American Thought Leaders

Dr. Lynn Fynn is a clinical research scientist and a retired infectious disease specialist. We sat down together to discuss issues she sees plaguing medical research, including the misallocation of funds, a broken peer review process, and major conflicts of interest.”Any time you incentivize something, you’re creating a bias. And when you create a bias, there’s an element of truth that’s removed from the equation,” says Dr. Fynn.“When a pharmaceutical company gets to pour money into a program, the curriculum is going to reflect what they want it to reflect, to make it a profitable transaction for them. It’s a return on investment.”What practical steps are needed to restore public trust in science and medicine?“Where there’s transparency, there’s trust. It’s really that simple,” says Dr. Fynn. “Oftentimes, [in] what used to be the scientific method, the process gets reversed. They look at the conclusion that is agreeable or preferred, and then they start working backwards. How can we prove this conclusion?”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“Hollywood is about as left and progressive a community as there is in this country. And unfortunately, part of the box you have to check in that very left, super progressive space is being anti-Israel and being pro-Palestine in an anti-Israel way,” says Jonah Platt.Platt is a jack of all trades in the entertainment industry—an actor, director, producer, and singer. In the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis led by terrorist group Hamas, he launched the podcast “Being Jewish.”He recently visited Auschwitz, the largest German death camp, alongside over a dozen Muslims. He went with the organization Sharaka, which builds on the work of the Abraham Accords and educates Middle Easterners and other Arabs and Muslims around the world about the Holocaust.“Some of these people came on this trip at great personal risk. If you’re coming from Pakistan to hang out with Jews in the middle of this Israel-Gaza war, I mean, you could be in real, physical danger. Some people—they couldn’t be in any photos and their identities had to be kept secret to protect them,” says Platt. “There were Jewish slaves [at Auschwitz], working out in that kind of rain in threadbare pajamas, starving to death, and having to do physical labor and be shot if they didn’t keep up. And meanwhile, I’m freezing in the cold, but I get to go on a warm bus and get a hot meal after this.”In this episode, we discuss how to navigate being Jewish and Zionist in a society that is becoming increasingly hostile to Israel.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.***Disclaimer: One of the producers for American Thought Leaders participated in the Sharaka program to Poland on an all-expenses paid trip.

“Service … it’s a great healer for a broken heart. It helped me a lot through our fight for our son, and the difficulties and the challenges of fighting for him and then losing him,” says Gary Sinise.An Emmy Award-winning actor, producer, director, and musician, Sinise has dedicated his life to supporting America’s active-duty military, veterans, first responders, and their families.The Gary Sinise Foundation has raised over $500 million in support of these communities, and Sinise has won many awards for his humanitarian contributions, including the Presidential Citizen Medal, the second-highest civilian honor in the United States.In this episode, Sinise reflects on his three decades of service, from building dozens of specially modified homes for wounded veterans and first responders to playing nearly 600 concerts with the Lt. Dan band (named after his Forrest Gump character) at military bases across the United States and overseas.Sinise’s son McCanna Anthony “Mac” Sinise died last year at age 33 after a five-year battle with a rare bone cancer called chordoma. Before he passed, he was able to record an entire album of music that he’d begun in college. It’s titled “Resurrection & Revival.”Mac’s story and his father’s full tribute to his son can be found here on the Gary Sinise Foundation website: https://www.garysinisefoundation.org/mac-tribute

A few months ago, Canada unveiled its national memorial to the millions of victims of communism.In this episode, Ludwik Klimkowski, chair of the Tribute of Liberty, gives us a tour of the memorial and reveals the 17-year battle to realize it as the group navigated changing political winds.“This is a memorial to those who still struggle. This is the memorial given to those who still want to escape. This is the memorial to those who are still sitting in prison, whose organs are being harvested,” Klimkowski says.The memorial was inaugurated last year, although the final elements on the Wall of Remembrance are still under development.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

In this episode, we sit down again with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of two dozen books, including most recently “The End of Everything.”In this interview, we dive into the multifaceted dimensions of what he describes as Trump’s “counterrevolution” in the foreign policy space, from Canada to China to the Middle East to Ukraine and Russia.What might the end of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza look like?Should Trump have accepted a plane from Qatar’s royal family? Was it a good idea to lift U.S. sanctions on Syria’s new leader? Is there any truth to rumors of friction between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?Is it possible that Trump actually, in some sense, wanted Mark Carney to win and become Prime Minister of Canada?And how can the United States ensure the Chinese leadership upholds their commitments in a trade agreement, given their track record of not following through?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

There are few people who understand the workings of Chinese espionage as well as Nicholas Eftimiades.After a 34-year government career—including time at the CIA, Department of State, and Defense Intelligence Agency—he’s now a professor at Penn State University’s Homeland Security Program and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.“China uses what we call a whole-of-society approach to conducting espionage. … We’re not talking about thousands [of people]. We’re talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people engaged globally in carrying out the CCP’s will,” Eftimiades says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“One of the major driving factors of the extreme polarization that we’re living through right now is that most news consumers can very easily … tune in somewhere where they are just being force fed worldviews and perspectives that confirm all their priors,” says journalist Isaac Saul.“Think about what media outlets are really making their audience uncomfortable on a regular basis, and there’s very few of them,” he says.After writing for a wide variety of media outlets and seeing some disturbing trends, Saul decided to found Tangle, a newsletter that puts viewpoints from both the left and the right side by side.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  

“This system I had been turning to for help through all of these years, through the most formative years of life, that I had been assuming existed to take care of me ... was actually a system of control. And I just hadn’t seen it for what it was, because I had never said no to it before,” says Laura Delano, author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.”For 14 years, Delano was a “professional mental patient,” as she puts it, after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was a teenager.Now she wonders whether the dominant, medicalized approach to mental illness is actually making us as a society sicker.“Sixty-five million American adults and 6 million American children are currently on psychiatric drugs, and there are zero off ramps for getting them off these drugs safely within the mental health industry. Zero,” she says. “This is not about being ‘pro’ or ‘anti.’ This is about using straightforward, honest language to talk about what these drugs are, to talk about our limits of knowledge around what these drugs are and how they actually affect us, and then to let people make their own decisions from there based on their own life circumstances.”In this episode, we dive into Delano’s story and discuss the dangers of relying solely on medical treatments to treat mental health issues and of rapidly withdrawing from psychiatric drugs.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now,” says Brian Lee Crowley.“And I have seen a lot of my compatriots running around like chickens with their heads cut off, saying, ‘Oh my God, Donald Trump is a mad man. You can’t understand what he’s doing. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.’ And I looked at what Donald Trump was doing, and I thought, ‘Okay, I don’t have to like it. That’s a separate question. But if the question is, ’Can I understand it?' The answer is yes.”Crowley is the founder and managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Canadian think tank whose work is often cited by the Canadian Parliament.“What exactly is the difference between Canada and America, or Canadians and Americans? It’s not that it’s difficult to answer because there aren’t differences. It’s difficult to answer because the differences are subtle and hard to express,” says Crowley.“Remember that America broke away through a violent revolution from the crown and the United Kingdom—from Great Britain. Canadians never experienced that.”In this episode, we dive into the recent election in Canada, Trump’s comments about Canada as America’s 51st state, and what the future of United States–Canada relations may look like.“Canada exports 50 percent of everything made in the private sector, and the vast bulk of that, like 90 percent, goes to the United States. But [in] the United States, by contrast, foreign trade, or international trade, only represents barely 25 percent of the amount of the American economy, and that’s diversified across all of its trade partners. So, while for Canada, the relationship with the United States is existential, for America, the relationship with Canada is convenient, nice—not existential.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Dr. Paul Marik, a leading pulmonary and critical care specialist, discusses innovative strategies for reducing cancer risk through dietary changes like intermittent fasting. He emphasizes the importance of natural eating patterns over constant snacking. Marik also introduces the role of vitamin D and nutraceuticals in cancer prevention, while critiquing traditional chemotherapy methods. Additionally, he highlights the need for reproducibility in scientific research and the influence of AI on medical practices, advocating for a more holistic approach to cancer treatment.