#2324 - Amanda Knox

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Hello.

Hey.

Good to see you.

Good to see you again.

You have a book.

I do.

Yeah, I hope you like it.

Free.

That's a great news.

Yeah, well,

it's on point.

Yeah, it's on the nose.

Yes.

Well, that whole question of what does it mean to be free?

And what, you know,

yes, there's the physical, like, oh, you're out of prison, but then also

is your life the thing that you expected it to be?

And how do you make your own freedom when you feel hemmed in by all the things that happened to you?

So,

yeah, you're connected to that forever.

That's always going to be a part of your life.

It's not like anything else that didn't really happen, like you didn't do anything, and you're connected to something that you didn't really do forever.

For people that don't know the story, yeah, yeah, we should do a little recap.

Recap.

Okay, recap, friends.

Real quick.

Recap, friends.

And you can go back to the episode of that of Joe Joe Rogan.

What number was that?

Do you know?

Off the top of your head.

If you just Google Amanda Knox, you'll go, holy shit.

You'll go down a crazy rabbit hole.

Yes.

So in a nutshell, what happened?

Yeah.

I was studying abroad when I was 20 years old in Perugia, Italy.

One of my roommates was raped and murdered by a burglar who broke into our home.

But I was accused of having orchestrated a murder orgy.

And I was sent to prison for four years.

I was sentenced to 26 years.

I I was put on trial for eight years.

And it became this

international scandal

where

it sort of pinged all of the buttons in all the right places.

This happened in 2007.

So, you know, early 2000s when the internet was, or the internet, the social media was really becoming a thing, the iPhone was becoming a thing.

I think that that played a huge role of people sort of going into their little echo chambers and fighting online.

And so I think that there was, yeah, it was a case that for whatever reason

rose above the

level of other cases.

Like ultimately, this case was actually very simple and it wouldn't have risen to the level of international infamy were it not for the series of mistakes that the prosecution and the detectives made at the very beginning by trying to pin a man's crime on me, a woman.

Yeah.

And if anybody wants, wants, there's a documentary.

Yes, there's a Netflix documentary.

I wrote a book called Waiting to be Heard.

And then more recently, I wrote this book, Free My Search for Meaning, which covers like, you know, you can read it and learn about the case, but it's mostly about how do you come out of an experience like that and make sense of it.

And then

one of the big stories in it is how I then developed a relationship with my prosecutor, which I think you'll probably be in the camp of people of thinking that I'm utterly insane for having done that.

Maybe, maybe, maybe you won't.

I just remember that when we talked about this back in the day, you were like, this motherfucker.

Yeah.

So you've become friends with him?

Friend is an interesting word.

What is a friend?

Someone else asked me that.

Like,

I was like, it depends on what you mean by friend.

Because, and they said, well, do you trust him?

And I said, well,

I think that at the point that we are now in our relationship, I do trust him.

I trust that he's telling me the truth about what he really thinks and feels about the situation.

So I feel like I have

very privileged, special access to

the mind of the person who put me in prison.

And that is a very interesting,

awkward, but also empowering place for me to be because one of the things that really bothered me about this experience was not understanding why it happened to me.

Why did this man look at a 20-year-old girl with no criminal history, no motivation to commit this crime?

Why did he look at me and think, there's my rapist and murderer?

And I didn't understand it.

And I didn't feel like demonizing him in my mind or vilifying him in my mind was going to actually give me a satisfying answer as to the why of it all.

A lot of people said, well, it's just because he's a bad dude.

He doesn't care what the truth is.

He's just covering his ass.

Like these were all really simplistic ways of framing his motivations.

And I didn't really buy them.

So instead, what I was interested in was going to the source and confronting him,

asking why.

But to ask someone, why did you hurt me?

Which I think is a really common thing that people who have been hurt want to know is they want an acknowledgement that they've been hurt and they want to understand why and they want to know if that person's not going to hurt them anymore or not going to hurt other people.

Like, that's really common for people who have been hurt.

The challenge is that people who hurt other people don't like to be confronted with that fact.

And so, how do you start a conversation that's not going to immediately become adversarial?

And that was one of my biggest challenges.

But I came up with this methodology that I actually became so important to me that I tattooed it on my arm.

So this is it.

There are four steps.

And the first one is find common ground.

So it's this Venn diagram.

Find common ground.

I promise you that every single person on this earth, you have something in common with them.

Find it.

So I asked myself, what could I and my prosecutor have in common?

I didn't know this man.

I didn't know what his history was, what his background was, but I did know that he, like me, was part of this really big, scandalous in the media case.

And he very likely felt misconstrued or misrepresented also in the process, maybe dehumanized in the process.

And so I reached out to him and I acknowledged that fact.

I said, hey,

I don't know who you are.

I only ever encountered you in the police office and in the courtroom where you were someone who was trying to ruin my life.

So you were a big, scary boogeyman.

And I saw you in the media and I, you know, I've seen how the media represented you, but I, knowing from experience, I know how that can be very misrepresentative.

So I said to him, I want to know who you really are.

And I hope that you might be interested to know who I really am because I don't think you know who I really am.

I don't think that you would have prosecuted me if you knew who I really am.

And that was the beginning of the dialogue.

This, like, I went out of my way to acknowledge that he might have had noble motivations, even if he was wrong.

And I think this is like a really important

thing:

I

wanted to give him

radical benefit of the doubt.

Maybe, just maybe, this like horrible thing that happened to me could have been the result of understandable mistakes.

And if anything, I think coming into contact with the innocence movement and criminal justice system stuff and reform, all the stuff that I've learned after having gone through this experience has made me realize that some of the most horrible things can happen and can be enacted by people who have the best of intentions.

And so I assumed that of him and I gave him that benefit of the doubt.

And as soon as I like opened that door, like, hey, you hurt me, but maybe that wasn't your intention.

Maybe your intention was something else.

He filled that void with his story and his message and what he wanted me to understand about himself.

And

I mean, one of the wildest things about this book is that I talk about, like, I do not sugarcoat what I went through, like, and especially what he did to me.

Like, I very, like, clearly set out, like, here's the fucked up shit he said about me in court, completely without evidence, like, totally made up bullshit.

Like, and it ruined my life, right?

Here's what it is.

Acknowledge these facts.

And also, and also, here is a person who might have had, like, in doing so, might have been coming from a place of trying to rationalize things in his own mind, which is a thing that we all do, we all do on a regular basis.

We're all just sort of interpreting our reality in the way that suits us.

And so I

and I wrote this book from my perspective.

I translated the entire thing into Italian before it ever got published so that I could share it with him, so that he would know what I was saying about him in public, what was imminently going to come out.

And his response was:

I have never felt more seen.

That's what he told me.

That sounds like something a teenage girl would say.

Well, that's an interesting observation

because it's become quite

emotional,

especially on his part.

I don't know.

I shouldn't go there too much.

You're protecting his privacy?

That's hilarious.

Yeah.

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Yeah.

You're a very nice person.

You're so much nicer than me.

Well, I don't know.

I've just had really bad stuff happen to me and like I don't wish bad stuff upon other people.

That's a beautiful way to live your life.

It really is.

I mean

that's what all Christians aspire to.

This is what you're doing.

Yeah,

I guess I'm not a Christian.

Radical forgiveness.

Yeah, you know, it's funny.

I didn't really set out for people like point to that.

They're like, forgiveness, forgiveness.

You're doing forgiveness.

And I was like, is this forgiveness?

Or is this just communicating with him is forgiveness in some way and not having extreme anger.

Well, that's the thing.

I do have extreme anger.

Like, that's all part of it.

And this is where the Buddhist in me comes out, where

you can have extreme anger towards a person and and at the same time

hold them in your hand as this like

tender, fallible creature that is capable of violence against you, but is also capable of being hurt.

Just because someone hurt you doesn't mean that they're not capable of being hurt.

And I certainly don't want to be in the position of hurting someone.

Like, that's just who I am.

And if anything, like, one thing that I've communicated to him is like, look,

I don't know if you're ever going to really wrap your head around what you did to me.

But if you do, one day,

I know that you're going to feel really, really bad.

And I just want you to know that I

don't wish suffering on you.

I don't.

Did you ask him if he had gone over any of of his previous cases and wondered whether he did the same thing to other people?

Because I don't think that's something you do once.

I don't think you are an ethical prosecutor who just really objectively analyzes the evidence and puts forth a case based on what you think

is the facts.

I don't think you do that your whole career.

And then this 20-year-old bitch, I think she's too cute.

I don't like how she's smiling.

Yeah,

there was that element to it.

Hasn't there been anything?

Well, yeah, I think that, and

I do feel like there was some kind of pornographic nature to it.

Like, I don't know, like, I think that men.

Well, there's a lot of men that have like a deep resentment for beautiful women.

Just from feelings of rejection or, yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because

they are attracted to them or they find them to be beautiful or desirable and they know that that woman wants to have nothing to do with them.

Like they are completely repulsive.

And so you see it a lot with, unfortunately, unattractive men.

They develop a hate for women.

I've seen it.

I've seen it evolve over years with people that I used to be friends with.

You know, like just constant rejection and then it becomes like, fuck these women, fuck them.

They just want this like,

okay.

Put yourself in their position.

Your growth.

Like,

what are they supposed to do?

Try harder.

What are they supposed to do?

Like, be with someone that they're not attracted to to make that person feel better.

Like, that's not what people do.

Like, you have a short window of life.

Yeah.

You're supposed to pursue what you like.

And

your fucking hand of cards sucks.

Sorry.

You know, this is how it goes.

But that thing

where, you know,

they look at you like you have it too easy.

You have too many gifts.

Life has given you too good a hand of cards, you know, and you should be punished.

You should be knocked down a peg.

You see that in particular in the media with celebrity.

It's a big one with celebrity women.

If something goes wrong, like they just can't wait

to dunk on them, mock them for weight gain, whatever it is.

For getting out of a car in the wrong way.

They were the ones who were like showing up to get up their skirt.

Yeah, any sort of.

That stuff was on purpose.

Oh, is it?

Yeah, I think the Paris Hilton stuff, like back in the day, where a lot of women were like, it was like an epidemic of

getting out of cars.

Photographers just happened to be on the ground.

Like, you're a woman, you've worn skirts.

It's not easy to look up someone's skirt.

If you're standing up and someone gets out of there, how the fuck do you get down there?

You'd have to be on your knees.

I think they were doing it on purpose.

I think it was a way of going going viral

before viral was a thing because it went away.

Like, when was the last time that we had an off-the-skirt shot?

Whoa, I don't have any underwear on.

That seems weird.

Well, panty lines, you know, that's a real thing.

Yeah, sure.

But that's what G-strings were invented for, right?

Those still create lines, my friend.

Depends on the drift.

Yes, but I mean, are you that concerned with lines that you want to go bareback?

I've not gone bareback

at a premiere.

I have a lot of people.

You have a little skirt on?

Hopping out of a car and the way they did it.

It's just, I think it was like,

you know, there's the same people that had sex tapes that leaked air quotes

that were engineered.

I mean, the whole thing was, it was on purpose.

Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah.

But in, but in terms of your, of like trying to take beautiful women down a peg, I think you're right.

I also think that something that was going on in my case that I think you also tend to see in those situations where you're trying to take beautiful beautiful women down a peg, is this idea of like pitting women against each other?

Like, that was a huge thing in my case, where they were suggesting that, you know, here I was, this like free-spirited, but also hoary, you know, American girl versus the uptight, judgmental British girl.

And therefore, they hated each other and with, you know, with a vengeance, with a lethal vengeance,

And then

this idea of like a murder orgy appeared where this pornographic fantasy of women

expressing

their own violent fantasies towards each other in real life and using men as pawns in that.

in that game of violent hatred towards each other.

I think you see that a lot,

you know, even in like a person that I write about in this book who's become a dear friend of mine is Monica Lewinsky, and how I feel like people really wanted to bring her down a peg, in part because they wanted to bring Hillary down a peg, and the whole like

person the person who actually committed the affair was sort of I mean, he definitely got his part, but it was all like a political game of they're trying to take down the man, but they're also taking down the woman, and they're especially railroading this young woman who made a mistake, And it became known as the Monica Lewinsky scandal and not, you know, the Bill Clinton affair or whatever.

Like, it matters what you name a thing.

And it seemed like the legacy of that and the person who became defined entirely by that scandal happened to be Monica, the one who was the person with the least amount of power and agency in that equation.

Also, 20 years old.

Yeah, 23 years old.

Yeah.

Who did a very normal thing, which was fall in love with a charismatic, powerful man.

And he was handsome as fuck back then.

Oh, yeah.

And he was the president of the United States.

He was the president of the United States.

He was charismatic.

He was handsome.

He showered her with attention.

And it makes sense that a young...

inexperienced person would fall in love with him and yet she was the one who got railroaded she was the home wrecker she was the the one who became the subject of all the rap lyrics and her entire life and her entire identity became identified with with this mistake she had made.

And that was not the same thing with the President of the United States.

And I think that

that impulse to define women by their worst moments and to tear them down for their worst moments is

prevalent from what I have seen.

Well, I think because they know it's so devastating to the person.

You know what I mean?

It's like there's that the bully instinct when they know that you're weak and vulnerable, you know, to attack.

You know, but why?

To what end?

People are cruel because they've been hurt.

You know, it's the hurt people, hurt people thing.

You know, I think it's like Schadenfreude, just as an audience, like we want a story, we want a real-life story where we get to

passively enjoy the destruction of another human being.

Right.

And also, you don't know her, so you're disassociated.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, if she was your friend and you did that, you'd have to be a special kind of monster.

Like that woman, Linda Tripp, who did it all.

That's a special kind of monster.

Right.

Special kind of monster who trots that out to the whole world to try to take down Bill Clinton.

Yeah.

Which didn't even work.

No, and that's what's fascinating.

It worked to destroy Monica.

But also, like, you, when you look at Bill, Bill Clinton, this handsome president, and then you look at Linda Tripp, who is very unattractive, that's also plays in, like, I want to take him down too.

And probably I want to take her down as well.

Like, there's a lot of, like, fuck, fuck everybody else.

There's a lot of that.

You know, when you're, you know, you're unseen, to use the same vernacular, you know.

And then you see like other people getting attention.

And it's just like the fact that she did it and she knew her.

And she, but also, this is like, this is the game of cards that they're playing.

This is House of Cards.

This is, you know, this is literally what they do anytime they have a chance in the political realm to use anything.

Any window, any vulnerability.

Anything.

It's the dirtiest game in the world.

It's a disgusting game.

And if you get sucked into it, you'll find that out.

I don't want anything to do with it.

It's the most evil.

It really is.

Like when I see people that are running for president, I'm like, what are you doing?

I know.

Why would you do that to yourself?

Yeah, and then you have to spend the rest of your life with

Secret Service following you around so you can't exist in the world as a normal human being.

I do feel like there is a you have to be a special kind of person in order to be attracted to something like that.

Yeah, I am not.

And ironically, that's the kind of person that's attracted to that in general is not the kind of person you want in a leadership position.

Right.

You know, which is like, wow, what do we do though?

Yeah, yeah.

So, is democracy completely and utterly flawed because it relies upon the ambition

of

the wrong people.

Or heroes, or legitimate heroes, like someone who's like, you know, I'm going to tolerate this.

I'm going to carry the burden of this on my back because I think I can help people.

But does anyone ever, like, actually arrive at the pre, like, at the seat of the president as that person?

Like, here's the question: do they stay that person?

Because I used to think Obama was that person.

I really did.

You know, I was like, wow, we got a good one.

You know?

Yeah, I was sad I missed out on that.

Yeah.

It was pretty cool.

But

in

retrospect, when looking back,

like, probably not really.

Like, probably got corrupted by the system or was corrupt originally.

You know,

and is now willing to openly lie.

God.

Yeah.

It's uh, it's dark.

It's dark.

You know, and I think

it's just a

it's it's a strange social position that I don't think is manageable for anyone.

I don't think the human mind is prepared to be in that kind of a position of power and not have it completely distort what you are.

And then there's the relationships that you have to have with all of these various politicians and then special interest groups and lobbyists and then foreign leaders and then

how do you manage all of that?

Heads of defense contract companies, like what?

Yeah.

Can I tell you a story?

Yes, please.

Okay, so

this story didn't actually make it in my book, but it is one that I

wanted to tell you because it

talks about how my weird relationship with other people who are in positions of power, like police officers, right?

Like, you know, I'm an advocate of criminal justice reform.

I talk a lot about like I go and testify in front of my, you know, state Congress trying to get certain laws passed to protect, you know, innocent people.

And one thing that I like to point out is that I'm not anti-law enforcement.

If anything, I was a victim of crime before I became a victim of the criminal justice system.

Like someone broke into my home and raped and murdered my roommate and then I called the cops and then the cops went on to betray me.

And,

but that doesn't mean that there isn't, like, I'm not one of those, you know, fuck all the police.

We don't need them, you know, abolish the whole system.

That's not what I believe.

But

as someone who has had this complicated experience with police,

I don't really know what to do.

when something bad goes down.

And I want to tell you a story about something bad that went down.

It was in LA.

I was staying at a friend's house with my husband and our two kids.

We were doing work down there.

And our friends were not there.

But

in the middle of the night, we hear someone yelling

out in the street.

We think there's some drunk guy out there, but it gets closer and closer and closer until finally there is a huge bang.

And my husband gets up up in his tidy whities

and says one thing to me, call the police, before he marches downstairs.

We were upstairs in the second story, and we hear a bang, we hear yelling.

He goes down there in his underwear, and I don't know if the last thing I'm ever going to hear from my husband at that point is call the police, which is an interesting final words to get from the love of your life when you're me.

And my, my, you know, infant son is crying.

My two-year-old daughter at the time is going, what's going on?

And I'm trying to calm him while reassure her while looking around the room thinking, how do I barricade a door?

And can I jump out of a window with two small children?

All of that.

before I think dial 911.

Because the last time that I dialed the equivalent of 911 to call for help, I got thrown into prison.

I realize that there's nothing I can do to protect my kids, so I call 911.

And

eventually, you know, my husband is able to get this intruder to leave the house.

The police arrive,

and

I have a very strange encounter with them because they are very nice to me.

And I was not expecting that.

And they are very nice to my daughter.

And they give her a nice little, you know, police badge.

And I'm sitting here thinking, great, now I'm going to have to throw a police-themed birthday party for her because now she's going to be super into police.

And I'm just like, what is happening to my life?

And I'm scared that they're going to recognize me.

And I'm scared that they're going to think maybe she faked a break.

And like, all of that is going on in my head.

And

I don't know how to resolve that.

You know,

somebody broke in to,

I have, you know, broke into my home once, murdered my roommate, broke into the place I was staying again, thankfully didn't murder anybody.

But, like, how do I make sense of my relationship with

people who are empowered to protect me, but also are empowered to hurt me?

What do I do about that?

You tell me,

Joe.

What do I do?

There's no way I could know what's going through your mind.

You know, the experience that you had is

no one can even pretend to

have those thoughts in their head because this is not just paranoid fantasy.

This is your actual lived experience for years.

Yeah,

that's a good question.

What had happened?

Like, the bang?

Was it someone kicking down the door?

Yeah, he had kicked in the door through the deadbolt.

What was the yelling?

The yelling was he was just

schizophrenic?

Yeah, he thought that someone had stole that house from him, and he was yelling for some name of a person who didn't live there.

Clearly was just like either confused or mentally ill in some capacity.

But

and thankfully not armed.

But like my husband didn't know when he walked down the stairs in his underwear without any,

like he grabbed a broom on his way down and that was he was

between putting himself and a broom between

whoever this person was who had just kicked in the front door through the deadbolt and his family

and that might have been the last time I ever saw him

you know

and

I did not know what to do I try to like joke about it now where

I actually did a stand-up bit about it a while back about how I was like testing my butt to see if it was bouncy enough to like jump out of the window and bounce.

But like,

when I think back on it, it's just it's still scary, you know?

Um,

and and I don't, I don't like how I feel right now

that

when I'm scared, I'm supposed to call the police, but I'm also scared to call the police.

Jesus,

and so, you know, when I go and do advocacy work for, you know, I'm now on the board of an organization called the Innocence Center, InnocenceCenter.org, which, by the way, just got a bunch of federal funding taken away, thanks, Elon.

You'd think that they would be interested in supporting organizations that clean up the messes of the criminal justice system, but apparently not.

So if you want to support us, innocencecenter.org.

What happened that they got their funding taken away?

What was the circumstances?

I mean, there's a federal funding that is designed for innocence organizations.

And I think what I heard is that there are certain words that sort of became taboo within the administration.

That if you are using these words or these terminologies that they associate with like DEI,

that then that sort of puts you on the list of being cut for federal funding.

And one of those words was like the word fair.

And in an organization that is interested in justice and for in getting innocent people out of prison, the word fair is going to come up quite a bit.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So, is it just an algorithm?

They're just scanning

the mission statement of whatever these organizations are?

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's

a first step: they'll just use this, they're going to use algorithms and AI to help them identify potential things to cut.

And I think

as a new innocence organization, we were considered not worthy of the federal funding that we have relied on and to help innocent people.

And now we're...

Are you one of the founders of this organization?

Me?

No, I'm on the board.

You're on the board.

But yes, this is formerly the California Innocence Project that has since sort of turned into the Innocence Center.

But you're seeing this all across the board of innocence projects of getting their federal funding funding taken away.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And there's no accusations of impropriety or misuse of funds or high salaries for certain individuals or

nothing.

Nope.

Just it's deprioritized because I think we're considered leftist organizations potentially.

I don't know.

But I know that like

I have always thought that innocence and getting and justice were bipartisan issues and I thought that we had been making great you know strides in in sort of welcoming in both liberal and conservative partners in this ongoing fight but because these sort of these things disproportionately impact people of color you're going to see

language around that that acknowledges that fact and I think that that has been sort of put in we are innocence organizations are now being put into DEI camps and we're being stripped of funding.

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And I think that that's,

I hope that that's an oversight issue and that they're going to recognize the mistake that they're making.

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filing all of their work and going through all of the casework and doing the DNA tests and doing investigations to see if you can reach the witnesses that maybe have changed their stories in all these years.

It takes a lot of money and resources to prove a person's innocence.

You have to reinvestigate a case and

we don't have the funding that we used to.

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I do a lot of work with Josh Dupin.

Yeah.

You know, Josh?

Yeah.

I mean, I've never met him personally.

He's with the, he was with the Innocence Project, and now he's with the Ike Pro Mutter Center for Legal Justice.

And it's the same kind of work.

Ironically, Ike Pro-Mutter is very close friends with Trump.

And so...

I mean, I would have thought that that would have been of interest to Trump, considering.

I think it's a baby with the bathwater type deal.

Right.

Where there's a lot of what you would call almost like slush fund NGOs where they're inappropriately moving funds around and doing stuff.

And I don't know if you've ever seen any of Mike Benz's work, but he essentially says that USAID is really there to do things that are too dirty for the CIA.

So the extraordinary amount of money that was

being moved around,

there's a certain percentage of it that was inappropriately being used.

I imagine so.

Yes.

An enormous percentage.

It's a lot of money.

But unfortunately, there's a lot of good that also is coming out of that money.

And that's what's difficult.

It's like, you know, when you round up

all the quote-unquote gang members, right, and you fly them to El Salvador, are you sure?

Yeah.

They're all gang members, or do you care?

Right, exactly.

And I don't know.

Do you care, or is it just like we're just here to clean things up?

And if

we throw in innocent omelette.

Right.

Are innocent people the price of us getting to be efficient?

Don't become a monster when you're fighting monsters.

Yeah.

And that's what I think we're

brushing up against right now.

And

as someone who really is like just interested in keeping, especially this issue, like this is a human, like

we all should be on the same side about this.

100%.

Yeah.

Why is it being turned into this a left or right issue?

Well, maybe I can get this in front of Josh and he can present it to some people and, you know, have them reconsider their position.

That would be great.

I would, you know, and if you need, put me in contact, like, I would be happy to.

You know, one of the things through working with Josh and, you know, just through this podcast, we've gotten a lot of people released

that were wrongfully convicted.

And,

you know, when you go over the amount of corruption that's involved, and I think there's an issue

with

human beings whenever there's a binary position, a one or a zero, you win or you lose.

Yes, the adversarial system.

It's like, I have to be, I have to win this side, and I cannot at all acknowledge some truth that might be to the other side.

And then you have this game where you hire, like, if you are a guilty person, you hire the best defense attorneys that probably even know you're guilty, but their job is to get you off by any means necessary.

Well, their job is to make the government prove your guilt, right that's what a technically a defense attorney who's really good yeah but that's not really what they're doing yeah

they're trying to get you

yeah yeah of course yeah yeah the goal being if you can't actually prove it then well their goal is to win as often as possible so that they're the person like this this is the guy you want

although i have talked to some really interesting defense attorneys um

the defense attorneys who represented larry nasser for example um famously for those who don't remember, was

molesting young gymnasts.

You remember him?

The Olympics guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

I interviewed them because it was two women who represented him.

And so a lot of people were like, how dare you represent this man as a woman?

How could you?

And their position was, well, we didn't represent him to prove him innocent.

We had him plead guilty to these crimes.

We just feel that everyone deserves to have a, you know, a defender.

We're defenders.

We represent people in the law.

And they were getting like demonized for even taking him on as a client.

And I thought that was interesting because they weren't trying to get him off.

They were just trying to

represent due process.

And I felt like that was a really interesting case of

people confusing

what is the role of a defense attorney.

And I think you're right.

Like some defense attorneys really don't care if their clients are guilty or innocent because they are also in this adversarial system.

And so they are also in this position of just wanting to win and wanting to make the lives of law enforcement difficult.

And they're willing to throw victims under the bus in the process.

Like, I've had really frank conversations with

friends of mine in the innocence world where they talk about how they were trained to just

destroy a victim in order to

diminish their credibility in court and to really put them in a really bad position.

So, they didn't want to pursue justice for themselves.

And I think that, and they look back and go, oh my God, I can't believe that that's how I was trained to be a defense attorney.

But, like, that was just part of the game.

And I think that's where this whole course of justice gets completely distorted because it's like, well, what is the point of all of this?

Like, it should be about arriving at the the truth and and then doing and then having there be like some recognized consequences for acknowledging what really happened like we need to address the issue which is somebody got hurt by someone else what do we do now what and instead it's become well

I'm gonna win it like I'm on this team you're on this team fight fight fight let's see who wins and as a result the the whole issue of truth gets distorted and and becomes about making the best story that captures the people's attention.

And

I think, I mean, that was a huge lesson for me was realizing that like the truth didn't matter.

Like nobody cared about the truth.

They cared about the story.

And was it a story that spoke to them?

And was it a story that lingered for them?

And that's, you know, an ongoing thing that I write about is like, okay, here's this crazy story that is not true that took over my life and that still has this huge role like I'm still in conversation with that crazy story that was written about me and and the fact that like my entire identity is now wrapped up in the death of my friend that I had nothing to do with and I'll forever be defined by it because it's such a captivating story and because the prosecutor was

dead set on winning and wasn't necessarily interested in the truth

what he says, and it's very,

again, it goes back to like, what are we telling ourselves and what is the cognitive bias?

And I think this is where it gets super interesting because

winning

is interpreted in some people's minds as doing their duty, right?

Like the way that my prosecutor has always talked about it with me is that he maintains that he was doing his duty.

This was his job.

His job was to

make a case that made logical sense to him based upon certain premises

and then to win that case in court.

That was his job.

That was his duty.

And he believes that he was doing the right thing because that's what he was trained and incentivized to do.

In the same way that, like, you know, journalists, if you ask journalists back who covered the case back in the day, they'll be like, well, we were doing our job.

Our job was to sell the best story that we could to our audience.

And right?

And so that's when it gets like fucked up.

Because like, how have our institutions that we've relied on to be truth-seeking institutions been corrupted from the inside by ultimately what is a question of like money or power when politics gets brought into

the equation with criminal justice, suddenly

your prosecutor is now wanting to win cases, not because they're the right cases to win, but because they want to be elected.

All of that gets

distorted and

the motivations behind all our institutions become warped.

But with the media, it's even more disgusting because it's not about politics.

It's literally just about getting people to pay attention to their story

and buy newspapers or click on links.

Right.

That's it.

Right.

And then

they hold the audience accountable for the kinds of stories that they are then incentivized to write.

They say, well, you know, I wouldn't have been writing the story if you weren't clicking on it.

And it's just like this vicious cycle.

That's crazy.

It's like I wouldn't have robbed your house if you didn't have nice stuff.

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's fucking crazy.

But like, that's how, if you're in that little echo chamber of a system and that's what your reward structure is, of course that's what you're going to end up delivering if you're somebody who's not, who doesn't have the introspection to question like, okay, wait, what am I doing and what is the point of all of this?

And do you have certain principles?

But again, the people who rise to the top are maybe the ones who are willing to question those principles in order to achieve certain ends.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then there's also the problem with you're working for a corporation if you're in the news.

If you're not an independent journalist who has like rock-solid personal ethics, you're working for a corporation and your job is to make money for your shareholders, ultimately.

And the way you do that is to get as many people to click on those links as possible.

And maybe the person who's on the ground has a certain vision for what they want their on-the-ground reporting to do.

But then, once it gets in the hands of editors and other editors, it becomes completely warped from the thing that they were originally reporting on because the person who's over here is so divorced from the actual on-the-ground story and they know instead the story that's going to sell.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's dark.

I mean, it's the same sort of distortion.

Excuse me.

Salute.

Sorry.

It's the same sort of distortion

when you were talking about prosecutors

just trying to win.

It's this thing where, and ultimately,

it's

it's it's a a severe distortion of what the best case scenario is.

The best case scenario is prosecutors don't care about winning.

They care about finding truly guilty people.

And in cases where someone,

whether they withhold evidence that could have exonerated an innocent person or whether they distort things or twist things around in order to win, they should be forever removed from that system.

You should never be allowed to do that.

But this is, Kamala Harris did that and rose to be vice president and almost became president.

And she is absolutely guilty of doing that.

Yeah, I know.

She tried to withheld, withhold DNA evidence that would have exonerated someone.

I know.

She was not a popular choice among the innocents community.

I'll tell you that.

Oh, yeah.

No, Josh Dubin broke her down on my show.

But when she was there, were they here together?

No.

Okay, no.

No, no, no.

He broke down what she was guilty of when she was a prosecutor in California.

Yeah, no, it wasn't,

and that's why I was so mad mad that our party never actually gave us a choice.

Right.

There was no primary.

No, there was no primary.

They were just like, here's the person now.

And if you don't vote for her, you're a bad person.

Exactly.

You're a fascist.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

No, it was that

this whole thing.

But then again, that's also just trying to win.

Yeah.

It's the same kind of thing.

It's just the focus is on winning.

Yeah.

At what cost?

And then that's a very slippery slope.

Because if you're willing to accept that, guess what?

Guess what?

slope keeps slipping.

And then, next thing you know,

you don't have brakes.

Right.

You have to put a fucking blinder on because you're a part of the problem.

You're a part of what's destroying society.

So then you have to reshape your own personal narrative and lie to yourself about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Right.

A little bit of like self-brainwashing.

And that fascinates me.

Like, in conversations with my prosecutor,

how has he convinced himself that he's the good guy?

And how has that changed when I have approached him not as an adversary, but as someone who is,

I wouldn't say like

tolerant because I've never put myself in a position of sort of saying, oh, what you did was not a big deal.

Like when I approached him, I was like, what you did was a big deal and you were wrong and you hurt people.

But like acknowledging his humanity and the complexity of him and acknowledging that like he's not an evil person

um

well what is evil

intentional intentional malice maybe that seems like he was doing it intentionally if he was paying attention to the facts of the case I mean there was DNA evidence there was all sorts of stuff that pointed to you not being the guilty party and they ignored that if that's not evil

I mean what he did it's interesting

He wrote a whole book about the case, and he talked about how when he first arrived at the scene, he immediately knew that it was a conspiracy because he looked at the broken window, how the person had actually broken into our home, and said, there's no way, zero chance that a burglar would have broken into a house this way.

He just was like 100% convinced that immediately that the break-in was staged.

And if you take that, if you and your brain truly believe that,

then what logically follows is a lot of what he then came up with.

Well, someone in the house is trying to cover up for a crime that they were involved in.

Who lives in that house?

Well, there are three other girls, one of whom was in Rome, one of whom is another Italian girl who was with her boyfriend and friends, and one of whom is the American girl who who was with her boyfriend that night, but who also happened to be the one who called the police and brought attention to the house.

So maybe because we found her at the scene of the crime,

all of it sort of starts to like make logical sense if you begin with a false premise.

How did he reconcile that in the book?

In his book?

Yeah.

I mean,

he makes logical leaps.

So he goes, okay, well, then we discovered that, you know, all of this DNA of the person who actually committed the crime, right?

Like, you know, they finally get the DNA back, and it's all pointing to this guy who has a history of breaking and entering and aggression towards women.

And he doesn't go, oh, no, we made a mistake.

He goes, oh, how can now he be involved in this thing that I know Amanda is involved in because I know the break-in was staged.

And, you know, like, so these,

this is how a person with good, with genuinely good intentions can

have false beliefs that then logic from which one can logically derive an insane story that requires like him to now believe like one of the things that I pointed out to him that just like drives me nuts that he continues to like somehow hang on to is this idea that I was in a threesome with like I was in a three-way relationship with my actual boyfriend Raffaele and this burglar Rudy Gadet

And I was like, where are you coming up with that?

And he was like, well,

whenever I interviewed Rudy, like he talks about interviewing, you know, interrogating Rudy, Rudy always seemed to have affectionate things to say about.

He always seemed to like be interested in you.

And from that, I can logically deduce that you guys had a relationship.

And I was like, we, we, like, I didn't even know his name.

There's no record of us ever communicating with each other.

No one ever like saw us hanging out with each other.

Like, what are you talking about?

And he's like, well, if he was involved in the crime and you're involved in the crime crime and he's sort of talking about, you know, you in an affectionate way, then

logically it makes sense that you were in this, you know, three-way relationship with Raphael Ann Rudy.

And I'm like, that's not true.

And he's like, well, that's what it's, that's what made logical sense to me at the time.

I think the issue is an egotistic idiot that has power.

That's really what I think it is.

It's literally someone who has a belief and a confidence in their own abilities as a logical

thinker.

And I think anyone who is in that kind of position has to believe in themselves in that kind of way.

But not just that.

Like, you have too much power.

Fair.

There's not enough oversight.

You have too much power.

And then you say something, and if your initial assertion is incorrect, you then have to defend it.

So then you do mental gymnastics to try to defend it at the expense of your fucking life.

Yes.

He was willing to put you away forever.

Like he had had to know.

At some point in time, in the back of his stupid brain, he had to know that you were innocent.

And he was willing to push forward and concoct some sort of a three-way relationship narrative that he still sticks to.

Fuck that guy.

Well, and sometimes that's what my brain says.

You know, sometimes your brain should say that.

You know, I mean, forgiveness is really important, but some people you just can't forgive.

Like, some people, it's like, no,

you need to come to grips with the fact that you're you're a piece of shit.

That's what's wrong here.

It's not me forgiving you and you having this hall pass to just to be a piece of shit because you had this theory that you're still accusing me of.

No,

that's that's not you're bad at what you do.

And sometimes people are bad at what they do.

Sometimes you get bad teachers.

You get bad cops.

Sometimes you get a bad electrician.

Your house catches fire.

Some people suck at what they do and to like have this like eternal forgiveness.

Like sometimes it's not smart to do that.

Well, certainly.

And I think that's a good idea.

Is he still working as a prosecutor?

No, no, he's retired.

He has retired.

He should be in jail.

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Like, literally.

I do not wish jail upon him.

I don't know.

Okay.

That's sweet, but that's crime.

Like, what he did, it was not just a crime, but it was a conspiracy.

Yeah,

I would have to say that I agree that there's I always wanted to, I always wondered where the adults were in the room.

Like,

you know, the whole first two years of my imprisonment, I was like, this is all a huge mistake, and it's really obviously a huge mistake.

And when are, when are like the mommies and daddies going to show up and say, okay, kids, stop your squabbling.

Like, let's straighten things out.

There's no mommies and daddies.

There are no mommies and daddies.

That's the thing that freaked me out.

Yeah.

It's like, we're all adults now, and this is all we are.

We're just a bunch of screaming toddlers, just screaming at each other constantly.

And here I am now,

I feel in a way, trying to mother

my prosecutor through his, you know, psychological tantrums,

which is a weird position to be in.

Because now that I've, you know, developed the relationship that I've developed with him,

I care about him.

Like, I don't think that you can, I set out to understand him.

I wanted to understand him.

But in the process of like really understanding a human being and having them like

be

really open

to you, I don't know.

I feel like you inevitably begin to care about this person, even in their, you know, flawed fragility as a human being.

And so on the one hand, I'm very angry at him to this day.

And on the other hand,

I care about him and I have to give him some props.

He didn't have to respond to me.

He didn't have to meet with me.

He didn't have to sit there and hear me talk about how he had fucked up my life and he shouldn't have.

I did not like, it's not that like me being kind to him does not mean me tolerating injustice.

And it does not mean me not setting boundaries.

And it does not mean me sugarcoating what really happened.

Like he knows what I think really happened.

And he says, well,

you know, we can disagree about our perspectives in some ways, but ultimately what matters is that you reached out to me and saw me as a human being.

And in response, I, like, I

also inevitably came to see you as a human being and I care about you.

And

so in a way, like, we're still in this awkward dance of like one part of us is stuck in that adversarial system and one part of us is in a non you know adversarial very like accepting of all the things space

and we're paradoxically existing in both of them at the same time

and i think that that's just kind of how life is

like you know one of the paradoxes of life is that like if you really just sit down and and sit with yourself and your life just the way it is right now, if you really do, just like notice like right now, you and me, here we are talking.

We are okay.

You and me, we are good.

And also, there's still fucked up shit in my life, and there's still fucked up shit in your life, and things could be better.

And all of those things can be true at the same time.

Like, you know, I'm still fighting to clear my name in Italy.

I don't know if you have you kept up with like the latest with my case.

Oh, yeah.

So,

still, so I've been cleared of like all the crazy, you know, horrible murder orgy, all of that stuff, cleared.

The thing that remains, and this is just the bane of my fucking existence, is when they cleared me of having anything to do with the crime, they left open the possibility that I was present when the crime occurred.

And I believe the reason that they did this was because they wanted to find me guilty of something.

And the thing that they found me guilty of was the way lesser crime on the list of all the crimes that were there, which was slander.

They accused me of knowingly and willingly falsely accusing an innocent person of having committed this crime.

Because during my interrogation, I was coerced into implicating myself and my boss, Patrick Lumumba,

of

of committing this crime.

And I immediately retracted it, all of that, but that was one of the things that they were holding me accountable for.

And they, to this day, I am still convicted in Italy of knowingly and willingly accusing an innocent man.

And for me to knowingly and willingly accuse this innocent man, I would have to have been at the house and known who really was the murderer at the moment that I falsely accused this innocent person.

Like I would have had to know that he was definitively innocent for this to be the case.

And for that to be true, I would have to be physically present at the crime, even if I was not participating in it.

So the legal standing right now to this day is that I was there

and that when I was interrogated, I knowingly and falsely accused an innocent person.

I appealed this, by the way, to the European Court of Human Rights, and they ruled in my favor.

They said that because I had been denied the right to have an attorney and an interpreter when I was being interrogated, that none of that should ever have been, I should never have been convicted of that.

And I took that back to Italy.

I took that ruling back to Italy and they overturned it.

I was actually acquitted of that for a second, but then sent back for retrial recently.

And recently, yeah, this is 18 years later, recently was put back on trial for that.

This was last year.

And I was found guilty again.

Oh my god.

On the basis, not even of the statements that the police like coerced me into signing, but on my retraction.

So I hand wrote a retraction of those statements that the police coerced me into signing.

And I was like, I'm so confused.

I can't testify.

Like, I don't know if Patrick did it or not.

Like, I just don't know.

And they said, well, even a confused statement where you're not sure what the truth is, if you were physically present at the crime, is

slander.

And you falsely accused an innocent man that you knew to be innocent and so but they have no proof that you were there exactly so we're in this like cyclical thing where they're like don't want to admit that they fucked up that's what i think and i'm at this point where i'm like okay

now what

because i'm definitively convicted of this thing and like the legal truth in this case does not represent the actual truth in this case are they trying to protect themselves from some sort of a civil suit maybe um i think even more than that, I think they're trying to protect themselves from admitting that they tortured an innocent girl.

Oh my God.

Oh, my God.

So

they can say, well, she is guilty.

She did do this.

She's a guilty person.

And so it's not crazy for us to think that she might have been involved in the murder because here she is.

She probably lied about being there.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

And all they were ever able to do was prove that I lived in the house that this happened in.

Like, sure, my DNA is in my house.

It's not anywhere near Meredith's body or where the crime occurred.

But they're saying that like I was there.

And it's sort of this like cyclical sort of reasoning.

Like Amanda said she was there, therefore she was there.

Therefore she said she was, you know, like it's this like insane cyclical reasoning.

And I'm at the point where I have to ask myself, like, how do I fight this?

And if so, do I?

And that's where this whole question of freedom comes in.

Like, do I, do I have to definitively like prove my innocence in a court of law to feel that I have definitively proven my innocence?

Or do I need to definitively prove my innocence in the court of public opinion in order to feel free or to feel like I like I'm not regardless of whether I definitively prove my innocence or not, like, am I ever going to be free of this?

Is this ever going to be not touching me and impacting my life?

And the answer that I've come to is, well, no, in the way that, like, any of our experiences have come to define us as human beings.

And in a way, it's like another way of reframing this is, okay, these are my credentials now.

Like, I went to the,

I didn't go to four years of Ph master's degree in poetry.

I got a master's degree in

whatever this is, being fucked.

And I've learned things from this.

I've learned things about the criminal justice system.

I like, I can see things that need to be fixed that have are really common sense fixes to like

it there is no reason why we shouldn't be just recording any kind of communication.

Like anytime that anyone is being questioned by anyone in law enforcement, there's no reason why we shouldn't be recording it.

And I'm not talking about even just suspects because like there's been a whole

world of advocacy around like recording interrogations, right?

Like custodial interrogations and especially

making it so that police officers can't lie to you when you're being interrogated because that was a huge thing that impacted me as like a young, confused, like overwhelmed human being is police lying to me and telling me that they have proof that I was there when the crime occurred and it made me like feel like I was insane.

And so, like, the problem of police lying to you is not just that it's like a bullying technique, but it warps your sense of reality, and you start to question yourself.

And so, there's psychological research to show that there are very negative consequences for police lying to you during interrogation.

But at the very least, if you record it, you can sort of track how that is impacting a person who is being a suspect.

The wild west of all of this is eyewitnesses or anyone else who is being questioned by police because there's no Miranda rights.

Like as a person who is being questioned by police, you don't really have

rights.

Like you don't, you don't have, like, one of the things that they say in my case is that I never had the right to an attorney because I wasn't a suspect.

I was a witness.

And so like to this day in Italy, there's like this resistance to the idea that I was like coerced into, I was, that I was even interrogated at all because there's this like little loophole where they say, oh, you weren't interrogated, you were interviewed.

Oh, you weren't interviewed, you were questioned.

They just changed the language, but what's ultimately happening is the same thing.

You are stuck in a room with a law enforcement officer who may or may not be lying to your face and bullying you.

And you don't know if you're free or not to go because the door is closed and it doesn't feel like it.

And so

for me, I think that if you consider how many wrongful convictions happen because of misidentification by witnesses or the number of times that like witnesses say, well, I wasn't really sure that it was him, but the police sort of coaxed me or pressured me into saying it was him and let sort of made it known to me that it was him.

Like there are lots of things that are happening behind closed doors that we really don't have an excuse for not fixing when every single one of us has a recording device in in our pocket at all times.

And the amount of resistance to like getting just really common sense changes like that to happen from like law enforcement lobbies is just so frustrating as someone who like shows up again and again and again to like try to make

because it seems like this adversarial thing.

Like we're, we're all on the same side.

It's not like victims' rights versus defendants' rights.

It's not law enforcement versus, you know, innocence.

It's like we're all on the same page.

Why can't we just acknowledge a true thing?

That's been one of my biggest frustrations in this world is like feeling like we should all be on the same side and we should be making common sense changes and

that don't you know

that's the way the system is structured.

There's two sides trying to win.

And when you lose, you don't like to lose.

And so people would cheat to win.

But like lose.

What are you losing?

But they're playing a game.

I mean, it's your life and it's other people's lives.

It's innocent people's lives.

But it's also guilty people's lives.

But why doesn't like a law enforcement officer look at something that happened to me?

Actually, you know what?

I take that back.

Plenty of law enforcement people have talked to me and said like, we are so sorry for what happened to you.

The ones who weren't involved.

That's the problem.

The problem is, do you look away when you are involved?

You know, how many law enforcement officers will stick their neck out if they they think their partner overstepped their boundaries and got someone to admit to something that maybe they did or didn't do, withheld evidence that may or may not have exonerated someone?

Like, there's steps along the way on the road to evil.

Right.

And no one gets rewarded for sticking their neck out or for holding their friends accountable.

Yeah.

You get exon, I mean, you get

excommunicated from your tribe.

It's very dangerous, you know?

So how do we motivate any other like how do we?

It's a real problem.

It's a it's a giant conundrum.

It's a real problem in the way this the system is structured.

And the feeling that you have to like, in order to do the right thing, you just have to switch sides, like that really bothers me.

Also, because like one thing that I have I would love to see more of is more of like a collaboration between victims' rights advocates and innocents' rights advocates.

But like oftentimes you see us sort of pitted against each other as if like, you know,

I've always felt that the criminal justice system never did enough for victims.

That like the only compensation that victims are really given is the idea that you're going to punish the perpetrator.

And I've always wanted to know how is the system, how is the system going to help the victim rebuild their life and take back and like reclaim what can be reclaimed of their experience and and and be uplifted and supposedly where the civil

supposedly but like you're you're you're suing the person who committed the crime and are you ever actually going to get any money from them are you like well sometimes money's awarded to families by the state

you know there's those but i mean is that enough like is monies

is that enough you know No, I don't think so.

I think that people need more support than that.

But what is the support, though?

Like, what would make it right?

Well, I think it's overhaul of the system.

Yeah, yeah.

Really, the only way to truly make it right is to find, I mean,

if you're a person like, I think

your approach to this all, this...

radical acceptance and forgiveness is very, very, very beautiful.

It's amazing that you can do it.

It's amazing that you think the way you think.

And, you know, I used you as an example the other day.

We were having this conversation about

horrible things that have happened to people that have made that person a beautiful person.

Because you went through this insane thing, but on the other end of it, you came out with this really interesting person.

Oh, well, there you are.

You really are.

I used you as an example of

things that don't break you, but that you would never want to wish on anyone else.

But then the result of that is this person comes out extraordinary.

Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of the obstacles, the way kind of stuff.

I mean, it's a lot of stuff that I write about in the book, actually, is one of the things that my goal with this book was to try to, like, yes, what happened to me is like, oh, crazy story happened to a girl one time, but also there are like universal lessons and truths that I've derived from my experience that make me, and when I communicate them, they make me feel less ostracized or less like singled out as a human being.

And one of those is like there is opportunity in every tragedy.

And

I think that what my tragedy challenged me to do

was

to not

be

broken by it.

And my definition of being broken by it was coming out of it

a person who was angry and and embittered and and diminished by this experience and i just the the rebellious side of me was like fuck that

what matters to me What matters to me is the truth

and is compassion, curiosity, compassion.

Those are things that I genuinely care about.

And having the courage

to

approach human beings and situations that are painful and that are wrong

with the open heart that it requires to have compassion and genuine curiosity.

That is what I wanted to define me.

I did not want this horrible experience to define me on its terms.

I want it to define me on my own terms.

And I think the challenge that any one of us has

is

remembering what even our terms are when we're feeling sort of overwhelmed with the

existential crisis of it all.

I think that one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they are stuck, they are fixated, they dwell on the life that they should have lived

instead of

acknowledging and accepting that this is the life that they are living.

And when you are acting in the world as if you are living the life that you should have lived, you are inevitably becoming ineffective.

Like if I were to approach the world and be like, my prosecutor never should have done this to me and

I never should have gone to prison and people sh never should have villainized me in the press, I would just find myself debilitated, utterly debilitated by the fact that reality is other than that.

And I would just find myself angry

and bitter about it all.

And instead, I go, well,

all of that happened.

Now what?

And

by accepting reality and life as it is, I can now become a more effective agent in my life.

I don't want to live my life acting and feeling and thinking in ways that are not going to be effective.

And so instead, what happens and the radical acceptance of it all is truly coming from a place of

not, I'm not trying to be Christian about it.

I'm just trying to like not

be

the completely and utterly overwhelmed and disempowered person that I was when I was in prison.

Like I

lost

so much.

I had so little control of my life.

And I think in the end, all of us do.

I feel like I weirdly had a midlife crisis when I was 20 because my entire life fell apart.

Or

I was put on this track, this train that just like left the station and was going on its own.

And there was really nothing I could do to stop it.

And so, okay.

Now what?

That's a great way to put it.

Like, you're on a train that you can't stop.

Yeah, I mean, what you've done is admirable.

I mean, the approach that you take is really...

I mean, if...

Is it admirable?

Is it self-serving?

It's not self-serving.

Obviously, it's self-serving, but that's a good thing.

I mean, you're serving yourself in the best possible way and to not be completely defined by...

you're being victimized,

you've risen above it.

I mean, just the fact that you've contacted the prosecutor and tried to reach out and talk to him as a human being and try to find out and accept him where he's at.

Yeah.

Like, this is where you're at.

Well, he's a kind of a victim in a way because he shouldn't have had the kind of power that he had.

There's no way to tell.

Like, there's no checks and balances that are put in place to make sure the person's ego is not overwhelming them to the point where their initial idea of a conspiracy is

and he's also not in a vacuum like there were other people around him who were like building building him up and supporting that story and and you know like well it's also like he's in a position of power they're underneath him yeah you know there's this weird structure that's in place

yeah all of that can be true yeah all of that and i can accept that as also true and i think there's this like weird resistance that people have to accepting the context around a person Maybe because you realize that if you accept the context around the person, that feeling of self-righteousness that you're ultimately grasping onto dissipates because it does inevitably dissipate.

But I think that's again a per that's a symptom of someone dwelling on the life that they should have lived instead of accepting the life that they have.

Right.

And I just find that to be a waste of time.

It is not just a waste of time.

It's the opposite of self-serving.

It kind of destroys you from within because you know it's not true.

Right.

Yeah.

And so you're bullshitting yourself as you're bullshitting the world.

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And that's who you are now.

Yeah, that I think that is a scary trap that victims can fall into is like how you then become self-destructive in your own mind as a result of someone having been destructive towards you.

That is, I think that is the deepest tragedy of hurt is how it can then become implosive.

And

I did not want to implode.

I was scared to implode.

I saw a lot of people around me in prison imploding.

And I did not want that to be me.

It's an insane mental resolve to not.

And that's

the trap that most people are going to fall into.

And to a lesser extent, he's a victim as well.

He's a victim of his own actions.

And it will haunt him.

I mean, he's defined by that as well.

Now, particularly, that everybody knows that you're innocent and that you've been proven innocent.

And then in the retrial, you got proven again.

And so that's him.

That's over his head everywhere he goes.

He wrongly prosecuted and jailed you for a murder you did not commit.

And he has to live with that.

Every day when he wakes up and he looks in the mirror, that's who you are, bitch, forever.

And you could dance around, you know, I was doing my job, and this you can, you can have, you know, that's that's where you kind of try to find some sort of no, no, you did this thing, you were wrong.

You, your ego, whatever the fuck it was that led you to

up with the initial theory and then

try to use confirmation bias to

reinforce it at every step of the way.

That's you.

And if he doesn't admit that, he will go to his grave haunted.

And I think what's a really interesting thing for me is discovering

what can

come from approaching someone recognizing that.

So

when I approached him, I approached him in a really unconventional way, right?

Like, I'm trying to find common ground with this person.

I'm trying to, I'm very, I'm deeply, genuinely curious about this person.

I am primed to feel compassion for this person because that is just the mental and intentional space that I put myself in in approaching him

and the surprising dividends that arise from that.

Because I think everyone is evolving.

No one is static.

Even he is on his own journey, he's on his own path.

And I'm not in control of his path.

But that doesn't mean that I can't be a very compelling influence of all the people in the world who could be nice to him and have that have an impact on him.

Me.

And like recognizing, like, I didn't really fully comprehend that until I sat down with him.

And, like, I sort of in my mind,

I realized what it looked like from my position.

Like, here's this person who had this overwhelming impact on my life.

And

to this day, like, continually, like, this story that he made up like took over my life and continues to take over my life.

Like, this is what I'm going to live with for the rest of my life is because of him.

This person who has had this outsized influence on my well-being and my personhood and my existence, this guy,

I sit down across from him

and I'm nice to him

and

I walk away from that encounter realizing

that

his well-being depends on me.

much more so than my well-being depends on him.

And I think because deep down,

he understands that there is this dynamic, that, you know, whatever stories he can tell himself about what happened,

he was the one who was in power, and I was the one who went to prison.

And

for me

to be kind to him,

I didn't have to do that.

He had never had it happen before.

It was unheard of.

And as a spiritual person, he experienced it in a spiritual way.

Me,

I came out of that experience feeling like a fucking superhero.

I have never felt more powerful in my life than when I sat across from him and was kind to him.

And it didn't matter what he said or what he did because I showed up.

And

that was, I was not expecting that to happen.

That was not how I expected to feel.

It surprised me,

but like, it had such an impact on me that I felt like I had discovered something about,

about

trauma and about healing and about

people and dynamics and in a world that is so conflicted, and where the people are, you know, not building bridges, they're blowing them up.

I was like, I wanted to remind people of what happens when

you take a chance and you take a stand.

Yeah.

Well, that kind of kindness is rewarded by the universe.

And that was the feeling that you got, that you were on the right path to like the best possible person that you could be.

What would the best possible version of you do?

And you did that, and then you had that feeling because of that.

That was the universe telling you, right?

This is the best thing you can do.

You could yell at that guy and call him a piece of shit and slap him in the face.

And feel justified in doing so.

You would be.

And you would be.

And that might even feel a little good in a way, but it wouldn't feel like that good.

Yeah.

Negativity always,

no matter what leaves you with this

residue this like icky

even if you're correct this just like slime

that's on you this psychic slime right that's on you no matter what yeah

and that's your power that you could

sit across this person and treat them with compassion

and that's why you felt that way you know it's like have you ever felt that way?

I've never had anything remotely like your situation.

But you've had you've had encounters with people.

Like, I don't think you have to have as devastating of a situation to be in a position to know that you're doing the right thing in a moment.

Like, for instance, when my husband got up in his whitey tighties and walked down the stairs to put himself between me and my fan and his family and this crazy guy, I feel like maybe he felt that in that moment, like total

clarity of purpose.

And

it didn't really matter what happened

because he was doing

the thing that had to be done in that moment.

And there was no confusion.

I think that like when I talk about it with him today, like to this day, he's just like, I was just not confused.

I just knew exactly what I needed.

I didn't even think.

It was that flow state even that they talk about in like Tao, when like you, you and the universe are moving in the exact,

in sync.

Yeah.

And that, that was my version of it.

That was his version of it.

And I think that all of us have the opportunity to glimpse that in our lives.

And I'm just curious if you've ever felt like you were moving in sync with the universe.

I try to be.

Yeah.

But again, I haven't.

You still feel kind of slimy.

Well, I've had moments where I haven't.

I've had moments where I was very negative and attacked back, and I never feel good about it.

You know, it's one of the reasons why I don't engage with people online that are negative.

I just, I don't, you know, especially, particularly like the lowest level of it is social media.

You know?

I'm not interested in conflict.

I'm not interested in it.

I don't want to do it.

You know, even if someone has negative things to say about me, I'm not really interested in engaging.

I don't think it's valuable.

You know, I think it's a trap.

Yeah.

But it's not the same situation as what you were in.

I don't know how I would be.

Because the other danger is like,

you know, I don't want to consider myself above criticism, say.

Like, that's, I think, the other flip side of that, of, like, of having confidence, is potentially having the confidence that my prosecutor had.

When was he feeling in sync with the universe when he was prosecuting me?

Did he clearly not?

There's no way.

No, that, but that's not confidence, that's ego.

Confidence is an objective analysis of all the facts,

doing the right thing, having a rock-solid ethical and moral foundation, and knowing you're doing the right thing, and knowing you can do it.

That's confidence.

What he had was ego, you know, this desire to, you know, when people are in a position like that, where people's freedom

hangs on your decisions and what you do and what you don't do.

And then you do it for so many years and you see so many people prosecuted.

You just get calloused about it.

You see it with doctors, where doctors don't, you know,

they have this, some, not all, some doctors develop this very callous feeling whether someone lives or dies.

They don't care anymore.

They're so used to people dying.

You know, I mean, there's doctors that do surgeries that are completely unnecessary just because they want the money.

You know, we were talking the other day about this guy who was an oncologist who

treated people with chemotherapy who did not have cancer because he wanted the money.

Wow.

And it was, he was convicted.

It was like, I think it was some insane number of people took this horrible poison to try to kill the cancer inside of them and ruin their lives.

And there was nothing wrong with them.

Wow.

Yeah, because there's

and I think his justification was even more sick.

His justification was that he was always taught that you eat what you kill.

And in that business, in the business of being a surgeon, in the business of being a doctor, like you have to perform this medicine in order to get money.

And this is the incentive structure that's put in front of you.

I don't know if you know that, but chemotherapy is one of the most profitable things that a doctor can prescribe.

They actually get an enormous amount of money from each individual person that they, yeah, there's all sorts of very twisted and bizarre financial incentives.

Again, these institutions that get warped by the

various exactly.

I mean, this is the case with vaccinations, this is the case with prescriptions of various medicines.

There's kickbacks, And these kickbacks become incentives.

And, you know, and then you have the overwhelming burden of the financial responsibility that you have with your medical school debt.

And then you have

malpractice insurance, which is overwhelming.

You have overhead.

You have staff.

You have a bunch of people.

And then people start justifying things in a very twisted way.

And it's because of the system.

And you have to be an incredibly powerful person to rise above that and to say, this is not what I'm going to to do.

Even if it means I can't do this anymore, I'm not doing this.

And then the weakest amongst us just

instead they go the other way and say, I'll just justify what no one's going to know.

I was like, yeah, you got cancer.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

You know, we're just going to, I'm going to give her a low dose of chemotherapy for like six weeks.

It's like, you know, whatever.

No big deal.

Yeah.

Just destroy your body from the bottom.

And then just like this godlike power that you know that you are imposing this medication on this person that absolutely does not need it.

And that person doesn't know any better.

Yeah.

That's fucking dark.

Well, you could go darker.

You could go darker with medical transition of children.

You know, this

whole

gender affirming care thing where you're taking young kids and convincing them they need to be chemically castrated or physically castrated.

Right.

And there's that's there's a a lot of weirdness in in the world.

Yeah.

There's a lot of there's evil's a real thing.

And the the motivation to do these things can can be very, very hidden and masked with all sorts of incentives and the structure in which this institution was sort of created.

And that's the world we're living in.

And it's not a good world.

It's not a perfect world.

It's not like this is ideal.

This is how it should be.

No, it's not like that.

Money is a weird fucking thing.

Money and power are two very, very weird things.

And

without

some sort of a higher power that you call upon, or some sort of a higher power that you are beholden to and that you have to answer to, it's very difficult for people to

make

decisions if they know they're not going to get caught, if they know they're not going to get in trouble.

If you're a prosecutor and you're beyond reproach and all you have to do, and the system protects you, and everyone's protecting you.

And not only that, once the wheels are in motion, the train's on the track, we can't turn the train around.

What do you want to do?

Well, the fucking train has to be on the track.

So she's got to go to jail, I guess.

Yeah.

And there you go.

Can I tell you something I'm conflicted about?

Sure.

So,

you know, my book's been out for a month or so now.

And I'm also, you know, working on, I don't know if you knew this, I have a Hulu show that I'm working on that's based on my life.

Yeah, Monica is executive producing it.

Monica Lewinsky is executive producing it.

And I'm really proud of it.

It's, it's, um,

It's coming out

at the end of the summer, late summer.

But one of the things that, like, one of the responses that I've had to my book and to the, you know, the news that I'm telling my story in this way or in another way.

And I write about this in the book, is this question of

do I have the right to tell my story

and

what

yeah who's saying that well

people who believe

that I'm not the real victim of the story the real victim is my roommate who was murdered and that unless I have the blessing of

Meredith's family to tell my story, that I should shut up and disappear out of respect.

That's crazy.

You're a victim, period.

Full stop.

No ifs, ands, or buts.

You were 20 years old?

I was 20 years old.

You're a victim.

Period.

You didn't commit a murder.

You went to jail for a murder.

You're a victim.

Period.

Fuck those people.

Are they even real people?

Have you talked to those people?

Are they humans?

I mean, have you been in front of them?

Are you just reading things?

I mean, I've been reading things online.

Journalists certainly who have interviewed me.

I get this.

I get this a lot.

I get this a lot.

From who?

From people who I feel like are suffering from something I call the single victim fallacy, this idea that you have to decide who's the real victim.

Oh, because a victim hierarchy.

You're not the greatest victim because you're still alive.

Right.

You weren't raped and murdered, so you're still alive, so you're fine.

Like, that is ridiculous.

If that's a journalist that's saying that to you, I would just leave the room.

I would be like, well, I'm trying to have a conversation with these people about it.

I'm not to you about that.

That's a preposterous position.

To tell a 20-year-old that went to jail for years for a crime they didn't commit and had their whole life publicly, publicly ruined worldwide in a country you don't even live in, or you're not even from,

fuck that person.

That's a crazy position.

And if they're just trying to do that to

you know, just get a rise out of you, to get a reaction, to try to like, they're bad.

They're bad at what they do.

It's a bad person.

The idea that you're not a victim is preposterous.

That's a crazy position.

An actual human being sat in front of you and was saying that?

So it comes in different forms.

So some people are very explicit and say, like,

don't you think you shouldn't be doing this when the Kircher family's lawyer says that you shouldn't be doing this?

And then they're saying this to your face.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then I have to sit there

and again, do like

experience the rage that washes over me and then go, how do I have an effective conversation with this human being?

How do I convey that my life matters too?

And that there's room in this world to acknowledge all of the truth of what happened, which included my own victimization and my own story and the things that I've learned from it, that I've had the privilege to learn from it because I'm still alive.

That's such a crazy position.

That's like saying if you were in the Twin Towers and you got out right before it collapsed, you should shut the fuck up.

Right, because you didn't die.

Because you didn't die like all those other people that were inside of it.

That's ridiculous.

It's still your life.

It's still your real lived reality.

And the lawyer for the family that's telling you that you shouldn't be talking about it, fuck that guy too.

That's crazy.

That's a crazy position.

You can't listen to that.

You're going to get the most preposterous takes because you're dealing with something that millions of people are commenting on.

So the idea that every one of them is going to be a rational position, that's not real.

People are silly.

Like, people are weird.

They have crazy takes on everything.

There's all sorts of personal justifications and mental illness, and there's people who hate women.

There's people that, you know, whatever.

Law enforcement's always right.

You're always going to have ridiculous takes if you get a billion takes on things.

That's your world.

No, you shouldn't be struggling with that at all.

That's crazy.

Anybody who says you shouldn't be talking about it, but fucking, of course you should be, because there's a lot to be learned.

There's a lot to be learned from, first of all, the admirable positions that you've taken, the way you've formed your life and who you are as a human being because of your struggle, because of this insane experience that you had to go through at fucking 20 years old.

Your brain's not even fully formed.

It's insane.

Your frontal cortex is not fully formed.

And for someone to say that you're not the real victim, well, that's crazy.

That's crazy.

This is a stupid position.

We shouldn't be conflicted in any way, shape, or form about that.

And I think there's a great deal that we can learn from your experiences.

First of all, again, learn from the way that you've handled it, where you can sit across from that prosecutor, and this feeling of like

being kind to this person who did this thing to you, how it made you empowered.

I really do think that's the universe telling you you're on the right track.

You just can't listen to the peanut gallery.

You can't listen to all the noise.

There's just too much noise.

And you have to learn how to do that on a much lesser scale, I see that with friends who are famous, who read comments about them, or read articles, and you get infuriated, and it ruins vacations because they have to type up a response.

Yeah, the impulse to respond is like,

you don't have to.

Not only do you not should you not respond, you shouldn't read what they're saying in the first place.

You shouldn't pay attention.

Is there ever, like, I wonder if the fear is, and maybe this is my fear because I'm always questioning myself, is like, is there, I always want to, like, at least hear it and, like, cycle the thought through my mind so that I can test the validity of it in my mind.

Yes, there's definitely that, sure.

But to a point, you should probably do that yourself without those people.

That's the best way.

The best way is to have an internal auditing system where you look at your own life and say,

What did I do that I could have done better?

Right.

And

is there anything about what I'm doing that feels icky?

Right?

Is there anything about the way I'm capitalizing on this that feels icky or feels conflicted?

Is there anything about it that I don't like?

But just do that yourself.

You're a smart person.

You don't need all those other opinions

where you have to like, you know, let's take email today from all the Mandanox haters.

Like, you don't have to do that.

Fair.

Yeah.

And thankfully, my husband is the one who takes the brunt of that.

And

yeah, let me help.

As a person who's been famous for a long time, don't do it.

Okay, fair enough.

There's no value in it.

There's zero value in it.

I mean, there's times where I was forced into responding, like during the whole COVID situation when CNN was saying I was taking veterinary medicine.

And you were like, I need to clarify reality or not.

Also, I need to say, hey, fuck you, because the world should say, fuck you.

You're not supposed to be able to do that.

You're not supposed to be able to be the news and lie and then hold yourself to this moral high ground and say, we have to stop misinformation.

What about you, motherfucker?

Like, what about you?

You know?

And so there's that.

Like, I've had to respond in that way.

But I mean, if I responded to everything that everybody ever says about me, I'd have no time for my children, for my family, for my life, for my job.

I would have no time for anything, but you can't do it.

You have to have an internal auditing system where you look at yourself and you have to be your own worst judge.

You know, anything anybody says about me that tries to make me feel bad.

Well, guess what?

I'm way harsher to me than you are and I know me.

And that's

all the dark thoughts and blame me feelings.

But that's why I work really hard to be a good person.

I work really hard to be a good person because I don't like those feelings.

I don't like

when I judge myself and I find myself to be lacking.

I don't like it.

So I institute a lot of self-discipline and I institute a lot of introspective thinking.

Yeah, what is your auditing?

Like, what's your self-auditing process?

Well, first of all,

it's like,

why are you doing what you're doing with your life?

Like,

why do you do a podcast?

Why do you do comedy?

Why do you do anything?

Why do you do what you do?

So the best way I approach it is I do it because

I love what I do.

I'm intrigued.

I'm curious.

And I do my best.

Always do my best.

Now, if I half-ass something,

it will haunt me.

Like, if I have a bad podcast interview, if I don't, if I think I interrupted too much or if I didn't ask the right questions, like, that'll fuck with me for the rest of the day.

Like, I don't need other people to fuck with me.

I fuck with myself.

I really do.

So the best response to that is do better every time.

Every time, like, sit when you sit down, be as open as possible.

Try to like,

don't let all these little weird, mind-fucky things enter into your head.

Just try to be pure.

Try to be genuinely curious.

Like, what's your genuine feelings about these things?

And then

did you handle it well?

If you didn't, what could you have done better?

Right.

Well, then work on that.

Yeah.

That's all you can do.

I think one of the things that I am

worry about is

that people

only

feel

safe when they're either being self-righteous or when they're being cynical.

Yeah.

And like genuine compassion or curiosity is looked down upon as naïve and a wit and a weakness.

But I feel like the only way to be truly ethical

is to be exposed in that way.

Cynicism and self-righteousness are shields.

They are ways of approaching the world with with with a barrier.

Absolutely.

And so I

And I can't promise anyone that doing things my way, which is like really trying to like push back against those impulses, which I recognize as being dangerous impulses,

is going to necessarily lead to good things.

Like it's less.

It's not your job to promise people that.

It's not your job.

It's your job for you, for your soul, whoever you are.

It's to speak to what is the right path for you.

You don't have to promise these people.

This is the burden of being a public figure.

Like, you're not, you're not a role model for all these people.

If you are a role model for these people because they find you admirable, that's great.

But your responsibility is to yourself, your responsibility is to your own mind and the people that you come in contact with.

So, your responsibility is not to like say, like, don't be cynical, be kind, and oh, it didn't work out for you.

Oh, fuck, I fucked up.

It's me.

It's on me.

No, it's on them.

It's on them.

It's on you everyone has their own soul their own mind their own path and you have to find out what's right for you in doing what you're doing you are most certainly a role model and you most certainly will be a role model for including me i i find myself

admiring like when we had the first podcast i thought about it for a long time i would think about it all throughout the day sometimes like randomly i would just think about

imagining myself in your position and how would I be?

And I, you know,

I don't know.

I can't answer it, but I admire the position that you've taken.

I think it's incredible.

I think it's a great,

it's a great example to the world of what's possible if someone is thrust into a horrible position that's totally beyond their control.

But what is in your control?

What's in your control is how you respond to it.

And how you responded to it was incredibly admirable.

That's your responsibilities to yourself.

And you did a great job with it, a fantastic job.

Exemplary.

I don't think there's anybody else that I could point to that's ever been through anything even remotely close to what you've been through and come out the way you have.

The only examples that maybe I could point to are some of the people that I've dealt with through Josh, where we brought people in that were wrongly accused, that went through these horrible incarcerations and came out on the other side.

These incredibly well-read, brilliant, articulate people that are so thoughtful and so introspective.

And then made the time in prison empower them.

It can be done.

And those are examples.

But the responsibility is to yourself.

It's not to these other people.

I guess, like, I think that's so.

I mean, thank you.

And I agree.

Like, I've met very incredible people who have made the most of a bad situation, which ultimately that's what it comes down to.

I guess my one pushback might be that I have come to realize that we are so interconnected.

Like we are all influencing each other constantly.

Yes.

And so on the one hand, yes, I'm only answerable ultimately to myself.

But when I really sit down and like sit with it,

like part of the reason why I was able to approach my prosecutor with the perspective that I had was realizing that like there is a fluidity between us and all of us where we're all influencing each other and people in his life have now like the influences in his life people I will never have met

have had direct influences in my life because it's been like this fluid path like this connectedness between me and him, me and you any any person we talk to any person we encounter is going to then have this ripple effect.

And so on the one hand, yes, like I'm a drop, but I'm also a drop in an ocean that has a ripple effect.

And that ripple is going to interact with your ripple and all these other ripples.

And

so

yes, I am answerable to myself,

but I also feel like I can't ignore the potential impact that my ripple might have on another person.

And I've been really rewarded in the way that I have, I've been,

those ripples have been communicated to me.

Like, I've had someone tell me that they didn't kill themselves because one day they heard me, you know, in an interview and

that they were going to kill themselves and then they didn't.

And like, I've had someone tell me that.

And like, I never in my wildest dreams thought that me just deciding to like have a conversation with someone one day on a podcast would save a human being's life.

But like those are those like the interconnected fluidness of all of us that like I also can't discount.

You shouldn't.

And that I think about a lot.

Well, you should.

I mean you are an example.

I mean, we are all an example.

And if you're a public example, or we right now, both of us are public examples.

We're two human beings that are communicating right now to millions of people.

It's kind of fucked up if you really think about it.

What are we doing?

I know.

But what we are was being real people publicly.

So

we're thinking publicly, you know, and

that is very beneficial to other people that are thinking privately because you get to hear people think publicly.

especially a person like you that's very exemplary and that I would love if more people could follow that line of thinking.

And your example, it's a beautiful example of someone who

did nothing wrong, but had wrong done to them and came out a better person because of it.

And that's

that's it's not just inspirational, it's aspirational.

It provides the universe with positive energy in a weird way, the human universe, I mean.

And

this thing that you said, I think, is very important.

People protect themselves with cynicism and with

people that constantly want to criticize things.

They're constantly criticizing things.

Finding fault.

You're ignoring your own life.

That's a part of what's really going on.

The real things are

inside their own life, there must be things they're ignoring.

If they're spending that much time focusing on external factors like that and other people and other people's flaws and other people's things, other people's life, especially like trivial, nonsensical things like celebrity beefs.

Oh, I know.

You know what I mean?

It's like, what are you doing with your fucking life?

Like, you don't, it's like.

I just don't know how anyone has the time, honestly.

Like, as a.

It's because they're losers.

And this is the reality of, like, some people don't want to hear this because you're a loser, you know, and it sucks being a loser.

I've been a loser.

I've been a loser many times in my life.

you're a loser if you're doing that because you are on with your own decisions becoming a loser you're deciding to be a loser by focusing this precious energy that you have in life on shit that should mean nothing to you is there like a uh

is there

are they thinking that they're being effective agents in the world by participating in that's the con that's

like yeah by taking them down a notch yeah

I'm a part of something and I'm and I'm accomplishing something you're not you're not you're not it's cynicism it's it's uh it's

you know the flag of moral virtue that you're you're waving to show that you're better than other people but in doing so you're attacking that person which is inherently evil like you you're you're using this justification that you're correct to try to ruin someone's lives or ruin someone's reputation or ruin someone's feelings to hurt them that day to reach out to them and attack and it's almost always based on a feeling of personal inadequacy almost always based on your life is not what you want it to be you know the people leaving horrible comments on someone's Instagram page or Twitter page there's no way you're

living the life that you want to live.

There's no way that you're in an ideal situation of love and harmony and success.

And, you know, you have great friends and life is amazing.

But yeah, this fucking fat cunt.

You know, like, there's no way.

There's no way if you're typing those things, there's no way.

Like that,

it's a human flaw and it's accentuated by this disconnect that comes with social media.

This disconnect of being able to send a message to someone and have

no consequences and no social cues, not to see the person read it and get hurt by it.

You know, you're like sending little bombs over the fence.

Yeah, we are primed to be psychopaths.

Our algorithms have primed us to be psychopaths.

And

that worries me.

But that's like a disempowering position.

You know, like, you don't have to be.

You don't have to do that.

Like, no one's compelling you to do that.

I don't do that.

Why are you doing that?

Like, why do it?

You don't have to do it.

Then this is the example that you can lead for other people if you are talking and speaking publicly.

Just don't do that.

It's not good for you.

It's not good for the, it doesn't help anybody hurting someone that you don't even know.

That doesn't help you.

You should be, you have, I always try to, this is what I tell my friends when I talk about reading comments and reading things and engaging with social media because I have friends with it'll like ruin their week, ruin their day.

Like one comment will will fuck them up and they'll come to me and talk to me about it I'm like listen I want you to think about your mind and your attention like it's a number like it's you have energy and you like you like a battery right you have or bandwidth that's on a broadband cable right you have a hundred units if you're spending 30 units of your precious time

concentrating on someone who's saying something that's not even true, that's mean and horrible, and it's the worst possible least charitable position on you.

You're robbing yourself of these precious units of attention.

You have a hundred units.

Your hundred units should be all on loved ones and friends and things that you love to do and life.

That's what your units should be used for.

And if some of that sneaks in and it resonates and you go, oh my God, they're right.

Well, fucking correct it.

Figure out what you did.

Don't do that anymore.

It's like, it sounds so simple, but that's it.

If you are do something, you are doing something that people are rightly criticizing, recognize it.

Recognize it.

Course correct.

Like,

this is where friends are supposed to come at play.

Your friends are supposed to be able to tell you, Amanda,

you didn't have to do that.

Like, I know the reason why you did it, but like, don't do that.

Like, this is why.

This is what I felt.

I felt like you overreacted.

You didn't have to do that.

Now, this person's all fucked up because of it.

Right, but your friends are not going to define you by what they consider the worst thing you've ever done, and they're going to recognize that you're an evolving human.

And I feel they love you.

And they love you.

The whole picture is.

And it's coming like their criticism is coming from a loving place instead of an attacking place.

And so, how do we get back to communicating with each other, not from an adversarial place, which automatically instigates defensiveness and sort of

refusal to acknowledge anything, right?

To a place of like genuine openness.

Well,

this is going to sound so cliche.

You have to act out of love.

Like I reached out to a friend of mine recently.

They're doing a podcast and it went completely sideways.

And I reached out to him and I sent him a text message and said, hey, man.

You can't do this.

Like, this is why you're doing that.

You have to recognize that people are listening to this.

You're actually ruining your own product by doing this.

And he responded back, I know.

I realized that I felt terrible while it was happening.

I got caught up in this thing.

That slimy feeling.

Bunched up.

He's like, I got all bunched up.

And I just responded, I felt terrible.

I was like, it's okay.

Just don't do it again.

Because he gets to have another chance.

Yeah.

And the reason why I said it to him is because he's done it before.

And I'm like, stop doing this.

Stop doing this.

Like, you don't have to do this.

This is fucking you up.

And ultimately, like, if you,

I hate to use, like, is conversation an art form?

I kind of think it is, right?

If, if, if people are consuming it, it's a skill.

Yeah.

If people are consuming it, it's an art form.

So if you're being

overbearing and gross and like whatever it is, it's like that you're ruining this art that you're creating.

And it's like

this real art, like that painting is.

art.

This is real art.

This is a weird art.

It's like, I don't even want to call it art.

It's like a dance, but with words.

It's a dance.

It is a dance.

It is a dance.

Conversation is a dance.

And this is why I have such a hard time.

Like, I would go on a double date with my wife or something like that with people and they start talking over everybody else.

And sometimes I have to go, stop.

Like, she's talking.

Like, he's talking.

Haven't you ever listened to a podcast?

What the fuck are you guys doing?

It's like playing, it's like if you were Roger Federer and you're playing tennis with people, like, no, you can't fucking hit the ball like that.

Like, what are you guys doing?

You can't just do multiple balls at the same time.

Do you not listen?

I know you want to say something, but this other person is talking right now, and you can't just talk when you want to talk.

You have to also listen.

Like, listening is a part of the dance.

Don't step on people's feet.

Like, you see that foot there?

Oh, I want to put my foot there.

But the foot's already there.

Don't step on their foot.

This is crazy.

But you have to step on a couple of feet to realize, oh, I stepped on her feet.

I can't do that.

You have to accidentally fuck up to realize, like,

don't do that again.

Like, back up, figure out what you did wrong, course correct.

Can I ask you about comedy?

Sure.

Because I want to do comedy.

I'm doing,

guys.

I want to.

I'm actually doing stand-up on Saturday,

but on my

on Vashon Island, I'm doing.

What's Vashon Island?

It's where I live.

It's a little island right outside of Seattle that is

awesome.

Okay, I know where that is.

Have you been to Vash Island?

No, I've been to Bainbridge.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Bainbridge Island.

Our island is a little more rural than Bainbridge.

It's Oh, so you're doing comedy for your community?

Yeah.

That's a terrible idea.

Is it?

Yes.

Is it?

Well, don't do it.

No, you want strangers.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

You don't want to interact with those weirdos that you live with.

I feel like we have a very supportive community.

I've done it before, and it's been great.

Do you have an opening act?

Do you just go up by yourself?

No, I'm part of like, it's like this Saturday, I'm going to be a part, I'm in a lineup of people who have like a seven-minute set.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Oh, that's safe.

Seven minutes is safe.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I'm walking up there, and I'm like, How many times have you done it?

This will be like the fourth or fifth time.

Whitney actually was the one who first introduced me to stand-up.

She like, I love Whitney, by the way.

Can we just gush about Whitney for a second?

And I love the fact that we both have small kids at the same time.

And I just, I just love her.

And so she was the one who first recognized, like, this girl's been through some shit.

I bet she's fucking funny.

And, and, you know,

befriended me after I got on her podcast.

And then when she did the roast of Whitney Cummings for OnlyFans, I was her, like, special surprise guest.

And I got to do a little bit of a roast of her and a little bit of myself, right?

Like, of course, the one place that I can finally get my comedic, you know, true self out there is on OnlyFans of all things.

And, you know, I get to be,

you know, when I go this Saturday, I get to be the ex-con mom on the, on the menu, and that's a pornhub search for you.

You know, like, I get to like lean in to the tragedy of it all, but it then goes back to that question of

do people stick you into boxes or are you you allowed to be more than what people expect you to be?

And I've, you know, in the past,

not from my own community, but from strangers, received criticism for making jokes about

my experience.

And

again, coming from that place of how dare you joke about, you know, going to prison for a crime you didn't commit when you're not the real victim and whatever.

Or you're, or you're a true crime figure.

You're a person who has been, I associate you with a tragedy.

Therefore, you have to stay in tragedy space and moving into comedic space is not allowed.

And so I'm just curious what your thoughts are about that.

It's the same thing.

You're dealing with commenters.

Like, you can't listen.

I just

want to do my thing and I'm on business.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

If I listened, I would have never done anything I've done.

If I listened to people, I would have never done anything that I've done.

Ever.

Not one thing.

But we should, yeah, okay.

I would have never fought.

I would have never gotten into martial arts.

I never would have fought.

I never would have done stand-up comedy.

I never would have done a podcast.

Even my own wife jokes around about it because when my kids were really little, there was one time where my wife wanted to go to Disneyland and I said, I can't.

I have to do a podcast.

She goes, no, you want to do a podcast?

I go, no,

I have to.

I told the people that I was going to do it, so I have to do it.

I committed.

But back then, it was, it made no money.

It was just like nonsense thing that I was doing on the internet.

Like, what are you doing?

And to this day, we laugh about it.

Like, thank God you didn't listen to me.

But I don't listen to anybody.

I listened to me.

I listened to my own mind.

If I wanted to, like, I would have never moved to Austin.

Like, I moved to Austin in the middle of this giant Spotify deal.

And they were like, what are you doing?

Like, you got like, what?

Like, so they gave me all this money, and I'm like, I'm going to leave LA.

They're like, what?

Like, how are you going to get guests?

I'm like, I'm flying them in anyway.

Like, who cares?

Like, I want to do what I want to do.

I'm going to just do it.

I have a little fucking compass.

It's like,

right, as if also as if everyone only lives in L.A.

and you weren't, like, the only people worth talking to are going to be in L.A.

Also, I was like, I would rather be broke and not live under the thumb of retarded government than

stay in L.A.

and have a successful career.

Like, fuck you.

I'll just do stand-up and travel the country and just live in the middle of it.

I'm not doing this anymore.

I mean, you can't tell me I can't work.

You can't tell me I can't go out.

You can't tell me I have to put a mask on when I'm walking the dog.

Fuck you.

Like the whole thing was just like, I'm out.

I'm getting out of here.

And, you know, moving to Austin was a crazy risk.

You know, like

opening up a comedy club.

Everybody's always told me.

I've always told people, be nice to comedy club owners because you don't want to be one of them.

Like, you want to deal with us?

You want to deal with a bunch of fucking crazy people that unreliable.

Half of them are on drugs.

They're all narcissists and fucking insane people.

And they're all just like, just, their whole game is a lot of people.

You're really selling being a comedian right now.

Yeah, well, just being honest.

They just, half their mind, most of the day, is trying to figure out things that are fucked up enough to talk about on stage.

Like, and how do I phrase this?

How do I structure it?

What's a way to get into people's heads with this idea?

How do I make it really funny?

Like, what's the best way to do it?

And, like, this is a crazy way to live.

Like, you don't want those people to be your primary source of income because, like, with a comedy club owner, all you have

is what the artists create.

That's all you're selling.

Otherwise, you just have a box.

You have a box of the microphone and you're selling drinks.

All you have is other people's creation.

And those people, half of them are fucking insane.

Like, you don't want to be one of those.

But then I came out here and I was like, God damn it, I have to be one of now.

No regrets.

No, no, it worked out great.

I mean, I went to your show last night.

It was super fun.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Glad you had a good time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you have to just do what you think you want to do and then just do the best version of it you can.

But to listen to people say you shouldn't be making jokes because you're a tragic figure.

Fuck you.

Says who?

Says you.

Let me look at your life, bitch.

Let me go through your fucking pathetic mind and find out what weird justifications you're making for the way you think and behave.

Like, you're not in any position to be giving out advice.

And most of those people are not in any position to give it out, to be giving out advice.

Yeah, and I do worry about people's lack of imagination.

It's like, I don't know, I've had enough taken away from me that I am not going to be limited by a lack of imagination.

Absolutely.

So,

and it's also people don't want you to succeed.

You know, that sucks.

Why?

Yeah, because they're not succeeding.

It's all it is.

People that are succeeding, for the most part, want you to succeed up until you get to their level.

And you're like, hey.

Hey,

you're button up on my success.

They don't want you to summon it.

Is there a limited amount of success in the world?

No.

Why then?

Well, because they're fools, and it's famine thinking.

It's a famine mentality.

And you could either think in terms of abundance or famine.

But it's a real problem with comedians.

Comedians that criticize other comedians, kind of crazy that they're only criticizing the ones that are way more successful than them.

Seems odd.

Convenient.

Seems weird.

But they don't think about it that way.

They just look at this other person that's getting a lot of attention and they feel bad.

So they think that should be them.

And instead of like using it as inspiration, like, wow, look at her.

She's fucking selling out arenas.

This is crazy.

What is she doing that I'm not doing?

What can I learn from her?

What can I learn from that?

Instead, they're like, fuck her, and fuck this, and fuck that.

And what you're doing is stealing bandwidth from yourself.

That 100 units, you're now spending 30 units criticizing other people who aren't even thinking about you.

Ha ha.

Ha ha, doing it to yourself.

Not only that, but when you're doing it publicly, everybody knows what you're doing.

Anybody who's really worth considering, who's an intelligent, objective person, knows exactly what your motivation is.

They know why you're doing it.

The least charitable takes on things and the worst possible light that you're shining on things and

the worst descriptions of people.

Like, you know what you're doing.

You're just trying to make up for the fact that you've fallen short.

You don't like how your path has gone.

And you're, you know, you see someone, all of a sudden, she's doing comedy now.

Fuck that.

You know, you shouldn't be doing, because she shouldn't be doing comedy.

These hot takes that people have, you know, while they're on antidepressants and their whole fucking world's in a tizzy.

Like, shut up.

You don't have to listen.

But it's okay that they talk.

It's okay.

It's like part of the learning experience of human culture.

Like, civilization has to have a bunch of fucking people talking about stuff and a bunch of it's noise.

And it's up to you to figure out what's noise.

And like, well, then you see someone who's not noise and who's someone who's living an exemplary life and go, okay,

that's not noise.

Okay, what's in that?

What's in that?

Like, oh, she met with a prosecutor.

Wow.

And she, she felt empowered.

You know how people are going to listen to what you just said about that and just like, just like

when they're alone, like throughout the day, when they're driving their car, when they're sitting on the train, they're going to think about that.

I mean, I'm still thinking about that.

I'm, I'm still like trying to figure it out.

And I think that's good.

I think

we're all like you said we're all interconnected.

We're all learning together.

And the only thing you could do is do your best.

Do your best.

Do your best.

Is that the advice?

Do your best.

Yes.

Is that advice, Daddy?

With everything.

With everything.

With everything.

Do your best.

Be a nice person and do your best.

Yeah, it's all you can do.

Done and done.

Yeah.

We have solved.

It seems so simple.

But, you know, those demons will, they never sleep.

They'll wake up in the morning, tapping you on the head.

Again, the thing that haunts me is when people think they're doing their best and they're not.

That's what haunts me.

Like, and that happens.

That is happening constantly.

It's people convincing themselves that they're doing their best and they're not.

But then how do you get out of that cycle of convincing yourself?

Because that's where the issue of cognitive bias comes in and like reaffirming your sense of self to yourself and your identity.

Like, I'm a good guy.

I can't, you know, I can't do wrong.

Or like,

you know, I'm a good friend.

I can't be a bad.

Like there are ways that we define ourselves that makes it impossible for ourselves to see ourselves clearly.

And that freaks me out.

Like, I'm always afraid of that.

Five grams in silent darkness.

Prescribe.

And you might have to do it more than once.

You might have to do a lot of cleaning.

Yeah.

Clean your closet.

Clean your closet.

Okay.

Throw out all the stupid shit.

But it's hard for people because you're on this path of momentum.

Oftentimes, people are ahead of their skis.

You know, they're on this path of momentum and they don't know how to sit down.

That's the train.

That's out of the station.

Yeah.

But in a much lesser extent because it's more in their control.

You know, in your situation, it's beyond your control.

And a lot of people, they're the fucking,

they're at they're the engineer.

You know, that's the one that's the same.

They're the ones who's in the skis.

They're the ones that are deciding to go straight downhill.

It's hard.

It's hard.

And then you have all these things.

Once you've sort of created a life and you have all these pieces in motion and then you realize like, oh my God, this is kind of beyond my control.

And I don't like where it's going, but everything's still moving.

It takes a lot.

to pull that back and you kind of have to slow it down in stages.

You know, you have to like throw things off the side of the car.

Like, what's go?

Got to get rid of this, got to get rid of that.

You're going to have to cut people out of your life sometimes.

Sometimes it's people.

Sometimes certain people, they're not going to learn.

And I think,

you know, the universe provides them as an example of how not to live, but also as a puzzle that you need to solve.

Like, you need to solve if this person is continually bringing negative things into your life and continually tripping you up and sabotaging you.

You have to, at a certain point in time, separate yourself.

You have to.

You got to ghost people.

As horrible as that seems, like, you can't, because you don't have enough time.

Yeah.

There's not enough time in the world.

Your time is very precious.

And if people don't want to help themselves, you can't help them.

True.

That's very true.

I've definitely found myself in the position of not being helpable.

There's a story I tell in the book about trusting the wrong person and wanting to believe that they were someone like me, someone who could understand me, and then I realized they were not.

That's horrible when you let someone in and then you realize you fucked up.

I've had that happen multiple times.

Yeah, there's a lot of con artists out there, there's a lot of sociopaths, there's a lot of slippery people that they're chameleons, they're like little cuttlefish, they kind of adapt to their environment and slip into your world.

It's dangerous, you know.

There's a lot of people that

they look at it like

it's a like a game.

Like, how do I get close to this person?

How do I benefit from this relationship?

How do I make these connections?

And in the business world, you're actually taught to do that.

Right.

Which is really crazy.

Which is like, no wonder why.

It's networking.

It's a good word.

Yeah, you have to bullshit, you know, and you and the wife have to go out and like pretend

I know he's an asshole.

We're going to sit with him because it's really important for my promotion.

And then, you know, that's no wonder why CEOs become sociopaths.

Like, of course.

Like, that's Carl.

That's a good book about that.

Have you read the psychopath test?

No, I haven't.

Oh, it's funny.

I read the publicly shamed book, though.

Yeah, that's a good one, too.

It's great.

Yeah.

He's so funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's,

I mean, it's

being a human is weird.

There's no guidebook.

You know, there's you have the most complex

interactive machine that is constantly adapting and changing, and it's completely variable.

It's completely variable based on your environment, like not just your environment in terms of the human beings, but even the like weather.

Like, if you live in Seattle, right?

You're on a very different wavelength than when you're in Austin.

It's just

I come here and I feel like I'm in a bath all the time.

Just in a bath.

What do you mean?

It's so hot.

And that impacts me in a way where I just feel sort of dreamy, like I'm in a bath all the time instead of...

That's interesting.

I've never heard it put that way.

In a bath.

That's funny.

That's funny.

Yeah, I don't think about it that way.

I wanted to ask how you slow down, though, right?

You're talking about slowing down and like taking stock.

And the way I do it is by meditating.

But I have found that a lot of people are resistant to the idea of meditating because they have certain ideas about what meditating is.

And like it's shutting off your thoughts.

And it's like, well, you know, eventually you might be able to do that.

But ultimately, it's just sitting down and noticing your thoughts that arise.

But I like to say that anyone

who can masturbate can meditate.

And ultimately, like.

Actually, people that can meditate maybe not be able to masturbate because they don't have any arms.

You can still meditate.

Exactly.

And you get get ultimately to a similar place of like just single-minded focus

and bliss.

So go for it.

Don't hold back.

Yeah.

And the funny things that occur to your brain when you are meditating.

Like, I have,

okay, can I tell you something that's kind of like off color?

Sure.

Well, maybe you know this, like, since becoming a mom, like my libido.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

Just because I'm constantly being like touched that like the last thing I need is for my husband to climb on me like a jungle gem.

Like it's just

not what's on the menu for me.

Also, you're probably tired all the time.

I'm so tired.

And like I'm just like my body is different.

The chemistry is still working itself out.

The one thing that reliably makes me horny is meditating.

Interesting.

Isn't that wild?

Huh.

And you know, we have this like term in meditation, like

monkey mind, right?

Like the idea being that, like, when you sit down, you really notice that your mind is going all over the place and is just like reacting like a monkey.

But also, another thing that monkeys are famous for is just masturbating voraciously.

And I feel like that's also what's happening in my mind.

Like, I sit down and notice how perverted my mind is when I'm actually just sitting there meditating in a nice group of people on a Sunday morning.

That's funny.

So, group meditation.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's not just like when I'm home alone, like in my intimate space.

Like, I'm like,

I feel,

yeah, this is.

I hope no one at my Zendo is

conversation.

Maybe they're gonna come up to you the next time you do, like, me too.

And then you don't want to know because then you're gonna be meditating, like, this freak is thinking about sex, too.

Well, I mean, and you're sitting there and you're thinking, like, what else are the uses of these floor cushions?

Like, you're just like going, like, all of the things in your brain, and then you're thinking, Am I the only one?

Interesting.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

there's something again one of those like weird unintended consequences of just trying to like sit back and take stock is like rediscovering parts of yourself that are have been sort of diminished or made dormant because of this the stress of existence so

another

reason why they should advertise that.

I don't know why they don't advertise that on meditation apps.

It's like, is this just me?

Like, I'm trying to get perverted.

I'm trying to find my inner pervert.

Exactly.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't necessarily meditate that way,

but I do incorporate a lot of voluntary adversity.

A lot of it is working out.

You've got a lot of Buddhas around you for someone who doesn't meditate.

I know.

Weird, right?

What's for that?

My friend Duncan has some very bizarre theories about that.

I know.

I'm very drawn to that.

I do, though.

It's just I do it while I'm doing other things.

I've always said that martial arts is a form of moving meditation because it's so singular in its focus that it requires all of your thoughts and it cleanses your mind.

There's a bunch of things that I do.

A bunch of things that I do that do that.

Archery does that, oddly enough.

And then the art of archery.

There's a reason why there's that book.

Yes.

There's something about because have you ever done archery?

I I have done it because

my brother-in-law is a Renfair guy.

He's a Ren Fair performer.

Yeah, so cool.

Can I call out Seattle Knights, by the way?

He is the director of the Seattle Knights.

And yes, he jousts.

He talks.

What adorable.

I know.

It's so cool.

It's so cool.

I love it.

And I always, I'm going to go to their show on Woodby Island this month anyway.

That's funny.

Yeah.

They're awesome.

But yes, so yeah.

What were we saying?

Archery, archery, yes.

So I've done it like in his backyard because he has all of the medieval weaponry.

And that's a lot of partux.

Yeah.

I don't use the medieval ones.

I use modern ones, but the

thing about it is that it's very difficult to do accurately, especially at distance, right?

So when I practice, I practice it most of the time, I practice in at about 85 yards.

And the amount of movement,

like, so if you're at full draw, so you draw the bow back, right?

If you're at full draw, if you look at my arm, if my arm does this, I miss by six inches.

Wait, what did you just do?

This, this, this, this.

Ah, ah.

I'm missing by six inches at 85 yards.

Just slight, I mean, a millimeter of movement is four inches off target.

So you're saying that Legolas is a badass is what I'm hearing.

Who?

Legolas from Lord of the Rings?

Oh,

I'm not.

I'm not.

That's not a real person.

I'm applying it to human beings.

Oh, okay, fine.

There's this repeatable technique that you have to do.

It involves breathing and focus and concentration.

And there's actually a whole process that I go through.

There's this guy named Joel Turner who was a,

he was a SWAT instructor and a lead guy in hostage situations

where you know someone would like have a child hostage you had to shoot the guy who was like holding a knife to a child and he's he's had situations like that where you have to be completely focused on the task and so he developed this process of talking yourself through a shot with this you have these words that you say and you repeat in your mind while you're going through all of these various techniques.

So when you're drawing a bow back, you draw back, you have to anchor, so you put this string in a very particular part of your mouth every time.

My knuckle, this finger goes underneath my jaw in the exact same spot every time.

My elbow goes up in the exact same spot.

And then it's staying still and concentrating on the target and pulling through.

And you can't think about anything else.

It's so overwhelming that you have to focus if you want to be accurate, you have to focus only on that.

And in doing so, the world just goes away.

The world goes away because it requires so much of you.

Martial arts is the same thing.

Like if you're doing jiu-jitsu and you and this person are trying to solve each other's puzzle and you're trying, you're you're essentially trying to kill each other, but in a friendly way, like you're friends, but because you can tap out, you don't hurt each other.

But

you can't be thinking about your bills.

You can't be thinking about an argument you got in this.

Why did my dog shit on the rug?

You can't be thinking about those things.

You have to be completely focused on what you're doing.

And in that way, like jiu-jitsu people are some of the calmest, most chilled-out people you will ever meet in your life.

First of all, because they get all of their aggression out, like all the unnecessary aggression that people carry around with them all this angst and

100 which is part of being a human being because we're designed to run away from predators we're designed to hunt and gather and look out for invading tribes like this is the genetic sequence that evolved for hundreds of thousands of years that we still have it's still a part of us these human reward systems are all in place you have to honor those and one of the ways you have to honor those is rigorous exercise whatever you like to do, you can play squash, you could play tennis, you can run, you could do yoga, you could lift weights, you could do jiu-jitsu, but you have to do something.

If you don't do something, you're going to always be

the most anxiety-ridden people I know are also sedentary.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

And I also always feel like whenever I'm feeling really shitty psychologically, I need to go for a run.

Yes.

Do you find so?

Here's my question.

Given that that is your like meditative practice, do you find that in the moment that the you release the bow and that like that becoming one and that flow state that you have entered into in order to perfectly align yourself with the bow and the arrow, does that moment of release ever

ever result in some kind of unconscious processing coming into your consciousness?

So like some kind of a new awareness of something that you've been trying to figure out and it like is a catalyst for you figuring out what you need, like that feeling of like being in sync with the universe and knowing what you need to do.

Do you ever find yourself like in the moment that you are like

immediately exiting that flow state,

do you feel more clarity about your life or what you need to do or that thing that you weren't thinking about, like your to-do list or your bills or that argument that you've had with somebody that you care about?

Like does anything come into focus or do you find you walk away from an encounter in jiu-jitsu like knowing, not just feeling better emotionally, but like knowing what you need to do next?

I think more so with jiu-jitsu.

With archery, it's just,

you know, because it's so hard to do.

And it's such a singular thing, just doing this one thing over and over and over again.

Like I'll do it like a hundred times in a day.

The thing is like, okay, what did I do right?

What did I do wrong?

Like

why did that shot go bad?

Like what minute adjustments.

Yeah, just minute adjustments.

And

again, it's just a clarity.

I'm sorry about my throat people.

Yeah, no worries.

It's just a clarity of

analysis of technique and of execution.

So it's so overwhelming.

It's so singular

in the focus that you don't really think about anything else.

So there's no room for like, oh, now I know what I did wrong in my life.

Yeah, I guess one of the benefits that I get from meditation is feeling like when I come out of meditation, I feel like

I have a clarity of purpose that I might not have had because I was

I had monkey mind and I was busy, I was distracted and I was using my bandwidth with so much and so

you just tune down what your bandwidth is like paying attention to and then you re-enter the world with a renewed sense of clarity and you're not as distracted.

You're not on that treadmill of thought.

Yeah, I think that comes, to me at least, that comes much more through rigorous exercise.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

That's at the end of a really hard workout and sauna and stretching.

Stretching is always great too.

That's a good time.

for reflection after it's over and it's like this wind down, cool down.

And then I'm just, I always feel so much nicer.

That's the one thing I really like about it.

Like after I work out, I feel so much nicer.

Like, I want to be.

I'm a good person now.

I just want to be nice to people.

I want to smile and say hi to everybody.

Like, all the weirdness of being a man, it just goes away.

You know?

The weirdness of being a man.

I do think that I do not envy you being a man.

Oh, my God.

It's the best.

I don't envy you being a woman.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, no.

I much prefer being a woman.

Of course, you're a woman.

I mean, testosterone is a hell of a drug, my friend.

Like, what the hell is that?

Testosterone, I don't want to deal with that.

That's interesting, but you have some.

You have more testosterone than you have estrogen.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah, women have more testosterone than they have estrogen.

But I've never felt the impulse to punch a wall, you know?

Me neither.

That's stupid.

Okay, well.

Don't punch walls.

Well, you have an outlet for your punching energy, but like,

I don't know.

I mean, what I mean is like that innate

elevate, like an elevated level of aggression that just is not like accessible

to me as a as a woman.

Is that wrong?

Am I like inaccurate in this?

I just feel like I don't know what I would do if I wanted to just like jerk off all the time.

Like, I just don't understand what that is like.

And that seems over, like

that doesn't seem fun to deal with.

Yeah.

Well, you don't really want to jerk off all the time unless you're a sex addict.

You know, and then you you probably got other issues you're dealing with.

But the aggression thing,

it's not just like aggression for no reason.

Like, you only have aggression for a reason.

Like, I never have aggression for, I'm never, like, walking around fucking mad at everything.

It's never, never, it's never the case.

And, um, but I also, I work out a lot.

So

I get it out of my system.

It's just a thing, like, you just have to maintain.

You just have to maintain your life.

You have to maintain your body.

You have to recognize you have biological needs.

And as a man, I think one of those needs is you have to exercise to just calm yourself, to relieve anxiety.

And again, that's that term that is used often, but I think it's the right term, voluntary adversity.

You show up at class, you work out really hard.

You show up at the gym, you work out really hard.

And then when it's over, you're like, you feel better.

You feel good.

Like you're nicer.

Like strong,

powerful people

can be the nicest people because they don't have to be nice.

They're being nice because they want to be nice.

There's a lot of weak, feeble men that pretend that they're nice.

But really what they are is just vulnerable.

They have to be nice because they don't have any choice.

Like if you're not.

And if they were in a position of not having to, then they would drop the nice act.

And that's what happens.

happens.

There's some of the creepiest fucking people when they have power.

It's like really weak men.

They're some of the scariest people.

And they're the scariest people as politicians.

They're just really weak men that all of a sudden have power.

I'm going to fucking show you.

Like, having real power is to be kind when you don't have to be kind.

You know what I love about being a woman, though?

What?

That I do think is a genuine thing and a genuine difference is it's easier for me to be nurturing

in the the sense that like no one would bat an eye if

I saw a kid who was like I couldn't figure out where their mom was and I were to approach them and say, come here, honey, let me help you.

As a man, like, do you second, like, I know that, like, my husband has told me this, that, like, he second guesses, like, hanging out at, you know, with the kids at the park because someone might think that he's a pedophile.

Oh, that's crazy.

Hanging out with his kids?

Yeah, because like, if you're just just like a guy sitting on a bench and your kids are playing, how does anyone know that you aren't just a guy?

I mean, he's really overthinking things.

Of course, you're a fucking dad at the park.

That's crazy.

You see other dads at the park.

You say hi.

It's like, you're not a pedophile.

Those are my kids.

How old's your kid?

Like, it's normal.

Okay.

I've taken my kids to parks a thousand times.

You've never felt in some way

that your masculinity inhibited your ability, like your instinct to be nurturing and affectionate?

No,

no, I think that's a weakness.

Like if you can't be nurturing and affectionate because you think you're masculine, that's crazy.

That's just weak.

That's that's nuts.

That's like a distortion of what strength means.

Like that's not, that's not strong.

That's weak.

Like, why can't you be nice?

Like, why can't you be like the idea that if you're nice and you're affectionate and you're kind, that you're weak, that's crazy.

That's crazy.

Especially if you have options.

Like,

if you don't have to be nice and you're nice, like, that's real niceness.

Like, it's pure.

Like, you don't have to be.

You don't have to be a nice person, but you're nice because it's a good thing to do.

Like, that it's the right way to do it.

Okay, so what's so great about being a guy?

Everything.

It's awesome.

We fucking build everything.

We run the world.

It's great.

I don't know.

I am a guy.

I mean, I would like to be a little bit more.

And yet, it all comes down to trying to get the attention of some lady.

Not at all.

No.

I already have the attention of a lady.

Right.

I'm good.

I'm still love being a guy.

It's not like that's the primary motivation.

No.

What is the primary motivation?

Fun.

Fun?

Fun.

Yeah.

Life is fun.

Okay.

Life should be fun.

Sounds pretty great.

It should be fun if you pursue it correctly.

There's a lot of stuff to do.

A lot of stuff to do that's interesting.

That's why when I hear people say, I'm bored.

Like, I don't even understand you.

I don't even get it.

How the fuck can you be bored?

I wish I had 50 lives to live simultaneously.

I would do a bunch of different things.

I would have a bunch of different jobs.

There's like so many different things that I'd love to do.

Aren't people sometimes beholden to doing things that they don't want to do just because they have to make bills or they have to, you know,

but that's all ch choices that you make too.

And unfortunately, these choices sort of they cascade.

You know, you you could find yourself motivated by the wrong things and

doing things for the wrong reasons like doing things just for money and just for this or just for that and I've done that before I know it but then you have to realize like what you're doing and not and stay focused on the prize yeah take the steps to not want to do that anymore you know but

you know it's like

you people there's people listening to this right now like oh that's easy for you to say because I have to do this and I have to do that.

That's true, but

you can do things to better your life with your free time.

Go open your phone right now

and look at your screen time.

Okay, now I understand the screen time is 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, five minutes here, five minutes there, but that screen time

It's probably about five hours, which is crazy.

That's five hours you could have been improving your life.

That's five hours you could have been doing something different.

That's five hours you could have went to the gym.

That's five hours you could have eaten better.

You could have taken steps to have better food in your house.

That you could have taken steps to pursue a career or move in the direction of pursuing something that's different than what you're doing, that you would actually find satisfying and fulfilling.

You just have to decide, what are you doing with your time?

And, you know, and this goes back to people commenting and bitching at people online.

Well, that's what you're doing.

If you're distracting yourself by doing a bunch of shit that's just worthless, and it is worthless.

And easy, maybe.

And easy.

And very easy.

Yeah.

It's because you need discipline.

You need to figure out what do you really want to do with your life and what makes you feel better.

Do you feel like you are innately disciplined?

No.

No, I've learned that.

Okay.

I've developed that.

Yeah.

That's not no one's innately disciplined.

No, I don't think that's real.

I think we look at people that are disciplined like, oh, it must be easy for them.

You're just born with that gene.

No, that's not real.

No, you recognize the value of discipline and the rewards.

You reap the rewards and then you like it.

And so you keep doing it.

You keep pursuing it.

I'm just curious about like brain chemistry because when I think about, you know, you've been very complimentary towards me in this conversation.

But a part of me is wondering, am I just lucky that I have the the kind of internal chemistry that I have that makes me value the things that I value?

And,

you know,

I'm just doing what I feel compelled to do.

And I'm curious when people feel compelled to do otherwise.

And I don't know where to place

responsibility for that.

Do you know what I mean?

Well, you wouldn't know unless you are them.

You could look to your own life to times where you haven't

lived in an exemplary way or

done things where you're helping yourself and done things, in fact, that are actually sabotaging your life.

And you can correct them yourself.

But it's very hard.

I mean, you would have to be a fucking counselor that would have ultimate truth access to a person's thought processes to really find out why they're doing things differently, why they're not living in a way.

The only thing you can do is live by example.

You know, there's a term for a taekwondo instructor.

It's called a sabam nim, and it's one who lives by example.

And that's what you have to do.

You have to live by example.

Live like someone's watching.

Yes.

This is what I tell people, and I've said this for years.

You want to have a successful life.

If you want to live your life like there's a documentary crew around you filming your everyday life and that you want people to be impressed with you.

Do it when no one's watching.

Do it when no one's watching.

I think about that when I work out.

I think about that.

Yeah, if people were judging me and they were watching me right now, and they would,

what would you think?

Yeah, and I now I'm wondering if like that's one of those weird silver linings to this whole experience is that my life became very, very public very early.

And so I literally do have to walk around living my life as if there is potentially a documentary crew following me around.

Yeah, I think that is.

I think that's real.

I think that's the gift that I have gotten by being famous.

That I have to live publicly.

And if I didn't, like if I was just some fucking tyrant that no one knew, you know, and I just had all this wealth and power and no one knew me and I could just get away with being an asshole.

Right.

Yeah.

I think the most wealthy and the most powerful do not want fame because with fame comes accountability.

Yeah.

But that's good.

That's good.

Even the haters are good, you know, and then the people that defend the

defend you against the haters, that's good too.

It's all good.

So everyone's just working this out together publicly, you know, and they're doing it through different vessels.

And sometimes they do it through other people.

They're doing it through me, and they're doing it through you.

Would you wish fame on anyone?

No,

no,

no, no, no, no, no, no.

You can't handle it.

Yeah.

No, but you can handle it.

But most people can't handle it.

It breaks people.

That's why people can't have it when they're young.

The worst thing you do to a child is make them famous.

The worst thing.

I mean, look at, there's countless examples.

I've talked to so many of them on the podcast.

They're all broken.

Yeah, like who have you talked to?

I'm curious.

Collie Culkin, Miley Cyrus.

He's doing much better now, isn't he?

He's great.

Yeah.

He's great.

I mean, he's as great as you can be to be super famous when you're six.

God.

I'm friends with Ricky Schroeder.

You know, I've had a bunch of them on, a bunch of people on that were famous when they were young, and they all are missing something.

It's like when you're making cement and you don't add enough water.

There's like something that happens when you have fame and adulation during your developmental stages as a child when you're supposed to be like figuring out how do I get people to like me like what what is it about

you know and there is that is that is that developmental stage when like your your brain chemistry is being configured for the rest of your life

like that that is scary you want to you want to put that brain chemistry uh coagulation into the in the right configuration in the right set of circumstances or else you're going to be having a complex for the rest of your life that you're going to be grappling with.

Because I don't know if you can undo

the stuff that you get ingrained in your brain chemistry when you're a kid.

Like, I don't know if I don't know anything about it.

I don't know fuck all about brains, but like, it seems to me that, like, especially

developmental, when your brain hasn't configured yet, that's when you get hardwired to

have complexes the rest of your life that you're going to be dealing with.

100%.

And if your brain is formulated with extreme adulation and

love for no fucking reason just because you're a cute kid but you're a cute kid in front of the whole world in home alone that's nuts that's nuts yeah i mean he's a very thoughtful person and he's come through it i mean i really enjoy talking to him he's really nice does he regret being in the home alone movies boy that's a good question i'd have to ask him i don't know i mean i don't know you know because i mean you know you can look look back.

I don't even know how much of a choice that was for him.

How much can you choose anything when you're six?

How can you choose?

But, like,

so in a way, it was a thing that happened to him that he didn't really have control over.

Right.

And does he look back on that and go,

would I, would I give up that?

Like, if I could get that life back, would I have a different life?

I'm curious what he would say.

Well, he most certainly would have a different life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Would it be better?

I don't know.

You know, but I don't know anybody that's, again, gone through that.

That's,

air quotes, whole at the end of it.

You know, I just think that

there's also this weird thing where you become the provider for the family, which is very

child, yeah.

And then you have this parasitic relationship that your parents have to you,

which is, I have friends that were famous as

young people, and they have these very fucked up, complicated relationships with their parents.

One of my friends where they're found out their parents stole from them millions of dollars.

Yeah.

And then you have to grapple with that as you're an adult.

These monsters, you know, they used you as an ATM machine and they stopped working and they became your quote-unquote manager, really just pushing you out there to try to siphon money off of you.

Fucking A.

Fucking A.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But

I got fame in a slow drip.

I got slow doses, like snake venom.

You get a little bit of snake venom.

If you get one big bite from a cobra, you're fucked.

That's what I got.

Yeah.

Well, you're strong.

So you're.

But you're strong.

You came through it on the other side, a very durable person.

And I think there's, you know, it's a trial by fire, and you went through it.

I mean, you know, that's what,

you know, that's what they do in boot camp.

You know, you, you go through something very difficult to be strong at the end.

And you don't become strong.

Just wake up one day.

I'm strong.

No, you have to go through some shit, you know, and that going through some shit when you're a kid as becoming famous is different than going through like hardship as a child.

I know a lot of children.

That went through hardship.

Like all my friends that are interesting all had horrible childhoods.

All of them.

All my most fascinating friends.

I'm so grateful that I did not have a fucked up childhood.

Well, that's probably what prepared you or helped you.

Indeed.

I feel like if I had gone through this experience after having a fucked-up childhood, I would be a psychopath today.

Right.

So thank God I had a good childhood.

Yes.

Yeah.

I didn't have a bad childhood.

I had a complex childhood, but it wasn't bad.

You know, my mother and my stepfather are very nice people.

It wasn't bad, but it was fucked up.

It was moved around a lot, didn't have a lot of friends, got bullied,

a lot of different things.

But it wasn't the worst.

You know, nothing horrible happened to me.

You know, so it's like

the

trials can't be too hard.

They can't break you.

They have to be just enough so that you gain some strength and you rebuild.

And if they do break you, then it's it's a very difficult task of rebuilding.

And people that have gone through horrible childhood trauma, particularly abuse and sexual abuse, they have the most difficult hurdles to overcome.

I agree.

I think in large part because how do you trust others?

Like, I think rebuilding your life relies upon like upon rebuilding yourself in the context of other human beings.

And how do you do that when you can't trust anyone?

It's true.

But I do know some people that have gone through childhood sexual trauma that are also incredibly fascinating people

because

they've figured out a way to acquire strength through it all.

But what about trust?

And that's the other thing I was going to say.

And then they've also figured out a way to, well, they're also very skeptical people, and rightly so.

Rightly so.

But that's a good thing because a lot of people don't have your intentions in mind, especially if you're a woman, right?

If you're a woman, everybody's bullshitting you to try to get in your pants.

It's constant bullshitting.

So you have to figure out, out, well, who's actually bullshitting me and who's just being nice and who's being nice, but kind of bullshitting, just slowly playing this game.

You ever heard of the definition of a gentleman?

No.

It's a patient wolf.

Okay, yeah, all right.

Yeah.

And then ultimately, the prey sort of acknowledges, yeah, here you are.

You're getting into my pants in the end, but because you've been the most patient, the most impressively patient of all.

Yeah, you've done the dance correctly.

You've put your feathers out like a good peacock.

Yeah.

I like that.

I like that dance.

Yes.

Yeah, well, that's the thing is like women are designed to like that dance, right?

Because this person has shown you the respect of not just trying to use their physical force and

take it from you and not care about you as a person.

They've chosen to acknowledge you as a person and like, this is what this person wants.

They want to feel comfortable with me.

But then you can't be a sociopath, too.

It has to to be genuine.

You have to genuinely like this person.

So, you know,

for a woman to feel safe, right?

Like, how do you, you know, and then that's, you got to go through a lot of trial and error with that, too.

You have to figure out, like, why did that relationship fall apart?

Oh, that was a piece of shit.

Like, why'd that one fall apart?

Oh, she was a psycho.

Like, recognize, like, what, what do you actually like?

Is it just that they're hot?

This is the thing.

Like, I've had a bunch of friends that just married hot people.

And then, you know, you're going through divorce and it's all chaos.

You can't just fucking marry hot hot people just because they're hot and they're sexy and they turn you on.

Like,

that's just genes.

Like, you gotta, you gotta understand, like, there's a personality involved.

And then there's also, like, when you're hot, you have ultimate power.

You have the Willy Wonka golden ticket.

Like, everybody's stumbling at their feet to try to open doors for you and be nice to you.

Put you in prison.

Open a certain kind of door

and then close it forever.

Yeah.

It's

fucking.

Just flirting.

It was flirting in the end.

That's all it was.

Being a person's fucking weird.

You know, it's really weird.

It's really weird, and it's temporary.

It's like you're always looking at that fucking hourglass, just sands running out, you know, and like, what am I doing?

Why am I doing it?

What's this about?

What do I like?

And then you can get overwhelmed with like existential angst.

Just, what's the point of it all?

Yeah, well, you have to find a point.

You have to, like, what is man's search for meaning?

Like, what is it?

What are we doing?

Well, that's a subtitle of my book,

My Search.

Search for Meaning.

Oh, my God.

Right there.

In cursive, if you can still read cursive, some people can't anymore.

It's that your actual handwriting?

No, I wanted it to be my actual handwriting, but they.

Where is it?

Fuck heads.

They were like, this looks so much more pretty.

I don't know.

Yeah, you could have made it that pretty.

I do have great handwriting.

What the fuck?

It's close.

Might as well.

It is odd.

Yeah.

The search for meaning.

Search for meaning is very odd.

And, you know, and you could.

Especially when there's no inherent meaning.

You just have to make it up.

I think.

I mean, it means something to you.

If it means something to you, it's inherent.

It's real.

If it means something to you, if you actually care, it means something.

Like, what's the point of it all?

If you're going to die someday, and who knows what happens when you die?

And then there's is the real fatalist, the thing.

When you die, it's over.

It's just black and emptiness.

And then just shut off.

Like, okay.

So you're still alive, bitch.

Okay.

You got to figure out what you're doing with your day-to-day.

Do you enjoy your day-to-day?

If not, why do some people, how come some people enjoy their life?

Why don't you?

Like, what is man's search for meaning?

Enjoy your fucking life.

Enjoy this life.

You can.

It's possible.

It can be done.

And I think living by example shows other people that it can be done.

And then being like like really honest about it.

Like what is, what are the steps?

What's the struggles?

Like how do you do it?

Yeah, that's actually been a really sort of fun takeaway that I've had from having just an Instagram is like I'll post a silly video of me dancing for my kids.

And a lot of the comments are just people being like, I'm so glad that someone like you can be happy.

You know, it's like, thank God someone like you can be happy.

And I'm like, yeah, someone like me can be happy.

That means you can be happy too.

It's possible to be happy.

Yeah.

But, you know, when you're a 500-pound person and you want to be thin, that's a long road.

It's not going to come quickly.

And if you're a severely depressed, very unhappy person with a disaster of a life, it's not going to turn around overnight.

That's a battleship.

It takes a long time to turn that bitch around and get it facing the other direction.

And the motivation has to be that you have to see some kernel of opportunity embedded within that darkness because otherwise, like,

how do you even know what direction to go towards?

And you have to be enjoying the process.

You have to figure out a way to enjoy the process of improvement.

Even though it's hard.

Yes.

Yeah.

And because it's hard.

Hard can be fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You have to enjoy the hard.

And that's why voluntary adversity is so important.

You have to force yourself to do hard things so that you can do hard things no matter what.

If I do, what's that?

Pump-up remix.

Pump-up remixes.

Someone, you got to get motivated somehow.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

Although David Goggins doesn't listen to music because he thinks it's cheating.

Really?

Yeah, he gets all his motivation internal.

It's like, come on.

External motivation is pure.

He's a fucking complete psycho.

You know, but he's like.

I need a good soundtrack when I'm running.

But that's the spectrum, you know, the spectrum of discipline, you know?

Yeah, that's what he's doing.

That's what he's doing.

That's what he's doing all day long for no goal other than, like, I talked to him about it.

He's like, I'm in the lab every day downloading information.

Like,

whoa.

Cool, dude.

You're in the major expression.

This is a crazy video of him working out with my friend Israel Adesanya.

Israel Adesanya is the former UFC middleweight champion of the world, one of the greatest fighters that ever lived.

And he is working out with David Goggins, and he can't keep up with him.

And David Goggins just breaking him.

And he's throwing up in garbage cans, and David is putting him through his workout.

And it's one of three workouts that David does in a day.

And he's like this incredibly fit world champion fighter.

Is he distracting himself?

I don't know.

You have to talk to him.

You have to dig into that brain.

You have to dig into that.

That's a very unusual brain.

But he was 300 pounds and fat at one point in his time.

It just has become become his purpose.

That's his meaning, right?

That makes sense.

That's his meaning.

That's why he says he's like, he goes, I'm downloading knowledge.

Like every time he's like pushing himself past the limits that he thinks he's capable of, further and further, he's downloading more understanding of himself.

That's we should work out sometime, by the way.

I think that would be fun.

I only studied fighting when I first got back out of prison because I was getting a bunch of death threats, so I did Krav McGaw.

And it was a lot, a lot of it was just learning how to scream

yeah well the first like my Krav Maga instructors because they were instructing me on a specific for a specific reason it wasn't just to work out their first thing that they taught me was how to scream just to like without without holding back the the amount like I was surprised and and they were telling me

people don't want to take up space and take and make noise.

Like we're we're taught from a very young age, especially women, to not do that.

And so you have to, in the first,

the first lesson was make noise, take up space.

And so we just practiced like screaming as loud and as hard and as long as we could.

And then once we got through that, then we started doing the fighting moves.

And the first thing I had to do before I did anything was scream first, then move, scream, move.

And so that the screaming became part of

movement.

So it would trigger, so I wouldn't have to think about it.

If it ever came down to it and someone actually attacked me, I wouldn't have to think, scream.

I would just scream.

Kraft McGaw is legit.

It gets criticized a lot.

Does it?

Yeah, by martial artists.

Why?

Well, because it's a combinatory martial art, so it combines a bunch of different things together.

So it's essentially like a jack of all trades.

What's wrong with that?

There's nothing wrong with that.

Oh, okay.

No, no, there's nothing wrong with that.

It's like only being into purebred dogs.

Like, what what's up with that?

Well, n no, it's like, is it effective?

Right.

Like, there's no Krav Magaw artists that have gone on to dominate in the UFC.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

But it kind of, you could kind of say that mixed martial arts, in a sense, is

essentially the roots of Krav Magaw.

Because it's taking the best aspects of various martial arts and training them.

Yeah, how is it different?

Well, the thing is, is that if you are training for self-defense, okay, you're training to defend yourself against an attacker.

The true, in my personal opinion,

the true best way to learn how to fight is to learn how to prepare yourself for trained killers,

not the average person.

Really?

Yes.

Like, how often are you going to encounter trained killers?

It doesn't matter.

You should be prepared for trained killers because you could run into a trained killer.

And if you try to do some crab magon nonsense on me, I'm going to fucking strangle you.

You can't defend yourself against someone who actually knows how to fight.

Okay, here's a question: Can I ever actually defend myself against someone like you?

No,

not against someone else.

Well, then, what's the fucking point?

Because you could defend yourself against someone who doesn't know how to fight as good as me, but the odds of someone like me attacking you are very, very, very, very low.

You're saying I should train to be able to, you know, to fight against trained killers, but.

Yes, defend yourself.

But jiu-jitsu, you can.

Jiu-Jitsu, you could defend yourself.

You're not going to.

The way you would be able to beat me is if I was untrained.

I have too many advantages.

But also, I don't have advantages if someone's bigger than me and just as well trained as me.

Right.

Or more well-trained than I am.

Better than me.

I'm not going to beat

the UFC heavyweight champion.

I'm not going to win.

It's not possible.

I don't care how long I do martial arts.

But you can avoid dying by them.

No.

No, no.

Okay, they'll just murder you.

No, I can't.

No.

No, I'm completely vulnerable.

Okay, great.

As an expert martial artist with three black belts, I'm completely vulnerable.

Yeah, that's reality.

That's physics.

It's like you against an elephant who's going to win.

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's the 100 men versus a gorilla.

Yeah.

Obviously, the gorilla would win.

Whoever thought the gorilla would lose?

Retards.

Men.

Who have never seen a gorilla?

Men who think they can fight better than they can, which is most men.

Who ever brought up that as even a thought experiment?

I don't know, but it's funny that it's like viral in 2025.

I thought we would have worked that out in the 50s.

The fact that...

I feel like people just don't remember what animals are like.

We're so out of touch with animals.

They don't even know what an animal is.

They have no idea.

People know what their dog is.

They have no idea what an animal is, an actual real animal.

And also, your own dog could fuck you up

if it wanted to.

It just doesn't want to.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Well, unless you have a little dog.

I'll fuck up a Chihuahua.

Yeah.

My dog, Marshall, he's a golden retriever.

He's the sweetest dog on the planet.

But if you, he could probably kill me if you want.

He just doesn't know.

Right.

And he would never think to.

But if like a rat was trying to attack you, you'd be fucking terrified.

Or if he got infected by rabies.

Right.

You know, like and lost his mind.

Like, ciao.

It'd be a real problem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there's, there's the reality, but if you're training to defeat a trained killer, you're going to be way better off than if you're training to defeat someone who's going to lunge at you this way, and you're going to block that, and hit them here, and hit them there.

But don't you fight differently against a trained killer versus like some dude who's drunk and fighting?

No, the right way to fight is the right way to fight, period.

Whether it's some drunk dude, if some drunk dude tries to take a swing at me, I'm not going to think, oh, he's a drunk dude.

I shouldn't avoid this punch.

I should do something different.

No, it's like, it's all the language.

So martial arts is essentially like a language.

And some people only know a couple of words, and some people can eloquently recite Shakespeare at the drop of a hat.

And that's the difference between an expert and someone who doesn't really know what they're doing.

And most people don't know what they're doing when it comes to martial arts.

If you're preparing for someone who doesn't know what they're doing, that's not the right way to do it.

The right way to do it is to prepare for someone who knows what they're doing.

Now, this is very different when we're talking about like women's self-defense versus just, you know,

like

a grown

man who is of normal size defending himself against another grown man of normal size.

A fair fight.

Yeah, a fair fight.

But in a fair fight, you should be preparing to fight against a trained killer.

If you are a person who just only trains in self-defense tactics, like someone comes at me, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do that.

Good luck doing that to someone who knows how to fight.

Good luck.

Because they're going to recognize all of your movements in advance.

You're going to go like this and they're going to go, oh, well, his right arm is coming this way.

So I'm just going to step this way and I'm going to avoid that.

And I see his left foot step backwards.

Well, now his right leg is vulnerable, so I'm going to kick it.

Like, it's like, it's language.

It's understanding the flow.

flow of body dynamics and movement.

And it's happening so quickly that the only way that you can actually be effective is if you're fluent and you don't have to think about it.

You don't think about it.

When you're training, it's like you very rarely think, oh, now I'm going to do this.

It's like opportunities open themselves up, especially in striking.

Striking is something that

you do where you're doing these techniques so often that as things happen, you're just responding in a trained way.

Your mind and your neurosystem is completely trained for these actions and these movements.

Do you think that fighting

and you know fighting your friends, like not like actual like fighting for your life, but fighting for your friends is a crucial part of brain development?

Because I know that I've heard, or at least I've read, that rough housing with small kids is a really important

part of their brain development.

And the people who become more

well-adapted, well-adjusted emotionally, just they seem to be more fit emotionally were kids who had some rough housing when they were when they were young, especially with their parents.

Is that like an elevated form of rough housing part of a human being's cognitive development?

Well, I think physical altercations are a normal part of human existence that have existed.

It's been going on since the beginning of time.

And to no understanding or no knowledge of it and no experience with it at all.

Because I'm not like, I'm not a fighter.

I don't, like, I've never gotten to a physical fight with anyone.

Good.

Is that good?

Is that good?

I haven't either.

Okay.

Other than ones on purpose.

Right, okay.

Like, I'm not, I don't get in street fights.

I don't, I'm never good.

I haven't been in a fist fight since I was a kid.

I just, they were all martial arts fights.

Okay.

I, I, you know, and

I just think for men, being vulnerable is not good.

It's just not good to not know how to defend yourself.

It just leaves you with this deep insecurity.

And that's why I see men that don't know how to fight.

They use bravado and they puff their chest out and they yell.

They try to intimidate people and scare people.

It's just posturing.

It's just like.

Maybe this is why I feel bad for men because I don't feel any sort of impulse to do that.

to puff up my chest and and like i don't know maybe isn't well you shouldn't

Men shouldn't either.

And the men that do it are generally vulnerable.

It's bullies, right?

Why are bullies bullies?

They're bullies because they're pussies.

That's really what it is.

That's why they're trying to intimidate people and hurt people.

It's because they're weak.

It's like you don't, like, trained fighters are some of the nicest people.

Like, people that fight in the UFC, they're some of the nicest people you'll ever meet.

It sounds crazy.

Like, my friends that are all jiu-jitsu people, they're the nicest people.

They're so friendly.

They're so good because they're not scared.

They're not insecure.

They're not vulnerable all the time.

Most men who don't know how to defend themselves, who are really mouthy and get loud, they're just vulnerable.

And

I have a friend and he has real rage problems and he doesn't know how to fight at all.

And he was yelling at someone in the parking lot of the comedy store once.

And I pulled him aside.

I go, what are you doing, man?

He goes, I don't know.

I fucking see red.

And I go, you don't know how to defend yourself.

I go, one of these days, you're going to do that to someone who's like me, but they're mean.

And they're going to just say, oh, here's a nice opportunity to just fuck this guy up.

And you're going to wind up in the hospital or worse.

Like, don't do this.

Like, you can't do that.

But, like, some men grow up puffing their chest out and they get away with it.

And they get away with it if they're loud enough or they're mean enough or they yell enough.

And they, they, you know, that becomes their defense mechanism.

They get shitty with people all the time but it's that's all it is and if they don't get shitty with people publicly they get shitty with people online they get shitty they do get off your cushion

they get it out that way but it's all just weakness it's all it is it's just like you're vulnerable and just don't be vulnerable figure out figure out a way to not be vulnerable I got into martial arts because I was getting bullied and I didn't, I just didn't, I was always scared of altercations.

Like, I hate this feeling.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to become what I'm terrified of.

Okay.

I guess my one sort of pokeback at that, though, is I find it interesting that

you frame vulnerability in such a negative way.

Physical vulnerability is negative.

Yeah, but I think the thing that I'm sort of thinking about is how it doesn't matter really how strong you are or capable you are.

We all are still utterly vulnerable.

so I guess, like, but what can you control?

Fair.

You can control some aspect of that.

But you can't control guns, right?

If you, if someone has a gun, you're vulnerable.

I don't care who you are.

You could be Superman.

Well, not Superman.

He's bulletproof.

But you could be, you know, UFC heavyweight champion.

You're still vulnerable to a gun.

One little kid can kill you.

Bang.

You're dead.

Yeah.

But how much can you control?

You can't control some of it.

So is the idea like, oh, you can't control any of it.

So why control it all?

Why do anything?

Why be strong?

Well, I guess, no, I guess my thing is for me,

it's less about like

positioning myself to not get hurt.

And it's more, for me, my big sort of like training that I attempt to do is

how do I get up when I am inevitably hurt?

So

I understand that life is going to hurt me, and I don't know how life is going to hurt me.

So, there's like a million different ways that I can be hurt.

It might be that I'm physically assaulted.

It might be some other thing.

And knowing that I can't prepare for all of the ways that I am vulnerable to existence, instead, I try to think, okay, I am vulnerable to existence and I am going to get hurt.

How do I

not be broken by the hurt?

And how do I,

I don't know, maybe

I'm treating the inevitable pain of life as

that

as that training to get strong.

It's just kind of like I almost don't seek out pain because I've had enough pain come at me.

Does that make sense?

What do you mean by seek out pain, though?

Well,

you were talking about like voluntary adversity.

Yes.

Right.

And like to an extent, I agree with you because that's a very stoic thing to do, to seek out challenges so that

you can test yourself and test your mettle and push yourself to become better for the inevitable things that might happen your way.

But not even just for the inevitable things that happen, just for your own resolve,

just for you as a human to achieve balance.

We're all vulnerable.

There's no invulnerable people.

We're all going to die.

We all are made of flesh and bone, and we're all weak.

Right.

There's no invulnerable humans.

But you can be less vulnerable.

And you should probably optimize that,

especially as a man, I think, because

without it comes a lot of weird insecurities that are not comfortable.

And they can trip you up in all sorts of aspects of your life.

I think maybe this is another like woman-man thing, maybe, where like women have to

accept vulnerability as like an inescapable aspect of our lives, even just in our interpersonal relationships.

Like I know that when I walk into the room, I'm not the one who's going to win a fight, that's for sure.

Right.

And so knowing that,

I

feel like I

sure, I

prepare myself in the ways that I can, right?

And I and I'm strong in the ways that I can.

But like, I don't think about about vulnerability

in negative terms.

Because I've also found that once you've been, once you've been,

once you've been forced to reckon with your own vulnerability, that is when you find your strength.

So I don't know.

I see them as like interchangeable.

They're like different things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think physical vulnerability.

Look, I think there's certain

there's certain roles that males and females ultimately play that are unavoidable.

And one of them is when your husband went downstairs to protect you.

Right.

There's a reason why I wasn't the one who did that.

Yeah.

Ultimately, right?

In that situation,

if you are less vulnerable as a man, it's a good thing.

If someone breaks into my house and they're a normal-sized person without a weapon,

I'm not scared of them.

You know, I'm scared this crazy person is in my house.

I'm scared that they might have a weapon.

But if I realize that they don't have a weapon and

they're physically threatening, I have a massive advantage.

It's up to me whether or not they die.

It's my choice.

And that's better.

That is better.

It's better than you getting beat to death by some schizophrenic who breaks into your house because you don't know how to defend yourself.

Fair.

And you panic and you start flailing and you hyperventilate and you don't know what to do.

Yeah.

That's not good.

No, it's not.

That's all I'm saying.

I mean, we're all vulnerable.

It's part of what you're doing when you're working out really hard is to try to increase the strength and decrease the vulnerability.

You're trying to increase your resolve to push through difficult things, increase

your character and your will.

You're trying to fortify yourself.

And they're also trying to.

And that's not bad.

It's all positive.

It's all positive.

You know, but it gets labeled as negative because there's a lot of things that get attached to it, like jocks and bullies and assholes and aggressive men and shitty men.

Who then who think themselves superior to people who are

more vulnerable

instead of just being nice?

Because, you know, you can kill everybody in the room.

Just be nice.

Like, that's the real nice person is the person who can kill everybody, and he doesn't want to.

You know, the really shitty people are the ones that would act on that.

And sometimes you'll run into those, and it's better to be prepared.

That's that's all it is with like physical vulnerability.

But what you're talking about, like, psychic vulnerability and not wanting to go through pain because you've been through so much?

Of course, yeah.

Look, ideally, we should go through zero pain.

Ideally, we should go through zero aggression, zero shitty, deceptive, conniving psycho people that are trying to ruin everything in your life.

Ideally, yeah.

Ideally, you shouldn't have to prepare for that.

You shouldn't interact with those people.

I don't know.

And again, I'm also like speaking at counter purposes with myself because I did the exact opposite thing with my prosecutor.

I didn't have to talk to him.

I didn't have to have a conversation with him that was difficult and awkward and hard and

forced me to confront all of his pain.

And I did because I knew that there was value in that like

so

yeah we we seek comfort always

and we avoid pain yeah but I don't know maybe I'm a masochist because I always feel like there's something to gain from pain because you've gained so much from your pain and you kind of must know that you are who you are you know you're kind of an extraordinary person and you've gone through a lot to become that person you don't just wake up and have this perspective that you have you have to go through a lot of shit.

You know what's fucked up though?

What?

I trust pain more than I trust joy

because when I'm going through something painful, I know what that is and I know how to confront it.

When I'm going through joy, I'm afraid that something bad is going to happen to me.

That happens to people where they self-sabotage.

You know?

I mean, I don't know.

I was having a great time in Perusia and then everything just went really bad out of nowhere.

And so, like, I don't know.

Like, a part of me is like always is trying to see like the yin-yang of it all, like the, the, the good that's embedded in the bad, but then afraid of the bad that's embedded in the good.

Like, that's, I'm, that's what,

and, you know, and that's a reality.

Like, you know, the more that you, now that I have the privilege of being a mom, I know that one day, you know, like if something were to happen to my kids, I would be all the more fucking dead, like all the more pain in my life.

Like if I never had kids,

I wouldn't have the opportunity to experience a potential pain that would be utterly devastating.

And so like that's

where that play goes in my head.

And I just wonder if it's a trauma response where like I'm afraid.

of good things happening.

I'm sure part of it has got to be a trauma response.

I mean, I think a lot of people that self-sabotage when things start going well in their life, it's because they're used to things going badly.

And this idea of things going well, this

it just scares the shit out of them it's the unknown and it's the pain that might come with it falling apart the pain that might come with you hang all your hopes and dreams on wow things really actually are better and then they're not and like fuck

so you want it to fall apart so that you could achieve some level of comfort in the understanding of this state that you've been in many times before the state of failure i need to get rid of that i need to i need to lose this yeah but you're aware of it, which is the first step.

You know, I don't think you're embracing it.

You know, clearly, you're not.

You're writing books.

Yeah, you're here.

You got the Hulu series.

You got a lot going on.

Yeah.

It's like it's not.

You're not going.

Yeah, it's not like you.

I'm just like, what?

Yeah.

I'm still just a little bit like looking over my shoulder.

Like, of course.

You've coming at me.

Imagine if you didn't.

That would be crazy after all that you've been through.

Imagine if you didn't think like that.

You know,

it's understandable.

More than understandable.

You know?

Yeah, that whole like lightning doesn't strike the same place twice.

And it's like,

it can.

It can.

It can.

Tell that to someone who's been struck by fucking lightning.

Yeah.

You know, it's possible.

You can't think.

The fear of the unknown and the fear of the possibilities can really cripple you.

It really can.

I'm trying not to let it do that to me.

You're doing a great job.

Thanks.

You really are.

Yeah, working on it.

But again,

it's a struggle, and this is important for people to hear.

It's not like it's just like every day.

Like,

it's hard.

Life is hard.

Even a guy like Goggins, you know, he told me?

And he goes, sometimes I stare at my fucking shoes for like 30 minutes before I put those motherfuckers on.

He goes, because he's like, I don't want to do this.

I don't want to do this.

But he knows he's going to do this.

And he goes, but I put him on.

him it's not easy life is not easy but it's worth living

it's worth doing

it really is does he put those shoes on because he knows that ultimately he's going to be glad that he did it if you ask him he's like because I'm not a bitch okay well

because that is what it is yeah he's ultimately going to be glad that he's he's still got the strength and that strength needs to be watered every day like a garden it's not like you just have it now you have it for life.

No.

You have to keep at it.

Everybody could slide.

Everybody could slide back.

It's true.

Yeah.

As much as we can improve ourselves, we can't easy.

It's not easy being a person,

but it's worth doing.

Yeah.

Yeah, and you can do it.

And everybody could do it.

You could do it better than you're doing it.

I could do it better than I'm doing it.

I'm trying.

and you could do it better than

all of us i'm so grumpy sometimes yeah it's like so unnecessary unnecessary avoidable but it's good it's good to you know struggle's good it's good all of it's good it's all we're on the path you know but this is like this all this this all this this idea that you should know better by now that's also silly i know 80-year-old fools no everyone if there's anything i've learned from being a mom it's that everyone every human being is a toddler.

Every single person is a toddler who either hasn't gotten enough attention or hasn't had their nap, whatever the fuck, and they're just having a tantrum.

And if you treat everyone like a toddler, it is actually a very successful way of interacting with people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's true.

That is the lesson of parenthood, right?

Yeah, I

talk about that all the time that

I started looking at people as like babies that grew up instead of looking at them like, oh, this is Mike.

He's 35.

Like, no, Mike was a baby.

Like, how'd Mike become so fucked up?

Well, Mike got a lot of bad information, a lot of bad experiences.

And he still is a baby.

He still has the same needs that he did as a kid.

They're just more sophisticated now, but ultimately, they all derive down to these same things.

Do you need a change of situation?

Do you need some attention?

Do you need to sleep on it?

Like, you know, whatever's going on.

Like, just if you can identify those, like, basic human needs and address, and just tweak their circumstances, you can change a person's life.

And also, recognize that if you ignore those basic human needs over and over, they're gonna compound and you're gonna have more problems

and they're gonna lose their shit in the middle of the grocery store.

Where

Amanda, I really enjoyed talking to you Again, thank you very much.

Really appreciate you.

And your book is out now, Amanda Knox, Free, My Search for Meaning.

Yeah, if anyone wants to reach out, I'm at Amandanox.com.

It's pretty easy.

Okay.

Thank you for being here.

Appreciate you.

Thank you.

A lot of fun.

Bye, everybody.

Bye.