Amanda Knox recounts her eight-year legal nightmare, including fabricated claims by prosecutor Rudy Guede (later convicted as the actual killer), 53-hour interrogations, and media sensationalism reducing her to a "murderer" despite eventual acquittal in 2015. She highlights systemic failures—promotions for corrupt officials, dismissed DNA evidence, and Italy’s scapegoating culture—while comparing her ordeal to others like Samantha Geimer and Yeonmi Park. Now co-hosting Labyrinths, Knox advocates reclaiming agency through mindfulness, critiquing performative victimhood and the brain’s struggle with modern hyper novelty. Their discussion reveals how relentless external judgment and evolutionary mismatches shape trauma, resilience, and even civilizations’ survival instincts. [Automatically generated summary]
Whether it's radiation or some sort of propulsion system that they had that had some sort of energy that comes off of it, electricity, magnetics, whatever.
I don't know what it was.
I don't know if it's real.
It's hard when people just tell you stories.
He didn't seem like a liar.
He seemed like a very credible man that had an extraordinary experience many decades ago, but maybe he's full of shit.
Therein lies the Amanda Knox case.
No one knows the truth.
When you're dealing with any story where people are trying to piece together a story, it's very complex.
And people like to pretend that they can read people.
So my friend comes to me and he goes, like, something's wrong, man.
Like, this guy is completely fucked up.
Like, he's not good at all.
And so we're like, hmm.
And this is, by the way, a period of time in my life where I smoked more pot than I've ever had.
So it was like every day I was high.
So we're like, wow, why would anybody fake that?
That's so weird.
He's going to get caught.
So then he lied about a bunch of other things, got ostracized, and then wound up getting arrested for murder because he was dating this woman who was married and he wound up killing the guy and he was driving the guy's car around.
Yeah, I think that's the trouble with law enforcement also.
They tend to feel like they even go through trainings where they're trained to read people using the read technique.
And they come away with a false idea of being able to understand people's cues.
And of course, there's also the problem of like cultural differences and cultural cues.
That came into play in my own case, for instance.
But just in general, across the board, there is a tremendous amount of just the whole wrongful conviction process kickstarts from the get-go from a detective or a police officer getting a vibe and then following through on that gut feeling, regardless of what evidence presents itself.
I work with, I have a good friend, Josh Dubin, and him and a guy named Jason Flom had come on before and they work with the Innocence Project.
And I have started doing some stuff with Josh and he's coming on again soon and we're going over very specific cases.
And I've actually sent him some cases where people reached out to me and friends that I know.
There's a lot of that out there.
There's a lot of wrongful convictions.
There's a lot of really obvious shit police work, corrupt cops, corrupt prosecutors who just want to get a number on their ledger, just want to get a score up on the board.
And it's scary also because I tend to look at it like this is – it's not like there's just some grand conspiracy, right?
Like it's not like there's an evil cabal of prosecutors who are getting behind closed doors and evilly cackling about how they're going to wrongfully convict innocent people.
I think the more interesting fact is that they live in this sort of echo chamber of like, we're the good guys going after the bad guys and so we can't do wrong.
And they get into this cognitive bias space where their instincts are the right instincts.
They have better instincts than anyone else.
And even if the evidence doesn't follow through and confirm their initial suspicions, they know what the truth is.
And so even when DNA evidence comes back, well, maybe she had sex with someone else that night, but this guy is the real rapist and we just didn't happen to get his DNA.
Like that's the kind of like mental gymnastics that you see people going through.
And you don't need to be an evil person.
That's the interesting thing.
You don't need to be a bad person to do those kinds of mental gymnastics because we all do that all the time.
And if anything, the way that our criminal justice system works incentivizes prosecutors to do those mental gymnastics because they don't get props when they're wrong.
No one congratulates them for overturning a wrongful conviction that they've done.
Instead, they get penalized.
And not to say that they shouldn't be because accountability is important.
And if you are blatantly going out of your way to suppress exonerating evidence and Suppressing the ability to check DNA, like there's all of that going on.
But they're coming from a place of, well, we have limited resources in the criminal justice system, so I don't want to waste time looking at DNA from an old case that was like put away a long time ago when I'm dealing with this million murders right now.
So, I mean, there's like all of these interesting, complicating factors that aren't just this prosecutor happens to be evil.
And I think that's the more interesting problem.
Because, you know, in the Innocence community, one of the reasons why I really like the Innocence Project is it's very practical.
It's like, look, we have DNA. It doesn't cost us that much to, like, check DNA to prove who it was who actually did this crime.
Let's just do it because, if anything, we've proven that these mistakes do happen.
Human beings make mistakes all the time.
But they're also reaching out across the table to try to recognize the humanity of the people who are actually committing these terrible injustices and trying to Have a conversation where everyone wins.
And there is like a conservatism bias where the first thing that you thought of is the thing that you really hold on to.
And even when new evidence comes in, you are inclined, you're biased towards not totally throwing out your initial Impression, but you're just skewing it slightly so that you can keep holding on to that thing so that you don't have to be so wrong.
The idea that you could be so wrong when you mean well is devastating, and it causes you to go through all of these mental gymnastics to reexamine who you are as a person.
I was watching the Netflix documentary and I watched it two nights ago.
It was the first time I'd ever seen it.
I knew about your case, but I didn't know the specifics.
So I watched the documentary and I watched how assured the Italian prosecutor was when he talked about how the body was covered and that's something that a woman would do.
If she murdered someone, she would kill someone.
Acting like he's just a serious, absolutely defined professional.
That's what he is.
But then I see him...
Walking through the crime scene.
I see all those people walking around the crime scene, and I'm like, I'm not a cop, okay?
I'm not a cop, but I've watched enough cop shows.
I'm like, what the fuck are they doing?
Like, this is crazy.
Even when I'm watching the lady kick open the door and she kicks her foot through the window, and I'm watching, like, you're shattering glass everywhere, you're contaminating the scene.
That man, that his DNA was all over the room, that he told a story that he went to the bathroom and came out and witnessed a man cutting Meredith's throat.
I mean, I'm trying to remember all of it because he's changed his story many, many times.
But I think what he said was that he had met her on Halloween, which was the day before she was murdered, and they had decided that they were going to hook up the next day, which is totally absurd.
And then he came over the next day and they were hooking up and then he had a stomach ache and went to the bathroom for a while.
The fact that they didn't convict him on that, just the whole insanity of the story, to me, it only seemed like that was even remotely plausible because they were so determined to convict you.
They were doing that, but where I lived and where Raphael lived was actually quite close.
And so it was possible that the towers that we were using were interchangeable, basically.
So like the main thing that really would confirm or not whether or not we were there when this crime was committed was whether or not there's fucking DNA there.
And like the thing that's always bothered me about and think about motivated reasoning.
My prosecutor is like, well, you know, she's covered with a blanket.
A woman must have been involved.
Well, she was also sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.
That's usually something that If we're talking about what women do when they're committing murder, the vast majority of the time it's going to be something like hitting someone with a car or poisoning.
If we're going to talk about base-rate reality, what do women do when they're committing murder?
The telltale signs are not, do they cover a body with a blanket?
But the fact that if we're genuinely looking at a crime scene where there's a body, young woman, sexually assaulted, stabbed to death, tons of DNA of one dude...
All over her body, all over his fingerprints in her blood, his footprints in her blood, his DNA everywhere.
What is the likelihood that three people were involved in that scenario and that only his DNA was left behind?
Like, that's the thing that, like, really bothers me is my prosecutor having motivated reasoning to not, like, having this bias to not change his perspective about how there were multiple people I had to be involved.
He said, well, Amanda must have cleaned up her DNA and left Rudiga Days behind so she could frame him.
Like, I remember a detective friend of mine was like, you should get the Nobel Prize in chemistry if you were capable of doing that, because there's no way.
Yeah, no, it's obscene on multiple levels because what you're looking at is someone who's saying, okay, a lot of people died, this horrible tragedy happened.
And usually, when it's a natural disaster, we all agree that, like, sometimes fate fucking sucks.
And, like, it's horrible and people die...
And yeah, there are probably things that we could have done to prevent that, like having better, like, building structures that would, you know, resist earthquakes better.
But instead of, like, pointing the finger at, you know, could we better protect ourselves from this kind of natural disaster, we're just going to point at the scientists who are supposed to know when earthquakes are going to happen and how bad they're going to be?
Like, of course not.
There is that impulse, especially by authority, to point the finger at someone who has fewer resources and power to defend themselves and say, I'm just gonna put this on you.
And the idea that they did not consult with scientists to try to understand how this equipment works, try to understand, like, what's the current state of the understanding of this science?
Like, what do they do to predict earthquakes?
And then they charge these guys with manslaughter.
These are scientists and their whole life is uprooted.
Whoever convicted them should also go to jail.
Go to jail for a long period of time.
And it should be a public prosecution where you should let people know, like, you're a bad person.
Like, what you've done, you've abused your position of power.
Your arrogance has led to the complete total disruption of someone's life who did nothing but study science, did nothing but study geology and try to figure out seismology or whatever it is that they study.
And I'm curious to know how they actually, I've not looked into this, what sort of consequences they have in Italy for that and how that compare here to the kinds of protections that we give to prosecutors.
Like they have an insane amount of immunity even for overt corrupt activities that they do in the course of their prosecutions.
The power and also the influence and sort of cronyism like being deeply attached to the criminal justice system for many, many years over there.
Being respected and being a part of this investigative world where they're all the cops and they're all just like they know each other and they look out for each other.
The fact that they didn't change their story once they had all the DNA evidence of that Rudy guy and then it was all over this.
They didn't go, okay, we've made a mistake, and instead they doubled down.
And not only that, but didn't go after him for the murder.
So they say that the scenario that my prosecutor painted, and he painted a few different scenarios because he couldn't really, like, his imagination was going wild and there wasn't a lot of actual, obviously there wasn't any evidence to support any of them, but he kept thinking, okay, it's the day after Halloween, so maybe it's a satanic sex ritual.
We know that there's some kind of sex thing involved.
We know that Amanda has sex with people, so she's probably a sexually obsessed person.
And Meredith looked down on her for being a sexually obsessed person.
So what is likely to have happened in his brain is that I was hanging out with Raffaele and Rudy.
Meredith comes home.
She starts scolding me for my bad morals.
And then I'm like, you know what, bitch?
We're going to rape you and kill you.
That's his scenario.
And it's so unfortunate on so many levels because it says more about him than it says about anyone else that he would imagine that that's just how people react to each other and This was not his initial idea, though, right?
I mean, his initial idea was that I was involved somehow.
He didn't know how, but he thought that I was involved somehow, I knew something, I was covering up for someone, and that's why he interrogated me for 53 hours over five days.
And people who I was entrusting my life and safety to were screaming at me that I was wrong, that I was never going to see my family again, that I was super traumatized, that I had seen something so horrible that I must have just completely blocked it out.
And here's a scenario that would explain that.
Look, you have a text message from your boss, Patrick Lumumba.
You must have met him that night.
You must have seen him murder Meredith.
Just admit it.
Just admit it.
Remember, remember, remember.
They kept telling me, like, the gross thing about it was they kept telling me to remember.
They didn't even tell me to, like, admit it.
They were telling me that I just couldn't remember it and I had to remember or else I was never going to see my family again.
I started to believe them that I must have witnessed something horrible and I just couldn't remember it and that's the only explanation for why they would treat me that way.
So, I was, you know, a few hours into that final interrogation that was in the middle of the night.
I was not prepared to be interrogated at all because, honestly, they didn't even call me in that night.
They called my boyfriend, Raffaele, but I was staying with him and I was afraid to be alone at home because a murder was on the loose.
And so I went with him and I was waiting in the lobby, like by the elevator, waiting for him to come out from questioning.
And then they brought me in and just went on and on and on.
And so...
I cracked eventually.
So the thing that cracked me too was they brought in an interpreter, right?
Someone who actually spoke English because for a long time I was just talking to people in Italian and I was worried that I wasn't even comprehensible.
I thought that the reason why they were yelling at me was because I was doing something wrong.
I had taken Italian for a year before, so I was about as fluent as—I like to say I had about the fluency of a 10-year-old, but I think that that's even generous because I could speak in certain tenses.
My vocabulary was totally limited, though.
So there were limited things that I actually had the words to say.
And I remember even when I—shortly after I was interrogated and signed the statements that they had written up for me— They finally stopped yelling at me.
They left me alone.
I had a moment to just be off to the side, quiet, to myself.
And I was like, oh my god, what just happened?
Everything is wrong.
This is all wrong.
I need to tell them that it's all wrong.
And I can't just go up in front of a jury right now and say, this is the person who did it.
I saw him do it.
I don't actually remember that.
And I told them, I need to tell you.
I need to tell you.
And they were like, no, you'll remember.
Don't worry about it.
We don't need to talk anymore.
You'll remember.
Just stay over there and keep remembering.
And I was like, no, I'm not remembering.
I'm not remembering.
And eventually I asked them, like, please give me a piece of paper because they weren't listening to me.
So I wrote on this piece of paper.
I'm so confused.
They were yelling at me like, I can't actually testify to this.
And I gave it to them and I was like, Here's a gift because I didn't have the word for like, here's my recantation.
I was just like, I'm giving this to you.
I need you to hear me.
And they were like, okay, whatever.
We're taking you to jail.
Actually, they didn't even tell me they were taking me to jail.
They were telling me that I was being taken to a holding place for my own protection and that I was an important witness.
Yeah, so she had moved in before me, but it was basically there were two rooms to let in this little house that was right next to the university and we both happened to pick a flyer.
I remember we went to, like, there's this famous chocolate festival that's in Perusha where they would, like, take huge refrigerator-sized blocks of chocolate and, like, carve them, which was super cool.
I'm very into that.
And we would go and check that out together.
But we weren't, like, the best of friends.
Like, she had a friend group of other young women from Great Britain that she hung out with a lot more than she hung out with me.
But that isn't to say that we didn't go out dancing together or go out to dinner together.
It's confusing because I knew that something was wrong as soon as I came home and I found that there was a window broken into and Meredith wasn't answering her phone.
But I didn't understand what was wrong.
I didn't know.
And when the police came in and broke down her door and everyone started screaming, I didn't see into her room.
I never actually saw her body.
And so I didn't know what was going on.
I didn't know if that was Meredith in the room.
In fact, I remember at the first thing that Philomena, one of my roommates, started yelling was, a foot!
A foot!
And I was like, oh my god, is there like a severed foot in Meredith's room?
Like, I don't know what's going on.
She's...
Philomena is hysterical, and I don't know what's going on.
Everyone's yelling in Italian, speaking really quickly.
I don't understand.
So I actually was relying on Raffaele to translate for me, like, what is going on?
He was like, I don't know.
Let me figure it out.
And we were all, like, shoved out of the house, and finally someone is like, it's Meredith.
It's Meredith, and she's dead.
And I was like, oh, my God.
Like, it was outside of the house that someone was telling me her body was in there.
And someone told me that there was all this blood.
I remember not actually knowing, like, how she had died until I went to the police office and I asked.
I was, like, being questioned, and one of the police officers was like...
And so like I sort of learned over the course of that day the details of it, but I didn't fully understand like what had really happened.
Like as far as I knew, you know, she – I mean it was clear that there was a break in.
Like, the window had been broken into one of...
It was Philomena's room.
All of her stuff was all over the place.
It wasn't clear to me what had happened, though.
And it wasn't until over the course of that whole day and piecing together what I was hearing that I understood the gravity of the situation, that she had been sexually assaulted, that she had been stabbed to death, that it was a struggle.
I remember the first thought and it's a guilty thought that I had.
I remember thinking, thank God I wasn't home because that could have been me.
And a part of me like over time felt really guilty about that thought because I thought maybe if I was home and there had been two of us, maybe the outcome would have been different.
Maybe we would have been able to fend him off together.
But here's, you know, an athletic guy wielding a knife.
I'm not sure that we would have.
And maybe I would have been dead too.
So it's kind of a thought that comes back to mind a lot when I think about this and how fortuitous it was that I just happened to be in this like brand new romance and hanging out with my new boyfriend all the time every waking moment that I could.
It's hard for me to imagine the jolt of a 20-year-old life where you are overseas, going to school, involved in this new romantic relationship, and then out of nowhere, boom, you're a suspect and a murder.
I'm thinking, oh, my God, this is all just a horrible misunderstanding.
Like, I'm sure they're going to figure it out sometime.
I remember, like, the first two years of my imprisonment, I was convinced that it was all just a big misunderstanding and somebody would figure it out.
And I was convinced.
I was convinced that there was no possible way that people could actually believe that I was involved.
Even just not because it's me, but because there wasn't any evidence there.
Like, it was so patently obvious to me that, like, this idea of me, this Foxy Noxy character that was being constructed in the courtroom, this Luciferina, like, this idea of a person was obviously made up.
And that was one of the big sort of regrets that especially my family had was at the very beginning, they were advised to not speak to the media at all, because they were just going to make a field day of it.
There was, you know, in the same way that there was never going to, once I was accused, there was never going to be anything that I could do to prove my innocence in the eyes of people.
My lawyers were also worried that there was nothing my family could say but that would not be twisted and turned into something that would just further fuel the scandal mongering.
And what that meant was there was a void.
There was a void in which who I was, my very identity, could be reconstructed out of total fantasy that was the only reason why it was being constructed was to further this scandal and to sell more could be reconstructed out of total fantasy that was the only That was the reason why it wasn't the public interest of the story that kept the sun in Britain reporting on this case.
They were reporting on whether or not I ate pizza the days leading up to my arrest.
And yeah, I mean, the same way that Great Britain also has a really sketchy tabloid culture, there is a sensationalist bent to it that's very much a result of like the Berlusconi era of news.
I don't know if you're very familiar with Berlusconi and how his legacy shaped the way media works.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, he's kind of like the Donald Trump of Italy, where he starts out as this media personality who is really, really known for just like having that sort of reality show, strippers in every show kind of vibe where he's just giving the people strippers in every show kind of vibe where he's just giving the people what they want and, you
And then he turned that into a political career and then ran the country for a ridiculously, how long do you?
You have Donald Trump or a man who's got something seriously wrong.
He's a guy who's had multiple aneurysms, had actual brain surgery.
And is 78 years old and is experiencing some sort of pretty radical cognitive decline and is in some way controlled by the other people in the party, whether it's Nancy Pelosi or whoever else.
And, you know, he keeps saying things like, they tell me not to answer questions or tell me not to be like, hey, motherfucker, you're the president.
Could you imagine Obama saying that?
Tell me not to answer questions.
Of course not.
He was the fucking president.
When Obama was the president, he was the fucking president.
Unless something radically changes with him in the landscape, he's not going to be able to do it.
Ross Perot came the closest to doing it.
But the problem with that was when Ross Perot did it, he made it so that people that were thinking about voting for George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush's dad, again, didn't, and that's how Clinton wound up being president.
I mean, I think UBI may become a very important point once automation really does kick in.
If he's correct, and if many other people are correct, automation is going to take a lot of jobs away.
That does the job of standard human beings where you could have one person essentially monitoring systems that take the jobs of hundreds if not thousands of people.
It's seemingly inevitable.
But I don't know enough about it.
I've been warned by people who do understand it that it's going to be literally a job-pocalypse.
You're going to have massive amounts of people out of work.
I have a position on work that's very conflicted because one part of me is very disciplined and I believe in hard work.
I believe that ultimately there's an element of meritocracy in most businesses.
I think there's a lot of businesses where cronyism and nepotism and corruption stifle meritocracy, and those are dangerous, sneaky businesses, and they're very prevalent.
But I also grew up poor and my family was on welfare.
We were on food stamps.
I remember very clearly being poor.
I remember being nervous about whether or not we'd have enough food.
I remember that being a young boy, thinking that way.
I remember drinking powdered milk.
I remember it.
We benefited from welfare and my parents worked hard.
They got off of it and then eventually did very well.
And then when I was in high school, we lived in a decent neighborhood.
It was a nice place, middle class neighborhood.
So I've seen the benefit to families of social aid and welfare and of this idea that there's people that have bad circumstances.
They're unfortunate.
And as a community, which is what a country is supposed to be, it's supposed to be a massive community.
I'm very interested in helping people that are unfortunate.
I'm very interested in giving people the opportunity to work hard.
Because it's not as simple as everybody's on the same starting line and some people just work harder than others and that's how they get there.
That's bullshit.
But I also believe in working hard.
And I think there are some people that...
They don't necessarily think that hard work is important, that it is a factor at all.
They want to look at it as an absolute, like that everything is corruption, and everything is fortune, and everything is privilege, and they're grifters.
And they hop on this idea, and they hop on this idea, and they sell it to people that are unfortunate.
They sell it to people that aren't doing well, and that it's not about hard work.
And then it's not about discipline.
It's not about focus and it's not about like forcing yourself to organize and making sure you get things done and then trusting in the process that eventually that will lead to progress and it'll lead to more success.
I believe that there's a lot of people out there that are lazy and they blame others for their own failures and I think there's a lot of people that they Latch on to social movements and they latch on to strife and they latch on to people that have Anger about their place in life and they offer them excuses and they offer them reasons for why other people have done better than And so there's so many things that
are working at the same time.
There's definitely corruption.
There's definitely income inequality.
There's definitely some very fucking shady laws when it comes to taxes and corporations and there's, you know, there's a lot going on there.
But I don't think that regular work is necessarily the most important thing.
The idea of universal basic income to me is that All of your basic human needs would be met.
You would have food.
You would have a place to live.
That's kind of it.
I mean, if you're getting whatever Andrew Yang was proposing, I think it was very low.
It was like $1,200 a month or something like that.
I do agree that there is absolutely genuine value in hard work.
The other aspect of that is dignity, though.
You can work really hard and feel like a slave and be demeaned and feel like all of the work that you're doing and all the time and all the sacrifices you make, even just in terms of time.
I have so much respect and I understand the value of time.
And so, like, for someone to be told my time is worth $7, my time that I could be spending with my kids is worth $7, and I have to sacrifice time with my kids, which is priceless, so that I can get $7 so I can feed them, is the most undignified shit that I, like, it's so, like, in a rich society like ours, I feel like that's kind of unacceptable.
Is it like, I also know that there's like toxicity involved, like even when talking about the COVID pandemic, like those miners that were in there like scraping away at like the bat dung when they got sick, like, and they just died and everyone's like, huh, that's an interesting experiment that we just did.
Have there been other coronaviruses that have come out of...
Yeah?
Well, I know they know of some because that was one of the things that the Bat Lady from the Wuhan lab had gone to study.
And this was one of the revelations that they had perhaps captured some of these bats that were infected with these diseases and done these gain-of-function research projects on them, which just has come out definitively that Fauci lied to Congress about this.
So we'll see what happens there.
Probably fucking nothing!
Probably fucking nothing because the world's gone haywire.
Let's concentrate on comedians taking horse dewormer.
He was talking about new revelations that it was either September of 2019 or October.
In the middle of the night, one of the scientists from the lab went in and deleted an absurd amount of data that corresponds with the very first people that got sick there.
So there was three people that got sick there.
They wound up infecting people around them.
One of their spouses wound up dying.
And then in that same time period, there it is, September 12th, 2019. As C underscore small underscore discovered, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its bat and rodent pathogen database with 22,000 specimens and sequences offline in the early hours of the morning.
So that is most likely when, and Sagar's done an amazing job of covering this stuff, and he's the one that had this very detailed description of all the research that he is aware of so far that showed that these three people from that lab who got sick Wound up infecting other people and then they think there was some sort of a sports
event that it wound up getting into the sports event and then these people from the sports event had come to Wuhan from other countries and they went and spread it by plane to other places and then now we're in lockdown.
Found something.
There you go.
Over the past 50 years several viruses including Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Nipah virus, Henda virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome, coronavirus, which is the first SARS, Middle East respiratory coronavirus, MERS, have been linked back to various bat species.
Despite decades of research into bats and the pathogens they carry, the fields of bat virus ecology and molecular biology are still nascent, with many questions largely unexplored, thus hindering our ability to anticipate and prepare for the next viral output.
That sounds like a fucking sales pitch for gain-of-function research.
We live in a strange, strange time and this is a very important time for character.
It's a very important time for composure.
It's a very important time for ethics and morals and for people to treat people in a kind and considerate way.
And that is being thrown out the window by a lot of people under the guise of being upset at people's choices, under the guise of the current circumstances.
There's many excuses for people in this current...
Very bizarre and unprecedented situation in our lifetimes for people to act horribly and they're doing it and you're seeing very poor character from a lot of human beings very very poor character wishing people dead wishing people to get no medical service wishing people to be ostracized for their choices even wishing people who have superior immunity We're good
been infected by COVID, many of them before the vaccines were ever even available to people, they have superior immunity, and yet they're still being ostracized because they won't additionally vaccinate on top of their superior immunity.
Immunity that's been showed by a study in Israel to be six to 13 times better at avoiding infection than the immunity that you get from the vaccine.
And that's the initial burst of the immunity that you get from the vaccine.
It's not like a traditional vaccine, like a polio vaccine or something like that.
Your body's getting a version, a dormant version, a dead version of the virus, and it puts it in your system and your body says, oh, we've got to fight this off.
And one of the things that actually really bugs me about the case is there actually was DNA that was never tested and it was on the pillow that was found underneath her body and it had semen stains on it.
And meanwhile, the only thing that anyone has ever heard of me about is in relation to a murder that I didn't even commit.
So, like, the horrible, frustrating, like, part of this is not only is the actual victim overlooked because everyone's talking about me and I have nothing to do with her murder.
Meanwhile, the actual murderer is quietly sort of forgotten, tucked away.
You know, meanwhile, they've gone on to like, I think the lead detective is on is on trial right now for abuse of office in a totally separate case, but no one has ever like brought to them an abuse of office case, in part because I don't really feel like I could bring that potentially, but I don't think that I would win because ultimately people look at me and they think, well, This whole thing is probably her fault anyway.
Yeah, so I get, it's interesting how, like, I used to think that there were two people, there were two kinds of people in regards to this case, I guess three kinds of people.
Those who had never heard of the case and didn't care, and then those who had heard of the case, the ones who were super convinced I was guilty, totally I'm an evil person, and those who were super convinced that I was innocent, and there was no in-between.
But what I've actually found is that there's also this middle ground of people who have sort of kind of heard about it, Probably think I'm innocent, but also probably think that I'm responsible for my own wrongful conviction.
And a great example of this is Malcolm Gladwell.
What?
Well, so Malcolm Gladwell makes a really strong case in his new book, Talking to Strangers, for how I'm obviously innocent.
But he puts the explanatory burden of my wrongful conviction on me.
He says, oh, well, Amanda is a type of person.
She's a type of person who is innocent, but acts like a guilty person.
Well, it's a shitty system here, too, because we do that exact same excuse.
We say, well, you are the one who confessed to the crime, so we don't have to compensate you.
And they act like someone just waltzes into an interrogation room and is like, ding, ding, ding, I did it, even though I didn't.
And no one does that.
You're in an interrogation room and people are coercing you or berating you or confusing you or scaring the shit out of you and making you think that the only way out of that situation is to say whatever they want you to say, sign whatever they want you to sign.
And especially in the lead up because he had this family in Perugia that was actually a very wealthy family that had kind of sort of adopted him.
But then he started stealing from them and they sort of were like, okay, you're out.
And as soon as that happened then he went on this burglarizing spree that lasted like the months leading up to Meredith's murder and like basically climaxed at Meredith's murder.
He had a history of wielding a knife when confronted.
I don't know if he had a history of actually getting into fights with people.
I know that he was definitely had definitely like wielded a knife when confronted in someone's house and then escaped.
And it's like when you look back on it now, it's like, why is this so dumb?
Like, why is this so obvious?
And there has been some speculation by people that, I mean, here's the weird screwy thing.
He had been arrested prior to Meredith's murder, like a week before.
He had actually gone to Milan and broken into a law office, or I think the law office was in Perugia, but he had broken into a school in Milan, and he had been arrested there and found with stolen property and all of that, and the Milan police had him in custody.
And for some inexplicable reason, they let him go.
And he returned to Perugia, and the next thing that happened was Meredith was dead.
And no one really talks about that, like why that happened, why this person who had stolen property on him was just let go.
There's never no one's really looked into that seriously.
And I think that's in part because there's this saving face issue of who's ultimately responsible for Meredith's death.
Well, of course, it's Rudy Gaudet.
But like, People knew he had an M.O. He had never killed anyone yet, but he was doing all the things that led up to that killing.
And people knew about that.
It was not like he was an unknown entity, that he was unknown to the Perusian police.
And some people speculate that he might have been an informant for the police, that they had some sort of relationship.
Satan-worshiping slut aspect of it, the sacrificing the girl and murdering her and doing it with the two guys you're in an orgy with, like all that is like so sensational.
They get caught up in that narrative and once that seed got planted, there's no stopping the beanstalk.
Yeah, like I didn't, there was no way that I, looking back, I wish I had known so many of the things that I know now, even just about how human beings work.
Like I was 20 years old and I didn't like, I just trusted people.
I had lived a pretty like sheltered life.
I did not grow up in circumstances that were challenging.
I grew up in middle class, like I could trust anybody.
Nothing bad had ever happened to me.
And so it never occurred to me that like people could have really really bad motives even when they think they're doing the right thing.
Like that's the thing that really gets me.
When I was like sitting in my cell thinking like why?
Why is this happening to me?
It never occurred to me that like it's just evil people.
It occurred to me that they thought I was evil and there was nothing I could do to convince them otherwise.
He came in at the very end for like, I remember like, I thought he was there to save me, actually, because the detectives told me that the Público Ministero was coming.
And I didn't know what Público Ministero meant.
It means prosecutor.
But what it sounds like it means is public minister.
I thought maybe he was like the mayor.
And I thought the mayor was coming in to save me.
And that was not he was just coming in to sign my arrest warrant, like the arrest warrant to take me to prison.
So I reached out to him and at first he refused to even like look at a message from me because he was like, it's unprofessional.
I can't do that.
But then I went back to Italy.
I don't know if you knew that.
I did go back to Italy and I spoke about trial by media in particular to an Italian audience.
And I talked about him and how I thought that it wasn't satisfying to just portray him as a comic book villain in this story.
That didn't actually answer to me why this horrible injustice had happened.
And I needed to see his humanity and understand his humanity in order to really understand why this had happened to me.
And it was after that that he finally answered my letter.
And I can't say what he said to me because I promised to keep that between us.
But what I can say is that that sentiment that you're pointing to, him saying, if they're innocent, I hope they can forget, is a sentiment that I have felt from him in more explicit terms in our exchanges.
So that was the day that I asked myself whether or not life was worth living.
Um...
Not because I was feeling an overwhelming desire to kill myself, but because I had had this existential crisis of understanding that the truth didn't matter and that I was not just some kid who was lost and trying to find their way home.
I was a prisoner and prison was my home.
And I had to reshape my understanding of what my life was going to be.
And I had to ask myself if what opportunities I had left, given the constraints that I was under, were worth it to me.
And I don't want to romanticize prison because not everyone comes away from that experience with that.
A lot of people don't come away from an experience where they've had everything taken away from them, feeling like they have a bright, sunny disposition to the rest of the world.
Like some people come away really broken and bitter and angry.
Angry and unable to forget everything that they've lost, even when they have everything in front of them.
So that isn't to say that it's a guarantee that that's what's going to happen to someone.
What I can say is that for me, it did.
In part, because I, first of all, got a sense of what I was capable of.
Which is interesting to say when you're in a situation where you're completely and utterly powerless.
Like, that was my reality for four years, at the very least.
I was completely and utterly powerless, had barely any agency in my own life.
And what I was able to do under those conditions was very humble, but also valuable to me.
So anything from...
Doing as many sit-ups as I possibly could on my bunk.
I didn't do 900 setups out of nowhere and I didn't do it again.
I'll say that.
But you give yourself humble goals that you can accomplish.
And because my goals had been so humble and because my opportunities were so limited and because my horizon was so short, I did get a sense of purposefulness that I wouldn't have otherwise.
And so Welcome to my show!
I just don't, I don't take it well and I still need to work on that.
I don't know if I would have survived psychologically that experience if my family wasn't there for me.
And lots of people don't have that.
Lots of people.
And that's also true about wrongful convictions in general.
Like the psychological health and well-being of the person going through it doesn't really ultimately depend on their relationship with spirituality or their relationship with like, you know, even the prison conditions necessarily.
It's like whether or not their mom is there for them and is alive when they get out.
Well, so I kind of got into this mindset that I learned from playing soccer when I was young.
Like, I had a really tough coach when I was young.
A little too tough.
Like, 12-year-olds don't need to be vomiting on the side of the field.
But we did.
And I remember, like, doing all of that work and thinking, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.
Again, like, stupid little engine that could shit.
That does matter.
And, like, Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, I just had to believe that I could do it, at least that far.
And then I did.
And then I would do the next minute.
And I would try to find something that mattered to me to do in that time.
And the greatest challenge is thinking that you won't be able to find something to do.
But I could.
I was writing letters to my family members.
I was running.
I was doing sit-ups.
I was learning how to make pizza dough and rolling it out with a broomstick handle.
These are all things that I could do.
I became fluent in Italian and I was actually a huge resource for a lot of the women there because most of the women in that prison were not Italian.
They were Nigerian.
They were Romanian.
They were foreigners.
They were people who had been caught up, you know, as drug mules or as prostitutes.
And I translated their court documents for them.
I, like, a lot of them spoke, like, pidgin English, and they spoke better English than they did Italian, so I was doing that work.
Although, like, I remember there was a Chinese prisoner there once, and they were like, Amanda, you're the translator.
And I was like, um...
Alright, here's a Chinese to English dictionary.
I'm just going to point at words in the dictionary to her, and then she's going to point at words, and I'm going to look them up and then translate into Italian so that she can talk to the doctor about how, like, her tummy hurts.
The raw need in that place is really, really visceral.
And it doesn't manifest in good ways.
It's not like everyone's just like...
Most of the people in that space were super traumatized and addicted to drugs and really, really struggling and didn't have support from their family members.
And a lot of them resented me because I had all of my teeth and had visitations every week.
And that made me sad because I felt for them.
It also made me a target for lashing out because a lot of people in that space don't have good emotional intelligence and impulse control.
And that, you know, people like on the there is the sort of fame angle like everyone knew about my case was constantly talked in the news, but I think ultimately it came to the issue is it's less the fame issue than the forgotten issue.
I tried to do what I could, but most of the time I tried to be invisible.
Unfortunately, I remember I had this really difficult conversation with one of my cellmates.
She wanted to fight with me in order to...
We were having a discussion about where to keep the snacks in the cell or something, and she was mad at me and she wanted to fight me in order for us to get the emotions out and get our frustration out and then be cool.
And that's just not how I function.
I don't fight people.
I'm not a fighter.
And so she kept getting more and more frustrated with me because I wouldn't fight her.
And I couldn't meet her at that level.
I'm more of a stoic than an emotional, impulsive actor-outer.
And so I couldn't meet her at that level.
But what I could do is talk to her about the schooling that she was doing.
And most of the people that I was in there with were illiterate.
So really, I could write their letters for them.
That was my big thing.
That was my hustle, really, was writing people's letters for them.
I would get occasional visits from my attorneys and they would update me.
But, you know, there were long stretches of time when nothing could be done.
Like right after my conviction, there was like a year where there was just nothing to be done because I was waiting for the opportunity to take that to appeal.
So I was just there for a year living as a prisoner.
when you finally did get through all of it eight years later how long before you could sleep and not have nightmares about being back in jail oh um so it comes in waves um There are times when it feels really heightened and something triggers me and makes me think about it a lot more.
I can't say that it happens a lot today.
It's been a bit.
What is it?
It was 2015, so it's been six years since it's been all over.
I think...
I don't have them often, though, now.
So I think maybe, like, a year before I stopped having them pretty regularly.
And again, like, it's also because you get into a mindset of a prisoner, right?
Like, there was a long period of time where I was still washing my underwear in the sink just because, like, I had gotten into that rhythm.
Yeah, like they had like so in the bathrooms, there was the shower, there was the toilet, and then there was the like bidet thing that was an actual totally different sort of sink setup.
And I got really used to that being where you wash your clothes, where you wash yourself, where you wash your feet.
And I miss that to this day.
I miss having that extra little appliance in my bathroom.
So I do do interviews, but I shape the narrative, whatever it is.
Say I was interviewing you, we would have this whole conversation about A time in your life when you felt lost and like you didn't know your way out, you would tell me a story.
And then depending on, you know, how you tell that story or what kinds of interesting things we could then take away from that story, I might write VO around that, cut and chop the interview so that we got through some parts that were going a little slow.
And tell a story that frames your experience through your voice, because I really believe that that's really important, that stories are often told about people and not by people.
And bringing my own perspective into it.
So, you know, a good example of this is talking to Samantha Geimer.
Who was raped by Roman Polanski when she was 13 years old.
She often felt like people were trying to have her be a voice for their narrative and that her voice never fit into anyone's narrative correctly because she wouldn't play just like the innocent victim who was wanting retribution at all costs and she wasn't going to be the person who was making excuses for him.
She wanted to be this middle ground where she wanted accountability from him, but she didn't get it through the criminal justice system and actually was exploited by the criminal justice system.
And no one would listen to her when she talked about how the way that the media and the criminal justice system treated her was actually worse than the rape itself.
And I listened to her and gave her that opportunity to talk, and I was able to relate to that in a lot of interesting ways and bring in interesting—my own insights into that conversation, but through, like, VO. How did she say she was exploited by the criminal justice system?
So, she never wanted to take that case to trial.
Ever.
Because she did not want to have to stand in front of a jury and talk about how, like, to go through the trauma of having to relive that experience in front of an audience.
And the judge and the jury wanted to nail Roman Polanski because he was this big, you know, case.
And she was like, I don't want to be a part of this.
And they basically vilified her for not wanting to be a part of it.
Meanwhile, the defense is vilifying her for being this like Lolita.
But like throughout her entire life, she's like, look, Roman Polanski eventually apologized to me.
Like he and I came to an understanding and some kind of accountability on our own.
No thanks to all of you.
And meanwhile, you keep dragging me back into the news every decade and people paparazzi come into my house, like come outside of my house and harass my family because I am the rape girl for you.
I'm not going to be your rape girl.
And she's very, very forceful about that and very strong about that.
And I kind of respect that because of all the people who should be able to define themselves in that moment.
It's the person who is the victim of the crime.
Like, she doesn't owe anybody anything.
And the criminal justice system acted like she owed something to it.
So where my passion resides is where people feel like whatever experience they're experiencing, it is overwhelming and it is something that they feel like they don't know the way out.
And I had this like epiphany very soon after I got home from prison because...
First of all, when I came home from prison at first, I thought, finally, I can go back to the life that I'm supposed to be living.
I'm an anonymous student, Amanda Knox, that had nothing to do with this murder.
Oh, well, I guess that world doesn't exist anymore.
Paparazzi are showing up outside of my house.
I can't go to school without other students taking pictures of me and posting them onto social media about how they're taking a class with a murderer.
And, like, I, my life is not, like, I don't get to go back to my life.
My life is now within the context of a murder I didn't commit, and my identity is totally always, always, always seen through that lens, no matter what I do.
And that seems like my sort of nightmare scenario is that no matter how much good work I put out, no matter how hard I work and how much good work I try to put out into the world, nothing will define me more than this thing that I had nothing to do with.
Ever.
But to go back, I came home.
I discovered that I had to re-again have this existential crisis of, oh, my life is not what I expected it to be.
What can I do with this life?
I did have a new understanding and appreciation for not just the experience of being a victim of the criminal justice system, also a victim of crime.
I could have been killed.
Someone broke into my house, murdered my roommate.
But I had an appreciation for, like, How there was the pile on culture and the scapegoating and the tribalism that is very much a part of the media environment.
I had like an early glimpse into that before it became like the big news of 2016. And I went back to school and I connected with this girl in my poetry class who I didn't really know why we connected.
We just got along really well.
We really liked each other's poetry.
And we used to hang out on Saturdays.
Like we would go to this cafe and hang out on Saturdays and just talk poetry and music and stuff like that.
And one day she showed up and was like, oh my god, you're Amanda Knox.
Because I, you know, I was just Amanda in class.
And she was like, holy, oh my god, you're Amanda Knox.
And I was like...
Oh, no.
I think I just lost a friend because they Googled me and who knows what they think of me now.
It's going to alter our relationship.
And she was like, no, no, no, don't misunderstand me.
I was raped when I was 16. And everything you talk about, about how it feels to be wrongly convicted, how it feels to have your life taken away from you and your identity stolen from you, all of that really, really resonates with me and feels like how I felt when I was raped.
And the whole aftermath of that.
And I was like, wow, this experience is not an experience that's incomprehensible to people.
I'm not alone.
Actually, there is a lot of common ground.
And the thing that's in common is that feeling of being helpless, of having your identity taken from you and your physical body taken from you and your freedom taken from you, and by somebody who has way more control and who is never going to be held accountable.
All of that resonates with a lot of people's experiences.
And so I like to find the common ground in those experiences and try to give a sense of ownership back to the people who find themselves stripped of their agency in those kinds of situations.
I got to go home to the United States, and I was facing extradition.
And while that was going on, the director of the Idaho Innocence Project reached out to my mom and said, Hey, we have a conference every year where we invite wrongfully convicted people.
It's going to be in Portland.
That's not far from where you live.
You need to take Amanda.
And, of course, my thinking at that time was, Right now, I'm convicted, and the last thing that I want is to walk into a room full of strangers who know my face and know my name.
That is the last thing that I want to do.
I just want to hide.
was a really hard time too.
A lot of people think that like the prison time was hard, but also the living free while being on trial and being convicted and facing extradition and not feeling like you can, you can actually live, like you can set down any roots, that you can make any friends, that you can have a job, that you can have a life, like that's also real.
And that was the space that I was in when, um, when my mom forced me to go down to Portland with her.
And, um, I remember being in this like hotel conference space, like, you know, the bad lighting and the horrible carpet and these like ballrooms.
And we walked into that space and these two men ran up to me and they hugged me and they said, you don't have to explain a thing, little sister, we know.
And, um, them doing that.
Like they knew what I was afraid of even.
They knew that I was going to be walking into a space where I would just constantly have to explain myself and that I would be misunderstood and that I would be afraid.
And they immediately quashed that.
They recognized exactly what I needed in that moment.
They told me that they were there for me, that I didn't have to talk to anyone if I didn't want to, but they also wanted to introduce me to a lot of people who already had a lot of love for me.
And I was introduced to a whole family of people, mostly men, mostly older men who had spent decades longer in prison than me, who embraced me and understood me and who I didn't have to explain myself to.
What kind of coping skills and what did you have to learn in order to deal with the fact that your life is Is irrevocably changed like the this idea that you were gonna get out and that now you could go back to being Anonymous Amanda Knox and just go to college when when you realize that that was over and that
your life was it It's just not gonna happen How did you reset?
How did you change the way you interface with the world?
And I think that it's important that, like, it's good to know oneself, but it's also good to remember that you don't just stop being a person and defining yourself in the past.
Like, you still have a whole other part.
You're still present, and the present is yet to be defined.
You know, I mean, that's why morals and ethics are so important because you have to have some sort of consistent framework.
But who you are right after someone cuts you off in traffic versus who you are after a friend gives you a hug and wishes you a happy birthday versus who you are when you're in love versus who you are when someone breaks up with you versus who you are when you get a promotion versus who you are when you get fired.
Like, fuck.
We vary so much from moment to moment, day to day.
We vary depending upon who our friends are.
We vary depending upon how our family members are doing.
That some people get institutionalized and the day-to-day routine of prison is in some way shape or form more comforting than being out on the street with the unknown and all these random possibilities and chances.
That happens to a lot of men when they do decades behind bars.
They wind up doing some sort of petty crime to get arrested again.
The idea of being trapped into this thing where you accept that you want to have that structure of someone telling you what to do, waking you up at a certain time, you know when the meals are coming, you know when this is coming, and you don't have to deal with the random variables of life on the outside.
And it's devastating because what a loss of humanity that is.
And it's also a loss of an opportunity.
I'm actually on the board of an organization called the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, which its sole purpose is to put people who are not in prison in contact with people who are in prison so that there is an understanding of the humanity That is being lost.
The opportunities that are being lost.
The potential that is lost behind bars.
And to let there be more of an understanding.
I know that I personally grew up feeling so, so divorced from that space.
Like, that's just where the bad people went and good riddance.
And having lived alongside people who had committed horrible crimes, even.
Like, I hung out and played cards with women who killed their children.
And it gave me a very, very different perspective on the context of their humanity.
I mean, it's one of those stories that it's very hard to even tell, like to talk about and just to describe how she described it.
She was essentially, she was 13 or 14 years old and she escaped and became a sex slave in China and was there for two years and then eventually escaped and got to South Korea and it is...
A crazy story.
I mean, it's so crazy in so many ways, on so many levels, like the way she describes it.
But one of the things that she said that was so...
She's so small.
She's so frail.
She probably weighs like 80 pounds or something like that.
Everything about her is tiny.
Her hands, her bones, and no one has food in North Korea.
She was talking about...
How she had to, they would forage for food.
They don't give you food, but they don't allow you to get it.
Like if you kill an animal, like a cow or something like that, they execute you.
So they were living off grasshoppers, things like that.
They would go and find grasshoppers, and that's where they would get their protein.
She goes through this whole horrific story of her life and what she went through and what her mother went through.
Her mother was with her when she escaped.
And when she was a young girl, her mother offered herself to these rapists because they wanted to rape her daughter.
And so the first sex she ever even understood or knew was her mother getting raped in front of her.
By people that were going to sex traffic her, and that was her helpers to get her out of North Korea.
She explains all this.
And in the course of the conversation, she talks about therapy.
Like, why would I need therapy?
And she's talking to people who get therapy.
She's like, what, I'm going to sit there and complain to somebody about, oh, my life was terrible?
Like, why do I want to complain?
And I'm like, Jesus Christ!
This lady's a rock.
And she wasn't in denial.
She had an acceptance of horrific circumstances that had befell her, that she had fallen upon, that she had been subject to, that she had been a victim of.
There's nothing she could do about it and she was so nice and so friendly and she giggled a lot and laughed a lot and she was such a like pleasant person to be around and like whatever she had gone through whatever fucking horrific shit she had gone through had made instead of this bitter angry person had made this Wonderful,
very sweet, very nice, friendly human being who was really well educated.
I mean, she went, she made her way through university, she graduated, she's like, she speaks perfect English.
Because, like, the thing that I keep thinking about is how lucky I feel to be the kind of person who is predisposed to when I am subjected to a certain kind of experience, I don't become bitter and angry.
And I feel like...
I feel like when people try to give me props for not being angry, or I am angry actually, but for not like expressing myself with bitterness or anger, it feels, the experience to me feels like It's obviously not what I want to do.
My experience of being angry doesn't want to express itself through bitterness.
And I wonder if her experience is a little bit the same way, where she's like, it instinctually feels to me like the way to deal with this emotionally is to be really stoic and practical and mindful about it.
And not everyone who goes through those kinds of experiences is going to emerge that way.
And I, again, I feel a sense of, like, compassion for those who don't have, who don't demonstrate resilience.
Because a part of me wonders whether they can.
Like, if you were to rewind their life and do something slightly different, would they have made any different choice and been any more resilient?
And I can't really imagine that.
Nor can I imagine, like, I guess it makes me a little bit more forgiving of those who don't live up to the way that life, you know, their best selves and the best way to respond to bad situations.
Because a part of me wonders if they even realize that they had a better choice in that moment or if they did what they felt was the right choice even though it wasn't.
Being a person is an insanely complex arrangement of genetics and experiences and nurture and nature and positive and negative and you should have went left but you went right and everything changed.
One of the things that I find most offensive in life is this pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality.
That's all you gotta do is get your shit together?
Get your shit together.
Oh!
I didn't know.
I didn't know.
This swirl of emotions like imagine you're a person who's seen your parents murdered or imagine you're a person who's been sexually abused by your grandfather or something.
The horrific circumstances that some people are subject to.
The The mistakes that you made when you were young that haunt you for your whole life.
We are this weird combination of a person living in the moment and trapped by the past.
And whatever you are today, however much of you can decide what you're going to do next, Is in many ways based upon factors that are completely out of your control currently.
It's like what is free will?
Are you absolutely free to make decisions?
Would we like everyone to have better choices that are available to them and then in those better choices make informed decisions?
It's one of the most horrible things about people being not just judgmental, but publicly judgmental in a sort of performative way where you want everyone else to pile on with it.
Because you want to be sort of affirmed in your cruelty that there's a reason to act and behave and think this way.
And this is a complete disregarding.
You're completely disregarding all the things that we just discussed.
But then the question becomes a meta question of, well, why does that person who is doing that, who is doing that pile on and is scoring those points, why are they the hero of their own story?
There's a part of them if they're auditing at all, if they're doing any kind of self-auditing, if they're doing any sort of introspective, objective analysis of their own behavior, they're embarrassed by it because there's nothing heroic about that.
There's nothing admirable about that.
There's nothing noble about that.
They know they're weak.
That's why they're doing it in the first place.
It's a weak person's thing.
It's a weak person's activity.
The pile-on is a weak, weak thing.
It's from a person who's never been piled on before.
Or they have, and they never recovered from it, so they want to get it back.
A lot of like, particularly online, a lot of online bullies are just, they're echoing the feelings of victimhood that they've experienced in their own life.
They're just, they're lashing out at other people because of their own, they've been attacked themselves and they still have these scars that they're carrying around with them and they just want other people to feel what they felt.
And the thing that I feel really bad for, I feel a lot of pity for people like that more than anything else, because I wonder if they feel like they don't have any other way to express, like they just don't have either the intelligence or the resources to express their pain in any other way.
There's a lot of that where they haven't been exposed to people that can adequately express themselves, where they can kind of mirror that and model that and sort of admire the way a person is able to use language and sincerity to resonate with people.
It's not just the ability to express yourself, but you have to express yourself in a way that the other person goes, I see what you're saying.
I get it.
I get you.
I get you.
I get you're a real thing.
You're a real person.
You're not doing a play.
This is not fiction.
I see how you're making these words describe what's actually going on in your mind.
Yeah, I actually feel so bad for people who suck at that.
It's hard!
I know a number of wrongfully convicted people who, you know, they spent 40 years in prison.
They didn't get media training.
And so it bugs me out when a reporter puts a microphone in the face of a person who's just walking out of prison and is like, how does it feel?
It's like that person does not have the words to describe what it feels for them right now and actually like their first thought walking out of prison is not going to be like their best thought about their experience.
Like they need time to process it and they probably need help finding the words for it because ultimately words are not just this thing that we can take for granted.
It's hard to understand how other people are experiencing you talking.
That's one of the major problems that people have, particularly people that maybe weren't around a lot of educated people, weren't around a lot of articulate people.
They don't really see how other people are seeing.
They have an idea of how they'd like to come across, but they don't understand how other people are interpreting that idea.
And then oftentimes it fails miserably and they don't understand why, but it's just because it's so insanely complex.
It's so insanely complex just to be a person, but to express yourself.
Express yourself where you feel like, I think Amanda Knox knows who I am.
It's hard work for the person who's across from you, too.
You have to really be paying attention, and you have to be giving the benefit of the doubt, and you have to be trying to find common ground, and you have to be trying to give reasonable doubt to that person's experience because they also might be trying to tell you something and not finding the right words.
And you have to say, like, what do you really mean?
That's why we should be really careful people that are always angry.
Like really careful of communicating with people that are always expressing disdain and they're always mad at this person and mad at these people and these people are idiots and everyone is stupid and like that's your take?
I wonder if a hunter-gatherer is actually way better equipped to deal with internal turmoil because they're ultimately foraging around for mushrooms all day.
I'm on the third chapter now, and it's all about the struggles that human beings are going through right now with what they call hyper novelty.
This current state of life that we're living in that we're not essentially designed for, that things are changing and moving so fast.
We're designed for a certain amount of adaptation that we can adapt to a lot of different changes, a lot of different environments.
But that there's a certain amount that we can tolerate, and we have far exceeded that, far exceeded that, and are doing so exponentially basically every day.
There's just fucking information and data coming out at us, and there's just so much novelty, and the world is changing so quickly.
And it's one of the things about this whole pandemic that has thrown people for a loop is like the regular world was hard enough.
But now this fucking pandemic has made everybody out of everybody's throats because they don't know how to deal with themselves.
And they want to blame the whole world and blame...
Everything else around them for the way they feel and the way they think.
And then there's legitimate blame in other folks, too, which makes people upset.
I'm just trying to imagine, if you think about it, a hunter-gatherer spends a bunch of their time just being able to follow the same rhythms and be aware of their own thoughts.
For a long time, and when an adaptation happens, it's usually a threat to their existence, first of all.
So if you're constantly adapting, does a primitive part of your brain think, I am under attack?
And is that what novelty is to us?
Sure, it can be fun, but also, are we a little bit under threat all the time?
And are we a little bit in survival mode all the time because we're having to constantly adapt and there's no stability?
There's certainly the potential that we're under threat, right?
Because a change could lead to an invasion or starvation or it could lead to the development of a new tool that can help you hunt or a new ability to control fire.
I think that's one of the reasons why people are always seeking out new things and innovation.
It's like we're obsessed with innovation.
Look, the new iPhone 13 just came out.
Do you know about it, Amanda?
It looks fucking exactly the same as the iPhone 12. Your experience will vary as slightly as humanly possible.
Because, like, what if we just gain enough technology that we have a whole different form of existence and we create internal worlds instead of exploring external ones?
Yeah, I don't think Fermi's paradox, we were talking about that before the podcast, I don't think it's correct.
I just think if you are from a planet or another dimension, like imagine, right?
If you're in some sort of an environment, some sort of solar system that has less chaos, right?
So there's less potential for being hit by asteroids, which is a big factor.
And then let's imagine that the biological diversity doesn't...
and has figured a way out of that.
Like maybe there's enough resources that they don't struggle as much and there's enough, enough maybe like physical distance between predator and prey in certain circumstances where some animals or some beings are able to figure a way around their circumstances to develop technology without ever implementing it as weapons upon each other, right?
So we know these variabilities, like random mutations and natural selection and then evolution drives culture in some strange way that creates these environments where somehow or another they can thrive by not killing each other.
Whereas the other chimps are fucking plotting and without even a language, they figure out a way to find chimps that are in another neighboring tribe and beat them to death.
It's weird because they're our closest relatives, but the two chimpanzee tribes that we're aware of, the bonobos and the regular chimps, they exhibit similar behavior to some humans and then similar behavior to the worst humans.
Maybe it's not the best to just be fucking everybody, but there's something about the fact that they don't kill each other when they're in this environment, the same environment that the chimps who do kill.
Yeah, so that's a solution that they've come up with to mitigate this issue that exists in many, many, many mammals that are capable of killing babies.
It's a big issue with bears.
Bears will always find cubs and kill them, to the point where they think that bears coming out of hibernation, one of the first things they look for is cubs to eat.
And they think they do it because they think of the cub as competition, but also just plain food.
And also, there's nothing that keeps bear populations down other than bears.
Yeah, it's probably one of the reasons why males are much bigger.
Because male lions don't really hunt.
They kind of just protect and then they kill the babies and then it forces the females into heat and then they start having sex with them and then their babies and then a new male lion comes along and kills that male or forces him out and then kills those babies and that's the only thing that mitigates the lion population, that keeps the lion population in check.
There's all these sort of natural, horrific, cruel, and ruthless systems.
Logical, yeah.
Logical if you were objective and you took emotions out and you say, oh, I see what it's doing.
That's my concern with human beings.
My concern with human beings is when I take logic and I take all the emotions and all the things I love about people and I say, well, what is this thing doing?
Well, if I was something else from somewhere else and I was looking at this life form known as human beings, I would say, oh...
It makes better things constantly.
That's all it does.
Like, it doesn't ever get satisfied like a beehive.
Bees make a beehive and go, this is what we do.
We make beehives.
They don't say, fuck this, we need to make condos.
Right?
They don't say, we need planes.
I could fly in a fucking plane if I could have a plane.
They don't do that.
They just make beehives, right?
But we don't do that.
We make better shit constantly and then we make these big leaps like the iPod or like the internet or like the printing press or an automobile, the combustion engine.
We make these big leaps and from there we expand in these large branches that go off of these new innovations and then constant innovations branch off of that and then within Decades, the world you live in is unrecognizable.
If you go from 1950 to 2021, the world is unrecognizable.
Somebody put this on Instagram that the difference between 1939 and 1980 is the same difference between 1980 and 2021. And you're like, what?
It's just like, if you buy a phone and it has an 80 megapixel camera, and then the next phone has a 130 megapixel camera, you feel like, I gotta get that.
This is part of what I'm worried about with the human experience.
If I think about it when I'm alone and I'm just anticipating this weird progress, if you extrapolate from where we are now to where we're going, it seems like it's unstoppable.
We're obsessed with innovation and And technology.
The big thing is making better technology.
That's the number one thing.
We have expos where people fly in from all over the world.
They wear fucking masks because it's COVID, but they want to be there when the new thing gets resolved.
What is the new thing?
What's the latest Samsung?
What's their new television?
What does it do?
How big is it?
Is it bigger?
Does it have a camera?
Can it see me?
Can I talk to it?
Can I ask it questions?
Do I have a thing by my bed that I can tell to turn the lights on and turn them off?
Does it listen to everything I do?
Can it be used in a murder investigation?
Because it can.
There have been times where those little fucking Amazon things that you keep by your bed.
Yeah, I was about to say the consciousness problem is the issue because you all of a sudden become an entirely different person as soon as you have a different experience.
Is this one of many, many, many layers of something that we can't detect?
What if...
Death is some sort of chemical portal into another realm.
Like, what if we exist in these stages and we go from here, you die, your energy, whatever your consciousness is, transcends this physical body in space.
And goes into this other dimension, whether it reincarnates or whether it experiences a completely different realm.
We don't know.
But imagine if you like hijacked that and got stuck in a hard drive.
That's fair, but like if your consciousness is stuck in your body and then it chemically is released into a whole new space that we don't know of, isn't it a prisoner of that space as well?
Yeah, no, but there was this thing that happened that I got out of it that was pretty strong was that it alleviated these ruthlessly introspective thoughts that I have constantly.
Where there's a constant analysis of every thought that I've ever had, every action that I've ever taken, every piece of art that I've ever produced, every word I've ever said on a podcast.
This constant, ruthless, introspective voice that's like, well, that fucking sucked.
Well, this sucks.
This is not good.
Fix that.
Do that better.
It's like this droning, constant narrative of do it better.
yeah but you could that will burn your house down like and build it from scratch that's true that's true you got to be careful feeding that beast yeah don't hate yourself while you're doing it well that's a problem like it's uh like i'll have a great show i have a standing ovation from thousands of people but i'll have one word up and that will haunt me for days Like I'll be working out.
I'll be on a stair mill and that's all I could think of is that one word.
I'm like 35 minutes in drenched with sweat and all I'm thinking is that one fucking word.
If the people that criticize me are right, I know if they're right.
Yeah.
I mean, people fuck up.
I make mistakes.
But the voices that I have in my head, that's one thing that saves me, honestly, is that my own ruthlessly introspective Self-critical thoughts are so much worse.
If I did, oh my God, that would be the ultimate hate.
If I really wanted to hate myself, I'd tell myself a false story and then just lie to myself and then eventually catch up to it and go, what the fuck is this?
There's ways to feel good about life during this whole process, though, and that is to do something that sucks for you.
Far more than regular life.
You have to do very physically difficult things.
And in doing very physically difficult things, you can alleviate this pressure and this...
You alleviate the angst.
You alleviate the anxiety.
Because you realize, like, physical survival that's at question when you're doing something incredibly difficult, like really difficult physical exercise.
Like, if you're doing a round on the bag, and it's like, you have a three-minute round, and you're doing, like, ten of them, like, there's no getting away.
You have these things that you have to do.
I have this digital timer in my gym and it goes off.
And there's no getting away.
It's right there.
But during those times, when you hit round seven and eight and nine, you don't think about shit.
I was talking to a woman yesterday that wrote a book on addiction.
And one of the things that she was talking about, we were both talking about, was how people that used to be addicted to substances can find relief in marathon running and ultra marathons and triathlons and just things that are incredibly physically exhausting.
Because there's this moment of mindfulness that occurs when you're going left, right, left, right, left, right.
You have to keep going.
And your feet hurt and your knees hurt and your back hurts, but you're going to keep going because you know the finish line is way the fuck over there and you know you want to get across it.
I mean, not to be like, oh, by the way, prison, but it does, because you do.
You just have to get through one more day.
And there's a singularity of purpose to get through there.
And it might be that your way to get through there is, I'm going to do sit-ups and I'm just going to keep going until I'm in pain.
I have like an interesting relationship with pain because I feel like I'm a little bit masochistic where I grew up doing soccer and doing things like I was I was on like a legitimate team that was the idea was you were gonna go on and become a professional soccer soccer player so like you definitely were pushed to those experiences quite often like every practice you had a moment where you were like I'm just doing this And that sort of prepared me in an interesting way to grapple
with, like, okay, I have a singularity of purpose today, and that is to live through prison.
And that's it.
That's all there is.
And one could say that, I guess, about any day and living through anything, if you think about it in terms of what is your ultimate goal?
How do you get from here to there?
And is there a singularity of purpose and awareness of that at any given moment?
I wonder if whatever encoded Whether it's in our genes or in our mind or in our history, whatever it is that we're designed for, like whatever we've evolved to.
Because we're essentially designed for a different life than we're living, right?
This is one of the things that is always discussed when people are discussing human genetics in the context of the modern world.
Is that we're really designed for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
Certainly.
And if you talk to people that are subsistence hunters and people that are hunter-gatherers, they have a different freedom.
Their day-to-day life is lighter.
Because I think they interface with it.
They're a square peg.
There's a square hole.
And there's struggles and there's loss and there's love and there's all the terrible things that can occur with any human being trying to make it through life.
And I wonder if whether it's whatever struggles that we've created in the modern world, when you interface with those, your body is trying to find Your mind, your genes, they're trying to find some way that this fucking makes sense.
Like, how do I make sense out of this?
And if you wanted to look at just the large numbers of people that are experiencing depression and just crippling anxiety in this world.
Kids are getting porn on their phone when they're fucking eight.
You're giving a kid a phone, they're eight years old, and their friend's going, want to see something?
Look at this.
And you watch someone getting fucked in the ass, and you're like, what is this kid seeing?
Like, murder, car accidents, people jumping off bridges and bouncing off concrete, and you're seeing this at like six years old, seven years old, whenever they get access to the internet.
That's what's scary because suddenly they are exposed to things that predispose them to be dehumanizing people that they encounter.
If you're watching a human being get flattened on some concrete, you have a very different relationship with human suffering than someone who had never been exposed to that from a young age.
They're never bored, and they don't have conversations with themselves.
They're always having conversations with some sort of external stimulus, and that makes them constantly seeking to make an impact externally as opposed to internally.
And cruelly unusual experience that you've had in life, do you have a feeling of obligation?
Like when you're talking about doing these podcasts and reaching out to people and discussing these people's lives and stories, do you feel like you have an obligation?
To try to help other people that are going through something else, whether it's similar or just something else that's difficult, because you've gone through something that's so fucked up.
I mean, I know that I myself am not going to be rescuing anyone, but what I can do is offer someone the opportunity to be seen.
And I think that's actually something that we take for granted in a world where we're constantly exposing ourselves and asking to be seen.
It's often through this filter of judgment.
And I, like, as someone who has been, like, judged really, really harshly, and I constantly feel like I'm talking to people across a cardboard cutout version of myself, I recognize the immense beauty and gift that it is to just genuinely listen to someone.
Like, just listen, with no judgment, with no fear, with no need to get something out of it.
To just feel like someone is bearing witness to you so that you don't feel alone.
I know how beautiful a gift that is and I know how rare it is today.
So I feel like I can do that.
And it's something that I wish I had been given when I was a young kid trying to navigate this horrible situation and it was one thing I feel like I wasn't given.
So That's the sort of perspective that I bring, and I feel like it's a kind of survivor's guilt kind of thing, but also it's like I feel like if I ask myself what's the best thing that I can do, it's not, you know, it's listen.
That's what I feel like I'm really good at.
Listening without judgment.
And I don't feel like a lot of people feel like they have a safe space to do that unless they're paying someone, like a therapist.
I don't even want to tell people how to be.
I just feel like We don't give each other enough of an opportunity to be human and to make mistakes and to have bad thoughts and to process them.
I feel like we're constantly having to justify ourselves and I don't think that that actually lends to processing and having better thoughts and doing better things and being at peace I don't know.
Well, I think you have a unique perspective on this.
I think what you're saying I'm sure resonates with a lot of people and certainly resonates with me.
If you want to make the world a better place, one of the best ways to start is just being a little less judgmental of other people's struggles and a little nicer and having an understanding that This world is fucking crazy.
Which is why I find it really, really sad when it seems like there's a lot of people trying to decide who a person is and what they're about for one moment in their life and having that be the defining thing about them forever.
I think that's one of the side effects of social media, unfortunately, is this disconnect that we have with each other when you're communicating through text to someone who you don't even know their real name.
They have a fucking fake name on a screen and they're saying something cruel to you and you're saying something cruel to them or you're posting about something that you saw in the news or someone says something and you just want the whole world to put them on blast.
There's a disconnect.
You're not in the room with that person.
You're not communicating with them eye to eye.
This is the way we're supposed to talk.
And just the way you and I are talking here, as odd as it is that we're talking in front of millions of people, even though it doesn't feel like it is.
I don't, I read tweets, you know, but I don't read anything about me.
I just read other people's tweets sometimes and it can't Very rarely I'll post something, very rarely.
When I post something on Instagram, I don't read responses.
I'm not interested in that kind of communication.
Sometimes it's great, I'm sure.
Sometimes people are being really sweet and I appreciate them very much.
But the ones who aren't, I don't want to take that risk and interface with that kind of energy and the way people communicate online in this sort of callous, non-connected way.
It's just, I do too much of this.
This gives me faith in humans.
These kind of conversations that you and I have had for these three hours, that I've had with these people this week, it gives me faith in humans.
Most people that are in the podcast world or in entertainment or anything where you're in the public eye, you kind of have to have a certain amount of engagement.
But I also feel like what I'm doing is so expressive.
I put so much of my thoughts out.
Like, enough, fuckface.
Stop talking.
I don't have to talk to everybody.
I can't.
I only have so much time.
I do this this week, five days, three hours a day.
I feel like I'm constantly trapped in a conversation with the fake version of me in people's minds that keeps getting recycled over and over and over again.
I don't want to in any way diminish that, but there's a certain richness to your character and the way you communicate that I don't know if you would have that.
I've been amazed by how she is such a kind person, and she has been so generous towards me, even just with her time and thoughts and the fact that she put me in touch with you.
But besides that, I've been reaching out for her for advice ever since I talked to her.
I didn't have, I actually was initially Amama Knox on Twitter too because someone else was Amanda Knox and they weren't tweeting and so Twitter gave me my name.