Goin’ Deep Show 2333: Missing Her Face

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.

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