Cutbooms.
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants of the old republic, a sole fashion of fairness. He treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the rich pill poppers in the penthouse. Wow to Clearinghouse of hot takes, break free for something special. The Fifth Hour with Ben Mallard starts right now in.
The air everywhere The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben Mahler and Danny g Radio. You have come within earshot of this podcast. It is the twenty eighth day of November. We had Thanksgiving yesterday, a day of football.
We have another game today.
Black Friday kicks off later on today with the Eagles hosting the Chicago Bears. A programming note, it is our doorbuster special, Benny Versus the Penny. You can get my pick on the Bears and the Eagles. I know Lucky Tony is excited to watch that, and so is ferg Dog and Alf and all the regulars will be over there watching that as they waltz through life. So that
content will be up later today. We'll have the full episode of Benny Versus the Penny I was gonna post it already, but my good friend Tom Looney in production Looney did not send me the copy of Benny Versus the Penny. It's actually in the can. It'll be up here later today. On this podcast, you've heard of the Great Battles. How about the Battle of Costco Hill. The Battle of Costco Hill, it's a revolutionary war story back in black and the word of the week.
We'll start with this.
So, as you go through life, there are certain checkpoints that you have to go through, and certain things that test your metal, that make you question whether the fellow human beings that you share this world with it's mortal coil, whether they know what they're doing, whether the all of society is hanging on by dental floss. Now, one of those moments happened to me earlier this week, the day before Thanksgiving.
So I have two words for you. Costco Run. Now.
I talk about Costco a lot. It's one of the things I do on a regular basis. So a lot of the stories that I tell you on this podcast are somehow related to Costco because I spend time at Costco.
Now, I'm not.
Talking about your random Tuesday afternoon meander where you sashchet your way around Costco and you eat a lot of samples and you might buy some double A batteries. Maybe you take a bag of pretzels or something like that. I'm talking about a Wednesday Costco trip, the day before Thanksgiving, the big one. This is where you get the Costco and it's like a religious revival.
The day.
The parking lot looks like an evacuation scene from Armageddon. They're loading up Noah's Arc, getting two of every animal, and the shopping carts move in this formation. These convoys like navy destroyers through the asphalt and the parking lot. And this is not shopping. This is a quest. It is a quest. So I got the text the reason I went on Wednesday. I got the text, can you grab a couple of pies and some dinner rolls for my work?
I got a thing of things. My wife had.
Sent this to me. Some of you know she's a nine to one to one operator and they have more events with food at police stations. So her job was to bring the pie and the roles. And since she was sleeping and I don't sleep very much. I'm only sleeping four or five hours a day, I guess I'll go out and go to the store.
No problem.
So I went out, did my thing and did the Costco trip again. This is the this is not the amateur one. And I went there and I had no map. You know, there's muscle memory. I didn't get a pep talk. I just had the outline of the mission, pie and dinner rolls, and the ominous sense that I might not return.
This could be the end of me.
I might be swallowed up into some kind of portal going to another dimension. It'll be a Kirkland brand dimension, and that could happen.
I don't know.
So there's really no casual way to get the Costco. The day before Thanksgiving it felt like the NFL Combine. You know they do that thing in Indianapolis, the Underwear Olympics. Instead of the forty yard dash and the cone drill. People were competing in who can get through self checkout with without losing their sanity?
Right, that old thing? Where do I find a shopping cart? There's none here? Where do I go?
So, because they were all out in the parking lot, so I grabbed my metaphorical armor, my version of chainmail, the modern version, and I stormed through the sliding door into medieval times.
If you will, I was like a medieval night.
Just think of me as swashbuckling my way into the battlefield. I didn't have a sword. I had an iPhone and my Kirkland brand membership. Now, truth be told, Costco is undefeated. It doesn't just test your endurance like the New York Marathon.
It abuses it.
Suddenly you're buying garlic that the quantities of the garlic are large enough to provide relief to an entire continent somewhere in Africa. And you walk in for two items and you leave in for somehow you're like in an inflatable kayak that is the size of Rhode Island and enough toilet paper to last at least three, possibly four presidencies. Like you have that much. And so my first stop was to pick up the dinner rolls. I figured, this is no problem. How hard could this be? I can
figure this out. And I'm guessing that even though it's the day before Thanksgiving, this is not going to be a popular part of Costco.
So I made my way.
I knew, because I'm a Costco veteran, I knew where the dinner rolls were aisle forty seven B. Everyone knows the gold standard when it comes to a dinner roll is a Hawaiian role. It's sweet, it's soft, it's got the pillowy carbs there. It's a gift from the gods. It's really not the nectar of the gods. It's the bread of the gods. But here's something I've long argued on the radio. I got married in Hawaii. I've been to Hawaii many times. I love the Hawaiian islands. The
people are great, wonderful, the scenery is amazing. It's the most beautiful place I've ever been is the Nepali coast on Kawaii.
It's amazing, just absolute paradise.
However, there's something that is not right about Hawaii is the food.
I don't love it.
I'll swim with the fish, However, I don't eat the fish, and that's a problem. That's a bit of a problem. I don't really care for spam. I'm not a spam guy, and I will make the exception with Hawaii Hawaiian roles.
And I learned I was curious. I said, well, I wonder what island they're from.
I thought, well, maybe they're from Kawaii and that's the island I got married and I was going to tell some big story and oh, by the way, these rolls have a sentimental meeting, now they don't. They Actually Hawaiian roles come from Portuguese immigrants who arrived in Hawaii in the late nineteenth century and brought their native recipes sweetbread recip he's with him from Portugal, and over time the
bread got rebranded. Portugal made the dough. Why he got the credit, and it's bread essentially wearing an a loha skirt, and what's wrong with that?
Nothing?
And I'll tell you this, Costco stacks those rolls up like they're preparing for a delicious carbohydrate apocalypse. And I don't have a problem with that. Entire mountains man made mountains and would literally just bury a tesla, would just be buried in this. And then came the moment, the real test, the pie aisle. The Hawaiian role thing was that was child's play to my right, So imagine me.
I'll get into the pie and it's really kind of near the bakery, so I don't know pie aisles the right way, but.
It's still kind of aisles. So I get to the pie aisle.
To my right, they have arranged apple pies, each one identical. It's synchronized. It's like in the Olympics synchronized swimmers. But this is the Dessert Olympics, not to be confused with the housekeeping Olympics, which we workshopped on this podcast a few weeks ago. To my left, so I've got to
my right, I've got the apple pies. To my left, this massive pumpkin pie display that at the time, it felt large enough to affect the gravitational pull, Like if I took the pumpkin pie out, I would somehow, you know, somebody would fall over in New Zealand because of that. And I saw one of them had its own weather system. It was that big, that big a pumpkin pie. And so I froze for a moment. I stared, and I debated in my head. Now this is a conversation I'm
having in my head. I'm not having this out loud. I'm not talking about this out loud. So I'm like an apple pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie.
What am I gonna do?
And I was deep in thought when I saw, but not the spotlight, not the light from the gods, not center stage. Off to the side, like a backup singer at the Grammys, was a separate display peep pecan pie ding ding ding ding ding. Now, let me be very clear, for those of you in the back of the room, those of you that aren't paying close attention because you're doing the Honeydew List or you're just living your life, pecan pie is not just dessert. It's the unicorn of
the pie world. It's a seasonal pie, which makes it rare, which makes it more valuable. Sometimes you'll get it for the Christmas season, barely see it where I am the rest of the year. You don't just buy pecan pie.
Pecan pie chooses you. So I marched towards it. In my head, it was in slow motion, like a scene from that old baseball movie The Natural, and the music was playing, the sappy music was playing in my head, and I picked it up gently, like the scene from The Lion King when they lifted Simba there and I whispered, you're coming home with Daddy, And then I tossed an apple pie and a pumpkin pie into the cart for
my wife's office office office police station thing. The Thanksgiving deal because you know, again, I don't do lists, as you know, Terry and England knows that we don't do this on this podcast, but we do do Big Benz Big Pie Board where every pie has its lane. Now, I'm not going to include the King of all pies, Banana cream pie, because that was not an option. I'm not going to give you Key Lime Pie, which is a very solid pie. I just had my key Lime
Pie recently in the last year. Here a couple of them from our friend in Florida who sent those out. So on Big Ben's Big Pie Board where every pie has its lane, you've got got apple pie, which is the I call that the Swiss Army Knife of dessert. It's available year round. Every major restaurant has apple pie. You never have to worry about a supply chain shortage of apple pie. It's just always there when you live
in America. Now, pumpkin pie has a short lifespan. It's kind of like the NC doublea men's basketball tournament, and it goes some selection Sunday and really kind of interest wanes after the first weekend of the men's basketball tournament, then picks up again for the final four. But the pumpkin pie from relatively say October fifteenth through possibly January first, it's a seasonal pie. Now, pecan pie is like that
rare comet that flies across the holidays. Guys, you never really know when it's going to be available, other than possibly around Christmas. So I got everything, and at checkout, I then got a body blow, body blow, a gut punch. You want to take a guess how much the three pies and the dinner rolls cost me?
Ding ding ding ding ding.
Yeah, three pies and a bag of Hawaiian rolls cost me seventy dollars. Now, look, I am not saying I expect to get some kind of overnight talk radio discount or a military discount or any kind of discount. I just thought for seventy bucks, I should have at least gotten a back massage, shoulder rub, maybe a whisper like, hey, you're doing great over there, We thank you.
How about a puppy.
I would have liked a puppy, or but no, you swipe the card at the self checkout and you move a long soldier and don't look back. Inflation, my friends, you're dealing with the same stuff I'm doing.
With is undefeated.
And those pies rang up like they were being hand crafted at a bakery that's been around since the sixteen hundreds in Peri, and then flown in not coach but first class to America from Zimbabwe. So they started in Perie, they went to Zimbabwe and then made their way back to the States. Now in the moment, I thought, well, this is insanity, this is ky, this is Costco and again we were talking about the event is one of the great events in history, the Battle of Costco Hill.
We're doing the Battle of Costco Hill and it's not easy. It's not easy to do the Battle of Costco Hill. And then I thought, well, this is Thanksgiving. This is what it's all about, right, small missions carried out by exhausted people or someone else who is out there and they need the help. And it's all about the meal. It's a war meal. Your dad, a husband, whatever, wife, teenagers, kids, and you do these errands and no one's gonna remember.
That's the thing.
You don't remember what you ate. Nobody will remember what brand of pie I bought, what size of pie I bought. Nobody will care where it was apple, pumpkin, or pecan. But they'll remember that there was pie and they showed up and I brought the pie to the table, and that's it. That's part of the Thanksgiving festivitus. Even though I did not partake in the apple or the pumpkin, did not do that.
And there you go.
Just another day meandering around Costco on a holiday, the day before a holiday. Now, speaking of that today is kind of a big deal. Back in black The things you should know about Black Friday, which is today, and it really is not about shopping. When you dig deep, it's about a subculture. It's about an identity. It's about belonging, and a lot of what we do in a lot of what we do is about belonging. It's about the only American religion you know, is we all practice right?
A lot of people have different relgions. Some people aren't religious at all. Yeah, it's fine. I don't know.
Whatever gets you through life, as long as don't just don't bother me. I'm not going to bother you.
The thing that stands out though, the religion of America is consumerism, the great unifier, the soft anthem, the pledge of allegiance with a receipt at the end, and it.
Began with panic, not pleasures.
So the history of black Friday as a term the experts dated to eighteen sixty nine.
Hello, eighteen sixty nine.
It was used to describe an economic disaster, a gold speculation scandal that rocked Wall Street and left these monstrosities.
These newspapers searching.
For a word to capture the carnage, and the newspapers came up with this word, which was dark and ominous and unstable, and that's what they came up with, black Friday. Now you fast forward to the nineteen fifties and Philadelphia, so we're talking about eighty some years after the initial black Friday was used, and this was in Philadelphia. Police used the same phrase, but they used it to describe this nightmre shopping situation post Thanksgiving, with traffic everywhere, pickpockets,
crowds behaving like animals. It was not a celebration. It was crowd control. And the cops in Philadelphia called it black Friday, and they had to deal with all these people who were out of control because they wanted to get a deal on products. And so naturally, in this country, the one that can take a headache and turn it into a holiday. Did what we always do. We monetized
Black Friday. We said, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is chaos, but we can sell a lot of crap, and we want to sell a lot of crap because America does not believe in bad ideas, only unbranded ideas.
That's it.
And so retailers. It started in Philadelphia, but they flipped the narrative. They said, oh, okay, you guys misunderstand Black Friday. The black part is not some kind of calamity. Black is about profit. It means we're in the black. You're in the red, you're losing money, you're in the black.
That's great.
This day is not disorder, it is economic rebirth.
Halllelujah, hallelujah.
And just like that in exorcism, a linguistic exorcism occurred. Black no longer meant danger, it meant deals. Graphic designers added, sparkle ads cheered, the crowd arrived, chaos was.
No longer going on. And so that was the tradition.
It was a tradition, and that's the American special, not reinvention. You just reframed stuff. And as I've gone through life, you learn certain things. It's the same reason when I was a kid, made in Japan was synonymous with cheap, and I heard this from my parents and relatives and all that because it was after World War Two.
You know, I was born way after World War Two.
But the phrase made in Japan was synonymous for cheap in the nineteen forties, and by the time I was a kid, and it had changed in the engineering excellence of Japan. By the nineteen eighties, it became synonymous with good things. It's the same reason bad became praise after Michael Jackson moonwalked that phrase into the dictionary. The same reason underdog once meant loser in a dog fight. Now it's the most beloved arc in sports. Oh, an underdog.
Everyone loves the underdog. Words don't change. They do not change the words. You repeat something enough and eventually it becomes true. And phrases, and we lived in a period where people try to redefine phrases and things like that.
It's a messy situation. Now.
If you watch a department store at four in the morning on Black Friday, it's no longer a store.
It has become theater.
A running back darting through a linebacker through the a gap and then getting dog piled. Is no different than a shopper sprinting down the left side, turning right and then going fast and then turning left because that's where they want to get to the target aisle for the last seventy inch Samsung television, which is fifty five percent off. But only that, only this day, because America on Black Friday today stops being a country and becomes a checkout line.
We call it shopping in quotes, but be honest, it feels more like hunting. It feels like you're on a scavenger hunt. People don't browse, they stalk. They camp out like pilgrims on asphalt. They rush the doors like a jail break. And this is not merely commerce. This is chemistry, is what it is. It's a dopamine surge disguised as patriotism, helping the American economy. It also teaches the one rule
that has quietly shaped our entire culture. If everyone else wants something, you must want it to You just have to want it again. It's not this one's not capitalism. It's social survival is what it is. And human beings are grammable. You learn that as you get through life, you like to think, Oh no, I'm not programmable. Doctor Seuss taught me. I'm one of one. You can't program me. But we don't really live in a democracy. We live in a brandocracy is what we live in. Because this
works every year without fail, the crowd's return. I don't care how bad the economy is. I don't care about any of that. And it's not because you need a new microwave or discounted towels. It's because of three things. There's three triggers that are involved in this. You've got scarcity, which triggers the survival instinct. Scarcity of food, scarcity of toaster ovens, countdown. That's something they learned in the infomercial world,
where you introduce panic disguised as urgency. You better shop. These deals are going away and they're never coming back. Oh mg, crowd participation now that replaces judgment with belonging.
And so really this is the group mind.
It's group think, the one that terrifies every man, woman and child, the one that confronts all of us, the one that we all swear we're not a part of.
You might be, but I'm not.
Even while we are filling up our cars. Now I don't take part in Black Friday. My wife she loves it. Right, the rise of online shopping, and you know that's big today, it's supercharged all of this. You enter cyber Monday, which is coming up here, and end of the week before sales, end of the last minute sales. You've got the month long shopping season today, fifty to sixty percent off. And countries globally now participate and start in America and some
version of this around the globe. About fifty percent of the countries. Europe calls it Mega Sales Day. China does its own thunderous version called Singles Day. November eleventh now the biggest shopping event on Earth. And Black Friday has gone global not because it sells products, because it sells validation. And Black Friday is the latest day long line of
hypnotic tricks used by Madison Avenue. To me, the greatest of them all, by far, the greatest of them all was breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And every once in a while it will come up in conversation and I don't eat breakfast, but somebody will say, hey, you gotta get breakfast. You'll be on baking. We gotta get breakfast. Why are we gonna get breakfast? Well, it's
the most important meal of today. And then of course I become the douche if I bring this up and I say, you know that phrase breakfast is the most important meal of today. That's not a medical consensus, it's not scientifically based. Cereal companies, Kellogg's, they didn't just create breakfast. They created guilt, parental guilt. Are you are you feeding your kids the fuel they need for school? Are you raising a future champion? That That wasn't advice. That was
salesmanship and a lab coat. You put people on television and lab coats and oh my god, we better listen to these people said well, no, it's actually bull crap.
No, but we better listen. It's very important. They look like they know what they're doing.
And before that slogan, people did not did not really eat breakfast that much.
If they ate breakfast, it was just leftover some the night before.
And then after that it changed, It changed a lot, and it's like, okay, now and now we got something. You know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Another one of those phrases, diamonds are forever or a diamond is forever the for words from de Beers in the nineteen forties, and suddenly every every single proposal required a diamond.
Oh, you gotta do it, a diamond ring.
And before that, before nineteen forty seven, rings were pretty modest or nonexistent. After that without a diamond, like, what kind of loser are you? You don't have a diamond. They didn't just sell jewelry. They sold legitimacy is what they sold. They sold that as well. The shopping cart is another great example. People did not like shopping carts
when they started, and started in Oklahoma City. So what they did is they hired hot women and attractive men and they had paid them to walk around the store with the shopping carts even though they weren't buying anything. And the reason they did that is because the other customers saw it and they said, well, these are that woman's really hot. I better I want to know what she's doing. And then the women looked at the men's Oh that guy's handsome. I got to find out what
I mean that shopping cart. I might want to get one of those. And so that's how that began. Black Friday is not about discounts. It's about again identity. It asks do you belong in the tribe? Are you part of the right tribe. If the answer is yes, you'll chase the sale because belonging beats logic every.
Time, and so it's it's the truth. It's not flat, it's not flattering.
America does not want things as much as we want the feeling of wanting things. It's buyer's remorse for so much of this stuff. The chase is the thrill, The KRT is the adventure. The only two left by now that's the drum beat. Of course, I'll let you in a little dirty secret, that a dirty little secret that a lot of those only two left things on the internet.
Are bull crap. They are a bull crap.
And anyway, when you arrive, some people still go to malls and stuff that want disappears, the thrill evaporates, we begin hunting again, just go hunting again. And nothing proves this more than the abandoned cart syndrome, the phenomena of millions of people loading digital carts and never checking out.
Which is a thing right.
People will put a bunch of stuff in the cart and then that's it, and they won't actually purchase it.
But we're really not chasing products again, We're chasing purpose. That's what it is.
And so Black Friday arrives every year like a spiritual audit, and it asks the same question, gently, powerfully, repeatedly, do we truly need all this stuff? Or do we just need to feel like we need this stuff and be part.
Of the community.
It's the busiest shopping day of the year. It's also, in many ways the loneliest question that hides inside it. Are we buying gifts? Or are we buying permission to matter? Black Friday? It's not on the calendar, it's in the bloodstream.
It just is.
And until we recognize that we won't own our own choices, they will own us.
Now go off and bob bye bye bye bye, not bye bye baby.
Go buy a toaster oven so you can make French toast. All right?
Now for the word of the week, the word of the week, and the word of the week is avocado.
Is the word of the week. This was sent to me. We get the name here. One second.
This was sent by Dale, who is not related to Chip. I met a Dale in Syracuse whose Chip in Syracuse. This is not his blood relative his brother, and he said, Dale said, how about avocado? And I thought, well, I don't eat avocado, why would I want to worry about avocado? And then I realized I had the come to Jesus moment when I saw the origin of the word avocado.
It goes back to the Aztecs, not the San Diego State as Techs, the actual Aztex and they called the fruit by their in their own language, a word which directly translates to both avocado and testicle.
That's right, yes, that's right. Now.
Scholars believe that the association came from the obvious oval shape and the resemblance to testicles, and the fact that avocados often grow in pairs hanging from the tree, and so you put all that in there. It reinforced this
sexual connotation, and it was adopted. When the Spanish encountered the fruit, they adopted the Aztec in their language phrase, and over time it was reshaped into avocado and English, partly influenced by the similarity to the word advocate from Latin and in colonial English, avocados were sometimes called alligator pears alligator pairs, and the Aztecs considered avocados to be fertility boosters and gave you vitality, a working libido that goes to the roof.
And so the meaning, the dual meaning.
Of this ASTech word reflects how liosten things have multiple meanings all the time in life and certainly in our verbiage.
And so the.
Dual meaning was not unusual for the Aztec language. Words often carried layered meanings, we are told, blending physical resemblance with symbolic or cultural significance and all that. And so there it is the good job by Dale. The word of the week. Word of the week avocado. All right, This podcast is being produced by Danny G.
Radio.
Is a Danny G Radio production, so if you have any complaints, blame him.
No, I'm kidding. We love Danny.
Danny's having a great holiday weekend. We will get you on the next podcast tomorrow. And as Danny would say, later, skater asta pasta a riva da che.
Oh that's he doesn't say that.
Now he will edit that out on the point he does not say a riva dre cha. He does not do that, does not do that.
Got a murder. I gotta go