The Confessionals - Introducing: Free The Rabbits

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey guys, today is the day. Free the Rabbits, the new podcast through Merkel Media, hosted by Joel Thomas, is now available. Go ahead and check it out right now on any podcast playing app on YouTube Rumble. Wherever you get your podcast, it is there for your listening pleasure. And if you want proof, go ahead and listen to these clips right now from today's episode. And then go listen to the full thing over at Free the Rabbits. Link in the description below. My parents were always critical thinkers, and they encouraged my sister and I to be critical

Starting point is 00:00:30 thinkers. So I didn't really think anything about Bigfoot and all that. I just kind of thought that it was very possible they existed. I know as I got older, I dug into other conspiracies deeper, right? You know, 9-11 happened. That's when a lot of people started questioning things. I know the older generation were probably point to JFK and his assassination as a spinning moment in time where they stopped and said, you know, something doesn't add up. Maybe there's more to this, right? And I think that's what most people have done with certain points of their lives. Something happened, big, and it shook them to their foundation to where they were like, you know what? I don't know if everything that people in charge are telling us is necessarily true. I don't know if I've really thought about it

Starting point is 00:01:24 that way because I think growing up I had a healthy distrust for people with power and money. We got to start living in the real world, guys, and I mean it. I don't mean that we don't need to take on board critical thinking and look at the wild and the weird. Believe me, I've seen pursing the wild and the weird. You know me. I'll go to the first end of it. But I also believe we've got to be centered and grounded. When we're not centered and grounded, these conspiracy theories rule our lives, and they become us. To the point that I'm calling myself Matrix Thomas, because the Matrix Theory is my theory, and it is everything of my life. The Nudge is we will use the term as any aspect of the choice architecture

Starting point is 00:02:16 that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not. So you see what they're using here? It's called nudge theory.

Starting point is 00:02:38 They're going to nudge you in the way that they think you should go because you don't know what's good enough for yourself. Now, to his point, there are a lot of people out there making dumb decisions. A lot of people that don't critically think, and to his point, these sheep need to be herded around. I don't know if he's necessarily wrong from his angle in how he thinks about that. He's not. Now, I don't think that way because I don't look at people as sheep and cattle, and I think people need the right to think for themselves and the ability to do so. Everybody in Hollywood's a reptilian.

Starting point is 00:03:14 No. impossible. Even if there is a possibility that are there are reptilians in Hollywood, that just doesn't work that way. We have got to get out of this all or nothing mentality in this community, whatever it is. I don't consider it community. I think it's just people fighting each other all the time. We got to get out of this. Everything's fake mentality. That's how we think. And it really is a service to ourselves because again, once everything becomes fake once it all becomes a facade, then we don't know how to connect with anybody else because we look at everybody else's fate. We look at everybody else that we're the only real people

Starting point is 00:03:55 walking the planet. When in actuality, we might actually be the fakes people on the planet. We've got to start thinking that way. That's how you critically think. It's not looking at a mean, it's not looking at an article headline and taking it as truth. We need these conspiracy theories to justify how bad we feel inside. We're not actually using these conspiracy theories to help us grow or look into the truth so we can help other people, are we? Are we just doing it so we can scream and yell because we don't like our lot in life? We don't like how we feel about our lives. We're not getting along with our wives or husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, kids.

Starting point is 00:04:33 So we want to use these conspiracy theories as a catalyst to get our anger out. I'm just speaking to facts, y'all. That's what I'm here to do. So they do get into the crippled epistemization. again, we'll talk about that, and how dangerous it can be. You know, I always say about NASA that NASA's not all lies. They wouldn't be successful if they were. I think NASA is a mix of truth and lies. We don't know what the truth is, and we don't know where the lies end.

Starting point is 00:04:59 We don't know. And it's easy to be NASA's full of lies or still in all our money. Yeah, in some ways, for sure. Maybe it's still a money part. But there's not all lies. And we have to understand that. We've got to live in this, like, medium ground where we understand there's this, like, fakeness that's perpetrated on us constantly. But there's also a real world and real people and real connections that are going on at the same time.

Starting point is 00:05:30 We've got to find a balance. We won't be able to combat the system otherwise. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. So basically he's saying that people that believe in conspiracy theories aren't actually don't have mental illness. They don't have simple irrationality. They may be very intelligent individuals, but they just have a lack of epistemology, which is the lack of the investigation of what belief is from opinion. You see where he's going with this? He's skewing the lines between what critically thinking is.

Starting point is 00:06:08 He's actually spinning it back. he's saying to be a critical thinker, you have to be able to push back from these conspiracy theories. Right? Right?

The Confessionals - Introducing: Free The Rabbits

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