Kutbooms.
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 sol fashion of fairness. He treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Wow.
The 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 and a happy, happy Saturday.
College football.
Yeah, all day long, college for We had NFL football last night as we slide into the sixth day of September. And you just got me to Danny G is under weather. Hopefully my man Danny G will be good enough to join us tomorrow morning for the mail bag. And you got me. So I stayed up, and I really didn't stay up that late. It's rather early here on the West Coast, but I watched the game there on Friday
night on the YouTube. I thought it was on regular TV in LA because the Chargers are plausibly an LA team and Justin Herbert three hundred and eighteen yards passing, not one, not two, but three touchdowns, no interceptions, ran for thirty two yards. That's the first three hundred yard three touchdown game since Week ten of the twenty twenty
three season for Justin Herbert. And a lot of passes, a lot of passes to the wide receiver room there for the Chargers eighty two over eighty two percent of his passes for Herbert, the most he's ever targeted wide receivers in a single game in his NFL career. So very unusual these international games. I was, I did take the Chiefs, and so I lost that game. On Benny versus the pen. We actually gonna talk more Benny versus the penny here in a couple of minutes got the
cyber swamp and mouthwash madness. But as far as the Chiefs and the Chargers game, the better story is in the losing locker room.
That is where the story is. And you look at.
The game, and it was really a domination situation by the Chargers. Now that the stats don't really indicate that, because the yardage was rather close, the first downs were rather close. The big difference in this game was that the Chargers were able to get some big plays. They were able to make some wild plays, and the Chiefs, you know, they had.
A couple of them. But in the big picture, it just seemed.
Watching the game in real time that the Chargers were leading the race and the Chiefs were going uphill the entire way. And there was an injury early on for Kansas City, and you look at Mahomes and Mahomes ran for fifty fifty seven yards. He had two ordered fifty eight yards passing, but a lot of dink and dunk and this, you know, those short passes. For the most part, he averaged Mahomes thirty nine pass attempts twenty four completions,
averaged a six point six yards per pass attempt. Now, remember the standard in the NFL seven the baseline is about seven is average. So if you're above that, you're pretty good. If you're below that, you're not doing so good. And justin Herbert averaged nine point four yards per reception, and he spread the ball around. McConkie had six catches, Johnston had five catches for seventy nine yards.
There were three or four.
Charger pass catchers that did a solid job in that game last night, And so the Chargers get off to the good start, and for the Chiefs, there like, oh my god, they lost a divisional game, and Mahomes in the offense, they didn't look all that gray. There was that missed extra point that totally fed up things and just did not help the process or process. The Chiefs
their first three drives for rather block. They started out punt punt, punt, and so the Chargers had built up a ten to nothing lead, they had a thirteen to three lead, and then the Chiefs came back and they would have would have tied the game, and then that touchdown that would have made it thirteen to thirteen, Bucker missed the extra point wide right, and that created a situation where the Chiefs had to go for two, and
then they didn't get the two. The two point attempt failed, and so then they were playing uphill and they went from they could have been tied at twenty down twenty to eighteen. Then the Chargers scored another touchdown, so it's a nine point game, and then the math on that was a problem, but we'll get away from that. On this part. We got the cyber swamp and the mouthwash madness. Will start with this on a college football Saturday on the fifth Hour here a spin off of the Overnight
You my guy Danny, Do you feel better? He'll be back, hopefully tomorrow, But we begin with this. So after two years under the NBC, polished roof, big major national broadcasting company.
But what an honor it was to work for them. I've had two different runs at NBC.
I had one back in the twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve period of my life and more recently. But Benny versus the Penny now wanders into the wilderness of YouTube. You might know by now if you follow me on social media. It is not so much a move as it is a rebirth, or perhaps a recalibration, trading the corporate umbrella for the wild wild West, And I do mean the wild wild West where the sheriff is an hour algorithm and the saloon owner sells credibility by the pint.
So you can call this if you want, manifest destiny with ring lights and all that. It sounds somewhat noble. Some would say, hey, this is the way to do it. You're being very noble. It's independence. Some would say rebellious. Now I have a problem with all of those big words noble, independent, rebellious. The problem is this, I've experienced a little bit, and I'm just starting out here as
a YouTuber. The issue I have is that YouTube. While it is a wonderful, wonderful place with all kinds of amazing content, YouTube is like every other digital pastor, it isn't really the field of dreams. It presents itself to be, right. It pretends to be this field of dreams where anybody can just all of a sudden pop up and become a star and make a lot of money. And it confirms what of my beliefs that it is the matrix with an algorithm.
For a gatekeeper. Right.
It is a carnival midway of smoke and mirrors. It's a funhouse reflection where the guy who yells the loudest gets the biggest stuff to animal and all that. Myself and Tom Looney are diving headfirst into this gooey ooey cyber swamp, and we are armed with what what do we have? What are our weapons? We have a microphone? Check, we have a camera. I have a camera right on my computer here. Check somewhat a sense of humor, possibly football shape, penny. We got that now we were already
already dabbling in this world. We've already found out that in the land of independent creators wink wink, nod nod, independence is open to interpretation, and independence is off and as real as professional wrestling going back to the eighties and the nineties and the two thousand tens in the twenty twenties. So yes, it is true. You can be on YouTube. The problem is to matter on YouTube, you need to know whose palm degrease, and I don't know
for sure who's palm degrease. You need to know whose ego you have to stroke and how to package reality into the neatest, most clickable thumbnails. Now, the independent creator often has as much independence as a Hollywood studio actor back in the day. I remember reading about this when I was younger, the Hollywood studio actors that had contracts in the nineteen forties, and good luck on that right.
Even like the Three Stooges iconic in their era, they didn't make hardly any money, and they had no idea that they were as famous as they were because they were just under a studio contract.
It's wild story if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
Some good books have been written about that there's some good stuff online about the Stooges and not knowing, not real life, the impact they were having on the culture because they were just it was a job. They were under contract and that was that. But you look at the independent creator and it's all big business. It's agents, it's managers, it's investors, all of them lurking off camera, curating the illusion of independence and freedom and pulling yourself
up from the bootstraps and all that. Give you an example, mister Beast. We saw mister Beasts last night. For some reason, the NFL thinks that that's going to grow their audience. Spoiler alert, that's dumb. Anyway, mister Beast was not built in a day. He was also not built in the
basement of his home somewhere in South Carolina. He was built with investors, managers, lawyers, and the machine, the machine that makes it look like he's just a kid with a big idea, just a kid with a big idea that happened to make it.
That's all it is. And you're like, what, well, not so much, not so much.
And it's like the line from the late Great Casey Case and keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. Well, in this case, mister Beast again a bunch of other people around him.
I'm not knocking mister Beast. That's just the reality.
A lot of people don't realize that the big stars on YouTube that are very popular, mister Beast, Kai Sennett, the Costco guys, these independent stars are all are run by people headquartered in New York boardrooms, groomed by management firms who know that the attention currency is where it's at.
Right.
It's all about the marketing of these people, and it is pay to play. It's not a dirty secret on YouTube or the other social media channels. It's a business model. And followers and views are a commodity. We all know that, and they are traded in a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The amount of money that is tossed
around it is crazy. And the Internet is a great case study on perception versus reality and the fact that perception is reality on social media, perception is manufactured that a channel. I'll tell you this, right, So there's two
channels and both of them are doing food reviews. You have a channel with one hundred thousand followers, and you have a channel with one hundred followers, right, So who you're going to pay more since attention to you can say, well, the channel with one hundred thousand that's got more trust, trust that's more trustworthy, is more credible, while a channel with one hundred followers might as well be broadcasting to the furniture.
Right.
And by the way, our channel Benny versus the Penny has about like two hundred followers or whatever.
So these because we just started, but.
The psychology is as old as the Emperor's new clothes.
If everyone else sees it, it.
Must be real. Nobody checks the stitching. They just nod at the shine and the buying and the selling. And this is something I've had my eyes open to. I always knew this was going on. But the buying and selling of followers is no different from printing counterfeit money.
And it's not even illegal. It isn't.
It circulates, it inflates, it deceives, and no.
One audits it.
There's nobody saying, well, wait a minute, that person's got a bunch of fake followers, because everyone is benefiting from the counterfeit. It's a Ponzi scheme where everyone is cashing in on this. The illusion of popularity, and I was reading a story a couple weeks back.
I think I mentioned it to you on this podcast.
Remember the story of there was a couple of musicians who became famous on TikTok and then they agreed to go out and perform in front of a live audience, so they had to sell tickets. And I believe the story I'm paraphrasing this, I don't have it in front of me, is that they couldn't sell enough tickets to cover the costs of the crew and the travel and all that to make this happen, because it turned out, while they had hundreds of millions of people that were
watching their music online, they weren't real people. They were fake and so the amount of real people was not enough to sell out a venue, but the illusion was they were very popular. It is a multi million dollar industry that hums beneath the surface. It's like a black market, bizarre behind the town square, and everyone pretends not to notice.
It is the Komodo dragon in the room because the facade keeps that circus a lot and well a million followers at one point, maybe it did mean a million people. Now a million followers can mean half a million bots, quarter million engagement farm accounts overseas, and the rest die hards who don't even know they're part of the hustle. That's the thing, right, that's the thing. And that's why I say, well, there's nobody that's really hurting from any
of this, because what ends up happening. It's kind of like you open up a restaurant and if you want to create a little bit of buzz about the restaurant, you pay people to stand in front of the restaurant and then they'll be out of curiosities. People that would never have gone to the restaurant and say, well, this place must be popular.
Why don't we go to that restaurant. Well, there's nobody actually at that restaurant. It's all paid actors. Well we don't know their paid actors. They're online. Looks like they want to enjoy the food, so let's go there.
Another example of that is the shopping cart, the buggy, the shopping cart. So we talked about this on this podcast, but the origins of the the shopping cart leave. It started at Oklahoma, but originally it was emasculating. Women did not want to push the cart because it you know something like moms do, and they're like, unless if you didn't have kids or I don't know, I'm not a I don't want to be.
Type cast as that.
And men didn't want to push carts because it was emasculating. So what they did to encourage people to use shopping carts is they got really beautiful women and really beautiful men, paid actors to go to the stores and walk around with the carts and pretend like they were shopping. And so they would do that, and then the regular Hoi, POLLOI, the flotsam and the jetsum would see this and they'd be like, hey, those are good looking people.
I want to be like them.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to push the cart like them because they're good looking people. Maybe I'll become better looking. And that is a true story, Hand to God. That's how the shopping cart became a mainstream thing. But it's the same concept on social media, like you have fake followers and then you gain real followers because people are easily hornswaggled.
They just are. They just are.
And you look at these following numbers, it's like baseball attendance. When I was a kid in the nineteen eighties. The announced attendance bore no resemblance to who was actually there in the ballpark, and the reality is whatever the algorithm.
Says it is. No one again is.
Doing any inventory on what's real and what's counterfeit and all that. So for Benny versus the Penny, which we need your help. You can follow that Benny vs. Penny at Benny Vspenny on YouTube. That means to us that the penny may have to be cannibalized. I've been studying this, and there's an art to YouTube, and you people do not do not generally watch long form content. So Benny
versuspent about half an hour forty minutes every week. What we likely will have to do at some point is chop that up into smaller, bite sized pieces and just instead we'll.
Have long form.
But then we're going to have to have short form because that's the way the game is played, and attention spans are now measured in seconds, not minutes.
We're all a bunch of goldfish swimming around.
So welcome to the YouTube casino, where the odds are long and the attention spans are short, and the house rules. But maybe just maybe there's a little bit of room there for an honest game in this crooked canival. So we'll see the NFL season kicks off for real the Mary we had a couple of appetizers with the game back on Thursday, where.
The Eagles won, and then the Chargers on Friday.
The NFL season, though, remains a weekly TV drama O rama assume without a script, assume without a script, and unlike the algorithms, you know, we actually care about the results and all that. Now, if we can cut through the clutter on Benny versus the Penny with just wit, candor and a little old fashioned stubbornness, then maybe just maybe Benny versus the Penny can survive outside of that NBC corral and all that. Now, it's not going to
be easy, it's not going to be fair. Then again, I would argue that makes it all that much much sweeter because my experience in broadcasting I've been doing this a long time, is you actually have to build an audience up, but it's a real audience.
There's no shortcuts.
On social media, there's a lot of shortcuts, like if somebody wanted to I've forgotten emails from people in the past, they're like, hey, I work in social media. I can get you know, so many followers and all that, and I always turned that down. Now, if somebody wants to do that, I'm not against it. I'm not going to go out and solicit it. But if somebody wants to do it, but we need your help. And really I believe we have a big enough audience based on when I started this fifth.
Hour podcast, I was like, who the hell's going to listen to that crap?
And I always said, if the numbers are bad, if no one's listening to this thing, then I'm not going to do it. It's not worth my time. Time is the most valuable thing we have. I'm not going to bother doing the podcast. And the numbers have steadily climbed. We've done very well with this podcast. Are we Joe Rogan? No, we're not Joe Rogan? Are we Adam Carolla? No, we're
not Adam Corola. But however, in our little niche stay in your lane, as LeVar Ball likes to say, we have been able to build up a good following and Danny G's helped a lot.
We was a stretch.
We were losing people, we were bleeding. We had a lot of politics on the podcast. People got all upset about that, freaked out, lost their mind. And so the numbers have been very good. And we can just take a good chunk of this and put it there on Benny Vspenny on YouTube. Get your kids to sign up. Well, I don't want to set up there. Those are a bunch of old's talking football. Just do it, little Johnny, come on, help your dad out, all right? You know
that kind of thing helps us out. That does help us out. It would help a lot if they actually watched the show. So it's not smooth, double churned or slow churned Vanilla. It's gonna be rocky road. It's gonna be rocky road. But with a little help from my friend that would be you. And we are on a mission, on a mission to follow it.
The show.
You know, it's nothing looked quite as good as I wanted to look. I wanted to look good. I want I want to look just like the TV show. But the TV show had thirty people working on it. We have two, so it's a lot different. But if you just follow the channel, subscribe to Benny Vspenny, and if you put a review, a comment, in there. You watch the videos. Man, would that be cool? That would help
us out, you know, help us fight again. It's the machine and really try to do this organically, and then it's a self fulfilling prophecy where if you do build up a base and eventually we can move on to something bigger and better. Now turn the page on that. I would like to address a moment that happened on the Overnight Show earlier this week. I got several emails about this, and I thought this would be the perfect form because this podcast the fifth Hour plausibly you're listening
because you are a next level fan. Legends like Lucky, Tony alf the Alien, Opiner, ferg Dog, Mister nice Guy, Jonathan and Delaware. These are big time heavy hitters in the Malin Militia, big balls, Bob, and they listen to this podcast. So this is just like a tight knit group that we've got here. So every radio show, I'm gonna go a little zen on you. So every radio show worth its salt as a cast of characters. That's my belief on talk radio. And if you don't have that, you're.
Not doing it right. You're not doing it right.
So there's gotta be to do a radio show the right way, there's gotta be rasmatash. There's characters orbiting whoever the host is. In this case, it's me like satellites, some are closer to the Sun than others. Some are burping and some are burning, some are burning up in re entry, some others just kind of drifting forever in their own strange you know, just kind of a strange path around the cosmos. But ours happens to include a
man on the Malord Militia named mouthwash Mike. So mouthwash Mike called up the other night and was really disheveled and all that. And some people have feelings about this, and some people reached out to me. Some of you think we are celebrating mouthwash Mic, others that we are exploiting him. Some of you have written into tell me your concerns. Others with amusement, and still others with kind
of righteous indigestion indignation. If I could talk to that, what else this righteous indignation that the Ben Maler Show, the nighttime airways of Fox Sports Radio would beam this voice of mouthwash Mike to six hundred plus radio stations around the world. And that's fine. That's the business and all that stuff. That's what I say, right, that's the exchange rate of talk radio. But I would like to reset the board. I want to reset the board here because we did not find mouthwash mic.
He found us.
I think it's very important. Like some of you don't understand how this works. You don't understand any of this works. So let me just pause and I'll reset again. I did not go out and find mouthwash Mike.
He found us. Mike.
Not an algorithm. It's not a targeted ad. It's not a viral clip. It's not some made up chat GPT voice.
It's none of that. He found us.
You know.
That's that's the way it is. It's not because of a server in Menlo Park thinking that you'll like it. He is the purest, in the purest sense, broadcast. That is what broadcast is broadcasting. He's out there. You don't know who he is. You stumbled across him. Maybe it is the magic of radio. It's not narrow casting. It's broadcasting. It's not narrow casting to your taste. It's not a it's not some Spotify playlist. It's it's a street lamp. It shines for everybody. It's not just made for you,
it's for anybody. And this guy, Mike, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that he doesn't shine.
Weird, because he does. He's very weird.
This is a man who once showed up to our listener event, the Malar Meet and greet with a half drunk bottle of a quit that's the Walmart brand original anti septic mouthwash, the gold bottle be kind you buy at Walmart when you're giving, you're giving a couple of bucks on your EBT card and you can't afford a brand name.
And he would wave that around like.
A championship belt, a totem passport. Our guy mouthwash, Mike, who this guy has given us amazing stories. He tried to get us to go swim at the Bolagio fountains. He swims there like it's his private country club.
We are not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to swim. I do it anyway. What are they gonna do? They're gonna come drag me out of the water.
So he does that right, swimming at the Bolagio founds, and he'll scale the fence over at Caesar's Palace like Spider Man, spider Many man after a three day bender.
So does this sound tragic? Yes?
Yes, a man who is addicted to the Walmart Equate original anti separtic mouthwash does not sound good.
Does it sound comic? Yes, it does.
And in the dissonance of this is kind of a whole point. Mike mouthwash. Mike is a character on an overnight radio show. That is what he is, and in many ways he is, whether you want to admit it or not, part of the show's mythology. Now, and this is not new, and some of you are new to the show, and God bless you for joining us.
Thank God for that. But those of you that have been with me a long.
Time, sports radio, especially overnight sports talk radio, has always been fueled by the bazaar, but in my era of sports radio by what I'd call booze infested poets. Booze infested poets, Benny's booze infested poets. These are some of the most important people that have helped prop me up, put me on a pedestal legends like the Great Genie in Medford, Jimmy Ray from Tampa Bay beer drinking Brian Moonshine, Mark you can build a wing in the Hall of
Fame of radio callers for these people. Now, some of you know who these people are. Genie Metford was a very big star. She's been gone for a number of years. Jimmy Ray from Tampa Bay beer drinking, Brian Moonshine Mark, all important names. All of them important names, right, And they all lived on the fringes of society that they would thrive at two or three in the morning on the phone to the Ben Maller Show. That was their Broadway, that was their Carnegie Hall, that was their big stage.
And the thing is, you cannot manufacture this. I tell people, well, I have friends of mine. They're in the social media world. That's their only world. It's like, it's totally different than what I do. What I do is I can't It's different. It's a different skill set. You cannot manufacturers. You cannot program mouthwash mic into existence in chat GPT. He exists in the wild, in hospital emergency rooms, in jail cells, on sidewalks, sleeping in Las Vegas with a mouthful of
anti septic courage. Now, we don't use him any more than a lighthouse us as a shipwreck. We just shine a light and sometimes he sails into it.
I give out the number, and whoever calls calls, whoever calls calls.
If you're looking for dignity, right, it's there. It's not some kind of hallmark kind of dignity. Mouthwash Mic. He may be a mess, but he is authentic. Yeah, and that to me, that's important. We live in an era where everything is curated, staged and polished for likes and retweets and all that crap, and on some level in the multiverse, there's a certain nobility in that that he is the opposite of filtered. It is raw, unfiltered, unprocessed.
That's mouthwashed Mike. And we don't know how mike story.
Is going to end.
We don't know how mouthwashed Mike's story is going to ultimately end. And while I suspect it will not be a pretty ending and it's not going to go that well, that is not my role in this story. I am just doing a talk show and those that want to be part can be part. We have encouraged mouthwash Mic to get the proper help, and he has chosen to not listen to us. However, for now and however long this lasts, we're just going to enjoy it. Mouthwash Mike is part of our family. He's part of our chorus.
He's just another voice on the overnight opera. And that's what this is, right. The Mallard Militias a bunch of random people that have come together to provide entertainment to other people that would never call a radio show characters.
Some are louder than others.
Like Scream and Steven or Scream and Steve, and others are rather quiet, and a lot of you will never call the show. And like all the great characters who have wandered on to the stage on the Ben Maler Show before mouthwash Mike, he makes what we do bigger, stranger, fun, and just more alive. Because radio overnight radio kind of like mouthwash. It's not meant to be spit out. It's meant to be swallowed whole. Of course, I say mouthwash.
If your mouthwash, Mike, you swallow a hole. For most people, you're not supposed to swallow mouthwash. But what we do, you're just supposed to absorb and enjoy. All Right, On that note, we will get out. Hopefully Danny g will join me tomorrow for the mail Bag. Got a full day of college football today. We're looking forward to that. I will be perusing I got a lot going on today,
but I will be watching the college football. I will probably watch most of it on my phone as I will not be home today of some things I have to do. My presence has been requested at multiple events. Why, I couldn't tell you. I'm being dragged. But I will make the most of those events. We'll see where that where that ends up leading us, where that ends up leading us. But there are some interesting gambles we'll see.
I can't imagine arch Manning is going to have. That's an early game this morning here our time here on the West coast. But Texas plays San Jose State, which is a just what the doctor ordered the game for arch Manning to put up four touchdown passes and three hundred yards against the Spartans old Spartey of San Jose and San Jose State, and then Texas can get back on track.
In that game.
And then there's not too many really great matchups today. I guess Oklahoma State, which is not ranked, and Oregon that should be pretty good. That you know it is a big point spread, as a big point spread in that game, but you'd assume the position.
That you should get at least half a game.
From Oklahoma State, and then again, the big one wud be Michigan and Oklahoma a couple of blue bloods. That game not until tonight in beautiful Norman, Oklahoma, one of the great venues of college football. All Right, anyway, we'll watch all that, We'll deal with that at another time, mailbag tomorrow.
Have a great rest of your Saturday. And as Danny G would say, later skater or was that Austa pasta? Now? Yeah, and don't forget. Don't forget to follow Benny vs.
Penny at Benny Vspenny on YouTube at Benny Vspenny on YouTube.
Have a great day.
Gotta murder, I gotta go