Advertise on podcast: Don't Praise The Machine (DPTM)

Hollywood Is Out of Ideas. The Internet Kids Are Taking Over. Tom Cruise’s Digger is on track to lose around $245 million. In the same year, two horror films from people who started out on YouTube have made close to a billion dollars between them. The Backrooms cost $10 million, came from a 4chan photo of an empty furniture store, and has taken $400 million. Obsession cost $750,000 and has grossed over $500 million, the most ever for a film made on under a million. Alex and John look at how a generation raised online is getting films made without asking Hollywood first, why a meme nobody owns turns out to be great business, and whether this is cinema’s new 1970s or a short detour before the next He-Man reboot. Plus Chiwetel Ejiofor’s secret Love Actually sequel, and the question the film never answers: how come you can eat them? 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you grew up leaving the TV on past midnight, you remember them. The stadium crowds with their hands in the air. The soft music. The man on stage who could heal your bad back, provided you called the number on screen. The death of Jim Bakker sent us back to late-night Channel 10 Australia, and we came out with a lot of questions. How did a guy with a puppet show become one of the most powerful men in American television? How did a Christian theme park with a water slide end up the third most popular in the country? And how did it all end with five years in prison and a second career selling buckets of freeze-dried food for the end times? Along the way we meet Aimee Semple McPherson, who did sermons on a motorcycle in the 1920s, Fulton Sheen, the bishop who beat Frank Sinatra in the ratings, and Oral Roberts, who told viewers God might take him if he didn’t hit his fundraising target. Then there’s Benny Hinn, whose healing technique Alex can still do from memory. We look at where televangelism lives now. Spoiler, it’s on YouTube, and the thumbnails are better than ours. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1989, the ABC asked a group of Australian kids what they do when they're bored. The first answer was "I ring people." Imagine asking a kid that in 2026. Alex and John were born in 1982, which makes them part of the last generation that grew up properly bored. This week they look at what happened to boredom after the iPhone arrived in 2007, and why losing it might be part of why so many of us feel flat all the time. They get into the 2014 study where people chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts for a few minutes. They talk about how skater kids went from a parent's nightmare to a parent's dream, and how 90s slackers turned being bored into a look. Alex explains his phone-free "key walks" and three-hour runs with no headphones. John makes the case for treating phones at the dinner table like loud farting. If you know someone who can't get through a two-minute queue without their phone, send them this. Maybe don't tell them why. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're 80, there's a decent chance a robot helps you out of the bath. At the recent World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, one robot ran the 100m faster than Usain Bolt and another couldn't work out how to stop. At a different event in China, dancing robot fell down the stairs mid-Billie Jean and got dragged offstage by the ankle, creating an instant viral moment. Right now they're still in gimmick territory but so was AI about five minutes ago. We get into why robots are built in our shape at all, why there's no "internet of movement" to teach one plumbing, whether it's okay to punch your robot butler, robot aged care, robot soldiers, and the urgent need for a robot plumber's crack. Laugh at Robots while you still can. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Australia taxed cigarettes until a legal pack cost around A$40. Gangs now smuggle in cheaper ones and shops sell them for about A$17. Rival crime groups fight over territory, and there have been more than 100 documented attacks on tobacconists, some carried out by teenagers hired to throw the firebomb. Alex and John trace how a legal drug ended up with a black market that looks a lot like the one for illegal drugs. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rachel "Raygun" Gunn is back, and this time she's brought a Netflix documentary with her. The boys watched all 72 minutes of Untold: Raygun Breaking Badly so you don't have to, and they've got thoughts. Redemption arc or re-writing history? You'll have to listen to find out. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After almost 30 years, someone has finally been convicted for the murder of Tupac Shakur, and the way it happened is stranger than any fan theory. Dwayne "Keefy D" Davis was found guilty of first-degree murder this week for supplying the gun and planning the shooting outside a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas in 1996. He was granted limited immunity back in 1998 for cooperating on an unrelated case, then spent the next two decades describing his role in the murder anyway, in interviews, on Vlad TV, and eventually in his own memoir. This week Alex and John (a lifelong Suge Knight defender since age 13) walk through the case: the profer agreement that didn't cover what Davis actually admitted to, the Suge Knight and P. Diddy conspiracy theories that dominated the story for decades, the Biggie/Tupac beef that set the whole thing in motion, and the strange economy of hip-hop YouTube channels like Vlad TV, where guests get paid tens of thousands of dollars to tell stories that can apparently also convict them of murder. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Woolworths just ran one of the most successful marketing campaigns in Australian retail history. It was free, plastic, and aimed squarely at six-year-olds. This week Alex and John dig into Ooshies: the blind-bag Disney toys that took over Australian supermarkets, gave Woolworths' share price a boost, dented Coles', and turned primary school playgrounds into trading floors. We'll get into the psychology behind blind-bag toys (it's the same intermittent-reinforcement mechanism that makes slot machines addictive), the $30,000 rare-donkey eBay listing that wasn't quite what it seemed, and why it's parents, not kids, actually driving the spend. Send this one to the friend in your life who's currently a few hundred dollars deep chasing a rubber Wolverine. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's a data center planned for Utah that was originally supposed to be twice the size of Manhattan. Even after intense local pushback chopped it in half, it's still incomprehensibly massive. Alex and John try to picture that (they can't), then get into why old Rust Belt towns are trading steel mills for server racks and getting a fraction of the jobs they were promised. Tax breaks, diesel generators, a 24-hour hum nobody asked for, but hey, John gets to pester ChatGPT with nonsense hypotheticals. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fenix Flexin swore up and down he freestyled "Rubberz." He didn't. This week: how an AI-generated rap song landed on the Billboard Hot 100, racked up 35 million Spotify streams, and got taken down by a producer who noticed the file name still contained the AI music platform they used. facepalm Alex and John pick through the wreckage. The mumble-rap-to-Morrissey pivot nobody saw coming. The Andrew Callahan interview where Fenix can't even remember his own "freestyled" lyrics on camera. What it means when a guy with a decade of real releases decides two prompts and a "generate" button beat writing an actual song. Plus: Pitchfork's first zero-out-of-ten in years, the Fawaz/Madonna cover mess, and why Spotify's new AI labeling rules protect almost nobody. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

TikTok Shop is quietly building the biggest impulse-buying machine in retail history — a live, algorithmically-fed home shopping channel on track for $112 billion in sales this year alone. Alex and John trace live shopping back to the QVC playbook of the 1980s, work out why parasocial trust converts better than any ad ever could, and confess their own TikTok- and Facebook Marketplace-fuelled purchases. Also: why eBay is panicking, why Australia still can't get TikTok Shop, and the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt that explains it all. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Alex and John go deep on the nicotine pouch revolution that started in Sweden, jumped to America and has now completely taken over British train stations, McLaren merchandise and apparently Tucker Carlson's entire personality. They get into what is actually in these little white pillows (spoiler, not tobacco), why a Swedish company sold to Philip Morris for sixteen billion dollars, why teenagers on TikTok have turned pouching into a personality and why Tucker Carlson had to be told by his own sponsor to stop making claims about what Zyn does for a man's stamina. Also covered, why Australia just banned the entire category, why France did too, whether wet bagging is cool or deeply embarrassing and whether either host would actually put one in their gums for the sake of content. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Screensavers used to be a whole universe — toasters with wings, mazes drawing themselves, flying stars you could stick your face in. Then one day they just... stopped. This week Alex and John dig up three pieces of tech that were once completely unremarkable parts of daily life and are now totally gone: screensavers, ringtones, and answering machines. Along the way: the accidental birth of the flying toaster, why Jefferson Airplane nearly sued a screensaver company, the Berlin-founded ringtone empire that gave the world Crazy Frog, a $4.4 billion industry that vanished in five years, and the case for the answering machine as the original social media platform. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The 2026 EIU Global Liveability Index has dropped, and Alex and John have a combined 60+ years living in this year's top 10 — which makes them uniquely qualified to ask: is "liveable" actually the same thing as good? This week: why the famous rankings are secretly a corporate tool for calculating executive danger pay, what the criteria hilariously refuse to measure (fun, weather, goth scenes, the price of cigarettes), and why the world's "best" cities, New York, Paris, Berlin, aren't anywhere near the list. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bonnie Tyler has died, and with her goes something bigger than one Welsh voice with a rasp. Total Eclipse of the Heart is seven minutes of zero-irony emotional maximalism, the kind of song everyone on Earth knew without ever choosing to, and nobody makes anything like it anymore. So this week Alex and John tear up the episode schedule to ask the big question: what actually killed the power ballad? Along the way: Jim Steinman, the leather-gloved rock opera maximalist who wrote it for a Nosferatu vampire musical (really), the gloriously unhinged music video, the uncredited male vocalist you never knew was on the track, the 1995 Nikki French eurodance cover that fooled a generation, why hair metal bands were contractually obligated to get sentimental, and how irony, algorithms and the death of the school disco slow dance quietly murdered the most sincere genre pop music ever produced. Turn around, bright eyes. This one's for Bonnie. 🛎 Get bonus episodes, early episodes, and exclusive goodies while supporting DPTM! Patreon ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/dptm 💌 Sign up for John's famous weekly DPTM newsletter Click here ➡️ https://dptm.org/ 🔌 Connect with us! TikTok: ➡️ https://www.tiktok.com/@dontpraisethemachine Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/dont_praise_the_machine/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.