Endless Thread - So Cute!

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

While some people find Labubus terrifying, millions of others find their big eyes and furry features irresistibly adorable. Why? From Labubu dolls taking over TikTok, to emoji taking over our text messages, cuteness is all over the internet. Ben and Amory talk to Joshua Paul Dale, professor at Tokyo's Chuo University and the preeminent cuteness expert about how cute has conquered all. A previous version of this episode incorrectly stated that Despicable Me was a Disney movie. The episode has been updated to reflect that Despicable Me is a production of Illumination and Universal Pictures.  Show notes: Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World (Profile Books) The Cute Studies Project This episode was produced by Grace Tatter, edited by Meg Cramer, and co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Earlier this year, the Philadelphia Eagles posted a TikTok of football player after football player being handed a small package wrapped in colorful foil. You can open it.

A caption says that it's the first day of training camp and that the first day of training camp and that The packages contain plush toys called Labuboos. Most of the Eagles players look bewildered as they consider these dolls. They're small enough to fit in the palms of the player's huge football playing hands. They're furry. They look kind of like rabbits. They have big, pointy ears. But they also have disproportionately large heads.

Huge eyes, little button noses, and a toothy smile represented by nine white triance. that look awfully sharp. Which might be why offensive guard Landon Dickerson refuses to accept the one he is handed. He walks away from the camera empty-handed, making the sign of the cross. No, that's evil. These strange dolls were viral long before a savvy social media manager put them into the hands of NFL players. What's Fuzzy got 19th and has people going out. Absolutely crazy.

If you want to get in on the trend, be prepared, though, to pay up because prices have skyrocketed. Labubu. The toys are based on the work of Kassing Lung, an artist from Hong Kong and the Netherlands. Kassing was inspired by Nordic folklore about trolls and wrote and illustrated a picture book series called The Monsters. One of his creations was named Labubu. In 2019, the Chinese manufacturer Pop Mart commissioned toys based on the book series, and the Labubu doll was born. Now, every time Pop Mart drops a new Labibu, they sell out immediately.

Part of the appeal is the blind box. You can't know what Labubu you've purchased until you unbox it. It's like the teeny beanies in the McDonald's happy meals. First I got Pinky. Then I got Pinky. I got Pinky and Patty in the same week. Or like Pokemon, right? Like you can buy a deck and not know what's in it

and you can have like a golden ticket in there. Got to open it up. Unbox Labibu's with me. Let's do LaBibou unboxing. I really want the loved one or the secret. I have everything else besides those two. These mystery unboxings make for great social media content or maybe not great but you know, people are into it.

All of which contributes to the ubiquity of these dolls on the internet. I have Labibu fever. And there's no cure. This was my first Labuobo. Celebrities carry keychain libuboos on designer bags. There's even a meme circulating of a Labubu doll placed on the ground next to Carl Marx's tombstone among flowers and other more typical graveside offerings. We can't verify that this picture was real, but it says something about this day and age.

You ain't got to own the means of Labubo production. The insane popularity of these dolls has led to shot. shopping aisle showdowns. At one point, Pop Mart had to actually pull Labubos from their physical stores in the UK because of fighting. Yeah, that was me.

Sorry, guys. And of course, the popularity has also led to knockoffs, known as La Foufus. The Eagles, by the way, the Philadelphia Eagles, they actually had Lafoufus, according to the full caption

of that TikTok video. It's like they don't have enough Super Bowl rings to get Labibu's. You know, the NFL. Times is hard. Budgets is tight. There are many videos building on the joke that there's something

sinister about these little dolls. Except for maybe, to some people, it's not a joke. Yes, I am afraid we are quite serious. This is just another fad that people are buying into, not understanding the spiritual ramifications. People are saying that these things are cute, that they have to collect them

and get as many as they can. Bro, this is demonic. But at the heart of it, people are not buying these things because, as the theory goes, they're under the influence of an ancient demon called Pazuzu. Pazuzu is, by the way, a dark figure from the Mesopotamian mythology. His interest in modern internet trends could not be journalistically confirmed. But no, while some people find these big-eyed, sharp-toothed, wide, smiled, rotund creatures scary, their biggest fans feel quite the opposite.

He's so cute in fact. Oh my gosh, she's actually really cute. She is the cutest thing ever. Look at her. She is so cute. Cute toys went viral before we had TikTok or Instagram. Back to my teeny beanies, case in point. But social media has accelerated how quickly these toy trends spread.

Before Lububo's, TikTok was flooded with videos of squish mallows and jelly cats. And it's not just toys. Some of the earliest globally viral videos were cat videos. You know, have you ever seen those cats getting freaked out by cucumber videos, Amory? You bet I have. Those creepy, creepy cucumbers. That's me when you put a cucumber next thing. You if you were a cat.

Yeah. There are whole internet communities built around cuteness, like furries and big-eyed characters from manga and So why does the internet take cuteness and run with it? To answer that question, we talk to maybe the world's preeminent cuteness expert, the pioneer of a whole academic field called cuteness studies, Joshua Paul Dale. Cuteness unlocks all of these social behaviors in our brain and makes us want to get closer to things and connect with things and communicate with them. I'm Amory Siebertson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

And this is Endless LaBoo Boo Boo. Coming to you from W. LaBoo, you are in Boston. In today's episode, as Amory is demonstrating, we're getting cute. Or we're just losing it. Don't get cute with me. Joshua Paul Dale is a professor at Chew University in Tokyo, as well as the author of Irresistible, How Cutness wired our brains and conquered the world.

For many years, researchers thought about cuteness, specifically in terms of nurturing. You know, if we think something's cute, we want to take care of it. But Joshua makes a case in his book that cuteness is about more than taking care of small things. He argues that cute things also bring out our desire to be social and to play. Do you think Laboo Boo Boo Boo Dolls are cute? Personally, I see why people think that they're cute. When I look at them, I don't see it as much, although I'm more familiar with them now, and I think they're kind of growing on me.

I think I'm starting to feel that they are cute. Once you have more exposure, that can happen. I think that thing's going to kill me in the night. I really do. I felt the same way about Furby's, too. I never understood the Furby thing. But I don't know. Part of me, I think, generally when someone tells me that something is cute,

or like it's being marketed to me as a cute thing. Right. There's some part of me that, I guess, subconsciously resists that. Whereas if we're talking about like a living being, I'm all over it. When it's a living thing, it's a different matter. You know, there was a famous dog in Japan, Wasao, who was famous because he was so ugly. Oh, yeah. ugliest dog in Japan.

But people loved him because he was a dog. You know, he didn't know he was ugly. He was enthusiastic and lively and loved people. And so he became famous all over the country because of that. So really the dog was cute? Yes, the dog was cute because he acted cute. And the gap between his appearance and his actions made it super cute. Just enhanced the cuteness.

I think that's what Labibu fans feel. Like there's a certain gap in, the appearance of the booboo between what you expect as cute and what you're actually presented with. But for people who are into Lubu, it just enhances the cuteness to see that gap. For the rest of us, we don't like it so much. I was just trying to think about the things that I thought were cute. And the only thing that I could come up with was when children wear bow ties. And I don't know.

It's just like the only thing. But other than things in my own family, like, I think my cat is very cute. But, like, for me, cuteness is it's not a way something looks, but more like a way I feel about it, if that makes any sense. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, if you can feel that you have a relationship to a cute object, it definitely enhances the cuteness. This is true, even if the relationship is only in your mind, like if it's an object and not a living. thing. This is the reason that Hello Kitty has a backstory, even if it's only three sentences, because people can feel closer to something cute if they know something a little bit more about it

and can form a relationship to it in their mind. Wait, what's the three-sentence Hello Kitty backstory? Oh yes, she's from London. Her name is Kitty White, and she's five apples tall. I hope I have the right number of apples there. I hate to get that wrong. What was your gateway to studying cuteness. How did this become your area? Oh, yeah. Well, I had been in Tokyo for quite a while already. So I knew about the cute culture here, kawai, as they say in Japan. But I never really paid that much attention to it. And then one day I walked out of my apartment.

And you know those road construction barriers, like orange and white stripes telling you not to go into dangerous areas? I walked out of my apartment, and all of those have been replaced with lines of hello kitty. He's holding rainbows. And at first I thought, you know, okay, it's just another tie up with Sandrio, the company that makes Hello Kitty. But then I noticed a lot of other construction barriers that were like blue leaping dolphins or green smiling frogs. It just happened everywhere all at once.

And I just thought, something's going on here. Like, this would never happen at home. And I started seeing it more and more. And I predict that after our conversation today, you and Ben will also go out and not. notice more and more cuteness because the rest of the world is catching up. Plenty of biologists had studied cuteness, but in the humanities it was relatively undiscussed, unlike cuteness's classier cousin, beauty. So Joshua set out to change that and bring together researchers from across the disciplines whose work touched on cuteness. When I started studying this,

all of the work on cuteness stressed that we feel things are cute because children need nurturing and care, which is true. But I just, more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, this is not the whole story. There are other reasons why we find things are cute. If one of them is care, then the other one is play. Let me ask you a question. Which is cuter, a six-month-old baby or a six-day-old baby? Six-month is my answer. No, I think probably, well, I would say a six-day-old baby. I think it also depends on whether or not you're thinking of your own children when you answer that question.

Because there are other chemical responses in the brain for parents that make them need to take care of newborns. But for the rest of us, six-month-old babies are cuter surveys have demonstrated. And that's the age when children get old enough to sort of engage more with the world. And so cuteness unlocks all of these social, behaviors in our brain and makes us want to get closer to things and connect with things and communicate with them and also stimulates the pleasure centers of our brain but also lowers stress and anxiety. It just makes people feel more comfortable when they're around cute things. And I think that that's one reason that cuteness has become so ubiquitous in our 21st century culture.

Our 21st century understanding of cuteness echoes a theory. from the 20th century. In the 1940s, Austrian animal behavior scientist Conrad Lorenz identified what he called the baby schema, a set of physical traits

that he theorized automatically trigger our caregiving responses. And even though Joshua thinks cuteness is as much about bonding and play as it is about nurturing, he's got to hand it to Lorenz.

The baby schema still tracks. For the most part, if we see this characteristic six that young children and also baby animals have, you know, large head relative to body size, large eyes, sort of broad forehead, short stubby arms and legs, wobbly movements, things like that. Then we're very likely to feel that that thing is cute. I went to a few African countries earlier this year, which is not a humble brag. It's just a brag brag. I was very lucky to get to do it. And I saw so many baby animals. And when I see something

that is very, very cute. I like get this, I don't know if it's like I bite my tongue or something, but I always have this like clench reaction where I feel like I'm just going to explode. And if I don't bite my tongue, I don't know what I'm going to do. And there was someone else on the trip too who kept just saying like, I want to put it in my mouth. And we have these kind of weird physical reactions to cuteness. And I know that you're looking at this more from a humanity's perspective, but is there anything in your work that explains maybe that more physical reaction that some of us at least have to cuteness? Well, scientists call that reaction cute aggression, and only about half of adults have it,

so I think you're lucky. It's like cute overload. It's so cute that you can't stand it. And so we got all these physical responses, our vocal pitch rises and our teeth tend to or fist clenched, and we're just like, it's so cute, it's so cute, it's so cute, like that. And the important thing to note with that is that the name cute aggression is a bit of a misnomer. It's not quite the right name because it suggests that we want to behave aggressively towards the cute object. It kind of seems like that. You say, I want to put it in my mouth.

It's kind of aggressive. But the point is, we don't actually do those things. because one of the earliest lessons we teach children is that don't squeeze the puppy too hard, right? We know that that will kill the cute object, so we can't do it. And so I think that the aggressive response comes back on us and we take it out on ourselves. So that's why there's all these reactions like tensing muscles and clenching teeth because we know we can't exercise this impulse onto the acute object. so it rebounds back on us in order to keep the huge objects safe. Wow, I've never thought about it like that. That makes so much sense that it's like, I can't do this to the creature.

So I'm just going to like, you know, hurt myself, yes. Whoa. The rest of this episode is so cute. You could just eat it right up in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Science, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics.

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Our English word, cute, has its own origin story. Cute comes from acute, you know, sharp, cunning. And for quite a long time until the 19th century, when you saw the word cute, it was simply a shortened form of a cute and it meant a cunning person and not a particularly pleasant way. Someone who might cheat you was cute.

And it only switched in the late 19th century when a new word was needed to describe this upsurge in popular culture of adorability. And so cute sort of was repurposed and became the cute that we know today. Maybe in American cute, there's still a little echo of the old clever or cunningness. Like I think of, I don't know, American cartoons often are sort of funny or goofy and they just have a little twist to it. And in that, I see an echo of the older meaning. Yeah, there's like some mischief to it that is cute for some reason.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, exactly. Mickey Mouse has some mischievous moments. As do minions, the little hyperactive yellow characters from the movie Dispicable Me. Maybe mischief is part of the appeal of Labuboos, with their big grins and doe eyes. In fact, Pop Mart even released a special series of Labubo's called The Mischief Diaries. It featured a Labubu Cupid with his bow and arrow drawn, looking ready to cause some chaos. Cute is a relatively new word compared to kawai.

The Japanese have celebrated kawai for centuries. It comes from the word for face and the word for flushed and dazzled, the way you might feel when seeing something cute. The word kawai has been called the most popular word in the Japanese language, most commonly used word and most popular word. So you just hear it all the time every day. People are just sort of intercaulte and predisposed to think about it. I think there's a few reasons for that.

And one of them is that to say something is cute, it's not only a conversation opener. It can also continue a conversation. And it can do so in a way that's not divisive and doesn't make people angry or aggressive. It's just a way to pass the time. And I think people enjoy it. One of the earliest examples of Kauai in the digital age are emojis. In the 1980s, Japanese schoolgirls used a popular, cute, shorthand sort of writing, where they rounded their characters, included little pictures. Their teachers hated this cutesy handwriting and found it hard to read, which of course, in turn, made it incredibly popular.

Companies used it in ad campaigns, and Apple Macintosh even added it as a font. But by the mid-1990s, girls in Japan had a new tool to communicate. Even before cell phones came out, there were pagers. And mostly, pagers were intended for use by, you know, doctors on call or businessmen. But in Japan, the parents started buying them for their children to keep track of them, especially girls. And when girls got the pagers, they realized they could send messages to their friends on them. And so they started to use little esky characters like a colon and a parenthesis for a smile. They had a whole language using those characters.

and these pages also had primitive emoji that they used as well. So when cell phones came, each cell phone provider in Japan had its own emoji palette, and the people who used it the most were teenage girls. When Apple launched the iPhone in Japan in 2007, it was a complete flop because it had no emoji. So Apple got together with Google, and they created an international standard for emoji, and that's the emoji we used today. Why do you think things like cat videos were early viral hits? Yeah, once social media came and previous to that, the internet in general and YouTube especially,

cuteness just exploded. And I think one reason for that is not just that cuteness is easily shareable, because a lot of things are. But think about the difference between receiving a picture of somebody eating a delicious meal and receiving a picture of a really cute cat. you cannot eat that meal. You can't bite into that steak when you're looking at the picture. So you feel a little bit of envy. But when you look at the picture of the cat, yeah, you can't pet the cat,

but you can look at the cat and you can feel cuteness. So a cute picture or a cute video gives you something. It doesn't remind you that you're lacking something. And I think that's the biggest reason why cuteness just spread so quickly around the world. Joshua's written how the 20th century belonged to American cuteness. Mickey Mouse and the rest of the Disney characters, Shirley Temple, the Peanuts, but the 21st century might belong to Kauai. I think that the American cuteness that spread in the 20th century was largely top-down, like Disney.

Now with Kauai in the 21st century, we have a lot of user content being generated. It's more like a bottom-up phenomenon. So yes, of course, we have Hello Kitty and many other cute characters made by corporations, but there's also cuteness in fashion, and there's cuteness all over social media, and people are generating their own content. And of course, they also use the previous American cute aesthetic, but I can see more and more touches of Japanese kawai impuring in all of these manifestations. You can see it in the color scheme, maybe a little bit less,

bold colors and more pastel. You can see it in character design, like really big sparkly eyes, in many, many aspects. So I think it's going to continue. I think Kauai is the next worldwide huge hit. Do you think that this is a good thing, like this change,

even if it means we're really inundated by Laboo Boo Boo Meems? Why do you feel optimistic about the future of cuteness online? Well, I think that overall, cuteness is a biological phenomenon that evolved because we need to take care of unsocialized children. And it does things to our brain, like activates the reward centers in our brain and makes us more social and lowers our stress. Those qualities are what attract most people. And I think those are the things going forward that are going to be characteristic of the new cute culture. And in that sense, I'm optimistic. Joshua, what's the cutest thing in your apartment?

My cat. Oh, okay. Fast answer. Hands down. What's your cat's name? And can you describe your cat's cuteness to us? Toby. In Japanese, Tobiru means to jump or fly.

He's very good at jumping. It's just an ordinary tabby cat, a rescue cat. But I love him. There you go. All you need is a three-sentence backstory. it turns out for all cat-related cutness. How many apples tall would you say, Toby? When he stretches out, he is really long, actually.

I'm always surprised. Like at least a seven-apple cat, I would say, stretched out. All right, seven-apple cat, there you go. Seven apples long. Thank you so much, Joshua. It's been a real pleasure talking to you, and it's a fun topic. So thank you. Sure, no problem at all.

Thanks for having me on. By the way, an earlier version of this episode incorrectly stated that Dispicable Me is a Disney movie. It is not. It was produced by illumination and distributed by Universal Studios. We apologize for the error. Endless Threat is a cute-ass production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter, hosted by me, Ben Kauai Johnson. And me, Amory Labubo.

Lafoufoo. You're more of a Lafoufoufouf. You're more of a Pizzou-Zoo. What's Pizzou again? That's like the possessed overlord. Yeah, the possessed demon from Mesopotamia. Love it. And me, Amory Pizzuzuzu Sieverts.

It was edited by Meg Kramer, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Frannie Monaghan, our production manager, Paul Vikis, and managing producer Samanta Josie. Who is 74 apples tall. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and La Fou Fos. If you have an untold history and unsolved mystery or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell in emojis, hit us up.

Endless Thread at WBUR.org.org.