There were no real expectations when we launched Defector, five years and one day ago. Plenty of planning went into what we would do with the site and how it would work, and many hours of committee meetings have followed in that vein, but that it arrived on Sept. 10, 2020 was a reflection of the fact that we were ready to do it, and that—you may recall what September of 2020 was like—we were both eager to get to work and didn't really have that much else going on at the time. History has vindicated the decision to get on with it, but in recording this week's episode of The Distraction, the lack of foresight was jarring. Did we really not think, in all those hours of discussion, about how this anniversary falling right after Week 1 of the 2025 NFL season would impact our fifth-anniversary podcast?
You will notice that this episode, which is just Drew and me, is a bit longer than usual. Where those extra 10 minutes fall is for the listener to decide. Was it at the beginning, where Drew and I talked about our favorite memories of Defector, where we believe the site is going and how we make it work, and how it fits into the burgeoning field of worker-owned media outlets? Maybe, although I think there's some good stuff in here about what makes Defector's workplace and business model different from any other place I've ever worked. Your tolerance for that will obviously depend upon your interest in that sort of thing.
I don't think it came during the bit that followed, where we discussed the delightful collaboration between the scammy failed carbon-trading concern Aspiration Inc. and Kawhi Leonard/Kawhi Leonard's Uncle Dennis, which allegedly circumvented the NBA's salary cap in the laziest possible ways. There is something about a scam like this, just on the merits, that is a delight to talk about even as the broader cultural diseases it reflects remain pretty awful. We talked about the magic of the story, from the remarkable Uncle Quotient to Kawhi refusing to do anything in exchange for these millions of dollars in sponsorship money. We also considered the NBA's response to it, and arrived at the conclusion that elite impunity and corruption are harder to get upset about when the damn Clippers are involved.
Those extra 10 minutes might have been hiding somewhere in the NFL portion of the episode, which is the longest and most detailed. But there was a lot to talk about here. We discussed the work of getting back into shape at watching NFL football, and the magic of Sunday night's Ravens-Bills classic, the distressing experience of watching Aaron Rodgers look more or less like Aaron Rodgers long after either of us had stopped expecting (or wanting) such a thing, and the revelations in past podcast buddy Tyler Dunne's big three-part exposé about the Chicago Bears, Caleb Williams, and the half-sociopathic institutional culture that has developed under GM Ryan Poles. There was a lot to unpack on that last bit, and we unpacked it—what is and isn't wrong with the Caleb Williams Experience, the sort of mimetic understanding of how to be A Real Football Guy that dummies favor, which amounts to acting like an asshole and assuming that somehow makes you more like Bill Belichick. If Sunday night's game was a reminder of how much I actually enjoy watching the NFL, this segment served the same purpose in reminding me how much fun it can be to talk about with Drew.
Those extra minutes are in there somewhere, and your surplus might be different than mine, or some other listener's. Given the occasion, let's just call them a birthday gift from us to ourselves and keep it moving. Thank you for getting us to this point. We couldn't do any of this without you, and it is an honor and a privilege and a damn treat to get to do it.
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