The Fifth Hour: Signed, Sealed, Delivered

we begin with this. So we are recording this live on digital tape, as we like to say, later than normal. And the reason that we are doing that is because Uncle Benny did not want to disturb his nieces that we're sleeping right next door to the remote studio where we do the overnight show from occasionally and also do this podcast. There is an adjacent bedroom which has a very thin wall with bad insulation, and that is where much of the audio magic comes from on this side

of the wall. We didn't want to disturb the people on the other side of the wall. As much as I wanted to get in here and bark early in the morning, would have caused a great disruption to the beauty sleep and did not want to upset my twenty something nieces. So nevertheless, here we are. Now the big news of the week. Well, I took a couple of again rare inappropriate days away from the radio show. There was no holdout, There was no hashtag, there was no drama,

there was no hostage video that was released. There was no I want to be traded to some other team that did not happen. No, just a pen, a paper, maybe some docu sign new a multi year deal, done the way things used to be done. Quietly. You know. I realized I am in the talk radio business and that we liked the contract holdout in pro football because

it's good for business. However, my business done on the down low, the DL, as we used to say, So we did not announce that there were extension talks going on on this podcast or the talk show. In fact, technically I was working without a contract for a couple of weeks. My contract had run out, so at that point I was a free agent, even though I was

still getting the microphone time at Fox Sports Radio. But we did not leak the news to a trusted source, not that there's many of those people left trusted sources. There was no campaign on the gram featuring my dog Moxie wearing a T shirt saying pay me. There was none of that. No, no, we signed this new multi year deal. We did it behind closed doors, under the cover of darkness, which, if you know the Malor brand over the years, that's about as on brand as it gets.

And so let's be honest here now, there was a point where we thought this would not be happening, where it all might come tumbling down like a wobbly Jenga tower tipping over and hitting the floor, pieces flying everywhere. So let's go back on the hot tub time machine to a sad moment on the history of the show and in a moment where at the time I was

at the very top I thought of the mountain. Let's go back to November mid November twenty twenty four, I had returned from a very brief trip to Cansa City, had returned from Kansas City after a VIP weekend. They rolled out the red carpet, had a penthouse, hotel room, the airfare, everything taken care of courtesy of the landing in Liberty, Missouri, the home of the Ben Mallard Chicken fingers and my friend Bob Fesco, the big morning star

at the fan in Cansa City. I went in there and you guys showed up from all over the Upper Midwest. We had people come down from Iowa, Nebraska, obviously Missouri where we were doing the broadcast Kansas which is right across the way there, and it was awesome. I had a great turnout. People were very kind. And then I got back and I walked into an audio bloodbath. The company had whacked the great Eddie Garcia steamboat. Willie, my longtime Update anchor, partner in crime after more than two

decades at Fox Sports Radio. That's it now. As you know, for all of us, the experience of you a listener me doing the show that was a major, major gut punch, the kind of sudden move that makes you realize yet again, how fragile these gigs really are, the fragility of the business that I have chosen my life's profession. You see, there was no golden watch that was handed out. There was no farewell tour. I don't like those anyway, just

a thanks for everything. It's not you, it's us. And then a vanishing act of Eddie that reminded everyone who's involved in the business that you're only secure until you're not. And listen, we have built a freakishly loyal cult audience, which hopefully you're part of. You're listening to the Fifth Hour podcast and I think you're in that. It's my opinion, but you're listening to the radio show and the Witching Hours. However you consume this stuff, it doesn't matter. Right, We

started to wonder if our number was next. My deal was up in the summer, just a couple of weeks ago, in July of twenty twenty five. So you do the math on that. You say, well, Eddie and Eddie got let go in November and then my deal is up, and okay, you put two and two together. You're like, well, this isn't good. That's not good. And if Eddie could go, I certainly could go. I'm not giving a lifetime contract

or anything like that. So one thing about getting into the industry at a pretty young age you learn at an early point in life that not only life is temporary, but the business you have chosen is temporary. This is not something that you normally do for a long time, certainly not in one place, which makes what has happened to me in my situation even more outrageous and more crazy and all that stuff. Radio, especially talk radio, does

not offer long term leases. It does not you You're always month to month, at best your month to month. And while these jobs are hard to get, they're even harder to keep. And if you manage to stick around, as I like to say, you age in dog years, a decade on the air is really like seventy seventy years on the air. Like the format shifts, the executives change. I have had in my time at Fox Sports Radio,

I think I've had three or four different bosses. If I did the math on that, yeah, I've had four bosses, four people that could have whacked me at any time. So I've had four executives that I've had to deal with. And then what ends up usually happening is it's not even the executives that you deal with. It's one day some middle manager from San Antonio tells you that your P one numbers are strong, but your P two numbers

are soft. The quarter hours just aren't really working out for us anymore, and suddenly you find yourself only doing a podcast, which listen, eventually, I will only do a podcast at some point. That is the way it's going to go. But the point is you're only doing a podcast, and then you're doing ads for a lawnmower blade replacement company. And that's fine. You try to avoid that as long as you can. And we survived for now all yet again and listen were locked in financially for a couple

of years to the company. And we're still calling the shots, still sitting in the catbird seat, the watch tower of the overnight, still commandeering the overnight airwaves, like the one man navy, writing the monologues, the bullet points of the monologues, putting the things together for the show as a one man op. But why do we enjoy those crazy nighttime hours? Because for all the pressure, capital pee pressure, the late night slot comes with something that no amount of drive

time Molah can buy you freedom. Freedom with a capital F. And we talk about this from time to time, But no one's breathing down my neck at three in the morning to get me to do something that they think needs to be done. Meaning there's no brand consultants that are yelling at you about your tone of that monologue or the pacing of that particular segment, or you left that guy Jed who fled on too long. She was

on the air for too long. There's no zoom calls filled with big buzzwords with things like synergy in platform adjacency. I don't even know what that means. Right, you don't have that. So those are all positive things. Those are all positive things. You don't have to deal with the rigamarar that a lot of those other shows have, where there's people in management that often feel the need to do something to justify their existence, which often means busy

body work. We don't have that. We don't have that. They've given me the freedom of the overnight to go in there and just get weird. Right, you get to be weird, you get to be real, get to talk with yes, you the listener, the audience. You don't have to talk at anyone. I don't have to talk at you. I don't have to sit like I'm on some mountaintop

that I'm better than you. And one thing you learn also is that the people listening at the hour where you should be sleep and nothing good happens after midnight, the phrase one or two in the morning, whatever it is. But the people that are listening, the insomniacs, the truckers, the security guards, the cops, the robbers, the fast food workers, the night owls, a few lost souls mixed in there. You're not flipping around, You're not hey, you're not dabbling,

You're locked in. You listen. Many of you listen for the entire four hours of the show, or you'll listen for an hour. Most people in daytime radio, you're lucky if you get them for seven or eight minutes. Very rare that they listen that long. And the difference also is you listen overnight and you call in, you become part of the show. You become a character on the show. I go out and do these meet and greets the

different towns. I've been all over the United States, from from Maine all the way to Seattle and all over South Carolina. We did one last year in Charleston, in southern California, all over the place. And always somebody will say, hey, what's so and so like, And it's a caller to the show. They're like, Hey, what's that person like? And so that's one of the reasons you don't leave something like this. And sure could I have jumped to a morning show somewhere or afternoon drive and made a lot

more money. Absolutely, I'm not getting rich doing this. I'm not and doing a zany show, a zoo show with goofy animal sound effects and giving away wads of cash, or a car wash in Temecula, you know, like I used to do at the mighty six ninety in San Diego back in the day. We could have taken this audience and tried to rebuild something somewhere else. Very difficult to recreate that. We've had opportunities over the years. I've been offered radio jobs in many cities, well three to

be exact, since I've been at Fox Sports Radio. But fun equals funds, right because radio at night, and we have preached the bully pulpit, from the bullie pulpit, this and I continue to say this radio at night just means more. It connects deeper, cuts deeper, It sticks in your soul longer. It builds community in a way that daylight radio cannot touch. It just can't. There's a lot more people awake during the day, but there's a lot of options, and people are busy and they're listening with

half an year. At night, there's less going on and you're more locked in. And that is why the Malard Militia as we've called it, thanks to Jahattis John and Michigan who came up with that name, the Malard Militia isn't just a catchy name. It's a movement, right, It's the movement is it's a small movement. It's a movement. Got a bunch of diehards across every time zone in

the United States. We have an international reach, but we've got people at truck stops and people listening during the day while I'm sleeping in office buildings who treat me like a friend in the room, not just some random voice in the box. What's in the box right? Not that? And what kind of bond? You don't throw that away for some tea time. I'm not even a golfer a golf once a year if I'm lucky. You don't throw that away for some tea time at nine or ten

in the morning, and then a What's trend segment? No, So we stayed. We stayed with Premiere Networks, which is still the top of the food chain in syndicated radio. There is no one that does it better than the Premiere Networks. And I recall them my younger days. I was like, that's the gold standard. You want to work in radio and you want to do syndicated radio, you work for a Premiere. They were called Premiere Radio Networks when I started. Now they're just called the Premiere Networks.

And then with Fox Sports Radio having started shortly after the network launched, and remember being on and only markets, the test markets. We were doing beta testing at Fox Sports Radio in the early days, and I was the first weekend overnight host on Fox Sports Radio. They were playing recorded programming overnight and they gave me the Friday and Saturday overnight shift. I was, I believe twenty five

years old or something like that. I got the overnight show at Fox Sports Radio on the weekends, and we were doing beta testing in Binghamton, New York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and there were a couple of other small markets, but we were only on in like four or five cities. To start Fox Sports Radio, we had to work out the kinks. We had to give the customer a product. At that time, ESPN Radio was the gold standard. Everyone had listened to that they were at the very top

of the food chain. And now you look all these years later, and Fox Sports Radio is the gold standard. It's been that way for years in national syndicated sports talk radio. And so they've given me this stage with a microphone, a moon, and a man on a mission. And so the audio penthouse stays occupied and the show we're not coasting along. We're evolving. We're getting bigger and louder and stranger and hopefully better. Of course you'll be the judge of that. So we may soon be entering

our year twenty five. Now I'm a little behind Fox Sports Radio. Fox Sports Radio's birthday is August twenty eighth, is when the network launched in two thousand. So I have to wait. I haven't done the math on this. I haven't done the math on this. I'm sure alf or ferg Dog or someone will do the math. So I'm six months in twenty six days. Actually seven months in twenty six days behind that because I started about a month after the network started, so I'm about eight

months behind. So I guess the summer. If my math is correct, the summer of twenty twenty six will be my twenty fifth anniversary at the company. But in talk radio terms, that's something like, you know, twenty five years is like eighty two and a half. I did the math on that. The legs still work, the voice still cuts decently, still cuts decently. Occasionally I get my vocal cord shredded from talking so much being a one man

act on the overnight. By the end of the show, some of you guys still laugh, some of you still enjoy the show. And more importantly, that red on air light that flashes outside the studio it still means something to me. I was raised on radio. My parents worked crazy hours. My mom ran her own business, and she'd always have the radio on. A little fat Benny would tag with my mom after school and she'd make her deliveries to post offices or whatever, and I was with her,

and she always had the radio on. It always meant a lot to her. She always would turn it up for certain segments on the radio. My dad was the same way, grew up listening to Art Bell through Coast to Coast late at night. But my mom, both of them loved, loved radio, and she would turn on in

the afternoon at five point thirty. There was a guy named Jim He who did a sports show in LA and she knew I liked sports, and so she turned that on and he had all these goofy sound effects and so I listened to that and I loved it. And there's just something magical about doing it live. Performing live the grid of the overnight, you don't get that same vibe. Not that I don't love doing the podcast, but you don't get that same vibe. And you don't

get many second acts in this business. You don't. And so we were able to secure a third or fourth. I don't even know what we're on now. So remember to turn out the lot. But the party's not over. The party's not over. And you leave that radio on and you download the podcast, you listen to that, you give us a good review, and you help keep this show going as long as we can go. And we'll just keep doing it and doing it and doing it

and doing it and doing it. And I have no plans on stopping as long as the health is good and life is great and I loved it. We've survived a freaking pandemic together. We can survive just about anything. Now, turning the page on that, you gotta check the inbox. What's in the box? You gotta check the inbox? So he announced your pronouns. He emailed me a few weeks back. His name Will Will the thrill from oh Glaholma, so he said HEREM. I almost didn't open the email. I

get inundated. This is a person named blind Scott who is one of my crazy friends. I've known Blind Scott since a man the early days. He was one of the original people that fell in love with the Overnight Show and his many service dogs. Now he can't have a service dog anyway. Scott and I go go way back, and he sends me literally hundreds of emails a week, and as a result, I have to like get rid of him, and it's hard to go through the email.

It's a whole flugezy thing. So I get this message from Will from Oklahoma, and as I said, I almost didn't open it, because you know, spam is everywhere other than blind Scott, and I am not in the market for some kind of malware by opening some email I don't recognize, or trying to have someone sell me a discounted timeshare or some off brand pharmaceutical products that will promise to regrow my hair. I'm good on that. I

have a nice hat collection. But something in the subject line caught my eye and I'm not sure what it was. I don't think he said longtime listener, first time visitor, although he could have said that. It turns out that Will wasn't just another overnight zombie. No, this was a card carrying member of the Malor militia, a real one, authenticated and essentially from before he was even a teenager. So he said he had been listening to the show since he was the tender age of twelve years old.

So at age twelve he found the show. Let that marinate in your brain for a second. For me, I was like, that kind of reminds me of me. I fell in love with radio around that age. I think I started listening. I was a little younger than Will, but right around that age, and I loved it. I loved. I was an introvert and the radio talked to me. It spoke to me, and I didn't have to deal with anyone. I didn't have to talk back to it. It just talked to me. And if I wanted it

to shut up, I just turned it off. It was wonderful. So I've always said, and I said this earlier thing dog years and all that. So using that analogy that we used earlier in this fifth Hour podcast, that would make this kid about sixty in radio terms. All right, So he grew up in southern California, my stomping grounds, and would sneak a transistor radio or probably a phone with the iHeart app. You know, I don't know, I'm old under the covers and listen to this overnight circus

that we've created. His dear old mom, he said, would scold him for staying up too late to listen to that gas bag. I don't know. His name might start with a B. Maybe that would be me, and hey, listen, I've been called worse. Now. Will told me sadly that his mom had recently passed away from cancer, and now, at twenty one years old, all grown up and married,

he was coming back to town. Wanted to visit the studio just to kind of hang out, and I gave you say thanks and all that, just to see the place where this odd little cult show is brewed, a nice warm brew every night. Like the bizarre stew of many hot sports takes and Mallard monologues, goofy sound effects, all the lunacy, all the nonsense, all the wacky callers, all of that. Now you should know that we've had a few bumps in the road with visitor requests. I

love opening our doors. I think that's the coolest thing. I still get a kick out of walking into the radio studio now again, I guess I'm getting old boomer, not a boomer. I just feel the energy. I feel the vibe of the microphones and all the legends that have worked in that building. We're in the old Rush Limbaugh,

Steve Harvey compound. Just amazing people in broadcasting, some of the greatest of all time, who entertained millions and millions of people, and they sat in those same studios, slaving away in the mic over the microphone. Casey Casem his old studio is down the hall. It's our podcast studio. Like this is just amazing, you know, the ghost of

that building, if they could talk. So I want to let you guys in, if your friends, if I know you from the show, and you're called in and see that's one of the things Will told me as a kid caller, and I had forgotten. But he went back to the iHeart archive and sent me the clip that Will had been a kid caller, that he'd fallen asleep as a little kid on the air, and I'd forgotten that, and Will sent me the audio and I kind of

refreshed my memories. There you go. So I was like, I kind of let this guy in, come on and so, but we did have some issues now with the visitor request. I don't want to name anyone. However, Mike Leprechaun, you know who you are, Mike. Mike gave us all a mild case of PTSD. I mentioned earlier in this podcast

that my contract was coming up in the summer. And about a month before the contract comes up, I get all these messages from management complaining that one of my rogue listeners had shown up into the building and violated the security protocol and you know, going nuts on me. So I say, oh boy, this is not good. So again a little bit of PTSD. We don't need to go in any more detail on that, but let's just

say you get burned once by Eleprecaun, you think twice. Still, something about Will's story felt genuine and felt authentic, and so we told him. I said, listen, I don't want to be a douche. You can stop by briefly. It's gonna be a long drive for you. If you're that motivated, you can do it. He said his uncle. His uncle was the guy who had indoctrinated him into the cult of the Overnight Sports Radio World when he was twelve years old. So we said, hey, listen, bring the uncle.

Just don't bring a posse, right, don't bring an overnight bag, don't bring a pillow. Don't show up at noon for the midnight visit, or you're going to get pepper sprayed. So Will was raised properly, not by wolves. His mom did a good job. So he followed our instructions. He showed up with Uncle Josh, polite, normal middle aged human being, not wearing a cape or asking to speak to the ghost of Genie and Medford or see if he could

channel Jimmy Ray from Tampa Bay. No he didn't. So we gave them a very brief walk behind the scenes tour. And I say very brief because it was in the middle of a stop set and I had to get back behind the microphone. Nothing glamorous unless you consider the stack of ancient show rundowns off to the side or some stale vending machine leftovers on the Smurf kitchen glamorous. So he met the crew. He and Josh met the crew, saw the magical on air light and the various buttons

and gadgets in the studio. We snapped a few photographs, We chatted for a couple of minutes, and then that's it, he laughed. That's it. That was the visit. It wasn't long, it was short. It was sweet. It did stick with me, though, because here's this kid, and he's not a kid anymore. He's all growing up. Who stayed up late with a cheap in my head, a cheap radio and just go with my version of the story and listen to me

ramble into the void of the darkness night. And now he's all grown, he's working the dreaded day shift in Oklahoma. He's still listening, still connected and granted he's a podcast guy. He told me he listens to the podcast, which is understandable. Nevertheless, still loyal and that's awesome. And people think no one listens to the overnight radio. Why did he do the Overnight show? They think it's the like a graveyard shift, a wasteland of insomniacs and weirdos yelling at the clouds.

And while we get a lot of that, we get a lot of the angry old guy like Jerome and Charleston who just calls up to complain about everything, and so some of that is true. Every once in a while, though, one of those weirdos turns out to be just a cute kid who's growing up and wants someone to listen to, something to listen to, and finds the show and it's a companion as a background soundtrack in this case to

his life. Now, did it make me feel a little bit, a little bit and a little like the godfather of this strange nocturnal family, the mal Or Militia that we have built up over the years. So to Will, thank you, pal, it was great to meet you. Will wants me to do a Malor meat greet in Oklahoma. I've been to Oklahoma City before. Now Will lives in a small town in Oklahoma and not in Oklahoma City. So if I do end up there, will I promise we'll do a

malor meat greet. But I did want to think you're not just for listening, but for reminding me yet again, why this thing we do in the middle of the night. Well, ninety nine point seven percent of the population of sleeping other than Alf and ferg Dog and mister nice guy and a few others still matters right now again, Will you got to get some sleep during the nighttime hours because you work the dreaded day shift. You've got a family to support. You're all married, So welcome to adulthood,

and thank you, thank you, thank you. Will and on that we will put the baby to bed. We'll have some new podcast all weekend and get you caught up on the schedule for next week as well. So thank

you for listening and supporting in the podcast. You can email me if you get this in by tonight, you can email me a question for the mail bag and send that in care of what that would be the Real Fifth Hour Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com and put name and city, name and city in the headline on that Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com, and your comments and questions we'll be read in the Sunday mail bag, but we'll have new pods all weekend.

Have a wonderful, wonderful rest your Friday. Thank you for allowing me to put this up a little bit later. It's an afternoon podcast on a Friday, but that's all good. That's all good, So we'll catch you out tomorrow and aloha all that wonderful stuff. And as Danny says later, skater now asta pasta, gotta murder, I gotta go