American Thought Leaders

Recently, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) reached a major settlement concluding the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against government-induced social media censorship.I sat down with Mark Chenoweth, president and chief legal officer of the NCLA, to discuss what this settlement actually means.The 10-year consent decree blocks the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from pressuring social media companies to censor speech.“The federal government has now admitted that it was engaged in a very systematic operation of social media censorship,” Chenoweth says.So what does this mean exactly? What legal precedent does this set? What happens after the 10-year mark ends?And why a consent decree at all? Why was the lawsuit settled?We also discuss several other important cases that the NCLA has currently pending at the Supreme Court. One of them, Powell v. SEC, seeks to put an end to what Chenoweth calls the SEC’s “gag rule.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

In this episode, I’m sitting down with Frank Bisignano, who oversees not one, but two of America’s most consequential institutions: the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).Before stepping into government, he built a career at the very top of finance as the youngest senior vice president in American Express history at just 25, co-COO of JPMorgan Chase, and CEO of the fintech company Fiserv.Now, he’s taking on a different kind of challenge: bringing, in his words, “accuracy” to massive federal agencies that impact every American.He’s cleaning up records—including moving records of 12.4 million people aged 120 and over into the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File—and digitizing records to streamline systems.“There wasn’t really a routine to reconcile data. ... It wasn’t that people who weren’t alive any longer were getting paid social security. It was that there was a live social security number which could be used throughout the whole system,” Bisignano said.How is he transforming these agencies? What new benefits are there in this year’s tax season?How are the newly rolled out “Trump accounts” doing? And will Social Security be able to resolve insolvency challenges in the decades ahead?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Have Gen Z and Gen Alpha lost touch with the real world? Gen Z entrepreneur and founder of Touch Grass Together, Adnan Alkhalili, thinks so.“I grew up very natively online, scarily so ... I grew up on the Discord world. I grew up on the gaming world as well ... and even the friends I had in real life, we would end up not even spending time together. We would spend all of our time online. So they‘d be in their house, I’d be in my house,” Alkhalili says.The online world traps Gen Z into an escapist reality that their parents do not comprehend. Even good parents, he said, have no idea what their kids are doing online and to what extent they live online: “If you talk to any Gen Z and have them explain it to somebody that’s not Gen Z, the person who’s not Gen Z—maybe a later millennial and older—will actually have no idea what they’re talking about. It sounds like another language.”Gen Z and Gen Alpha, he said, spend most of their time indoors on their devices; they don’t move much. They eat addictive processed food and drink lots of addictive energy drinks to combat tiredness.“My metabolic health was destroyed,” he told me in our interview. “I felt like my life was over. ... I was so tired of life that I felt like I was in my 70s or 80s.”Now he’s helping other young people exit this lifestyle with Touch Grass Together, a health and wellness initiative focused on metabolic health and real life community experiences: “We’ve come up with a framework called the touch grass moment. And ultimately, we’re trying to recreate human ritual.”This framework, he explained, is based on four core components: light, movement, nourishment, and human connection. The goal? Getting Gen Z off their devices and out of their rooms, getting them to do things together outside such as touching grass or jumping into leaf piles and eating healthy food.But how to achieve that? In our interview, Alkhalili talks about the constructive role technology can play in helping Gen Z to escape “brain rot” online. Is there also a constructive role for AI? What about social media? And should schools forbid smartphones?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.