American Thought Leaders

Dr. Joanna Moncrieff is a British psychiatrist and author of “Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth.” She challenges the long-held belief that depression is caused by a lack of the hormone serotonin. “The serotonin myth … was first put out there in the 1960s, then picked up by the pharmaceutical industry in the 1990s and widely propagated by them as part of their cam...

Erin Friday is an attorney and the co-lead of Our Duty, a parent-led international organization that opposes transgender procedures for minors. When her daughter was 13 years old, she began identifying as male, and school staff began using a male name and pronouns to address her—without the knowledge or consent of her parents. When Friday found out, she called the school and told them to stop. A w...

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy recently unveiled a new food pyramid and dietary guidelines for Americans that emphasize high-quality protein, dairy, healthy fats, vegetables, and fruits. Whole grains are downgraded, and processed foods and added sugars are discouraged. “We’ve been consuming this ultra-processed food, which I call human pet food,” says Dr. Shawn Baker. A former orthopedic surgeon...

A typical vaccine stimulates a person’s immune system, yet only a portion of the immune response actually targets the disease it’s designed to protect against. However, a new technology may be changing that dynamic. In this episode, I sit down with Lou Reese, an entrepreneur who has led or co-founded several biotech companies and has been working on synthetic peptide-based active immunotherapy med...

An estimated one in six American adults today are taking some form of psychiatric medication. Yet it seems mental health outcomes across America have seen no significant improvement, despite the promises of the psychopharmacology revolution. David Cohen, professor of social welfare and associate dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, argues that many of the core assumptions of modern psyc...

“Minnesota … is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Minnesota has become the epicenter of several overlapping fraud investigations of childcare programs, small business pandemic loans, and Medicaid services. Earlier this month, Dr. Oz traveled to Minnesota to tour suspected fraud sites and meet with whistleblo...

One of the first executive orders President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration last January was titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to produce a systematic review of pediatric transgender procedures and their impact on children within 90 days. In May 2025, HHS published a more than 400-page...

Ronald Reagan first visited the Berlin Wall in 1978, during the Carter administration. While there, he reportedly told his aides: “We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” says Mark Joseph, producer of the 2024 film “Reagan.” “Reagan” is a biographical movie starring Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan and Jon Voight as KGB agent Viktor Petrovich. In this episode, Joseph shares why it took nearly 20...

It’s been almost a decade since then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes first launched his investigation with now-FBI director Kash Patel into the scandal that became known as “Russiagate.” His watershed memo back in 2018—dubbed the “Nunes memo”—detailed what he describes as grave abuses in how the FBI obtained surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (F...

The Small Business Administration (SBA) recently suspended nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers for suspected fraud in pandemic-era small business loans totaling nearly $400 million. “We worked through the holidays, from Thanksgiving up to New Year’s on about 20,000 different files, found about 8,000 instances of fraudulent loans, and moved quickly to make sure that those borrowers … could never acces...

In this episode, we sit down with J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and author of “Big Intel,” to understand the geopolitical implications of America’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. “For the first time in a very long time, the President of the United States has reasserted the Monroe Doctrine to keep foreign empires out of our hemisphe...

“I’m seeing crime, chaos, and death on the streets of America. ... The homeless are being used. And Antifa, the far left activists, they want to keep the tent encampments on America’s streets to show that capitalism isn’t working,” said Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and a senior journalism fellow at the Discovery Institute. At Turning Point USA’s AmFest conference, I...

Former New York Times reporter and now independent journalist Alex Berenson is the author of “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.” In this episode, we dive into the debate around cannabis and THC and President Donald Trump’s recent executive order directing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III...

At age 12, Chloe Cole began identifying as male and started socially transitioning. Soon after, she was put on puberty blockers. Testosterone injections followed at age 13, and she underwent a double mastectomy at 15. Shortly after the surgery, she realized that it had all been a terrible mistake: “I didn’t believe that I was a boy ... until that idea was put in my head.” When she decided to detra...

Have we reached the end of “woke”? Comedian and writer Andrew Doyle thinks yes. But he believes new forms of what he calls the “authoritarianism impulse” will follow. He’s the author of “The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.” Doyle is the creator of Titania McGrath, a fictional ultra-woke activist whose X account became hugely popular and...

“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 di...

“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...

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 calle...

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 sch...

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 recentl...

Amidst ongoing U.S. efforts to mediate a Russia–Ukraine peace and the release of a new U.S. national security strategy that has sent shockwaves through Europe, I’m sitting down with the foreign minister of Latvia, Baiba Braze, to get her unique perspective. Latvia is a small Baltic country bordering Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia. In the 1940s, the Soviets occupied Latvia and its neighbor...

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says he’d like to see the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines phased out and eventually removed from the market. Redfield led the CDC from 2018 to 2021. While an avid proponent of vaccines in general, he hopes that the fallout from the emergency-authorized mRNA vaccines will lead to a broader recognition that vaccine manufa...

“I’ve been fighting communism by teaching capitalism,” says Robert Kiyosaki, holding up a copy of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and a copy of his book “The Capitalist Manifesto.” Robert Kiyosaki became famous as the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” a book that has sold 48 million copies worldwide since its 1997 publication. Kiyosaki maintains that in today’s America, plagued by high inflation an...

“Neuroscientists who stand up and say ‘we have souls’ are few and far between,” says pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor. “But when you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don’t come from the brain.” Egnor himself started off as a materialist and atheist....

Maryanne Demasi is an independent investigative journalist based in Australia and a former medical scientist with a PhD in rheumatology from the University of Adelaide. For many years, she worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and gained wide attention for reporting on controversial medical topics, particularly the efficacy and safety of statins and psychiatric drugs. Demasi was...