This week we've got a surprisingly lengthy debate about what "pomp without circumstance" actually means. (Spoiler: it's absurdity. The Spleen has strong feelings about this.)

From there we spiral into our wheelhouse: the discourse around Graham Plattner's apparent fascist-adjacent situation and what it says about Maine's famously unclassifiable political identity, why the "this is not who we are" crowd are doing everyone a disservice, and how understanding why people become Nazis (racism, it turns out.. not that complicated) can actually reduce your emotional suffering. Spencer also revisits the 9/11-as-unique-tragedy conversation and makes the argument that Americans' inability to see their suffering as part of a global pattern has caused enormous downstream damage.

We also cover: TikTok's hidden "Farlands", a creepy unlisted corner of AI-generated nightmare content that is somehow better than normal AI output; why AI might actually be most useful when it's making deeply disturbing uncanny valley content rather than generic slop; the depressing lifecycle of corporate loyalty and how Spencer's manager's lifelong single-employer career might explain an entire dysfunctional workplace. We also discuss loneliness, the ADHD "object permanence for people" problem, and solving every problem alone since childhood.

We read listener mail, including heartfelt thanks, an emergency pants-exchange situation involving a missing house key, and the extremely fair note that Spencer spiraling about the podcast being bad is the only part of the podcast that's actually bad. We close, as always, with a word from our "sponsors": a very detailed, very earnest advertisement about pelvic floor dysfunction that Spencer found on TikTok and decided all of you needed to experience. You're welcome.

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