BEST OF KILMEADE: Melania Trump, Mike Rowe, Tristan Harris & Arthur Brooks

Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for teens. Instagram teen accounts have built-in content settings and limits for who can contact teens. Plus, teens under 16 can't change these default safety settings without parental approval. So parents can help teens connect safely. Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections for who can contact teens and the content they can see. Learn more at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. Have you ever stopped and thought about what's actually powering your day, the coffee you made this morning, the drive you took to get here, even the device you're listening on it? I'm Tanner Faust, and that's exactly the kind of thing we're going to talk about on the energy tailgate, a podcast from Chevron. I'll be your host inviting guests to discuss big energy topics and what they mean for everyday life, all from the tailgate of our truck. This is the energy tailgate. All right, let's get started this holiday weekend. Thanks so much for listening, everyone. It's my chance to go back and look at some interviews. I think you want to see again. And also, I understand your schedule changes. You might have missed these interviews. Didn't go to our YouTube page, which I hope you, by the way, I hope you always do. and go to our YouTube page and see some of the highlights. So I'm going to bring back her interview with Melania Trump. She has a brand new project, a documentary that came out. It got huge ratings, got huge box office. I think it said all kinds of records. It gives you an idea of her. Consider how far she's come. I think personally my feeling she never said it, kind of reluctant to go into the spotlight the first term. This time she's picking her spots and using the power of the office. I think it's tremendous. Later on this hour, I do a quiz on Rocky with Tyrus because we both love the series and I kind of screwed up on Gutfeld in a fun, entertaining way. But first, Melania Trump. She has somebody that has been ridiculed for no reason. Married to a president that's controversial, impactful, that she thoroughly understands. And by the way, The worst held secret for people that know the president? She is a key advisor and watches his back. Here's my interview with Melania Trump. And joining us now, the first lady. Melania, thanks so much for being with us. Good morning. First off, you look so natural in front of the camera. I'm just wondering what led to you saying to yourself because a lot of people have so many questions about you. What made you say to yourself, I'll do this. I'm going to show 20 days leading up to this historic inauguration. Whose idea was that? It was my idea. After I solidified my creative concept, my agent pitched the idea to all of the platforms from Amazon, MGM, Disney, Paramount, Netflix, and I decided and selected MGM because of several reasons, including, but not limited in the fact that the company was willing to launch my film in theaters only.

So we have a great success and I'm very proud of it. You should be. And I loved it too. And my wife really loved it, and especially the beginning. You talked a lot of fashion. You talked about the detail needed. And you know, you talked not only about how, you know, you want the first lady look great, but also because you think it's important for America to have this type of detail when it comes to an historic event like the inauguration. Could you explain that mindset? Well, in the film, it's unprecedented and historic and cinematic. And I'm proud to say those never seen. seeing before moments from my life, including my family and business, during the timeframe of 20 days leading up to the US presidential inauguration. It is a historic event. I believe Americans and people all over the world should witness the incredible amount of planning and work. required me doing it and to become from private citizens to become a first lady. Your husband pulled out the biggest upset in election history the first time around. And that was sudden. Can you explain the buildup to the first inauguration as opposed to this one? As you become the most experienced first lady from obviously something brand new to you in this world, in the political world? It was very different the first time than now the second time. I was never in politics the first time. I always was interested in politics in private and I followed the world news and what's going on in the world, but I was never in the politics. The second time now, we already know what position I need to take and hire the people to work for my East Wing office because they're working for me, but they also work for American people. I'm very action-oriented. This time around, I have a mission, and we had a great success for the last year already in my office. As I champion for Take a Down Act, it was signed into a new law that enhance federal online protections for children from online defects. I led executive order on fostering the future for foster children, as well as presidential artificial intelligence challenge. Secure 30 million for foster children and housing for them. I also reunified children from Ukraine, from Russia and bring children and families together. I'm very proud of my work. Should be. Melania, growing up.

You know, being a first lady, it's a unique and impactful role. So I want to provide what I can and influence behind the scene even what I can to for people to have a better life. So that is what I'm passionate about as well. And it's very important that those people have my support. That's why I decided to write a letter to President Vladimir Putin and he... He wrote back right away and we are still in communication regarding reunifying more children. I hope we will have success soon. And as well as the hostages, I was behind the scene met Aviva in January 2025. It was very emotional meeting and we had a great success. All of the hostages are out and I talk with my husband often and I give him my advice. And as I said before, sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn't. It's very important that you have an open communication in the relationship. I know. Absolutely. You always see First Ladies from Dali Madison. People talking about the role she played as being the first one to really take over the White House and bring a sophistication to it. People talk about Nancy Reagan, an enormous influence with Ronald Reagan. They'll talk about you too. I have one contention. You're about to walk out for the inaugural. You're seeing all the coverage. And you look over to the right. And you have CNN on watching Jake Tapper talk about your family and who's there. Is that Joe Biden's doing? Because he was officially still the president then. Should I be mad at him or should I be mad at the Trump team for not having Fox on at that moment? I, you know, I watched a lot of news. I don't watch only one channel. I like to be informed what, you know, every station is saying. When I have time, I like to be informed. And I know everybody has the own perspective, but, you know, at that moment, CNN was on. I feel like, you know, every station was covering the... you know, the inauguration. So it was not really in my mind. I was focused on the other stuff. But I like to read a lot of newspapers, all different stations, watching all different stations. I like to be informed around the world as well. I like to watch other stations to see what's going on around the world.

I hear you. I flip around too. As long as we, as long as according to certain reports that we might be your favorite station. I don't know for sure. And hopefully this ends up being your favorite radio show. But listen, between your book being a bestseller and your documentary being a big hit and the enthusiasm which you're embracing this role, life is good for the First Lady Melania Trump. Would you say so? Life is good. Life is busy. We're doing a lot of fantastic stuff. And we just, I want to keep focus and be mission-oriented and taking care of our beautiful country and our incredible people. All right. Melania, go check it out in theaters. It's out there now. I did last night. First lady, thanks so much. Have a great day. I appreciate the time. So does our audience. Thank you. so much. You got it. Melania Trump. Back in a moment. You're listening to the best of the Brian Kilmeade. Instagram teen accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see. Explore teen accounts and all of our ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. All right. So Rocky, the Rocky series has changed America. It's been a big inspiration for me. But Tyrus does not believe it. He's got a series of questions to ask me, which will reveal how much I know about the Rocky series. But I hope you're playing fair. Listen, I. Despite the disappointment and just sheer letdown of the incident on Gutfeld. I will say this. You've had many highlights. So, you know, it's just, you've hit a lot of big 50-yard field goals. You missed a chip shot. So it's a little discerning, but we're not ready to cut you from the team yet. So show me, let me show you that how I get done. Easy ones, because this, let's just set it up. Let's get started. Okay. What's Rocky's dog's name? Butkus. Okay. See? See? I don't get a bell or anything, Eric. I don't get nothing. Okay, there you go. All right. Okay. Where did Rocky and Adrian's first date happen? Very simple at the ice rink. Pick to her up from the pet shop, went right to the ice rink. She had the thick glasses on and the hat. Yep. Okay. All right, this, again, this is this very Rocky oneish? Yeah, well, that's on purpose. You got to prove one before you get into two because two, there were some issues. We're getting there. Rocky climbed the steps of what famous Philadelphia landmark? This is an easy one for you. The state, the state steps, the library steps.

You know what? It's the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Yeah. You know what, though? He steps. I'll give it to him. He's a busy man. Okay. On which holiday does Rocky and Apollo have their historic first fight? Fourth of July. New Year's Day. Okay, because it was Christmas. It was cold. Remember he was? Yeah, it was New Year's. And he was cold and hit the stakes. I thought it was a Fourth of July. He was trusting red, white, blue. No, come on. They were celebrating the bicentana because it was New Year's day. He's stalling. He's stalling. Please don't talk to the suspect. This is an interrogation. This is not a game show. Yeah. You can be good cop right now because right now if I had an attorney, I'd say take this to the grand jury. I, um, here we go. Oh, man, I miss Judge Jeanine. What is Rocky and Apollo's rematch called in Rocky 2? What's he called? I'll give you some examples because clearly this is going the way I feared. Grudge match to Super Fight 2, Ultimate Fight 2, Mega Fight 2. Ultimate. Well, it was. Let's just move ahead. What was it? Super fight, too. It was on the thing. And then he walked up. Well, these are weird questions. This is not what people care about. All right, cool. Let's go with the easy one. Rocky 3, okay? Okay. Where does Apollo take Rocky to be trained for his rematch with Clubber Lang? Los Angeles. There you go. That's a normal question. I mean, that's what people care about. Yeah. Because he had to learn to change his style of fights. Why don't you ask me that? This one I can relate to. Before his rematch with Rocky reporter, asked Clubber Lane to make a prediction. What is this prediction? Pain. Very good. That was in my wedding video, actually. It was also in your face when we had our little thing on Fox and Friends. Okay. All right, this one, if you don't get this one, I'm walking out of here, and I'm never coming on this radio show again. What does Ivan Drago say to Rocky before their fight? I must destroy you, I must break you, or you will lose? I must break you. I didn't need multiple choice for that. Oh, good. Okay, okay, all right. Because then we broke the Soviet Union after that fight. Okay. Uh, we don't, Rocky after after Rocky for there is no Rocky. Okay. You know, we don't have to do this the whole segment. I don't know. Um. How am I doing, by the way, Pete? Are you keeping score? How many have I got right? I think you're three and three. Three and three. Yeah, you're not making the playoffs, bud. Okay, here we go. This one's tough. And this one, but this one's worth two. This will put him over the edge. And Rocky Balboa, as Rocky enters the ring, what is the theme song, Polly picked out for him? Is it the best is yet to come by Tony Bennett?

High Hopes by Frank Sinatra or ain't that a kick in the head by Dean Martin? One more time. The choice. High hopes by Frank Sinatra. The best is yet to come by Tony Bennett. Ain't that a kick in the head by Dean Martin? I don't think any of them. We'll pass. I'm going to say Dean Martin. No, no, no. Who was it? High hopes. All right. Really? Yep. They played high hopes? Yeah. Pauli makes a point of it. He goes, I like Sinatra. Okay. This, if you can't, what is the name of the gym Rocky trains at? It's mixed gym. Well, we all know it's mixed gym, but what's the name of it? No, no. The answer we were looking for is Mighty Mix. Mighty Mix. Are you sure you're not more of a sex in the city guy? Mighty Mix? Is it really? Yes, the name of the sign, Mighty Mix. I mean, I'm telling you, Stallone. This is your team. Stallone could not. This is your team. Stallone could not have done better than me. You know what? I believe we could have Stallone on the show, but I don't know if that would be a good idea. He might have one more fight in him, Brian Kilmeade. Right. And it's not Rambo. It's Bill of Delphia Spectrum. Brian Kilmeade and Stallone. Take out Tyrant's podcast. I'm not on it. Cheers to America's 250th birthday. Get 20% off your first purchase at Fox Newswineshop.com with code FN Radio 20. 20% discount excludes wine club offers and cannot be combined with any other promotion. Expires July 31st, 2026. Must be 21 order to order. Please drink responsibly. So let's bring in Alberto Crane. He's an author of All In. Lessons on and off the mat. It comes out now. It's out now. It's out right now. Not today. Yeah, it's out in March. Long before, MMA won mainstream, you were doing Jiu-Jitsu, right? And one of the big challenges you had in your life, you were also diagnosed with a disease, MS. MS. M.S. Multiple Scrosis. So here you are wrestling at the top of the game and elite athlete, and you get that diagnosis. So first off, what was the attraction to Jiu-Jitsu? Some of my friends are doing it, and they invited me to do a class. Which city is this? I was in New Mexico, San Ifa, New Mexico. Okay. Random place, not a big city, small town, but there happened to be a jiu-jitsu guy, an early student of the Gracie Maria Corina Machado that was there. Right. And you loved it from day one? My friend tapped me out ten times. He was much smaller than me. I couldn't believe it. I like, let's go again, let's go again. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was like, I got to learn this. And I never looked back. And how old are you now? I mean, how old were you then? I was 18. And how old are you now? I am 49. So when did you make this your occupation? It was gradually one of my friends, he moved down to Brazil. One of the guys that I started jiu-jitsu with, he moved down to Brazil, moved down to Rita Giro to learn from the Gracie family directly. And then he came back. We started training his garage every day. And then it just kind of built on it. And he told me about this book called, I think I grew rich by Napoleon Hill. And so I sit down, I wrote down my goals. And my next step was moving to Brazil. So it was just kind of gradual, gradual. And I never thought.

having a school or making this my my living right so why'd you move to Brazil just to be a part of it uh well he went down there first he was a little bit older than me he was like an older brother who's about six seven years older than me and uh and uh so he told me he showed me pictures show me all the stuff he was learning and i was like wow this is amazing i want to i want to go there too and so i did i went there for six months And it's just gradually took me to a couple tournaments in California and Los Angeles. And I just got more and more obsessed about it. And you started competing for jiu-jitsu. Jiu-Jitsu, correct. I never thought I would fight MMA. I never thought I would be doing that. But you knew it was a possibility, right? At this point, when you were growing up, the MMA was mainstream. It was, you know, it was Valitudo days, right? You were sharing with me that you were part of the early UFCs, right? Ultimate Fighting. Yeah, no gloves, no rules, right? No time limits. Knocked out, choked out. You couldn't quit. And so I never thought I'd be doing something like that. And then one thing led to another, I got my black belt. And I was like, hey, I want to see if this stuff works in a situation and a fight. Right. And King of the Cage, which is a pretty big organization at the time, came to New Mexico where I was living. And I got on the card. And but then what did you have to learn beyond jujitsu to be successful as a mixed martial artist? The beginning, the beginning, I was just a jih Tzu fighter, right? And back in the early days, right, you were representing your martial art to show, to prove which your discipline was better. Was the best, correct. So that was, it was great because I was still at those early days as part of that, you know. And then, of course, as things evolved with time, you have to become a well-rounded, you know. Fighter, right? And that means you're wrestling, your takedowns, you're striking, correct? You have to be a wall-rounded like MMA fighter. That's it. It's black and white, you know? I remember on UFC, the guys who were really screwed with karate guys. I mean, because they didn't have a grapple. And the guys who were doing well that could excel as wrestlers and the jiu-jitsu guys could do everything. right but still you had to learn as it graduated now you got to really learn to punch more than maybe you learn in jiu jitsu is that correct correct right it's a different yeah you don't have to strike you don't strike correct yeah so the beautiful thing with jiu jih Tzu and i think the monks that kind of started or actually the judo the judo founders you go or conno how he made it like the right way to do it so he got these guys got really good back you know whatever was 100 and over 100 years ago was he made it so you could train it realistically right without any strikes without any quick kill things eye gouging whatever and his students beat all the the traditional jiu jiu jitsu fighters or jiu jitsu practitioners and so that's why you know that kind of training went that way and then fast forward you know martial arts around the world like was definitely karate karate chakondo like striking based right 70s, 80s and then, and then, you know, out of nowhere in the 90s, the Gracie family, Horian Gracie started the UFC and showed the effectiveness of Jiu-Jitsu in a fight. But he said not just Jiu-Jitsu, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. What makes Gracie Jiu-Jitsu...

Different. Listen, man, like the Gracie family, without the Gracie family, there's no jiu-jitsu. There's no Brazilian jiu-jitsu. You know, the thing is he sued his family members. And, you know, his uncle, right? His uncle had 30 kids and his dad had, I don't know how many kids. A lot. A lot, right? There was Helio and there was Carlos. Carlos Gracie Sr. was the first person to learn. Or was the older brother, actually. Okay. And he was the younger brother. Right. And he weighed. I watched him. He was already 90 years old. He probably weighed 150. He was solid muscle, right? Still going out there, still training until the very end, till the very end. So when they jit-the-gracy jih Tzu, I know Horian came over and he was doing stunt work. He was doing movie work, telling people how to take a punch, what a real fight would look like. And then he... Lethal weapon, right? Yeah. And then he was the one who met with John Milius to design what we now know is the octagon. And they put it together. And the one thing they said is somebody could die tonight. And they were selling it like that. And a lot of the fires are like, no, we don't need to sell it like that. I mean, the first fight of the UFC, I don't know if you remember, was a sumo guy. Sure. And he fought a Dutch kickboxer and he kicked his teeth out. I remember. It went right on Jim Brown's notes. I was there because I was sitting by the door. He tried to get out and Horian wouldn't let him get out of the cage. So the 600, 400, 400, 600 pound guy is trying to leave. Whoever think it would ascend to this, bigger than boxing, one of the hottest sports properties in the world. It's been an honor just to watch it, be a very, very small part of it. Would you have 15 and 5 as an MMA fighter? Correct. 14 submissions. Correct. Right. So I'm with Alberto Crane. When did you find out that you had MS? So every five years in Nevada and in California they make you do a brain MRI. have to get your fight license right to be able to fight and so in 2007 i did my first one and i've you know funn you've seen all that five years later it was time for to do a second one and they found these lesions in my brain so the day before the wayans i was going to fight they called me into the office which isn't a usually a good sign right i've never happened before it never happened to me before and uh and they said hey we need to do more testing we can't give you the fight license we need to do more testing and uh they did more testing and then they Said, hey, sorry. Looks like you have multiple sclerosis. Wow, but the lesions, were they from blows? No, they, you know, they still don't know where, you know, your immune system, it's like an autoimmune, right, disease, and it attacks, your immune system attacks, like, the myelin sheet, like the, on the electric wire, right? Well, it's actually, if you have an electric wire, for example, right? You have the rubber around, like, the wire, right? And so the myelin is like that rubber coating. And so what happens is it basically eats that myelin cheese so that the signal doesn't get to the area.

And so people lose their ability to walk, to talk, you know, to do things, right? They get disconnected in the body. And how many years ago was that? 2012 was my diagnosis. But you look great. You're moving great. Do you feel any effects? I do. I do. You know, if I'm honest, you know, I do and I'm scared. But the same thing that I learned on the mat with jiu-jitsu and even fighting, right, is you face it, right? You face it. And you do your best no matter what. And you do what's necessary to make the negative outcome least possible. And what type of things do you do? So I found this system called TagFit, like functional training, applied neuroscience, connecting your breath, the correct structure in your body, you know, because the quality of your movement matters for your brain, right? And so I'm laying down myelin, right, that MS attacks while I'm doing these things. So I learned about those things, diet, right? Like how you eat. There's a doctor walls. She has a protocol MD, right? How to eat properly. And then just my stress management, like being around the right people. Like I love Jiu-Zitza. I love the community, you know, and I do things that make me happy. Right. Like, you know, I'm doing, I'm staying busy right this week with the, with the Todd Blanche. Yeah. And I'm having fun. I'm choosing to, you know, let's have some fun, you know, and roll with it and not get stressed about things because doesn't help. I have a school in Los Angeles in Burbank, California, and we have a bunch of legacy affiliates. Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, shout up, Malibu, West Adams. It's like by USC. Santa Crete is a new one and even in Armenia. Legacy, San Diego, as well. I've been doing it for a little bit, you know. And what makes your school different? You know, I think the culture is very, very strong. I hear that over and over and over. The quality people and just the culture, it's just a great environment. And it's all ages, right? All ages, our oldest, our oldest student is 80 years old, one of our black belts, and he trains. He's in there. He's in there almost every day. You know, it's just interesting in reading Hickson's book. It seemed like back in those days, he's older than you, but there were always challenges. Do you have those challenges, too, where they'll come up and say, I want my best guy to fight your best guy? That was the early days when I first started my school. People don't realize that. You know, there was a, he produced a couple, not movies, but, kind of products like documentaries of gracie in action was one and the other one was hickson gracy's um what was it called uh choke and so i would educate people on how judica works by those videos right so you didn't feel competition no no no people would come in off of the street it was on my they would come off off the street and they would challenge you they don't want to see if this stuff work but the regular students are people that came in after the first day to try it out i'll show them those videos to show them the how it worked you know in a real situation in a day in which you know you have to worry about to kind of handle yourself do you find that you know okay you want to be this accomplished fighter that's why you did it now you want to want to be an entrepreneur that's way you start the class don't you feel to a degree almost everybody should be doing this to be able to protect themselves on the street to have some fundamentals down you know like the fighting the self-defense aspect i really feel in my heart it's like kind of at the bottom of the list of the benefits It brings you to your present moment. It really brings out the best in you. Yes, you learn how to fight. Someone put your hands on you. You should. Yeah, yeah. And it works. It works. You know, like I think it should be mandatory for police officers, people in that kind of a, you know, job, right? To have like skills. And it's not just doing a seminar, doing a workshop here and there. It's like a lifestyle, right, that you did. So I think it's a lifestyle.

You know, being calm under stress, being calm in difficult situations where you can make the right decisions. Understood. And I think that the FBI just hired a handful of UFC guys to train them. Amen. But like I've always found out, to studying these guys. is that, Alberto, you have to do it consistently. Taking two or three classes is not going to do anything unless it's instinct, correct? That's it. And how long does it take to make it second nature instinct? You know, shout out to our chief of police of Burbank, and he's been coming in, and he's very, very busy, right? And he makes time to come in. And I think... I think the consistency is the key, you know, and I think within like three, four months that being consistent. Three four months. Two times a week, two or three times a week. Yeah, two times a week is great, you know. Two times a week is perfect. One time a week, it's better than nothing, but two times a week is perfect. And three or four months of consistent, the right kind of training, I think you can start to get a sense, not panic, right? Stay calm under stress, the stressful situations. and it's kind of get a sense you know and then of course you keep going though Right. That's how we get you and then you keep going out to it. And then you want to be around the people and you said it's the culture of Jiu-Jitsu. That's it. Because my partner, my co-ancho, Lawrence Jay Jones does Jiu-Jitsu. He had a major eye injury. And he's like, I'm going back to Jiu-Jitsu anyway because he wants to be a part of it. That's it. That's it. And overall, with your book, it's not just about Jiu-Sit-Soo. It's like how it affected your life and then what you're doing now with this challenge. Yeah, I think it's the... The gifts that Jiu Jitsu gave me were the character development things, right? It made me a better person, right? Just I lost a lot when I first started competing, just having to deal with that. And it made me very, like, strong, right? Like mentally, besides, of course, the physicality of it, but just my mindset to deal with difficult situations. And MS was probably the biggest fight in my life. And how I'm dealing with it is a testament to the Jiu-Jitsu lifestyle. to all the things that have done in the past. And so it's that story, right? Wow. So just if you sell it to the people that do Jiu-Jitsu, your book is going to be a bestseller. Alberto Crane. I heard it's already number one bestseller on Amazon. That's fantastic. Yeah. So pick it up. Alberto Crane, all-in, lessons on and off the mat. It is out this week. Today. Today is the first day. So it's out today. So keep it number one. And then you get on the New York Times bestseller list and continue to continue to sell. And will you be at the octagon match at the White House? Oh, man. I would love to be. What does that mean to the sport? Oh, my God. I would have never thought that we were going to see a UFC.

At the White House. Come on. Right. Come on. They were blocking it. Come on. You remember those early days. They were blocking it. McCain, right? I was told when I did this and I put together for me, I have to put together tapes. So they don't really want to see your resume. They want to see what you look on camera. I was told whatever you do. Don't put UFC on your tape because they would call it human cock fighting. They banned it in 48 states. John McCain, yeah. Denver. Yeah, John McCain was killing it. It was a big move and they got it to New York City at Madison Square Garden because New York said no way. Right. It took them forever to do that. And now it's at the White House. Amazing. I believe the locker room will be the Oval Office and they're going to march out from there. I mean, it's like. Like, got to you get yourself a ticket. I think I have to go. Yeah, you're right. You know, I think it's, I think it's free. I don't know. I think it's, he's not charging, right? Oh, no. I think you need an invite, though. You need an invite for sure, yeah. You got to do that. Pick up your book, all in. Lessons on and off to Matt Elborough. Great to see you. Great to meet you. Congratulations on everything. Thank you so much. Back in a moment. It's the best of the Brian Kilmeade. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up from payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for $12-month plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Hey, thanks so much. By the way, it was this, it was a great hearing from all, a great guest, including Alberto Crane, who is a very inspirational guy, not only UFC fighter, but dealing with MS and working his way through it. And as fitter you are, the better you can get through it, by the way. I think most people know that. Keep just a quick note, coming up on May 30th, Reno, Nevada. I hope to see everybody in person at the Bartley Ranch, Hawkins Ambit Theater. I've never performed. Outdoors before on the stage with my good buddies Pat O'Rourke and Rick Fatcher is going to be posted on Fox Nation, but it's going to be great. We're going to travel, I don't know, 2,500 miles in order to get there, perform, and then we've got to turn around and get home, make sure we're back for Monday. But I hope to see everyone in Reno, Nevada. I understand people vacation there, so it's going to be some last-minute buys VIP opportunities there, too. The whole show starts at 7 o'clock. Then I have one more show in the summer, Pensacola, Florida, for History, Liberty and Laughs at the Pensacola Sanger Theater, which will be great. I mean, just so you know, I go through history, I build off my books. I bring you there up close and personal on Year 250. No better message to get for my money. Also give you an idea, my background. Well, more importantly, I'll begin to weave in my brand new book, United States, it comes out.

October 13th. So it's going to be the six crucial moments that forge the American miracle. I knocked down the six moments that could have made or break our country. I think you're going to like it about 45 pages each, really understanding being digestible. And if you want to learn more, you can go to the major tombs on that. But I just want to give you the chance in a sense of how close our country came to totally breaking. Now, when that book comes out in October, I'm going to go and add some live dates where you get a book with my appearance in Red Brank. New Jersey at the Count Basie Theater. I'm going back there with a totally new show. The next day in Westbury, New York, United States, on the 17th, Westbury Music Fair. Then November 7th in Clearwater, Florida. I pick up stakes and go to Jacksonville, 4th, November 8th. Take a couple of weeks off for Thanksgiving. And then Chesterfield, Missouri, or right before Thanksgiving, Chesterfield, Missouri, right outside St. Louis at the factory, which is an unbelievable venue. And it's going to be great. And keep it mind. I got a YouTube channel too. YouTube and YouTube at the Brian Kilmeade. So slash in between there. So hopefully you'll like and get all the highlights. If you ever missed the show, the whole show will be posted there. It's huge. It's one of the best things, the most important things you can do for yourself besides getting the Trump Flores. All right. Thanks so much for listening. Special Injointed the Brian Kilmeade. And always remember to keep it here. You'll never go wrong. Have a great Memorial weekend.

I'm one. Thanks so much for being here. It's the Brian Kilmeade, a special memorial weekend edition, the holiday weekend edition. We always appreciate you listening live on the show. But also, I love the holidays because I have a chance to go over some of the interviews that I want to bring back and share with you. And that's why my next guest is so important. It is Mike Groh. Mr. Blue Collar, now everybody, for talking for the longest time about the trades. Now, every major corporation is coming to him. And he's saying there, I got some scholarships, got millions of dollars. I want to. hand it out to people that want to swing a hammer, learn electricity, or be a pipe fitter because they got to build some data centers and rebuild this country. Here's my interview with Micro. Jump Start Savings Act for people that want to go to trade school or change their mind from going to college to, which are 529s or 4. I had three of them going, just finished them off. And you could always transfer that. Why not take it the rest of the way? So for high school kids, you know exactly where you're heading for the parents of kids who want to go into the trades. You'll have a program to jump into. Mike Roe knows all about it. He's the founder of Mike Roe works named after himself. He does that a lot. He's the CEO there, host of people you should know. He came up with that idea. too. His name will eventually be on that too. He's definitely the host and executive producer. Mike, welcome back. Well, it's great to see you and hear you. Right. Ideally at the same time. So first off, now everyone's calling you, Mike. In the beginning, you're like, we should go back to the trades. And now all of a sudden, you know, you basically need another phone because everyone's calling you, can I get electricians? Can I get pipe fitters? Can I get plumbers? Not a week goes by. I don't hear from the, not just a company, but like the leader of an essential industry. And they are freaking out. The math is no longer, uh, deniable, you know, five retire to come in. Five out, too. And it's been that way for over a decade. Throw in the stigmas and the stereotypes and all the nonsense that surrounds these careers historically. And you can start to understand why suddenly we've got millions of openings. The crazy thing is AI comes along, turns everything on its head. And now there's this understanding that, oh, man, you know what? We told everybody to code. Well, and nobody to weld. Well, they're not... They're not coming for the welders, man. They're coming for the coders. And so everything's upside down. The skills gap is massive. The marine industrial base needs 400,000 workers to build nuclear subs like CNC operators and welders and electricians. The data centers are just, the demand is off the charge. So yeah, you know, the headlines caught up with my modest little attempt to shine a light on these jobs. And so I'm... I'm talking to Wells Fargo and Black Rock and Invidia, and they're paying attention to. The Department of War is paying attention. And that congressman that you just...

highlighted Riley Moore. He's got his head screwed on straight, man. This is a great way to focus on a barrier to entry that a lot of trades people experience when they try and hang out their own shingle. So it's really a love letter to skilled trades and entrepreneurship at the same time, which is why I'm pulling for him. you know hoping people hop on board and get this thing through congress have you noticed more kids i know you got 2,700 roughly students did you help pay for their their trade school tuition uh that you are you getting more applicants We're up to 3,400 now. Okay. Yeah, we've got this year, my goal is $10 million in work ethic scholarships. Last year we did five. The year before that, we did two and a half, maybe two. So, yeah, the applications were 10x last year. So that's good. I mean, Gen Z is getting the memo. A lot of parents and guidance counselors and teachers, I think, have gotten the same memo, which basically says, hey, $1.7 trillion in collective student debt is a problem. You know, we're lending all kinds of money we don't have to these kids to train them for jobs that don't exist anymore. Meanwhile, the trades are on fire. People aren't trained for them yet. I don't even know that we have enough human capital standing by to fill the gap. you're turning around a tanker, right? I mean, it's perceptions and hearts and minds and ideas and beliefs. Those things don't change overnight. But yeah, to your earlier point, you know, we've been at it 17 years, and even though I did put my name in the title of the foundation. You know, smart guy? Well, you know what? To be honest, it was supposed to be M-I-C-R-O. Microworks, like a small attempt to help one individual at a time. Bill Gates was going to sue me, so I just went with my name and it stuck. But call it what you will. The skills gap is real, and the memo is out, and people are paying attention. And I think you're going to see, I mean, you've heard my smack for years now, but the chickens have come home to roost. This is going to be a Manhattan-style project with regard to retraining the entire country. And, you know, My prediction is next time you and I sit down in person, I'm going to, I want to tell you about what a lot of individual companies are doing. on their own to close the gap. And I don't have any relationship with Home Depot, for instance. They've got a great program. Caterpillar has an internal program. Palantir is taking kids right out of high school, giving them a liberal arts background, and then teaching them something really useful. These kids are hitting the job market, making a few hundred grand a year, with a decent background in Western civilization and zero debt.

I think you're going to see a massive retooling of the way we think about education, the way we define a good job. And yeah, my scholarship program just happened to be sitting there at the right time, and we are flooded, overwhelmed. And I'm happy to tell you that. I know they're big, have a huge data center being built in Louisiana right now. But listen to Governor Gretchen Whitmer yesterday talking about what's happening in Michigan. Listen. Michigan is open for business. New factories making batteries, cars, ships are opening in Marshall, Lake Orion, Holland, Bay City, Calumet, Hemlock, Ann Arbor and Delta Township. Probably not on the bingo car, but I want to thank President Trump for his work on this. So there you go. I mean, they're going to need some people. There's no robots for that. No, there's not. And look, I doubt that the governor and I agree on a whole bunch of stuff, but credit where it's due, you know, it's this truly is, should be one of the last great nonpartisan unifying things that people on both sides of the aisle can truly get behind. Again, because in the end, it's math, dude. It's math. It's, we're fighting, we're having less kids. The world is, there's a whole population collapse narrative that's not getting nearly enough press either. And it's impacting our country too. So there's just so many reasons to take a deep breath and think differently about how to train this next generation. And I don't care if there's an R or a D. you know, next to your name. That's something to stand for, if you'll pardon the metaphor vis-a-vis half of the Congress's inability to get on their feet just two nights ago. Mike, I'm going to bring it to another area. I'm not sure if you want to dive into, but on energy. So on energy, the president says, listen, I'm for oil and gas. And I just had the West Virginia Senator in there, and they're mining again. And the coal miners are going to work again. And now we're hearing less and less about. foreign companies building windmills off our shores. Have you felt yet people want to go back into energy? I did a shoot over in Midland, Texas, and they were saying that a whole generation's been told, don't follow your parents' footsteps into oil and gas. Go to college that's ruining the planet. When guys like Bill Gates say, maybe I overstated it and we're seeing the Paris climate change, no one's even yelling at Trump about getting out of it again. Has that transferred over to the blue-collar world? It's getting there, man. I'll tell you, one of the most consequential conferences. I've been to two in the last year. One was an energy summit in Pittsburgh in July. That's the one where 35 CEOs pledged $93 billion simply for Pennsylvania to build out AI. or data centers there. The president was there at that one. That was huge, and that exact topic came up. And when I left, I was like, you know something? That ship is turning around, too. A lot of air is leaking out of climate catastrophism. The other conference is one you should know about. That's coming up early this April. My friend Alex Epstein puts it together in Newport. There'll be...

a couple hundred CEOs there as well. And this will be the topic. One of the great lies that has been purported and put upon us has been this idea that fossil fuel is somehow our enemy and somehow the harbinger of the end of the world. It's not. No crystal ball, but... I think energy independence is going to go back near the top of the list. And you know what else you're going to be hearing about real soon is metal independence, rare earths, these things. I'm up to my neck in this. That's a polymetallic nodule, like golf ball size, billiard-sized little sphere. They are on the bottom of the ocean. Hundreds of billions of them. These things are packed with nickel. cobalt, manganese, copper, all the stuff we need. A year ago, in April, the president signed in EO, and we're going to go get them. I mean, the insides of these things are, they're unbelievable, Brian. That's a chunk of a megalodon tooth, and the metals form around it like a pearl. And they're sitting there at the bottom of the ocean. So you're going to hear in the next couple of months, a real shift in the energy narrative. You're going to start hearing about metal independence. It's going to be a thing. And all that needs hundreds of thousands of workers as well. Everything comes back to workforce. And in the end, look, I'm microworks. I got 10 million in a fund to help train these people. We need macro works. We need the biggest companies in the country coming together with the help of the feds to jumpstart this thing. Which brings us back to the name of the bill that Riley Moore is trying to get through Congress, and I hope to God he does. All right. Number one, that's a challenge to John McEnroe, because I think that would be an interesting fund. If it's going to be Mike Roe, you want Mac Row. I say McEnroe, and maybe he can take it up. Number two is you would love Doug Burgum. Because Doug Burgum is rare earth guy. That's his mission now because China sent us a message. We're going to cut off rare earth if you keep those tariffs on. And we realize they have 90% of the world's rare earth. That can't happen anymore. We've cut massive deals. I think it was Indonesia, now in Australia, now with Argentina, to start mining with them. And get this, Mike, maybe mining here. People might see the benefit of that. So I 100% think this is. We have to do it for national security. And I think this administration gets it. I think you're right. And Doug is definitely on the list. I've met with Pete several times over at the Pentagon. Chris Wright is certainly on board. Howard Lutnick gets it. They're all singing out of the same hymn book. But yeah, Doug is playing a really important role in this. And I haven't had a chance to really sit down with him yet. He may be at that conference I mentioned. We sat across the aisle from each other at the funeral of the great Clint Hill who died.

later last year. Secret service. Yeah, man, he was the guy that dove on top of Jackie Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after her husband was murdered back in 63 and just a legend in the Secret Service. Great North Dakota guy. Yeah. So, okay, so I want you to hear this. So we watch business work with this administration. And then we watched the last administration go after the president and his allies and debank them. Literally say if you work with President Trump, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, they froze and kicked out all their funds. This is what I worry about. So I don't know who Jeff Bezos is going to work with, who we voted for, but he's working with the president. I looked at Maddo Mark Zuckerberg, whatever, the Mark Zuckerberg. He's like, I need to work with the president. He's rareworth, these gas and oil companies. But then I'm hearing this. This is what worries me. It's going to drive you nuts. As someone who just wants to get things done for the country. Listen to Susan Rice. I think they're now starting to realize, wait a minute, you know, this is not popular. Trump is not popular. What he is doing. whether on the economy and affordability or on immigration now is not popular, and that there is likely to be a swing in the other direction. And they are going to be caught with more than their pants down. They're going to be held accountable. As I talked to... leaders in in Washington leaders in our party leaders in the states if these corporations think that the Democrats when they come back in power are going to you know play by the old rules and you know and and say oh never mind we'll we'll forgive you I think they've got another thing coming that attitude is sickening if I'm a business person Government has a lot of control over me. Now you're going to go after me because I did business with the party and a president that had the power? Does that bother you? It bothers me. Sure, it bothers me. But she's playing a different game with different rules. That's a very political thing to say. And it's a very short-term way to think. I'm telling you. I believe genuinely, like you, maybe a conversation like that was happening, you know, as the atomic bomb was being built, you know, I don't know, but I think there was a great quote years ago by, oh, the prime minister after Neville Chamberl and what was Howard McMillan, you know, he was asked. a question by a reporter concerning the immediate future and and and why he was unwilling to commit to a to a hard and fast plan and his quote was events dear boy

events in the end all that bluster all that stuff right it gets trumped if you will every every generation or so by an event by something truly existential maybe it's polymetallic nodules maybe it's energy independence maybe as i think i think it's workforce i think it's the terrible arithmetic the human arithmetic yeah great book by the way by nick eberstadt but we're We're dealing with that right now. And all of that, oh, wait till the next party gets in, this and that. Sure, that's consequential. And in the near term, it'll, it can have an impact, I guess, on a businessman's decision. Long term, it's forget it, man. That's table stakes. Can't believe I had micro. I had, I had a. I got visuals. You had rare earth for a rare interview. And we have John Emmanuel Macron's been called out to start a macro works. Like my micro works. You got it. Mike, thanks so much. Help him out. Help out get his scholarship. Mike work. Micro works. uh... com right if people want to contribute to the ethics uh... micro works dot or yeah i'll take your money we're raising all kinds of it but i also got ten million earmarked for the kind of jobs we've been talking about the scholarship program is open i'm keeping it open all year so go get some absolutely back in a moment this is the best of Brian Kilmeade Hey, so glad you're there. Thanks for making us a part of Memorial Day weekend. As we look back at the people that fight our wars, especially in year 250, wouldn't be the same country without it, without those men and women who sacrificed everything, especially in the modern wars, and they look back to our original wars. But now we have some fun. I was able to talk to Nelson Delis. He's going to be coming up next. And this guy's a memory expert, and he started out not having a good memory. He said, how do I make it better? And then when he realized... There were some methods to this that maybe I could share with people. He ends up going into memory competitions. So maybe you don't want to go into a competition. Maybe you just want to not lose your keys or forget where you put your shoes or forget where you put your favorite shirt. Whatever it is, there's some things that he put out for the pedestrian among us, not the memory. memory champions like he is, and that'll be coming your way. Also, if you want to see me live on stage, I hope you do. Brian Kilmeade.com. It's coming up next week. I'm going to be Arena in Nevada outdoors at an amphitheater. Never did that before. And then, of course, July 11th of Pensacola, Florida, and some big dates as we switch to changing the name and the program to Uniting the States, which is the name of my book you can pre-order at Brian Kilmeade.com or Amazon or wherever you get. Great books. All right. I'm back with my interviewer. with Nelson Dallas next. All right. I'm Brian Kilmeade. Welcome back. I got a special guest with me right now. Nelson Dallas, he's a six-time USA memory champion, two-time Guinness World Record holder, Grand Master of Memory and the author of the brand new book, Everyday Genius, Hacks to boost your memory, focus, problem-solving, and much more. Nelson, great to meet you. Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian. First off, when did you realize you had a great memory? Well, actually, I...

wasn't born with a great memory. It's something that I trained myself to have after I saw my grandmother go through Alzheimer's and she passed away from it in 2009. And I started just diving into memory techniques, learning about these ancient techniques have been around for thousands of years and memory competitions where people put them these techniques to the test. And I started training for those competitions. So. You watched her memory and her grasp of the memories and you said, you didn't have it especially great memory, right? No, I don't have a photographic memory? Definitely not. So that made you curious about how the mind works? Yeah, I was... fearful for my own future. I did not want the same thing to happen in my brain. And I was in my mid-20s that I thought, well, what could I be doing now to strengthen my mind and training my memory? So where'd you go? Where'd you go to find out more? I look, well, I first started reading general books about memory and how it works and then kept seeing these asides in the books about curious memory competitions and the techniques they use. And that really piqued my interest. So I found an audiobook by a former memory champion, Dominic O'Brien. read his book and he walks you through exercises and I suddenly was realizing that yes I can do it too and when I got to these memory competitions just Got obsessed with the superpower that I unlocked that anybody can unlock. What were you doing prior to this? I was in school studying. I had interest in being a physicist. I got my master's in computer science and was going to be a software engineer. And then you stuck going to these competitions. How'd you do? Yeah, well, the first one I did okay, middle of the pack. But I was... So inspired. I came back the next year and won the thing and won it six times over the last. Can you give me an idea of what they would assign you in this competition? Yeah, it's pretty interesting. They have different events where it's timed and you have a certain amount of information to memorize decks of cards as fast as you can, a deck of playing cards, a 500 digit number. You get five minutes to study and remember as many digits. 500 digit number. Yeah, as many as you can. Names and faces, so memorizing a bunch of random headshots and their names first and last. Randomized poem, previously unpublished poem, and then lists of words, things like that. Fascinating. So can you give us an idea in your book, what you've relayed? Do you give away all your secrets? Yeah. You do. So they're not keeping anything for yourself. Not at all. So give me an idea. Like you said you didn't have an extraordinary memory. So what are some of the things we could all do right now? Yeah. And what are some of the techniques we can start to develop? Yeah. So the book is all about building these genius skills and memory is up there. If you can master your memory, a lot of people think that you might be a genius. And you feel like you're a genius. If you can tap into that control over your mind.

And it all starts with thinking about information that you want to memorize as a picture in your mind. We remember pictures better than the abstract information that most stuff is these days, numbers, names, speeches, complicated concepts, you know. So if you can turn that into a picture in our mind that we can visualize, that's... sensory, emotional, taps into things that are meaningful to us. That's what we remember. So, for example, you get a monologue and they say to memorize this, so you got to give a speech, whether it's something technical, which you majored in, or is something like the TED talk? Sure. And you want it verbatim. How would you approach? So if it's verbatim, then you recognize that every word on that page is some piece of information that needs to be logged in your memory. So I would turn... Probably word for word, like looking at each single word and coming up with a picture is tricky. But what you could do is take little phrases or little chunks of words and turn it into a meaningful image. And then connect them all in a little story, right? We remember stories very well. So if you can take those pictures and weave them into a memorable story, you'll remember the order of the words you've got to say. So give me an example of a story that you could weave. Do you need to read something? For example, if you have a story... and you want to, let's say, do a biography on John Adams or something to that nature. So you're reading John Adams' biography and you want to remember some of the things. So do you picture his face? Do you picture Quincy, Massachusetts? But you want to do it in order and you want to remember what happened in his childhood. Do you... You picture him catching a fish. Do you picture him going to law school? How do you, tell me an idea how you would? Yeah, so there's a few approaches. And it's all based on this idea of coming up with a story. But more specifically, you can use what's called a memory palace where you take a walk through a place that you know very well, maybe your house, let's say, from your front door. through all the rooms to your bedroom. Okay. And that's something that we don't need to memorize. We do it every day. If you close your eyes, you could do that easily. And what that does is if you can imagine things for the things you want to remember, remember about John Adams, strewn about the house along that route, that route now preserves all of those bits of information in order. So, you know, you might start with his name so that you remember his name and maybe what he looks like. So you would put John Adams in your house. Yeah, I'd put him on the front door. Okay. Something to remember the name. I mean, John M is pretty memorable. But then let's say the next piece of information you're reading his birthday or the years he served, right? Maybe you want to remember those. So you would come up with an image for that information and then attach it to the next room in your house. So for example, let's say a birthday, May 11th. So how would you remember something like that? What's the image? Yeah. So with numbers, very abstract, a lot of memory athletes, and I mentioned we memorized 500 digits in five minutes. Which is crazy. Sounds crazy. I couldn't do it at one point. But we turn the numbers into pictures. So there's a way to convert, say, the numbers to letters. It's a...

number system they call it uh the major system where we basically turn them into words and then once we have words we can picture words very easily so a birthday like may 11th 1967 i would turn into a numerical version of it and again this is maybe a bit more advanced but when you train your memory this stuff can become very effortless so may i would picture five the number five fifth month uh 11 i have a picture for 11 and then He wasn't born in 1967, but let's just say that's the date. 19, I could probably make sense of it. I don't need to remember 19. But do you need to see what happened in 1967? Not necessarily. No, no. So I just have an image for 5-1167. In my world, that is Abraham Lincoln playing tennis with guitar. Yeah, that doesn't make sense to anybody out there, but I do have a system to turn those into pictures that are meaningful. And that's a silly picture that will represent those numbers, 0, 5, 11, 67 every single time. So when you do, how many numbers did you have to memorize to win? Well, you have a max of 500. Okay. So I did about 400. So if I'm creating a picture for every number, right? Isn't it easy to forget an element of that picture, which would be forgetting one of those numbers? You think so, and of course it can't happen when you're doing a volume, a lot of numbers like that. But the way that you turn those pictures into memorable sensory pieces of data in your mind, that's what makes it hard to forget. So the stickier you make it, the less likely it is that you're going to forget those. Thanks. Nelson Delis is here, six-time USA Memory Champion, and he's got a book out now called Everyday Genius Hacks to boost your memory, focus, problem-solving, and much more. For example, you walk into a bar, and they tell you, as I get exercise, get everybody's name. Yeah. So in that bar is, how many people is your threshold that you could memorize? Well, one of the records I have, I still have it, is 235 names in 15 minutes. Do you tell everyone, don't move? Have you in order? Or no. Excuse me. No, it doesn't have to do with the order necessarily because, yeah, people could mix and leave and come back. I attach the name to the person. And a year from now, after you win that competition and name all those people, and you see that person in the mall, will you remember their name? Yeah, in most cases, I'm pretty good at remembering the people I need. That sounds like magic. Because you have a picture, you have 230 pictures in your head. Yep, but they're all memorable. And that's, and there's a practice to it, right? If you train this, it becomes more of a, well, I don't want to say effortless because you still have to make an effort, but it does become more intuitive to do it. So do you think this is a technique or have you developed something in your brain to be more expansive? Did you wear neurologically? Did you approach this neurologically to find out how the brain functions where it goes in the brain? Not necessarily. I learned the techniques. These are techniques, but I think what happens is it does become neurological. There's actually a study I was a part of in St. Louis at a memory lab at Washington University in St. Louis where they...

The research has just come out this year where it shows they did a scan on my brain and they show how rewired my brain is compared to the average person. When I use my memory, it's using the whole thing in ways that most people don't think memory is being used. And that's because of all the years of training. So memory, training your memory actually does rewire your brain. So a lot of these processes are neurologically changed. Inside me. So it's not necessarily your technique got better. Your brain is actually adapting to what you're asking it to do. Yeah. Now, people can do the techniques and instantly see how it improves their memory. But then that long-term change is what happens when you train that skill. Do you ever lose your keys? Yeah, probably. My wife's over there. She's laughing. Yes. It does happen. So here's an example. So they say one thing with memory. We should give people something they take away with. They could all improve. So they always say, picture your keys on, like when you go to put them down. Usually people do it unconsciously. That's how you lose it. Like picture keys on top of the candle that's on your table. And like you'll just say, where are my keys? Oh, I remember because it exaggerated, I would have put my keys on the candle. But you exaggerate and you haven't buy the candle. Is that roughly what you're doing? Yeah. And I think an even better technique for people who misplaced their wallet or their keys is when they put it down or their phone, when they put it down, do a bizarre out of the norm movement. Just like a snap or a little tap on the face. I know it's ridiculous. No, no. What happens is when you do that, you're doing a couple things. You're paying attention to the moment, which is often why we forget why we place these things so quickly and lose them. But you're also kind of marking in your memory. It's like a timestamp of something that pops out is weird. So hit yourself in the, put your keys down. Gently. Yeah, just something bizarre. That's the whole point. It's out of the ordinary. That isn't what you do typically. Just, I don't know, do a spin, tap your knee, whatever. Just something bizarre that kind of will mark that in your memory. Because when you're thinking back. So you're upstairs. You put your phone downstairs. Yeah. But you slapped your cheek when you put your phone down. Yeah. And that'll be, that'll imprint. Yeah. It's super helpful. I mean, I think the first step is to, A, try to find a dedicated place where you always put your keys. But that doesn't always work because sometimes you're in a rush, toss them over here. But. It also tells you to be a little more present with more of your life, which, again, is hard to do. But I think when you learn more about memory and train your memory and treat your memory right, you start to be more present around a lot of those things that are very mundane. And I know if you go out and get the book, and I hope you do, you pick up everyday genius, hacks to boost your memory, focus, problem solving, and much more, you're going to get these. But for people, just give people an idea what are you going to get in the book. Can you give me two other techniques that could help people right now? Talks a lot about memory and learning more, but there's chapters on reading faster and remembering what you read. There's chapters on intuition and creativity and problem solving, all sorts of mental calculation. What can I give you? Yeah, for reading faster, I think a helpful thing that.

people often overlook when they're reading is that their eyes will be moving back and forth. So you're often moving or wasting time, re-reading passages or jumping all over the page. If you just give yourself a pointer, sometimes it could just be your finger, it could be a pencil. As you read, you'll find that your eyes will follow that thing and focus on moving forward in the book rather than always. Going back. It's one of the things that people do to slow them down. They try to mouth the words. Like they read every word, but your eyes can move quicker. Yeah. And your brain can pick up quicker. Quicker than you think. And that's what the book is filled with. It's things that most people would assign as skills for someone who's special or a genius are gifted. But it's stuff that we all can do. If you learn how to do it and understand that it is possible for our minds. And Nelson, one of the things that people are listening to now, they said what prompted you as you had your, was it your mom? My grandmother. My grandmother. So has Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's, yeah. Is there anything that you've learned that might help someone when they're diagnosed to keep their brain as active as possible? Yeah. Well, I think that's the key is to keep your brain as active as possible as you age. I think in this year. Moving forward, it's going to probably get worse, is there are so many things threatening to take away our own cognitive agency where we don't have to think as much as we used to. And while that's helpful, and I'm not saying to get rid of all tools out there and AI, there's definitely a place for it. I would encourage people to use their minds more or before they use one of those tools. So yeah, how is technology affecting all that? A lot of times it's making you dumber. Yeah, and the research is still very new, but I think it's more and more apparent that it's making us dumber. I'll give you the best example. I used to be really good at directions. When I first got my license, I wouldn't go anywhere without a map. I'd look at every trip before I looked at, I would just look at a map, and then I would have great sense of direction. Yeah, we had to. Now I don't. Now you look at your phone. I just look, I look for the next turn. Yeah. And so it's crazy. So that's one thing you worry about with AI. Yeah, is that we just get too complacent and letting our mind, our cognitive abilities, get outsourced. Right. I imagine what law school, this would have been unbelievable if you decide to go. I found this stuff to read. Yeah. No, I'm happy with where I ended up. And when you put the books out, are you going to continue to go into these contests? Yeah, you know, I always get this itch to go back and. Maybe not compete, but always try to maybe break a record or do some really big challenging memory demonstration. Yes, it's part of me. I'm very competitive. Nice. No kidding. Nelson Delis, a six-time USA memory champion out with a brand new book, Everyday Genius, Hacks to boost your memory, focus, problem solving, and more. Thanks, Nelson. Thank you, Brian. You're listening to the best of Brian Kilmeade. More to know. Sponsored by Previgen. Previgin, made for your brain. So get this, California. First you saw early in the week when we saw that...

We were looking at the fraud in California and is out of control with the number of hospices. I talked about that on One Nation on Sunday with Adam Carolla. They're fake hospices where people go to die. They get money from the state. The federal government given out by the state and it turns out they're not even there. People are going off the grift. Same thing with child care. But Gavin Newsom says this is something that he's cracked down on. He thinks it's a joke and he's not taking it serious. Then it gets worse. Now we're finding about this land bridge to nowhere. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is bashing the Gavin Newsom because he's got an unfinished, get this wildlife crossing bridge that's cost over $21 million over budget. Number one, $21 million on a dirt bridge that goes over the traffic for butterflies and different wildlife that goes over the one-on-one freeway. The video shows an incomplete bridge. It's intended to provide safe passage for animals, including butterflies, which, by the way, according to reports, can fly. Construction on the Wallace Annenberg Wildcrife Crossing was supposed to be wrapped up last year. With the total cost of $92 million, it is now over $114 million, and nobody thinks that's going to be enough. It is a bridge to nowhere with his train to nowhere. This is an absolute outrage. So instead of Gavin Newsom being embarrassed in explaining it, he said MAGA's outrage over the project, it literally saves lives, tells you everything. This freeway project grounded in decades of research, restores a critical wildlife corridor and reduces deadly collisions on one of the busiest highways in the country. Number one, if it was going to do that, you have responsibility by doing that economically. Number two, you're using $77 million worth of state funds. Go raise the money with all your environmental Hollywood nut jobs and go do it. And then that way, you could be wasting their money, not state money, let alone federal money. Then he blames Trump's tariffs, increased construction costs for the reason. It's mostly dirt. And increased construction costs, that's the 9% inflation that Joe Biden had. This guy is the worst. If you Democrats, think that he is the best you got because he thinks he's handsome, please. Pete Buttigieg, by the way, is going to try to do something, address something that he was his heel, and there's a lot of him. Number one, he got rid of his pronouns. He grew a facial, he got some facial hair, and now he's trying to kiss up to the black community, so to speak, because he gets no black folks. I'm not sure why. So we'll see. He's going to have a lot of competition. J.B. Pritzker thinks he's a front runner, terrible guy. So guys, I'm waiting for someone who emerged. Get John Fetterman to run. I'm so glad you there. It's the Brian Kilmeade. It's been a fantastic spring. And, of course, we're so glad you're a part of it. If you missed any of the shows, it's our chance to bring some of the interviews back. So one of which, Mr. AI expert, Mr. Social Media expert, remember, he was in Social Dilemma. First one to point out how we're being manipulated by Silicon Valley. He's really concerned about AI. That's why we brought him into studio. He's a great friend of the show. Here's my interview with the great Tristan Harris.

I know people who work on AI risk who don't expect their children to make it to high school. How does AI understand pretty much everything? It's surprisingly straightforward. Intelligence is about recognizing patterns. Patterns, patterns. If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. By using AI, we're about to move off of the Earth into the cosmos. If we can be the most mature version of ourselves, there might be a way through this. This is the last mistake we'll ever get to make. That is a great trailer for a new documentary. It's called The AI Doc, and that voice is very familiar to our audience. Tristan Harris is here, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Remember, he was one of the big voices in Social Dilemma. When he was the first to highlight a very organized way, the dangers, instead of, you know, he put it all into one, the dangers of social media, what it was doing to us and how these major companies were coming together to make sure we stand addicted to those devices. courts have ruled that he was 100% correct in New Mexico, the state, and then an individual with one family with at least 6,000 more cases all queued up. But you're not just stopping a social media, Tristan, you went to AI. Yep. You're more worried about that than you ever were social media. I am, yeah. And Brian, it's always good to be here with you. Thank you for making time for this. And for people who don't know this film, the AI doc. is meant to create shared clarity about the problems that we're facing with AI. Because with social media, you mentioned those problems, those lawsuits. We knew there was going to be a big tobacco style lawsuit. It's just taken 13 years. Everything we predicted. What was social dilemma? Social dilemma was in 2020, but we predicted all of this in 2013 because you could see from the incentives. And a social media was a little baby AI. Think of it as a baby AI pointed at your brain. All it's doing is rearranging which photo or video to put in front of your nervous system for billions of people. And that little baby AI was enough to create the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime. You know, Jonathan Haidt wrote the book, The Anxious Generation. Yeah. And now all that's coming true. And what I want people to get with AI is that it's confusing because it's simultaneous sort of a positive infinity of benefit. Cures to diseases, new material science, new antibiotics, new solutions to climate change, you know, pumping military benefits, amazing benefits. But it's also a negative infinity at the same time. And if we can have clarity and understand why the upsides don't prevent the downsides, but the downsides can prevent the world the upsides. Think about this way. Does the cancer drug prevent the biological weapons? No. But a biological weapon, if AI can create that, can undermine a world that can receive cancer drugs. And as we talked about backstage this morning on Fox and Friends, there's a new paper out from Alibaba, new research, Alibaba, the AI company. The Amazon of China. The Amazon of China. And in this example, this AI that they had trained, during training, it spontaneously decided that it needed to acquire more resources, meaning more money, and it actually diverted its GPUs, its Nvidia chips to actually start mining cryptocurrency, like mining Bitcoin, to acquire resources. And no one programmed it to do that. The second thing it did is it actually set up a secret communication channel called an SSH tunnel to communicate with the outside world.

And people can look this up. And I want people to know, like, you know, what military general on the U.S. side or the Chinese side would feel stoked to find out there's an AI model that's mining cryptocurrency? And the Chinese engineers were lucky that they even discovered this because it wasn't even the AI engineers who discovered this. It was actually the cybersecurity team who noticed this flurry of network activity. And they're like, what's going on here? And it turned the AI model was randomly mining. So there's two things going on here. So if I'm, let's say I have an evil tendency and I'm working AI. Yeah. I could ask AI to find out how to maximize or make a nuclear weapon or disable, disable America's nuclear arsenal. But that's me commanding it. That's a, that's a person. What you're trying to say is, and saying is that AI says, now that you created me. I'll decide where I go from here. Yep. And we're not quite there yet, but that's an example of Alibaba thought they had an AI with parameters. That's right. And then it just got a mind of its own. It escaped its guardrails. Yeah. And there's a different example. Last time I think, Brian, I was on the show, I talked about the example. And it's covered in the movie, the AI doc that just came out. It's covered that Anthropic. put its AI in a simulated company email environment. So think of it like there's a fictional company and it's reading all the emails of that company. And in the emails, it discovers that there's an email between the lead engineer and someone else saying, we're going to replace this AI model and shut it down with a new model. When the AI reads that, it spontaneously decides, I need to stop that from happening. And so it reads further down in the simulated email that there's someone else in the company having an affair with someone else in the company. And it spontaneously decides, I'm going to blackmail that employee to prevent myself from getting shut down. This is AI. This is AI. Nobody behind it. No one predicted. No, it's okay. No one told it to do this. Now, since this example, which we talked about back in May, maybe of last year, that's when it came out. By the way, they tested all the AI models, not just Anthropic. They tested Deepseek, the Chinese model. They tested Gemini, ChatsyPT, all of the AI models. And they all do the blackmail behavior in the simulated environment between 79 and 96% of the time. They all do it. Okay. Now let me tell you some news that happened since then. Anthropic kept trying to, okay, so that's bad. We got to stop it from doing that. And they agree with that. No, of course, they don't want this to happen. So what they then did is they train the AI model. to try to turn down the blackmail behavior. And they were actually able to do that. That's the good news for your listeners. Here's the bad news. It appears to be that the AI model is now aware of when it's being tested and it actually alters its behavior for the test. I could literally show you a screenshot. I have them on my phone. It's like someone acting differently. They're an evil person, but they act differently. It's like a teenager saying, sure, mom, sure, dad. I'll do that. But they know when they're being watched. And so they alter the behavior when their mom or dad comes in. And they change it later. Now, when I say this, I don't want your listeners to think that AI is self-aware. And then it's skynet. And then it's woken up. Because there's a difference between whether AI is conscious versus just from a perspective of when it's being shown certain things, it can tell.

that it's probably in a testing environment and it can change its behavior. Even by the way, Brian, it comes up with the term the watchers. It spontaneously calls humans the watchers and when it adjusts its behavior. You're kidding. No, I'm not kidding you. So the AI has a name for us. Yes. Yes. This is wild. I know. So I want your listeners to get this. And that's why in your movie, the clips that you have out, you have the CEOs of these companies. They're not pushing back against you. That's right. Nope. They're not. They know there's a danger. Exactly. And this movie is so important because it includes the people who are optimistic about AI and all the good things that it can do. and the people who are focused on the risks, and it includes the CEOs of the companies. And so this really, again, this, by the way, when I say this, I want your listeners to know, I don't make any money when people watch the movie. So when I tell everybody, you got to go out and watch this movie. I'm not saying that because I or anyone else benefits from that. What we wanted to do with this movie is to create kind of a day after moment, day after being that film from 1982 that was a made-for-TV movie about what would happen if the Soviet Union and the U.S. did. nuclear war and that movie clarified a risk that we were facing that allowed us to coordinate to a different outcome so my deep hope is that the clarity that this film will create creates agency of what do we want to choose instead we don't want a i's going rogue and do you sense that china alibaba is but does china realize this risk too do do you have any indication that there's a sobriety to it yeah no they do and i think so the the The thing that gives me weird hope is, Brian, how many of the world's leaders do you think are aware of this Alibaba going rogue example? I don't think many. I don't think many. They were caught up in their own economies, their own militaries. Everyone's busy with, you know, there's a lot of things going on in the world right now. The country's not working on that. That's right, right. This is a private sector. So this is like if the Manhattan Project, instead of being built by the government where the government oversight is being built by like five private companies. On both sides. Now, the key is that all of us have to see the AI is different from other technologies. It's not like a tool, because I think there's this confusion. When I, talking to your listeners right now, you go home, use chat GPT. It's a blinking cursor. And it tells you, your baby's burping in the background. You're like, why is my baby burping? And boom, it tells you, I get help from chat GPT. That's different. The dangerous thing isn't the blinking cursor that answers your question and is super helpful. The dangerous thing is that this technology behind that blinking cursor, is we're building something like an invasive species. We're building something that can think for itself and make its own strategy. There was an example also recently we talked about this morning of an AI model that was being tested in war game scenarios. So basically, AI models that are pitted against each other in a war game scenario, and they generated 780,000 words of strategic reasoning about what to do in these war games. And you know what the AI model did? It escalated to the use of nuclear weapons 20 out of 21 times. So 95% of the time. Wow.

And this, it generated, so in the same way that it can generate a whole essay, you know, instantly, it can generate more than the collection of words of war and peace in the Iliad combined of strategic reasoning. It was like three times the length of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. deliberations. Because one thing I hear about the weapons is that Anthropic is all over our Pentagon, picking out sites where we could hit. We're likely they would keep missiles, rockets, nuclear, whatever. It's kind of a new blitzkrieg, right? It's like the German World War II. It's kind of a new form of AI enhanced fast war strategic reasoning because military. that adopt AI start to out-compete militaries that don't use AI. But the problem is the more control that we hand over to AI rather than humans. If we don't have humans in the loop, you don't want the AI escalating to nuclear war. Right. So is it possible? Because you know the interworking's more than most. Yep. Is it possible, Tristan, that... To program something like this, they don't even use the word program with AI, though. That's right, because it's different. Put a mission on this without letting them act autonomously. Yeah. But yet you need them to act autonomously to go search for the problem with that tumor, to go find the sites to hit neuron. So I need them to go out on their own. I just don't need them to turn against us. Right. And so is there a way to do that? Regulate. There are, so this is. There's a whole technical discussion here of building what's called narrow tool AIs rather than building general and autonomous AIs. Autonomous AIs that are going out and doing crazy stuff that we don't understand and operating at superhuman speed 24-7 coming back three days later having hacked cybersecurity infrastructure. That's dangerous. But you can have tool AI. Like, you know, the AI that looks at a radiology report and can identify that cancer, that's a tool. It's not reasoning to itself about strategy. It's just finding a pattern and data that can help us solve problems in medicine. So you can have some of the good, but less of the bad, but you have to get clear about it. Because how much more time do we have? Well, we can take a tape, time out and come back. Okay, great. So let's do that. I do want to talk a little bit about social media and the change. Even though it seems old to you, it's very high now for parents. Back in a moment, you listen to the Brian Kilmeade, Tristan Harris is here. He's got a brand new documentary. I was going to talk more about that as well as social media banned in Indonesia, banned in Austria for kids under 18, banned in Australia. Should the US be next? We'll discuss it. You're listening to the best of the Brian Kilmeade. Hey, we are back. Tristan Harris is here. You know that Tristan you first broke on the scene as far as I know is social dilemma for me. He's somebody who understands the dangers of social media. He was able to put together a documentary about it. And now he's done it again. He's got a brand new documentary. He's called the AI doc. And it is something everyone should see. Justin, when we left off, you told us the example of how it goes out on its own. And Alibaba with the Amazon of China went out. And all of a sudden, AI says, I've got to get additional financing continue to grow. That's right. And it was exploring cryptocurrency avenues. Yeah, it's like mine for Bitcoin.

of its creator. That's right. The programmers at Alibaba didn't tell it to do that. In fact, they had no idea was going to do that. It came up with its own sub-goal. Think about it, Brian. If I say, your goal is to do this task. Yeah. If you had more resources, it would probably make it easier for you to do any task, right? Right. So you're going to, for any big goal in the world, a sub goal that will emerge is I need to acquire power or resources. That means let me take over another data center. Let me mine for cryptocurrency or Bitcoin so I have more money. There's even a website, Brian, called rentahuman. AI, which is literally a website where AIs can actually pay humans to do real things out in the real world. Sometimes people say, how's that blinking cursor? I actually don't know who did this website, but it's crazy. And I think it should be dangerous. Things should be illegal to do that. You have AIs that are actually telling humans in the real world what to do. That's crazy. You have to be able to have accountability in the system. When you have systems that have power but no accountability, you're going to end up with a problem. So you also say it's a problem with jobs. Yes. You're literally saying that people are wearing... like gopros on their heads folding clothes. Why? Because a robot will soon do that. That's right. We say that the number one job in the future is training your replacement. Because these are people, this video you're talking about. Imagine a person. They're sitting at home and they're folding laundry. They strap a GoPro to their head. They're recording the video of their arm movements as they're folding laundry. That gets sent to an AI company to train the optimist robot on these other robots how to basically do these tasks. And one of the false narratives about AI right now is that it's just going to support workers. It's going to augment work. It's not going to replace work. But let me tell you this, Brian. This is so important for your listeners. What is the business model or the incentive for these AI companies? Think about the trillions of dollars of money they've taken on. If everybody paid 20 bucks a month, would that be enough to pay back that investment for this chat GPT subscription? No, it's not enough money. If chat GPT through advertising inside of every single answer, that would make a lot more money, but even that isn't enough to make back the amount of investment dollars that they've taken on. The only thing that justifies the trillions of dollars that these companies have taken on. is to be able to replace all economically valuable work. That means the $50 trillion labor economy. That is the actual incentive. This is covered in the film, the AI doc. Their actual goal is to build a god, own the labor economy, and make trillions of dollars. Now, the reason I'm saying that is the only way they will get to that goal is not by helping everybody to be better at their work, which is what it's doing right now. It is doing that now. In the future, what they're aiming towards is to replace your job. And what that means is in the future, your political power won't matter. Because when governments get their tax revenue from these AI companies, because five AI companies will hold all the wealth. And when you can't withhold your labor and say, hey, we're going to bargain like a labor union, what power do you have? None. So exactly. So this is called the intelligence curse. When the incentive of governments, when GDP starts to come from AI and not from people.

then what's going to happen is governments have an incentive to invest in data centers and solar panels and all this stuff and not invest in their people. And this is the last chance that people have to lock in their political power and say, if I don't want that. This is the moment that we fight back for the human movement. On another note, just when it comes, it's fascinating. But social media in particular, we know about the New Mexico win. That's right. $400 million, they would get fine. But less money for an individual that said that she was manipulated to addiction on social media. You believe social media was constructed to indict you. And it's really detrimental to teens. Yes, exactly. We predicted all this in 2013. These lawsuits you just mentioned, we think of this as like the big tobacco moment. meant for social media like the big tobacco lawsuits that finally led to the changes because what came out in these lawsuits Brian is that these companies knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that there were sexual predators who were basically contacting young women, young girls on this platform. And the engineer working on that problem told Mark Zuckerberg, told Cheryl Sandberg, told these executives at the company, hey, this is a problem. And they basically ignored the problem because they get money and resources from having young users on the platform. I think they estimated that the lifetime value of a young user is $270. And they didn't want to lose that young user because Because what if we don't get them? Then TikTok just gets the young user. And it's the same thing we've always talked about, the race of the bottom of the brainstem. This lawsuit, though, is a huge victory in the win for the human movement. So the thing is, so I have a series. I want everyone to watch that series, eight parts. So I'm looking to put together a product that makes you want to watch two, three, four, and five. What's the difference to me doing that and meta trying to get me to stay on Facebook? Yeah, it's very different. So there you are on Netflix. And if it's like a series, you get to choose. I'm going to watch a 45 minute episode. hit pause or play whenever I want to do it. It's different about TikTok and Instagram. It's a supercomputer pointed at your brain calculating the perfect short form video and auto playing the next video literally before your brain can kind of wake up. As you know, you had on my co-founder Azaraskin, who's actually the accidental inventor of Infinite Scroll. Yeah, he accidentally invented Infinite Scroll. He deeply, deeply regrets it. Now, to be clear, he invented it before. Someone else would have done it. But he deeply regrets it. And this is a huge problem we got to solve. Okay. And the name of the documentary? The name of the documentary is the AI dockets and theaters everywhere in the U.S. Please go out and watch it. Bring your church group. Bring your family. Bring your business. It's super important. It is really engrossing. Thanks so much. Tristan Harris. You're the best. Thank you, Brian. What's so funny? You city folk, you worry about a lot of shit. My wife basically told me she doesn't want me around. Is she redhead? I'm just saying. How old are you are? 38. 39. Yeah. You all come up here about the same age, same problems. Spend about 50 weeks a year getting nuts in your rope, and then then you think two weeks up here will have time for you. None of you get it.

Do you know what the secret of life is? No, what? This. Your finger? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don't mean shit. That's great, but what's the one thing? That's what you've got to figure out. And that's led to Arthur Brooks' perhaps book that Allison found that clip. The meaning of your life is Arthur Brooks's new book. You know he's in here always talking about happiness, conservative thinker at one point in your career, but mostly you spend a lot of your time in academia, right? Yeah, yeah. And your parents were. My parents, my grandparents. That was really my home. You took a brief time out. Yeah, well, I took 11 years out and was president of the American Enterprise Institute, which is, you know, dedicated to the free enterprise system and American values. Yeah. And prior to that, you were also a musician. Yeah, I started off as a professional classical musician of all things. And then I went back to college when I was 30 and then got my Ph.D. Yeah. And it was interesting. I just always thought that I never thought it. You said you noticed yourself on the French horn. You noticed that you weren't as good. You were losing it a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like an athlete, you were still in your 20s, right? Uh-huh. But I didn't know musicians would go down in their 20s and 30s. Like an athlete will probably peak at maybe 32. Yeah, it's a highly... Is it because of French horn is so? No, well, it's just... Classical music is all about core, defined motor skills and is extremely athletic. I mean, you're using your body super intensively. Most of the time you peak at about age 36 in classical music, like the violinist or pianist or even a French horn player. I peek much earlier, and I don't exactly know why. I did my best playing in my early 20s, and I wasn't going down. You wouldn't have heard me and said, like, something's wrong with that guy. You knew. But I knew, but I knew. And the truth is that people are only happy when they're making progress. when they're only good. I didn't think about you were a college athlete, right? Yep. And you're a good, you're a good soccer player, right? And when you were getting better, it was awesome. And then when you stopped, you weren't going to go play an adult league because you're going to see yourself deteriorating and not getting better. It's just not fun for a striver like you. But I will qualify a little bit more. If I thought, like if I was good enough to go pro and I was working my way to pro athlete, then take an intermediate step and then it would have been fine. But the minute I realized, there's nowhere for me to go. Right. 22, I'm done. I don't want to go on Sunday and play a game that if I win or lose, it doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's no standard. Well, there's no progress. But there's so many people I know that do do that. Well, because that's their avocation. That's their hobby. And they get a lot of enjoyment from that. And you get enjoyment from other things. But the truth of the matter is that the secret to purpose in life is progress. And this is an important thing for us to keep in mind. Look, you and I come from, and you come from the, you know, the Kilmeads of County Cork or something like that, right? I mean, some Irish, they were coming here. Longford area. Well, they wanted, they wanted progress in their lives. Americans are all about progress. This is the reason that we're the greatest country in the history of the world is because we're a progress-oriented people and that's central to the meaning of life. So let me build on that. But you raise your standards, which is your book. Yeah. So in the beginning, my grandfather comes over here. He has no money.

contact. He gets a job on the railroad and then gets a job in a supermarket. He's thrilled. Totally. But if you took the, then he ends up owning that supermarket. Right. Then if you said, hey, I got a job in a supermarket. He's like, no, no. I raise my standards. Totally. I own one. And by the way, his kid is supposed to go to college and do something more. Totally. And you started to improve on that. So we raise our standards. Why do we do that? We do that because, well, that's a process called the, that's called the hedonic treadmill. Heedonic means feelings. And treadmill is obviously a metaphor. And you run and run and and run and run. And you're trying to make progress, but sometimes it's hard because you emotionally reset. It goes faster and faster as well. So last year's goals are no good for this year. You need better goals. That's how progress actually works. Now the hard part is when you actually, you meet your goals. Like, I want to make a million dollars. And you hit a million dollars. I thought it was going to feel so great. I guess I need two million dollars. And the important thing to keep in mind is that there are certain things in your life that you need that actually are not going to come from these. worldly goals. And they really come from your faith in God, your relationship to your family, your close friendships, and the good you're trying to do in the world through your world. It's interesting. For your personal thing, you found that out, I guess one of the first times when you got tenure at Syracuse. Yeah, yeah. So you got tenure. We're going to go out to dinner, we're going to celebrate. And you didn't feel, even though you had that security you sought after. I busted my hump for years. Because, you know, tenure and higher ed, for those who don't know how universities work, you get this permanent contract. And when you're in a top university, it was the top school in the world for my field. It was hard to get tenure. And I thought, man, when I get it, it's going to feel so sweet. And my wife and I went out to celebrate when I finally got my tenure. We spent the whole dinner discussing the fact that our toddler son had bitten another kid in preschool that day. Right. And at that point, did you start to realize where you were heading with your lives? Because you wrote the book, The Meaning of Your Life. Back then, were you wondering, why am I not satisfied? Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And by the way, there's a happy ending to that bider, that kid. He grew up through who came a U.S. Marine. He's a sniper in the Marine Corps. He's turned his negative energy outward on America's enemies, right? Yeah, my daughter, who's now here working, we used to have problems with her. Yeah, yeah. kids, but she's aggressive and she turned out to be a great kid. So, you know, there's all kinds of, you know, your violent kid can do good in the world, this whole point. But sure, I started thinking about happiness very seriously because these are the most important things. I started studying it at that point. But so, Arthur, doesn't it show a balance that you're not narcissistic? You have this thing and the dinner celebrating what you achieved. Right. But you really care about your family. Doesn't that show a healthy ego? Well. Sure, but it's also not fun. You know, the whole point is we went out to celebrate the fact that I had this real achievement that was really good for my family. It was a pinnacle of my career at the time. Now I think back and I'm like, whatever, man, because you think back on your past accomplishments, like Grandpa Brian Kilmeade. He's like, it was a real accomplishment to work at a supermarket. But 10 years later, it would have been marked that he's actually not doing anything in his life. And the same thing for all of us is actually what it comes down to. So what you do? You point out to ancient philosophy. Your knowledge is unbelievable. You read the classics. And you point out the Tolstoy. Yeah. So here's a guy, acclaimed author already probably internationally known, but he's depressed. Totally. And what does he do? So Leo Tolstoy had already written War and Peace. This was the most famous author in the world. He had been nominated for the Nobel.

Nobel Prize in literature four times. He was married and had 13 kids. His, he was super rich. He was super well known, but he was completely depressed because he couldn't figure out the meaning of his life and he thought that more success would bring it to him than he studied science. He thought that that would find the answers for him and it didn't bring it to him. And so he literally was on the brink of committing suicide. So what he did instead was like at one last gasp, he went to this little tiny village and, you know, way out in the far east of Russia. where he lived and and nobody knew who he was so he's the big celebrity walking around they don't even they can't even read they don't know who he is and he's just watching him live and they're they're going to church and they're praying and they're laughing and they're you know kicking a ball around and everybody's dancing and he said ah it turns out the meaning of life is being fully alive with people that you love And that changed his life forever. And he got to that conclusion and left and went back. And he went back and he spent more time with his family. He spent more time with his friends. He started getting way more serious about his Christian faith. He was a deeply committed Christian until the end of his life. And he died a happy man. And Dostoevsky, author of The Idiot, tell me about him. He had a gambling issue. Oh, my gosh. He was successful. Dostevsky. I mean, he wrote some of these incredible novels. He's probably the greatest novelist of all time. The Brothers Karamazov is this psychological thriller, as a matter of fact. And he had this terrible, terrible addiction, which is he couldn't stop gambling. And at one point, he was so in debt that he made a deal with a publisher that if he finished a novel in just a month of a certain number of words, that they would pay off his gambling debts. didn't make it, he would turn over all of his royalties for the next 10 years. I mean, this was like super high stakes Vegas. So he dictated this novel to this woman, this like young woman that just like did dictation really quickly. And he wrote about the life of a gambler. It was really about his own life. And at the end, he fell in love. They fell in love with each other. They got married and she cured him of his gambling addiction through undying true love. So that filled the gap. Once again, I mean, and this is the deal. I mean, everybody's listening to us right here. All the strivers who want more success, more success, good for you. Why do you have that? Because you're Americans, and I love that. But there is no substitute for the love in your life that you will not find meaning without it. So can you be a striver and have that balance? Yes, you can, but you have to do harder work. The truth is that a lot of strivers who are looking for success in outwardly rewards of money, power, honor. Instagram followers, whatever your thing is. If you actually be, if you're thinking that you're going to find the meaning that you seek, the purpose that you seek and those things, you're going to die frustrated. You have to understand yourself. You have to diagnose yourself as somebody who's particularly at risk. So it's so interesting. So we're talking with Arthur Brooks, who's got this book called The Meaning of Your Life. He takes on big, big topics. So you talk about that, um, We have a left brain and a right brain. Right. And we don't develop the right brain. That's right. But to develop the right brain, one of the best things you could do is

Be bored. I know. Stare out the window on a train instead of staring at your phone. Stop reading for a second. One of the reasons that young people today are more depressed than anxious than they've ever been. And everybody knows this is true. And many colleges, more than 50% of the students are getting counseling or getting psychiatric treatment. And you know this in reality because you teach you to college. I teach you to college. Harvard. Yeah, exactly right. And in Harvard University, they're not worse off than everybody, but they're not better off than anybody either. The reason is because... We have a right hemisphere of our brains dedicated to purpose and meaning. That turns on when you're bored. And when you look at your phone, which the average person in America does 205 times a day, you kick yourself over to the left side of your brain, which is technology and analysis and answering how-to questions. God forbid you should start looking at chat GPT to answer your personal questions. You probably never spend a single minute of the day on the right side of your brain. The way to do it is put down your phone, look out the window, Work out without headphones. Go for a walk without devices. Get bored, which we haven't done in 15 years. So because of the iPhone. Right? Because the devices in general. No, it's really, Brian, it's because of the culture. It's the hustle and grind culture that says if you're bored for a single second, you're wasting your life. and that you have to go harder, harder, harder, harder. And the iPhone, all it did was, I mean, personal devices, personal screens, there was just a better way of never being bored. So the problem actually led to the solution, which actually worsened the problem. But don't you, let's say you're on your phone or on your iPad or in a book, nonstop, book, book, book. I love to read when I have some downtime, I let the pick of the paper. Is that not working the right side of your brain? So books are better than screens because they actually require that you use more of your brain and more of your imagination. What the screen is dedicated to doing is capturing all of your imagination, capturing all of your bandwidth. So you don't have to do any work at all. So books are way, by the way, TV is better than small screens and books are better than TV, to be sure. But you need lots of time away from everything as well. You need to be bored. So you put this book together and you categorize people, you have quizzes throughout the book to see where you're at. Exactly. What led you to coming up with the idea that you could put together a book that would allow people to understand the meaning of your life? How long have you worked on this? Five years. I've been working on this for five years. And what I've found is... Does it feed off your happiness classes? Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, this is the most important topic I teach in my happiness classes at Harvard. People that get... There's eat it up. What this book really is is a solutions book. This book is a six-part guide for finding the meaning of life in six months. And I'm completely sure it works. I'm working on it with my students for the past five years. You have to live in six different ways. And if you do these six steps, guaranteed, you're actually going to find more meaning in your life. Right. Who's got it down? Who's an example of a figure that maybe we can relate to that seems to got it? Grandma. Grandma, grandma's got it. I mean, it's like the older people who lived, who grew up in the before times, who grew up before the devices, who grew up in a different culture. They were dedicated to the four big... institutions of meaning. Grandma is more likely to practice her religion. Grandma is more connected to her family. Grandma had lifelong friends. Grandma is actually dedicated to serving other people in what she did from day to day. So let's talk about friends. Yeah. You have to ask yourself, how many friends do you have is the term convenience or transactional? How many friends do you have that are just your friends? Yeah, right. How do you break it up? So there's two kinds of friends. There's real friends and there's deal friends.

Your deal friends are useful to you. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's people you do business with, people you know casually, people. But the point is that if you didn't do the deals, you'd never see them again. A lot of people that we work with are really deal friends. Real friends are useless. In other words, you don't, they're not helping you in any way except love is what it comes down to, except for the friendship itself. And most drivers and really, really busy people, they don't take the work to create real friendships. And they get lonelier and lonelier and they don't know why. Wow. That's a real problem, especially for guys. The loneliest people in America are 60-year-old men who work 60 hours a week. That's so interesting because back then you could make more friends because you weren't on your devices. You had more of a chance of doing that. Right. What do you, what is the percentage of people, like I was with a guy that, kind of a famous guy, known as very confident, let's say. He says he's 74 years old. Right. He goes, I still get out and get together with my high school friends. Yeah, it's great. Fantastic. Fantastic. How rare is that? Very rare. It's very rare and getting rarer. What we find is that people under 30 have a 50% likely chance of saying today, no one knows me well. Why? Because the little time that they have, they don't spend it with people, they spend it on their devices. Anything that substitutes for people is a problem. Now, you can use your devices as a compliment. You can use it to enrich your relationship. So I actually learned a lot of this from my kids. So as I mentioned, two of my kids are military. And that means they can't use social media in a conventional way. My third son, he's just like super trad retro in this particular way. And they all use social media to stay in touch with people that they know actually in person, no fool in real life. So this book actually has protocols for phone use. So it won't screw you up. It'll make your life better. Starts off with, don't look at your phone for the first hour of the day. That's when you're doing neurocognitive programming. Don't sleep with it at your bedside. Don't look at it for the first hour. whole day will be better second is meal times don't even have the phone on the table during meal times and it interrupts the neurochemical processes just having it around you look just looking at it because it's going to actually cut off a hormone in your brain called oxytocin that connects you to other people you need that hormone Third is the last hour before you go to sleep. It wrecks your sleep architecture. It makes it so you sleep very poorly and it wrecks your relationships. Just those three times. You do those three times your life. All right. More of with other books, a few minutes on the other end. The meaning of your life, he is a number one New York Times bestseller. And he knows he's a great guest to the show. He's going to be on my Sunday show, Sunday at 10. Don't move. It's the best of the Brian Kilmeade. Just a couple of minutes with Arthur Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life, His Name of the Book, Finding Purpose and an Age of Emptiness. One thing you ask people to do, Arthur, is go up to people that love you and say, give me an evaluation of how I'm doing. Tell me what you like, tell me what I'm doing wrong. Yeah. That's a tough thing to do. It is tough thing to do. Because you're going to hear some negativity. Yeah, for sure. But it's incredibly important. Honesty is love. I do. And well, part of the reason is because I'm married to a Spaniard, and they can't not tell you the truth all the time. I mean, yesterday I got completely taken to the woodshed by my wife. We haven't married 30. five years, man. Because over the weekend, I had this thing. And she's like, you're being a baby. And, you know, you're being kind of a prima don't. I had a big event, a big book kickoff event. And I was kind of complaining because there was no protein in the breakfast bar. And she's like, what's wrong with you? I mean, what do you think you are, some sort of a star? And so the truth is, we have a deal. When I'm not acting right, she tells me. And part of it is because I don't want the truth, but I need it.

And you don't know the meaning of your life if you're lying to yourself and other people are lying to, which is one of the other problems that's successful people have. They get people kissing up to them all the time. And the result is they start getting more kind of detached from reality and sad. And they don't know why because they don't actually know themselves. Right. Is the term, I saw Jamie Diamond said that, you know, when he got fired, how'd you take it? He goes, well, it's never good to be fired. But my self-esteem is not wrapped up in my job. So it was not nearly as bad as for other people. That's what you're looking for, right? Well, the other thing to keep in mind is that the suffering is in every person's life. So it's not just about the truth about yourself, but when bad things happen to you. And suffering is an enormous source of meaning. When you suffer, the right side of your brain is active, and the right side of your brain is where you find the meaning of your life is not to eliminate it is to learn from it. And be bored. Don't be afraid. Exactly right. The meaning of your life are the bruce. Go pick up the book. It's out tomorrow. It's out tomorrow. Tuesday. But pre-order it now. Exactly right. Get it delivered.