Don't Praise The Machine (DPTM)

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 m...

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...

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&#...

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...

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...

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,...

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 psych...

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 gener...

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...

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 purch...

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 t...

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 fly...

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...

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?...

One in eight Americans is on a GLP-1, and the ripples are turning up in the strangest places. Victoria's Secret is selling fewer big bras. Secondhand sites are drowning in suddenly-too-large wardrobes. The checkout impulse aisle — a $6 billion monument to your eroded willpower — is dying. In part two of our GLP-1 deep dive, Alex and John follow the money through the collapsing snack economy: why c...

30 million Americans are quietly getting thinner, and it's not through discipline or willpower. It's a weekly injection derived from the saliva of a Gila monster lizard. Welcome to the Ozempic revolution. In part one of a two-part series, Alex and John dig into the GLP-1 drug phenomenon that's reshaping bodies, brains, and culture at a speed no diet trend ever has. From the Danish pharmaceutical c...

This week Alex and John trace the full arc — from Ötzi the Iceman's 5,300-year-old tattoos to the Gen Z vs millennial style split, the mainstreaming of ink in professional life, and the industry that's now growing faster than tattooing itself: laser removal. Also discussed: how you rebel against your parents when your mum is already covered in tattoos, why the tattoo removal industry is worth $1.8...

Alex saw Michael Jackson perform live in 1996. He was 14, obsessed, and desperately wanted to be one of those lucky boys he always saw by Michael's side. As the years went on, he became very glad he wasn't. With the MJ biopic crossing a billion dollars at the box office and two active lawsuits still pending against his estate, Alex and John ask the question nobody in a theatre queue seems to be as...

This week on Don't Praise the Machine, we're asking the question nobody in the productivity space wants to answer: is optimization culture actually making your life worse? When a clip of Steven Bartlett went viral, explaining how three glasses of wine with friends "ruined him for three days," the internet didn't push back on the sobriety. They pushed back on the measurement. The Whoop band. The sl...

Rebel Wilson , star of Fat Pizza, Bridesmaids, and now defendant in her own defamation trial — is back in an Australian courtroom, this time on the wrong side of the lawsuit. We break down the full saga: a Bondi Beach hives incident, an Outback debutante ball musical, nasty websites, a Ghislaine Maxwell comparison, and PR staffers privately texting that their own client is completely unhinged. Joi...

How did a guy who used to jump around in a white fur coat screaming "Bawitdaba" end up advising the Pentagon and hanging out in MAGA’s highest circles? While his massive 1998 breakthrough album Devil Without A Cause pitched him as a raw, trailer-park, anti-establishment hero, the actual research reveals a slightly different story. From growing up on a wealthy Michigan estate with horses and orchar...

Hollywood has a new favourite hero, and it is not a warrior, a wizard, or a spy. It is a founder, a CEO, a disruptor. In this episode, we name and explore a brand new film genre: the capitalist procedural. From startup biopics to corporate origin stories, business movies have quietly taken over cinema and streaming, and we want to know why. We break down what defines the genre, why studios keep gr...

Banksy built his reputation as an anonymous, anti-establishment street artist, spray-painting subversive stencils, dodging the law, and thumbing his nose at the art world elite. So how did he end up with Brad Pitt, Christina Aguilera, and Westminster City Council singing his praises? We trace Banksy's full arc: from punk origins in early-90s Bristol, to A-list celebrity collector, to a Reuters inv...

Prediction markets have exploded to $25 billion traded in a single month — but what exactly are they, and why should you care? Bloomberg journalist Tom Maloney joins the show to break down how platforms like Polymarket work, who's getting rich, and the deeply weird world of betting on elections, missile strikes, and Kim Kardashian's bar exam. From soldiers allegedly insider trading on military ope...

We pull back the curtain on the Clip Economy — the hidden industry where streamers pay teenagers thousands of dollars a month to flood TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts with manufactured viral content. We break down how Andrew Tate pioneered the paid clipping model, how figures like Clavicular and Gymskin rose to fame through coordinated clip campaigns, and why context is dying in the age of t...