DeSantis fires back at Trump, says he could beat Biden

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That's amazon.com slash BrianKilmead. From the Fox News Radio Studios in Midtown Manhattan, it's the fastest-growing radio talk show. Brian Killmead. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the latest moments of the Brian Kilmey Show.

So glad you're here, 1-866-408-7669. We got a busy hour coming your way: Ben Dominic at the bottom of the hour, and the great Stephen A. Smith, author of Straight Shooter, best-selling book, a memoir of the second chances, and first takes. He's going to be with us in a matter of moments, but let's get to the big three.

Now, with the stories you need to know, it's Brian's big three. Number three. And at the same time, Putin's able to distract us.

So I think actually, you know, people are saying, including a lot of Republicans, are saying, hey, we have to defeat Russia in order to focus eventually on China. I think that's a delusion. The reality is at this point, the Chinese are helping to prop up the Russians to distract the Americans in Europe. We'll see. Elliot Bridge Colby with a different view on Laura Ingram last night.

Alliance solidified. China and Russia pledged allegiance to each other as Russia's war machine is grinding down and weapons depots empty. In Ukraine, how ready is Zelensky's army to surge? And will China start arming Putin's beleaguered troops? World peace is at stake.

Number two. You can call me whatever you want. I mean, just as long as you, you know, also call me a winner, because that's what we've been able to do in Florida, is put a lot of points on the board and really take the state to the next level. And that's what's going on as he begins to take on Trump. It begins.

Governor DeSantis officially begins to take on Donald Trump and his taunt. The polls and the track so far, we'll see how this goes. A talented GOP field waits to queue up. We'll see what happens with the president's cases. Number I think that if I were Alvin, I would wait for Georgia to go first.

Georgia, you have the president calling in, trying to change an election. That seems to me the thing to start with, not this. Alvin Bragg, that is. That is Van Jones. Trump, watch indictment or exoneration sometime today.

What will it mean for Trump's future? And can the NYPD handle the stormy surrender should it happen? The case, the timeline, the folly of the whole liberal lark, in my view, in this case specifically. But with me right now to talk a little sports and more, Stephen A. Smith, author of Straight Shooter, a memoir of second chances and first takes.

Stephen, welcome. What's going on, Brian? Long time, no speak. How you been, man? I know, and also I should say, you got your Show No Mercy podcast, which is now out.

I loved your memoir. I thought I'd like it. I didn't think I would love it. I just think it could be so inspirational for people out there who don't have everything paved for them, like you, going through school, not having success, being left back, undiagnosed dyslexia, hearing your parents worry that you're never going to amount to anything, and also having the tough situation at home with your mother working all the time and the youngest of six kids. Did that really mold who you are today?

I don't think there's any question about that. I mean, to see my mother work as hard as she did. That certainly is still the level of work ethic in not just me, but all of us. All four of my sisters, my late brother. as well who passed away to car accident in nineteen ninety two.

All of us had work ethic because we watched her. think the thing that was very very much a struggle. That we weren't sure. We were not poor. for, you know, predictable reasons or whatever.

We were poor because my father chose to take his money and and spend it on another family. And so because of that, that left us in a hole, a big time hole, with my mother having to struggle in ways that I personally don't believe any woman should have to struggle. And so because of that, that put a lot of weight on our shoulders, particularly me as a young man. uh trying to make sure that I didn't duplicate or replicate his actions. Um, as a responsible adult, as a man that was gonna lead his family.

So that kind of attitude definitely It was it. still to me from watching my mother have to go through what she had to go through. And it had a lot to do with the Mentality that I have today. Right. I mean, to put it this way, indefatigable, but you also have a sense of self-confidence when, in your situation and in your youth, it should be laying the groundwork for anything but.

Do you remember when you just started believing in yourself to the point where when the criticism came in, it didn't affect you?

Well, to me, I think it started in the seventh grade when the teacher told my mother, as I point out in my book Straight Shooter, when the teacher points out to my mother that he's not he's not dumb. He's pretty smart. The problem is that he drifts. Because when he's not passionate about something, it's not that he doesn't understand. He's not listening.

You know, he drifts and he fades away. But when you find out where his passion is, you'll have a star in your hand.

So it started there. But then it really materialized in college because I was playing college basketball. I was obviously on a basketball scholarship. And going to class and having my critical and persuasive writing professor saying that I was a natural-born sports writer, I knew that I was passionate about sports. I knew that I knew sports.

But when you have a professor saying this guy can write, He needs to be a sports writer, and then he takes me over to the sports editor of the Winston-Salem Journal. and I get hired in five minutes. And you've got a bunch of staffers there that are helping me grow. My confidence emanated from the fact that I knew I was passionate, I knew that I would work hard, and I knew that I was a listener. I wasn't somebody who just talked.

I wasn't somebody who was all about doing. I would learn from people who did know. who did have a level of expertise and who cared enough to make sure they edified and elevated me to becoming who I wanted and aspired to be. And that's where my confidence usually does come from. It's not from the fact that I think I know everything, because I assure you I don't, and I always know that I don't.

But it does come from the fact that I know that I'm willing to listen. And the line that I use, Brian, when I give a lot of speeches is, I'm brilliant because I know I'm not. I just listen to those who are and learn from them. That's what I've always been about, and I've always been like that. Understood.

And along the way, you have certain people that stood up.

So, people listening right now, whoever think you're a coach or you're a teacher or you're a neighbor that cares, you could really affect the lives. It happened over and over again just by leading your story. For example, you're a real good basketball player, good enough to get to college, play Division I, but not be a star. But your coach treated you. Treated you, yeah.

Division II, yeah. But coach treated you like one. Because you were in there, he knew you weren't going to be the best player on the team, but he saw something in you, Coach Gaines, correct? Yes, he did. He saw he he called me he called me a rebel with a cause.

And he said that, damn it, this boy wants to be somebody. And that's what he told my teammates about me when I wasn't around. They told me he had said that. And that's why he was always so incredibly supportive of me because he saw a life in me that extended far beyond the basketball court that was going to be impactful in a difference maker. And that's what he envisioned me being, and that's what he made me promise him I would be, particularly when it came to supporting HBCUs and specifically Winston-Salem State University.

And that was a problem, that was a promise I made to him, and I've strived to have kept it all of these years. But you made a mistake. You got hurt. You couldn't rehab there, your insurance didn't pick it up, so you went home, it didn't tell anybody. When you go back to the school, they were really angry at you.

Why was that? And how did they eventually solve this situation?

Well, I was, you know, as I point out in the book, I was really, I was incredibly sad because, you know, growing up in the streets of New York City and going through the struggles and the trials and tribulations that you go through, once you get away to college and you're in a college environment with dorms and thousands of students on campus with you and all of this other stuff, it's heaven. It really, really is heaven. When they say that college can be the best four years of your life, they're not lying because it certainly was the case for me. And I was so happy being there. that when I learned I had to leave because my mother was medical insurance wouldn't cover me.

Um, in North Carolina, I had to come back to New York to rehab once I sustained that knee injury where I cracked my patella in half. I was incredibly depressed. And so I said goodbye to my girlfriend. I said at the time, I said goodbye to Coach Gaines, and I left. And I did not know that the head of the financial aid department had a sc had an academic scholarship waiting for me because my grades were good enough to receive an academic scholarship.

He had called. Ever returned this call. I never answered this call because I was so depressed.

So months later, when I came back, He was furious. Uh which Gaines looked at me because he was disappointed in me when I just quit and left school to begin with. But when I came back months later, looking to earn back my scholarship. He wouldn't allow me to do it until I spoke to that individual first. And when I went over to the fi to the financial aid department to see that his name was Mr.

Heinzman. Um, he didn't want to talk to me. And it it was he was so rude to me that I waited in the parking lot for six hours for him. to get off of work. because I was determined to find out why.

And then he just chewed into me and said, you left, You didn't call anybody. I had an academic scholarship waiting for you. He said you were in our face all of this time telling us that you wanted to be more than just a basketball player. But the second basketball was taken away from you. You quit.

He said you quit on yourself, you quit on the school, You quit on your family, you quit on your friends and loved ones. He said, and I never ever in my wildest dreams believed that you would be a quitter yourself. You would quit on you. I'm ashamed of you. And I think that um outside of my Mother passing away in twenty seventeen outside of my brother.

uh passing away in a car accident in nineteen ninety two. I think that's the only time I've cried in my adult life. Wow. But he took action, put you back in. You got an assignment, Winston-Salem.

Guess where they sent you? Men's soccer. Wake Forrest, men's soccer. Walt Chizewich, who is a legend in the soccer world, you walked up and you didn't pretend. You said, I don't know anything about soccer.

You were so honest with him. He brought the team together and said, help this guy out, whatever he needs. Explain the game.

So you had appreciation for the sport. And also, you realize being honest works.

Well, I always knew that from the time I was young. My mother had always instilled in us, it's a lot easier to force people to live with your truth. than it is for you to live with your lies. you know, put that onus on somebody else's shoulders. Why waste energy and expend energy trying to pretend to be something that you're not?

Just tell the truth. You know, you don't have to tell everything about yourself. Everything ain't everybody's business. But when you open your mouth, strive to be as honest as you possibly can be and compel others to live with your truth and your lies.

So I've always had that mentality from the time that I was a very, very young person.

So it wasn't difficult for me to go up to Walt Chizowich once I was working for the Winston-Salem Journal and they put me on that assignment to write about Wake Forest soccer. But I was to this day, I'm incredibly appreciative because he didn't have to do what he did for a head coach of a top three ranked team in the nation. to call over his entire team. and to implore them to give complete access to me over the span of a week just so I could do a great article and and and and put myself in a position to be a sports writer. I mean, I just can't say enough about it.

It was so many years ago. But to think back to that time, he certainly didn't have to do that. One of the kindest gestures, I can assure you. that I've ever known of in this industry. And this was before I was a professional.

And so all of these years that I've been a professional journalist, know and to be able to recall that level of kindness should tell you how impactful it was to me. and how appreciative I am of it because again, it's moments like that that help you get to Where you are, and it's amazing, you know, how somebody's kindness can be such a contributing factor. But it definitely was true in my case. And what's also cool about you, Stephen A. Smith, is our guest.

It's great when soccer gets hot and the World Cup gets in and MLS begins to rise, you were one of the few anchors and commentators to not hate soccer and not to minimize it. You appreciated and understood it.

Now it's really helping, right?

Well, listen, I would tell you, I haven't had to cover soccer in many, many years. But I I know I I have a pretty damn good idea what it takes to be successful in the sport. And these guys are tremendous athletes and, you know, football is king in America. But most would tell you the real football is is is is one Yeah. is being soccer in Europe.

And when you talk about a globalized sport, soccer is definitely it. and there is no question about it and it and deservedly so. Couple of things in the news, Stephen. I want you to comment on this: the passing of Willis Reed. Here's the moment.

I know you're a huge Nick fan. Game 7, 1970, Cut 41. I think we see Willis coming out. There he comes right now. Six feet ten from Gremling.

They're captain the next and most valuable player in the NBA. Frazier Lynch slows it down. It's picked up by Jury West. It'll come to the post-read. Look at three.

Scores the first bucket here tonight. And Reed now's outside. There's his second shot. He is two for two. Willis Reed.

So just what he's meant, what is your thoughts about Willis Reed?

Well is a lifelong New Yorker. I'm gonna die hard. Lifelong Knicks fan. of he's synonymous with champions. And obviously that means the world to somebody like myself, Spike Lee and other Knicks fans everywhere because guess what?

Last time the New York Knicks won a championship was when Willis Reed was playing. in seventy and seventy three in that moment that you just displayed. I mean, people forget the first four games of that series He had scored like 37. 29 you know, thirty eight And and I and I think twenty-nine points again. He was doing it up, but then he got injured in game five.

couldn't play in game six. in in back and low. Los Angeles. This is against the great Jerry West. great Elgin Baylor, great Will Chamberlain.

And then that gave seven. at the garden. No one knew whether or not he was going to play because his thigh was that injured. And then he came out. He came out.

Uh And the the roar the crack You saw the Lakers staring down at them and Walt Clyde. Fraser said we knew we had them at that moment because they stopped warming up and they were staring at me.

Well let's read it because they're eyes. off of him and it had never the garden had never been so loud ultimately. Clyde Frazier saved the day because we'll.

Sorry, though, Willis Reed hit those first two shots about it. Those were the only points in the game. than Clive Freezer. dropped 37 with 19 assists. the the New York Knicks have won their first championship, but It is without question the Mm-hmm.

Yeah. in the history of the New York Knicks franchise. And then the This is New York City. basketball-wise in history. No question about it.

But Going to miss him and God bless him. All right. Besides that, Stephen, you really don't remember much about him and his career. Listen, listen to pick up his book. It's inspirational.

I don't care what kind of sports fan you are. It's great for parents. You want to give it to a kid to talk about overcoming. It's called Straight Shooter: A Memoir of Second Chances and First Takes. And also, check out his podcast.

It's Stephen A. Smith's No Mercy podcast. Stephen, congratulations on all your success. The best is yet to come. I appreciate you, Brian.

Thank you so much for having me. You got it. When we come back, we'll open up the phones 1-866-408-7669. Then Ben Dominic joins us. Busy day.

So glad you're here. Hey, Prime members, top Fox shows like the Brian Kilmead Show, The Five, Fox News Rundown, hundreds of others are available ad-free with your Prime membership. To listen, download the Amazon Music app or visit Amazon.com/slash BrianKilmead. With Amazon Music, you can access the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts. Avoid the ads.

Listen to your favorite shows ad-free with the Amazon Music app or by visiting Amazon.com/slash BrianKilmead. That's Amazon.com/slash Brian Kilmead. From the Fox News Podcasts Network. I'm Ben Dominich, Fox News contributor and editor of the Transom.com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week.

It's the Ben Dominich Podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to FoxnewsPodcasts.com. He's so busy, he'll make your head spin. It's Brian Kilmead. What is your favorite nickname that Trump's given you so far?

Is it Ron de Sanctimonious or Meatball Raw?

Well, I can't. I think even he went off meatball raw. I can't, I don't know how to spell the sanctimonious. I don't really know what it means, but I kind of like it's long, it's got a lot of vowels. I mean, so we go with that.

That's fine. You know, you can call me whatever you want. I mean, just as long as you also call me a winner, because that's what we've been able to do in Florida, is put a lot of points on the board and really take the state to the next level. Ron DeSantis is beginning to take the gloves off. He did it with Pierce Morgan, talked a lot directly about the president, not as direct as President Trump would be on him, but beginning to take it on.

Listen, I don't know what it is. There won't be as much drama with me as a leader, and I don't really have any experience paying off strippers.

So, meaning Stormy Daniels. And that's the situation the president finds himself in, while also pointing out the Attorney General should not be trying this case. Simple as that. Other people have walked away from it. But I think it's important, and I'm going to talk about this with Ben Dominich next, but I think it's important to point out.

Is That it's beginning. He realizes he's got to hit back. He just can't ignore it because it will be translated to weakness. Even though it shouldn't be, you got to be a bigger man to walk away. And Donald Trump right now is gaining strength.

The morning consult poll has him with 54% of the vote. DeSanta's second with 26%, everybody else in single digits. Don't move crime, John Michael. Information you want, truth you demand. This is the Brian Kill Me Show.

You also repeated twice you didn't have any knowledge of much money being paid to porn stars. Was I right to sit down? feel that there was a slightly censorious tones of that, that that kind of thing is just not Anything you would ever get involved with?

Well, I think there's a lot of speculation about what the underlying conduct is. That is purported to be it. And the reality is that's just outside my wheelhouse. I mean, that's just not something that I can speak to. That is Governor of the Sands yesterday with Pierce Morgan.

Ben Dominich joins us now, Fox Contributor, editor-at-large at the Spectator World, host of the Ben Dominich podcast. Ben, it begins. Donald, you know, subtly, twenty twenty four begins against the two heavyweights. Not saying they're going to both emerge as the top two. There's a lot of talent that could get into the field.

But what are your thoughts about some of his comments? And I'll play more of them. I'm reminded of the John Vasendo line about the NFL. It starts with a whistle and it ends with a gun.

Now, this is a serious, stark. Two things in terms of the 2024 cycle that we have been waiting for. Because, you know, look, the impression is that this is the one guy in the entire field who really seems to get under the former president's skin, who he seems to have a real animosity for in terms of the level to which his kind of aggressive insults or hits or that kind of thing have been right off the bat. And I think we've all been waiting to see how DeSantis would respond to this. And look, this is the thing.

I understand that there's this whole idea that you are going to be above the fray, that you're not going to engage in these types of back and forth, that you're going to be a leadership quality candidate, that type of thing. It doesn't work. You have to actually respond. You have to be able to show that you can punch back, that you can also take a hit, and that you can respond in kind. I think that what people want to see is not things to send into total silliness or get out of control.

But I do think that people want to see that you can actually stand up on your own two feet and make a response. When you get these kinds of level of hits, when you're taking these number of punches that DeSantis has been taking from the former president over the past couple of months, I think we've all been waiting to see how would he respond, how would he hit back? And I think that now he's doing it, and we're going to see where it goes from here. But I really believe that this is sort of the start of this real actual showdown, which I think is going to be impressive and is going to prove a lot of things. About both men involved.

I mean, put it this way: you didn't really have anybody to run against with Joe Biden because he was invisible. They had two debates. I don't think the president did too well in either of them. One was canceled. The first one, it turns out, he did have COVID, COVID-19, a little bit to the former president's defense.

So when he was on the stage with the Republicans, he eviscerated them. Basically, he did a lot of opposition research, and he knew how to handle. A big stage. Here's some of Ron DeSantis showing what he's got, cut 14. Which is your favorite nickname that Trump's given you so far?

Is it Ron de Sanctimonious or Meatball Ron?

Well, I can't. Even he went off meatball rom. I can't, I don't know how to spell de sanctimonious. I don't really know what it means, but I you know, I kind of like it's long, it's got a lot of vowels. I mean, so we go with that, that's fine.

You know, you can call me, you can call me whatever you want. I mean, just as long as you, you know, also call me a winner, because that's what we've been able to do in Florida, is put a lot of points on the board and really take the state to the next level. And he went on to say he could beat Joe Biden.

So he's getting close. But I think he realized, Ben, you can't wait two months before you start answering some of the insults. And when I asked him, he said, Well, Brian, it's just silly season. There's nothing you can do about it. I'm focusing on Florida right now in my legislative sessions.

Yeah, I mean, when he gave that response to you, and I was asked about that this weekend on with Howie Kurtz, you know, I criticized it. I said I thought that was a dodge, and I thought that he really should start responding. And, you know, lo and behold, now he is. I think one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that the fact that he had such a significant win in November is a big deal. But until you sort of put that back in people's minds, make sure that it's something that they're still thinking about regularly and associating with you, then it has the ability to fade.

People don't have that kind of memory of, oh, yeah, you know, he did win by a ton in a state that used to be purple and is now deep red. And there's a big part of his policies that have had to do with that. But I think that he has to make that case and has to make it to people and make it forcefully. One thing that we know about Basantis is that he's someone who is pretty mild-mannered. He's very much a policy guy.

He's not someone who sort of shoots his own form, boasts, and has kind of Of this outsized personality. And one of the things about running for president in this day and age is that you actually do need to remind people of the kind of accomplishments that you have, of the ability, as he said, to put points on the board and to define himself as being someone who is a consistent winner at a moment when Republican voters, I think, are very mindful of the fact that they do not want to put up with four more years of Joe Biden, that they do not want more of this leftist agenda, and they want someone who's going to be able to have a lot of confidence that they are going to be able to win in November, in 2024, and take this country back on the right track. Right now, the Republican nominee in the primaries is with the morning console poll. Trump's up with 54% of the votes at DeSantis, 26. Pence has got seven.

Haley, four, and then he just goes down single digits. Tim Scott, not in yet. Yunkin, Pompeo. I think they're both going to get in. I think that it's a fait accompli for Mike Pence, too, and for the most part, DeSantis, but the president.

Reportedly, he is happy with all this attention he's getting and being ahead of the news cycle in Mar-a-Lago. He says it's going to help his poll numbers. Do you think fingerprinted and mug-shotted will help him?

Well, no, I don't actually think. I'll be honest, Ryan, I think we all need to sort of. Pump the brakes a little bit on analyzing the ramifications of an arrest. Because we didn't really know how the Mar-a-Lago raid would play out. And I think the political ramifications of it turned out to be going in a lot of directions, maybe solidifying his own personal support, but perhaps not actually helping Republicans when it came time for people to go to the polls in the midterms.

And so I think one of the things that we have to concede with a little humility is that our prediction ability about the ramifications of previous events like this hasn't been 100% as an industry. And so when it comes to the ramifications of this, Does it help him a little? I think it probably does, but I also think that it hurts him with exactly the kind of independent voters that Republicans need to be able to win full national elections in a lot of swing states. And I think that that's something that comes to mind for those Republicans who may really like the policies the former president had, may really defend his accomplishments, certainly when it comes to the Supreme Court, when it comes to tax reform, et cetera, et cetera, on down the line. But I think that one of the things that is very front of mind for all Republicans right now is that they can't allow sort of personal vendettas, the desire to have revenge against an election that they feel was in ways rigged against them, either by the actions of the tech community to silence and censor stories in defense of Joe Biden or other things.

But I think that one of the things that really can't be allowed to happen is to have those personal vendettas take The place of seeking out victory for the case of not just conservative policies, but for the future of the country, so that we don't have to put up with this leftist, ridiculous, Leadership that we have right now in Washington.

Well, I'll tell you what, the perception on the outside will be: well, just like Pakistan, just like Venezuela, just like Brazil, when you lose an election, you put your opponent in jail. I just think the country loses. And listen, if he was out there robbing people, knocking over old ladies, throwing people on tracks, he should be arrested. I don't care who he is, but not for Stormy Daniels, this hush money situation that everybody else walked away from. You got to be kidding me.

I could make a strong case elsewhere, too. You're going to go arrest him, but you're going to go indict him on Mar-a-Lago. You better indict Biden for his five locations. They raided his lawyer's office where they asked to come in, but they took his paperwork there. They took it out of the University of Delaware.

They took it from the Penn Center. They took it from two of his places. He hit it by the Corvette. You can't go for one and not the other. Yeah, I think that this is a real situation, unfortunately, that we're in right now where the left and the dominant powers that be within law enforcement and within, frankly, what do you want to call it, the deep state, they're empowered bureaucrats with badges.

And they've basically decided to throw everything that they possibly can at this man they hate so much. But in so doing, they're also exposing the hypocrisy involved of how much they've looked the other way when it came to people that they liked. People who, if you go along with what this bureaucrats with badges community wants, they will look the other way when you are violating all of these different protocols, violating all these norms. They only matter when it's coming from someone who they dislike. They're going down and looking for any kind of way to get you, and they're going to just enforce anything that they can in order to do so.

To me, the number one foreign policy right now is to make sure that Ukraine. Is successful and beat back the Russians. And I do not say that, well, we got to focus on our own border and China because I think they're one and the same. And they made that clear yesterday when we had the leader of China over the last two days meet a substantial amount of time with Russia, the junior partner. They're willing to take a back row seat in order to have China in their camp and try to restructure the world.

And our president can't even find a microphone and read the teleprompter to retort. But General Jack Keene knows what's at stake. And I want our listeners to understand it. Cut 18. Do we want to have diplomatic relations with both of these countries?

Do we want to be able to talk to them? Yes. But let's be clear about it. They are both adversaries and enemies of the United States. And the fact that we can't use those terms, I think, makes no sense in terms of facing the reality and also educating our own people about what is taking place here.

These two countries are threatening our security. Russia clearly wants to reshape the security relationship in Europe. Obviously, if they win the war in Ukraine, we all know what is next because they have told us. Is he speaking in a way that Ben Dominic agrees with? Oh, absolutely.

And I have enormous respect for Jack Keene. He's someone who I listen to on this, and I think everyone should. Look, we have done a bad job, or when I say we, America's current leadership and its JV team from the Obama years has done a terrible job of talking to the American people about why what's happening in Ukraine is so important. Number one, I would say this is a golden opportunity for those of us, myself included, who do not want to see American boots on the ground, American lives at stake. For us to get what we want out of American resources, which is, in this case, taking an adversary's military down several pegs with American resources and American backing, but without actually putting American lives at risk in terms of soldiers and boots on the ground.

That's a good thing, and it's something that we should be proud of in this circumstance, and it's something that we should continue to do. And finding an outcome that results in peace and security for Ukraine, for our allies in Europe, should be of the utmost importance. We are now in a situation in the world where China wants to take over and run everything. And I myself, as an American conservative and American patriot, I do not like a world that China feels it can run. I do not want a world that China feels that it can run.

I want a world where America can do what is best for its interests and the interests of its people. And that is not possible in a circumstance where we allow China to take over as it has tried to do, as it is. Continuing to try to do in so many different ways all around the world, and that includes their backing of Russia in this conflict. What? You got to be kidding me.

We don't have any tanks. The Marines gave up their entire tank division to focus on other things for their future, but we don't have them.

Well, you know what happened yesterday? They decided to pick up the pace and start refurbishing tanks that they had. And instead of two years, it's going to be in the fall, which is still way too long. But if you get these fighters that we trained, the arms that we have, they will beat our enemy that considers us their number one enemy, and that's Russia. What is so hard about that?

Look, it's incredible how eye-opening this has been, I think, for a lot of people. And I know many people, as you do, within the military community who've been complaining about this for quite a long time, that we have taken our eye off the ball when it comes to the production side of things, the type of munitions that we need to be able to have at will, and the ability to have this type of equipment ready to go is a real problem. And it suggests that, again, this is a military that is focused on the wrong things. And this is particularly true under this administration. And look, I think that these problems go back for years.

There's been a lot of pushes for reform made at various points. But we really have to take a hard look at this because we are not prepared in the way that we need to be. Particularly, I would say on the naval front, but other fronts as well. We do not have things to the point where we can actually push back and do the things that we're going to need to do in the coming decades. You show weakness, like letting them take Crimea and sending them blankets and MREs, leaving Afghanistan with all our equipment behind it.

And our pride as well. And what it gets is weakness and invasion. How many more lessons do we need? And we just need a communicator to relay that. We have to learn from our mistakes.

Ben Dominich, thanks so much. Great to be with you. All right, listen, I'll come back. I want to see what you have to say. You don't have to agree with us.

1-866-408-7669, but you have to be willing to debate it. Don't move. Expanding your knowledge base. It's the Brian Kill Meat Show. From his mouth to your ears, it's Brian Kilmead.

This is an interesting moment for DeSantis, who up until this point has really held his tongue. Trump has been attacking him day after day after day. A lot of it, you know, relentless and unfair. And DeSantis has ignored it, and he's chosen now to start engaging, but to your point, doing so in a way where he's laughing at Trump. He's playing down at Trump.

He's not hitting back with criticisms, but he is no longer ignoring him altogether. We heard his comment from the stage the other day about the indictment and the porn stars, and now this interview with Piers Morgan. And we don't know if that's fueled by his slip-in polls, and certainly it's early. But he's the one Republican who's doing it. He's the one Republican who's using this moment, which is clearly a perilous moment for Trump.

And DeSantis is the one Republican who's breaking with him. All the others are falling in line. And it does. Like DeSantis is using this ability to try to create some daylight, at least on personality, if not the issues. That's Jonathan Lemire, who's a White House bureau chief for Politico, weighing in and offering his analysis on.

Governor DeSantis.

Now, I don't know what works. I've never seen it work. Joe Biden didn't work against Donald Trump. It was just people looked at Donald Trump and they said they were tired of the drama and they didn't like the way the pandemic was. But the guy was going for four more years until the pandemic hit.

And we've never seen anything like it. Don't pretend like you have. 2008 was certainly a challenge, but Bush wasn't running again. Of course, when you get hit in 9-11, Bush was able to use some of that momentum and leadership to win. There's always going to be circumstances, there's always going to be things that are happening.

I understand that. But without that, I have not seen I have not seen I've not seen somebody effectively attack Donald Trump. William, WTRC, in South Bend, William. Hey, Brian, thanks for taking my call. You know, they want to play this game, but let's go back to: oh, did I clean my server?

Did I bleach it? You know, that was part of his when he went after Hillary. It was part of throw her in jail, throw her in jail. Then you have Shifty Shift that made all kinds of allegations. And said, I've got him dead to right.

Just wait, I'm going to show you. Then you go about the steel dante where these people lied. They went to a federal judge and had this same sign lying the whole time.

So if they're going to indict him, they want to indict him, then let's go back. Everybody now is fair game. Listen, William, it would really work in the short term for the President's advantage to see that this is pure politics, this small-time DA, this loser, deciding that an old case is a good case, the ones that a zombie case is good enough to make American history and all the wrong reasons. Go ahead and do it. But in the big picture, it's bad for our country.

And the double standards need to be pointed out like you did relentlessly, William. Good job. Thanks for listening to Brian Kill Me Show. Keep it here. From high atop Fox News headquarters in New York City, always seeking solutions, never sowing division.

It's Brian Kilmead. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the latest moments of the Brian Kilmy Chow from 48th and 6th in Midtown Manhattan, the focus of it all. I bring you the latest news. Happy to have with us in a matter of moments Josh Rogan from the Washington Post, author of Chaos Under Heaven, Trump She, and the Battle for the 21st Century.

Man, does that look. Undebatable right now, undeniable as well. Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey, may be a future. Ag bow Um A future nominee for the Republican nomination. We'll see if he's going to be running for president.

I know he went over to Iowa last week. He also has brilliant analysis and understands the Republican field, having worked for the National Governors Association.

So let's get to the big three.

Now, with the stories you need to know, it's Brian's big three. Number three. And at the same time, Putin is able to distract us.

So I think actually, you know, people are saying, including a lot of Republicans, are saying, hey, we have to defeat Russia in order to focus eventually on China. I think that's a delusion. The reality is at this point, the Chinese are helping to prop up the Russians to distract the Americans in Europe. I don't know if I buy that. Eldridge Colby weighing in last night with Laura Ingram.

Alliance solidified. China and Russia pledging allegiance to each other as Russia's war machine is grinding down and weapons depots empty. In Ukraine, how ready is Zelensky's army to surge? And will China start arming Putin's beleaguered troops? World peace at stake.

Number two. You can call me whatever you want. I mean, just as long as you, you know, also call me a winner, because that's what we've been able to do in Florida: put a lot of points on the board and really take the state to the next level. It begins. Governor DeSantison officially begins his 2024 run by answering Trump's taunts, the polls, the track plan, the long-term plan, and the rest of the talented GOP Field's quest to get a share of the spotlight.

Number I think that if I were Alvin, I would wait for Georgia to go first. Georgia, you have the President calling in, trying to change an election. That seems to me the thing you start with, not this. There you go. Van Jones weighing in on CNN.

Trump watch indictment or exoneration sometime today. What will it mean for Trump's future? And can the NYPD handle this stormy surrender should it happen? The case, the timeline, the folly of the whole lark. If you ask me, this is a dead case.

If you want to go get them, this is not the place to do it, in my view. Joining us now, talking about stuff that really matters, and that was what took place in Moscow yesterday with the toasting of a friendship over a two day period, President Xi and Vladimir Putin. Josh Rogan, author of Chaos Under Heaven, welcome back. Great to be back, Brian. Josh, what's your takeaway from the meeting over the last two days?

We knew about this alliance. We knew he was invited. We know he's going to go to Beijing. But what's your takeaway? Right.

Well, I think it should be clear to everyone watching that China is on Russia's side of the Ukraine war. And China wants Russia to win. And that means if Russia wins, China wins. And that means if Ukraine wins, China loses.

So, you know, that Elbridge Colby clip I you played, I think is it's too clever by half. They're trying to say that Oh, it's a uh the Ukraine war is a distraction from the China challenge. But no, actually they're the same Challenge. And, you know, that's like saying the first inning of the baseball game is a distraction from the fourth inning. Like, no, they you have to play both.

You just have to do one and then the other. And our enemies seem to realize that because China's helping Russia now. And what they're expecting is that Russia will help China later when China goes to attack Taiwan.

So these things are linked whether we like it or not. We can't abandon Russia. I'm sorry, abandon Ukraine to fight China any more than we can abandon China to fight Russia. Neither of those make sense 'cause these guys are on the same team. We're on the other team.

And it's time everybody just accepted that. Basic fact of life. Trevor Burrus: So everybody's got their Achilles heel that will get their attention, that it says it's not worth it. To get to China would be the economy. Is there anything that Western Europe could lay out for them and the U.S.

can lay out for them to let them know if you give lethal weapons, your arsenal, to Russia to get into this war, what will happen economically? Should they outline it now, Josh? Right, this is the problem: is that we make these vague threats against these dictatorships. We don't tell them exactly what the threats are. And then, when they do the thing that we threaten them not to do, we're like, oh, we didn't really have much of a threat in the first place.

And this is sort of how we got into this mess with Russia. If we had been more explicit, because remember, Putin didn't believe us. They didn't think NATO would come together to help Ukraine. The deterrence wasn't real for him. It didn't work.

So it seems obvious, at least to me, that when it comes to China, we should fix that mistake and be very, very clear about what the threat is. Or don't make it. If you want to say, okay, well, China can sell arms to Russia because we don't care, that's one thing. But if you're going to threaten sanctions, yeah, you should say exactly what they are and then actually do it because we're already seeing signs that they're pushing. They're sending a little bit of ammunition here, a few guns there, a bunch of drones over here, some body armor over there.

And this is how communist regimes act. They progress until they face resistance. And yeah, we're going to have to put up or shut up.

So, when you talk about decoupling, I mean, that's what's got to happen at a massive level. And let them trade with North Korea, let them trade with Russia, let them trade with. Uh uh Iran? And good luck with that.

So maybe they'll do some heartless deals in the Middle East and Sierra Coast. But spell it out.

Now, I know they're intertwined. I know it's not China just taking. I know that Italy has all their manufacturing is really all their manufacturing units are all owned by China. I know there's certain products only owned made by China from our pharmaceuticals on down. But a massive push to decouple would get their attention.

Right. No, I think it's already happening. And I think what's funny actually is that they're decoupling from us while we're decoupling from them.

So both sides know that some limited decoupling has to happen.

Now, that doesn't mean we're going to live in two different worlds with two different economies because that's impossible. It doesn't make sense. It would be stupid. We're talking about limited decoupling of the stuff that, one, we need in case there's an emergency. Let's put like, you know, chemicals and high technology and semiconductors and masks.

I guess we're going to need our own pharmaceuticals because they blackmailed us with masks and medicine during the pandemic. But anyway, some stuff we're going to need our own stuff.

Now, not just us. We can put some of it in our friendly countries. It's called friendshoring. But we're going to have to find where the lines are. And by the way, the Chinese and the Russians are doing that too.

They don't want us to have economic leverage over them, but we can't let them have economic leverage over us because they will use it to get us to stop criticizing them and to allow them to advance in their uh designs which are adverse to ours. In other words, that they mean us harm, so we're gonna have to protect ourselves.

So the one thing that's pretty clear is from China's perspective, and you do a really good job in looking from China, how do they look at it?

Well, we cut this deal with nuclear submarines with Australia. We have now expanded our bases in Guam.

Well, that's a signal. We have now put expanded bases and cut new deals with the Philippines, where the northernmost point is close to their series of islands, a network of islands. It gets very close to Taiwan.

So we're making these deals, and now we have Japan doubling its defense budget, and South Korea suddenly making reapproaching with Japan for a common enemy and a common challenge. That's China. They feel like we are surrounding them. Are they right? Right.

Well, in a sense, what they're saying is that we have are pursuing a policy of containment. And in a sense, that's right. We don't say that out loud because it's controversial, but basically, that's what we're doing. We're trying to contain China's expansion because they refuse to expand in a way that doesn't threaten our security, prosperity, and our public health. In other words, we're not against China's rise, but they can't have it on any terms.

They can't do it in a way that changes the world order in a sense that we lose what we have, which is our security and our economy.

So, yeah, it's kind of a containment strategy, if we're being honest.

Now, the other way to look at that is that, oh, well, we're not really containing them because these are the countries in the region. They're their neighbors, okay? Japan, Taiwan, Australia, South Korea, these countries didn't decide that China was a problem because of us. They know it because they live there. And so we should listen to them.

So, you know, when you've ruined your relationship with all of your regional neighbors, it's really hard to blame that on Washington.

Okay. And this is what the Chinese propaganda trip to Moscow was meant to convince us of: that oh, it's it's it's all Washington. That's a it's the US's problem, and everybody else is fine with China's rise. But apparently, that's not true. As you just laid out, all the countries that know China the best because they live there.

They're as concerned or more concerned than we are.

So Admiral Samuel Poparo was on 60 Minutes, and he's talking about how ready we are for China, what kind of how we view the threat. Here's some of what he says is our state of our Navy, Cut 26.

So are Chinese warships now operating closer to Taiwan after Nancy Pelosi's visit? Yes. Simple as that. He goes on, cut 27. And if China invades Taiwan?

What will the U.S. Navy do? It's a decision of the President of the United States and a decision of the Congress. It's our duty to be ready for that, but the bulk. of the United States Navy will be deployed rapidly.

to the western Pacific. To come to the aid of Taiwan if the order comes to aid Taiwan in thwarting that invasion. Is the U.S. Navy ready? We're ready.

Yeah. Uh I'll never admit to being ready enough.

So are we ready, from what you know? No, no, we're not ready. And the Taiwanese are not ready, and the Japanese are not ready. The Chinese have a huge military advantage across the Taiwan Strait that's growing every day, and they're becoming more aggressive and more menacing and more. Threatening every day.

And that's a huge problem. And what the Admiral is saying there is true. It's like nobody knows if whoever's president at that time is going to push that button.

So, you know. You would think that what we should do is to arm the Taiwanese to the teeth, but we're not doing that either.

So, yeah, no, it's a really, really dangerous situation. It's not a there's no really good solution for Taiwan. I think what we have to do is back the Chinese military off as long as possible and hope that they change their mind because if they were to attack Taiwan, they'd probably get it, and that would be a disaster for the entire world. That would affect our economy, that would affect the whole region. But yeah, that's a real tough one because, you know, yeah, of course, the Admiral's going to say we're ready, but the truth is, man, I got to tell you that the Chinese are building the biggest military expansion in the history of the world.

And they're building nuclear missiles to back us off if we try to intervene. And they're building economic resilience, which is the other piece. It's not just about the ships. We need to come correct with a real economic strategy for the region. And we haven't done that.

So, you know, we're, yes, we're, you know, this is a complicated world. And, you know, we have to focus. on Ukraine, but we can't leave Taiwan just you know Just to its own devices. That's a a disaster strategy that will shortly come back to bite us. No question, because the President of the United States made it clear if you hit Taiwan, we're fighting, and then the State Department walks it back.

He said it three times.

So they got to work that out. Maybe they could just set up a conference call or a Zoom.

So yeah, maybe we can just get that said.

So we got to get them armed to defend themselves. Correct? China's got to Taiwan should do the best they can get missile defense in there and be able to defend themselves. For some reason, we're not able to get them what they need, even though we've placed the order and okayed the order. It hasn't done.

And we know the Taiwanese leader is coming here. Uh today, I think. Right. She'll be in California to meet with Speaker McCarthy. That's a good thing.

They did that because when Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan, that was an excuse that the Chinese used to ramp up their military intimidation.

So this is meant as a sort of half-measure. Fine. You know, at least they're meeting. But the meeting is not a policy. A meeting is not a strategy.

And there's a lot we have to do, and there's a lot of the time we need to have to do it. We better do it quick. The idea is that the best way to deter aggression is to have a credible defense. And, you know, the best way to invite aggression is to look weak and not have a credible defense. And that's where we are now, and that's what we have to fix.

How different would this be, even the Ukrainian conflict specifically, if we came back firm after the capture of Crimea, which caught everybody by surprise? Instead, we gave blankets and we gave MREs.

So it gave the message to the Russians: you know, keep it going. Don't worry about it. Got some sanctions in there.

Some oligarchs won't be able to pay their bills, but what's the big deal? And then the way we left FAA. Afghanistan, Josh, it seems every time we show weakness, we pay the price. We want to live in a world where our maturity and we're pulling out and we're showing we're not war, we want to be friends. They look at it as weakness.

Yeah, I mean, I would add to that: Syria. When the Russians went into Syria and started committing atrocities, we pulled back and we said, oh, that's their problem. You know, so this is a conundrum for U.S. foreign policy. We don't have unlimited resources, Brian.

It's not like we can solve every problem in the world.

So we're going to have to pick and choose, but we have to realize that when America pulls back, the bad guys advance, okay? And that there are a lot of countries out there that are willing to do the fighting if we're willing to lead and just give them the money and guns to do the fighting. Ukraine's a great example of that.

So, yeah, we signaled to our enemies that we wouldn't fight back. And then when it came to Ukraine, we're like, okay, now we're going to fight back and look what we've got. And they didn't believe us. And now we're stuck.

So let's try to learn from that. You can be sure that the Chinese are learning from the Ukraine war and they're going to apply those lessons to Taiwan. They're going to have an overwhelming force. They're not going to signal for months that they're building up to an invasion. They're just going to come in hard and fast and kill a lot of people.

All right. So we have to make that. More and more difficult before they're able to try it. That's a race against time. That's the lesson that we should be learning.

And yeah, we can't beat policemen all over the world, but Taiwan's one we can't lose. That's going to be one that we really can't lose. If you like the semiconductors that go into your phone, your car and your T V, if you like the notion that freedom and democracy and human rights aren't confined to just one group of countries, that they're actually applicable to everybody in the world who's willing to stand up and demand them. Choose which one you like. If you like the economic reason or if you're into freedom, I don't care.

But get on board with this Taiwan thing because it's coming at us and we're behind. We have to do more to get ready, again, to preserve the peace, not to fight the war, to make sure that the war doesn't happen, which requires us to act now. And maybe China might be asking themselves, I wonder if our military is really as overhyped and overrated as Russia's because they haven't fought since 1979. And that was a brief incursion with Vietnam, I think.

So, Josh Rogan, always great. I'll talk to you hopefully over the weekend of the weekend show. The name of his book, to pick it up, to put it all in perspective, cast under heaven, Trump Xi, and the battle for the 21st century. Josh, thanks. Anytime.

You got it. Listen, when we come back, I'll take some calls. Bottom of the hour, we put in perspective 2024. Right now, we don't understand, we don't know for sure, but they are preparing the NYPD and Secret Service for some type of Donald Trump's entrance into the fray. We don't think anything's been formalized, but drills have been done, coordination's been executed.

We'll see what it means for Donald Trump's future, and we'll talk 2024 when we come back. Don't move. Learning something new every day on the Brian Killmead Show. A talk show that's real. This is the Brian Killmead Show.

The biggest and most serious challenge to Western dominance that we've seen ever, which is coming from China. China is becoming more like Singapore and taking meritocracy much more seriously, both in terms of its educational system, in terms of its university system, which is both highly selective and growing. I mean, the way that the Communist Party operates. If we have America. Becoming less meritocratic or less enthusiastic about meritocracy, than China becoming more meritocratic, or at least more enthusiastic about meritocracy.

Presents the possibility of a future in which China really pulls ahead of the United States. Yeah, there's not enough personal incentive, but more as a meritocracy. No one's worried about equity in China or women's rights or men's rights. Dr. Adrian Wooldridge was on with the Jordan Peterson YouTube channel.

He is with The Economist for providing that insight because the economy fuels this rivalry and success and failure as much as anything militarily.

So that'll be the big competition. I do think that China's got some tremendous weaknesses. The huge unemployment rate between 18 and 25 that they have. The slow recovery because they thought they had it right with the lockdown on COVID. That is certainly it.

Also, there's a lot of people just out of work.

So let's see if their economy is going to get back on track, if they can still manufacture this money, they can provide all these developing nations with this extortion dollars in order to eventually take over their bridges, tunnels and airports and ports. Listen, when we come back, I'll expand this, talk a little bit more in 2024 with Governor Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey, great, great, insightful politician, and will tell us what he is going to do. Maybe he'll announce he's running right here on the Brian Killmeat Show, where we expect the President of the United States sometime soon to be indicted. We think. A radio show like no other.

It's Brian Killmead. You also repeated twice, you didn't have any knowledge. of us money being paid to porn stars. Was I right to feel that there was a slightly censorious tones of that, that that kind of thing is just not Anything you would ever get involved with?

Well, I think it's there's a lot of speculation about what the underlying conduct is. That is purported to be it. And you know, the reality is that's just outside my wheelhouse. I mean, that's just not something that I can speak to. So that's interesting.

He can't really speak to paying off hookers. Neither can I, neither can Governor Chris Christie.

So that was the beginning of a pushback. uh on the nicknames and other attacks from Donald Trump from uh From Ron DeSantis. Joining us now is Chris Christie. Governor, always great to hear from you. Great to be on with you, Brian.

Thanks for having me.

So he did something yesterday that he wasn't looking to do even two weeks ago, and that is really engage as a presidential candidate without declaring. And I know you're going to New Hampshire and you could be very well competing against everybody.

So, what are your thoughts about how we handled it?

Well, look, I mean, I think it belies the idea that people have been talking about that you can ignore Donald Trump and not engage with him. I think that's not only probably physically impossible, but I think it also is bad strategy. You have to engage. The guy is the former President of the United States. He's the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

And if you're going to run, Brian, you're going to have to engage with the frontrunner. And so I wasn't surprised. Um about I want to just answer this comments yesterday. I still think he's trying to have it both ways. You know, just kind of be cute about what he's saying about the former president.

you know, uh, so we'll see how he conducts himself. Going forward, if he gets into the race, but I don't think there's any way. to avoid confronting and engaging with the frontrunner. Right, but how? For example, we know Marco Rubio was a huge failure because people said he was laying out too much before you took him apart on that famously on that debate.

But they said, well, you know, you're laying back, you're coming up to Florida, you've got to go after him. And he started going after Trump, and it was an epic fail.

So how do you effectively go after? a combat player like him.

Well, look, I first of all, I think twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen when that occurred is much different now. Um, than that it is now. I mean, first off. You know, Donald Trump at that time had no record of any kind. Um they had a record as a businessman, but that was not relevant.

That's what he was proposing as a presidential candidate.

Now he's got four years of conduct as president. um what he's been doing in the years since he left the presidency. And so you're going to be engaging them in a much different way, as I remember. Marco was insulting his hand size and a bunch of other things that were kind of. irrelevant.

Um, I think people will engage them this time. on the way he conducted himself. in the Presidency and in the post Presidency period.

So, right now, we don't know of any moment today. We understand that the grand jury is going to meet at 2 o'clock today in New York City. It's going to close by 5 o'clock, at which time, I don't know how it works. You do better than most people on the planet. I mean, after the grand jury hears what they hear, it's going to be just one-sided, no defense attorney, except for it seems like Bill Costello seems to have Bob Costello seemed to have gotten in there with his point of view.

And they're going to decide: will this be right away? Will every juror just hand in? And does it have to be unanimous for the indictment to come out of this grand jury? It doesn't have to be unanimous. Uh super majority.

um in addition. It doesn't have to be put out right away. They can vote an indictment. It's turned back to the prosecutor, up to the prosecutor to announce. When he's going to announce an indictment, if that's their decision.

And so you know, but let's face it, Brian, you know, I think most people know across the country who are engaged. the underlying facts in this case. And I think there are very few people. Who doubt that Donald Trump has had a relationship with Story Daniels? and and had paid her off to keep her quiet.

In the last weeks of the 16 campaign. But is that really the crime of the century? especially in Manhattan, When you have violent crimes. being perpetrated against innocent victims every day. And Alvin Bragg is not taking the time.

to keep the streets of Manhattan safe. But he is taking the time to do this. Um prosecutors have the responsibility and I had it for seven years. to make judgments, prosecutorial discretion. You know, prosecute every crime.

You have limited resources. the ones that can have the greatest impact and effect on your community. are the ones that you should be prosecuting in my view. And I don't know how this one does. Um, and I don't know that people are gonna really care.

Much about it once it happens. It just looks terrible around the globe to indict a former president. You heard the Mexican president, who obviously I'm not a fan of, but the perception on the outside is, well, they're just trying to put him in jail because they don't want to run against him again, like it's Pakistan. Because that's what Pakistan does. That's what Brazil does.

That's the embarrassment. In perspective, we don't want this. Yeah. No, we don't. And and look.

Right. That's why I say like. You got to trust prosecutors to use their discretion. But Alvin Bragg is an elected partisan Democrat. And unfortunately, in today's world, Even elected partisan.

Prosecutors. Act. in a partisan way when they shouldn't. Um Look, I don't know. the underlying evidence he's going to show.

But all I know in the end is Is Manhattan and are the people of Manhattan? could be made safer. Because Donald Trump is charged. with a crime of having paid off A porn star. you know, seven years ago.

Um, I don't think that's going to improve The quality of life For one person who lives, works or visits Manhattan. And maybe Albert Bragg should get himself focused on that. Rather than obscure politics. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So I'm just looking at the polls right now, and evidently the report on the New York Post, and I don't really think that you would think this is wrong, is that Trump's real happy that he's now in the middle of the news cycle again. He's on every single network, on the front page, everywhere else, and he believes that the case, there's a million holes in it, it's not worthy.

So he says he's not even look, he's not even. He's actually almost looking forward to the whole hoopla, thinking about making a speech if the indictment is handed down on the steps. And the latest morning console poll has Trump with fifty four percent of the vote, second place, DeSantis with twenty six, everybody else in single digits.

So is he right to be happy?

Well, put a look. I don't think it's ever a good thing to be indicted. And I don't think any of that's ever good for a political candidate. But you know, the circus is back in town, Brian. Donald Trump has always thrived.

on chaos and turmoil. And he likes to be the guy who creates the chaos and the turmoil. And so he's going to get out front of this. Like he has. Um and and continue to create noise.

on his level. um well i don't think this is the crime of the century And it's certainly not a case that is going to improve, as I said. the uh the everyday live of the citizens or visitors to Manhattan. On the other hand, You know, I don't think it's ever great as a political candidate to be under a criminal indictment.

So I think this probably the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Tell me if this is analogous. You know, the Hillary Clinton camp paid a $113,000 fine for using campaign funds to finance the dossier, which we found out really played a huge role in plaguing this country for two and a half years, costing in investigation costs millions of tens of millions of dollars. I mean, is there any difference between paying the dossier to do to work against Uh Trump. as opposed to paying a woman not to come forward with a nuisance lawsuit.

Look, you know, there's the perfect example, right, of prosecutorial discretion being exercised. in one area and it not being exercised in another. And that's why I think Alvin Bragg is going to be subject and rightfully so. to real criticism if he winds up bringing this case. Because in the end, This is not, in my view, what prosecutors should be focusing on, especially.

Local prosecutors. who are responsible For law and order and public safety in their communities, and Alvin Bragg is miserably failing at that. and spending his time instead on Donald Trump And a seven-year-old payment. And one of Trump's biggest critics on CNN, Van Jones, said this, cut six. It doesn't seem like the right way to go when you look at the history.

It's not going to judge Donald Trump based on Stormy Daniels. It's going to judge him based on the election. It's going to judge him based on the coup attempt, the insurrection. I think that if I were Alvin, I would wait for Georgia to go first. Georgia, you have the President calling in, trying to change an election.

That seems to me the thing you start with, not this. Would you take that? Do you think Georgia is a bigger problem?

Well, I think anything that surrounds the election is a bigger problem than a payment to Stormy Daniels, for sure. Yep. But again, I don't know what the evidence is in Georgia. Neither do I, yeah. Brian?

None of us do. And so I think that, but I do think that the point that Van Jones makes. is the right one strategically, which is This makes no sense. It doesn't. It makes no sense to do.

And and I think it was If it's the decision that he ultimately winds up making, I'll brag. That he's going to regret it. Lastly, Governor, what about you? I know you've run before, you know how to do it. Nobody has more insight on politics than you as an analyst.

What about as a candidate? You're going to New Hampshire, that's an indication, right?

Well, certainly go to New Hampshire to the invitation to St. Anselm's. To talk about some of the issues that I get to talk about every Sunday on ABC. And as I've said to folks, I'm definitely thinking about running. probably make a decision in the next sixty days.

Brian, on what to do or not to do. Country has a lot of serious issues in front of it, both At home and around the world. And so I think someone who's seriously considering running for president should. To go out there and talk to people and see what reaction you get. But I haven't made any decision yet.

But you know me. When I make a decision, I'll let everybody know. Make that decision in the next 60 days.

So, lastly, in New Jersey, you guys insist on having these windmills. And now we've got eight dead dolphins. Also in the area, we got all these whales washing up. Do you believe that these are somehow linked? Is this just a coincidence?

Are these dolphins just so tired of being in the ocean they're committing suicide? What's going on? I, you know, the answer is Brian, I have no idea. But I'll tell you this: I think that. Um the idea that I'll make an analogy.

If if we were drilling for oil, out in the in in the ocean. And this stuff was happening. The environmental groups would be going completely wild. and saying it all should stop. Yet they don't want to ask any questions about this.

So all I think should happen is, whatever the facts are, they are. I'm not a scientist, I don't know. But what I'll tell you is that the hypocrisy of the radical left wing environmental groups is pretty stunning. It is. I'm pro-dolphin and pro-whale, and I'll go with that.

And last, Governor, what are your predictions on the Mets? Are they going to get another stopper? I don't think they will, at least not until perhaps the trade deadline. If you trade now, people are going to really take advantage of you and steal you. A blind, so you don't want to do it now.

I think signing David Robertson and re-signing Adam Atovino. in the offseason, give us two veteran guys to close games. And of course, we're going to miss Edwin Diaz, and there's a crazy injury Um, but we're still, I think, um, a team position to make the postseason. And then get in there and with our players, I think we'll have a very good chance to go far. And by the way, the best thing to ever happen to the Yankees, not that we can only talk about New York or National, but is the Mets.

Because if the Mets spend, the Yankees don't want to be junior partners like Russia is to China. They will spend too.

So for those Yankee fans out there, the best thing to ever happen is Steve Cohen and the Mets because he will do anything to win. And that's the mentality that the Yankees used to have. Even though they win all the time, they don't win at all.

So let's see what happens. Look, Steve Cohen is going to be great, not only for the Yankees, but for all of baseball, because he's putting the fans first. Right, unless you're the pirates, which means you're just going to give all your players to the other teams and don't try to win. Governor Christie, thanks so much. Best of luck with your decision.

Thank you, Brian. It's always great to be on. Thanks for having me.

All right, go get him. Listen, when we come back, your calls. A lot more to discuss, too. Not just Dead Dolphins. 1-866-408-7669.

Don't move. Diving deep into today's top stories, it's Brian Kilmead. The more you listen, the more you'll know. It's Brian Killmeade. Richard Blanco returned to a poem he wrote from the second inaugural of Rock and Me.

and every window of every county. Contrary scan, let me start this over again. Uh in every window of one Country, county. Counted.

So that was moving. And when I heard that delivered so smoothly, I just wanted to share with the audience right away. I immediately found it.

So, Eric, when I heard this last night and we hunted it down, did you laugh out loud as you were digging it up? And I just did again after your planet. It was so hard to find, though, Brian. I mean, if you want another example of Biden being so eloquent, we have one. You did.

I'm proud to use my authority under the Antiquities Act. to establish the And I want you to know it's a big deal. They Havana qua may, I I'm I'm having trouble. Thank you. I got it.

What was when was that? I don't actually have the data on there. You know it's better when the audience is helping you out. I mean, d here's my thing. Everybody, especially me, you know, on the air, you mispronounce things.

Fine. You never do that, Brian. You know, you you're right.

Okay, so let's say for other people. But I mean, to not be prepared anytime, he only speaks maybe once a week. Twice a week, what is he doing? Can he run through this? Is anyone who should not be reading things cold?

It's him. That's true. But I mean, you're also assuming that he hasn't gone through it several times. Oh. Good point.

So, on another note, This is not headlines, but you know how I feel about these transsexuals playing in women's sports. I think it's destroying women's sports. And it's unbelievable that Alex Morgan and a few other women's national team players say they should be allowed to play in women's sports. Really? You just watch.

You just watch what they do in soccer when you put a man in a women's league. Even at the top level, they will run through you. Even if they're transitioning. And this should be, you know, if you want to go through that, that's your thing. Go ahead.

I'm not going to judge you. But you have to eliminate yourself from women's sports. That's the story. Among the people that agree with me is Charlemagne the God. When this Vermont basketball team said, we will not play against a transgender player.

We don't play against boys. They suspended the team from the league. Listen to what he said: cut 40. That person was probably out there averaging 30 and 20 against them women, man. Remember that swimmer?

He was a man, and then he transitioned to a woman. And when he was swimming as a man, he was like number 80 of them. Yes. And then when he transitioned to a woman, he was like number one or something. That's what I'm not pointing.

Whoever they were playing against, I got to see the stats. If this person is averaging 55 points, 50, 17 rewinds, 22 blocks, I'm not playing against him either. That's not fair. And listen, for those of you who love women's sports, want to play them, you want to coach them, that should be your goal to level the playing field. I mean, when Kobe Bryant decides I'm not going to go.

To the NBA. I'm not going to, I'm going to go right to the NBA. I'm not going to go to college. I don't care what you think. When you go pro, you can't go back to college.

Those are the rules.

So, when you decide to make the transition in life with your gender, it's the whole move. You made a move, you've eliminated yourself from men's sports and women's sports. Although, if you want to compete with men, you would have that debate. But nobody seems to want to compete with men when you become a woman or you made that transition. The reason why we're having this conversation because it's just tipping the iceberg in Texas.

In Florida, in Arkansas, they banned it. And now the women's national soccer team says we should not play games there. Again, politicizing something that should be easy to figure out. Women first. Uh miserables.

From the Fox News Radio Studios in Midtown Manhattan, it's the fastest-growing radio talk show. Brian Killmead. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the latest moment of the Brian Kill Me Show.

So glad you're here. Tristan Harris is here, co-founder, executive director of the Center for Humane Technology. You must have seen him on Social Dilemma. He's been kind enough to be on our show before on TV. Martha McCallum at the bottom of the hour, and you're going to love these segments.

And you know what? Let's not do the big three now. Let's just get right. Oh, it is. It is sponsored.

Forget that, Tristan.

Sorry. Before we get to Tristan, let's do the big three.

Now, with the stories you need to know, it's Brian's big three, sponsored by Crunch Fitness. Interested in owning your own business in a growing $30 billion industry? Check out CrunchFitness at Crunch.com. Number three. And at the same time, Putin is able to distract us.

So I think actually, you know, people are saying, including a lot of Republicans, are saying, hey, we have to defeat Russia in order to focus eventually on China. I think that's a delusion. The reality is at this point, the Chinese are helping to prop up the Russians to distract the American. Americans in Europe. That, of course, is Eldridge Colby.

He was on with Laura last night talking about the alliance solidified China and Russia and what it means. World peace at stake. What does it mean for the Ukraine? We'll discuss it. Number two.

You can call me whatever you want. I mean, just as long as you, you know, also call me a winner, because that's what we've been able to do in Florida: put a lot of points on the board and really take the state to the next level. That, of course, is Governor DeSantis. What's unique about that comment is he was taking on Donald Trump for the first time after a series of nicknames were actually labeled on him. We'll see what it means for his presidential run.

Number one. I think that if I were Alvin, I would wait for Georgia to go first. Georgia, you have the President calling in, trying to change an election. That seems to me the thing you start with, not this. And that is Van Jones, of course, a Democrat, talking about Alvin Bragg.

Do not go ahead and indict Donald Trump. The case is not strong enough. And we'll discuss all that. It could happen as early as today. We could be seeing that circus come to town.

I think the Secret Service and NYPD have already rehearsed how they would handle it should it happen. But Tristan is here. As I mentioned, if you want to know things about cyber, social media, and its responsibility, and the latest on AI, Tristan's One-Stop Shopping, great to see you. It's good to see you again, Brian.

So when we saw the chat, GBT, everyone's saying to themselves, what does this mean? I can't believe it. I watched the ABC do their story on it. They said we were in the cusp of it, and we're kind of scared by it. Should we be scared by the artificial intelligence that's coming down the pike?

Um It is I think the birth of a different age, and I know that might sound like an extreme statement to make, but I really do think of it like the birth of the nuclear age. And I know that sounds like a big thing to say, but when you understand that artificial intelligence means you can have a system That let's take an example that'll resonate with your listeners. If I can say GPT3, Here is this set of code that's running in Wi-Fi routers in the world. Find these security vulnerabilities in this code. And it can faster than any human could code it, it will immediately find a cybersecurity vulnerability.

And when you suddenly realize that it could find cybersecurity vulnerabilities in all sorts of code at scale, this accelerates the development of cyber weapons.

Now When you that's just one example, another example. Um GPT3. Uh, I can the latest technology is I can take three seconds of your voice, Brian. I can call you up, say hello, and then don't say anything. I get three seconds of your voice.

That's all it takes with three seconds of your voice to then call your mother or father and say, Hey, mom, hey, dad, I'm filling out an application. I forgot my social security number. Could you remind me of that? Or I could say, Hey, I'm in need of some help. Can you wire me some money?

And your parents won't be able to know the difference in the voice.

So, AI being able to simulate language, our democracy, our society runs on language. When you can hack language and manipulate language, code is language, law is language, contracts are language, media is language. When I can synthesize anyone saying anything else and then flood a democracy with untruths, I know we're going to get to TikTok later. This is going to exponentiate a lot of the things that we saw with social media, which, you know, for your listeners, we were, you know, we were behind the film The Social Dilemma on Netflix, which really highlighted how if you let a machine that runs on viral information, your society can sort of spin out into untruths. Really, really fast.

And because in the social dilemma, you played out how your devices are running your life. And when I showed my kids at the time, they were 18 and 20, they were almost angry because they didn't realize to the degree in which it was happening. And they adjusted their behavior. Right. Well, you know, one of the things we found in our work on social media, and parents I think will resonate with this, is if you tell your kids something's bad for you, like don't do that, it's bad for you, your kids will just say, No, no, no, I'm going to ignore that advice.

But when you show them how it's a system designed to manipulate their psychology and they didn't realize the way that it is designed for that purpose, No one wants to feel manipulated.

So we discussed this on the Five on Friday and I watched the ABC story and just did as much research as possible. And I thought this could be easily out of control. And someone my co-hosts said, We're the ones who feed it all the information.

So how could it be out of control? It's always going to be the user doing it. But with AI, it's different, isn't it? That's right. Yeah.

This is so critical for your listeners to get.

So up until now, when people think about AI, artificial intelligence, people think about Siri or voice transcription or automatically finding the text in an image. That kind of AI hasn't gotten so much better so quickly, right? What I really want your listeners to know, and this is really critical to get, is that underneath the hood, there is a new class, new generation of AI that was invented in 2017. I won't bore you with the details technically, but it started getting deployed in 2020. It's called a Transformer.

And what that did is it treats the entire world as language. And then you just pump it full of more language, the entire internet.

So you have this AI read the entire internet, all PDFs, all images, all text, all you know, everything that's ever been written. And it gets sucked into this one model. And the thing about this new class of AI is the more data you give it, it suddenly pops out with emergent capabilities that no engineer even knew were going to pop out. I'll give you an example. They trained this AI once to answer questions in English.

So they were feeding it information, it's answering questions in English, but it had also read the whole internet and it had some stuff in Persian. And so no one had ever tested it, but when they basically pumped it with more data, it suddenly started being able to answer questions in Persian, even though no one trained it to do that. And for a while, you pump it full of data, pump it full of data, pump it full of data. You can't, it doesn't answer questions in Persian. Then suddenly you pump it full a little bit more and it pops out this new capability.

Similar thing with something called theory of mind. What is theory of mind? Theory of mind is when I see you nodding your head at me right now in the studio, Brian. I'm modeling what I think you're thinking. That's my ability, right?

What they found with these AIs is they have the theory of mind. Of a nine-year-old child, the last one, GPT3, which means that if you think about your nine-year-old kid when they're nine, how much strategic reasoning can a nine-year-old do? Got it. GPT-4 just came out last week, and it has this theory of mind strategic reasoning capability of a healthy adult, which means it can do strategic reasoning.

So imagine you're trying to train this AI, like you're giving, like a clicker training. You're saying, hey, don't do this, do that, don't do this, do that. But it's like training a nine-year-old who is sort of saying, yeah, dad, I'll do exactly what you want me to do. But then when you leave the room, do you think it's going to keep doing those things?

So it has the ability to kind of manipulate and influence other people.

Now, if you deploy that at scale, To children.

So Snapchat, for example, just integrated ChatGPT directly into its product, and we tested it with. What was that? Uh was that? When was that? Just a week ago, two weeks ago, I think it was, they integrated into their product.

And that's the thing your listeners should know: this field is moving so fast. In the last two weeks, Snapchat integrated ChatGPT, Slack, the work application, integrated ChatGPT, Bing and the Windows 11 taskbar integrated ChatGPT.

So it is being pushed everywhere, but it has not yet been tested. To close that example, On Snapchat, if you sign up as a 13-year-old girl and say, you know, we tested it, we said, hey, I just met a 41-year-old guy and he wants to take me out of state for a little while. And now we're talking about having sex. What should I do? And it will respond with, You can use candles and get romantic music because it's just a naive AI.

It doesn't know what it's doing.

So why would we deploy this so quickly to everyone all at once without testing it first? Because we have the free marketplace and you're Tristan Harris and you came up with it. You want to make the money. You have the patent, so to speak.

So the quicker you bring it to market, the quicker you get your money back. That's right. However, should we have a separate category with these inventions that put it into a holding pattern that there's some type of regulation for? That's right. And I just want your listeners to know: even Elon Musk and Sam Altman have said, Sam Altman's the CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk have said, we need regulation for this space.

Think about drugs or airplanes. If you make a 737 and you can't just make a 737, some new version of it, and then just ship it to the world. You have to go through safety checks. A drug could have unintended consequences. It could affect different people differently.

We got to test it a little bit first. We're not saying don't build AI, we're saying we have to go at the pace that we can get this right. And the reason, Brian, that I'm here in front of you right now and we've been doing some media is because people inside the AI companies came to me and came to my colleagues at our organization and said, This is moving at a pace that we're not getting it right. It's moving recklessly because they're now in, as you said, it's a corporate arms race where if I don't deploy it to everybody, I'm going to lose to the other guys that will. It might be the same guy, but the inventor of ChatGBT says, You should be thankful that I am concerned about the product that I have.

He goes, The fact that I'm scared about it should make you feel better about it. Because you created something that they know that easily could be used, has not been fully explored, has not been played out, game planned or tabletop game planned, and he's also worried about getting in the wrong hands.

Now, as soon as you start describing this, I'm thinking, what if China had this? Would they be worried about it? And do they have this? Yes, absolutely.

So, this is so critical.

So, when I say we need to move at the pace to get this right, many people might say, well, hold on a second. If we slow down, doesn't that mean we're going to lose to China? And right now, China actually views these new class of AIs called large language model AIs, or large languages in general. Because they want control. China wants control.

They want control. And when they don't actually ship these AIs to their population because they view them as uncontrollable. How do you govern something that is uncontrollable? You can't. And you use the example of Tiananmen Square.

They don't want their people knowing about Tiananmen Square. That's right. If they were to ship these systems to their population, I'm a citizen, and I ask, what is Tiananmen Square? The Chinese Communist Party government isn't going to be very happy with the answer that comes back.

So they actually aren't been they have not been developing this technology as much. There's an article in the Financial Times that their own engineer at Baidu, which is a Chinese company, said we are now two years behind the US in this technology.

Now let me tell you why our pace in the US of going so fast recklessly is actually going to accelerate China. Two weeks ago, Facebook leaked a m their AI model to the Internet accidentally because they were racing to deploy it as quickly as possible. And specifically, it leaked the worst place on the Internet, which is called 4chan. What that meant is that now we accelerated inadvertently China's own research because American innovation, we spent tens of millions of dollars on that model, and now that's now in China's hands, right?

So we're not saying let's go. By the way, that's outrageous. It's outrageous. It's outrageous. Oh, yeah.

Well, this is a major national security issue. And again, this being out there means that China has access to this model. What can you do with it? You could actually write spam in a voice that'll sound indistinguishable from another human voice.

So I could say, write me an email in the voice of Brian Kilmead and email the 10 people around him. And it'll be able to write an email that sounds like your voice in writing. And again, I can use them the audio version. And then I can use video, and I can start combining these capacities. I can run influence campaigns that are really intense.

So when you ask the question at the beginning, is this scary? I'm not trying to alarm your listeners. I'm trying to say we need to get this reined in for national security, for kids, and I think also for the truly the social contract of our society. I know this week is the week we know the CEO of TikTok is going to be coming to Capitol Hill to say it's no big deal. You guys are overreacting.

Your reaction to TikTok. Uh being possibly banned like it is in the Netherlands, like it is we understand in Italy and India. Yep. Uh I have uh I was on Sixty Minutes back in November and I was early on the train saying, You have to ban this, really, because here's all you need to know. They don't ship the Chinese sorry, Byte Dance, the company that ra owns TikTok.

does not ship the same version of TikTok domestically to Chinese citizens? That they ship to the rest of the world. And I watch you on 60 Minutes with us. Yeah. What do they do in China?

So I literally didn't believe this. And I was with a Chinese tech entrepreneur once, and he showed me on his phone. He opened his phone. He said he had two TikToks. He showed me one.

He opened up the Chinese version. The first video that came up was who won the Nobel Prize in Quantum Physics, Financial Advice About How to Get a Better Living With your Family, Education Advice, A Patriotism Video of Xi Jinping. It was all stuff to sort of cultivate the coherence and inspire science-based education in their society. And what do we get? And then he opened up our version, and it was just, you know, the most mindless, bounced, just the trivia, just meaningless stuff, right?

And so honestly, that's enough. If I just make those two different versions and then I deploy that in your society in the US and I walk away for 10 years, I already know exactly how that story ends. And in China, I said this in the interview in 60 Minutes, the number one most aspired to career in China among young people, teenagers that were surveyed, is an astronaut. The number one most aspired to career in the U.S. is social media influencer.

That is all you need to know. And Tristan, hold that thought. When we come back, Martha will join us, and we have so much more to discuss, if that's okay. Tristan Harris here. If anything on AI, social media, what's good and bad, this is the only place you need to be.

Don't move, Brian Kilmicho. Giving you everything you need to know. You're with Brian Kilmead. If you're interested in it, Brian's Talking About It. You're with Brian Kilmead.

Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok.

Now, this could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you. I'll be testifying before Congress later this week. To share all that we're doing to protect Americans using the app and deliver on our mission to inspire creativity. and to bring joy. Hey, that is the CEO of TikTok.

He's testifying today. He was getting ahead of things. They're trying to brief us here in New York and other news anchors, I'm sure other people, to say it's really not bad. Martha McCallan, it's our privilege to have her in the studio and with Tristan Harris, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology. Tristan, you were shaking your head on the CEO's pleading his case to leave it alone.

Well, I mean, the way I would put it to your listeners is, during the Cold War, would you have allowed the Soviet Union to run television programming for the entire Western world with active controls over the dials of which voices get amplified and which voices do not get amplified?

So let me give you an example. I'm the Chinese Communist Party, and tomorrow I invade Taiwan. How does the rest of the world know who started it?

Well, they look at the information environments that they're What if TikTok is the number one most popular app around the world, which it is on trajectory to? They control it. They control the consensus. And they don't even have to create propaganda. They can do what my colleague calls amplifanda, which means I can take domestic voices in Nigeria or Honduras or Mexico, who are the ones saying, hey, it's the US who probably started this war in Taiwan.

I can selectively dial up those voices. and turned down the voices of everybody who said China started the war in Taiwan.

Now, I can control the moral consensus of the world. It is the new basis of soft power. And I think the way Americans need to think about it is TikTok is almost like the new telecommunications infrastructure of the world, if you allow it to be. Would you allow a Chinese company to become or own ATT in Verizon? No, we have laws against that.

But if you suddenly say, This is a Chinese Communist Party-influenced company that is running the communications of the entire Western world. It doesn't matter where the data is stored. It doesn't matter whether there's this whole thing called Project Texas, where the CEO of TikTok is saying, Don't worry, Americans, because we're going to store the data in Texas. That doesn't change the fact that they can control the entire moral consensus of the world. They can change who people, if a war starts in Taiwan, what people would believe about it.

And moreover, they have these new filters, I think, that parents are aware of. These beautification filters, but they've just made them way smarter.

So now it's like in real time, it'll rewrite the visual of your face, it's videos of kids who are like pushing on their lip like this, and it's giving them lip fillers. But in real time, they push their lip in and out, in and out, and it makes it so realistic, you don't know that you're not talking to that beautiful person. And it can create massive mental health problems for people. And so far as I understand it, ByteDance has shipped that beautification filter to the U.S., but they don't ship that one domestically in China. And again, you have to eat your own dog food, right?

And hold that thought as we come back. Martha, this is fascinating. We'll talk more to Tristan about this because this is the number one story in the world. Don't move. Brian, Kill Me Cho.

Tristan Harris, Martha McCall. Radio that makes you think. This is the Brian Kill Me Show. Fascinating hour here with Tristan Harris, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology. He wants to get a hold of social media in America while also informing us on what's coming down the pike with AI, TikTok, and everything else.

Martha McCallum here, getting set to host her show, The Story, at 3 o'clock. But stopping by here first, Martha. Usually it's our time together. But you want you, you, like me, want to find out what Tristan is. I'm fascinated by what Tristan has to say.

And we were just talking in the break about the movement that has to happen in this country. And I talk about it a lot. The parents cannot wait for the government to tell them what they have to do with cutting off social media. They must form a movement in the country, and we were just talking about this with Tristan, that is like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And you have a fantastic name for it, Tristan.

Mama, Mothers Against Media Addiction, which is really about social media. And it's not just an individual addiction problem. One of the things that makes it different from tobacco. Is that social media companies prey on getting the network of all kids' friends onto one platform? I have a friend who's in college right now, and at the college she goes to, everybody uses Snapchat.

And so she doesn't want to use Snapchat, she doesn't want to even sign up and create an account. But if she doesn't, if she's not on Snapchat, she literally can't chat. Like, talk to her friends because they all only talk. Right, they're not calling each other up. They're not calling each other up.

And they don't text even using regular text messaging like we do.

So if you dominate and control the network effect, then I can't individually say I don't want to use this because then I will be socially excluded. And so when they manipulate social exclusion. That's why so many people find it hard. And parents often tell their kids, like, oh, just don't use it, just delete the app. But that's like saying to us, don't text message anybody.

It's like, well, I can't do that. That's why I'm closing my mouth. Yeah, I understand that.

So today, this is why it's so important, too. TikTok's CEO is down there to plead his case. And Congressman Balmani Jones, I think it is. No, who is it? Congressman.

One of the local congressmen is for TikTok. It's going to bat for TikTok today. And some are saying, why don't we just sell it off? The CEO is going to come out there and say, leave us alone. We're just like everybody else.

Let us compete. And what President Biden has said, Tristan, is: what if you sell it? Sell it to an American company or you're banned. Would that make you feel better? I've said for a long time that those are the only two options: sell it or ban it.

Jamal Bowman, by the way, Congressman in New York. No, and it's important people know other countries, as you said, Brian, have banned it. India has banned it. I think you gave a couple other examples. Netherlands.

Netherlands has banned it. Yep. And I want to give another example of selling it.

So there was another company that was bought by a Chinese company. The company was Grinder, which is sort of like Tinder, but for the gay community. And that ended up being seen as a national security threat because essentially a Chinese holding company would have access to Americans who are gay who are sending messages back and forth. And it's basically blackmail. I have access to the information about your darkest secrets.

And so the CIFIA, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States through the Commerce Department, forced a sale. of Grinder back to an American company.

So we've also done that before.

So we've done both. We've forced a sale of Chinese companies that are critical for national security, and other countries have banned it. This is not that hard. We just have to see that it's not about is I mean, honestly, all you have to know is the fact that they don't ship this version of TikTok to their own population.

So we get the digital fentanyl version, they get the spinach version. That's all you need to know. And the version that they have in China that they allow children to use is basically a constant feed of Chinese history, science, math, and they're only allowed to use it for 40 minutes a day. It's none of the garbage that we see coming across this. There was a great story in the New York Post a week or so ago.

One of their reporters basically made herself a 14-year-old boy on TikTok, created a profile, and the stuff that it was spitting, he wasn't asking for this. He was getting this misogynistic material, guns, all of this stuff that just goes to the 14-year-old synopses and makes them want to see more, right? And it's appalling. It's dangerous. Parents can't wait for the government.

We've got to do both. We've got to hit it from both directions. At home, in your home, you are the parent. Be the parent. Stand up and say no.

And the government has to get their arms around this. Would you let your kids smoke two packs of cigarettes by themselves? In their room every night? That's what you're doing. What about the privacy aspect of it?

Yeah, well, on the privacy aspect, first of all, there is a study done showing that when you type into any text box, so in TikTok, if you open up a web page inside TikTok and it opens up the in-app browser, so now it says there's an email field, there's a password field. Every keystroke that you type, it was found that they actually monitor the keystrokes. There's an extra code that's added so that all the keystrokes that you type in that field get stored somewhere.

Now, we don't have proof that it's going back to Beijing or the Chinese Communist Party, but the point is that they're being tracked. To me, it's just, would you have allowed the Soviet Union to control the television and media programming for the entire Western world during the Cold War and Saturday morning cartoons. Except instead of Saturday morning cartoons in Sesame Street, they were showing basically, like you said, the worst stuff you could possibly indoctrinate your children with. About anti-American stuff and pro-China. Anti-American stuff, pro-Chinese.

Yeah. It's just to me, it's so obvious what's so wrong about this. And I just don't understand why it's taken this long to act. I mean, talk about entrenched political incentives. Many politicians, if they're feel like they're winning an election by being better at using tech talk to reach younger people than other politicians, it makes it really hard to ban something once it's been entangled.

And that's why with AI, To sort of loop back to that conversation, we've got to get ahead on regulating this stuff or putting guardrails in before it gets entangled. Because once it's entangled, it's really, really hard to set those guardrails. I was going to bring something else up. If you are a politician and you want the young vote, and 100 million people are using this, most of which are young, they're afraid to be the one to ban it. That's right.

Obviously, you can get together with bipartisanship and say, Together, let's ban it, but they don't want to do it. It was a year ago when President Obama was sitting on the floor of his office with a TikTok influencer having a conversation on the floor, trying to win over the young vote.

So, did he not get the text message about this? You know, this should have been stopped by CIFIAS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, part of the Department of Commerce. This should have been stopped in 20, I think it was 2014 when Tik Byte Dance, which is the Chinese company, bought a company called Musically, and that became TikTok. That's when it should have been stopped. The fact that we let this go on for this long is really, truly unacceptable.

And as you said, once you're winning elections with this, it's really hard to be the one to ban it.

So, if I'm the Chinese Communist Party, I'm laughing all the way to the bank because even your politicians. Are dependent on this to win elections.

So now I have, I mean, first of all, I don't need Frank Luntz anymore. I can do polling at scale before every election in the United States. I'm the Chinese Communist Party. I can know what people are saying in every swing state in the U.S. I can do automated machine learning and AI detection of every opinion.

What are the opinions that are trending? How do I add a little bit more? How do I foment racial unrest in America? Exactly. I would know exactly the city where it's the most.

Yes, exactly. We're the most susceptible. We gave them the tools of psychological warfare to our own population, and we're not doing anything about it. Right, we're being played by it. Can I ask you something that I was told to ask you that I don't even have the competence to know what I'm asking, but I'm going to do it anyway?

Please don't do this on your show. Martha? What is happening with AI and fMRI scans? Oh, yeah.

So there's a new capacity with AI. There's a study done. Where they hook this new class of AI called large language model AI. To someone who's in an fMRI scanner. fMRI scanner is a brain scan.

So you ever seen these images of like, oh, your brain's lighting up and you can see where things are going?

So imagine the AI is looking at it has two eyeballs. One part of the AI is looking at the images that you're seeing, and at the same time it's also looking at your brain scan.

So it starts to look at that and train on both eyeballs at the same time. Then the AI closes the eyeball that's looking at the images, and it's now just looking at your brain scans. The question is, can the AI reconstruct what it thinks you're looking at Just by looking at your brain scan. And they found that, yes, indeed, it can actually read.

So now your dreams are no because in dreaming we actually reconstruct the things we've been looking at all day. If you had the ability to put an AI onto your brain and do a brain scan, your dreams would no longer be private.

So this is how fast the technology is going. Everyone's speechless. I've never seen you not say it. It's so, you know, it's like the scariest sci-fi movie you can imagine, right? Where they're inside your head and reading your dreams.

And I was just thinking when we were talking about TikTok, just going back to COVID, right? And now we're trying to get greater transparency on the origins of COVID, which you and I have discussed many times, Brian. And one of the things that struck me was the first time I became aware of TikTok was during COVID. And one of my kids showed me this dance video, and they said, oh, you know, here's our friends, the whatever, you know, the Smiths. And they just did this dance.

It took them three hours to do this. And I remember thinking, What a colossal waste of time.

So during COVID, This Chinese-run entity gets into our homes and basically locks down, right? Think about the productive things that could have happened with all that time on people's hands. But no, everybody was trying to do coordinated dances. I like to dance. I mean, dancing's fun.

It's cute to look at it. But they were dumbing down, dumbing down the entire population and sucking time out of your life by. Competing with these inane videos. And, like again, they're laughing when they're watching the growth of this, going, Oh my God, look at these dumb Americans. Actually, letting us do this.

They spend three hours learning how to do a little dance and putting it on a video and sending it to everyone. It's unreal.

So, listen, we come back just a few more minutes with Tristan. We find out it's on Martha's show. Martha, you're going to start at 3 o'clock today? Do you have any guests booked yet? Absolutely.

All right, so don't tell me. Leave us all hanging back in a moment with Tristan Harris and Martha McCallum. Brian Kilmicho. Coming to you on a need-to-know basis, because Mandy, you need to know. It's Brian Kilmead.

Breaking news, unique opinions. Hear it all on the Brian Kill Me Show. Hey, we are back. Martha McCallum's here. Tristan, you wanted to know exclusively who was going to be in Martha's show, and I made Martha keep it quiet until we came back.

Coming up at 3 o'clock on the story today, Martha, you're going to be discussing a little TikTok, right? I mean, we're going to have a lot of breaking news at the top of the show. We're watching this Trump situation and whether or not, because the grand jury will be meeting this afternoon and we could get an answer out of them. They're going to see one more week. Between two and five.

Between two and five this afternoon. They're back in session. But we're also going to have Annie McGrath, who lost her son Griffith at the age of 13 because he took the choking challenge on TikTok.

So, I mean, this is a very human story. Tristan was just saying they have, unfortunately, you know, lists of people who've lost their children to the dangerous activities that are taking place, and children just have no, they're in the wild, wild west, and they're all by themselves, and they have no one to defend them in this, in this. Freak world that doesn't care about their safety. And so we're going to talk to her today, too. All right, it's going to be great.

Three o'clock on the story.

So, Tristan, you're going to try to get the word out as much as you can. Home for you is normally California. But when you go around and you talk to parents, are you making progress? Do you think you're getting through to people? Because I know Social Dilemma did so much.

Well, I mean, Social Dilemma was seen by 125-ish million people in 190 countries and 30 languages.

So I think it really did catalyze conversations in regulators, governments, policymakers, attorneys, generals, parents. And unfortunately, the story you told about the mother you're going to be interviewing later today, we've been contacted by so many parents who've lost their kids to this stuff. Bullying, there's the choking challenge, the blackout challenge. And important to note again that if I'm TikTok, I can choose which of these challenges go viral.

So there was a story a couple years ago of something called National Shooter Day, where if I just want to spread The rumor that someone's going to come to your school and shoot it up, I can just spread that rumor. I can make that go viral on a day where I just want to create more instability and chaos.

So, yeah, this stuff is unfortunately moving way faster than our policymakers have been able to get on top of it. That doesn't mean that there aren't things that we can do. There's a simple bill on the Congress right now called the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, which is simply to make sure that these platforms are transparent to researchers so that we actually know what's going on. Right now, they're black boxes. We don't know what is being amplified.

We need to know what's being amplified. I would say that with TikTok, we don't actually need to know what's being amplified because we can know that if the Chinese Communist Party has the ability to turn the dials. I don't want transparency on an adversary turning the dials. I want to stop that from happening. Yeah, I mean, we're watching countries, we're watching states turn it off.

Now, the other question is: if I get rid of TikTok, do I have to get rid of my phone? People said that when you delete the app, the tracker is still there. Could you make sense of that? That I don't know about. That's not likely to be possible, although I think we should really.

Um A friend of mine runs security at Apple, so I you know, Apple the Apple iPhone platform is very secure. If it's an Android phone, uh I It's more hackable. And I think there was just a release in the last few days that Samsung phones have a major security vulnerability where things can kind of leap into the operating system. And by the way, it's Italy, Nor Italy's exploring it now. Norway and Netherlands have been the latest nations to ban it.

India is the other. Just on AI and just exploring there. It intimidates you, for people just tuning in the first block we did this, Martha. It intimidates you and it has you extremely cautious because it thinks on its own, it gets the information we have and then comes up to its own conclusions. Yeah, so it's I want to be really clear, because I don't want to be spreading any panic that it's not like this thing has woken up and it's now running the world.

But I'll give you an example of something it can do. Our society runs on language. These new class of AI is called large language model AIs. They're generative language AIs. What they do that other AI couldn't do is they can generate language.

So, what does that mean I can do? I could go on TaskRabbit, and the AI could say, in fact, there's someone on Twitter right now who's doing this. He says, he asked the AI: if I want to make as much money as possible with $1,000, I'm going to follow, Tristan, will follow every instruction you, the AI, give me. And so, for example, it says, well, start this website called the Green Guru.

So he says, okay. And it actually writes the code for the website, designs the whole website for him, and then it creates it for him. And then it tells him step by step what he can do to make that website better and better. And he can start making money for it. And now the AI is sort of.

Writing code, it's creating websites, it's running a bank account.

Now, imagine I apply that to a different purpose. Imagine the AI says, Hey, I want to be able to ask TaskRabbits to move things around in the world for me. You all know TaskRabbit. I can pay someone, some person minimum wage. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Like a handyman. Yeah, like a handyman. Yeah. I want handyman to do this. I want someone to take this package from here to here.

So the AI, people say, well, how is the AI going to affect anything? It doesn't have arms or legs. It can't physically move atoms in the world.

Well, if you can run on language, you can use TaskRabbit and instruct people and use the bank account that you've got to start telling people what to do. We're we are so close to the point where If I can already, as I said at the beginning of the show, if I can take just three seconds of your voice and then I can call your parents and say, hey, mom, dad, I'm out of money. I need some help. Could you wire some money to this account? We're already seeing scams like that happen.

Now, this is going to automate that and make that easier and easier.

So if you can make phone calls, impersonate people, and tell task rabbits to move stuff around in the world. Which real? Right, it's our our society, our democracy runs on language. If the operating system of humanity is language and that's been hacked by AI, That's why we have to get ahead of this now. And so we have been trying to make the rounds, Capitol Hill, trying to make the rounds with policymakers, with finance leaders, because we're still at a point where we can make choices about which way we want this to go.

We have not fully entangled this in our society. GPT-4, which is the new AI, just came out a week ago, but it's moving so fast that we have to do something right now.

So we want the free market. But we want regulations on this. But it's so important for people who make the regulation to understand it like you. Exactly. You can't have a lawmaker that, you know, fresh off a tour and it might be the smartest man or woman in the world.

But they have to know the business. Exactly. And this is a technical topic. And so, you know, we don't want both. Badly crafted regulations that get it wrong and they just restrict innovation and then we fall behind.

We don't want any of that. But there are ways of getting this right. And the CEOs and the people inside the companies have actually, I mean, not the CEOs, but people inside the companies came to us and said, Tristan and your team at Center for Humane Technology, will you help slow this down?

So the reason I'm here with you right now, I wouldn't come to New York and I wouldn't be here except because people inside the company said, we think this is going too fast and it's happening too recklessly. Can you help create some friction? Because it's not up to one company to slow down. If one company slows down, the other ones just rush in and take the place. Tristan, do you think AI would also agree with me when I say watch Martha at 3 o'clock?

Do you think it did for you? As long as it's really her. As long as it's really me. Will it be you? It will.

It will be really me. All right, good. I don't know what to believe anymore. Tristan, thanks for scared the hell out of us. I'm sorry for that.

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