Double Rainbow

Origin

On January 8, 2010, Paul Vasquez — who posted as Hungrybear9562 and was known as Bear — filmed a double rainbow from his property near Yosemite National Park and uploaded the result to YouTube.

The video is three minutes of a man reacting. He films the rainbow, and then, progressively, comes apart: gasping, laughing, and eventually weeping, repeating “Whoa!” and “It’s so intense!” before asking, genuinely, the question that became the meme:

“What does it mean?”

It is completely sincere. Vasquez later described the experience in explicitly spiritual terms, saying the rainbow was the universe moving through him and that his reaction was to seeing something holy.

What it means / how it’s used

The video is invoked as the benchmark for overwhelming, disproportionate awe. It is used:

• To mock someone reacting excessively to something ordinary.
• Sincerely, to express genuine wonder.
• As the audio, cut over unremarkable footage.
• Via the phrase “what does it mean?” alone, applied to anything.

Its tone has shifted over time. In 2010 it was largely laughed at; it is now more often shared warmly, as an artifact of a man having an unguarded moment of joy on a mountain and posting it.

How it spread

The video sat almost unwatched for six months. Its breakout came on July 3, 2010, when Jimmy Kimmel tweeted a link to it, and within an hour the sports writer Bill Simmons had retweeted him. The Huffington Post covered it on July 4, and a large YouTube commentary channel featured it on July 5.

The clip became one of 2010’s defining viral videos. The Gregory Brothers — the musicians behind the Auto-Tune the News series — produced a remix that was released commercially, with proceeds split with Vasquez, and Microsoft featured him in a promotional campaign on September 1, 2010.

That revenue split is worth noting. In 2010 it was still unusual for the subject of a viral video to be paid at all, and the arrangement is an early example of the practice that later became standard.

After

Vasquez continued making videos and remained a warm presence online, embracing the attention without ever seeming to trade on it cynically.

He died on May 9, 2020, aged 57. The cause was not publicly confirmed, though it was reported that he had tested positive for coronavirus shortly beforehand. Tributes noted the same thing repeatedly: that a man who became famous for being overwhelmed by a rainbow appeared to be exactly as sincere as the video suggested.

Notable examples & variations

• The original three-minute video.
• The Gregory Brothers’ Auto-Tune remix.
• The audio cut over unrelated footage.
• “What does it mean?” as a standalone caption.
• Tribute reposts following his death.

Legacy / cultural impact

Double Rainbow belongs to the first generation of YouTube virality — a period when a single unedited home video could reach the entire internet without any platform algorithm pushing it, carried instead by a celebrity tweet and a news blog.

It is also one of the very few memes of that era that has aged into something gentler than it started as. The joke was originally that his reaction was absurd. Fifteen years on, the more common reading is that he was right.