Don't Praise The Machine (DPTM)

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...

Pamela Anderson was the ultimate '90s tabloid machine — Baywatch bombshell, Playboy's most-covered model, and ground zero for the mechanics of celebrity . So how did she end up quoting Dostoevsky and giving spiritual speaking tours in Australia, selling skincare and preaching slow living at 58 yeard old? We break down the one of the most audacious celebrity rebrand of the decade — the Pamverse in...

Keinemusik are the Berlin electronic music collective who've built a global empire playing Afro house in front of pyramids, eating on stage and checking their phones — and somehow it works. They are both genuinely impressive and strangely irritating, and we want to explore why. We dig into what Keinemusik actually are, why they've become such a massive cultural phenomenon, and whether there's anyt...

Sovereign citizens believe they can opt out of the legal system using magic phrases and pseudolegal theory. But what actually happens when they try? A barrister breaks down the movement's origins, its conspiracy thinking, and why it occasionally turns deadly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In light of Afroman and Justin Timberlake's separate filmed run-ins with the law, this week we trace the wild history of dash cams and body cams and explore how one rapper turned his own police raid footage into certified internet gold. Justice never sounded so funky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The pod-brothers get together in the same room for a rare in-person off-the-cuff chat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After 27 years together, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O — Australia's most dominant commercial FM breakfast duo — have finally parted ways. Jackie has declared she can no longer work with Kyle, who has been stood down for serious misconduct, and their $200 million, 10-year KIIS FM deal is now in tatters. We look back at how they built their partnership in Australian media, how they commanded eye-wat...

We’re venturing into the Skibidi-infested trenches of Generation Alpha to discover if these "iPad babies" are evolving into the most tech-fluent creative class in history or if they’re simply the first generation to have their frontal lobes successfully replaced by a 24-hour loop of algorithmic brain rot. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why on earth are the world’s most famous people haunting GoFundMe? We’ve seen a string of tragic headlines lately, from James Van Der Beek to Eric Dane, but in the wake of the sadness comes a strange new reality: your famous heroes are asking you to help them out financially. Is this a genuine community safety net for those slipping through the cracks of a broken healthcare system, or have our par...

The most intimate of filler injections, credit card fraud , Jake Paul crying at ice skating events and Snoop D-O-Double-G's minders getting physical with Dutch winter Olympic Royalty. How did this Blue Ribbon event turn into a low-brow meme-fest?  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matcha's been absolutely everywhere for a while. How did we get here? What cultural, commercial and psychological forces sit behind matcha's runaway success? And what is the next matcha? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We watched 28 Years Later and noticed something strange: the "naked" zombies aren't actually naked. Turns out 80-90% of what you see on screen is completely fake. From White Lotus to Euphoria to Pam & Tommy, Hollywood actors are wearing carefully crafted prosthetics instead of the real thing. Why the sudden shift? We investigate the rise of intimacy coordinators, the on-set rules that changed...

Stare into the neon-green abyss of Kick.com, a gambling sanctuary where $100 million contracts and uncurated chaos have created the unhinged frontier of streaming. Let's cross this digital desert of high-octane antisocial behavior to see if culture is evolving or just making everything much, much worse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Remember when movies had bangers? From Top Gun to Pulp Fiction, we unpack how soundtracks shaped pop culture—and why they vanished. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Can a single millimeter change the course of your life? In this episode, Alexander and John descend into the obsessive world of "Looksmaxxing"—where the human face is no longer a part of the soul, but another thing to be "optimized" for the sexual market and beyond. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.