Ideologically Opposed To Proper Workout Form, With Patrick Wyman

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.