It is hard to know what middle age looks like for a podcast. The medium itself isn't that old, although the form in which it exists—people talking, about something, in some kind of shape and to some sort of end—is not merely ancient but one of the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. So if you consider the fact that this is the 100th episode of The Distraction with Multitude, and that we also recorded more than 100 episodes during our previous engagement with Stitcher, and also that we had a very similar podcast before that at the old site—hold on, I need to lie down for a minute. This'll just be a minute. Just give me a minute.
Hi, sorry. Anyway, considered in the grand tradition of people bullshitting for their own amusement and others, The Distraction is actually quite young. Viewed in the context of how long a podcast generally lasts, though, let alone in an identifiable and recognizable form as itself, The Distraction is pretty undeniably middle-aged, if not quite mature. We're still figuring stuff out, from cleaning up our verbal junk to more macro-scale concerns re: What We Are Even Doing Here, but that is also very middle-aged now that I think of it. And so it was that, 100 episodes into our Multitude Era, we took the time to do another middle-aged thing—celebrate ourselves just a little bit.
Not immediately, though. We started with a Christmas story from Drew, and then my annual celebration of the smells of the season, highlighted by a blessed recent experience of seeing an uncanny and delightfully fragrant Invasion Of The Body Snatchers–style unloading of Christmas trees. But once we welcomed our producer and guest Eric Silver onto the pod to get our little birthday party started, we tightened things up somewhat, with a discussion of the pleasures and pressures of worker-ownership and having work be something you actually care about, and also our ongoing struggle to Be Normal about the actual significance of our silly podcast. This was to some extent a continuation of the conversation I had with Eric on Multitude's Attach Your Resume podcast; we talk about the deeper commitment involved in starting a business, and the role those businesses will play in a future where the incumbents are for the most part either crumbling or capitulating. There was some decently substantive stuff in here, but also a high volume of digressions—on Eric's summer camp experience with the Bari and Suzy Weiss family, the phrase "jailhouse Manischewitz," an appreciation of Canada's mighty potato chip brand Humpty Dumpty, things of that nature. If you are familiar with our work as the bad boys of podcasting over the previous [number redacted] episodes, you know the vibe.
After the break, we more or less returned to our regularly scheduled programming. Drew convened a miniature hater's guide for the College Football Playoff, which in this case featured Drew and two people who only sort of watched college football this year. We still found it in ourselves to be rude about Ohio State, assess the challenge of trying to make a college football tournament work like March Madness, and unintentionally share a sweet Remember A Guy moment when we tried to remember the last NFL player to come out of Indiana University. By this point we were approaching the one hour mark, which led Drew to lead us on one of his signature speed-runs through other stuff on his mind, which led to some of the goofiest stuff in the episode, including what is surely the most facile conversation about Luigi Mangione available online and the never-before-seen spectacle of me grudgingly handing it to New York Mayor Eric Adams for missing an opportunity to fuck up. We had time for only one Funbag question, which was about the joy of making "ooo" sounds to support your favorite team. It was a good place to end—a bunch of sounds, enthusiastic if not necessarily coherent, made in good fun, together. I could manage another 100 episodes of that, easy.
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