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November 21, 2012 • 33 mins

Who came up with Pinterest and why? Why is Pinterest so popular among women? In this episode, Cristen and Caroline do more than answer these questions -- they also explore Manteresting, Gentlemint and other 'Pinterests for dudes.'

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you. From how stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And this is a topic that
some folks have really been waiting for, been in demand.
It has been in demand Pinterest. We're talking about pinterest

(00:27):
do day. Um So my first question, though, Caroline, for
you is did you when you were a kid ever
have to do an insect collection for school? Now? I
had to do one. Maybe that was a weird homeschool curriculum.
I did have to cut up in a frog, but
that was in college. No, that was in high school too. Continue,

(00:48):
So no insect collection. Now I collected. I collected a
lot of weird things, but not insect. Not insect. I
I had to do an insight collection, as did my
my two older silk So for me, when I did
my insect collection, it was like a sign that I
was growing up, which is kind of weird. But um,
I asked you about insect collections because that was one

(01:12):
of the initial inspirations for Ben Silberman, incredibly successful young
guy now for starting pinterest because he loved the idea
and the action of collecting things and curating and of course,
now we have the ubiquitous pin. Yeah, it's it's quite

(01:34):
an interesting story, although I feel like it is common
among like you know, these run of the mill geniuses
who go to college and they can't find what they're
interested in and they end up, you know, starting a
wildly successful internet company because they start free associating there. Like,
you know what I liked as a kid, collecting insects
with my insect collection? How can I transition my Barbie

(01:54):
collection into a bajillion dollar job. I'm still working on
that modeling. So pinterest was launched in March, which is
crazy to think that it has become such an online
juggernaut and such a short amount of time. And as
I mentioned, it was started by a guy named Ben
Silberman who, as of this podcast recording in October I

(02:19):
was thirty years old. He was on a track in
college to become a doctor. I think he came from
a family of doctors, and he was like, well, I
will do medicines as well. But then he was like,
I don't want to do medicines, and so then he
got a consulting job right out of college, and all
the while was keeping tabs on this crazy new fingled
social media thing going on, got a job at Google

(02:43):
in customer support, but then he left Google. Who leaves Google?
Who leaves Google? Well, people who were going to start Pinterest? Well, yeah,
he didn't know he was going to start Pinterest yet.
He launched Tote, which is a shopping app, but he
noticed it was not very successful, and he noticed that
people were not using Tote as he expected. Instead, they
were emailing themselves pictures of products to view later. So

(03:06):
they were collecting pretty images of things foreshadowing shadowing. Yeah,
So he tucked that away in his brain and one
day he's hanging out with this guy, Evan Sharp, uh,
and he wanted to come up with, uh, you know,
like a look for this website idea that would let
users scroll through a ton of images at once, the

(03:30):
old infinite scroll, which I love it too. I wish
the whole Internet were infinite scroll. It's kind of amazing. Um,
and the whole concept. It's interesting that there's it's the
whole like infinite scroll. And also going back to his
childhood of this idea of of collecting things and keeping
things ordered and curated, because that really jives with these

(03:52):
major trends that we're seeing online where we have all
of this information, all of these images coming out as constantly,
and so what do we need? Of course, a way
to order all of it in beautiful boards with beautiful
pens that we can stare at when we should be working.
I'm not I'm not gonna lie to you. When I

(04:12):
first heard about pinterest um, which was the summer of it,
was right after it launched, my friend, my friend Katie,
was on it immediately, and I had seen people posting
stuff on Facebook and I was like, what is this junk?
Like this is so stupid. I don't care what kind
of like back porch you want on your house when
you're fifty, you know, like how this is so boring?
And then Katie like tried to convince me to get

(04:34):
on there. She's like, Caroline, have you heard about the site?
It's called Pinterest. Obviously no, I had not heard of
the site because I'm not an early adopter of anything,
so must have been really grumpy when well, because the
way she presented it, it's like, will you go on
the internet and you find pictures of things you like,
maybe at a store or something, and you pin them

(04:56):
to your board and people can look at it, and
so que me stare r blankly at her, and I
was like, right, so it's a registry, yeah, like what
would I want to see? Yeah, and She's like no, no, no.
I was like, well why am I? Why am I
pinning things to a board for people to see if
they're not going to buy it for me? So that

(05:17):
was my thought for the longest time up until stuff
Mom Never told You got its own Pinterest board. And
then I was like, well, maybe I maybe I do
need another way to waste hours of my life. Yeah,
because it's you start and then it's snowballs. Because if
you the way I started um pinning as well, I'm not.
I feel like I'm not as active as of a

(05:39):
pinner as I kind of should be because I see
people that have like all these amazing boards, but um,
for me, when I first started doing it, I the
first board I started was of peeps. It was around
Easter and and I got sucked into this vortex where
all of a sudden, like I was in my bed.

(05:59):
It was very it at nine hours had passed and
I couldn't stop looking for pictures of peeps. Because the
more you put on your board, the nicer it looks,
and the more people look at it and comment and
like and oh my god, when somebody repens a pen,
it's like a popularity contest. Well, speaking of popularity, Pinterest
has grown in leaps and bounds at an astonishing speed,

(06:23):
which most of us probably know. They're unique monthly visitors
in the US alone. Get this. In July they had
six eight thousand, pretty good. By December of eleven seven
point five million, Okay, that's huge, and then by June

(06:45):
more than twenty twenty point four million, And according to
tech Crunch, they passed the ten million mark for unique
monthly US visitors faster than any other standalone site in history. Yeah,
and so now there's only Facebook and Tumblr that have
more social media time on site, so more people spending time.

(07:10):
It's a big time waster. It is part of the
big three time wasters. Yeah, and and for for website
geeks like myself, because yeah, we do this podcast, but
I work for how stuff Works dot com and we're
always talking about page views and visitors. Listen up if
you if you enjoy these kinds of tidbits, because monthly
page views on pinterest, and it's probably grown since these

(07:33):
stats came out one point five billion in the US
one point nine billion worldwide. And on top of that,
the average time that we spend on pinterest is fifteen minutes,
which might sound like not much time, but that is
huge in internet land. Yeah, and it's also huge when
you're trying to get ready in the morning and you're like, oh, well,

(07:54):
I'm brushing my teeth. I'll just look at this board
and oh god, now I'm late for work and I
have no guns us brushing my teeth. Um well, amid
so a middle of this popularity, you think, oh my god,
these guys must be like the jillionaires. Right. Well, the
website itself is making no revenue none, but investors love it.

(08:16):
Pinterest has raised a hundred and thirty eight million dollars
from investors, and during a financing round in May, raised
one million and that values the startup at one point
five billion dollars billion dollars. And when that valuation came out,
and of course the internet first exploded and then all

(08:38):
of the tech commentators were like, you know what that is?
That is huge. That might be overblown. They don't have
a clear business model. Pinterests still doesn't have a hammered
out way that they are going to start bringing in
the money. Are they going to pull a Facebook and
we're going to start seeing a lot more integrated advertise

(09:00):
saying um. But the thing is, even though pinterest doesn't
have um a clear cut business plan, the opportunity, the
reason why they're getting all this money in this huge
one point five billion worth which is right now imaginary money.
But nevertheless it's a huge commercial opportunity. When you look

(09:20):
at the audience of Pinterest, which is buying large women
and what we're doing, which is a lot of looking
at things that we want to buy and then buying them. Yeah,
people are more likely to look at something pretty on Pinterest,
click on it, go to the site, buy it than
they are, like if you post something on Facebook or

(09:41):
Tumbler for instance. Yeah. Um. This was coming from an
infographic over at Fast Code Design. Uh. The average order
value when a pinner buy something that he or she
sees a hundred and seventy nine dollars and thirty six cents,
compared to if we see something on Twitter and we
buy it sixty dollars and Facebook eighty dollars. So already

(10:03):
we have those high marks and speaking to The Atlantic,
Patrick Chung, who's a partner at New Enterprise Associates, said
Pinterest drives more traffic to Williams Sonoma and Martha Stewart
Living than Facebook and Google combine, which makes so much sense.
It makes all the sense in the world because when
you look at the demographics, when you look at what

(10:23):
people are posting, when you look at them as popular pins,
a lot of that stuff is like dream homes, dream kitchens,
dream backyards. I mean I have like all those boards too,
and people are posting like fancy Schman's and stuff that
they would one day like to purchase or own. And
so that's that is driving a lot of traffic to
like the the home sites and the kitchen stores. Yeah,

(10:46):
and according to I was, I was a little surprised
at this breakdown. But also according to fast Go Design data,
the top five categories um of Pinterest stuff that's on
Pinterest the number one category. And this is also you know,
sending dollar signs and the guys of marketers are jewelry, luxury,
and accessories, all of those. It's a very aspirational site

(11:10):
of like I don't know how many boards of friends
that I've seen where it's like what I would like
in my closet, shoes I would like to own, or
handbags that would be nice on my wrist, and then flowers, gifts, greeting, fragrances, cosmetics.
I mean, it's all of these, all of these consumer brands.
And then food, so much food, porn, so many recipes. Yeah,

(11:35):
and I look at all of them. I'm like, God,
that would be so great if I ever felt like cooking,
wouldn't that be wonderful. Instead, I'll just look at your pictures,
or instead you could just look at the cards, which
are the fifth most popular category, and be like, oh,
that was a clever quip on that, on that little
vintage photo. Okay, so I already mentioned that it's we
both have already mentioned it's mostly mostly ladies on the site.

(11:56):
The breakdown, according to Fast Code Design is that it's
seven nine percent female, mostly in the fifty four age range,
kitching and male. And I know we have mentioned in
previous episodes that you know, women are considered the major
shoppers of the household, like they're making all the major
purchase decisions. In the UK, it's a closer split, but

(12:19):
they're actually more men fifty percent male versus pent female
viewing Pinterest in the UK. But analysts think that once
pinterest gets larger in the UK than the demographics and
the pen topics are probably going to trend more like
the United States. Um. But one interesting thing about the

(12:40):
growth of pinterest was that some of the early adopters
that really got it off the ground and really grew
it into this lady haven that Pinterest has really become
is the quote unquote blogger Knackle. That's right, Blogger Knackle
of Young Mormons and speaking of young Mormons, and Romney

(13:03):
in fact, was one of the first celeb level uh
pinners on Pinterest. Yeah, and Gawker offers a an explanation
for this. They say that, well, it's because the site
is the most inoffensive place on the Internet. They call it,
quote a gated community of perfectly curated boards, sprinkled with

(13:24):
Etsy made children's toys and food blog recipes, sheltered from
the blasted racist hellscape of the rest of the web. Yeah,
I mean it is. It is kind of a visual haven.
I got on to to prep for this podcast for
a minute, right before we came into the studio, I
just got onto the pinterest homepage and got that infinite scroll.

(13:45):
I found like eight coats that I wanted by that
I can't afford. And yeah, it was like a weird
moment of zen um. And so going on with the
with the Mormon bloggers, which is something I would be
I'm saying this now to any listeners out there who
might have some insight into someone we could talk to
you about this UM because the Mormon Mommy blogosphere is

(14:11):
this is this huge thing right now. And they said
that the site is a demographic sweet spot for young
mothers UM and especially appeals to a lot of Mormon
women who tend to get pregnant families earlier and more often.
As well as that focus on homemaking. Yeah, um, yeah,
the focus on homemaking exactly. Mormon women tend to be

(14:33):
more inclined to pursue crafts and cooking. I'm not just
pulling this out of my butt. I was just having
dinner with my friend whose sister lives out in Utah,
and she herself said they're very crafty people. And the
site has has grown since then into even more of
a female dominated space. But this might also just be

(14:53):
a reflection of the larger pattern online where women tend
to be more social media minded, where men tend to
be a little bit more on the engineering side. They
tend to comment more often, but it's more of just
like a one off kind of thing. Or they are

(15:14):
on Google Plus for as is like Google Plus seventy
one per cent men because it's mainly composed of early adopters, engineers,
and developers, which again excuse a little bit more male.
But if we talk about Facebook in favor of women,
and also when women are on Facebook, we upload upload
more photos, we post more status updates, we provide more

(15:37):
information about ourselves. Yeah, we spend more time on the site,
which drives exactly with all the pinterest apps. Like if
if the site's audiences mostly women, it's no wonder that
the average time a user spends on the page it's
pretty high. Yeah, And it's also no wonder that why
the you know, the the gender split has become so

(15:57):
extreme of like seventy twenty one, because it's almost like
a you know, snowball effect where the more uh, I guess,
female centric stuff you have on there, then of course
it's going to appeal to one demographic more than the other.
But what about Caroline feminism? And Pinterest because you know,

(16:18):
we had to talk about that. Yeah, feminism, I mean
Pinterest and feminism. It's got a lot of people to
have that argument that we sort of touched on in
our film Phobia film Phobia and Manic Pixie dream Girl
podcasts about the whole girly thing, the pink and the fruit,
fruit and the cupcakes and the nail art because oh god,
is their nail art on Pinterest. So there's there's a

(16:42):
bit of a philosophical look at this. Nathan Jurgensen from
the Society Pages back in March of this year pointed
out the difference perspective versus the dominance perspective in regard
to women on Pinterest. Yeah, the difference perspective of feminism
as it relates to Pinterest would maintain that it is
distinctly feminine and therefore something to celebrate. Hooray, ladies, we

(17:05):
have carved out our our place on the web. Come on,
come on, bring your uter i uterus is I always
want to say, ter I. I think you should. Um
Blogger Amanda mark Coat says, quote the pink and girly
exterior of Pinterest works as a jerk force field, keeping
the most piggish men away, which to me it sounds
a little snubbish. I don't know, mine, you know, we

(17:26):
can all share space and look at cutting boards together, right. Um.
But at the same time, though, according to this difference perspective, UM,
they're saying that we should celebrate it because the site
shouldn't be dismissed because women are using it, like this
is what makes it important. But what about the dominance perspective,

(17:46):
Caroline Right, The dominance perspective basically says that the type
of femininity that's presented on pinterest is in itself problematic. Uh.
Some with this view, I think that pinterest is exemplifying
a juvenile and defanged version of women and empowerment that
is ultimately more appealing to men. And we're back at

(18:07):
our fimphobia podcast, and I don't know, I mean, I
feel like that's almost that's an overreach, because is there
a ridiculous aspect of pinterest When you stumble across boards
of like vintage travels or something. You know, yeah, that's
kind of crazy, but it's nice to look at. Um.
But then, uh, for a final perspective on it, there's

(18:30):
the mother ing perspective, which is viewing the mail as neutral.
By that logic, websites composed mostly of men are seen
as neutral, and those with even a hint of femininity
are seen as saturated with gender. In other words, would
this be such a huge story? Would we be talking
about this and even asking whether or not it's problematic

(18:51):
at all or good or bad if it weren't catering
at the time more toward women. Yeah. I mean we
asked the same question when we did our our NFL
Female NFL Fans podcast, because we talked about, you know,
just like the ESPN website, that's neutral, it's for sports fans,
And then we talked about how ESPN was launching espn

(19:12):
W for female sports fans and do we even need this?
What's the difference? Like, what's the important aspect of having
a totally separate website? And it just seems to be
over and over again we've said this that male things,
men related things, masculine related things are okay for everybody. Yeah,
that's the Yeah, the assumption that that's the neutral space, right,

(19:35):
whereas something that trends female or feminine or woman related,
that's gendered and it's pink and it's only for a
subset of the human population. And I would say too
aside from and this is just my my opinion looking
at the site, like if I the content of the
pins aside and what you follow dictates what are going

(19:57):
to be on the pins as well. Um, I don't
feel like the site itself looks inherently girly, you know,
it's red. I mean the script of the p and
the Pinterest it has a nice little flourish. But I
don't think that it's interesting that this was started by
by two guys who wanted a curation device. They weren't

(20:21):
out to, you know, start something for I mean, it's
not just pie recipes, you know, like, there's no reason
to dismiss pinterest just because you think it's all like
recipes for cupcakes. I was just looking at the technology
and design boards because I freaking love typography, so I
like to look at the design boards, and I was
looking at ridiculous things like screw speakers into the ceiling,

(20:45):
kind of stuff from Hammocker, Schlummicker or whatever that side
is called on the technology board. So I mean, it's
not just like look at my wedding dress boards. Yeah,
I feel like it's um if anything. It's a it's
a nice way of ordering the chaos. Yes, but Pinterest

(21:06):
is not without its problems. And one thing that we
have to talk about on Pinterest but because it's tried
to get rid of this, but it is still out
there so much, and that is Finns Bow or thinspiration
pins of extremely thin either self portraits, pictures of models,

(21:27):
pictures of actresses saying oh, it's the ideal body, or
it might be another version of Finns Bow of like
super cut, like extremely muscular, like like twenty four packs,
like I don't know even know how those exist. Yes,
um so in March because a lot of people had

(21:48):
started saying, Hey, whoa, I'm running across a lot of
Finns Bow on Pinterest because it's so visual. Um. On March,
the site band all content explicitly encourage self harm or
self abuse. Yeah, and Pinterest had become the blogging platform
of choice for Thinsbow supporters viewers basically after Tumbler and

(22:10):
Facebook had instituted stricter anti self harm policies as well.
And part of the issue with that, the reason why
there was this big migration from those sites to Pinterest
in the first place, according to Claire Misco with the
National Eating Disorders Association. She said that the format is
attractive to the pro and a community because it's both
visual and highly interactive. A lot of pictures that infinite scroll.

(22:34):
You just can sit there for hours and scroll through
pictures of women who are you know, completely emaciated. And
so after um Pinterest in March band this content, they
basically went quote unquote house hunting according to Forbes, and
have moved on to having a bigger presence on Instagram.
But there's still some and I understand that Pinterest, as

(22:55):
well as Tumbler and Facebook, UM, they'll they'll never be
able to comple letely weed out pro and A messages,
thins bo um images related to self harm UM. But
it is astonishing how quickly and how often a simple
browse through UM through Pinterest will bring up something with

(23:19):
the quote of say nothing tastes as good as skinny fields,
which that might just seem like, oh clever and quippy
and okatee Moss, you you silly gal. But I mean
I feel like that's like, you know, that's an example
of it. It still is. And I tweeted this a
while ago now, but I just did a simple search

(23:40):
of women and in the Pinterest search bar, and what
came back was almost like I would say, thins bow,
even though it might not have been explicit enough to
you know, raise some alarms and get it blocked. But
it's still there, you know, I mean, And that's so
and that's not a problem so much of Really it's

(24:03):
Pinterest that's a bigger societal problem unfortunately. Yeah, and also
the double edged sort of how easy and nice it
is to look at it and repin and keep on scrolling.
But yeah, please don't repin. Nothing tastes as good as
skinny fields. No, we need to banish that. I really

(24:23):
like spaghetti. I think that tastes pretty good than being hungry.
All that grellan, the grillan and my system that's making
me hungry, starving right now. Well, before we wrap up
this Pinterest episode, because we could clearly talk about Pinterest
all day long, we have to talk about how some

(24:44):
other enterprising gentlemen have said, hey, you know what like Pinterest? Like,
all right, that's cool. We like the idea of curation
and collection and ordering things on boards. But since this
is for the ladies, let's make something for the guys. So, yeah,
there's all these sites there now, and it's so funny
how they did not really deviate from I mean, they

(25:05):
are really just trying to make a dude Pinterest, and
so we have sites like Dude pins Man, Interesting, punch Pin, Gentleman,
and Darted Up and yeah, speaking of Darted Up, Brandon Harris,
the co founder, was talking about Pinterest and he said,
you know, he looked at the edit I guess his
girlfriend's account, and he said, I loved what it did,

(25:26):
and I love the features, but I didn't like the content.
The content is not geared towards the guy. I am
not interested in cupcakes or puppies, but I am interested
in cars and gadgets, and I will say, I'm sure
you can find cars and gadgets on Pinterest. I was
just looking at gadget. Yeah, I was just doing that.
But however, um, these guys, yeah have come up. They've

(25:46):
taken the Pinterest template and brode it out. So instead
of pinning something, if you're on man teresting, you're gonna
nail something. On Darted Up, guess you dart it, and
in on Gentlemant you save something to your mentor was
just a little clunkier, gentleman. But I like saying gentleman.

(26:08):
I'll give it that. And I wanted to give the
bro pen sites the benefit of the doubt, you know,
because this was reported on in CNN, and a lot
of the guys who who have founded these sites really insisted, hey,
you know what this isn't like our sites are not
about cheesecake. They're not. We know, we respect women, and

(26:33):
um we we just want a more like manly interest displayed.
So I went over to man darresting to see what
guys were nailing, and I gotta tell you it was
about fifty percent. Nope, I'm gonna say it was about
se boobs not I mean, not pornographic like you know, naked,

(26:54):
nothing like that. It was safe enough for work. But
it was busty ladies and a lot of butt butts,
butt shots and yes there were lots of cars. But
um yeah, I don't I don't know. I was like, well,
one one of these articles said that you know, they

(27:15):
not so much. I wanted to pin things that they
are nail or dart or whatever, things that they were
interested in, per se that things that represented themselves the
way they wanted to be perceived, so like, I want
to be perceived as the guy who pins busty boobs, boobs,
busty broad and cars instead of like, well, I do

(27:38):
like that outdoor wedding photo, you know right, I mean
it largely looked like uh, you know, if you could
take um, you know, posters that would be put up
on a on a college guy's dormwall and transferred to
the Internet. And like I said, I only went to
man teresting. I scrolled until I could scroll no mo,
because I just couldn't. I couldn't handle all of those uh,

(28:02):
all that all of those cleavages. Cleavages. Not to say
that I'm anti cleavage. You know, breasts are great, but
you know what I'm saying, I hear you. I don't think.
Let's just say I don't predict they will be around
for too long because Pinterest did something really well and yeah,
it's become a female dominated space, but um but hey,

(28:25):
they did it well. Yeah, so it'll be interesting to
see though, what happens once they tried to monetize the
company and whether or not they will skewer themselves or
whether or not we will continue to pin. Yeah. Well,
and also the thing is you can't really tell if
a pin is going to be a sponsored pin or
a regular somebody just likes that dress first spam pen. Yeah.

(28:47):
So I can't wait to hear from our listeners about
pinning and any guys on Pinterest out there, or guys
who are on you know, if you are a gentleman,
let us know it too. I don't want to immediately
disparage these Pinterest for dudes sites, but it just seems
a little like, I don't know, guys, give yourself a

(29:07):
little more credit. Yeah, I'm there's not come to Pinterest.
Come follow our board on Pinterest. Even better, there are
lots of lady pictures on Pinterest. Yeah, so I'm just
saying that's what you're into. Anyway, Send us your Pinterest letters,
Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can

(29:28):
direct them. And speaking of letters, before we get around
to them, we first have a quick message to share
from our sponsor who brought us to this episode of
stuff Mom Never told You about Pinterest, and that is Netflix. Yes, so,
for a limited time, Netflix has a special thirty day
free trial offer for our stuff Mom Never Told You listeners.

(29:52):
Head on over to Netflix dot com. Slash Mom, and
we recommend checking out the ballet documentary first position a
look at young ballerinas, and you know, while you're over there,
just checked through their selection. Titles are subject to availability,
So head on over there to a Netflix dot com

(30:13):
slash mom to get this special deal and back to
a lot of That's well. We've had a couple of
letters to share about our episode on Crazy Cat Ladies,
so Rachel writes, first of all, I want to say
I'm a huge fan. Thanks Rachel. I listen to you
guys every week during my bike commute to school or

(30:35):
while cooking and cleaning my home. I just listened to
your podcast on a Crazy Cat Lady and I felt
compelled to write in because I come from a family
of cat lovers. There has only been one year I've
I have lived without a cat, and that was my
freshman year of college, when I was in the dorms.
Among my family members, we have a total of seven cats.
I have to, My parents have too, my sister has two,

(30:56):
and my brother has one. Every time we get together,
we inevitably share store race about our cat's crazy antics,
which we are never in short supply of. My boyfriend
used to point this out to me often because, to
be honest, I had never seen it as being odd.
After my last breakup, I actually talked about getting another cat,
and my best friend warned me not to because I
was on the version of becoming a crazy cat lady. Obviously,

(31:18):
my family is not concerned, but my friends definitely are. Kristen,
I loved your story about Sir Lancelot. I often talked
to my cats and introduced him to my friends, and
I pretty much converse with any cat that I see. Rachel,
you and I cut from the same cat claw. I
I think Kristen's interactions with Sir Launcelot are charming. Thank you.

(31:39):
He's a kid cat. He's kid, he's got extra I
really like he should have some sort of admiral's coat.
I think, to whar he's he's really stately looking. Okay,
So here's a letter from Alexis talking about her relationship
with cats. She said, I had the best relationship with
my cat when we got him as a kid, and

(32:00):
I spent heaps of time with him. And when I did,
I said his name over and over again so he
would learn it. I gave him lots of attention and love,
and he returned it. He would follow me around and
I was clearly his favorite of the family. If he
needed to be found, my mom would just ask me
to stand in the backyard and call his name. Moments
later I would hear his bell and he would be there.
He used to sleep on my pillow too. It wouldn't

(32:21):
go to bed until I was there. This led to
some annoyance as I grew older, stayed up late, and
therefore had allowed me ow and cat at my feet
wanting to go to bed. Also, I am allergic to cats,
something my parents kept bringing up and that I kept
denying despite my constant sniffing and sneezing. It was worth it.
I loved that cat so much. So thank you, Alexis,

(32:43):
and thanks to everyone who's written into Mom's Stuff at
Discovery dot com. You can also find us on Facebook,
Like us over there and follow us on Twitter at
Mom's Stuff podcast, and you can also follow us on
Tumbler as well as stuff Mom Never Told You dot
tumbler dot com, and you can also head over to
our website during the week, It's how Stuff Works dot

(33:05):
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it how Stuff Works dot com

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