In a monumental ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, local governments are now, once again, allowed to prosecute homeless people for sleeping on public property. This ruling officially closed a major loophole that led to large enclaves of homeless encampments in American cities. However, in order to explain what this ruling says, as well as what it means for America moving forward, let’s rewind the clock to 2008 and go through the full backstory. Join host Roman Balmakov on this week’s episode of Facts Matter. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 🇺🇸 Epoch Times $1 Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale

The U.S. Navy is preparing to be ready in case of a war with China within the next three years, that is, by 2027. This new strategy—called the Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy—aims for “readiness for the possibility of war with the People’s Republic of China by 2027 and enhancing the Navy’s long-term advantage” by making the Navy “more ready for sustained combat” as well as “prioritizing the People’s Republic of China as the pacing challenge.” According to this navplan, CCP leader Xi has told his forces to be ready for war by 2027, but the U.S. Navy will be “more ready.” This would be achieved through the implementation of what they’re referring to as Project 33, which focuses on preparing the Navy for that potential conflict with the CCP by 2027, while at the same time enhancing the Navy’s long-term advantages. Of course, when it comes to combating the CCP’s navy, the biggest point of note is the Chinese communist regime’s potential invasion of Taiwan. Indeed, the United States has determined that the threats from the CCP are greater than those of the Cold War. We’ll discuss these topics and more in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/3TDpg0J Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

Former Pussycat Dolls member Jessica Sutta says she experienced a severe reaction to the Moderna vaccine. Three days after her first shot in August 2021, she developed an excruciating muscle spasm in her side, she says. After chiropractic treatments, acupuncture, massage, etc. proved unhelpful, she went to the hospital. Doctors believed it was a kidney infection and did not associate it with the COVID-19 vaccine, she says. Her symptoms worsened after her second shot. She developed brain fog and her weight dropped sharply. In December 2021 she started developing pain in her entire body. In January 2022, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and was told to work out, she says. While doing a yoga pose that involved twisting her back, she started experiencing neuropathy. “Small fiber neuropathy feels like you’re on fire … It was in my ribcage and all the way down my spine.” The pain came in waves, almost like contractions. Watch the video: “When the neuropathy came, it spread through my whole body. I remember staring at the ceiling and thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is it. I’m dying,’” Sutta says. In this episode, she shares for the first time what she experienced, and why she has decided to speak out. Correction: The timeline of her symptoms has been updated for clarity and to accurately reflect when her muscle spasm first started.  FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jessica Sutta, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jessica Sutta: Thank you, Jan. Thank you so much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: It’s amazing to have you here on the American Thought Leaders set. You’re a member of the Pussycat Dolls, one of the most successful girl bands of all time, a multi-platinum winner. You’ve had a solo career. Let’s start by summarizing for me what brings you here. Ms. Sutta: I was severely injured by the Moderna vaccine, and I found that your show is the safest place to be to speak my truth, because I know there’s a lot of people suffering out there. I know it’s brave for me to do this, which I think is crazy, but now I have the strength to do it and that’s why I’m here. So, thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: I am very happy to have you here. We should start from the beginning because there might be a few people out there that aren’t familiar with your dance and singing days. Maybe just start us off, how did you even get into the whole world of music? Ms. Sutta: I’ve been a dancer since I was three. I love dance. I love performing so much. I went to a performing art school called the New World School of the Arts where I focused on dance. Later on, after a knee injury, I switched to theater and got into acting. In Miami, once I graduated from high school, I danced for the Miami Heat, and did music videos. I danced with Will Smith. And then, I was lucky enough to be on a soap opera called Ocean Ave. It was really fun. I enjoyed it so much. I loved being on set, but I'll let you in on a little secret, I’m a terrible actress. I moved to Los Angeles to act and it wasn’t really going so well for me. My first love was obviously dance. I was asked to do a public service announcement for Smokey The Bear. It was my first job in Los Angeles, and it happened to be with Robin Antin, the creator of the Pussycat Dolls, who was the choreographer for this public service announcement for Smokey the Bear. We were putting out forest fires with our top hats and tuxedo leotards in the middle of the forest. It got cut out. Mr. Jekielek: Of course. Ms. Sutta: Of course. It got cut out of the actual PSA, which was very sad. But that’s when I established a little relationship with Robin Antin. On set she said, “I really love you. I want you to do me a favor. I want you to cut your bangs and I want you to be in the Pussycat Dolls.” I was like, “What is that? Okay, sounds good.” That’s how I started in the Pussycat Dolls. It was a cast of about 50 girls. The lead was Carmen Electra. We had a lot of celebrity guests that came on, which gave it a lot of notoriety in Hollywood. It was a very cool underground show where Christina Applegate was an MC. Christina Aguilera performed, and Gwen Stefani. When Gwen Stefani came in, she actually got the attention of her label, which was Interscope Records, and they were very interested in doing something with the group. But they had no idea what to do with it because it was just so wild. It went from 20 girls to six girls, and I stayed with the six. I was part of the pop group, the Pussycat Dolls, and it absolutely changed my life forever. It was incredible. After the Pussycat Dolls, I did some solo work. I did some singing for dance music. I have five number one hits on the Billboard dance club chart. I love performing, and it’s been a really amazing, fun career. Actually, in 2019, we decided to have a reunion, which was really fun. But unfortunately, COVID stopped that, so it’s no longer happening. Mr. Jekielek: COVID really changed all sorts of things, and indeed it brought you here, ultimately. Ms. Sutta: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What happened to you? Ms. Sutta: I’m a law-abiding citizen. I want to do what’s right for the community. I wanted to stop this pandemic. I’m not anti-vax in any way. I went to protect my community, and unfortunately my reaction wasn’t what I thought it would be, and it changed my life. It’s been almost two years. It’s something that is not really allowed to be spoken about publicly because it’s so taboo. Maybe it’s rare, but it’s real. I live it every single day. My point in being here, Jan, since I’m also a fan of your show, is that I would like to speak to the vax injured and let them know that they’re not alone. This is real. Your voice matters. You are loved. It’s time to take off your tinfoil hat that has been so graciously given to you by other people, because you’re not crazy. It’s happening. It’s time to get the researchers and the doctors involved to heal us because I know we will heal. It’s important to speak out now, truly. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you for doing that. It can be really difficult, and I’m familiar with a number of these vaccine injuries. Brianne Dressen, who I’ve had on the show, is in a similar situation to you, where it’s not obvious on the surface when you look at someone that anything’s different. It might be very easy for someone to say, “It’s all in your head,” or, “There’s some other reason.” There’s a whole lot of it that is not obvious. Ms. Sutta: No. In fact, I can tell you about my journey. Three days after the Moderna vaccine, I woke up with the most excruciating muscle spasm. As an athlete and a professional dancer, it just felt so different. It felt like I'd broken my rib. I had broken my rib before on tour, so I know pain very well. I danced about three shows after breaking my rib, so I’m familiar with pain. I went and did all the therapies that I would normally do; the chiropractor, acupuncture, massage, and rest. Nothing would get this muscle spasm out. That was September 15th, 2021. I admitted myself to the hospital and they ran all these tests and all this blood work. I did a CAT scan and come to find out I was in perfect health. There was absolutely nothing wrong with me. They sent me home with antibiotics saying that there was a kidney infection. They had to wait to get the test, and they said, “Okay.” So, I just went on and tried the same therapies and nothing was working. I was getting to a point where it was really hard to breathe. It just felt like burning and just knives in my side, and it was incredibly debilitating. I couldn’t even lift my son. I had just had my son. That was really hard because just even holding him was a struggle. Our trainer mentioned to us that a friend of his in Boston had an adverse reaction to the COVID vaccine and that I need to take a look at something. So, my husband that night showed me a video of a thousand women having these horrific side effects from this vaccine. I just remember telling my husband, “Can you turn it off? I don’t want to see this. Come on, no way. This is just a muscle spasm. It’s going to go away.” Eventually it got so bad. It was December 7th, and around that time it had spread through my whole body where I was just so heavy and my eyelids and my legs and my feet and everything hurt, and I just couldn’t move. I was still about 50, 60 pounds overweight in August from post-pregnancy, and I had lost that weight by December. I was already back to underweight, which was about 115. It was crazy because I live in Hollywood and I was getting compliments. It was like, “Wow, you look great. What are you doing?” I was like, “I’m not doing anything different. I don’t know what’s going on with my body, but it feels like my body’s eating itself.” It’s even hard to talk about. Just speaking here right now it’s like, “Wow, I actually have a voice to speak out on this, as scary as it is.” I eventually found a massage therapist that was working on my back, and she finally got the muscle spasm out. Once I got the muscle spasm out, I was laying in bed. All of a sudden I started developing a tremor. The next couple nights I started getting involuntary head jerks and leg jerks. It scared me because it felt like, “Oh my God, this is not my body anymore. What is going on?” When I went to a rheumatologist and she said, “You have fibromyalgia.” I did a whole other blood test, a whole line of blood tests, and everything you can imagine. Nothing indicated any type of autoimmune disease. Nothing was abnormal. She said, “You have to work out. It’s fibromyalgia, you'll work through this.” When I would do that, it actually made things worse. I was in a yoga pose, and as I was twisting my spine, I came back and that’s when the neuropathy started. Mr. Jekielek: Very briefly, for those that might not know, what does that mean exactly? Ms. Sutta: Small fiber neuropathy feels like you’re on fire. It feels like it’s burning all throughout your ribcage. In my case, it was in my ribcage and all the way down my spine. It would come in contractions, it would come in waves, and it was so debilitating, and I just didn’t know what to do. At the time, I had switched insurances. I begged my general practitioner, “Can I please see a neurologist? I really feel like something’s very wrong.” She said, “Okay.” She finally let me see him and the first thing he said was, “When did you get the vaccine?” He goes, “I think you had an adverse reaction.” That was the first time that I acknowledged it was actually happening to me. Mr. Jekielek: When you saw that video earlier of the many, many women that were having the tremors and the adverse reactions, I’m sorry to put you through that. Ms. Sutta: That’s okay. Mr. Jekielek: But for some reason you just weren’t ready to accept that this could be a possibility. Even though you had mentioned earlier that you had taken the vaccine and they were ignoring that. In the back of your mind, you knew. I am just trying to chart your thinking on this. Ms. Sutta: I didn’t want it to be real, especially because I was just trying to do the right thing. I couldn’t imagine that this could ever happen. This wasn’t something that was warned about. I didn’t get a heads-up that this could be a reaction, an autoimmune response. To this day, I still get gaslit to think that it’s not real. Mr. Jekielek: Having spoken to many people who have been injured, this is a very common situation. There was even this video that went around of a woman who had very severe tremors. She wanted to show people this is what can happen, but nevermind people not believing it, people were making fun of it. This is a reality in our society today. What is your reaction to that? Ms. Sutta: It’s so painful. But you know what? I’ve been gaslit a lot in my life, so I studied how to navigate through it. As hard as it is when people are gaslighting you and just trying to make it seem like what’s happening is not happening, you have to go back to your truth and know exactly how you feel. With my fellow vax injured friends, their experiences are very real, and I’ve seen it firsthand. As to people who have not seen that, they don’t have friends that have myocarditis from this. They don’t have friends that have similar symptoms like I do. When I went to the hospital, when the neuropathy came and spread through my whole body, I remember staring at the ceiling and thinking, “Oh my God, this is it. I’m dying. I’m dying. This is it. I have everything I’ve ever wanted in my entire life, and it’s almost over.” I didn’t know. I went to the hospital for the second time, and that was May 3rd. Talk about being gaslit, that was probably one of the worst experiences of my life. Unless my arm is falling off, I won’t step foot in another hospital again. They didn’t want to believe it, even though I had been diagnosed by the neurologist from that hospital. Somehow, through my therapies and all of that, I had developed a lesion on my spine, on my C5-C6. They were like, “This is what we think. You have symptoms of MS [Multiple Sclerosis], but you don’t have MS, so that’s good.” I was like, “I don’t know if that’s good, at least you can treat MS. What do you do with me here?” They said, “In three months you‘ll be fine, and this is just going to leave your body. Just don’t get the booster. You’ll be okay.” It’s been two years, so it’s not getting any better. If anything, it’s getting progressively worse. That’s when I started really searching for answers and doing as much research as I possibly could and opening my mind and making my mind more broad in the sense of learning about everything and listening to everything everyone has to say. I want to hear it all. I want to hear the scientists. I was really drawn to Dr. Robert Malone. I believe he’s a hero. I’m so grateful for that man. I just did a lot of research and then I came across React19. I saw Brianne Dressen speak in Congress talking about her experience and it was so similar to mine. But what scared me the most was that she was in a wheelchair. As a dancer and as a new mom, that’s terrifying. I’m a fighter and I’m not going to get there, hopefully not. But yes, she gave me a lot of strength without even knowing it. That’s when I reached out to React19 on Instagram and I said, “Thank you so much for the work you’re doing. I’m actually vax injured. I’m terrified to speak out, but God bless you and God bless you guys being on the front line. I know that you’re getting so much hate, but thank you, because it means so much. You’re saving me. You’re saving me because I feel like I’m going crazy.” Mr. Jekielek: In those early days there was a lot of pressure to get vaccinated. There were all these influencers saying this is what you need to do. You had doctors saying things like what you just described, without really understanding the cost-benefit analysis, which I think every doctor should. You mentioned you wanted to do the right thing. There was this sense that this was the right thing to do for the community. Ms. Sutta: Right. Mr. Jekielek: But did you ever feel pressure? Ms. Sutta: Oh yes. I felt a ton of pressure from the media and people in the industry speaking out and bullying people and saying, “You’re a bad person if you don’t get this vaccine, I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to listen to your music.” Looking back, it was so incredibly irresponsible for them to do that. Especially some of them that I know personally, and that know about my condition. They just didn’t want to believe me. But me staying silent, I believe it is irresponsible for me to do so. That’s why I was like, “Okay, eventually when I feel better, I’m going to speak out.” When I saw your interview with Bri, and I really am a fan of your show, I was like, “Yes, I want to do it with Jan. I think Jan’s the best one to do this.” Thank you for having me, because I don’t want to talk to anyone else. Mr. Jekielek: I’m glad to have you here. Ms. Sutta: Yes, thank you. Mr. Jekielek: What does it mean for you in your career to go public like you are today? Ms. Sutta: It’s probably one of the worst things I could ever do. It’s still very frowned upon in the industry. People get treated so poorly for speaking their truth. But here’s the thing, I’m not angry. I’m definitely sad when I think about it, but I’m not angry. I’m not pointing any fingers. What’s done is done. It is what it is. I live a solution-based life now. I have a son. I want to have another baby eventually if I can. It’s just time to heal the community. I’m okay with the repercussions that come along with it, because I’m coming from my heart. I’m not angry, not anymore at least. Mr. Jekielek: I remember when we were talking offline that you mentioned to me that early on, while you were pregnant, you even had a doctor recommend that you take the vaccine during pregnancy, but something told you not to do that. Please tell me about this. Ms. Sutta: I was 32 weeks pregnant and she had mentioned that she was giving her patients the COVID vaccine and that it was fine and the babies are healthy and they’re actually immune to COVID when they come to the world. She said, “It’s actually a very good thing. Next time you come, let’s do it.” I loved my doctor, of course. I was like, “Okay, let me think about it.” I got home and I told my husband and my husband was like, “No, no, no. You didn’t want to do it before,” because I didn’t. I truly was apprehensive, because I was already scared during pregnancy. It was a stressful time for me, because I just wanted to protect my baby so much. I was pregnant during a pandemic. I was so paranoid and just stayed in my bubble and just stayed away from people as much as I could. I told him, “Yes, you know what? You’re right.” I was easily influenced back then because I just wanted to do the right thing. But looking back, I don’t talk to her anymore. I have a lot of resentment about that situation because I truly could have lost my son with the reaction that I had. That is absolutely a devastating thought for me. Mr. Jekielek: Censorship is really strong. This is what the Twitter Files revealed. But the other thing that they revealed is how you can craft the illusion of consensus, when social media, media, government, and all these different entities, ostensibly independent, are actually all united around the same talking points. Ms. Sutta: That little box on Instagram says, “For the facts on COVID go here,” that really started hurting me. I would start trying to speak out and I would post funny things from Russel Brand because he’s really funny with this whole thing, and I would get this box. “For the real truth go here.” And then, I posted again. It just kept on going. The censorship was just unbelievable. They’ve had a funny way of just making it one narrative and everyone just following through. That is why it’s so hard for people to wrap their head around this, because social media is a big muscle. It’s a big way of mind control. Thank God for Elon Musk. Thank God for him unveiling all of the things that were hidden, all the censorship and all the things that I needed to read. I needed to see the protocols that these doctors were giving to people that had adverse reactions with MS symptoms. There were all these protocols and things I just didn’t have access to. It just became a very isolating world where I was like, “Okay, I guess I’m just dying. This is just in my head, and I just got to suck it up and take Gabapentin,” because that’s what they give you. That was the thing when I went to the hospital, they gave me so much medicine and I’m in recovery. It’s a hard thing. A lot of the medications that they gave me that didn’t help were the most mind-altering drugs, and they need to have black box warning labels on them. I also think that the Moderna vaccine should also have a black box warning label. Mr. Jekielek: Are you able to dance now? Ms. Sutta: My friend actually introduced me to this documentary called, “Get to the Root.” It’s about root canals and how infections could cause autoimmune problems, because there will be infections underneath the old root canal, the post and the tooth, that regular x-ray couldn’t pick up, and you would have to get a CAT scan. I got myself to the best biodentist and I had a tooth removed. About six days later, after having it removed, I felt completely normal and I had all my energy back. I could put thoughts together. It was incredible. That’s when I started dancing ballet again. It was a good two months where I had an amazing time. I had my ballet teacher come to the house and I was strength training that way. It was such a spiritual experience for me, especially as an adult doing ballet, because when I was younger I just said, “Ugh!” As an adult it was just so wonderful, and it just felt like I was connecting to my Archangels. And then, unfortunately, the neuropathy, the burning through my ribcage, came back worse than ever. And yes, I had to stop doing ballet. Mr. Jekielek: What does your root canal abscess have to do with your vaccine injury? I’m not super clear on this. Ms. Sutta: From my experience, it just feels like my body is in full attack mode. My immune system just fights everything. Then I stumbled across that documentary, “Get to the Root.” In that documentary, they talk about how some infections could be hidden in old work, like a root canal or fillings that are not picked up by just a 2D X-ray. They need a CAT scan. My body could be trying to fight what’s going on in my teeth, but just can’t get to it, leaving my body in an autoimmune response. I was willing to try anything. I was like, “Just take them all out.” It actually worked for about two months and then it came back. Unfortunately, I guess that wasn’t the root cause. I’m glad the infection’s out and I’m glad I was introduced to biodentistry. Maybe it will alleviate some problems for other people. It did for me. But unfortunately, other things are causing the neuropathy. Mr. Jekielek: Do you know anyone else in the industry that is experiencing the same things you are? Ms. Sutta: Oh, yes. Mr. Jekielek: Similar things? Ms. Sutta: I know of a lot of people. Mr. Jekielek: You know of a lot of people? Ms. Sutta: A lot of people. Actually, Bethenny Frankel, I don’t know her personally, but she just was on Page Six talking about that she has an autoimmune response and she’s very angry. I hope I can reach out to her and bring her to React19 so she can get the help she needs. But it’s very scary because that was one of the reasons I wanted to speak out. A lot of these people are a lot bigger than me, and I don’t even consider myself a celebrity. But I was angered by the fact that they’re not speaking out. I’m like, “Why aren’t they speaking out?” They want to work. They have endorsement deals. I’m like, “Well, I don’t have an endorsement deal, so I guess I should just go and speak.” Because it’s time to heal. That’s it. Mr. Jekielek: What kind of numbers are we talking about that you are aware of? Ms. Sutta: Personally, I know about 10 people, which is a lot. But in the industry, it’s just categorized as some weird neurological disorder. Mr. Jekielek: It just happens to be happening at much higher frequency than ever before? Ms. Sutta: People are finally coming out of the gaslight and they’re seeing the truth and thinking for themselves and realizing, “Oh my God, this is a possibility.” With a lot of people in the industry, I gave them my word, and I would never say anything about them. But I hope that this interview will inspire them to come out, because it could really change lives and even save lives. I know it’s scary. It’s a lot more than people think. A lot of people don’t talk about it at all. It’s that taboo thing to even speak about, especially in Hollywood. A lot of people in the industry who don’t believe me, they kind of mess with me in a sense and say, “Well, I just got my booster, I just did this and I’m fine,” which I think is so dangerous. My very, very close friend’s aunt’s father just recently died. Oh god, it makes me so sick and sad. I know that everyone’s body is their body and everyone has the choice. But I would recommend maybe halting the vax just to reconfigure. Because one death is enough, one child on the football field is enough. I just read that the FDA had pulled some eye drops because they killed one person. For just one person, it was pulled. Why is it different with this? Why is it so different with this, with all these young, beautiful kids and athletes in superb health? Why isn’t it completely pulled off this shelf immediately? It’s so confusing to me. Maybe they need to tell us the truth of what this really is. I’ve had to stop a lot of mainstream media, especially like KTLA. There was the issue about the military and that they want to stop the mandated vaccines for our military. I was like, “Oh, thank God.” Then, the reporter says, “Can you believe they still think it’s not safe or effective,” as I’m feeling the small fiber neuropathy throughout my whole body. I just looked at my husband and I was like, “Shut it off. I can’t watch this show anymore.” That hit me really hard, because I’m a big supporter of the troops. I performed in Afghanistan and Jordan at the bases there. They have my heart. For any of our soldiers that would go through this, that are protecting our country, it’s vital that they do not get the vax. It is so imperative that we protect our military who are protecting our country and keeping freedom alive. Mr. Jekielek: What has been the impact of this injury on your family’s life? Ms. Sutta: Thank you for asking that. It’s been really hard for my husband because he doesn’t want to see me suffer. He’s watched this whole journey. He’s been my champion. He’s the one that steered me into knowing exactly what it is. It’s a lot for the families that have to deal with having family members that are suffering like this. I want to speak out on that and say how important and vital they are, and how grateful I am to my husband because it is not easy. He asked me the other day, because he’s been staying strong, “How are you doing? How are you doing?” Finally in tears the other day he’s like, “I want to take this away from you, babe. I just don’t want to see you suffering.” I said, “Honey, I’m just glad it was me and not you or our son.” I was like, “I don’t want to inflict this on anyone that I love. I’m glad that it’s me, not you.” I know that’s hard for him, but I know I’m going to get through this. To my fellow injured, I will say this with confidence, “We will heal. I pray for us every single day, we will heal.” Mr. Jekielek: There’s two things that come to my mind when I hear you speaking. On the one hand, there might be people who have been injured that are watching this, and they may get some inspiration. There’s also inner strength that you need to find to deal with being, as you call it, gas lit. What would you say to people that are in this situation? Ms. Sutta: I just want to say first of all, your voice matters, and you are worthy of your feelings. It’s an opportunity to really meet who you truly are inside. I know there’s a lot of people that have taken their life over this, and I understand that. That’s not an option for me. I’m a mom. I was just always in fear that this was just going to kill me. Things have gotten better, and I'll have a week that’s good. Right now I’m in pretty bad pain. But what I would say to them is stay strong. I would say go to React19. Join the community. There are all these beautiful protocols that they are finding, all these new tests, all these things that will help us heal. You will be heard and you will be seen and you'll be loved and accepted. They’ve just been so phenomenal. All the vax injured doctors that are working with React19 have taken me under their wing and are helping me get into the neurologist, because it’s very difficult. Doctors are very, very busy right now. Appointments take about six months to get, but they’re getting me into doctors that are not even seeing new clients, and they’re getting me in to get me well. They actually care. They hear me. Bri Dressen, she’s my hero. She has truly been a beacon of delight for me and for so many other people that I know. I’m just so grateful for warriors like her who paved the way for us to make us feel seen and heard and loved. She takes time out of the day when I’m just not feeling good. She explains to me what’s going on, because no doctors really explained anything to me. The whole community has been a godsend, because we can speak to each other with such a knowingness and there’s no biased confusion or any of that. My voice matters and it hasn’t mattered for so long. It’s been stifled for so long, and I’ve had so much shame with this. Like, “Oh my God, why is this happening to me?” But maybe it happened to me for a reason, and if I can just give any inspiration and hope to your viewers, that would mean the world to me. Mr. Jekielek: That’s beautiful. Ms. Sutta: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Jessica Sutta, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Sutta: Thank you, Jan. Thank you so much. I just want to commend you for Epoch and your show, for true journalism. We need this in our world so badly, and I’m so grateful for all of you, and this is coming from all the truth seekers in the world. We love you guys. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you. Ms. Sutta: You’re welcome. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Jessica Sutta and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. Moderna did not immediately respond to our request for comment. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

The days of cheap prices from Chinese e-commerce companies are likely coming to an end. The White House is moving to close a trade loophole being used by Chinese online marketplaces like Shein and Temu, which will eliminate the ability of these companies to sell at significantly reduced prices. We’ll discuss in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/3MSybHQ Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

“Now you have nudge units embedded in governments or advising governments all around the world. And what they’re really trying to do is change the will of the people from the top down. Now, there’s no democratic mandate for this. So, governments are sneakily using pre-conscious subliminal and covert techniques to change the way we behave, to make us model citizens. And maybe it’s supposedly in our best interests, but we haven’t been consulted upon it.” In this episode, I sit down with Laura Dodsworth, one of the first journalists to expose COVID-era government manipulation and how “nudge units” used fear to change behavior. “I feel it and I think I know a lot of people do—this feeling of something quite dark brewing, socially and politically. There’s a feeling of a net tightening and of truth being squashed, of more surveillance, more censorship, institutions captured by woke ideology,” says Ms. Dodsworth. We discuss the new book she co-authored: “Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It.” “Your mind is wonderous. You do deserve to be sovereign of it. And you can be in charge of your own decision-making capability. You’re not on a sliding scale with a piece of machinery at all,” says Ms. Dodsworth. What is the real threat of AI? Of social media? Of pornography? Of net-zero? Watch the video: “One study in 2007 estimated that the human brain receives the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of information every day. So, that’s the first thing. You’re overwhelmed with information. And the human brain simply can’t cope with it all. So, what you do is you depend upon shortcuts—cognitive biases to make sense of the world,” says Ms. Dodsworth. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Laura Dodsworth, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Laura Dodsworth: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Laura, some years ago you exposed these nudge units in the UK government and revealed how they were seeding fear into the populace in order to affect behavioral change. You were ahead of your time. Since then we have learned this has been happening on a mass scale across the legacy media, and we are being bombarded by propaganda daily. Propaganda and censorship are two sides of the same coin. Now, you’ve written a book that explains how to inoculate yourself from all of this in a whole myriad of ways. Please tell us about your book, “Free Your Mind.” Ms. Dodsworth: “Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It,” is very much my follow-up to my last book, “A State of Fear.” I’ve co-written this book with Patrick Fagan, a fabulous psychologist and behavioral scientist. The idea behind the book is that we do live in quite a unique time where we are bombarded with information and propaganda. It will sound dramatic for people to hear it this way, but there’s a war on for your mind. Your brain is a battlefield. One study in 2007 estimated that the brain receives the equivalent of 174 newspapers-worth of information every day. That’s the first thing—you’re overwhelmed with information. The human brain simply can’t cope with it all. Therefore, you depend upon shortcuts like cognitive biases to make sense of the world. We don’t really live in a democracy in the same way that we used to. Democracy is about enacting the will of the people. But now you have nudge units advising governments all around the world. They are trying to change the will of the people from the top down. There is no democratic mandate for this, so governments are sneakily using preconscious subliminal and covert techniques to change the way we behave in order to make us model citizens. Supposedly it’s in our best interest, but we haven’t been consulted about this. This is a confluence of sophisticated psychology, nudging, and behavioral insights, combined with AI and social media platforms and Big Tech. The world is changing, and we cannot begin to understand the ramifications of all of this. There are thousands of books that teach people how to use propaganda, nudging, persuasion, and advertising. Until now, no one has written a book that is a defense against these dark arts, and that teaches people how to identify and resist the manipulation. That’s what “Free Your Mind” is all about. Not everybody will want to resist the manipulation. Not everyone will agree that they are under the spell of so much manipulation. It takes quite a lot of humility to admit this has happened. When I wrote my first book, “A State of Fear,” for me it was such an epiphany to understand that governments could weaponise our emotion and our fear against us, and put us into a state of fear. My book, “Free Your Mind,” looks at how they change all the normal rhythms and rituals of life to make us follow the rules. Supposedly, it’s in our best interest, but life changed in a way that we never could have imagined. I realized that I had lost all of these essential freedoms. But there was one domain that I could still have freedom over if I wanted to, and that was my mind. That set me on this path of trying to understand how we reclaim sovereignty of the mind. Mr. Jekielek: Often there are nudges, but sometimes, there are extremely heavy-handed attempts. Just look at Google Gemini where there was so much ideology embedded in the system. It’s astonishing how heavy-handed that manipulation was in this case. Ms. Dodsworth: We’re so lucky to have seen that. It’s one of those moments when the curtain was drawn back. Do you remember all the furor in the media not that long ago when Big Tech and AI leaders and politicians were telling us that AI could develop sentience, write religious tomes, rule the world, and presented a threat to humanity that was at the level of nuclear weapons? It was an extinction-level threat. I didn’t agree with any of that. I can tell you what the real threat is. In a nutshell, it’s that AI can be sedimented with psychology and nudging. It’s a brainwasher’s dream, frankly. But AI doesn’t have sentience. It doesn’t really generate language. It’s riding on the wave of sentience. It’s riding on the coattails of humanity’s achievements. You can’t forget that it’s humans that are coding it. People like to think they are above ideological influence, that they can’t be manipulated, that they are not brainwashed, and that they are not brainwashers. But what we’ve seen with Google is the pure, unadulterated, ideological bias of the programmers. Mr. Jekielek: They want to change the way we perceive the world, and they want to change the way we think about the world. Over the last five to seven years, every power structure in our Western democracies is full of people that share this ideology, or are ready to be on board with it as a way to success. Ms. Dodsworth: You are absolutely right. It is everywhere, and so many of us can sense this. This might even sound a little bit dramatic, but I can feel it. I know many people have this feeling of something quite dark brewing socially and politically. There’s a feeling of a net tightening, truth being squashed, more surveillance, more censorship, and institutions being captured by woke ideology. I don’t have the answer as to what is causing this. I don’t really know. It’s complex and it’s multifactorial, but we can feel it. But we can see the foot soldiers who are pushing this. They are the technocrats, the behavioral scientists, and the people that are trying to change how we think. They want to get into your brain and change how you think. They want you to imagine the world in the same way they do. Google AI is a fantastic example, but it’s absolutely everywhere. It was having to wear masks with no decent underlying scientific evidence that it would stop transmission of a virus. They loved the masks because they were signals of danger. There was danger in the air. They made us into walking billboards for danger. There is the fact that we were compliant, and we were conformists. They didn’t like the odd man out. We also see it with the climate change narrative and this constant push that we must change our behavior to avert some catastrophe. They try to take us down a path that they want us to go down. They have a desire to capture your brain and make you think the right way as a woke citizen of this new, unpleasant, dystopian world. This is what we all need to fight against. Mr. Jekielek: There are different personality traits in our society. Some people believe that others should think as they do, that they think the right way and that others should think as they do. But you don’t want to give those people the levers of power. Before we get into how to inoculate ourselves, I want to talk about AI. Ms. Dodsworth: TV changed the world. The internet changed the world. AI is going to be another game changer. Aldous Huxley said in, “Brave New World Revisited” that technology had disadvantaged the little man in favor of the big man. He wrote that even before the internet, and that’s a really good point. There’s something called the picture superiority effect, which means that pictures affect us more emotionally. They are more persuasive than text. If you want to consume information rationally and make the most wise decision for yourself, it’s best to get in writing. Reading a newspaper without pictures would be the ideal way to not be manipulated when you consume the news. But of course, we’re not doing that. We’re scrolling through video very quickly. If you imagine a world where we are wearing Apple Vision Pro or you can create video just from text, the options for where this could go could be almost endless. What I find concerning is the exact kind of safety mechanisms they want to put in. These Big Tech platforms and social media and this new technology know a lot about you. We stomp around with very heavy digital footprints. One study that’s about a decade old actually showed that from just 200 likes, Facebook knew you better than anyone except your spouse. Facebook could detect your sexuality. You can imagine a world where Facebook would know that a young teenager is gay before the teenager knows they’re gay, but actually, that’s pretty old. Now, you have a completely personalized digital footprint. There’s no such thing as a neutral platform online, it’s increasingly personalized towards us. Not only does it know you, it can predict what you will do, and it can shape your behavior. You can imagine a world where we’re all in separate little, separate digital pictorial worlds that are awash with symbolism, affecting how we see the world, and how we interact with it. It’s not even the real world. That’s really the threat posed by AI, not this nebulous idea that it’s going to develop sentience. Mr. Jekielek: A case in point is this work that Dr. Robert Epstein has done showing that based on just simply altering the order of the results in Google around, he created experiments where he was able to demonstrate that for people who are undecided on who they’re going to vote for in a particular set up, that you can actually manipulate them to pick somebody with very high probability without them being aware of the fact that they’ve been manipulated in the first place, simply by reordering the search results. This is something that happens through something called ephemeral experiences, meaning that no one ever knows what you saw. You don’t even know what you saw actually because you go to your next search and you’ve already been effectively programmed if you were someone who was undecided on a topic. It’s that easy, never mind generative video that has subtle subliminal messages embedded within according to the biases or ideological views of the creator. Ms. Dodsworth: Yes, it happens in a more blunt way already. For instance, if I search for knives on Google, I'll probably get some straightforward results about Swiss Army knives for whittling or kitchen knives. But if I was black living in a city and listened to drill music, it’s quite conceivable that I would be getting something about reducing knife crime. This kind of thing already happens, operated by government agencies. Again, it’s supposedly in our best interests, but it’s not well understood. It could be that if you see a video about knife crime, it might make you more likely to buy a knife and commit a crime with it. Just like there are studies that show that if you put up no smoking signs, you might be more likely to smoke because it reminds you about your life. It reminds you about your cravings. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’m reminded of the Delhi cobra effect. Do you know about this, Jan? Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about it. Ms. Dodsworth: It’s an old example of nudging. Back during the British Raj in India, the British authorities wanted to deal with the appalling number of cobras. They incentivised the citizens to bring in a dead cobra in return for money. To their delight, this scheme worked really well. The citizens were bringing in piles of dead cobras and being rewarded handsomely for it. It turned out that the locals had been breeding cobras to exchange for the money. When the scheme ended, what happened was loads more cobras were released into the wild. All of these schemes that are put in place already, which are quite blunt, may be leading to unintended consequences. But it is going to become a lot more sophisticated. The thing about this confluence of AI with picture superiority effect, with search results, and with social media, is that you'll be living in an increasingly personalized digital world that can be scaled up to reach the whole world like never before. The statistics say that 83 percent of the world owns a smartphone now, and it can be sedimented with totally unique nudging directed at you, personally. When they were trying to persuade everyone to get the Covid-19 vaccine during the pandemic, that started with nudges. You can learn a lot about the government’s intentions from its gentle nudges. It’s the first tool in a deployment of policies that go from a shove to a cattle prod. In this country, we were given stickers for getting the Covid-19 vaccine in order to show your social conformity. It was your social proof that you were part of one big group of people that had gotten a vaccine, as evidenced by your sticker. Then there were some other enticing incentives, such as raffle tickets or shopping vouchers for people that got the vaccine. There were some really weird incentives around the world, such as marijuana for vaccines in Washington State and lap dances and even brothel trips for vaccines in Austria. It got crazy. There were college education raffles in the States. Then it went through to mandates. Imagine a world where your Google search results and everything you see on social media or some kind of metaverse-like world around you is shaped exactly to your particular reasons for vaccine hesitancy. Then it’s not a nudge anymore. A nudge should be a choice that you’re able to make yourself. It’s supposed to be choice architecture. You can choose one thing or another thing. But you won’t really be aware that it’s a choice when what is put in front of you is totally unique to you and based upon your psychological profile. Mr. Jekielek: One of your chapters contains a beautiful phrase, “Social media distancing is required here.” Ms. Dodsworth: Absolutely right. We all know we could benefit from less social media time. There is a study that says, on average, people think they pick up their phone 25 times a day, but it’s actually up to 80 or 90 times a day. I really had to confront myself when writing this book on being quite addicted to social media. I put myself into an experiment where I went into a convent for 24 hours for a digital detox. I'll confess something to you. It was actually supposed to be for two days, but I decided that I couldn’t face it. I made it for only one day, which says a lot. That did allow me to step back just that one day, and it affected my social media consumption for another week or two. But then I went back to my normal habits. We do have a chapter called Social Media Distancing. It spells out an obvious message that you can be manipulated on social media. It’s designed to be sticky and addictive. There are bots and trolls and it runs on emotion. You can receive personalized messaging to make you buy stuff. The answer for a lot of people would just be to use it more mindfully rather than not use it at all. But there are all kinds of ways you can hack yourself. While other people can nudge us, we can also nudge ourselves. It’s a technique that psychologists call pre-boosting. You can hack your phone by setting screen time limits or turning your notifications off. You can make your phone grayscale which makes it a lot less enticing. There are lots of things you can do to manage your own social media use as well. Mr. Jekielek: But that also takes the will to do it, because these things are inherently addictive. They are manipulating people, thinking that is the perfectly moral, reasonable thing to do. Then it becomes an arms race of manipulation. Ms. Dodsworth: You’re absolutely right. I don’t know how long this has been going on. I really became aware of it during Covid. Many people thought the fear mongering and nudging and propaganda was the right thing to do, because otherwise people would be too irresponsible and stupid. They don’t believe in the wisdom of crowds. They don’t trust the individual to make the right decision for themselves or society. The problem is that is exactly how the nudgers think. David Halpern is the head of the Behavioral Insights team, colloquially known as the Nudge Unit. He was interviewed several months ago at the Covid-19 inquiry about his part in the Covid-19 pandemic. He said that the use of fear was justified if people’s brains were wrongly calibrated. That really struck me because I thought, “What an interesting word to use. How interesting to talk about calibrating a brain.” We don’t normally talk about calibrating people. We talk about calibrating machinery. It’s as though people are little units to be shuffled around on a board. I like to joke that we don’t live in the age of misinformation. We live in the age of myth information. These people are totally open, shameless, and brazen about this nudging and how it’s supposed to be good for us. There is no democratic mandate for this. When all this nudging started, when it became embedded into governments, the behavioral scientists themselves actually talked about the legitimacy of the government influencing the public in this way. Also, these smart people are just as susceptible to brainwashing as anybody else. In fact, there are some studies that show that smart people are even more susceptible to brainwashing. I know that everybody clever watching this program will be thinking, “No, not me. I’m too intelligent to fall for any sort of brainwashing technique.” But it’s not true. It’s just that smart people are better at justifying it. They have their motivated reasoning. If you are smart, you can intellectually justify an emotional position that you hold. There’s also the cultural mediation hypothesis. Smart people are very good at working out what norms and ideologies and behaviors they should adopt in order to fall in with the right crowd and do better in life. This is like Rob Henderson’s theory of luxury beliefs. We used to have material objects to indicate our social status, but it has increasingly become about the beliefs we hold, and they can be pure luxuries. That’s why you get an elite class in metropolitan cities who believe such mad things as men can be women or that you can identify as a cat. These are not the preoccupations of the developing global world. Smart people are very good at taking on crazy ideas and justifying them because they have the brains to do it. Mr. Jekielek: Recently, we had the second anniversary of the truckers’ convoy in Canada. Thankfully, the Canadian High Court officially ruled that shutting down the protest through invoking the Emergencies Act was an unconstitutional act. However, the Canadian leaders really believed that there were dangerous people coming to Ottawa to wage an insurrection because a compliant and funded media network pushed this narrative. In effect, the elite class can decide to brainwash itself into believing something this crazy. Is this how societies collapse? Ms. Dodsworth: Yes, you make a good point. We don’t exactly know what the politicians in Canada thought about the truck convoy. But you do get these thought frameworks within a group that can perpetuate, and it can become like a sick dog eating its own tail. What you say makes a lot of sense to me. For instance, it would be almost impossible not to see the example of climate change, because that is also something being constantly pushed down our throats. I’ve seen one review of our book where the reviewer complained that we don’t seem to be on board with the climate agenda. But to anybody like that, I would say, “You may approve of the means justifying the end, if you believe the end is a climate catastrophe.” But we actually need to learn what their means look like, so we can spot them in any situation. Last summer, quite a few techniques really came to my attention when our book came out. We had a lot of news stories in the UK about terrifying temperatures. That is using a technique called salience. The news would say that it’s going to reach 48 degrees. They would talk about a predicted temperature. Now, we never reached the predicted temperatures, but that doesn’t matter because they put that one big shocking number in your head. Once it’s there, it’s there, so that uses salience. They used the picture superiority effect. There were so many pictures and videos of cars on fire or scrubland on fire. With these headlines and the news reports, the news readers would link it to climate change, but no one could prove it was linked to climate change. Later on, if you remember, there were stories about arsonists being involved in these fires. We know that cars don’t really explode on highways because of climate change. But by then, it’s too late. People have seen the video and the photos and that link has been made in their minds. Modeling is being used more and more with climate, just like it was used with Covid, and it’s also being used with public health. We heard about the number of heat-related deaths. When I first heard this, I thought, “This is astonishing. How has somebody worked out how many people have died from heat all around Europe and reported it back in real time when they don’t even have the coroner’s reports yet?” I looked into this and it was modeling, so basically, it’s made up. You might as well chuck chicken entrails on the ground. Mr. Jekielek: This is outrageous. Ms. Dodsworth: Yes, it really was incredible. With the heat modeling, they are trying to create this salient effect. You just get this high temperature posted. How many people look at the report that’s behind the headline and then work out that it is modeling, and how this modeling actually works? I did it because I’m interested, but a lot of people will take it at face value. The truth is many more people die in the winter from cold than die in the summer from heat. Otherwise, nobody would live around the equator or in the south. It just doesn’t make any sense at all. Then it goes even further than that. It becomes embedded into drama and children’s programming, not just the news, not just weather reports, and not just public health announcements. In our public health announcements, we now have color-coded warnings for the weather. You can have an amber alert or a red alert which is supposed to be signaling danger. Something that we just would have thought of as quite normal before, like a very hot day or a storm, gets a color-coded alert. That is to sacralise the idea of danger around perfectly normal things like weather. There was a report produced a couple of years ago by the Nudge Unit, the Behavioural Insights team, and Sky broadcasting, that talked about how to use the power of TV in order to nudge people towards net zero behavior. Quite shamelessly, it talked about using news, drama, documentaries, children’s shows—the whole gamut of TV programming. They were so brazen they would talk about putting in characters or storylines that would encourage people to have electric vehicles or do recycling. It talked about using children’s programming in order to influence children, but also to create a multi-generational spillover into the family. It talked about using weather reports to explain the impacts of climate change catastrophe. There is a very concerted top-down effort to program us into being open about environmental issues and anxious about climate change. Because you would have to be fearful and anxious in order to adopt net zero behavior, which is going to involve not having your heating on in the winter, not having cars, not buying many clothes, and changing how you eat. It’s always our behavior that’s the problem. Even if you go along with the man-made climate change theory, it’s never about China or India. It’s about our behavior right here that is supposed to change. The citizens become the policy problem that requires a solution. That solution involves manipulating us and nudging us into behaving differently. Mr. Jekielek: The corollary means dramatically lowering your standard of living. Most people are not going to be on board if you were to tell them this is the plan. Ms. Dodsworth: Of course not. It involves donning a number of hair shirts. But by the time you’re living in that world you might be grateful for the hair shirts, because you’re going to be pretty cold. You won’t be able to afford your heating in the winter. I would be really careful about any movement that has a zero in it. I just hear the zero now and I shiver. We just had zero-Covid, and now it’s net zero. To be honest, it reminds me of Pol Pot’s Year Zero. Beware of the zero. What is a zero? A zero is nothing. It’s a big gaping hole. It’s an eternal nothingness. It’s a moral flatlining. Never aim for a zero. There isn’t anything necessarily deliberate about this. I don’t think that the people that aimed for zero-Covid and net zero have got some dastardly zero plan going on. It’s more symbolic of something quite nihilistic. Both zero-Covid and net zero were about a constriction of humans down to a nothingness. You know, to achieve zero-Covid, you had to be cut off from the world into your own hermit kingdom. Never leave your house and never see anyone’s face. There was something so miserly and anti-human about it. It involves rewinding to a pre-industrial era where we live in mud huts and don’t have any heating. They don’t want the things that have saved us in the past like good diets, heating, and lots of farming. They want us to rewind and live like serfs. These are such unpleasant, miserly visions of the world. I don’t think there’s anything deliberate about it, but the symbolism comes through because these people have this really miserly view of humanity. Mr. Jekielek: You talk about dataism as a kind of quasi-religion. I recently spoke with Mihai Nadin, who views our current predicament as a kind of machine theology. We created the machines and then we started imagining ourselves as the machines. Ms. Dodsworth: Yes. Dataism is a philosophical, almost religious movement in this pivotal time of entering into the fourth industrial revolution. It’s where the biological and the physical fuse with the technological. The philosopher Yuval Harari writes about this and sees human beings as nothing more than organic algorithms. We are just thought processes. It’s a very bleak and dismal way of viewing people as just a collection of decision-making processes and fleshy algorithms. It’s not a view of the world that I share. I don’t know what they see coming to pass. But it’s interesting trying to understand these people who advise the World Economic Forum or other supranational bodies or governments. These people have embedded themselves in public health and science. If you see human beings as organic algorithms and you can’t really argue for human agency or the existence of a human soul, that is the complete opposite of everything I believe. It’s the complete opposite of a book like, “Free Your Mind,” which is all about trusting the individual and saying that your mind is actually unique and wondrous. I believe you have a soul. You may not believe you have a soul, but that’s neither here nor there, really. But your mind is wondrous and sovereign. You can be in charge of your own decision-making capability. You’re not on a sliding scale with a piece of machinery at all. Mr. Jekielek: In the book, there’s a chapter, Don’t Be a Slave to Sex. One of the elephants in the room around our social disruption today is this ubiquitous, on-demand availability of extreme, hardcore pornography. Ms. Dodsworth: You’re the only person to ask me about the chapter, Don’t Be a Slave to Sex. Patrick and I thought we would get a lot of questions about this chapter, because it’s one of the more controversial ones. People have not been brave enough to bring it up, so well done. You get the prize. Mr. Jekielek: It’s not that people don’t want to study it. I’ve only covered it maybe two or three times out of almost a thousand interviews on American Thought Leaders, because it seems like people aren’t interested in hearing about it. But I feel like we need to discuss it. Ms. Dodsworth: If I’m being really honest, I believe that pornography has influenced quite a lot of people. My first three books, a trilogy about the body, plus my documentary, “100 Vaginas,” were about countering the pernicious effects of pornography. It’s something I had covered before. Patrick and I really debated whether this chapter should go in the book. Initially, he was very keen on it. I said, “We can’t do it. It’s actually a whole book to talk about sex and manipulation. It’s just so big. How are we going to get it all into one chapter?” But he persuaded me to do it. We really wrote this chapter very closely together, because it was very important that a man and a woman bring equal parts into it. Pornography is part of it, but it’s not the only part. The first thing we should start with is that rape is a weapon of war and it always has been. The other thing I want to say is there’s nothing wrong with sex. You’re not interviewing some kind of weird prude here who’s not sex positive or whatever they say. Sex is brilliant. I love sex. Sex is wonderful. It’s very pleasurable and very powerful. Maybe it’s so pleasurable and powerful we should be treating it a bit more seriously. Pornography has always existed in one form or another, but it’s different now. It’s very ubiquitous. It’s on everyone’s phone or computer. The reach of pornography is a very powerful thing. We’ve known since the 1960s that people can be conditioned to develop paraphilias. There was a study where male rats were conditioned to fancy female rats wearing jackets. You can train a male rat to prefer a clothed rat, not a normal, furry, naked rat. It’s incredible what you can do because sex is a powerful reward. It’s really the classic way to condition people because it has this powerful reward at the end of it. In another study, men were conditioned to find boots attractive by being shown, first of all, pictures of naked women in boots, and then the boots on their own. If you can do that to people and animals, what are we doing with pornography? I went through some of the major pornography sites in depth one day as research for the book, and I was just astonished at the things that are on there. What was really obvious to me from the homepage of one of the biggest sites was incest. While they’re not pushing actual incest by blood they’re kind of circumventing it by talking about doing things with your stepmom or your stepsister. It’s about these weird little steps. They’re really pushing those frontiers. There’s a lot of stuff about sex with machines, and you'll see a lot of sex that’s increasingly kind of not real. It’s sort of AI-generated and cartoonish and featuring all kinds of strange activities, which stretch the realms of what normal sexual activity is. We interviewed transgender people who said that they felt that pornography had been complicit in them developing transgender identities. I’ve interviewed men who developed erectile dysfunction problems. I’ve interviewed women who felt like they needed to have surgery, including labiaplasty after watching pornography. We know it can affect body image. There are studies that show correlation, if not causation, with divorce. We know that it can change sexual tastes, even to the extent of creating paraphilias. Yes, we do advise that people shouldn’t watch it. Mr. Jekielek: I don’t know if most people understand what paraphilia means. Please explain that very briefly. Ms. Dodsworth: Paraphilia would be a sexual fetish. It’s when you develop a taste for something that is outside of the normal. Mr. Jekielek: But it’s associated with sex. Ms. Dodsworth: Yes, it’s associated with sex. It’s this furtive thing that people do illuminated by their screens at home. Also in the real world, that’s mirrored by this sex positivity movement, where we’re supposed to say anything goes, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. We don’t really have enough honest conversations about pornography. There’s a conversation about protecting children from pornography, which hasn’t happened at all and it’s not working. But we don’t talk about its impact on adults or society as a whole. Whatever people do in their bedrooms is up to them as long as it doesn’t harm anyone, but is it harming us? Is it harming society? Mr. Jekielek: For my viewers here, this is something that I’m going to be tackling more. I'd love to hear about the people doing credible research around this issue. Ms. Dodsworth: Even if isn’t harming the viewer and it’s not harming society, what about the performers? Unfortunately, the current model is very much based on homemade pornography. There’s plenty of evidence, anecdotes, and news reports about people that have been coerced and raped, including underage minors. Is this an industry that relies on criminal activity and the exploitation of people? I just don’t see how that is even in question. The other side of the industry is harmful anyway. This moment we’re going to get to is what I call the Apple Amish. I was envisaging the Apple Vision Pro community and the Amish community. People like Harari have said that they see society dividing into two. There will be those who are willing to go along with the technological world, be enhanced, and embrace transhumanism and all the technology. Then there will be the Luddites who will step away. For me, there will be a point where I don’t really want to be in that world anymore. Fertility rates aren’t too good in the Western world. I actually think that people that really go down that road are going to end up dying out, to be honest. If people are in this world where they’re completely immersed in a fantasy AI dream-driven, symbolically drenched, artificial world, they’re not participating. They’re not really having relationships. They’re not really having families and having children. I don’t see it as a healthy, prosperous, long-term way for a society to function. I don’t see how it’s actually possible. Whereas, the Amish keep having babies. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about something that’s age old and incredibly beneficial which is meditation. This is a very powerful tool to inoculate yourself with. Ms. Dodsworth: Yes, that’s absolutely right. There are a few places that meditation pops up in the book as a tool. One reason would be that mindful meditation has been shown to reduce your susceptibility to your own cognitive biases. There’s a chapter in the book about self haunting. Really, it’s the work of a lifetime. But the more you get to know yourself, the less susceptible you will be to any form of manipulation because half of the problem is the message, but the other half of the problem is you. Whether it’s advertising, online shopping, government propaganda or more sinister nudging, whatever it is, it’s got to play upon you and your cognitive biases. You can learn what they are. We have a whole chapter on those called Get Immunity. But it’s also your weaknesses and your foibles. It could be fear of death. It could be your own issues with body image. It could be your insecurities about your children’s financial future. If you know yourself, you will be more resistant to the messages. That’s especially pertinent in an online world where we get advertising that is shaped particularly to us because we’re followed around by cookies on the internet, and because we’re known so well by the platforms. Even just taking time out helps you because your cognitive brain can only cope with so much. We’ve only got so much space for information, which is why we rely upon psychological shortcuts to make decisions. There are good evolutionary reasons for them. There are studies that have shown that if you overload people with information, they can be manipulated more easily. By just taking time out away from that overload of information, meditating in itself makes you more resistant. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve been talking for quite a while now, and we’ve only scratched the surface of, “Free Your Mind.” In the chapter, Be the First to Speak Up,where you look at how you can break through conformity, which is important in avoiding manipulation. Let’s touch on that and some of the other tools that you have identified. Ms. Dodsworth: Don’t watch porn. Don’t go on your phone and meditate. Now, everyone’s going to think, “Gosh, I don’t want that book. I already know I have to do all that good stuff. Maybe they'll be telling me to eat vegetables next.” Of course, I want people to buy and read my book. I want to influence you to read it, and hopefully it will be quite fun and entertaining. There may be times you want to go to a festival or to church. These are places where you could say some degree of manipulation happens and you want to let go and submit to it and enjoy it. But by the time you’ve read this book, you know what to submit to and how you know how to do it. But there are lots of practical tools contained in each chapter. Be the First to Speak Up is important because it’s this convergence of free speech and free thinking. We hear a lot about free speech and it’s good that we do because it’s really important. But of course, free speech means nothing without free thinking. Free thinking is as vital as clean air and clear water. You could look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and you should put free thinking right on the bottom, because if you don’t know how to think for yourself, you’re basically just a slave. You’re an automaton. Once you know how to think for yourself, the next thing is you have to speak. You have to be able to influence the group you’re in. We are group animals and we’re very tribal. We conform and there are good evolutionary reasons for it. We don’t eat the berries on the poison bush. If you see everybody running past you, there’s a good reason. Maybe they’re running away from a tiger and maybe you should join them. There are reasons why we conform. That is how we have successful societies. But you can get these cascades of conformity, which can be dangerous. One of the best things I’ve taken away from writing the book myself is having the confidence to speak up in a social or professional situation to defend somebody else. We interviewed whistleblowers. You’ve got to have someone who is the voice of sanity and can turn around a cascade of conformity. Nothing good really comes from the center of the pack. Every innovation, scientific discovery, artistic endeavor, and religious leader in the world has come from those outlying regions. We have to develop the confidence to speak up. Even if it’s hard, even if you’re somebody who’s naturally very agreeable on the big five personality traits or you’re anxious and you like to please, everyone can practice. You don’t have to do something dramatic and cut off all your friends or say something wildly unpopular. You can practice. You can do little bits at a time. You learn how to do it and then you feel less vulnerable and less fearful. It’s like the story of the emperor with no clothes. If you remember, there are weavers who give an emperor this fantastic outfit which they have woven from magical thread and only really intelligent people can see it. Of course, nobody can see it. Nobody wants to look stupid or lose their position at court or insult the emperor, so everyone tells him how fabulous he looks. He goes on a parade through the town. It took just one innocent child’s voice to say, “The emperor has no clothes.” We shouldn’t really have to wait for the innocence of a child. We can all be that voice. Mr. Jekielek: That is such a powerful story. In this information warfare morass that we’re in, many of these stories are being adulterated or changed. It is so important to keep these old stories because they essentially all talk about the human condition. Ms. Dodsworth: That’s right. The emperor’s new clothes isn’t just a story about the innocent child. It’s also a story about remembering that our leaders are sometimes quite foolish, vain, and naked. Draw back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz and the wizard is just a very weak, little man. It’s also a story about the fallibility of leaders. There are two sides to that story, which I really love. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish up? Ms. Dodsworth: Learn to understand your biases. Again, we explain what the psychological biases are and you can learn to understand yourself better. You need to see the story. Stand up for something or you'll fall for anything. Stop haunting yourself and learn to be the first to speak up. Mr. Jekielek: Laura Dodsworth, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Dodsworth: Thank you very much for having me, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Laura Dodsworth and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

One of the last things that Thomas Crooks reportedly searched for on the internet before he tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump was pornography. It’s brought the taboo issue of pornographic addiction back into the limelight. “What we have to understand about pornography is that it literally rewires the brain,“ says Clare Morell, senior policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. ”Their prefrontal cortex—which is that part of our brain responsible for our self control, our impulse control, emotional regulation—isn’t fully developed till the age of 25.” Morell is an advocate for child protection and a leading voice in the conversation about digital safety. She’s also the author of the forthcoming book, “The Tech Exit: A Manifesto for Freeing Our Kids,” which looks at the disastrous effect that pornography and other violent and sexual online content has had on society. Watch the video: “Kids don’t even need to go looking for it anymore. It finds them on social media,” says Morell. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Claire Morell, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Clare Morell: Thank you so much for having me, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Clare, the Daily Beast reported something very odd about what the FBI source discovered on the phone of Thomas Crooks, the would-be Trump assassin. After he had communicated with his parents, his last internet search was for pornography. What is happening here? Ms. Morell: It’s shocking. Why in the world would he search for pornography right before he tries to assassinate Donald Trump? It speaks to how addictive internet pornography is for this generation, because of how common it is and so easy to access. Kids don’t even need to go looking for it anymore—it finds them on social media. The nature of pornography is to addict its user. If it becomes addictive, then it’s not surprising that someone would be turning to their phone to search for it to get that next dopamine hit. We have to understand that pornography literally rewires the brain, and it rewires the brain in several different ways. The first thing is that it creates habitual neural pathways, so that the person needs to continue to access pornography due to such a high level of dopamine being released in the brain when they view this type of content. It actually rewires the brain to need that level of dopamine and to actually crave it. This neurotransmitter is released in the brain as a pleasure hormone, but it actually creates cravings so that your brain will repeat that activity. We have to understand that this is not just kids stumbling across their uncle’s Playboy magazine. It is online, interactive sexual experiences that children are being exposed to, which are extremely violent, which are eliciting this dopamine response that is highly addictive, and which rewire the brain to constantly crave more. It also desensitizes the brain to the pleasures of the natural world due to the level of stimulation provided by online pornography. People constantly crave it and they need more. The normal everyday things around them don’t elicit that response, so they actually become desensitized to things in the real world. It’s a really alarming problem that many people are not paying attention to. It is the stealth public health crisis of today which is having these mental and physical effects on children, especially at a stage when their brains are still developing. It is habituating children into becoming addicted to something that is inherently harmful to their bodies and their minds. This is having an impact on children’s relationship formation. It is also having a societal-level impact on the children accessing this type of content. Mr. Jekielek: What you’re describing has an effect not just on children, but on the whole society. The same phenomenon happens to adults. It’s just that children’s brains are a lot more plastic. Please give us a sense of the scale of this. We’re going to talk about kids today, but this actually applies to adults as well, except the legal dimensions are a bit different. Ms. Morell: To your point about the plasticity of children’s brains, that is why we are particularly focusing on kids, because their brains are still developing and those neuron pathways are being formed. If they’re formed towards pornography, it’s going to be very dangerous and hard for them to overcome the addiction. On the prevalence scale, it’s very hard to measure these things. A lot of the surveys that have been done are self-reported. They interview teenagers to understand how many have accessed pornography, if they came across it accidentally, and how often they access it. A recent survey in 2022 by Common Sense Media was done by a group of teenagers. It found that over three quarters of teens have accessed pornography. The study was done on 13 to 17-year-olds. They found the average age of first exposure is age 12. The majority of these children are encountering it for the first time accidentally by clicking a link that they didn’t understand was going to send them to a pornographic website. This is extremely prevalent. Part of this is because kids today are carrying smartphones around in their pockets. They have 24/7 access to this type of content. We’ve never had this before. Historically, it would actually be very difficult for children to come across porn, and they would have to intentionally seek it out. But now with social media, children don’t need to go looking for pornography, it just finds them. A curious child lingering over a post on social media can get quickly sucked down a very inappropriate and dangerous rabbit hole of sexual content. Then the app’s algorithms go to work and just continue to put more and more of that type of content into the child’s feed. We’ve seen the average age of having your first smartphone decrease to ten-years-old now. That average age of porn exposure being 12-years-old is only going to decrease further. The reality is that we have literally given children computers in their pockets with access to all sorts of apps where they’re just stumbling upon this horrific content. Mr. Jekielek: They will find all sorts of things that will be very enticing, but they can’t remotely understand the consequences of looking at it. Ms. Morell: Kids are very naturally impulsive. They’re not thinking through the long-term consequences and they’re just naturally curious. Big porn is preying on the natural curiosity of kids. They’re putting this content out on all of the social media. There’s a symbiosis between pornography sites and adult apps, like OnlyFans. These porn performers and porn websites are actually going to social media to recruit new users. It’s very easy for a kid to stumble across it and think, “Oh, what is this?” They just click on a link without even thinking further. Their prefrontal cortex, which is that part of the brain responsible for self control, impulse control, and emotional regulation, isn’t fully developed until the age of 25. It’s tragic that these children whose brains are not fully developed are being thrust into a very adult online world, without the ability to handle it. I’ve summarized this as saying the great digital paradox of today is that kids have access to adult content more than ever before in human history. This is the kind of world that they are thrust into. Mr. Jekielek: They have access to all sorts of adult content that even adults haven’t had access to throughout history. Ms. Morell: Absolutely. This is at unprecedented levels, and never before seen in history because of the technology. At the same time, children have never been less prepared to handle it, because their brains are not fully developed. When they are accessing this social media technology, the constant dopamine hits that they’re getting is stunting the brain’s ability to develop that prefrontal cortex. This reward circuitry of the brain is really overtaking the emotional and self-control aspects of the prefrontal cortex. The technologies have been designed to hijack our brain’s natural vulnerabilities. Their brains are being wired a certain way that is detrimental to their well-being and to their ability for long-term success in life. Mr. Jekielek: They are also getting mixed messages about how to deal with such things. There is this snowballing effect of the many factors that get someone through that door and start getting them hooked. Ms. Morell: Yes. Let me explain what exactly is going on, so we can understand what is happening. The online world today, not even the most extreme pornographic websites, but social media like Snapchat or TikTok, is full of this type of sexualized content and it’s sending a message. We have to understand that the medium is the message. The message of this medium of social media is that sex is normal, including for children, and includes violent and aggressive sex. Children are on social media and they want likes and followers. They’re incentivized to post very sexualized photos of themselves. They think it’s normal because the content that they’re taking in is very sexualized. The porn companies and the Big Tech companies are really hijacking children’s vulnerabilities. This is happening on apps where parents are not fully aware of the harm that is on there. In Snapchat, a very common, popular app for young kids, with four clicks, a child can get onto the Pornhub website. The For You feeds page on Snapchat often advertises this type of content. The parental controls don’t work inside of these apps. If you’ve installed a filter on their phone, you’ve activated a setting that prevents access to adult websites. What parents don’t realize is that there are browsers within the social media apps. If a child clicks on a Pornhub link inside of the Snapchat app, they will be brought to Pornhub’s website, all within the app, which is something that the parent can’t see into. The filter is not given access to work inside of the app. With smartphones and hundreds of apps, there are just thousands of portals to this type of content that are incredibly difficult for parents to oversee effectively. This really is a dire situation. That’s why a lot of my work focuses on trying to help pass better laws to back parents up and to protect our kids. Mr. Jekielek: You’re suggesting that the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan proposed. You were saying that in social media, the content is inherently sexualized. Can you qualify what you mean by that? That’s not necessarily obvious. Ms. Morell: Yes, let me explain. Social media is designed to incentivize people to try to get as many followers and likes as possible. It’s an entire ecosystem based on metrics. It’s not based on relationships—it’s based on metrics. How many people are following you? How many people have liked your photos? By nature, humans are drawn to sex and humans desire sex. Children are curious about this, and not just children, but adults as well. What starts to trend on social media is the more sexualized or racy or extreme. It’s not just sexualized content, but also extreme content, violent content, and the most sensational stuff that preys on our vices and basest desires. It’s really sad that they are preying on these aspects that the human brain is naturally curious about or drawn to. This content tends to trend the highest on social media because the algorithms pick up what people are liking, what they’re lingering over, what they’re watching, and then it quickly feeds them more and more of that content. Children are on these platforms and they want friends and they want followers and they want likes. They understand that the more sexualized photo and the sexy selfie is what garners likes, so they’re incentivized to post that type of content. It really drags children into this adult world. A Harvard professor, Leah Plunkett, did some research on TikTok live spaces where she found that viewers were kind of urging and egging on young girls to perform acts on TikTok live streams that towed the line of child pornography. She said that it was like going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds. This is not something that our children should be encountering or being incentivized to do. But the online world is encouraging this, so it just spirals and feeds on itself. Mr. Jekielek: What is big porn? Ms. Morell: Big porn is the businesses that are producing these pornography websites and selling porn. The biggest one that people would know about is Pornhub. People see that it’s a free service, so how are they making their money? Similar to Big Tech, big porn is pivoted to this advertising model where they provide the content for free, but they’re making money off of ads. They’re trying to get people hooked, so then you will pay for their premium service which is an ad-free version. There are these huge companies and Pornhub is the biggest. They have created websites where you can go and access this type of pornographic content. They are commodifying the content and selling data to advertisers. Advertisers are their business model and that’s how they are making money. It’s a very predatory industry, in the way alcohol or tobacco or other predatory industries are. They try to addict users to their products so that they'll continue to want more and more and buy it. In this case, childhood innocence is the collateral damage. They’re putting their products on social media and catching young children in their nets, who are then drawn to this type of website. That’s how I would define big porn. These are the companies that run the websites that are behind the content that is being promoted on social media. Mr. Jekielek: Pornography is a big issue, but it’s not really talked about. The Thomas Crooks connection is the first time I’ve seen it talked about in a while. It just doesn’t come up very often. Ms. Morell: One of the things that is difficult about pornography is that there’s a stigma to it. It’s difficult because it is such a sensitive topic to be discussed publicly. But if we’re going to protect children and make a difference, we have to be willing to have the hard conversations. Because of how ubiquitous it is, people often feel implicated by it. Here is a statistic to help us understand an Australian study in 2017. When asked about pornography use, 100 percent of 15 to 29-year-old men had seen or viewed pornography. In that survey, they could not find a single 15 to 29-year-old survey that had not viewed it. To the point about how the smartphone and the Internet and social media have changed the nature of this, everyone is now affected. Everyone has come across this or seen it. Unfortunately, because it is so addictive, it can very easily hook people and draw them in. It becomes a shameful struggle where people don’t even know how to talk about how they feel so drawn and addicted to this. That is the power of it. When it hooks and addicts people, it makes it very difficult for them to reach out for help or to talk about this publicly. People often feel guilt or shame for their addiction, and I really feel for them. I’m not trying to shame people who have become addicted to pornography, because it’s actually not their fault. Big porn has designed it this way to prey on our human weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We have to be willing to take them on to get to the root of the problem. We need to say, “Yes, we want to shut down access for kids, and try to make it as difficult to access as possible.” But we have to really go to the root of the problem and address the porn companies in order to help people become freed from this. Anecdotally, I know lots of people who have struggled with this for years and they’re actively trying to fight it. To do so, they basically have to lock down all their devices, just like an alcoholic who can’t even have a sip of alcohol. If they were an alcoholic, they would have to completely shut off access, but it’s difficult when it’s the internet. Mr. Jekielek: There needs to be some kind of accountability system like Alcoholics Anonymous or something of that nature. Ms. Morell: Yes. Addiction scientists define what is addictive by how much dopamine the activity or the substance releases. Drugs like heroin or cocaine are highly addictive because they release an unnaturally high amount of dopamine. Studies have found that online, interactive pornography has a very similar effect. It releases a very high level of dopamine, which means that it’s inherently addictive, because dopamine creates cravings. As soon as they’ve seen it, they want to click to watch more and they want the next hit. We do have to treat this as a very addictive substance and regulate it the same way we have regulated alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. We know they are difficult for people to resist and harmful to health and development, particularly to that of children. We cut off the root of how people are getting access to this. But it’s very difficult when it’s on the internet and it’s something that is in our pockets 24/7. Mr. Jekielek: When you talk about dopamine, I also think of oxytocin. Much of this problem has to do with the fact that the device is with you all the time. It makes it harder for you to have those human relationships, which in turn also drives that cycle. You see people walking around with their phones or you see a family sitting there and everyone is staring at their phone. Ms. Morell: Yes. There’s a real difference between dopamine and oxytocin, which Arthur Brooks has mentioned in his studies about happiness. Both dopamine and oxytocin are related pleasure hormones. But dopamine just creates a craving so that you repeat that activity which just gave you that experience of pleasure. It actually doesn’t create satisfaction in the brain. It’s actually just creating a constant craving for more and more. Whereas we get oxytocin from real life interactions. That hormone is released from eye contact and physical touch. It’s actually the hormone that bonds us to other humans. It bonds mothers to their babies. It bonds husband and wife. It bonds friends because we’re interacting and we’re experiencing oxytocin when we’re in person together with eye contact and physical touch. It helps create bonds of trust, mutual love, and the responsibility that we need to survive and thrive as a civilization. The online world does not produce oxytocin. It produces these shallow connections, not real relationships, and it’s all based around dopamine. Every time kids get a like on their post or a new follower, they get a little hit of dopamine that draws them back for more. I’ve explained to parents and policymakers that when you put screen time limits in place, the screen time limit isn’t sufficient. Even if they’re on for only 15 minutes a day, they’re going to be constantly craving more. The online world will dominate their mental space the rest of the day. They’re going to be thinking about who liked their photo or who started following them. They will think, “I have to go on and check.” It is this constant urge to go on and look and get that next hit of dopamine. Pornography does the same thing and creates this dopamine response. You just want to view more and it’s never enough and you never gain satisfaction. From a civilizational standpoint, we’re wiring these kids to become dopamine addicts and dopamine-addicted users of social media or online pornography. They’re not able to form relationships in real life. There have been studies that show that oxytocin isn’t released through a screen. Even when you are on a Zoom call and talking to someone through the screen, you’re not actually getting oxytocin. It’s something that can only happen in the real world. If we’re allowing kids to inhabit the virtual world and they’re growing up completely online, then what does that mean for the formation of marriages and families, the building blocks of civilization? What if kids aren’t able to develop and learn how to form relationships in the real world—relationships that bring true happiness and satisfaction? That is something that we are now seeing. There are rising rates of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. But also there is a movement of people that are becoming more connected than ever. That is because the social media connection is so shallow. It’s all based on this dopamine that just creates craving for more. It doesn’t actually bring satisfaction and happiness. Then what do we want for our kids? We want their long term success and happiness. We need to focus on helping them inhabit the real world and form real life relationships. Studies that have been done on happiness show that the number one predictor of success as an adult and of life satisfaction is childhood self-control. People who learned and developed self-control and the ability for delayed gratification became the happiest adults. Social media and online pornography in particular undermine that ability to develop delayed gratification and self-control. We’re really eroding away the foundation that we would want to build for a life of happiness. Mr. Jekielek: Pornography is a heightened version of a lot of these online interactions, which prevent the development of normal human interactions. Then it creates a certain level of isolation. Ms. Morell: Kids are inherently habit forming. We’re trying to help them develop habits that will make them an independent, successful adult. Allowing them to become habituated towards screens really just caves in on them. It’s creating dependency and addiction to these devices, or to the terrible content that they’re coming across online. That is something to really pay attention to. Children are being shaped and influenced by something, and they’re always being formed. What are we allowing them to be formed by? Mr. Jekielek: There is not much out there about teaching delayed gratification. It would be good for both children and adults to have that knowledge. Everything today is all about instant gratification. Ms. Morell: Yes, and it’s all hyper-novel and you'll never run out of content. The social media feed is designed to be infinite. It’s called Infinite Scroll or autoplay, these features that are always feeding you more. It’s really teaching our children to become consumers. It’s teaching them that life is about endlessly consuming content. Whereas, if you ask most parents, they want their child to be a contributor to society. But the screens are working towards the opposite goal of what parents really want. They are just training our children to consume and to be mindlessly entertained. They are stunting their ability to be creative and to be productive. Mr. Jekielek: You have given this a lot of thought. I’ve been reading Jonathan Haidt’s book. He advocates for removing screens from schools altogether, and he celebrates every time that happens. What is your opinion on this? Ms. Morell: I have a book coming out next summer called, “The Tech Exit: A Manifesto for Freeing Our Kids.” The reason for the title is because I’m pleading with parents to push these technologies out of childhood entirely. I am saying that smartphones and social media are too dangerous and too harmful to children. The harm reduction measures that Big Tech and their libertarian allies and even pediatricians have proposed to parents is that you can mitigate these harms with screen time limits and parental controls. I am saying that is not possible. The level and the nature of the harms can’t be effectively mitigated by screen time limits and parental controls. I’m urging parents to not accept the premise that these technologies are an inevitable part of childhood. You can actually give your child a childhood free of social media and smartphones and other interactive screens. We can protect their childhood and their brain development so that they can enter adulthood as a successful, independent adult with agency and freedom and self-control and delayed gratification. We don’t need to accept these technologies as part of childhood if we know that they’re inherently harmful for kids, and they’re also harmful for adults. But there’s a deeper concern with children, because their brains and bodies and habits are still being developed. We want to protect this period of special vulnerability, so that they can develop into mature and healthy adults. I try to explain to parents that this actually is possible. Parents and families have done this and they are flourishing because of it. The book really tries to create a positive vision of what childhood can look like and what is possible when we leave these technologies behind. Mr. Jekielek: But even if you do that, they’re still going to get exposed to these technologies. Ms. Morell: Yes, we can’t completely shield them from technology today. Mr. Jekielek: The steps that you are describing still cannot be a completely full measure. Is that even possible in this day and age? Ms. Morell: No. The greatest challenge to parenting in the digital age is that these technologies have become ubiquitous and unfortunately, ubiquitous amongst children. My book tries to encourage parents about what they can do. I suggest creating a home and a family that is free of these technologies. The greatest influence on a child is their home and their family, so if we can make these spaces free of these technologies, that will go a long way. But you’re right that it is not enough. The book also addresses what communities can do together. Parents can actually band together with other parents and families in their neighborhood, school, or church to say, “Together, let’s not give these devices to our kids.” Then your child actually has friends and peers who are also device-free. They’re playing outside with each other and doing activities together. Even if you can find just four or five other families, it’s a really powerful antidote to the digital age that we live in. If you can create these communities where childhood is full of running around outside, playing music, playing games, and not just being tethered to a screen. The book also addresses what schools can do. Schools can take another step towards protecting the student social environment from the influence of these technologies. The final chapter of my book addresses policymakers. I say that in the past, when we as a society recognized that something like tobacco or alcohol was harmful to children, we did not leave it to individual parents. We said that for the common good and the sake of childhood health and well-being, we would push these things out of childhood entirely. I’m advocating that lawmakers should do the same when it comes to social media and particularly online pornography, and make sure that that is age-gated and age-restricted to back parents up. The last thing I'll say is that no parent can perfectly protect their child. I do believe it is parents’ job to do everything in their power to protect their child, but we also have to prepare our children. I do encourage parents that the best way to protect their kids is by preparing them for when they come across something that is pornographic and how to respond in that situation. Parents need to have those conversations with children early and often, knowing that the age of the smartphone has decreased to age ten and knowing that the age of porn exposure is now age 12. I really encourage parents to start talking to their children early and often, saying, “If you come across something, I want you to tell me. I want you to turn away and look away. I want you to talk to me about it. You’re not going to be in trouble for coming across it. But I want to have you talk to me. I want to help you through that.” This is so that parents become the go-to source. Because children are naturally curious and you want them to turn to their parents and not to the internet or their friends to find out how to navigate this. There’s both a role to protect, but we also have to be very clear-eyed that this stuff is surrounding them constantly. We also want to prepare them for how to handle it if they come across something. Mr. Jekielek: What does that conversation look like? Maybe you’ve had one. Ms. Morell: Sure, I’m happy to talk about that. I should just be clear, I’m not yet a parent of tweens or teens. My oldest child is four-years-old. But I have lots of friends who are parents who I’ve had these conversations with, and I asked them to model this for me. An organization I would recommend to parents is called, “Protect Young Eyes.” Their founder, Chris McKenna, talks about, “Ten before Ten,” which means ten porn talks before the age of ten. He explains that the porn talk is not some long one-time, sit-down conversation where you explain all these things to your kids. It’s just daily reminders like, “Hey, if you see something inappropriate or that makes you uncomfortable on your friend’s phone or your friend shows you something, I want you to talk to me about it.” Again, you are reassuring them that you are a safe space where they can come to you with those questions or that experience and you can then walk them through it. I would recommend a book, “Good Pictures, Bad Pictures,” that I read to my four-year-old. They have, “Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, Junior,” where they talk about how there are good pictures and there are bad pictures. If you come across a bad picture, the book explains that you should close your eyes or turn away from the screen. Then tell your parents or a trusted adult what you saw and let them help you through it. It explains that bad pictures are pictures that show private parts or a person does not have their clothes on. Like there’s language you can use even with young kids to introduce what is a bad picture and saying that this is not something to be looking at. I would really recommend this to parents. I don’t think that the age of four is too early, because you want them to understand that we don’t look at those kinds of pictures, and that your parents will help you if you come across them. There are a number of states that have passed laws related to restricting access for kids to pornography. Mr. Jekielek: How effective are these laws, given what we know? What else can be done? Ms. Morell: This is one of the most encouraging aspects of a really sad problem. We really delved into the kind of harms and the sad reality of online pornography that kids are coming across. But the positive news is that states are stepping up and passing these laws. Over 12 states have passed laws requiring age verification for pornography websites. That means if you click on a link to PornHub to access the site, you have to prove that you’re over the age of 18. These laws are going to have an incredible impact. They are having an impact in the sense that PornHub didn’t even want to comply with the law in seven states, so they are not going to give access to PornHub in Virginia or Texas. Pornhub is actually pulling out of states in response to some of these laws, which is a victory in itself. But the bigger victory is about when a kid in a state where one of these laws has been passed accidentally clicks on a link to PornHub inside of Snapchat. This is where the parental control filter can’t reach. Now, if the child were to click on that link and get brought to PornHub’s website, they’re not going to be able to see anything. They would have to show that they are over the age of 18 and verify their age. It’s going to block kids’ access and keep them safe from this type of content, which is a really critical piece of the problem. We are now able to block these websites that we don’t want children to access, so they will effectively be blocked from accessing them. That law has passed in 12 states, and in seven of those states it has gone into effect. PornHub just decided they don’t want to do business here, so they aren’t even offering their website at all in those states. The fight is not over, in that a lot of these laws are being litigated. The big porn companies are suing and trying to enjoin them. They say that the laws restrict adults’ access to free speech, because pornography is considered free speech. But obscenity is not free speech. With many of these laws and particularly Texas’s law, the definition of what kinds of websites are blocked is narrowly defined as, “material harmful to minors,” which focuses on obscene content. That type of speech is not protected even for adults. These laws have really been narrowly crafted and narrowly tailored. The age verification technology that we have today means that adults can verify their age in very easy, quick, and anonymous ways. This is not going to place a burden on adult free speech. For those reasons I do think it passes constitutional muster. But that will be litigated before the Supreme Court. The law out of Texas was upheld by the Fifth Circuit. It was appealed up to the Supreme Court and they granted cert. This will be a very pivotal case for the future of many of these laws. We will see what the Supreme Court does with this law, but I’m very hopeful that it will survive the constitutional challenge. Mr. Jekielek: We live in a very complex time. You are talking about adult rights vs. children’s mental health and then deciding which is more important. Ms. Morell: It’s not even just children’s mental health. We have wrongly weighted adult rights over and above protecting our children. The kind of content that the kids are accessing online, and what is being advertised and promoted to them on social media is not your uncle’s Playboy magazine. It is by nature violent, graphic, degrading, and dehumanizing. It portrays things that are shameful for even adults to watch. It’s just it’s horrific to imagine that children are watching this. There are things like rape and choking and slapping and kicking. Again, it is just violent, degrading, dehumanizing porn. One of the top trending searches on Pornhub is incest porn. Trans or sissy porn is also on the rise. It’s just extremely violent and graphic. To me, children being exposed to this online is akin to child sexual abuse. They’re being subjected to an interactive sexual experience where extreme violence is being depicted. We know the effects it has on the brain, but it’s not just their personal mental health and development. It’s also the societal impacts that this is going to have, because children are being habituated to believe that sex is violent. Their expectations for a relationship are being completely warped in a very degrading, dehumanizing way. I'll just share this last anecdote. A teacher in Ireland surveyed his high school students on what they thought was expected of them from the other sex in a romantic relationship. The girls expected to be slapped, choked, kicked, and be submissive in a very aggressive type of interaction. The guys thought they were expected to be with a stranger, be with as many people as possible, be domineering, be aggressive, and slap, choke, and kick. These are actually the societal level effects of pornography. Think about the building blocks of marriage and the family. We want children to form healthy relationships and not think that this kind of violent interaction is normal. Children imitate what they see and their mirror neurons are very strong. What they behold on the screen they feel compelled to act out and to imitate. We are now seeing rates of child-on-child sexual abuse that we’ve just never seen before. ER doctors and nurses are seeing instances of child sexual assault, such as an 11 or 12-year-old boy assaulting a four to eight-year-old girl. There have been reports of students acting out sexually on their teachers at school. We shouldn’t be surprised, because we already know children are natural imitators. They are easily influenced by what they are taking in. If that is what they’re taking in, then that’s what they are imitating. That is what they are acting out on others and what they are expecting to be part of a relationship. There is a deeper concern here, beyond the individual mental health of children. That is a key part of it, but there are also the societal level effects from our over-prioritizing of adults’ right to access this type of speech, vs. actually protecting our children and the future of our country. Mr. Jekielek: We will be covering this topic a lot more on American Thought Leaders. Clare Morell, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Morell: Thank you so much Jan. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

“The bottom line is that 30 to 40 percent of cancers are preventable. … And there are simple things that people can do to reduce your risk of getting cancer,” says Dr. Paul Marik, a founding member of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and former chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School. Watch the video: “Cancer is big business. It’s highly profitable. The average cost of chemotherapy for a patient is probably $100,000,” Dr. Marik says. He’s the author of “Cancer Care: The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer.” In this episode, he breaks down his key findings on preventing and treating cancer. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Paul Marik, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Paul Marik: Thank you, Jan. Thanks for inviting me back again. Mr. Jekielek: When we spoke last some months ago on American Thought Leaders, you were looking into cancer treatment and cancer prevention. You are a well-published medical professional, but you discovered there is a whole body of well-established, scientific literature that you were just simply unaware of. We were talking about how astonishing that was. You have since turned that into a monograph and what you revealed is absolutely astonishing. Please tell us what you discovered. Dr. Marik: Yes, this was all by accident. I certainly didn’t know this information three or four years ago. Obviously, Covid opened up our eyes and it started this quest looking at repurposed drugs and alternative therapies. The bottom line is that 30 to 40 percent of cancers are preventable. Just through simple lifestyle changes and through supplements, you can reduce your risk of getting cancer. This is really important, because about 10 million people on the planet die of cancer every year. Approximately 600,000 Americans die of cancer every year, and cancer will become the leading cause of death. It’s going to affect one in two men and one in three women, so it is a very common disease. There are simple things that people can do to reduce their risk of getting cancer. This is well published, and it’s just been hidden in the literature. This is really important. Similarly, there are very simple, effective measures that people who have cancer can take to improve the quality of their life and to increase their chances of going into remission. These are simple lifestyle changes, dietary changes, and the use of many over-the-counter supplements. Mr. Jekielek: I once watched a very interesting documentary about Dr. Burzynski from Texas who has been in practice for decades. He discovered antineoplaston, a way to treat cancer. He developed a clinic which was successful. People in industry and in government had been trying to shut him down for decades, but they were unable to do so. He continued on and his clinic became a place where cases that were deemed untreatable, maybe people could try there, because it had helped a few people. The message of the documentary was also that industry didn’t want to validate his findings because he owned the patents. At the time I thought, “This seems very compelling,” and then I just left it at that. But now with everything you’re saying, this whole picture takes on a new meaning. We talked about diabetes and there are treatments for type II diabetes that have very few side effects. They actually work very well, but again, they are largely unknown by the broader medical community. In how many areas is this actually the case? You dug into cancer. How many methods are there that actually could work that we’ve been told are some kind of snake oil or dangerous or problematic? Dr. Marik: Obviously, cancer is a big business, and it’s highly profitable. The average cost of chemotherapy for a patient is around $100,000. Big pharma makes a lot of money, and the oncologists in this country make a lot of money. The drugs we are talking about are cheap, off-patent drugs, so you can understand this narrative. It goes against big pharma and it goes against traditional medicine. It is a tragedy because these are very effective therapies that can really improve the patient’s outcome. Some of these can be used in conjunction with standard chemotherapy. We are not saying to throw away standard therapy. These can be used as adjuncts and as supplements to standard chemotherapy, if patients so choose. I was stunned recently to discover that MD Anderson Cancer Center, which is probably one of the biggest cancer hospitals in the world, indeed has an integrative oncology program. There they advise and they recommend and they coach patients in comprehensive lifestyle changes. These lifestyle changes, which include relaxation therapy, sleep, improved diet, improved relationships, and exercise, can significantly reduce the risk of patients dying of cancer. It’s an astonishing finding. Mr. Jekielek: They seem to be applying it in isolated cases. But it’s not really there yet in the collective understanding of how the disease needs to be dealt with. Dr. Marik: No. You can go to a traditional oncologist and ask, “What dietary advice would you give me?” The oncologist will say, “Diet has nothing to do with it. You can eat whatever you want to.” We know that’s just simply wrong. There is overwhelming scientific data that specific dietary interventions can have a profound effect on cancer, and this is challenging the standard narrative. Mr. Jekielek: With Dr. Burzynski’s method, is this a real therapy? Dr. Marik: Yes, I think it’s real. It’s been subject to scrutiny and I think we should be transparent and open. From my understanding, it seems to be an effective treatment for cancer. I don’t understand all the biochemistry, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t study it. It doesn’t mean that it should be outlawed by the FDA. It should be investigated. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of cancer therapies have extreme side effects. There are serious quality of life issues with radiation and chemotherapy. On the other hand, these antineoplastons and vitamin D may not be a panacea, but they are not associated with these types of dramatic reductions in quality of life, so that should be part of the equation. Dr. Marik: Absolutely. For many patients, the treatment of the disease is worse than the disease. We know about the extreme toxicity of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but these antineoplastons seem pretty benign. All of the repurposed drugs that we recommend are extremely safe and effective. What does the patient have to lose? When you have an intervention which is cheap, safe, and possibly could completely change the directory of the trajectory of the patient’s disease, what do you have to lose? Mr. Jekielek: When we talked about Covid in the past, we talked about vitamin D. Vitamin D seems to be a miracle vitamin that significantly affects the immune system in conjunction with some other supplements. But from what you’re saying, it also has a positive impact on cancer, not just on Covid. Dr. Marik: Yes. Vitamin D truly is an astonishing vitamin, and it should almost be called a hormone. As we know, it’s very effective for Covid, it’s effective for depression, it’s effective for Alzheimer’s disease, and it’s effective for diabetes. It just so happens that it is highly effective in both the prevention and treatment of cancer. There is overwhelming data that patients who are vitamin D-deficient have a much higher risk of developing cancer. As you go further away from the equator and get less ultraviolet B and less vitamin D, your risk of cancer goes up and your risk of Alzheimer’s goes up. There is really good data that if you give patients vitamin D, you can reduce their risk of getting cancer. With patients who have cancer, if you give them high dose vitamin D it significantly improves their chances of going into a remission. This is a simple over-the-counter medication. Mr. Jekielek: Presumably some of these things could also be used in combination. You could do a diet change, you could do vitamin D, and you could also do chemo at the same time. Should that help you? Dr. Marik: Absolutely. What you say is true, these things work much better in synergy when they’re done together. For example, one of the things we recommend is intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding. It’s been shown in the oncology literature that if you do time-restricted feeding at the same time you’re doing chemotherapy, you get a much better response. For patients undergoing standard chemotherapy, there’s absolutely no reason that it should not be combined with these supplemental or complementary techniques which can only enhance the patient’s response to therapy. Mr. Jekielek: One of the big findings in your monograph is that you essentially believe cancer to be a metabolic disease. That is not the conventional wisdom. Dr. Marik: What you say is true, and this is based on the work of Dr. Seyfried. This is his area of expertise and he has written hundreds of papers. He has written a book on cancer as a metabolic disease, which basically challenges the conventional wisdom that cancer is due to a chromosomal mutation. That has profound implications. If indeed it’s a chromosomal disease, then the current chemotherapy does fit with that narrative. But if cancer is a metabolic disease, then the standard approach is not going to work. There is overwhelming evidence in the literature that it’s not a chromosomal disease, it’s a metabolic disease. In fact, one of the people that discovered DNA, Dr. Watson, has basically said in an op-ed that he doesn’t think cancer is a chromosomal disease and that we should look at the metabolic changes that happen in cancer. Mr. Jekielek: The question is, could it be both? Could there be genetic mutations? We know that mutations can cause cancer, but the question is how that happens. Couldn’t both mechanisms be right? Dr. Marik: Yes, you’re right. There is a complex interplay between metabolism and genetics. We know there are some genetic predispositions. For example, we know that women with the BRCA gene have a much higher risk of developing cancer. But what’s interesting is that the risk of getting breast cancer nowadays is about 60 or 70 percent, whereas 30 or 40 years ago, it was 40 percent. It does illustrate that it’s an interplay between environmental and lifestyle changes and genetics. Most current thinking is that maybe 5 percent of cancers are due to chromosomal or genetic defects. It appears that most cancers are not genetically determined. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a significant increase in a variety of metabolic diseases. In America, there is an obesity epidemic, which has a significant impact on metabolism. What did you find are the core causes? Dr. Marik: There’s a strong link between obesity, insulin resistance, and cancer. Probably 30 or 40 percent of cancers are due to obesity and insulin resistance. There’s a very strong association. There’s an association between the intake of high glycemic index foods and sugar beverages and cancer because of its effect on insulin resistance. There’s overwhelming data, and the incidence of obesity is increasing. In parallel, it seems that the incidence of cancer is increasing. Then obviously, there’s the problem of environmental carcinogens, just to layer on top of this problem. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve noticed a perspective in the literature and in the health-related discourse in the media that obesity is more a genetic disease than a lifestyle disease. Dr. Marik: I don’t think that’s true, because people’s genes haven’t changed much over the last 30 or 40 years. But the incidence of obesity, particularly in the U.S., has increased exponentially, so it is a lifestyle disease. Like most things, there may be a genetic predisposition, but without a doubt, obesity is a lifestyle problem. We eat processed foods and foods high in carbohydrates and glucose, and we snack all the time. Western people tend to eat all the time, rather than doing what our forefathers did, eating one or two meals a day. Western people eat all the time. They eat processed foods high in carbohydrates and glucose. In essence, we have become processed food addicts. Mr. Jekielek: Does it make sense to say that if you just focused on the obesity issue, you would deal with a whole bunch of other issues, perhaps even including cancer? Dr. Marik: Yes. With lifestyle change, which would start off with diet, exercise, and sleep, you could eliminate almost all the chronic diseases of Western society. That would include cancer, cardiac disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. All these chronic diseases are related to bad lifestyle and lifestyle choices. Mr. Jekielek: You don’t think it has to do with increased radiation? That’s one of the things you often hear. Dr. Marik: Obviously, environmental carcinogens are important, and people that live near power lines are at an increased risk of certain kinds of cancer. The problem is that pesticides and toxins are so pervasive that it’s very difficult for any individual to completely eliminate them. However, there is good data showing that people who eat organic food have a lower risk of cancer. There is data showing that if you eat a diet of organic food, your risk of cancer is less. There are things that you can do, but it’s pretty difficult not to breathe the air that we are exposed to or not to drink the water. But there’s no question that environmental carcinogens have played a role. Mr. Jekielek: You found a series of lifestyle decisions and perhaps supplements. Let’s go through that in order of importance based on your study of the literature. Maybe there are some things that folks watching could implement right now that would help them. Dr. Marik: I can quote a randomized control trial, which is the gold standard that the ivory tower uses. They did a simple intervention with three things to see what would happen to the risk of cancer. It was vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, plus an exercise program. They showed the combination of all three reduces the risk of cancer by 60 percent. Those are very simple things that people can do. It’s a matter of exercising, taking vitamin D, and modifying your diet, which can significantly reduce your risk of getting cancer. Mr. Jekielek: I’m just going to repeat that. The combination of vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, and exercise reduced cancer by 60 percent? Dr. Marik: That’s correct. That doesn’t get a lot of press because you can’t make money on it. In fact, it’s counterproductive for the pharmaceutical industry and the medical complex if people don’t get cancer. This was published in a peer-reviewed paper in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s a really good study that is supported by other studies. There are many studies that show that exercise reduces your risk of cancer. There is data showing that simple relaxation techniques, including meditation and yoga, improve your outcome if you get cancer. There are some very simple lifestyle interventions that can reduce your risk of getting cancer. If you have cancer, these interventions can improve the outcome. Mr. Jekielek: The risk of cancer is high for every person in this society. If you can reduce that by 60 percent, we should all be rushing off and starting this regimen. Dr. Marik: It doesn’t get the attention that it should get. The data on vitamin D in preventing cancer, in preventing Alzheimer’s disease, and in preventing depression is overwhelming. It’s a safe, cheap intervention that has minimal adverse events. From my perspective, there’s no reason that everybody should not be taking vitamin D. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk more about vitamin D. Can you overdose on vitamin D? Dr. Marik: It is possible that if you take megadoses of vitamin D, it can cause high blood calcium levels which can cause kidney stones, but you have to take exceedingly high levels. We recommend 10,000 units a day, which seems to be a very safe dose. By all standards it’s a very high dose, but the data suggests that 10,000 units a day is safe and does not cause toxicity. Mr. Jekielek: Do you feel comfortable recommending this to a broad group of people, based on your understanding of the literature? Dr. Marik: Yes. Between five and 10,000 units a day, depending on your particular scenario, makes a lot of sense, and there is really good data for this. For patients with cancer and patients with depression, we would recommend 10,000 units. As a prophylaxis for people, 5,000 units a day is a very safe dose. Mr. Jekielek: This is also for Covid prevention. Even in a situation where people have been overly boosted and therefore more susceptible to being infected, this would still help. There would be no problem taking vitamin D to protect yourself. Dr. Marik: Yes. Vitamin D has enormous immunological effects and it affects gene expression. There are hundreds of genes that are affected by vitamin D. There’s really excellent data showing that vitamin D reduces your risk of getting Covid. If you do get Covid, it reduces the severity of the disease. Your chances of being hospitalized or dying are much less. During the Covid pandemic, if it was a pandemic, we should have been boosting people’s vitamin D levels, particularly the elderly in old age homes. They don’t get much sunshine and are certainly vitamin D-deficient. Instead of vaccinating them, we would have done a much greater service to the population if we had just given them vitamin D. Mr. Jekielek: People with darker skin in northern climates don’t synthesize it as much, so they may have even lower levels of vitamin D and not realize it. That’s another very valuable use case. Dr. Marik: Yes. Elderly people don’t make vitamin D well, obese people don’t make vitamin D well, and people with dark skin don’t make vitamin D well. With certain groups it’s even more important to take vitamin D. Mr. Jekielek: Is there anything else vitamin D is good for? Dr. Marik: There’s really nothing that it’s bad for. The only thing it can be bad for is if you have high blood calcium. If you have hypercalcaemia you wouldn’t want to take vitamin D, but otherwise it’s very safe. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned something about addiction to food. Recently, I heard about someone working in the food industry who quit, because she realized that her job was basically to make food more addictive. Dr. Marik: There’s no question that there’s a pervasive addiction to processed food. The sugar and fructose causes a high that then stimulates the appetite. It becomes self-serving, because the more you eat, the more you want to eat. Then your blood glucose goes up and you develop insulin resistance, so you become addicted. There’s animal data that shows that glucose is more addictive to mice than cocaine or heroin. Mr. Jekielek: Please say that again. Dr. Marik: Animal data suggests that glucose- Mr. Jekielek: Like sugar? Dr. Marik: Like sugar and sweetened beverages. They are more addictive to experimental animals than cocaine. It causes such a high. Mr. Jekielek: Of course, we’re not allowed to run those experiments on humans. Dr. Marik: There is no question that a large segment of the Western population is addicted to processed foods. You can improve just by switching to real food, which means if it looks like food, then it is food. If it comes in a carton or has a wrapper and it has a package insert or a list of ingredients and preservatives and chemicals, then it’s not real food. Just by changing your diet to real food, you can make an enormous difference. Mr. Jekielek: The moment you start doing keto dieting, that actually becomes very normal. You just have to overcome the initial desire to eat the sugary things, but after a while, it’s not an issue at all. The reason it actually works is because you just can’t eat most processed things. If you’re on the keto diet, it’s just not an option for you. Dr. Marik: Once you become adapted to eating real food, eating processed food becomes very difficult. It just becomes unappetizing and it doesn’t have the same appeal, so that’s why it’s not a difficult thing to do. It should be a lifestyle change, not a diet change. Once you start eating real food, then the processed food becomes unappetizing. Mr. Jekielek: It’s still nice to have that burger once in a while. Dr. Marik: Yes, I cheat every now and then. Mr. Jekielek: I do a lot of meditation and it has been very helpful to me. At the same time, I don’t get a ton of sleep. What is the cost of that? You mentioned sleep as something that is important. Dr. Marik: Sleep is really important for brain restoration. There’s something called the glymphatic system, which is the way the brain detoxifies itself during sleep. It’s like the lymphatic system of the brain, but it’s only active during sleep. We know that if you are sleep-deprived, it reduces your life expectancy and it increases your risk of cancer. It is not true that people can get away with five or six hours of sleep and it won’t affect their health. The data is clear that an adult needs at least seven hours of sleep. Interference with sleep increases your risk of many diseases, including dementia. There is data showing that people who have cancer and have sleep dysfunction have a much higher risk of demising. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned some repurposed drugs for use with cancer that are not generally known. Dr. Marik: There is a group called the ReDo project, which looks at repurposed drugs for the use of cancer. They list about 250 different drugs that have shown in experimental models to have activity against cancer cells. In the monograph that I wrote, I reduced them down to the 30 drugs that I thought were the most effective. There are already good studies showing that in a test tube, in an animal model, as well as in patients, these drugs have anti-cancer activity. There’s a list of these 30 drugs in my monograph. Vitamin D is number one, but then we have melatonin and green tea. The antidiabetic medication Metformin is actually a very powerful anti-cancer drug. Then we have the antiparasitic drugs like mebendazole and ivermectin that have activity against cancer cells. Mr. Jekielek: Some people call ivermectin a horse dewormer. Dr. Marik: Believe it or not, this so-called horse dewormer is very effective against certain cancers. There were patients who had solid tumors who were given horse dewormer together with some other drugs. As I said, it’s not one magical drug. It’s a combination approach, These patients were given a regimen which included this horse dewormer and the cancer disappeared. Mr. Jekielek: Every day you could have your vitamin D, your concentrated green tea, and your melatonin. These things are very innocuous. Dr. Marik: Yes. The bottom line is there are some patients who would choose this approach rather than undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy, particularly for cancers that are not responsive to chemotherapy. But you can also use them as adjuncts to chemotherapy, so that in the end you need less chemotherapy. The data is clear that the combination is more effective than chemotherapy alone. Mr. Jekielek: The point is you have to approach any treatment regimen skeptically. You really have to do your own research. This became something that you were not allowed to say over the last few years. Dr. Marik: Absolutely. The bottom line is patients must be empowered. They need to be empowered by the truth, and they should do their own research. The days are gone where you can trust implicitly what the physician says, particularly the oncologists in this country. In some European countries, the oncologists are integrative oncologists. They'll use a combination of standard therapy plus what would be considered unconventional, but it happens in the same hospital. In this country, almost all oncologists will just follow chemotherapy. Mr. Jekielek: With the exception of this one, which has this whole integrative approach. Dr. Marik: Yes. They focus on lifestyle interventions as part of it. They don’t look at repurposed drugs or other dietary manipulations. I was surprised that they actually do have such a program. But it should be the standard of care that patients should follow in comprehensive lifestyle changes as well as I would say repurposed drugs. Mr. Jekielek: How many papers did you look at for this monograph? Dr. Marik: I looked at over 1400 different peer-reviewed papers and I have a pretty good understanding of the literature. This data is out there and this data is published. There is really good data showing that if you have surgery for colorectal cancer, and then afterwards you control your diet to control your glucose, your risk of getting a metastasis and dying of a metastasis is much less. This is in the oncology literature, so the data is out there. That’s why patients have to do their own research. In my book I compile all the data out there in one place where patients can read it and then decide what would fit their lifestyle. Mr. Jekielek: You started out running a big emergency room. You also developed the vitamin C Sepsis protocol, which has now been vindicated. You’ve published over 500 papers, but not really focused on cancer. Why should people trust this? People might say, “Stay in your lane. Dr. Marik.” Dr. Marik: Yes. I have been asked the question, and that is a good question. First, it was ICU, not emergency medicine, although it’s a small point. The reason is that I have no stake in the game and I have no conflict of interest. I can objectively look at the literature. That’s what I’ve done in most of my career. I have looked at the literature objectively and come up with treatment plans. I have no conflicts of interest here. I can objectively look at the scientific data, assimilate the data, compile the data. That’s what I did. I’m not claiming to be an oncologist. I’m just compiling and presenting the data that’s already out there. I have no conflict of interest, I have no skin in the game, and I can be honest and objective and transparent. If people don’t think it’s true, let them decide for themselves. But obviously, I’ve looked at the literature and I’m presenting it as honestly and as scientifically as I can. Mr. Jekielek: I mentioned the number of papers you have published. Sepsis is a huge problem in any hospital and it’s a significant cause of death in any hospital. You’ve developed protocols that are better and cheaper and can be applied almost anywhere in the world, including in places that don’t have great hospital facilities. You’ve done a lot of thinking about how to treat people and help make them better, including during Covid. In fact, that is actually what cost you your career running the ICU, because you refused to use their protocols, which we now know were terrible. You tried to do something better, which indeed worked. Dr. Marik: Covid basically opened my eyes, to be honest. I followed the narrative, and then I realized that there was another story. The diabetes and the cancer treatment is a good illustration that there is another side. The data is out there, it just needs to be brought to the surface. Mr. Jekielek: Where can people find this cancer monograph of yours? Dr. Marik: In two places. They can go to the FLCCC [Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance] website. That’s flccc.net, and they can download it for free. You can buy the monograph on Amazon.com. Mr. Jekielek: Wonderful. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Dr. Marik: People need to be empowered to improve their own health. Cancer is largely a preventable disease and people should do what they can so they don’t get cancer. It’s as simple as that. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Paul Marik, it’s so good to have you on the show again. Dr. Marik: Thank you, Jan. It’s always a pleasure. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Paul Marik and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

The United States is moving forward to prepare for a potential war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Satellite photos show that U.S. troops are reclaiming a Pacific Island airfield from World War II. This aligns with recently announced strategies that the U.S. would establish a network of airfields in the region, and staff them with troops trained to fill multiple roles. This happens as global conflicts are expanding in the Middle East, in Latin America, in Europe, and elsewhere. We’ll discuss this and more in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.    🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/3XACKvc Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

China’s communist regime is launching a new program to train 3,000 law enforcement officials in other countries. This is part of a push by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to extend its influence over policing and global security, with all of this tying into the CCP’s push for a so-called Multipolar World Order. We’ll discuss the development in this episode of Crossroads. *Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/3TsbmOO Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

A Chinese video game has jumped to the top of sales charts. The game, “Black Myth: Wukong,” sold over 10 million copies within a few days of release. And while the game caused a number of controversies, those are the least of the problems with Chinese video games overall. The real problem with video games coming out of China actually has to do with the anti-cheat software that gets installed on players’ devices. We’ll discuss all this and more in this episode of Crossroads. *Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/478BLXw Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

The end of the U.S. dollar gold standard in 1971 had unexpected, far-reaching consequences for the United States and its adversaries, ones that are central to today’s economic and geopolitical realities. What happened? Jeffrey Tucker is the senior economics columnist at The Epoch Times and the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute. “You’re gutting your entire industrial base and turning yourself into a whole country of indebted and stupid consumers. And you’re not making anything anymore. This is a crazy system,” said Tucker. In this episode, we dive into what’s really going on with the U.S. economy. Are we in a recession? Are prices and unemployment rising or falling? What about domestic goods and imports? And what is the data really saying? “You need to adjust this data by inflation, which is easy to say. But if you’re going to do that, you need an accurate reading of inflation. And if you don’t have that, you’re going to end up with inaccurate data,” said Tucker. He claims that many financial indicators we use to measure economic growth are inaccurate. Watch the video: “So now, we’ve got the highest rate of multiple job holders we’ve ever seen. Some people are holding two full-time jobs, which is extremely strange,” he said. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jeffrey Tucker, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jeffrey Tucker: Thank you, Jan. Thanks for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the new employment numbers. People are suddenly yelling recession, even though everything seemed fine. Mr. Tucker: Yes, it’s strange to watch. Just one set of numbers, released on Friday morning, showing a small increase in the unemployment rate, completely shifted the attitude in Washington, Wall Street, and the mainstream media. We went from celebrating a booming economy and the absence of inflation to suddenly believing that a recession is probably already here. The world seems to be falling apart, and panic selling begins. It’s an overreaction, to say the least. First, the data is already a month old, so the recession didn’t just happen on Friday. It was from the previous month. Secondly, the numbers weren’t particularly bad compared to the past. It has been obvious to me and many others for at least two years, if not longer, that we never fully recovered from the lockdown period. Worker participation ratios and labor participation rates are still below 2019 levels. When we analyze the jobs data, we see a growing gap between the household survey and business payrolls, indicating potential double counting in the establishment survey. This gap never existed before, but now it’s widening. It’s becoming more extreme, with one set of data dropping and the other rising. This has been happening for several months over the past year. Additionally, there have been revisions to the jobs data every month. For example, they would initially report 220,000 jobs, but then revise last month’s 190,000 jobs down to only 90,000 jobs. Where did those jobs go? It seemed like all the jobs were being pushed forward a month and taken out of the previous month’s count. There have been illusions in the data all along. I lost interest in the headline unemployment numbers because they don’t include discouraged workers or account for people who have dropped out of the workforce. The unemployment data only counts those who are actively looking for jobs and can’t find one. While that number may be relatively low, it doesn’t mean a healthy job market. In other words, the job market has not been healthy. For a very long time, there was something that shattered the psychology of denial on Friday morning. It had something to do with Wall Street and the attachment of Main Street Media to the headline unemployment number. Once that news broke, everything else crumbled, and suddenly someone shouted, “There’s an elephant in the room!” and chaos ensued. Mr. Jekielek: Why are these numbers so different? You’ve been covering this issue and examining various types of data. Mr. Tucker: I can’t stop writing about it; I’ve become obsessed. As an economist, I have always been taught to trust the data. Economists trust the CPI [Consumer Price Index], GDP [Gross Domestic Product], and jobs numbers, much like epidemiologists put their trust in vaccines. It’s an integral part of our profession. If these indexes are compiled incorrectly and cannot be trusted, then what can we trust? It’s like a professional doctrine and I have never doubted them. However, in the past four years, I started scrutinizing these numbers more closely, with a genuine curiosity. Sometimes, you don’t notice something until you have a reason to look for it. In recent years, I have become somewhat obsessed with deconstructing these figures. What I have come to realize is that they have always been approximations, but it feels like they have become highly politicized and muddled, especially since the lockdowns disrupted everything. The labor numbers, the output numbers, the trade data, everything fell apart. It has taken a long time to regain more accurate data collection, and during that time, trust has eroded. For instance, fewer businesses are willing to participate in surveys, resulting in fewer responses and less accurate data. We can delve into each of these numbers, but I want to quickly touch upon the issue of unemployment. We typically observe business cycles, believing that economic activity fluctuates with periods of growth, followed by corrections and recoveries. This has been a widely held belief for centuries, and it has proven more or less true for a hundred years.It is crucial to accurately date the business cycle. When did the recovery start? When did the recession begin? How long did the recession last? How significant was the recovery? How long did the growth period continue? These questions are of great interest. Why do we ask them? We are curious about whether the world beyond our personal experiences is truly functioning. What kind of world are we living in? Are we becoming wealthier or poorer? What is happening to the status of others? How is our country faring? Are we expanding or contracting? We seek answers to these questions. The only way we can truly find these answers is by collecting and analyzing data. We conduct what may be considered as a form of science, feeding information into machines and waiting for the results. We label the outcomes as recovery, recession, growth, shrinkage, or whatever the case may be, and we use these labels to ascertain our current situation. However, to make these determinations, we need standards. Traditionally, a recession has been declared when there have been two consecutive quarters of declining real GDP. Now, let’s consider GDP numbers, which measure output. Output is a broad term encompassing various elements. Let’s assume we can measure it accurately. Real output requires adjusting for inflation. If the output numbers only reflect increases in prices, they are not useful. This presents another challenge because precise measurements of inflation are also necessary. By combining accurate measurements of output and inflation, we obtain real GDP. We can then examine two consecutive quarters, which equate to three months each. If both periods show zero or negative growth, we conclude that we are in a recession. This is the rule we follow, though it is one we have established and largely invented. Nonetheless, we have always adhered to it. However, in the first and second quarters of 2022, we faced a serious dilemma as we experienced two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. But no one wanted to acknowledge a recession at that time. Having a recession right now seemed like a terrible idea, terrible timing. As a result, people began to argue that there was no recession. But how do we determine this? There has always been a caveat, and that is the condition of the labor markets. They must remain healthy for us to assert that there is no recession.There needs to be a rise in unemployment. If you have two consecutive quarters of declining real GDP and increasing unemployment, then it would be considered a recession. That was the explanation for the first and second quarters. People like me are saying, “We’ve had two consecutive quarters of declining real GDP. That’s a recession. You can’t just come along and say it’s not a recession.” Well, apparently you can, because every previous recession has been accompanied by higher unemployment. What can you do about that? I guess you just have to accept it. This continued until Friday, when we encountered a problem. We now have an uptick according to the so-called SOM rule, which says that a 50 basis points increase in the unemployment rate compared to the previous year is a recession, so now we have an additional problem—this shattered market psychology. My point is, nothing really changed except people’s perceptions. Suddenly, on Friday, everyone was screaming ”recession.” Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been asking questions about these unemployment numbers for some time. Mr. Tucker: Yes, I have. The jobs numbers have been really unreliable, especially because of the two surveys: the payroll survey and the household survey. Let’s say the bakery across the street fires a full-time employee and hires two part-timers. The phone rings, and someone asks, “How many jobs did you create this month?” The response might be, “We used to have one employee, now we have two.” But in reality, that still counts as one job. On the other hand, if you ask the households, they will report how many people are working in that household. If you ask businesses, they will report how many people they employ. This is where the discrepancy arises. Over the past four years, after the lockdowns and when the economy started to recover, there has been a significant increase in the number of people holding multiple jobs. This is due to various factors, including the impact of the hospitality industry during the lockdowns. They started hiring more and more part-time workers. As a result, we now have the highest rate of multiple job holders ever seen. Some people even have two full-time jobs, which is highly unusual. I recently shared a story in my Epoch Times column about an incident at the grocery store. Normally, it’s considered rude to strike up conversations with strangers in line or comment on their groceries. However, I couldn’t help but notice that a lady in line had two collapsible clothes hampers, which I found intriguing. Being a bit chatty, I asked her about them, wondering why she bought two. To my surprise, she explained that she was shopping for someone else through Instacart and didn’t know much about clothes hampers. Curious, I inquired further about her experience with Instacart and discovered that many people in the store were shopping for others through the service. This made me wonder about the prevalence of this phenomenon. On a subsequent visit to the store, I encountered several more individuals shopping for others. I asked if they were shopping for themselves or for Instacart, and they confirmed they were indeed working for Instacart. I was struck by the fact that these individuals, many of whom had university degrees and full-time jobs, were dedicating their nights and weekends to this gig. It seemed odd to me that despite having decent salaries and education, they still needed second and third jobs to make ends meet. This observation made me realize that there are larger issues at play in our country’s job market. Speaking of larger issues, I want to touch upon this inflation number, which ends up being really important. Mr. Jekielek: The amount of money injected into our system over the past four years is staggering, and it’s difficult to believe that there would be no inflation as a result. Mr. Tucker: Thank you for recognizing that. It puts you in a rare category of a person who actually understands the cause of inflation. In fact, I recently shared a chart in my Epoch Times column. I used the PPI, [Producer Price Index], which is a more reliable indicator than the CPI. If you look closely, you‘ll see that they are rising at exactly the same pace, just with a slight lag. Now, let’s talk about M2. M2 refers to the fungible money, which essentially means it can be easily converted into cash. This includes checking deposits, checkable deposits, and other such assets. It’s quite fascinating how closely correlated these factors are. The correlation is almost exact. I was particularly intrigued to see this unfold because we have never witnessed a six trillion-dollar cash infusion over a span of 24 months. Actually, it was even less, more like 20 months. Such a massive amount of money being pumped into the system is truly astonishing. This infusion happened because Congress spent an enormous amount of money, almost recklessly doling out trillions here and there. As a result, the Treasury found itself short on cash to comply with these spending mandates, so it resorted to issuing IOUs. These IOUs were then put on the market, seeking buyers. The Federal Reserve, being responsible for managing the money supply, stepped in and said, “No worries, we’ll take them.” How did they do this? By buying these IOUs with newly created money. Essentially, they were using this money to purchase bonds, and this newly created money was injected directly into people’s bank accounts. This situation is quite different from what happened in 2008 during the financial crisis. At that time, they implemented what was known as quantitative easing, although it didn’t cause price increases as many of us had anticipated. I personally thought it would lead to significant inflation, but I now understand that there was more to it. The Federal Reserve, through quantitative easing, created trillions of dollars and recapitalized the banks with it. Then Ben Bernanke came up with his supposedly brilliant solution, which we can discuss later. But for now, let’s acknowledge that it served its purpose. They kept the money within the Federal Reserve itself as deposits, paying more than market rates to prevent it from circulating freely. It’s similar to the way they stored money in a giant mattress during the Great Depression. Consequently, it didn’t cause inflation. However, in 2020, things were different. It was like a metaphorical helicopter flying over every city and county in America, dropping money from the sky. We had no idea what the outcome would be; predicting it was extremely difficult. But now, looking back, it seems glaringly obvious that it would generate an enormous and concerning level of inflation. When Janet Yellen made her statement in the spring of 2021, she said, “We have transitory inflation,” and people interpreted it as temporary. However, transitory means we are transitioning from one thing to another. The problem is, nobody asked what we are transitioning to. What she should have said is that we are transitioning to a world where the value of the dollar is significantly less than before, as we have to pay for recent events. The real question is, how much less? According to official data, it is a 20 percent decrease over four years. One dollar in 2019, it is now worth 80 cents. These figures are hard to believe, and anyone listening to this interview would most likely be shouting that it is not true. But they have seen their current grocery bills and know what they used to pay. They know how expensive eating out has become. They are well aware that a lunch that used to cost $20 now costs $80. This is evident in personal experiences, such as replacing an air conditioner unit and paying three times the amount compared to ten years ago. People know this, whether it’s about shopping for cars, houses, car insurance, home insurance, health insurance, or the interest rates they have to pay. Mr. Jekielek: You have also addressed this issue in your writing. Some products have seen astronomical price increases, as you described. However, there is another category of products that have remained flat, and they show no signs of inflation. I haven’t seen anyone examine why this is the case. Mr. Tucker: Let me give you two examples—one related to domestic products and the other to international exchange, which is a complex matter in itself. First, let’s talk about the sector with the lowest price increase, which is wine, beer, and liquor. Their prices have gone up maybe 5 percent, perhaps 10 percent, or maybe not at all. I often visit local merchants and engage in conversations about their pricing strategies, profitability expectations, and the difference between retail and wholesale prices. I find it all very fascinating. I can still find a fantastic bottle of wine for $12, just as I could four years ago. The reason for this is that profit margins have always been very high in the wine industry. The profit margin difference between a $1,000 bottle and a $30 bottle is not significant. They have always had hefty profit margins. It’s not that they are reducing their margins to keep prices low. The goal is to keep people buying, because nobody wants to raise prices on consumers, contrary to popular belief. It’s not corporations ripping people off. Businesses dislike charging consumers more money because it risks a decline in demand. Unfortunately, they don’t know the price elasticity of demand for their products. There’s no guarantee in the universe that tells them how much they will sell at a higher price compared to a lower price. That’s just the law of demand. They want to avoid testing those limits. If they can maintain low prices while still making a profit, they will. Now, let’s talk about restaurants. Restaurants are the least inclined to raise prices because the customers will complain. For example, your typical pizzeria has been selling the same pizza to the same customer four times a week for 10 years. It’s incredible how well customers know the menus and prices, and they will certainly protest if prices increase. However, restaurants operate on tight margins, and they face challenges such as rising costs for rent, transportation, and other inputs. How do they address this issue? The solution lies just down the street at the liquor store. Liquor stores have always had higher profit margins, although they have now become tighter. Restaurants buy alcohol at wholesale prices and sell it at a retail markup because they know that the price elasticity of demand for drinks is different from that of food. For example, a person who wants a glass of wine with dinner is likely to also order a cocktail or a beer. Price doesn’t deter them in this case. Consequently, the prices of liquor, wine, and cocktails at restaurants have skyrocketed. It’s unimaginable that five years ago, the house wine at a restaurant would cost $25 per glass. This change in pricing is driven by the fact that customers are more tolerant of higher prices when it comes to drinks compared to food. Restaurants have reduced their profitability from 50 percent to 10 percent or 5 percent and compensate for this loss by charging more for drinks. Those who have observed this know that it’s true. This explains why, when you go to a restaurant, the waitstaff often ask if you want a cocktail. If you decline, they will try to move you along because they won’t make much money on you. It’s also the reason why you’re paying more for sparkling water, sodas, and everything else. That’s where the profit margin lies. Let me clarify that this discussion is about domestic prices. The general rule is that if you had high profit margins before the onset of the great inflation, you’re now having to dip into those margins just to survive. You try to minimize passing those increased costs onto the customer. This is why fast food prices have risen by 80 or 100 percent. Their profit margins are already very tight, so they are highly affected by inflation. However, other things, like liquor stores for instance, are not impacted as much. That’s just one example. But what I find most intriguing is the price of imports. They have experienced almost no inflation at all, which has been a saving grace amidst the great inflation. Although it’s not possible to exclude import prices entirely from the CPI, doing so would significantly change the dynamics of the CPI. Discovering these dynamics takes time. The other day, I needed to buy some bedsheets and checked on Amazon. I noticed that I could buy a set of high-quality, all-cotton sheets for only $45. How is that possible? Then it hit me—we no longer have a textile industry. We drove it out, and now it’s all based in China. There’s a specific index for import prices that remains nearly flat. Meanwhile, we are dealing with massive inflation. Any goods that are produced in the U.S. from start to finish, and sourced entirely in dollars, have experienced something close to hyperinflation over the past four years. On the other hand, prices for all imported goods have remained steady. It’s truly incredible. Mr. Jekielek: When observing the overall numbers, the extent of domestic inflation is hidden. Mr. Tucker: I wonder if that’s true. While I know there is some truth to it, I’m unsure of the extent. It would be interesting to see the impact that flat import prices have had on the CPI. There must be a reason why the CPI is low, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. When you see significant increases in car prices, housing prices, fast food prices, and grocery prices, but the CPI remains low, something doesn’t add up. It’s important to analyze things in more detail. While import prices do matter, there are also peculiarities within the CPI itself. For example, instead of including medium home prices, the CPI uses a measurement called owner-occupied rent. This distorts the real picture of home prices. Similarly, the CPI uses hedonic adjustments for car prices, which can manipulate the perception of quality and impact the overall price calculation. These adjustments always reduce prices, even when quality degradation occurs. Furthermore, interest rates are entirely excluded from the CPI and housing insurance is not considered at all, despite its impact on affordability. Mr. Jekielek: We’re accustomed to relying on certain indicators to predict outcomes, but perhaps these indicators are no longer appropriate. Mr. Tucker: They may not be. This is easily demonstrated by utilizing various other tools. I have a friend who is a quantitative economist and worked for a healthcare company. He made two simple adjustments to the figures over the past few years. He replaced medium home prices with owner-occupied rent and included interest rates. With just these two adjustments out of 18 possible, he quickly calculated a figure of 127 percent inflation over four years. He showed all of his work, demonstrating that it’s just math. It’s quite intriguing. Let me provide another fascinating example regarding the increase in health insurance prices. Many people might not be aware of how much health insurance has risen because a significant portion is paid by employers. However, the prices have dramatically increased. Interestingly, according to CPI, they were initially flat and then falling for two years before leveling out. This conclusion was reached by comparing the premium paid for health insurance to the amount of medical care consumed. Surprisingly, during 2020, there was a one-third decrease in the consumption of medical resources, which future historians will find perplexing as it occurred in the midst of a pandemic. Nonetheless, from 2021 onwards, there was a significant rise in consumption. The CPI records a notable decline in health insurance premiums, even though they were increasing, because it measured the increased premiums adjusted against price. There could be arguments made about this approach, as it seems peculiar. To say the least, 2020 was an unprecedented year, as it altered the dynamics of various equations. You are right about the problem with the CPI. In the past, the things excluded from the CPI didn’t create significant issues as they were not a substantial part of the index. However, if the most rapidly changing element is the one that was already most distorted in the CPI, then the model is broken. Unfortunately, this is precisely what has happened in the last four years. The things that have experienced the greatest increase were already the most distorted in the CPI, such as interest rates. For 25 years, they remained flat, and then suddenly skyrocketed.Well, it doesn’t matter if we excluded them in the past. What matters is that we exclude them now. The same applies to housing prices, health insurance prices, and cars. Hedonic adjustments may not have been a big deal in the past, but when cars suddenly increase by 50 percent or 70 percent, the hedonic adjustments become significant. All the things that have significantly increased in price, which were already problematic in the CPI, have been exposed even more during the post-pandemic period. Sometimes, when I talk about this, people ask why we need an accurate measure of inflation. It’s because we use the data for other purposes, such as collecting data on retail sales and wholesale factory orders. If we only collect nominal data on retail sales, we won’t get useful or accurate information. For example, if I got a haircut last month for $20 and now it costs $25, an economist might incorrectly say there was a 20 percent increase in spending on haircuts over a month. In reality, I got the same haircut, but the price increased, so we need to adjust this data for inflation. But to do that, we need an accurate reading of inflation. Without that, our data will be inaccurate. Even if we use the current CPI data and adjust it against retail sales, which are usually not reported in real terms for some reason, we won’t get an accurate picture. My colleague at the Heritage Foundation, EJ Antoni, routinely adjusts retail sales and wholesale factory orders against a conventional reading of CPI, and shows they are not up, but rather down. This has been the case for the past four years. Once we start accurately measuring inflation, and I won’t speculate on the exact number, but we know it’s at least 127 percent over four years. You can verify this yourself by replacing owner-occupied rents with median housing prices and including the increase in interest rates as part of the CPI. If you continue and add real health insurance costs and real increases in house prices, where will it lead us? I hope people are following along because the implications are truly significant. We began this interview with the question of whether we are recovering from the business cycles. Are we in a recession? That’s where we began this interview because we want to track and understand. We want to know in real terms, so let’s adjust these numbers for inflation. What happens if we take the last four years of GDP data and correct it for inflation? How does that affect real GDP? I’m pretty sure it would show a negative rate for many years, possibly dating back to March 2020. It’s very possible that we never actually recovered from the supposed brief one-month recession. This is an alarming realization, which is why there’s now a sudden frenzy about the recession on the streets. I’ve been closely watching this for four years, and I’m not sure the recession ever truly went away. However, I do believe things are getting worse. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that imports have remained flat when adjusted for inflation, while locally produced manufacturing has significantly increased. Over the past few decades, the manufacturing sector has been greatly weakened, with much of it moving to China. The impact of what you’re describing might further devastate productivity in the heartland. Do you see it that way? It seems like this is an emergency that needs to be addressed. Mr. Tucker: I regret to say that this emergency dates back 40 years and it’s only worsening. We’ve destroyed a truly significant number of major industries, probably around 12 if I were to count them in my head. All of this started when we moved away from the gold standard. It’s not normal to have a country with numerous industrial sectors completely decimated. It doesn’t make any sense. Driving through New England today just breaks your heart. How is it possible that a country known for its expertise in apparel, textiles, toys, shoes, watches, pianos, steel, consumer electronics, machinery, and so much more suddenly doesn’t produce any of those things anymore? We had the knowledge, the resources, the markets, and the supply chains. Is it right that we let all of that go to waste? My point is that this isn’t true free trade. It doesn’t meet any standard of free trade. Someone might argue otherwise, but I can explain to you a theory presented by the great Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who wrote a letter to the great political theorist Montesquieu. The issue at hand was mercantilism. Does a country require an industrial policy to hoard gold and impose tariffs? David Hume disagreed and stated that it was unnecessary. According to him, the process takes care of itself. When a country exports numerous goods, they import a significant amount of money, ultimately driving up prices. As a result, their goods become less competitive, leading to decreased sales and an incentive to import more. This principle, known as the price-specie flow mechanism, was described by Hume and proved effective for 200 years. Specie refers to money based on real substances such as gold, silver, or copper, limiting its availability. Additionally, if a country were to release excessive paper money and experience inflation, Hume argued that it would self-correct over time. This point has proven to be accurate. Other economists, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Frederick Bastiat, acknowledged and built upon Hume’s theory. Post-World War II, the theory was further developed and formed the basis for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). However, in 1971, Richard Nixon abandoned the gold standard, resulting in fluctuating exchange rates and the creation of a global fiat currency market. This shift had far-reaching consequences, sparking deindustrialization in the United States. Efforts to address the issue, such as James Baker’s attempt to stabilize exchange rates in 1985, were unsuccessful due to a lack of discipline and a solid anchor. The accounts no longer settle and deficits persist. Paper money is used to finance assets, which are often synthetic in nature. These assets are predominantly purchased by China, who further inflates them, creating an enormous and ultimately unsustainable industrial base that lacks economic basis. This has led to China selling us products we used to manufacture without any adjustment. David Hume would likely question this approach and the consequences it brings about. He would say, “This is insane. You’re gutting your entire industrial base and turning yourself into a whole country of indebted and stupid consumers. You’re not making anything anymore. This is a crazy system.” Mr. Jekielek: Robert Lighthizer, the former U.S. trade representative, was one of the first to actually put the Chinese regime on notice with his policies. If any trade relationship runs in deficit in one direction and surplus another for too long without equilibrating, then that’s a problem. Someone is gaming the system. Mr. Tucker: That is true. By the way, I didn’t always understand this and I didn’t always believe this. I used to think that trade deficits and national income accounting were just mythical, but they’re not. Free trade doctrine, the idea that accounts settle over time, includes a built-in settlement mechanism. The exporters become importers, the importers become exporters, and everybody cooperates together for mutual benefit. That’s a beautiful world and how modernity was built. However, you cannot have a system like the U.S. has with China where we print all the fake paper and send it out to the world because we happen to be the world reserve currency, thanks to the petrodollar system. This system was hammered out in 1976 to save the dollar from disaster and it lived on until last month. Where we have dollars, the world reserve currency, we produce a bunch of debt and export it to the world. Their central banks buy it and inflate it to build industrial structures that compete against all the productive capacity in the U.S. They sell us cheap things and get us addicted to cheap products because, God knows, we like cheap products, and we don’t make anything anymore. That’s where financialization comes from. Debt is the leading export of the U.S. and a leading product that we make. This is not sustainable; it’s just not going to work. You’re right, it’s getting worse, and it’s a tremendous emergency. Granting China, under the communist party, permanent trade relations status and then accession to the WTO in 2001 was the one-two punch that worsened the situation.The decline we’re witnessing was caused by a punch, and what you’re indicating is that there is another system at play here. It’s not just trade, but rather the problem lies in the Federal Reserve’s creation of an excessive amount of money. This issue dates back decades and has worsened considerably over time. Financially, there has been an influx of money and numerous dollar-based assets circulating the world. This situation allowed certain countries, like the one you mentioned, to peg their currency at an extremely low rate against the dollar, thus enabling them to become strong exporters and acquire our products at a disproportionately low cost. While observing from a distance, it becomes apparent that they are not producing iPhones, electric cars, or solar panels as expected. Instead, they take advantage of credits assigned to their industry, underprice our goods, and then poof, our industries disappear one by one. This is happening because they are using treasury bills from their central bank, which they have inflated by 15 percent per year for the past 20 years. It’s important to note that this is the People’s Central Bank, and the inflation is based on dollar-based assets stored in their central bank, assets that were created by our Federal Reserve. Mr. Jekielek: In recent discussions, TikTok has been considered as one of the most powerful weapons in the Chinese regime’s arsenal against the U.S. and the free world. The subject you’re bringing up may also be vying for that same title. Mr. Tucker: I hate to say it, but the entire industrial structure of China is the arsenal. It’s not because China reformed its economy, despite what my dear free market, free trader friends may believe. It’s because the yuan was artificially kept low by using dollar assets held in the central banks. They manipulated the system with great success. Wake up, my friends, and take a look around this country. Drive around America and observe. What do you see? The toys, the furniture, the textiles are all gone. Steel? Forget about it. We have lost everything. We used to be a nation of makers, producers, and manufacturers. We were the best in the world. We were not solely an export economy; we had imports too, just like others. That’s how the world prospered until it all fell apart. The signs are everywhere—American industry has been gutted. This, my friends, is not a free market; this is not capitalism. It is a rigged currency system where one country decimates another’s industrial base. Now, you may be wondering, what can we do about it? I know that’s the question you have. Mr. Jekielek: We have been aware of some aspects of this for some time now, as we have witnessed the devastating social effects. Furthermore, the Chinese regime has added to the turmoil by waging a drug war on the very communities that lost all the jobs. Initially, we talked about a recession, but the economic reality you just described goes well beyond that. Mr. Tucker: Yes, it goes well beyond a recession. It goes beyond a typical economic cycle. This is a distraction. I am glad that people are acknowledging the recession, and I am even pleased to see that Wall Street financials are under pressure. But the problems we are facing are much more significant. Let’s go back to David Hume for a moment. According to him, if a country becomes an importer, it is exporting money and importing goods. Under those circumstances, what should happen to the price level in your own country? It should increase, right? The remaining money should gain value because there is less of it. This should result in downward pressure on wages, prices, and everything else in your country. This should naturally lead to a production base that enables you to become an exporter. But all of this hinges on the price-specie flow mechanism, so your prices have to be adaptable. We never allowed that to happen in this country. Instead, we wanted higher and higher prices for everything, and that’s what we’ve been seeing for over 40 years. As a consequence, we became an import-dependent country and stopped exporting, except for dollars and debt. Even if this recession runs its course and we recover, we still need to address this problem because we can’t continue functioning this way. There are solutions for our nation. There are fixes. There are fixes. I believe we should look at what Milei did in Argentina. He cut the budget by 1.5 percent of GDP. He scaled it back. We need to stop creating more debt. Just stop it. Stop printing money and reduce the budget. We need to prevent Congress from making reckless decisions. It can be fixed. But if we want to save American manufacturing, we need to start there. Mr. Jekielek: We need to make a decision to stop that. Mr. Tucker: Recently, I’ve had thoughts about how to prepare the public for the necessary steps to restore our industrial base and make our country a productive sovereign nation again. How do we prepare the public for what needs to happen? I believe honesty is necessary. We need to explain what went wrong and provide charts and graphs showing how China built its industrial infrastructure on top of U.S. debt. We need to illustrate the growth of U.S. debt and how much of it was funded by printing money. We need to tell the truth and say that this needs to stop because we'll end up without any jobs, especially well-paying ones. Mr. Jekielek: It reminds me of the term “austerity.” Mr. Tucker: Yes, I agree with that, and I don’t think it’s impossible. Forty years ago, we had a president who explained that we would go through a period of austerity in this country. That president was Ronald Reagan. He appointed a new Federal Reserve chairman who tightened monetary policy and allowed interest rates to rise naturally. Our savings rates are running at 3.2 percent, which is unusually low. But Reagan prepared the whole country for this, acknowledging the past mismanagement and the need for suffering to get it right. He believed that if we went through this, we would come out prosperous on the other side. They were on a clock since American elections happen every four years, so there was a four-year deadline. Reagan knew this, and going into the 1982 midterm elections, the country was in a deep recession, and the Republicans suffered significant losses. They were heavily impacted in that election due to the deep recession the economy was facing. Some argue that Reagan’s policies caused it, but I believe it was simply a result of shutting off the money printing presses. That’s the gist of it. Additionally, Reagan also implemented tax cuts, which was nice. However, by 1983, everything had bounced back remarkably quickly. We endured a relatively short period of suffering. Economies are resilient and robust and they respond rapidly. When I mention economies, I’m not referring to some distant machine. It’s about people’s responsiveness. When people believe they will be rewarded for their work, when they see the government living within its means, when they feel trust is being rebuilt and the truth is being told, they become motivated. They engage in enterprising activities, invest, and help in the swift rebuilding of the country. I genuinely believe that the rebuilding process could take place relatively quickly. It’s not a hopeless situation. I recently highlighted this in my column in The Epoch Times. Mr. Jekielek: There’s another important factor to consider here. The discussion about decoupling from China has gained traction due to the significant vulnerabilities in the global supply chain. Reports indicate that the Chinese regime is preparing for possible conflict and isolating itself from the global economy on its own terms. This is indeed currently happening, but it doesn’t serve the interests of the free world. This context is crucial in understanding everything we are discussing. Mr. Tucker: Absolutely. If something were to rupture the financial relationship between the United States and China, this ongoing monetary finance Ponzi scheme that has been in place for several decades, China’s industrial structure would have to undergo a complete reconfiguration. The current system would no longer be sustainable. Should U.S. debt no longer be perceived as a valuable asset, and should the U.S. lose its international markets for its debt, which is entirely possible, it could be the end of the petrodollar that ultimately breaks it all. A noteworthy development occurred on June 4 of this year when Saudi Arabia chose not to renew its commitment to the petrodollar. Additionally, we see BRICS [Brazil,Russia, India, China, South Africa] making moves to fill that void. Just recently, Saudi Arabia joined BRICS, which is essentially a proposed currency union and trade agreement. If this change to the petrodollar happens, it would dethrone the U.S. dollar as an international reserve currency, and that would be a game-changer, altering the current dynamics. The reason is that you can trust the dollar to settle your accounts, whereas trusting the yuan would be insane. The only reason why anyone trusts the yuan is because of the dollar’s reserves held by the central bank. If the dollar were to be lost or pulled back, it would have a profound effect on China as well. Clearly, they don’t want that, and neither do the U.S. elites. The dollar’s status as the international reserve currency can be attributed to two reasons. Firstly, the petrodollar status, and secondly, the fact that the U.S. always pays its bills. It’s widely known that there is no default risk on U.S. debt and that the U.S. would simply print money to resolve any financial crisis. However, this promise of the dollar’s status as an international reserve currency comes at the potential expense of American citizens. We have experienced a significant wave of inflation, but the exact percentage is uncertain. Over the past four years, I believe it to be at least 127 percent, but it could be even higher depending on the domestically produced goods, not imports. Currently, we are discussing lowering interest rates to mitigate an impending recession that the Federal Reserve plans to do in September. After 1971, we saw a surge of inflation that eventually subsided, leading the Federal Reserve to lower rates. This pattern repeated itself with another wave of inflation and rate adjustments. Then, in 1978 and 1979, the third wave hit, reaching double digits, and devastating American savings and capital. This period ultimately led to a significant political revolution in the country. My concern is whether the recent inflation over the past four years, which has subsided to some degree, will be our first wave. Are we going to risk experiencing two more waves and recreate the turmoil of the 1970s? This would be a terrible idea. Therefore, I strongly oppose the idea of lowering rates at this time. Instead, the U.S. government should focus on living within its means, stop excessive money printing, and hold Congress accountable. Mr. Jekielek: There are these incredibly low interest rates that came from the third wave and got the capital markets addicted to such cheap money. It changed how Wall Street works. We’re still living in that reality where money is created by manipulating money, because the money is so cheap, the risk is so low. Mr. Tucker: Indeed, this situation intensified greatly after 2008. After rescuing the financial crisis, we experimented with zero interest rates, subsidized entirely by money printing that stayed off the streets, as I described earlier, and remained in the bank vaults. However, this also inflated capital for financing and led to a surge in higher-order production goods. It was during this time that we witnessed significant corporate consolidation and the creation of massive pools of white-collar professional jobs, which reached ridiculous levels. During the lockdowns, to preserve the economy, we dumped trillions of dollars on it. Everybody thought this was great, as they could stay at home, relax, and receive money from the treasury. Even though nobody was working, it felt like nirvana. Of course, we paid the price with inflation, which was the biggest head fake in economic history, in my opinion. The wealth seemed to vanish. My concern is that this bubble in professional services and the credentialed white-collar class earning six figures or more without actually producing anything has a long way to go before it becomes normalized again. When Elon took over Twitter, we got a glimpse of what that might look like. He immediately fired four out of five employees, and despite a few hiccups, the platform started working better than ever. Many serious business people in the United States were watching this development, thinking that we might see similar changes. We have already witnessed significant layoffs in the technology and information sectors, as well as widespread job freezing in hospitality and other industries. However, things could get even worse. Perhaps we could get back to a time when we focus on building things in this country. People desire that. Sitting around as a white-collar employee, pretending to work all the time but not actually being productive, is unsatisfying. Our lives need more than just debt and money; we need mission, purpose, and achievement. Making something at home that we are proud of is gratifying. Imagine if our entire lives were spent making things again. That would be a good life. To get there, we might have to endure years of setbacks, suffering, and readjustments. But I believe in our resilience as Americans. We can handle it. Let’s remind ourselves of who we are and what we are capable of accomplishing. Mr. Jekielek: The Chinese regime holds substantial amounts of U.S. debt instruments, which has been driving this entire situation. There is some interest in decoupling, but it has implications for the global economy. Are you suggesting that we should just take action without knowing how things will change? Should we take a risk and see what happens? Mr. Tucker: Let’s start by focusing on sound finance and fixing the money system. I’m not suggesting that we go back to a hard money standard like in the 19th century. I would love to do that, but I’m not sure how to achieve it. If someone put me in charge, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. However, I do believe that if we can implement sound fiscal and monetary policies, stop assisting China in their price-fixing schemes and industrial pillaging of America, it would be a step in the right direction. The situation could improve if we get our house in order. Currently, China is counting on America never taking action. They think we will continue to be ignorant and rely on TikTok and credit, while they laugh at us and produce everything we consume. I believe this country can regain its productivity and become a mission-driven producer of goods made by Americans, for Americans, or anyone who wants to buy them. I think the decoupling part of your story will naturally happen. I don’t even like using that word because it implies the absence of relationships. I don’t care who the U.S. trades with, whether it’s Vietnam, Mexico, Canada, or any other country. As long as we have a genuine market with true settlement and no country relying on debt to inflate and take advantage of others, we can fix what’s wrong. The problem lies in our addiction to cheap products and financialization, which has resulted in the decline of the American manufacturing industry and work ethic. My message especially to white-collar intellectuals who believe they are above it all is to open their eyes and see what has happened to American industries over the years. We need to question if this is the way it’s supposed to be. It doesn’t make sense, it’s not justified, and it’s not sustainable. But the reasons behind this can be addressed and fixed, and then we can go back to having genuine free trade, just like we used to. Mr. Jekielek: I recently talked with Greg Autry, and we discussed the space industry in America. It’s one of those industries that has performed exceptionally well. Former Congressman Frank Wolf passed legislation that prevents the U.S. from cooperating with communist China on space-related technology and manufacturing. Mr. Tucker: I understand this impulse, and I’m not as opposed to this industrial policy as I used to be. I understand where it comes from, just like I understand the reasoning behind tariffs. Mr. Jekielek: You’re describing a situation where the system is being heavily manipulated, and not just by one side. Many people are taking advantage of it, and this legislation was meant to prevent a specific type of manipulation. Its effect is that it allows a normal market to function. We have a proven ability to have a highly successful space industry. We have already launched Starlink satellites and enhanced global connectivity. Many have forgotten what Americans are capable of. But we have already demonstrated our potential, and we should continue to do so. Mr. Tucker: It’s interesting how you can target one industry and ensure its success by eliminating manipulation in the system. That’s what you’re describing. A similar situation occurred in the United States with the steel industry in the 1880s. We imposed high tariffs to protect the U.S. steel industry from European countries, mainly Germany. Back then, it was a brand new industry, and the U.S. wanted to establish itself. Now, I’m a free trader and not a fan of tariffs, but it did work. We were able to build a massive steel industry. However, in 1913, an interesting shift happened. The federal government decided to finance itself through income taxes instead of tariffs. Personally, I believe that income tax is a more detrimental way for governments to raise money. Furthermore, if I recall correctly, it was initially intended as a temporary measure. Many people remind me of that. They often point out that it was a constitutional amendment. But the most important thing about the 1913 income tax is that it was initially only for the wealthy. Of course, that’s what they always say. Nowadays, nobody believes that anymore. However, there’s increasing talk about getting rid of income tax and replacing it with tariff revenue. Between the two, I would prefer the latter. It’s a fantastic idea that I would support. It’s fascinating to discuss these possibilities, as they bring up many points that we’ve discussed today. It might be shocking to hear about the fakeness of economic data and the unfairness or instability of our so-called free trade regime. Personally, I don’t believe it functions like free trade. However, don’t just take my word for it. Take a look for yourself and try to understand what is truly happening. I believe you will reach the same conclusions as I have, but if not, that’s okay. I welcome anyone to write to me and correct any points made in this interview. Mr. Jekielek: Jeffrey Tucker, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Tucker: It’s great to be here, Jan. Thank you. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

It appears that relations between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and North Korea have run into problems. This started after Russia and North Korea begun developing closer ties, and CCP leaders seem concerned the warmer relationship could impact their own interests. We’ll discuss in this episode of Crossroads. *Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.  🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/3MGHHh4 Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/