Yesterday When I Was Young

December 31, 2025·38 min·3 clips

AJ Benza smacks a slow-walking man with his bag at Target, saying 'This is who I am'.

AJ opens on the last day of 2025. He does a quick December 31 date bit, then shoves listeners toward the relationship side show with Mike, Irina, Irina's husband, and Kenny's big-mouth energy. Kenny is the early hook. The plug is not smooth, which fits. AJ is basically telling regulars that the other show has loosened up and now runs on old friends taking swings at each other. Then the lane is gone. An L.A. memory pulls him back to one of his California trips, with Robert Evans' Jaguar, a drive toward Palm Springs, and Samantha Phillips waiting at the end of the story. There is heat in it, plus the old gossip AJ likes to chew on. Then come roadrunners, mirages, California weirdness, and AJ noticing that he has lost the point. That is pretty much the format. When he tries to get back to it, the show turns into a rant about culture, kids, looks, and what he thinks parents should push back against. Some of it lands rough. Some of it is just ugly. He complains about racial representation in children's dolls and says toddlers should not be handed lessons he thinks can wait. The anger does not cool off. A store conversation with Rosalie leads to his reaction to seeing a woman in a hijab behind a counter, and he treats the moment as proof that the world around him is wearing him down. He knows he is still raging. Late in the episode, the mood gets comic and bleak, with AJ half-joking that some future fight will end with him winning and going to jail. Then the calendar catches up with him. The last show of 2025 turns into a goodbye, with AJ wishing the audience well for whatever years are left. Sentiment does not soften him much. He says there will be no show tomorrow, expects to return on January 2, and gets in one last shot at New Year's Eve television before signing off. It ends right where AJ lives: cranky, close, raw, and warmer than he probably means it to be.

As heard by us

A loose, unfiltered year-end hang that blends banter, memories, and fast-moving opinions.

AJ Benza closes 2025 with a loose, unfiltered monologue that wanders from resolutions to old friends and then into a Palm Springs memory about a Jaguar.

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Why you'd press play

A year-end rant that bounces from old friends to culture-war flare-ups and back again.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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Play clips from this episode More from AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch