November 7, 2025 • 32 mins
Ben Maller (produced by Danny G.) has a great Friday for you! He talks: Bot Army Scam, Boujee Benny Car Seat Covers, A Ring of Fire, 101 Freeway Fourth Street Bridge Fire, & more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Cutbooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Mahler starts right now.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
In the air everywhere, The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben
Mahlor and Danny G Radio. And just like Muhammad Ali
said back in the day, on this podcast, we were
gonna float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Because,
as you know, this is just a benign podcast, the
Fifth Hour Podcast. It is in addition for the real
(00:50):
p ones of the Overnight Show during the week the
Ben Mahlor Show. You come in here, you hang out
with us on the podcast. But all things, as Ernest
Hemingway said, all things truly wicked, start from the innocence
of a weekend podcast. So you got me Ben, Danny
g is producing this podcast. He'll join me hopefully at
some point over the weekend. On this pod, We've got
(01:13):
growth hack, Bougie Benny and a Ring of Fire, and
these are never before told stories. You're only gonna hear
this content right here in the Fifth Hour. It is
a global exclusive. All the other broadcast companies want this content.
It's only available here for you. The competitive edge of
(01:35):
the Fifth Hour podcast right here. So we will not
waste any time and we will skid daddle into the
storytelling mode. So there was a point, and we're talking
about the media business, So there was a point in time,
long long ago when success. I'm gonna focus in on music.
(01:57):
Now you know, I'm not a music guy. I listened
to music, but I'm not music guy. Started out as
a DJ. I was a bad DJ. I have friends
that are very into music. But the point of the
story is when there was there was a period of
time when success in the media business was measured by
something tangible, meaning ticket sales or screaming fans, or maybe
(02:20):
some gold records on the wall, stuff like that. Now
here we are in twenty twenty five, and success comes
from a bunch of bots in a basement somewhere in
Moldova clicking repeat on a fake Drake song for twenty
three hours a day. Now I bring this up because
it's not show business. It's show fraud, is what that is.
(02:44):
According to a new lawsuit filed recently by rapper RBX,
as I understand it, the same RBX from the death
Row Records days. I had to look that up. So
get to the point, please, So Spotify, the mass CIV
media company Spotify, which is so popular or are they
(03:04):
their entire empire, according to this lawsuit, is built not
on rhythm, not on the melody of the music or art,
but on algorithms, phantom users, and artificially inflated stream counts.
It's not the music industry anymore. It's the metric industry.
You see now Spotify again, this is going to a lawsuit.
(03:27):
Spotify is letting fake streams flood their platform by the
billions with a B like ben billions billions each month.
Now why would they do that? I mean, no reason
would there unless there's a financial gain. Ding ding ding
ding ding ding ding. Yes, because it turns out the
(03:48):
fake plays are really sexy for the people on Wall
Street man, those people that do finances when they actually
deal with media companies, they don't seem to understand how
any of this works, which is somewhat troubling considering they
control the wealth of the United States. So because fake
(04:08):
people are listening to real music and it's fake plays,
they look good again for Wall Street and to advertisers
as well. The more streams that they can tout, the
higher rates they can charge for advertising. The shinier the
IPO is, the bigger the bonuses. It's the trickle down
(04:29):
economics from the bot. It's the oldest trick in the media.
Grift playbook, cook the books and then sell the sizzle.
Now your reminder, just so we don't get sued. You
can sue almost anyone for almost anything, and Spotify is
in a court case now defending themselves. The real question
(04:51):
isn't if you can sue, it's whether or not you
have a viable, winnable case. So turning the page on that.
If this lawsuit sounds familiar, caught my attention enough to
share it with you here on the podcast. If it
sounds familiar, it should. We have seen the same hustle.
I'm not talking about motown hustle. We've seen the same
(05:12):
hustle before. I've ranted here on these microphones in the
Fifth Hour Studio Fifth Hour Podcast Studio, That podcast downloads
are tremendous bullshit, you know, and now listen, we do
pretty well. I've not invested in that form, but once
you see what happens in a lot of these podcasts,
(05:32):
it's like, oh my god, oh my god, podcast downloads
that never existed. YouTube views inflated by bots. I've learned
that as I've gotten involved in YouTube, how bogus YouTube
is a lot of it. You've got TikTok stars. This
is my personal favorite tale, and we talked about this
in a previous episode of the Fifth Hour podcast. I
(05:52):
know Lucky Tony knows exactly what day we talked about it.
But TikTok stars, who are so popular, have millions of
people following them on TikTok and the people love their music.
Except they could not sell out a coffee shop if
they were giving away free coffee. Couldn't do it. Couldn't
do it. Now, real fans buy concert tickets. Bots do not. Okay,
(06:17):
real fans buy the concert tickets. The bots do not.
But these fake streams, if you believe this lawsuit, and
I'm leaning that way, help Spotify keep its stock price
inflated again Wall Street. They don't do the digging on that,
so the stock price is inflated and its artist payout
numbers conveniently are obscure, right, they're kind of hidding. The
(06:41):
company claims to pay musicians based on the share of
total streams. But if total streams, if those numbers are
people futzing around, If there's stuff with robotic repeats, I
don't know of Drake or any other top shelf act
that is part of the mainstream. The little guys get
(07:01):
pennies while the big dogs are raking monopoly money, and
everyone smiles and nods like this is the progress of
the music world and all that stuff. It's kind of like,
do you use a sports analogy, because plausibly, I don't
think the fifth Hours of Sports podcast, but the radio
show mostly is. So it's like baseball juicing the stats.
(07:24):
So everyone in twenty twenty six is going to a
bat four hundred, until you realize in order to get there,
in order to get to everyone batting four hundred, the
balls are made of cork, the fences are moved in
one hundred and fifty feet shorter, and all of a sudden,
everyone's hitting four hundred. Now, make no mistake, this is
the greatest con ever pulled in media, and that includes
(07:47):
in the past, we've had some Nielsen box futzing around
radio spins popular back in the day, those fake number
one on iTunes charts that exist for about eleven minutes. Now,
Spotify's entire ecosystem thrives on illusion. Right. They sell artists
(08:08):
on exposure, they sell advertisers on engagement, and they sell
investors on growth, all things that are very important in
the world of engagement. But in reality, if you read
this lawsuit, in reality, they're selling all of us a
ghost story. Oh spooky. Think of it like a musical
(08:28):
seance where the spirits are synthetic and the applause is
pre programmed. You'd think that this would absolutely outrage a
lot of people, specifically the people that are tasked to
regulate this kind of stuff, But it turns out that
is not the case. Silicon Valley long ago. The people
(08:51):
that run the tech world master the art of self
policing much like the government does, which is to say,
not policing at all. Every bot farm is treated like
a growth hack, every fake stream a data point in
user retention. They're not fixing it because it's not a bug.
(09:14):
It's the business model that they're going for. The lawsuit
calls out again, this is based on just what I
read the other day. The lawsuit calls out billions of
fraudulent streams. Again. I keep going back to that number.
It's amazing. I just trying to wrap my head around
a billion and billions and billions of fraudulent streams. However,
that number does not even capture the cultural decay, the
(09:38):
rot that this leads to. Right, you push, you push
this out in the world that we're in, and when
you cannot tell here's my point, When you cannot tell
what real anymore, When every chart, every ranking, every viral
(09:59):
hit is just a hologram, aren't you living in a
simulation at that point? And this is my argument about
the matrix and the Internet and all that stuff like
and who knows what's gonna happen with us? Lawsuit was Spotify.
They're not alone, Right, they're alone. It's just the latest
stop in the long digital funhouse. And up is down,
(10:21):
and right is left and black is white and bought
his fan And that's the way it is. You're not
listening to the music of the future, right, And this
is certainly not the future of music. You're listening to
a spreadsheet, humming to itself is what you're doing now.
Years ago, we used to mock. There was a group
(10:42):
called Milli Vanilli. You know, mock Milli Vanilli for lip syncing.
I told the story before that one of the members
of Milli Vanilli was a DJ at Kiss FM when
I got my start, one of my early jobs in radio,
and so I saw him doing a midday show, very
short show was before the day of voice tracking, so
we actually came in. Now the entire industry is lipsticking
(11:06):
to its own numbers. The bots have replaced the fan,
the data dashboards replace the DJ, and the accountants replaced
the artist. And just like that, Oof goes to magic
drag and authenticity has left the building. It's taken the
shortcut out of the building. Now, if this lawsuit gets traction, maybe, maybe,
(11:32):
just maybe we'll see someone holds some people accountable. Don't
hold your breath. When there's this much fake money swirling around,
No one wants to turn off the tap. If you
know what I'm saying, right, Why would anyone mess with this?
Everyone's making money, money, money, money, money, money. Bottom line
(11:53):
though the music industry, and I know I do sports
and spoken words. But the music industry didn't just sell
its soul to the algorithm. It rented it out by
the stream. And the only ones dancing are the bots.
And there are billions of heart stopping bots that are
dancing and having a great thing and just wonderful, and
(12:16):
all the rest of us thunderheads over here like what
are we doing? Some serious god zukeri are turning the page.
So the maloromobile, I know you love stories about the malomobile.
You're nodding your head, Yes, I know. So the malomobile
is not just a mythical vehicle like the Batmobile or
the Scooby Van. No, no, no, the dream Machine van.
(12:38):
It is a companion in many ways. It is a
confessional booth. It's a war buddy, the radio wars. It
has been with me through more dead of the night
freeway drives than most people have seen sunrises, just has.
And while other people upgrade, and I live in a
place where you upgrade all the time. Other people up
(13:00):
grid their rides like phone models. Now you got to
get the new iPhone and all that we've stuck with
the old friend, battered, scarred, and more reliable than the
Dodger Bullpen in the regular season in July. This isn't
the showroom Queen, the Malamobile. It is a working class
(13:20):
vehicle that knows the exact on ramp rhythm of the
one oh one at three point forty three in the morning,
when the freeway's hum like a sleeping beast. The Malormobile
has seen a thing or two, so it knows a
(13:40):
thing or two. In many ways, it is a museum piece.
Not the fancy wing of the museum where the whispers
are there about impressionist art and all that stuff. The
other wing, the one where they show you the relics
from ordinary lives. The rotary phone, the transistor, AMF radio,
(14:01):
the baseball mint, that type of stuff, the lawnmower that
smells like summer. It's seen the Malomobile Los Angeles at
its emptiest and the rarest form of the city when
it feels like a ghost town. It's seen me shuffled in,
bleary eyed, armed with a bottle of caffeine pills and
(14:24):
a bunch of opinions about the type of pancakes Bill
Belichick likes to eat when he's in Chapel Hill hanging
out with Spacoli. Now it's it's waited patiently. The Malomobile
sits there, waiting for me in the parking garage at
the iHeartMedia Building, the Premiere Network Studios, home of Fox
Sports Radio. It is there like a loyal dog, engine
(14:47):
cooling its cracked leather, quietly testifying to the many years
of service. Unfortunately, as you know, nothing lasts forever. Time
is undefeated. Recently experienced the awkwardness of getting into the
Melamobile and sitting on the driver's seat. And this has
(15:09):
been my throne. This has been my throne for some time. Unfortunately,
the throne started cracking. The driver's seat. The leather on
the driver's seat started cracking. And I'm not talking about
a small little crack, no, no, no, This was the
kind of fissure that makes you say out loud, well
that is not good. That I'm telling you that is
(15:31):
not good. And then you start debating with yourself, like,
maybe it wasn't that bad. I'm just imagining it being
that bad. It probably wasn't that bad. But you say, well,
it's not good, you say it out loud, just talk
to yourself, no one in particular. And this was not
just a tear in leather. In many ways, it was
(15:52):
a wrinkle in time right. It was the first whisper
that this car, which had been a loyal foot soldier
for the radio show, the first whisper that the Maladmobile
was moving into the well loved classic chapter of its life.
And now now back in the dark ages when I
learned to drive and was enjoying my CD. Actually, when
(16:17):
I learned to drive, it was like cassette tapes, so
we had CD easy as well. But when I was
growing up, I would see cars that had seat covers.
Seat covers were a joke. They looked like something you
won from a claw machine at a carnival. They were ugly,
they were saggy. It was just a sad disguise to
(16:41):
cover up and paper over the cracks for a really
sad seat. And if if your car had seat covers
when I was a kid, it meant you were like
one car wash away from giving up entirely. However, to oh, no,
(17:03):
seat covers have become bougie. Yeah, so you can call
me bougie Benny. They really have the hug the seat
gets from the cover. They hug those things like their
tailored suits, and you can't even tell they're there, which
blows me away. And I don't know when that happened.
(17:27):
I wasn't paying attention. It may have happened years ago.
These are the boats of the automotive world. Subtle, their sly,
and they just speak to you. I've still got this.
I got some more life in me, these old bones,
this old warhorse has more more time. So we made
the leap, and we did it. We pulled the trigger.
(17:49):
A major upgrade to the Malemobile forced because of a
rip in the leather. New seat covers, not wheel not
new wheels. We didn't get new tires, not a new
sound system. We didn't spend seventy eighty ninety one hundred
thousand dollars on a status symbol. We didn't do that.
We didn't get massage seats, and we didn't get a
(18:09):
bigger display. It didn't go down to Best Buy and
buy a bunch of bells and whistles. No, what we
bought was just a simple seat cover, a simple act
of trying to preserve what we have, the kind of
thing you do when your car is not a disposable product,
(18:30):
but it's more of a relationship. So you see the
Malamobile has earned every scar. It's been in multiple accidents,
every freeway chip, every dog here from Moxie and the
late Great Bella embedded deep in the carpet and the
seats and all that. Every dent that comes out has
(18:50):
a story. You know, at the time, I was leaving
the Fox Sports Radio parking lot and I swung a
little too wide. Ding ding, Yeah, a little bit too
much there the time. You thought you could parallel park
like a champ, but you were a little tired, and
needless to say, it didn't go so well. A new
(19:10):
car would erase all of that. I'm not a historian.
I am not a historian, but a new car would
erase all of that history, all of it. And these
seat covers in many ways honor it. This is how
people who actually live a real life. And I'm assuming
you're like me as well. I do overnight radio. I'm
(19:31):
not getting rich, I'm not making Colin Coward money, so
I got to preserve what I have, and so this
is how we do it. You know. It's like, hey,
not just driving the car. You're not doing that. You
treat the ride the way it needs to be treated,
and you do a little patch over here, a little
spackle over there, and you keep the thing going. It's
(19:53):
a little malor meatball surgery on four wheels and the malomobile.
We're not replacing the malamobile. We're not. It's just being refreshed, revived,
that kind of thing, right. And so this is how
people who again are partaking in this, you know, late
night radio thing. Every late night radio shift begins and
(20:14):
ends on that driver's seat. It's the malormobile that warms
up while the rest of LA cools down or in
some ways burns more in that a minute. But it's
the malormobile, the iconic malomobile, that gets gets you to
the studio through those graveyard hours and some sometimes during
(20:35):
the day. We don't like to talk about that. Sometimes
have to go out during the day and get your
home though, before the world wakes up, and the seat
covers are more than full leather. They are. They're a statement.
They're a middle finger to the depreciation value of automobiles,
a quiet rebellion, if you will, against the very idea
(20:55):
that everything must be replaced the minute it shows any
kind of where the world sports stadiums the worst is
sports stadiums and I've not been to Europe. I'm gonna
get there at some point. And some of these stadiums
on the pitch are from the eighteen hundreds. I think
there's one that's even older than that, believe it or not.
(21:16):
But they've been around, been around a long time, and
they don't get rid of them. They don't here we
get rid of stuff. And so yes, the math Andmobile
has seen better days, better days, but it has also
seen a lot of days, and that does matter. We're
not just driving to work. Spent a lot of time
in the Malamobile from the north Woods. We're driving a timeline. Now.
(21:36):
Some of you guys I know, like JT the Wingman.
Some of you guys are in your car all the time,
Truck or Joe. All you guys a rolling archive, moving
man Matt in Boston, a museum piece that still punches
the clock. And now now it's become because of the
improvements of technology, a bougie seat cover. It looks just
(21:58):
a little more dignified doing it. And the truth is
a new car might ride smoother, would get better gas mileage.
It would also cost one hundred thousand dollars or whatever.
These cars are insane and in fact, I'm not gonna
get any more new cars. I think I've told that
story before. I'm going used, pre owned, whatever you want
to say. Certified, pre owned is the way to go
(22:19):
on that. If I do get a new car, the
car I got to teach the car. It wouldn't know
the rhythm of the overnight, it wouldn't understand me. So
the maloromobile rolls on. It's still scrappy, it's still scarred.
Just got a nice new suit covering it up. One
other thing I wanted to mention, and the naked city burns.
(22:42):
So again a story about me coming and going to work.
So driving back to the north Woods in the aforementioned
malomobile is like slipping through a portal, a dimension, a
parallel dimension. Overnight commute to Bizarrow and I just like
(23:03):
to share these crazy stories that happen when I'm driving home,
because it's there's no one with me, everyone's sleeping, it's
just me and the road. And there's something about Los
Angeles at night that just hits different. It just does
the daytime version. If you, I know most of you
aren't in LA, but if you've ever been to La,
the daytime version is this manic dreamscape of Tesla's and
(23:27):
juice bars and tofu salads and kale fueled optimism and
all that. And then after midnight, after midnight, the mass
goes away. And when you go further and further into
the night, the city of Angels, which is really the
city of Dodgers, becomes a mood piece. It's smoky, it's cinematic,
(23:49):
it's slightly surreal. So I do this drive often. I
talk a lot about my commute, winding from the Sherman
Oaks Studios just down the hill from bel Air, through
the labyrinth of freeways, the maze that that is always
the same mission. Avoid two things I try to avoid.
(24:10):
I try to avoid Coltrans, which is freeway work and
drunk drivers. Both will ruin your night, one slowly and
one suddenly. But the endgame is not good. So the
one on one freeway again, another one on one freeway story,
my companion. This is a pretzel, a ribbon of asphalt
(24:31):
that doubles as a I've talked about a water park.
When it rains, it fills up with water and floods
because the people at Caltrans don't believe in clearing out
the drains that the freeway has until it rains. So
you really haven't lived until you've hydroplane passed the Koanga Pass.
You just have it right wondering whether your tires are
(24:53):
auditioning for Finding Nemo, the new version of Finding Nemo
or not. Now the other the highway that I was
on turned into a James Taylor song, the one to
one Freeway, fire and rain with a touch more arson
than melody. So somewhere near the Fourth Street Bridge, coming
(25:16):
to the East LA interchange, four Street bridge, the cinematic
overpass that you've seen in every car commercial, every low
budget crime movie since the nineteen seventies, there's this one
stretch in LA. They film all the car commercials there.
It's wild. It's been in every kind of car commercial anyway.
(25:37):
So I rolled straight into a ring of fire, not
realizing it was a ring of fire. I'm not talking
about some kind of made up fire. This is not
This is not some bogus nonsense, not Johnny Cash poetic fire,
actual fire, burn, baby burn. So I'm driving, I'm mining
my own business, and this I see up ahead, like
(25:59):
that's a little orange. What's that? That doesn't look good?
And it was a blaze that was flickering just off
to the right, just off to the shoulder, and it
was licking up into the end of the night air
and it was so bright it was painting the concrete walls.
There was this orange glow from the fire. And it
(26:23):
was crazy because behind it, I'm just trying to paint
the picture if you're blind. So behind it, the skyline
is glistening. You know, it's got a pretty good skyline.
It's not as good as like Vancouver's got a better silene,
but it's it's a nice skyline. And so it's it's
glistening there the glass towers of downtown Los Angeles reflecting,
and it was it was just crazy. You got this
(26:43):
cathedral of mirrors and here I am out in the
distance and moonlight in the air, and moonlight doesn't care
about this. All of a sudden it became this dystopian,
oddly beautiful situation where it's like watching civilization rehearse its
own funeral. Uh, that could be too dramatic. But you
(27:03):
could feel the heat from the car. You could smell.
I wasn't sure. I thought it might have been plastic.
I'm not sure exactly what it was burning and I
see the heat, and I'm not going that fast. I'm
kind of cruising trying to save truth be told, I
try to cruise down the one on one save some
money on gas. But because I'm cheap like that, I
am cheap like that. So I see the heat shimmer,
(27:25):
you know, dancing above the flames and all that stuff,
and no sirens, no flashing lights, just me and just
casually driving up ahead. I see the city ablaze. So
I did what any responsible grown up would do. I
grabbed my phone and punched in three numbers and I said, okay,
(27:45):
let me help them out. Now, my wife works in
the business of chaos. She's one of the calm voices
that answer when your life falls apart. So I called
her employer nine one one, what's your emergency? I calmly
told them that I was just a motorist. I was
not an arsonist. I was a motorist and I just
(28:07):
happened to see the fire. And I said, well, we
didn't start the fire. I said, half of Billy Joel,
half civic duty, and probably just another meth head, somebody
leaning in too much doing fentanyl. And then the match
is lit in the middle of the night. See. That's
the part though, That is the part the outsiders never
(28:29):
quite understand. When you visit southern California, Los Angeles does
not sleep. I see it because I'm there. It burns.
And this is not some kind of apology. I'm trying
to think of the word here, like a apocalyptic like
the San Andreas Fault, the fire season kind of thing.
(28:53):
It burns in spirit, this strange again glow, this a
bit of desperation. Some loser arsonists lit this thing on fire.
But at three in the morning, the city is it's
like half of it's an art film with the buildings
in downtown. Half is a fever dream. And there is
(29:17):
this I'm telling you this when everyone's sleeping, but not
everyone's sleeping. It's like there's a there's somewhere out there
as somebody who drives a prius in Silver Lake who's
going to make the next big movie, but we don't
know their name yet. Right, there's that person. Then there's
(29:37):
some actress who's crying outside a Melrose apartment, and a
guy named Vinnie or possibly Steve torching a mattress under
the four Street bridge, and each one living a different
version of the same story. Right, trying to stay warm.
And you know this is a place where they sell sunshine.
(29:59):
By you can buy a lot of sunshine. So I
rolled down the window. I watched the flames dance. I
then looked in the rear view mirror. No cops, no firefighters,
just another unsupervised, uncontrolled blaze in the naked city, a
live action metaphor for La itself. Dazzling, obviously a little
(30:21):
bit dangerous. There the fire and one spark away from
absolute cast. Now I kept driving north, and I was
heading to the north Woods, past the flickering lights, past
the echo of sirens in which finally arrived, and that skyline.
I love skylines. I'm a big skyline guy. Love beautiful skylines. Man,
(30:41):
is that great? It's just wonderful man made art. And
so it was all kind of a mirage. At that point,
somewhere between Studio City and the north Woods, I realized that, listen,
this is kind of crazy. This is wild and nuts
and all that stuff. And so even though Los Angeles
has many issues politically, taxation, all that stuff, it's not dying.
(31:04):
It's rehearsing. Some would say, it's always been on fire,
always been on fire. Right, Sometimes literally sometimes spiritually on fire.
I know, every couple of months we need reasons to
burn stuff. And the Dodgers won the World Series, So
what are you gonna do? People are flummoxed. They go
out there and they destroy the thing of a jig
and the watch mccullett and all that stuff, and then
they're good for another couple of months until something else happens.
(31:26):
And so I will tell you this. The people that
live here find new ways to burn and destroy stuff.
And a lot of these people don't seem very political,
but they find ways to burn stuff anyway. That's the secret.
One of the secrets here about La does not fade
quietly into the night. It glows until the morning and
(31:47):
when the sun comes up tomorrow, tomorrow is another day.
Just it's like artistic. It's very artistic, is what it is.
All right, Well, leave you on that, have a great
rest of your Friday. We may have an ask Ben
if you listen to this on Friday on the X machine,
so keep an eye on that or possibly the YouTube page.
(32:08):
Benny versus the Penny is up. Check out week ten
the full edition of Benny Versus the Penny. I Love you,
I thank you, for listening. Danny G thanks you. I
don't know if he loves you, but we thank you together,
and we'll have a new podcasts all weekend later. Skater
Asta Pasta now a Rivada, Jay got a murder. I
(32:34):
gotta go.
Cutbooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Mahler starts right now.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
In the air everywhere, The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben
Mahlor and Danny G Radio. And just like Muhammad Ali
said back in the day, on this podcast, we were
gonna float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Because,
as you know, this is just a benign podcast, the
Fifth Hour Podcast. It is in addition for the real
(00:50):
p ones of the Overnight Show during the week the
Ben Mahlor Show. You come in here, you hang out
with us on the podcast. But all things, as Ernest
Hemingway said, all things truly wicked, start from the innocence
of a weekend podcast. So you got me Ben, Danny
g is producing this podcast. He'll join me hopefully at
some point over the weekend. On this pod, We've got
(01:13):
growth hack, Bougie Benny and a Ring of Fire, and
these are never before told stories. You're only gonna hear
this content right here in the Fifth Hour. It is
a global exclusive. All the other broadcast companies want this content.
It's only available here for you. The competitive edge of
(01:35):
the Fifth Hour podcast right here. So we will not
waste any time and we will skid daddle into the
storytelling mode. So there was a point, and we're talking
about the media business, So there was a point in time,
long long ago when success. I'm gonna focus in on music.
(01:57):
Now you know, I'm not a music guy. I listened
to music, but I'm not music guy. Started out as
a DJ. I was a bad DJ. I have friends
that are very into music. But the point of the
story is when there was there was a period of
time when success in the media business was measured by
something tangible, meaning ticket sales or screaming fans, or maybe
(02:20):
some gold records on the wall, stuff like that. Now
here we are in twenty twenty five, and success comes
from a bunch of bots in a basement somewhere in
Moldova clicking repeat on a fake Drake song for twenty
three hours a day. Now I bring this up because
it's not show business. It's show fraud, is what that is.
(02:44):
According to a new lawsuit filed recently by rapper RBX,
as I understand it, the same RBX from the death
Row Records days. I had to look that up. So
get to the point, please, So Spotify, the mass CIV
media company Spotify, which is so popular or are they
(03:04):
their entire empire, according to this lawsuit, is built not
on rhythm, not on the melody of the music or art,
but on algorithms, phantom users, and artificially inflated stream counts.
It's not the music industry anymore. It's the metric industry.
You see now Spotify again, this is going to a lawsuit.
(03:27):
Spotify is letting fake streams flood their platform by the
billions with a B like ben billions billions each month.
Now why would they do that? I mean, no reason
would there unless there's a financial gain. Ding ding ding
ding ding ding ding. Yes, because it turns out the
(03:48):
fake plays are really sexy for the people on Wall
Street man, those people that do finances when they actually
deal with media companies, they don't seem to understand how
any of this works, which is somewhat troubling considering they
control the wealth of the United States. So because fake
(04:08):
people are listening to real music and it's fake plays,
they look good again for Wall Street and to advertisers
as well. The more streams that they can tout, the
higher rates they can charge for advertising. The shinier the
IPO is, the bigger the bonuses. It's the trickle down
(04:29):
economics from the bot. It's the oldest trick in the media.
Grift playbook, cook the books and then sell the sizzle.
Now your reminder, just so we don't get sued. You
can sue almost anyone for almost anything, and Spotify is
in a court case now defending themselves. The real question
(04:51):
isn't if you can sue, it's whether or not you
have a viable, winnable case. So turning the page on that.
If this lawsuit sounds familiar, caught my attention enough to
share it with you here on the podcast. If it
sounds familiar, it should. We have seen the same hustle.
I'm not talking about motown hustle. We've seen the same
(05:12):
hustle before. I've ranted here on these microphones in the
Fifth Hour Studio Fifth Hour Podcast Studio, That podcast downloads
are tremendous bullshit, you know, and now listen, we do
pretty well. I've not invested in that form, but once
you see what happens in a lot of these podcasts,
(05:32):
it's like, oh my god, oh my god, podcast downloads
that never existed. YouTube views inflated by bots. I've learned
that as I've gotten involved in YouTube, how bogus YouTube
is a lot of it. You've got TikTok stars. This
is my personal favorite tale, and we talked about this
in a previous episode of the Fifth Hour podcast. I
(05:52):
know Lucky Tony knows exactly what day we talked about it.
But TikTok stars, who are so popular, have millions of
people following them on TikTok and the people love their music.
Except they could not sell out a coffee shop if
they were giving away free coffee. Couldn't do it. Couldn't
do it. Now, real fans buy concert tickets. Bots do not. Okay,
(06:17):
real fans buy the concert tickets. The bots do not.
But these fake streams, if you believe this lawsuit, and
I'm leaning that way, help Spotify keep its stock price
inflated again Wall Street. They don't do the digging on that,
so the stock price is inflated and its artist payout
numbers conveniently are obscure, right, they're kind of hidding. The
(06:41):
company claims to pay musicians based on the share of
total streams. But if total streams, if those numbers are
people futzing around, If there's stuff with robotic repeats, I
don't know of Drake or any other top shelf act
that is part of the mainstream. The little guys get
(07:01):
pennies while the big dogs are raking monopoly money, and
everyone smiles and nods like this is the progress of
the music world and all that stuff. It's kind of like,
do you use a sports analogy, because plausibly, I don't
think the fifth Hours of Sports podcast, but the radio
show mostly is. So it's like baseball juicing the stats.
(07:24):
So everyone in twenty twenty six is going to a
bat four hundred, until you realize in order to get there,
in order to get to everyone batting four hundred, the
balls are made of cork, the fences are moved in
one hundred and fifty feet shorter, and all of a sudden,
everyone's hitting four hundred. Now, make no mistake, this is
the greatest con ever pulled in media, and that includes
(07:47):
in the past, we've had some Nielsen box futzing around
radio spins popular back in the day, those fake number
one on iTunes charts that exist for about eleven minutes. Now,
Spotify's entire ecosystem thrives on illusion. Right. They sell artists
(08:08):
on exposure, they sell advertisers on engagement, and they sell
investors on growth, all things that are very important in
the world of engagement. But in reality, if you read
this lawsuit, in reality, they're selling all of us a
ghost story. Oh spooky. Think of it like a musical
(08:28):
seance where the spirits are synthetic and the applause is
pre programmed. You'd think that this would absolutely outrage a
lot of people, specifically the people that are tasked to
regulate this kind of stuff, But it turns out that
is not the case. Silicon Valley long ago. The people
(08:51):
that run the tech world master the art of self
policing much like the government does, which is to say,
not policing at all. Every bot farm is treated like
a growth hack, every fake stream a data point in
user retention. They're not fixing it because it's not a bug.
(09:14):
It's the business model that they're going for. The lawsuit
calls out again, this is based on just what I
read the other day. The lawsuit calls out billions of
fraudulent streams. Again. I keep going back to that number.
It's amazing. I just trying to wrap my head around
a billion and billions and billions of fraudulent streams. However,
that number does not even capture the cultural decay, the
(09:38):
rot that this leads to. Right, you push, you push
this out in the world that we're in, and when
you cannot tell here's my point, When you cannot tell
what real anymore, When every chart, every ranking, every viral
(09:59):
hit is just a hologram, aren't you living in a
simulation at that point? And this is my argument about
the matrix and the Internet and all that stuff like
and who knows what's gonna happen with us? Lawsuit was Spotify.
They're not alone, Right, they're alone. It's just the latest
stop in the long digital funhouse. And up is down,
(10:21):
and right is left and black is white and bought
his fan And that's the way it is. You're not
listening to the music of the future, right, And this
is certainly not the future of music. You're listening to
a spreadsheet, humming to itself is what you're doing now.
Years ago, we used to mock. There was a group
(10:42):
called Milli Vanilli. You know, mock Milli Vanilli for lip syncing.
I told the story before that one of the members
of Milli Vanilli was a DJ at Kiss FM when
I got my start, one of my early jobs in radio,
and so I saw him doing a midday show, very
short show was before the day of voice tracking, so
we actually came in. Now the entire industry is lipsticking
(11:06):
to its own numbers. The bots have replaced the fan,
the data dashboards replace the DJ, and the accountants replaced
the artist. And just like that, Oof goes to magic
drag and authenticity has left the building. It's taken the
shortcut out of the building. Now, if this lawsuit gets traction, maybe, maybe,
(11:32):
just maybe we'll see someone holds some people accountable. Don't
hold your breath. When there's this much fake money swirling around,
No one wants to turn off the tap. If you
know what I'm saying, right, Why would anyone mess with this?
Everyone's making money, money, money, money, money, money. Bottom line
(11:53):
though the music industry, and I know I do sports
and spoken words. But the music industry didn't just sell
its soul to the algorithm. It rented it out by
the stream. And the only ones dancing are the bots.
And there are billions of heart stopping bots that are
dancing and having a great thing and just wonderful, and
(12:16):
all the rest of us thunderheads over here like what
are we doing? Some serious god zukeri are turning the page.
So the maloromobile, I know you love stories about the malomobile.
You're nodding your head, Yes, I know. So the malomobile
is not just a mythical vehicle like the Batmobile or
the Scooby Van. No, no, no, the dream Machine van.
(12:38):
It is a companion in many ways. It is a
confessional booth. It's a war buddy, the radio wars. It
has been with me through more dead of the night
freeway drives than most people have seen sunrises, just has.
And while other people upgrade, and I live in a
place where you upgrade all the time. Other people up
(13:00):
grid their rides like phone models. Now you got to
get the new iPhone and all that we've stuck with
the old friend, battered, scarred, and more reliable than the
Dodger Bullpen in the regular season in July. This isn't
the showroom Queen, the Malamobile. It is a working class
(13:20):
vehicle that knows the exact on ramp rhythm of the
one oh one at three point forty three in the morning,
when the freeway's hum like a sleeping beast. The Malormobile
has seen a thing or two, so it knows a
(13:40):
thing or two. In many ways, it is a museum piece.
Not the fancy wing of the museum where the whispers
are there about impressionist art and all that stuff. The
other wing, the one where they show you the relics
from ordinary lives. The rotary phone, the transistor, AMF radio,
(14:01):
the baseball mint, that type of stuff, the lawnmower that
smells like summer. It's seen the Malomobile Los Angeles at
its emptiest and the rarest form of the city when
it feels like a ghost town. It's seen me shuffled in,
bleary eyed, armed with a bottle of caffeine pills and
(14:24):
a bunch of opinions about the type of pancakes Bill
Belichick likes to eat when he's in Chapel Hill hanging
out with Spacoli. Now it's it's waited patiently. The Malomobile
sits there, waiting for me in the parking garage at
the iHeartMedia Building, the Premiere Network Studios, home of Fox
Sports Radio. It is there like a loyal dog, engine
(14:47):
cooling its cracked leather, quietly testifying to the many years
of service. Unfortunately, as you know, nothing lasts forever. Time
is undefeated. Recently experienced the awkwardness of getting into the
Melamobile and sitting on the driver's seat. And this has
(15:09):
been my throne. This has been my throne for some time. Unfortunately,
the throne started cracking. The driver's seat. The leather on
the driver's seat started cracking. And I'm not talking about
a small little crack, no, no, no, This was the
kind of fissure that makes you say out loud, well
that is not good. That I'm telling you that is
(15:31):
not good. And then you start debating with yourself, like,
maybe it wasn't that bad. I'm just imagining it being
that bad. It probably wasn't that bad. But you say, well,
it's not good, you say it out loud, just talk
to yourself, no one in particular. And this was not
just a tear in leather. In many ways, it was
(15:52):
a wrinkle in time right. It was the first whisper
that this car, which had been a loyal foot soldier
for the radio show, the first whisper that the Maladmobile
was moving into the well loved classic chapter of its life.
And now now back in the dark ages when I
learned to drive and was enjoying my CD. Actually, when
(16:17):
I learned to drive, it was like cassette tapes, so
we had CD easy as well. But when I was
growing up, I would see cars that had seat covers.
Seat covers were a joke. They looked like something you
won from a claw machine at a carnival. They were ugly,
they were saggy. It was just a sad disguise to
(16:41):
cover up and paper over the cracks for a really
sad seat. And if if your car had seat covers
when I was a kid, it meant you were like
one car wash away from giving up entirely. However, to oh, no,
(17:03):
seat covers have become bougie. Yeah, so you can call
me bougie Benny. They really have the hug the seat
gets from the cover. They hug those things like their
tailored suits, and you can't even tell they're there, which
blows me away. And I don't know when that happened.
(17:27):
I wasn't paying attention. It may have happened years ago.
These are the boats of the automotive world. Subtle, their sly,
and they just speak to you. I've still got this.
I got some more life in me, these old bones,
this old warhorse has more more time. So we made
the leap, and we did it. We pulled the trigger.
(17:49):
A major upgrade to the Malemobile forced because of a
rip in the leather. New seat covers, not wheel not
new wheels. We didn't get new tires, not a new
sound system. We didn't spend seventy eighty ninety one hundred
thousand dollars on a status symbol. We didn't do that.
We didn't get massage seats, and we didn't get a
(18:09):
bigger display. It didn't go down to Best Buy and
buy a bunch of bells and whistles. No, what we
bought was just a simple seat cover, a simple act
of trying to preserve what we have, the kind of
thing you do when your car is not a disposable product,
(18:30):
but it's more of a relationship. So you see the
Malamobile has earned every scar. It's been in multiple accidents,
every freeway chip, every dog here from Moxie and the
late Great Bella embedded deep in the carpet and the
seats and all that. Every dent that comes out has
(18:50):
a story. You know, at the time, I was leaving
the Fox Sports Radio parking lot and I swung a
little too wide. Ding ding, Yeah, a little bit too
much there the time. You thought you could parallel park
like a champ, but you were a little tired, and
needless to say, it didn't go so well. A new
(19:10):
car would erase all of that. I'm not a historian.
I am not a historian, but a new car would
erase all of that history, all of it. And these
seat covers in many ways honor it. This is how
people who actually live a real life. And I'm assuming
you're like me as well. I do overnight radio. I'm
(19:31):
not getting rich, I'm not making Colin Coward money, so
I got to preserve what I have, and so this
is how we do it. You know. It's like, hey,
not just driving the car. You're not doing that. You
treat the ride the way it needs to be treated,
and you do a little patch over here, a little
spackle over there, and you keep the thing going. It's
(19:53):
a little malor meatball surgery on four wheels and the malomobile.
We're not replacing the malamobile. We're not. It's just being refreshed, revived,
that kind of thing, right. And so this is how
people who again are partaking in this, you know, late
night radio thing. Every late night radio shift begins and
(20:14):
ends on that driver's seat. It's the malormobile that warms
up while the rest of LA cools down or in
some ways burns more in that a minute. But it's
the malormobile, the iconic malomobile, that gets gets you to
the studio through those graveyard hours and some sometimes during
(20:35):
the day. We don't like to talk about that. Sometimes
have to go out during the day and get your
home though, before the world wakes up, and the seat
covers are more than full leather. They are. They're a statement.
They're a middle finger to the depreciation value of automobiles,
a quiet rebellion, if you will, against the very idea
(20:55):
that everything must be replaced the minute it shows any
kind of where the world sports stadiums the worst is
sports stadiums and I've not been to Europe. I'm gonna
get there at some point. And some of these stadiums
on the pitch are from the eighteen hundreds. I think
there's one that's even older than that, believe it or not.
(21:16):
But they've been around, been around a long time, and
they don't get rid of them. They don't here we
get rid of stuff. And so yes, the math Andmobile
has seen better days, better days, but it has also
seen a lot of days, and that does matter. We're
not just driving to work. Spent a lot of time
in the Malamobile from the north Woods. We're driving a timeline. Now.
(21:36):
Some of you guys I know, like JT the Wingman.
Some of you guys are in your car all the time,
Truck or Joe. All you guys a rolling archive, moving
man Matt in Boston, a museum piece that still punches
the clock. And now now it's become because of the
improvements of technology, a bougie seat cover. It looks just
(21:58):
a little more dignified doing it. And the truth is
a new car might ride smoother, would get better gas mileage.
It would also cost one hundred thousand dollars or whatever.
These cars are insane and in fact, I'm not gonna
get any more new cars. I think I've told that
story before. I'm going used, pre owned, whatever you want
to say. Certified, pre owned is the way to go
(22:19):
on that. If I do get a new car, the
car I got to teach the car. It wouldn't know
the rhythm of the overnight, it wouldn't understand me. So
the maloromobile rolls on. It's still scrappy, it's still scarred.
Just got a nice new suit covering it up. One
other thing I wanted to mention, and the naked city burns.
(22:42):
So again a story about me coming and going to work.
So driving back to the north Woods in the aforementioned
malomobile is like slipping through a portal, a dimension, a
parallel dimension. Overnight commute to Bizarrow and I just like
(23:03):
to share these crazy stories that happen when I'm driving home,
because it's there's no one with me, everyone's sleeping, it's
just me and the road. And there's something about Los
Angeles at night that just hits different. It just does
the daytime version. If you, I know most of you
aren't in LA, but if you've ever been to La,
the daytime version is this manic dreamscape of Tesla's and
(23:27):
juice bars and tofu salads and kale fueled optimism and
all that. And then after midnight, after midnight, the mass
goes away. And when you go further and further into
the night, the city of Angels, which is really the
city of Dodgers, becomes a mood piece. It's smoky, it's cinematic,
(23:49):
it's slightly surreal. So I do this drive often. I
talk a lot about my commute, winding from the Sherman
Oaks Studios just down the hill from bel Air, through
the labyrinth of freeways, the maze that that is always
the same mission. Avoid two things I try to avoid.
(24:10):
I try to avoid Coltrans, which is freeway work and
drunk drivers. Both will ruin your night, one slowly and
one suddenly. But the endgame is not good. So the
one on one freeway again, another one on one freeway story,
my companion. This is a pretzel, a ribbon of asphalt
(24:31):
that doubles as a I've talked about a water park.
When it rains, it fills up with water and floods
because the people at Caltrans don't believe in clearing out
the drains that the freeway has until it rains. So
you really haven't lived until you've hydroplane passed the Koanga Pass.
You just have it right wondering whether your tires are
(24:53):
auditioning for Finding Nemo, the new version of Finding Nemo
or not. Now the other the highway that I was
on turned into a James Taylor song, the one to
one Freeway, fire and rain with a touch more arson
than melody. So somewhere near the Fourth Street Bridge, coming
(25:16):
to the East LA interchange, four Street bridge, the cinematic
overpass that you've seen in every car commercial, every low
budget crime movie since the nineteen seventies, there's this one
stretch in LA. They film all the car commercials there.
It's wild. It's been in every kind of car commercial anyway.
(25:37):
So I rolled straight into a ring of fire, not
realizing it was a ring of fire. I'm not talking
about some kind of made up fire. This is not
This is not some bogus nonsense, not Johnny Cash poetic fire,
actual fire, burn, baby burn. So I'm driving, I'm mining
my own business, and this I see up ahead, like
(25:59):
that's a little orange. What's that? That doesn't look good?
And it was a blaze that was flickering just off
to the right, just off to the shoulder, and it
was licking up into the end of the night air
and it was so bright it was painting the concrete walls.
There was this orange glow from the fire. And it
(26:23):
was crazy because behind it, I'm just trying to paint
the picture if you're blind. So behind it, the skyline
is glistening. You know, it's got a pretty good skyline.
It's not as good as like Vancouver's got a better silene,
but it's it's a nice skyline. And so it's it's
glistening there the glass towers of downtown Los Angeles reflecting,
and it was it was just crazy. You got this
(26:43):
cathedral of mirrors and here I am out in the
distance and moonlight in the air, and moonlight doesn't care
about this. All of a sudden it became this dystopian,
oddly beautiful situation where it's like watching civilization rehearse its
own funeral. Uh, that could be too dramatic. But you
(27:03):
could feel the heat from the car. You could smell.
I wasn't sure. I thought it might have been plastic.
I'm not sure exactly what it was burning and I
see the heat, and I'm not going that fast. I'm
kind of cruising trying to save truth be told, I
try to cruise down the one on one save some
money on gas. But because I'm cheap like that, I
am cheap like that. So I see the heat shimmer,
(27:25):
you know, dancing above the flames and all that stuff,
and no sirens, no flashing lights, just me and just
casually driving up ahead. I see the city ablaze. So
I did what any responsible grown up would do. I
grabbed my phone and punched in three numbers and I said, okay,
(27:45):
let me help them out. Now, my wife works in
the business of chaos. She's one of the calm voices
that answer when your life falls apart. So I called
her employer nine one one, what's your emergency? I calmly
told them that I was just a motorist. I was
not an arsonist. I was a motorist and I just
(28:07):
happened to see the fire. And I said, well, we
didn't start the fire. I said, half of Billy Joel,
half civic duty, and probably just another meth head, somebody
leaning in too much doing fentanyl. And then the match
is lit in the middle of the night. See. That's
the part though, That is the part the outsiders never
(28:29):
quite understand. When you visit southern California, Los Angeles does
not sleep. I see it because I'm there. It burns.
And this is not some kind of apology. I'm trying
to think of the word here, like a apocalyptic like
the San Andreas Fault, the fire season kind of thing.
(28:53):
It burns in spirit, this strange again glow, this a
bit of desperation. Some loser arsonists lit this thing on fire.
But at three in the morning, the city is it's
like half of it's an art film with the buildings
in downtown. Half is a fever dream. And there is
(29:17):
this I'm telling you this when everyone's sleeping, but not
everyone's sleeping. It's like there's a there's somewhere out there
as somebody who drives a prius in Silver Lake who's
going to make the next big movie, but we don't
know their name yet. Right, there's that person. Then there's
(29:37):
some actress who's crying outside a Melrose apartment, and a
guy named Vinnie or possibly Steve torching a mattress under
the four Street bridge, and each one living a different
version of the same story. Right, trying to stay warm.
And you know this is a place where they sell sunshine.
(29:59):
By you can buy a lot of sunshine. So I
rolled down the window. I watched the flames dance. I
then looked in the rear view mirror. No cops, no firefighters,
just another unsupervised, uncontrolled blaze in the naked city, a
live action metaphor for La itself. Dazzling, obviously a little
(30:21):
bit dangerous. There the fire and one spark away from
absolute cast. Now I kept driving north, and I was
heading to the north Woods, past the flickering lights, past
the echo of sirens in which finally arrived, and that skyline.
I love skylines. I'm a big skyline guy. Love beautiful skylines. Man,
(30:41):
is that great? It's just wonderful man made art. And
so it was all kind of a mirage. At that point,
somewhere between Studio City and the north Woods, I realized that, listen,
this is kind of crazy. This is wild and nuts
and all that stuff. And so even though Los Angeles
has many issues politically, taxation, all that stuff, it's not dying.
(31:04):
It's rehearsing. Some would say, it's always been on fire,
always been on fire. Right, Sometimes literally sometimes spiritually on fire.
I know, every couple of months we need reasons to
burn stuff. And the Dodgers won the World Series, So
what are you gonna do? People are flummoxed. They go
out there and they destroy the thing of a jig
and the watch mccullett and all that stuff, and then
they're good for another couple of months until something else happens.
(31:26):
And so I will tell you this. The people that
live here find new ways to burn and destroy stuff.
And a lot of these people don't seem very political,
but they find ways to burn stuff anyway. That's the secret.
One of the secrets here about La does not fade
quietly into the night. It glows until the morning and
(31:47):
when the sun comes up tomorrow, tomorrow is another day.
Just it's like artistic. It's very artistic, is what it is.
All right, Well, leave you on that, have a great
rest of your Friday. We may have an ask Ben
if you listen to this on Friday on the X machine,
so keep an eye on that or possibly the YouTube page.
(32:08):
Benny versus the Penny is up. Check out week ten
the full edition of Benny Versus the Penny. I Love you,
I thank you, for listening. Danny G thanks you. I
don't know if he loves you, but we thank you together,
and we'll have a new podcasts all weekend later. Skater
Asta Pasta now a Rivada, Jay got a murder. I
(32:34):
gotta go.
Host
Ben Maller
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