So Cute!

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's Fall Drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall Lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite?

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Mmm.

• 0:56Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites.

• 1:02Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 1:05Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 1:09Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it.

• 1:18Speaker 06

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Earlier this year, the Philadelphia Eagles posted a TikTok of football player after football player being handed a small package wrapped in colorful foil.

• 1:37Amory Sivertson?

  You can open it. A caption says that it's the first day of training camp and that the packages contain plush toys called La Boo Boo's. Most of the Eagles players look bewildered as they consider these dolls. They're small enough to fit in the palms of the players' huge football-playing hands. They're furry, they look kind of like rabbits, they have big, pointy ears, but they also have disproportionately large heads, huge eyes, little button noses, and a toothy smile represented by nine white triangles that look awfully sharp.

• 2:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which might be why offensive guard Landon Dickerson refuses to accept the one he is handed. He walks away from the camera empty handed, making the sign of the cross.

• 2:29Speaker 09

  No, that's evil.

• 2:33Amory Sivertson?

  These strange dolls were viral long before a savvy social media manager put them into the hands of NFL players.

• 2:42Speaker 10

  What's fuzzy got nine teeth and has people going absolutely crazy?

• 2:47Speaker 11

  If you want to get in on the trend, be prepared, though, to pay up because prices have skyrocketed. La Bubu. La Wawa. Yeah, you heard me. It is a collective.

• 2:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  The toys are based on the work of Kasing Lung, an artist from Hong Kong and the Netherlands. Kasing was inspired by Nordic folklore about trolls and wrote and illustrated a picture book series called The Monsters. One of his creations was named La Bubu.

• 3:11Amory Sivertson?

  In 2019, the Chinese manufacturer Popmart commissioned toys based on the book series, and the La Bubu doll was born.

• 3:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Now, every time Popmart drops a new La Bubu, they sell out immediately.

• 3:26Amory Sivertson?

  Part of the appeal is the blind box. You can't know what La Bubu you've purchased until you unbox it. It's like the teeny beanies in the McDonald's Happy Meals.

• 3:38Speaker 12

  First I got Pinky, then I got Pinky. I got Pinky and Patty in the same week.

• 3:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Or like Pokemon, right? Like, you can buy a deck and not know what's in it, and you can have like a golden ticket in there.

• 3:49Amory Sivertson?

  Hmm, gotta open it up.

• 3:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Unbox La Bubu's with me.

• 3:52Speaker 13

  Let's do a La Bubu unboxing. I really want the loved one or the secret. I have everything else besides those two.

• 4:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  These mystery unboxings make for great social media content, or maybe not great, but, you know, people are into it. All of which contributes to the ubiquity of these dolls on the internet.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  I have LaBubu fever and there's no cure. This was my first LaBubu.

• 4:17Amory Sivertson?

  Celebrities carry keychain LaBubus on designer bags. There's even a meme circulating of a LaBubu doll placed on the ground next to Karl Marx's tombstone among flowers and other more typical graveside offerings. We can't verify that this picture was real, but it says something about this day and age.

• 4:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  You ain't gotta own the means of LaBubu production. The insane popularity of these dolls has led to shopping aisle showdowns. At one point, Popmart had to actually pull LaBubus from their physical stores in the UK because of fighting.

• 4:54Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, that was me. Sorry, guys. And of course, the popularity has also led to knockoffs known as LaFufus. Yep. The Eagles, by the way, the Philadelphia Eagles, they actually had LaFufus, according to the full caption of that TikTok video.

• 5:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's like they don't have enough Super Bowl rings to get LaBubus.

• 5:18Amory Sivertson?

  You know, the NFL, times is hard, budgets is tight.

• 5:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  There are many videos building on the joke that there's something sinister about these little dolls, except for maybe to some people, it's not a joke.

• 5:35Speaker 09

  Yes, I am afraid we are quite serious. This is just another fad that people are buying into, not understanding the spiritual ramifications. People are saying that these things are cute, that they have to collect them and get as many as they can. Bro, this is demonic.

• 5:49Amory Sivertson?

  But at the heart of it, people are not buying these things because, as the theory goes, they're under the influence of an ancient demon called Pazuzu.

• 5:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Pazuzu is, by the way, a dark figure from the Mesopotamian mythology. His interest in modern internet trends could not be journalistically confirmed. But no, while some people find these big-eyed, sharp-toothed, wide-smiled, rotund creatures scary, their biggest fans feel quite the opposite.

• 6:17Speaker 14

  He's so cute and fat. Oh, my gosh, he's actually really cute. She is the cutest thing ever. Look at her. She is so cute.

• 6:27Amory Sivertson?

  Cute toys went viral before we had TikTok or Instagram. Back to my teeny beanies, case in point. But social media has accelerated how quickly these toy trends spread. Before Labubus, TikTok was flooded with videos of Squishmallows and Jelly Cats.

• 6:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  And it's not just toys. Some of the earliest globally viral videos were cat videos. You know, have you ever seen those, those cats getting freaked out by cucumber videos, Amory?

• 6:58Amory Sivertson?

  You bet I have. Those creepy, creepy cucumbers.

• 7:05Amory Sivertson?

  That's me when you put a cucumber next to me.

• 7:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  You if you were a cat?

• 7:09Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  There are whole internet communities built around cuteness, like furries and big eyed characters from manga and anime.

• 7:19Amory Sivertson?

  So why does the internet take cuteness and run with it? To answer that question, we talked to maybe the world's preeminent cuteness expert, the pioneer of a whole academic field called Cuteness Studies, Joshua Paul Dale.

• 7:36Speaker 15

  Cuteness unlocks all of these social behaviors in our brain and makes us want to get closer to things and connect with things and communicate with them.

• 7:47Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson.

• 7:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 7:50Amory Sivertson?

  And this is Endless Labubu.

• 7:55Amory Sivertson?

  Coming to you from Labubu, you are in Boston.

• 8:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  In today's episode, as Amory is demonstrating, we're getting cute.

• 8:08Amory Sivertson?

  Or we're just losing it.

• 8:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Don't get cute with me.

• 8:24Amory Sivertson?

  Joshua Paul Dale is a professor at Tsu University in Tokyo, as well as the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World.

• 8:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  For many years, researchers thought about cuteness specifically in terms of nurturing. You know, if we think something's cute, we want to take care of it.

• 8:43Amory Sivertson?

  But Joshua makes a case in his book that cuteness is about more than taking care of small things. He argues that cute things also bring out our desire to be social and to play.

• 8:56Amory Sivertson?

  Do you think Labubu dolls are cute?

• 9:00Speaker 15

  Personally, I see why people think that they're cute. When I look at them, I don't see it as much, although I'm more familiar with them now, and I think they're kind of growing on me.

• 9:13Speaker 15

  I think I'm starting to feel that they are cute. Once you have more exposure, that can happen.

• 9:18Amory Sivertson?

  I think that thing's gonna kill me in the night. I really do. I felt the same way about Furbies, too. I never understood the Furby thing, but I don't know. Part of me, I think, generally when someone tells me that something is cute, or like I'm being, it's being marketed to me as a cute thing.

• 9:39Speaker 15

  Right.

• 9:39Amory Sivertson?

  There's some part of me that, I guess, subconsciously resists that. Whereas if we're talking about like a living being, I'm all over it.

• 9:48Speaker 15

  When it's a living thing, it's a different matter. You know, there was a famous dog in Japan, Wausau, who was famous because he was so ugly.

• 9:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 15

  Ugliest dog in Japan. But people loved him because he was a dog. You know, he was, he didn't know he was ugly. He was enthusiastic and lively and loved people. And so he became famous all over the country because of that.

• 10:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  So really, the dog was cute?

• 10:12Speaker 15

  Yes, the dog was cute because he acted cute. And the gap between his appearance and his actions made it super cute. Just enhanced the cuteness. I think that's what Labubu fans feel. Like, there's a certain gap in the appearance of Labubu between what you expect as cute and what you're actually presented with. But for people who are into Labubu, it just enhances the cuteness to see that gap. For the rest of us, we don't like it so much.

• 10:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  I was just trying to think about the things that I thought were cute.

• 10:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  And the only thing that I could come up with was when children wear bow ties. And I don't.

• 10:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's just like the only thing. But but other than like things in my own family, like I think my cat is very cute. But like, for me, cuteness is it's not. It's not a way something looks, but more like a way I feel about it, if that makes any sense.

• 11:15Speaker 15

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah, if you can feel that you have a relationship to a cute object, it definitely enhances the cuteness. This is true, even if the relationship is only in your mind, like if it's a an object and not a living thing. This is the reason that Hello Kitty has a backstory, even if it's only three sentences. Because people can feel closer to something cute if they know something a little bit more about it and can form a relationship to it in their mind.

• 11:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wait, what's the three sentence Hello Kitty backstory?

• 11:46Speaker 15

  Oh, yes, she's from London. Her name is Kitty White, and she's five apples tall. I hope I have the right number of apples there.

• 11:55Speaker 15

  Hate to get that wrong.

• 12:04Amory Sivertson?

  What was your gateway to studying cuteness? How did this become your area?

• 12:11Speaker 15

  Oh, yeah, well, I had been in Tokyo for quite a while already. So I knew about the cute culture here, kawaii, as they say in Japan. But I never really paid that much attention to it. And then one day I walked out of my apartment. And you know those road construction barriers that like orange and white stripes telling you not to go into dangerous areas? I walked out of my apartment. And all of those have been replaced with lines of Hello Kitties holding rainbows.

• 12:38Speaker 15

  And at first I thought, you know, okay, it's just another tie up with Sanrio, the company that makes Hello Kitty. But then I noticed a lot of other construction barriers that were like blue leaping dolphins or green smiling frogs. And it just happened everywhere all at once. And I just thought that something's going on here like this would never happen at home. And I started seeing it more and more. And I predict that after our conversation today, you and Ben will also go out and notice more and more cuteness, because the rest of the world is catching up.

• 13:12Amory Sivertson?

  Plenty of biologists had studied cuteness, but in the humanities, it was relatively undiscussed, unlike cuteness's classier cousin, beauty. So Joshua set out to change that and bring together researchers from across the disciplines whose work touched on cuteness.

• 13:29Speaker 15

  When I started studying this, all of the work on cuteness stressed that we feel things are cute because children need nurturing and care, which is true. But I just, the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, this is not the whole story. There are other reasons why we find things are cute. If one of them is care, then the other one is play. Let me ask you a question. Which is cuter, a six-month-old baby or a six-day-old baby?

• 13:59Amory Sivertson?

  Six-month is my answer.

• 14:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, I think probably, well, I would say a six-day-old baby.

• 14:08Speaker 15

  I think it also depends on whether or not you're thinking of your own children when you answer that question, because there are other, like, chemical responses in the brain for parents that make them need to take care of newborns. But for the rest of us, six-month-old babies are cuter. Surveys have demonstrated. And that's the age when children get old enough to sort of engage more with the world. And so, cuteness unlocks all of these social behaviors in our brain and makes us want to get closer to things and connect with things and communicate with them. And also stimulates the pleasure centers of our brain, but also lowers stress and anxiety.

• 14:51Speaker 15

  It just makes people feel more comfortable when they're around cute things. And I think that that's one reason that cuteness has become so ubiquitous in our 21st century culture.

• 15:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Our 21st century understanding of cuteness echoes a theory from the 20th century. In the 1940s, Austrian animal behavior scientist Konrad Lorenz identified what he called "the baby schema," a set of physical traits that, he theorized, automatically trigger our caregiving responses.

• 15:24Amory Sivertson?

  And even though Joshua thinks cuteness is as much about bonding and play as it is about nurturing, he's got to hand it to Lorenz. The baby schema still tracks.

• 15:35Speaker 15

  For the most part, if we see these characteristics that young children and also baby animals have, you know, a large head relative to body size, large eyes, sort of broad forehead, short stubby arms and legs, wobbly movements, things like that, then we're very likely to feel that that thing is cute.

• 15:54Amory Sivertson?

  I went to a few African countries earlier this year, which is not a humble brag, it's just a brag brag. I was very lucky to get to do it. And I saw so many baby animals. And when I see something that is very, very cute, I like get this, I don't know if it's like I bite my tongue or something, but I always have this like clench reaction where I feel like I'm just going to explode. And if I don't bite my tongue, I don't know what I'm going to do. And there was someone else on the trip too, who kept just saying like, "I want to put it in my mouth."

• 16:29Amory Sivertson?

  And we have these kind of weird physical reactions to cuteness. And I know that you're looking at this more from a humanities perspective, but is there anything in your work that explains maybe that more physical reaction that we, that some of us at least have to cuteness?

• 16:51Speaker 15

  Well, scientists call that reaction cute aggression. And only about half of adults have it, so I think you're lucky. It's like cute overload. It's so cute that you can't stand it. And so we get all these physical responses. Our vocal pitch rises and our teeth tend to clench, our fists clench, and we're just like, "It's so cute, it's so cute, it's so cute," like that.

• 17:12Speaker 15

  And the important thing to note with that is that the name cute aggression is a bit of a misnomer. It's not quite the right name because it suggests that we want to behave aggressively towards the cute object. Kind of seems like that if you say, I want to put it in my mouth. That's kind of aggressive. But the point is, we don't actually do those things. Because one of the earliest lessons we teach children is that don't squeeze the puppy too hard, right? We know that that will, you know, that that will kill the cute object, so we can't do it. And so I think that the aggressive response comes back on us and we take it out on ourselves. So that's why there's all these reactions like tensing muscles and clenching teeth,

• 17:55Speaker 15

  because we know we can't, we can't exercise this impulse onto the cute object. So it rebounds back on us in order to keep the cute object safe.

• 18:04Amory Sivertson?

  Wow, I've never thought about it like that. That makes so much sense that it's like, I can't, I can't do this to the creature. So I'm just gonna like.

• 18:13Speaker 15

  So you do it to yourself.

• 18:15Amory Sivertson?

  Hurt myself? Yes. Whoa. The rest of this episode is so cute. You could just eat it right up in a minute.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 19:01Speaker 16

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 19:28Speaker 17

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new Fall arrivals in-store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 20:32Amory Sivertson?

  Our English word, cute, has its own origin story.

• 20:36Speaker 15

  Cute comes from acute, you know, sharp, cunning. And for quite a long time, until the 19th century, when you saw the word cute, it was simply a shortened form of acute and it meant a cunning person and not a particularly pleasant way. Someone who might cheat you was cute. And it only switched in the late 19th century when a new word was needed to describe this upsurge in popular culture of adorability. And so cute sort of was repurposed and became the cute that we know today. But maybe in American cute, there's still a little echo of the old clever or cunningness. Like, I think of, I don't know,

• 21:20Speaker 15

  American cartoons often are sort of funny or goofy and they just have a little twist to it. And I, in that, I see an echo of the older meaning.

• 21:30Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, there's like some mischief to it that is cute for some reason.

• 21:35Speaker 15

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, exactly.

• 21:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mickey Mouse has some mischievous moments, as do minions, the little hyperactive yellow characters from the movie Despicable Me.

• 21:51Amory Sivertson?

  Maybe mischief is part of the appeal of Labubus with their big grins and doe eyes. In fact, Popmart even released a special series of Labubus called The Mischief Diaries. It featured a Labubu cupid with his bow and arrow drawn, looking ready to cause some chaos.

• 22:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cute is a relatively new word compared to kawaii. The Japanese have celebrated kawaii for centuries. It comes from the word for face and the word for flushed and dazzled, the way you might feel when seeing something cute.

• 22:27Speaker 15

  The word kawaii has been called the most popular word in the Japanese language, most commonly used word and most popular word. So you just hear it all the time, every day. People are just sort of into kawaii and predisposed to think about it. And I think there's a few reasons for that. And one of them is that to say something is cute, it's not only a conversation opener, it can also continue a conversation. And it can do so in a way that's not divisive and doesn't make people angry or aggressive. It's just a way to, you know, pass the time. And I think people enjoy it.

• 23:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  One of the earliest examples of kawaii in the digital age are emojis. In the 1980s, Japanese schoolgirls used a popular cute shorthand sort of writing where they rounded their characters, included little pictures. Their teachers hated this cutesy handwriting and found it hard to read, which of course, in turn, made it incredibly popular. Companies used it in ad campaigns and Apple Macintosh even added it as a font. But by the mid 1990s, girls in Japan had a new tool to communicate.

• 23:38Speaker 15

  Even before cell phones came out, there were pagers. And mostly pagers were intended for use by, you know, doctors on call or businessmen. But in Japan, parents started buying them for their children to keep track of them, especially girls. And when girls got the pagers, they realized they could send messages to their friends on them. And so they started to use little esky characters like a colon and a parenthesis for a smile. They had a whole language using those characters. And these pagers also had primitive emoji that they used as well. So when cell phones came, each cellphone provider in Japan had its own emoji palette. And the people who used it the most were teenage girls.

• 24:23Speaker 15

  When Apple launched the iPhone in Japan around 2007, it was a complete flop because it had no emoji. So Apple got together with Google and they created an international standard for emoji, and that's the emoji we use today.

• 24:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Why do you think things like cat videos were early viral hits?

• 24:45Speaker 15

  Yeah, once social media came and be previous to that, the internet in general, and YouTube especially, cuteness just exploded. And I think one reason for that is not just that cuteness is easily shareable, because a lot of things are. But think about the difference between receiving a picture of somebody eating a delicious meal and receiving a picture of a really cute cat. You cannot eat that meal. You can't bite into that steak when you're looking at the picture. So you feel a little bit of envy. But when you look at the picture of the cat, yeah, you can't pet the cat, but you can look at the cat and you can feel cuteness. So a cute picture or a cute video gives you something. It doesn't remind you that you're lacking something.

• 25:30Speaker 15

  And I think that's the biggest reason why cuteness just spread so quickly around the world.

• 25:35Amory Sivertson?

  Joshua's written how the 20th century belonged to American cuteness. Mickey Mouse and the rest of the Disney characters, Shirley Temple, the Peanuts, but the 21st century might belong to Kawaii.

• 25:48Speaker 15

  I think that the American cuteness that spread in the 20th century was largely top-down, like Disney.

• 25:56Speaker 15

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

• 26:35Speaker 15

  You can see it in character design, like really big sparkly eyes in many, many aspects. So I think it's going to continue. I think kawaii is the next worldwide huge hit.

• 26:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you think that this is a good thing? Like this change, even if it means we're really inundated by the boo-boo memes? Why do you feel optimistic about the future of cuteness online?

• 27:02Speaker 15

  Well, I think that overall, cuteness is a biological phenomenon that evolved because we need to take care of unsocialized children. And it does things to our brain, like activates the reward centers in our brain and makes us more social and lowers our stress. Those qualities are what attract most people. And I think those are the things going forward that are going to be characteristic of the new cute culture. And in that sense, I'm optimistic.

• 27:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Joshua, what's the cutest thing in your apartment?

• 27:37Speaker 15

  My cat.

• 27:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, okay. Fast answer.

• 27:39Amory Sivertson?

  Hands down.

• 27:40Speaker 15

  Yep.

• 27:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  What's your cat's name? And can you describe your cat's cuteness to us?

• 27:45Speaker 15

  Toby. In Japanese, tobiru means to jump or fly. He's very good at jumping. He's just an ordinary tabby cat, a rescue cat, but I love him.

• 27:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  There you go. All you need is a three-sentence backstory, it turns out, for all cat-related cuteness.

• 28:04Amory Sivertson?

  How many apples tall would you say Toby is?

• 28:08Speaker 15

  When he stretches out, he is really long. Actually, I'm always surprised. Like, at least a seven apple cat, I would say, stretched out.

• 28:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, seven apple cat, there you go.

• 28:18Amory Sivertson?

  Seven apples long.

• 28:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thank you so much, Joshua. It's been, it's been a real pleasure talking to you and it's a fun topic. So, thank you.

• 28:26Speaker 15

  Sure, no problem at all. Thanks for having me on.

• 28:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  By the way, an earlier version of this episode incorrectly stated that Despicable Me is a Disney movie. It is not. It was produced by Illumination and distributed by Universal Studios. We apologize for the error. Endless Thread is a cute-ass production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter, hosted by me, Ben Kwai Johnson.

• 29:05Amory Sivertson?

  And me, Amory LaFufu.

• 29:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  LaFufu, you're more of a LaFufu. You're more of a Pazuzu.

• 29:12Amory Sivertson?

  What's Pazuzu again? That's like the possessed overlord.

• 29:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  The possessed demon from Mesopotamia.

• 29:17Amory Sivertson?

  Love it. And me, Amory Pazuzu Sivertson.

• 29:23Amory Sivertson?

  It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

• 29:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Franny Monahan, our production manager, Paul Vikes, and managing producer, Sumita Joshi.

• 29:34Amory Sivertson?

  Who is 74 apples tall. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and LaFufus.

• 29:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell in emojis, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR.org.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 30:38Speaker 18

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  And just explain why you're excited about it.

• 30:44Speaker 18

  Oh my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 31:34Speaker 17

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite?

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Mmm.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 32:26Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it.