"New Models Podcast EP 25: LIFE GO BRRR" is an April 7, 2020 episode of the New Models podcast, recorded in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The episode title — "LIFE GO BRRR" — plays on the "money printer go brrr" meme then circulating in response to emergency Federal Reserve actions, applying its logic to the general experience of life accelerating and destabilizing during the pandemic's initial phase.
What This Source Provides
The episode was recorded during the acute uncertainty of early COVID — a period that Rao would later analyze extensively in pandemic-time-essay and connect to the broader frameworks of clockless-clock and temporal disruption. As an early document from that moment, the New Models episode captures Rao's immediate processing of the pandemic's temporal and social disruptions before they had been fully theorized.
The "LIFE GO BRRR" framing suggests the episode engaged with:
Context: New Models
New Models is a podcast and community at the intersection of art, internet culture, and critical theory — associated with a younger, more aesthetically oriented audience than Rao's typical ribbonfarm-blog readership. The venue connects to the cultural communities interested in what Rao calls domestic-cozy and cozyweb — the retreat from public platforms into more intimate, offline, or semi-private social spaces that accelerated during the pandemic.
Rao's appearance on New Models in April 2020 situates him at an intersection of internet-culture criticism and pandemic phenomenology. The episode is evidence of how Rao's ideas about social platforms, temporal experience, and the cozyweb-turn traveled into cultural-critical communities beyond the ribbonfarm-blog readership.
Research Value
The episode is significant as a contemporaneous document of Rao's thinking during the early pandemic — before pandemic-time-essay and related pieces had been written. It provides evidence of how the pandemic was initially framed and processed in Rao's conceptual vocabulary, and how that framing evolved into the more developed analyses in the-clockless-clock-series and pandemic-time-essay.