Share
Don't Praise The Machine (DPTM)
Why Every Bus Stop In London Is Selling Nicotine Now
•
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/
More episodes
View all episodes
Everything the Raygun Documentary Conveniently Left Out
53:43|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.Tupac's Murderer - Guilty After Bragging on YouTube
57:09|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.Ooshies Fever: The Supermarket Toy Turning Parents Feral
46:04|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.Your Rust Belt Town Just Got Data Centred: Deal With It
46:37|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.The Viral Hit That Proves AI Music Is Out Of Control
53:22|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. facepalmAlex 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.TikTok's Live Shopping Boom Is Changing The Face Of Retail
40:25|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.Screensavers, Ringtones & Answering Machines: A Eulogy for Dead Tech
46:51|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.There's Something Missing In The World's Most Liveable Cities
01:11:39|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.