The Fifth Hour: Package People on the Pitch

Now that the World Series is over, we don't have to sit here and wait for a game to end and then sleep and then go into the studio and I we don't have to worry about any of that stuff.

were there and I saw immediately turned it off. I said, I'm not watching this crap once and I saw Kendrick Perkins. I'm like, Okay, I'm good, I'm out, I'm done, to see you later, Bye bye and all that. Anyway, Yeah, so I did get fooled by I just assumed that they're on ESPN now, Barkley and Kenny Smith, so when there's an ESPN game, they'll be on a halftime No. No, what a sweetheart deal those guys got, right. I imagine

that they get paid all that money. They don't have to deal with the ESPN bull crap, and they I guess they don't have to work that much. It's good living the high life, right there.

is like the worst election. There was one thing on my ballot in California. One thing. One thing on the ballot, which is like, why drag everyone into vote if there's one thing on the ballot? But whatever, So I went to cast my ballot. And of course the big thing about voting, Danny is the sticker. See, that's that's the big Now I am an absentee voter. But what I like to do is I like to drop the ballot off. I like to drop the bat off. It makes me feel like I wait till election day. It makes me

feel like I've accomplished something. On election day, I don't bother sending it in. But so this time I didn't, you know, I got my stick or whatever, I go to drop the thing off. And when I went to park just off on the on there was a big field. There was a building we could vote, and then behind it was a park in the vast park lands of the north Woods. And something caught my eye off in the distance. There was there was a bit of movement,

there was some rhythm, so I knew it was. It was on the the field, the big fielding a football field. And what I kept walking out towards these guys and there was a group of young men, all of them wearing the same uniform, and they were darting up and down the pitch with with the with the football at their feet. Danny, all right, and so not the kind we like, not the not the the duke, the NFL football, the round kind, the soccer, the full on MESSI and all that stuff.

the road Warriors, the Amazon. They're all out on the grass, laughing and shouting and sprinting and running around and having a great time.

was pretty cool, Daddy. I was like, these guys are loving life. And they were there I didn't say the whole time. They were there well over at least an hour. And I don't think your breaks are that long on Amazon, I don't know. And these guys were really into it. You know, there's nothing quite like a good pickup game. I'm not a soccer guy, but I used to play

pick up football basketball back in the day. The midfield maestros out there and these guys, I'm telling you, Dany, they thought they were they were auditioning for the cover of FIFA twenty five or twenty six or whatever. They really into it, right, they were really into it. And uh, the imaginary defenders he had the goaltender. You know, it might as well have been these guys were playing for

Manchester City or Real Madrid or something like that. You know, I think those are the only two soccer teams I could name, but it was it was pretty cool. And so again I did laugh, though, Danny, because I thought there's somebody like you or my wife refreshing the Amazon app, and I like, the truck seems to be stopped, stopped at the park. I don't understand why. Part it makes no sense. And then then they can well, the package is delayed, the package is out for delivery is delayed.

So now, Danny, next time, if I if I were something on Amazon, I usually don't want much. My wife does. But if we don't get something right away, I'm just gonna go down the park and say, what do you got? You got my package?

that they didn't take off their uniforms. You'd think they might want to take off their Amazon shirts and just wear their T shirts underneath, but no, these the Amazon all Stars of the north Woods. I don't know who these guys are. I'll probably never see them again. I don't know. Maybe they'll hear this somehow I salute them. They'll probably never never hear about this. But I sat there and I was like, wow, this is cool. Man. These guys love soccer. I'm not a soccer guy, and

these guys are out there. Think about the coordination involved in that. Because these guys are they deliver they working at Amazon. They're not even though they're coworkers, Danny, They're not like side by side, you know what I mean. They're not driving by themselves. They're not with other people. So they had to coordinate and plan. Hey, let's meet at three o'clock at the north Woods Park.

your buy one, get one free. At the network, everybody was rocking extra Dodger gear that day, not surprisingly because as I say, and as you probably know by listening to the Fifth Hour radio, people love free food. So Sam the editors had on some Dodger blue and they were all set and ready to go get there buy one, get one free. I told my wife, I said, hey, when I get home, you know, i'll watch CoA. You go get a burrito bowl or vice versa. So I get home and he's kind of set in with her.

They're in the living room, and I told her it's all right, I'll go run down there and get two burrito bowls. I'm not gonna say that I don't see lots of Dodger fans in my neighborhood, because I do. I mean My next door neighbor is a big fan. There's even some car flats in our building. I see car flags on the freeway on my way into work. Obviously work with Dodger fans, but maybe this is a product of the World Series and back to back championships. There was I'm not kidding you, there was a line

wrapped around this damn building. There's a Panda Express next door to my Chipotle. Poor Panda. Yeah, they were blocking the entrance and exit to Panda Express. This line literally went into the parking lot. There had to have been fifty people in this line, all wearing Dodger gear. Wow. I looked at the line.

of there, even in an hour. That was a huge I haven't seen a line that long since I was at Disneyland.

a couple of instructors with them. It's almost like they're on a field trip.

get an autographed no way, not even free food. But you know there's somebody, Danny, some opportunistic person in the Greater LA area that started out when that promotion began on that Thursday and hit ten fifteen restaurants to get all the different food they could possibly get, and it's all in a freezer somewhere and they're gonna be eating like kings.

LA area. So I remember they had their first location and they announced the date it was going to open. So I was like, Okay, maybe i'll maybe I'll just go down there and i'll camp you know, camp out and get some free I figured they'd give like a free thing or something if you're first in line, and uh. And so I did contemplate it, and the night before the opening, I was like, let me drive down there,

see what's going on. I drove down there and there was already a line of people and I said, screw that. I'm not I'm not sitting there with those people. It was like it was like it wasn't even that late at night, Danny, and there were already people lined up online waiting for the morning after to get whatever free stuff they're going to get from the restaurant. But any other Dodger promotions we needed to know about, I guess

probably not. The World Series ended last weekend. Usually these guys all go away and all that stuff, and.

It was madness there. There was just a few shirts, all crumbled up in balls, all the same size, extra large, and the material of these shirts were junk for eighteen dollars and ninety nine cents hard pass.

blame the pandemic. But you play those win money while you play games on your phone. You know, they pop up and you're sitting online like you're at Costco or something. You're waiting to return the toaster oven that you bought that you don't need, and the ad pops up and it says, hey, real freak win real money, real cash. And if you play a few rounds of some you know, word puzzle or solitaire, whatever, you think, Okay, it's harmless.

It takes a few minutes a day. And then at some point, when you play these games where you win real money while you play, you realize that you have watched the same exact ad for some off brand TMU thing thirty seven times. You're now stuck in some kind of digital guantanamo Bay. And I bring this up because I saw a story this week that several of you idiots sent me involving stephen A Smith, and it triggered

my memory of my experience. Now Steve and A are former Morning guy who is now apparently the face of a Solitaire app, the World's Solitaire Championship. If you please saw that, you want to moment to process that. So this is all because steven A was so bored watching the Thunder and the Pacers in the NBA Finals that he was playing on his phone while the game was going on. Somebody recorded it and it became a viral thing. And so of course the World Solitaire Championship, not the

Super Bowl, not the not a charity bowling event. Solitaire, which I believe danny as an introvert, is a game design for people like me, introverted people who don't want

to talk to anyone. And yet this week the story came out stephen A had signed on as the official ambassador for the company behind it, the same company that now is being sued sued for allegedly rigging the Solitaire game, claiming it's a game of skill, when really, when you get to a higher level, you're going against unbeatable bots, unheatable box, and it reminded me of the famous Larry David commercial. I don't think so, I don't think so.

So the lawsuit I started diving into this, Danny, because I was like, oh, this is interesting. Here, this is crazy. So the lawsuit accuses the company behind the game, the folks behind the app, of creating unwinnable situations while advertising cash prizes. So think about that for a second. We've evolved from casino slot machines to slot machines in your pocket, wrapped in skill competition. And here we are. It's late twenty twenty five, and this is the new three card MONTI.

This is the new shell game on the corner, except this time the con man is the algorithm. And yet again it's the celebrity pitchman yelling about how you listen. I mean, I've I'm a stay at home mom with four kids, but I play Solitaire and I'm like five hundred dollars a week, you know? Is that kind of crap? And so I totally get why Steve Any would do it. He loves the bag, you know, He'll we'll all hore ourselves out. Steven a one of the great wars and

media advertising of all time. He's got dozens of side hustles, so he's all about it. Get that money while you can. At some point people are gonna hate steven A. Smith, so you might as well make the money. But here's the thing. To me, it's not even about steven A or the company. It's the it's a whole, this digital underworld that we're living in. I guess I'm the old guy crying and screaming at the crowds, clouds because it's it's the lawlessness of it. The frontier with push notifications,

a world it's like the wild Wild Western. We've seen it. Play for cash, win fifty dollars right now, no risk, you know, compete with real players and all this stuff. And then of course you're not competing with real people. You're competing with bots who never blink, Danny. They never go to the they never go to the bathroom, they don't take a lunch break. That the house isn't in Vegas anymore. It's inside your phone while well, you know,

you're sitting there. It's got a smiling avatar and it's you know, some its claims to be some woman from Michigan, and you know it I again I got hooked on one of these things years ago. I've talked about it long ago. I'm sure Lucky Tony's heard the podcast. It was many years ago and during the pandemic, and it promised me one hundred dollars. All I had was a word game. All I had to do was get to level one hundred. So I played a little bit every day.

I played before bed, i'd play a little bit after I woke up, and I made it. I made it to level ninety nine. I then got to level one hundred. Now you have to get past level one hundred. I played this game for months. I watched every effing ad everything, So I finally got there. I met the finish line. I've run the New York Marathon. I've gone twenty six point one miles. I got to go one more point

of a mile and I'm there. And I saw that glorious level one hundred thing flashing, and I started playing. And then I didn't win. So then I played again. I didn't win, and I kept playing, and I kept playing, and I kept playing. I never won. I never won. I kept seeing it. I never won. It turned out that I was the Mark Danny. I was the stool pigeon. I was the sucker. It was a total scam that I fell for. I was the rube, and I learned my lesson. I do play solitaire. I've played against some

of the people that listen to this podcast. A lot of you guys have quit playing Solitaire because I kicked your ass. That's fine, but they don't. They just put pop up ads on there and I don't who cares. I just put my phone down when the ad comes up, and then I picked the game back up. But we've seen this movie before. I mentioned Larry David. You remember Larry David, Shack, Tom Brady. I think Steph Curry was involved in that. The celebrity Mount Rushmore of bad crypto endorsements.

Remember that, Yeah, FTX and they said it was the future, and it turned out the future was bankruptcy. That that was the future. But at least FTX they gave us that great Larry David ad remember when he was questioning everything, every invention in history and I already used the line, but he said, I don't think so. And it was like supposed to be ironic. It ended up being accurate,

not ironic. What was iron It was accurate and so here comes stephen A shuffling digital cards promoting a game that may may have been stacked against everybody from the start. And it's the same story, new packaging, and you mix celebrity technology and then people that are looking for the quick fix, and it's like, there you go. And I picked those footballs out at that point, you know, to me,

they're perfect, exactly, they're very perfect. So, because I know I sound like a dinosaur here, Danny, I apologize, But you listen these kids on their phones, Danny, I just I look around and I see the stuff that we've seen here. And the thing about it, too, is there really are no watchdogs, like the people that are supposed to keep track of the stuff. I guess the FTC they're not going to keep up with ten thousand new

apps a month. And the app store is the homeland of the wild wild West, and there are no sheriffs. They laid off the sheriffs and all that stuff. So if the same company promised you a skill based stock market tomorrow, how about your half of America would download it and they wouldn't read the fine print and all that stuff and so, and they'll likely shut this thing down and then they'll move on to some other hustle and all that. So, hey, Steve and A got a check.

He triggered me, and you know he'll likely say, well, listen, I need the money. They are I didn't read the fine print whatever. But when the game's rigged and the players are bots, Okay, when the game's rigged the players at bots and all, it's not business. It's like a con dressed up with celebrity cologne and all that. So somewhere in the digital casino there the dealer just smiles, Hey, would you like a new deck? Would you like a new deck? Of of course, so there you go, Solitaire,

knock yourself out on that. All right, on that note, Danny, we will put the baby to bed for this Saturday. We will have the mail Bag on Sunday, actual questions by actual listeners. We want to send a question in for a future edition of the mail Bag, send it care of Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com. That's Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com, and we may use it on a future episode. I also want to thank all the people that sign up when I give

out the email, Danny. Many people think it's fun to put my email in accounts where I get a lot of spam email for all kinds of products that you can imagine the things that I get. I really do appreciate that that you love the podcast so much that you share my email address with people that just bomb me, carpet bomb me with spam email. It does mean a lot, Danny.

I might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but seriously, I do appreciate the fact that I get so much email that I have to sort through to find the people that actually ask questions. You know what I'm saying. All Right, have a great rest of your Saturday. We will yap with you tomorrow.