If you had a week to live, would you stop sweating the small stuff? One answer is yes. The other would be MORE upset about traffic. That tracks. Also: ears cleaned for science, a guy in a mascot costume jumps into a monkey enclosure and gets arrested before the monkeys can handle it properly, AI dating negotiations, and Stranger Things, Wheel of Time, and Game of Thrones all convicted for crimes against their source material.

The 2nd annual charity golf tournament raised money for the American Cancer Society, Anthony showed up with 10 pounds of venison nobody would take, and somehow the conversation ended up at the Artemis 2 crew answering questions from children — all of which were about food or bodily waste. In between: how much of your charity dollar actually reaches the cause, why Mike and Jesse changed a flat tire for four kids who didn’t know there was a spare in the trunk, and whether Shania Twain is famous because of talent or a lucky break. Anthony says luck. Jesse disagrees. Nobody wins.

Solo episode energy with Angel filling in for Mike, and somehow it works. The conversation hits the bar’s origin story, AI etiquette, a feminist chatbot breakup, and whether the Great Salt Lake needs a billion dollars or just a rain dance. The back half gets surprisingly substantive: corporate greed as a design feature, why the immigration system backlog is a feature not a bug, ESOP as an exit strategy, and the argument that Trump tribalized America more than anyone since the Civil War. Also: somebody put new stickers in the urinal and Jesse’s excited about it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Josh is 41, the Earth is older, and the immigration appointment system is broken on purpose. Episode 213 gets into it: redistricting and the fair districts amendment, why 8 million protesters still wasn’t enough, corporate short-sightedness versus the guy who plants trees for future generations, and what a humanitarian party platform might actually look like. Meanwhile: Nicole wins again at Hard Rock Bet, someone stole the urinal mat, sex bingo is next Saturday at 8, and the honey bears are apparently flying off the shelf for reasons everyone understands.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Jesse’s back from Breckenridge with a report: worst snow in 50 years, one open quarter of one mountain, and a lot of beginners getting in the way. Meanwhile, the crew catches up on the No Kings protest math, debates whether online slots are actually rigged (Nicole wins $700 on her first spin and hasn’t stopped), and goes deep on the mom-and-pop economy, what killed it, and what’s left. Also: Pee Wee Herman’s adult HBO special, Phil Hartman dying before your coworkers were born, Howard the Duck in the MCU, and a piracy website that’s been up for a decade and nobody cares.

From colonoscopies to Breckenridge, episode 211 covers a lot of ground. The crew checks the math on whether the No Kings protests have the numbers to matter, relitigates the country music discourse, and swaps first-concert stories that range from Genesis to Pantera to, yes, Air Supply. The back half goes deep on education: what’s actually going on with autism diagnoses, why ADHD might just be a mismatch between how kids learn and how schools teach, and whether any of this gets fixed if we keep paying teachers $38,000 a year. Patty from the IEP trenches joins to set everyone straight.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The boys hit 210 and celebrate the only way they know how — by arguing about guns, addiction, traffic, housing, and whether the solar system might be conscious. Jesse’s got AI limit complaints, Ed’s got Renaissance Fest regrets, and Mike’s got opinions on bowling alley engineering. Also: Trump’s Mueller post, Rob Mueller’s death, self-driving cars as a subscription service, and the strong case for three presidents.

Jesse has officially outsourced his brain to an AI. This week he trained Claude to read his POS system’s creative spelling (“Crown Apple 750 w Flask” is apparently a different product than “Crown Apple 750”), hit his session usage limit doing bar inventory, and used it to tell him which Joe Rogan episodes to skip — which turns out to be most of them. Ed and Mike try to keep up while Jesse explains game theory, Robert Axelrod, and the prisoner’s dilemma, none of which anyone asked for. Also: online voting, casino money laundering (Mike legally cannot elaborate), and Iran’s oil fields are on fire but that’s fine.