It is a foolish, useless, and extremely popular thing to be in the vibe-assessment business. As a skill or a party trick, it is useful: It is very valuable to, for instance, sense when you are walking into a bar that you should immediately walk right back out of. As a way of assessing broader social or political trends, it is much harder to trust, and so much less useful. It is entirely too easy to conflate your own mood with something bigger and broader, and anyway it is just a mood. This is advice that I would give to the people covering politics at the nation's biggest and most important outlets, but this week's episode of The Distraction is proof that 1) vibes are real, and 2) no one should be taking my advice about them.
Last week's episode was, for reasons having to do with things in Drew's life and mine and also broader trends in the world, anxious and a little gloomy. This week, after a momentous change in the presidential race, the mood on the podcast was giddy, goofy, and as close to joyous as anything with my Eeyore ass on it can get. It helps that we had a great guest, which compelled both of us to clean up our shit and turn our frowns upside down, but instead of trying to figure out who deserves credit for what I'll just say that both the presence of Pablo Torre and the absence of Joe Biden's whispering ghost clearly got our energy level up. I'm not ready to declare it A New Day In America or whatever—Drew is a bit ahead of me on that—but it was for sure a fun and feisty episode of the podcast.
The Trump stuff, I am sorry to say, is sprinkled pretty liberally throughout the episode; I can attest that once you're less convinced he's going to be president again, it gets a lot easier to enjoy honking away in his stupid voice. But the episode itself follows a sort of classic Distraction shape, as we talked to Pablo about the recent reporting on his (excellent) podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out about rampant cheating in Olympic saber fencing, the dynamics of cheating in that sport and who benefits from it, and how and why obscure Olympic sports tend towards this kind of corruption. Some discussion of other hard-to-parse new Olympic sports, from breakdancing to kayak cross, led us to address both the challenges of learning how to watch a sport that is maybe only barely a sport and the pleasures of having a fandom that only exists in quadrennial bursts. We talked about the U.S. men's basketball team, too, but we know what everyone is really here for—conversations on journalistic ethics, fencing-obsessed oligarchs, and the relationship between cheating and opportunity. Rest assured that we delivered on all that.
The Funbag raised the question of whether Donald Trump could grow a garden if given all the necessary tools and training, and we used it to postulate alternative futures in which Trump is shilling a signature weed strain on Newsmax and Dan Bongino has grown a long mane of hair and a conscience. A question about the relative merits of online basketball discourse and online college football discourse led Pablo to air his grievances with both Dan Orlovsky's jargon-heavy analysis and seasoning-deficient diet. It was all decently out of pocket, but the extent to which we were enjoying ourselves comes through clearly even as the conversation changes direction without warning. Perhaps this is where the true vibe shift begins—with a bunch of bad Trump imitations and three people expressing their qualified excitement about the Paris Olympics. It has to start somewhere.
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