Hyperfixed - Presenting: Panic World - The Disturbing World of Cute Cat AI with Panic World

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

This week we're cooking up a couple stories in the lab so while you wait, please check out Panic World, a fantastic podcast hosted by friend of the show Ryan Broderick.-----Why are cats so popular on the internet? It started with cat memes like I Can Haz Cheezburger and Keyboard Cat, then we became enamored with cat celebrities like Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, and Princess Monstertruck. And now, we’re witnessing the next evolution in cat internet content: “cute cat AI.”Our guest and host of American Hysteria, Chelsey Weber-Smith, calls it a “Kitty Horror Picture Show.” Chelsey joins Ryan and Grant to tell us about the explosion of really weird AI-generated cat videos depicting cat families that’s all over TikTok and YouTube right now — much like Elsagate once did in 2014. Then, Ryan takes us back even further, to cover an older cat-based moral panic: Bonsai Kittens. Together, we look at how though technology has changed, we’ve pretty much always wanted to show each other freaky stuff on the internet — whether real or fake.Our guest Chelsey Weber-Smith hosts American Hysteria, a show that explores the fantastical thinking and irrational fears of Americans. Check it out here or wherever you listen to podcasts. LINKSGarbage Day NewsletterPanic WorldAmerican Hysteria Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Try Hard is back with a new season featuring conversations with Ingrid Nielsen, Anna Sale, Rishikeshirwe, Alexander Chee, and so many more guests. This season, we're diving into guests' try hard moments, the big decisions, the pivots, and the leaps of faith that came to define their lives. We're talking to an OG lifestyle influencer who decided to leave her YouTube career behind, an author who chose to write the book he wanted to write, instead of the one his editors wanted, and a fancy pants, business consultant who stepped off the career treadmill to do something radically different. Each of these episodes digs in the powerful stories we tell about ourselves. And what every guest has in common is that they've asked themselves the same question. What if I told a different story? Listen to Try Hard from Defector Media wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everyone. This is Alex. And this week, we are sharing a podcast by our friends at Panic World. Panic World is an internet culture podcast that's hosted by Ryan Broderick, who is an incredible reporter. And it's a show that looks at the way internet culture intersects with offline culture. And every week he has a prominent figure on to discuss some internet phenomenon, what it means to the offline world. And it's always fascinating.

And the episode that I'm sharing with you today is about a strange evolution in the always beloved online cat video, which is cute cat AI. That's right. AI cat videos are taking over the internet. So listen to this episode. It's a lot of fun. You can find Panic World wherever you find podcasts. And also be sure to check out Ryan's newsletter Garbage Day, which you can sign up for at Garbage Day.

Email. Okay. Enjoy the show. What's the deal with cats? Why do people on the internet love them so much? Why are they so obsessed with them? And most importantly, why do they continually put them in really weird, kind of dangerous situations?

Today, we're not talking about animal abuse, but we are talking about fake depictions. of animal abuse that are extremely insane and very, very popular on platforms like TikTok and YouTube right now. A welcome to the world of weird AI cat videos. What is your favorite cat-related content on the internet? Like, what's your favorite video posts, meme, whatever? Okay. Do you all remember this was probably like three years ago, maybe a little less? And there was just this really quick video of a cat coming around the side of a fridge.

And it sounds like he says, well, hi. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a favorite for me. And that's like worked its way into my regular rotation of vocabulary for sure. That's definitely a good one. What about you guys?

I, well, I've met many famous internet cats, actually. So I can say that I thought little bub had the best vibes of all of them. I don't remember. Who's a little bubub? Oh, oh. Was he kind of like bug-eyed and growling a lot? Yeah, yeah. He was awesome.

Yeah, he was cool. there's like a lot of things that Ryan's bashful about and it's like very cute that he's like oh I wouldn't show off about that but he boasts about meeting internet cats yeah as often as I will tell you grumpy cat I didn't like I didn't like the spectacle around grumpy cat it felt very exploitative yeah I feel uh princess monster truck I enjoyed quite a bit she was very nice but little bub I thought had the best vibe he was just sort of chilling yeah you know yeah I think that that's nice I mean keyboard cat classic classic it got so annoying eventually like the i can has cheese burgers just classic millennial cringe you know and i hate

using that term by the way but it's i love using that term yeah i love i love calling millennial cringe what it is though i will say and i probably have told this story in the show before but like i remember the night i discovered lull cats on a four-chan thread and was like you have not told this oh yeah so i must have been probably like 13 probably 14 no i was like probably freshman year high school 13 and i was like on the family computer and it was like midnight and I was laughing so hard my dad came down and like must have thought I was watching porn but I was actually laughing at still images of cats with like really written on them do you usually laugh at porn well I guess if you're 13 I guess if you're 13 yeah true yeah like there is that there is

that um but I think it was more just like I'm sitting in a dark room and I'm just like scrolling and like completely transfixed by these like cat pictures. Yeah. I think still are. I mean, still are kind of funny. They are still funny. I think you're right. Do you remember?

Do you remember like what? I just Googled lolcats to see if any rang a bill. No. None of these are are making me laugh now. They're like baby talk now. But at the, oh, yeah. Wait, hold on. I think I remember the one.

Sure. it just yeah it's still good it's still good it's still good it's still getting them it still hits so you gotta be

you gotta be kind of an X-Men fan to get the reference here I'll read it for our audio listeners it's a cat and it's like stuck it what appears

to be like the top of like a trash can so it looks like the juggernaut from X-Men and then the caption is Charles no get out of my head

I just think it's really funny that's nice God this is just what a different time you know So it's just, it's idyllic and frozen in the past. In a way, we'll just never get back. But that's okay.

At least we get it and we get to have that in the back of our hearts all the time as we face this new frontier, including the terrifying shit I'm going to share with you guys today because that's what I'm here for. Yes, I'm very excited. So let me do some table setting here. So you're going to take it away in the first half. I am. I'm going to take away in the second half.

And we are going to be talking today about, well actually I don't know what you've brought for us which I'm very excited about so I'm going to let you kick things off here but we are we are I will say to our audience that we are broadly talking about uh say it like fucked up cats stuff on the internet I guess but we are being careful we are being so careful everyone we're being careful yeah this is not going to be a bummer episode of us like documenting animal abuse um but we are going to be talking about kind of, well, first, hold on, let me read, let me do this. This is Panic World.

I show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And also, this is American Hysteria, because we're doing a co-episode here. This is American hysteria. Back on the show again, Chelsea Weber-Smith, welcome to the show again. How are you? You know, I am doing fine. I've definitely been in this, like, really strange snow globe world that I'm going to share with you about this phenomenon that really.

hit the internet in 24, early 2025, and it's known as cute cat AI. And it is a real kitty horror picture show, which I came up with like 10 minutes before we started reporting. In case it didn't sound natural. Now question for you. I don't recognize the name, but I wanted to see, are these the videos of like the fat Chinese cat on a motorbike that's like constantly being cheated on and having to work out and stuff? Or is this a different AI cat thing? You know, it has much in common with that. I think that maybe that was the more famous manifestation of the same kind of thing.

So yes and no. But same kind of conceit of this like cat family and a bunch of different random kind of sloppy bullshit happens in these videos that. definitely verges on being very inappropriate, especially based on the titles and based on what you can imagine as being marketed toward kids in a very similar way to Elsigate, which I am going to give a quick, you know, primer back on.

Yeah. I'm glad you brought this up because I was actually working on another project recently, and basically our researcher for this show and for Garbage Day, my newsletter, Adam and I were looking at the sort of proliferation of what we're calling Mr. Beast regional variance, Okay.

So it's like every country has Mr. Beast. And what's really interesting is like up until recently, you probably wouldn't know that, but YouTube has launched an auto-dubbing feature that has meant that all of these Mr. Beast variants are breaking containment and they're getting like international eyeballs. And it has kind of turned into a gigantic Elsa gate where it's now like everything feels like ElsaGate because like these Mr. Beast rip-offs are just doing every version of American brain rot they can think of through a Mr. beast lens. I see. But what's, I think, really interesting right now about the internet is like

everything kind of feels like Elsagate. And I think AI has a lot to do with that. And before I give you the show and let you take the reins, I do want to go on record and saying, I think the Chinese AI cat videos where he rides a motorbike are awesome personally. Yes. I like those. But I don't like whatever you're going to show me. Probably not. And I think it is one of those cases where, like ElsaGate, It started out innocent enough. And then once you get this ball rolling, I won't say bad actors necessarily, but people start to realize that you can combine something really popular with kind of these very base kind of like id types of content that then starts it going in the direction of sex, death and just gore in general. Quick thing in case people don't remember. Alsa Gates started in earnest around 2014 when a Vietnamese YouTube channel, among others.

But like a lot of these were international channels with names like Spider-Man Frozen Marvel superhero real life. And they realized that if they like jammed things like search terms basically together, the children were looking for, they could kind of hypnotize them and slowly like show them more and more deranged content as they wanted to keep their attention spans. And like that is happening again now, right now, with a lot of these channels. The biggest one that we found is a guy named William Bruno, who's like a Russian Mr. Beast. And his videos are like, don't watch Slender Man videos at 3 a.m. Don't play Squid Game with Roblox at 3 a.m. Like that kind of stuff.

Sure, sure. And the last episode that we did together, we talked about mobile game ads, which is also in this same kind of category of surreal, uncanny valley exploitation of the kind of, yeah, like I said, like the baser instincts of humanity that really work to grab eyeballs in whatever way they can. And that often means using what's already popular. Like I imagine the Mr. Beast videos are kind of working that way where they're like, we know this framework is extremely popular. and now let's just jam as many, like, different already popular things in there and then give it the spice of making it kind of gross and weird.

So more people are going to be engaged in watching it because of, like, our morbid curiosity. I do want to point out one thing here because I think this is interesting and it might be useful for today's episode. So with these Mr. Reese variants, it is weirdly similar actually to Elsigate, which so for a lot, it's a lot of like foreign creators working in markets for like AdSense, payouts probably go a lot longer and they're building like low effort content farms to sort of hack attention spans. And they realize that like children's YouTube is the easiest place to do that. That's my theory. Yeah. No. And I think that's, I think that's right on. Luckily, what we're seeing with these cute cat AI videos, they're not really making it through to YouTube kids. I think that ElsaGate really freaked YouTube out in that way. And they crack down a lot. But nonetheless, we can assume that many kids are still on. like YouTube proper and are still seeing these videos. So a few more things I'll say about Elsa Gate, just to really drive home how insane it was. I did an episode about this pretty early on in our show,

maybe like 2019, 2020, but I wanted to read just a list of the different videos that I personally found just to really show how dark and bizarre this got. So, okay, we had beloved character, you know, Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, Spider-Man, the Joker, Thomas the Tank Engine, Shrek, just like all the characters you can imagine that children would be attracted to watching were put into these situations. So these include sexual situations.

They include them firing off AK-47, firing off AK-47s, eating feces, committing suicide, burying each other alive. There were child pregnancies and abortions, vampires. toilets, decapitation, hypodermic needles and injections, fake wounds, crawling with maggots, kidnappings, violent claymation eye surgeries, spiders crawling in mouths and ears. So this was really popular. It was cartoons peeing into a urinal. And then that pee goes into a faucet that's on the other side of the stall. And then they pour it in a glass and drink it. So that was like a really popular one. So this is the kind of stuff we're talking about here that is far beyond the scope of anything that

is appropriate for kids to see. And yet they were seeing it all the time. So what's the problem here? I don't, I know it's, so I remember years ago, a guest of the show, friend of the show, Keenna Topolis. Hold on a second, we have a dog barking inside. Well, that dog is barking.

What is a vampire toilet? It was a toilet that opened its lid and it had vampire teeth and then it chased around like. Cool. And it was usually the real life ones, which I didn't mention some of them were like people in like Spider-Man and El also costumes and this was like they'd be like oh my god the toilet and then the toilet would chase them around as like an animation uh cool yeah it was yeah super cool that is cool i mean that that one

actually sounds like a vampire simpsons house of horror is one episode so years ago friend of the show kian top list reporter up his insider and i were sort of discussing why there's so much fetish art online of sonic the hedgehog and like her her sort of take on it I think has become my guiding principle for whenever I, like, end up in a corner of the internet like this. Teenagers or, like, tweens in particular, they transition between being a child and being a teenager online now. There's, like, this weird corner of the internet that, you know, a lot of adults, I think, end up getting stuck in because they never grow out of it. We're like, it's, like, very hard to tell, like, am I looking at fetish art or am I looking at, like, a young person, like, going through puberty online? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, like, I want to see, like, how big and round Sonic can get. And I don't know why. You know, like, like, so there is a bit of that. But I, you know, I think AI changes this a bit because I don't think teenagers are making this stuff. I feel like it's adults, like professionally pumping out, like millions and millions of AI videos rather than like, you know, a handmade drawing of like a teenager drawing like Sonic with, like, big feet or something. Yeah.

Yeah. I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. It's less innocent. It's less innocent, I think. It is less innocent. Yeah. How much do you care about Sonic being inflated? And like, I will say that like a lot of the Elsigate discourse when it was happening was like are these people trying to groom children in this kind of grand conspiracy?

Which I don't personally think is true. I think it really just comes down to money and attention like we've already talked about. But it doesn't mean that it's not like extremely creepy and very upsetting. Totally. But, you know, the intention I don't think is as sensationalized as we kind of made it back then, which I also understand why that happened. Well, I'm excited to see some of these vampire toilets. Before we get into what Chelsea brought today, first, a word from our sponsors.

That one Sarah McLaughlin video about adopting animals. Remember that? Whatever company did that, that's going to play next. An AI version, and that would be really funny. Yeah, an AI version of the Sarah McLaughlin video about adopting animals, but it's about putting them in washing machines or something. All right, and I'll say more after this. Shall we get into it? I mean, you know, there's the story, of course, where it starts with these more innocent videos of these humanoid cat families, just doing more like regular things, like going to their grocery store.

And then kind of it got into, uh-oh, the kitten's been left behind on a road trip and they're traveling back. And, you know, they have to go through all these trials and stuff. So, yeah, they're really just these humanoid cat families in these different dynamics. And the themes are really repetitive. So you'll kind of get many, many, many, many variations of the same, like, mini plot. And a lot of these are about a minute long. Some of them are like an hour long. So it really runs the gam.

But really, it is that same kind of bad AI sloppy stuff. Like it really kind of fluctuates between being pretty decent looking. And then suddenly there's some profound issue with the AI, which just gives it that really uncanny feeling that we get from a lot of AI slop, I think. And also, you guys mentioned that there's like a fruit family version of this where they're like fruit families doing really weird shit. and then there's a minion version as well. So this is not just cats, but that's the example we're going with today. Oh, yeah.

No, I'm a big fan of Fruit Love Island. I think it's great. Okay. It was all over TikTok. I think a lot of the accounts got taken down recently actually. Okay. All right. Well, why?

Why doesn't TikTok want that on their platform? What's wrong with Fruit Love Island? I can't imagine. I can't imagine why TikTok would not want this on their. Sounds as fine as anything else I've heard being with TikTok. Okay, guys. Well, let's get into what one YouTuber called the beak called MeowGate. Okay.

All right. So what I'm going to do for all of you non-video listeners, which is all of our listeners, is I'm going to do my really quick, I'm just going to go as quick as I can to describe to you what is happening in this video. So, you know, just bear with me here because I'm trying my best. A lot happens in these videos. Some of them have talking. Some of them don't.

So I'm going to do my best. I literally practice this, which is, was a ridiculous thing. All right. So scene set, we have a beautiful woman cat in like an elegant outfit lying on a bed and her fully dressed humanoid cat husband kind of standing over her. So go ahead and play the video. Okay. So the cat dad is pulling the eyeballs out of the cat woman and she is crying from her eye sockets.

Uh-huh. And now he is putting the, oh, now he's a doctor. He's going to take the eyeballs with him into his blue convertible, drive into the hospital. And he's putting them in a different cat's open eye sockets in a surgical procedure. Oh, now she's got new eyes and her beefy lion husband is so happy about it. The world is beautiful now. Now the little cat is coming home. Oh, no, his mom's on the bed with open eye sockets and purple blood on the bed.

The little kitten's freaking out. There they go to the hospital. We're almost there, kid. Hang in there. Your mom is going to need new eyes. Wow, yeah. Oh, the dad who stole the eyes is eating steak and drinking champagne in a hotel room. I'm busy, son.

Don't call me again. But dad, she's asking for you. Please come. I'm not coming. Goodbye. Okay. Now he's at the hospital. The kitten is crying and is actually a different age altogether.

Oh, my God. Why is he so sad and crying? Here comes the woman with the new eyes. Years. My mom is sick. Let's go. Oh, the kitten recognizes the eyes. You can donate one of your eyes to your mom.

This will help her see again. Oh. Oh, and now the kitten has had a surgery and now both of them have one eye. I love you. And now they are walking out iconically both wearing eye patches. That's cool. I like the eye patches a lot. Yeah, and he's saying, can we get ice cream? So this is one of my personal favorites.

And this is a theme where a parent gets hurt in some way and loses a body part. And then the kitten is the one that has to kind of selflessly save the day for his parent, which is kind of a strange theme, I would say, for what is apparently a children's video. But I don't really know who this is for. So that one was just called Dad Cat sold his cat wife's eyes. I get served a lot of like really low, low, low, low, bad video slop on X now. And like, I'm always really curious, like, who is watching this, you know? And so, like, I pulled up this account just to see what the comments were. And half of them are real people, clearly.

And then the other half, like, are bots or sock puppets? or like... Probably. Yeah, like, I'm just so, I'm so fascinated, like, who this is for. Yeah, and it could be like a bot situation, right? I don't... You guys are much more informed about how the internet works. I'm a bit of a luteite compared to you guys.

But, you know, I think that it can be one of those things where, like, the bots are feeding the views, which is then feeding the algorithm. That would just be a guess that I would have. I think that's exactly right. Usually that's how it works where you buy a bunch of bots to like inflate the views. Like a lot of these accounts look like they're based in like Nigeria or Ghana or somewhere or like Southeast Asia. It's just similar to ElsaGate too. Super similar.

Yeah. And like I mean none of the comments are full sentences. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Someone just commented, I guess, bro. I try every day to fight the urge to. believe in dead internet theory but like it is hard i think when you when you look at this stuff

not to think like is there anyone out there is it just so fucked up that you just keep watching is it kind of like like um vague posting i i would think so i don't know let's watch more and find out let's let's check it out so our next theme is kitten goes into a body part of its parent and reeks havoc okay so this one's called she's in her foot All right. So before we start, there is a giant foot far larger than it should be based on, you know, what the cat's sizes actually are. A giant kitten foot, I should say, though it wouldn't be surprising if it were a human foot. But there is a little target on the foot and a little kitten with a bazooka. Okay? Play. Roll the video, Grant. before I roll to Ryan's other new favorite point

I'm seeing a lot of feet on the sides and a lot of armpits and armpits are the new feet yeah yeah so that is true like we know what this is actually about but also like under late stage capitalism everything is fetish art so that's true

all right so the kitten's got a bazooka the kitten is blowing a hole in the mother's foot and climb it on in now she's inside the foot riding a bicycle and it's like in a weird tunnel inside the foot now it's telling you to like subscribe and share now wait wait hold on wait hold on there was a clue there so follow so the language of the person who made this is german okay taylin tellin is follow in german it says i love this i love this kind of stuff so so it's a german account interesting all right

So the kitten is inside the foot, whipping the sides of whatever foot tunnel she's in. The mom's noticing and is in pain. Now the cat's got a flame thrower and the mom's foot has got a bunch of disgusting blister bubbles on it. And she's freaking out. Now the kitten is throwing ice cubes and it just is so happy. Now it's ice skating inside of the mom's foot tunnel and now the foot is frozen. She warms it up in a little pool of warm water. on a fan boat, the kitten, I should say.

And now the mom's like, I got to go to the doctor. The kitten's on a wooden swing inside her foot now. And now a fox is performing surgery on the mother, thank God. And now the foot tunnel is crumbling behind the kitten. And she is running. Mom's throwing away her foot into the garbage. And now she has a bionic leg and all is well. I should do this professionally.

She composted the foot, which I do think is very German of her. One of the top comments on this video is a user that wrote, I love you. And they appear to be based, they appear to be a little girl, like a very, very young girl living somewhere in like the global south, it looks like. Okay. In a French speaking country. I'm going to go with Nigeria because it's a little girl playing with like, so the person who wrote, I love you on this video of like a cat's. foot being destroyed, is like a, I would say like 11 or 12 real girl playing with like TikTok

filters and the sounds that she's using as audio files on them link to, uh, comfort ecundayo, which appears to be like a, like a common name in Nigeria. Okay. So that's what I'm guessing that this is a like Nigerian 12 year old that loves this video. What's not to love? You know? And you don't think that that would be a bot. That's also creepy where it's like, you know, because to populate like a lot of bot farms, like, some of them use AI,

but some of them just will take photos and videos usually off Facebook and just like put them on another platform. So it could be that, but it is like this little girl playing with like TikTok filters. The rest of these comments are like literally just random characters that people are typing. Mm-hmm. So yeah, super, super weird. Okay, I love this. I love this.

I know. I love it too. And I really appreciate talking to someone who does love it because a lot of people do not in my house. Yeah, this is so fascinating. Okay. Why don't people normally love this? No idea. No idea.

What would you say if people's problems could possibly be? I mean, this is my comfort zone right here, baby. The thing about these videos that I find like probably most interesting of all. So this account was started at the end of February. It has a really recent. Really recent. It has about a quarter of a million followers, which is pretty incredible. Its most popular video has 7 million views.

And it has no link to anywhere. So it's not like it's promoting anything even in its bio. It's not trying to sell anything yet. And there are so many of these accounts on TikTok that are clearly being grown for something. Yeah. But that hasn't deployed yet. Like the second half of the operation hasn't happened yet. Yeah.

It's fascinating. Yeah. No, this is great. This is lots more information than I would have earned. ever know how to find. So all right. Next one we're going to do is a theme where a cat or a kitten turns into a skeleton in a variety of creative ways. All right. Cool. Okay. So remember, I'm going to set the scene. So give me a quick pause at the beginning here. All right. So what we're seeing, for whatever reason, is kind of like a little house on the prairie outfit on a mother who is on the

phone, which is a key thing that happens a lot in these videos, is the distracted mother as an archetype. And like, what happens when you're distracted as a mother? There's some morality plays in here for sure. So she, in her arms, she is holding a really large iguana. And her little kitten is sitting in a little strawberry shirt on the countertop next to her. And she had, and the mother has like a big pot of boiling water on the stove. So take it away. Oh, boy. She's, She's a trad. She is. She's giving trad, for sure.

Giving trad. In a really weird way. So, okay, the iguana is on the table now. It's opening up its mouth. It has swallowed the kitten. The mom is freaking out. The hot cowboy dad is running inside with his chainsaw and cutting the top of the jaw off of the iguana.

And now the kitten is being hauled out as a skeleton. And now the skeleton kitten is in a lab. And the parents are crying. And the kitten is. like floating in like some scientific fluid while they're, you know. Oh, and now we're supposed to like and subscribe again and share and all of that. Okay. So now the kitten is a black kitten and the black kitten is being spray painted white by a goat. Parents are so happy that their kitten's not a skeleton now. Kittens in the bath. What's going to happen? Uh-oh, the paint's

coming off. The kitten is now black and is coming to find his parents. How the hell did our son turn black? I have no idea. He was like yesterday. This is impossible. Listening. I'm just multitasking of it. Wow. Okay. So initial thoughts, boys.

I mean, there's a lot here. I mean... A lot to unpack. There's a lot. This is an extremely rich. It's an extremely rich text. A tone, maybe. Yeah.

So, like, I have seen... I have seen a lot of AI slop. There's a lot of... like AI slop that like plays off of like porn tropes like fetish tropes right like you'll see like a hot carrot woman and a hot carrot man go to the hospital because the carrot woman's pregnant oh yeah and then she comes home and she has like a cucumber baby and there's like a cucumber that like they're friends with there's a lot of that stuff going on yep and that same with these I didn't do any pregnancy ones because those really I can't there's like a lot of

can see gore. I don't know, man. It's rough. It's really rough stuff. So, again, yeah, there are a lot of, like, black cat gets treated, or like black kitten gets treated worse than white kitten kind of a morality plays as well. And, yeah, there's a lot of the themes that you would kind of imagine for these types of videos that are going to catch your attention. But that is kind of a jump scare at the end, right? It's kind of like you don't know it's going that direction at all. So it's, it's really, really strange. It's like very much like, what do we know about Americans? Totally. Prairie, cowboy dad, chainsaws, nice kitchen, a spider man bathrobe. Yeah. Racist. Yeah. Like, like, it's like, well put. So once again, what are American tropes? Once again, I went to the

comment section to see who is engaging with this in good faith. And one of the top comments is from an account named Boxer Nam Ken Tron, who appears to be like a... Oh, Kentron. It appears to be a Vietnamese woman who, like, sells clothing or has tried to sell clothing on TikTok and her comment like cannot be translated so either it's like Vietnamese web speak that like doesn't work or it's like I don't know um like nonsensical kind of nonsensical and like everyone replying is replying with nonsense emojis so I don't really know what's going on there and then another top comment is just six seven uh which I think is good and that actually kind of

a lot that's fun about it I once did a massive project on this for wire where I was trying to figure out those home remodeling videos where they come from. Yes. And I eventually figured out that they were videos being made as shit posts for fun on China's version of YouTube, Beely Billy. And then people were re-uploading them to TikTok. So I'm always kind of curious, like, where this stuff is coming from? And like, is it that we are just not in on the joke, you know?

Totally. Absolutely. It could be. And I think that was part of ElsaGate, too. And as you mentioned, Grant, I think some of it also was how do we make something for American audiences while having this cultural barrier that makes everything just seem like a little bit off. And yeah, we see that with this as well. I think, you know, these are, it's hard because these are all just theories that we can have. We're not going to really get answers about a lot of these

trends. I don't think. It's just like the lowest opinion of Americans. Yeah. Probably. This is probably like how Pixar films kind of look after like enough like passes around the world, right? Oh, yeah. Totally. So like I think your theory though that like children are watching this stuff is correct. It's like it's a lot of kids like so far like in the global south that are not taking them super seriously but like are watching them which is probably bad in its own way. And then I think about the things that we all watch when we were 12 and in a lot of ways we're going to get. I know. That's my segment today. I know.

I know. So the next one I think is important because it is. one of the themes is like a beefy dad cat. So you will see in these videos, like we kind of saw it with the cowboy, but a lot of times it's like shirt off six pack, like ridiculously beefed up cat dad. And a lot of times he's taking revenge on like, for lack of a better word, slutty cat mom who is like distracted by an affair. She gets like punished in some way because the affair has caused her to like ignore the safe. of her child and then something bad happens. So when does she put the kitten in a washing machine?

So if you want to skip the long before. I was hoping that would be the one. So we've got a mom cat taking a little nap on the couch in like a tight-fitting red dress and she has pink long flowing hair and her little kitten is about to buzz her hair off with, you know, a, what do you guys call those? buzzer? Like a razor. Razor.

Like an electric razor. Like an electric razor. All right. Let's do it. All right. So the buzzing is happening. The kitten's got the hair. The mom realizes, oh, my God.

My hair's been cut off. She's screaming. And the kitten is making something out of the hair. Adorable little fuzzy slippers the kitten has made for itself. The cat mom is screaming and choking the kitten, throwing it in a washing machine and starting the washing machine. Here comes the. beefed up cat dad. He is screaming. He sees his little kitten, who's now realistic kitten,

and it's puking up rainbow. He's rushing the kitten to the hospital. Now the kitten is puking in the hospital. The dad is like, who did this to you? The kitten's holding a picture of his mom. Now the cat dad is screaming at the mom and throwing her to the ground outside. She's been kicked out of the home, and now the happy single dad and his baby are together in safety away from the evil mother. So this is a theme. A great end of the story. Yeah, no, that's beautiful theme. Yeah. One, I love that the mom is originally falling asleep on a couch and then wakes up in a bed.

Yeah, there are little details. Like, in your efforts to nail the plots of these things, like, every video has something uncanny and wrong. You're like, wait, but that's not. And there's like, there's no time to describe them, but just like, so the listeners know every one of these videos, you're like, wait a second, you were just in a red dress. Why are you in a yellow dress now? Like, there's something like glaringly off. Just so we know, yeah, like in this one, the white animated kitten, when it is puking, turns into like an orange striped real looking kitten.

And then it just goes back to being a white kitten. Yeah. So it's... I miss that. Like in the wash, the tie pod, there's a little tie pod thing happening. And so the kitten becomes rainbow because like of the detergent. Which good shout out to an early Panic World episodes about tidepods. you should listen to that.

And now I'm wondering if like that Tidepod, because this is a recurring theme, man, it is like cat in the washing machine. And now I'm wondering if that was a grab from the TidePod panic as a like another thing to just add in of like a historically popular thing to just like mash in with all this other shit. Very, very possible. I also wonder if it's like a Nion cat thing. What's that? Right. Like the rainbow like the rainbow pop-tide cat. Sure.

But I wanted to say, like, so this account is not a TikTok account. This is a YouTube account. Yeah, there's like a four and a half minute version of this video on their page. There's a longer one. You know, I don't feel like we can actually judge it. Yeah, it's not fair. Like, I think we need the full context. Basically a trailer.

It's interesting that, like, they're trying so hard with this. It also seems like Chris Hemsworth is a recurring character in their videos, which is also kind of fascinating. Like an AI, Chris Hemsworth. Really? Or it could be the real. real could be the real Chris Sonsworth. He hasn't had a great career since Marvel, but he he pops up in a few of these a lot. Also, maybe shaved head galgado. Yeah. Yeah. Even these thumbnails are horrific. Like there's a raccoon on its stomach getting an injection into its butt by a hot nurse. You know, it's like,

whoa, what? What is happening? So, okay, so unlike TikTok, these are much more coherent comments. Okay. Interesting. The top comment is, I feel like the dinosaurs deserved the earth more after seeing this. Absolutely right. Someone else wrote, can the sun explode early? Yeah, and it's a lot of people being like, why am I watching this? Why did this get shown to me? Which is, you know, that's really interesting.

Like, there's definitely like a deeper layer to YouTube. Like, I've seen, I've seen like the really low, bad levels of YouTube. But I feel like they're hard. to access than TikTok where like it's very easy to see a random video on TikTok and just be brought into like a whole other world on that platform but yeah the majority of these comments are like people coherently being like this is insane and i watched it anyways i mean how could you i'm yeah i mean that sounds fine to me and i should have said that these are on youtube ticot instagram i'm sure they're in other places too but it's this isn't just a youtube thing the way that

elsie gate was right because that ticot wasn't right i mean i don't I mean, I don't know when TikTok came out, but it was not what it is today, at least. We are getting very close, actually, to porn that you're meant to be laughing at in a dark room. It already exists. It already exists. No, no, but like, it's like it is both fetish content and comic, like, comedy. Okay, I want to address the fetish thing, you know, before we move on here. Because I think when I say fetish, I think everyone assumes that I mean that this is sexual.

It could be. But I think what you need to think about is like, we have had digital video long enough now. We know what people are drawn to, like on a instinctual level. And like fetishes work the same way. So like if you put feet in your videos or like mutilation or like cuckoldry imagery or whatever, like these have been abstracted to the point that they are just tropes that you're using to like catch people. people's eyeballs. And I think it is not so much like someone's supposed to like crank their hog to this. It's more like it's supposed to be so hypnotic. You can't look away on like an instinctual primal level. Definitely. It's that id, man. It's like that's what it's targeting. And it's the same. We talked about this in the mobile game ads episode. Same thing. And that is like just getting you to watch that video, download that app. And then they don't really care from there because

they're getting paid for the ads. So it's like that's why we find those games. being absolutely nothing like their wild ads that are often fetishization, like you said, like a little, a lot more sexual in the mobile game ads sphere than this one. But there definitely is like some more mild sexual stuff in these, but it is still, you know, it's still there for sure. And I will also say something I didn't mention is that like most of these have come up for me not by like typing in extra things, but just typing in cute. cat AI. So this is a feels key, right? And you don't, you don't have to go far for this stuff to

start. So here's one more interesting detail about this account. It links to an Instagram called Kitten Narrative, which is the name of the YouTube channel. The Instagram has some of the Kitten Narrative videos that we see on YouTube, but it also has like a couple newer videos it's making, which are AI generated versions of what this is describing as African folk tales. So it uses the hashtag, hashtag African Folktales, hashtag Nigerian Stories. And then those videos link to an account called H.O.C. Tales, which doesn't have an Instagram, but there is a YouTube channel called H.O.C. Tales, which is, yeah, it's African Folktales and Village Mysteries brought to life with shocking twists and their AI generated videos there's like you know half dozen

of them and the only sort of context I can have I have here is like there was an AI generated video that I want to say went viral in December on Instagram which was like a cartoon of like a preacher that was like doing a sermon about How do I describe this? It was a cartoon of a preacher talking about, like, finding out that their mistress got pregnant as he was doing a sermon. That's the cartoon. But it was set to a Nigerian Afro-pop song that was AI generated by a comedian.

And I, like, fell down this rabbit hole and, like, kind of learned through that process that, like, AI-generated content, particularly on Nigerian internet, is, like, no one's really batting an eyelash about whether it's AI-generated or not. There's not really like not that I can see like much of a conversation among users being like get this evil AI stuff out of me out of you know out of my feeds. And so that's why I'm always sort of leaning to like maybe these are people based in countries like Nigeria or Vietnam or like the average user is like not really thinking about whether it's AI generated or not. Yeah, that makes sense to me. The last thing I want to show you guys is the thumbnails of the gore because that's a big thing that people talk. about is like this graphic gore that is very present in these videos.

It's a little harder to get to. It feels more buried, but it's there. And it's same thing with sexual themes, same things with like kitten abuse is a huge one where like a kitten's getting hit with like a baseball bat by its parent, could be the mom, could be the dad. And it is like pretty awful. And a lot of those are like hour or more long, which is very strange. But I want to just look at the kittens in horrible accidents thumbnail. if you don't mind, and just to give you the vibe

without having to watch an hour-long video of like car crash cat, gore, which is the really popular thing. But as you can see, it's like pretty horrifying. Yeah. It's really rough. Let's describe there's a pregnant cat at a car accident. The user's name is Kitty Coast.

It looks like. Yeah. And these are very, these only have like a couple thousand views on each of them. Yeah. It's not like the really popular ones. luckily. And you know, we don't have to necessarily describe them. Just know that like, it is really graphic gore in cat form. Yeah, it's, it's awful. It's really awful. It's, yeah,

it's, it, I think these things get worse and worse, the deeper you go into them for sure. So, one thing I could say here is like years ago, I was tipped off to like the monkey torture YouTube stuff. What's that? And I, and I, I ultimately passed on it because I was like, I have like, other shit to do and I don't want to do this. And I think the BBC eventually covered it. But basically, I think the guy who was running the monkey torture ring eventually got arrested. So this is like real. Not AI or anything.

Yeah. To be clear, that was all AI. Yeah. No, no. But like, basically like there were people who were basically uploading videos of like monkeys being hurt or monkeys hurting each other. And it was like way more prevalent than like almost any other form of animal abuse on the internet.

And the people who were doing it, you know, when asked like why, they were basically like, we don't know, like, people seem to like this for some reason, which is like a common refrain you're going to hear from people making like really bad stuff on the internet. They're like, I don't know. All of this is to say this is like not the first time I've seen like YouTube's algorithm. What's weird here is like they're not popular videos. Like no one's watching these. I think they're top.

Well, okay, though that makes sense. So like their top video has 62,000 views. and they made it a year ago. I see. Okay, I see what happened here. They basically made a video of like a cat. Like their first video is about like a baby cat and the house is on fire and it like did kind of well. So then they made another video that's even gorier and then that did better.

And then they made like a super gory video that did the best of all. And they're basically like, they're like they seem to be chasing that. Sure. That is a thing that like happens in a lot of different forms, like even beyond AI. Like people will like sort of accidentally unlock an audience of like true sickos and then sort of like mindlessly chase them. That makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't like it. But it makes sense. No, I don't like it either. So I guess I'll just close out there and and let you guys take it away because because I think that's a pretty good overview of what we're seeing here. And there are many more themes that are equally bizarre. And it just it's all very, very unsettling, I think is is the word that comes to mind.

but also if you are someone who seeks out the unsettling, go ahead and go watch these videos or watch the Panic World version of this video and you'll get to see it. Well, we're going to match your freak with something equally freaky today. But first, a word from our sponsors. Anthropic.

Okay, so, Chelsea, do you remember a little website called bonsai kitten.com? I absolutely remember it. And we did an episode on rotten.com. So I am pretty intimately connected to these memories because I relived them not so long ago. So I haven't opened this website since I first opened it. So it's still there. There's an archive version.

Okay. The University of Michigan has like an archive of it. And I opened it and like was immediately, I could have immediately. I could immediately smell and hear the air conditioning unit of my high school computer lab, which is where I first encountered it my freshman year. It'd be really fucked up if you're like, I actually look at this all the time. I like, this is how I see with myself. That would be really weird.

But so before you went back to this era for your episode, when did you first encounter bonsai kittens? And don't worry about explaining what it is yet because we'll walk everyone through that. When did you first encounter it? I would say maybe around 12, 13, I think is like the era of that type of video. I was born in 88. When were you guys born? 89. Okay.

90. 90. Same as Taylor Swift. Yeah, really close. Yeah. So I definitely was on these types of websites, unfortunately. And I'm sure that it marred me in ways I'll never fully understand. But, yeah, bonsai kittens was definitely something.

that I thought was real at the time. I don't know. Did you guys see this when you were younger? Yeah, I saw it when I was probably 12 or 13. It was part of what was pitched to me by friends as the unholy trinity of internet content, which would have been Tub Girl, Harlequin Fetus, and Bonsai Kittins, I think was the version that was given to me. I've heard another version that included Blue Waffle. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. This is all pre-tub girl. This is all pre-2 girls one cup, by the way. Harlequin fetus was like a really fucked up medical photo of like an aborted fetus, I think. Tub girl was a woman going the bathroom on herself. That's a nice way to put it. You can fill in the blanks there. And then bonsai kittens, which before, I'm going to say this right now, this is fake.

It was always fake. But when it was introduced to me, when I was 12 or 13 years old, around. the time I was discovering lull cats for the first time, I believed it was real. And it was, it depicts basically growing a cat in a jar. That is the premise of bonsai kittens that you push a small kitten into a jar and then it grows around the jar, like a bonsai tree kind of. It was created as a joke, thankfully, by MIT students and hosted on university servers. And it went viral by accident. And the reason we wanted to talk about it in relationship to what you found is because I always think it's really important to start from a place of the internet

and people using the internet have kind of always been the same even though the technology changes and most importantly the scale changes. And I feel like keeping that in mind like is a great way to like orient yourself for the new horrors to be like, yeah, we've always kind of been freaking each other out this way. But like the ways we do it are changing and the believability, which is this is a weird one actually because this is more believable than the AI cats like I know the AI cats aren't real Bonsa Kinn, I didn't know was fake for years. I don't think I knew it was fake maybe even until I did that episode really I'm not sure I wouldn't blame you I wouldn't blame you I really don't know it's like maybe I just hadn't thought about it in a really really long time until I got back into that world but yeah I don't

know I what you're saying makes total sense for sure about it's like Looking back at the stuff that we watched, it's almost like these cute cat AI videos like pale in comparison. Because we had like practical effect kind of hoaxes or, you know, and as a lot of Ron.com ended up being hoax stuff, which was really comforting to me to learn. Yeah. You know, many, many, many years later. Two girls one cup is mostly fake, I believe. I don't know. I would.

I hope. I know that there's a much. Why do you have to ruin the magic of everything, Ryan? Why can't some things remain for me? Can we have nothing? It's nothing sacred. Yeah. It's nothing sacred.

I'll leave that one for everybody. But yeah, so Bonzi kittens was fake. And yeah, the idea was you could put a kitten in a jar and it would grow into the shape of the jar. And but the kids who made it in MIT were really not prepared for how viral this would go on early internet. It was uploaded in 2000. And I did a project years ago about sort of 2000s internet, specifically like the years 1999 to base 9-11, being this really weird moment where Google launches search properly and the internet connects to itself for the first time in a really real way. And no one knew what to do about it. And what's really interesting is like to this day, Google like, Google like got kind of mad at me for that piece.

because I basically argued that like Google made stuff go viral and they're like, we don't make stuff go viral. Like we've never made anything go viral. And it's like, no, man, like you listed all the websites and then you ranked them and people found them. And like you get a lot of really weird memes and like fake websites and sort of internet stories happening in this time period. And I largely blame Google search for causing the chaos, which it's not inherently bad.

It's just like no one was really prepared. for it. That makes sense, which feels like kind of what we're seeing with AI right now. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it. You're exactly right. Bonsai Kitten goes live in December 2000. 20 days later, the U.S. Humane Society posts about the site, advising the public to email MIT's web complaint department. And the story spread so much that basically like a bunch of cat, like pro cat websites start like condemning it. Yep. this is from a site called catlovers.about.com.

Remember about.com? And it reads, my larger concern with whether, aside from the shock value, the creator of this site is actually practicing his insane cruelty upon helpless kittens. If this is indeed the case, this sicko needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Please do not under any circumstances email or call the owner of bonsai kitten domain, nor sign his guest books. Oh, guest books. I forgot about those. I know. How sweet. People like this,

on the attention so don't feed his greedy sickness. Be a rude guest. Yeah, don't sign his guest book. Don't even bring them a present. Yeah, so two days later, two days after the U.S. Humane Society steps in, MIT takes the site down. And it wasn't like MIT was host. It's like there was free hosting, I think, for MIT students.

I think that's the way to sort of think about this. But a bunch of backups get made and one becomes cruel.com. sight of the day. Yep. I mean, I don't remember that, but I remember it from the research. Yeah, that was a big, a big moment. And it's really interesting, too, because this was like a full-blown moral panic, I would say, over something that looking at it now, these pictures are really fake. Like, they look bad. They look really bad. And it's very, very, very clear that these are computer generated. And so it's just interesting because we have, it's, again, it's the classic Moral panic. Do you want me to read some of the selections I picked out that show how fake it is

and also that like this was clearly written to be a joke? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll read from the method section. At only a few weeks of age, a kitten's bones have not yet hardened. They are extremely soft and springy. In fact, if you take a week old kitten and throw it to the floor, it will actually bounce. We do not recommend that you try this at home. The kitten may bounce under the furniture and be difficult to retrieve. Yes, it's to be very clear. This is fake, fake, fake, fake. Not in good taste, but fake.

Totally. As well as covered in unsightly household dust. However, the flexibility of the kitten skeleton means that the bones are gently warped at this early age and they can be molded into any desired shape. At Bonsai Ken, we achieve this by placing a kitten into a rigid vessel soon after birth. The kitten essentially grows into the shape of the vessel. Once the cat is fully developed, it is removed or the vessel broken to remove it, producing a lovable fairy pat you've always wanted, but it remains in the shape you've always dreamed of.

This is, I mean, it's actually very funny now that I'm reading it as an adult and not horrifying, like it was when I was a kid. Well written. They're like showing you that you could do, you can do a, you can put a baby in the jar. Oh, right. That rocks. Yeah, I'm going to put a baby in the jar. Yeah, and it's very clear that they're just, like,

kind of shooting these to make it look like the cat's in the jar, and it's not actually in the jar. No. That's a happy cat right there. And the ones that are in the jar finished, those look very, very fake once you get. Very fake. I mean, also just like, it's like, yeah, you ever see a cat's mush its face?

Except against something, that's what it looks like. It's like the cat's fine. The cats are weirdos. Yeah. I understand why people were freaking. out, you know? Well, in a lot of ways, this is kind of another interesting comparison

to the AI CAD videos is like, and maybe it is about believability to a degree, but like, I do think we have gotten a lot more used to sort of like engaging in dark art impulses online, you know? Yeah, like 20, 26 years later. like we are there are people who are like yeah i'm here to watch like fucked up cat videos yeah because i'm a sicko and like 26 years ago when the internet was mostly like

IT professionals and college students and like conspiracy theories i guess um they were like that's weird don't do that yeah yeah yeah it's a slippery slope yeah it's like it's like as the internet's become more mainstream it's filled up with different kinds of sickos yeah there was something kind of nice over like If you wanted to see this shit, you would to go to cruel.com. Yeah. You would actually like, you had to go to rotten.com, right. Yeah.

That you were a little sicko. Like you had to opt in. So in terms of the outrage, our researcher Adam put together a bit of a ticking clock for us here, which is just a really fascinating document of like how the internet used to work. So July 24th, Blues News, a like old school gaming news aggregator. They link to it and they get so much hate that they have to delete the link and apologize. guys. The register, which is like still a site that's pretty good. They write an article titled Bonsai kitten craze sweeps online world. It takes a while, but they eventually say

like, it's a joke. It's a very convincing joke. Then an Estonian magazine picks it up a few days after that. And then finally it becomes like a piece of syndicated journalism. Wow. And this is this is where it gets really crazy. It bounces around the internet for like a year. And then the FBI subpoenas MIT to find out who did it, which is crazy. Which is crazy. Could you imagine the FBI doing something crazy? No. To people who didn't deserve it?

Could you imagine the internet being, could you imagine the FBI being overly precious about stuff on the internet? No, I couldn't imagine. Hey, it's Alex. So some of you might know that before I was doing hyperfixed, I was at Reply All. and one of the people I used to co-host with was Emmanuel Jocci, who is just an amazing reporter,

really knows how to find the story inside the story. And now Emmanuel has a new show that I am excited to tell you about. It's called Big Lives, and he hosts it with Kai Wright, another award-winning journalist. And together they dig into the BBC's archive

to tell the real, complicated, surprising stories behind icons who shaped our culture. We're talking David Bowie, Tina Turner, Richard Pryor, Jane Fonda, people that you think you know. But, you know, that's kind of the whole point of the show. You don't actually know them.

Not the full picture. The show's smart. It goes deep. And it has a lot of heart. Which, if you know Emmanuel's work, will come as no surprise you at all. Again, the show is called Big Lives. It's from Pushkin and BBC Studios. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

But what's, I think, interesting, too, about this is eventually this would be hosted on rotten.com after it kind of ran out of different places to go. And that was a part of rotten.com's like dedication to free speech. And, you know, I think people like Elon Musk come out of this, this era of free speech being anything and everything hosted on the internet without any kind of real moderation. And, you know, I mean, rotten.com would end up going to court over different aspects of free speech. And it kind of was this like, quote unquote, bastion. a free speech. I'm not saying I feel that way, but that was sort of the narrative that was going around. And I just think that that is a really interesting part of how the early internet built

some of the people that were dealing with today and what they expect from the internet. So I don't disagree, but I'm curious, like, if you could say more about sort of the Elon Musk connection there. So like, are you saying that like he, he grew up as sort of, not grew up, but he was an edge lord on the internet during peak edge lord times. Yeah. And, He just sort of carried that on. Yeah, I think that's what I mean. And that it's so married that this type of like really sometimes exploitative or gruesome in some way or fucked up content is really connected to this like very important American ideal, even though that feels like kind of gross to connect some of like the worst videos out there real as well to this idea of free speech. I'm not saying it's wrong.

I don't have a strong opinion. I just think about the edge Lordian time as having a profound effect on what people expected and wanted out of the internet. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, so in the, you know, the part of the story here where the FBI subpoena's MIT, the person behind it, Dr. Michael Wong-Chang talks. It's a pseudonym. Yeah, definitely a really charming. Just being really. It's a pseudonym, to be clear.

They spoke to Wired at the time, and they said, I was surprised. I really thought the FBI had better things to do. That's your tax dollars at work. And then there's a quote in the piece from like a Boston criminal defense attorney, which if you all would like, I can do in the accent as someone who grew up in the area. This is why we're doing this entire episode. It's all leading up to this point. Why are they doing this?

I think the answer is that political correctness is in effect of the FBI. And I think it's like the FBI has gone woke Boston. Yeah, it's like it sounds like the FBI is wick awoke now. But like it is it is sort of a weird pre-9-11 environment, you know, between like 1998 and 2000, based 2001, where liberal progressives, it's not that they were the bad guys. like they were the no fun police basically. And I suppose that's something that the right wing has tried to bring back now. But like it's not it's it's not the same. I feel like now, especially sort of in late stage Trump era, there is the reversal happening a lot more often.

Like like this story, I'm trying to imagine like what bonsai kittens would look like in 2026 if he tried to do it. And like who would be mad? Right. Yeah. But also like animal stuff now is so low like I guess you could be like yeah like we made a website where like young couples do a baby in a jar I guess. Sure. And then like conservatives freak out like pro life conservative's freak out or something. I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out like how you would do something like this now. It's hard to imagine. Yeah. The culture has moved on so far from these dynamics at play here of like we're going to freak everyone out. Yeah. And I think hoaxes are harder to pull off. You know, and people just have the ability. And not to say that everybody believed bonsai kittens was real, but a lot of people did. And then a lot of people were just mad about the poor taste of it all. But, you know, I just, I think it's just easier to disprove something like that than it was back then.

I mean, think of the Blair Witch Project. I think you just unlocked it for me, actually. Okay. All right. So there is like an entire content economy out there right now of people rage baiting each other. usually around like sex and gender roles right now like the like the entire trad wife economy is this right and like none of these people are real like it's all performative it's all sort of devolving into the same like attention mechanics with the AI cat videos or mobile games where it's like we're just going to jam a bunch of shit into this video and like piss you off yeah and there's so many now that like i i assume that we are we are quickly moving to a place where the average person assumes that whatever they're seeing online is at best like inflated engagement bait and you know or at worst just like not real at all and back then 26 years ago you sort of assumed that most of the stuff online was real because why would it not be yeah yeah

it also wasn't algorithmic a hoax gets attention from humans because you're like arguing with your friend is this real and you have to send it to one another versus like i'm going to put all the right words into this video and like it's going to it's going to get spread so this was this was the big argument i had with google a couple years ago where i was arguing that like it was algorithmic actually that like we've actually never we've never really known internet without algorithmic virality because the search algorithm is an algorithm it's just that like it it prioritized different stuff and so like a lot of these early internet touchstones you know are all your base belong to us and stuff an algorithm was yeah simpler times an algorithm was like giving it to people um because like google's big

thing was it moved from the chronologic largely chronological feeds of like yahoo to something more tailored to like a non chronological search result feed right so it's it's it's not totally one to one with now, but like it is interesting that like, it's interesting that I guess you could say that like hoaxes kind of like are very prevalent in like deeply algorithmic moments. Yeah. I guess just to put a cap on the story before we sort of land the plane here today. In 2005, Bonsai Kitten's resurfaced. Oh, really?

Yes. Yes. My excitement is palpable. So once again, this is like another moment where like the internet landscape business. shifting. Old stuff is going viral again. We saw this with like the rise of TikTok turning like every old internet thing into like a new internet thing. And it happened again. The New York Daily News basically had to write a story about this and the piece reads, if you're the parent of a teenager, you may want to have a serious discussion with your child. You need to explain that no one is

selling cats and jars. Rumors to the contrary are creating anxiety for a number of young animal lovers. The teens have been posting outraged messages about the alleged lost art of bonsai kitten creation on multiple youth-oriented websites. God, we have been having the same conversation about the internet for 30 years. Yep. Yep. The piece includes a quote here.

It's so sad when one young girl wrote, these kittens are stuffed in little bottles after being given a muscle relaxant and then locked up for the rest of their lives. They are fed through a straw. After a while, the skeleton of the cat takes the form of the bottle. Please help us do something to stop this disgusting practice, which again has never been real. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, how are you sort of feeling about all of this right now?

Let's do a vibe check. Yeah, I mean, I think what it's bringing up for me is like one of the things I was originally going to research for our episode, but it just didn't end up going anywhere, was the history of cats and the internet. And I think it makes sense when you look at the cute cat AI videos, as well as probably bonsai kittens in another way. But we get this cute version first, right? We get this like engagement with a sweeter type of this cat, you know, content. And the first videos posted were of cats, you know, really early videos on YouTube. cat-centric, and then eventually, once that popularity is proven, people are going to add in

their own spin that's going to continue to get our attention. But I think that cats being kind of this unofficial mascot of the early internet, it just makes sense that the trajectory went the way that it did, and that it continues to do that on like a microscale, where we get these cute cat AI videos that are doing really well. And then people come in and they say, how do we make these videos go even more? Well, let's play on base instincts. Same with bonsai kittens. So like, yeah, let's just take this thing that is immensely popular and figure out how to hack it using kind of the worst parts of being a person, which are often the parts that you direct attention, you know, you direct your attention toward these, these things that shock. I think that's exactly right. I want

Thank you for doing a split episode with us today. This was awesome. I love doing it. Would you mind if I gave you just the shortest palette cleanser? Absolutely. Okay. So if you go to the bottom, Grant, you'll find the first cat video ever made. And it was from 1894.

Ah, yeah, yeah. By Thomas Edison. Do you know this video? I do. But we should watch it. It's very nice. It's really sweet. And I think it does prove that we've been interested in cat violence since the very beginning.

But don't worry. It's not real violence again. It's just this was a popular trend that I read about back in the late 1800s of basically guys traveling around with cats and teaching them how to box. So they put, they're just two cats that are kind of going at each other in a cute way, but they're wearing boxing gloves and they're in a little ring. My cats do this all this time. This is what I would love to go back. I would love to go back in time and show Thomas Edison like a cat with a big stinky feet. You know?

Yeah, his head would just blow off his body. A pregnant cat with big stinky feet. Yeah. And just start bazookaing his arteries inside his foot. Well, it's been a real joy, you guys. So thanks for going down to these places. I don't really know. Thank you.

Thank you for coming with us. Go edit it with. For our audience that doesn't know you just yet, where can they follow you? Follow me, American Astoria. You can just find that wherever you get your podcast. That's the most important thing. just come listen to my show. We cover history mostly, but it is weird history,

and it can be as old as the 1600s. It could be as due as yesterday, but we do these pretty wide, a pretty wide range of topics that I think a lot of you would really enjoy. And then we only have Instagram, thank God, and that's out of Eric and Astero Podcast. Not that I like Instagram either.

Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is, our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Kevin Barone, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing,

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Chill out and touch grass while you still can.