During one of Melbourne’s long lockdowns last year, Youtube’s recommendations seemed exhausted. I’d watched just about everything the platform thought I might be interested in, and its recommendations were starting to get wacky. When it offered up a video called “DankPods CASHIES SPECIAL”, written in Comic Sans font no less, I honestly thought I’d broken the algorithm.
But it turns out CASHIES SPECIAL, filmed in the aisles of a Cash Converters in suburban Adelaide, was the work of a most unlikely Aussie influencer. Wade Nixon — who goes by the name DankPods on YouTube — attaracts millions of views for videos like these, which blend nostalgia, tech expertise and incredible wit.
Influencer Wade Nixon has built a YouTube and Patereon business without showing his face.
The videos are utterly bizarre, most of them shot above a tattered lime green iPad cover, with Nixon’s face nowhere to be seen but his hands and the gadget he’s talking about filling the frame. But they’re also charming, and wonderfully earnest.
The channel’s early videos are all about repairing and cleaning old iPods, hence the name, and nostalgia is a large part of the charm. You’re taken back to a time when the device in your pocket just played music, and didn’t ping you every three minutes with a deadline. For Nixon, a musician, iPods are the devices that keep on giving.
“Last year I was teaching in schools, and then rehearsing in the evenings, and then gigging on the weekends, working 18 hour days, but nobody was paying me. I defaulted on my Spotify payment,” he says.
“I just dug through the drawers, found the old iPod still loaded with music. It still worked, didn’t need a subscription or internet. Boom, rescued those car journeys until someone finally paid me.”
Nixon’s always loved iPods and has a history modifying and fixing them, but he’s noticed the retro technology has seen a swing in popularity more broadly in the last few years, as people seek refuge from their phones or discover an interest in buttons rather than touchscreens.
The channel came about when Nixon saw how much upgraded iPods were going for on eBay. He had planned to make a living turning busted fifth-generation iPods, which could play video and originally had 80 gigabytes of storage, into working devices with a terabyte (or 1000 gigabytes) inside. But a friend suggested he could make more money talking about them than selling them.