American Thought Leaders

Grace Jo was born in North Korea and nearly starved to death as a child during the country’s devastating famine in the 1990s.

Her father crossed into China in search of food for his family, only to be tortured and die after returning to North Korea. Her grandmother and two younger brothers died of starvation. And her oldest sister disappeared while searching for food. The family suspects she became a victim of human trafficking in China.
Jo still remembers that her grandmother’s dying wish was to eat a baked potato. It was a wish the family could not fulfill.
At six years old, Jo first crossed the Tumen River into China with her mother and sister. In China, they lived in hiding—ever fearful of being sent back to North Korea. Jo was repatriated twice before finally escaping North Korea for the last time.
Her story is a haunting account of survival, loss, and hope that shows the brutal reality of life under North Korea’s regime and the determination, resilience, and sheer luck it takes to escape it.
In 2008, with the help of a missionary, Jo, her mother, and her older sister made it to the United States. She became a U.S. citizen in 2013.
Today, she is the founder of the Broken Chains Foundation, formerly the Grace Jo Foundation. And through the Dissident Project, she speaks regularly at schools and other venues, sharing her story to educate young people about the realities of totalitarian and communist regimes.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Is the end of privacy inevitable? Is programmable money inevitable? Is it inevitable that artificial intelligence will eliminate most of the world’s white-collar jobs?

Oxford professor Carissa Véliz argues that such claims are a red flag.
She’s the author of the new book “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future.”
Someone who says a future is inevitable is trying to get you to do something and benefit from your belief, she argues.
She is convinced that such self‑fulfilling prophecies only work if we believe them and she urges people to defy these narratives by asking: Who is predicting this future? Who benefits? What data supports it—and what missing data might contradict it?
Véliz is a philosopher and author who specializes in privacy and the ethics of artificial intelligence. She is an associate professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford.
Prediction, Véliz explains, is a business model: diagnose a problem, promise that more data will solve it, then sell tools to analyze the huge datasets institutions don’t know how to use.
Throughout history, rulers have attached themselves to prophets. Today, that role is played by immensely rich and powerful tech executives who advise governments and control key infrastructure and access to citizens via social media.
In our interview, we discuss how surveillance and behavioral prediction undermine and erode an open society where people should have the freedom to speak, protest, and be anonymous.
Other questions we discuss: Do “digital natives” like Gen Z and Gen Alpha—who have never experienced a true non-digital world—even understand the role of privacy? And what are the best antidotes to the harms of digital life?
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 exclusive interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, we dive into the FBI’s campaign to take down scam centers around the world, from Burma to the United Arab Emirates.

Last year, the FBI launched Operation Blackout, a 16-month campaign that dismantled four of the world’s largest scam centers.
Working with international partners—notably including China’s Ministry of Public Security—the FBI seized over $15 billion, arrested more than 300 individuals, and freed thousands of trafficked victims who had been forced to work at these scam compounds.
The amount of money Americans have reported losing to fraud has increased over threefold from 2020 to 2025, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. And nearly half of that in 2025 went to romance cryptocurrency scams—known as pig-butchering scams.
Scammers use texts to build trust before luring victims into fake investments that drain their life savings. Then they move and launder the money through crypto wallets.
So what can people do to avoid being scammed? Will the FBI be returning all the seized money? And why has the FBI chosen to work with China on tackling these scam compounds? How can the Chinese regime be trusted to work in good faith?
In this wide-ranging interview, we also discuss the FBI’s fight to catch spies, investigate transnational repression, cut bureaucratic red tape, and prevent the next terrorist attack.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Almost a year after the Washington Declaration, Armenia is trying to turn a hard-won peace with Azerbaijan into something lasting. In this conversation, Armenia’s ambassador to the United States, Narek Mkrtchyan, explains what the agreement means on the ground and why the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity could reshape the region and the country’s future.

“We sit in a very tough neighborhood. We sit in a very interesting geography. We are at the crossroads of Europe, Middle East, Central Asia, South Caucasus,” Mkrtchyan says.
Mkrtchyan describes how Armenia is trying to turn geography into strategy through the development of diplomacy, new trade routes, and international partnerships. He views this as more than a peace process—it’s a chance to redefine Armenia’s place in the region.
“In the center is the concept of crossroads of peace,” Mkrtchyan says.
Recently, Armenia also got approval for the biggest artificial intelligence factory in the region—a $4 billion project that officials say could help make the country a hub for computing power and advanced technology.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Americans are ripped off in the billions annually through romance “pig-butchering” scams—the most dominant type. But who’s really behind them?

The shocking reality is the vast majority of these scammers are trafficked victims, enslaved across more than 60 countries and forced to scam or face torture.
“You’re working 17-hour days. You’re catatonic. You’re not getting sleep. You start to doze. They‘ll electrocute you, and if you refuse to scam, they’ll torture you,” said Timothy Blackwood, an award-winning Canadian-American film director.
His film “Scam Slave: From Hell to Home” follows a Ugandan man promised a high-paying job in Thailand, only to be kidnapped by a Myanmar-based crime syndicate.
“There’s all different types of scams going on there. There’s villas, there’s strip clubs, there’s clinics to support the staff that are managing and running these compounds,” Blackwood says.
These scam centers in Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar generate billions that fund even more advanced operations.
“It’s not simply in the horrific statistics of how many billions of dollars are being scammed from Americans annually, but the human cost to people’s lives.”
In this episode, I dive into how these operations stay hidden and what can actually be done to stop them.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.