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 sole fashion of fairness. He treats crackheads in the ghetto cutter the same as the rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Wow.
The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special. The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now.
In the air everyway in a very happy, happy, happy Sunday Sunday Sunday to you as we are chamouing on this glorious day here in NFL Sunday week number ten in the National Football League. And I will be in attendance at one of the games today. As we are doing this. I am in can City on National Vanilla Cupcake Day, very specific holidays. National Vanilla Cupcake Day a very important day, and also Sesame Street Day today, Danny. I know it was very important for both of us growing up Sesame Street.
And you are a big snuffle up a gift guy.
I am, I am. I love snuffle love gus big military weekend as Veterans Day is tomorrow, it's US Marine Corps Day today. It's also it's the Marine Corps birthday today, so there's a lot going on. And as far as the Malar meet and greet, which was yesterday, as we normally like to point out Danny on this podcast, now, I sent some stuff out on the socials yesterday at the landing over in Liberty.
So yeah, I saw pictures that looked like it was a good turnout.
Yeah. Yeah. I like to let this stuff breathe and kind of collect my thoughts. It's been a whirlwind this weekend, and in just a few minutes.
They the real reason is you want content for next weekend's podcast.
Exactly, And I'm saving content. I know Terry and England loves that. He always likes to point that out, how great it is. Always looks forward to me saving content for the following week. But yeah, so we'll have, you know, have some of the stories and I'll have more stories. Today. I'm going to the Chiefs game. They're playing the Broncos this afternoon at Arrowhead and I will be tailgating the tailgating. Danny begins, the gates open. I think it's seven thirty
this morning, the gates open. So I again, no sleep, but I'm fine, you know, I'm having a good time. I'm having fun. Everyone's been very nice here since I got to town, and I'm just enjoying a rare and appropriate weekend away because I normally do not travel at all, especially since I've started doing the TV show the last couple of years during football season, don't do it. But I made the exception, so I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it. Today. I am going to consume.
I'm not a big drinker, but I will be consuming large amounts of alcohol and barbecue today. That's the plan. At the game, we do have the mail bag. This is a mail bag podcast, Danny. But before we get to that, I wanted to do the Idiom of the week. Are you prepared for the idiom of the week?
The idiom of the week?
All right? This one came from p Air from Springfield, friend of Alf the Alien Opiner, and he said, how about cornering the market? Since I've heard that phrase. Wants to know about cornering the market? So for those of you in the back of the room, it's rather obvious, but maybe not. What does the raise corner of the market mean? Well, make a long story short, it essentially means in business. You've acquired enough of a company, like the shares of a company, to be able to manipulate
the price of the company. Hence the name. The market is backed into a corner where there is no room to move because you have cornered the market, and the corner is as old as trade itself. And this is crazy, though, I thought, well, this is probably a phrase from like the eighteen hundreds or something like that. No, no, it goes all the way back to a Greek mathematician, and I believe the name is Thales. I believe is that how you pronounced it? Dan, You're a big Greek guy, mathematician,
asked astro astronomer. Easier for me to say philosopher. And according to the legend, I think I just butt youered all this. But according to the legend Aristotle on you got that one right, Yeah, corner of the market on olive oil presses. And so this this goes back to ancient Greece and all that. And so this, this guy, the mathematician, was able to predict the upcoming large crop of olives, and he knew he'd done the math on this.
He figured it out the rudimentary numbers. He figured it out correctly and decided to make the best of it. He raised a small sum of money. He paid deposits for the whole of the olive presses, and you know, hire them these other people at low rent. And when the season arrived, there was a sudden demand for these olive presses and he made a ton of money. It
cornered the market. So the phrase cornered the market goes all the way up, all the way back to ancient Greece, and it involves Aristotle and then also a famed fellow Greek mathematician and philosopher who was involved with Aristotle. So for the idiom of the week, cornering the market, cornering the market.
Idea, I was going to learn something.
It's educational. It's a teachable moment.
Danny.
Let's get to the mailbag. What do you say you want to mail bag? We got the mail bag, right, it's this mail bag. Thank you very much, ohio Al, the legend that is the great ohio Al. And right to the mailbag we go. These are actual letters by actual listeners. You can send in your questions anytime. You can do it right now, you can do it tomorrow, you can do it the day after. I don't care. Just put mail bag or mail in the headline on the email that you send, and make sure to send
it to Real fifth hour at gmail dot com. That's Real fifth hour at gmail dot com. First one, Mike in Fullerton writes, and he says, hello, Ben and Danny, in response to Louis in Delaware's question from last week's mailbag. I don't know about masshole, Mickey, but I'm convinced that Alf and Ferddog are both AI chat box and they aren't even good bots of that. Everything they say on the show is stupid. According to Mike and Fullerton, even their names are stupid. Alf's spin off the air for
over thirty years. If I were you, Ben, I'd stop reading their tweets immediately. Not to go all third rail on you guys, but I'm curious how much election coverage you guys watched back on Tuesday. It worked out well that it was called a little before Ben's show came on the air. Mike says, so yeah, I'll go first. I was trying to find something to watch I get
ready for the show, and I usually watch basketball. There was no basketball, God forbid, the NBA plays an election night because their fans are they're so stupid they can't watch a game and vote, so they cancel all the game. So I ended up watching the Bruins and the Maple Leafs and the Kings in the wild. I was flipping back and forth. Those games were co inciting for a fair amount of time, for a fair amount of time.
But then after that ended, I did turn on the election coverage, and I had it on in the background, and I was putting monologues together, notes for monologues, and I'd look up every you know, every ten minutes or so and see what was going on. And I was flipping to the different news channels, and people were not we're not handling it very well. In some of those liberal outlets. They were freaking out. They were like, oh, you know, this is not right. They're like, well, there's
still time, you know. Not only but I did watch, and you know, it was I'm not a huge political guy, but I do enjoy the election coverage and the drama of it all. What about you, Danny.
I brought back a present from the airplane and getting home from Seattle. You ever have those flights where it messes up the pressure in your head Oh yeah, in your ears.
Yeah, I have terrible hearing. I mean my headphone and headphones have destroyed my earring. And yeah, I've got all kinds of issues.
Yeah, I wasn't feeling well. Not only was I coming off a busy weekend for work. When I got home, I just felt like I had been run over by a truck. So I was in bed Monday. I worked, but I went right back to sleep as soon as I got home. I did the same thing on Election Day and evening, so I'm laying in bed. I had
the coverage on. I was flipping around to see how the different channels were covering it, and I fell asleep, like in a kind of under the weather days where you hear things and you start having dreams about what you're hearing on the TV.
Oh yeah, you confuse dream land with reality.
Yeah, yes, yeah, that's what happened.
And in my dream, Donald Trump was calling the network again, and.
Buddy, that's right. You were friends with President Trump. That's right.
Eh, Yeah, he voted for me. Remember to get a raise?
Last question? Did you tell my producer Danny g that he deserved a raise when you called last time?
Absolutely? I said, you get the president, but you really do. You have a great show, and he's a nice guy. But I said, you get the president of the phone, you deserve a raise. I haven't done too many of these calls lately.
Now that he's president again, you should send him a letter and say, hey, by the way, Yeah, I think.
That the best he could do right now for broadcasters is to ask for us not to get laid off.
Yeah, exactly.
So I wake up out of the stupor, and it was perfect timing because they had just one of the networks had just called it. As I woke up, splashed some cold water on my face and brushed my teeth. Trump was going to come out for his speech, so I got to watch all of that unfold.
Good timing, way to go, and I didn't. I was hoping we would get a concession speech that night, but we did not, so I had to I did. I didn't. That happened while I was I was sleeping the next day, but it was. It was a wild night, man, just a wild couple of days because he had all the usual suspects before the election, like oh yeah, Trump's gonna lose blah blah blah blah blah, and then obviously that did not happen.
You fired.
Ron from Florida writes some of the mail bag. He says, Ben and Danny, how did you gen survive? Here would go again? A lot of political emails? My man third rail mo man. Ron says, how did you get you gen survive another? Election? Uh? Election cycle? So I I mean, we just talked about it, Ron, but it's pretty much just plug away, right, put one foot in front of the other, keep your head down, that kind of crap. And I did enjoy some of the insane stories that
we got from this election cycle. The two that I loved the most were a large number of people the day of the election who googled did Joe Biden drop out? On election Day? You talk about not having a clue, right you met it is the day of the election, and you're like, did Joe Biden drop out of the election? Well? How else? Why else would his name not be on the ballot? Dummy? So that was pretty amusing.
Those are the same people who ask you when is the Super Bowl? Oh?
Yeah, yeah, it's the same crowd. And then my other story, which I love and it's a great way to rip the younger generation, which we both love so much. It's
the number one pastime. Is this story that there were long delays in a lot of places because the younger voters, the eighteen plus voters that hadn't voted before eighteen, nineteen twenty, that didn't get to vote in the last presidential election, the younger voters did not know how to sign their name because they have not you know, they don't have
to do that anymore in school. And so they couldn't sign the voter registry because they had never written their name out, or they didn't know how to write their name out, and you have to sign. You have to sign your name when you go in.
They don't learn cursive yeah.
Exactly, exactly, that's what you said. It better than me. But so they didn't know how to sign their name in cursive writing, and so it became this whole to do and which is just perfect. You talk about the zeitgeist of the times, say, then, I get it. You know, you're on your phone all the time, you're on computers. You know, we're dinosaurs, Danny. We had to learn how to write with a pen and use a typewriter, not
a computer, a typewriter. But that's just so hilarious to me that at places across the country, from from Maine to Hawaii, the kids were like, I don't know, you want me to sign my name. I don't know what are I supposed to do? I just sign my name Kevin in Texas Rights And he says, Ben, you had said sarcastically on this podcast you do with Danny that you expected writing after the election, why didn't we get the mass looting Kevin from Texas? I think we covered
this earlier, Danny, But I am surprised. I thought that we would see I'm happy that we didn't. We saw more violence after the Dodgers won the World Series? Am I correct in saying that than we did after the presidential election? Which is surprising?
Control, wasn't it? Yeah?
And I think it's because the Weienioles and whoever else might have voted for Kamala. They were crying on their keyboards. I don't think they were going to go out and do anything in the streets.
Yeah, well, it's it's great. I mean, I'm obviously I love it. I think it's ridiculous burning stuff down because your favorite political hero didn't win. I think the whole thing's absurd, and it is a rather large upset that I didn't I haven't seen the numbers the last couple of days, but I at last I checked Trump. I don't think all the voting totals are even in yet, but Trump, I think he won the popular vote. He was winning the popular vote, which is now that is stunning.
That is that's a that's a bigger upset since remember one University Maryland, Baltimore County and Farley Dickinson, those sixteen seeds won in the NCAA tournament. Like that, that's like that big an upset to me, a sixteen seed beating a one that Trump ended up winning the popular vote.
So anyway, Mike and Iowa writes, and he says, Ben and Danny, do you think these celebrities and athletes like Lebron James are feeling like they failed because they endorsed the loser people did not list some of them and vote for their candidate in the presidential election. But there's a lot of political email this week day. It's almost like people are more concerned about the election than they are anything sporty. I guess, so, yeah, I don't. I don't think this is gonna what do you think that.
I don't think this is going to change how athletes approach this kind of stuff. I mean, my belief is when you reach a certain level of celebrity like lebron and to a lesser degree some of the Hollywood people, that you live in a different dimension. You're not in
the same world we're in. They're in a bubble and they're insulated from the real world and they live in a different universe, and they hang out with people who share their ideology and their dogma and all that, and and so they're convinced that they have all the power, and obviously they don't. Right otherwise, I mean, then the media, then the celebrities, the election would have come out differently.
Well, the celebrities can't relate to our day to day lives. I saw Beyonce posting stuff on social media and the first comment are underneath her post for Harris said, what the hell are you talking about? You haven't been to the grocery store in decades. You don't know what the hell's going out there, and you got paid ten million dollars to side with who you're siding with. I don't know if that checks out or not. That she got paid, But you know, I take it with a grain of salt.
Who cares what a rich celebrity says about politics?
Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm right there with you. And I'm at the point now I'm old enough, like I'm kind of grown up. I guess I still talk about sports for a living, but I'm kind of growing up. And I know what I like in life and what I don't like in life. And I know what I want to have happened and what I don't want to have happened. And I don't need Lebron James or anyone else for that matter to tell me. And I do think it's very pretentious. In fact, I saw I think
it was Aaron Rodgers this week. I did one of his paid interviews with Pat McAfee, and he was mocking the celebrity endorsements like Lebron and whatnot. And I think that's that's kind of where I am on it. Like I think we agree we're in lockstep when it comes to that. Oh me, since he Tommy writes in he says, uh, here Benny the Brazen and Danny Ganja the Wife and I finally tried raising canes this past weekend, and one
word sums it up. Amazing. Amazing is the word that since he Tommy said, whodos to you, gentlemen for speaking of the deliciousness that is raising canes. Tommy says, I told the girl at the pickup window that Ben Mahler sent us, and she said who who? I quickly explained to who you are, and she said she'd give your show a try. Just out there repping your show and packing my grill with amazing dummy chicken fingers. Have a
great day, gentleman. Who day from Sincy Tommy. The Bengals planned back, of course, on Thursday against the Baltimore Ravens. So there you go, Danny, we got a guy to go to Keynes. We should we should have Keynes as an advertiser or something like that. Come on, buy some spots on the podcast. All right, I want my chicken is one of those birds going.
Damn you?
All right, mass whole Mickey. He is next on the mail bag and he's he said he was riding this while he was waiting for the Boston Globe truck to arrive, and he always listens to our podcast, and he did confirm here massle Mickey Danny that if everything goes well and the TV show gets picked up that he knows people and I can end up going to Wooster, about a forty five minute trip west of Boston and throw out the first pitch at a at a minor league baseball and that'd be awesome.
You mean throw out one of your lollipop pitches.
Well, that's what you say, Danny, But listen, I am a veteran of the first pitch honors. It is a tremendous honor to throw out the first pitch, and I will put on a show. Well I bring back the lollipop curb. I don't know. Maybe I'll throw a knuckleball, Maybe I'll throw a fastball. Who knows. And Mickey also says there's a.
Great maybe you look like one of the neat Crow brothers. How dare you?
That is a cancel drop? So anyway, mass whole, Mickey says, there's a speak easy there. He says, it's a tell vernon where Babe Ruth used to drink during prohibition times. That's kind of cool, right, that's awesome. Go to a bar that Babe Ruth got hammered at during prohibition? Can you imagine they tried prohibition again today on like anything. How how ineffective that would be, right? I mean, the fact that they were able to do it for several
years when they did is rather crazy. But imagine you're.
Telling you what my telling you what my new job would be. I'd be a bootlegger.
Oh yeah, Well I heard stories when I was a kid, and maybe it was my grandparents making it up, but they lived through prohibition and in LA what they would do is they'd all go on to a boat and they'd go out into international waters and just get hammered. It was. It was a drinking boat because you couldn't drink legally here. But if you're out how many I think we've had this conversation before, But how many miles is international waters? It's a certain number of miles off
the coast. But you go out there and you're done. You're good. Do whatever you want, gamble, you can drink and do all kinds of debauchery out international waters. Alf from the future or is it the past? He says, gentlemen, did you ever envision a future in radio where you would be broadcasting remotely or producing for talent in a far away studio from weekend overnights to weekday overnight's, periscope,
videos to YouTube and all things in between. It's hard to believe that in the last twenty years how media has changed, especially since the invention of the smartphone and social media. So he says, alf, well, yeah, absolutely, it's insane. I remember when I was in my early days in radio and Mike Thompson was the boss. He came up to me and I was working local radio in LA.
We got covered up a lot by Dodger baseball and we were doing a show in the evening and the Dodgers played during the summer every night pretty much when we were on, so we weren't on very often. And my boss is like, listen, there's this thing we want to try to do. We're going to have you do your show, but it'll just be broadcast on the internet like a podcast. And we both looked at him like he was speaking Chinese, like you what are you Chinese? Russian? What is that? And he's like no, no, So we
didn't test it out. It's new technology, and at that time, everyone and their mother was listening to to the radio and nobody was listening to streaming music. I think at that time, maybe what was that what was that thing? The streaming service was just getting going? What was that music one? The Napster I think it was. Was it called Napster? I think that was it. Yeah, Napster, I think it was around that time, but it was it was still kind of a new thing and not everyone
was aware of it and was it legal? Is it not legal? And all that stuff. So we were like, you're nuts, what are you talking about? And we never actually ended up doing it, But now we have such a large aunt. The numbers on the Fox Sports radio channel on iHeart, which is the largest streaming service in America, if not the world. There are how many different channels are there on the iHeartRadio I don't know, like fifteen hundred or something like that.
Yeah, it's something like two thousand.
Two thousand, and Fox Sports Radio is in the top five every single time the ratings come out on iHeart, we're in the top five out of two thousand channels.
That is insane And that's why we haven't been laid off in radio yet.
Thank god, people are actually listening, which is great, and uh, you know what I I I love that. I was talking to some of the guys in the the I T Department, the social media team at Fox and and they were telling me that we knew very well on my show with people waking up in Europe and whether they don't know whether it's ex pats or people that they assume it's it's you know, ex Americans that you know,
former Americans that are living abroad. But when they wake up in the morning all over Europe, the numbers spike up on on my my show or for the the overnight, which is early morning in you know, in the UK. And I was like, well, that's kind of kind of bizarre, but I guess it makes sense if you're from the States and you just kind of want to get little taste of home. You'll turn on some sports talk and we're talking about all the bull crap that's going on
in American sports, and we're not talking about football. We're talking about football. You know.
It's Yeah, imagine hearing that heavy accent all day long. Turn your show on, and all of a sudden you hear weed man, hippie.
Yeah, weed man, angry Bill, Doc Mike, the whole trifecta. So, yeah, the industry is is nuts. I still haven't gotten over, Danny. We used to have when you did remotes, we had this thing called an ISDN line. It was a hard line, hardwired line, and it was very reliable and worked wonderfully. But now everything is pretty much done internet based, and I still don't trust it, don't. I can't get over that. It's my issue, Danny. I still don't trust them. I don't,
but everyone in the business. It's an industry standard now to use this Wi Fi, but I still don't trust it.
Dealt with that for a few days this past week with internet issues in the county that I live in. And I'm all so old enough in radio to remember when we did hard lines for the remotes. There was one radio station where the general manager had this whole system where there was like actual phone cable that was rolled up and we had to find a phone jack wherever we were broadcasting from the plug into.
Oh When I began, we would send out well, I did reports. We do the reports over landlines, and I like when I was a stringer at Dodger Stadium that all started and I would call up at every fifteen or twenty minutes or whatever and do an update from Dodger Stadium on a landline, and you know, it's like, who has a landline? I know nobody had a landlines. What are you talking about landline?
Here?
You lost your mind, you old man. All right, let's see your next one is from Stevo, he says, gentlemen, I saw a news story this week. Chaos had descended on a small town in South Carolina. He says. They were over forty monkeys broke free from a research facility. And I said, there's a large monkey breeder, one of the biggest in the entire world. It's based in South Carolina. Ben, I know you were in South Carolina not that long ago. What does this sound like to you? To me, it
sounds like a great documentary, is what it sounds like. Yeah, the same people that made The Lion King can make this right, or you know, the Tiger not the Lion King, the Tiger King. Can you imagine a documentary about the day that forty monkeys escape from a facility and like, where did they go? Ye doing?
When you were talking about that story, I couldn't help but picture Jerry Jones and his famous drop.
I am a monkey fan.
No, for sure. I think that's well, good for the monkeys. I'll tell you a funny story about I don't know if I've talked about this on the podcast or not, but I grew up in Orange County, in Irvine, in Orange County, SoCal and years and years ago from I think it was the Santa Ana Zoo in Orange County, there was a prison break of parrots, those exotic parrots.
I've heard this story before.
Yeah, maybe I'm the one that told you, But they escape from the Santa Ana Zoo and there was a jail break. They all got out, and there are now multiple generations of parrots flying around Orange County, California that are the second third generation of that original escape from from the zoo, and they've just they live in the area and they fly around and people that live there see them. They fly in the afternoons in the mornings,
and they fly in convoys around Orange County. Parrots, wild parrots that escaped from and every one of the animals in the zoo must look at those parrots and say, someday, that's going to be me. Right, someday, I'm going to escape the zoo and I'm going to be like those beautiful parrots when they make their way around all right. Last one on the mail bag. This one comes from David, who is in Vegas. He listens every every Sunday, loves the mail bag, or so he says, probably lying just
so i'd read this on the air. But David, good luck it worked, And he says, you guys, being in radio your entire career. I want to know what you thought about the story this week that the AI radio station turned out to be a complete disaster. So he sent me this. So this is from New York Times. A state funded radio show in Poland could not find
an audience, right, so they listen. You know, we're gonna do We're gonna experiment with AI hosts, and we're gonna have all AI Hosts're gonna try to appeal the younger listeners. You know, everyone wants that younger demo. They don't want that younger demo. So they went to AI AI generated gen z hosts and there was initially a little bit of an uptick, but eventually the results are in and it turns out it was a complete disaster and they
had great intentions. They painted the whole picture. This is really great. The future of media AI blah blah blah blah, blah, but yeah, I didn't. It turns out people actually like human beings talking to them and not AI bots, so it turned out to be a total debacle. And obviously, I mean, this guy knows, Danny. We're we're pro human that's a very controversial position. But we like human being
doing radio jobs and podcasting jobs. And I'm sure at some point we'll all lose our jobs to AI, but I'd like to think that we'll be long gone by that by the time that happened.
And even if something like that were to come to fruition in the future, if there are some broadcast owners that said, you know what, let's do away with the live people, they eventually I think would still have to bring them back then because broadcasting companies have tried this in the past and failed.
Let's just do all music.
Let's test that there were radio stations across the country that experimented with just playing music, kind of like what Pandora does nowadays. But Pandora is supposed to be without personalities, that's supposed to just be a playlist. Radio is the relatability. It is the warm feeling you get from feeling like
you're with a live human being. And that goes away, whether it's a robot AI recordings like VOICEO for stuff that some radio stations try to trick listeners with, like let me pre record something and pretend like it's live on an FM music radio station. The listeners can sniff that stuff out.
Oh yeah, more now than ever. I'm right there with you. And then the whole point, the advantage that we have in radio. I say this all the time, and we're twenty four hour shop. We never close is the fact that at any moment, if you're by yourself and you're driving on some deserted, dusty road down the Winnemucker Road, if you will, and there's nobody around, and you want to have a connection to another human being, if you turn on a radio show, you can hear other human
beings and you're not alone. On a podcast, like I mean, we're doing podcasts now, we can do this whenever, right, you know, of course this you know a week ago and you never know. But on live radio it's a much different communal experience.
Yeah.
So in fact, this is last week. We don't even know what happened in the election yet.
Yeah. In fact, we actually did this about three months ago and the joke's on you.
This doesn't have the number one station anymore.
Is it? All right? We'll get out on that. I am off tonight. I'm traveling back. I'm going to the Chiefs game today, and there were no flights that would get me back to LA in time to do the show. Believe it or not. The flight you have to stop. You have to stop again on the way back.
What a slacker? How dare you take a day off?
I know, but I'm taking the first flight out on Monday, and then I'll be back Monday and Tuesday on the radio show and probably be sleeping all day and all that. And Danny, what do you have going on?
There's like an apool person beside it and another one inside, and it has big guys that're looking at us.
Ben, look forward to a lot of conspiracy theories next week on the podcast, because Alex is going to fill in for me. What the wife and I decided to do was not go on that Christmas cruise. It wasn't in the cards. But our anniversary is coming up next weekend, so we are going to instead go out of town and celebrate our anniversary.
All right, Well, a happy anniversary to you. Danny and your wife, and hope you have a wonderful, wonderful time and thank you.
Oh the conspiracy from Alex. What do you think he's going to say about the election. I'm going to make a prediction. He's going to say, Ben, this is the last election that's ever going to happen in our country. It's going to be a royal family. He's going to say that. Watch mark my words.
Baron Trump will be the next president of the United States.
I bet you he's going to say something like that.
I can only I can only wait. So get your emails to the Vegan. Alex, the Vegan, the conspiracy theorist will be in next weekend with me for at least part of the weekend. Then Danny, I'll talk to you in a couple of weeks. Man, have a fun time and we'll talk to you on this podcast next weekend. And Daniel, I'll catch up with you next time you're on.
Thank you, brother. Aasta pasta gotta murder. I gotta go