Episode Details

Today’s episode of The Noon Hour of Madness and Mayhem begins with Peaches casually unveiling what appears to be the collected works of a man who has been trapped in a basement with a typewriter for seventeen years, only for us to discover that it is actually the beginning of his autobiography. Naturally, this immediately becomes Peach’s Book of Anger, because apparently the universal rule of writing a large amount of text is that you must be furious. From there, the conversation detonates into a completely unnecessary philosophical debate about GLP-1 medications, their side effects, methamphetamine, cigarettes, concert smoking sections, and the deeply irritating person who would walk into a smoking area specifically to inform everyone that they might have consequences for their choices. The smoking section, however, is defended as one of the last remaining bastions of human civilization because it is apparently the only place at a concert where people can actually talk without screaming directly into each other’s skulls. 

The episode then spirals into the increasingly ancient problem of going outside after 6 p.m. Apparently staying out past six on a school night is now an extreme endurance event, and the boys contemplate the collapse of their trivia-league ambitions because someone took a nap at six o’clock and the others apparently require the gravitational assistance of a bartender, Becca, and a person identified only as Bubblegum Booty to form a functioning team. The stakes become even higher because listeners have been instructed to photograph Peaches at concerts and post the evidence online, meaning Peaches is now considering simply refusing to leave the house ever again. Somewhere in this timeline, Theory of a Deadman and Sevendust are waiting for September 23rd while the hosts perform advanced temporal mathematics to determine that the event is approximately one month away. 

Then comes the real centerpiece: National Radio Day, a holiday apparently invented so radio employees can celebrate the fact that radio employees are disappearing. Instead of balloons, cupcakes, party favors, and Fred Meyer pastries, the hosts discover the much more appropriate visual representation of modern radio: one remaining employee attempting to track seven shows a day before being reduced to atoms. This sends them into a horrifying archaeological expedition through radio job listings, where they discover opportunities in Charleston, West Virginia, St. Louis, mysterious Midwest locations, and Roswell, New Mexico. Every listing sounds progressively more like a corporate hostage note, especially the positions demanding that one person simultaneously be an on-air personality, brand ambassador, social media manager, content creator, Swiss Army knife, spiritual disciple, country-music expert, and presumably the person responsible for unclogging the office toilet. The Charleston position even includes the sacred corporate relics of health insurance and a 401(k), while the actual salary remains hidden in a vault guarded by three retired program directors. 

The radio-job discussion reaches maximum corporate-radio psychosis when the phrase “Swiss Army knife” is interpreted correctly to mean, “Congratulations, you now have eight jobs.” The hosts imagine mandatory meetings, conference-room pizza parties, screaming general managers, and the strange expectation that a radio personality should drive around town talking about anxiety. Unfortunately, the anxiety is not hypothetical. The episode reveals that the hosts are barely sleeping, with one of them lying awake at 1:30 in the morning while apparently half of Facebook simultaneously reports that they too have become unwilling nocturnal creatures. The moon is blamed. The lack of air conditioning is blamed. The entire human condition is briefly blamed. 

Then the