Episode 2339 - Nurse Fiona is getting a titty upgrade, and Kid and El Pres have more questions than any respectable medical professional would ever entertain. Things get progressively more ridiculous when the crew revisits legendary adult performer Heather Brooke and the jaw-dropping talents that made her an early internet sensation. Kid digs deep into the GDS archives to resurrect the infamous Christmas story, the gang mourns its embarrassing fall in the raunchy podcast rankings, and Hat Trick's bizarre adventures in the foot fetish business prove there's a market for just about anything. Somewhere between turning Fiona into a Jackson Pollock masterpiece and debating the absurdities of internet porn, Kid declares war on Bud Zero, discusses a possible Lansing serial killer, and delivers a passionate defense of baseball as the greatest sport on the planet. Throw in root beer floats, questionable relationship advice, AI-generated garbage, and enough inappropriate nostalgia to fill a psychiatric textbook, and you've got another Goin' Deep Show where growing older clearly hasn't translated into growing the fuck up.

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.