Kabooms.
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 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 Mather and Danny G Radio a hap be Happy, Be Happy.
Saturday to you.
We are hanging out a college football Saturday. Thanksgiving upcoming and we got you covered. Danny G is producing this podcast. He will be with us for the mail Bag on Sunday, but you got just me today on this podcast. We have through the fog, zip codes and Pineapple Express, and we'll put all of those things together and we are going to make the Gabba Ghoul and the Baba Gnoose.
We're gonna make all that.
But we open up with this so the theater is open fun for all ages. Now, you have to understand something about the weeknight radio show Overnight Radio. It's not so much as a job. It's a form of time travel, which is really really kind of cool, really really kind of cool. So we sit alone in a little Sherman Oaks studio. It's two thirty in the morning, and there are no windows in the studio in now we have no windows.
The lights hume along.
There's a security guard in the building in the courtyard, somewhere in a galaxy far far away, acting like stephen A Smith watching an NBA Finals game, playing solitaire.
That's if you're lucky, by the way, Okay, if you're lucky.
The security guard is acting like stephen A and an NBA Finals game and he's playing solitaire. If you're not lucky, he's conducting his own sleep study while working. He's doing a sleep study while working. Now, the newsroom at the company is a ghost town. It's a ghost ship, okay, formally buzzing with life for years and years, but every year they keep laying people off and they don't replace them,
and so it's made it kind of depressing. Right, Maybe there's a leftover container of some orange chicken and some memory of a clip of a stay Awake with Jake back in the day, Jake the Great Jake Warner and out of the silence.
In our studio.
You start barking into these microphones and your voice gets shot out of satellites and into transmitters and out into the abyss, the great beyond, and you don't know where it lands. You don't know who catches it. And that's the magic of overnight radio. You're speaking to everyone who's among the living, and yet no one at the same time,
and that transmitter booming the voice. It might ricochet off a commercial truck in Barstow and then bounce into a casino surveillance room somewhere outside a Wheeling, West Virginia, at a little casino there. I don't even know if they have a casino in Wheeling, West Virginia. I just brought up Wheeling, West Virginia. We used to have a caller from Wheeling, West Virginia who was very annoying, and I
don't know if he's around anymore. Radio Rich or maybe that signal sneaks under a bedroom door and Dayton, Ohio at the exact moment someone woke up at three in the morning, they make a pit stop, and that's how it happens. Radio is discovered the way trains used to back in the day be seen through fok. Right, it's the same thing. You know, radio has discovered the way that trains used to be seen through fog. And that's how Ed from Dayton, who Ed from Dayton found us.
He said that the radio happened to be on one night and he got up to use the powder room, as they say on ht TV in Canada, HGTV in Canada, they say the powder room. Now, that is how all great romances begin in overnight talk radio. The creeping crud, indigestion, insomnia, you gotta go, and nobody beats the ways, you know, dumb luck, whatever that might be. So this week Ed Ed Ed Ed showed up in Los Angeles and he was saying in Pasadena, home of the Rose Bowl.
To be exact, now, fly no, he did not. Ed drove.
He took four days to drive nineteen hundred and twelve miles from Dayton, Ohio to Los Angeles. And he got to California and he was expecting that California sunshine, palm trees. Maybe he'd get a celebrity siding at Erwan, the overpriced trendy grocery store in southern California.
That's E. R.
Whon Home of the fifty Dollars Strawberry. Instead, Ed got rain. Now, not the serious biblical El Nino rain that we get every once in a while in the Golden State. Not the type that makes the local TV reporter send the camera person down and they stand dangerously close to the storm drain and tell you to.
Stay in your home.
No, this was the kind of mild rain that makes the SoCal basin act like they've entered the perfect storm. But really, you just need windshield wipers that work. That's all you need. Stay off the one oh one freeway. I didn't take the one oh one Freeway driving into work. I made sure I took the long way. I went about twenty miles out of my way because I did not want to deal with the water park that is
the one oh one Freeway. Still, listen, when you're from Ohio, you expect California to beat California, just like the brochure, you want paradise. Instead, Ed got puddles. Puddles and puddles and puddles and puddles. Anyway, he called it in the show one night, and first time ever I believe Ed's called the show and he asked, he said, listen, I'm in town. I'd love to come by and then stop stop by the studio. Now, this is a tricky little dance.
Back in the old days, as you know, we used to do studio business like it was the statue of liberty. Give us you're tired, you're poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free with Overnight Sports Radio. Then a gentleman named Mike the Leprechaun jumped onto the scene. And Mike the Leprekahn a harmless fellow, as harmless as a sunflower. He arrived some twelve hours early, covered in suntanned lotion
head to toe, and he scared management so much. How much he scared them so much that management is convinced that we are harboring radio fugitives on the Overnight show. So after that, there were several memos sent out. Thanks to Mike the Leprechaun, the rules got tightened from the corporate overlords of the people that pay my salary. Radio executives do not speak harmless. They don't understand. Hey, Mike just loves suntan lotion, he loves radio. He's a leprechaun.
Leave him alone. No, they speak legal liability, they speak legal liability. No more pop ins is the message. No unexpected mal or militia hello, none of that. But something about Ed just felt right. He said he had been a big fan for years. And I thought, you know, if I was a guy like Ed, and I loved radio, because I did love radio growing up before I gotten.
A ring, I loved man, the magic of it, the theater of it, the holy.
So if I were like Ed, and I happen to be in town, and I loved the radio show, and I wanted to see the show. So what I did is I said, listened, just email me, we'll figure something out. That's a radio host way when a radio host says, hey, email me, we'll figure something out.
That's a way of the host.
Saying I'm not really sure that I want to do this, but I want you to think that I might do it. So why don't you just send me an email and then I'll say, well, maybe I will do it. And we played a brief email tag game, and then I remembered something that sometimes sometimes in life it is okay to say yes. You can actually say yes, and it doesn't cost me anything. I'm doing the show. I'll be there at the studio. There's a slight level of risk. This is a total stranger. I don't know Ed. I've
never met Ed. I don't know anything about Ed from Ohio. I just know that he likes the show and he's a listener. ED might have a giant butcher knife. I want to chop me up in little pieces.
I don't know. However, I took a risk. I said, you know, listen, help this guy out.
It's a good mitzvah, a little kind thing and active kindness. So we set a time, and I held my breath, and sure enough Ed showed up on time, on time, a good Midwestern person, good Midwestern manners, not Minnesota nice because he's from Ohio. He's from Ohio, not Minnesota. And Ed stayed exactly thirty minutes. That's the allotted window. We now have only thirty minutes. We asked if he could take a photo for the social media, and we made sure to get permission. That's also a new rule that
we added recently. We had one person I will not name the woman, who once threatened to contact the state department and also sue me because we posted a benign, harmless selfie of the woman and she requested that we delete it and the whole thing. And so now we have to ask people to post photos on social media. So we've had a bit of tough luck on studio visits. I mean, it's not every day that you have someone in you take a photo, post it to promote them
and they want to sue you. It's also not every day that someone shows up twelve hours to the radio station twelve hours early, covered in suntan lotion. But here we are now Ed is not that person. Ed is not that person. Ed is not He was there just thirty minutes and we talked a little bit briefly about what made Ed tick. We talked about from Dayton Hall of Famer Dick from Dayton, the Babe Ruth of overnight callers.
Ed mentioned that he had become a fan he found our show when Clay Travis, the man who once hosted Mornings on Fox Sports Radio and now sits in one of the most significant shares in American broadcasting, the post Rush Limbaugh seat, which is a massive seat in broadcasting. And I was Clay Travis's lead in for a few years there, and Ed knew that he didn't forget that
and that's that right there. That is radio magic. The reason, as Paul Harvey would say the rest of the story, the reason that ed from Dayton, Ohio found the show is because of Clay Travis and because.
He had to go take a peepee. Yeah, he stayed because of something else entirely. But he happened to go to the bathroom. He woke up early and he had the radio on and it was our show, and he liked what he heard.
And he has continued to listen since that point in time. And so that's it. He stayed because of something else. Once you find a show that you like, and I'm the same way, I'm the same way. I'm not different than you. You find something you like. If you watched Benny Versus The Penny, there's a new episode up right now. In one of the episodes we've done this week, we talked about the Stardust Line, which I used to listen to as a kid every Sunday night from ten to midnight.
The Stardust Line. I loved it, absolutely loved it. The show really hit something with me and it just worked.
It worked.
So once you find a show that you like, it becomes part of your routine. It becomes part of your life. And that's why it's so important not to miss too much work when you do these kind of jobs, because unlike a podcast where you do one a week, and it's easy to do a podcast like I'm doing right here, it's very easy. Live radio just cuts a little different, just a little harder to do live talk radio.
And you have to be there. You have to be there. You have to do the dirty work, do.
The grunt work, and show up day after day, hour after hour. And the way I look at it, it's kind of like a sofa, not sufa stadium, which helmet Man calls sofi stadium. It's like a sofa that you have a sofa. You might not need that sofa. You might go a day or two without using the sofa. Maybe you go all week without using the sofa. However, you like the fact that the sofa is there because if you need the sofa, you can go on the sofa, and every once in a while you just want to
go back on that sofa. And maybe you love the sofa so much you go on there every day of the week because that's a very important sofa.
You want to do it.
You want to go on the sofa. Sometimes you don't, sometimes you don't.
And so there it was. And there are places you go.
Because they feed you, and there are places you go because they know you. It's like it becomes part of your routine, you know, like a diner becomes part of a trucker's map for you boys that are on the road all the time. So I told that, listen are You're the backbone of the show. Not the callers, not the characters, not the podcast reviewers or the social media
warriors with fake avatars. No, no, no, the silent majority, the quiet ones, the ones who never text, the ones who never post anything, the ones who listen to the podcast while mowing the lawn on a Saturday morning, or live overnight while stocking at Kroger Aisle seven or making bullets at a factory in Missouri all night. Wink wink, nod nod. They rarely call, but they are always there.
They know every nickname, every catchphrase, all the characters that call the show, from Jed who Fled, to Marcel and everyone in which Justin and Cincinnati and Robbie the Mariner fan, mister nice Guy and no Stredinis.
And they know everybody.
They know who won Benny versus the Penny in Week seven of the twenty nineteen NFL season. I don't even know who won Benny versus the Penny in Week seven of the twenty nineteen NFL season. They are the reason the lights stay on at three in the morning, the silent majority, and they're the reason that radio still feels a little bit like magic presto.
Theater of the mind, they call.
It, and that's not I don't know if that's quite right theater in mind.
It's theater of connection.
It's all about connection, the theater of stumbling into and onto a voice in the night and deciding not to turn it off. And radio just again means a little more at night.
It just does.
You get paid more money during the day and people like you more and all that, but it just is more important at night.
It just is.
It just cuts a little different. And so when Ed was ready to leave the studio because we're getting close to the thirty minute mark, it was kind of a rainy week, as we said, you know, not hard, just enough to make the street lights glow a little bit.
And I escorted Ed.
From Dayton out of the building and we took our photo walked him out and all that waved goodbye, and back into the studio I went. And then the fan was spinning, the control board was humming, the buttons were flashing.
The clock said really late, really late.
And somewhere out there heading back to Pasadena, a guy from Dayton, Ohio now knew what the studio looked like, what we look like. The voice in the dark and.
The other are actually real people. Hear human beings.
And you know a little little diner in the night with the seat belt yourself or seat yourself down.
You have to wear a seatbelt, you can seat yourself and all that. Now, isn't that something that's overnight radio.
You talk to strangers long enough and some of the strangers become friends.
You never see them, yet they're your friends. You're just weird for.
The midnight travelers. We'll leave the light on for you, kind of like that hotel. Meanwhile, turning the page on that it is a college football Saturday today. You will not see Old Miss be playing on television.
No, Old Miss.
They play the day after Thanksgiving game against their blood rival Old Miss versus Mississippi State.
So I bring this up.
There are reports now we're doing this early on a Saturday, the twenty second day of November, that there are reports here that came down overnight that said that Lane Kiffin has been offered a record tying amount of money to leave Miss for SEC rival LSU in a major college football story. It's not done yet as we are rolling on this podcast, but the coaching carousel going round and round and round and round and round. So the question for the esteem panel, what is Lane Kiffen going to do?
Report is he hasn't decided yet, but he's been offered a record tying amount of money. So what does old Miss coach Lane Kiffin do? That is the question. What is the answer. So he is going to do what Lane Kiffen always does. He's going to pack up the suitcase and fire up the Hobo Express and many mana many mane may This is not a hard decision. Lane Kiffen was born to wonder. He's in a football family. Monte Kiffen, the old the late coach, his dad football lifer,
and Lane Kiffin inherited that it's the family business. He's a football carpetbagger, an opportunist, a traveling pigskin salesman. Most of these college coaches, if they're any good, they're like modern day snake oil hustlers.
They're snake oil husters.
They show up, crank up the hype machine, grab the bag, and yodel out of town before the paint trials. Seven years, ninety million dollars is the report that LSU has offered their head coach their next head coach. They hope Lane Kiffin. Keep in mind, they're gonna pay Brian Kelly the payout. They got a lot of payout money they're paying, and now they want this guy ninety million dollars plus twenty five million dollars salary cap in nil money every year.
So what's he gonna do. You don't reject a winning lottery ticket. You hop to the lottery office and you say, okay, let's cash this thing, and you wave goodbye to Mississippi. You say bye bye, We'll be back to see you in a little bit. And old miss was never ever going to be the final destination. The last supper for Lane kifvin Oxford, Mississippi is essentially a BUCkies on the coaching road trip map. I think Kiffin will go to
Baton Rouge or somewhere like it. Would go with Baton Ruge, win some games, and in four years from now he'll be on the sidelines deciding whether or not he wants to leave to go back to USC again or coach dot Dallas Gabbars. You see Lane Kiffin if he were a stock, high volatility, high volatility, good.
For day trading only. Now.
The only thing that worries me, and this is I have no skin in the game. I'm not an old miss fan. I'm not like numb nuts. Brian Finley, fer Dog's friend, I'm not like him. He's a huge old Miss fan. Family goes there, Family's been there. I'm not like that. I'm not certainly not an LSU fan. Although I've dealt with some people in Baton Rouge. The great Dale Brown, the LSU's basketball coach, did some shows for Fox Sports Radio, and Chris Landry, the Fox football scout
at one point lived in Baton Rouge and whatnot. So I have no skin in the game on that the only thing that does concern me. The internet has been buzzing here that the reason LSU is able to come up with this kind of money, it is all the brain child behind the guy who created raising Canes who's a huge fan of LSU football. His money is involved.
Is it true? If indeed, if indeed the person behind the person behind the raising cans chicken fingers has cut a cartoon sized check in order to get Lane Kiffen to baton Rouge.
And it's that money.
If this goes the way it could, where the canniac combo now goes for thirty.
Five dollars, I'm out.
I am not financing LSU's defensive line push because I want some crinckled cut fries and some Texas toast. No, this is how college football works.
Though.
You buy a coach, you buy a roster, and you pray, you pray in the transfer portal. That is what this is right, that Lane Kifvin's already halfway to baton Rouge as we talk here early on this twenty second day of November. And this is subject to change based on what I know. Lane Kifven just hasn't officially gassed up the old U haul. And he's coaching like like you know, he's coaching like it's coaching like he doesn't have a home. He's a mentioned vagabond. Most of these big time coaches
don't have hometowns. They have zip codes with forwarding addresses. It's all about the zip code. You don't even know what zip code you're in.
You have no ID.
You just on the move, on the move again, you have no idea. You don't put down roots. There's no roots. You do not put down roots. Absolutely not no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, what.
Are you talking about? Put down roots? No? Never. Lane Kiffin is LSU.
Bound, baby LSU bound, And don't get too comfortable. That won't last. It certainly won't be his last stop, right, it will not be his last stop. He'll end up somewhere else. And you know whether that is you know, a couple of years we said, coaching USC or the Dallas.
Cowboys or whoever. He will be be somewhere else.
All right, now, the final part of this, I got several emails from people upset that I was not on the radio Friday night into Saturday because of the news out that the Lakers, who have been purchased by the Dodgers owner, they whacked a couple of the bus kids, not Genie, but a couple of the other bus kids.
They whacked them.
And now they brought in some Dodger executives as consultants. So that's the stories. Several of our guys in so Cow were like, I wondered what your take would be on this. So the question is how do the Lakers start operating more like the Dodgers?
Right?
More like the Dodgers here, Well, they've decided to bring in Dodger executives far Han Zaedi, who was the general manager of the Giants, Andrew Friedman, the longtime Dodger executive. They're doing this to start consulting on the Dodger Way. They want to bring the Lakers up to speed like the Dodgers. Zaedi is serving as the new right hand man for Mark Walter, his representative in the transition process.
So digging a little deeper, you got the dog your executives with Andrew Friedman far Han z Aedi helping consult the Lakers. Is this a good idea or a bad idea?
So my first thought is what are we doing here? Like? What are we doing?
This is sports cross pollination gone nuclear. The Dodger Way, while it has been so successful, does not apply to the NBA on any level. It's like taking a pineapple expert, someone who has studied the pineapple and knows the point to pick the pineapple off the tree because it's so juicy and it's so wonderful. It's a real pineapple expert. And you take that person and you say, hey, can you go run the grape division? Well, no, I'm the pineapple person. I'm not the grape person. But we want
you to run the grape division. But I know, but I've spent my life becoming a pineapple expert. I don't know anything about Well, it doesn't matter. We want you because you're so good at pineapple, we want.
You to do grapes.
It's a different sport Lakers to Dodgers, obviously, different system, different economy, different clock, all of that.
Baseball is a marathon.
Basketball, in comparison, plays half about half as many games. Baseball is a is a marathon. Basketball is a sprint, and the salary cap much different. The draft value minor leagues. There's no real minor league in basketball. The G league doesn't really count. The roster turnover is not the same. Nothing overlaps nothing. It's like taking a carpenter and sticking him at Google headquarters and asking him to code.
You're really really.
Good, like just Josh and Cincinnati at redoing kitchens, like Josh is amazing. I've seen some of these photos just Josh post and like that guy's an artisan. Just Josh is an artist of redoing kitchenes the guys great. That doesn't mean I want him at Google getting him to code.
I don't know that that crosses over. I would say it does.
Not say hey, hey, just Josh, here's your mouse and a keyboard, big fella go nuts. Well, no, I would rather have a toolbox with some hammers and I'd like to have some saws in it. And I'd like, no, well, we didn't. We don't want that. We want you to do the code. But I'm not a code person. It's the consultants for the sake of consultantc thing.
It's corporate bureaucracy at its peak.
And let's have a let's have a meeting to schedule a meeting about future meetings. Who says, no, it'll hurt both teams. The Dodgers are finally, finally in the middle of this dynasty. It looked like they were going to go the wrong direction after they lost in twenty seventeen and again in twenty eighteen.
Although both the those teams they lost too cheated.
But the Dodgers now have turned this into essentially cookie cutter. They have the depth, they have the data, they have the durability, they have the flexibility of deferred contracts. The Lakers, they don't even need the help. It's a rigged deal. It's a rigged operation. If the Lakers ever get too bad, the NBA delivers them stars like Door Dash Shaq, Paw Gasol, the Luka Doncik gift wrapped trade from the Mavericks for some broken glass.
All of that, all of that.
The league has been a concierge, a bell hop like Joey the bellman for the Lakers for forty years. And if this new owner, Mark Walter, who's the Dodger guy, if he wants to feel smart by calling in the Dodger Way, congratulations, you just created sports bureacra. See jazz. There's no rhythm. There's no reason, there's no rhyme or reason. You don't get cross sports expertise. It doesn't happen. The
Colorado Rockies are trying to do it. They hired a guy that was a baseball guy who became a football guy and now is a baseball guy by again, baseball guy again, It's like, what are you doing? So is this a good idea? Hell to the no, Hell to the no. It's specialization malpractice. And that's the thing there, there's no one size fits all in sports. You dilute the Dodgers, well, who cares Andrew Freeman even consulting? This is the time you turn the players over and Andrew Freeman.
Last year he did not have this, and he still added some really terrible contracts, including for the year. It turned out long term not to be a problem. Michael Conforto and the single worst Dodger closer they've ever had, was a big addition the Dodgers made last season in the offseason. But this is the time you fix your roster and all that stuff. Also, I checked the NBA bylaws.
I don't believe you are allowed to defer the amount of money the Dodgers deferred for Otani and all of these other big additions they've made recently, So that would be a problem. You can't take that to the NBA. So congratulations though, to the new Lakers owner there. Who's the Dodgers owner? You just stepped on two rakes at once. Congratulations. So you dilute the Dodgers a little bit, and you don't really fix the Lakers, who again don't need to be fixed.
We'll get out on that.
On that note, have a wonderful rest of your Saturday here and the mail bag tomorrow. Danny g should be with me on the mail bag and we'll answer your questions.
You can email the.
Mail bag at Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com, Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com and keep it a little open ended, whether it gets in the mail bag tomorrow or or the following week, which I think will be our last November show.
I believe that's right.
I don't know how many days are in November, but a week from tomorrow it'll be November thirtieth, I believe.
I think that's accurate. I believe that would be accurate. I don't have the calendar in front of me anyway.
I have a great college football Saturday at USC and Notre Dame today.
I'm old school. I'm old school.
I'll check that out and some of the other nonsense. We'll talk to you next time later, skater my Folacia