American Thought Leaders

“We get a lot of inappropriate over-prescribing for almost everything,” says drug policy researcher and journalist Alan Cassels.Cassels is the co-author of “Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients.”For Cassels, it was one disease in particular—osteoporosis—that changed his entire view of medicine.Based on changing definitions of the disease, large swaths of Americans could suddenly be declared sick and in urgent need of drug treatment.They “medicalized normal aging of basically the entire female population. Overnight,” he says.In our interview, we discuss the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on overdiagnoses and prescriptions, and how the criteria for many diseases can be expanded arbitrarily.“When you look closely at the quality of prescribing, a lot of times, the decision-making is not really driven by evidence. It’s driven mostly by … marketing, biases, influence from thought leaders, and influence from guidelines, medical guidelines themselves, which are often appallingly biased,” he says.Many doctors, Cassels says, know little about the adverse effects of the many drugs they prescribe to their patients.We also dive into the connection between psychiatric drug prescriptions and violence, how psychiatry labels normal behaviors as abnormal, and how exaggerated statistics are used to sell theories of disease and drug treatments.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“COVID was a really dark time for me and for a lot of people,” said Rob Schneider.For the famous comedian and actor, the years of the pandemic were a time to take stock of what had become of America, speak up about it—and even write a book. “You Can Do it! Speak Your Mind, America” was published in September 2024.“If we’re going to continue to have a free society, it’s going to require people to step up and be courageous,” Schneider said.Schneider, who is also a screenwriter and director, rose to prominence as a cast member and writer of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. He earned three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his writing on the show.In this episode, he reflected on our current political and cultural moment.What really happened when Rob bumped into Robert De Niro at the SNL reunion? What is the role of comedy in an age of outrage? And how do we turn around the tribalism he sees gripping America?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

As early as 1989, intelligence officers in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recognized China as the next threat, says former DIA officer and physicist Michael Sekora.“We identified what [China] was doing to become a superpower faster than any country in history, and we were on track to containment,” Sekora says.Back in the 1980s, he led a classified Defense Intelligence Agency program called “Project Socrates” that was created under the Reagan administration to determine the cause of U.S. economic and military decline, find a way to reverse it, and outcompete Moscow. Later they turned their sights to Beijing.“It was very obvious what was going on: China was executing a national technology strategy, which basically was playing ... a very adroit game of worldwide offensive, defensive, technology exploitation chess,” Sekora says. “What we had in Socrates could have easily contained China.”The project was defunded by the Bush administration, and the United States went the opposite route, allowing many key technologies to be handed over to Beijing over the course of several decades.In this episode, he breaks down why he believes the United States has lost its edge in technological innovation and how this can be turned around.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

For the past half century, Americans have been told that psychiatric drugs fix chemical imbalances in the brain. But this is nothing but a myth, says journalist Robert Whitaker.Whitaker is the publisher of MadInAmerica.com and is known for his influential critiques of modern psychiatry and psychiatric drug treatment.It was hypothesized that depression was due to too little serotonin and that schizophrenia was caused by too much dopamine—and that drugs could fix that, just like insulin for diabetes. But that was never backed up by evidence, Whitaker said.“That was the story that was used to sell a whole second generation of psychiatric drugs and dramatically expand the psychiatric enterprise worldwide,” he said.In 1999, Whitaker co-wrote a series of articles for the Boston Globe on psychiatric research and became a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, thereby establishing his reputation in this field. Later, he served as director of publications at Harvard Medical School.“We have this story that we’re making great progress in diagnosing and treating mental disorders,” he told me.U.S. spending on treating mental disorders has risen substantially over the past decades, from tens of billions in the late 1980s to more than $100 billion per year today. But there is no evidence, he says, that these drugs improve long-term outcomes. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that psychiatric drugs can actually make things worse, he says.“They actually cause chemical imbalances, increase the chronicity of disorders, increase functional impairment, and you see rising disability rates wherever you see this paradigm of care adopted,” he says.Certain antipsychotics for schizophrenia, for instance, can actually reduce brain tissue, particularly in the first year, and that’s been associated with cognitive decline and a worsening of symptoms.Evidence shows that other countries, including developing nations, that have not adopted this same approach have seen much better outcomes, he says.In this episode, he breaks down his findings from decades of studying this issue. Whitaker is the author of “Mad in America” and “Anatomy of an Epidemic.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

How might a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan unfold? China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy—a combination of missiles, submarines, sensors, and air defenses—is designed specifically to block and disrupt US air, sea, and even space and cyber power.But the true outcome of the operation will hinge on the rapid mobilization of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ground forces, argues recently retired four-star general Charles Flynn, former commander of U.S. Army Pacific.He warns that the real “center of gravity” of a Chinese invasion will lie in its ability to rapidly assemble, deploy, and transport land forces across the Taiwan Strait.“What keeps me up at night is their ability to actually pull that off in 96 hours,” Flynn says.He is convinced that building a “strategic land power network” and forging deep, enduring ties with partner armies in Asia will be vital to deterring the Chinese regime.In this episode, Flynn lays out a roadmap for how the U.S. military should rethink its strategy, technology, and partnerships to deter Beijing and safeguard its allies in the Indo-Pacific.“This century is going to be defined by the relationship between the United States and China. … We’ve said we’ve pivoted to the Pacific for more than a decade, and in actual behavior and actions, that’s not accurate,” Flynn says.Before commanding U.S. Army Pacific, Flynn served as the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Training (G3/5/7). He is the brother of General Michael Flynn, former national security advisor to President Donald Trump.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.