Emily Unleashed

Emily Unleashed: A Critical Thinking Show for The Broken Science Initiative Critical thinking is in the toilet. Americans, lacking the will to challenge conventional wisdom, are blindly deferring more and more autonomy to perceived authorities. Curiosity and a healthy rebellious attitude, once a mainstay in the American zeitgeist, are now perceived as dangerous traits. Individuals who challenge authority face dire consequences including public humiliation, private isolation, job loss, and excommunication from their peer-groups. If we’re to have any hope of returning to a nation of innovators, creators and a people who believe in the rights of the individual over the consensus of a few in power this fear-based mindset needs to be called out and rectified. Unleashed will feature prominent guests in art and science who exemplify the antidote to these problems. In some cases their willingness to revolutionize their own industry has led to wild success and in others it has led to being canceled–and in some cases both outcomes are true. The goal of the interviews will be to showcase how these individuals recognized a problem, or a lacking in the current offerings, and felt compelled to change things. Curating a mixture of guests that range industries from science to art, Unleashed will (hopefully) create a narrative theme that rebelling against the norm is often necessary and is the only path to progress. We hope to encourage listeners to ask questions, consider how they might improve their own lives by doing things their way, rather than simply falling in line. Agency is a key element in building a revolution of critical thinkers; people need to believe they have the right to ask for information, admit when they don’t understand, and feel entitled to answers from those dictating demands. Our guests will tell our audience how and why they stood up and called for change. Providing the public with examples of real people who have done this gives the audience a vision of what being brave in the face of opposition looks like. It should, if done properly, inspire people to replicate these examples and support those in the trenches. In turn, I hope we raise a new army of thinkers who recognize that curiosity and standing up for what you believe in is directly tied to our innate sense of free will and without it, we succumb to a life as automatons deferring all our power to arbitrary sources of authority. As the host of Unleashed, I bring a few important cards to the game. As a former investigative reporter who has reported for newspapers, magazines, written columns and as one of the youngest producers at 20/20 and Primetime where I covered murder and medical mysteries, I have experience with deep-dive interviews and can get down to the crux of these issues. In my role as the founder of The Kleio Group, I have helped people who have been canceled for standing up to authorities. I see how these takedowns work, what strategies are implemented and how to combat them. I am one of the few people who worked in the media and saw how it was being weaponized against critical thinking. I left because of this deterioration of balance, fact checking and what I saw as an overly politicized agenda being forced on newsrooms. I pivoted from giving voice to the voiceless as a reporter to helping those being wrongly maligned by the media. My extensive work covering health and medicine plays a prominent role in my work as co-founder of The Broken Science Initiative. I am well practiced at reading medical studies, pointing out, in simple ways, why they’re misleading, poorly designed, making claims of significance they cannot make, etc. With the same approach I take to deconstructing medical studies, I will apply a similar framework to interviews with artists, comedians, musicians, and business leaders. We will consider why their ideas were so controversial at the time, why the threat of their novel approach rued feathers and how they handled it. In some cases, the guests changed paradigms and we will examine how the ideas that were once controversial are now commonly held and widely accepted. We will discuss what that experience taught them. It will also be interesting to get into how they’ve changed since their days of rebellion, do they still hold those same values and where do they come from? What advice do they have for a young rebel? What would the current state be if they hadn’t had the impact they had? And, for those that were canceled, we’ll get into what they would have done differently, if anything, and what they learned from the experience. We’ll discuss what their ideas were based on and when the culture/industry/environment might accept them and how even if they don’t become a part of the conventional wisdom, the introduction of the ideas played a pivotal role in the conversation at-large. The broad range of guests for this show exemplifies the critical criteria common in all creative thinkers. Musicians, comedians, activists, scientists, business innovators, etc all bring essential stories to this narrative. By including guests from many industries, we will draw in a larger audience who will hopefully enjoy one episode on a hero of theirs and stay to listen to others they may not have heard of before. Through this continuum, we build our narrative thread, which will be Unleashed’s theme: How to be an independent thinker and why those who challenge the status quo are the ones who push us all forward.