The Goin' Deep Show

Episode 2338: The 22nd anniversary starts without much ceremony because apparently after more than two decades even the intro can be added later.

Kid and Nurse Fiona settle back into the studio and immediately discover that absolutely nothing has changed. Mr. Kleen gets dragged into the conversation despite not actually being there, old GDS characters start resurfacing, technical problems remain undefeated and Fiona and Kid conclude that they may essentially be each other's emotional support humans.

From there, the episode wanders through relationships, dating disasters, friendship, communication, people addicted to drama and the strange collection of characters accumulated over two decades of doing the show. El Pres eventually joins the room, bringing another branch of GDS history with him and turning the episode into something halfway between an anniversary show and three friends sitting around opening boxes marked DO NOT OPEN.

There are stories about bizarre dates, old relationships, unfortunate decisions, animals causing havoc, the mysterious Builder, Mr. Kleen disappearing from regular GDS duty and the strange ways people enter, leave and occasionally wander back into your life.

But buried underneath all of that is probably the real subject of the episode.

Twenty-two years is a long damn time.

Kid looks back at the beginning of the show, when a group of people in their late twenties had cheap equipment, called friends without warning and basically used the podcast as an excuse to hang out. Nobody sitting around those microphones in 2004 could have predicted they were accidentally starting something that would still exist 22 years later.

And maybe that's what GDS actually became.

Not just episodes.

A record.

People arrived. People disappeared. Relationships started and ended. Kids grew up. Friends changed. Technology changed. The hosts got older. Some people became family. Some became stories. And the microphones kept recording all of it.

By the end, nobody announces some grand reinvention.

It's simpler than that.

Twenty-two years are in the books.

Now make it 22 more.

Go Deep.

Episode 2337 - Kid ,El Pres and Zaldor recap a weekend that somehow crams a film festival, live music, aggressive people-watching, Justin Verlander, mysterious admirers, missing passes that weren't actually missing, non-alcoholic beer, dating philosophy and an unexpected statistical investigation into El Pres's past. Then Kid gets properly irritated about people policing AI and creativity, arguing that artists have always stolen, sampled, collaged, remixed and adapted whatever tools happened to be sitting in front of them. Add phones quietly poisoning everybody's sanity and the realization that getting older means you'd better enjoy the good parts while they're happening, and you've basically got the weekend. Its the 22nd Anniversary of the Podcast. Yes you read that correctly. Oct. 2, 2004 was the first ever recording and this is episode 2,337 of this bullshit. Go Deep.

Kid and El Pres settle in for an episode openly built from poor preparation, scattered headlines and the sincere belief that eventually something resembling a subject will emerge. It begins with Hell's Half Mile Film Festival reaching its twentieth year and Kid looking forward to seeing months of design work finally walking around town on shirts, passes, programs and banners. That leads into a surprisingly honest conversation about adultification, maintaining curiosity and finding room for creative work when responsibility keeps eating the calendar.

Then the phones take over. After watching a mother and child cross the street while staring at separate screens, Kid argues that everybody is technically connected while being mentally absent. He remembers forcing a baseball crew to stack their phones in the middle of a table, instantly transforming a distracted gathering into an actual conversation. Naturally, this thoughtful meditation on modern isolation is followed by a man blasting strangers with an air cannon loaded with concentrated farts.

Baseball enters the mess through the Savannah Bananas, constant MLB rule changes, the end of vintage base ball season and the possibility of catching one final Tigers game. Kid also recommits himself to a fifty-mile ruck despite having previously topped out around twenty-two miles, while El Pres counts down the remaining days until retirement and dreams of reversing his current responsibility-to-fun ratio.

Politics eventually barges through the door when El Pres reveals that voting for the wrong Senate candidate could supposedly end his relationship. The source of the opposing political research appears to be TikTok, which does not impress Kid. That becomes a larger argument about political ultimatums, straight-ticket thinking, selective outrage, expensive gas, mangled government hearings and a country increasingly willing to say every quiet part directly into a microphone.

Elsewhere, the guys admire an e-bike that costs roughly as much as a used car, complain that streaming subscriptions have recreated cable at a higher price and anticipate another expensive October of chasing baseball broadcasts. A story about people fantasizing about becoming miniature sends the show into its final strange corridor, where first-time nerves, hypothetical performance reviews from former partners and personal grooming become the closest thing the episode has to a conclusion.

The official lesson: if you want somebody to leave, apparently all you need to do is vote differently. Also, never hand these two an unorganized stack of headlines unless you have seventy minutes to lose.

Kid is apparently conducting several experiments on himself at once.

First, he's stopped drinking. Now he's stopped jerking off. Instead of instant gratification, he's getting shit done around the house, which apparently means turning an unwanted shed into a free rage room with an axe and sledgehammer.

Underneath all that demolition is the actual meat of the episode. Kid is cautiously interested in somebody who lives several states away, which sends the room into a surprisingly thoughtful discussion about long-distance relationships, missing people, hearing someone's voice instead of just firing off texts, and whether modern phones have made communication easier while quietly making relationships worse.

That leads directly into micro-cheating, checking your partner's phone and Kid resurrecting his longtime nuclear option: the complete phone swap. If two people are really locking in, swap numbers, inherit the incoming riffraff and start answering some serious questions.

Naturally, Hatrick then drags the conversation back into the gutter with the six-foot-eight cousin, Fireman, old hookups, enormous hands and the return of the legendary Dragoncock, whose current dimensions apparently require independent verification and a standardized object for scale.

There's also a trip through Goin' Deep history as Kid revisits the infamous Quifford Sutherland episode, originally episode 342 from September 2007 and later rebroadcast as episode 914. Listening back becomes its own weird experience because Kid now has more than two decades of himself sitting there waiting for anybody he dates to discover. Nothing inspires confidence quite like receiving a link from someone you're interested in and immediately wondering what horrible thing Past Kid said into a microphone.

Finally, the show wanders into AI potentially ending humanity, expensive new phones stuffed with even more AI, superhero villains, political nonsense and the general realization that nobody in the room can personally stop civilization from collapsing anyway.

So the plan is simple: fix the house, survive the schedule, enjoy life, have better relationships and apparently fuck as much as possible before the machines take over.

Kid and El Pres start with something dangerously close to peace and tranquility. After spending the previous day at the ballpark, Kid realizes baseball does for him what meditation, yoga and expensive wellness nonsense apparently does for everybody else. Put him in a seat with a scorebook, earbuds and a game in front of him and the rest of the world can kindly disappear for a few hours.

That leads into a surprisingly good technology rabbit hole. Modern earbuds at concerts become old transistor radios under the covers at night, distant AM stations, old radio dramas, cassette recorders, iPods and the strange realization that the gadgets change while people basically keep chasing the same experience. Kid even traces his obsessive need to record everything back to tapes from the early '90s that feel suspiciously like prehistoric Goin' Deep Shows.

Then comes the bigger thought: what exactly is keeping him where he is?

Sitting at the Tigers game, Kid realizes he could theoretically sell the house, dump most of his possessions, work remotely and relocate somewhere closer to the thing that makes him happiest.

It isn't exactly a moving announcement, but it opens up a conversation about freedom, routines, getting older, baseball, responsibilities and what "normal" is supposed to look like once the old definition stops fitting.

The show itself gets pulled into that conversation. Former cast members are resurfacing, Hat Trick is once again missing in action, and Kid admits the podcast has always been one of the few places where his brain can shut off and simply go.

Through difficult periods, friendships and decades of life changes, the microphones have kept running. El Pres lands on the obvious conclusion: Kid never learned to keep a journal, so he accidentally made one with thousands of episodes.

Naturally, that moment of introspection cannot survive for long.

Country music gets dragged into the studio and beaten senseless when Kid and El Pres reduce an imaginary hit song to its essential ingredients: wake up, coffee, camo, climb tree. They feed the ingredients into Suno and discover the horrifying part: AI can actually turn the nonsense into something that resembles a legitimate song. Change the genre and the same ridiculous lyrics suddenly become something completely different, sending the guys into a larger argument about creativity, AI overload and whether technology is making everything easier or simply burying everyone beneath endless options.

The internet only makes things stranger. They wander through questionable viral stories, subscription platforms, filters, fake imagery and the increasingly difficult task of figuring out whether the person, picture or story on your screen actually exists.

Kid argues that people have become so obsessed with presenting perfected versions of themselves that reality almost feels like the unusual option.

That eventually circles back to a much more useful idea: stop expecting people to be perfect. Everybody screws up. Everybody disappoints somebody eventually. The better move might be accepting that people are complicated, getting your own routines under control and learning to appreciate the moments when life actually feels good.

Then a ridiculously attractive ballpark cheerleader destroys approximately forty minutes of Kid's previous anti-cheerleader philosophy.

So much for enlightenment.

Listen in. Go Deep.

Kid and El Pres are back in the studio, and Kid isn't exactly arriving with a clear head. A relationship he thought had long-term potential has suddenly gone quiet, leaving him trying to reconcile the comfort of believing he'd found somebody to grow old with against the reality of barely communicating at all.

Beneath all the usual Goin' Deep stupidity is something considerably more sincere: the realization that the podcast has always been a place where jokes cover heavier things that don't necessarily get discussed anywhere else.

Kid returns from a vintage baseball weekend where the Independents got their asses kicked, the roster looked increasingly aware of its collective age and the team captain missed the festivities after getting sick. The baseball may have been rough, but the friends weekend and general distraction were exactly what Kid needed.

That leads into the other major distraction of the week: Foo Fighters in Detroit. Kid and El Pres put the show among the best concerts they've attended, with Kid comparing it against an Eagles show that still holds the championship belt in his personal concert rankings. Queen of the Stone Age gets plenty of love too, along with a tease about an old Josh Homme story involving somebody connected to the show.

Then artificial intelligence takes over the studio.

Kid starts demonstrating how easily old photographs can now be animated, altered and completely reinvented. An innocent old Goin' Deep studio photo slowly mutates until the original Red Eye looks like he's spent the last decade secretly training for an action movie. That sends the guys into the larger question of whether AI has made fantasy so instantly available that younger people simply aren't impressed by the things that once felt forbidden or exciting.

That becomes part of a bigger generational argument. Are younger audiences really less interested in sex scenes? Did growing up with unlimited access to everything fundamentally change what feels provocative? And what happened to the traditional rock star, who once existed in a world without somebody filming every stupid decision from six feet away?

El Pres is meanwhile approaching retirement and beginning to imagine life without worrying quite so much about what everybody thinks. Travel enters the picture, including Paris, London, Liverpool, Abbey Road and Ireland, while Kid argues that making those memories with his son could be worth more than anything sitting around the house.

There are detours through Buc-ee's chaos, social-media personalities who may or may not resemble AI, old morality films that aged spectacularly badly, Detroit Tigers anxiety, the Dodgers tempting fate, and the strange experience of podcast listeners recognizing Kid away from the microphone and knowing considerably more about his life than expected.

And finally, civilization arrives at the question philosophers were apparently too frightened to ask:

Why do bangs look like a warning sign?

Grok is summoned. Grok is instructed to become less polite. Grok eventually concludes that bangs represent a daily declaration of war against the forehead.

That seems scientific enough for this show.

Listen in Go Deep

Kid, El Pres, and Hat Trick cover enough territory to make three completely different podcasts. What begins with a late arrival caused by groceries and a low tire quickly transforms into an obsession with The Wicker Husband, a movie about a living wicker man that launches an entire discussion about monster romance, BookTok, "hear me out" culture, and the increasingly absurd places internet fiction keeps wandering.

From there the show bounces through AI-generated headlines, fake news confusion, political satire, internet memes, celebrity rabbit holes, and the continuing rise of Jimithy lore before landing on relationship dynamics. Hat Trick shares updates on her evolving arrangement with the fireman, sparking one of the episode's more honest conversations about communication, expectations, and why keeping things simple often works better than trying to force traditional relationships.

The second half veers into internet culture, social media algorithms, music, celebrity crushes, Christian comedy, religious debate clips, and the strange reality that today's feeds are becoming nearly impossible to trust. The crew wraps things up discussing attraction, dating psychology, AI-generated content, baseball, new music experiments, and resting bitch face.

Kid and El Pres open the show like a pair of retirees trapped in a padded room, negotiating temperature, mattresses, and whether the studio is cold enough to preserve meat.

That leads into Kid's latest AI music experiment: feed a chatbot the DNA of gloomy, grinding hard rock, hand the description to Suno, and wait for the machine to produce eight minutes of strip-club entrance music with mystery vocals nobody requested.

The robots can imitate the mood, but apparently "instrumental" is still open to interpretation.

From there, the conversation checks in on aging, testosterone supplements, cholesterol medication, disappearing erections, and the increasingly complicated maintenance schedule required to keep a middle-aged man operational.

Baseball provides temporary shelter as Will Clark and Eric Byrnes spark a discussion about players who once traded hitting advice over beers but now retreat to hotel rooms and video games.

Kid argues that people find time for whatever they genuinely want—whether that's baseball, summer hobbies, or avoiding their responsibilities with professional-level dedication.

The sports talk expands into a full soccer dismissal, followed by a youth-baseball coach whose mound visits sound more like a roast at a failing strip club. That raises the episode's recurring question: Is anything online genuine anymore, or was the funny part dubbed in afterward?

Ring cameras, edited clips, AI fakery, and everybody's instant courtroom opinion make reality feel like another piece of content waiting for somebody to slap a watermark on it.

El Pres brings in family history involving his late father's former wife, one final pre-marriage hookup, and the uncomfortable possibility that being his father's son may be more literal than anyone needed explained.

The show then detours through flexible adult performers, pronoun arguments, an absurd alphabet-soup satire clip, anger-management irony, political stupidity, and a fake investigation into whether one strategically deployed fart can alter a man's entire sexual destiny.

Grok gets dragged into the mess when Kid asks his British AI companion to explain an emerging fascination with women farting in elevators. The bot attempts a reasonable explanation involving exposure and reinforcement before being ordered into "goblin mode," proving that artificial intelligence may eventually destroy civilization—but first it has to survive customer service.

The final stretch turns unexpectedly thoughtful as the guys discuss Sony, disappearing game discs, rented software, streaming libraries, subscription traps, and the difference between possessing a physical object and merely receiving permission to access it.

AI gives creative people more tools than ever while simultaneously making creativity feel exhausting, disposable, and dependent on somebody else's server. Then the computer crashes, the show ends early, and technology delivers the strongest rebuttal of the episode.

Episode 2330 - Kid and El Pres open with a viral story about a female pastor allegedly offering an extremely hands-on form of spiritual cleansing. Naturally, this inspires more interest in church attendance than either man has shown in years. From there, the conversation wanders into Pete Davidson, parental grief, bars as strange rooms where strangers repeatedly buy drinks, and Kid's absolute hatred of line dancing. His scientific breakthrough: slap Benny Hill-style chase music over any line-dancing video and it syncs perfectly, no matter where you start it.

Hat Trick arrives with an important design challenge—what belongs beneath her boobs? The proposed tattoo concepts range from delicate floral geometry to a Mad Magazine-style fold-in that reveals Kid's face when the cleavage closes. This quickly becomes the least strange attraction discussed, because Hat Trick introduces her "hear me out" list: Gritty, Venom, Scar, the dragon from Shrek, Puss in Boots, Gill from Finding Nemo, and other characters that require both an explanation and possibly a licensed professional. The distinction is established: Jessica Rabbit doesn't count because everybody already understands. A true "hear me out" should make the room stop, stare, and reluctantly request supporting evidence.

The show also checks in on Hat Trick's fireman situation, including a smoke-shortened camping trip, a heroic amount of sex, the hazards of being on top too often, and the revelation that a little extra belly can function as an "added feature." Beneath all the filth is an actual conversation about catching feelings, old relationship damage, ruined plans, emotional boundaries, and the difficulty of pretending a daily connection is still casual just because nobody has upgraded the label.

Elsewhere, the crew covers hot people farting in elevators, bodily-function etiquette, "extra creamy" compliments, the looming threat of droopy balls, and Kid's personal rules against back titties and multiple chins. Hat Trick counts threesomes, Kid prepares for the exhausting public service of researching "Guess Her Muff," and everyone meets Jimothy—a short-spined raccoon shaped like an escaped Squishmallow. The mood briefly turns anxious when Kid reveals his cat has disappeared somewhere in or around the house, but the episode ends with Jimothy worship, "hear me out" homework for the listeners, and the promise of more questionable visual research.

The episode opens with the crew reflecting on how far they've come from the nights Kid would pass out on the neighbor's lawn and still somehow drive home. He walks through the exact moment he realized his tolerance had become dangerous, then the conversation pivots hard into fingering technique. Hat Trick explains why straight in-and-out does nothing for her, demonstrates the "come hither," and then Kid drops his own signature move: thumb from behind while flicking the bean and sucking tit at the same time. They reference the Instagram anatomist breaking down internal clitoral structure and the ongoing mystery of squirting, with Kid admitting he used to be able to make it happen reliably and now wonders WTF.

From there it's a parade of old war stories: finger blasting at a Janet Jackson concert, the hunt for extinct hot tub hotel rooms, and the bang time in a minivan for lunch. Hat Trick reveals her older neighbors have started commenting on the blue truck's schedule and made a dog-slobber joke that nearly killed everyone in the room. They watch an AI-generated soccer clip of women flashing titties in the stands, then pivot to a Michigan Instagram guy preaching the gospel of which "fat bitches got the best pussy" in a gravel parking lot. Hat Trick gives her current weekly average with the fireman and confirms he now waits down the road until the kids clear out.

The back half turns political. Kid plays a bleak satirical song about America being founded on genocide and built on slavery, then the three of them try to figure out why the 250th feels like such a non-event compared to the bicentennial they actually remember. They land on Taylor Swift's New York wedding shutting down the city as the perfect distraction from everything else, debate whether billionaires giving away millions still counts when the system is this broken, and close with Hat Trick pulling the actual lizard piercing out of an old jewelry box—the same one from the legendary "There's a Lizard in My Snatch" episode. They end by announcing Guess Her Muff is coming back as a full segment.