Our First Negative Review 📝
Plus: Offline media enters the chat
blog.eighty-six // When we launched Neighborhood Watch in June, we set out with a goal: to approach the Internet’s unique forms of expression the same way Roger Ebert would review movies, or Pitchfork rates new albums.
What started as a miniseries has now evolved into a weekly Thursday slate, featuring words from myself, our staff, and even some of our readers.
We’ve reviewed everything from Alex “ish” Kisiel’s Civilization: Rich & Poor—a two-and-a-half-hour-long simulation video that can best be described as Minecraft meets Lord of the Flies—to Miles Murphy’s through and through—a cinematic short film that builds its world in just twenty-four seconds.
If you’ve been reading every week, you’ve probably picked up on a pattern: we tend to cover irreverent, artistic, and informative videos. We’ve also focused on pieces from creators we enjoy watching, leading us to dish out mostly positive reviews.
But not everything emerging from digital spaces is worthy of celebration. And as a publication dedicated to exploring those digital spaces, it’s our responsibility to offer balance, saving room for a critical lens on the forces rapidly changing culture as we know it.
All that’s to say: Scroll down to read our first negative review, as well as a new section dedicated to highlighting “offline” media.
And if you’d like to write a Neighborhood Watch review in the coming weeks, you can pitch us here.
— NGL
P.S. Last blog, we wrote about the why behind our month-long Subathon—and shared who’s currently in first place. You can read it here.
Video: ‘The Benjamin Netanyahu Interview | NELK BOYS’ (2025)
Creator: The NELK Boys
Runtime: 1hr 14m
Review by: Nate Graber-Lipperman
In 2021, news broke that Stephen “SteveWillDoIt” Deleonardis (a member of prank creator group NELK) supported his lavish lifestyle and video giveaways by partnering with an online cryptocurrency casino called Roobet.
The partnership was simple, yet lucrative. Steve received affiliate commissions whenever the house won. In other words, the more his YouTube audience lost money gambling, the more money he made.
Steve ultimately deleted his gambling channel, and, in recent years, stepped away from NELK. Nevertheless, the house keeps winning. Happy Dad, NELK’s hard seltzer company, has grossed hundreds of millions since launching four years ago; thanks to a budding relationship with Dana White, NELK’s members are now a ringside fixture at the increasingly-popular UFC.
Most prominently, Donald Trump has appeared on the group’s FULL SEND PODCAST three times—including when he was at his lowest, bunkering down at Mar-a-Lago in early 2022. At the time, NELK didn’t hide their admiration for the then-former president, and the pranksters committed to rebranding Trump for Gen Z, eventually launching a voter registration drive to help turn young men rightwards in 2024 (it worked).
These moves have all legitimized NELK in a sense, as the group proved they wielded contemporary culture’s most valuable currency: attention. But there’s another trait powerful guests have banked on when sitting down for a mic’d up brouhaha with the boys: ignorance.
“We are so not qualified to be doing this,” FULL SEND hosts Aaron “Steiny” Steinberg and Kyle Forgeard stated—half-jokingly, half in awe—shortly before welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu onto the podcast, a podcast that (over the course of an hour-plus) saw them sip espressos, glaze Trump, and debate whether McDonald’s or Burger King made a better hamburger.
What followed was arguably NELK’s biggest public stumble, as blowback was swift. “You guys didn’t question him once, this is crazy,” one viewer commented. “I miss when youtube used to show dislikes,” another commented. According to the external tool Jabrek, the video currently sits at forty thousand likes to two hundred and fifty-six thousand dislikes.
In the beginning of the episode, NELK’s justification for this particular interview’s existence was rather cut-and-dry. “How could you pass up this opportunity?” Steiny asks, a rhetorical question uttered in a matter-of-fact tone.
Under this worldview, rigorous conversations and nuanced research take a backseat; podcasts are wielded not as a form of entertainment or education but as tools, conduits for social climbing. This silent transaction—trading a platform of impressionable young men for access to previously-closed rooms—is precisely the point.
Yet to label NELK purely as “right-wing podcasters” or members of the “manosphere” misses the mark. To fully understand the appeal of such creators, you have to go backward—not to the Trump interviews, nor the escapades with self-labeled misogynist Andrew Tate, nor even the anti-lockdown frat parties NELK held during the peaks of COVID.
No, it all kicked into high gear with a prank filmed at Venice Beach in 2015. After attempting to sell “coke” to boardwalk passersby, Kyle and Co. get pulled over by cops; as it turns out, their trunk is filled with cans of Coca-Cola. The whole endeavor is caught on camera, the cops have a laugh, and the boys go on with their day.
That video sits at fifty million views. But the NELK Boys didn’t rest on their viral laurels. Over the next five years, they took their show on the road, playing drinking games at college campuses while crashing with fans they found on Snapchat.
If prank videos were your thing, NELK could be written off as rowdy, apolitical fun—Gen Z’s version of Jackass. And the vlogs made them relatable. In videos as recent as 2018, the group goes grocery shopping and cooks from an Airbnb, explaining how they like to save money while on the road.
In short, NELK built a relationship with their audience over the course of a decade. In doing so, they learned the language of modern media.
When facing any controversy, they posted through the criticism, coming out the other side seemingly stronger. Their podcast was video-first from the jump, a medium that seems obvious in hindsight but has only recently been adopted by the mainstream. And NELK has never shied away from working with gambling companies, long before ESPN and other sports outlets finally caved to one of the only steady revenue streams left.
At a time when trust in news media is at all-time lows, the perception of authenticity a NELK carries simply cannot be manufactured, no matter how much money you throw at trying.
Which brings us back to Netanyahu’s appearance on FULL SEND. In it, the Prime Minister claims that Iran was behind both assassination attempts on Trump in 2024; agrees that his current relationship with the president can be described as a “bromance”; states that he lost his first reelection campaign in 1999 due to “NGOs” (aka non-governmental organizations) funding his opposition as an act of retribution; and confidently proclaims that Burger King’s Whoppers are, in fact, better than McDonald’s Big Macs.
To put it bluntly: The entire episode was a pointless watch at best, and wholly irresponsible at worst.
I’m not interested in evaluating each and every one of Netanyahu’s claims, as other outlets have done that work. And while it’s worth highlighting Steiny’s and Kyle’s implicit decision to go along with whatever their guest said—other than during the hamburger debate, which featured their biggest moment of pushback—the thing that caught my eye is everything that happened after all the dislikes racked up.
The NELK Boys seem to have learned an important lesson from their spiritual ancestor, Dave Portnoy: never let a good controversy go to waste. They streamed with Hasan Piker, and listened quietly as Egyptian comedian and television host Bassem Youssef roasted their ignorance (“You need to stop infantilizing yourselves…you’re thirty years old, and you need to be aware of what’s happening in the world,” Youssef told them on the follow-up episode of FULL SEND).
In some respects, it was refreshing to see media figures own up to their mistakes and pledge to do better. Yet after all this controversy, the Youssef interview now has more views than the podcast it was responding to.
What are the odds the NELK Boys will actually grow from this whole ordeal—rather than make a business decision, capitalizing on the current attention en route to avoiding politics altogether moving forward? It’s not like anyone asked them to be the arbiters of foreign policy discourse in the first place. It doesn’t seem like they’re particularly interested in that role, either.
Whatever they do next, a silver lining here is that the popular video podcast format—an engaging cocktail of static shots mixed with handheld crash zooms—is no longer a secret formula reserved by the Logan Pauls of the world. Prominent journalists like Vox cofounder Ezra Klein are not without their detractors, yet Klein’s New York Times show has found success on YouTube by leaning into his long-held relationship with readers. He welcomes guests he disagrees with while not sacrificing rigor; the podcast’s description literally says “A host who actually does the reading.”
Klein may be a unique example, given his blogging roots once put him on the outside of the media élite, looking in. Nonetheless, it certainly feels like his nontraditional path has become the rule, not the exception, as “outsiders” build trust precisely because of their lack of experience charting mainstream waters.
The dilemma we then need to interrogate is how, exactly, the winners of the attention economy plan to run the show. After all, the NELK Boys placed two sponsorships on their disastrous Netanyahu interview: one with a gambling company, and one with a crypto trading app.* When your business flywheel is built off of this strain of advertising, you better believe that the Bassem Youssef follow-up also featured Moon Pay affiliate links, too.
In some respects, nothing’s really changed since 2021, and—figuratively-speaking—we may all just be hapless participants in SteveWillDoIt’s offshore crypto casino. The more we lose, the more they win.
Nate’s Score: 1 / 5
A new section of Neighborhood Watch, dedicated to the books, music, movies, and physical media that played a meaningful role in stopping our scroll.
Book: The Book of Delights (2019)
Author: Ross Gay
Pages: 288
When I log off at the end of the day, I’d love to tell you that my first stop is a big ‘ole dose of historical nonfiction, learning all about a place and time removed from my own.
The truth is, sometimes, you just need a book that offers you a spark, that levity and light in a world full of noise. And award-winning poet Ross Gay delivers that here.**
He kicks off the book with a set of rules, all centered around a key idea: write a daily essay, by hand, about something that delighted him. Gay starts on his birthday, and pledges to end the experiment after writing every day until his next birthday.
The mini-essays—or “essayettes,” as Gay labels them—center on everything from the majesty of hummingbirds to a surprisingly fruitful conversation while being patted down by the TSA. What makes the book special, though, is the emphasis it places on finding beauty in the mundane.
As a writer, it’s an inspiration. As a human, it’s a call-to-action.
Nate’s Score: 4.4/5
Artwork: S**t Fountain (2005)
Creator: Jerzy S. Kenar
Kasama is a Chicago-based restaurant known for many things: its cameo during Season Two of The Bear, when Ayo Edebiri’s character pops by; its Michelin star, awarded in 2022, making it the world's first Filipino restaurant to earn the prestigious mark; and its beloved breakfast sandwich, which features a tangy, Filipino-style sausage.
This is not a review about Kasama—though I highly recommend you brave the long wait and drop in sometime. No, this is a review about the turd-like statue a mere block away, which pops up on Google Maps under the name “S**t Fountain.”
The statue sits on the property of Jerzy S. Kenar, a practicing artist whose political and religious pieces typically sell to institutions like churches. Kenar installed S**t Fountain in 2005 following frustration with local dog owners, a reminder to always bring Pooper Scoopers along for the ride.
To call S**t Fountain famous would be an overstatement. But there’s something endearing about its bronze coils, a neighborly feel to its ridiculousness. The fact that it’s located next to a world-renowned restaurant only adds to its lore.
And yes, it is a working fountain.
Nate’s Score: 💩 / 5
Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.
* PrizePicks, a Daily Fantasy Sports app and one of NELK’s longstanding sponsors, is (legally-speaking) a “skill-based game,” not gambling. This classification is a point of debate as gambling becomes more normalized.
** Vicky did recommend this one to me, so I won’t take credit for discovering it on my own.