American Thought Leaders

Dr. Irwin Goldstein is one of America’s leading sexual health physicians, a pioneer in the field, and the director of San Diego Sexual Medicine.In this episode, he breaks down his latest research into what’s known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD)—a condition that’s not uncommon but rarely discussed publicly.He’s found that a class of antidepressants known as SSRIs can cause lasting physiological damage even after patients discontinue the medication—contrary to what many patients are told.“When they stop the medicine, the usual teaching is that everyone returns to their pre-medication sexual function, and that’s not what we’re seeing in our sexual health clinic here,” Dr. Goldstein says.His recent research showed that SSRIs can cause structural damage to genital tissue as well as many other physiological problems, like genital numbness, erectile dysfunction, and loss of libido. These problems persist long-term after discontinuing SSRI antidepressants.“It’s kind of an awful thing, and it doesn’t go away,” Dr. Goldstein says. “These individuals in my clinic who have been given the medicines: Our youngest is age 11. They'll never experience what one would otherwise consider a normal sexual life.”Dr. Goldstein holds a degree in engineering from Brown University and a medical degree from McGill University in Montreal. He is credited with advancing the study and treatment of both male and female sexual dysfunctions and has authored more than 360 academic publications in the field.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

What happens when a business decides faith matters more than profit? Apparently, it flourishes.Hobby Lobby, founded by David and Barbara Green in Oklahoma City in 1972, is a private, family-owned corporation now with over a thousand arts-and-crafts stores nationwide. The stores are closed on Sundays, do not sell any Halloween-themed products, operate debt-free, and are run according to Biblical principles, emphasizing the value of faith and family life.David Green told me in our recent interview: “God blesses us when we do what we should do, rather than what’s maybe most profitable.”“When we closed on Sunday, we did less business. When we stopped selling Halloween, we did less business. I can name seven or eight different things that ... cost us, but it was the right thing to do,“ he said. ”So I think God is asking us to do the right thing and not what’s most profitable.”In 2012, the owners of Hobby Lobby sued the federal government for requiring company insurance plans to cover four specific contraceptives—two morning-after pills and two copper IUDs—that they argued could end life after conception. Facing daily fines of $1.3 million, the Green family filed a lawsuit that culminated in a 5–4 victory at the Supreme Court.In my interview with Green and his longtime friend and co-author of his many books, Bill High, we talk about their latest book “The Legacy Life.”How do we build a lasting, meaningful legacy? How do we become good stewards of our resources, time, and talents? How can families ensure their values are truly passed on to later generations—and not lost over time?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

What if the most potent weapon that America has against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) isn’t nukes or tariffs?“This isn’t a competition between the largest economy and the second largest economy. This is a competition of ideals—and we’ve got the better ones,” says former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback.“If you want to hit them where it hurts, hit them on human rights issues, genocides in their own country, religious freedom that they don’t grant any of their people—whether they be Buddhist, Muslim, Falun Gong, Christians. That’s where they’re the weakest. It’s where they’re the most vulnerable.”Ahead of President Donald Trump’s expected meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, I sat down with Brownback to understand what he sees as the Chinese regime’s greatest vulnerabilities, its deepest fears, and how those can be strategically leveraged by the United States.Brownback is co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit. He previously served as governor of Kansas from 2011 to 2018 and as a U.S. senator from Kansas, 1996 to 2011. His upcoming book is titled, “China’s War on Faith.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

More than 11 percent of Americans take antidepressants, including rising numbers of kids and adolescents and even pregnant women.The majority of Americans believe that depression is linked to a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that drugs can fix this imbalance—just as someone with Type 1 diabetes might take insulin. But that’s not true, according to board-certified psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doerring.“There’s never been any evidence that there’s been a chemical imbalance,” Witt-Doerring says. “There is no way to differentiate patients who are depressed from those who are not depressed using any objective markers.”Instead of fixing a chemical balance, what antidepressants really do is mask symptoms, he says.A former FDA officer and now director of TaperClinic, Witt-Doerring helps people safely get off of psychiatric medications.In this episode, we dive into the realities of antidepressant drug use, what most patients often aren’t told by their doctors, and how a patient can be weaned off of psychiatric drugs safely and avoid devastating withdrawal symptoms.How do these drugs affect people long-term? Are they really safe for pregnant women? And what kinds of potential side effects do they have?And we dig into perhaps the most taboo subject of all: Is there a link between antidepressants and mass shootings?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Political scientist Charles Murray has written many well-known books over the course of his lifetime.Many of his works—including “Losing Ground,” “The Bell Curve,” and “Coming Apart”—have deeply influenced the intellectual discourse and zeitgeist of our times and provoked heated debate about the roots of major social problems in America.His latest book covers a topic that he has never covered deeply before: religion.Murray writes in the foreword of his book “Taking Religion Seriously,” “Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant. We grew up in secular households or drifted away from the faiths in which we were raised and never looked back. For them, I think I have a story worth telling.”In our conversation, he recounts how he slowly came to question his assumption that there was nothing in religion for him.He began to grapple with questions such as: How did life come to be? Why is there something rather than nothing? What happens to purely secular societies? What happens to art that no longer acknowledges beauty, truth, and the good?He said: “I finished the book by comparing myself to a kid whose nose is pressed against the glass watching a party that’s going on inside that he can’t join. I have had the good fortune to meet a number of people who have had a very full, rich spiritual experience. ... I look at the kind of people they are, and I say to myself: I want more of that.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) has been spearheading efforts in Congress to combat the threat posed by the Chinese regime to American interests—from economic warfare to espionage and infiltration—as chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.“With rare earths, China is basically firing a loaded gun ... on our economy,” he says.He’s pushing a bill that would phase in a 100 percent tariff on all strategic goods from China. The tariff would not just penalize China but also incentivize “other countries, as well as the United States, to invest in this almost as if it’s a Defense Production Act activity.”Beyond rare earth minerals, what leverage does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have exactly in trade talks with the United States? What will the CCP’s strategy be? How should President Donald Trump respond to the CCP’s coercive tactics and its recent attempts to gain additional leverage?And what can America do to extricate itself from its dependence on China for some of its most critical manufacturing technologies?Moolenaar points out that the CCP is using its leverage not only over trade but also over Chinese nationals studying or working in America via its extensive United Front operations.“Under their recent national security laws, any Chinese national who doesn’t carry out the will of the Chinese Communist Party, no matter where they are in the world, on U.S. soil or somewhere else in the world, [is] in violation of national security laws,” Moolenaar says.On the other hand, is the position of the CCP really secure? And what about Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s position in particular? What signs of dissatisfaction and unrest are there among the Chinese population?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

NBA player Jonathan Isaac is known not just for his talent on the court, but for his convictions and outspoken faith. He’s the author of the 2022 best-selling memoir “Why I Stand.”As a youth, he struggled with anxiety—but a chance encounter in an elevator with the man who would later become his pastor changed the course of his life.Faith helped him triumph over his battle with anxiety, but it also later put him at the center of a national debate. After George Floyd’s death, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, most NBA players chose to kneel during the national anthem. But Isaac chose to stand. Later, his decision to decline the COVID-19 vaccines also drew intense media scrutiny.In this episode, he shares his story, his convictions, his choices and why he made them, and what it means to believe in something bigger than yourself.Now, through his UNITUS shoe line, Isaac shares Bible verses and a message of hope.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recently imposed unprecedented export controls on rare earths, escalating the U.S.–China trade war.How is it that the Chinese regime managed to gain control of many of the most essential supply chains, from critical minerals to pharmaceuticals? How should the Trump administration approach this threat to national security?In this episode, we sit down with Lee Smith, author of “The Plot Against the President,” and the soon-to-be-released book, “The China Matrix: The Epic Story of How Donald Trump Shattered a Deadly Pact.”“It was simply American corruption that has allowed all of this to happen. And that’s certainly the point that [U.S. President] Donald Trump makes in the book,” Smith says.What is Trump’s strategy when it comes to China? How does he actually view Chinese leader Xi Jinping?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.Editor’s Note: Lee Smith previously hosted the EpochTV program “Words That Matter.”

Few people understand the far-left extremist group Antifa as well as investigative journalist Andy Ngo, author of “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.”He has been beaten, attacked, and nearly killed by Antifa for his undercover reporting of the group’s operations.In an executive order signed on Sept. 22, President Donald Trump designated the group a domestic terrorist organization. On Oct. 8, the president hosted a roundtable focused on Antifa and invited Ngo and other journalists to participate.In this episode, Ngo recounts his harrowing personal experiences.What will it take to actually dismantle Antifa? How is Antifa organized and funded? And what does Ngo make of the broader trends of political violence, from the assassination of Charlie Kirk to the murder of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and coined the name “Wikipedia' in 2001. He established many of Wikipedia’s founding policies, including the original neutrality guidelines, before he left in 2002.Since then, he has become a vocal critic of Wikipedia’s growing ideological bias, particularly on politically charged issues.Sanger says certain outlets are favored as sources while others are blacklisted, creating systemic distortion and exclusion of dissenting views.Most of Wikipedia’s top editors are anonymous, which means that people have no legal recourse for lies or inaccuracies about them that may be published on Wikipedia’s pages.In this episode, Sanger breaks down what went wrong with Wikipedia and how it can be reformed.Sanger has put forward nine theses for reform, including enabling competing articles, restoring original neutrality policies, convening an editorial assembly, and creating transparent rating systems for entries.But what is the likelihood it will happen? Can—and should—Congress do something about it? And could Elon Musk’s Grokipedia offer a more balanced alternative?Editor’s Note: The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to our request for comment.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

While we often hear that free trade means cheaper goods, is it really that simple? What is the true cost of that? How can we measure the long-term decline of America’s manufacturing and industrial base and its impact on America?John Gardner is the author of “Manufacture Local: How to Make America the Manufacturing Superpower of the World.”“America has a lot of questions to ask itself about the morality of what we’ve done to our own citizens, but also the morality of chasing sweatshop labor in other nations,” he says.Why is having a robust industrial base so important? And if so, how do we turn things around? Are tariffs really the answer? Is an External Revenue Service a good idea?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  

“What we’ve got today is too much money riding on seed oils. They can’t produce addictive, empty, junk food, processed food without the seed oils,” says Sally Fallon Morell.For decades, Morell has led a grassroots movement to see healthy foods in every household in America.“You need to get in the kitchen. [It] doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the kitchen, but you need to get in the kitchen and learn how to produce healthy food for your family,” she says.In this episode, she explains what’s wrong with our modern diet and calls for a return to traditional, nutrient-dense foods for better health.“Animal fats are good for you. They’re not going to give you heart disease. Quite the opposite—they’re very stable, and they support good health. They support heart health,” Morell says. “Our mission is to bring people back to these foods, to get people to eat butter again, whole milk. By the way, egg yolks are a sacred food as well, very rich in nutrients and fat-soluble activators.”Morell is the President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of, “Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Mollie Engelhart was once a celebrated vegan farm-to-table restaurateur in California. When she decided to put meat back on the menu, a targeted campaign forced her to close her business.She ultimately decided to make the painful decision to uproot her entire life, sell her farm, and rebuild from scratch in Texas.She’s the author of the new book “Debunked by Nature: How a Vegan-Chef-Turned-Regenerative-Farmer Discovered that Mother Nature Is a Conservative.”“We’re treating the soil and our bodies like we can outsmart them, but we’re getting sicker,” she says.Once an ardent believer in the vegan movement, Engelhart now questions much of what she once believed.“Nature taught me my ideas were ridiculous. ... My cow isn’t the enemy,” she says.Real environmentalism is “not to avoid nature, but to interact with her; not to try to out-science her, but to remember her wisdom,” she says.How does the health of our soil shape the health of our bodies? In this episode, we dive into the roots of our health crisis and why real change often starts small, with curious consumers and courageous farmers.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“President Trump talks about ‘drill, baby, drill.’ We’ve also got to mine, baby, mine. We’ve got to get back into this business,” says U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.China has a stranglehold on rare earths and critical minerals, controlling at least 85 percent of the refining of the 20 most important rare earth minerals, Burgum says.As secretary of the interior, Burgum oversees nearly half a billion acres of federal land and plays a key role in the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda.In this episode, we dive into what the Trump administration is doing to end America’s rare earth minerals dependency on China, accelerate energy production, and win the AI arms race against China, which will require major increases in energy supply.We also discuss the government shutdown and how it impacts the Department of the Interior and the American people.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 early September, during a joint press conference with Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo publicly announced the decision to eliminate all state vaccine mandates—including those required for schools.In this episode, Dr. Ladapo explains the decision, how it will take shape, and his response to critics of the announcement who say there will be increased outbreaks of infectious disease.“It’s just not appropriate for someone else to be able to dictate or force you to put something into your body.… If you own anything, you do own your body, just as you own your free will,” he says.Florida’s Department of Health is removing all its current mandates, but a complete removal of all vaccine requirements from state law will require legislative action. Dr. Ladapo says he’s confident it will be passed.We also dive into his concern that many pediatricians can refuse to treat children on the basis of the child’s vaccination status: “To be kicked out of pediatrician practices for that reason, it’s just wrong,” he says.He’s working with Governor DeSantis on what he calls a “patient’s bill of rights.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Chinese communist regime has “created a market in the organs of their political enemies,” says Matthew Robertson, a researcher who has been investigating China’s organ transplant system for more than a decade.Fluent in Mandarin, Robertson is a China studies research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and co-author of a number of research papers on China’s organ transplant system including, “Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China.”After conducting a forensic review of thousands of Chinese research papers, they found 71 cases where violations of the dead donor rule were essentially written into the paper itself.In a moment that stunned the world, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin were recently caught on a hot mic with their translators talking about increasing longevity through repeated organ transplants.What is the true extent of China’s forced organ harvesting industry? How are physicians in China complicit? It’s been known for many years that practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual practice have been a prime target—but are they the only ones?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.Editor’s Note: Matthew Robertson previously worked as a journalist for The Epoch Times. 

Family farms in America are slowly disappearing, with a 2022 USDA census reporting that America lost 142,000 farms over just five years. The average farmer in America is now nearly 60 years old.But it’s not government subsidies that farmers need to stay afloat, says Joel Salatin. What small farmers really need is the freedom to innovate and sell directly to local consumers—without facing a morass of red tape, regulations, and mandates.Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia, is widely recognized as a leading pioneer of sustainable or regenerative farming practices that enrich the land, rather than depleting it.Over the last half century, Salatin has seen his fair share of what he calls the “food police.” He discovered it was illegal to sell a couple dozen homemade pot pies at the farmers’ market without proving he had a certified $50,000 septic system; illegal to process his own meat without sending it to a licensed butcher; illegal for his 17-year-old apprentices to operate a cordless drill—even though they were legally allowed to drive a car; and illegal to build housing without a permit on his farm—an agricultural zone—for his highly popular farmer apprenticeship program.The result? Small farmers have to fight for survival, factory farming wins, and America is less healthy, he says.“In my lifetime I have watched this erosion of farmer access to retail dollars. Meanwhile, we’re seeing farmers go out of business hand over fist,” Salatin says.What America really needs is a “Food Emancipation Proclamation,” he says.Salatin is the author of 17 books, including “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front.”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 decades, there has been an assault on the Western classical tradition and the core values, arts, and philosophy at the bedrock of Western civilization, says classicist Spencer Klavan.Are we now witnessing a shift in this tide?Klavan is the author of multiple books, including “How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.”He is also an associate editor at The Claremont Review of Books and host of the “Young Heretics” podcast.“People are starting to realize that you can only scream and yell and tear down statues and set things on fire for so long,” Klavan says. “Now the energy seems to be in the direction of … recovering and rebuilding some of our most profound traditions, these wisdom traditions of Athens and Jerusalem.”In this episode, we dive deep into questions of form and matter, beauty and truth, and the importance of finding spiritual meaning in our modern era.“It’s often attributed to Werner Heisenberg that once you take one sip from the cup of science, you become an atheist. But when you drain it to the dregs, God is waiting for you there at the bottom,” he says.What do the classics have to offer us? Why is classical art and literature important? And why does Klavan believe President Donald Trump’s executive order on restoring classical architecture is a major step forward?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 did the last nine years change Eric Trump? How did the second son of President Donald Trump react to the assassination attempt on his father’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania? And does he plan to run for political office in the future?His new memoir is titled “Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation.”“It’s the thousands of stories behind the scenes of how they try to dismantle our family and the greatest political movement in American history,” Trump 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.

Since mRNA technology was deployed widely in the COVID-19 vaccines, developers have rapidly accelerated research into more mRNA products. Moderna alone has more than two dozen mRNA products in development.But is the mRNA platform really the revolutionary breakthrough that its champions claim?Since early 2021, Cole has been at the forefront of alerting the public to an unusual spike in cancer diagnoses following the widespread adoption of the COVID-19 genetic vaccines.In this episode, Cole explains the risks he sees with mRNA technology and how he sees things shaking out at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the coming months and years.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.