Skip to content
HeyJared

Don't Praise The Machine (DPTM)

Al and John grew up together in the 1990s but now live on opposite sides of the world. Each week, they get together through the magic of the Internet to catch up, make each other laugh and try to make sense of it all.The result is a funny, surreal and thought-provoking…

Podcast · By Alexander Holland & John Maloney · English · Official site

Indexed episodes, last 90 days
10
Latest publication
Sep 7, 2026
Audience
Checking…
Earliest in this view
Jul 6, 2026

Latest episodes

  1. Episode · Sep 7, 2026

    Tupac's Murderer - Guilty After Bragging on YouTube (opens the original)

    Episode notes

    Read excerpt

    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,

  2. Episode · Aug 31, 2026

    Ooshies Fever: The Supermarket Toy Turning Parents Feral (opens the original)

    Episode notes · Neutral tone

    Read excerpt

    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 mach

  3. Episode · Aug 24, 2026

    Your Rust Belt Town Just Got Data Centred: Deal With It (opens the original)

    Episode notes · Neutral tone

    Read excerpt

    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 hypothetic

  4. Episode · Aug 17, 2026

    The Viral Hit That Proves AI Music Is Out Of Control (opens the original)

    Episode notes

    Read excerpt

    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 me

  5. Episode · Aug 10, 2026

    TikTok's Live Shopping Boom Is Changing The Face Of Retail (opens the original)

    Episode notes · Positive tone

    Read excerpt

    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 #TikTo

Publishing over time

Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.

Recurring subjects

Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.

Audience

No verified audience measurement yet.

About this data

Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.

Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.

See coverage about Don't Praise The Machine (DPTM)