Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey are welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie
Kai E Douglas. Oh yeah, that's your your new nickname now,
I just want to try it out. Kawai kai. Yeah,
(00:24):
I don't know. I don't think that people usually call
me cute that, which is what kawaii essentially means in Japanese.
M Yeah, what is it? What is cute? What does
it mean to be cute as a person is a thing? Like?
What does that label mean within our culture? Well, I
think the United States it's more of an outward appearance,
whereas in Japanese culture it is sort of this whole
(00:45):
industrial complex of absolute cuteness. Yes, yes, definitely in Japan,
kauai is big business and has been for for decades now. Um,
but certainly cute holds a lot of power here in
the States as well throughout most of the rest of
the world. I mean, even just looking around in this room,
we can see some little bits of cute peking their way,
(01:07):
and there's a there's a wooden monkey over there on
Noel's desk. There's Pablo Picasso in his underwear. Picture of
Pablo Picasso is underway. Yes, I don't know how cute
that is, but but the monkey's cute to eliminate extent,
the dinosaur is cute. And if you go around our death,
like any workplace, you're gonna find various totems of cute,
various little, uh little icons of cuteness that just some
(01:30):
degree empower the individual who has it. That's right. So
we are going to explore this concept of kauai e
and we're gonna do it through a couple of different
vectors here, one of which is, of course, uh, one
of the big exports of the Internet, and I'm not
talking about porn, but the other thing cats cats. Yes, yes,
(01:51):
So it should come as no surprise anyone that, of
course the Internet is full of cat videos, cat photos,
cat memes, images, gifts, you name it. I mean, in
any given day, you're probably bombarded with at least two
or three of these things, right, and if you act
actively seeking them out, if you're actively consuming them, then
there's no end in sight. You could get on a
kick one day and just keep going that you starve
(02:12):
to death. You could you would just fall down that
cat wormhole and and you're right, you can fill your
head with with all these sorts of images. And actually,
there is an artificial neural network that Google's ex Laboratory
and Stanford University have been working on. And again, this
(02:33):
is a large scale neural network. It's distributed across sixteen
thousand process of course, and researchers trained models with more
than one billion connections. And they found that this network,
when it sort of ran off on its own, it
learned how to identify a cat after a week of
watching YouTube videos. That is how prevalent this subject is
on the internet. Yeah, they fit at random thumbnails of images,
(02:57):
each one extracted from ten million YouTube big eos. And
it ends up having to basically invent the concept of
the cat in processing all of this data, figuring out right,
what's at the heart of this? What is this about?
What is what? What? What is all this data telling me?
It is telling me this is a cat, this is
the form of the cat, and uh and and then
and then everything else stems from that. And so you
(03:20):
have someone like philosopher Dan Dennett, who who's talking about
these sort of super normal stimuli, and he's talking about
super normal stimuli like chocolate cake. He's saying that there
are certain things in our environment that we see that
really get us ramped up, and that cats, babies, these
all maybe the sort of super stimuli that works UM
(03:44):
on this sort of evolution and instinctual preference. So if
you look at a chocolate cake, for instance, Um, that
is a high energy food, right, You like the chocolate
cake not because it's chocolate cake, but because you know
that it's going to be a huge shot of glucose,
and that you know, from an evolutionary perspective, that would
be helpful for us to have stores with that, right, Yes,
(04:05):
because in the ancient past, of course, a big chocolate
cake was hard to come by, or certainly that much sugar,
that much energy in one place was hard to come by.
You had to jump on it. And uh, it's the
chocolate cake example is great too because if anyone remembers
back to our episodes on decision fatigue UM and in
neural load and how that how we carry that through
the day. The experiments that studied it, Uh, most of
(04:26):
the time they seem to incorporate chocolate cake in one
form another, using that as the temptation as to your
to your willpower to your your problem solving ability. Let's
see what happens when we throw a chocolate cake in
your direction. Not literally, uh though that would be awesome
as well, but but we'll put it in your vicinity
and see how it affects your brain power and low behold,
(04:47):
it just really tinkered with people's ability to think rationally. Yeah,
because suddenly I have to at least resist it. And
in a way, it's like I have to fight that
chocolate cake. It's like it's like you're going through a
dungeon and you're trying to get to the treasure. Then
you have to fight a troll along the way. It's
the same thing, except the battles taking place inside your
mind as you try to resist the irresistible glucose temptation
(05:09):
of the cake. So Dannatt would say that a super
normal stimuli for cuteness, of course, would be babies. He says,
it's important that we love babies that will not be
put off by saying messy diapers. He says, so babies
have to attract our affection in our nurturing, and they do.
And so that's when you begin to really look at
not just babies, but cats and puppies and really anything
(05:29):
that embodies this idea of innocence and vulnerability and and
this sort of parental instinct that we'll talk a little
bit more about. But this is this idea that cats
perhaps have arrested our attention because of this instinct because
they look like babies essentially, and then play it up
to as we've discussed before, crying in a way that
(05:51):
mimics the cries of a baby, et cetera. Yes, now
I wanted to mention this because we are going to
go dive into this kawaii or going to dive more
into cats and the culture of cats on the internet.
But there's something called cute aggression, and I think, I
don't know, part of me is sort of, you know,
one eyebrow raised about this study and it just sounds
(06:14):
like a tumbler page. It's actually a study actually theory. Yeah.
So Rebecca Dyer, she's a grad student psychology at Yale University,
took one nine people and she had them look at
pictures of animals. The categories were cute, funny, and neutral
photos actually specifically of puppies, and then the participants rated
how they felt about the pictures agreeing or disagreeing with
(06:36):
statements like I just can't handle it, meaning the cuteness um,
or whether whether or not it made them want to
squeeze something, or if they were seized with the impulse
to vocalize after seeing one of these pictures like so cute.
So researchers found that the cute or the animal, the
more aggressive the response. Okay, okay, So now they follow
(06:58):
up with a non verbal study and participants. Participants are
given bubble wrap and they're told to just go to
town with it, okay, and they watch a slide show
of cute and then funny and then neutral pictures of animals,
and then lo and behold. Which you find is that
more bubbles were popped during the cute slide shows as
(07:19):
opposed to the funny pictures of animals or the neutral
pictures of animals. Now, the data is not that crazy.
I mean, we're talking about hundred and twenty pops for
the cuteness um, eight pops for the funny, and only
one hundred or excuse me, and one hundred for the neutral.
So you know, the data Here's not like putting this
this strong information out there to say like people are
(07:42):
just bursting with cute aggression. And you know, but they
are saying, Rebecca Dye or at least is saying it
could be the sort of pent up frustration at not
being able to reach through those photos and cuddle that
baby or that puppy because you just want to touch it,
you don't want to bite it. Well, and that's what
we've talked about the before. How how sometimes there are
(08:02):
these there are people who will say that baby is
so cute, I just want to eat it. Yeah, and
on some level, you you actually do. On some level,
you're being fooled into into equating the baby's cuteness and
the face of the baby, the shape of the baby,
the baby nous of the creature. Equating it with something
you would actually gorge on is found in the barest,
(08:23):
which is kind of awful. Yeah. Alright, well, on that note,
maybe we should take a break here and when we
get back we'll get more into this idea of quite
all right, we're back. You know, another thing about that study,
(08:43):
I had never heard of a study using the bubble
wrap uh method before. I really hope that become standardized
to the point where we see movies about serial killers
where like a potential serial killer is being forced to
look at, you know, accident photos gets a rise out
of him. And so it's like, you know, and Anthony
Hopkins Hannibal like characters sitting there with the grim face,
watching grim footage and then popping bubble rap, and it
(09:05):
just becomes really so much a part of how we
determine unconscious thoughts that even the CIA begins to use it, right,
just just orders with like vast reams of the stuff. Yeah,
and then people are probably more willing participants because who
doesn't love to pop bubble wrap? Everyone? Everyone loves it,
even dogs love it. Sure it's not as fine, all right. Kawaii.
(09:25):
Um we we touched on it at the beginning of
the episode, but I kind of see it. This is
very reductionist because it really we could do an entire
podcast on Japanese culture in kawaii, but um, it's sort
of this Hello Kitty ization is certainly the the easiest
example and certainly the most widespread example of of Japanese
(09:45):
culture Kawaii cute culture because it's it's everywhere now, and
it's it's it's the big eyes, it's the cute creature
and it and it also has this sort of Japanese
school girl quality to it. And then that's, according to
some cultural historians, that's kind of the the origin of
the Kauaii movement in Japan anyway, that it you go
(10:07):
back to the nineteen seventies, you find this kitten writing,
this cute handwriting they call it among schools, right because
it wasn't really all that readaful. I mean, it got,
you know, to the point where it's just big round
characters and faces and stars and uh and the and
the teacher who was saying, no, this is not actual writing.
But then it blows up. It starts showing up in
comic I mean not in common boost been magazines, but
(10:28):
then ultimately in Magna and other forms, and eventually becomes
this huge industry with stuff like Hello Kitty, which is
just all over the world and and and attached to
so many different products. Yeah, and if you look really
deeply into kauai, you will begin to see that it's
not just the products the clothing, um even food items,
or even some of the logos that are on airplanes
(10:50):
in some um government entities, but it's also behavior and
mannerism among both genders. And it really is this preoccupation
with um not just cuteness, but youth and innocence. So
it's this, uh, sort of an arrested development. I look
at it that way, not the TV show, but in
(11:11):
terms of, you know, trying to stave off aging and
all of the sort of responsibility and perhaps the less
fun aspects of life as you get older. Yeah, and
then probably encapsulates a lot of nostalgia as well, because
you grow older, you end up still catching attaching these
cute icons in this qualification of just about every aspect
(11:34):
of life, and therefore you keep it kind of tethered
to youth and tethered to youth culture. You know what's
interesting about that too, is that if you seize onto
this idea of kai and you see them to this
idea of embodying these aspects of cuteness and big eidness
and innocence, then perhaps in a way you're thinking to
yourself on a subconscious level, at least you know, I
(11:56):
will be more protected out there in society, which then
brings up this whole idea of you know, how do
we really how much of this parental response is responsible
for our behavior in the way that we interact with
things that are cute. Now, another bit of Japanese cuteness
that instantly comes to mind is the the lucky cat.
(12:17):
If you find all you find it all over Asia,
and you you find it increasingly everywhere in the United
States as well. Of course, the little generally like a
gold plastic cat, big eyes and it's it's waving its
little paw in the air. Uh. These are officially called
maneki nicko or beckoning cats. And I was looking up
(12:37):
some stuff back because I'm well, how does that tie
into cute culture? Because as I suspected, that's older in
its roots than the Hello Kitty. It dates back to
the the Edo period, which was between a sixteen o
three and eighteen sixties seven. Uh, And you know, it's
just sort of picked up steam over time. So even
though we look at the kitten writing in the seventies
(12:57):
and and the rise of Hello Kitty is sort of
the real um pivotal aspects of Hawaii, I feel like
that the roots were already there, if if nowhere else
in the presence of cats. I think you're right now.
I have this idea of you know, the thousands of
years from now, well people look back at you know,
sort of a saying, oh, the Ming dynasty thing, you know,
(13:18):
the rise of the Hello Kiddy dynasty, Because that really
is how pervasive kauai is. And I think in the
United States here were we have flavors of it um
and you know, just look around, as you say, like,
you know, we look around our office and we can
see that it's it's um interwoven into the way that
we decorate or we perceive certain aspects we have our life.
(13:39):
At least two adult members of the staff who are
Disney fanatics, and there's a lot of kauai tied up there.
And again, just about every other death has some sort
of token, some sort of little bit of kauai. I
feel like if you look closely enough, if you root
through their stuff, I mean really get in there and
in their privacy, you'll find some bit of cute that
is keeping them going. And that sounds kind of specific.
(14:02):
What have you found? Oh, all sorts of stuff. I'll
show you later. I have a box. Okay, So you're
probably wondering to yourself, are there any studies that can
support this cuteness, that can kind of give us a
better idea of why we react to this stuff the
way we do. Of course there is because you know
what we're talking about cute. We're talking about the way
that of kitten's face is cute to us because it
(14:25):
is reminiscent of the baby's face. And then what happens
when we look at the baby, right, that's the question. Well,
there have been studies that have looked at that. We
have the technology, of course to look inside the brain
to see how what kind of neural activity is going
on when we do different things. And there was there's
one particular study that we're looking at here, uh and
this was this involved the use of a meg scanner
(14:46):
and they were looking at parental responses to both puppy
faces and baby faces and then unfamiliar adult faces. Right, yes, Okay.
The really startling thing about this study is that when
participants looking at all of these pictures within one seventh
of a second, just a split second, literally, the medial
(15:06):
orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in emotional responses, lit
up like a pinball machine when people look at infant
and puppy faces, but was pretty, you know, relatively silent
when adult faces showed up. So kringele Bach Morton Kringelbach,
who ran the study calls this the parental instinct, and
he says these responses are almost certainly too fast to
(15:28):
be consciously controlled and are therefore perhaps instinctive. That's his
idea about it. Yeah, because we're talking about middleseconds here.
We're talking about just an instant of seeing that baby face,
that puppy face, and you are suddenly pacified. You suddenly
you're maybe put out of an aggressive spirit or irritated spirit,
and you have to somehow help the poor larval human
(15:49):
or dog. Yeah. And the thing is that it even
goes beyond visual processing, because people who are blowing from
birth have the same areas activated in their brains when
they hear the name of animals. So the concept of
animals or how we've painted them and language just goes
far beyond just pictures. Here. The idea is really standing
in for um, the experience. So that study makes a
(16:13):
lot of sense. I mean again, it just ties in
directly to the way we look at look at an infant,
at a kitten, at a puppy and uh and and
how we instantly want to care for it on some level.
And I feel like we all buy into that really easily.
But here's another idea that two twelve Japanese study looked at,
and this one was published in the Plos One. They
were asking, well, if I look at something cute, how
(16:34):
does it affect my attentiveness? Which which that question makes
me think of all these things that we were We
surround ourselves with these icons of cute, Like the cute
little lamp that I have on my desk. It's like
a little face um that I got an I kea
years ago. What happens when I look at that? Is
it making me more relax? Is it making me more atentive?
(16:54):
Is it a just a distraction? Is all this cutest
a distraction? Well, in this study they looked into this.
They took participants and they viewed animal images and then
they tested them to see how they performed on various tasks,
and they found that participants who viewed infant animal images,
ones that were rated particularly cute, they were able to
perform pass better than those who viewed images of boring
(17:17):
adult animals. So it's interesting, right, because you're like, well,
is it really possible that if I look at a
cute object or a cute picture that I'll be able
to better? You know, concentrate on the task before me.
But I would indeed hang in there as the cute
cat hanging from the branch. I would want to to
(17:38):
to convey to you. I like, how you get that?
That was nice stuff? Um. But the thing is is
that each group of participants consisted of less than fifty
university students, and I think they did three different versions
of these attention tests. And then all of these fifty
university students were between the ages of eighteen and twenty two.
And so this is also taking play in Japanese culture,
(18:01):
where you know that the kawaii effect is much more pronounced,
which leads some people to say, perhaps there's not really
that much evidence here that cuteness could bolster your attentiveness. Yeah,
because if this held true, you would just want to
cuteify everything. You'd want a little cute faces and animals
(18:21):
just crawling all over just everything in your work life,
everything at home, just until you're just there's just an
overdose of cute all the time, just to keep you attentive.
And I have to say that might be distracting at
that point. Yeah, alright, so what about cuteness and a robot?
And I'm not talking about you, Arnie. Sorry, but I'm
(18:42):
talking about Kismut the robot. And we've actually met Kismut
before here on, at least in the episodes that we've described.
Kismutt is robot that has been used at M I
T and it is used to figure out sort of
the psychological ramifications of interactions between humans and robots, specifically children.
It kind of looks like a skinless robot Magua or Furby. Yeah, yeah,
(19:06):
Ferby definitely. It's got the furry ears, it's got huge eyes,
and it can make a lot of distinctive um faces
that that interact with the person. Yeah, and it works. Uh.
I think it works really well because it's not it's
not an attempted to human face, so you don't actually
get into that possibility of uncanny Valley. It's instead this
(19:27):
this non human but but it that it has human
qualities to it, and then it is successfully making all
these various faces and conveying emotion. At the bottom of this,
there's just cuteness. That's what reigns supreme about this robot
um other than its ability to interact with humans. So
what do you do? You take this robot and you
insert it into a study, which is headed up by
(19:50):
Terry Burnham at Harvard University along with Brian Hair. They
pitted nine volunteers against each other anonymously in games where
they had to donate money or withhold. It's sort of
the classic scenario we've seen over and over again. They
can donate it into a communal pot and that would
yield the most money, but only if other people donated
to So the researchers split the group into two. Half
(20:12):
made their choices undisturbed at computer screens, while the other
half were faced with the photo of this absolute adorable kisman. Now,
the players who gazed at Kismut gave thirty more to
the pot than others, and Vernam and Hare believed that
at some subconscious level they were aware of being watched,
or they sort of took that as being watched just
(20:34):
looking at this photo. Um, but it may have something
also to do with our brain kind of carrying out
this decision making with this cute, this representation of cuteness
in front of us. Yeah, because how hard and selfish
can you be in the presence of like a really
cute kitten or an adorable baby. Not so much in
even in the processing of it of thinking thinking, oh,
(20:56):
this is cute, and you know that melts my heart
a little bit. But in that those micro sect that
we talked about, of seeing this cute image and that,
you know, against every fiber in your your your body,
any defense you may have you may have up against
that cuteness and against the idea of giving your money
away or or or or letting your your temper go
down a bit, it kind of creeps in past all
(21:18):
those defenses and deactivates you. Well, what I love too,
is this idea that you could manipulate altruistic behavior with
a pair of fake eyeballs, right just staring at you,
adorable fake eyeballs. All right, Well, we're gonna take one
more break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk
a little bit more about Kauai and a little bit
(21:39):
more about cats. All right, we're back. Okay. So there
is a wonderful article from Wired magazine called In Search
of the Living, purring, singing Heart of the Online Cat
(21:59):
Industrial Complex. Uh. The author, Gideon Lewis Krause, cites a
couple of different studies to try to explain why cats
rule the Internet. And it's very interesting. Yeah, it is
a very long discussion of the power of cats, the
power of feelines, but it is I would say it's
must read for anyone who is a self aware cat
(22:20):
person because she really gets into how we interact with
the feelines, how the feelines to limited extent and interact
with us, and how this becomes a metaphor for the
way we approach life itself. Yeah, and if you're very
interested in Japanese culture, this is also a great way
to sort of plunge in and see how that's played out.
(22:42):
The first study that was mentioned in this article is
a study of internet habits of two hundred and six
teams or a University of Science and Technology students. Now
of these students were deemed depressed after they were being
after they were surveyed, so there's this sort of you know,
pat standard survey to assess levels of depression that was
(23:03):
administered to them. So they figured out that, you know,
within the sample size of these people are depressed. So
they found two things in this Internet usage UM. By
the way, they also had access to the amount of
UM activity they had online, not specifically what sights they
went to, but the kind of activity like for instance,
(23:25):
file sharing, checking their email, surfing, the way of looking
at images, looking at videos. Yeah, and so to findings
in general, the more participant score on the survey indicated depression,
the more his or her Internet usage included, uh, those
features as you say. So there was a lot of
file sharing, high levels of that, especially with music and movies.
(23:48):
And second, they found patterns of Internet usage that were
statistically high among people with depressive symptoms compared with those
without the symptoms. So, for example, people with depressive symptoms
tend to engage in a lot of email usage, so
they were sending emails right and left and um. This
correlated with some research that was done by psychologist Janet
(24:10):
Moorehan Martin, and Phyllis Schumacher. They found that frequent checking
of email rate may relate to high levels of anxiety,
and then of course that correlates to depressive symptoms. Well,
I can definitely see where checking your email all the
time would be depressing, because that's where we get our
bills these days. That's where bad news is just as
(24:31):
likely to come in via email as it is to
come in over the phone. Yeah, and I think it's
you know, just the the act doing that over and
over again, sort of bullies. This underlying anxiety, Yes, that
is at the root of all of this, and so, um,
the study is really interesting. I won't go into all
the different points that correlated with depressive symptoms, but those
(24:52):
are just a couple of the highlights. Um. Lewis Crofts,
the the author of this article I'm Wired, then looked
at this other study because he felt like these two
kind of dovetailed together really nicely. Because first you have
the study of just you know, if you're if you're depressive,
then perhaps you're a higher user of the Internet, or
you you're watching more videos and possibly suggested in this article,
(25:15):
you're seeking out more cat videos. You're seeing now more
cute videos. Are You're going to cute overload to get
that dose of cute fluffiness into your life. So he says,
you know that they did not know what exactly the
content was, but you know, it stands to reason that
cats would be part of some of that, all right.
So the second study, which is called Factors Influencing the
(25:35):
Temporal Patterns of dietic behaviors and Interactions between domestic cats
and their owners. The conclusion quote that the higher the
proportion of all successful intents to interact with the cat
that were due to the cat. The longer was the
duration of the interactions. So he says that, in other words,
your cat will like you best if you pretend that
you don't desperately want to play with it. I love
(25:58):
this study even has not one a prize with the
ignobles it should. I mean, it's a very interesting study
and a revealing study, but it reveals something that scientifically
that cat owners pretty much already know that. You bring
somebody into the house who's allergic to the cat, who
who who does not like the cat, That's who the
cat is going to insist on walking on and climbing
(26:20):
up on and rubbing against and everything else under the sun.
You bring in a toddler who wants nothing more than
to pet the cat for hours and hours on end,
the cat is going to avoid that child like the plague.
That's right, and it's great that there's finally a study
that says this is this is what's happening here, because
all of us have suspected it. Um. The other part
of the study was that the more neurotic cat owner,
(26:42):
the more desperate for fuzzy comfort and nesley security and
unconditional affection, which is essentially what we were just talking about.
And then of course the brief of the interactions. So
I think it's just important to state that as the
owner and and and the cat that dynamic because Lewis
Kraft says, hey, what do we do on the interner
that all day long we like things and then we
sit around and we wait for things that we do
(27:04):
to be liked, And he says that we check all
the analytics and all the retreats, and this is where
those cats come in, because cats essentially are us trying
to gain approval. Yes, so there is huge symbol of
these interactions that we have between us. Yeah, when the
cat shows you attention, you have you sort of won
(27:26):
that attention. You have to you have to continually rewin
that cat's attention because otherwise, because at any given point
a day, okay will be like, hey, I really want
to leave the house and never see you again. Is
that cool? Uh? And then I will happen if you
allow it to. And then if the cat remains in
your house, you have to you have to sort of
play it cool or you sometimes you have to coax
the cat and to get the reward of the cute face,
of the warmth against your body, the furry feeling of
(27:50):
holding the cat, and of course the health ben offense.
They've been numerous studies that have looked at the health
ben if it's of cat ownership. But then again, the
more you chase after it, the more you try and
make it your own, the more likely that have penis
is going to crawl under the bed and hide from you. Yeah,
And it's sort of like if if you seek out
these pictures and these videos of cats, then on some
level you're you're courting approval from them. And it says,
(28:13):
you know, if you see a picture of a cat
and says, oh hi, it's not you know, it's the
cat's not saying oh, hello, hello, look at me, the
cat saying oh I didn't see standing there. It's that
sort of attitude. And so I love how he weaves
all of this together, this internet usage. So in that sense,
be the Lucky Cat is really a cat video that
takes back to the Edo period because it's a beckoning cat.
(28:35):
The cat is waving, the cat is saying hi, hello,
and and actually acknowledging you, even though it's just a
mechanical cat or or just even an unmoving uh image
of a cat. It's waving to you, it's beckoning to you,
and therefore it's approving of you. Messengers like the unrequited love.
And finally you have this cat saying yes, come here,
(28:56):
I will fold you into my arms. And then you
have somebody that got frustrated and said, forget it. I'm
not going to try and len these cats approval anymore.
I'm gonna make myself one out of stone, or I'm
gonna make one that actually mechanically waves at me, and
that will do it. It would be my cat gollumn, yes,
cat go yeah. Um. Clay Sharkey has an interesting TED
(29:17):
talk and he talks about something called cognitive surplus, and
then he weaves that into l O L cats and
he says that cognitive surplus is the ability of the
world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large,
sometimes global projects. So he uses l O L cuts
as an example. Right, a lot of people from all
(29:38):
over the world contributing to this one effort essentially just
to make all of this laugh, which is a great thing.
And he says that um, it is made up of
two things this cognitive surplus. He says that it's the
world's free time and talents. And he says, the world
has over a trillion hours a year of free time
to commit these shared projects. I kind of I don't
(29:58):
know where he came up with that, staff, but that's
a lot. And then he says that, um, you know,
we as a collective power of world changing behavior, if
we can do the ll L cats that we could
potentially with that those trillions of hours actually committed to
(30:18):
something that is meaningful, I mean beyond making all of
us laugh, because that is meaningful. So he's saying, hey,
if you've got time to ll okay, you've got time
to cure cancer. I think he's saying, we can all
maybe not cure cancer, but you know, we could all
freak at least love each other a little more. We
could love each other a little bit more. We could
pool our efforts to try to tackle certain problems that
(30:39):
would rely upon individual efforts, um to to give their
talents to this one thing. It's an interesting concept. It's
very ted. It is it's very ted. Yeah, and it
does make me think again of cuteness as a as
an icon, cuteness as as an object of worship, a
little adorable cat made out of plastic that you put
on your desk and in a sense, you pray to
(31:01):
every time you look at it. You're you maybe not,
you're actually not Actually you're not actually saying any kind
of a prayer, but you are looking to it and
investing some level of cognitive energy into it and expecting
to gain from it. There you go. I mean, this
is as good as it gets when it comes to
trying to explain the love of cats, the obsession with
(31:23):
cats on the internet, and then touching on this idea
of kauai and uh, the ways in which it colors
our perception. All right, So there you have it, kauaite cute. Um.
I'm sure everyone has some little bit of insight on
this to share, and we would love to hear about it.
We'd love to know what is the little icon of
cute that empowers you throughout the day, or what is
(31:46):
the what is a little bit of cuteness that you
absolutely detest and uh and would I would actually interfere
with your productivity during the course of the day. Let
us know about that as well. You can find us
in all the usual places. Stuff to about your Mind
dot com as the mothership, but we're all so on Tumbler,
Facebook and Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, Blower Mind, Stuff Show
and Julie. If they want to send us a good
old fashioned email, where can they do that? Well, it's
(32:08):
really quite easy. All you have to do is send
us an email at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com,
YEA for moralness and thousands of other topics. Does it?
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