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 to Clearinghouse of hot takes, break free for something special. The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now.
In the air everywhere. The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben Maller and Danny G. Radio A Happy Saturday. It is the twenty third day of August as I hang out here at a very early morning hour in Lost Wages, Nevada, and I have made some donations here to the local economy, which I guess is struggling everywhere I read on social media.
It's struggling in.
Danny G Radio holding down the ford in LaVita Loca in southern California. And we are reunited here on a very important day which we will get into in a minute. Danny, We've got Vegas Baby Donald derangement syndrome, but not what you think and Benny and the Boys. Now that has the makings of a very mediocre podcast. Danny but it'll be hopell me better than mediocre. We're hoping better than mediocre on the fifth hour today.
By the way, we are now less than two weeks away from the NFL season.
Yeah, college football beginning right. It was from college football. It's like a soft launch for college.
Football week zero. Right.
I was told like I on the Overnight show. I say, well, it's the zero hour, and then I said, well, no, that's it's our one. I said, well, no to me, it's the zero hour, and then Lorena would argue with me. I said, one, it's zero and she said, no, it's our one. It's not the zero hour. We got into that. But today's today, Danny. Today is today. It is launch day. It is blast off. We're on I'm the launching pad right now. This has become we we wanted to be
an annual pilgrimage. We think it's going to become that. This is year number two. The faithful, the curious, and the What the hell else am I going to do? I'm a middle aged person. It's a Saturday in Vegas. I got nothing else to do. That crowd will all descend upon the Stakeout Bar and Grill over near UNLV here in the desert this afternoon. It is the twenty twenty five Vegas Malor Meet and Greet, and it is on like a Donkey Kong video game, and I'm very
excited about that. People have been asking questions, Danny. We've you've been to some of these in the past. I've done a lot of them, and we promoted it a lot on the Overnight Show, and people have been asking questions like, why are you doing this, Why you're not getting paid to do this, why are you doing this? And to me, you're already missing the point. This is, as you know, we both fell in love with radio, Danny.
This is radio.
We're talking about the most intimate, most personal medium there is. And every once in a while, you sit alone right in the studio and you listening will you'll be alone. You'll lay in bed alone, maybe you've got insomnia. It might even be married. There might be somebody next to you, but they're sleeping, so you're pretty much alone. And you're driving alone, you're working at night, you're in your own
little world. You know, the voice in the dark that would be coming out of the magic radio box or whatever, And so every so often that voice in this case me, we decide to step out and as weed Man hit me calls of the magic radio box and see if the people on the other end of the speaker actually exist. Spoiler alert, Danny, they actually do.
They actually do. I know, Sap, you were waxing poetically.
I know a deep thoughts on the Fifth Hour podcast. Now, how many people are going to show up? This is another question I get a lot of, Danny. I have no idea. No one may show. We might just be there and that's it. Nobody will be there. I don't know, maybe five people, six people. There could be six hundred. I had a dream. I don't dream very often, Danny, but I had a dream the other day that it could be like six thousand, you know, and suddenly Clark
County's finest. We'll be asking who's this guy named slug who organized this flash mob at some bar near UNLV, Like, what is this all about? And that's uh, that's part of the charm, Danny. That's that's part of the charm. And there's no RSVPs, although some people of us know they're gonna be here. Like supermarket Steve Queen Rocks in Big lou He's on number two from the LBC. Some legends have announced they're going to be there, but as
far as I know, there's no bottle service. It's it's in many ways a democracy, right, It's you show up, and it's the silent majority, the people that listen but don't actually usually call the show and stuff like that.
And so the people that.
Will be there though salt of the earth and it's not some sanitized corporate networking mixer type deal.
Everyone's on their best behavior.
The way I would sum this up, and I want to get your thoughts on this, Danny, because the way I would sum up a malard meat green, I've talked about this. I don't do it often, but every once in a while I'll go out to Santa Anita here in Socow beautiful racetrack, and I'll look at the crowd and I'm always amazed by the crowd or a horse race, and I think we've gotten to that point with the Malard militia. It's a race track crowd and I love it.
I'm talking about rich guy, poor guy. You know here in Vegas is you know the whale that gambles a ton of money, and then right next to that person would be like some degenerate gambler and you know, somebody who lost all their money, but they still have a little bit left to buy Keno tickets or something like that.
And so to give you an example, last.
Year we had at the meet and greet we did, which was in August of twenty twenty four, we had an actual Bolaggio executive who was there, and ten minutes later a guy known as mouth Washed Mike, the homeless, lovable, possibly intoxicated, well definitely intoxicated guy. He showed up telling stories about he's from the Midwest, but he lives in Vegas.
Here, I don't know that he lives in Vegas.
He's homeless, and he was telling stories about swimming in the same Blaggio fountains from the you know, the executive that had been there and wanted me to go out and watch him swim. And and that's the that's the gist of it. It's like a racetrack crowd. So there'll be some really rich, successful people there and then there'll be other people who are not doing so well. And
I've never been to a Colin Cowherd appearance. I don't know that he does the is I doubt he does, But if he does, I'm guessing it's probably the same, unless it's not.
He's had events for the Volume, which is his podcast network. But yeah, but it's not. It's not usually for the listeners. It's for the industry. They're like industry parties, the VIP.
Yeahah, so this to me that the appeal is like the malor meet and read is unpredictable. We have done a lot of these. The one in Boston. We had Dave from Florida who drove all the way up just to hang out for an hour at the cask and flagging in Boston and you know whatever, thousand miles.
Whatever it was.
And then he had Roscoe the parrot, and I said, where's Roscoe. The parry says, don't worry, hold on, let me go to the car and get Roscoe. And then he walked back in and he held up very proudly Roscoe the parrot.
Who is a stuffed animal that was taxidermy or.
No, no, no stuff dni.
Yeah. No. It's a wide range of people, from lawyers to the people lawyers sometimes put away in jail.
Yeah, well, I'll give you exp what Eddie called into the show. A couple of days back, and he had mentioned that he had met a big fan of the Overnight Show, a gentleman named Sherwin. And Sherwin is a retired federal judge. That's like the that's pretty close to the top. You're a federal judge. You know, you're not Supreme Court judge, but you're a federal judge. And so it is really the wild wild West, and you don't
know who you're gonna meet. There'll be some big executives there, and then there'll be a truck driver from Bakersfield, and maybe there'll be some guy wearing an old clippers lamar odom jersey who just came back from the Bunny ranch. And you know, you don't want to really touch that guy's hands, you know, but yeah, you know, just hang out. And it's always fun too because I'm, as you know, Danny, I'm an introvert. I am not the most social person, so it is out of my comfort zone to do
these things. It is, and then a lot of the people will also be introverts that will show up today, and so it's it's always an awkward things like you always can tell the people in the back of the room that want to be there, but kind of don't want to be there, you know what I mean, Danny, You're like, yeah, I know, I want to. I'm a fan of the show, but I don't really like being around other people, and so I kind of I totally get that.
It's kind of like being a chaperone at a dance. A lot of a lot of the kids are too shy, so they're up against the wall and you have to like push them up against each other so they could really bump and grind.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. But then there's also there's a few people that are extroverts and swap spit and the extroverts one did there they want to be the star of the show.
Oh yeah, there's always somebody tap dancing.
Yeah yeah, there's always I mean, we had and I don't know if he's going to be be here in Vegas today. We had Surfer Todd, the comedian was great and he he came with his wife, a great couple of his fun people, total extroverts, you know, total extroverts. And then I hit our buddy from Knoxville, who's not gonna be able to make it. We had Tammy, who lives here in Vegas, but she's busy. She won't be
here today, so who knows. But it's gonna be fun, have a good time, and hopefully no one there Danny will be suffering from Donald derangement syndrome.
I'm hoping. I don't know though, maybe they will be. I have no idea.
Tag oh val yah.
Yeah. At the end of last Saturday's podcast, we gave big ups to mister k he knows some people. He knows some Disney folks. Yeah, Minnie Mouse, I think he used to date. Yeah. They don't like to talk about that, but yeah, yeah, he broke up the Happy Home with Mickey. So cool that I was able to get to bring the family to the park. We get inside and you know, the morning is great there because there's not the full on rush of people yet the weather is not you know, Anaheim, California.
When it says it's seventy four, it feels like ninety four there inside the park.
Yeah, there's a lot of concrete, there's a lot of asphalt.
And a lot of bodies. Yeah. And we started out by running over to Toontown. When you went to Disney, did you go on the railroad Mickey's railroad?
I did not I did not make it to Toontown. We mostly hung out around Pirates of the Caribbean in that area, and we went to the Star Wars thing a little bit. We didn't make it all the way back to Toontown.
How was it was? It? Was it all right? I think that's that new Mickey Mouse ride they do the old school cartoon. You're standing in front of the screen and then the train like crashes through the screen and there's real smoke that comes out, and CoA said, Wow, if CoA could curse, he would have said, holy shit. That was the tone in his voice. So he was blown away by that. And then we're walking through the rest of Toontown. My better half she sees the Donald
Dutt character walking through. Now, you know, and we've made fun of Disney adults before on the radio. These are grown men and women who stand in line and they make the lines impossible. These characters are there for the kids. They're not there. They shouldn't be there for the adults. I understand if you love Disneyland, and I like the park a lot, but I'm not gonna take a spot in the line to meet a character holding an autograph book. Yeah,
it's a little tough. Yeah, I've seen grown adults holding autograph books standing in the line, pushing little kids out of the way so that they could get one of the character's autographs. Yeah, well, what should be the cutoff on that, Danny? What do you think? Probably twelve years old? Okay, Now Brenda's fall Donald. She's holding CoA, so she has a reason to stalk Donald.
And again, for those that are new to the podcast, how old is Cole?
Again, He's very like a couple of years old? Right, he just had his second birthday a couple of weeks ago. I get a couple two years old. That's it just turned to. It's one of his favorite things to say. He holds up two bananas and he says two two, and I'm like, how old are you? And he says too. He sounds very Italian when he says it. Yeah, So Brenda is now stalking Donald Duck because she knows Donald is on his way to a signing or you know,
people take photos with him. They have these little spaces where they walk the character over and then they'll start forming the line. And there's the employees who are now trying to orchestrate everything of this rude family cuts in front of Brenda even though she's first. Ah, and now we have to wait for CoA to meet Donald Duck. Now he just turned too. He doesn't understand sharing yet.
He doesn't understand the concept of waiting for anything. The fact that these kids, these two kids in this family cut in front of him. He was super pissed off, to the point where he was screaming as if Donald Duck was murdering him with a knife. Got a murder. You should have saw the look on the employees' faces. And now these two little kids, they have autograph books. Okay, that's cool because they're the ones that are supposed to
have those books. Although I still don't understand that. Either you give your little kid an autograph book. I don't want Mickey Mouse's autograph or Mini's or any of those characters autographs, but whatever, these kids get the autograph. Meanwhile, I know you.
Want Danny's Walt Disney's autograph, but he's not available.
Yes, yeah, if you got his autograph, that would be magical and slightly creepy and cryptkeeper. Like CoA, he's not understanding why he has to wait, Like I see Donald Donald's right there, he's right in front of me. Give me, Donald Duck. Finally these little kids and they're taken forever. They move out of the way. We walk CoA over, and his tears they go away pretty fast because Donald Donald's like trying to calm him down. And I'm gonna
shoot you a picture right now. This is uh, this is when the crying stopped and CoA leaned over and gave Donald Duck a huge hug. All right, Oh man, look at that. That is joy right there.
That is uh, his face is buried and yeah, ah on Donald's armpit.
Is that's that's great? Yeah? Not the uh, not the most clean part of that costume right there to put your face in. By the way, what kind of job is that where you have to stand in one of those As I said, once the sun came out, it felt like one hundred degrees in the park. For those employees who wear those character costumes, do they get hazard pay? Yeah?
Well, I obviously they don't work that long, right, They take a lot of breaks. But I can only imagine what the smell must have been like when they took that thing off. I was I've told the story before, but years ago, when I was doing stuff for the Dodgers. We were in Milwaukee at the old County Stadium and I was walking It was a day game, the Brewer day game. We were walking around in the bowels of
County Stadium. We walked into a backroom and a friend of mine that showed me where the racing sausages uniforms were sausage race and they only wear those for like one half inning in between. I think it's the seventh inning where they the sausage race. And I went in there and I picked one of the costumes up and it smelled Danny like. It smelled like a hockey locker room, you know, terrible. It was foul. I can only in those Disney costumes. They were him every day, right NonStop. Man,
Oh look cool, cool. I'm seeing another photo here.
Yeah. I sent the one as he's parting ways with Donald and he says bye bye, and he said, thank you. That is great. That is outstanding. Many long day at the park. You do it for the kids. Your legs feel like jello. At the end of the night. We stayed all the way till midnight. We closed that bitch down because we knew we weren't going to be able to go back anytime soon, especially with all the kids together because now two of them are off to school.
So it was a beautiful, beautiful day. Again, thank you to circle K there. Yeah, man, yeah, And that's gonna be one of my longtime memories now, is how CoA just could not wait to get into Donald Duck's arms.
That's that photo of him, your your son who by the way, there's no debate, that's your son. Looks just like it just looks just dead wringer.
You know, I'll post that picture today at Danny G Radio on Twitter.
But that's you know, that's why you know you spend the money. Now, we had the the sugar daddy, uh you know a circle k who helped us out.
But that was that was That's great.
Man, That's an awesome photo him so very very cool and definitely Donald arrangement syndrome. And is it still I know it's been a few days, is co is still romanticizing Donald Duck? Have you have you shown him like Donald Duck cartoons on the phone?
Have you pulled out some old yeah, you know what he's been doing the past week now. He pulled out all of his Disney stuffed animals that he has, and he's been lining them up and he's been carrying the Donald around by itself, like to the high chair, to the to the bath. And now that Donald Duck is on his hip. That's awesome. And you know he feels like he knows him. Now. Oh yeah, we were tight, you know, hell yeah, you know that's my dog, the boy.
I heard that, my duck. That's my duck, my duckh that's great.
Uh So turning the page on that though, as as you know, uh any, we text now and again, we keep in content. We do the podcast every weekend and you listening as a p one last weekend took an extended elongated couple of days and went on a little roady. And here's the thing though, I bring this up from time to time when you live in southern California, like we do the show from Southern California, live here, your road trips, stay in California, like the state is too big.
It's you know, I realized, I'm doing this from Vegas, which is like a suburb of LA but it really is the Hotel California. You can check out anytime, but you can never leave. And we packed up the station wagon. The otherwise knows the malormobile. We went full I'm gonna date myself full heule Houser in search of California's goal. That's a dated reference, but this guy was a legend on PBS many years ago.
Rest in peace, fuel Houser. And so we hit the road.
This was the last I guess the Thursday prior Thursday prior, and was we went right into the buzzsaw, right into the bus. So that is Los Angeles traffic. And if you're the type who loves what I call the Big three, Danny, I call it the Big three. I call it gridlock, congestion, and smog, this was your paradise. And so I'm the driver who I'm in the big chair, and I'm driving. The wife is the navigator, not that you really need a navigator, but you're trying to avoid the traffic, so
you have the wife be the navigator. And I will not reveal her name, although the court systems may or may not list her as my spouse. So we were both running on fumes that were working overnight, and there was a tactical error that was made. Believe it or not, we were supposed to zig instead of zag and as a result of that tacnical error, which again I was the driver, I was not the navigator, so I'm not taking responsibility.
I'm blaming the wife.
Anyway, we ended upright in the belly of the beast on the four to five freeway at the worst possible time. Bumper to bumper to bumper to bumper, cars stacked up like dominoes and who goofed. I've got to know, on the four h five freeway a place you don't want to be. And then serendipity, sirens, flashing lights, lights, red lights and blue lights spinning around. Now, my wife spotted it first because I was in a traffic days and way off in the distance.
What's going on?
And she said, is that a funeral procession? You see all those lights up there, Maybe that's the royal family. And I kind of turned my head and I looked out in the distance and I saw, you know, I moved my neck a little bit. I saw there were multiple California Highway Patrol motorcycles, and then there was a bus, and then there was another bus, and then there were there was not three buses, and there weren't four.
There was I think there was five or six.
It was a fleet of buses, all of them in perfect military style formation, surrounded by a brigade of cops a motorcade.
Yeah yeah yeah.
And so at first I thought, well, maybe that's Lance the bus driver doing the tributes, because you knew I was leaving town. And then I realized, well, he's in San Francisco, and said, well, maybe that's Roberto of a bus driver. And then no, Roberto drives up. He's driving school. And then I thought, well, maybe that's Mason the bus driver, and he said no, he's in he's in the Bay Area.
Uh.
And I saw it and it was just like a just like a song. I saw the sign Danny as we got closer, and it took a long time because we're in bumper to bumper traffic. We're on we're going northbound on the four oh five. This thing's coming southbound on the four oh five. We're in the kind of the West LA area, right around the ten Freeway, a little south of that, so I think that's West.
La and uh, where's driving?
And then I saw on the on the wind shield there was a little white placard on the first bus and it had a star on it. And it wasn't just any star. It's not the star of David. It was not Captain America's iconic you know shield star when that this was the star, the iconic logo of America's team, the Dallas Cowboys.
They were leaving Oxnard.
They trained in southern California up and ox starred and they were headinging camp.
Yeah.
Yeah, they were heading to lax to fly back to Dallas for a meaningless exhibition game. And this was not meaningless though, this was a moment.
Yea.
Even my wife, who as you know, you've you've met my wife a few times over the years. Yeah, yeah, well that's just Na. She does not have the sports gene. She's lacking the sports team. And even she recognized the Cowboys logo. That's how big they are, right, the Cowboys.
The Cowboys are beyond football, one of the biggest worldwide brands.
Yeah, I mean it's good there beyond football because they're really bad at football. They're pop culture. They're McDonald's, they're Nike there, you know, Costco, Taylor, Swift, Apple, all that stuff. Rolling the run and so I mean, well, care's your
traffic there on the out side of fur. But for me, Danny, it hit differently, and I for a second I paused, and I'm like, you know how many hours I've spent how many years of my life barking into a microphone about the Dallas Cowboys, waxing poetic about Jerry Jones fun Zone Carnival in Jerry's world, and Dak Prescott's ceiling or lack thereof, or Micah Parsons chasing ghosts, and the endless
soap opera that is the Dallas football team. And there they were, just a few feet away from me, surrounded by a concrete divider, and on those buses, surrounded by a fleet of police. Jerry's in there somewhere, Dak, Micah, Cede Lamb, the NEPO baby, Brian Schottenheimer. Frankly, you won't see a more gifted.
Passer, That's right.
And in many ways I was trying to circum size a mosquito, Danny, as I was thinking of all the cast of characters, Schottenheimer and all the rest there who I know will fill valuable talk radio real estate from now until the draft and beyond, Like ships passing in the smoggy La afternoon, Hayes there and right there, on one side, you had the Cowboys on the other side, just a struggling gas bag, and they were America's team, knowing that we'll meet again at the witching hour on
the radio, and so in honor of Hulhauser, Danny, that was California's gold right there. Well, I guess it's Texas's gold. But still there was a weird, serendipitous moment. So on that we'll get out, Danny. We got the mail bag. The meet and greet is this afternoon, three o'clock till five o'clock.
You should probably already know that.
You should already know that, and you might be listening to this after the meet and greet. So I hope it went well. And if it didn't go well, we'll pretend it did go well. So we'll get out on that. That's what I'm doing today, Danny. Anything else you want to promote here, anything you'd like to say and celebrate on this college football Saturday.
Last weekend was busy. This weekend, just gonna sit back and relax with some football, settle in just a little bit beautiful, all.
Right, heavy, wonderful rest you Saturday. We thank you for coming out today to the Malor Meet and Greet. We thank you if you thought about coming out to the Mallor Meet and get but didn't show up, but either way we'll have great stories to tell. We got the mail bag for you tomorrow and we'll talk to you then.
Have fun at the meet and greet. Asta Pasta by Bend, some chicken fingers, What buy me my Felicious