Pod Insights Panic World Why AI cat videos are becoming the internet’s newest weird obsession About this episode Why are cats so popular on the internet? It started with cat memes like I Can Haz Cheezburger and Keyboard Cat, then we became enamored with cat celebrities like Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, and Princess Monstertruck. And now, we’re witnessing the next evolution in cat internet content: “cute cat AI.”
Our guest and host of American Hysteria, Chelsey Weber-Smith, calls it a “Kitty Horror Picture Show.” Chelsey joins Ryan and Grant to tell us about the explosion of really weird AI-generated cat videos depicting cat families that’s all over TikTok and YouTube right now — much like Elsagate once did in 2014. Then, Ryan takes us back even further, to cover an older cat-based moral panic: Bonsai Kittens. Together, we look at how though technology has changed, we’ve pretty much always wanted to show each other freaky stuff on the internet — whether real or fake.
Our guest Chelsey Weber-Smith hosts American Hysteria, a show that explores the fantastical thinking and irrational fears of Americans. Check it out here or wherever you listen to podcasts. Want even more Panic World content?
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Transcript 13,375 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:30 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. A welcome to the world of weird AI cat videos. What is your favorite cat-related content on the internet? Like, what's your favorite video posts, meme, whatever?
1:03 Speaker 02 Okay. Do you all remember, this was probably like three years ago, maybe a little less, and there was just this really quick video of a cat coming around the side of a fridge? And it sounds like he says, "Well, hi."
1:15 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
1:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:33 Speaker 02 That's a favorite for me. And that's like worked its way into my regular rotation of vocabulary, for sure.
1:40 Ryan Broderick? That's definitely a good one.
1:41 Speaker 02 What about you guys?
1:42 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.
1:52 Speaker 02 I don't remember. Who's Little Bub?
1:53 Ryan Broderick? He's the one with the thumbs up.
1:55 Speaker 02 Was he kind of like bug-eyed and growling a lot?
1:57 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, yeah.
1:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was awesome.
1:59 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, he was cool.
2:00 Speaker 03 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.
2:07 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
2:08 Speaker 03 As often as I can.
2:09 Ryan Broderick? I will tell you, Grumpy Cat, I didn't like, I didn't like the spectacle around Grumpy Cat. It felt very exploitative.
2:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, I feel that.
2:16 Ryan Broderick? 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.
2:23 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah, I think that that's nice. I mean, keyboard cat, classic.
2:27 Ryan Broderick? Classic.
2:28 Speaker 02 It got so annoying eventually, like the I can has cheeseburgers. Just classic millennial cringe, you know? And I hate using that term, by the way, but it's just, there's no other word. Yeah.
2:41 Ryan Broderick? 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-
2:52 Speaker 03 You have not told this.
2:53 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, oh, really written on them.
3:14 Speaker 02 Do you usually laugh at porn?
3:19 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.
3:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:36 Ryan Broderick? I think still are, I mean, still are kind of funny.
3:39 Speaker 02 They are still funny. I think you're right.
3:40 Speaker 03 Do you, do you remember, do you remember like what-
3:43 Ryan Broderick? I just Googled lolcats to see if any rang a bell. 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.
3:58 Speaker 03 Share.
3:59 Ryan Broderick? It just. Yeah, it's still good. It's still good.
4:03 Speaker 02 Still getting them.
4:04 Ryan Broderick? 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. Just like, it's really funny.
4:25 Speaker 02 That's nice. God, this is just what a different time, you know?
4:29 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
4:29 Speaker 02 It's just, uh, it's idyllic and frozen in the past in a way we'll just never get back. But that's okay. At least we get it and we get to have that in the back of our hearts all the time as we face this new frontier, including the terrifying shit I'm gonna share with you guys today, because that's what I'm here for.
4:47 Ryan Broderick? Yes, I'm very excited. So let me do some table setting here. So you're gonna take it away in the first half.
4:52 Speaker 02 I am.
4:52 Ryan Broderick? I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take away in the second half and we are gonna 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, uh...
5:10 Speaker 02 Say it.
5:12 Ryan Broderick? Like fucked up cat stuff on the internet, I guess.
5:15 Speaker 02 But we are being careful. We are being so careful, everyone.
5:19 Ryan Broderick? We're being careful.
5:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:20 Ryan Broderick? This is not gonna be a bummer episode of us like documenting animal abuse. Um, but we are gonna be talking about kind of, well, first, hold on, let me, let me read, let me do this. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture and eventually our reality.
5:35 Speaker 02 And also, this is American hysteria, because we're doing a co-episode here.
5:39 Ryan Broderick? This is American hysteria. Back on the show again, Chelsea Weber Smith. Welcome to the show again. How are you?
5:45 Speaker 02 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. Uh, 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.
6:11 Ryan Broderick? That's true, yeah.
6:12 Speaker 02 In case it didn't sound natural.
6:14 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?
6:29 Speaker 02 You know, it has much in common with that. I think that maybe that was the more famous manifestation of the same kind of thing. So, yes and no. But same kind of conceit of this like cat family and a bunch of different random kind of sloppy bullshit happens in these videos that definitely verges on being very inappropriate, especially based on the titles and based on what you can imagine as being marketed toward kids in a very similar way to Elsegate, which I am gonna give a quick, you know, primer back on, yeah.
7:10 Ryan Broderick? 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.
7:25 Speaker 02 Okay.
7:26 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. And it has kind of turned into a gigantic Elsegate where it's now like everything feels like Elsegate. 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 Elsegate 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,
8:10 Ryan Broderick? I think the Chinese AI cat videos where he rides a motorbike are awesome.
8:14 Speaker 02 Great. Yes.
8:15 Ryan Broderick? I like those, but I don't like whatever you're gonna show me.
8:19 Speaker 02 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.
8:53 Ryan Broderick? Quick thing, in case people don't remember, Elsagate started in earnest around 2014, when a Vietnamese YouTube channel, among others, but like, a lot of these were international channels with names like Spider-Man Frozen Marvel Superhero Real Life. And they realized that if they like jammed things, like search terms basically, together,
9:13 Speaker 02 Right.
9:14 Ryan Broderick? that 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.
9:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:23 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 Slenderman videos at 3 a.m. Don't play Squid Game with Roblox at 3 a.m." Like that kind of stuff.
9:44 Speaker 02 Sure, sure. And the last episode that we did together, we did, we talked about mobile game ads, which is also in the same kind of category of surreal, uncanny valley exploitation of the, kind of, yeah, like I said, like the baser instincts of humanity that really work to grab eyeballs in whatever way they can. And that often means using what's already popular. Like, I imagine the Mr. Beast videos are kind of working that way, where they're like, "We know this framework is..." Extremely popular and now let's just jam as many like different already popular
10:25 Speaker 02 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.
10:35 Ryan Broderick? I do want to point out one thing here because I think this is interesting and it might be useful for for today's episode. So with these Mr. Beast variants, it is weirdly similar actually to Elsagate, 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.
11:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, and I think that's I think that's right on. Luckily, what we're seeing with these cute cat AI videos, they're not really making it through to YouTube kids. I think that Elsagate really freaked YouTube out in that way and they 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 Elsagate, 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
11:39 Speaker 02 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 AK-47, firing off AK-47s, eating feces, committing suicide, burying each other alive. There were child pregnancies and abortions, vampire toilets,
12:21 Speaker 02 decapitation, hypodermic needles and injections, fake wounds, crawling with maggots, kidnappings, violent claymation, eye surgery. 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.
12:54 Ryan Broderick? So what's the problem here? I don't, I don't. So I remember years ago, a guest of the show, friend of the show, Kenia Topless. Hold on one second. We have a dog barking inside.
13:05 Speaker 03 Well, that dog is barking. What is a vampire toilet?
13:08 Speaker 02 It was a toilet that opened its lid and it had vampire teeth and then it chased around like.
13:14 Ryan Broderick? Cool.
13:14 Speaker 02 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.
13:27 Ryan Broderick? Cool.
13:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was, yeah, super cool.
13:30 Ryan Broderick? That is cool.
13:30 Speaker 03 I mean, that one actually sounds like a.
13:32 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, that sounds fun. Vampire.
13:35 Speaker 03 House of horrors one episode.
13:36 Ryan Broderick? So years ago, friend of the show, Kenia Topless, reporter at Pizz Insider, and I were sort of discussing why there's so much fetish art online of Sonic the Hedgehog.
13:46 Speaker 02 Ah, good question.
13:47 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?
14:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
14:20 Ryan Broderick? It's like, yeah, like I want to see like how big and round Sonic can get. And I don't know why.
14:26 Ryan Broderick? You know, like, like, like there, so there is a bit of that, but I, you know, I think AI changes this a bit because I don't think teenagers are making this stuff. I feel like it's adults like professionally pumping out like millions and millions of AI videos rather than like. You know, a handmade drawing of like a teenager drawing like Sonic with like big feet.
14:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right.
14:49 Ryan Broderick? It's less innocent. It's less innocent, I think.
14:51 Speaker 02 It is less innocent. Yeah.
14:53 Speaker 03 How much do you care about Sonic being inflated?
14:57 Speaker 02 And like, I will say that like, a lot of the Elsagate 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.
15:18 Ryan Broderick? Totally.
15:19 Speaker 02 But you know, the intention I don't think is is as sensationalized as we kind of made it back then. Which I also understand why that happened.
15:29 Ryan Broderick? Well, I'm excited to see some of these vampire toilets. Before we get into what else we brought today, first, a word from our sponsors.
15:38 Ryan Broderick? That one Sarah McLachlan video about adopting animals. Remember that? Whatever company did that, that's gonna play next.
15:45 Speaker 03 An AI version of that would be really funny.
15:46 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.
15:53 Speaker 02 All right, and I'll say more after this.
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17:25 Speaker 02 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, uh oh, the kitten's been left behind on a road trip and they're traveling back. And, you know, they have to go through all these trials and stuff. So, uh, 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.
18:08 Speaker 02 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 from a lot of AI slop, I think. And also you guys mentioned that there is like a fruit family version of this where they're like fruit families doing really weird shit. 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.
18:47 Ryan Broderick? Oh, yeah, no, I am, I'm a big fan of Fruit Love Island. I think it's great.
18:52 Speaker 02 Okay.
18:54 Ryan Broderick? It was all over TikTok. I think a lot of the accounts got taken down recently.
18:57 Speaker 02 Okay, alright, well.
18:59 Ryan Broderick? Why? Why?
19:00 Speaker 03 Doesn't TikTok want that on their platform?
19:03 Speaker 02 What's wrong with fruit love?
19:05 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, I can't imagine. I can't imagine why TikTok would not want this on their...
19:09 Speaker 03 It sounds as fine as anything else I've heard being on TikTok.
19:12 Speaker 02 Okay, guys, well, let's get into what one YouTuber called the beak called Meowgate.
19:24 Ryan Broderick? Okay.
19:25 Speaker 02 Alright, so what I'm going to do for all of you non-video listeners, which is all of our listeners, is I'm going to do my really quick, I'm just gonna 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 gonna do my best. I literally practiced this, which is, was a ridiculous thing. Alright, 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.
20:08 Speaker 02 Okay, so the cat dad is pulling the eyeballs out of the cat woman, and she is crying from her eye sockets.
20:19 Speaker 02 And now, he is putting the, oh, now he's a doctor. He's gonna take the eyeballs with him into his blue convertible, driving to 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.
20:40 Speaker 02 Now, the little cat is coming home. Oh no, his mom's on the bed with open eye sockets and purple blood on the bed. The little kitten's freaking out. There they go to the hospital.
20:50 Speaker 04 We're almost there, kid. Hang in there. Your mom is gonna need new eyes.
20:57 Ryan Broderick? Wow, yeah.
20:58 Speaker 02 Oh, the dad who stole the eyes is eating steak and drinking champagne in a hotel room.
21:03 Speaker 04 I'm busy, son. Don't call me again.
21:05 Speaker 05 But dad, she's asking for you. Please come.
21:08 Speaker 04 I'm not coming. Goodbye.
21:11 Speaker 02 Now he's at the hospital. The kitten is crying and is actually a different age altogether.
21:15 Speaker 05 Oh my god, why is he so sad and crying?
21:17 Speaker 02 Here comes the woman with the new eyes.
21:20 Speaker 05 Here's... My mom is sick.
21:22 Speaker 04 Let's go.
21:22 Speaker 02 Oh, the kitten recognizes the eyes.
21:24 Speaker 04 You can donate one of your eyes to your mom. This will help her see again.
21:27 Ryan Broderick? Cool.
21:28 Speaker 02 Oh, and now the kitten has had a surgery and now both of them have one eye.
21:34 Speaker 05 I love you.
21:34 Speaker 02 And now they are walking out iconically, both wearing eye patches.
21:38 Ryan Broderick? That's cool. I like the eye patches a lot.
21:40 Speaker 02 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, so...
22:13 Ryan Broderick? 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.
22:29 Speaker 02 Oh, right, yep.
22:30 Ryan Broderick? And half of them are real people, clearly. And then the other half, like, are bots or sock puppets or like...
22:38 Speaker 02 Probably.
22:40 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, like, I'm just so, I'm so fascinated, like, who this is for.
22:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, and it could be like a bot situation, right? I don't, you guys are much more, more informed about how the internet works. I'm a bit of a loonite compared to you guys, but you know, I think that 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.
23:05 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.
23:21 Speaker 02 It's just similar to Elsagate, too.
23:23 Ryan Broderick? Super similar, yeah. And like, I mean, none of the comments are full sentences.
23:28 Speaker 02 Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:31 Ryan Broderick? Someone just commented, "I guess, bro."
23:35 Ryan Broderick? I try every day to fight the urge to believe in dead internet theory, but like, it is hard, I think, when you look at this stuff, not to think, like, is there anyone out there? Is it just so fucked up that you just keep watching? Is it kind of like vague posting?
23:50 Speaker 02 I would think so.
23:52 Ryan Broderick? I don't know. Let's watch more and find out.
23:54 Speaker 02 Alright, 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." Alright, so before we start, there is a giant foot, far larger than it should be based on, you know, what the cat's sizes actually are. A giant kitten foot, I should say, though it wouldn't be surprising if it were a human foot. But there is a little target on the foot and a little kitten with a bazooka, okay? Play, roll the video, Grant.
24:29 Speaker 03 Before I roll,
24:32 Speaker 03 to Ryan's other new favorite point, I'm seeing a lot of feet on the sides and a lot of armpits.
24:38 Speaker 02 Oh, armpits.
24:38 Speaker 03 And armpits are the new feet.
24:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
24:41 Speaker 03 So I do feel like we know what this is actually about.
24:44 Ryan Broderick? But also, like, under late-stage capitalism, everything is fetish art, so...
24:49 Speaker 02 That's true. Alright, 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.
25:07 Speaker 02 Now kitten is
25:08 Ryan Broderick? 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.
25:17 Speaker 02 Okay.
25:18 Ryan Broderick? Taylin, telen is follow in German. And it says, I love this, I love this kind of stuff. So, so it's a German account, interesting.
25:28 Speaker 02 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 foot tunnel. And now the foot is frozen. She warms it up in a little pool of warm water. Now the cat's on a fan boat, 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.
26:10 Speaker 02 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.
26:23 Speaker 02 I should do this professionally.
26:25 Ryan Broderick? She composted the foot, which I do think is very German of her. One of the top comments on this video is a user that wrote, I love you. And they appear to be based, they appear to be a, a little girl, like a, like very, very young girl. Living somewhere in like the global south, it looks like.
26:48 Speaker 02 Okay.
26:49 Ryan Broderick? In a French speaking country. I'm going to go with Nigeria because it's a little girl playing with like, so the person who wrote, I love you on, 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, like a common name in Nigeria. So that's what I'm guessing that this is a like Nigerian 12 year old that loves this video.
27:27 Speaker 02 What's not to love, you know? And you don't think that that would be a bot?
27:31 Ryan Broderick? That's also creepy where it's like, you know, uh, so to, cause to populate like a lot of bot farms, like some of them use AI, but some of them just will take photos and videos usually off Facebook and just like put them on another platform. So it could be that, but it, 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. So yeah, super, super weird. Okay. I love this. I love this.
27:56 Speaker 02 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.
28:02 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, this is so fascinating. Okay. Why don't people normally love this?
28:07 Speaker 02 I have no idea. No idea.
28:08 Ryan Broderick? What would you say if people's problems could possibly be?
28:12 Speaker 02 I mean, this is my comfort zone right here, baby.
28:14 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-
28:24 Speaker 02 So really recent.
28:25 Ryan Broderick? Really recent. It has about a quarter of a million followers, which is pretty incredible. Its most popular video has seven 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, but that hasn't deployed yet. Like, like the second half of the operation hasn't happened yet.
28:50 Speaker 02 So scary. Yeah.
28:51 Ryan Broderick? It's, yeah, it's fascinating.
28:52 Speaker 02 Yeah. No, this is great. This is lots more information than I would have 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.
29:06 Ryan Broderick? Cool.
29:07 Speaker 02 Okay. So remember, I'm going to set the scene. So give me a quick pause at the beginning here. All right. So what we're seeing for whatever reason is kind of like a, a little house on the prairie outfit on a mother, uh, who is on the phone, which is a key thing that happens a lot in these videos is the distracted mother as an archetype. Um, and like what happens when you're distracted as a mother? There's some morality plays in here for sure. So she, in her arms, she is holding a really large Iguana and her little kitten is sitting in a little strawberry shirt on the countertop next to her and she had, and the mother has like a big pot of boiling water on the stove. So take it away.
29:49 Ryan Broderick? Oh, boy.
29:51 Ryan Broderick? The trad.
29:52 Speaker 02 She is, she's giving trad for sure.
29:55 Ryan Broderick? Giving trad.
29:56 Speaker 02 In a really weird way. 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 the kitten is like floating in wa- 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.
30:38 Speaker 02 Parents are so happy that their kitten's not a skeleton now. Kitten's in the bath. What's gonna happen? Uh oh, the paint's coming off. The kitten is now black and is coming to find his parents.
30:48 Speaker 05 It's black. Oh my God, it's black.
30:51 Speaker 04 How the hell did our son turn black?
30:52 Speaker 05 I have no idea. He was white yesterday.
30:54 Speaker 04 This is impossible.
30:55 Speaker 05 Listening, I'm just multitasking a bit.
30:58 Ryan Broderick? Wow.
30:58 Speaker 02 Okay.
31:00 Ryan Broderick? Okay.
31:01 Speaker 02 So, initial thoughts, boys?
31:04 Ryan Broderick? I mean, there's a lot here. I mean.
31:06 Speaker 02 A lot to unpack.
31:07 Ryan Broderick? There's a lot. This is a, this is an extremely rich, it's an extremely rich text.
31:13 Speaker 02 A tome, maybe.
31:14 Ryan Broderick? Yeah. So like, I have seen, I have seen a lot of AI slop.
31:22 Ryan Broderick? 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.
31:38 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
31:38 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.
31:47 Speaker 02 Yep. And that, they're 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.
31:55 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
31:55 Speaker 02 It's rough. It's really rough stuff. So again, yeah, there are a lot of like black cat get. 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.
32:26 Ryan Broderick? It's like, very much like, what do we know about Americans?
32:30 Speaker 02 Totally.
32:31 Ryan Broderick? Prairie cowboy dad, chainsaws, nice kitchen, Spider-Man bathrobe.
32:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:39 Ryan Broderick? Racist.
32:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:41 Ryan Broderick? Like, like, it's like a, it's like.
32:43 Speaker 02 Well put.
32:44 Ryan Broderick? So, so once again.
32:46 Speaker 03 What are American tropes?
32:48 Ryan Broderick? Once again, I went to the comment section to see who is engaging with this in good faith.
32:54 Ryan Broderick? And one of the top comments is from an account named Boxer Nam Ken Tron, who appears to be like a.
33:05 Speaker 02 Oh, Kentron.
33:08 Ryan Broderick? It appears to be a Vietnamese woman who like sells clothing or has tried to sell clothing on TikTok. And her comment like cannot be translated. So either it's like Vietnamese web speak that like doesn't work. Or it's like, I don't know.
33:26 Speaker 02 Like nonsensical kind of.
33:28 Ryan Broderick? Nonsensical and like, 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 six, seven, uh, which I think is good. And that, that actually kind of unlocks it when you think about it. 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.
33:48 Speaker 02 Yes.
33:49 Ryan Broderick? And I eventually figured out that they were. Videos being made as shitposts for fun on China's version of YouTube, Beely Beely. 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?
34:06 Speaker 02 Totally. Absolutely could be. And I think that was part of Elsagate too. And as you mentioned, Grant, I think some of it also was how do we make something for American audiences while having this cultural barrier that makes everything just seem like a little bit off? And yeah, we see that with this as well. I think, you know, these are, it's hard because these are all just theories that we can have. We're not going to really get answers about a lot of these trends, I don't think.
34:30 Speaker 03 It's just like the lowest opinion of Americans.
34:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:34 Ryan Broderick? Probably. This is probably like how Pixar films kind of look after like enough like passes around the world, right?
34:41 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Totally.
34:42 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.
34:56 Speaker 02 Yeah. And then I think about the things that we all watched when we were 12 and in a lot of ways.
35:02 Ryan Broderick? We're gonna get.
35:02 Speaker 02 I know.
35:03 Ryan Broderick? That's my segment today. We're gonna get there.
35:05 Speaker 02 I know. So the next one I think is important because it is, uh, 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.
35:49 Speaker 03 Oh, boy. I was hoping that would be the one.
35:51 Speaker 02 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, uh, you know, a, what do you guys call those? Buzzer?
36:11 Speaker 03 Razor.
36:11 Speaker 02 Razor.
36:12 Speaker 03 Razor.
36:12 Speaker 02 An electric razor.
36:13 Speaker 03 Like a, like an electric razor. Yeah.
36:15 Speaker 02 All right. Let's do it. All right, so the buzzing is happening. The kitten's got the hair. The mom realizes, "Oh, my God, my hair's been cut off." She's screaming, and the kitten is making something out of the hair. Adorable little fuzzy slippers the kitten has made for itself. The cat mom is screaming and choking the kitten, throwing it in a washing machine and starting the washing machine. Here comes the beefed up cat dad. He is screaming. He sees his little kitten, who's now realistic kitten, and it's puking up rainbow. He's rushing the kitten to the hospital. Now the kitten is puking in the hospital. The dad is like, "Who did this to you?" The kitten's holding a picture of his mom. Now the cat dad is screaming at the mom
36:58 Speaker 02 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-
37:08 Speaker 03 A great, a great end to the story. Yeah, that's beautiful.
37:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:12 Speaker 03 One, I love that the mom is originally falling asleep on a couch and then wakes up in a bed.
37:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, there are little details.
37:18 Speaker 03 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 now?" Like, there's something like glaringly off.
37:40 Speaker 02 Just so we know, yeah, like, in this one, the, the white animated kitten, when it is puking, turns into like an orange striped reel looking kitten, and then it just goes back to being a white kitten. Yeah, so it's-
37:54 Speaker 03 I missed that. Like, in the wash, the Tide Pod, there's like a little Tide Pod thing happening, and so the kitten gets, becomes rainbow because like of the, of the detergent, which, good shout out to an early Panic! World episodes about Tide Pods. You should listen to that.
38:10 Speaker 02 And 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.
38:31 Ryan Broderick? Very, very possible. I also wonder if it's like a Nyon cat thing.
38:35 Speaker 02 What's that?
38:36 Ryan Broderick? Right? Like cats and rain, like the rainbow.
38:38 Speaker 02 Oh, sure, sure.
38:40 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.
38:50 Speaker 03 You know, I don't feel like we can actually judge it.
38:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's not fair.
38:52 Speaker 03 Like, I think we need the full context.
38:54 Speaker 02 Basically a trailer.
38:56 Ryan Broderick? 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 AI Chris Hemsworth.
39:07 Speaker 02 Really?
39:08 Ryan Broderick? Or it could be the real, could be the real Chris Hemsworth. He hasn't had a great career since Marvel, but he, he pops up in a few of these a lot. Uh, also maybe shaved head Gal Gadot, it looks like.
39:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:18 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
39:19 Speaker 02 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?
39:32 Ryan Broderick? So, okay, so unlike TikTok, these are much more coherent comments, actually.
39:37 Speaker 03 Interesting.
39:37 Ryan Broderick? The top, the top comment is, I feel like the dinosaurs deserved the earth more after seeing this.
39:44 Speaker 02 Absolutely right.
39:47 Ryan Broderick? Someone else wrote, can the sun explode early?
39:53 Ryan Broderick? 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 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.
40:24 Speaker 02 I mean, how could you not?
40:25 Ryan Broderick? Yeah. I mean, that sounds fine to me.
40:27 Speaker 02 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 Elsie Gate was, right? Cause TikTok wasn't.
40:38 Ryan Broderick? Right.
40:39 Speaker 02 I mean, I don't know when TikTok came out, but it was not what it is today, at least.
40:43 Speaker 03 We are getting very close actually to porn that you're meant to be laughing at in a dark room.
40:50 Ryan Broderick? It already exists. It already exists.
40:52 Speaker 03 No, no, but like, like, it's like, it is both fetish content and. Comet, like.
40:58 Ryan Broderick? I, okay, I wanna, I wanna address the fetish thing. Uh, 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.
41:39 Ryan Broderick? And I, I, I think it is not so much like someone's supposed to like, crank their hog to this. It's more like, it's supposed to be so hypnotic, you can't look away on like, an instinctual primal level.
41:50 Speaker 02 Definitely, it's that id, man. It's like, that's what it's targeting. And it's the same, we talked about this in the mobile game ads episode, same thing. And that is like, just getting you to watch that video, download that, 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.
42:28 Speaker 02 And I will also say, something I didn't mention is that like, most of these have come up for me, not by like, typing in extra things, but just typing in cute cat AI. So, this is, feels key, right? And you, you don't, you don't have to go far for this stuff to start.
42:47 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 is, has some of the Kitten Narrative videos on, 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 folktales. So it uses the hashtag, hashtag African folktales, hashtag Nigerian stories. And then those videos link to an account called HOC Tales.
43:23 Ryan Broderick? Which doesn't have an Instagram, but there is a YouTube channel called HOC Tales, which is, yeah, it's African folktales and village mysteries brought to life with shocking twists. And they're AI-generated videos. There's like, you know, half dozen of them. And the only sort of context I can 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
44:08 Ryan Broderick? talking about 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 Afro pop song that was AI-generated by a comedian. And I like, fell down this rabbit hole and like, kind of learned through that process that like, AI-generated content, particularly on Nigerian internet, is like, no one's really batting an eyelash about whether it's AI-generated or not. There's not really, like, not that I can see like, much of a conversation among users being like, get this evil AI stuff out of me, out of, you know, out of my feeds. And so, that's why I'm always sort of leaning to like, maybe these are people based in countries like Nigeria or Vietnam,
44:50 Ryan Broderick? where like, the average user is like, not really thinking about whether it's AI-generated or not.
44:54 Speaker 02 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
45:39 Speaker 02 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.
45:47 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
45:49 Speaker 02 It's really rough. There's a pregnant cat had a car accident.
45:54 Ryan Broderick? The user's name is Kitty Coast, it looks like.
45:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, and these are very, these only have like a couple thousand views on each of them. Yeah, it's not like the really popular ones luckily. And you know, we don't have to necessarily describe them. Just know that like it is really graphic gore in cat form and.
46:12 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, it's it's awful.
46:13 Speaker 02 It's really awful. It's yeah, it's it. These things get worse and worse the deeper you go into them for sure.
46:21 Ryan Broderick? So one thing I could say here is like years ago, I was tipped off to like the monkey torture YouTube stuff.
46:28 Speaker 02 What's that?
46:29 Ryan Broderick? And and I I I ultimately passed on it because I was like, I have like other shit to do and I don't want to do this. And I think the BBC eventually covered it. But basically, I think the guy who was running the monkey torture ring eventually like got arrested.
46:43 Speaker 02 This is like real, not AI or anything. Yeah, to be clear, that was all AI.
46:48 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, no, no, but like basically like there there were people who were basically uploading videos of like monkeys being hurt or monkeys hurting each other. And it was like way more prevalent than like almost any other form of animal abuse on the internet. And the people who were doing it, you know, when asked like why they were basically like, we don't know, like people seem to like this for some reason. Which is like a common refrain you're going to hear from people making like really bad stuff on the internet. They're like, I don't know. All of this is to say, this is like not the first time I've seen like YouTube's algorithm. What's weird here is like they're not popular videos, like no one's watching these. I think their top, well, okay, though that makes sense.
47:28 Ryan Broderick? 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 they're like, they seem to be chasing that.
47:57 Speaker 02 Sure.
47:57 Ryan Broderick? That is a thing that like happens in a lot of different forms, like even beyond AI content. Like people will like sort of accidentally unlock an audience of like true sickos.
48:06 Speaker 02 Sure.
48:07 Ryan Broderick? And then sort of like mindlessly chase them.
48:09 Speaker 02 That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I don't like it, but it makes sense.
48:12 Ryan Broderick? No, I don't like it either.
48:14 Speaker 02 So I guess I'll just close out there and let you guys take it away because I think that's a pretty good overview of what we're seeing here. And there are many more themes that are equally bizarre. And it's all very, very unsettling, I think, is the word that comes to mind. But also, if you are someone who seeks out the unsettling, go ahead and go watch these videos, or watch the Panic World version of this video, and you'll get to see it.
48:42 Ryan Broderick? Well, we're gonna match your freak with something equally freaky today. But first, a word from our sponsors, Anthropic.
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49:24 Speaker 06 Streaming October 30 on Paramount Plus.
49:26 Speaker 07 I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you.
49:31 Speaker 06 You're having a midlife crisis.
49:33 Speaker 07 I'm not ready for that.
49:35 Speaker 06 He's back.
49:36 Speaker 07 I'm older. I'm wiser.
49:39 Speaker 06 And sharper than ever.
49:41 Speaker 07 Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything.
49:48 Speaker 06 Dexter Resurrection, new season October 30 on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.
49:56 Ryan Broderick? Okay, so Chelsea, do you remember a little website called bonsai kitten.com?
50:03 Speaker 02 I absolutely remember it. And we did an episode on rotten.com. So I am pretty intimately connected to these memories because I relived them not so long ago.
50:16 Ryan Broderick? So I haven't opened this website since I first opened it.
50:22 Speaker 02 So it's still there?
50:23 Ryan Broderick? Ah, there's an archive version.
50:25 Speaker 02 Okay.
50:26 Ryan Broderick? The University of Michigan has like an archive of it. And I opened it and like was immediately, I could immediately smell and hear the air conditioning unit of my high school computer lab.
50:39 Speaker 02 Yep.
50:40 Ryan Broderick? Like, yeah, which is where I first encountered it my freshman year.
50:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:43 Speaker 04 It'd be really fucked up if you're like, I actually look at this all the time. I like, this is how I soothe myself.
50:50 Ryan Broderick? That would be really weird. But so before you went back to this era for your episode, when did you first encounter bonsai kittens? And don't worry about explaining what it is yet because we'll walk everyone through that. But when did you first encounter it?
51:03 Speaker 02 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?
51:13 Ryan Broderick? 89.
51:14 Speaker 02 Okay, so.
51:14 Speaker 04 90.
51:15 Speaker 02 90.
51:16 Ryan Broderick? Same as Taylor Swift.
51:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, really close. Yeah. So I definitely was on these types of websites, unfortunately, and I'm sure that it marred me in ways I'll never fully understand. But yeah, bonsai kittens was definitely something that I thought was real at the time. I don't know. Did you guys see this when you were younger?
51:39 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 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.
51:59 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think.
52:01 Ryan Broderick? This is all pre tub girl. This is all pre two girls, one cup, by the way. Harlequin fetus was like a really fucked up medical photo of like an aborted fetus, I think. Tub girl was a woman going to the bathroom on herself.
52:17 Speaker 02 That's a nice way to put it.
52:18 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. Um, 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
53:03 Ryan Broderick? 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.
53:13 Speaker 02 Sure.
53:14 Ryan Broderick? And I feel like keeping that in mind, like, is a great way to like orient yourself for the new horrors. To be like, yeah, we've always kind of been freaking each other out this way. But like, the ways we do it are changing and the believability, which is, this is a weird one actually, because this is more believable than the AI cats. Like, I know the AI cats aren't real. Bonsai kitten, I didn't know was fake for years.
53:38 Speaker 02 I don't think I knew it was fake, maybe even until I did that episode.
53:43 Ryan Broderick? Really?
53:44 Speaker 02 I'm not sure.
53:44 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, I wouldn't blame you, I wouldn't blame you.
53:46 Speaker 02 I really don't know. It's like, maybe I just hadn't thought about it in a really, really long time until I got back into that world, but uh, yeah, I don't know. I, what you're saying makes total sense for sure about. It's like, looking back at the stuff that we watched, it's almost like these cute cat AI videos, like pale in comparison, because we had like
54:07 Ryan Broderick? No comparison, yeah.
54:08 Speaker 02 Practical effect kind of hoaxes, or, you know, and as a lot of ron.com ended up being hoax stuff, which was really comforting to me to learn.
54:19 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
54:19 Speaker 02 You know, many, many, many years later, but.
54:21 Ryan Broderick? Two Girls One Cup is mostly fake, I believe.
54:24 Speaker 02 I don't know.
54:27 Speaker 02 I hope.
54:27 Ryan Broderick? I know that I know that there's a
54:29 Speaker 03 Why do you have to ruin the magic of everything, Ryan? Why can't some things remain?
54:32 Speaker 02 Can we have nothing? It's nothing sacred.
54:35 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
54:36 Speaker 03 It's nothing sacred.
54:37 Ryan Broderick? 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 based 9 11 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.
55:21 Ryan Broderick? 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. 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 for for causing the chaos, which is not inherently bad. It's just like no one was really prepared for it.
55:58 Speaker 02 That makes sense, which feels like kind of what we're seeing with AI right now.
56:02 Ryan Broderick? I think that's I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it. You're exactly right. Bonsai kitten goes live in December 2020 days later. The US Humane Society posts about the site advising the public to email MIT's web complaint department. And the story spreads so much that basically like a bunch of cat like pro cat websites start like like condemning it.
56:25 Speaker 02 Yep.
56:25 Ryan Broderick? This is from a site called cat lovers dot about dot com. Remember about dot com? And it reads, my larger concern with whether, aside from the shock value, the creator of this site is actually practicing his insane cruelty upon helpless kittens. If this is indeed the case, this sicko needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Please do not, under any circumstances, email or call the owner of bonsai kitten domain, nor sign his guestbooks. Oh, guestbooks. I forgot about those.
56:52 Speaker 02 I know. How sweet.
56:54 Ryan Broderick? People like this thrive on the attention, so don't feed his greedy sickness.
56:58 Speaker 03 Be a rude guest.
57:00 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, don't sign his guestbook.
57:03 Speaker 03 Don't even bring them a present.
57:06 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, so two days late, two days after the US Humane Society steps in, MIT takes the site down. And it wasn't like MIT was, 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's site of the day.
57:26 Speaker 02 Yep. I mean, I don't remember that, but I remember it from, from the research. Yeah, that was a big, a big moment. And it's really interesting, too, because this was like a full-blown moral panic, I would say, over something that, looking at it now, these pictures are really fake. Like, they look bad. They look really bad. And it's very, very, very clear that these are computer-generated. And so it's, it's just interesting because we have, it's, again, it's the classic moral panic.
57:55 Ryan Broderick? Do you want me to read some of the selections I picked out that show how fake it is, and also that, like, this was clearly written to be a joke?
58:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
58:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
58:06 Ryan Broderick? 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.
58:24 Speaker 02 Yes, to be very clear, this is fake, fake, fake, fake. Not in good taste, but fake.
58:32 Ryan Broderick? Totally. As well as covered in unsightly-
58:34 Speaker 03 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 Banzai Ken, we achieve this by placing a kitten into a rigid vessel soon after birth. The kitten essentially grows into the shape of the vessel. Once the cat is fully developed, it is removed or the vessel broken to remove it, producing a lovable furry pet you've always wanted, but it remains in the shape you've always dreamed of.
59:02 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. Well written. They're like showing you that you could do, you can do, you can put a baby in the jar.
59:20 Ryan Broderick? That rocks. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, 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.
59:32 Speaker 02 No.
59:32 Speaker 03 It's a happy cat right there.
59:33 Speaker 02 And the ones that are in the jar finished, those look very, very fake. Once you get.
59:38 Ryan Broderick? Very fake.
59:41 Speaker 03 I mean, also just like, it's like, yeah, you ever see a cat's mush its face up against something? It's, that's what it looks like. It's like, the cat's fine. The cats are weirdos.
59:48 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
59:49 Speaker 02 I understand why people were freaking out, you know?
59:53 Ryan Broderick? Well, in a lot of ways, this is kind of a, like another interesting comparison to the AI cat videos is like, and maybe it is about believability to a degree, but like, I do think we have gotten a lot more used to sort of like, engaging in dark art impulses online, you know?
1:00:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, like shock stuff. Yeah.
1:00:19 Ryan Broderick? Twenty six years later, like we are, there are people who are like, yeah, I'm here to watch like fucked up cat videos.
1:00:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:26 Ryan Broderick? Because I'm a sicko. And like 26 years 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.
1:00:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a slippery slope.
1:00:42 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.
1:00:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:47 Speaker 03 There was something kind of nice over like, if you wanted to see this shit, you would go to cruel.com.
1:00:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:53 Speaker 03 You would actually like.
1:00:54 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, you had to go rotten.com, right?
1:00:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, that you are a little sicko, like you had to opt in.
1:01:00 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 24th, Blues News, a like old school gaming news aggregator, they link to it and they get so much hate that they have to delete the, the link and apologize. Uh, the Register, which is like still a site that's pretty good. They write an article titled Bonzi 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.
1:01:40 Ryan Broderick? Wow. And this is, this is where it gets really crazy. It bounces around the internet for like a year and then the FBI subpoenas MIT to find out who did it. Which is crazy.
1:01:52 Speaker 02 Which is crazy.
1:01:53 Ryan Broderick? Could you imagine the, the FBI doing something crazy?
1:01:57 Speaker 02 No.
1:01:58 Ryan Broderick? 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?
1:02:06 Speaker 02 No, I couldn't imagine.
1:02:10 Speaker 02 But what's I think interesting too about this is eventually this would be hosted on rotten.com after it kind of ran out of, of different places to go. And, and that was a part of rotten.com's like dedication to free speech. And, you know, I think people like Elon Musk come out of this, this era of free speech being anything and everything hosted on the internet without any kind of real moderation. And, you know, I mean, rotten.com would end up going to court over different aspects of free speech. And it kind of was this like quote unquote bastion 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 that is a really interesting part of how the early internet
1:02:54 Speaker 02 built some of the people that we're dealing with today and what they expect from the internet.
1:02:59 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 grew up as sort of, not grew up, like, he was an edgelord on the internet during peak edgelord times?
1:03:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:14 Ryan Broderick? And he just sort of carried that on?
1:03:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that's what I mean. And that it's so married, that this type of like, really, um, 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 about the edgelordian time as having a profound effect on what people expected and wanted out of the internet.
1:03:54 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, so in the, you know, the part of the story here where the FBI subpoenas MIT, the person behind it, Dr. Michael Wong Chang.
1:04:05 Speaker 03 It's a pseudonym.
1:04:07 Ryan Broderick? It's a pseudonym.
1:04:08 Speaker 02 Definitely a really charming pseudonym.
1:04:10 Speaker 03 Just being really, just helping out the audience.
1:04:13 Ryan Broderick? Pseudonym, to be clear. They spoke to Wired at the time, and they said, "I was surprised. I really thought the FBI had better things to do. That's your tax dollars at work." And then there's a quote in the piece from like, a Boston criminal defense attorney, which, if you all would like, I can do in the accent, as someone who grew up in the area.
1:04:35 Speaker 03 This is why we're doing this entire episode. It's all leading up to this point.
1:04:38 Ryan Broderick? Why are they doing this? I think the answer is that political correctness has infected the FBI. And, um,
1:04:46 Speaker 02 Wouldn't that be nice?
1:04:47 Speaker 03 The FBI has gone woke, uh, Boston.
1:04:50 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, uh, pre-9/11 environment, you know, between like, 1998 and 2000, 2001, where liberal progressives.
1:05:12 Ryan Broderick? 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, this story.
1:05:37 Ryan Broderick? I'm trying to, I basically, I'm trying to imagine like what bonsai kittens would look like in 2026, if you tried to do it. And like, who would be mad?
1:05:44 Speaker 02 Right. Yeah.
1:05:45 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.
1:05:57 Speaker 02 Sure.
1:05:58 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 this now. It's, it's hard to imagine.
1:06:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:06:07 Ryan Broderick? The, the culture has moved on so far from these dynamics at play here of like, we're gonna freak everyone out.
1:06:12 Speaker 02 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 bonsai kittens was real, but a lot of people did. And then a lot of people were just mad about the poor taste of it all. But, you know, I just, uh, I think it's just easier to disprove something like that than it was back then. I mean, think of the Blair Witch Project.
1:06:34 Ryan Broderick? I think, I think you just unlocked it for me, actually.
1:06:36 Speaker 02 Okay, alright.
1:06:37 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.
1:07:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:07:05 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, 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?
1:07:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
1:07:29 Speaker 03 It also wasn't algorithmic. A hoax gets attention from humans because you're like arguing with your friend. Is this real? And you have to send it to one another versus like, I'm gonna put all the right words into this video and like, it's going to, it's gonna get spread.
1:07:49 Speaker 02 Like hack it.
1:07:50 Ryan Broderick? So the, this was, this was the big argument I had with Google a couple of years ago, where I was arguing that like, it was algorithmic, actually. That like, we've actually never, we've never really known internet without algorithmic virality, because the search algorithm is an algorithm. It's just that like, it 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 the chronological, largely chronological
1:08:31 Ryan Broderick? feeds of like Yahoo, to something more tailored to like, a non-chronological search result feed, right? So it's, it's not totally one-to-one with now, but like, it is interesting that like,
1:08:45 Ryan Broderick? it's interesting that, I guess you could say that like, hoaxes kind of like, are very prevalent in like, deeply algorithmic moments?
1:08:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:08:53 Ryan Broderick? I guess. Just to put a cap on the story before we sort of land the plane here today. In 2005, Bonsai kittens resurfaced.
1:09:01 Speaker 02 Oh, really?
1:09:02 Ryan Broderick? Yes, yes.
1:09:03 Speaker 02 My excitement is palpable.
1:09:06 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 TikTok, turning like, every old internet thing into like, a new internet thing. And it happened again. The New York Daily News basically had to write a story about this. And the piece reads, "If you're the parent of a teenager, you may want to have a serious discussion with your child. You need to explain that no one is selling cats in jars."
1:09:37 Ryan Broderick? Rumors to the contrary are creating anxiety for a number of young animal lovers. The teens have been posting outraged messages about the alleged lost art of bonsai kitten creation on multiple youth oriented websites. God, we have been having the same conversation about the internet for 30 years.
1:09:56 Speaker 02 Yep. Mm hmm. Yep.
1:09:59 Ryan Broderick? The piece includes a quote here. It's so sad, 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.
1:10:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:10:23 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, I mean, how are you sort of feeling about all of this right now? Let's do a vibe check.
1:10:27 Speaker 02 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 as probably bonsai kittens in another way. But, but we get this cute version first, right? We get this like engagement with a sweeter type of this cat, you know, content. And the first videos posted were of cats, you know, really early videos on YouTube, cat centric.
1:11:10 Speaker 02 And then eventually, once that popularity is proven, people are going to add in their own spin that's going to continue to get our attention. But I think that cats being kind of this unofficial mascot of the early internet, it just makes sense that the trajectory went the way that it did, and that it continues to do that on like a micro scale where we get these Cute Cat AI, Cute Cat AI videos that are doing really well. And then people come in and they say, how do we make these videos go even more? Well, let's play on base instincts. Same with bonsai kittens. So like, yeah, let's just take this thing that is immensely popular and figure out
1:11:51 Speaker 02 how to hack it using kind of the worst parts of being a person.
1:11:58 Speaker 02 Which are often the parts that you direct attention. You know, you direct your attention toward these, these things that, that shock.
1:12:05 Ryan Broderick? I think that's exactly right. I want to thank you for doing a split episode with us today. This was awesome.
1:12:10 Speaker 02 I love doing it. Would you mind if I gave you just the shortest palate cleanser?
1:12:15 Ryan Broderick? Absolutely.
1:12:16 Speaker 02 Okay, so if you go to the bottom, Grant, you'll find the first cat video ever made. And it was from 1894.
1:12:24 Ryan Broderick? Ah, yeah, yeah.
1:12:25 Speaker 02 By Thomas Edison. Do you know this video?
1:12:27 Ryan Broderick? I do, but we should watch it. It's very nice.
1:12:29 Speaker 02 It's really sweet. And I think it does prove that we've been interested in cat violence since the very beginning. But don't worry, it's not real violence. Again, it's just, this was a popular trend that I read about back in the late 1800s of basically guys traveling around with cats and teaching them how to box. So they put, they're just two cats that are kind of going at each other in a cute way, but they're wearing boxing gloves and they're in a little ring.
1:12:55 Ryan Broderick? My cats do this all this time. I would love, I would love to go back, I would, I would love to go back in time and show Thomas Edison, like, a cat with big stinky feet, you know?
1:13:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, his head would just blow off his body.
1:13:10 Ryan Broderick? A pregnant, yeah, pregnant cat with big stinky feet, yeah.
1:13:13 Speaker 02 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.
1:13:24 Ryan Broderick? Thank you. Thank you for coming with us.
1:13:26 Speaker 02 Who did you go edit it with?
1:13:27 Ryan Broderick? For our audience that doesn't know you just yet, where can they follow you?
1:13:31 Speaker 02 Follow me, American Hysteria. You can just find that wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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 at American Hysteria Podcast. Not that I like Instagram either.
1:13:59 Ryan Broderick? Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt 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, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hallows. 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
1:14:40 Ryan Broderick? one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected] . Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/panicworldpod. 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.
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