It is something between a custom and basic best practices, but whenever Defector welcomes a new comrade into the fold someone—often it is Jasper, given his uncommon and universally acknowledged status as a High-Functioning Adult—will make a point of reminding everyone not to be too weird. This is good advice, and I am happy to report that no one told our beloved departed interns to drink piss or whatever within minutes of them logging on. But there are also limits to this. To work at Defector is to work at Defector, and while we are all excited to have Rachelle Hampton on board—her first blog is here, and it's very good—at some point she is going to be confronted with the horror of how the people working at this website live, act, and are. All of which is to say that, at some point, Rachelle was going to have to come on the podcast.
That is kind of a tough break for her, but it worked out quite well for us here. Rachelle is an accomplished but currently retired podcaster, and she proved to be delightful company as we spun through a conversation notably light on sports. When we finally got there, it was mostly us agreeing that the Paris Olympics were indeed pretty cool and that newly minted gymnastics commentator Laurie Hernandez should get her own daytime talk show, reveling for one last time in the experience of watching sports you don't know how to watch, and steadfastly refusing to hand it to the IOC while trying to figure out what party actually deserves the credit. The French? Peacock? Rhythmic gymnastics competitors as a group?
But that's later. We began with the meta-material, getting Rachelle's thoughts on her experience with podcasting and her thoughts on the broader state of an industry that has been going through a weird time for quite some time now. The macro-scale state of that business is weird and fairly bleak in the way of every industry ruled by our super-class of anhedonic or actively sociopathic capitalists, but the micro stuff—Meghan Markle recording questions for an interview podcast but not actually doing any interviewing, the umpteenth pivot to video by podcasting companies—is kind of funny. We talked about both, and addressed Rachelle's modest proposal that "podcast microphones should be a controlled substance," for the good of all humankind.
In the back half of the show, we played a spirited round of Who Goes Woke, a game that Drew invented in which we tried to figure out which prominent reactionary freaks might try to pivot back toward normalcy in the event that Donald Trump fails to retake the White House. If there is a fun way to talk about JD Vance or Joe Rogan, this is probably it; if we are afforded a better opportunity to give credit to Elon Musk on a successful hair transplant and basically nothing else, I can't imagine what it would be.
After a brief shared recollection of fun online days—the consensus was strong for the day Trump got COVID, but I put a word in for the day the llamas escaped in 2015—it was into the Funbag. Here, more than anywhere else in the podcast, Rachelle received the full Defector experience, thanks to questions about the do's and don'ts of mousing your spouse's leftover food, how Roger Federer would fare if tasked with fending off an assailant using one or more tennis rackets, and how many times we believed we could listen to our favorite songs over and over again until we started hating the song or ourselves. Also Drew told a story about getting "consensually kidnapped" for work during his time writing for GQ and then just kind of ended the episode. We weren't going to be able to act normal forever.
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