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

Summary

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Hyperfixed Presents: Panic World – The Disturbing World of Cute Cat AI

Podcast: Hyperfixed (Radiotopia)
Episode: Presenting: Panic World - The Disturbing World of Cute Cat AI
Date: July 16, 2026
Host: Alex Goldman (Hyperfixed)
Main Guests: Ryan Broderick (Panic World Host), Chelsea Weber Smith (American Hysteria), Adam & other contributors

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Episode Overview

This episode is a collaboration between Hyperfixed and Panic World, centering on a bizarre, disturbing, and rapidly growing Internet phenomenon: AI-generated cute cat videos that, beneath their adorable surface, often veer into graphic, unsettling, or even gory territory. The show dissects the evolution of cat content online—from early meme culture through the nightmare of Elsagate, leading up to the current explosion of “slop” AI cat videos on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. Alongside, the hosts reflect on the cyclical nature of online moral panics, digital attention economies, and the evolving web of truth and fiction on the Internet.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nostalgia and the Positive Origins of Cat Content

• Internet Cat Culture: The episode opens celebrating the iconic status of cats online—classic memes, viral cats like Little Bub and Keyboard Cat, and the journey from wholesome, funny clips to today’s digital weirdness.
  • “It’s idyllic and frozen in the past in a way we’ll just never get back.” – Chelsea (09:05)

2. Rise of Weird AI Cat Videos

• The Emergence of AI Slop:

  • “Cute cat AI” videos emerged around 2024-2025. These are low-effort, mass-produced, AI-generated animations featuring humanoid cat families in repetitive, often bizarre and disturbing scenarios.
  • Cat videos are just the beginning. Variations include fruit families (“Fruit Love Island”) and minion knockoffs.
  • Unlike early cat content aimed for universal levity, these target kids but slide into exploitative or graphic themes.

• Content Examples:

  • Chelsea describes, in lurid detail, typical videos, e.g.: a cat dad steals mom’s eyes to give to another, kittens climbing inside parents’ body parts, or children selflessly sacrificing for neglectful or violent parents.
  • [24:41] “The cat dad is pulling the eyeballs out of the Catwoman, and she is crying from her eye sockets. Now he’s a doctor...”

• Algorithmic Amplification & Audience Ambiguity:

  • Many accounts, especially on TikTok, amass millions of views with strange engagement. Comments seem equally split between real, confused kids (usually from the Global South or non-Western regions), and empty, bot-like responses.
  • “Half the comments are real people, clearly, and the other half are bots or sock puppets... I’m so fascinated, like, who is this for?” – Ryan [25:28]

3. Comparison to Elsagate

• Elsagate Recap:
  • Between 2014–2018, YouTube saw a rash of “Elsagate” videos—cartoon and live-action kids’ content shoehorning beloved characters into obscene or violent situations to capture “kids plus algorithm” attention.
  • AI cat videos are viewed as a direct descendant—same mechanics, new tools.
  • “It started out innocent enough, then people realize you can combine something really popular with these base ID types of content... and then it starts going in the direction of sex, death, and gore.” – Chelsea [12:58]
  • List of Elsagate video themes includes weapons, sexualization, bizarre surgeries, and coprophagia ([16:00]).

4. Algorithm, Engagement, and Dead Internet Theory

• Engagement Farming:

  • These AI cat video channels often have no clear commercial goal. Instead, they seem to be “grown” to amass attention, likely for later exploitation or sale.
  • Presence of “bot” comments suggests views are being artificially inflated.

• Dead Internet Theory:

  • “Bro, I try every day to fight the urge to believe in dead, dead Internet theory. But…is there anyone out there?” – Ryan [26:45]
  • Conversation explores the idea that much of supposedly “viral” content and its engagement is now manufactured, with a large interest in “is any of this real?”

5. The Fetishization of Shock and the AI Slop Economy

• Not Just Sexual Fetishism:

  • Instead of explicit sexual content, these videos amass viewers by plugging into primal, “id” fascination—injury fetishes, spectacle, violence, and taboo.

• Market Origins:

  • Many origins traced to regions (Nigeria, Ghana, Southeast Asia, Germany) where making low-effort content can still be profitable due to ad rates.
  • “AI-generated content, particularly on Nigerian Internet, no one’s really batting an eyelash about whether it’s AI generated or not.” – Ryan [47:03]

• Themes of Violence and Morality Plays:

  • Regular tropes: parents abusive or neglectful, children suffering bodily harm, strong “trad dad” punishing the “slutty” mom, transformations, body mutilation.
  • “There’s a lot of pregnancy gore. There are a lot of like, black cat gets treated worse than white kitten morality plays as well.” – Chelsea [35:03]

6. Echoes of Early Internet Cat Panics: Bonsai Kittens

• Nostalgic Look Back:

  • The episode draws a line from current AI cat horror to the infamous 2000s hoax “bonsaikitten.com.” In its time, this site depicted fake “cat cruelty” as an art form; it sparked mainstream outrage despite being a poorly Photoshopped prank.
  • “I believed it was real… it depicts basically growing a cat in a jar.” – Ryan [54:15]
  • “Looking back at the stuff that we watched, it’s almost like these cute cat AI videos pale in comparison, because we had no comparison: practical effect kind of hoaxes…” – Chelsea [56:24]

• The Cycle of Moral Panic:

  • “Google launched search properly…and the Internet connects itself for the first time in a really real way, and no one knew what to do about it… you get a lot of really weird memes… I blame Google for causing the chaos…” – Ryan [57:00]

• Changing Perceptions & Acceleration:

  • Then as now, outrage and engagement fuel the spread; today’s key difference is the speed, reach, and algorithmic “optimization” that's made these cycles go global, instantly.

7. From Edgelords to Algorithmic Ragebait

• Connection to Modern Internet Culture:

  • Early Internet’s wild-west attitude (“free speech above all, no moderation”) paved the way for present-day controversy merchants and new waves of edgelordism.
  • “I just think the edgelordian time has a profound effect on what people expected and wanted out of the Internet.” – Chelsea [71:27]

• Algorithm Changes Context:

  • “Then, hoaxes get attention from humans, you have to send it to one another; now, the right keywords in a video get it cracked open by the algorithm.” – Contributor [75:41]
  • “We are quickly moving to a place where the average person assumes whatever they see online is, at best, inflated engagement bait, or at worst, not real at all.” – Ryan [75:17]

8. Cats as Internet Mascots—From Cute to Creepy, Again and Again

• The ‘Eternal Return’ of Cat Memes:
  • The cat endures as the mascot of the web—from the first Thomas Edison “Boxing Cats” film (1894) through lolcats, meme culture, Elsagate, and now, the uncanny valley horrors of AI animation.
  • “We get this cute version first, and then people are going to add in their own spin that’s going to continue to get our attention. Cats being kind of the unofficial mascot of the early Internet…” – Chelsea [78:39]

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Internet Cat Nostalgia:

  • “I remember the night I discovered lolcats on a 4chan thread…I was laughing so hard my dad came down and must have thought I was watching porn, but I was actually laughing at still images of cats...” – Ryan [07:33]

• Capturing the Uncanny of AI Slop:

  • “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.” – Chelsea [22:00]

• Describing a Typical AI Cat Video:

  • “The cat dad is pulling the eyeballs out of the Catwoman, and she is crying from her eye sockets. And now he is putting…the eyeballs in a different cat’s open eye sockets in a surgical procedure…” (graphic running commentary) – Chelsea [24:41]

• On the Engagement Dilemma:

  • “Who is watching this? Half of them are real people…other half are bots or sock puppets.” – Ryan [25:28]
  • “Bro, I try every day to fight the urge to believe in dead, dead Internet theory. But it is hard, I think, when you look at this stuff, not to think, is there anyone out there?” – Ryan [26:45]

• On Fetish & the Function of ‘Weird’ Content:

  • “Under late-stage capitalism, everything is fetish art.” – Ryan [27:58]
  • “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…fetishes work the same way. If you put feet in your videos, mutilation, cuckoldry imagery…these have been abstracted to the point they’re just tropes you use to catch eyeballs…” – Ryan [44:14]

• Comparing Hoaxes Past and Present:

  • “This is fake. It was always fake. But when it was introduced to me when I was 12 or 13… I believed it was real.” – Ryan [54:15] (on Bonsai Kittens)
  • “We’re quickly moving to a place where the average person assumes that whatever they’re seeing online is, at best, inflated engagement bait and, 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?” – Ryan [75:17]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [05:09] – The enduring appeal (and evolution) of cats on the Internet
• [09:31] – Introduction to the “cute cat AI” phenomenon
• [12:58] – Elsagate’s connection to today’s AI content sludge
• [24:41] – Lurid, graphic real-time descriptions of AI cat videos
• [26:45] – Speculating on the audience (real, bots, “dead Internet” theory)
• [36:04] – Race and morality tropes in AI cat videos
• [44:14] – AI slop as instinct-level engagement bait
• [54:15] – Bonsai Kittens and Internet moral panic lineage
• [71:27] – Early-Internet “edgelord” culture’s impact on today’s digital space
• [78:39] – Cats as the enduring mascot of the Internet cycle

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Final Thoughts and Takeaways

• The Online Cat as a Mirror: The journey from early viral cat memes to today’s grotesque, AI-generated cat slop reflects both technological change and the constant, weird evolution of our collective attention and anxieties.
• Everything Old is New Again: Each era’s tools (search engines in 2000, AI in 2026) amplify the same primal cycle: the sweet, the shocking, and, inevitably, the outright disturbing, to keep our eyeballs locked on the screen.
• Algorithm vs. Humanity: The shift from earnest, social sharing to opaque algorithmic recommendation has made the web feel both more optimized and more isolating—fueling suspicion that much “engagement” is now manufactured.
• What’s Real, What’s Bait: In a world oversaturated with weird, often ominous, AI-generated slop, the episode closes with a plea for context and critical thinking—and a reminder that our fascination with cats, weirdness, and hoaxes online is nothing new, just more automated.

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Palette Cleanser & Closing

• The First Ever Cat Video: Chelsea offers a palate cleanser: Thomas Edison’s 1894 “Boxing Cats” film—a reminder that the link between cats, spectacle, and technology runs deep.
  • “It proves we’ve been interested in cat violence since the very beginning. But don’t worry, it’s not real violence…” – Chelsea [80:37]

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Where to Find More

• Panic World: Hosted by Ryan Broderick, on all major podcast platforms and YouTube.
• American Hysteria: Chelsea Weber Smith’s podcast exploring history’s oddest panics, fads, and strange moments.
• Hyperfixed: Alex Goldman’s problem-solving Internet culture podcast, Radiotopia.

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If you've never pressed play on a single “cute cat AI” video, you’ll still leave this episode with a firm sense of the Internet’s capacity for both sweetness and surreal horror—and why the line between the two is always blurring.

Transcript

[Alex]

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[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

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[Ryan Broderick]

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. 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 hi.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, yeah,

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's a favorite for me. And that's like, worked its way into my regular rotation of vocabulary.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

For sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

That's definitely a good one.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

What about you?

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I don't remember. Who's Little Bub?

[Ryan Broderick]

He's the one with the thumbs up.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Was he kind of like bug eyed and growling a lot? Yeah, he was awesome.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, he was cool.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

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.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

I feel 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

You know?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I think that that's nice. I mean, keyboard cat classic, classic. It got so annoying eventually. Like the I can has cheeseburger is just classic millennial cringe, you know, And I hate using that term, by the

[Ryan Broderick]

way, but it's just another word. Yeah, I love, I love calling Millennial Cringe what it is though, I will say, and I probably have told this story on the show before, but like, I remember the night I discovered lolcats on a 4chan thread and was like,

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

you have not told us.

[Ryan Broderick]

Oh, yeah. So I must have been probably like 13. Probably 14. No, I was like probably freshman Year of 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Do you usually laugh at porn?

[Ryan Broderick]

Well, I guess if you're 13. I guess if you're 13. Yeah. True. Yeah. Like there is that. There is that. 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They are still funny. I think you're right.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Do, do you remember? Do you remember like what I just

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

Sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

It just. Yeah, it's still good. It's still good. 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 in 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's nice. God, this is just, what a different time, you know, 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. I'm going to share with you guys today because that's what I'm here for.

[Ryan Broderick]

I'm very excited. So let me do some table setting here. So you're going to take it away in the first half?

[Alex]

I am.

[Ryan Broderick]

I'm going to take. 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 gonna let you kick things off here. But we are, we are. I will say to our audience that we are broadly talking about,

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

say it

[Ryan Broderick]

like up cat stuff on the Internet, I guess.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But we are being careful. We are being so careful.

[Ryan Broderick]

Everyone, we're being careful. Yeah, this is not gonna be a bummer episode of us, like, documenting animal abuse, but we are going to be talking about kind of. Well, first, hold on. Let me. 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And also, this is American Hysteria, because we're doing a co episode here.

[Ryan Broderick]

This is American Hysteria. Back on the show again. Chelsea Weber Smith, welcome to the show again. How are you?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, 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 2024, 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 recording in case it didn't sound natural.

[Ryan Broderick]

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?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You know, it. It has much in common with that. I think that maybe that was the more famous manifestation of the same kind of thing. Okay, 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 is being marketed toward kids in a very similar way to Elsagate, which I am going to give a quick, you know, primer back on.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 Variants.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay.

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Alex]

And.

[Ryan Broderick]

And it has kind of turned into a gigantic Elsa gate, where it's now, like, everything feels like Elsa gate, because, like, these Mr. Beast ripoffs are just doing every version of American brain rot they can think of through a Mr. Beast lens. But what's, I think, really interesting right now about The Internet is like, everything kind of feels like Elsa Gate. 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 in 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 gonna show me.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I think 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

Quick thing in case people don't remember, Elsa 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 to, 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 3:00am don't play squid game with Roblox at 3:00am like, that kind of stuff.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sure, sure. And the last episode that we did together, we did, 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 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

I do want to point out one thing here because I think this is interesting and might be useful for. For today's episode. So with these mrbeast variants, it is weirdly similar, actually to Elsa Gate, which. So for a lot, it's a lot of like foreign creators working in markets where 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 Elsa Gate really freaked YouTube out in that way and they cracked 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 characters, 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 AK47, firing off AK47s, eating feces, committing suicide, burying each other alive. There were child pregnancies and abortions, vampire 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

So what's the problem here? I don't. I know.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's so.

[Ryan Broderick]

I remember years ago, guest of the show, friend of friend of the show, Kenyatopoulos. Hold on one second. We have a dog barking inside.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Well, that dog is barking. What is a vampire toilet?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was a toilet that opened its lid and it had vampire teeth. And then it chased around like. And it was usually the real life ones, which I didn't mention. Some of them were like people in like Spider man and Elsa 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Cool.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, it was. Yeah, super cool.

[Ryan Broderick]

That is cool.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

I mean, that one actually sounds like.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, that sounds Vampire Simpsons House Horrors 1 episode. So, years ago, friend of the show, Kenan, topless reporter at Biz Insider, and I were sort of discussing why there's so much fetish art online of Sonic the Hedgehog.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Good question.

[Ryan Broderick]

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, where, 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?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

It's like.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, Like, I want to see, like, how big and round Sonic can get. And I don't know why, like, you know, like.

[Alex]

Like.

[Ryan Broderick]

Like there. So there is a bit of that.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

But I.

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're absolutely.

[Ryan Broderick]

It's less innocent. It's less innocent. I think it is.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

There's a labor of love.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

How much do you care about Sonic being inflated?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And, like, I will say that, like, a lot of the Elsa Gate 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

Totally.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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.

[Ryan Broderick]

Well, I'm excited to see some of these vampire toilets. Before we get into what Chelsea brought today, first, a word from our sponsor. That one Sarah McLachlan video about adopting animals. Remember that whatever company did that, that's gonna play next.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

An AI version of that would be really funny.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, an AI version of the Sarah McLachlan video about adopting animals, but it's about putting them in washing machines or something.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 the grocery store and then kind of it got into, 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. 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 gamut, 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. AI slob, I think. And also you guys mentioned that there was like a fruit family version of this where they're like fruit families doing really weird. And then there's minion. A minion version as well. So this is not just cats, but that's the example we're going with today.

[Ryan Broderick]

Oh, yeah, no, I, I'm a big fan of Fruit Love Island. I think it's great.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay.

[Ryan Broderick]

It was all over TikTok. I think a lot of the accounts got taken down recently.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

All right, well, why, why doesn't Tick Tock want that on their platform?

[Ryan Broderick]

What's wrong with Fruit Love? I can't imagine. I can't imagine why TikTok would not want this on there.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Sounds as fine as anything else I've heard being on TikTok.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay, guys, well, let's get into what, what one YouTuber called the beak called Meow Gate.

[Ryan Broderick]

Okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

All right, so what I'm going to do for all of you non video listeners, which is all of our listene, 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. 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 Catwoman, and she is crying from her eye sockets. And now the. 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 kittens freaking out. There they go to the hospital.

[Ryan Broderick]

Almost there, kid.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

Hang in there.

[Ryan Broderick]

Your mom is going to need new eyes. Wow. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, the dad who stole the eyes is eating steak and drinking champagne in a hotel room.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

I'm busy, son.

[Ryan Broderick]

Don't call me again.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But, dad, she's asking for you.

[Alex]

Please come.

[Ryan Broderick]

I'm not coming. Goodbye.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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? Here comes the woman with the new eyes. My mom is sick.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Let's go.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh. The kitten recognizes the eyes.

[Ryan Broderick]

Donate one of your eyes to your mom. This will help her see again.

[Alex]

Oh.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And now the kitten has had a surgery, and now both of them have one eye.

[Alex]

I love you.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And now they are walking out iconically, both wearing eye patches.

[Ryan Broderick]

That's cool. I like the eye patches a lot.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep. 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

So 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 our bots or sock puppets or, like, probably. Yeah. Like, I'm just so. I'm so fascinated, like, who this is for.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And it could be, like a bot situation.

[Alex]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I don't. You guys are much more. More informed about how the Internet works. I'm a bit of a Luddite compared to you guys. But, you know, I think that it's. It can be one of those things where, like, the bots are feeding the. The views, which is then feeding the algorithm. That would just be a guess that I would have.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think that's exactly right. Usually that's how it works where, like, 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,

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

which is similar to Elsa Gate, too.

[Ryan Broderick]

Super similar. Yeah. And like, I mean, none of the comments are full sentences, right?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

Someone just commented, I guess. Bro, I. I try every day to fight the urge to believe in dead, 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?

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Is it just so fucked up that you just keep watching? Is it kind of like, like, vague posting?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I would think so.

[Ryan Broderick]

I don't know. Let's watch more and find out.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

All right, let's check it out. So our next theme is kitten goes into a body part of its parent and wreaks 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

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. Oh, and armpits are the new feet.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, yeah, so that is true.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Like, we know what this is actually about.

[Ryan Broderick]

But also, like, under late stage capitalism, everything is fetish art.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 climbing 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Alex]

Okay,

[Ryan Broderick]

Is follow in German? It says, I love this. I love this kind of stuff. So. So it's a German account. Interesting.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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. And now the cat's got a flamethrower 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 tunnel. And now the foot is frozen. She warms it up in a little pool of warm water. Now the cat's on a fanboat. The kitten, I should say. And now the mom's like, I gotta 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

She composted the foot, which I do think is very German of her.

[Ryan Broderick]

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, a little girl, like a like very, very young girl living somewhere in like the global South. It looks like. Okay, in a French speaking country. I'm gonna 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 year old girl playing with like TikTok filters. And the sounds that she's using as audio files on them link to Comfort Ekundeo, which appears to be 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

What's not to love? You know? And you don't think that that would be a bot.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 photo and videos usually off Facebook and just like put them on another platform. So it could be that, but. 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Mm.

[Ryan Broderick]

So, yeah. Super, super weird. Okay. I love this. I love this.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah. This is so fascinating.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Why don't people normally love this?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No idea.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

No idea. What would you say if people's problems could possibly be.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

This is my comfort zone right here, baby.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 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 thing.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

But that hasn't deployed yet. Like, it. Like the second half of the operation hasn't happened yet.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, it's.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, it's fascinating.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. No, this is great. This is lots more information than I would ever, 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 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 the mother has, like, a big pot of boiling water on the stove. So take it away.

[Ryan Broderick]

Oh, boy.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

She's a trad.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

She is. She's giving trad for sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

Giving trad in a really weird way.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. 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 this float, the kitten is like floating in. 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

It's black.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh my God, it's black.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

How the hell did our son turn black?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I have no idea. He was white yesterday.

[Ryan Broderick]

This is impossible.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Listening. I just multitasking a bit.

[Ryan Broderick]

Wow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay. Okay, so initial thoughts, boys.

[Ryan Broderick]

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

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

A tome, maybe?

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 pregnancy gore. I don't know, man. Yeah, it's rough. It's really rough stuff. So. And yeah, there are a lot of like, black cat gets treated or like black kitten gets treated worse than white kitten kind of 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

It's like very much like, what do we know about Americans? Totally Prairie cowboy dad. Chainsaws. Nice kitchen. Spider man bathrobe.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Racist. Yeah. Like, like, it's like a. It's like, well, so. So once again, what are American tropes?

[Ryan Broderick]

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 Kentron, who appears to be like a. Oh, Kentron. 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, like nonsensical kind of nonsensical. And like, no. And 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 6, 7, which I think is good.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

That actually kind of unlocks that. Think about it.

[Ryan Broderick]

I once did a massive project on this for Wired where I was trying to figure out those home remodeling videos. Where they come from.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes.

[Ryan Broderick]

And I eventually figured out that they were videos being made as shit posts for fun on China's version of YouTube Bilibili. 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?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Totally, absolutely could be. And I think that was part of Elsa Gate too. And it, 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

I don't think it's just like the lowest opinion of Americans.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, probably. This is probably like how Pixar films kind of look after, like enough, like, passes around the world, right?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, totally.

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And then I think about the things that we all watched when we were 12 and in a lot of ways we're gonna get. I know.

[Ryan Broderick]

That's my segment today. We're gonna get there.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 safety of her child. And then something bad happens. So when is she put the kitten in a washing machine. So if you want to skip the one before. Oh boy.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

I was hoping that would be the one.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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, what do you guys call those? Buzzer Razor. Razor.

[Ryan Broderick]

Like, like a, like an electric razor. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 has 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 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, a great, A

[Ryan Broderick]

great end of the story. Yeah. Beautiful.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

One love that the mom is originally falling asleep on a couch and then wakes up in a bed.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

They're 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, 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? Like there's something like glaringly off just so we know.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Like in this one, the, 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

I miss that. Like in the wash, the tide pod, there's a like a little tide pod thing happening and so the kitten gets. Becomes rainbow because like of the, of the detergent which.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Good.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Shout out to an early Panic World episode about tide pods.

[Ryan Broderick]

You should listen to that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Now I'm wondering if like that tide pod, 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 tide pod 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

Very, very possible. I, I also wonder if it's like a nyon cat thing.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

What's that?

[Ryan Broderick]

Right? Like cats and rain, like the rainbow pop tart cats.

[Alex]

Sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

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, of this video on their page. It's long, there's a longer one.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

You know, I don't feel like we

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

can actually judge it.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Like I think we need the full context.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's basically a trailer.

[Ryan Broderick]

You know, it's interesting that like they're, 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 A.I. chris Hemsworth, really? Or it could be the real. Could be the real Chris Hemsworth. He hasn't had career since Marvel, but he pops up in a few of these a lot. Also maybe shaved head Gal Gadot, it looks like.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean 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?

[Ryan Broderick]

So, okay, so unlike TikTok, these are much more coherent comments actually. Interesting. The top, the top comment is I feel like the dinosaurs deserved the earth more after seeing.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Absolutely right.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 harder to access than TikTok or 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, yeah, I mean, that sounds fine to me.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And I should have said that These are on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. I'm sure they're in other places too. But it's. This isn't just a YouTube thing the way that Elsa Gate was. Right, because TikTok was on.

[Alex]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean, I don't know when TikTok came out, but it was not what it is today, at least.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

We are getting very close, actually, to porn that you're meant to be laughing at in a dark room.

[Ryan Broderick]

It already exists. It already exists.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

No, no, but like, like, it's like, it is both fetish content and comedy.

[Ryan Broderick]

Like, okay, I want to. 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's eyeballs. And I think it is not so much like someone 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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, you know, download that app, and then they don't really care from there because they're getting paid for the ads. So it's. It's like, that's why we find those games being absolutely nothing, like, they're wild ads that are often, like, fetishization, like you said, like, a little lot more sexual in the mobile game ads sphere than this one. But there definitely is, like, some. Some more mild sexual stuff in these that 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, A. AI. So this is feels key, right? And you don't. You don't have to go far for this stuff to start.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 Africanfolk tales, hashtag Nigerian stories. And then those videos link to an account called Hoc Tales, which doesn't have an Instagram, but There is a YouTube channel called Hoc Tales, which is. Yeah, it's. It's African folk tales and village mysteries brought to life with shocking twists. And their AI generated video, 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. Like, 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 Afrop 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 nothing 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 where, like, the average user is, like, not really thinking about whether it's AI generated or not.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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, 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Let's describe. There's a pregnant cat at a car accident.

[Ryan Broderick]

The user's name is Kitty coast, it looks like. Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

And these are very, these only have like a couple thousand views on each of them.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. So not like the really popular ones luckily. And you know, we don't have to necessarily describe them, just know that, that like it is really graphic gore in

[Ryan Broderick]

cat form and yeah, it's, it's awful.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's really awful. It's, yeah, it's, it think these things get worse and worse the deeper you go into them for sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

So one thing I could say here is like years ago I was tipped off to like the monkey torture YouTube stuff.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

What's that?

[Ryan Broderick]

And, and I, I, I, I ultimately passed on it because I was like, 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 like got arrested.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

This is like real, not AI or anything.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Yeah. To be clear, that was all AI video.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah. No, no, 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. 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, 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, like, 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 tr. They're like. They seem to be chasing that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

That is a thing that, like, happens in a lot of different forms, like, even beyond AI Content. Content, like people will like, sort of accidentally unlock an audience of like, true sickos and then sort of like mindlessly chase them.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That makes sense.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. I don't like it, but it makes sense.

[Ryan Broderick]

No, I don't like it either.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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. Of what we're seeing here. And there are many more themes that are equally bizarre. And it just. It's. It's all very, very unsettling. I think is. Is the word that comes to mind. 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

Well, we're gonna 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 bonsaikitten.com?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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. Not so long ago.

[Ryan Broderick]

So I haven't opened this website since I first opened it, which would be around. There's an archived version.

[Alex]

Okay.

[Ryan Broderick]

The University of Michigan has like, an archive of it. And I. I opened it and, like, was immediately. I could immediately smell and hear the air conditioning unit of my high school computer lab.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep.

[Ryan Broderick]

Like, which is where I first encountered it my freshman year.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Yeah, 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 myself now.

[Ryan Broderick]

Whether you're in 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. But when did you first encounter it?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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?

[Ryan Broderick]

89.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay, so 90. 90.

[Ryan Broderick]

Same as. Same as Taylor Swift.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, really close. Yeah. So I definitely, 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?

[Ryan Broderick]

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 been Tub Girl, Harlequin Fetus, and Bonsai Kittens. I think was the version that was given to me. I've heard another version that included Blue waffle.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, yeah, Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think this is all pre Tub Girl. This is all pre Two girls, one cup. By the way, Harlequin Fetus was like, a really up medical photo of, like, an aborted fetus. I think Tub Girl was a woman going the bathroom on her side.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's a nice way to put it.

[Ryan Broderick]

You can fill in the blanks there. And then Bonsai Kittens, which, before I'm gonna 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 lolcats 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

And I feel like keeping that in mind, like, is a great way to. 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. Banzai. Kitten I didn't know was fake for years.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I don't think I knew it was fake maybe even until I did that episode.

[Ryan Broderick]

Really?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I'm not sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't blame you. I wouldn't blame you.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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.

[Alex]

But.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I don't know. 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 no comparison.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Practical effect kind of hoaxes or you know, and as a lot of rotten doc like Palm ended up being hoax stuff, which was really comforting to me to learn.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You know, many, many, many years later.

[Ryan Broderick]

But Two Girls, One cup is mostly fake, I believe.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I don't know. Why would I hope.

[Ryan Broderick]

I know that. I know that there's a.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Why do you have to ruin the magic of everything, Ryan? Why can't some things remain?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Can we have nothing? Is nothing sacred?

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Well, it's nothing.

[Ryan Broderick]

I'll leave. I'll leave that one for everybody. But yeah, so. So Bonsai 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 at 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 911 being this like 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 it's. 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 is not inherently bad. It's just like no one was really prepared for it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That makes sense. Which feels like kind of what we're seeing with AI right now.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think that's. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I hadn't thought about, but you're exactly right. Bonsai kitten goes live in December 22,000. Twenty 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, like condemning it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep.

[Ryan Broderick]

This is from a site called cat lovers.about.com remember about.com and it. 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 helping 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 Banzai Kitten domain nor sign his guest books. Guest books, I forgot about those.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know how sweet.

[Ryan Broderick]

People like this thrive on the attention. So don't feed his greedy sickness.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Be a rude guest.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, don't sign his guest book.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Don't even bring them a present.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah. So two days late, two days 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 site of the day.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep. I mean I don't remember that, but I remember it from the research. Yeah, that was a big moment. And it's really interesting too because this was like a, 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, it's just interesting because we have, it's again, it's the classic moral panic.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Do you want me to read some of the selections I, I picked out that show how fake it is? And also the, that like this was clearly written to be a joke.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, it's to be very clear, this is fake. Fake, fake, fake, fake. Not in good taste, but fake.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

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 Bonsaikin, 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, furry pet you've always wanted, but it remains in the shape you've always, always dreamed of.

[Ryan Broderick]

This is. I mean, it's. 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Well written.

[Ryan Broderick]

They're like, showing you that you could do. You could do a. You could put a baby in the jar. That rocks. Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna have a. I'm gonna put a baby in the jar. Yeah. And it's like, very clear that, like, 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

That's a happy cat right there.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And the ones that are in the jar finished, those look very, very fake. Once you get very fake.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

I mean, also just like, it's like.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

You ever see a cat's mushroom space up against something?

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

It's.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

That's what it looks like. It's like, the cat's fine. The cats are weirdos.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I understand why people were freaking out, you know.

[Ryan Broderick]

Well, in a lot of ways, this is kind of a, like another interesting comparison to the AI cat videos in 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?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

Like shocks. 26 years later, like, we are. There are people who are like, yeah, I'm here to watch like, fucked up cat videos because I'm a Sicko. And like 26 years later ago, when the Internet was mostly like, IT professionals and college students and like conspiracy theorists, I guess they were like, that's weird. Don't do that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a slippery slope.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah. It's like, it's like as the Internet's become more mainstream, it's filled up with different kinds of sickos.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

There was something kind of nice over, like, if you wanted to see this, you would go to cruel dot com.

[Ryan Broderick]

Would actually, like, you had to go to Rotten dot Com. Right. Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

That you are a little sicko. Like, you had an opt in.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 24, 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. The Register, which is like still a site that's pretty good. They write an article titled Banzai 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 f. The FBI subpoenas MIT to find out who.

[Alex]

Who did it.

[Ryan Broderick]

Which is crazy.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Which is crazy.

[Ryan Broderick]

Could you imagine the. 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?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, I couldn't imagine.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

Hey, it's Alex. So some of you might know that before I was doing Hyper Fixed, I was at Reply all, and one of the people I used to co host with was Emmanuel Joshi, 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 Farn, Wanda. 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 Emanuel's work, will come as no surprise to you at all. Again, the show is called Big Lives. It's from Pushkin and BBC Studios. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Keeper sponsor, Security. Now, as we all know, I am under the assumption that Keeper Security is run, or at least heartily endorsed by the hilarious ghoul the Crypt Keeper. But the more I think about it, I'm not actually sure what the Crypt Keeper does. Like I've seen the crypt he lives in. It's a mess. So what does he do other than make ghoulish puns? But that's not the case with Keeper Security. For years I used the same password for everything. And then when I got into tech reporting, I started to look up how many of my passwords passwords had gotten leaked onto the Internet by hackers. And the answer is way more than you would think. Which is why Keeper has been a lifesaver as far as keeping me secure. 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That's three months of free [e-mail] hyperixed one more time gusto.com hyper fixed.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But what's I think interesting, too, about this is 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 bast of 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 is a really interesting part of how the early Internet built some of the people that we're dealing with today and what they expect from the Internet.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 like he was an edgelord on the Internet during peak edgelord times?

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

And he's just sort of carried that on.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I think that's what I mean. And that, 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. But I just think the edge Lordian time as having a profound effect on what people expected and wanted out of the Internet.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean so in the ca. In the, you know the part of the story here where The FBI subpoenas MIT, the person behind it, Dr. Michael Wong Chang talks.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Pseudonym.

[Ryan Broderick]

It's a pseudonym.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, definitely. A really charming.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Just, just, just being really, just helping out the pseudonym.

[Ryan Broderick]

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 exit. As someone who grew up in the

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

area, this is why we're doing this entire episode. It's all leading up to this point.

[Ryan Broderick]

Why are they doing this? I think the answer is that political correctness is infected the FBI and I think it is.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

The FBI has gone woke Boston.

[Ryan Broderick]

Yeah, it's like it sounds like the FBI is wicked woke now. But like it is, it is sort of a weird pre 911 environment, you know between like 1998 and 2000 Bas 2001 where, where liberal progressives. It's not that they were the bad guys, it was 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. In late stage Trump era, there is the reversal happening a lot more often. Like, like, like I. This story. Story. I'm trying to imagine, basically. I'm trying to imagine like what bonsai kittens would look like in 2026 if you try to do it. And like, who would be mad, right?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sure.

[Ryan Broderick]

And then like conservatives freak out. Like pro life conservatives freak out or something. I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out like how you would do something like, like this now. It's hard to imagine the culture has moved on so far from these dynamics at play here of like, we're gonna freak everyone out.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And I think hoaxes are harder to pull off, you know, and, and people just have the ability and not to say that everybody believed Banzai 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.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think, I think you just unlocked it for me, actually.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay. All right.

[Ryan Broderick]

So like, 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 gonna jam a bunch of shit into this video and like piss you off.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Off.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

Yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

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?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

It also wasn't alcohol. 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 gonna put all the Right. Words into this video and like it's going to, it's gonna get cracked.

[Ryan Broderick]

So the, 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 an 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, you know, simpler times. An algorithm was like giving it to people because like Google's big thing was it moved from, 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. I guess just to put a cap on the story before we sort of land the plane here today in 2005, bonsai kittens resurfaced.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh really?

[Ryan Broderick]

Yes, yes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

My excitement is palpable.

[Ryan Broderick]

So once again this is like another moment where like the Internet landscape is shifting. Old stuff is going viral again. We saw this with like the rise of Tik Tok 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 in 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 world websites. God, we have been having the same conversation about the Internet for 30 years.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep, yep.

[Ryan Broderick]

The piece includes a quote here. It's so sad. One year, 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.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan Broderick]

I mean, how, how are, how are you sort of feeling about, about all of this right now? What? Let's do a vibe check.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 in the Internet. And I think it makes sense when you look at the cute cat AI videos as well. 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 content. And the first videos posted were of cats, really early videos on YouTube, cat centric. And then eventually, once that popularity is proved 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, just. It just makes sense that the trajectory went the way that it did and that it continues to do that on, like, a micro scale where we get these cute cat 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 bass in the 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 things that shock.

[Ryan Broderick]

I think that's exactly right. I want to thank you for doing a split episode with us today. This was awesome.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I love doing it. Would you mind if I gave you just the shortest palette cleanser?

[Ryan Broderick]

Absolutely.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay. So if you go to the bottom, Grant, you'll find the first cat video ever made, and it was from 1894.

[Ryan Broderick]

Ah, yeah, yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

By Thomas Edison. Do you know this video?

[Ryan Broderick]

I do, but we should watch it. It's very nice.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

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 Trav 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.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

My cats do this all this time.

[Alex (Hyperfixed Host)]

This is.

[Ryan Broderick]

I would love to go back. I would love to go back in time and show Thomas Edison, like, a cat with big stinky feet, you know?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. His head would just blow off his body.

[Ryan Broderick]

A pregnant cat with big sticky feet.

[Guest or Contributor (possibly Adam or another researcher)]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And just start bazooka ing his arteries inside his foot. Well, it's been a real joy, you guys. So thanks for going down to these. These places. I don't really know.

[Ryan Broderick]

Thank you for coming with us. For our audience that doesn't know you just yet, where can they follow you?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Follow me American Hysteria. You can just find that wherever you get your podcast, that's the most important thing is 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 new 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 American Hysteria podcast. Not that I like Instagram either.

[Ryan Broderick]

Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fialstead is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, producer Devin Maroney and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. RC Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Kuga is their director of marketing, YouTube and podcast growth marketer Samantha Hollows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy Courier newsroom.com be sure to check out the panic world YouTube channel which you can [e-mail] anicworldpod and please give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can. Radiotopia from pv rx.