Chelsey Weber-Smith

And the last episode that we did together, we talked about mobile game ads, which is also in this same kind of category of surreal, uncanny valley exploitation of the...

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 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.

That's my theory.

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 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 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-47s, eating feces, committing suicide, burying each other alive.

There were child pregnancies and abortions, vampire toilets, decapitation, hypodermic needles and injections.