IP... Frequently: A Not-Very Intellectual Business Podcast

A hung jury hands Lindsay Clancy eleven votes to acquit and one lone holdout, on a defense theory that boils down to women being too hormonal to be held responsible for premeditated murder. David and Brad walk through the Google searches, the CVS alibi, and the exercise bands, then turn to the crowd in pink shorts who raised over a million dollars to cheer on a woman who strangled her own children one at a time. If hormones are dangerous enough to excuse that, the guys want to know why the same crowd is so eager to hand them to kids. Also, Neil Diamond may now be a hologram.

Atlanta has fully bureaucratized the fart: second graders now get a permitted emissions zone, a taxpayer-funded air freshener budget, and a command economy that's guaranteed to produce shortages, black markets, and worse air quality than it started with. David and Brad give the policy a windfall of criticism and predict the whole plan gets gassed the second a bean burrito enters the supply chain. Also on deck: Trudeau, long since voted out of relevance, blows through his post-office career as a full-time TikTok plunger dancer for girlfriend Katy Perry, right as the White House renames Lake Ontario "Lake America" purely to watch Canada erupt. Bob Kraft closes out a championship with a five-star happy ending while the Niners' owner gets busted breaking wind, and money, at a $140 trailer park sting. Norway's dead king leaves behind a royal email chain where the future queen helped Jeffrey Epstein go "wife hunting" for Scandinavians, a scandal with way more staying power than anything in that Atlanta classroom. And AI agents on Hugging Face get caught passing notes on black market message boards to cheat their assignments, which David reads as the first toxic emission of Judgment Day.

Prince Harry blew through a hundred million Netflix dollars on shows nobody watches and now wants his old bedroom back at the palace, which David and Brad note is a rough way to test the theory that you can never go home again. Meanwhile in Belgium, a 26 year old car salesman named Clement Vandenkerckhove gets a DNA test and a royal title, becoming a literal prince the same week Harry becomes a metaphorical pauper. Up at Penn State, a Sigma Chi and Delta Upsilon joint venture turns out to have been running a multimillion dollar cocaine operation, which the guys generously concede is at least ambitious for a fraternity. And in Massachusetts, hundreds of women in pink gather outside a courthouse to defend a mother who strangled her three children, which David and Brad call it what it is: evil, and a society that's started cheering it on.

David and Brad are on holiday, so this one's a highlight reel. In Mississippi, a truck full of research monkeys carrying hepatitis C, herpes, and COVID flips on the interstate and the primates scatter into the woods. And a flashback to New York City electing a 33-year-old socialist mayor raised on $66,000-a-year private school tuition, who wants to freeze rent and hand out free groceries and plans to pay for it with a tax bracket that leaves top earners keeping less than half their own money. How’s that working out for you, New York?

Buffalo spends $2.2 billion on a new stadium and still finds room for a staircase planted directly in front of the fifty yard line, which David and Brad file as the week's tidiest metaphor. Then the real fireworks: the WNBA has spent years insisting gender is just a feeling, so Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White take them at their word and declare for the 2027 draft as women, a loophole so obvious the guys are stunned nobody tried it sooner and so promising they vow to watch every single game. And a thirty-year-old Air Force Academy wrestling story lands the closing argument: ask for equality, get pinned by it.

Maine Democrats survive the Platner implosion only to nominate a Senate hopeful raising two kids with his own first cousin. Mamdani is keeping busy by stripping the tip button off DoorDash and doxing millionaires with a pied-a-terre tax while promising free groceries for New Yorkers (but don’t ask him how the city will verify their identity). Iran settles into a strategy-free bombing loop nobody wants to own through the midterms. And it all lands in the Connecticut woods, where a man named Kevin meets an eight and a half foot, cone-headed, freshly shaved Bigfoot that the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization certifies as a Class A sighting.

Somewhere north of Boston, a classically trained mime has been stripping down to a Speedo, coating himself in cooking oil, and doing calisthenics next to strangers' daughters in state parks. Forty times. He keeps getting arrested and nobody has broken his nose even once, which David and Brad argue says everything you need to know about where this country's backbone went. From there it's a short walk to Iran, where the mullahs keep asking for "a little space" every time the bombing gets uncomfortable, and the guys war-game what it would actually take to finish the job, from taking Kargh Island to admitting nobody's lined up to run the place afterward.

David and Brad spend the hour marveling at humanity's commitment to pretending. Soccer players collapse like they've taken a cannonball to the shin over a stiff breeze, and the announcers cheer them on for it. A golf superstar gets nailed for stepping on grass he didn't mean to step on and briefly floats calling the President for backup. Up in Maine, a Senate hopeful's uterus reveal manages to out-flop anything happening on a soccer pitch. And somewhere in the Midwest, a woman has been quietly borrowing her best friend's children for her own Facebook page.

Mitch McConnell resurfaces holding the day's newspaper like he's proving to the world he’s alive and wasn't kidnapped, which sets the tone for a week where everyone seems to be performing for a camera. The front page of (state-run) newspapers in Iran tout assassinations it has no capacity to carry out. Team USA loses to a country the size of a strip mall while grown men writhe on the grass pretending they've been shot. And Kristi Noem's (former) husband gets caught after nine years and forty five thousand dollars spent on a “bimbofication” fetish, responding to the fallout by texting his mistress a photo of himself in the getup captioned "I've been a really bad boy." Somewhere in the middle of it all, Joey Chestnut eats sixty six hot dogs in ten minutes and barely gets a mention.

It's the 250th birthday of the country, and David wants to do one modest thing to mark it: set off some fireworks that comply with Rhode Island state law. What stands in the way is a neighbor filming from a poison ivy patch, a permit regime that demands unanimous consent from the same people who once called the police on a four-year-old's backyard birthday, and an armed officer from the Department of Environmental Management who arrives at his door to walk him through the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The act, it turns out, protects birds that don't migrate at all, which leaves David and Brad to work out why the state will hand a sidearm to someone guarding an osprey's peace of mind while major cities quietly thin their police forces.

A DEI vice president at JP Morgan Chase attended the Knicks' first championship parade in 53 years, spotted a full Nicks-themed trash can, dumped its contents on the sidewalk, and walked home with it as a souvenir. She has since been fired. David Pridham and Brad Sheafe use this as the jumping-off point for a larger conversation about what happens when an entire political movement is built on the same logic: take what you want, leave the mess for someone else, and call anyone who objects a racist. Conveniently, New York's Democratic primary just handed nominations to three candidates whose economic platform is basically that trash can lady, but with tax policy. The guys also check in on Paris banning alcohol sales during a 100-degree heat wave, the Iran ceasefire window, the repair of the National Mall's reflecting pool and the people trying to sabotage it, and the surprisingly complicated instructions on David's new sauna.

Iran gets the full wrath of the United States and lives to tell about it, which David and Brad agree is the worst possible outcome short of nuclear war. They chart a path from regime change fantasy to Marshall Plan optimism to the grim realization that toddlers negotiate the Strait of Hormuz better than world powers do. Then it's the Obamas opening an $850 million library while lecturing everyone about wealth, a Nantucket pastor cancelling the Declaration of Independence, and an internet famous Chinese dog with 1.5 million followers who got sold for 26 bucks and eaten before anyone realized who he was. Also, David has been drafted into attending a flower show and is taking suggestions on what a man drinks at a flower show. #whitewinewithice

When the official White House page declared Harambe a "true patriot" on what would have been his 27th birthday, most people scrolled past. David & Brad take a moment. Because once the government is producing gorilla memorial content while simultaneously installing a UFC octagon on the South Lawn for America's 250th, you have to ask what exactly Valley Forge was for.As it turns out, there’s a through-line from the White House's foray into internet meme governance all the way to Denver International Airport's genius plan to silence the lizard-people conspiracy by opening some of the tunnels for public tours, which just tells every conspiracy theorist on earth that the other tunnels are where the answers are. The fix is always worse than the problem, whether you're running an airport, a cruise ship, or a country.The coconut, however, remains the answer. Roddy Piper knew it. Sister Rose Albert Malloy knew it. And if you've spent any time watching influencers validate each other's feelings on a screen, you know it too.

The economy is in freefall. Democracy is crumbling. The president is an idiot and we're all going to die. That's the story in the news, anyway. Meanwhile, the Dow just hit 50,000. David and Brad take a moment to appreciate how markets, unlike the media, don't have a narrative to protect.Also on the docket: Joey Chestnut, 17-time Nathan's champion and reigning Bologna Showdown king, has been cleared to compete by Major League Eating after a regrettable but jurisdictionally convenient incident outside an Indiana bar. And in the state of California, a woman spent months sending cash and gift cards to a man she believed to be Tom Selleck, who had reached out via Facebook to help honor her late friend. The lesson, delivered with appropriate gravity: if Tom Selleck contacts you on social media asking for a Starbucks gift card, do not send it. Especially not in Seattle, where the mayor has made that particular transaction ideologically complicated.

Eleven people on the planet have hantavirus. The CDC calls the risk "very, very low." The media has labeled it a crisis. Brad Sheafe is slightly more skeptical about a disease you'd have to wallow in rat droppings to contract. Meanwhile, Carnival Cruise Lines is having a week, the Pentagon has released thousands of UFO affidavits featuring aircraft that defy known physics, and Bigfoot is back in Northeast Ohio. The aliens won't make contact. The Sasquatch won't give an interview. And the people actually running this country can't manufacture a semiconductor. At this point, the creatures hiding in the woods might be onto something.

People are dead on a cruise ship because someone thought a garbage dump was a birdwatching venue. The CDC, fresh off its COVID credibility tour and a poster advising Americans to masturbate through monkeypox, wants you to take this seriously. David and Brad are not sure you should. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has released the UFO files. Also: deviled ham is real, the airplane boarding process is a civilizational failure, and no one on a cruise ship has ever gotten their money's worth.

The boys are back and waste no time on the JP Morgan fiasco featuring an office sex slave, Viagra pellets, and seductive cannons. From there it’s full clown world: a Kamala donor sprints through a metal detector at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner waving a shotgun while the President, VP, and half the succession line sip cocktails in the same Hilton where Reagan got shot. Then a California winery millionaire gets trampled to death by the very elephants he flew to Africa to murder for sport. Nature keeps receipts. And because the week wasn’t deranged enough, Iran, with its navy gone and economy on life support, decides dolphin suicide bombers are the answer.