Sept. 21, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:11:41
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
|
unidentified
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All day. | |
| Yeah, so we started off this conversation talking about aliens. | ||
| Because they're everywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
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They're everywhere. | |
| This is Travis Walton. | ||
| This is the guy who's got one of the more interesting cases. | ||
| He was abducted, allegedly, in Arizona when he was working as a logger. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And there was a bunch of witnesses that saw the craft and he disappeared for several days and then came back and has this crazy story. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Any anal probing? | ||
| I don't think he had any anal probing. | ||
| They supposedly worked on him because he tried to approach the craft, allegedly. | ||
| Okay, so this is like an ET scenario. | ||
| The craft is on the ground. | ||
| The craft was either on the ground or hovering above the ground. | ||
| I forget which. | ||
| And he and these other loggers saw it and he decided to run towards it. | ||
| And he ran towards it and got Hit with some kind of energy. | ||
| The guys freaked out. | ||
| The guys that he was with freaked out, took off, drove away. | ||
| And as they were driving away, they drove like, I forget how far. | ||
| And then they're like, fuck, we got to go back. | ||
| We got to go. | ||
| But this is crazy. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| They go back and he's gone. | ||
| They can't find him. | ||
| There's some evidence that the ship was there, that there was some sort of a disturbance on the ground. | ||
| But Travis is gone, disappeared for a few days, and then came back with this fantastic story. | ||
| And Define worked on him. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Maybe, I guess, whatever energy was coming off the craft damaged him physically. | ||
| So they did some sort of biological repair on him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like radiation? | |
| Whatever it was. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, I think that when people treat their ability to read other people like empirical evidence, that is a very troubling trend. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I used to think I was pretty good at spotting bullshitters until I met a guy who wound up becoming a murderer and was completely full of shit. | ||
| Like, absolutely 100% full of shit. | ||
| He was a fake black belt. | ||
| Wait, so he came and sat across from you and was like... | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It wasn't that simple. | ||
| I was introduced to him through friends. | ||
| That's why I accepted him. | ||
| And he was a guy who pretended to be a black belt in jujitsu, had made his way all the way into these very close circles of elite fighters. | ||
| And he was even doing reporting work. | ||
| He was working as a journalist for one of the online mixed martial arts websites. | ||
| And so I kind of accepted that this guy was legit. | ||
| Then he did some training with a friend of mine who is legit, and my friend was puzzled. | ||
| He's like, dude, I don't know what is going on, but he's fucking terrible. | ||
| He's like, he's not a black belt. | ||
| I go, really? | ||
| You go, sure he wasn't going light? | ||
| He's like, no. | ||
| No, he didn't know what the fuck he was doing. | ||
| He was like a white belt. | ||
| It's not even like a purple belt. | ||
| He's just faking it till he makes it. | ||
| Completely faking it. | ||
| But faking it to the point where he got on the mats with someone who's legit. | ||
| And then, you know, jujitsu is like, it's like a language in that if someone pretends they speak English, oh yeah, I speak fluent English. | ||
| And then they come to talk to you, be like, what in the fuck is happening? | ||
| And you're like, hey man, that guy can't talk English. | ||
| And you'd be like, wow, he told me he could. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It's like that. | ||
| So if someone like yourself who speaks fluent English was talking to someone who could barely get by, it would be very obvious. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's how it is with jujitsu. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So like taking over his life kind of thing. | ||
| Not just taking over his marriage, but taking over his life. | ||
| I think he was just driving the car around for a day. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because he didn't think that people would notice. | ||
| But it was like a very noticeable car, like a Jaguar in this town. | ||
| But the point is that- So joyriding. | ||
| I used to think that I was good, like that I would meet someone who was full of shit. | ||
| I'd be like, oh, that guy's full of shit. | ||
| But- I thought he was just a regular guy. | ||
| I was used to being around so many guys like that that were legit. | ||
| I just assumed he was legit too, you know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's scary. | ||
| It is scary. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Which is extremely difficult, right? | ||
| Because you've got to get a person to, they have to abandon their initial bias. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You guys have regular shoes on? | ||
| You don't even have booties on? | ||
| You don't have those suits that they wear? | ||
| You're passing around pieces of evidence. | ||
| It's fucking crazy that you're looking for DNA when you're spreading DNA. It was wild. | ||
| And then the fact that they were willing, now this is a spoiler alert if you haven't seen the Netflix. | ||
| Spoil it, spoil it. | ||
| Spoil it. | ||
| Rudy, what was his last name? | ||
| Rudy Gaudet. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, Meredith was my roommate and his story is that he and Meredith were hooking up, never hooked up before, like never. | ||
| They were hooking up, he went to the bathroom, he came out and she was already dead. | ||
| And he watched two people run away. | ||
| It's the dumbest story I've ever heard in my life. | ||
| But it's not just bad, it's like, it's criminally bad. | ||
| The story was also that he had met her and they had hooked up before, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| And then when he came out, she was dead. | ||
| Well, he had heard a scream or something. | ||
| Well, he said that he was listening to headphones, so he didn't hear anything. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And Raffaele. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the only reason they were, like, incentivized to convict Raffaele was because he was my alibi. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| And let's talk about, like, Raffaele, because no one ever cared about him. | ||
| Like, in his own book, he talks about how he was Mr. Nobody. | ||
| Like, nobody actually cared about him. | ||
| No one cared if he had a motive or not. | ||
| No one cared that he only knew me for five days. | ||
| Like, he's not going to go commit murder for someone that he met five days ago. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Well, okay, maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
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If it was a really good relationship. | |
| It was a great five days. | ||
| Yeah, rollercoaster. | ||
| But no evidence was implicating him. | ||
| He showed that he was on his computer. | ||
| There was all of this evidence that he was at home and no one cared because they were like, well, you're Amanda Knox's alibi and you were with her. | ||
| Did they have the ability to track phones back then in terms of cell phone data? | ||
| Did they have the ability to track where your phone was in relationship to a tower? | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's usually the type of methodology. | ||
| And even then, in a fit of rage, a woman is capable of stabbing someone to death. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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 the house. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Imagine you would be that good. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You can't tell where your DNA is. | ||
| Like, how do you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We talked about the Italian legal system on the podcast recently. | ||
| You did? | ||
| Because, yes, an unrelated incident. | ||
| They convicted geologists for manslaughter because they hadn't predicted an earthquake. | ||
| It's one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever read in my life. | ||
| These poor people had to literally go to court and spend an enormous portion of their life defending themselves, lost And then had to win on appeal. | ||
| Yeah, scapegoating. | ||
| Which is fucking terrifying. | ||
| Because there's no science whatsoever that anyone can predict accurately. | ||
| Especially not the magnitude of the earthquake. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're gonna be the face. | ||
| The problem is it's so dumb and so arrogant. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just astoundingly stupid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't actually follow the end of that case. | ||
| Were they able to... | ||
| Yes, they won on appeal. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| But it was on appeal? | ||
| They got convicted first? | ||
| Yeah, they got convicted. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Right, Tammy? | ||
| I think they were even in jail for like a year or two. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Italian legal system. | ||
| I should talk to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's stunning. | ||
| It's a stunning case. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and I'd be interested to know, because my own prosecutor was actually on trial for abusive office while he was trying me. | ||
| It looks like that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So it's scary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Power is so scary. | ||
| Like that kind of power. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, they did. | ||
| But they didn't convict him of the murder, I should say. | ||
| What did they convict him of? | ||
| So they convicted him of her rape because it was only his DNA that was found inside of her body. | ||
| And they convicted him of conspiracy to commit murder. | ||
| So basically taking part in a murder, but not being the one to actually plunge the knife. | ||
| But this was a fabrication by the... | ||
| This was the prosecutor's idea. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| That he was there with Raffaele and that you guys held her down. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Was this his initial idea? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Which is really scary that they can do that, right? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| You can get someone to say a lot of things if you can get alone with them in a room, scare the fuck out of them, and just torture them. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you know that because a lot of people don't know that. | ||
| You can get people to crack. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Like, that's... | ||
| It's... | ||
| People crack when they get pulled over by the cops for speeding. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| People crack for all kinds of things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| They crack if they have a joint in their glove box. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| People crack. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, when authority is scaring you, coming down on you, and in your case, they actually hit you a couple times. | ||
| And you're 20. Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I was 20. Your brain isn't even fully formed. | ||
| My brain isn't fully formed. | ||
| My friend had just been murdered. | ||
| I was alone in a foreign country. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| So were you thinking that you just had to tell them whatever they wanted to hear just so you could get out of there? | ||
| Honestly, I started to question my own sanity. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How long did that take before you think you started questioning your sanity? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like I just wasn't explaining myself correctly. | ||
| How fluent were you at the time? | ||
| I mean I had been there for like five weeks. | ||
| And you took Italian before? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So they didn't tell you that you were being taken to jail because you were one of the people they were accusing. | ||
| No, I was already in prison before I was ever actually told you are being, you are suspected for the killing of Meredith Kircher. | ||
| I was already in prison. | ||
| How long had you known this Meredith girl for? | ||
| A few weeks. | ||
| And you'd met her just because you'd all moved there at the same time? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And you were sharing a place together? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And did you guys hang out a lot? | ||
| Did you know her well? | ||
| Was she a good friend or was she just someone you lived with? | ||
| Um, she was, like, a budding friend. | ||
| Like, we definitely hung out. | ||
| We would go to pizza together. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We definitely did that. | ||
| The moment you found out that she had been murdered, what was that like? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was all... | ||
|
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It was all, like... | |
| 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. | ||
| And that's what happened. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and what's interesting is I didn't know. | ||
| Like, I didn't know that I was a suspect. | ||
| It's like the boom for me was someone close to me just died, and that could have been me. | ||
| And now what? | ||
| And then it was all those things that piled on, they kept piling on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then, you know, I'm in jail. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was so obvious to me. | ||
| And yet... | ||
| And yet... | ||
| And it seemed like the Italian media just ran with it, though. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's just selling papers. | ||
| It's just selling papers. | ||
| I'm not that familiar with the Italian news media, but do they have sort of a tabloid nature to the way they do the news? | ||
| Well, paparazzo is an Italian word. | ||
| Those motherfuckers. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Some ridiculously long time. | ||
| Like 10 years, more? | ||
| More. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, that's probably what Trump wanted too. | ||
| Is he trying again? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, he's gonna 100% try. | ||
| He's probably gonna win. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| How is Joe Biden gonna win? | ||
| How is it possible that he's gonna beat anybody? | ||
| After you've seen him speak, after you've seen the decay and the decline, how is it possible? | ||
| It's not very inspiring. | ||
| They've done a terrible job. | ||
| The Democrats fucked up royally by making that guy the president. | ||
| Do you think that they're going to allow someone else, like Kamala, to run in his stead? | ||
| She would lose just as badly. | ||
| She's the most hated vice president according to polls. | ||
| The least liked, I should say, vice president in 50 years. | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't very excited about her, given her history with wrongful convictions. | ||
| Exactly, I would imagine. | ||
| Yeah, well, that was one of the things that Josh Dubin talked about on my podcast with him. | ||
| He went into great detail about her history of wrongful convictions. | ||
| Not just that, but the fact that she kept prisoners in past the date they were supposed to be released. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know that part. | ||
| To force them to use them as cheap labor to fight wildfires. | ||
| Cute. | ||
| There's more than that. | ||
| She withheld DNA evidence. | ||
| That I know about. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's a lot to it. | ||
| It's awful stuff. | ||
| It's awful stuff. | ||
| And if she did wind up running for president, that would get... | ||
| I mean, it did during the debate. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard exposed her during the debates. | ||
| That's one of the reasons that knocked her down. | ||
| She was one of the favorites initially. | ||
| And then when Tulsi Gabbard exposed her, everybody's like, what the fuck? | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| And then they started looking it up like, holy shit! | ||
| Someone made an image of all the people that were either wrongfully convicted or she kept in jail. | ||
| And it's one of those pictures of these people and they made her out of it. | ||
| You know those things where they do? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I can imagine it. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy that that's the choice. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You believed it. | ||
| He represented America. | ||
| We needed him to be daddy, and he was daddy. | ||
|
unidentified
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He was a statesman. | |
| He was a hugely intelligent, very articulate person. | ||
| Like, my favorite president, in terms of, like, I don't agree with everything he said or did. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Especially the drone shit, but, you know, there's a lot of that. | ||
| But, fuck, what do I know? | ||
| No one's perfect. | ||
| I couldn't imagine being a person who they blame everything on. | ||
| Who's responsible for the economy? | ||
| Who's responsible for international relations? | ||
| Who's responsible for the military? | ||
| Who's responsible for, like, across the board? | ||
| Every time there's a natural disaster, every time, whatever the fuck it is, you're responsible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Shoo! | ||
| Fuck all that. | ||
| Well, I feel like he's basically said that by being like, I'm going to go windsurfing now. | ||
| You guys can deal with it. | ||
| Do you have any sense of whether or not the United States is ever going to have a three-party system? | ||
| Yang is trying to open that door. | ||
| Do you think that that's... | ||
| He has no chance. | ||
| I don't think he has a chance. | ||
| He couldn't win the mayor. | ||
| It's not in the cards. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But do you think that his platform for UBI is going to be the thing that actually ends up speaking to people? | ||
| No, not his platform. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's all you get. | ||
| You get food. | ||
| That's what I was going to propose. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| I imagine you more than many. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, we can do better than that. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| The idea, though, if I was going to play devil's advocate, I think, let me just say this right away. | ||
| I think that the basic wage, the minimum wage should be much higher than $7. | ||
| I agreed with the $15 minimum wage. | ||
| I think it probably should be like $20. | ||
| I mean, if you work all day, you should have enough money for food. | ||
| I only feel okay giving someone $20 an hour at least. | ||
| Well, it sounds like a small amount. | ||
| It is, ultimately. | ||
| You work all fucking hour, and you get $20. | ||
| I mean, in this day and age, with the prices that things are, the cost of living, it's not a lot of money. | ||
| The idea is that you're supposed to be fresh out of high school, and these are the jobs you get, and this is why you get $13 an hour, whatever it is. | ||
| Right, because also, let's be real, teenagers are not the best workers. | ||
| Well, also, you're getting job experience and life experience, and that's the idea behind it. | ||
| It's a weird idea, though, because would it be better if things cost a little bit more and you paid people a little bit better? | ||
| I mean, how much would a burger have to cost if you want to pay everybody who works their 20 bucks an hour? | ||
| That'd be a good question. | ||
| I don't actually know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was my question. | ||
| And the question I deal with the hardest isn't even our wages. | ||
| It's when I buy a phone. | ||
| How much slave labor is involved in my phone? | ||
| Yeah, that's real. | ||
| Will you take it all the way down to the people that are mining the minerals that are used to make the batteries? | ||
| Like, it gets dark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It gets real, real evil. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, you're literally dealing with child labor. | |
| Yeah, there's, you know, I had a friend of mine explaining to me the situation in the Congo where they, cold tan or cold, cold tan, right? | ||
| There's a mineral that's crucial for cell phones that they get. | ||
| It's literally dug out of the ground with sticks by kids. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The worst story that I ever heard was there's two scientists had set up cameras to make, I guess, video and photographs. | ||
| They were going to take shots of these bats exiting this cave. | ||
| And it's a particular cave in Africa that has just millions and millions and millions of bats. | ||
| And every evening they leave this cave. | ||
| So they set up, they set the cameras up, and they're filming this. | ||
| And as the bats leave, they shit. | ||
| And they shit all over these guys. | ||
| And millions and millions and millions of bats shit on these guys and they developed a hemorrhagic virus and they were dead within days. | ||
| Yeah, you say, of course. | ||
| They were fucking scientists studying bats. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if there's... | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I feel like I only know... | ||
|
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Maybe they were photographers. | |
| Maybe they were just photographers. | ||
| Maybe I'm getting it wrong. | ||
| But I mean, this virus, whatever they got, was horrific. | ||
| And they were bleeding out of their fucking eyeballs, like the whole deal. | ||
| Speaking of that, you guys have a bat thing here in Austin. | ||
| Yes, yeah, the bridge. | ||
| Is anyone worried about that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| People go there every night to watch the bats. | ||
| Everybody seems fine. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not an apocalypse. | |
| We actually walked by there last night and we were like, why is everyone hanging out on this bridge? | ||
| Well, I just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, whatever viruses that have jumped from bats to humans, this is the only one that I'm aware of that has ever been documented. | ||
| Maybe there have been more. | ||
| Have there been other coronaviruses that jump from bats to humans? | ||
| Because I know there's a lot that have jumped from livestock, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But flus, right? | ||
| Like avian flu, swine flu. | ||
| Many flus have jumped from these really super unnatural conditions where we take these animals and we stuff them into these cages together. | ||
| It makes my heart break. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| And you have a personal connection with cages. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| I don't like them. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't like them. | |
| 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. | ||
| It's called zoonotic spillover. | ||
| So I imagine there being a term for it means it didn't just get developed. | ||
| Oh no, well the zoonotic spillover applies to animals. | ||
| That applies to all animals. | ||
| Not just bats. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, okay. | |
| Well, then the path I'm jumping down is spilling over to humans. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| There's lots of articles in the last year about it, though. | ||
| There's a lot of zoonotic spillover, for sure. | ||
| But whether zoonotic spillover has come from bats. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, specifically bats. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know whether there's ever been a pandemic that came from- Because it was saying vertebrate animals is the links I was getting. | |
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not an expert in any of this. | ||
| No, nor am I. But that doesn't stop me from talking shit. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a weird thing about Austin, that bat thing. | ||
| People love to go down there and check it out. | ||
| It hasn't stopped them at all. | ||
| Like the coronavirus, they're like, oh, well, it's not here. | ||
| They're oblivious. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think it's a problem. | ||
| You know, because the bats don't shit on you if they don't come in contact with them. | ||
| But I bet if they did shit on you. | ||
| I bet if you're in one of them canoes under the bridge, you get shat upon. | ||
| Like, you must. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| It's part of the experience. | ||
| It's what you paid for. | ||
| Maybe they just use umbrellas. | ||
| Never mind, give up. | ||
| I misread the article, the headline. | ||
| It said how COVID first jumped. | ||
| I thought it was saying it was the first to jump, but dyslexia kind of missed the... | ||
| They don't... | ||
| Depending upon who you're asked, they're 95% sure it came from a lab now. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| I've understood that as well. | ||
| And of course, China would want to cover that up. | ||
| It's obvious. | ||
| Anyone who would be like, why would they ever cover that up? | ||
| Go to Sagar and Jetty's Instagram page. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| 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. | ||
| Oh, those little fucks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| Those little fucks. | ||
| All those dirty diseases. | ||
| It was horrible. | ||
| Those are terrible. | ||
| Marburg and Ebola. | ||
| All those fuckers have come from bats. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Doesn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
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A little bit? | |
| It does. | ||
| It does. | ||
| We need to just keep doing what we're doing. | ||
| It led to everybody dying. | ||
| Scary times. | ||
| Yeah, and it goes back to that issue of saving face, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that's the Fauci thing when he's being grilled by Rand Paul and he's saying, you do not know what you're talking about. | ||
| When you question Anthony Fauci, you are literally questioning science. | ||
| Yeah, that was an unfortunate moment for him. | ||
| It's unfortunate in many ways. | ||
| Well, also because the whole point of science is to question it. | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| So it's a very unscientific thing to say that you can't question me. | ||
| Ridiculously unscientific, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, and it's a little, what's odd about that is it's like, well, what is a vaccine? | ||
| A A vaccine is a little bit of the virus so that your body can build up. | ||
| Not this one. | ||
| This one's not that. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| This is an mRNA vaccine. | ||
| It's essentially a gene therapy. | ||
| It forces your body to create a spike protein that your body should recognize in the form of the virus. | ||
| When the virus shows up, your body says, I've seen this shit before, and it knows how to fight it. | ||
| But it's not the same thing. | ||
| I see. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We know what this is, develops immunity for it. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One of the things they're saying about SARS, the original SARS, which was, how many decades ago was that? | ||
| What was the original SARS? But they've tested people to this day that survived the original SARS and they still have immunity. | ||
| So that's a different kind of immunity. | ||
| It's a natural immunity. | ||
| And this is the same thing that they're talking about, 2002. Yeah, so almost a decade. | ||
| They still have immunity. | ||
| And so they still have the antibodies. | ||
| And so this is what they're wondering with people that have had the natural infection from getting sick from COVID and then recovering. | ||
| How long does this immunity last? | ||
| That's not known. | ||
| They really don't know yet. | ||
| Because they're not looking for it? | ||
| Well, they don't know. | ||
| I mean, we've only had it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's only been around for a year and a half. | ||
| So, like, how long does the immunity last? | ||
| If you were one of the early people that got infected, like, say if you got infected, my friend Michael Yeo got infected. | ||
| I want to say February. | ||
| February of 2020. Or in March? | ||
| No, February of 2019. February of 2020. That's really early. | ||
| When did we lock down? | ||
| We locked down in March of 2020, right? | ||
| So, no, I think he was February... | ||
| February of 2020. Yeah, it's felt like it's been forever. | ||
| I'm wrong because the whole Wuhan thing was September of 2019. So February of 2020, I think, is when he got it. | ||
| So he got it before we even locked down. | ||
| Somewhere around then. | ||
| And he got really fucking sick. | ||
| I don't know where he stands in terms of his antibodies, but that would be interesting to check. | ||
| Yeah, see if he can go get tested. | ||
| Jamie got sick in October of 2020, and Jamie's got mad antibodies. | ||
| Yeah, they're very angry. | ||
| They're mad. | ||
| They're very mad. | ||
| He's got thick lines. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| Well, we test him all the time. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| We test everybody. | ||
| We test everybody every day. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Every day here, we get tested. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| And Jamie gets the fucking, he gets the gold crown. | ||
|
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Yeah, hey. | |
| He's the king of antibodies. | ||
| Lucky me. | ||
| But we think that he encountered the Delta variant somewhere along the line because it seems like his antibodies got even thicker. | ||
| How many months ago? | ||
| About a month ago? | ||
| Two months ago? | ||
|
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What is it? | |
| September? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So yeah, July. | ||
| So you get tested for antibodies, what do you say, like every three months, two months? | ||
| Less than that. | ||
|
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I mean, more frequent than that, yeah. | |
| Once a month? | ||
|
unidentified
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At least once a month. | |
| Once a month. | ||
| So here we have PCR tests, we have rapid antigen tests, and we have antibody tests. | ||
| So we do all kinds of tests here. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| And even when it all seemed to go away, like in July, we were doing shows in Vegas. | ||
| Me and Dave Chappelle were doing these arenas, and everybody's like, COVID's done! | ||
|
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Yay! | |
| Two of my friends who were vaccinated got COVID there at the arena. | ||
| And it was like, whoa, this is not done at all. | ||
| This is definitely still here. | ||
| But people were saying, why do you still test every day? | ||
| Because I would have guests. | ||
| They go, oh, we got a test? | ||
| Isn't it over? | ||
| Well, why do we use condoms? | ||
| Yeah, which brings back to your case. | ||
| Wasn't that one of the things that the guy said the reason why they didn't hook up was because he didn't have a condom? | ||
| I think he might have said that. | ||
| I think that is one of the things. | ||
| His answers were so screwball. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They didn't test it? | ||
| They never tested it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The prosecution tried to stop them from testing it. | ||
|
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What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And they were like, ah, it's not relevant to this case. | ||
| Semen underneath a pillow at a murder scene? | ||
| Like on a pillow underneath her body. | ||
| At a murder scene? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is not relevant? | ||
| Not relevant. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Because it couldn't possibly come from me, so what do they care? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Oh my god, how frustrating for you. | ||
| Well, and at the time it wasn't even frustrating, it was just surreal and baffling. | ||
| Like, is my life just over because somebody doesn't want to admit that they were wrong? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| When did it get resolved? | ||
| How old were you when it got resolved? | ||
| So, totally. | ||
| That was the Supreme Court, the appeal, you win on the appeal, and then they take it again to the Supreme Court, and then you win there. | ||
| So, yeah, no, it's even more horrible than that because it's, I get convicted, I get acquitted on appeal. | ||
| How many years were you in jail before you got acquitted? | ||
| I was in jail for four years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's just a whole thing. | ||
| Then it was brought up to the Italian Supreme Court. | ||
| They overturned my acquittal, sent it back to the appellate court to try me again. | ||
| They found me guilty again. | ||
| Then it went back to the Italian Supreme Court and they overturned that and definitively acquitted me. | ||
| So it was an eight-year long process, which to be frank is actually lucky in terms of the worlds of wrongful convictions. | ||
| Usually the average amount of time it takes to overturn a wrongful conviction in this country is 14 years. | ||
| So I came away relatively unscathed in comparison. | ||
| Yeah, but then all of a sudden you're almost 30 and your life has been a mess and you've been in jail for something you didn't do. | ||
| And it's not like I get my life back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And not like you even get money. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| They don't say like, hey, we fucked up. | ||
| Here's 10 million bucks. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He's now free. | ||
| He's free. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| So he got out in November of 2020 after serving 13 years in prison. | ||
| So he's out. | ||
| He's free. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| And no one thinks of him when they think of Meredith's murder. | ||
| A lot of people have never even heard of him. | ||
| A lot of people ask me, who do you think really did it? | ||
| And that is because the prosecution and the media all defined this case with my face and my name. | ||
| Because it was sensational? | ||
| Because it sold newspapers? | ||
| It sold newspapers and it was also the first thing that the detectives and prosecution fixated on. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Has there been any repercussions for the people involved? | ||
| No, they got promotions. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's... | ||
| Promotion. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that was like a real nice like dig. | ||
| It was shortly after I got convicted. | ||
| The detectives involved in the case were all like given an award for their work in my case. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like even if she's innocent. | ||
| In Italy? | ||
| Honestly here too sometimes. | ||
| Here too? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Do you get a lot of that here in America? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How did you act like a guilty person? | ||
| Well, I mean, people say that I behave- Because you were stretching when you were at the police office? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or they say, oh, well, she falsely accused an innocent black guy. | ||
| She's another one of those white women who accuse black men. | ||
| And it's like, wow, way to just completely ignore all of the context of how false confessions even happen. | ||
| And how coercive my interrogation was just because you want to score a sort of like racial political point. | ||
| But yeah, there are people who think that like I am ultimately at fault for being suspicious to the cops. | ||
| And that's actually the reason why my own co-defendant didn't win his wrongful convictions case. | ||
| Like he he wanted to he went to Italy and said, I'm suing you for for wrongful imprisonment. | ||
| You should never have imprisoned me. | ||
| You should never have prosecuted me. | ||
| There was never any evidence against me. | ||
| And they said, well, it's your fault that you were suspicious, basically. | ||
| And so you don't get any compensation. | ||
| Meanwhile, there's actual evidence that he was home. | ||
| He has computer evidence. | ||
| Yeah, he had stuff on his computer. | ||
| But again, also no evidence of him at the crime scene. | ||
| There's no reason why they should have thought of him as being involved in this case at all, except that he knew me and was my alibi. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So it's just a shitty system over there. | ||
| 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 so you said there was 53 hours? | ||
| Over five days. | ||
| Over five days. | ||
| So are they doing 10 hours a day and they're just letting you home? | ||
| Are they keeping you in custody? | ||
| What are they... | ||
| So I got to go home. | ||
| I didn't have a home anymore. | ||
| I was staying with Raffaele and I had the clothes on my back. | ||
| I didn't have anything. | ||
| I didn't have my computer. | ||
| All of my stuff was in my house, which was closed as a crime scene. | ||
| I had my cell phone and the clothes on my back. | ||
| And they would let me go home. | ||
| And in fact, when they were interrogating me and tapping my phone and all of that, I had no idea. | ||
| No one ever told me that I was a suspect. | ||
| No one ever, ever told me. | ||
| All they told me was that I was an important witness, that because I was so close to Meredith, I was like really, really important to them. | ||
| them. | ||
| And so I kept having to come in and answer the same questions over and over and over again. | ||
| And Raffaele cracked too. | ||
| Yeah, actually, and it's really sad because the way that they posted to him was, look, you're an Italian guy. | ||
| Who's this American cow that you're, you know, hanging out with? | ||
| Just let her go. | ||
| And to his credit... | ||
| He did crack in that moment in the same way that I cracked in that moment. | ||
| He was like, okay, well, you're telling me that she's involved. | ||
| I don't see how that's physically possible because she was with me all night. | ||
| But I guess I did fall asleep that night. | ||
| So I can't say 100% that while I was asleep, she was with me. | ||
| That's basically what he was willing to say and sign under pressure from them. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Where is that Rudy guy? | ||
| Where is he at now? | ||
| Where is he? | ||
| Is he allowed to leave the country? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I presume so because technically he served his sentence. | ||
| I think he's in the same city that he was held at. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I don't know because like he was an orphan. | ||
| He didn't really have anyone in his life. | ||
| I almost feel bad for the guy because he's just this abandoned kid who's making his way on the streets and is making really, really horrible choices. | ||
| Breaking and entering. | ||
| Breaking and entering. | ||
| He had a history of that. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did he have any history of violence? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't have any evidence for this. | ||
| But there was never any question about that, like from your attorneys? | ||
| They didn't question that? | ||
| No, in part because Rudy was tried separately from us. | ||
| So there wasn't really anything we could do. | ||
| We had to try to fight the evidence that the prosecution was bringing that said that I was somehow involved. | ||
| We were like, this is absurd. | ||
| But we couldn't question Rudy on the stand. | ||
| We never got that chance. | ||
| Like, he was just not a part of our trial. | ||
| It was like he didn't exist. | ||
| And he had been quietly sort of convicted before us separately. | ||
| And then everything was about me and how jealous I was of Meredith and how dirty I was and how much of a slut I was. | ||
| And how that conflict, that girl-on-girl conflict, was fatal. | ||
| And it was all bogus. | ||
| It was all imagined. | ||
| And yet, that was the thing that really resonated with people. | ||
| It wasn't the, like, incontrovertible evidence in the history of this guy. | ||
| Like, no one cared. | ||
| No one cared about him. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, especially when it comes at the cost of a lot of professional reputations. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's a moment in the documentary where That investigator says, if they're innocent, I hope they can forget. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Notably, he didn't say forgive. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, then he said, if they're guilty, then, you know, he... | ||
| Divine justice, blah, blah, blah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You're going to go to hell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they show the surface of the fucking church. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| But that is a very telling moment. | ||
| That motherfucker knew you were innocent. | ||
| Yeah, and I have some interesting thoughts about that because for a while I tried to reach out to him. | ||
| I genuinely was like, after everything was over, after the Netflix documentary came out, I had this... | ||
| I kept wondering about my prosecutor. | ||
| I kept wondering, like, what is up with this guy? | ||
| Why me? | ||
| Why me? | ||
| Like, for him, why me? | ||
| Because ultimately, it really came down to him. | ||
| There were a lot of people involved, but, like, he was the one running the show. | ||
| Why me? | ||
| What is up with him? | ||
| And the Netflix documentary definitely gave me some insight. | ||
| Like, I remember the filmmakers showing me that exact clip and being like, what do you think? | ||
| And I thought, here's a guy who really thinks he was doing the right thing. | ||
| Who I think, at least in part because of that, was motivated with genuine good motivations. | ||
| I think he had also bad motivations. | ||
| He had every incentive to not admit fault because that says something bad about him. | ||
| But I also thought that he had good motivations, that he was empathizing with Meredith's family. | ||
| And as a father of four daughters, he was like deeply, deeply empathizing with the experience of losing a daughter. | ||
| He didn't empathize with having a daughter accused of a horrible crime, but I think he had sort of written me off as a bad girl. | ||
| I wanted to talk to him about it because it felt like it seemed like if he had ever actually gotten to know me he would know that that wasn't me. | ||
| Like that whatever vision of me that he had in his mind that wasn't me and he never really got to know me. | ||
| Like we had only ever really encountered each other in interrogation room and in the courtroom where he was actively trying to destroy my life. | ||
| Did he interrogate you? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I guess that's all I can say about that. | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| When you were convicted and you found yourself in jail and you're 20 years old, what was that first day like? | ||
| Um... | ||
| 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. | ||
| When you look back at all this, people have moments in their life that are horrific, and then they transcend those moments. | ||
| They recover, they get over it, and they have a deeper understanding of the possibilities of life. | ||
| Because there's lows that they've experienced that the average person will never... | ||
| So they have an appreciation for daily life. | ||
| They have appreciation for freedom, for the taste of a hot dog, for a blue sky with clouds, whatever it is. | ||
| Did you get any value out of being incarcerated? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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 got up to like 900 once. | ||
| Was very proud of myself. | ||
| In a row? | ||
| In a row, yeah. | ||
|
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Jesus. | |
| It took me all afternoon. | ||
| So I was like slow at it, but I did it. | ||
| How was the next day? | ||
| Well, I'd been working up to it, right? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| I mean, every day, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's pretty fucking understandable. | ||
| I know, but like... | ||
| Out of all the things, that's pretty goddamn understandable. | ||
| But if I wanted to be actually stoic about it, actually mindful about it, I would be able to, I know that emotion very well. | ||
| I am very well acquainted with what it feels like to be accused of something I didn't do. | ||
| I have lived with that emotion. | ||
| Almost more than anything else except love. | ||
| And I think the reason why I'm able to deal with it is because the emotion that I have most experienced in my life is love. | ||
| Like really, like it sounds like so corny and stupid, but like... | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So goals, so humble goals were the things that sort of helped you. | ||
| What other goals other than 900 setups? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But you do what you can and that's the hustle. | ||
| So was there any anger at you thinking that you were guilty in jail? | ||
| No, there was anger at me that I wasn't forgotten. | ||
| That you weren't forgotten, that you weren't abandoned, that there were still people coming to visit you? | ||
| 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. | ||
| No one forgot me. | ||
| My family didn't forget me. | ||
| The media didn't forget me. | ||
| Did you try to mitigate those feelings that those other prisoners had towards you by reaching out to them? | ||
| Was that possible? | ||
| 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. | ||
| What was a normal day for you? | ||
| Normal day was get up around 7 when the medical cart goes through the hallway. | ||
| Everyone else was getting their, you know, methadone or whatever it was. | ||
| I didn't get anything. | ||
| And then you stay in your cell, you make yourself a little espresso, and I planned my day. | ||
| All the things that I wanted to accomplish that day, which again were usually pretty humble. | ||
| The breakfast cart comes around. | ||
| Breakfast was like either hot milk or coffee or tea. | ||
| So you just sort of stuck a jug out through the bars of your cell and they filled it up for you and pulled it in. | ||
| And then I would usually eat that with some crackers that I bought from a commissary. | ||
| And then shortly after that, they would give us aria, so time to go outside in this little cement block area. | ||
| I would do some jogging. | ||
| Then I would come back inside and sit in my cell and read or write letters for hours and hours and hours. | ||
| Lunch would come around. | ||
| I don't have to tell you that it's not great food. | ||
| Then I would sit and sit and sit. | ||
| We'd say not great food, like what kind of food? | ||
| Well, it was always three things, a vegetable, a starch, and a meat. | ||
| But it was always very, very simple. | ||
| So it was just like, you know, boiled spinach, some pasta, and some like really crappy, you know, cartilage-y meat. | ||
| And that, it was like that every day. | ||
| I know that like, on Christmas, they would give us panettone. | ||
| They would give us little mini panettone. | ||
| But it was not... | ||
| What is panettone? | ||
| Panettone is that like, oh, you're Italian? | ||
| Come on! | ||
| I'll have to send you some panettone for Christmas. | ||
| It's their traditional fluffy cake that has usually confectionery in it or little raisins and stuff like that in it. | ||
| It's just traditional. | ||
| But then the afternoon I would spend again in my cell. | ||
| There would be a second opportunity to go to Aria. | ||
| I might go outside, go run, come back inside. | ||
| Then there was what was called socialita, an hour when people were allowed to go into other people's cells. | ||
| And so that's when I would go into another person's cell and spend that hour writing their letters for them. | ||
| And then I would go back into my cell around eight, maybe watch whatever soap opera my cellmate wanted to watch, and then go to bed. | ||
| And then all over again. | ||
| And in the meantime, someone was working on your defense. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you would get updates? | ||
| 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. | ||
| My mom was like, you're crazy. | ||
| We have a washing machine. | ||
| That's dumb. | ||
| Did you maintain any other prison habits? | ||
| Um... | ||
| Yeah, bathroom-y ones. | ||
| Bathroom-y? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why don't you get one? | ||
| I should, yeah. | ||
| But I mean, it's expensive to redo your whole bathroom. | ||
| Right. | ||
| One day. | ||
| What do you do now, in terms of like, as an occupation? | ||
| So I'm a podcaster. | ||
| I have a podcast called Labyrinths, which I produce and host and write with my husband, Christopher. | ||
| And I also do journalism. | ||
| So when you say write, so it's a podcast that's... | ||
| What kind of a podcast is it? | ||
| It's not a conversational podcast like this one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What she wanted was accountability from him. | ||
| And she wanted to move on with her life. | ||
| This was how many years after the rape? | ||
| Oh, this was immediately when she was like she never wanted to take it to the authorities. | ||
| Her mom did. | ||
| So she was 13 and they were making her do this in front of a judge and a jury. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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 it's interesting that you do podcasts because I was going to tell you at some point in time that you should do a podcast. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because you're so good at talking. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| You're very good at talking. | ||
| You're very compelling. | ||
| You have a great way of describing things that's descriptive but yet humble and your use of language is excellent. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Do you focus on specific types of stories? | ||
| Are you focusing on people that are involved in crimes or wrongly accused or victims? | ||
| Do you have a specific subject that you focus on when you do your podcast? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did that ever fade in any way? | ||
| No. | ||
| That is an ongoing problem. | ||
| I am defined by something that I did not 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. | ||
| How do you choose who you speak to? | ||
| A lot of times it's just who reaches out to me. | ||
| How many of these have you done so far? | ||
| So, let's see, the first season, we've had, I mean, we've had many, many episodes. | ||
| I'll just send them to you. | ||
| Do you speak to many people who are wrongly convicted? | ||
| So I have, but that's not the sole purpose of my podcast. | ||
| And if anything, I'm also working on other things where I talk to wrongfully convicted people. | ||
| But this podcast is not specific just to wrongfully convicted people. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| All the things you talked about earlier. | ||
| But when you speak to wrongly convicted people, what I was going to get to was other people who have been incarcerated for crimes that didn't commit. | ||
| Is there a kinship? | ||
| More than my podcast, that's just something that I get to live. | ||
| That's one of the weird sort of beautiful takeaways from this experience. | ||
| One of the bright spots in this whole experience is meeting other people who have been wrongly convicted. | ||
| And the only way that I really know how to describe what that feels like is back before I was totally acquitted, but I was free. | ||
| I had spent four years in prison, but I was still on trial. | ||
| I had technically actually already been reconvicted, so I was a convicted murderer. | ||
| Were you forced to stay in Italy at the time? | ||
| No, I got to go home. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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? | ||
| In a similar way that I did when I had to reset in prison, right? | ||
| Like, the question is, what can I do? | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| What literally can I do? | ||
| What is the best thing that I can do? | ||
| Do it. | ||
| That's what I ask myself. | ||
| Like, what can I do? | ||
| And do it. | ||
| There's nothing stopping me. | ||
| No one's putting me in jail anymore. | ||
| And has anything shifted in the way people talk to you? | ||
| Have more people given you the benefit of the doubt? | ||
| It definitely changed. | ||
| There was a shift after the Netflix documentary came out. | ||
| I didn't know how people were going to think of me after that documentary because it showed some embarrassing moments for me. | ||
| I'm a 20-year-old kid saying stupid shit. | ||
| I didn't think there was anything embarrassing about it at all. | ||
| Well, I have a friend who was the other girl on that, like, they show this phone call between me and a friend of mine. | ||
| And she's mortified. | ||
| She's not even named, but she's mortified that at 20 years old, she was like, Hey, it's okay. | ||
| You have a boyfriend. | ||
| Things are cool. | ||
| You're having the time of your life. | ||
| Listen, thank God no one has recordings of me when I was 20. Everyone's stupid at 20. Everyone's stupid at 25. Yeah, that's true. | ||
| We're stupid at 35. People are dumb. | ||
| I'm working up to that level of stupidity. | ||
| You can find a podcast for me from fucking three weeks ago that was probably dumb. | ||
| There's no escape from humans. | ||
| We're goofy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think we should allow ourselves to be goofy and to make mistakes. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| It's the only thing that will keep you sane. | ||
| If you want to go back and think about everything that you've ever said or done that's stupid, you'll be a prisoner. | ||
| You'll be a prisoner of your thoughts and your behavior and you'll be defined by it forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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're also this thing that fluctuates wildly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whether your parents get divorced. | ||
| Whether you had lunch that day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| Oh my god, there's so many things. | ||
| It's hard because everybody is in some way, shape, or form struggling. | ||
| And one of the things that I talk about a lot, and I apologize if anybody listens, but it's kind of an important perspective. | ||
| The worst thing that's ever happened to you Is the worst thing that's ever happened to you, even if it's nothing. | ||
| Even if it's bullshit. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I actually really, really... | ||
| I hate it when people say to me, I could never understand what you've been through. | ||
| You've been through so much, I have no perspective on that. | ||
| And it's like, really? | ||
| Haven't you felt like shit? | ||
| Like I bet you felt like shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really felt like shit. | |
| But you can feel trapped in your own life. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like that's ultimately what it is. | ||
| You feel trapped in your own life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what's crazy to me? | ||
| 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. | ||
| They do it and they wait to get arrested. | ||
| They want to go back to jail. | ||
| Yeah, some stability is a compelling motivation. | ||
| The idea of being institutionalized scares me as much as anything in life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It should. | |
| It should, right? | ||
| It should. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But you don't get to fulfill yourself either. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| You don't get to have purpose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| There's no good to it. | ||
| It's terrifying to me. | ||
| It's just waiting to die. | ||
| It's this thing that happens to some people where they just fall into a dull hum, a dull vibration of life, and they just accept that. | ||
| And some people, you know, they're helped by the medical institutions inside the prison environments. | ||
| Like, nothing makes a guard happier than a comatose prisoner who's just been given, like, a huge dose of a depressant. | ||
| Right, it just makes them easier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| 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. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| Well, frankly, it made me realize that postpartum depression is a real thing. | ||
| And some people who don't get, like the woman who I'm thinking of, the one who murdered her kid, she like lost, she just lost it. | ||
| She had a newborn. | ||
| She had no support and one day just lost her mind and put her baby in a garbage bin and just left it there because she couldn't deal with it. | ||
| She lost her mind. | ||
| And it's horrible and inexcusable, and she should definitely face consequences for that. | ||
| But, like, let's also look at the context of her. | ||
| Would that have happened if she had someone to turn to? | ||
| Something to turn to. | ||
| And a lot of these people that I met in prison didn't have good choices. | ||
| They had bad choices and they had bad mental stability in order to make those, like, choices. | ||
| And so I have, like... | ||
| I have a level of compassion that I know a lot of people don't really understand. | ||
| And it's simply because I've lived alongside them. | ||
| I've been there with them. | ||
| And I know that prison is not helping a lot of them. | ||
| Have you spoken to Yeonmi Park? | ||
| Mm-mm. | ||
| Do you know who she is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-mm. | |
| She's a woman that escaped North Korea. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Out of all the people besides you that have had fucked up stories, hers is the most. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're second place. | ||
| Wow, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| You won silver. | ||
| I'll take silver. | ||
| Her story is so crazy that I think you and her would have an amazing conversation. | ||
| Where is she at? | ||
| What's her situation? | ||
| We'll talk afterwards. | ||
| I'll tell you how to get in touch with her because she's She's actually in danger because of the way she speaks. | ||
| She lives in America, but the way she speaks about North Korea, she's potentially in danger. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| It's a crazy story. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So most people are tiny. | ||
| Yeah, non-nutrition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| She sounds lovely. | ||
| It's a crazy story. | ||
| But essentially, the entire country of North Korea is a horrific prison. | ||
| I mean, on so many levels, it's so fucked up. | ||
| Everyone has to report on everybody. | ||
| They're all ratting on each other. | ||
| People are in concentration camps because their grandfather did something horrific. | ||
| Or not a, you know, whatever, horrific in terms of like their judgment, not really horrific. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He said something bad about the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| So they are in jail. | ||
| They are in a concentration camp because their grandfather, it's many, many generations of your offspring will be punished. | ||
| You should talk to her. | ||
| I would love to talk to her. | ||
| I think you and her would have a fantastic conversation. | ||
| It would be very, very, very interesting to hear your take on her and her take on you. | ||
| Well, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is, so I, this may be a little bit weird, but I don't actually really believe in free will. | ||
| You're into determinism? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, I suppose so. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I do know what you're saying. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Imagine it's that easy. | ||
| Imagine. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Of course we would. | ||
| But we don't exist in a vacuum. | ||
| No, we do not. | ||
| We're not alone. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All the variables that make a human being. | ||
| All the context. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All of it. | |
| There's so much. | ||
| So much of it is... | ||
| Genetics and life experience and environmental. | ||
| There's so much. | ||
| To callously dismiss a human being because of one factor or another or to decide that they should have done better. | ||
| I would have done better if I was there. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's the thing that gets me, is that I would have done it differently. | ||
| I would have done it better. | ||
| It's like, how do you know, first of all? | ||
| How the fuck do you know? | ||
| 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? | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're not? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| The pylon person is never. | ||
| They're always embarrassed. | ||
| They're always ashamed. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And some people suck at that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a very complex skill that some people are just way better at than others. | ||
| And also, getting someone out of prison and sticking a microphone and intruding like that into their experience and saying, how does it feel? | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| And to treat it like that is the only moment in their life where they're going to have the opportunity to feel heard by anyone. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, it's just... | ||
| You don't have the right to get involved in their experience and just record it and force them to express themselves. | ||
| I feel very strongly about that. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Do random like I show up at a restaurant and someone asks me questions. | ||
| I don't do those. | ||
| That's not how you talk to people. | ||
| You're not going to get an accurate impression of who that person is. | ||
| You're just trying to get a weird gotcha thing. | ||
| Yeah, no, they're not interested in who that person really is. | ||
| It's hard to express yourself accurately. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I think she gets it. | ||
| It's fucking hard. | ||
| It's really, really, really hard. | ||
| 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? | ||
| That's your hot take on stuff? | ||
| Well, that's what I was saying. | ||
| The why question is really important to me. | ||
| If you genuinely want to understand why things happen to you, you have to do a lot of work and not just be angry at someone. | ||
| Well, a lot of times when people are expressing themselves, it's performative. | ||
| It's hard for someone to honestly say how they feel and think. | ||
| So they'll say things that they think are going to get a reaction that they would like. | ||
| That, you know, maybe someone will think they're noble. | ||
| Maybe someone will think, you know, they're virtuous. | ||
| You know, that's what virtue signaling is all about, right? | ||
| Like you're trying to get a very specific reaction by being disingenuous with your thoughts and the way you express yourself. | ||
| And it's common because it's hard to fucking communicate. | ||
| It's hard to be honest. | ||
| Especially with yourself. | ||
| The hardest. | ||
| It's the hardest. | ||
| You gotta spend a lot of alone time. | ||
| Very few people spend alone time. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| We can not be alone all the time. | ||
| My favorite alone time is the sauna. | ||
| Because I do it every day. | ||
| And I used to listen to books on tape. | ||
| I used to do a lot of that. | ||
| I listened to books on tape in there. | ||
| But I've... | ||
| Realize that in doing that I'm distracting myself from my misery. | ||
| I was about to say, you're spending that time with someone else's thoughts. | ||
| Yeah, I'm just like distracting myself. | ||
| And I'm getting the physical activity or the physical benefits of the sauna, but I'm not getting the alone time with misery. | ||
| Like the physical, uncomfortable, these moments where you just want to get out of there and bail. | ||
| Like you could distract yourself with a good book and you won't want to bail. | ||
| But there's a benefit to learning who's in there. | ||
| Like who's in that fucking head when shit gets hot? | ||
| Who's in there? | ||
| There's a lot of people that don't like that guy or that girl or that they, whatever the fuck you want to call yourself. | ||
| They don't like whoever it is when things get rough, and so they never get to know that person. | ||
| They always blame the world. | ||
| They're always lashing out at others. | ||
| They're always finding fault in everyone else but themselves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 could do that. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Well, there's something to that. | ||
| There's a book that I'm reading right now by my friends Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein. | ||
| It's called The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. | ||
| I just heard about that this morning. | ||
| Is it good? | ||
| Really good. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it's a great book. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a very small... | ||
| These are 120 hertz refresh rate. | ||
| But it's got such a better camera now. | ||
| I heard the cameras on me. | ||
| It makes almost no difference. | ||
| I have multiple phones because I have multiple phone numbers. | ||
| I have an ABC number system that I've had to implement in my life. | ||
| I've gotten more notoriety. | ||
| One of my phones is last year's phone. | ||
| I don't fucking notice any difference when I use it. | ||
| It's the same goddamn phone as this one, which is the new phone. | ||
| This year's is the 12th. | ||
| It's the fucking same phone. | ||
| I wonder if everyone is just chasing that feeling. | ||
| They want to be a part of the next feeling when there is a big leap in the technology. | ||
| When the iPod came out, that was kind of a big deal. | ||
| That changed the way that people experience music itself. | ||
| I feel like everyone, at least the way that they're commercializing these new iPhone, it's Revolutionizing the technology. | ||
| It's like, no, it's not. | ||
| Tell me when it really revolutionizes the technology and then I'll opt in. | ||
| Well, I have a dark thought on that. | ||
| My thought on that is that human beings are essentially Innovation creating things because we're creating the next form of life. | ||
| And that we're like a little caterpillar making a cocoon and we don't know why we're doing it. | ||
| I discussed that with Brett actually. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| I think that our obsession... | ||
| I hope that our AI overlords want to keep us like cute little puppies. | ||
| I don't think it's going to happen. | ||
| You know what I think is going to happen? | ||
| I think we're going to integrate. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think we're going to merge with technology and we're going to be a hybrid. | ||
| Well, that's one of the resolutions to the Fermi's paradox. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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? | ||
| That's another problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a problem. | ||
| But I mean, there are peaceful animals that are very similar to us. | ||
| Like bonobos are a great example of that. | ||
| Regular chimpanzees are fucking ruthless murderers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But bonobos... | ||
| They're just sexy. | ||
| They're just horny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're just freaks. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| It's weird because they're wild, 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. | ||
| And it's weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It is weird. | ||
| How does that happen, right? | ||
| And then there's other intelligent animals that don't get to manipulate their environment, so we get to see what it's like to be a dolphin. | ||
| You follow dolphins and you're like, this is fascinating. | ||
| They have a cerebral cortex that's 40% larger than a human being. | ||
| They have this complex language we can't decipher. | ||
| We don't understand what they're saying, but we do know they have dialects. | ||
| We do know that the sounds they make vary upon their geography, where they live. | ||
| So what are those? | ||
| What are those giant brain things that don't manipulate their environment but clearly are intelligent? | ||
| Dolphins alert other humans that people have fallen off of boats and show them how to get to them. | ||
| They're weirdly intelligent. | ||
| They're also kind of rapey though, right? | ||
| Super rapey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not just rapey. | ||
| They kill babies. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| Well, humans did that too before we created rules. | ||
| But they do it to force the female into breeding. | ||
| It's a dark thing that dolphins do. | ||
| Dolphins have this long period where the baby has to be with the mother. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like many years. | ||
| They have a big brain. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And so during that time period, the female will not breed with other dolphins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So male dolphins will often kill the baby to force the female into estrus. | ||
| So the female solution is to be hypersexual. | ||
| So the females breed with as many males as possible. | ||
| So the male will go, oh, I've had sex with her. | ||
| That might be my kid. | ||
| And so the male won't kill the baby. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Interesting, because no one's threatening them. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If there's a fucking 12-foot Kodiak grizzly or brown bear, what the fuck is going to eat that? | ||
| Nothing, right? | ||
| So other bears either kill them in a fight or a bear finds them when they're cubs and kills them and eats them. | ||
| They eat each other all the time. | ||
| I had no idea, but that explains why a mother bear is so fucking paranoid. | ||
| Yes, and ruthless. | ||
| That's why if you bump into a mom with cubs in the woods, you're fucked. | ||
| It's a bad time because they think that someone is going to kill their cubs. | ||
| That happens with lions. | ||
| When a male lion gets forced out of the pride, The new male lion that takes over, that forced the lion out, kills all his babies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, immediately. | ||
| And the females don't try to fight this? | ||
| What are they going to do? | ||
| Males are much bigger. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| 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 the same amount of time. | ||
| You're like, what? | ||
| That is shocking. | ||
| That's fucking crazy! | ||
| It also makes me feel old. | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| You're old. | ||
| I'm 54. I'm really old. | ||
| I'm legitimately old. | ||
| If you think about what we're doing as a species, we're We're constantly and consistently making better things and we're obsessed with it. | ||
| And I think that this is one of the things that's lost with this concept of materialism. | ||
| People think of materialism as if it's this bizarre, stupid, empty obsession that people have with objects. | ||
| But what I think is that it fuels innovation. | ||
| Innovation, particularly things like iPhones and stuff like that, do you really need anything better than an iPhone 2 or 3? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No, that's not the point. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what is the obsession with getting a faster processor? | ||
| If you're not editing video and it's not saving you time in your work week, what is that obsession? | ||
| There's an obsession with the newest, latest, greatest, best. | ||
| And if you have an old iPhone, people go, what are you, poor man? | ||
| Why you got the fucking big borders on the top and the bottom of your screen? | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's like a thing we want the newest, latest, greatest. | ||
| Status? | ||
| Yes, it's status. | ||
| But why? | ||
| Why is that status tied in to newer things? | ||
| Well, it's because it's difficult to attain and it shows you have a stat. | ||
| Okay, but there's more to it. | ||
| The ultimate motivation is to fuel innovation. | ||
| It fuels newer, greater objects. | ||
| Newer, greater objects, but mostly technology. | ||
| It's not like newer, greater chairs. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We're not looking to have newer, greater lamps. | ||
| We're looking for newer, greater objects that are technologically based because we're giving birth. | ||
| We're working towards this new thing. | ||
| And this new thing is going to be a life form. | ||
| It's probably going to integrate with us. | ||
| It's probably going to be... | ||
| We're going to be forced to merge with it because if... | ||
| We won't survive. | ||
| Someone's going to do it. | ||
| Like what Elon Musk is proposing, this whole Neuralink thing where they're going to drill a hole in your head and stick wires in there. | ||
| It's going to change the way you interface with information. | ||
| It's going to change the amount of... | ||
| And he eventually said that you're going to be able to talk without words. | ||
| How the fuck are you going to compete with people that are doing that? | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| If you don't do that. | ||
| No, we're going to be the Neanderthals. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we're either going to integrate or we're going to go extinct, for sure. | ||
| And that's going to be the iPhone 1. That stupid looking thing that if you saw it today, you're like, you want an iPhone 1? | ||
| You're like, fuck that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Give me that 13. That one with the little tiny border. | |
| That's the shit. | ||
| I want the new thing. | ||
| That's what's going to happen. | ||
| It's going to happen so quickly. | ||
| It's going to happen as quickly as... | ||
| Look, iPhone 1 to iPhone 13 is like, what is it? | ||
| 14 or 15 years or something like that? | ||
| I think like 2007 was the first one, right? | ||
| Yeah, it came out. | ||
| That's not that long. | ||
| That thing looks like shit now. | ||
| Pull up an iPhone 1, young Jamie. | ||
| If you try to look at one of those things, if that was at the store, you'd fucking laugh at that. | ||
| But anything else, like a knife from 2007 is a knife. | ||
| It is. | ||
| A rifle from 2007 is a rifle. | ||
| There's not much difference. | ||
| There's some minor innovations. | ||
| Carbon fiber barrels and shit. | ||
| Look at that stupid thing on the right-hand side. | ||
| That stupid button. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here with that nonsense. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Hunk of shit. | ||
| Also quite a bit smaller. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, they make a mini now, but the problem is the battery life because people are so goddamn addicted. | ||
| But I hear that the new mini is even better. | ||
| Well, right, because people weren't even using it to stream anything, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| The first iPhone. | ||
| Four gigabytes. | ||
| Two megapixel camera. | ||
| The new one has one terabyte. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So a thousand gigabytes. | ||
| So it goes from four gigabytes to a thousand. | ||
| And what is that used for? | ||
| Is that just for new applications that take up more space? | ||
| Videos, apps. | ||
| Yeah, you can make a lot of videos because you can shoot in 4K and 8K with some of these phones. | ||
| I don't know if you could shoot in 8K with the iPhone, but you can with the Samsung Galaxy series, the Ultras. | ||
| You can shoot, I mean, you can take massive images. | ||
| Because we're all documenting our lives now for... | ||
| For what are we doing? | ||
| I don't know what we're doing. | ||
| I mean, I don't even think it's that. | ||
| 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, they're listening. | ||
| They're listening to everything you do. | ||
| That's how you can say, hey Siri, turn the lights off. | ||
| Or hey, what do you say with the Google one? | ||
| Hey Google. | ||
| Hey Google, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| And this is just the beginning. | ||
| This is the beginning of the Star Trek episode. | ||
| This is the Black Mirror. | ||
| It's the beginning. | ||
| I was about to say, Star Trek, it looks good. | ||
| I mean, at the very least, it seems like human beings have their shit together a little bit. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| It's a diverse cast. | ||
| It is a diverse cast. | ||
| I actually haven't seen any of the recent ones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I haven't either. | |
| I'm talking about the old ones. | ||
| The old, old one? | ||
| The old, old one. | ||
| But even back then, they never anticipated cell phones. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There was a walkie-talkie. | ||
| Kirk out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They had a little flip phone. | ||
| They never anticipated. | ||
| Interestingly, they anticipated teleportation, which is a way harder nut to crack. | ||
| But communication was just like... | ||
| Well, the problem with teleportation is if you can do that, you can also make duplicates. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So who do you decide who's the real you? | ||
| Kim Jong-un. | ||
| He's going to be the first to make hundreds of him. | ||
| I don't know if he would, though, because he also likes being the special one. | ||
| Right, but he probably doesn't want to die. | ||
| So if we make a bunch of hims and freeze him and figure out a way to transfer consciousness from one to the other and keep the shell alive. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you think Donald Trump wants to die? | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| But he also doesn't want there to be another Donald Trump. | ||
| That would be his worst nightmare. | ||
| Just one or two spare. | ||
| Just sitting there like, waiting to turn on. | ||
| Yeah, if you could plug your consciousness in. | ||
| If you could plug that in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes, he would totally do it. | ||
| Wouldn't we all do it if we could plug our consciousness in? | ||
| No, I'd feel trapped. | ||
| I'd feel like, what if I'm going to be stuck in this fucking computer? | ||
| And what if there's something actually waiting for you? | ||
| What if whatever you are, you're a physical vessel for the soul, if that's real, right? | ||
| Whatever consciousness is. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The reason why I don't know is because I've had some pretty tense psychedelic experiences that made me question What is life? | ||
| What is the human experience? | ||
| What is consciousness? | ||
| What is this dimension that we exist in? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, wouldn't it just be the same thing as the teleportation issue? | ||
| You have a copy of yourself that lives on in the biological space. | ||
| What if you're the hard drive, Amanda? | ||
| You're like banging on the walls. | ||
| You thought prison was bad. | ||
| You're stuck in a fucking disk somewhere. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Can you imagine going to visit your old hard drive self and you can't get her out? | ||
| She's stuck in there, but you're free and you're in heaven. | ||
| You're in whatever heaven is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whatever it is, yeah. | |
| You're in this new realm and they go, Amanda, you can't go back. | ||
| You can't go back to let the old you out of the hard drive. | ||
| Well, I feel like, I mean, from what I've heard from people who have had psychedelic experiences, you kind of lose your sense of self. | ||
| You haven't had any? | ||
| I have not yet, no. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| Nothing, no. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| I am 34. I'm on that journey, though. | ||
| That journey? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When people say I'm on that journey, I always get very nervous, especially if they're wearing wooden beads. | ||
| Oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not wearing my wooden beads today. | |
| There's something about wooden beads. | ||
| Fucking, that's my button. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Did you carve those yourself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just one of those things that's so on the nose. | |
| You know, the spiritual people with wooden beads are like... | ||
| I'm not buying it. | ||
| Yeah, I haven't had mushrooms yet, but I look forward to the day. | ||
| You want some right now? | ||
| I can't. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| I know why. | ||
| One day. | ||
| One day. | ||
| I'm looking forward to the day. | ||
| Take a little, though. | ||
| Don't take a lot. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| People get crazy and they want to dive into the ocean. | ||
| I take that back. | ||
| I have taken mushrooms, but at a dose that was not taking me to any kind of... | ||
| Microdose. | ||
| Yeah, I've done a microdose. | ||
| Did it make you happy? | ||
| What I really enjoyed from the experience was feeling purposeful but without anxiety. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That was the feeling. | ||
| That's a great way to describe it. | ||
| Purposeful but without anxiety. | ||
| It alleviates a lot of stress. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A good light mushroom dose, like you're like, ooh... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You feel present. | ||
| You feel like you're doing something, but you don't feel the anxiety of the FOMO and what if you screw it up? | ||
| You don't have that. | ||
| You're just present. | ||
| That's what I enjoyed from the experience. | ||
| I was working on a sewing project at the time, actually, and I remember thinking, Oh, I'm just not worried that I'm going to screw this up. | ||
| Because even if I do it wrong, like, I'll just undo it and keep doing it. | ||
| I'm just doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's okay. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For me, the first, like, and it wasn't a big one. | ||
| It was a pretty, like, I would say it's like a medium-sized mushroom chip. | ||
| But there was a moment of... | ||
| Like one gram, two gram? | ||
| Probably two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| I'm looking at it. | ||
| Yeah, in the range of two to three. | ||
| There was moments where you're like... | ||
| That's legit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's exhausting. | ||
| It also makes you someone who does better. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's a blessing and a curse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Because of how it defines you to yourself? | ||
| No, it's just mistakes. | ||
| Like any mistake. | ||
| Any mistake. | ||
| It's the paradox, right? | ||
| It's the... | ||
| It's the conundrum of the person who wants success. | ||
| Is that there's only one way to get better. | ||
| The way to get better is to now analyze every single thing you're doing. | ||
| And so all your actions have to be criticized. | ||
| Everything has to be figured out and everything has to be improved upon. | ||
| So nothing is good enough. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| It's never good enough. | ||
| And if it is good enough, you've fucked up. | ||
| Because then you've taken yourself too seriously or you're self-congratulatory. | ||
| So it's like you have to find this ability, and it's very difficult to do, to stop thinking about things. | ||
| Just put it aside and let it go. | ||
| And then the demons will yell from behind the gate. | ||
| They're over there now. | ||
| And you just hear them yell. | ||
| And you're like, yeah, you're far enough away. | ||
| How are your demons in conversation with the people who criticize you? | ||
| The external voices. | ||
| Those don't bother me nearly as much. | ||
| There's no way they criticize me as much as I do. | ||
| That's the beautiful thing. | ||
| Do they ever echo each other, though? | ||
| No. | ||
| So they're talking? | ||
| Well, sort of. | ||
| I mean, if they're right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because I know me. | ||
| I mean, I know all of me. | ||
| And I really do. | ||
| I pay attention. | ||
| I don't avoid it at all. | ||
| I look for it. | ||
| I look for all my faults. | ||
| Because you don't want to hurt people. | ||
| I don't want to hurt me. | ||
| I don't want to hurt people. | ||
| I don't want to be a failure. | ||
| I don't want to suck. | ||
| I don't want all those things. | ||
| You're asking why. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're not telling yourself a false story. | ||
| There's no false stories. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, well, that's, I think, more common experience for people than they'd like to admit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That kind of stress and that kind of... | ||
| There's a fear of, like... | ||
| I might not make it out of this. | ||
| Can I keep going? | ||
| Yeah, can I keep going? | ||
| I might not. | ||
| So that kind of pain, you can't endure all day. | ||
| You can't do that all day. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| Your heart will break. | ||
| Your muscles will give out. | ||
| You will have an aneurysm, whatever the fuck it is, and your body will drop. | ||
| So you have to reach these RPMs that aren't possible to sustain for long periods of time, but you have to reach them often. | ||
| And because it, like, strips away all the commentary and you just exist? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, I get that. | ||
| Because you can't, there's no other way, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Other than, goddammit, three more minutes. | ||
| I've done a half marathon. | ||
| I get that with running and stuff like that. | ||
| It's just like, oh, I have to get from here to there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that reminds me of prison. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| 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. | ||
| But their life is natural. | ||
| Like it fits. | ||
| And it's not complicated by distractions that we're not adapted to encounter. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I worry about that. | ||
| People who are younger than us. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| How is that shaping their brains? | ||
| Clearly not for the better, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I mean, it's not even necessarily, like, real to them because they're seeing it on a screen. | ||
| Well, that's what's scary. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's also the amount of data that comes their way. | ||
| The amount of information, the amount of like stimuli that hits kids today. | ||
| Whether it's the form of video games or the form of TikTok or the form of whatever the fuck they're finding on the internet their friends send them. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| And they don't have a relationship with their own thoughts. | ||
| They're never bored. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because of the insane... | ||
| 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. | ||
| I try. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can find yourself in a terrible position. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's hard to do that, especially when you feel under threat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very hard. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or you're dealing with your own problems and you don't have any room in your mind or your consciousness for other people's perspectives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you look back on that and you think, shit, I failed in that moment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's also how you don't fail the next time it comes up again or something similar comes up. | ||
| You go, okay, I've fucked this up before. | ||
| I know how to handle this now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's the grueling, grinding process of improving as a human, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Constant reevaluation and two steps forward, one step back. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| That is really cruel, I think. | ||
| I think it's not just unfair, I think it's really cruel. | ||
| And not really based in reality either, because no human being is one moment in their life. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Hi! | ||
| We're also doing it in a way that is way more intimate than most people talk because everyone's checking their phone. | ||
| Everyone's looking around. | ||
| It's very rare that you sit across from a table and just have, we've been talking for over three hours. | ||
| We have? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, okay, cool. | ||
| You have a conversation with someone. | ||
| We haven't even had a drink to like dull our senses. | ||
| No, just talking. | ||
| For more than three hours. | ||
| This is a rare thing in life that you get to... | ||
| But I feel like in these kind of conversations, you really get to see who a person really is. | ||
| You get to understand how they really think about things and what's their thought process. | ||
| And you compare it to your own. | ||
| You find something that makes sense to you. | ||
| Like, oh, I see what she's... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then, you know, you put yourself in their shoes or you put yourself in their mindset or you try to imagine what it would be like. | ||
| Yeah, you try. | ||
| You try. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you communicate. | ||
| And I just, I don't communicate online anymore. | ||
| I don't do it at all. | ||
| I used to. | ||
| But now I don't even tweet. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is how I think people should talk. | ||
| And it would be nice if it didn't feel like... | ||
| I know a lot of people, and myself included sometimes, feel like you have... | ||
| Even though you know it's bad for you, you have to engage. | ||
| Because you're not above it, right? | ||
| We're all sort of stuck in this horrible hustle. | ||
| And you have to engage. | ||
| And you aspire for the time that you won't have to engage. | ||
| And a lot of people don't ever get there. | ||
| And I wonder if they're... | ||
| Do you think that... | ||
| Genuinely, anybody could disengage and still, like, achieve their goals in a world that requires us to constantly be in conversation digitally? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I mean, completely disengage, like, where you don't post anything, you don't do anything. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if you want to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| I've disengaged a lot in that I don't interact with people. | ||
| I don't go back and forth with people. | ||
| I don't read things about me. | ||
| And lucky that you don't have to. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I feel like also, I feel the same way that I feel like about fuck you money. | ||
| Like if you have fuck you money and you don't say fuck you, you're wasting fuck you money. | ||
| I saw those lions out there. | ||
| Oh, I bought those in the 90s. | ||
| That was like one of the first things I bought with money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think they're something dogs. | ||
| What are they called? | ||
| Oh, they're dogs. | ||
| What are those things called? | ||
| How come they're not guarding your house? | ||
| My wife fucking hates them. | ||
| I bought a lot of shit. | ||
| I bought a lot of Eastern art. | ||
| I have these random statues like Buddhas and Ganeshas and stuff like that. | ||
| She doesn't want to have nothing to do with those. | ||
| There's just one too many at the house. | ||
| They're all here. | ||
| The beautiful thing about the podcast studio is I have this fucking giant warehouse. | ||
| I can put all kinds of crazy shit in it. | ||
| So I put stuff here. | ||
| This is where I can express myself without... | ||
| Without getting crap. | ||
| She's not into it. | ||
| But it works because I have a place. | ||
| How the fuck am I going to have a house with this in it? | ||
| Neon UFO. This is a sweet setup. | ||
| As a podcaster, I have to say I'm super jelly. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| But my point is about not engaging, when you don't have to. | ||
| I feel like it's an obligation. | ||
| I have an obligation to not, because I've figured out that it's not good for you. | ||
| So if I just figured out that it was not good for me, and I was like an alcoholic who kept drinking, then I'd be a fool. | ||
| And it sucks, because it's not like you can share that with other people. | ||
| No. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Not everyone is in a place where they can just... | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's enough. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| I could get into that too. | ||
| You could definitely get into that, but with you way more so than anybody else that I know because of your past. | ||
| And it's not even a past, really. | ||
| It feels very present. | ||
| I'm still in conversation with that, whether I want to or not. | ||
| And it doesn't just impact me psychologically, but it impacts my reality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't get to go and just be Amanda Knox and let my actions dictate who I am. | ||
| I'm constantly in conversation with other people's recycled versions of me that gained traction because they were scandalous. | ||
| 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 agree. | ||
| You are a person who's gone through some shit. | ||
| You don't get to be you. | ||
| You're a complex sort of semi-resolved puzzle. | ||
| Well, and I actually have moments like that where I feel like, would my husband love me if I hadn't suffered? | ||
| Like, would anybody value me if I hadn't gone through this thing that I had no part in? | ||
| If I had just lived the life like I should have had, would I just be a lesser person? | ||
| You don't make diamonds without pressure. | ||
| But also, like, stuff implodes with pressure, too. | ||
| And, like, there's no telling what's going to come out of pressure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, like, you have so much responsibility, right? | ||
| Because, you know, there's so many eyes on you. | ||
| And you've gone through this. | ||
| And now, you know, and also, like, there's a lot of people that still think you're guilty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So you have to think of that. | ||
| And so you do have to like, almost like frame everything you're saying with like, I'm not guilty, but here I am. | ||
| And this is who I am. | ||
| And, and yeah. | ||
| It's like, I know you've, you've heard this whole long story. | ||
| I know there's a version of me that has existed in your mind space for a long time. | ||
| Nice to meet you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, you know, you're here because of Whitney Cummings. | ||
| I love Whitney. | ||
| And what's funny is like I'm not actually familiar with her as a comedian. | ||
| She's fucking hilarious. | ||
| She's really good, especially right now. | ||
| Something about her in the pandemic, she got way better. | ||
| She was always really funny. | ||
| But I saw her in Austin a couple months ago when she was here and holy shit was she good. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| She's just like, you know, like the pressure of this whole thing just has created a better version of Whitney. | ||
| But she spoke so highly of you. | ||
| She told me I have to have you on. | ||
| I was like, really? | ||
| And then we had this conversation about you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, she's been... | ||
| 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. | ||
| She's so smart. | ||
| She's like a big sister, and I've never had a big sister. | ||
| She's one of the smartest people I know. | ||
| She really is. | ||
| And there's this weird sort of chaotic intelligence, you know? | ||
| She's very, I don't know anyone like her. | ||
| Very, very unusual. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, she's so high energy. | ||
| Yeah, she's always like, well, I'm in the middle of directing a movie on violence. | ||
| And I'm like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| And there's like three things that she's doing at any given time. | ||
| Oh, I got a new rescue dog. | ||
| I bit my finger off. | ||
| I got to get that surgically repaired. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know! | |
| That's her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| She's going 100 miles an hour. | ||
| And meanwhile, she's like sending me text messages like, this is what you gotta do! | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's like, okay. | |
| She's a fascinating person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Love her. | |
| But she's the one who recommended it. | ||
| So, shout out to Whitney. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thanks, Whitney. | ||
| Thanks for looking out for me. | ||
| Amanda, appreciate you. | ||
| Thank you very much for being here. | ||
| Tell everybody about your podcast. | ||
| The Labyrinth, that's what it's called? | ||
| Labyrinths, yeah. | ||
| Labyrinths. | ||
| Oh, Labyrinths. | ||
| Oh, thank you for pulling that up. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| This has been a real pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| It's been fun. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| Okay, and so the... | ||
| What is the... | ||
| Oh, KnoxRobinson.com. | ||
| That's how you get it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| KnoxRobinson.com. | ||
| So go there. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And do you have social media? | ||
| I do. | ||
| So Twitter is at Amanda Knox. | ||
| Instagram is at Amama Knox. | ||
| Amama Knox? | ||
| Amama, yeah. | ||
| So Amanda Marie Knox. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How nice. | ||
| Yeah, that was very thoughtful of them. | ||
| Very nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was great meeting you. | ||
| I really enjoyed our conversation and best of luck with everything. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You too. | |
| Alright. |
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