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Rowan and I were at UC Santa Barbara last month presenting Pistachio Wars. We had a wonderful Q&A after the screening, which you can see below. Subscribers can listen to it on our usual podcast feed and read a cleaned up transcript below.

Thank you to Rich Farell and everyone at Carsey-Wolf Center for having us out and being such gracious hosts. Sorry for being such a doomer. But desperate times and all that… Of course watch Pistachio Wars if you haven’t already.

—Yasha

Rowan and I were at UC Santa Barbara last month presenting Pistachio Wars. We had a wonderful Q&A after the screening, which you can see below. Subscribers can listen to it on our usual podcast feed and read a cleaned up transcript below.

Thank you to Rich Farell and everyone at Carsey-Wolf Center for having us out and being such gracious hosts. Sorry for being such a doomer. But desperate times and all that… Of course watch Pistachio Wars if you haven’t already.

—Yasha

RICH FARRELL: Okay. My name is Rich Farrell. I’m a graduate student in the Film and Media Studies Department, and I’m pleased to be joined by the filmmakers of Pistachio Wars, Yasha Levine and Rowan WERNHAM. So a round of applause for you.

YASHA LEVINE: Thank you.

RICH FARRELL: So I just wanted to start the Q&A with some background and beginnings. First to you, Yasha. At the beginning of the film, you say that the story started with a piece that you wrote, “A Journey Through Oligarch Valley,” in 2013, which was published in Not Safe for Work magazine online. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, how you came to work on that story, and then how you decided to adapt this into a documentary?

YASHA LEVINE: Well, I’ll try to keep it brief. Thank you. Thank you everyone for coming.

I had been out of the country and started my journalism career reporting out in Russia, and I kind of missed the whole real estate bubble, the speculative boom that happened here, and the collapse that happened in 2007, 2008. I had been abroad watching it from afar. And when I came back to America, I was really curious about what it was all about. So I moved to LA and I was casting about for the best example of a speculative city that embodied the speculative boom.

I kind of toured California and chose Victorville -- a little suburb in the Mojave Desert, halfway between L.A. and Las Vegas -- because I really wanted to understand the kind of society, the kind of civilization that this boom created. Like what remained when Wall Street crashed and had to be bailed out…

For this anti-vamp stream from my newly established NY basement studio, I’m joined by Mike Pepi, author of Against Platforms. We talk about the failed utopian promises of the internet and how the tech platforms that now dominate our world are concentrators of power and destroyers of all other forms of organization that came before them. This monopolization/destruction isn’t an aberration or a corruption but is built into the very nature of this technology.

Mike opens his book by talking about an Apple ad that came out a few years ago that illustrates this Borg-like monopolize/destroy drive. I’m embedding it below because Apple had scrubbed this ad from the internet, following a backlash.

Compare this Apple ad…

…to the Borg. Who is more honest?

Help me make my Vampire Valley doc series. Give here. Or if you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation, write us at [email protected].

Buy Mike’s book today!

Help me make my Vampire Valley doc series. Give here. Or if you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation, write us at [email protected]. If you give $100 or more, you will automatically get an annual sub! A two-for-one deal!

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Evgenia pays tribute to Nikolai Komyagin, the frontman of the Russian cult band Shortparis. He died recently — tragically and unexpectedly ay 39.

As Evgenia explains, he was a true poet — and a total artist. With his music and videos, he did something that no one else had done yet. He captured on a pure emotional level the feeling of Russia with its failed utopian past and its violent present and all the ideals and the people that got ground up and spit in the two revolutions — the Bolshevik one and the Market Bolshevik one it had in less than a century. Ironically, the last big thing Shortparis made was the soundtrack to Limonov’s biopic, Limonov: The Ballad.

—IBWR

PS: Evgenia recently wrote about Limonov’s prophetic view of Russian politics.

PPS: The song in the intro/outro is Apple Orchard (Яблонный сад).

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For this anti-vamp stream from my newly established basement studio, I’m joined by internet by Brian Merchant, author of the wonderful book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. It’s a book about the rise and fall of the Luddites, a decentralized 19th movement of English textile workers against factories and the centralization of power. We talk about the history and politics of the Luddite movement and how the conditions they faced are not that different from what we all face today.

Eventually, the Luddite insurgency was crushed by a military force larger than the one England sent to fight Napoleon, which was happening at the same time. The history of this rebellion was erased, the state and its factory owners won, and the term “luddite” became synonymous with ignorance and laziness — any opposition to tech was branded as crazy and stupid. At the same time the Luddites were a huge cultural power, inspiring the Romantic movement and launching the sci-fi genre with works like Frankenstein. Of course, in the end, the Luddites were right. We’re all Luddites now, whether we realize it or not.

Watch and/or listen…and buy Brian’s book!

Yasha

* * *

I’ll be talking to people about the internet and the tech that’s destroying our minds and destroying our world — as part of my research for Vampire Valley. Live streams are available to the public but recorded streams are only available to subscribers. Reminder: If you give $100 or more to Vampire Valley, you will automatically get an annual sub. If you want to give a larger tax-deductible donation, get in touch with us at [email protected]

We record this on President’s Day to talk about the slop machine we all now inhabit and how all internet culture is an abusive psyop meant to keep us tethered and addicted and pacified. Everyone knows this. But few of us can escape.

Sam Kriss, slop merchant to the overly educated, makes an appearance in our talk. We also discuss how America’s ruling class hasn’t just psyoped the masses with this feedback loop tech — they’ve pysoped themselves, too. They’re just as confused and powerless as the rest of us. Everyone is looking for a strong leader type that hasn’t fallen victim to this feedback loop psyop — which is maybe why Xi has so many fans out there.

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Help Yasha’s crusade against the internet vampires that feed on us. Make a contribution (including a tax deductible one) to Vampire Valley today!

***

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We talk about how the Jeffrey Epstein scandal/spectacle fits into the larger context of American decline and collapse. And Evgenia explains how normalized all the Epstein revelations are to someone like her who grew up in 1990s Russia — a collapsed society that ran (and still does) on “Epstein ethics” and where living an Epstein-lite life became democratized and within reach of many men.

Among topics addressed: how Epstein is not some demonic force but a function of a massively unequal society with extremely bored and overfed elites, how social context creates sociopathy and breeds objectification, Alexei Yurchak and Hypernormalization, Mark Ames’s “The Life and Murder of Anna Loginova”, Fellini’s Satyricon, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut…and more.

Subscribe to listen!

Want to know more? Without realizing it, we did two Christmas Special episodes on Jeffrey Epstein — one in 2021 and in 2025. Christmas Special: Ghost of Epstein and Epstein Christmas Special ft. Vampire Valley… See how our views changed over the years.

We recorded most of this from inside a banya on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco as a rainstorm raged outside. We had to pause several times because the heat was making us woozy, but we persevered and held it together. As promised we are now releasing the ep…

Among the topics discussed: influencerism, Olivia Nuzzi and Yasha’s stories about briefly working with her at the start of her career, the cultural emptiness of artificial intelligence, Luddites, the growing importance of controlling distribution channels as filmmaking technology gets cheaper and cheaper, August Lamm and the limitations of the anti-tech flip phone movement…and a lot more. You also get to enjoy authentic sounds of the banya: moans and grunts, water hissing at it hits hot rocks, complaints and bickering.

Have a great 2026! С лёгким паром!

If you are in the Bay Area, come out to our event tomorrow in SF: INTERNET JUNKIE ANONYMOUS!

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We dial in on Christmas Day from sleeping gas San Francisco to talk about the two-day power outage (caused by Yasha psi powers), CIA mind control, the Luddites, Trump’s holiday Epstein file dump, Eyes Wide Shut and Kubrick, Russia, Marquis de Sade…

Happy Holidays!

DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST. SPEND TIME WITH YOUR FAMILY AND LOVED ONES INSTEAD.

PS: We’ll be holding a live event in SF on Jan 4 to talk about Vampire Valley, the internet as a pacification project, and the spectacle that’s grinding us all down. More info coming soon! And, as always, contribute to Yasha’s film. He can’t make it without your help!

We dial in to talk about my Silicon Valley Soviet immigrant tech bro origins story, my early anti-tech documentary attempts, and the anti-Silicon Valley series I’m making now — Vampire Valley. I’m raising money for the doc right now. So pitch in if you have some extra cash!

As we discuss, looking back on it now, there was pretty much no way that the internet would not have turned into the parasitic technology that it is today. On the one hand, it was a tech that had been built by the Pentagon for technocratic control — to surveil, predict, and manage populations. On the other, it was commercialized inside a hyper-consumerist society in the grips of neoliberalism and deregulation, a society that was already full of manipulative marketing techniques and propaganda, managed through an increasingly centralized mass media. So it’s no wonder that when these two systems collided in America in the 1990s, the worst of all possible worlds emerged — the internet that we all inhabit today.

—Yasha

PS: We’re also planning a surprise event in San Francisco in a few weeks. We’ll have more info on that soon.

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We went to a private preview of Cover-Up, the new Sy Hersh documentary that comes out next month, and stayed for a Q&A with Laura Poitras, its director. In this ep we give our honest appraisal of the film. And, sadly, it’s not a positive one.

There are a lot of problems with the film — overproduced yet clunky, boring, superficial, intellectually not there at all, very Wikipedia-like, and with an outdated pre-Trump America feel to it. But perhaps its main crime is that it wasted an opportunity to talk to Hersh about the mythology of journalism in America and journalism’s ultimate lack of power. He spent his entire life exposing secrets — the My Lai Massacre, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, torture at Abu Ghraib — and yet in that same span of time, America kept getting worse and more corrupt and unequal and more violent and more unaccountable. We’re at point where journalism doesn’t matter at all. And so what good was all his journalism? Was it just a game? Entertainment? A way to pass the time and make a living? A path to fame? A relief valve for society?

None of the problems with the film are Sy Hersh’s fault. It seems like he actually gets it. The problem is that Laura Poitras is just not that bright.

I guess you could say there is an unintended message in this film and it’s this: Information by itself is not power. You need organization to turn information into power, and journalism by itself does not provide that.

At the end of the ep we discuss a Laura Poitras scandal that few know about. It includes her, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, a very expensive mattress in Berlin, and her documentary Risk.

—Yasha

PS: We discussed the mattress scandal in detail in a previous episode: Triple Threat: Julian Assange.

PPS: We also previously reviewed The Beauty And The Bloodshed, a Laura Poitras doc about Nan Goldin and her fight against the highly respected Sackler family, which is actually quite good.