As the day grew closer, I found that I was getting excited to hear the words again. It hadn't really been that long, all told, and also I am in touch with Drew all the time—we talk to each other and a hardened crew of perverted callers-in on the Amp app for an hour every week, we see each other on various work calls, he sometimes texts me on Saturday mornings to tell me what movie he just finished watching before I even get out of bed. I am getting a lot of Drew Magary in the monitors, is what I'm saying, and yet it had been a month since we'd last done a proper podcast, and a lot had happened in that month. I knew that things wouldn't be all that different once we got things started back up, but I was also very eager to start things back up. And for all that I didn't know about how it would go, I at least knew how it would start:
And so it is with great pleasure that I can confirm we are indeed back. We're back, it's The Distraction, et cetera and so on. And as part of the newish vision for the podcast we're starting things off with our new production team at Multitude with an episode that's just Drew and me. We'll still have guests from outside the Defector universe, but we're going to be doing a little bit less of that and focusing a little bit more on Defector friends-and-family stuff, and mixing in more episodes where Drew and I talk to each other about whatever medical procedures or Dad Agonies we've been dealing with. We know what our listeners want, and we know it is Dad Agonies. You love 'em, and we love to talk about them, and we are not going to mess with what works.
I am not going to say that this episode—which begins with some frank talk about Quentin Tarantino's foot issues and then is mostly about Drew's experience covering the Vikings' playoff non-win and then the NFL Playoffs in general for the next 30 minutes, and then briefly about the whole Carlos Correa thing—is a model for what those future episodes will sound like. For one thing this is about as excited about football as I am ever going to sound, and there is going to be more straightforward NFL stuff in this episode than you're likely to find in most of our shows...unless we feel like it. This is still our thing, and while I do not know what future episodes will be like, it's just because we haven't recorded them yet, and because the things we'll talk about haven't happened yet. But it was important to us that they be something like, if not exactly like, what we've been doing, and they will be that. This might be the nicest we'll ever be to Brock Purdy, but that's really more his problem than ours, or yours.
Not because The Distraction is America's most powerful sports-adjacent podcast or whatever, but because we wanted to keep doing the thing we love to do, and have become passably good at doing, and because the people that listen to it—who send us Funbag emails and give us discreet daps in public from time to time, and sometimes hit (one of) us off with comped pickle plates at our prefered Maine restaurants—have become something very much like our friends. The people at Multitude get what we're doing with this podcast and at Defector, and are in fact doing something very much like it themselves. All of which is kind of a long way to say the only thing that really needs saying. We're back, and we thank you for bearing with us, and we'll see you next week.
If you would like to subscribe to The Distraction, you can do that at Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you might get your podcasts. Thank you as always for your support.
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