Can you have steak for Thanksgiving? What is the proper Black Friday tradition? We discuss that and more with all the guys on Thought Criminals, including Charlie Kirk, Blake, Tyler, and Danica Patrick, on this week s episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:04.000What is the proper Black Friday tradition?
00:00:06.000We discuss that and more with all the guys on ThoughtCrime.
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00:04:21.000Illinois State, Eastern Illinois, 1901. Arizona wasn't even a state back then.
00:04:25.000There couldn't be an Arizona state because there wasn't a state.
00:04:29.000I'm looking online and it says the duel in the desert is just 1899 and there's many rivalries that are older than 1899. There's Michigan-Notre Dame, 1887. Duke, North Carolina, 1888. Guys, guys, it's the oldest one that Tyler knows about.
00:09:06.000Bison liver alone packs up more than three times more vitamin A than muscle meat, along with high levels of vitamin B12, iron, and folate, all essential for energy, immune health, and keeping you sharp.
00:15:27.000It's like when I went to the Grand Canyon last summer and I discovered that I guess they just sell like prickly pear everything at every Arizona.
00:16:41.000For me, stuffing is like a type of food, and it should be used to stuffing it, but it is still stuffing, even if it's not doing the stuffing.
00:16:48.000Dressing is outside where we don't use the name properly, but we still call it that because it used to be done that way.
00:16:54.000I'm excited for Thanksgiving at this point.
00:17:22.000I have at times, and my mom knows this, I have left the house, gone to the store, and purchased the ingredients for pumpkin pie and brought it home and made it myself because there was no pumpkin pie available.
00:19:22.000I bet it's actually a pretty good lineup.
00:19:24.000And then it was the Cowboys, but now NBC got greedy, because it was Fox had their game, CBS had their game, and then NBC got greedy, and they snuck in their own.
00:20:33.000Yeah, you're pretty much in, I mean, it's like 90 minutes, you know, the way I drive, it's 90 minutes.
00:20:37.000Okay, so now that we have developed something...
00:20:40.000By the way, by the way, I don't want to throw my mom under the bus because every single year, and I know she's going to watch this, every single year post that, there's like a selection of pumpkin pies that is always available.
00:21:13.000So when I was younger, I was always pumpkin, but then pecan pie- Well, now we're getting into chocolate pecan pie, and that's where you just surrender.
00:21:43.000Talk about that for a little bit because there's, you know, a lot of people say, well, it's, you know, it's just about the, you know, it's the Indians, it's the pilgrims.
00:21:50.000Well, everything is what you make of it, right?
00:21:57.000They were not giving, you know, thanks to Brahman.
00:22:00.000They're giving thanks to the Almighty God.
00:22:03.000But yeah, secondly, I just think it's amazing, especially during this season where we have such abundance and we won the election, that there's a day where you just stop and you say thank you, which then of course acknowledges you're saying thank you to a higher power.
00:22:14.000And I don't know of another nation or another country that has a day of gratitude.
00:22:19.000I think I actually said this once and I guess there was like some random African country that has it and that's fine.
00:22:24.000I got like in trouble for saying this last year.
00:23:38.000But instead, now it's all like, oh, the Pilgrims were dying, and the Indians had to come, and they saved the Pilgrims because they were stupid Europeans, didn't know anything.
00:23:46.000Even though Squanto had actually lived in Europe, he had been in London more recently than the Pilgrims had.
00:23:54.000So he spoke English so well, but of course, you know, facts are, you know.
00:24:52.000Truly, you know, it's a great thing because it is possibly the one great national tradition that was created in America that we have had for the entire history of America that is just totally our own thing.
00:25:07.000And then us being America, we have exported it to the rest of the world in various ways.
00:25:27.000And it's not even Black Friday anymore, because Black Friday...
00:25:31.000Well, Charlie, given everything that you just said about the importance of Thanksgiving, what do you think about the people who leave Thanksgiving dinner early to go and start shopping?
00:25:52.000For younger listeners that don't know, after so many people got trampled in the Walmart raids because people would line up, they keep the stores open.
00:28:13.000And now you just wait for Cyber Monday and click a couple buttons.
00:28:16.000And so all the adventure of it, and you don't earn it anymore.
00:28:20.000It used to be you'd get home at 3.30 in the morning, you're like, I got a good deal on a big screen TV. It was a teenage rite of passage in suburban Chicago.
00:28:57.000It used to be, okay, it was on Black Friday normal hours.
00:29:00.000Then they would open it at like 6 a.m. in the morning and people would show up before.
00:29:04.000Then someone got ahead and made it, oh, let's open exactly at midnight.
00:29:07.000And then what finally killed it, I think, the rise of the internet was a factor.
00:29:12.000But another thing that killed it was companies decided to get so greedy and they just said, we're doing Black Friday on Thanksgiving.
00:29:19.000And they would just be open on Thanksgiving with those deals.
00:29:22.000And I think to America's credit, there was popular backlash to this where they're saying, wait, you're forcing employees to skip Thanksgiving to come in and work on Thanksgiving.
00:29:34.000Though, I must hedge, I have to be personally grateful for the fact that stores are open on Thanksgiving, some of them, because I visited a friend, this is about 10 years ago, I went down to a friend in Tennessee for Thanksgiving, and I took a megabus down.
00:29:52.000You know, poor, we have to travel by bus.
00:29:54.000And I took a Megabus down and I had a bag under it and I had to get off in Chattanooga, which was the final destination was Atlanta.
00:30:02.000And they get out and they're like, okay, where's your bag?
00:30:04.000I'm like, oh, it's under the thing and they open it and they feel around.
00:30:06.000They're like, ah, yeah, we can't find it.
00:30:11.000And they just drove away with my bag, with all of my changes of clothes, and I arrived late Wednesday night.
00:30:18.000So I had to go to a Walmart, which, thanks to American capitalism, was open on Thanksgiving, and I had to buy an entire set of clothes for the whole weekend.
00:30:29.000I actually, one of my first jobs was in high school.
00:30:32.000I took the seasonal job at Target and my first day, like first real day was Black Friday.
00:30:42.000So I had to wake up after Thanksgiving when I was like a sophomore in high school at like literally 4 a.m.
00:30:50.000I had to be at Target at 4.30, help stock everything.
00:30:54.000This was still the days Did they still open the doors like Charlie was talking about before they just like leave it open or open like super early?
00:31:01.000And there would be like, I get there at like four o'clock and there would be a line wrapped around the building that people waited to get in.
00:32:06.000And then during the Great Depression, I believe in 1939, FDR got in his head, if there's a longer time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there will be a longer Christmas shopping season.
00:32:20.000And so people will shop more and this will stimulate the economy.
00:32:24.000And so he intervened and he moved Thanksgiving to be a week earlier.
00:32:30.000And this became a partisan political issue.
00:32:33.000And so for a few years, Republican states said, we're not doing this and we're refusing to go along with it.
00:32:40.000So you had a Democrat Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday and you had a Republican Thanksgiving on the fifth one.
00:32:47.000And I think Texas, because they were a Democrat state but had a lot of conservative Democrats who didn't like FDR, they called the truce and they just had, they said, they're both holidays.
00:33:23.000In your teenage years, and working retail used to be part of this too, but in your teenage years, there used to be a variety of things that you would do as a rite of passage that have all been pretty much completely destroyed because of new technology.
00:33:36.000One of those, of course, was waiting in line like this.
00:33:39.000Another one of those, you know, having those retail jobs, again, with no phone to, like...
00:33:43.000Just, you know, constantly be there getting you through it.
00:33:49.000I don't know how I got into this the other day on Twitter.
00:33:51.000It's not even Thanksgiving related, but it was like when you used to have to call someone's house and if you wanted to call a girl, you had to call her house and you had to get through mom or potentially dad.
00:34:04.000And so it's like the elimination of all those...
00:34:08.000Things in society has now created men or adults who don't actually go through any meaningful rite of passage.
00:34:16.000No, I mean, I totally agree with that.
00:34:17.000I mean, some of these other rites of passage were like elementary things such as be home before dark.
00:34:24.000Like, that was, like, a very simple thing, right?
00:34:26.000I mean, other rites of passage were that you need to memorize, like you say, the home phone numbers of at least five people that you know.
00:39:05.000I once had a journey where my parents made me actually narrate the turns to make on an actual physical map that we had purchased with the highways of America.
00:39:20.000I remember I was living in New Jersey for two years when I was in junior high.
00:39:24.000And my mom printed them out on MapQuest and was going somewhere for my brother's football game and got so lost and turned around, she pulled over in a gas station crying because she didn't know where to go or how to go anywhere.
00:40:00.000I don't know if you still have You have to do this, but I know in London, in the UK, to become a cab driver, you used to have to, maybe you still do, but you had to pass this test called the knowledge, and it was basically, you had to memorize the location of like 27,000 different things in London, and people would lose their minds attempting to pass this thing, and obviously, if it's still around, it's obviously just a gate.
00:40:27.000It's more difficult to become a cab driver in London than pass the bar.
00:40:31.000I feel like Uber could use a little bit of that.
00:40:33.000They've done brain scans of cab drivers that have mastered the knowledge.
00:40:37.000And their hippoclamus, which is the actual part of memory, is bigger in their brain than the average person.
00:40:43.000And so in order for that to be true, in order...
00:42:07.000So the idea being then, the more you work it out the same way when you go to the gym and you're like, I'm going to focus on whatever muscle.
00:42:16.000A taxi driver's knowledge is often linked to an enlarged hippocampus, blah, blah, blah.
00:42:20.000Key points in the study here shows about brain plasticity.
00:42:23.000Phenomenon demonstrates the brain's ability to adapt and change based on the experience where the hippocampus can grow in response to intensive spatial learning.
00:42:30.000So let's put this on the flip side then.
00:42:32.000The fact that we're all using GPS now.
00:42:54.000If you are fact-checking your GPS, you are getting actually...
00:42:57.000I did this when we were driving around Pennsylvania with my brother during the election, and we were driving from Penn State to Philadelphia.
00:43:05.000And at one point, it wanted us to go on this road, which would take us to Baltimore.
00:43:08.000And I was like, why are we driving to Baltimore?
00:45:52.000I know for us, when it comes to Christmas, that's always definitely something where...
00:45:58.000Going from, like, receiving Christmas to being a parent when you are giving Christmas, along with Santa Claus, that, you know, as a parent, you really have to work with Santa, and there's a lot more that goes on, as opposed to being a kid and you just sort of experience Christmas, that it is stressful.
00:46:19.000It's definitely stressful, and it's something that I've noticed.
00:46:24.000One of the biggest differences of becoming, you know, becoming a parent or becoming a father is that you, you know, and obviously we're not doing a Christmas episode here, but yeah, it's in order of magnitude higher than that for Thanksgiving.
00:46:38.000And on Thanksgiving, you don't even have Santa helping you.
00:46:40.000Yeah, I typed in the chat, I'm just surprised that Black Friday hasn't been canceled.
00:46:48.000Yeah, I think it, there were a few efforts...
00:46:52.000I want to say there were probably a few efforts.
00:46:54.000I saw it kind of bubble up more than a few times.
00:46:58.000And by the way, you see this pretty often, where they'll say, you know, why is it that a black hat in cowboy movies is associated with negative, or Darth Vader is associated with negative something in a movie, and so the black color is associated with being negative, whereas the white collar is on a white hat is a good person, and white and black, etc.
00:47:19.000And so they'll try to do that, but it's just so ingrained in movies that there's not much you can do with it.
00:47:25.000Obviously the new Wicked movie that's, you know, that's out right now, which looks horrible, is like totally, you know, totally a play on that as well with, you know, is the witch good or bad?
00:49:09.000Also a reminder, there's a bunch of movies that release on Thanksgiving, so people will go watch the compilation of movies that are coming out.
00:49:17.000Like, I'm going with my family on Friday to see Moana 2, which we celebrate because Moana 1 came out in 2016 right after Trump won.
00:52:01.000Since we were talking about AOL. Okay, just because a movie has a scene in it which takes place in a certain, you know, there's like a turkey scene or whatever, that doesn't make it a movie about that.
00:53:37.000Braxton just had his third child, which we're really excited about.
00:53:41.000All was great, and baby came out great.
00:53:45.000We were worried because I went with my brother to the ASU game on Saturday, and my sister-in-law was a week overdue, so he really shouldn't have been maybe doing that.
00:54:25.000If I wanted to be serious, I can say it, but it's...
00:54:28.000I don't want to give away exactly where I live, but there's this...
00:54:32.000I'll just say there's this, like, Christmas tradition that has been going on for just years, and last year it got canceled because there was, like, a financial issue.
00:54:47.000And it basically people just kind of rallied and the whole community came together and was like, no, and it was a kids thing and it was like, we're, you know, we're totally going to save this and it's going to come back next year and it's going to be amazing.
00:54:59.000And we totally did and I threw a bunch of money in.
00:55:28.000And it's sort of like a, you know, a local landmark.
00:55:31.000And there was, you know, this This stupid thing that happened last year and it was cool to see people do that and it's just great because I can see that with my kids and then I can take them to see it as well and see that tradition keep going.
00:55:45.000And also, of course, for Saquon Barkley.
00:55:48.000So I'm very, very thankful for Saquon Barkley and the Eagles.
00:55:53.000I am thankful that tomorrow, as of when we're recording this, I forgot what day it was, that the Neff family, my parents, my brother, my two sisters, their spouses, their children, will assemble for Thanksgiving.
00:56:10.000There will be, trying to do the math in my head, but quite a few number of people, and there will be no libs.
00:57:31.000There are several liberal members of the extended Pozo family and on other people's sides who basically just won't come to Thanksgiving anymore, and it's sad, and I think it sucks, and I think there's some things that are bigger in politics.
00:58:30.000Oh, and with that, since we are right at the very tail end here, of course, we're also thankful for the ThoughtCrime audience and for everything that you guys have done throughout the year, year plus that we've done the show.