I am in the midst of media consumption whiplash this weekend.

Granted, it happens all the time, to various degrees, as my attention span speeds up or slows down and the ADHD determines just how far into which rabbit holes I absolutely must go in that particular moment. But right now the whiplash is almost comical, so I want to stop and think about it for a second.

This is a distinctly weird moment and I’m enjoying it.

The World Cup totally took over my life for a while there. In all sorts of ways, too. There were four or five daily podcasts I was watching the feeds for - some of them twice daily, or more - plus the TV coverage, plus the multiple channels of TV coverage around the world, and that's without even considering the written content around the event I was obsessing over, too. Thirty-nine days and 104 matches to watch multiplied all the thoughts, takes, and analysis across all those places meant I checked out of almost everything I normally check in on.

Granted, there's the stuff I have to do. The work-adjacent things, which I say broadly: markets and news (both for the advisory work and for Excess Returns/Panoptica prep), the Just Press Record and Intentional Investor background research. That kept me semi-grounded to routine. But everything else? Out the window, mid-June through mid-July.

It was like how people who diet talk about dieting. Including how one day it just ended.

I actually just listened to a lot of music this past week. Was it mourning? Because it wasn’t even my normal stuff. My attention was blowing in the wind and there was a lot of Italo/French disco energy in my head - courtesy of a DJ set my wife and I caught in Philly, not long after the World Cup final, funny enough.

So herein lies the whiplash. My normal routine broke for the World Cup. The World Cup broke, and now I can't tell if my normal routines are coming back or if they've changed.

And this is a beautiful thing. I love the disorientation of it all.

Partly because we dove straight back into our rewatch of The Wire, which means I'm semi back into the rewatch podcasts and reads I started before la copa, which are currently occupying at least 65% of my listening and reading time. But also because the break creates a new awareness of space including the option of - what do I do with it?

I've been clicking through my watch-later and listen-later lists on the podcast platforms. I'm looking at the random tabs and tags from hardly a month ago when I was too buried in sports (and wondering why things were even catching my eye). There are writer interviews, loads of old Cavett episodes, an assortment of topical things I wanted to understand the moment they drifted by in the feed (what happened at ESPN?).

And this is the joy of the access we have now. Wherever you go, there you are. So why stand still?

The algos all have a pattern for you. A pattern to put you in a space, for a time, and to keep you there. Good thing I’ve been working out in the morning to the Circle Jerks. I’m running wild in these streets. It’s carnal. It’s visceral. I’m 14 and 44 all at once over here, you know?

You don’t even have to be smart about it. You just weaponize whatever you picked up along the way to get yourself out of jail. World Cup was a great excuse.

Plus, I found a new word for this. It was in The Wire and it comes from the character Bodie. He’s being detained and questioned by police at the end of season 3 and he says, “Man this must be one of them contrapment things.” “You mean entrapment?” “Kids got a point…” IYKYK.

You start with infinite shelf space, then they give you an algorithm to sort it for you, and before you know it you’re lost in a groove.

CONTRAPMENT.

So you have to use that system back against them. You have to break out.

The value of unquenchable curiosity is that it breaks most patterns before the pattern becomes a detainment cell.

The magic of the World Cup is that it comes every 4 years and lasts about a month. It’s a media diet to blow up all your other diets. I’m loving being back to exploring broadly, exploring widely, and laughing at the smashed mold on the floor, with Cerrone playing in the background and a mishmash of fantasy Premier League and Wire rewatch episodes in my queue.

Go do your business in other areas. For the fun of it.

Ps. For the fun of it, listen to these songs back to back (whichever order) and appreciate where I’m at: