Goin’ Deep Show 2334: Sell Everything and Just Leave

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.