Jack Posobiec and the team dissect the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooter selfie controversy, debating signal jamming theories against Cole Thomas Allen's pre-attack photo. They analyze game theory through a viral red versus blue button dilemma, contrasting tribal survival instincts with Mr. Beast's reality show evidence of human selfishness. The discussion pivots to the Michael Jackson biopic, noting its high audience approval despite critical panning and the film's exclusion of pedophilia allegations due to family pressure. Ultimately, the episode challenges viewers to reconsider media narratives on cancel culture while teasing an upcoming review of the Angel Studios "Animal Farm" adaptation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Thought Crime Thursday Returns00:06:35
From the age of Big Brother.
If they want to get you, they'll get you.
The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone.
They're collecting your communications.
Ladies and gentlemen, Thought Crime Thursday is upon us.
They tried to shut it down.
They tried to cancel Thought Crime Thursday.
They tried to do everything they could, but they couldn't stop it because even without songs, even without presents, Thought Crime Thursday always comes.
I was going for a Grinch thing.
I don't know why I did that, but I just did that.
Let's see who we have here because I was like, where is Jack going with it?
How the Grinch Stole Thought Crime?
How the Grinch Stole Thought Crime?
That'll be our Christmas special.
You're a normie.
Mr. Grinch.
This is no normies allowed.
It totally works.
You're a man of boring thoughts.
No, it's just like establishment.
And on that day, the Grinch's thought crimes grew five sizes.
Okay.
Are we already getting into the JP Morgan story?
No, no, no.
No, we have a way more important topic that we were talking just before we started, which is.
Imagine that, by the way.
We were talking about probably, I think this is like the most impactful.
Video of the 1990s, possibly the most impactful cultural artifact of the post World War II era, which is the Crossfire advertisement from the 90s.
So hold on, this is how we got here.
The studio goes, Can we get a little crosstalk with Jack?
Because Jack's remote.
And I was like, For some reason, it made me think of Crossfire, the show with Tucker on CNN back in the day.
Who else was on that show?
I can't remember because I was like eight when I was on that show.
And then you guys didn't even care about that reference.
You were just like, Started singing a jingle.
To Crossfire.
Yeah, because it was amazing.
It was super important.
Right.
Yeah, you agree with me on this, right, Tyler?
You remember the Crossfire album.
Yeah, we immediately sang it together.
No, it was literally harmony in here.
They were trying to harmonize Crossfire.
You'll get caught up in the Crossfire.
I love that movie.
Crossfire.
Crossfire.
It was on every episode of Double Dare, I think.
Oh, is that where it's from?
Well, no, it was on Nickelodeon.
It was a kid's.
It was all the kids.
Was it a game or a show?
No, it was a game.
You don't know Crossfire?
I don't think you don't know about Crossfire.
I mean, if they pull up the video, maybe I do.
Andrew's Gem Y card.
Did you not watch Nickelodeon endlessly like we did in the video?
Crossfire.
What is it?
Crossfire.
Nickelodeon was all I watched.
Andrew was raised by.
Nickelodeon raised me.
I bet I know it.
I just am forgetting.
Andrew was raised by a wild pack of chihuahuas, actually, and they never let him watch TV.
So, wait, is it a board game?
Yeah.
No, it's not quite a board game.
It's like a Hungry, Hungry Hippos type.
Game, like, which is, I mean, it's like similar.
Oh, wait, is it have those little beebies and Bradley?
Is it like little beebies?
Yeah, yeah, we got it.
Do we have this ready to go yet?
Do we have this ready yet?
I don't have it ready yet.
It's like the total call from Kylie when she goes, It's not loaded yet.
I always do that to her during the live show.
I always feel like I said that at least 55 seconds ago.
I know, poor girl.
She's she, we give her a lot of like last minute demands, and so sometimes I make the call for the video and I hear that in our ear.
You don't hear it on the other side, but.
It's not loaded yet.
Yeah, well, maybe we'll get to it.
She's very thorough about letting us know when something is loaded.
Yeah, you know, well, we can, we can, we don't need to fixate on it.
But the point is, is Crossfire was important.
It was extremely culturally impactful.
It fit into the important millennial zeitgeist, which is you'd watch an ad, it would have an amazing song, it would make it look like the coolest thing ever.
And then you'd actually get it for Christmas and you'd play with it for like five minutes and go, I just kind of lame.
And then you became a jaded millennial who voted for Obama.
Well, yes.
That's true.
Oh, she said it's loaded.
It's loaded.
Let's do it.
Play the clip.
Oh, no.
No sound.
It's all right.
I'm watching.
It's the 90s.
It's not about the imagery.
It's not about the imagery.
It's white kids in a car.
Crossfire.
Crossfire.
And then they like explode.
Yeah.
No, the kid at the end, the kid spins out.
Watch this.
Yeah.
The game spins off.
I actually got one at one point.
It was so bad.
The what?
The board was bad?
No, the actual, if you played the commercial, it's the greatest, it's obviously the greatest commercial of any game for all time, but the actual game was awful.
There's no one who still plays it.
There's no, like, I thought this was the most important cultural artifact of the 90s ever.
Wait, I just Googled it.
Wait, I just Googled it.
Jack's right.
I Googled greatest commercial for any board game of all time.
The 1989 Crossfire commercial is widely considered the greatest, most memorable board game advertisement.
Board game advertisement featuring high energy rock music, laser shooting gameplay, and iconic streamline tagging.
You'll get caught up in the Crossfire.
Speaking of Crossfire, Jazz.
So this isn't nothing.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
I want to try it.
Let's see.
Whoa, whoa.
That is a.
Dude, that is quite the second.
Wait, wait, wait.
You want to hear the other four?
Battleship, Dream Phone, which also was a big deal.
The dream phone and pizza party.
I just decided to go bigger and I asked Google just the greatest toy ad of all time, and they listed several options, but they actually had Crossfire as one of the five, along with the original Slinky ad and the board game Mousetrap.
Actually, Mousetrap was a big deal, yes.
But I can't, oh, yeah, I remember.
And we're getting some of the younger people in the chat are not familiar with Crossfire, and all I have to say to them, I was not familiar, yeah, exactly.
So, all I'm gonna say is, I was fine, we're going to have some accountability for this.
Russ, you have to say on air, I am uncool and lame because I don't know what Crossfire was.
You know, Mousetrap was big.
The Selfie Video Segue00:09:04
You know what?
Dream Phone was big.
Oh, the Mousetrap was a decent game.
We're going to take them away.
Mousetrap was a decent game.
Splat?
Yeah.
Splat?
I've never heard of that one.
Shoots and Ladders?
You guys remember Shoots and Ladders?
Shoots and Ladders did not have any cool ads.
They didn't have any cool action.
But it wasn't an ad.
It was just a cool game.
Yeah.
Crossfire is a testament to America's greatest cultural export, which is insane commercials for things that are of middling quality.
And we should be proud of that because that has taken over the world.
Andrew, Andrew, so Andrew, you mentioned something about crossfire.
Yes, yes, I did.
Yes, well, that I mean, you want me to is this is this segue to me?
Yeah, I was trying to segue.
So, this is literally the segue.
Okay, I'm supposed to pick up, you're throwing me the ball, I'm picking it up, and I'm running with it.
So, yeah, um, Andrew had watched the ad, he would be like his brain would have received additional neurons from its.
Power and he would have caught the segue more effectively.
I would have.
Yes, but you know, it's probably that I'm just shaken up.
I'm shaken up still.
I would be shaken up if I learned that I missed the coolest ad ever when I was a kid.
So, White House Correspondence Center, we should address it.
Let's get it.
Let's, let's, we got to do the thing.
So, there's many things that we can talk about.
We've talked about on the Daily Show, but in general terms, yes, I was there.
Jack was actually the second person to call me and get through.
There was terrible service in the room.
But my wife was actually the first person to get through, which was, I think, actually a God thing because I tried to call her, couldn't get through.
She ended up getting through to me, and I knew she was going to be worried about me.
But we were all good.
It was just a crazy experience because we got stuck under the tables.
And I remember thinking the scariest part was don't make any abrupt moves because the Secret Service looked like very, very intense, which they should have, right?
But it felt like if you moved abruptly, that they might have considered you a threat and taken a shot at you, right?
I mean, it was my first memory I'm hearing glasses drop from the back of the room.
I look over and I see a chair flying through the air.
So, a Secret Service agent had actually picked up a chair and thrown it.
And that was pretty terrifying, actually.
Then everybody starts diving under the tables.
I'm sitting under there, and all of a sudden it occurs to me, was I just present for the assassination of President Trump?
You know, that was the part where, and you have to understand, in the room, nobody knew what the hell was going on.
We had no idea.
We had no idea because it was so cacophonous that there was, you were like, I obviously didn't hear what I was supposed to hear.
And then I kind of think, I logged.
Like, maybe a thump, thump in the back of the room.
But I really didn't know anything.
So, as soon as the coast clears and we all sit up and stand up, I looked, I saw Phil Wegman, who you've met Phil right before, Tyler.
Many times.
And he's with the Wall Street Journal.
I said, Phil, did they shoot the president?
And he said, I don't think so.
I saw them drag him off the stage.
I did not witness JD Vance going off the stage.
So, I was like, well, do you know if they dragged him off and he was injured or if he was shot or what?
And he's like, I don't believe he was shot, but I could be wrong.
So, for like, 20 minutes, we're all in the ballroom trying to figure it out.
And I think, Jack, this is what we talked about before the show.
What was the wildest part, actually?
What a weird place.
Is just I'm standing up there, and all of a sudden, within a moment, this is a room full of journalists, journalists, on air TV personalities.
They all start doing selfies.
I have this picture in my mind of the selfie videos.
It was 2,000 people in this room, 2,200.
I'm not kidding when I say, At least a third of them, within like as soon as everybody kind of started rising their feet, at least a third of them were going like this, taking selfie videos of what just happened.
And there was no service in that dang room.
I don't know, like maybe, yeah, no, I was getting texts from people who were in the room and they only were arriving a half hour plus.
Yeah, I don't know if it was signal jamming for no, I think it's just it's underground.
It's a bad, yeah.
Well, I do think, no, I actually, in all seriousness, that when there is something like that, um, signal jammers will sometimes be employed, it's an EOD, um.
Strategy for basically that if there's any remote controlled devices, remote controlled IEDs, RCIDs, that they would block signals just in case, out of abundance of caution, if there were something that they would block signals to prevent it from sending like a trigger signal or something.
But it is also an underground.
Yeah, I think it could be like both things are true.
In addition to all the obvious.
Yeah, it could be like both things are true.
But, anyways, the point is.
It's just standard procedure.
I just remember, like, so there was somebody on the team that was like, you should do a selfie.
That was literally what it took for my team to, like, tell me I should do a selfie from the room.
Cause it didn't occur to me, even as I was watching everybody do the selfies.
All right.
So now, wait, guys, Andrew just got his Gen Y card back.
No.
So check this out.
So I, I, I look up.
No, but I look up and freaking Brian Stelter had jumped up onto the stage.
Like, legit.
Like, we had just.
I didn't know he could jump.
He's a.
Wow.
I don't know how he got up.
Maybe there were stairs on the side.
I'm looking.
Brian Stelter's on the freaking dais.
There's a ladder.
Also, the real Brian Stelter was executed in Guantanamo Bay.
Of course.
This is the core real raw news lore.
The lookalike, the real raw news.
I don't know if our audience is fully aware of this.
This is an interesting thing, though, is that because I saw the selfie discourse actually kind of became a topic trending online, and people were saying, Hey, note to younger journalists if you're in a room where something like this happens, you're supposed to point your phone at the thing that's happening, not at yourself, which I admit I found that to be pretty.
It was interesting.
I saw, yeah, I mean, listen, there were like some journals that weren't doing it.
Like, I think I saw Nora O'Donnell or whatever.
I saw Margaret Brennan, right?
I saw that they just looked very, very upset and distraught.
Well, you know, though, I actually, like, I would actually kind of push back on some of the people who were like hypercritical of the younger folks who were doing the selfie videos because.
When you're on like TikTok and Instagram and even Twitter as well, X, those videos are very relatable with a younger audience.
And those are the type of videos that they tend to look for for authenticity.
And they look for that for a direct connection with the person.
So I'm not saying, obviously, if there's something going on, you do want that footage.
But I did see, I do think there's like a generational gap here where it's like, No, they do want the selfie videos because they feel it has more authenticity than, you know, you just like being behind a camera in a studio with the Chiron and like, this is what happened.
Like, they feel like it's more real.
Listen, it was, we could have, what's wild is, I don't think people understand this.
In the room, we did not know what happened.
We had no idea.
So you got all these journalists that are like, all they do is like watch the news all day.
They're all in the dark.
Which is funny because no flip side watching it at a distance, which I was.
It's extremely obvious nothing happened because the camera is actually on Trump when it happens.
And then they whisk Vance right away.
They take a little while to get Trump out.
I think I noticed too.
They take a little bit to walk him out.
There was that one dude, though, that went and stood right there.
But it was so easy for you to rewind it and see, like, okay.
And so we found out at a distance pretty quickly.
Yeah.
I actually, the very first thing that I saw was just a clip of them whisking Trump out.
Like, someone came over at this place I was at, called my house, and was like, have you seen this?
And I thought just initially, I thought like maybe something had happened to the president the way that they all swarmed around him because that's all I saw.
Well, then he fell.
So that was the other thing.
He like went down.
And so people like.
Yeah, but were there like steps or something?
I think.
I don't know.
But it was like.
I thought they like pushed him down.
I don't know if they tripped him.
I thought they were like trying to get him down low.
I also heard a theory he was going down low.
Is that what it was?
I thought they were trying to like push him down, like get him down because they weren't sure like that the road was going down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All I know is it, but there is another selfie angle to this, Jack.
If you could throw up image one, this is Cole Thomas Allen.
Main Character Syndrome Explained00:03:32
He's taken a picture in the mirror.
Man.
Just moments before.
Apparently, this was within 30 minutes of his attack.
Dressed all in black with a red tie.
He's got a knife in his belt.
He's got a gun, looks like strapped underneath his arm.
And he had a shotgun, right?
Where's the shotgun in this?
I don't think you can see the shotgun in this picture.
Maybe it's a shotgun.
If you zoom in on his face, he's got like a DreamWorks face, if you guys are familiar with it.
Fat.
He's doing the office, right?
Who's that character from The Office?
Is it Jim Hubbard?
It feels more like it.
It feels like.
Yeah, Jim Hubbard.
I need to see his face, guys.
His face.
Not the face, guys.
Not the weapons, the face.
The weapons?
There's the weapons.
I just want his big, low resolution face glaring right at me.
That was actually helpful.
I want to go back to those in just a second.
We'll get there in a second.
We will.
Oh my gosh.
That's totally DreamWorks face there.
It's just because he's like half black, half white.
No, no.
He doesn't have an even smile.
He's doing that like.
He looks good.
And like every DreamWorks character has that.
Shrek, Mega Mind.
Look at all the DreamWorks posters.
For me, I go to Jim from the office that it's just that like.
You know, and JD Vance kind of did a similar, you know, smug with Margaret for the camera when he was on at the debate.
Oh, that was a debate.
You're right.
Yeah, I thought he looked like I think this guy looks like somebody that everybody's seen before.
I thought it was well, that's what I'm saying.
It's the mixed race thing, and to the DreamWorks thing, it's like every character on any like animated thing is like always ethnically ambiguous.
There's like a few white kids, and then everybody else is kind of like, Oh, I don't know.
He definitely the reason I say DreamWorks race, they always have that smirk.
It's like it's a way of showing.
That you're not one of those basic, just normal smilers.
You've got punk energy.
You've got an edge to it.
Look at all the knives this guy has.
And DreamWorks will always do that to show they weren't just a Pixar movie.
Okay, that's the shotgun down there with the handguns, the shotguns.
So he had it slung over his shoulder, maybe, in that image.
Remember, somebody was saying this to me one time.
I can't remember what incident it was.
I don't think it's over his shoulder.
I don't know.
I can't remember what incident it was.
I just don't see it.
But people were saying to me when people go in and do stuff like this, Part of like their whole, like, you know, anti hero arc that they believe that they're like part of is like that process of like getting booked and all that stuff.
So, like, they're like at peak joy in those moments where, like, you've seen that a lot happen where it's like a lot of them have, like, sometimes you see like people look like they're shaking up and they're like, they've lot, they've, they're like have screws loose.
But some people, like, this guy, this guy was not a quack in that sense.
No, no, it, similar to similar to, uh, The what, uh, to Luigi, right?
Right, so it was initially his manifesto.
You know what that's called, though?
You know what that's called?
That's main character syndrome, yeah.
That's main character syndrome, it's really like the narcissism of it, is yeah.
They all think that they're like the hero of a movie, and you see this, you see this with like a lot of Redditors, you see this with a lot of like people in Sky Anon in that lane of you know, lane of country where it's just this constant, like, it's like they're performing for someone, like, like someone's watching them, so.
I guess he took this selfie and we don't know.
I think I read the affidavit.
I don't know if he texted this selfie to anyone, which is really interesting to me.
So it's like, did he take this selfie knowing that the police would find it and then show it later?
Naming Liberty Hall After Charlie00:08:34
Like, who's the audience for this anyway?
Yeah.
I don't know, man.
Maybe he just knew it was documented in history.
He's like, this is going to be the guy that killed a bunch of cabinet members and should probably be.
Is this tie tucked into his belt?
Yeah.
Like, what?
I mean, it was a little bit.
It wasn't very well planned.
Like, who just runs straight into a.
Well, so this brought up an interesting thing.
And so I just tweeted about this.
I want to know.
Angelo thinks this is probably not a good idea.
So I trust Angelo's wisdom on this stuff.
But you're going to ignore it anyway.
No, no, no.
Like, no, he's saying it's not a good idea.
So I shouldn't push.
No, I don't think.
I don't know.
I don't think he minds if I bring it up.
But somebody posted an AI image of the new ballroom.
So there were two things that happened.
So then a bunch of people online started saying this is a good reason for the ballroom.
And then.
Because, you know, for security reasons.
100%.
And then somebody posted this the Charlie Kirk ballroom that Trump's developing.
And I was like, this is a great idea because you have the Brady briefing room that was, Brady was shot.
Retweet, retweet.
Yeah, Brady was shot at the Hilton, too.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, so we got the Brady briefing room.
How about the Kirk ballroom?
And, you know, and then I think, you know, the question is, is that like, well, Trump's probably going to name it after himself.
So maybe we're giving people like a bad choice because the people that want him named Trump or Kirk, they both like each other.
So you're giving them like an impossible choice.
I mean, I just think it's just a word.
Andrew, Foz is denying this.
Foz is saying that you are fake news.
He said it was a bad idea.
Oh, it's a positive paradox.
Yeah, Okay, so to be fair to what Foz said, he said, if you're loyal to Charlie, is it cool, Foz, if I read this?
I'm just making sure.
I want to make sure I get you right.
The positive paradox.
So if you're loyal to Charlie, then you'd be de facto loyal to Trump.
And if you're loyal to Trump, you're de facto loyal to Charlie.
So it's one of those questions where any answer will get you.
Oh, you mean over.
Wait, are you just saying about the name?
Yeah, yeah.
The Charlie Kirk ballroom or the Trump ballroom?
Because everybody.
I would.
Because I tweeted this the other day.
I would just say, I would go with Charles J. Kirk.
Yeah.
I just think maybe a little more official.
Charles J. Kirk as opposed to Charlie.
I know we all know Ms. Charlie.
I know that that's.
I'm into it.
You know, obviously what he went by, but I would just say Charles J. because it's just that.
It just gives it that little extra level of.
It's Donald J. Trump.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, John J. Trump.
And one thing conservatives love is to give you your whole legal name.
You're well, that's that's an official thing within government.
What does the chat say?
That's the identifier.
We should have the chat, actually.
I think another, frankly, another good reason to name it after Charlie is it's possible due to various legal things, it might not be done by the time that this administration is out.
And I think if you just pre announce this is named after Charles Kirk, thank you, it's a lot harder for baddies to undo it.
And we don't then we don't end up with the Amanda Gorman ballroom or something.
And by the way.
Charlie, that's a good point.
Charming Point was actually one of the first to host like one of the main galas at Mar a Lago, which has become a thing.
Like, that's kind of a number.
And let's be real, like, this ballroom is like a basically an ode to Mar a Lago at the White House.
Oh, Dylan in the chat pointed out we have the Donald J. Trump International Airport because that's isn't that what they named Palm Beaches and Gibberish Nation says, and then and then here's here's Kyrie McAllen uh saying Jack's keeping the formality so.
Charles J. Kirk, Donald J. Trump, you know, the ballroom.
The other point I would make is just real quick if you want to, because they're talking about the whole point of this, Andrew, I don't know if you said, is that like there was this like conspiracy theory that we were all talking about the ballroom because that like someone had like told us to tweet about it or something.
It was a group chat and led to it.
Yeah.
That there was like a, yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
No, it was, we were right there with, with, it was actually, Just so ridiculous.
Like, you read some of this stuff, like, yeah, we're all logged in.
When you couldn't even have access to like, you know, Wi Fi, like, we're all logged in.
It's like, no, men can actually just think independently.
That's how it works.
But what do you call it?
If you want it to, if you want to keep the focus on security and if you want to keep the focus on political violence, then what better way?
Free speech, First Amendment.
Also, it just, naming it after Charlie.
Really, I mean, it's so multi layered.
It's just so multi layered.
Also, frankly, they already have renamed the Kennedy Center to be the Trump Kennedy Center, which is another big events venue.
And so I don't think he needs two events venues named after him.
And by the way, to your point, if you named it the Charles James Kirk Ballroom, like you're right.
I dare the left to try and take his name off that.
I mean, they still might.
We are a governor here vetoing Charles Kirk's highways.
Well, we did just get a roadway in Westminster.
I want the loop.
I want the loop.
Well, if Biggs gets into office, I bet we could get it.
We better.
What do you think?
No, the loop.
It will happen immediately.
The 202?
Yeah.
Everything that got.
Wait, but is that Charles or Charlie?
I'm not sure.
I feel like a road is fine being Charlie.
A ballroom is more formal.
Yeah.
Yeah, the ballroom.
Yeah, it's a White House room.
Well, so, and that's it.
It's the James Brady press room.
But again, it's the full name.
We call it the Brady press room, where that's what the press briefings happen when they're, you know, when Caroline, of course, is, I guess, off.
On maternity leave, and we're all praying for Caroline, of course.
But when she's there, it's, and when she's not there, actually, it's called the Brady Press Room, also because of political violence.
So a lot of people want to call it the Charles J. Kirk Freedom Hall.
You know, you want a real thought crime.
But then they just probably call it the Freedom Hall.
You want a real thought crime.
I don't like too many things being just named the Freedom X.
It's like a low effort name for things.
There's a lot of that freedom.
And it's not like, what's a Freedom Hall?
It's not a Freedom Hall, it's a ballroom.
And just maybe if you named it specifically after, if you said Charles J. Kirk Freedom Hall, because that was on his shirt, I could be okay with it.
But I think someone even suggested Freedom Hall and then it honors both.
I would push back on that.
Freedom Hall, then it's just generic.
You could call it the Liberty Hall.
I do like having Freedom incorporated.
Maybe you use Freedom for the podium or the stage or a different part of the, like, this is the Freedom Stage or something like that as an aspect of it.
And then You could have like a freedom shirt that's put up there, so there are ways to incorporate it that I think would be cool.
Zuzu's Petals, I don't know if it's a comment.
Oh, there we go.
Says, I would love for a debate hall at a university to be named after Charlie.
That's actually a really good idea, like the Oxford debate.
You know, I think something where you could create like a do we have any debate halls here in America?
That's such a well, definitely develop one, yeah.
With in Charlie's name, like we could probably get one of those done at what like Texas AM or.
Or something, I don't know.
What's the most, like a Hillsdale one, of course, but what would be like the most prestigious university you could see this actually happening at?
Actually happening?
Yeah.
Probably the most respected, most conservative school.
Like Clemson?
No, it's probably like a really high state school.
But if you created a university like Austria or Miami, what about Georgetown?
University of Miami.
Yeah, why not Georgetown?
Or like George Washington.
Georgetown.
I mean, George Washington, way too lib.
A lot of these schools are pretty mercenary, so you get someone to pay for it.
They'll probably put up whatever you want.
Baylor.
Baylor.
Well, Baylor is super lib, though.
That's the thing.
I mean, but they're historically, like, their board and things like that are, like, is historically, like, pretty conservative.
The Blue Button Debate00:15:15
Texas AM might be the most.
Probably.
That's maybe one of the most conservative private schools.
It probably needs to be at a private school, so, you know, public schools are probably the most conservative.
The highest ranked academically public school in a red state where we could just force it on them would be UT Austin, and UT Austin is lib, so they would.
Flip out about this, but it would be funny.
Yeah.
Maybe that's the point.
You force it down.
And then also, but then people are going to be mad that I said UT Austin is more distinguished than AM.
So maybe we should just go with AM.
Otherwise, all of the AM cultists will perform a bloody Golan, man.
I don't want that to happen.
While we're coming up, Hillsdale, yeah.
Hillsdale would probably be the best.
But okay.
So we talked about this idea of a positive paradox question.
And there is one that is going wild over the internet.
And that is red button versus blue button.
Um,.
Have you heard about this, Tyler?
Yeah.
I looked at it.
Blake, give us what is the.
I did not hear about this until.
Until our channel.
Until you guys brought it up.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
All right.
So, is it the buttons you said?
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
So, this is a question that made the rounds.
Let me throw up the image here so I can look at it here.
Just got to find number nine on our stupid list of numbers.
So, I want to read it.
So, this is a question that made the rounds.
I don't think it originated with Mr. Beast, but he posted a very high visibility poll of it.
It's a.
It was even going big hit before then.
But the question is: it's everyone on earth is given secretly a command to push either a red button or a blue button.
You just red button, blue button.
And the stakes are: if more than 50% of people push the blue button, everyone in the world survives.
If less than 50% of people push the blue button, in other words, if more than half of people push red, only people who pressed red survive.
Presented with this choice, which button do you press?
Tyler?
The logical button to push is the red button because you survive no matter what.
So that's the logical button.
The pro social button.
The pro social button is blue.
So I actually, there's an argument to say that the blue button is.
So if you're.
Because this is the interesting thing.
Only libs that believe in agenda.
21 stuff that want to eliminate half of society because they think that the world is overpopulated, those people would all push red.
So, like, super, super.
It's interesting you're saying that because most people are saying a lot of people, the take is their take is a lot of people are giving the take that blue is the lib button.
I know.
I think it's a horseshoe.
I think a majority of libs would push it, but I think there's the rat, the most radical libs would push red.
All right.
So, Caboose has this whole thing broken down because people get lost in the language.
This is actually what the truth is.
You push the blue button, you might die.
You push the red button, you definitely won't die.
So if you, but this is that way.
No, no, no.
This isn't, but this, this isn't getting to the heart of the question, though.
The heart of the question is, what do you think most people will push?
Like, like in your, and by the way, is this, wait, is this world or country?
World.
The world is the, is the Mr. Beast typo.
This is what was a typo?
And I want to hear this from the chat.
Right.
I need, we need this from the chat.
So it's, it's also trying to understand what do you think most people in the world will push.
Push, which I think I think blue wins.
If you did a globe, if somehow you did a global poll of this, I think blue wins.
I think so.
Um mr, in Mr Beast Poll, blue wins with about, so it's about 56 to 58.
So the question, the real question I saw someone post, I saw someone post, after this, xy, do all the blue people throw?
Do all the blue people throw all the red people in jail afterwards?
Maybe no, this that was what I said yesterday.
I said here's what happens, all the blue people, the blue people, Will want everybody to hit blue, and then, when they survive, they take out their guns and they shoot all the people who hit blue.
Mel Shell says blue, everyone can survive.
See, people like Mel Shell are why I'm saying blue will win.
I would push red, but I think blue would win.
Suzu's Petal says blue will win.
I think blue will win.
I think blue will win, but more to the point, I think we actually should push blue because I think the world, what we're really voting for is do you want, well, you're voting for your own survival, but then on top of that, do you want the world where all of the blue pushers have been purged and are dead or are still with us?
And I'll be frank, I think the world with all the blue button pushers.
Taken out is a worse one.
I think we do not, we have not improved the world if we take out people who are pro social but not very good at game theory.
People who are pro social and not very good at game theory are like the people who make sure that the lights remain on.
They're the people who put the shopping cart back.
They are the people who put the shopping cart back.
But Blake, every, but this is the.
I don't know if I agree with that.
No, actually, I'm pressing in on this.
Shopping cart is a perfect analog.
No, here's my follow up.
Because there is no game to you.
The shopping cart back, but expect everybody else to go to bed.
No, no, definitely not.
No, put leaving the shopping cart out like an animal is the red button push.
It's the doing the thing that only helps yourself and you're okay with hurting the rest of society because there's no harm to you because you'll never be harmed for not putting the shopping cart back.
You're just inflicting harm on others.
I feel conflicted about it.
You've got to do the pro social thing, you've got to save the blue button push.
But here's the point the real thing is more interesting, which is what would be the outcome afterwards because all of the blue people, I agree with you, I think blues.
Actually, it wins, it would survive, but they would come after the red pushers.
If it's not private though, how do you know?
How do you know it's private?
There has to be somewhere.
There's no fraud in our elections.
There's nothing truly private.
There's nothing truly private.
And so the bigger question is the better question is would you rather, would that change your vote if red loses and you get thrown in jail for the rest of your life, slash, or if red wins, all the blue people die?
It says private right there.
I don't think that's like, I don't know.
I think at that point it just makes it easy for blue to win because no one's going to want to vote for the situation of like, I might win but just go to prison.
I think if that was the case, though, I think red would win.
What?
Why would red win in the situation where if you push red, people wouldn't want to get thrown in jail?
This is only an interesting hypo.
This is only an interesting hypo if like red is the answer of 100% self interested.
In terms of your own survival, but then blue is saving other people.
Would you only have Republicans left though?
You would be able to stop the blues from doing it because the reds would be better at fighting.
Red would definitely be majority Republicans.
I'm just going to say.
But it would also be radical.
It would be radical Dems too.
I don't think it's something you're going to be like the Rhodesian Bush War.
What are you talking about?
Guys, I think pushing the blue button is totally like an evangelical mega church thing to do.
Yes.
Yes.
Got to save people.
How many women would you care for?
Like, we gotta have women.
Like, guys, we don't want women.
If Red won, how many women would be left?
There'd be like five men to everyone.
Yeah, do you want the future of like where everyone's fighting over like a tiny number of women who are also the like nasty red button pusher or super progressive?
You are like, you are the only women left.
Jennifer Welch.
There's a bunch of battle nurses.
Lesbians and men.
Yeah.
Why not?
Nelshell just wrote, I'm a nurse and I put away other people's cards.
I've done it.
I put away other people's cards.
Liz just wrote, I disagree.
I'm totally pushing red, and I always pick up the shopping cart.
So, you are pretty much exactly the same.
Liz, I think you've got to reconsider.
I think you might be dissociating.
I would like to say when you think you're pushing away those coffee carts, make sure you're not experiencing a psychotic episode and actually pulling the shopping carts out and creating chaos.
Wait a minute.
No, I just, I just make it fun of her.
But Nation is saying this to Andrew.
Andrew, you, there's a question in the chat as to whether or not Andrew is in fact the hated non grocery cart returner.
No, no.
I put my grocery carts back and it's, I will tell you, it's always a pain because I have to make sure the kids stay in the darn car when I'm like trying to return the grocery cart.
And I'm like, buckle up.
I want to see all the buckles.
So, I know.
So, you've never once said, these kids are really annoying.
I'm just going to ditch the cart.
Nope.
Never once?
Nope.
You're not.
Would you bet your life on it?
No joke.
I literally put it back every time.
Every time.
Don't you look at me like this when you got bad.
You don't know, but you know, no.
I put it back every day.
Okay.
I believe you.
I'm a caboose and I figure it out.
You don't know that I do this, but you.
What am I like?
Just putting you under the microscope.
What's the matter?
I paid a guy to follow Andrew around for a month.
I'm sure you did.
There were a couple times where there were close calls, but he did remember.
He did remember.
A couple close calls, but he remembered.
I've claimed all of my women friends are pushing red.
This is making me worried about women.
Women are being a little ice cold here.
Wait, women are going red?
Liz claims all the women she knows are red pushers.
She's been pushing red, And then we have Noah.
The chaos people, the depressed people.
If it was all, if the red one, you would end up with a mix of like very libertarian, like pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, Republican, conservative.
What jobs would.
Really awful people.
What job.
But here's the point in the chat literally every nurse, every firefighter, every police officer for the most part would probably be gone if red won.
Yeah.
That's what I'm thinking.
No, not every nurse.
And like, there's no, no, no.
And to just appeal to the right nurses out there, There, that are not okay, that do not have a vast majority of them would be gone.
Those nurses would be gone.
I thought it would be gone, all a lot of them would be gone.
Wait, did you have a hot take on nurses?
But we can get rid of those in other ways.
On this, that comes to me via it was from Still Boneless, and he said, He said, you know, why like the nurse ratchet type nurses exist, and he said it's because.
It's because those types of nurses' personal lives are so disordered and chaotic and insane that they take it out on their patients, and that's why they're just like so incredibly tyrannical and unfeeling when it comes to their actual patients.
I, yeah, I mean, it's like I think probably for the teachers too that I've just mentioned, the really nasty teachers, like, yeah, there's a Venn diagram there, man.
Yeah, I'm telling you, this is what's weird about this question is the overlap of good, like, amazing people that you would want to be your neighbor, self sustaining.
Live off the grid, you know, wants to take care of their own community, their own family first and foremost, not the government.
You'd get this weird overlap of really good people that are good for the country and really bad people.
Isn't the whole idea of living off the grid that you're not really anyone's neighbor?
That's what I'm saying, but that doesn't make them a bad person.
They just care about their family, their church, the things that's close to them.
That's honestly, I have no problem with those people, but there is like a concept in Christianity where it's not like pro government coerced socialism, it's voluntary.
Community, right?
It's voluntary, brothers taking care of brothers, you know, that kind of thing.
I just think, I think, for sure.
I think, without question, though, if Red did win, it would be predominantly men.
We'd have a huge lack of women problem for a while.
That's the bigger problem.
It would not be good.
And that would cause.
That would cause.
Go to the women and be.
Well, no, actually, though.
But you look at the chat, like we already have the best women pressing red.
So.
Sergeant 1978 says, as a Christian, you would want to save everyone.
Yeah.
That's what I was.
I argued that too.
I was saying, if you're going to argue we should push red, I think you are basically arguing the vast majority of Christian clergy should die if you're saying we should let the blue button pushers die.
XY guy has a really important point, though.
Did we give Russia a red or blue reset button?
Every lawyer would be pressing red.
It's usually a red XY guy.
Mean buttons are always red.
I was reading up where he said, just give the part a shove and leave.
Just give what?
A shove?
Just give the car to shove and get in the car.
I think what I would do is I think I would press both buttons at the exact same time and then just live with whatever happened.
Well, you won't live with whatever happened because if you pressed blue and I won, you would die.
I would live with whatever happened.
By the way, a fun thing with the button.
So, the button Hiller gave was red and it said para grushka on it, which does not mean reset.
It means overload.
They mistranslated it.
They messed that one up.
No, I think para grushka means reset.
Does it though?
Yeah.
It has two meanings.
It can mean both things.
Oh, that's terrible.
Google lied to me then.
I have the same question, Kyrie.
Kyrie says, Why does it seem like 90% of the libtards are either in the medical or the educational field?
I literally have the same question.
Thought at night.
Again, that's what I'm telling you.
It's this idea that they don't have control over their social lives, their individual lives.
So they want to seek control over others.
And we saw this during COVID.
We saw this with teachers.
We saw this with nurses.
We saw this with like, sort of, and what do you call it, flight attendants who would just put the mask on, waitresses in some cases.
I'm not saying all of them.
I ain't saying all of them, but I'm saying there were a whole lot of petty tyrants out there.
And that's exactly what it is.
That's what creates the petty tyrant.
All I know, yeah, all I know is if we, if we, if blue won, they would kill all the reds.
But let's just assume.
Let's just assume the blues are going to kill all the reds.
I don't think the blues are going to kill all the reds.
This is what communists do.
No, no, no.
I know they probably wouldn't.
But the point is.
No, it's not a communist thing.
If the blues could kill all the reds, they could do it now because we're in the reality with all the blue and red people right now.
It's a collectivist thing.
Okay, so here's the thing.
All I'm saying is, say the blues.
And all the reds died.
If that's the way this hypo worked, okay?
I'm telling you, what you would be left with is like a 50 state, like Democrat majority.
That's like without question.
So you might get some of the pro social, but this would be.
How many?
Why People Pick Red00:11:16
Good question with the red blue.
If red won, how many members of Congress would go?
That's an interesting question.
That's actually, you should tweet that.
All the members of Congress are pro social.
You're not, I'm going to do it.
It would be like, all.
It would be like, all.
All again, it would be the exact that would actually be a great indicator of like how society is represented by a representative.
I think what would happen is you would have a lot of the Dems gone, definitely all the female Dems, except for the psychopaths.
So, the so like AOCs, the she'd be gone.
No, she would be around.
You think she would pick red?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Fascinating.
Tlaib would pick red.
See, I would have picked them as blues because, like I said, like the agenda 21 guys, Russ, what do you think?
I don't know.
I would, like I said in the office, I would have picked red.
You're a red pusher.
You're abandoning them.
You're abandoning them.
I would have pushed red.
You're abandoning the pro social, the cart put backers.
Like, I get the Christian angle, but I don't know.
What would Jesus do?
He probably wouldn't push red.
Just be honest.
God did not create a world where everybody gets saved, but sin also.
So.
Do you think you'll be saved if you push red?
I mean, red is confessing Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
It doesn't say that on the button.
It says, I want to save myself and let others die.
I mean, I'm certainly picking the cross.
I just, yeah, I mean, I just don't trust people.
I don't think pressing red is unchristian.
Yeah, I don't think that's essentially what we're getting at here.
Is picking red anti Christian?
I don't think so.
Is that against the values of Christ?
No, I think it is.
I don't think, I don't think, I don't equate that.
See, this is where we're missing each other.
I think Jack hit the fundamental level.
It can be, but it isn't necessarily.
It can be if you want the blue pushers to die, then yes, that would be unchristian.
But It could also be that you just want you and your family to live and you think that blue is going to lose.
And if that's the case, then you're trying, you're doing so out of trying to save your family and your position in it.
So again, it's a tribal thing.
In a weird way, I think it matters.
It comes down to what's in our heart.
I think it matters the fact that it seems pretty clear that blue is ahead in polls, but not extremely decisively so.
If it was like 30% are picking.
Blue, and it's like clear that red is going to win.
I think it's more acceptable to pick red because you don't really have an obligation to commit suicide here.
Well, but here's what I'd say the more people understand this question, the bigger the share of the vote red's going to get over time.
It's way more compelling, it makes way more logic.
And then the point is red is now self defense.
Yeah, it's like self defense.
I mean, I'm thinking of even other ones, you know, they're giving this to everyone.
What about every like six year old who doesn't get it?
They have to push it, and you're just going to let every six year old who pushes the wrong button die.
No, you got to be the head of your household and take care of it.
No, that's why I'm telling them to press red.
It's a secret.
It's not, you guys, it doesn't say that there's this is all like appearance to be secret in the actual hypo.
More boys would pick red than girls would pick red.
Yeah, but if you're going in there with your children, then you tell your kids, hey, the family's pressing red.
We all press red.
Make sure you press red.
Yeah, that's exactly what I would be doing.
This is very similar.
Have you guys watched Beast Games?
No.
I've seen a little bit of it.
I've watched Beast Games, though.
I've watched both seasons of Beast games, and there's many games that Mr. Beast puts out that actually forces people into these quests.
And this is why I don't trust people.
I don't trust people because I think at the end of the day, people are going to go for their selfish nature, which is going to be to click red.
I don't care.
I get that the poll is showing that we're on a trend of blue, but at the end of the day.
That's what I'm saying.
Like, you've seen every selfish nature is going on.
You've seen every episode of Beast Games.
I've watched both of these.
Hold on, one conversation at a time.
Okay.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I agree.
Once you hit 50%, people are going to start getting the memo.
Yeah.
Like, you can, everybody can get saved.
You know how?
You all pick red.
To Tyler's point, Beast Games is a perfect example because the amount of people that it's like, hey, if you don't do anything, if everybody doesn't do anything, you all get money.
But if one of you decides to sell out the rest of your group, You get all of the money.
The amount of people who are just like, yeah, I'm out.
Yeah.
It actually doesn't help.
But what's interesting in the show of Beast Games, most of the time, I would argue, and again, this is just my recollection, most of the time, people actually go with the group, save the group, and they end up with nothing.
That is why humanity has thrived, though.
The ability to put the group.
I'm not saying, I'm not giving my commentary on it.
I'm just saying, in the game, most people have lost because of their willingness to save others.
Yeah.
The people who have gone out on a limb and taken a couple of games where they can press a button and get a million dollars, but they like sell out like 10 people or like their entire team.
This is why Mr. Beast and most don't do that.
The few that have actually walked away with a million bucks, and the other 500 or whatever starts on the show.
I can't remember how many.
I think it's a 500 or a thousand.
They walk away with nothing.
And that is why Mr. Beast is correctly named after the Beast of Revelation because he is sewing moral correctly.
Liz has a really good point.
He's sewing evil.
If everybody picks red, We lose no one.
That's what I just said.
But they won't.
We know that won't happen.
Okay, but then that's on them, dude.
I feel like the attribution is not good because X, Y, and Z.
No, but the argument is that you lose maybe some of your best people.
We must protect the people who are pro social but bad at game theory.
One final thought of all of this.
I wonder if people's opinions are at all affected by the fact that in America, red states are the conservative ones and blue states are the liberal ones.
Because this is always a pet peeve of mine.
It always is a pet peeve of mine.
It should flip it and run it.
Blue is the conservative color everywhere else, and it's also a better color.
And we should have had blue, and I'm annoyed we didn't get it.
I actually made that observation in the SBLC op ed that I wrote this week.
I was like, hate crime map for SBLC.
It's red, like hate, and the Republican Party, and the Bolsheviks, and the red flag, the song they sing.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
I would just like my last take on this is that I don't get good vibes from Mr. Beast.
He gives me blippy vibes.
Tyler knows how I feel about Blippy, and just doesn't allegedly have good energy.
I don't think he's in that positive out there.
And yeah, just overtly pagan.
I like the intrigue that he injects into all the videos that he does.
But I think it's super entertaining.
So he's definitely talented.
I don't think he's blippy.
All right.
Blippy would probably push the red button, by the way.
All right.
Jack, let's go to the other story of the day, and that would be Michael Jackson.
Because apparently I was wrong.
I was under the impression that MJ was like, that we all assumed he was guilty of being a pedophile.
You just assumed he was guilty?
You believed the lying?
You assumed he was guilty, and the jury said he wasn't.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, for real.
Like, I'll own it completely.
I just kind of have been walking around.
You thought Michael Jackson was a pedophile just because.
We should present the topic.
I would just like to know.
I would just like to know.
Andrew thinks Michael Jackson is a pedophile just because Michael Jackson talked to Nick in a high pitched voice and would invite children over to his house.
Where he had a roller coaster and he would have sleepovers with them in his room where they would sleep in the same bed.
And he would do, you think he was a pedophile just because he did that?
Andrew, I'm really disappointed in you.
Well, okay.
Let's.
So, hold on, guys.
Set the premise.
Context, as usual, like that we usually do when we change topics.
Context here is that so, Michael is a new movie that's come out, a biopic, as Andrew likes to say, biopic, is it just got dropped last week.
All right.
Yeah.
No, you're not living that down.
So, what are the wait, Jack, Jack, what are the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes?
You sent me this.
It's like, well, so it's currently, I was going to say, it's currently the number one movie in the entire world.
Rotten Tomatoes was trashing it.
Russ is like our Rotten Tomatoes guru.
So I think he probably has the actual numbers, but it was one of those ones where it's like the critics are trashing it and the audience loves it.
Yeah.
I mean, that happens a lot.
I feel like that happens more than anything popular.
At this point, it's actually kind of funny because I've seen over the last year, like a couple of years now, Rotten Tomatoes, people are just like, nobody listens to Rotten Tomatoes anymore.
Nobody listens to Screen Rant anymore.
And it's kind of funny to watch.
So the IMDb readiness is 7.7 out of 10.
Yeah.
That's a rock demand.
I like it.
38%.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
So, Jack, they did not include any of the allegations of pedophilia against Michael Jackson in the film.
Isn't that the big controversy here?
Yeah.
So the controversy, well, there's actually, yeah.
I mean, just yeah.
It's that the easiest way to sum it up is that, yes.
So they cut the movie because the family was involved with creating the movie.
And so they say, oh, the family is, you know, too much control, et cetera, et cetera.
But it's like, well, if they're putting up money and they're involved in the movie, then why wouldn't they, you know, have any control?
I mean, it's kind of a silly argument.
But, but they were saying that you can't like, you're not allowed to like this movie because it wasn't a critical enough lens on Michael Jackson.
And the, uh, yeah.
Oh, Angelo, um, you know, Angelo says, uh, you brought in tomatoes is still good.
Just do the opposite of what, because, to Jack's point, what the critics, Say, yeah, yeah, because to Jack's point, the audience scores a 97%.
Dang, so it's like well, it's a well, there are still occasions where the ratings are the same, but I don't want to derail this.
But so I wanted to take this in another direction because obviously, the audience is like, we don't care, we like Michael Jackson and we love the songs, and there is a jukebox, um, you know, kind of element to this where it's like there's a lot of recreations of him.
Performing, you know, also when he's younger with the Jackson Five, and then when he's older in his solo career, you know, the first moonwalk, like the first time he played Billie Jean, or, you know, it ends with the Bad Tour and he's going up on stage, the thriller movie, music video sequence when they're doing like the short film, et cetera, is in there.
And, you know, the audience is like, we don't care.
Michael Jackson's Cultural Impact00:15:36
But I want to do, I actually was like, guys, let's do this.
And so I kind of Leroy Jenkins did.
On Twitter this week.
And I'm like, I'm just going to come out and say it.
I don't ever think that Michael Jackson was guilty.
I've never thought this in my entire life.
I followed many of the cases, you know, in real time as they were live.
And I'm sorry, it just never passed the skull test.
I'm curious, Tyler, did you think, did you just sort of like assume he was guilty?
Yeah, I grew up thinking that for sure.
Blake, you did, it never.
I mean, I'm not an obsessive true crime junkie, and I will admit.
With, as they say, where there's smoke, there's fire, and it's like a gigantic smoke machine just constantly spewing fumes.
And yet, I will say, I think with Michael, what stands out is Michael Jackson is actually so weird and the fact pattern around it is so strange.
I'm much more open to the defense, which is he's not a molester.
He actually is just a weirdo.
And what stands out in this, as well as some other high profile cases where people were assumed guilty and then it was walked back, is.
A lot of the people, until they actually had a very strong financial incentive to claim otherwise, said nothing happened.
And so they'll come out and they'll say, oh, this person who was around all the time says Michael molested him.
Oh, by the way, he wants $25 million.
Yeah, Caboose made a good point.
Said, I assumed he was guilty after that leaving Neverland doc.
And I think that was kind of a big turning point for.
Yeah, I was going to.
Yeah.
I assume he was guilty just based off of growing up.
Yeah.
This documentary, though, has been like really, really criticized in terms of like so many things in terms of stuff they pulled out.
I mean, it's basically like a true crime podcast about Michael Jackson falling into the same lies and half truths and.
Misrepresentations that pretty much all of the true crime genre is known for because they don't have to be.
I was going to say, what was that one about the guy in Wisconsin, the killer, making him a murderer?
Yeah, that one was like so compelling.
If that's all you watched, that this guy was innocent, but then there was like a whole other side of the story that wasn't covered.
Yeah, so Scott Adams actually talked about, what was it called?
Leaving Neverland, right?
I keep wanting to say Finding Neverland because that's the other movie.
About how the Peter Pan series was created, but it was a really good movie, actually.
But the line was that Scott Adams said years ago, I guess, when he had watched this, was that you have to beware the documentary effect.
And when he said the documentary effect is this that when you watch a documentary, typically they take one side of the story and they just ride that side all the way home rather than giving you a two sided view on things.
And typically, those are more popular and those get a lot of clicks and a lot of views.
And then, you know, and they're very persuasive.
But you could then go and watch a counter documentary right after that and be just as persuaded, like Andrew, like you were saying about the make of a murderer, that actually that documentary was full of crap because there was a whole bunch of information they didn't include.
And I'll actually give you guys a great example of this that I just know about from my own life.
Do you guys remember Tiger King?
Yeah.
You don't?
I didn't watch it.
I've never.
No, you're okay.
I know it exists.
I said, Do you remember it?
I didn't say if you watched it.
I said, Do you remember it?
That was like a cultural phenomenon.
Yeah, I remember it.
It is a cultural phenomenon.
Is it like a COVID one?
Yes.
That's the thing.
Everyone else watched it.
Everyone was watching it during COVID.
I did not know it existed for several months after the big meme.
I was totally out of the loop.
And instead, I was reading a bunch of books.
I read a bunch of spy novels in the spring of COVID.
Okay, okay, okay.
But the point being is, everybody watched Tiger King.
It was a huge cultural phenomenon.
And everybody thought like this guy shouldn't have been in jail and that Carl Bastian killed her husband and they thought all these terrible things, right?
Well, I actually happened to be in Oklahoma in 2020 later on.
And I said, with the guys I was with for reporting for OAN at the time, I was like, hey, we should actually check out the Joe Exotic, you know, Tiger Place and see what it's actually like.
And I got to tell you guys, when I got there, I did not realize how small it was.
And I did not realize that, like, He was keeping those tigers and whatever they did with that documentary to make each of the pens and enclosures look so much bigger.
It's just, it was all fake.
These things were actually really small.
Tigers were being kept in closures that were like smaller than a closet, where they some of them were so small they couldn't even stand up all the way.
And I'm sitting there going, Yeah, Carol Baskins has a point, man.
Carol Baskins totally has a point.
And I felt like Netflix totally lied to me about that.
Carol.
Baskins.
Like, those were not good conditions for white people.
I'm remembering, like, Florida.
Was Florida a part of this story?
I think any story involving people collecting and raising tigers and other exotic animals is spiritually Floridian, regardless of where it takes place.
Okay, am I weird for kind of just getting weirded out by zoos in general?
I mean, I go to them with my kids, but like there's a part of me where I'm just like, this makes me sad.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
It's like animals.
They should be able to see animals at the zoo.
I know.
I sometimes feel that way about house pets.
Before we go too off of this, though, there is still this huge, and I don't want to go through like every claim against.
Michael Jackson, that's been made, et cetera, et cetera.
That, you know, it's he settled the first one in 93 and thinking that, oh, if I just pay to make this go away, that it like the story will go away.
But unfortunately, when he paid, that kind of made the story bigger because people are saying, oh, he paid because he did something.
Yeah.
As opposed to him thinking, oh, if I throw money at this, it's going to go away.
So then other accusers came out and eventually it led to actually charges in Andrew, as you should know, in Santa Barbara.
I think one.
And a whole case that, you know, probably took place while you were there.
A take that Angela.
That was before.
Something Angela pointed out that I found interesting.
It's just, it's worth remembering.
This is one of the, this is kind of the first big child sexual abuse scandals involving a celebrity and really just making it a big story in general.
Because, and so as a result, it sets the template that we've seen.
And so as an example, Michael really was the kind of guy who, yeah, he would try to pay people to make it go away.
And I think today, there'd be a lot more awareness that.
Oh, paying someone $10 million is 100% going to make me look guilty.
And that wasn't the way he would think about it in the early 90s.
This is before the internet.
This is before we have super refined, advanced lawsuit culture.
And so, yeah, he fell into that trap of thinking that that would work because it was an earlier time.
And so people have run with Draxmore accusers.
Yeah, to your point, this was like, I don't know if it was exactly concurrent, but right around the same time as like the OJ trial.
So, this was sort of the rise of your tabloid culture.
Um, this is what the Kardashians came from, obviously.
Um, being that their father was one of OJ's lawyers and was like possibly intimately aware of the case, which uh we should probably get into at some point.
But it was right around that time that tabloids were just having a feeding frenzy and they sicked all of them on Michael Jackson.
And so people have been saying that, uh, yeah, and to Angela's point, this was like the first cancel culture, it was like the first iteration of cancel culture to say, oh my gosh, we can get this guy.
And so, you know, so is there a theory, but is the theory.
Is the theory that so he does the settlement and then he goes on Oprah, becomes even bigger or whatever.
And then all these other people came out of the woodwork because they may have had some connection to Michael and they were just completely motivated by money.
And that's why there was multiple.
There's a lot of that.
And I think the also.
Well, the parents.
There's like a.
Yeah, the parents.
And there's like a.
The sort of cancel culture.
Also, this weird.
Let's call it what it is.
Sort of bully siding of Michael.
I remember it was just the biggest running joke in the world that he, you know, for example, he had the white skin.
And a lot of people thought, oh, he might have bleached it.
It might have been all that.
That was the big rumor.
And the really sad thing is, it appears to be genuinely the case.
He just had a bad medical condition that was turning his skin white.
He also had all the nose.
Where is it wrong?
It's vitiligo?
Something like that.
And then a reason he would make his skin white is basically you either look like a splotchy disaster or you make your skin as white as the whitest parts on it.
Yeah, there's a couple photos you can find of him.
I don't know if we want to look for one, but where you can see that.
So when he's younger, this is why he wore the glove, by the way.
Because when he was younger, it started in his hands first.
And so he wore the one glove because his one hand was turning white.
That's why he wore the glove.
And he was like, I want to put this on.
Then later, it was like the fingertips.
So that's why you'll see pictures with him.
And he has like the tape over the fingertips.
You know, he turned it into this like fashion statement.
And it was actually like, you know, obviously very iconic, but it was because of this skin disorder.
But then later in life, he ended up getting so.
Like so, white in terms of the skin color, that you can see blotches of like dark brown blotches on his arms and stuff, where the rest of it is just naturally pale.
And to your point, Blake, it's actually very sad.
And that's why he had to, you know, wear or, you know, have like umbrellas when he went out and things like that.
He couldn't even go into the sun.
So, I still remember, I actually, weirdly enough, I remember my mom watching that Oprah interview.
She was always watching Oprah.
And so, I was like, my brother and I would always catch like.
Whatever Oprah interview that she had on.
And I still remember when a couple of the ones that she had Michael on.
I see some of the people in the chat are saying, I remember when Michael's hair burnt during a Pepsi ad.
I'm sort of like these vague.
That's in the movie.
Oh, is it?
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
They do a huge thing in that movie.
It is like, like they show, it's graphic.
They show everything.
So there's two graphic scenes for anyone who's seen the movie.
The one, there's one scene where they definitely show him getting whipped, belt whipped by his dad, which is, you know, pretty well known that he was.
That he was beaten, father was abusive.
And many people say that this is kind of the reason for his later behavior in life that he just sort of had this stunted childhood.
He had the physical abuse in childhood.
Also, something that people don't know is that his dad would book the Jackson Five to play in strip clubs in addition to other places.
So he was present, you know, as a young kid, you know, 10 years old, and he's being put in these strip clubs.
And so for, you know, some of the later behavior, to Blake's point, which is obviously, you know, abnormal.
It's more of this like childlike, you know, psychology that, you know, comes from a lot of stuff that's not used.
It's like a rest of development.
Yeah, it's like a rest of development, literally.
I think it's so.
And then the other physical scene is that they show his hair getting set on fire.
And I didn't realize that he had an entire patch of the back of his head, like basically just burned off.
And they told him that you're never going to be able to grow skin back there again.
You're never going to grow hair back.
And then there's a scene where, you know, obviously foreshadowing where the doctor says, Hey, I can prescribe you these painkillers.
You're going to need them.
So that's ultimately what ended up killing him.
And that's kind of, well, it's, yeah, it's like what set him on the path, right?
I think, well, the doctor got, the doctor killed him, got involuntary manslaughter, by the way.
He was convicted.
Well, like growing up, I think it's so interesting that specifically around Michael Jackson, like I remember growing up and like the narrative was that he hated his skin color and was trying to become white.
Yeah.
And he was bleaching his skin.
Yeah.
And then he was trying to look more white, which is why he got all the nose jobs.
Yeah.
And then now you start to realize there was actual stuff that was going on.
And then he had.
What's the word it's called?
Vidurago or whatever.
My dad had a favorite line that he would repeat.
I can't imagine he came up with it.
Originally, yeah.
The joke was Only in America can you be born a poor black boy and die a rich white woman.
I think I've heard that.
But no, I thought that was such an interesting joke.
That joke was around it.
That was, yeah, I definitely heard that before.
Having gotten older and looked back and forth looking into the case, I thought that was always really just fascinating how.
He was always pretty quiet about it.
Like, he didn't really weigh in and set the record straight too much.
I think Michael Jackson.
And that's possibly would have been a better P, like from a PR strategy, you know, to kind of like maybe just have somebody go out and talk about that.
Right.
And maybe these days that might be more of what someone would do.
I think that, I mean, you look at the last 40 years in American pop culture.
I mean, the guys who have become mega, mega superstars Madonna, Britney Spears, you could put Kanye in there, Michael Jackson, they've all had like, Horrifically bad stuff happened to them because I think the amount of pressure and mental fatigue that is created by creating icons like these people.
I mean, Elvis destroys them.
I mean, if drugs doesn't get you.
Well, yeah, but like, but to your point, like, even Elvis was pushed there.
Like, yeah, there's like a lot of these guys.
And a lot of those people like die early deaths because of drugs and partying.
And that's a different category of person in my mind.
The person that I'm looking at is like the person that's surrounded by so many people constantly and is made.
Into like this almost like godlike pop culture figure.
And they like no human being is capable of, I don't think anyone really is capable of overcoming that situation.
And I think I actually, Michael Jackson to me, you know, he's probably a weird guy that was created in that light, in that vein.
But I kind of feel bad.
Like me, for me, like I kind of feel bad for Michael Jackson in the same way that I kind of feel bad for Kanye West.
Yeah, but unless he actually did.
Did a little kid's.
No, no, I know.
And that's like the caveat, right?
Like, of course, like if he's a criminal, but if he's not a true criminal, he's just a weird person that like said weird things and was weird around people and did and like kind of screwed up at the worst possible moments and didn't handle those things correctly.
Yeah.
Like, again, I think Kanye West is actually the most similar person in modern culture to that.
Not in the same, in the exact same personality type way, but in the way where it's like there's nothing that he could do.
He was kind of crafted into this, like this, the social pressure situation.
Of course, he said he's said and done some things that are really stupid and and like made him look really bad, but there was like no win for him to come out of that.
So, this is interesting.
And I kind of feel that way about Michael Jackson.
Foz has a good, interesting uh timeline.
So, he does the Oprah interview.
The 14-Year Silence Timeline00:04:31
He it was what was what you say?
It was the 14 year silence, yeah.
So, no interviews, just his music.
Let's that speak for itself.
Six months later comes the first accusation, and so Foz is saying because he looked weak.
So, people thought they could take advantage.
90 million people watched it.
90 million people watched it.
Interesting.
Wow.
That's an interesting insight.
Wow.
No, and that's what I'm saying, though.
It was like the OJ trial in the sense that it, because this was the era of three, six, and 10, and there were only a couple of channels, everybody watched them.
It's hard to explain how big Oprah was back then and how big.
Just broadcast TV was because that's all you had.
There was nothing else.
So that's why we had a monoculture in the 90s for many reasons.
That's why we had so many of these things because everybody was centered around television.
And there's all like a bigger media story here as well.
And Michael Jackson dominated on television.
There's no question.
And then eventually MTV, which gave rise to that.
And so this, none of this is in the film, by the way.
So the film.
Stops right, you know, I want to say like 1989, 1988, give or take.
So it stops right before the 90s when all of this happens, where he gets propelled into insane levels of superstardom, but also that these hits start coming.
But it does, I think, for a lot of people, it resets the narrative on Michael Jackson by going all the way back to when he's a kid, showing that he did have this abusive childhood, showing that when he talked about, hey, I had this Neverland because I wanted to recreate my lost childhood, which is a huge piece, right?
So they show him reading Peter Pan when he's a kid, and then Eventually, he gets Bubbles the Monkey and he's like reading it to Bubbles.
And as he gets older, he's like talking about it over and over of him trying to find Neverland, the land where you never grow up.
And then eventually he creates it himself.
And I just say this while we're on here that, you know, Macaulay Culkin, who was famously friends with him at the time, has always defended him, has always publicly defended him, and I believe testified on his behalf under oath that, you know, he was there and nothing ever happened.
All right.
But Jack, thought crime.
Uh oh.
Dark crime.
What if Macaulay Culkin was guilty?
Yeah.
Not about that, Jack.
No.
No, he was a kid.
Two childhood stars.
A kid capable.
A kid capable.
In their weirdness.
A kid who I will know is capable of building a well engineered trap engine.
Trap house.
To like take out adult men whom he like tortures with blowtorches and stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Totally normal kid.
Micro machines and broken Christmas ornaments.
Yeah.
You know.
Yeah.
Come on now.
No, I almost wonder.
I would even go so far, and I tweeted something about this earlier this week where I said, you know, in a way, and what I was getting at was that I wonder if Michael was trying to reach out to, you know, child stars like a Macaulay Culkin to say, hey, you're blowing up the same way I did when I was a kid, but maybe I can get you out of those bad situations that I was in.
And like, here's a place you can come where none of that stuff is going to happen and they can't get to you from here.
And let me try to get you off of that.
Train because you know, go look at some of the other 90s kid stars.
Um, my gosh, you know, you could go down the list of uh, you know, like Lindsey Lohan and others that were, you know, just just Amanda Bynes, Amanda Bynes, that's who I was thinking too.
So many problems that happen that of child stars from pretty much the same era or just a little bit there.
Now, Ariana Grande is going down that.
Before we move on, no, she's crazy.
She was on the same show, right?
Wasn't wasn't Ariana Grande also on a Nickelodeon show?
She was on the Nickelodeon show.
Yeah.
Hey, guys, we're running out of time here.
But before we run out of time, did you know that there's a Michael Jackson arcade game where you have to save children from like pedophiles?
Stop it.
Is there really?
Yes, there is.
Let's throw it up.
Let's throw up that image I posted in Tharkham.
Let me move it over to production.
This is a real image from it.
It's a really small image.
It's called Moonwalker.
Yeah, it's called Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.
Reviewing Animal Farm Controversy00:03:49
It's great.
Every single level, there's a bunch of kids.
They've been abducted by these fat.
Middle aged looking white guys who are like creepy looking, and you have to beat up those guys and rescue the kids.
And when you touch the kids in the game, you walk over them, they'll be like, Thank you, MJ.
You save them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You save the kids.
So it's like a big thing.
I played the Sega version of this a lot.
The ending screen of this game says, What about the children that he saved?
Well, they're smiling because deep down in their hearts, they know that Michael will return one day to share with them another wondrous and magical adventure.
That's disgusting.
All right.
All right.
So, last thing, last thing, we're all going to try and watch Animal Farm, I believe.
This is the last thing, and then we'll go.
Well, yeah, but we're going to review it next week.
Yeah, we're going to review it next week.
So I don't believe in trashing a movie before I see it.
No, I'm not going to trash it.
And so here's what I will say I called because we've worked with Animal Farm, or sorry, Angel Studios for years.
The guild approves all the projects.
So you have to green light it with the guild.
The guild voted for it, which is interesting.
And like a lot of our audience are members, they didn't make it, they distributed it.
And by the way, I'm told Seth Rogen will not.
At uh, he is will not promote the film once Angel got involved, which is fascinating, which makes sense with being Seth Rogen, yeah.
Okay, so Angel Studio is distributing it, but they didn't make it right, correct, right.
So, the other thing I found out though is that they did tweak the ending a little bit to like I guess they in an attempt to make it a little bit more thematically with what the original was.
I think they want to make it half the controversy.
What's the controversy?
The controversy is that it is actually a critique on capitalism, where the original is a critique on communism.
So they flipped the roles, but I'm told that it's a it's the the the guild voted for it because there was an assumption that it was a critique on just corruption in general.
But I'm not gonna, I'm gonna have to see it, I'll have to see it.
And I've read Animal Farm relatively recently, so yeah, but I mean, I've read the book, I don't even know how many times.
I mean, it's it's so great, yeah.
Well, I'm just saying, I mean, no, Russ, it's real short, like you could literally read it.
No, I read it, I read it all four years in high school.
I don't know, as a homeschooler, sometimes they're like, yeah, they're like, hey.
There's nothing bad.
So I read it four times.
Yeah, we're going to watch it at the.
Yes, we will.
I'll get a screener for the team.
So I literally heard we were going to talk about this and I was like, you know, what is it?
All I know is that Angel Studio does a lot of good stuff.
Can they miss sometimes?
Absolutely.
I'm going to go into this with an open mind.
And if they missed and it is like a crap movie that totally bastardized it, like a lot of people are saying, I will be the first to admit it.
I'm interested.
But I also don't think, you know, Listen, it just shows you got to have a little creative license in this business, and they probably missed on this, but I don't know.
We'll see.
I will go into it with open eyes.
I have, you know, I like to come, as everybody knows, I like to have my own opinion on things, especially films.
And, you know, I don't always.
Overtly capitalist.
And he's often wrong.
Overtly capitalist.
All at two times speed.
Oh, yeah.
Everything at 2x.
Why would you waste time?
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
So we are going to give you a review of Animal Farm because it's been a big kerfuffle.
Tim Poole is very upset about this adaptation of the film, and we'll see if he's right.
I haven't watched the screener yet.
And in fairness, I will say I did try to track down, Russ and I were chatting about this this week.
We tried to track down like an advanced screener of it, weren't able to get one.
Watching Films at Double Speed00:01:23
So we will have to wait and report back.
Yeah.
Apparently, the guy that directed it is like pretty left.
So, Andy Circus, he's Gollum.
Oh, wow.
The star of Lord of the Rings is super left.
Wow.
He's not.
So, the star of Lord of the Rings is super left.
The star.
Sorry, I can't hear you, Jack.
I got a star over the side.
Amazing music.
Music.
Amazing music is really drowning it out.
So, the main guy from Lord of the Rings is super to the left.
Wow, that's crazy.
And he's ruining, like, a famous anti communist.
The main guy from the story.
Wow.
That's interesting.
I wonder how gay Animal Farm is going to be.
Oh, no.
I need to get off the show.
Yeah.
Overtly piggy.
All right.
That wraps us up, Jack.
It's been a good show.
You want to take us home?
Ladies and gentlemen, go out there and commit more thought crime.