January 16, 2026 • 27 mins
Ben Maller (produced by Danny G.) has a great Friday for you! Audio snafu leads to torpedoing Maller Monologue and conniption fit. Plus, Ben gives a bonus Maller Monologue on college hoops point shaving scandal and educates the dingleberries who wanna ban sports wagering!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Cut booms.
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 soul 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 clearing House of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now in.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
The air everywhere, The Fifth Hour with me, Ben Mahler.
Because four hours a night are not enough, and we
do this eight days a week, this would be I
think the eighth day, right. I'm a little confused because
we did the overnight show, had a little bit of
a pause, came back in to the remote studio, and
(00:51):
we have two shows today, and so yeah, I think
this would be the eighth day, right, because we have
five shows a week, three on the weekends, and there's
a little crossover here on on Friday in the middle
of January, the calm before the divisional playoffs. Don't forget
Benny versus the penny. You can binge watch or binge listen.
(01:16):
If you're blind, you can do both. If you can see,
it's Benny Versus the Penny on YouTube Benny Vspenny, comment,
subscribe support Benny versus the Penny in our latest endeavor.
We only have a few shows left. We've got this weekend.
You can binge watch the Saturday and Sunday edition, and
then next weekend is Championship weekend in the NFL, followed
(01:40):
of course by some little game in San Francisco. So
that is what we have on the agenda for that.
Now on this edition of the Fifth Hour, we've got
watch out for the Hummingbird the Dollar Shave Club as well.
But we're going to start with this. Today is Friday,
January sixthe eighth. It is National Fig Newton Day, National
(02:05):
Fig Newton Day. Now, my mom enjoyed a Fig Newton
many many years ago. I've not had one since my
mom was around. She's unfortunately gone for a while. And
the fig Newton, I learned some fun facts is why
would you need a day for the fig Newton? Is
it true that the fig Newton a cookie is actually
(02:30):
originally a health food? That's right, I fell down this
rabbit hole. So the fig Newton came into existence in
the late eighteen hundreds, like the eighteen nineties, and the
fig role became a popular food item because of medicine
(02:53):
at that time. Modern medicine in the nineteenth century, they
promoted that people needed to eat biscuits. Now I want
doctors to say, go eat biscuits. So they said, you
got to increase your consumption of biscuits and fruit and
your diet. You want to live a long time, and
you're worried about digestive problems, well, come on now, just
(03:16):
eat more biscuits. And so the fig roll became a
thing again because of all that. In eighteen ninety one
there was a guy named Charles Roser who invented a
machine to insert the fig paste into the dough and
abracadabrajocus pocus and eventually the product of Nabisco the original
(03:42):
name of the product and was changed to fig Newton.
So there you go, get figure with it. If you will,
you can get figure with it. So, in terms of
the meat of the matter, here on the fifth hour,
I wanted to talk about something that happened the other
night on the show Go back a few days in
the hot tub time machine and the flickering fluorescent twilight
(04:06):
of the overnight in the main studio at the Fox
Sports radio compound, where the air is often thick with
the scent of rotting trash that is there everywhere. I sit,
five nights a week in a radio studio doing my thing.
Some have called me the high Priest of the Graveyard Shift.
(04:28):
I don't know if that's an honor or not. I
consider myself the level headed gas bag navigating an obstacle course,
occasionally the friendly skies of the Red Eye, and oftentimes
it's like a tightrope walker, and you forget that you're
three hundred feet above a concrete floor. Every once in
(04:51):
a while you're reminded. And earlier this week the tightrope snapped.
The culprit was not a lack of preparation, but a
lack pause. Now to set the scene. For those that
didn't hear the show, bad job by you, But the
scene I know Lucky Tony knows exactly what I'm talking
about in Fergdog and Alf. For some of you, though
you don't so the scene was a classic NFL Malard monologue,
(05:15):
a verbal tapestry that we wove together equal parts sarcasm,
little vitriol, and some supposed insight. You are the judge
of that anyway. The subject of this particular male monologue
the lead was the Minnesota Vikings. Now, I love my
people in Minnesota. You guys have been great. The Vikings franchise, though,
(05:39):
has spent the better part of I don't know sixty
years perfecting the art of the almost. We almost won
the super Bowl, we almost went on a run on
the playoffs. We almost had this great quarterback. Now, the
inciting incident to inspire the malar monologue involved the general manager,
(06:00):
Quasy Adolphamensa, a man whose Ivy League resume is often
used as an academia shield against the slings and arrows
of social media and talk radio. And so a random
beat reporter tossed what I thought was a softball question
to Adolphamensa, the Vikings GM. It had all the velocity
(06:24):
of a rightening banana, and he asked if quarterback JJ
McCarthy was the man for twenty twenty six. Now, this
is a layup, go team go. That's the moment. Instead,
though instead Quasy did not take debate. The GM gave
the world a dramatic pause and then a verbal pratfall,
(06:49):
a stumble, a marble mouth moment that in my business.
When you do talk radio is the equivalent of finding
a giant chunk of gold, a golden nugget, not the
hotel in Vegas. It's like fighting it in the gutter. So,
(07:11):
acting as my own digital archaeologist, I was able to
excavate the audio gold from the dark web. There's a
big dark web of sports clips doing the heavy lifting,
the busy body work, if you will, of hand crafting
bullet points and timing the clip for the Mauth monologue. Now,
(07:32):
in the bureaucracy of FSR, this involves needlessly complex steps
of passing the clip to a circus of personnel yours truly,
A yours truly. I grabbed the sound. I toss it
to the middle manager. This is part b Kooper loop,
(07:52):
who then funnels it into the bowels of the FSR dungeon,
where this is the last part. A nameless, faceless editor
performs meatball surgery on the audio file. Now, the tragedy
of this mini Mallard meltdown was not that the clip
failed to play. It played. It was played way too
(08:16):
well an editor and I'm not going to send any
names here, perhaps motivated by a misguided sense of I
gotta clean this thing up, got to clean that audio up.
Decided to perform a digital lobotomy on the sound bite
that I wanted. They butchered the hesitation, the very essence
(08:37):
of the clip. They deleted the stumble, they smoothed over
every crack that had given or was going to give
the Malard monologue its very foundation, and everything I was
going to play off didn't work in doing so. They
didn't just edit a sound bite, they absolutely torpedoed my
(09:00):
plan of attack. And this was a friendly fire in
the trenches of the twenty hour a week live audio
Battle Royale plus this podcast, plus this podcast, and so
we're lucky enough to be on a lot of stations.
We have a big stage, and we're also essentially recording
a podcast because we have a lot of people that
(09:21):
listen when they want at their leisure on demand of
the podcast. So it's great we get two for one
and it usually works out pretty well. And while we're
doing that, though, always juggling torches in real time, you
rely on your support staff for a little bit. I
consider it the bare minimum. I try to do as
much as I can. I'm wired that way, and so
(09:45):
you need them sometimes to be the wind beneath your wings,
not the humming bird. That is a bird strike in
your engine. You don't need the hummingbird in your jet engine.
And so what fun followed was a moment of pure,
unadulterated radio theater, kabuki theater, a nuclear malar meltdown fueled
(10:08):
by the frustration of a craftsman who sees the finished
work shattered by some ham fisted apprentice who doesn't know
what they're doing. And so the migraine, headache and ulcer,
and it was a bit of an ulcer, you know,
the whatever ailments there were, they these are occupational hazards.
(10:35):
And it's it's really my issue, right I treat the
show way too seriously. It's a dopey overnight show. The monologues,
I like them to be a symphony. I do not
want them to be a child the first time they
ever played a piano where they just hit all the
buttons and rub their fingers up and down. To the
casual consumer, and you're listening to the fifth hour, so
(10:56):
you're a higher level, but the casual consumer, we're most
background noise. You're working in a factory, you're alone, you're
in your bedroom, you got the creeping crud or whatever.
You turn the radio on because you want to hear
a voice, because it's the sound of silence is pretty wicky.
So you turn it on. And so that's it. And
if you're listening with half an ear, a three second
(11:17):
pause is trivial. I completely get it. I completely get it, dude,
I do. But for me, it's heartburn. And you can
blame John Wooden, Ben Franklin. It was John Wooden who said,
make every day your masterpiece. Every day should be your masterpiece.
The Wizard of Westwood also known as win the Day,
(11:39):
you got to win the day. And by failing to prepare,
Benjamin Franklin said, you are preparing to fail. So I
always make sure to prepare. I want to make every
day my masterpiece. And that's always been been the goal.
And it works out most of the time. It does
not work out all of the time. And this was
(12:01):
one of those moments, and it was just a cacophony
of things that were going on and on and on,
and so it all kind of reached the tipping point
during the the Vikings monologue. And so you know this
and that that happens every once in a while. It happens.
(12:22):
I mentioned John Wooden, and I also mentioned the the
great Ben Franklin. The quote that does sum up this show.
If there's one quote we've talked about this in the past,
my favorite quote of all time. I was actually reminded
of this by a friend of mine this week and
(12:42):
I was like, you know what, I got to focus
on that more because that's really what we do, and
he said, what are you getting about? All right? So
it's it is my single favorite quote. I used to
have this on my social media from w Seafields, a actor,
(13:04):
a comedian, fat alcoholic guy, very funny man in his
day one hundred years ago or close to it, and
his quote was, if you can't dazzle them with brilliance,
baffle them with bullshit. And that's that's what we try
to do. That's what we try to do here. So
(13:26):
you know, in this case, it was the difference that
SoundBite that the pause was the difference between a punchline
and a thud, And it is the sound of the
sausage being made. Only to find out someone forgot to
put the meat in the casing. Well, we can't have
sausage without the casing. Well I know, that, but somebody
(13:46):
screwed up and they had a tough night. So we
did snap a bit and went back into the basement
and just banged our head against the wall. A reminder
that even in this high tech, wacky wacky world of
modern and broadcasting, you still are at the mercy of
the human element. The names and faces of the guilty
will remain silent, just like they change all the time.
(14:12):
Some numb nuts. They really screwed up anyway, to put
a ball on this part of the fifth Hour. In
the end, more people, based on the feedback that I
get from you, more people seem to enjoy me having
a conniption fit like a fussy baby than you would
have just wanting to hear the random stylings of Quasi
(14:35):
Adopha Mensa, the Viking, GM, Stumble and bubble. So it's
one of those double edged swords things where we have
this ear for the authentic, and then it's like they
say in Japan, the wabi sabi. It's a Japanese term
that means flawed beauty, the perfection of imperfection, wabi sabi.
(14:55):
So there you go, all right, Now turn the pages
on that to the justice files. The Justice files if
you will. So the question, it's the big story that
did not end up on the radio show. It ended
up on the cutting room floor on the overnight show
here as we're doing this in real time on this Friday,
and so it involves college basketball. So the question, I
(15:17):
will frame it this way, where are you at on
the let me check my notes here, twenty six men
who are out? Nine eight men out? Now, twenty six
men who are out in the college football not college basketball,
college hoops point shaving scandal. Again, sorry, so where are
you at on the twenty six men who were involved
(15:41):
in the college hoops point shaving scandal according to the Feds?
Now for you reactionary dingle berries in the middle of
the room, not the back, not the side, not the front,
the middle of the room, the reactionary dingleberries. If you're
looking for a shoulder to cry on because some scholarship
scrub from Kennesaw State decided to trade his integrity for
(16:02):
a stack of easy green, You've come to the right neighborhood,
but you're knocking on the wrong door. So I did
not give this the full Milor monologue. I did not
give that to you on the Overnight let me tell
you why though, because the Dodgers in the nighttime hours before,
not that long before I cracked the microphones, the Dodgers
(16:22):
went out and backed up the Brinks truck for Kyle Tucker.
And in my industry, the industrial complex of the hot take,
it's not narrow casting, it's broadcasting. Right. So Superstar signs
sixty million dollars a year contract and decides not to
(16:44):
play for the Mets, and that beats the other story,
which is really it's the dollar shave club story. Right.
You were shaving points for a couple of shekels, a
couple of dollars, and so that wins the baseball signing
every day of the week and twice on the Ben
Malor Show, if you will. And besides, let's be real here,
(17:05):
ninety eight percent of the college hoop teams that are
involved in this it is a hodgepodge of nothingness. We're
talking about Alabama State, Nickels, State, Abilene Christian as some examples.
Now for our purposes, that does it get you warm
and tingley and move the needle. Not exactly a murderer's
(17:28):
row of talent. Yeah, listen, the kids are playing basketball.
Good for them. They're also not seeing a dime of
nil sugar sugar sugar, and they're looking at the point spread,
and they got these shady people that come over to
them and say, hey, you want to make a couple
of bucks. You don't have to lose the game. You
just have to underperform. Just pretend like you're a little sick.
(17:52):
You know, you got the whatcha mc college's not working,
You got to get the do hickey going, that whole thing.
And so well, college players are like, oh man, this
is easy money. E z money, and I'm good to go.
Now Here are the facts of life for the uninitiated,
in terms of those that are up in arms over
(18:12):
sports gambling and all that gambling has been around since
the very first caveman bet a rack of ribs on
which Wooly Mammoth would drop first. Me know that not real? Yeah,
well okay. The only difference now is that it is
(18:33):
legal in most places other than the People's Republic of California,
where we broadcast from and a few other outposts out
in the way way blue yonder way out there. So
it's all digital now, right, It's all digital. That's really
the difference now is it's it's on your phone and
(18:56):
it's staring you in the face every time turn on
the tube, every time you turn on the radio show.
I mean, listen, hey, I'm part of it. You know.
DraftKings is a great sponsor of the radio show. And
there's a lot of Draft Kings love that we give
them because they love us and we enjoy them. And
the whole thing so in terms of the banit Caucus,
(19:19):
which is out in force now, you've got to get
rid of it. And I'm not part of that group.
I'm on the other side of the aisle. I'm not
clutching pearls acting like the sky is falling because of
the point shaving scandal. Spare me. It makes me want
to bar from my mouth because it's not freedom. That
is not freedom. That's a nanny state with a whistle.
(19:43):
And I don't know about you, do you. I don't
want to live in a world like that. The whole
thing is, it's like cars. I'll use an example, like cars.
So the thing about cars is some dope is going
to treat the freeway the interstate like it's the Indy
five hundred or the Daytona five hundred. And there's gonna
be accidents and people are gonna get hurt and all that.
(20:04):
Do you get rid of cars? You want a kitchen
because you want to make supper, Well, some Mama Luke
is going to burn their house down and maybe even yours.
So this is the freedom versus fallout quagmire. And to me,
the malor math on this is rather simple. The benefit
you get the liberty if you choose. It's not for everyone,
(20:25):
and everyone shouldn't do it to put your skin in
the game. In terms of sports wagering, the cost you
deal with is the greed. The greed, the fallout of
the stupid, right, the fallout of the stupid, and humans
are fallible, and so listen, there are twenty six geniuses,
(20:48):
absolute geniuses, that are completely tied up in that federal
what they're calling the international criminal conspiracy, because not just
college basketball player, it's Chinese basketball. They don't mess around
in China, so good luck on that. And the people
involved in this, based on what I've been reading here,
(21:09):
did not exactly go to the Ocean's eleven school of
planning a money grab heist situation. They followed the New
York Times bestseller the paperback version of a complete idiot's
guide two point shaving. Now, in the old days, in
(21:30):
the old country, you met a guy in a trench
coat behind a dumpster and there'd be envelopes that would
be exchanged with cash, and that was that. There was
nothing recorded at all. Today, the modern element to this
(21:50):
these scholars, these scholars are leaving a digital paper trail
longer than the standard CVS receipt. They're laying out the
whole scheme in text message chains. It's integrity for dummies.
It's like, hey, hey, skip the layup in the second
(22:11):
half and I'll buy you a used Honda click scent
screenshot and it's like, why don't you what do you
even want to use Honda? All right? The gambling houses
are not charities. Obviously, this is big money and they
often work, believe it or not, on razor thin margins,
(22:32):
and they're not in the business of losing a bunch
of benchwarmers from or losing, you know, to a bunch
of bench warmers from I don't know nickels state, I
don't even know where that is. The moment the alarm
bells sound and things aren't kosher, there's some kind of
fugazy betting pattern, the gambling companies release the hounds and
(22:55):
hand the digital keys to the Feds. It's checks and
balance is in the age of the algorhythm. That's the
way this works. Now. I saw some comments by the
US US Attorney and you know, talking about how, you know,
significant corruption of the integrity of sports and all that
very dramatic. He's really just describing the weather, is all
(23:20):
he's doing. And if you're the US attorney, this is
a big story, and this can enhance your career in
law enforcement and in that world political world as well,
and so it's important for you to get out in
front and the cameras and really go deep on how
bad it is. But but this is the new normal.
If you think this ends with a few Chinese Basketball
(23:42):
Association games and some low level college basketball, then I
have some really really nice beachfront property in the Sahara
Desert right in the middle of it, with your name
on it. I'd like to I'd like to make a deal.
The NFL, you got I think at some point they're
involved in this, right you gotta think they're involved in this.
(24:04):
We've had Major League Baseball, the NBA, college basketball. The
argument's always been in NFL and college football. In order
for it to really work, you just have to get
the quarterback. You just have to get the quarterback. But
even that you could have if the quarterback's really bad,
they would bench the quarterback and then you've got to
get the backup quarterback. Like the fixers are already lurking
(24:25):
in the shadows, you know, they're like, oh, that would
be the all timer. Because there's so much money bet
on the NFL. It would be very easy in theory, right,
if you workshop it, it would be very easy for
them to get away with it. In theory. The only
problem is everything's done via text message now so, and
people have loose lips and all that. So that would
(24:47):
be the hard part because you do it all via
text and you'd have to use coded language and all that,
and good luck on that. So you take the good,
you take the bad, and you realize that as long
as there is a scoreboard, there's a guy up in
the nosebleeds who's tossing down raspberry is trying to rig
the action electronically and all that. So the bottom line,
(25:12):
all right, the bottom line, the game is obviously not
over by a long shot, it's just being played by
a different set of rules. And if you're surprised that
the kid that has no nil check, no nil check
and a smartphone is somehow susceptible to a big, giant
(25:35):
cartoon payment and he's not even that big, by the way,
then you haven't been paying attention. And really, you haven't
been paying attention, not just currently, not the times we're
in now, the modern era, the zeitgeist of the times,
if you will, you haven't been paying attention to the
human race for the last I don't know, six thousand
(25:56):
years something along those lines. It's been a minute. It
has absolutely been a minute now. I had mentioned on
the radio show that I was going to do this
big rant and I didn't get to it about a
certain pro bouncy ball player. So I'm gonna save that.
I'll do that for tomorrow. I'm up against it, right,
(26:19):
And as the Great Pt Barnum said, you always have
to have a little something for everyone. Gotta have a
little something for everyone. So I'll have that. I'm sure
you'll look forward to that with bells and whistles. But remember,
Benny versus the Penny is on right now. Benny versus
the penny is available. You can binge watch that. You
can go back and listen to some of the old
radio shows this week and all the way back nine
(26:42):
years or something like that. That's quite the roller coaster,
a lot of chills and thrills. Some of the boys
are still going back through the archive, the upside down
archive of work that we have on the radio show,
so check all that out. Have a great day today
whatever you are up to, and don't forget new pods tomorrow.
(27:03):
If you want to send a message in for the
mail bag, you can do that right now care of
Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com. That's Real fifth
Hour at gmail dot com. Your comments can and will
be used against you in the court of the malor militia.
So be very very very careful. All right on, behalf
(27:24):
of the Great dandyg Radio. Have a wonderful time in
Bye bye Aloha, Osta pasta. Blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah. You're fired. That's how you do it. Yeah, now, no,
that's not how you do it, all right, That's how
(27:45):
I did it. What do you want me to do?
Speaker 2 (27:47):
You pay me five hundred thousand dollars on endorse A
game magazine
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Got a murder, I gotta go
Cut booms.
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 soul 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 clearing House of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now in.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
The air everywhere, The Fifth Hour with me, Ben Mahler.
Because four hours a night are not enough, and we
do this eight days a week, this would be I
think the eighth day, right. I'm a little confused because
we did the overnight show, had a little bit of
a pause, came back in to the remote studio, and
(00:51):
we have two shows today, and so yeah, I think
this would be the eighth day, right, because we have
five shows a week, three on the weekends, and there's
a little crossover here on on Friday in the middle
of January, the calm before the divisional playoffs. Don't forget
Benny versus the penny. You can binge watch or binge listen.
(01:16):
If you're blind, you can do both. If you can see,
it's Benny Versus the Penny on YouTube Benny Vspenny, comment,
subscribe support Benny versus the Penny in our latest endeavor.
We only have a few shows left. We've got this weekend.
You can binge watch the Saturday and Sunday edition, and
then next weekend is Championship weekend in the NFL, followed
(01:40):
of course by some little game in San Francisco. So
that is what we have on the agenda for that.
Now on this edition of the Fifth Hour, we've got
watch out for the Hummingbird the Dollar Shave Club as well.
But we're going to start with this. Today is Friday,
January sixthe eighth. It is National Fig Newton Day, National
(02:05):
Fig Newton Day. Now, my mom enjoyed a Fig Newton
many many years ago. I've not had one since my
mom was around. She's unfortunately gone for a while. And
the fig Newton, I learned some fun facts is why
would you need a day for the fig Newton? Is
it true that the fig Newton a cookie is actually
(02:30):
originally a health food? That's right, I fell down this
rabbit hole. So the fig Newton came into existence in
the late eighteen hundreds, like the eighteen nineties, and the
fig role became a popular food item because of medicine
(02:53):
at that time. Modern medicine in the nineteenth century, they
promoted that people needed to eat biscuits. Now I want
doctors to say, go eat biscuits. So they said, you
got to increase your consumption of biscuits and fruit and
your diet. You want to live a long time, and
you're worried about digestive problems, well, come on now, just
(03:16):
eat more biscuits. And so the fig roll became a
thing again because of all that. In eighteen ninety one
there was a guy named Charles Roser who invented a
machine to insert the fig paste into the dough and
abracadabrajocus pocus and eventually the product of Nabisco the original
(03:42):
name of the product and was changed to fig Newton.
So there you go, get figure with it. If you will,
you can get figure with it. So, in terms of
the meat of the matter, here on the fifth hour,
I wanted to talk about something that happened the other
night on the show Go back a few days in
the hot tub time machine and the flickering fluorescent twilight
(04:06):
of the overnight in the main studio at the Fox
Sports radio compound, where the air is often thick with
the scent of rotting trash that is there everywhere. I sit,
five nights a week in a radio studio doing my thing.
Some have called me the high Priest of the Graveyard Shift.
(04:28):
I don't know if that's an honor or not. I
consider myself the level headed gas bag navigating an obstacle course,
occasionally the friendly skies of the Red Eye, and oftentimes
it's like a tightrope walker, and you forget that you're
three hundred feet above a concrete floor. Every once in
(04:51):
a while you're reminded. And earlier this week the tightrope snapped.
The culprit was not a lack of preparation, but a
lack pause. Now to set the scene. For those that
didn't hear the show, bad job by you, But the
scene I know Lucky Tony knows exactly what I'm talking
about in Fergdog and Alf. For some of you, though
you don't so the scene was a classic NFL Malard monologue,
(05:15):
a verbal tapestry that we wove together equal parts sarcasm,
little vitriol, and some supposed insight. You are the judge
of that anyway. The subject of this particular male monologue
the lead was the Minnesota Vikings. Now, I love my
people in Minnesota. You guys have been great. The Vikings franchise, though,
(05:39):
has spent the better part of I don't know sixty
years perfecting the art of the almost. We almost won
the super Bowl, we almost went on a run on
the playoffs. We almost had this great quarterback. Now, the
inciting incident to inspire the malar monologue involved the general manager,
(06:00):
Quasy Adolphamensa, a man whose Ivy League resume is often
used as an academia shield against the slings and arrows
of social media and talk radio. And so a random
beat reporter tossed what I thought was a softball question
to Adolphamensa, the Vikings GM. It had all the velocity
(06:24):
of a rightening banana, and he asked if quarterback JJ
McCarthy was the man for twenty twenty six. Now, this
is a layup, go team go. That's the moment. Instead,
though instead Quasy did not take debate. The GM gave
the world a dramatic pause and then a verbal pratfall,
(06:49):
a stumble, a marble mouth moment that in my business.
When you do talk radio is the equivalent of finding
a giant chunk of gold, a golden nugget, not the
hotel in Vegas. It's like fighting it in the gutter. So,
(07:11):
acting as my own digital archaeologist, I was able to
excavate the audio gold from the dark web. There's a
big dark web of sports clips doing the heavy lifting,
the busy body work, if you will, of hand crafting
bullet points and timing the clip for the Mauth monologue. Now,
(07:32):
in the bureaucracy of FSR, this involves needlessly complex steps
of passing the clip to a circus of personnel yours truly,
A yours truly. I grabbed the sound. I toss it
to the middle manager. This is part b Kooper loop,
(07:52):
who then funnels it into the bowels of the FSR dungeon,
where this is the last part. A nameless, faceless editor
performs meatball surgery on the audio file. Now, the tragedy
of this mini Mallard meltdown was not that the clip
failed to play. It played. It was played way too
(08:16):
well an editor and I'm not going to send any
names here, perhaps motivated by a misguided sense of I
gotta clean this thing up, got to clean that audio up.
Decided to perform a digital lobotomy on the sound bite
that I wanted. They butchered the hesitation, the very essence
(08:37):
of the clip. They deleted the stumble, they smoothed over
every crack that had given or was going to give
the Malard monologue its very foundation, and everything I was
going to play off didn't work in doing so. They
didn't just edit a sound bite, they absolutely torpedoed my
(09:00):
plan of attack. And this was a friendly fire in
the trenches of the twenty hour a week live audio
Battle Royale plus this podcast, plus this podcast, and so
we're lucky enough to be on a lot of stations.
We have a big stage, and we're also essentially recording
a podcast because we have a lot of people that
(09:21):
listen when they want at their leisure on demand of
the podcast. So it's great we get two for one
and it usually works out pretty well. And while we're
doing that, though, always juggling torches in real time, you
rely on your support staff for a little bit. I
consider it the bare minimum. I try to do as
much as I can. I'm wired that way, and so
(09:45):
you need them sometimes to be the wind beneath your wings,
not the humming bird. That is a bird strike in
your engine. You don't need the hummingbird in your jet engine.
And so what fun followed was a moment of pure,
unadulterated radio theater, kabuki theater, a nuclear malar meltdown fueled
(10:08):
by the frustration of a craftsman who sees the finished
work shattered by some ham fisted apprentice who doesn't know
what they're doing. And so the migraine, headache and ulcer,
and it was a bit of an ulcer, you know,
the whatever ailments there were, they these are occupational hazards.
(10:35):
And it's it's really my issue, right I treat the
show way too seriously. It's a dopey overnight show. The monologues,
I like them to be a symphony. I do not
want them to be a child the first time they
ever played a piano where they just hit all the
buttons and rub their fingers up and down. To the
casual consumer, and you're listening to the fifth hour, so
(10:56):
you're a higher level, but the casual consumer, we're most
background noise. You're working in a factory, you're alone, you're
in your bedroom, you got the creeping crud or whatever.
You turn the radio on because you want to hear
a voice, because it's the sound of silence is pretty wicky.
So you turn it on. And so that's it. And
if you're listening with half an ear, a three second
(11:17):
pause is trivial. I completely get it. I completely get it, dude,
I do. But for me, it's heartburn. And you can
blame John Wooden, Ben Franklin. It was John Wooden who said,
make every day your masterpiece. Every day should be your masterpiece.
The Wizard of Westwood also known as win the Day,
(11:39):
you got to win the day. And by failing to prepare,
Benjamin Franklin said, you are preparing to fail. So I
always make sure to prepare. I want to make every
day my masterpiece. And that's always been been the goal.
And it works out most of the time. It does
not work out all of the time. And this was
(12:01):
one of those moments, and it was just a cacophony
of things that were going on and on and on,
and so it all kind of reached the tipping point
during the the Vikings monologue. And so you know this
and that that happens every once in a while. It happens.
(12:22):
I mentioned John Wooden, and I also mentioned the the
great Ben Franklin. The quote that does sum up this show.
If there's one quote we've talked about this in the past,
my favorite quote of all time. I was actually reminded
of this by a friend of mine this week and
(12:42):
I was like, you know what, I got to focus
on that more because that's really what we do, and
he said, what are you getting about? All right? So
it's it is my single favorite quote. I used to
have this on my social media from w Seafields, a actor,
(13:04):
a comedian, fat alcoholic guy, very funny man in his
day one hundred years ago or close to it, and
his quote was, if you can't dazzle them with brilliance,
baffle them with bullshit. And that's that's what we try
to do. That's what we try to do here. So
(13:26):
you know, in this case, it was the difference that
SoundBite that the pause was the difference between a punchline
and a thud, And it is the sound of the
sausage being made. Only to find out someone forgot to
put the meat in the casing. Well, we can't have
sausage without the casing. Well I know, that, but somebody
(13:46):
screwed up and they had a tough night. So we
did snap a bit and went back into the basement
and just banged our head against the wall. A reminder
that even in this high tech, wacky wacky world of
modern and broadcasting, you still are at the mercy of
the human element. The names and faces of the guilty
will remain silent, just like they change all the time.
(14:12):
Some numb nuts. They really screwed up anyway, to put
a ball on this part of the fifth Hour. In
the end, more people, based on the feedback that I
get from you, more people seem to enjoy me having
a conniption fit like a fussy baby than you would
have just wanting to hear the random stylings of Quasi
(14:35):
Adopha Mensa, the Viking, GM, Stumble and bubble. So it's
one of those double edged swords things where we have
this ear for the authentic, and then it's like they
say in Japan, the wabi sabi. It's a Japanese term
that means flawed beauty, the perfection of imperfection, wabi sabi.
(14:55):
So there you go, all right, Now turn the pages
on that to the justice files. The Justice files if
you will. So the question, it's the big story that
did not end up on the radio show. It ended
up on the cutting room floor on the overnight show
here as we're doing this in real time on this Friday,
and so it involves college basketball. So the question, I
(15:17):
will frame it this way, where are you at on
the let me check my notes here, twenty six men
who are out? Nine eight men out? Now, twenty six
men who are out in the college football not college basketball,
college hoops point shaving scandal. Again, sorry, so where are
you at on the twenty six men who were involved
(15:41):
in the college hoops point shaving scandal according to the Feds?
Now for you reactionary dingle berries in the middle of
the room, not the back, not the side, not the front,
the middle of the room, the reactionary dingleberries. If you're
looking for a shoulder to cry on because some scholarship
scrub from Kennesaw State decided to trade his integrity for
(16:02):
a stack of easy green, You've come to the right neighborhood,
but you're knocking on the wrong door. So I did
not give this the full Milor monologue. I did not
give that to you on the Overnight let me tell
you why though, because the Dodgers in the nighttime hours before,
not that long before I cracked the microphones, the Dodgers
(16:22):
went out and backed up the Brinks truck for Kyle Tucker.
And in my industry, the industrial complex of the hot take,
it's not narrow casting, it's broadcasting. Right. So Superstar signs
sixty million dollars a year contract and decides not to
(16:44):
play for the Mets, and that beats the other story,
which is really it's the dollar shave club story. Right.
You were shaving points for a couple of shekels, a
couple of dollars, and so that wins the baseball signing
every day of the week and twice on the Ben
Malor Show, if you will. And besides, let's be real here,
(17:05):
ninety eight percent of the college hoop teams that are
involved in this it is a hodgepodge of nothingness. We're
talking about Alabama State, Nickels, State, Abilene Christian as some examples.
Now for our purposes, that does it get you warm
and tingley and move the needle. Not exactly a murderer's
(17:28):
row of talent. Yeah, listen, the kids are playing basketball.
Good for them. They're also not seeing a dime of
nil sugar sugar sugar, and they're looking at the point spread,
and they got these shady people that come over to
them and say, hey, you want to make a couple
of bucks. You don't have to lose the game. You
just have to underperform. Just pretend like you're a little sick.
(17:52):
You know, you got the whatcha mc college's not working,
You got to get the do hickey going, that whole thing.
And so well, college players are like, oh man, this
is easy money. E z money, and I'm good to go.
Now Here are the facts of life for the uninitiated,
in terms of those that are up in arms over
(18:12):
sports gambling and all that gambling has been around since
the very first caveman bet a rack of ribs on
which Wooly Mammoth would drop first. Me know that not real? Yeah,
well okay. The only difference now is that it is
(18:33):
legal in most places other than the People's Republic of California,
where we broadcast from and a few other outposts out
in the way way blue yonder way out there. So
it's all digital now, right, It's all digital. That's really
the difference now is it's it's on your phone and
(18:56):
it's staring you in the face every time turn on
the tube, every time you turn on the radio show.
I mean, listen, hey, I'm part of it. You know.
DraftKings is a great sponsor of the radio show. And
there's a lot of Draft Kings love that we give
them because they love us and we enjoy them. And
the whole thing so in terms of the banit Caucus,
(19:19):
which is out in force now, you've got to get
rid of it. And I'm not part of that group.
I'm on the other side of the aisle. I'm not
clutching pearls acting like the sky is falling because of
the point shaving scandal. Spare me. It makes me want
to bar from my mouth because it's not freedom. That
is not freedom. That's a nanny state with a whistle.
(19:43):
And I don't know about you, do you. I don't
want to live in a world like that. The whole
thing is, it's like cars. I'll use an example, like cars.
So the thing about cars is some dope is going
to treat the freeway the interstate like it's the Indy
five hundred or the Daytona five hundred. And there's gonna
be accidents and people are gonna get hurt and all that.
(20:04):
Do you get rid of cars? You want a kitchen
because you want to make supper, Well, some Mama Luke
is going to burn their house down and maybe even yours.
So this is the freedom versus fallout quagmire. And to me,
the malor math on this is rather simple. The benefit
you get the liberty if you choose. It's not for everyone,
(20:25):
and everyone shouldn't do it to put your skin in
the game. In terms of sports wagering, the cost you
deal with is the greed. The greed, the fallout of
the stupid, right, the fallout of the stupid, and humans
are fallible, and so listen, there are twenty six geniuses,
(20:48):
absolute geniuses, that are completely tied up in that federal
what they're calling the international criminal conspiracy, because not just
college basketball player, it's Chinese basketball. They don't mess around
in China, so good luck on that. And the people
involved in this, based on what I've been reading here,
(21:09):
did not exactly go to the Ocean's eleven school of
planning a money grab heist situation. They followed the New
York Times bestseller the paperback version of a complete idiot's
guide two point shaving. Now, in the old days, in
(21:30):
the old country, you met a guy in a trench
coat behind a dumpster and there'd be envelopes that would
be exchanged with cash, and that was that. There was
nothing recorded at all. Today, the modern element to this
(21:50):
these scholars, these scholars are leaving a digital paper trail
longer than the standard CVS receipt. They're laying out the
whole scheme in text message chains. It's integrity for dummies.
It's like, hey, hey, skip the layup in the second
(22:11):
half and I'll buy you a used Honda click scent
screenshot and it's like, why don't you what do you
even want to use Honda? All right? The gambling houses
are not charities. Obviously, this is big money and they
often work, believe it or not, on razor thin margins,
(22:32):
and they're not in the business of losing a bunch
of benchwarmers from or losing, you know, to a bunch
of bench warmers from I don't know nickels state, I
don't even know where that is. The moment the alarm
bells sound and things aren't kosher, there's some kind of
fugazy betting pattern, the gambling companies release the hounds and
(22:55):
hand the digital keys to the Feds. It's checks and
balance is in the age of the algorhythm. That's the
way this works. Now. I saw some comments by the
US US Attorney and you know, talking about how, you know,
significant corruption of the integrity of sports and all that
very dramatic. He's really just describing the weather, is all
(23:20):
he's doing. And if you're the US attorney, this is
a big story, and this can enhance your career in
law enforcement and in that world political world as well,
and so it's important for you to get out in
front and the cameras and really go deep on how
bad it is. But but this is the new normal.
If you think this ends with a few Chinese Basketball
(23:42):
Association games and some low level college basketball, then I
have some really really nice beachfront property in the Sahara
Desert right in the middle of it, with your name
on it. I'd like to I'd like to make a deal.
The NFL, you got I think at some point they're
involved in this, right you gotta think they're involved in this.
(24:04):
We've had Major League Baseball, the NBA, college basketball. The
argument's always been in NFL and college football. In order
for it to really work, you just have to get
the quarterback. You just have to get the quarterback. But
even that you could have if the quarterback's really bad,
they would bench the quarterback and then you've got to
get the backup quarterback. Like the fixers are already lurking
(24:25):
in the shadows, you know, they're like, oh, that would
be the all timer. Because there's so much money bet
on the NFL. It would be very easy in theory, right,
if you workshop it, it would be very easy for
them to get away with it. In theory. The only
problem is everything's done via text message now so, and
people have loose lips and all that. So that would
(24:47):
be the hard part because you do it all via
text and you'd have to use coded language and all that,
and good luck on that. So you take the good,
you take the bad, and you realize that as long
as there is a scoreboard, there's a guy up in
the nosebleeds who's tossing down raspberry is trying to rig
the action electronically and all that. So the bottom line,
(25:12):
all right, the bottom line, the game is obviously not
over by a long shot, it's just being played by
a different set of rules. And if you're surprised that
the kid that has no nil check, no nil check
and a smartphone is somehow susceptible to a big, giant
(25:35):
cartoon payment and he's not even that big, by the way,
then you haven't been paying attention. And really, you haven't
been paying attention, not just currently, not the times we're
in now, the modern era, the zeitgeist of the times,
if you will, you haven't been paying attention to the
human race for the last I don't know, six thousand
(25:56):
years something along those lines. It's been a minute. It
has absolutely been a minute now. I had mentioned on
the radio show that I was going to do this
big rant and I didn't get to it about a
certain pro bouncy ball player. So I'm gonna save that.
I'll do that for tomorrow. I'm up against it, right,
(26:19):
And as the Great Pt Barnum said, you always have
to have a little something for everyone. Gotta have a
little something for everyone. So I'll have that. I'm sure
you'll look forward to that with bells and whistles. But remember,
Benny versus the Penny is on right now. Benny versus
the penny is available. You can binge watch that. You
can go back and listen to some of the old
radio shows this week and all the way back nine
(26:42):
years or something like that. That's quite the roller coaster,
a lot of chills and thrills. Some of the boys
are still going back through the archive, the upside down
archive of work that we have on the radio show,
so check all that out. Have a great day today
whatever you are up to, and don't forget new pods tomorrow.
(27:03):
If you want to send a message in for the
mail bag, you can do that right now care of
Real fifth Hour at gmail dot com. That's Real fifth
Hour at gmail dot com. Your comments can and will
be used against you in the court of the malor militia.
So be very very very careful. All right on, behalf
(27:24):
of the Great dandyg Radio. Have a wonderful time in
Bye bye Aloha, Osta pasta. Blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah. You're fired. That's how you do it. Yeah, now, no,
that's not how you do it, all right, That's how
(27:45):
I did it. What do you want me to do?
Speaker 2 (27:47):
You pay me five hundred thousand dollars on endorse A
game magazine
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Got a murder, I gotta go
Host
Ben Maller
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