Fresh back from round two of Graeme’s wedding (the “attention-based one,” his words) and a very soggy van week in France, we kick off with Paris myths, Versailles fanboying (Louis XIV, Napoleon’s big wall-sized portrait), and why the city still slaps in the rain. That segues into the week’s wildest story: the Louvre-style museum heist done in broad daylight—think cherry-picker, glass cutters, seven minutes, scooters. Cinema.
Then the internet falls over. We unpack the AWS US-East hiccup that nuked everything from banks to doorbells, and Graeme’s current obsession: Yanis Varoufakis’ “techno-feudalism”—how Big Platforms became our new lords, why profit no longer matters, and what that means for the rest of us.
From there it’s AI deepfakes and Sora, TikTok’s talent for tricking boomers, and whether any video is believable anymore. Plus a very us detour into therapy vs. CBT, the reality of doing sessions remote, and one massage story you’ll wish you could un-hear. (Pot Noodle discourse is back too. Sorry/not sorry.)
It’s doomy, daft, and occasionally useful—Social Meltdown exactly as advertised.
Notes: strong language, mentions of mental health.
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