It is strange to consider that it has only been three months since last week. It feels both closer—it feels like it never ended—and like something that happened years ago, to someone else. And yet it's right there on the calendar: only 90 or so days have passed since we recorded last week's podcast from the smoldering wreckage of the 2020 Presidential election. The national situation has changed both dramatically and not at all since then—there is a new president-elect, but there is also the same old president and presidency, and there are all the various lines going up where they should be going down and going down where they should be going up. Everything is dumber, because everything is always getting dumber, but in familiar ways.
It goes without saying that Drew and I were both in no shape to discuss any of that, which is why we brought in The New Yorker's master interviewer Isaac Chotiner to help us make sense of it.
As it turned out, there wasn't really much sense to be made of any of it—it sure looks like things are just going to kind of go on like this for a while for lack of any better ideas, although there is at least a chance that they might take on a slightly different vibe in the not-too-distant future. That's not a great deal of fun to talk about, so we quickly turned to other matters. Many other matters, actually, from Chotiner's beloved Houston Rockets and their ongoing teardown and this brutal sham of a college football season to the art and science of interviewing people who are not used to being challenged, with stops touching on our shared issues with Bill Simmons and on Chotiner's personal preference for extremely unripe fruit, and on an abiding enmity for The Big Glossy Celebrity Magazine Profile. The Funbag was opened and swiftly closed, but sadly not before some questions escaped.
After Isaac left, Drew and I decided to get stupid per the usual. A truly miserable tweet by Howard Kurtz was discussed; Drew sang a Black Crowes song with his absolute whole being; an extremely tall and grouchy former Mets Guy was remembered. All in all, a very full hour. Full of nonsense, mostly, but those are the hours we've got right now.
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