.
0:19:35 Right.
0:19:36 And that’s, that’s low, right?
0:19:41 That’s why Prince had hundreds of thousands of songs and Mac Miller died with, you know,
0:19:42 albums, right?
0:19:44 Albums and albums unreleased.
0:19:45 Like that’s the point of art.
0:19:50 Like people think that I write a lot on Twitter and there’s a lot more that I don’t post.
0:19:50 Right.
0:19:53 Like that’s the point is to cut down.
0:19:57 So yeah, my advice, if you’re making AI movies is be grateful.
0:20:01 If you get a couple of good seconds, a few, three, four good seconds, it’ll never be perfect.
0:20:02 That’s just making movies.
0:20:04 That’s reality of making art.
0:20:08 And so cut it up and then use your taste and skill.
0:20:10 It takes a lot of hard work still.
0:20:13 Like this has been the most locked in period of my life.
0:20:14 Like it’s so much fun.
0:20:22 Look, vibe coding is the fastest way to go from idea to shipped product.
0:20:25 And most marketers are completely sleeping on it.
0:20:26 And here’s what’s wild.
0:20:30 HubSpot just dropped 10 vibe coding prompts.
0:20:31 That’ll take you from.
0:20:35 I have an idea to an actual working product in hours.
0:20:42 You get the complete zero to ship framework with prompts at every stage from ideation,
0:20:44 technical optimization, and scaling.
0:20:46 It’s the entire package.
0:20:48 Get it right now.
0:20:49 Click the link in the description.
0:20:51 Now let’s get back to the show.
0:20:54 And that’s when this is all going to get better and better.
0:20:54 Yeah.
0:20:55 Exactly.
0:20:55 Exactly.
0:20:56 Like it’s never perfect.
0:21:00 And that’s what’s cool too, is you just like, if you want to just regenerate it, something,
0:21:04 a really fun feature that I think we did is we just show your recent prompts and all you
0:21:06 have to do is just press it again.
0:21:06 Right.
0:21:11 And then just basically like, if you want to tailor the prompt a little, but like you
0:21:13 just press generate video and you get to do it again.
0:21:14 I tweeted this the other day.
0:21:18 You remember like those video games where you’d blow on it to try again?
0:21:20 Like that’s what AI is half the time right now.
0:21:22 It’s like, it’s like, please just try again.
0:21:24 Apparently they even did that in Japan.
0:21:26 I was curious if that was an America only thing.
0:21:29 I was like, I asked my wife, you’re like, no, they did that in Japan too.
0:21:32 You know, with the Famicom games, they were, they were blowing on them as well here in Japan.
0:21:33 That’s so funny.
0:21:34 It’s absolutely crazy.
0:21:36 Like the stuff you can make today.
0:21:38 And I’m really excited for people to try out the software.
0:21:40 You know, I built the first version by myself.
0:21:46 I don’t know how to code and I built it with no code tool called bubble and grew it to, you
0:21:50 know, a hundred K ARR myself in nine months before I raised.
0:21:54 And so now we actually have engineers, we have money, you know, people already loved it.
0:21:56 The design aesthetic is very interesting.
0:21:56 Okay.
0:21:59 It’s almost like windows 95 or something like this.
0:22:00 Yeah.
0:22:00 Yeah.
0:22:05 It’s basically a, the way that my engineer described it is it’s windows 95 on Jason’s
0:22:06 drugs or whatever.
0:22:09 So here you can see like meme Lord is the new Hollywood.
0:22:10 Right.
0:22:18 So let’s say like man saying meme Lord is the new Hollywood and taking a puff of a cigarette.
0:22:21 Um, and we’ll see how that goes.
0:22:22 Yeah.
0:22:28 That’s the craziest part about building creative weird software is seeing what others create.
0:22:28 Yeah.
0:22:31 You never expected like the weirdest things like, yeah.
0:22:35 Do you imagine, uh, mostly like individuals using this or do you think a lot of companies
0:22:37 wind up using meme Lord or?
0:22:39 So people are always surprised.
0:22:44 It is mostly businesses or at least creators and entrepreneurs who are trying to build their
0:22:45 business.
0:22:48 But we have CMOs at some of the fastest growing companies.
0:22:52 We also have public companies literally using our software, which sounds absurd.
0:22:58 Um, but you know, when the white house is posting memes and public companies are memeing, uh, we
0:23:00 have entire teams using it.
0:23:03 So we’ve got, you know, multiple seat plans and everything.
0:23:06 It is, uh, it sounds crazy, but it’s B2B meme SaaS.
0:23:07 Yeah.
0:23:10 I think you described it as like the Palantir of memes or maybe somebody else did.
0:23:11 Exactly.
0:23:12 Exactly.
0:23:12 Exactly.
0:23:13 Memetic warfare probably.
0:23:14 Yeah.
0:23:14 What does that mean?
0:23:16 And is that like kind of the business model?
0:23:19 It’s kind of like a Palantir where you got like technology and services or?
0:23:19 Yeah.
0:23:24 The way that I see Palantir for memes is essentially it’s both software and services.
0:23:30 We really just do services with big companies now, public companies and soon to be public
0:23:33 companies as well as, um, you know, government projects.
0:23:36 And then we have the software, right.
0:23:37 Which mostly brands use.
0:23:41 And at first I started as a joke saying it was Palantir for memes, but I was literally at
0:23:43 Palantir last week.
0:23:43 Right.
0:23:47 Are they going to invest in the, uh, we’ll see, we’ll see.
0:23:49 Uh, you know, I, I love Palantir.
0:23:52 I think they’re doing super important work and big fan of Lonsdale and the whole team.
0:23:57 So at the end of the day, like what we’re trying to do is super important.
0:23:59 It’s not just silliness.
0:24:04 It’s not just make people laugh, but it’s ideal warfare and it’s getting rid of bad ideas
0:24:06 and fighting for the good ideas in the world.
0:24:12 And, uh, hopefully the market decides and people make crazy stuff and, uh, have fun and push
0:24:12 their ideas.
0:24:16 We have customers who are, you know, health food people, right?
0:24:19 One of our customers runs a dried mango company.
0:24:21 He makes mango memes, right?
0:24:25 But then we also have companies who are, you know, a hundred billion dollar companies or whatever
0:24:27 that are using our software.
0:24:32 And so it’s the whole gambit, whatever ideas somebody wants to promote into the world or
0:24:34 spread, they could use me more to do that.
0:24:35 Yeah.
0:24:39 Uh, for anyone who’s listening, like what’s your pitch to a listener of like why they should
0:24:40 use me more if they’re a business owner.
0:24:41 Yeah.
0:24:45 I would say you can stay on top of the hottest trends faster than anybody.
0:24:47 We are scanning the internet all the time.
0:24:52 So the second Trump says something memeable, the second that there’s something in sporting,
0:24:56 uh, something in technology, anytime there’s a big event, you know, first, right?
0:24:59 Like memes aren’t just silly images and JPEGs.
0:25:01 They are actual narratives.
0:25:06 And if you want to jump on some of the trending narratives and stay on top of that, you can be
0:25:07 a meme Lord, right?
0:25:12 Like we have very high up PR type people, right?
0:25:16 Who are using it all the time because they want to understand what’s going on in the world.
0:25:19 Marketers, founders, whoever, they want to understand the narratives.
0:25:25 And so once you get those narratives and you understand what’s going on, you can then tailor
0:25:26 it towards your business.
0:25:28 However it is, memes can be applied anywhere, right?
0:25:35 The same meme could be used in e-commerce, tech, finance, uh, you know, only fans, whatever
0:25:36 it might be, we’ve got it all.
0:25:38 And that’s the beautiful thing about memes.
0:25:42 At the end of the day, like meme Lord, all it is, is just a funny marketing business and
0:25:46 funny marketing has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.
0:25:49 It’s, I wish I invented funny marketing, but I didn’t.
0:25:52 They were doing funny ads in the newspaper 300, 400 years ago.
0:25:58 So if you want to, you know, leverage funny marketing as one of the tools in your tool
0:26:00 belt, meme Lord is the company for you.
0:26:02 There’s plenty of other marketing tools.
0:26:07 We’re not the SEO tool, you know, we’re the funny marketing tool and, uh, it’s becoming more
0:26:12 and more important, uh, in the age where anybody could build anything, but it’s harder and harder
0:26:13 to get attention.
0:26:14 Uh, you got to stand out.
0:26:14 Cool.
0:26:16 That would be the pitch.
0:26:16 Yeah.
0:26:16 Yeah.
0:26:17 It’s a good pitch.
0:26:18 It’s a good pitch.
0:26:18 I appreciate it, man.
0:26:19 I appreciate it.
0:26:25 I’m curious on your end, uh, what you’ve been, uh, seeing on the AI front these days.
0:26:27 I feel like there’s a new model every day.
0:26:30 Are there any, any that have been super fun or?
0:26:34 There’s like model fatigue is setting in, you know, it’s like, there’s always a new model.
0:26:38 And before the podcast, I was covering all of it on Twitter X, you know, for like, I guess
0:26:40 the last three years now.
0:26:43 And, uh, you know, uh, you know, GPT-5 is amazing.
0:26:46 I’m excited about it, but you know, it’s like, okay, something came out and it’s slightly
0:26:46 better.
0:26:50 I’m, yeah, I’m more and more getting interested in like, okay, what can you actually do with
0:26:53 the models versus just like, oh, the model’s slightly more intelligent.
0:26:55 Oh, 100%, man.
0:27:00 Like every day there’s just a new model that like, should we integrate this?
0:27:01 Should we not integrate this?
0:27:06 It must be really weird being one of these companies right now.
0:27:12 And at the same time you’re building a 10 billion dollar, trillion dollar business, but at the
0:27:15 same time you also have no moat, like numbers are just fake at this point.
0:27:16 It’s crazy.
0:27:17 They may be.
0:27:19 I think that’s what some of these people actually realizing.
0:27:19 Yeah.
0:27:25 I was talking to one of our investors, Ariel Zuckerberg about how Mark is thinking about this
0:27:25 stuff, right?
0:27:29 I was at an investor retreat with her a few weeks ago and it was really cool.
0:27:34 She was just saying like, he is such a wartime CEO because like all these rumors were coming
0:27:39 out about how he’s giving these big offers and she’s like, when he’s feels behind, he
0:27:40 goes crazy.
0:27:42 Just like work so hard.
0:27:45 Well, yeah, because with AI, like Facebook and Instagram could become pointless in the
0:27:45 future.
0:27:47 Like you might not even need them.
0:27:50 The whole interface may change in the future because AI.
0:27:50 You got to win this.
0:27:58 And what I think is also really cool is just like, yes, there is this AGI coming, whatever.
0:28:00 Like who really knows what that means?
0:28:04 But at the same time, like, I think what we’re all realizing is like, hopefully we’ll have a
0:28:06 lot more time to create and make cool stuff.
0:28:09 And I’m personally very excited about that as a meme lord.
0:28:14 When I first invested in your company, I started watching your Silly Valley episodes on YouTube.
0:28:16 I know you stopped doing that, I think, or at least put it on hiatus for now.
0:28:18 But what was that about?
0:28:19 Like, how did that get started?
0:28:20 Yeah.
0:28:22 So I believe like software is the future of content.
0:28:25 And that’s kind of an expression of that.
0:28:29 So every episode we just built something really fast.
0:28:33 And so the first one was called Duo F***go, which was Duolingo for cursing.
0:28:36 And you like went, pitched it to New York VCs and stuff like that.
0:28:39 Pitched to VCs, did a whole viral campaign.
0:28:45 And then we pretended to vibe code Palantir, which like, you know, you could vibe code very
0:28:45 simple apps.
0:28:46 You can’t vibe code Palantir.
0:28:47 We found out.
0:28:47 Right.
0:28:50 And, you know, software is content.
0:28:52 It’s getting easier and easier to make software.
0:28:56 I think there’s something fun about that in a show format.
0:29:00 And we’re still going to be doing a bunch of shows and silly stuff.
0:29:06 Really, just like during the raise, what happened was I just got way too busy to be filming every
0:29:06 week.
0:29:09 I was like, wow, these episodes are like pretty well put together.
0:29:10 It’s a lot of work.
0:29:14 But, you know, we’re going to try to be getting back on these as we scale out the team.
0:29:18 But at the end of the day, we got to focus on the software business.
0:29:19 Yeah, that is what I was wondering.
0:29:24 Like, you’re like VC backed startup, but you’re like making revenue off of YouTube sponsorships
0:29:25 from other companies.
0:29:26 Yeah, 100 percent.
0:29:29 100 percent, which it was great for reducing burn for a while.
0:29:33 But now it’s not as necessary with a few million in the bank.
0:29:34 So, yeah.
0:29:34 So, yeah.
0:29:36 So with a few million in the bank, like what’s next?
0:29:42 So what’s next is we build Mean Lord into a premiere place to make movies.
0:29:45 You know, all these people are thinking too small, in my opinion.
0:29:48 They’re trying to build apps for for TikToks.
0:29:50 And I’m trying to build movies, man.
0:29:55 Like that’s what we want is real software to build movies and start movements.
0:30:02 And so to do that, one of the big reasons we raised was to help make it cheaper for users
0:30:05 to create movies and videos.
0:30:09 When you say movies, I mean, do you mean like for like any purpose, like whether it’s entertainment
0:30:12 or education or marketing or?
0:30:12 Yeah, yeah.
0:30:13 A hundred percent.
0:30:16 So, so Meme Lord, like you could upload videos of yourself.
0:30:21 You know, a movie studio could upload videos like, you know, a kid in India can animate something.
0:30:25 It could be used for anything the same way that, you know, Final Cut or Adobe Premiere can be
0:30:26 used.
0:30:31 And it’s cheap enough at the $42 a month price range that that anybody could use it.
0:30:35 And really, you know, memes are the gateway drug into making movies.
0:30:38 You know, memes are the silliness.
0:30:40 They’re the smallest unit of cultural transmission.
0:30:44 But, but the bigger picture is, is to make movies and movements.
0:30:46 And there’s a reason that’s what we’re going after.
0:30:47 That makes sense to me.
0:30:51 I mean, I think because of AI, work’s really going to change and people are going to want
0:30:52 to do more creative work.
0:30:54 And then it’s awesome that AI enables that.
0:30:57 I mean, I, one guy made our entire launch video.
0:31:01 I did the storyboarding on Meme Lord on our infinite canvas.
0:31:02 Are we able to see it or no?
0:31:03 It’ll be on Twitter.
0:31:04 We’re still putting finishing touches on.
0:31:05 Yeah.
0:31:10 I mean, one guy just did this whole movie, whereas I did the scripting and then I did the
0:31:13 creating and the characters and different variations.
0:31:17 AI edit, make me a guy with a t-shirt, make me a guy with a blue shirt, make me a guy with
0:31:22 a green shirt, and then combining them into scenes, then pressing, hey, AI, turn the scene
0:31:23 into a video.
0:31:28 These characters down to the storyboard and everything.
0:31:30 It was all made on Meme Lord, right?
0:31:37 And this is what I want to give to the world is for people to make all their crazy ideas
0:31:38 and dreams possible.
0:31:40 The future is going to be so much fun.
0:31:42 I think people should be more optimistic about where things are happening.
0:31:43 Dude, me too, man.
0:31:47 I mean, there’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the world, but there’s also a lot of beautiful
0:31:47 stuff.
0:31:52 I look at the AI Doomerous and I look at my broke friends.
0:31:55 It sounds bad, but I look at friends in comedy.
0:31:57 You know, we were all stoner artist types.
0:32:02 And I made it out of the stoner artist type and found the tech world a little bit, I guess,
0:32:03 six years ago, seven years ago.
0:32:07 But we were all just like stoner artist dreamy types as a teenager.
0:32:13 And most of them are stuck in Brooklyn and doing comedy for 10 bucks an hour or whatever.
0:32:15 And they hate AI.
0:32:17 They hate technology.
0:32:19 Hate capitalism, probably, like in that situation, if I had assumed.
0:32:20 Yeah.
0:32:22 Hate capitalism because they’re bad at it.
0:32:23 That’s my hot take.
0:32:25 People hate capitalism because they’re bad at it.
0:32:28 Get AI to help train them to teach them how to be good at capitalism.
0:32:30 They could be having so much fun.
0:32:33 I don’t feel bad because they’re broke and working as a substitute teacher.
0:32:35 I feel bad because they’re missing out on the fun.
0:32:36 Wait, why doesn’t that exist?
0:32:39 There need to be something that’s like a capitalism 101, like AI power.
0:32:42 Like, why is it better than the alternatives?
0:32:45 It’s not perfect, but why is it better than the alternatives and then how to play the game?
0:32:45 100%.
0:32:47 I am having fun.
0:32:52 You could be having so much more fun if you just leaned into the technological revolution
0:32:55 and AI revolution that is going on right now.
0:33:01 Like, you could be angry and sad and pessimistic, or you could be like, you know what?
0:33:05 I’m going to have a good time and I’m going to make some cool stuff and I’m going to get
0:33:09 rich and I’m going to get my whole squad rich and I’m going to retire my parents off
0:33:10 of silliness.
0:33:11 That’s my plan.
0:33:14 I don’t know about the people listening, but that’s my plan personally.
0:33:15 That’s a great story.
0:33:17 That might probably be like your final book in life, right?
0:33:20 You like write that whole story from A to Z.
0:33:20 I hope so.
0:33:22 Dude, like AI can’t do this, right?
0:33:25 AI can’t make this kind of fun right here, you know?
0:33:29 I heard you used to like ghostwrite for some pretty well-known people as well.
0:33:29 Yeah, yeah.
0:33:30 That was three years ago.
0:33:34 So I used to ghostwrite for a lot of founders and VCs.
0:33:36 You know, one of them was Danny Grant.
0:33:41 I could say that we worked together for three or four years and big fan of Jam.
0:33:47 And that was really when I leaned into funny marketing was working with these founders and
0:33:50 VCs was like, wait, you guys want me to be funny.
0:33:53 So you get more attention and that makes me money.
0:33:55 Okay, sure.
0:33:57 Like, I don’t have to do the serious stuff.
0:33:58 Like, I don’t know.
0:33:59 Okay.
0:33:59 All right.
0:34:01 Like, I could write serious stuff.
0:34:02 I was a journalist for a bit.
0:34:05 You know, I know how to do that, but I’d much prefer to be silly.
0:34:11 There’s a fun question I like to ask people, which I have no idea what you’re going to say,
0:34:13 because I think you’re very different than our typical guests.
0:34:17 But let’s say you step into a time machine in New York.
0:34:20 You step out and it’s the year 2050.
0:34:21 What are things like?
0:34:22 What has changed?
0:34:22 What do you say?
0:34:25 It can be technology, politics, whatever you want to talk about.
0:34:28 Whatever you think will have changed in that time period.
0:34:33 I think the internet and being on social media makes you think things are a lot crazier than
0:34:34 they are.
0:34:39 But every day that my wife and I walk through Central Park, we’re like, ah, it’s pretty cool.
0:34:40 Life’s pretty good.
0:34:46 And so I think if AI really and tech is going to, you know, make us a lot more free time,
0:34:52 I think we’ll see a lot more people making art in the streets and filming more and more
0:34:58 movies and maybe, you know, reading in the park more and listening to podcasts.
0:35:00 I think we’ll see more people out again.
0:35:00 Yeah.
0:35:06 I do think we’re hitting this point of like late stage phone addiction as well, where
0:35:10 like, you know, at the same time of all this happening is like people are going to want
0:35:15 to spend more time with friends and family and making art together and so stuff.
0:35:17 I think they’re actually going to have more time as well, right?
0:35:22 Because I mean, as AI gets better, a lot of tedious work, I think you’ll be able to like
0:35:25 have your AI do that for you.
0:35:25 Yeah.
0:35:30 And I think harkening back to our first conversation about politics in New York, I know this is
0:35:35 not like a political thing, but I do want to leave with this, which is I think New York
0:35:36 is a very resilient place.
0:35:42 And whether it’s Zohram, I’m Donnie or whoever that ends up winning, I think New York will be
0:35:43 okay.
0:35:46 And I plan to be here at least for the long haul.
0:35:50 So I really hope that we just keep building cool stuff, man.
0:35:55 Like building cool stuff and hopefully I’m walking around New York filming crazy stuff
0:35:59 with my kids and grandkids probably in 50 years.
0:36:00 So that’s awesome.
0:36:01 Yeah, that’s been awesome having you on here.
0:36:03 How can people find you online?
0:36:06 So we officially bought the domain.
0:36:08 We are now live at memelord.com.
0:36:11 You could go there, give it a try for free.
0:36:14 It is then $42 per month.
0:36:20 You get a load of AI credits, unlimited AI image generation, all the newest trending memes.
0:36:22 Also just hit me up on Twitter.
0:36:23 I respond to DMs.
0:36:27 It’s just, I am Jason Levin and send the death threats to my lawyer.
0:36:29 Great.
0:36:31 Jason, this has been awesome, man.
0:36:32 Thanks for coming on.
0:36:32 All right.
0:36:32 Thank you.
0:36:33 Of course.
0:36:33 I’ll talk to you later.
0:36:34 Yep.
0:36:45 I’ll talk to you later.
Want to make content with AI? Get the system here: https://clickhubspot.com/rjb
Episode 79: How can you use AI to make memes that don’t just go viral—but help you (and your business) make millions? Nathan Lands (https://x.com/NathanLands) is joined by Jason Levin (https://x.com/iamjasonlevin), the creator of Memelord.com.
Jason shares the wild story behind dropping memes that rack up millions of views (sometimes turning into Rolling Stone hit pieces and death threats), landing $3M in funding, and why he believes memes are the most underrated marketing lever in business today. The episode dives deep into the Memelord software—a powerful AI toolkit for mass meme creation—complete with live demos, meme tactics for brands, and a glimpse at how Memelord aims to democratize next-gen content creation (movies included). If you care about making your brand stand out in a crowded feed, or just want to understand the culture-driving force of memes, this episode is for you.
Check out The Next Wave YouTube Channel if you want to see Matt and Nathan on screen: https://lnk.to/thenextwavepd
—
Show Notes:
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(00:00) AI-Powered Meme Revolution
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(05:30) Curiosity Fueled Meme Marketing
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(08:44) AI Hologram Branding Experiment
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(11:27) Meme Lord Mini Movies
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(15:25) Affordable Creative Platform Launch
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(16:05) AI Creativity: Endless Opportunities
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(20:54) AI: Hit Reset and Regenerate
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(25:28) Meme Lord: The Power of Funny Marketing
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(26:30) Model Fatigue and Practical Use
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(31:43) From Stoner Artist to Tech Success
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(34:28) Tech’s Impact: From Chaos to Creativity
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(35:25) Resilient New York’s Future
—
Mentions:
-
Jason Levin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamjasonlevin
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Memelord: https://www.memelord.com/
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Memes Make Millions: https://altamira.studio/store/p/memes-make-millions
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Nano Banana: https://nanobanana.ai/
Get the guide to build your own Custom GPT: https://clickhubspot.com/tnw
—
Check Out Matt’s Stuff:
• Future Tools – https://futuretools.beehiiv.com/
• Blog – https://www.mattwolfe.com/
• YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/@mreflow
—
Check Out Nathan’s Stuff:
-
Newsletter: https://news.lore.com/
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Blog – https://lore.com/
The Next Wave is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by Hubspot Media // Production by Darren Clarke // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano