It's not great, if I'm being honest. From amending my answer to the question "How ya doing, Roth" at the very beginning of this week's episode of The Distraction, it is clear that things are not going great. But for the second straight week, we found a way to split our episode between the Not Great stuff and being stupid about sports, with the result being one of the most enjoyable hours of my week. I'm not saying we've solved anything—honestly, if I thought we had solved something through our goofy podcast, I'd be kind of worried—but we've at least figured out a balance that works.
Of course, it helps when the guest is Patrick Wyman, America's largest historian, author of the upcoming book Lost Worlds, and a great podcaster in his own right. I've sought out his perspective on both the present and the past for years, and we got a decent dose of both in this episode. We spoke about the corrosive effect of sustained exposure to bad vibes, and the run-in with an unnamed former MLB player at an Arizona youth soccer game that inspired Patrick to purchase a heavy bag, but we also talked about history stuff. This meant trying to understand our current moment of national crisis in the context of the country's fractious and generally insane history, and examining the sclerotic empire we're in and what does and doesn't work about it; I misattributed an insight from one friend to another here, but the conversation didn't really suffer for it. And then, after a discussion of the country's competing layers of authority—and how fragile and contingent their relationship and everything that followed from them always was—we turned to Pete Hegseth's impossibly shitty kettlebell swings.
Patrick, a certified workout dude, has developed a convincing theory of why Republican influencer types cannot work out right, and why they are so intent on creating and disseminating content in which they work out wrong. It's funny, but I really believe that there is something to it, and that there is a through-line grounded in an ideological inability to take or even solicit advice that runs between RFK Jr.'s fucked-up pull-ups and RFK Jr.'s murderous public health policies. This conversation ends, rather abruptly, with Drew reading the words "fresh-squeezed country urine."
And when we came back from the break, it was sports time. We broke down the Jarrett Stidham/Drake Maye matchup in the AFC Championship Game with as much substance and as little bias as you can bring to a binary that features A Patriot Of Destiny and someone I have considered based on very little evidence to be A Good Backup. We worked through Patrick's decade-spanning case of Pete Carroll burnout, broke down the tape on a tragic Del Taco incident from Patrick's (and Pete Carroll's) time at USC, and successfully talked ourselves into the Seahawks. What was maybe a gag question from Drew about the Dodgers signing Kyle Tucker became a decently substantive conversation on how the Dodgers are, through a series of fairly elementary business maneuvers, successfully playing a different game than the rest of MLB, and how and why the failure of imagination among that sport's owners radiates throughout the rest of the culture. The word "horde" gets said a lot, here. A Funbag question gave us the opportunity to reconsider "turf toe" as the name for a fairly heinous injury, and we took it.
The times, as we established earlier, are bad, but the episode itself was a decently good time. We'll try to do the same next week, and the week after that, until times improve.
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