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My guest is ‪Tim Heidecker, a comedian, musician and actor. He is a host of Office Hours. You can find him performing live music as 'Tim Heidecker and The Very Good Band'. His video work pioneered the style, affect, and genre of new media alt-comedy. We discuss how online irony became today's real world politics. We explore the shift from legacy TV to streaming platforms. How did our media ecosyst...

My guest is Aella. We discuss the psychological and social origins of sexual fetishes, the dark side of internet pornography, and we bring clarity to the online debates around race and IQ. Due to TOS, some of these topics can’t be included on the YouTube episode. Other topics are better kept off of public channels.

My guest is Francis Fukuyama. We discuss the research background of Doomscroll and competition between the United States vs China in the 21st century.

My guest is Aella, a writer, blogger and sex worker. She writes the highly popular blog Knowingless. She is a member of the online community LessWrong. We discuss the emergence of AI, the sex industry (online and offline), robot gfs and libertarian transhumanism. Aella describes her evangelical religious upbringing and how she learned to navigate the secular world. We explore the overlap of niche...

My guest is Francis Fukuyama, a scholar and political scientist. He is the author of many books. He is most well known for his 1992 work, "The End of History & the Last Man". Drawing on Hegel and Marx, Fukuyama explores the concept of teleology — the idea that history is a linear process where human societies progress through sequential socioeconomic forms. As Marx famously wrote, Feudalism wa...

We recap Hasan’s upbringing in Turkey and his early origins at The Young Turks network. Later, he talks me off the ledge as I complain about how much it sucks to be on camera lol. We discuss media strategy, online debate and class consciousness. We both admit to mirin’ Yung Chomsky’s peak physique. (This is not gay.) Finally, Hasan drops some revealing streamer drama that I did not yet know — yike...

In advance of their new album SISTER —out Sept 12 via True Panther and Dirty Hit— EDM emo pop punk crunkcore electroclash dubstep screamo trance DJs, producers, and siblings Angel and Lulu AKA the Frost Children join NM to talk about making music in a memetically driven age. For more: frostchildren.xyz & @thefrostchildren Names cited: Above & Beyond, Adam Curtis, Addison Rae, Afrojack, All...

Our guest is American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff . He is the author of such seminal books on digital culture and networked communication as Cyberia (1994), Media Virus (1995), and Coercion (1999); and numerous further titles including, Program or Be Programmed (2010/2025) and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). He is also the host of Team Human and a pro...

Initially titled :::FEEL THE FUTURE::: , this lecture by Lil Internet is, in fact, more a eulogy for a fading era of the internet and its imaginaries—one that is being replaced by an entirely new structure of machine learning-driven networked media. The talk follows three threads: the pre-millennial concept of cyberspace , the post-millennial return of the cyber occult in the face of naive Web 2 o...

My guest is Hasan Piker‬, a live streamer and political commentator. We discuss the state of the online left and the massive rightward shift of young men toward Donald Trump and the Republican party. I sat down with Hasan during his suspension from Twitch. He reads a misleading headline published in the New York Post. Later, we discuss the strategic possibilities of a two party system and explore...

My returning guest is Catherine Liu. We discuss the crisis of elite academies, the influence of Foucault, a certain Twitter controversy, Thomas Piketty’s concept of the Merchant Right, the transformation of the artworld under neoliberalism and much more.

Our guest is Orit Halpern: co-author of The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023); author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014); and Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Often in discussions about machine learning and smartness, AI is presented as the natural path of human progress, an evolutionary – almost biological – d...

My returning guest is Catherine Liu,‬ a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine. She is the author of "Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class". We explore the psychological significance of “trauma” and “care” within the liberal discourse today. Liu describes a moral panic among elites where the language of personal therapy attempts to right social and historic...

This is a subscribers only episode. My guest is Jen Pan, the author of Selling Social Justice (2025). Jen and I breakdown these topics further and speak candidly about our frustration with elite institutions. I also share one of the more ridiculous political horseshoe stories from my social media research…

On this ep, NM is joined by filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko , who you may know as the director of 0s and 1s , Wobble Palace , Spree , and most recently, The Code , which stars Peter Vack & Dasha Nekrasova and is currently streaming on Mubi.  Like much of Eugene’s work, The Code understands itself both as entertainment and as cinema — cinema-in-a-time-when everyone is an editor, cinema-in-a-t...

My guest is Jen Pan, formerly a host of The Jacobin Show and a staff writer at the New Republic. She is the author of “Selling Social Justice” — out now from Verso Books. We discuss the DEI industry, the New Deal, American inequality and why the rich love anti-racism. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, Dissent, and Damage Magazine.

My guest is Anthony Fantano. We dive deeper into the ethics of criticism, the role of politics in “good art” and the extractive economic model of Spotify. Where did subculture go after platforms took over the internet?

My guest is Anthony Fantano, a music critic and the voice behind The Needle Drop. We discuss the role of politics in art and music, his origins in the anti-war punk scene and the strange state of American counter-culture today. Music scenes used to serve as a gateway to anti-establishment politics. It was once common to find DIY anarchist zines at the local punk show. Now these political subcultur...

In town for an event with Matt Copson at Berlin’s KW , Dean Kissick stops by the show to talk about art, criticism, and self-performance as well as fire punks, AI monsters, vulgarity, Ye, and the death of the hot take. Now based in London following a decade-long tenure in Downtown New York, Dean is a writer with recent and forthcoming work in Spike , Heavy Traffic , and Civilization . His ess...

This is a subscriber’s only episode. Professor Chibber and I dive deep into the history of the left and explore its transformation over the course of the 20th century. After the cultural turn, the march through institutions, and our current media environment, we ask — where did things go wrong?

My guest is Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the author of Confronting Capitalism, The Class Matrix and Postcolonial Theory & the Specter of Capital. Chibber is the editor of Catalyst Journal and the host of the Confronting Capitalism podcast. We discuss the cultural turn, the rise of identity politics and the crisis of academia. Chibber is deeply committed...

This is a subscribers only episode. My guest is Andrew Callaghan. We explore Andrew’s background in music and online subcultures, the ethics of publishing or "risk-for-harm", and his plans for the future of Channel 5 and more. Plus a few behind the scenes and personal stories that we could not include in the public version.

Gideon Jacobs joins NM to discuss his latest piece for the LA Review of Books , “ Player One and Main Character ,” which explores the logic of power in a time when some of its key agents are no longer operating in base reality.  Related: Lil Internet’s “ Hallucinator’s Dice ” (unlocked) See also: Gideon Jacobs, IMAGES: A Show @ Earth, NYC Gideon Jacobs, “ Trump l’Oeil ,” ( LARB , Nov 2024) NM...

My guest is Andrew Callaghan, a documentary filmmaker and the host of Channel 5. He is the director of This Place Rules (2022) and Dear Kelly (2025), an in-depth portrait of a man he met at a ‘White Lives Matter' rally. We discuss the breakdown of consensus reality and how deplatforming can often lead to greater political extremism. Andrew describes his early origins in the anarchist movement and...

With tariff talk dominating all channels, we speak with Trevor McFedries about the current psychic space of markets. Trevor is neither an economics nor a policy expert but, as a co-creator of Lil Miquela (the first virtual influencer) and Friends With Benefits (the first block-chain based culture DAO), he does fundamentally understand the business landscape of the past decade— which is to say one...