Latest / The Ben Maller Show / The Fifth Hour: Bot Army on Fire

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The Fifth Hour: Bot Army on Fire · The Ben Maller Show

0:00
Speaker 1: Cutbooms.
0:02
Speaker 2: If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
0:05
Speaker 2: a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
0:09
Speaker 2: of the old republic, a sol fashion of fairness. He
0:12
Speaker 2: treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
0:15
Speaker 2: rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
0:18
Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 2: The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special.
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Speaker 2: The Fifth Hour with Ben Mahler starts right now.
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Speaker 1: In the air everywhere, The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben
0:34
Speaker 1: Mahlor and Danny G Radio. And just like Muhammad Ali
0:37
Speaker 1: said back in the day, on this podcast, we were
0:40
Speaker 1: gonna float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Because,
0:44
Speaker 1: as you know, this is just a benign podcast, the
0:46
Speaker 1: Fifth Hour Podcast. It is in addition for the real
0:50
Speaker 1: p ones of the Overnight Show during the week the
0:52
Speaker 1: Ben Mahlor Show. You come in here, you hang out
0:55
Speaker 1: with us on the podcast. But all things, as Ernest
0:59
Speaker 1: Hemingway said, all things truly wicked, start from the innocence
1:03
Speaker 1: of a weekend podcast. So you got me Ben, Danny
1:07
Speaker 1: g is producing this podcast. He'll join me hopefully at
1:09
Speaker 1: some point over the weekend. On this pod, We've got
1:13
Speaker 1: growth hack, Bougie Benny and a Ring of Fire, and
1:18
Speaker 1: these are never before told stories. You're only gonna hear
1:21
Speaker 1: this content right here in the Fifth Hour. It is
1:23
Speaker 1: a global exclusive. All the other broadcast companies want this content.
1:29
Speaker 1: It's only available here for you. The competitive edge of
1:35
Speaker 1: the Fifth Hour podcast right here. So we will not
1:38
Speaker 1: waste any time and we will skid daddle into the
1:44
Speaker 1: storytelling mode. So there was a point, and we're talking
1:48
Speaker 1: about the media business, So there was a point in time,
1:52
Speaker 1: long long ago when success. I'm gonna focus in on music.
1:57
Speaker 1: Now you know, I'm not a music guy. I listened
1:59
Speaker 1: to music, but I'm not music guy. Started out as
2:01
Speaker 1: a DJ. I was a bad DJ. I have friends
2:04
Speaker 1: that are very into music. But the point of the
2:07
Speaker 1: story is when there was there was a period of
2:10
Speaker 1: time when success in the media business was measured by
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Speaker 1: something tangible, meaning ticket sales or screaming fans, or maybe
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Speaker 1: some gold records on the wall, stuff like that. Now
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Speaker 1: here we are in twenty twenty five, and success comes
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Speaker 1: from a bunch of bots in a basement somewhere in
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Speaker 1: Moldova clicking repeat on a fake Drake song for twenty
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Speaker 1: three hours a day. Now I bring this up because
2:39
Speaker 1: it's not show business. It's show fraud, is what that is.
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Speaker 1: According to a new lawsuit filed recently by rapper RBX,
2:50
Speaker 1: as I understand it, the same RBX from the death
2:53
Speaker 1: Row Records days. I had to look that up. So
2:57
Speaker 1: get to the point, please, So Spotify, the mass CIV
3:00
Speaker 1: media company Spotify, which is so popular or are they
3:04
Speaker 1: their entire empire, according to this lawsuit, is built not
3:08
Speaker 1: on rhythm, not on the melody of the music or art,
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Speaker 1: but on algorithms, phantom users, and artificially inflated stream counts.
3:18
Speaker 1: It's not the music industry anymore. It's the metric industry.
3:22
Speaker 1: You see now Spotify again, this is going to a lawsuit.
3:27
Speaker 1: Spotify is letting fake streams flood their platform by the
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Speaker 1: billions with a B like ben billions billions each month.
3:38
Speaker 1: Now why would they do that? I mean, no reason
3:41
Speaker 1: would there unless there's a financial gain. Ding ding ding
3:45
Speaker 1: ding ding ding ding. Yes, because it turns out the
3:48
Speaker 1: fake plays are really sexy for the people on Wall
3:53
Speaker 1: Street man, those people that do finances when they actually
3:57
Speaker 1: deal with media companies, they don't seem to understand how
4:00
Speaker 1: any of this works, which is somewhat troubling considering they
4:04
Speaker 1: control the wealth of the United States. So because fake
4:08
Speaker 1: people are listening to real music and it's fake plays,
4:14
Speaker 1: they look good again for Wall Street and to advertisers
4:19
Speaker 1: as well. The more streams that they can tout, the
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Speaker 1: higher rates they can charge for advertising. The shinier the
4:26
Speaker 1: IPO is, the bigger the bonuses. It's the trickle down
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Speaker 1: economics from the bot. It's the oldest trick in the media.
4:33
Speaker 1: Grift playbook, cook the books and then sell the sizzle.
4:40
Speaker 1: Now your reminder, just so we don't get sued. You
4:43
Speaker 1: can sue almost anyone for almost anything, and Spotify is
4:48
Speaker 1: in a court case now defending themselves. The real question
4:51
Speaker 1: isn't if you can sue, it's whether or not you
4:54
Speaker 1: have a viable, winnable case. So turning the page on that.
4:58
Speaker 1: If this lawsuit sounds familiar, caught my attention enough to
5:02
Speaker 1: share it with you here on the podcast. If it
5:05
Speaker 1: sounds familiar, it should. We have seen the same hustle.
5:09
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about motown hustle. We've seen the same
5:12
Speaker 1: hustle before. I've ranted here on these microphones in the
5:15
Speaker 1: Fifth Hour Studio Fifth Hour Podcast Studio, That podcast downloads
5:21
Speaker 1: are tremendous bullshit, you know, and now listen, we do
5:26
Speaker 1: pretty well. I've not invested in that form, but once
5:30
Speaker 1: you see what happens in a lot of these podcasts,
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Speaker 1: it's like, oh my god, oh my god, podcast downloads
5:36
Speaker 1: that never existed. YouTube views inflated by bots. I've learned
5:41
Speaker 1: that as I've gotten involved in YouTube, how bogus YouTube
5:43
Speaker 1: is a lot of it. You've got TikTok stars. This
5:46
Speaker 1: is my personal favorite tale, and we talked about this
5:49
Speaker 1: in a previous episode of the Fifth Hour podcast. I
5:52
Speaker 1: know Lucky Tony knows exactly what day we talked about it.
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Speaker 1: But TikTok stars, who are so popular, have millions of
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Speaker 1: people following them on TikTok and the people love their music.
6:04
Speaker 1: Except they could not sell out a coffee shop if
6:08
Speaker 1: they were giving away free coffee. Couldn't do it. Couldn't
6:12
Speaker 1: do it. Now, real fans buy concert tickets. Bots do not. Okay,
6:17
Speaker 1: real fans buy the concert tickets. The bots do not.
6:20
Speaker 1: But these fake streams, if you believe this lawsuit, and
6:24
Speaker 1: I'm leaning that way, help Spotify keep its stock price
6:28
Speaker 1: inflated again Wall Street. They don't do the digging on that,
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Speaker 1: so the stock price is inflated and its artist payout
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Speaker 1: numbers conveniently are obscure, right, they're kind of hidding. The
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Speaker 1: company claims to pay musicians based on the share of
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Speaker 1: total streams. But if total streams, if those numbers are
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Speaker 1: people futzing around, If there's stuff with robotic repeats, I
6:54
Speaker 1: don't know of Drake or any other top shelf act
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Speaker 1: that is part of the mainstream. The little guys get
7:01
Speaker 1: pennies while the big dogs are raking monopoly money, and
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Speaker 1: everyone smiles and nods like this is the progress of
7:12
Speaker 1: the music world and all that stuff. It's kind of like,
7:14
Speaker 1: do you use a sports analogy, because plausibly, I don't
7:17
Speaker 1: think the fifth Hours of Sports podcast, but the radio
7:19
Speaker 1: show mostly is. So it's like baseball juicing the stats.
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Speaker 1: So everyone in twenty twenty six is going to a
7:26
Speaker 1: bat four hundred, until you realize in order to get there,
7:31
Speaker 1: in order to get to everyone batting four hundred, the
7:34
Speaker 1: balls are made of cork, the fences are moved in
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Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty feet shorter, and all of a sudden,
7:39
Speaker 1: everyone's hitting four hundred. Now, make no mistake, this is
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Speaker 1: the greatest con ever pulled in media, and that includes
7:47
Speaker 1: in the past, we've had some Nielsen box futzing around
7:51
Speaker 1: radio spins popular back in the day, those fake number
7:56
Speaker 1: one on iTunes charts that exist for about eleven minutes. Now,
8:01
Speaker 1: Spotify's entire ecosystem thrives on illusion. Right. They sell artists
8:08
Speaker 1: on exposure, they sell advertisers on engagement, and they sell
8:11
Speaker 1: investors on growth, all things that are very important in
8:15
Speaker 1: the world of engagement. But in reality, if you read
8:19
Speaker 1: this lawsuit, in reality, they're selling all of us a
8:23
Speaker 1: ghost story. Oh spooky. Think of it like a musical
8:28
Speaker 1: seance where the spirits are synthetic and the applause is
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Speaker 1: pre programmed. You'd think that this would absolutely outrage a
8:39
Speaker 1: lot of people, specifically the people that are tasked to
8:44
Speaker 1: regulate this kind of stuff, But it turns out that
8:48
Speaker 1: is not the case. Silicon Valley long ago. The people
8:51
Speaker 1: that run the tech world master the art of self
8:55
Speaker 1: policing much like the government does, which is to say,
8:58
Speaker 1: not policing at all. Every bot farm is treated like
9:03
Speaker 1: a growth hack, every fake stream a data point in
9:08
Speaker 1: user retention. They're not fixing it because it's not a bug.
9:14
Speaker 1: It's the business model that they're going for. The lawsuit
9:18
Speaker 1: calls out again, this is based on just what I
9:20
Speaker 1: read the other day. The lawsuit calls out billions of
9:24
Speaker 1: fraudulent streams. Again. I keep going back to that number.
9:26
Speaker 1: It's amazing. I just trying to wrap my head around
9:28
Speaker 1: a billion and billions and billions of fraudulent streams. However,
9:33
Speaker 1: that number does not even capture the cultural decay, the
9:38
Speaker 1: rot that this leads to. Right, you push, you push
9:43
Speaker 1: this out in the world that we're in, and when
9:48
Speaker 1: you cannot tell here's my point, When you cannot tell
9:52
Speaker 1: what real anymore, When every chart, every ranking, every viral
9:59
Speaker 1: hit is just a hologram, aren't you living in a
10:04
Speaker 1: simulation at that point? And this is my argument about
10:07
Speaker 1: the matrix and the Internet and all that stuff like
10:09
Speaker 1: and who knows what's gonna happen with us? Lawsuit was Spotify.
10:13
Speaker 1: They're not alone, Right, they're alone. It's just the latest
10:16
Speaker 1: stop in the long digital funhouse. And up is down,
10:21
Speaker 1: and right is left and black is white and bought
10:24
Speaker 1: his fan And that's the way it is. You're not
10:26
Speaker 1: listening to the music of the future, right, And this
10:31
Speaker 1: is certainly not the future of music. You're listening to
10:33
Speaker 1: a spreadsheet, humming to itself is what you're doing now.
10:39
Speaker 1: Years ago, we used to mock. There was a group
10:42
Speaker 1: called Milli Vanilli. You know, mock Milli Vanilli for lip syncing.
10:46
Speaker 1: I told the story before that one of the members
10:49
Speaker 1: of Milli Vanilli was a DJ at Kiss FM when
10:52
Speaker 1: I got my start, one of my early jobs in radio,
10:54
Speaker 1: and so I saw him doing a midday show, very
10:58
Speaker 1: short show was before the day of voice tracking, so
11:00
Speaker 1: we actually came in. Now the entire industry is lipsticking
11:06
Speaker 1: to its own numbers. The bots have replaced the fan,
11:10
Speaker 1: the data dashboards replace the DJ, and the accountants replaced
11:15
Speaker 1: the artist. And just like that, Oof goes to magic
11:19
Speaker 1: drag and authenticity has left the building. It's taken the
11:24
Speaker 1: shortcut out of the building. Now, if this lawsuit gets traction, maybe, maybe,
11:32
Speaker 1: just maybe we'll see someone holds some people accountable. Don't
11:37
Speaker 1: hold your breath. When there's this much fake money swirling around,
11:43
Speaker 1: No one wants to turn off the tap. If you
11:46
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, right, Why would anyone mess with this?
11:48
Speaker 1: Everyone's making money, money, money, money, money, money. Bottom line
11:53
Speaker 1: though the music industry, and I know I do sports
11:55
Speaker 1: and spoken words. But the music industry didn't just sell
11:58
Speaker 1: its soul to the algorithm. It rented it out by
12:02
Speaker 1: the stream. And the only ones dancing are the bots.
12:06
Speaker 1: And there are billions of heart stopping bots that are
12:10
Speaker 1: dancing and having a great thing and just wonderful, and
12:16
Speaker 1: all the rest of us thunderheads over here like what
12:18
Speaker 1: are we doing? Some serious god zukeri are turning the page.
12:23
Speaker 1: So the maloromobile, I know you love stories about the malomobile.
12:27
Speaker 1: You're nodding your head, Yes, I know. So the malomobile
12:31
Speaker 1: is not just a mythical vehicle like the Batmobile or
12:34
Speaker 1: the Scooby Van. No, no, no, the dream Machine van.
12:38
Speaker 1: It is a companion in many ways. It is a
12:41
Speaker 1: confessional booth. It's a war buddy, the radio wars. It
12:45
Speaker 1: has been with me through more dead of the night
12:49
Speaker 1: freeway drives than most people have seen sunrises, just has.
12:54
Speaker 1: And while other people upgrade, and I live in a
12:57
Speaker 1: place where you upgrade all the time. Other people up
13:00
Speaker 1: grid their rides like phone models. Now you got to
13:04
Speaker 1: get the new iPhone and all that we've stuck with
13:06
Speaker 1: the old friend, battered, scarred, and more reliable than the
13:12
Speaker 1: Dodger Bullpen in the regular season in July. This isn't
13:17
Speaker 1: the showroom Queen, the Malamobile. It is a working class
13:20
Speaker 1: vehicle that knows the exact on ramp rhythm of the
13:27
Speaker 1: one oh one at three point forty three in the morning,
13:31
Speaker 1: when the freeway's hum like a sleeping beast. The Malormobile
13:38
Speaker 1: has seen a thing or two, so it knows a
13:40
Speaker 1: thing or two. In many ways, it is a museum piece.
13:43
Speaker 1: Not the fancy wing of the museum where the whispers
13:48
Speaker 1: are there about impressionist art and all that stuff. The
13:51
Speaker 1: other wing, the one where they show you the relics
13:55
Speaker 1: from ordinary lives. The rotary phone, the transistor, AMF radio,
14:01
Speaker 1: the baseball mint, that type of stuff, the lawnmower that
14:05
Speaker 1: smells like summer. It's seen the Malomobile Los Angeles at
14:11
Speaker 1: its emptiest and the rarest form of the city when
14:15
Speaker 1: it feels like a ghost town. It's seen me shuffled in,
14:20
Speaker 1: bleary eyed, armed with a bottle of caffeine pills and
14:24
Speaker 1: a bunch of opinions about the type of pancakes Bill
14:28
Speaker 1: Belichick likes to eat when he's in Chapel Hill hanging
14:31
Speaker 1: out with Spacoli. Now it's it's waited patiently. The Malomobile
14:37
Speaker 1: sits there, waiting for me in the parking garage at
14:39
Speaker 1: the iHeartMedia Building, the Premiere Network Studios, home of Fox
14:43
Speaker 1: Sports Radio. It is there like a loyal dog, engine
14:47
Speaker 1: cooling its cracked leather, quietly testifying to the many years
14:53
Speaker 1: of service. Unfortunately, as you know, nothing lasts forever. Time
14:59
Speaker 1: is undefeated. Recently experienced the awkwardness of getting into the
15:05
Speaker 1: Melamobile and sitting on the driver's seat. And this has
15:09
Speaker 1: been my throne. This has been my throne for some time. Unfortunately,
15:13
Speaker 1: the throne started cracking. The driver's seat. The leather on
15:17
Speaker 1: the driver's seat started cracking. And I'm not talking about
15:19
Speaker 1: a small little crack, no, no, no, This was the
15:22
Speaker 1: kind of fissure that makes you say out loud, well
15:28
Speaker 1: that is not good. That I'm telling you that is
15:31
Speaker 1: not good. And then you start debating with yourself, like,
15:34
Speaker 1: maybe it wasn't that bad. I'm just imagining it being
15:38
Speaker 1: that bad. It probably wasn't that bad. But you say, well,
15:43
Speaker 1: it's not good, you say it out loud, just talk
15:46
Speaker 1: to yourself, no one in particular. And this was not
15:49
Speaker 1: just a tear in leather. In many ways, it was
15:52
Speaker 1: a wrinkle in time right. It was the first whisper
15:55
Speaker 1: that this car, which had been a loyal foot soldier
15:59
Speaker 1: for the radio show, the first whisper that the Maladmobile
16:03
Speaker 1: was moving into the well loved classic chapter of its life.
16:09
Speaker 1: And now now back in the dark ages when I
16:12
Speaker 1: learned to drive and was enjoying my CD. Actually, when
16:17
Speaker 1: I learned to drive, it was like cassette tapes, so
16:18
Speaker 1: we had CD easy as well. But when I was
16:21
Speaker 1: growing up, I would see cars that had seat covers.
16:27
Speaker 1: Seat covers were a joke. They looked like something you
16:30
Speaker 1: won from a claw machine at a carnival. They were ugly,
16:36
Speaker 1: they were saggy. It was just a sad disguise to
16:41
Speaker 1: cover up and paper over the cracks for a really
16:46
Speaker 1: sad seat. And if if your car had seat covers
16:51
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, it meant you were like
16:55
Speaker 1: one car wash away from giving up entirely. However, to oh, no,
17:03
Speaker 1: seat covers have become bougie. Yeah, so you can call
17:07
Speaker 1: me bougie Benny. They really have the hug the seat
17:13
Speaker 1: gets from the cover. They hug those things like their
17:17
Speaker 1: tailored suits, and you can't even tell they're there, which
17:22
Speaker 1: blows me away. And I don't know when that happened.
17:27
Speaker 1: I wasn't paying attention. It may have happened years ago.
17:30
Speaker 1: These are the boats of the automotive world. Subtle, their sly,
17:37
Speaker 1: and they just speak to you. I've still got this.
17:40
Speaker 1: I got some more life in me, these old bones,
17:42
Speaker 1: this old warhorse has more more time. So we made
17:46
Speaker 1: the leap, and we did it. We pulled the trigger.
17:49
Speaker 1: A major upgrade to the Malemobile forced because of a
17:53
Speaker 1: rip in the leather. New seat covers, not wheel not
17:56
Speaker 1: new wheels. We didn't get new tires, not a new
17:58
Speaker 1: sound system. We didn't spend seventy eighty ninety one hundred
18:02
Speaker 1: thousand dollars on a status symbol. We didn't do that.
18:05
Speaker 1: We didn't get massage seats, and we didn't get a
18:09
Speaker 1: bigger display. It didn't go down to Best Buy and
18:13
Speaker 1: buy a bunch of bells and whistles. No, what we
18:16
Speaker 1: bought was just a simple seat cover, a simple act
18:20
Speaker 1: of trying to preserve what we have, the kind of
18:24
Speaker 1: thing you do when your car is not a disposable product,
18:30
Speaker 1: but it's more of a relationship. So you see the
18:32
Speaker 1: Malamobile has earned every scar. It's been in multiple accidents,
18:38
Speaker 1: every freeway chip, every dog here from Moxie and the
18:42
Speaker 1: late Great Bella embedded deep in the carpet and the
18:47
Speaker 1: seats and all that. Every dent that comes out has
18:50
Speaker 1: a story. You know, at the time, I was leaving
18:54
Speaker 1: the Fox Sports Radio parking lot and I swung a
18:56
Speaker 1: little too wide. Ding ding, Yeah, a little bit too
19:01
Speaker 1: much there the time. You thought you could parallel park
19:05
Speaker 1: like a champ, but you were a little tired, and
19:08
Speaker 1: needless to say, it didn't go so well. A new
19:10
Speaker 1: car would erase all of that. I'm not a historian.
19:15
Speaker 1: I am not a historian, but a new car would
19:17
Speaker 1: erase all of that history, all of it. And these
19:20
Speaker 1: seat covers in many ways honor it. This is how
19:23
Speaker 1: people who actually live a real life. And I'm assuming
19:28
Speaker 1: you're like me as well. I do overnight radio. I'm
19:31
Speaker 1: not getting rich, I'm not making Colin Coward money, so
19:35
Speaker 1: I got to preserve what I have, and so this
19:39
Speaker 1: is how we do it. You know. It's like, hey,
19:42
Speaker 1: not just driving the car. You're not doing that. You
19:45
Speaker 1: treat the ride the way it needs to be treated,
19:48
Speaker 1: and you do a little patch over here, a little
19:50
Speaker 1: spackle over there, and you keep the thing going. It's
19:53
Speaker 1: a little malor meatball surgery on four wheels and the malomobile.
19:57
Speaker 1: We're not replacing the malamobile. We're not. It's just being refreshed, revived,
20:04
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, right. And so this is how
20:07
Speaker 1: people who again are partaking in this, you know, late
20:11
Speaker 1: night radio thing. Every late night radio shift begins and
20:14
Speaker 1: ends on that driver's seat. It's the malormobile that warms
20:19
Speaker 1: up while the rest of LA cools down or in
20:23
Speaker 1: some ways burns more in that a minute. But it's
20:25
Speaker 1: the malormobile, the iconic malomobile, that gets gets you to
20:30
Speaker 1: the studio through those graveyard hours and some sometimes during
20:35
Speaker 1: the day. We don't like to talk about that. Sometimes
20:37
Speaker 1: have to go out during the day and get your
20:39
Speaker 1: home though, before the world wakes up, and the seat
20:42
Speaker 1: covers are more than full leather. They are. They're a statement.
20:47
Speaker 1: They're a middle finger to the depreciation value of automobiles,
20:52
Speaker 1: a quiet rebellion, if you will, against the very idea
20:55
Speaker 1: that everything must be replaced the minute it shows any
20:59
Speaker 1: kind of where the world sports stadiums the worst is
21:02
Speaker 1: sports stadiums and I've not been to Europe. I'm gonna
21:05
Speaker 1: get there at some point. And some of these stadiums
21:08
Speaker 1: on the pitch are from the eighteen hundreds. I think
21:12
Speaker 1: there's one that's even older than that, believe it or not.
21:16
Speaker 1: But they've been around, been around a long time, and
21:19
Speaker 1: they don't get rid of them. They don't here we
21:21
Speaker 1: get rid of stuff. And so yes, the math Andmobile
21:24
Speaker 1: has seen better days, better days, but it has also
21:27
Speaker 1: seen a lot of days, and that does matter. We're
21:31
Speaker 1: not just driving to work. Spent a lot of time
21:33
Speaker 1: in the Malamobile from the north Woods. We're driving a timeline. Now.
21:36
Speaker 1: Some of you guys I know, like JT the Wingman.
21:39
Speaker 1: Some of you guys are in your car all the time,
21:41
Speaker 1: Truck or Joe. All you guys a rolling archive, moving
21:45
Speaker 1: man Matt in Boston, a museum piece that still punches
21:50
Speaker 1: the clock. And now now it's become because of the
21:54
Speaker 1: improvements of technology, a bougie seat cover. It looks just
21:58
Speaker 1: a little more dignified doing it. And the truth is
22:02
Speaker 1: a new car might ride smoother, would get better gas mileage.
22:06
Speaker 1: It would also cost one hundred thousand dollars or whatever.
22:09
Speaker 1: These cars are insane and in fact, I'm not gonna
22:11
Speaker 1: get any more new cars. I think I've told that
22:13
Speaker 1: story before. I'm going used, pre owned, whatever you want
22:16
Speaker 1: to say. Certified, pre owned is the way to go
22:19
Speaker 1: on that. If I do get a new car, the
22:22
Speaker 1: car I got to teach the car. It wouldn't know
22:25
Speaker 1: the rhythm of the overnight, it wouldn't understand me. So
22:29
Speaker 1: the maloromobile rolls on. It's still scrappy, it's still scarred.
22:34
Speaker 1: Just got a nice new suit covering it up. One
22:38
Speaker 1: other thing I wanted to mention, and the naked city burns.
22:42
Speaker 1: So again a story about me coming and going to work.
22:46
Speaker 1: So driving back to the north Woods in the aforementioned
22:50
Speaker 1: malomobile is like slipping through a portal, a dimension, a
22:56
Speaker 1: parallel dimension. Overnight commute to Bizarrow and I just like
23:03
Speaker 1: to share these crazy stories that happen when I'm driving home,
23:05
Speaker 1: because it's there's no one with me, everyone's sleeping, it's
23:09
Speaker 1: just me and the road. And there's something about Los
23:12
Speaker 1: Angeles at night that just hits different. It just does
23:17
Speaker 1: the daytime version. If you, I know most of you
23:20
Speaker 1: aren't in LA, but if you've ever been to La,
23:22
Speaker 1: the daytime version is this manic dreamscape of Tesla's and
23:27
Speaker 1: juice bars and tofu salads and kale fueled optimism and
23:31
Speaker 1: all that. And then after midnight, after midnight, the mass
23:38
Speaker 1: goes away. And when you go further and further into
23:41
Speaker 1: the night, the city of Angels, which is really the
23:44
Speaker 1: city of Dodgers, becomes a mood piece. It's smoky, it's cinematic,
23:49
Speaker 1: it's slightly surreal. So I do this drive often. I
23:55
Speaker 1: talk a lot about my commute, winding from the Sherman
23:58
Speaker 1: Oaks Studios just down the hill from bel Air, through
24:01
Speaker 1: the labyrinth of freeways, the maze that that is always
24:07
Speaker 1: the same mission. Avoid two things I try to avoid.
24:10
Speaker 1: I try to avoid Coltrans, which is freeway work and
24:14
Speaker 1: drunk drivers. Both will ruin your night, one slowly and
24:19
Speaker 1: one suddenly. But the endgame is not good. So the
24:23
Speaker 1: one on one freeway again, another one on one freeway story,
24:26
Speaker 1: my companion. This is a pretzel, a ribbon of asphalt
24:31
Speaker 1: that doubles as a I've talked about a water park.
24:34
Speaker 1: When it rains, it fills up with water and floods
24:37
Speaker 1: because the people at Caltrans don't believe in clearing out
24:41
Speaker 1: the drains that the freeway has until it rains. So
24:44
Speaker 1: you really haven't lived until you've hydroplane passed the Koanga Pass.
24:50
Speaker 1: You just have it right wondering whether your tires are
24:53
Speaker 1: auditioning for Finding Nemo, the new version of Finding Nemo
24:58
Speaker 1: or not. Now the other the highway that I was
25:03
Speaker 1: on turned into a James Taylor song, the one to
25:05
Speaker 1: one Freeway, fire and rain with a touch more arson
25:10
Speaker 1: than melody. So somewhere near the Fourth Street Bridge, coming
25:16
Speaker 1: to the East LA interchange, four Street bridge, the cinematic
25:20
Speaker 1: overpass that you've seen in every car commercial, every low
25:25
Speaker 1: budget crime movie since the nineteen seventies, there's this one
25:29
Speaker 1: stretch in LA. They film all the car commercials there.
25:33
Speaker 1: It's wild. It's been in every kind of car commercial anyway.
25:37
Speaker 1: So I rolled straight into a ring of fire, not
25:40
Speaker 1: realizing it was a ring of fire. I'm not talking
25:43
Speaker 1: about some kind of made up fire. This is not
25:47
Speaker 1: This is not some bogus nonsense, not Johnny Cash poetic fire,
25:51
Speaker 1: actual fire, burn, baby burn. So I'm driving, I'm mining
25:55
Speaker 1: my own business, and this I see up ahead, like
25:59
Speaker 1: that's a little orange. What's that? That doesn't look good?
26:02
Speaker 1: And it was a blaze that was flickering just off
26:06
Speaker 1: to the right, just off to the shoulder, and it
26:09
Speaker 1: was licking up into the end of the night air
26:12
Speaker 1: and it was so bright it was painting the concrete walls.
26:17
Speaker 1: There was this orange glow from the fire. And it
26:23
Speaker 1: was crazy because behind it, I'm just trying to paint
26:25
Speaker 1: the picture if you're blind. So behind it, the skyline
26:28
Speaker 1: is glistening. You know, it's got a pretty good skyline.
26:30
Speaker 1: It's not as good as like Vancouver's got a better silene,
26:33
Speaker 1: but it's it's a nice skyline. And so it's it's
26:36
Speaker 1: glistening there the glass towers of downtown Los Angeles reflecting,
26:41
Speaker 1: and it was it was just crazy. You got this
26:43
Speaker 1: cathedral of mirrors and here I am out in the
26:46
Speaker 1: distance and moonlight in the air, and moonlight doesn't care
26:51
Speaker 1: about this. All of a sudden it became this dystopian,
26:54
Speaker 1: oddly beautiful situation where it's like watching civilization rehearse its
26:59
Speaker 1: own funeral. Uh, that could be too dramatic. But you
27:03
Speaker 1: could feel the heat from the car. You could smell.
27:07
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure. I thought it might have been plastic.
27:09
Speaker 1: I'm not sure exactly what it was burning and I
27:12
Speaker 1: see the heat, and I'm not going that fast. I'm
27:15
Speaker 1: kind of cruising trying to save truth be told, I
27:18
Speaker 1: try to cruise down the one on one save some
27:19
Speaker 1: money on gas. But because I'm cheap like that, I
27:23
Speaker 1: am cheap like that. So I see the heat shimmer,
27:25
Speaker 1: you know, dancing above the flames and all that stuff,
27:27
Speaker 1: and no sirens, no flashing lights, just me and just
27:32
Speaker 1: casually driving up ahead. I see the city ablaze. So
27:36
Speaker 1: I did what any responsible grown up would do. I
27:39
Speaker 1: grabbed my phone and punched in three numbers and I said, okay,
27:45
Speaker 1: let me help them out. Now, my wife works in
27:49
Speaker 1: the business of chaos. She's one of the calm voices
27:53
Speaker 1: that answer when your life falls apart. So I called
27:56
Speaker 1: her employer nine one one, what's your emergency? I calmly
28:02
Speaker 1: told them that I was just a motorist. I was
28:05
Speaker 1: not an arsonist. I was a motorist and I just
28:07
Speaker 1: happened to see the fire. And I said, well, we
28:10
Speaker 1: didn't start the fire. I said, half of Billy Joel,
28:14
Speaker 1: half civic duty, and probably just another meth head, somebody
28:19
Speaker 1: leaning in too much doing fentanyl. And then the match
28:22
Speaker 1: is lit in the middle of the night. See. That's
28:25
Speaker 1: the part though, That is the part the outsiders never
28:29
Speaker 1: quite understand. When you visit southern California, Los Angeles does
28:34
Speaker 1: not sleep. I see it because I'm there. It burns.
28:40
Speaker 1: And this is not some kind of apology. I'm trying
28:45
Speaker 1: to think of the word here, like a apocalyptic like
28:48
Speaker 1: the San Andreas Fault, the fire season kind of thing.
28:53
Speaker 1: It burns in spirit, this strange again glow, this a
28:59
Speaker 1: bit of desperation. Some loser arsonists lit this thing on fire.
29:05
Speaker 1: But at three in the morning, the city is it's
29:09
Speaker 1: like half of it's an art film with the buildings
29:12
Speaker 1: in downtown. Half is a fever dream. And there is
29:17
Speaker 1: this I'm telling you this when everyone's sleeping, but not
29:22
Speaker 1: everyone's sleeping. It's like there's a there's somewhere out there
29:26
Speaker 1: as somebody who drives a prius in Silver Lake who's
29:29
Speaker 1: going to make the next big movie, but we don't
29:32
Speaker 1: know their name yet. Right, there's that person. Then there's
29:37
Speaker 1: some actress who's crying outside a Melrose apartment, and a
29:43
Speaker 1: guy named Vinnie or possibly Steve torching a mattress under
29:47
Speaker 1: the four Street bridge, and each one living a different
29:52
Speaker 1: version of the same story. Right, trying to stay warm.
29:56
Speaker 1: And you know this is a place where they sell sunshine.
29:59
Speaker 1: By you can buy a lot of sunshine. So I
30:03
Speaker 1: rolled down the window. I watched the flames dance. I
30:06
Speaker 1: then looked in the rear view mirror. No cops, no firefighters,
30:10
Speaker 1: just another unsupervised, uncontrolled blaze in the naked city, a
30:16
Speaker 1: live action metaphor for La itself. Dazzling, obviously a little
30:21
Speaker 1: bit dangerous. There the fire and one spark away from
30:25
Speaker 1: absolute cast. Now I kept driving north, and I was
30:29
Speaker 1: heading to the north Woods, past the flickering lights, past
30:32
Speaker 1: the echo of sirens in which finally arrived, and that skyline.
30:37
Speaker 1: I love skylines. I'm a big skyline guy. Love beautiful skylines. Man,
30:41
Speaker 1: is that great? It's just wonderful man made art. And
30:46
Speaker 1: so it was all kind of a mirage. At that point,
30:48
Speaker 1: somewhere between Studio City and the north Woods, I realized that, listen,
30:54
Speaker 1: this is kind of crazy. This is wild and nuts
30:56
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. And so even though Los Angeles
30:59
Speaker 1: has many issues politically, taxation, all that stuff, it's not dying.
31:04
Speaker 1: It's rehearsing. Some would say, it's always been on fire,
31:09
Speaker 1: always been on fire. Right, Sometimes literally sometimes spiritually on fire.
31:13
Speaker 1: I know, every couple of months we need reasons to
31:16
Speaker 1: burn stuff. And the Dodgers won the World Series, So
31:19
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do? People are flummoxed. They go
31:21
Speaker 1: out there and they destroy the thing of a jig
31:22
Speaker 1: and the watch mccullett and all that stuff, and then
31:24
Speaker 1: they're good for another couple of months until something else happens.
31:26
Speaker 1: And so I will tell you this. The people that
31:29
Speaker 1: live here find new ways to burn and destroy stuff.
31:34
Speaker 1: And a lot of these people don't seem very political,
31:36
Speaker 1: but they find ways to burn stuff anyway. That's the secret.
31:40
Speaker 1: One of the secrets here about La does not fade
31:43
Speaker 1: quietly into the night. It glows until the morning and
31:47
Speaker 1: when the sun comes up tomorrow, tomorrow is another day.
31:53
Speaker 1: Just it's like artistic. It's very artistic, is what it is.
31:55
Speaker 1: All right, Well, leave you on that, have a great
31:58
Speaker 1: rest of your Friday. We may have an ask Ben
32:03
Speaker 1: if you listen to this on Friday on the X machine,
32:05
Speaker 1: so keep an eye on that or possibly the YouTube page.
32:08
Speaker 1: Benny versus the Penny is up. Check out week ten
32:11
Speaker 1: the full edition of Benny Versus the Penny. I Love you,
32:15
Speaker 1: I thank you, for listening. Danny G thanks you. I
32:18
Speaker 1: don't know if he loves you, but we thank you together,
32:21
Speaker 1: and we'll have a new podcasts all weekend later. Skater
32:26
Speaker 1: Asta Pasta now a Rivada, Jay got a murder. I
32:34
Speaker 1: gotta go.