interviews
TikToker Cookie King Talks Luke Belmar, '99% Accuracy' Trend And Other Brainrot Memes That He Somehow Started
The current state of TikTok "brainrot" is wedded to the CapCut editing app. Its filters and effects, like flame explosions and laser eyes, are essential to recent memes like the Eye of Rah and NBA YoungBoy Singing Opera, just to name a few.
However, what if we told you that the ironic use of these effects can be roughly traced back to one user, who's started more meme formats than one could imagine? A trend of meme reenactments with "99% accuracy" can be attributed to him, as well as script mash-ups in which "Friggin' Packet, Yo" and "Senator, I'm Singaporean" are individualized to a single unit.
Demir Basceri, better known as Cookie King online, boasts millions of followers across his many social media pages. He's one of the most prolific spammers on TikTok at the moment.
His accounts post several videos a day in varying styles – from candid lifestyle to POV skits, from TV edits to slop – forming the illusion that he shares over a hundred videos a day.
When scouring the slew, one can find the origins of many memes and the visual motifs that shape much of modern meme-creating. Interestingly, his views on the topics that he parodies are just as confusing and complex as the videos themselves.
On a call with us this week, Cookie King revealed that his content creation career started at seven years old when he followed a strict schedule of posting seven YouTube videos a day. "They were terrible videos," he noted, "like I just had my mom's phone filming me playing on my iPad. I remember I reviewed a new game on the App Store and overnight it got 500 views. I was so surprised."
At the time, his dream job was YouTuber. "I literally put 'I want to have a million subscribers on YouTube' as my 5th grade yearbook quote. I kinda got made fun of for it …"
@miamicookie
Creators like Ali-A, FaZe Rug and even Jack Doherty populated his baby self's subscriber list. He admired them for their work ethic.
On Doherty, for example, Cookie said, "He used to post a lot and he was pretty smart. I wanted to be like that."
Funny enough, the two eventually beefed. "It was kinda one-sided," Cookie said. "I just made a ton of videos hating on him like a year ago and then I met him." A bodyguard approached him at the encounter, putting a hand on him and telling him to go away. "We follow each other on Instagram now though, so I think it's all good."
@thisisnotcookie Blud left as soon as i pulled up 😭 @Jack Doherty #fyp ♬ original sound – NOT COOKIE 🦹🏻♂️
Cookie's first foray into memes was when he went viral for trying to sneak in Nebraska. For those unfamiliar, back in 2021, he posted a TikTok in which he wrote, "If you ain't in Cali, New York, Nebraska, Florida then where TF you at?" Know Your Meme actually interviewed him about it soon after.
The meme's legacy follows him around to this day. "People come up to me and go, 'Yo, are you still in Nebraska?' but I never lived there."
About a year later, Cookie started making edits for one of his favorite shows, The Walking Dead, using absurd CapCut filters and templates that devolved the show's plot to nothing. "I could just post a clip, like a six-second clip of a character just walking, no context, no text at all, no caption, and everyone would understand what I meant by it. It was just stupid but funny."
The habit started on one of his alt accounts @clashedpr. The first video acts as an omen for what was to come: four different videos play at once in the feed, showing increasingly old-filtered versions of Rick Grimes with an eery, oddly satisfying video playing the bottom left corner. In all, it reads as a parody of the then-trending sludge content phenomenon.
@clashedpr
For him, the Walking Dead edits jumpstarted his spamposting career. "That was my senior year of high school and I was really just out of it … I was posting like 20, 30, 40, 50 videos a day, just spamming. It was just so fun for me."
Looking back, the sheer number of these insane edits shows the fun he was experiencing. But what does one get out of spamming, especially when it's just low-effort effects that give actor Jon Bernthal lipstick as he angrily asks, "What is that?"
"I think whenever I created an account," Cookie said on the topic, "I wasn’t scared of how people would react. I posted a few spam videos and they did good, so then I started posting a ton. No hate comments would come. They weren't saying like, ‘Yo, bro, why you posting so much?' Instead, they all found it funny … And that’s what I do to this day, like I can post whatever and whenever I want."
Cookie's childhood adoration of dedicated YouTubers and the thrill he received by sharing whatever, whenever, seemed to combine into a perfect cocktail that both fulfilled his younger self's goal and the chaos he was then experiencing in his then 19-year-old brain. It was helping Cookie vent and grow a following at the same time.
Plus, he felt he was changing the way fandoms express their love online.
"I really think it unlocked a new era for fans of shows on TikTok," he said, "'cause now there's always the 'brainrot edits' … They put the lasers on them and the shakes. I really like to think that came from the Walking Dead stuff."
@saul_goodmun Replying to @v1mnes #rickgrimesfeetandtoes #bettercallsaul #breakingbad #walterwhiteedit #edit #thewalkingdead ♬ Love You So – The King Khan & BBQ Show
An outsider looking in might assume that Cookie is mocking TikTok's "edit culture" in which Dragon Ball showdowns are stylized on so-called "AniTok" and "sigma phonk" edits show Breaking Bad's "top based moments."
These fanmade videos with repeating effects and visuals are sometimes overly sincere and hand themselves belly up to the jaded side of the internet, waiting to be RKO'd by irony-poisoned anti-fans.
But Cookie urged that this is a wrong assumption. "I love the edit culture on TikTok," he said. "I especially get excited when it's underrated shows like Fear of the Walking Dead, which most people don't really talk about."
His love of the game shows because Cookie King makes his fair share of earnest edits, posted to the same account where all of the original slop comes from.
@clashedpr Shane V2 gets mad
So far in 2025, a new style of Cookie King's posting has been remixed and co-opted by others. Namely, a series of meme reenactments have been popping off, spawning and fueling memes like I Knew This Was Happening and the infamous Jaden Smith podcast clip when the host shouts, "BROOOO!"
Basically, people are just memorizing the scripts and mannerisms of viral videos and recreating them to the best of their ability, trying to reach "100% accuracy."
The trend stems from a series of videos that Cookie King made in which he recreated a clip known simply as the Johnnie Walker meme. The original shows "hustle culture" influencer Luke Belmar talking to a group of men about how he got in a room with Tristan Tate and impressed him with his favorite whiskey. It was supposed to be a lesson on the power of informed networking.
However, upon further inspection, Belmar sounds like he's in love with Tate, which Cookie found amusing. In turn, Cookie started giving the clip his usual treatment — spamming it multiple times on TikTok, each time using different, increasingly absurd CapCut effects. But it wasn't enough this time.
@miamicookie
"I was meming the Johnnie Walker video," he said, "and I was doing it with filters, and I was like, 'How do I take this a step further?' I was like, 'Wait, why don't I just reenact it?'"
The decision spread like wildfire, leading to video transcript speedrun challenges, opening up a new realm of memetic mutation in our short-form video-obsessed world.
@miamicookie
However, in true Cookie King fashion, the man didn't stop at simple reenactments. He began combining the transcripts of multiple viral videos and mashing them into one monologue, recited by himself in an innocuous space, pacing around a room, like the ramblings of the first senile Zoomer.
One of his most popular examples reads, "Friggin' Packet x Johnnie Walker x Egypt Property x Chopped Chin."
@miamicookie ♬ Twenty One Pilots Hometown Slowed Sad Part – Half Angel Half Devil
"On Instagram," he said, speaking about his inspiration, "there was a new meme. It was about Chopped Chin and Property in Egypt, and people were doing battles between them. I was like, 'Wait, what if I just combined them together with the Johnnie Walker thing and the Friggin' Packet Yo?' I just thought, 'I'm gonna combine them all.'"
The "mash-up" format has since spread far out of Cookie King's control as other TikTokers and video creators combine the copypastas of their favorite memes, sometimes to a nauseating degree, still trying to maintain "98% accuracy."
@igotstinkyfeet Guys is this a world record?? #fyp #foryoupage #foryou #viral #funny ♬ original sound – Isaak Bacha
While many TikTokers owe Cookie King a lot of credit, so does "sigma" influencer Luke Belmar. When he became the subject of Cookie King's spam, it opened up a world of mocking, hating and laughing both at the expense of Belmar and to his benefit. It got his name out there, in line with the saying, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."
However, despite parodying his Johnnie Walker clip and others like "Connect, Connect," Cookie King admittedly has a lot of respect for Belmar. "I think his message delivery is really funny but I think some of the stuff he says is very true."
"At first I didn’t like him," he continued. "I was like, 'Okay, this guy's super arrogant.' Then I saw one of his other videos, talking about, like, 'You need to study words, like the river and the bank,' all this stuff. I thought, 'Okay, it's kind of harmless actually.' So, I thought he was pretty cool."
@belmarrvault Money flows like water #lukebelmar #business #fyp ♬ original sound – Belmarvault
"I still do respect him though, even after all the funny stuff he said. He just seems like a really high-energy person, like someone I would definitely want to be around. Like, I was watching his meet-up, the one where he says the 'Johnnie Walker' thing … He's super motivating. He's like, 'All you guys, we're gonna make it. We're gonna get up there to the top.' It's a little corny but I mess with it."
@zxh.mark #lukebelmar #johnnywalker ♬ original sound – Markz
Cookie King told us that he actually likes Luke Belmar's brother, Mr. Belmar, more, so much so that he watches all of his videos and has even joined his "school community." He describes it as, "A community that you pay for where there's weekly calls, like imagine a Discord server but it's exclusive."
He paid for the community after Mr. Belmar piqued his interest on a necklace that allegedly protects you from "electromagnetic frequencies" (EMFs) that are emitted by computers and phones.
Cookie King laughed when he recalled his reasoning. "I didn’t know where to find the necklace, so I thought if I joined this thing, there would be other people in there who have found it and have talked about what it does for them. They also talk about cool meals they're making and stuff they're doing to recover."
We asked Cookie King if he was a "looksmaxxxer." From his interest in EMFs to his frequent spamming of James Sapphire content – also known as the real-life, uncanny Handsome Squidward – we had to know if his views on mewing and so on were also rooted in another, internal push-and-pull between sincere respect and the impulse to mock and parody.
He laughed and said, "Honestly, no, but I picked up some of the looksmaxxing tendencies, like here and there, I'll try and sleep on my back because sleeping on your side can make your face uneven … I find it funny, but in a way, some of the stuff they say is true to an extent, but it's very skewed."
@miamicookie
Just like the mass breadth of his content, pinning down a central motive in Cookie King's underlying dogma is difficult. While he's undoubtedly a leading taste-maker in the intentionally degenerate world of "brainrot" parody, Cookie King also finds value in the hilariously cheesy internet figures, themes and lessons he latches onto in his memes.
In a way, Cookie King's perfection of brainrotted satire more replicates the impulse to mock than it does embody it. That's kind of what makes Cookie King the perfect shitposter of the moment because he comes at everything he parodies from both sides of the discourse.
@miamicookie
Going forward, Cookie King wants to focus on streaming and continue to expand the so-called "Cookieverse," wherein he's the main character. Meeting more creators and influencers from every niche is also in his sights.
In recent months, he's done frequent collabs with creators such as Fruitsnacks and Vexbolts, notably joining the Chopped House with some of his other contemporaries.
Cookie wants to give his fans more lore fodder and fully embody the idea of being on a never-ending succession of "side quests," hopefully meeting up with your favorite niche micro-celebrity soon to make you feel like you're in a "fever dream" watching them collab.
Above all else, Cookie said, "Honestly, I just hope to have moved out from my dad's house."
For now, you can follow him on any of his TikTok accounts – @c00kiek1ng, @miamicookie, @clashedpr, @thisisnotcookie and any others we missed – or on Instagram at @cookiekinggg.
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