0:00

[crash] [screaming]

0:02

[crashing] Sorry, Snuggles.

0:04

Are you okay? [sniffing] At least we didn't break the camera.

0:08

We'll have to try going viral another time.

0:10

This obviously didn't work. [music]

0:14

Welcome back to all Cats and cat allies alike

0:18

to "6 Degrees of Cats" the world's best

0:21

and only cat themed culture, history and science podcast.

0:25

When I started talking about "6 Degrees of Cats"

0:29

this podcast, the reactions were across the board,

0:33

you know, optimistic and encouraging.

0:36

[music]

0:38

"How interesting!" "That's so... you, Amanda."

0:42

"Oh yeah, cats market themselves.

0:44

This is easy." I mean, obviously this was going to be a hit.

0:48

After all, cats are the number one

0:50

most beloved animal on the internet, right?

0:53

Kind of. I have a strong case

0:55

that cats should wear the crown

0:57

as king of the internet. I can name 20 cat influencers off the top of my head.

1:04

And I know I'm not the only one. So, truly.

1:07

[music]

1:09

I think that cats are the king of the internet.

1:13

But I guess we have to look at the history first

1:15

to challenge that hypothesis, if you will.

1:18

So... [music]

1:20

In this episode, we're going to be exploring the way our furry friends

1:24

have catalyzed conversations

1:26

across the worldwide web. [music]

1:31

Hang on, bear with me. [music]

1:33

Oh! It was just snuggles.

1:36

Sitting on the modem. All right, are we rolling? [music]

1:41

We are certainly living in a weird moment in time.

1:44

I don't think this is a unique feeling

1:47

to our here and now. But I don't think it's controversial to say that

1:50

we're living in a world beyond our ancestors'

1:53

wildest dreams. And nightmares.

1:57

We haven't achieved world peace.

1:59

We haven't solved world hunger. We haven't reversed climate change.

2:03

Or ended animal cruelty or housed everyone

2:06

afforded. But we do have

2:08

wireless, fidelity.

2:10

Wi-Fi. More generally,

2:13

the internet. [claps]

2:16

Hey, come on now, seriously. The internet.

2:18

It's amazing. It's great. It's... [typing]

2:22

The heck? Are you kidding me? [typing]

2:26

People think the world's flat? Oh my gosh, I can't even look at that image.

2:30

It's just racist.

2:32

Oh, she looks really pretty.

2:35

Let me just check the comment--. Mm, no.

2:37

What is wrong? Okay, fine. It does look like the internet isn't as civilized

2:42

a place as it could be thanks to the amplification and acceleration

2:46

of only the most extreme, chaotic,

2:49

and outré voices on there.

2:51

That's a bit of a bummer. But let's not just all be doom and gloom here.

2:56

On the whole, I still think things are a lot easier than they used to be.

3:00

It used to take weeks to send and receive documents

3:07

for signatures and stuff because we had to use snail mail to send printed items.

3:12

It would take hours if not days to perform research.

3:15

You'd have to actually go in person to libraries

3:18

and scan books with your eyes.

3:20

You had to use the phone, pick up the receiver, put it to your ear,

3:25

and hope that the person on the other end picked up.

3:28

But now... I can take my laptop anywhere in my home.

3:34

No wires. And connect to potentially 5.3 billion people

3:41

over half the world's population

3:43

to send pictures and graphics interchange formats,

3:47

gifs in real time.

3:50

I can chat with someone in, say, Algeria, where this here podcast was once in the top 100?"

3:55

So, truly, everything and everyone is connected.

4:01

A good majority of us, at least.

4:03

Thanks to that network of subterranean cables

4:06

and the satellites that communicate to make up the internet.

4:11

Thanks, US Department of Defense. Yeah, I told you everything's connected.

4:18

Almost all modern infrastructure and systems we use here in the United States

4:22

include innovation and technology first developed

4:25

through... more related stuff.

4:28

And in this instance, we are talking about

4:31

the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency,

4:36

or ARPA, who named the very first iteration of the internet, ARPAnet.

4:40

That actually could have caught on, ARPAnet.

4:42

Anyway, they launched that in the 1960s.

4:47

But, you know, let's not give them too much credit.

4:51

The concept of signals connecting wirelessly isn't new,

4:54

and you might be surprised by some of the four parents,

4:59

four mothers, if you will, such as...

5:01

Ada Loveless, the estranged daughter of none other than English romance poet,

5:08

and total rabble rouser, Lord Byron.

5:11

Ms Loveless was a 19th century mathematician,

5:16

and the first computer programmer.

5:18

And about a century later, none other than Hollywood actress

5:26

Hedy Lemar patented a special radio frequency hopping system

5:30

as part of an effort to support torpedo warfare for the Allies during World War II.

5:36

So again, a step towards wireless tech.

5:41

Thanks to... War... [doorbell ring]

5:44

My pizza delivery.

5:48

Perfect timing. While the original intent of the internet was to facilitate fast,

5:53

secure communication, of course, the tools of the internet were quickly found to be

5:58

very useful in the food trade.

6:00

Pizza is kind of famously the best food suited for delivery.

6:06

There was a monetization very early on,

6:08

which like trying to incorporate pizza delivery, the order off the internet.

6:12

[Music]

6:14

That was pizza expert, or pizza czar, chef Anthony Falco.

6:19

I am an international pizza consultant and the author of "Pizza Czar".

6:25

I have a consulting company called Falco and Limited Concepts with my wife, Rebecca.

6:32

My Instagram is Millennium_Falco, two L's and two N's.

6:39

And on my Instagram, I document my travels around the world as a pizza consultant.

6:45

I've made pizza in 20 countries and counting, and I have a goal to make pizza on every continent.

6:54

Maybe we should team up on my cat tour of the world.

6:57

Yes. We are on the same path.

7:01

It's just one is furry and cuddly, and the other is hot and cheesy.

7:08

The passion for pizza, like the passion for cats, is a global,

7:13

web-based phenomenon that gooey, cheesy slice of joy with any and all variation of toppings is the

7:20

unofficial food of the net. I mean, it's the most Instagram food on earth.

7:27

I think it's just like something that's universally loved.

7:29

I mean, if pizza can be adapted to anyone, there's gluten-free pizza.

7:33

If you're vegetarian, if you're vegan, if you don't eat pork, if you don't eat beef,

7:38

to understand the evolution of internet culture and its cat worshiping denizens is to appreciate

7:44

the rise of pizza. Anthony served me a slice of world history, starting with his own Sicilian style, personal,

7:56

pan-parable. The world had to come together to create pizza.

8:02

It's the world's favorite food because it belongs to the whole world.

8:04

No one really owns pizza. [music]

8:08

My dad's side are all Sicilian farmers from central Texas.

8:13

My great-grandparents immigrated through New Orleans and settled in Brasis River Valley of Texas

8:19

where there was a bunch of Sicilian farming communities.

8:22

They still have a big San Giuseppefestival in Bryan, Texas, which is not really

8:27

on a lot of people's radar.

8:30

I loved pizza as a kid, and my great-grandmother used to make something

8:35

that she would call pizza, but pizza was a word that she had never heard before,

8:40

because they only spoke Sicilian, which is considered its own language.

8:43

When they left Sicily, it had only been a part of Italy for a few years,

8:47

so they didn't even speak standard Italian.

8:49

We didn't actually describe what pizza is.

8:53

I think for the purposes of this episode of pizza is this round slab of baked dough.

9:00

I don't want to hear it Detroit. What even is Detroit Pizza? I've never heard of it.

9:02

I am from Michigan. Anyway, we'll say that the common understanding of a pizza is a flat bread, if you will,

9:08

with layers of sauce, usually tomato-based, plus cheese and toppings,

9:14

such as corn and mayo [gasp] I'm not kidding, ask the Japanese.

9:18

And pizza is from Italy, at least that version is.

9:23

According to my research, the modern day pizza seems to have originated in the 18th century,

9:29

some time around the net least, by the folks in Naples, not Bully.

9:34

You've heard of the Neapolitan pizza, right?

9:38

Well, seems like that's the OG pizza.

9:41

What's so special about this particular delicacy's history,

9:47

beyond how freaking yummy it is?

9:49

Is that? Pizza is one of the few foods where you can historically say it started at this time.

9:56

There's a great book by Michael C. Mann about the pre and post-columbian exchange

10:02

world. It's based on a more scholarly book called "Ecological Imperialism".

10:07

It dives into how the exchange of plants, animals,

10:15

diseases, and humans from the old world to the new world really affects every aspect of every

10:22

society on earth. Because wheat and tomatoes were separated completely until the European settlers

10:32

explorers went to Mexico and brought wheat to Mexico and then brought tomatoes back to Europe.

10:39

So it couldn't have existed before that.

10:43

There were flat breads.

10:47

And you know who was around then?

10:50

Keeping rodents away from the grains used to bake those breads?

10:55

I'm pretty sure that cats are old world species.

10:59

There are native big cats, so there's the cougar and then there's the jaguar,

11:04

which is also in North America, but less so.

11:06

It's been pushed out a lot. Then there's some small ones like links and oscillates.

11:11

But the domesticated house cat didn't come until possibly Viking ships in the ninth century

11:18

brought them. I have this image of a cat wearing a little Viking helmet and it's really just the cutest. [aww]

11:24

Oh my goodness, it just occurred to me.

11:28

Cats are partly responsible for pizza.

11:34

Okay, that might be a bit of a stretch.

11:39

Speaking of stretch, stretch, do we?

11:42

Ah, yes. Those flat breads.

11:44

Going back to the Roman times, you can see pizza ovrns that are almost identical to the ones that I

11:49

used today and they would put fat and meat and olive oil and herbs on them and stuff.

11:54

But there was no tomatoes. [gasp] You can't have pizza without tomatoes.

11:59

That's what makes it pizza and not a flat bread.

12:02

A lot of pizzerias have white pizzas, but there's no pizzeria that doesn't have tomato sauce.

12:08

I definitely can't think of a pizza without tomato sauce in some aspect of that equation.

12:13

And please, no ranch. No ranch.

12:17

Pizza has a lot of Mexican influence, actually.

12:20

Mesoamerican farmers, domesticated tomato, chili peppers,

12:25

and the water buffalo that makes buffalo mozzarella originates from India or East Asia.

12:33

And they were brought to Italy in the 12th century.

12:36

So mozzarella actually originates from a species from Asia.

12:41

Even wheat originates from Eastern and Turkey.

12:44

Really, the only thing native to Italy that's in pizza is olive oil.

12:48

So pizza is truly an international food.

12:52

The food of the people.

12:55

In person and online.

12:58

Anthony saw firsthand when pizza went virtual.

13:02

Yeah, I'm very early internet guy.

13:05

Like I was in high school working on BBSs, which is like a bulletin board system.

13:10

And that predated the internet. You had to call one website to log on, essentially.

13:16

That's pretty similar to how the first web-based pizza delivery site worked.

13:22

Courtesy one Pizza Hut located in Santa Cruz, California, USA in 1999.

13:30

The rudimentary online form was called "Pizzanet".

13:36

Once customers entered their pizza order via a pizza builder menu page,

13:40

someone from that Santa Cruz Pizza Hut would call and confirm that, yes,

13:45

"Seymore Butts" is your real name. "Why is that funny?"

13:48

And then you'd pay at the door in cash because the technology to pay by credit card for stuff like that wasn't set up.

13:58

Speaking of paying for pizza, pizza may have been the very first food purchased with bitcoin.

14:06

Or at least the most notorious bitcoin purchase of food.

14:10

You'll see what I mean.

14:12

When bitcoin first came out, some guy was like, "Oh, well, what do I do with this?

14:22

I have bitcoin now. I don't know what to do with it.

14:24

Someone buy me a pizza and I'll send them bitcoin."

14:27

It was only worth $8 or something, so like he said,

14:31

50 or 60 bitcoin, the bitcoin pizza would be worth millions of millions of dollars now that the guy bought.

14:38

$421 million to be exact.

14:43

Bitcoin Pizza Day is like an internet holiday.

14:45

And that illustrates how pizza is baked into the culture of the internet.

14:52

So, it's the 90s. We have the basics, food, a dial-up internet connection that

15:00

allowed for 28.8 kilobytes per second to be downloaded,

15:04

and a place to gather with the random friends we met online.

15:08

Who - no, dad. We were not telling them our home address so we could be kidnapped.

15:13

But what was there to talk about in those early internet days?

15:17

What were we sharing? How could we bond? What was the lingua franca of the early internet?

15:25

Come on, we all know who it was. Felis catus.

15:29

All right, folks. Order in a hot tomato pie, throw a piece of chicken at your kitty,

15:36

and we'll follow that pizza cat after the break.

15:55

Oh, that's so cute. I gotta send this to my cat text. Oh, sorry, I got a little distracted there.

16:01

Before the break, we learned how pizza took over the internet.

16:05

Pizza party. Speaking of parties.

16:11

Ah, isn't it fun on the web?

16:15

[Collage of various noise pollution from the internet]

16:17

Yikes, never mind.

16:21

I guess it's more like a bar fight when it's not a bunch of ads or commercials or

16:27

adritorials shouting at me to like buy a bunch of stuff I can't afford.

16:31

But as I said, it wasn't always this way.

16:33

The early internet was scrapier, more random, more playful, and full of cuter stuff,

16:42

like kitties. I had the opportunity to speak to an expert who literally wrote the book on

16:49

kitties and the internet. My name is Maria Bustillos. I'm a journalist and editor, the founding editor of

16:58

Popula and the Brickhouse Cooperative, which is a journalist-owned publishing platform

17:04

that you can find me at thebreak.house, which is where I do a lot of my publishing and editing,

17:11

and at MariaBussios.com. This is my personal website. I'm on mastodon@ [email protected].

17:20

So, the early publicly available web, uh, the memories.

17:25

You've got mail.

17:28

This essay that I wrote in an anthology from Coffee House Press, it was a very fun project

17:38

about how the internet started out being kind of like a homemage and ever.

17:46

At first it was fun and everybody was having a great time. There was no commercial interaction in it

17:52

at all, even on Facebook. When it first became possible for anybody to like get on Facebook,

17:57

there was a box where you could list the things that you liked. Click a button and you would

18:02

immediately find everybody on Facebook, individual people who had listed the same thing. I like

18:08

James Therber and I like half videos, and I like this one.

18:10

Indeed, the early internet really was all about connection. And this is where the cats come in.

18:18

It was cats that connected people across the internet from the get-go.

18:23

There's a few sort of universal human places of connection and cats and cat videos is one.

18:35

The thing that's so thrilling about them is a cat can at any moment be about to do something stupid

18:41

and embarrassing or noble and beautiful and it's at the same time, right? This is where we're

18:48

joined together in love of cats is like this whole love of the unexpected and excitement.

18:54

Interestingly, it was rodents that actually helped first bring kitties into the space.

19:02

Why does that sound familiar? I became aware that there were going to be absurd animal videos

19:09

right at the very beginning of the internet in the mid 90s when I first saw a website called

19:16

hamster dance. It was these like hamsters that were like allegedly dancing. My daughters would like

19:23

actually do the slow rotating and they would swing and the few people that were online at that point

19:29

were just completely obsessed with it. Oh yes, we were.

19:32

But of course we had no band with them. I mean, it was like literally impossible on these

19:36

modems that we had. You couldn't even send photographs at all. What passed for the internet in my

19:42

life was, and then see our team monitor two colors, kind of green and black. And so it was very exciting

19:50

when we started to be able to have photographs. Everybody put their pets up almost the first possible

19:54

thing. And this became a bonding mechanism for people all over the world to post pictures of their cats.

20:00

From scanners to digital cameras to today's smartphones, the trafficking of cute cat photos and

20:11

stories increased rapidly. As did groups, forums, platforms, and other types of community gathering

20:18

spaces online for pet owners and myers and for investigators.

20:25

It was an inevitability that people were going to film in cap videos and they just became more and

20:30

more fun and silly and funnier. And I would say 2010 to 2015 there was a real sort of golden age

20:38

of making awesome ridiculous videos of pets where it was just one person looking at my cat.

20:44

Yeah, it's this emotional connection to our adorable furry friends that will keep this kind of

20:50

content alive and flourishing on the web forever more or at least I hope. I think that's never going to end.

20:58

People are always going to love animals and they're going to love seeing other people's animals

21:03

and they're going to love an animal that gets rescued. And I still see the video of those guys who

21:09

had the pet lion and I've been like watching a hundred times. We now return to the present 30 years

21:20

after Hamster Dance and those weird homegrown community driven spaces, random chat rooms or forums

21:27

or rudimentary pages where you could make best friends with I love kittens and babies 1976.

21:33

A nice fellow youth or so you hoped messaging you from Omaha Nebraska. Well those spaces disappeared

21:41

or dissolved. Early web domains like geocities and browsers like Netscape gave way to the monolith

21:49

that is Google or alphabet. Stuff has become more accessible and affordable like high speed internet

21:58

and computers capable of processing more and more information that we can download within

22:02

seconds, microseconds into our ubiquitous handheld devices. Not all of this is bad per se but

22:12

the commercialization of the internet is the thing I wrote about in the essay and I mean what was

22:18

evident and slightly troubling and less fun in 2016 in 2023 is just become turbocharged into

22:26

appearance sanity to make money out of it then algorithmize and generate ad views and stuff. There's

22:34

always 10 computers in the way between you and anything. Less and less is it possible to just

22:40

find a person that you want to talk to by yourself without a commercial mediation and so there's

22:48

a less organic kind of feeling. The worldwide web has become well more and more homogenized

22:56

and whitewashed. Everything is starting to look and sound similar in all of this search engine

23:02

optimized driven language and for many reasons partly due to the huge population online as well

23:11

as this commercialization it feels very depersonalized almost not as human as it used to be. Look I'm

23:20

not saying anything original here this has been reported on by many a journalist researcher and

23:25

every single person who says I can't figure out TikTok it's intimidating.

23:30

Sure the internet is a marketplace but underneath all of that it is a community.

23:40

So I think we really need to value those chaotic wonderful cat videos not only because they're cute

23:48

but because they really do represent something so special about the culture of the internet.

23:54

I like the idea of exploring humanity through something like cats because I think it is that way

24:02

with pizza you know the more I go around the world obviously everyone's differences are important

24:08

and it's hard we're entering like a global culture where there's a flat lining of a lot of things

24:13

but I do think it's still a good thing to think of people is like we are all just humans feeling the

24:19

same human problems and you know that all the cats in the world are just cats dealing with their own cat

24:25

problems. Yeah and we all need a community a forum a place where we can share stories support

24:33

solutions and when we're able find the humor in them or our cat's problems as long as they're not

24:41

terrible. In the beginning of the internet there was pizza and there were kitties.

24:54

Cats truly are the symbol of the internet just pull up your keyboard you'll see there are more

25:03

cat emojis than any other animal emoji just want them to make a pizza cat emoji.

25:09

I think the story of pizza and cats on the internet is a great reminder to stay weird stay playful

25:18

and make this second life we live online a giant cat filled pizza party.

25:23

You're doing the world a good thing when you share a cute story or a picture of a cat so go

25:29

ahead and do that now and remember to tag @6DegreesOfCats so we can see it.

25:36

Thanks folks I know it was a real leap from pizza to pussy cats - that alliteration got a little edgy

25:43

there. In the next episode we'll be continuing our celebration of all things kitty as it'll be

25:51

Valentine's Day. We did an episode last Valentine's Day on Cupid and Kitties check out that episode

25:58

if you haven't listened to it already then make your own cat Valentine meme. I want to thank my wonderful

26:05

experts Maria Bustillos and Anthony Falco. While the opinions are my own the research and work

26:12

is theirs if you'd like to learn more about them please check out our show notes which also include

26:17

the references and research that went into this episode. If you loved it please help this pirate

26:23

ship sail across the worldwide web by sharing it writing about it and giving us a top rating and

26:29

a review with all those SEO keywords or whatever listeners community members brands on the internet

26:38

I appreciate you it's always so great to remember that everyone and everything is connected.

26:45

6 Degrees of Cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours truly Captain Kitty aka Amanda B.

26:55

please subscribe to our mailing list by going to linktr.ee/6degreesofcats

27:04

or look us up on all those social media platforms. You'll be first in line for the extra audio

27:09

and more treats if you connect with us there. All episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood,

27:15

the marginalized, the resilient and the weird and of course all the cats we've loved and lost.

27:22

[Music]

27:28

Maru is the one for me it's so obvious but I mean there's just I have yet to see another cat star

27:36

that would dislodge Maruin my heart, he's like the cat version of like Clive Owen for me.