Amanda Knox reflects on her wrongful conviction in Italy—26 years reduced to slander after coerced interrogations—while critiquing justice systems that prioritize narratives over truth, like her prosecutor’s refusal to acknowledge flaws despite her innocence. She advocates for radical acceptance, not bitterness, and contrasts her compassionate approach with societal cognitive biases that stifle growth, citing meditation and martial arts as tools to channel stress into clarity and discipline. Knox’s upcoming Hulu show and stand-up comedy spark debates on trauma, vulnerability, and the cost of fame, with Rogan emphasizing resilience over external validation while acknowledging life’s inherent hardness. Her journey underscores how systemic failures and personal integrity clash in rebuilding trust and meaning after injustice. [Automatically generated summary]
I was studying abroad when I was 20 years old in Perusia, Italy.
One of my roommates was raped and murdered by a burglar who broke into our home.
But I was accused of having orchestrated a murder orgy.
And I was sent to prison for four years.
I was sentenced to 26 years.
I was put on trial for eight years.
And it became this international scandal where it sort of pinged all of the buttons in all the right places.
This happened in 2007.
So, you know, early 2000s when the Internet was released.
I think that that played a huge role of people sort of going into their little echo chambers and fighting online.
And so I think that there was, yeah, it was a case that for whatever reason, rose above the...
Ultimately, this case was actually very simple, and it wouldn't have risen to the level of international infamy were it not for the series of mistakes that the prosecution and the detectives made at the very beginning by trying to pin a man's crime on me, a woman.
And then more recently, I wrote this book, Free My Search for Meaning, which covers like, you know, you can read it and learn about the case, but it's mostly about how do you come out of an experience like that and make sense of it.
And then one of the big stories in it is how I then developed a relationship with my prosecutor, which I think you'll...
Probably be in the camp of people of thinking that I'm utterly insane for having done that.
Maybe, maybe, maybe you won't.
I just remember that when we talked about this back in the day, you were like, this motherfucker.
I was like, it depends on what you mean by friend.
And they said, well, do you trust him?
And I said, well, I think that at the point that we are now in our relationship, I do trust him.
I trust that he's telling me the truth about what he really thinks and feels about the situation.
Privileged, special access to the mind of the person who put me in prison.
And that is a very interesting, awkward, but also empowering place for me to be, because one of the things that really...
What bothered me about this experience was not understanding why it happened to me.
Why did this man look at a 20-year-old girl with no criminal history, no motivation to commit this crime?
Why did he look at me and think, there's my rapist and murderer?
And I didn't understand it.
And I didn't feel...
Like demonizing him in my mind or vilifying him in my mind was going to actually give me a satisfying answer as to the why of it all.
A lot of people said, well, it's just because he's a bad dude.
He doesn't care what the truth is.
He's just covering his ass.
Like these were all really simplistic ways of framing his motivations, and I didn't really buy them.
So instead, what I was interested in was going to the source.
And confronting him, asking why.
But to ask someone, why did you hurt me?
Which I think is a really common thing that people who have been hurt want to know.
They want an acknowledgement that they've been hurt and they want to understand why.
And they want to know if that person's not going to hurt them anymore or not going to hurt other people.
That's really common for people who have been hurt.
The challenge is that people who hurt other people don't like to be confronted with that fact.
And so how do you start a conversation that's not going to immediately become adversarial?
And that was one of my biggest challenges.
But I came up with this methodology that actually became so important to me that I tattooed it on my arm.
So this is it.
There are four steps.
And the first one is find common ground.
So it's this Venn diagram.
find common ground.
I promise you that every single person on this earth, you have something in common with them.
Find it.
So I asked myself, what could I and my prosecutor have in common?
I didn't know this man.
I didn't know what his history was, what his background was.
But I did know that he, like me, was part of this really big scandalous in the And he, very likely, felt...
Misconstrued or misrepresented also in the process, maybe dehumanized in the process.
And so I reached out to him and I acknowledged that fact.
I said, hey, I don't know who you are.
I only ever encountered you in the police office and in the courtroom where you were someone who was trying to ruin my life.
So you were a big, scary boogeyman.
And I saw you in the media, and I've seen how the media represented you, but knowing from experience, I know how that can be very misrepresentative.
So I said to him, I want to know who you really are, and I hope that you might be interested to know who I really am, because I don't think you know who I really am.
I don't think that you would have prosecuted me if you knew who I really am.
And that was the beginning of the dialogue.
This, like, I went out of my way to acknowledge that he might have had noble motivations, even if he was wrong.
And I think this is, like, a really important thing, is I wanted to give him radical benefit of the doubt.
Maybe.
Just maybe.
This horrible thing that happened to me could have been the result of understandable mistakes.
And if anything, I think coming into contact with the Innocence Movement and criminal justice system stuff and reform, all the stuff that I've learned after having gone through this experience has made me realize that some of the most horrible things can happen.
And can be enacted by people who have the best of intentions.
And so I assumed that of him, and I gave him that benefit of the doubt.
And as soon as I opened that door, like, hey, you hurt me, but maybe that wasn't your intention.
Maybe your intention was something else.
He filled that void with his story and his message and what he wanted me to understand about himself.
I mean, one of the wildest things about this book is that I talk about, like, I do not sugarcoat what I went through, like, and especially what he did to me.
Like, I very, like, clearly set out, like, here's the fucked up shit he said about me in court, completely without evidence, like, totally made up bullshit.
Like, and it ruined my life, right?
Here's what it is.
Acknowledge these facts.
And also, and also, here is a person who might have had, like, in doing so, might have been coming from a place of trying to rationalize things in his own mind, which is a thing that we all do.
We all do on a regular basis.
We're all just sort of interpreting our reality in the way that suits us.
And so I wrote this book from my perspective.
I translated the entire thing into Italian before it ever got published so that I could share it with him, so that he would know what I was saying about him in public, what was imminently going to come out.
And his response was, I have never felt more seen.
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And this is where the Buddhist in me comes out, where you can have extreme anger towards a person and at the same time hold them in your hand as this tender, fallible creature that is capable of violence against you but is also capable of being hurt.
Just because someone hurt you doesn't mean that they're not capable of being hurt.
And I certainly don't want to be in the position of hurting someone.
Like, that's just who I am.
And if anything, like, one thing that I've communicated to him is like, look, I don't know if you're ever going to really wrap your head around what you did to me.
But if you do, one day.
I know that you're going to feel really, really bad.
And I just want you to know that I don't wish suffering on you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they are attracted to them or they find them to be beautiful or desirable and they know that that woman wants to have nothing to do with them.
Like, they are completely repulsive.
And so, you see it a lot with, unfortunately, unattractive men.
They develop a hate for women.
I've seen it.
I've seen it evolve over years with people that I used to be friends with.
You know, just constant rejection, and then it becomes like, fuck these women, fuck them.
Yeah, but in terms of trying to take beautiful women down a peg, I think you're right.
I also think that something that was going on in my case that I think you also tend to see in those situations where you're trying to take beautiful women down a peg is this idea of pitting women against each other.
That was a huge thing in my case where they were suggesting that here I was, this free-spirited but also...
Hoary, you know, American girl versus the uptight, judgmental British girl.
And therefore they hated each other and with, you know, with a vengeance, with a lethal vengeance.
And then this idea of like a murder orgy appeared where this pornographic fantasy of women like expressing...
their own violent fantasies towards each other in real life and using men as pawns
I think you see that a lot, you know, even in like a person I write about in this book who's become a dear friend of mine is Monica Lewinsky and how I feel like people really wanted to bring Her down a peg in part because they wanted to bring Hillary down a peg and the whole like...
The person who actually committed the affair was sort of, I mean, he definitely got his part, but it was all like a political game of they're trying to take down the man, but they're also taking down the woman, and they're especially railroading this young woman who made a mistake, and it became known as the Monica Lewinsky scandal and not, you know, the Bill Clinton affair or whatever.
Like, it matters what you name a thing, and it seemed like the legacy of that and the person who became defined entirely by that scandal.
Happened to be Monica, the one who was the person with the least amount of power and agency in that equation.
But also, like, when you look at Bill Clinton, this handsome president, and then you look at Linda Tripp, who is very unattractive, that also plays in, like, I want to take him down, too.
And probably I want to take her down as well.
Like, there's a lot of, like, fuck everybody else.
There's a lot of that.
You know, when you're unseen, to use the same vernacular, you know?
And then you see, like...
Other people getting attention.
It's just like the fact that she did it and she knew her.
But also, this is the game of cards that they're playing.
This is House of Cards.
This is literally what they do anytime they have a chance in the political realm to use any weapon.
Yeah, and then you have to spend the rest of your life with secret service following you around so you can't exist in the world as a normal human being.
I do feel like there is a...
You have to be a special kind of person in order to be attracted to something like that.
It's a strange social position that I don't think is manageable for anyone.
I don't think the human mind is prepared.
To be in that kind of a position of power and not have it completely distort what you are.
And then there's the relationships that you have to have with all these various politicians and then special interest groups and lobbyists and then foreign leaders and then...
Okay, so this story didn't actually make it in my book, but it is one that I wanted to tell you because it talks about how my weird relationship with other people who are in positions of power like police officers, right?
I'm an advocate of criminal justice reform.
I talk a lot about, like, I go and testify in front of my, you know, state Congress trying to get certain laws passed to protect, you know, innocent people.
And one thing that I like to point out is that I'm not anti-law enforcement.
If anything, I was a victim of crime.
Before I became a victim of the criminal justice system, like someone broke into my home and raped and murdered my roommate.
And then I called the cops and then the cops went on to betray me.
And but that doesn't mean that there isn't like I'm not one of those, you know, fuck all the police.
We don't need them.
You know, abolish the whole system.
That's not what I believe.
But as someone who has had this.
I don't really know what to do when something bad goes down.
And I want to tell you a story about something bad that went down.
It was in L.A. I was staying at a friend's house with my husband and our two kids.
We were doing work down there.
And our friends were not there.
But in the middle of the night, we hear someone yelling.
Out in the street, we think there's some drunk guy out there, but it gets closer and closer and closer until finally there is a huge bang, and my husband gets up in his tighty-whities and says one thing to me, call the police before he marches downstairs.
We were upstairs in the second story, and we hear a bang, we hear yelling.
He goes down there in his underwear.
And I don't know if the last thing I'm ever going to hear from my husband at that point is call the police, which is an interesting final words to get from the love of your life when you're me.
And my, you know, infant son is crying.
You know, two-year-old daughter at the time is going, what's going on?
And I'm trying to calm him while reassure her, while looking around the room thinking, how do I barricade a door?
And can I jump out of a window with two small children?
All of that before I think, dial 911.
Because the last time that I dialed the equivalent of 911 to call for help, I got thrown into prison.
I realized that there's nothing I can do to protect my kids, so I call 911.
And eventually, you know, my husband is able to get this intruder to leave the house.
The police arrive.
And I have a very strange encounter with them because they are very nice to me.
And I was not expecting that.
And they are very nice to my daughter.
And they give her a nice little, you know, police badge.
And I'm sitting here thinking, great, now I'm going to have to throw a police-themed birthday party for her because now she's going to be super into police.
And I'm just like, what is happening to my life?
And I'm scared that they're going to recognize me.
And I'm scared that they're going to think maybe she faked a break in.
Like, all of that is going on in my head.
And I don't know how to resolve that.
You know, somebody...
I have broken to my home once, murdered my roommate, broken to the place I was staying again, thankfully didn't murder anybody.
But like, how do I make sense of my relationship with people who are empowered to protect me, but also are empowered to hurt me?
Yeah, he thought that someone had stole that house from him and he was yelling for some name of a person who didn't live there.
Clearly was just, like, either confused or mentally ill in some capacity.
But...
And thankfully not armed, but like my husband didn't know when he walked down the stairs in his underwear without any, like he grabbed a broom on his way down and that was, he was between putting himself and a broom between whoever this person was who had just kicked in the front door through the deadbolt and his family.
And that might have been the last time I ever saw him, you know?
I try to, like, joke about it now, where I actually did a stand-up bit about it a while back, about how I was, like, testing my butt to see if it was bouncy enough to, like, jump out of the window and bounce.
But, like, when I think back on it, it's just, it's still scary, you know?
And I don't like how I feel right now.
When I'm scared, I'm supposed to call the police, but I'm also scared to call the police.
And so, you know, when I go and do advocacy work for, you know, I'm now on the board of an organization called the Innocence Center, InnocenceCenter.org, which, by the way, just got a bunch of federal funding taken away.
Thanks, Elon.
You'd think that they would be interested in supporting people.
Organizations that clean up the messes of the criminal justice system, but apparently not.
So if you want to support us, innocencecenter.org.
I mean, there's a federal funding that is designed for innocence organizations, and I think what I...
is that there are certain words that sort of became taboo within the administration, that if you were using these words or these terminologies that they associate with like DEI, that then that sort of puts you on the list of being cut for federal funding.
And one of those words was like the word fair.
And in an organization that is interested in justice and For in getting innocent people out of prison, the word fair is going to come up quite a bit.
Just it's deprioritized because I think we're considered leftist organizations potentially.
I don't know.
But I know that like I have always thought that innocence and justice were bipartisan issues, and I thought that we had been making great strides in sort of welcoming in both liberal and conservative partners in this ongoing fight.
But because these things disproportionately impact people of color, you're going to see...
Language around that that acknowledges that fact.
And I think that that has been sort of put in...
Innocence organizations are now being put into DEI camps and we're being stripped of funding.
And I think that that's...
I hope that that's an oversight issue and that they're going to recognize the mistake that they're making.
But as it stands right now, innocence organizations, not just the one that I'm associated with, are scrambling to get the funding that they were promised to continue doing, you know.
Doing the things that cost money, like filing all of their work and going through all of the casework and doing the DNA tests and doing investigations to see if you can reach the witnesses that maybe have changed their stories in all these years.
It takes a lot of money and resources to prove a person's innocence.
You have to reinvestigate a case, and we don't have the funding that we used to.
What you would call almost like slush fund NGOs, where they're inappropriately moving funds around and doing stuff.
And I don't know if you've ever seen any of Mike Benz's work, but he essentially says that USAID is really there to do things that are too dirty for the CIA.
So the extraordinary amount of money that was being moved around, there's a certain percentage of it.
And that's what I think we're brushing up against right now.
And as someone who really is, like, just interested in keeping, especially this issue, like, this is a human, like, we all should be on the same side about this.
You know, one of the things through working with Josh and, you know, just through this podcast, we've gotten a lot of people released that were wrongfully convicted.
And, you know, when you go over the amount of corruption that's involved, and I think there's an issue...
With human beings, whenever there's a binary position, a one or a zero, you win or you lose.
And I interviewed them because it was two women who represented him.
And so a lot of people were like, how dare you represent this man as a woman?
How could you?
And their position was, well, we didn't represent him to...
We had him plead guilty to these crimes.
We just feel that everyone deserves to have a defender.
We're defenders.
We represent people in the law.
And they were getting demonized for even taking him on as a client.
And I thought that was interesting because they weren't trying to get him off.
They were just trying to have...
to represent due process and I felt like that was a really interesting case of People confusing what is the role of a defense attorney.
And I think you're right.
Some defense attorneys really don't care if their clients are guilty or innocent because they are also in this adversarial system.
And so they are also in this position of just wanting to win and wanting to make the lives of law enforcement difficult.
And they're willing to throw victims under the bus in the process.
I've had really frank conversations with...
With friends of mine in the innocence world where they talk about how they were trained to just destroy a victim in order to...
Diminish their credibility in court and to really put them in a really bad position so they didn't want to pursue justice for themselves.
And they look back and go, oh my god, I can't believe that that's how I was trained to be a defense attorney.
But that was just part of the game.
And I think that's where this whole course of justice gets completely distorted.
Because it's like, well, what is the point of all of this?
It should be about arriving at the truth.
And then having there be some recognized consequences for acknowledging what really happened.
We need to address the issue, which is somebody got hurt by someone else.
What do we do?
Now what?
And instead it's become, well, I'm on this team, you're on this team, fight, fight, fight, let's see who wins.
And as a result, the whole issue of truth gets distorted and becomes about...
Making the best story that captures the people's attention.
And I think, I mean, that was a huge lesson for me, was realizing that, like, the truth didn't matter.
Like, nobody cared about the truth.
They cared about the story.
And was it a story that spoke to them?
And was it a story that lingered for them?
And that's, you know, an ongoing thing that I write about is like, okay, here's this crazy story that is not true.
That took over my life and that still has this huge role.
Like, I'm still in conversation with that crazy story that was written about me.
And the fact that, like, my entire identity is now wrapped up in the death of my friend that I had nothing to do with and I'll forever be defined by because it's such a captivating story.
What he says, and it's very, again, it goes back to like, what are we telling ourselves?
And what is the cognitive bias?
And I think this is where it gets super interesting.
Because winning is interpreted in some people's minds as doing their duty.
Right?
Like the way that my prosecutor has always...
Talked about it with me is that he maintains that he was doing his duty.
This was his job.
His job was to make a case that made logical sense to him based upon certain premises and then to win that case in court.
That was his job.
That was his duty.
And he believes that he was doing the right thing because that's what he was trained and incentivized to do.
In the same way that, like, you know, journalists, if you ask journalists back who covered the case back in the day, they'll be like, well, we were doing our job.
Our job was to sell the best story that we could to our audience.
Right?
And so that's when it gets, like, fucked up.
Because, like, how have our institutions that we've relied on to be truth-seeking institutions been corrupted from the inside by...
Ultimately, what is a question of money or power?
When politics gets brought into the equation with criminal justice, suddenly your prosecutor is now wanting to win cases, not because they're the right cases to win, but because they want to be elected.
All of that gets...
Distorted and the motivations behind all our institutions become warped.
But if you're in that little echo chamber of a system and that's what your reward structure is, of course that's what you're going to end up delivering if you're somebody who doesn't have the introspection to question, like, okay, wait, what am I doing and what is the point of all of this and do you have certain principles?
But again, the people who rise to the top are maybe the ones who are willing to question those principles in order to achieve certain ends.
And maybe the person who's on the ground has a certain vision for what they want their on-the-ground reporting to do.
But then once it gets in the hands of editors and other editors, it becomes completely warped from the thing that they were originally reporting on because the person who's over here is so divorced from the actual on-the-ground story and they know instead the story that's going to sell.
It's the same sort of distortion when you were talking about prosecutors just trying to win.
It's this thing where, and ultimately, it's...
It's a severe distortion of what the best case scenario is.
The best case scenario is prosecutors don't care about winning.
They care about finding truly guilty people.
And in cases where someone, whether they withhold evidence that could have exonerated an innocent person or whether they distort things or twist things around in order to win.
They should be forever removed from that system.
You should never be allowed to do that.
But Kamala Harris did that and rose to be vice president and almost became president.
In conversations with my prosecutor, how has he convinced himself that he's the good guy?
And how has that changed when I have approached him, not as an adversary, but as someone who is, I wouldn't say, like, tolerant, because I've never put myself in a position of sort of saying, oh, what you did was not a big deal.
Like, when I approached him, I was like, what you did was a big deal, and you were wrong, and you hurt people.
But, like, acknowledging his humanity and the complexity of him and acknowledging that, like, he's not an evil person.
He wrote a whole book about the case and he talked about how when he first arrived at the scene, he immediately knew that it was a conspiracy because he looked at the broken window, how the person had actually broken into our home and said, there's no way, zero chance that a burglar would have broken into a house this way.
He just was like 100% convinced that immediately that the break-in was staged.
And if you take that, if you and your brain truly believe that, then what logically follows is a lot of what he then...
Came up with, well, someone in the house is trying to cover up for a crime that they were involved in.
Who lives in that house?
Well, there are three other girls, one of whom was in Rome, one of whom is another Italian girl who was with her boyfriend and friends, and one of whom is the American girl who was with her boyfriend that night, but who also happened to be the one who called the police and brought attention to the house.
So maybe because we found her at the scene of the crime, all of it sort of starts to make...
So he goes, okay, well, then we discovered that, you know, all of this DNA of the person who actually committed the crime, right?
Like, you know, they finally get the DNA back and it's all pointing to this guy who has a history of breaking and entering and aggression towards women.
And he doesn't go, oh, no, we made a mistake.
He goes, oh, how can now he be involved in this thing that I know Amanda's involved in because I know the break-in was staged.
And, you know, like, so these the this is how a person with good with genuinely good intentions can can have false beliefs that then logic from which one can logically derive.
An insane story that requires, like, him to now believe, like, one of the things that I pointed out to him that just, like, drives me nuts that he continues to, like, somehow hang on to is this idea that I was in a threesome with, like, I was in a three-way relationship with my actual boyfriend, Raffaele, and this burglar, Rudy Gaudet.
And I was like, where are you coming up with that?
And he was like, well...
Whenever I interviewed Rudy, like he talks about interviewing, you know, interrogating Rudy, Rudy always seemed to have affectionate things to say about.
He always seemed to like...
Be interested in you.
And from that, I can logically deduce that you guys had a relationship.
And I was like, I didn't even know his name.
There's no record of us ever communicating with each other.
No one ever saw us hanging out with each other.
What are you talking about?
And he's like, well, if he was involved in the crime and you're involved in the crime and he's sort of talking about you in an affectionate way, then logically...
It makes sense that you were in this three-way relationship with Raphael and Rudy.
And I'm like, that's not true.
And he's like, well, that's what made logical sense to me at the time.
Yeah, I would have to say that I agree that I always wondered where the adults were in the room.
You know, the whole first two years of my imprisonment, I was like, this is all a huge mistake, and it's really obviously a huge mistake, and when are the mommies and daddies going to show up and say, okay, kids, stop your squabbling, let's straighten things out.
It's like, we're all adults now, and this is all we are.
We're just a bunch of screaming toddlers, just screaming at each other constantly.
And here I am now, I feel, in a way, trying to mother my prosecutor through his, you know, psychological tantrums.
Which is a weird position to be in.
Because now that I've, you know, developed the relationship that I've developed with him, I care about him.
I don't think that you can...
I set out to understand him.
I wanted to understand him.
But in the process of really understanding a human being and having them be really open to you, I don't know.
I feel like you inevitably begin to care about this person.
Even in their, you know, flawed fragility as a human being.
And so on the one hand, I'm very angry at him to this day.
And on the other hand, I care about him and I have to give him some props.
He didn't have to respond to me.
He didn't have to meet with me.
He didn't have to sit there and hear me talk about how he had fucked up my life and he shouldn't have.
I did not, like, it's not that, like, me being kind to him does not mean me tolerating injustice.
And it does not mean me not setting boundaries.
And it does not mean me sugarcoating what really happened.
Like, he knows what I think really happened.
And he says, well, you know, we can disagree about our perspectives in some ways.
But ultimately what matters is that you reached out to me.
And in response, I also inevitably came to see you as a human being, and I care about you.
And so in a way, we're still in this awkward dance of one part of us is stuck in that adversarial system, and one part of us is in...
A non-adversary, very accepting of all the things space.
And we're paradoxically existing in both of them at the same time.
And I think that that's just kind of how life is.
One of the paradoxes of life is that if you really just sit down and sit with yourself and your life just the way it is right now.
If you really do, just notice right now, you and me, here we are talking.
We are okay.
You and me, we are good.
And also, there's still fucked up shit in my life, and there's still fucked up shit in your life, and things could be better, and all of those things can be true at the same time.
So I've been cleared of like all the crazy, you know, horrible murder, orgy, all of that stuff cleared.
The thing that remains, and this is just the bane of my fucking existence, is when they cleared me of having anything to do with the crime, they left open the possibility that I was present when the crime occurred.
I believe the reason that they did this was because they wanted to find me guilty of something.
And the thing that they found me guilty of was the way lesser crime on the list of all the crimes that were there, which was slander.
They accused me of knowingly and willingly falsely accusing an innocent person of having committed this crime.
Into implicating myself and my boss, Patrick Lumumba, of committing this crime.
And I immediately retracted it, all of that, but that was one of the things that they were holding me accountable for.
And they, to this day, I am still convicted in Italy of knowingly and willingly...
I would have had to know that he was definitively innocent for this to be the case.
And for that to be true, I would have to be physically present at the crime, even if I was not participating in it.
So the legal standing right now to this day is that I was there.
And that when I was interrogated, I knowingly and falsely accused an innocent person.
I appealed this, by the way, to the European Court of Human Rights, and they ruled in my favor.
They said that because I had been denied the right to have an attorney and an interpreter when I was being interrogated, that I should never have been convicted of that.
And I took that back to Italy.
I took that ruling back to Italy.
They overturned it.
I was actually acquitted of that for a second, but then sent back for retrial recently.
And recently, yeah, this is 18 years later, recently was put back on trial for that.
And all they were ever able to do was prove that I lived in the house that this happened in.
Like, sure, my DNA is in my house.
It's not anywhere near Meredith's body or where the crime occurred.
But they're saying that, like, I was there.
And it's sort of this, like, cyclical sort of reasoning.
Like, Amanda said she was there.
Therefore, she was there.
Therefore, she said she was, you know, like, it's this, like, insane cyclical reasoning.
And I'm at the point where I have to ask myself, like, how do I fight this?
And if so, do I?
And that's where this whole question of freedom comes in.
Like, do I have to definitively, like...
Do I need to definitively prove my innocence in the court of public opinion in order to feel free or to feel like I'm not—regardless of whether I definitively prove my innocence or not, am I ever going to be free of this?
Is this ever going to be not touching me and impacting my life?
And the answer that I've come to— Is, well, no.
In the way that, like, any of our experiences have come to define us as human beings.
And in a way, it's like another way of reframing this is, okay, these are my credentials now.
Like, I went to the—I didn't go to four years of master's degree in poetry.
I got a master's degree in— Whatever this is, I'm being fucked.
And I've learned things from this.
I've learned things about the criminal justice system.
I can see things that need to be fixed that are really common sense fixes to.
There is no reason why we shouldn't be just recording.
Any kind of communication, like any time that anyone is being questioned by anyone in law enforcement, there's no reason why we shouldn't be recording it.
And I'm not talking about even just suspects because, like, there's been a whole, you know, world of advocacy around, like, recording interrogations, right?
Like, custodial interrogations and especially...
Making it so that police officers can't lie to you when you're being interrogated, because that was a huge thing that impacted me as a young, confused, overwhelmed human being, is police lying to me and telling me that they have proof that I was there when the crime occurred, and it made me feel like I was insane.
And so the problem of police lying to you is not just that it's a bullying technique, but it warps your sense of reality and you start to question yourself.
And so there's psychological research to show that...
There are very negative consequences for police lying to you during interrogation.
But at the very least, if you record it, you can sort of track how that is impacting a person who is a suspect.
The Wild West of all of this is eyewitnesses or anyone else who is being questioned by police because there's no Miranda rights.
As a person who is being questioned by police, you don't really have...
Like you don't you don't have like one of the things that they say in my case is that I never had the right to an attorney because I wasn't a suspect.
I was a witness.
And so like to this day in Italy, there's like this resistance to the idea that I was like coerced into.
I was that I was even interrogated at all because there's this like little loophole where they say, oh, you weren't interrogated.
You were interviewed.
Oh, you weren't interviewed.
You were questioned.
They just changed the language.
But what's ultimately happening is the same thing.
You are stuck in a room with a law enforcement officer who may or may not be lying to your face and bullying you.
And you don't know if you're free or not to go because the door is closed and it doesn't feel like it.
And so...
For me, I think that if you consider how many wrongful convictions happen because of misidentification by witnesses or the number of times that, like, witnesses say, well, I wasn't really sure that it was him, but the police sort of coaxed me or...
Pressured me into saying it was him and sort of made it known to me that it was him.
Like there are lots of things that are happening behind closed doors that we really don't have an excuse for not fixing when every single one of us has a recording device in our pocket at all times.
And the amount of resistance to like getting just really common sense changes like that to happen from like law enforcement lobbies is just...
So frustrating as someone who, like, shows up again and again and again to, like, try to make—because it seems like this adversarial thing.
Like, we're all on the same side.
It's not, like, victims' rights versus defendants' rights.
It's not law enforcement versus, you know, innocence.
It's, like, we're all on the same page.
Why can't we just acknowledge a true thing?
That's been one of my biggest frustrations in this world is, like, feeling like— We should all be on the same side and we should be making common sense changes and That don't you know, that's the way the system is structured.
You know, there's two sides trying to win and When you lose you don't like to lose right so people would cheat to win But like lose what are you losing?
You know playing a game.
Yeah, I mean it's your life and it's other people's lives.
It's innocent people's lives But it's also guilty people's lives.
And the feeling that you have to, in order to do the right thing, you just have to switch sides, that really bothers me.
Also because one thing that I would love to see more of is more of a collaboration between victims' rights advocates and innocents' rights advocates.
But, like, oftentimes you see us sort of pitted against each other as if, like, you know, I've always felt that the criminal justice system never did enough for victims.
That, like, the only compensation that victims are really given is the idea that you're going to punish the perpetrator.
And I've always wanted to know how is the system going to...
Help the victim rebuild their life and take back and, like, reclaim what can be reclaimed of their experience and be uplifted.
I mean, it's a lot of stuff that I write about in the book, actually.
One of the things that my goal with this book was to try to Yes, what happened to me is like, oh, crazy story happened to a girl one time.
But also there are universal lessons and truths that I've derived from my experience that make me – and when I communicate them, they make me feel less ostracized or less singled out as a human being.
And one of those is there is opportunity in every tragedy.
What my tragedy challenged me to do was to not be broken by it.
And my definition of being broken by it was coming out of it a person who was angry and embittered and diminished by this experience.
And the rebellious side of me was like, fuck that.
What matters to me?
What matters to me is the truth and is compassion.
Curiosity, compassion.
Those are things that I genuinely care about.
And having the courage to approach human beings and situations that are painful and that are wrong with the open.
That is what I wanted to define me.
I did not want this horrible experience to define me on its terms.
I wanted to define me on my own terms.
And I think the challenge that any one of us has is...
Remembering what even our terms are when we're feeling sort of overwhelmed with the existential crisis of it all.
And I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they are stuck, they are fixated, they dwell on the life that they should have lived.
Instead of acknowledging and accepting that this is the life that they are living.
And when you are acting in the world as if...
You are living the life that you should have lived.
You are inevitably becoming ineffective.
Like if I were to approach the world and be like, my prosecutor never should have done this to me and I never should have gone to prison and people never should have villainized me in the press, I would just find myself debilitated, utterly debilitated by the fact that reality is other than that.
And I would just find myself angry and...
And bitter about it all.
And instead, I go, well, all of that happened.
Now what?
And by accepting reality and life as it is, I can now become a more effective agent in my life.
I don't want to live my life acting and feeling and thinking in ways that are not going to be effective.
And so instead, what happens in the radical acceptance of it all?
I'm not trying to be Christian about it.
I'm just trying to, like, not be the completely and utterly overwhelmed and disempowered person that I was when I was in prison.
Like, I lost so much.
I had so little control of my life.
And I think in the end, all of us do.
I feel like I weirdly had a midlife crisis when I was 20 because my entire life fell apart.
Or I was put on this track, this train that just like left the station and was going on its own and there was really nothing I could do to stop it.
Well, he's a kind of a victim in a way because he shouldn't have had the kind of power that he had.
There's no way to tell.
There's no checks and balances that are put in place to make sure a person's ego is not overwhelming them to the point where their initial idea of a conspiracy.
I think that is a scary trap that victims can fall into is like how you then become self-destructive in your own mind as a result of someone having been destructive towards you.
I think that is the deepest tragedy of hurt is how it can then become implosive.
I did not want to implode.
I was scared to implode.
I saw a lot of people around me in prison imploding.
And I think what's a really interesting thing for me is discovering what can come from approaching someone recognizing that.
When I approached him, I approached him in a really unconventional way, right?
Like, I'm trying to find common ground with this person.
I'm deeply, genuinely curious about this person.
I am primed to feel compassion for this person because that is just the mental and intentional space that I put myself in, in approaching him.
And the surprising dividends that arise from that.
Because I think everyone...
Is evolving.
No one is static.
Even he is on his own journey.
He's on his own path.
And I'm not in control of his path.
But that doesn't mean that I can't be a very compelling influence of all the people in the world who could be nice to him and have that have an impact on him.
Me.
And like recognizing, like I didn't really fully comprehend that until I sat down with him.
And like I sort of in my mind, I realized what it looked like from my position.
Like here's this person who had this overwhelming impact on my life.
And to this day, like, continually, like, this story that he made up, like, took over my life and continues to take over my life.
Like, this is what I'm going to live with for the rest of my life.
It's because of him.
This person who has had this outsized influence on my well-being and my personhood and my existence.
I walk away from that encounter realizing that his well-being depends on me much more so than my well-being depends on him.
And I think because deep down, he understands that there is this dynamic that, you know, whatever stories he can tell himself about what happened.
He was the one who was in power, and I was the one who went to prison.
And for me to be kind to him, I didn't have to do that.
He had never had it happen before.
It was unheard of.
And as a spiritual person, he experienced it in a spiritual way.
Me.
I came out of that experience feeling like a fucking superhero.
I have never felt more powerful in my life than when I sat across from him and was kind to him.
And it didn't matter what he said or what he did because I showed up.
And I was not expecting that to happen.
That was not how I expected to feel.
It surprised me.
But, like, it had such an impact on me that I felt like I had discovered something about trauma and about healing and about people and dynamics and in a world that is so conflicted and where the people are, you know, not building bridges, they're blowing them up.
I was like, I wanted to remind people of what happens when you take a chance and you take a stand.
Negativity always, no matter what, leaves you with this residue, this like icky, even if you're correct, just like slime that's on, this psychic slime that's on you, no matter what.
And that's your power, that you could sit across this person and treat them with compassion.
And that's why you felt that way.
Have you ever felt that way?
I've never had anything remotely like your situation.
I don't think you have to have as devastating of a situation.
To, like, be in a position to know that you're doing the right thing in a moment.
Like, for instance, when my husband got up in his whitey-tidies and walked down the stairs to put himself between me and his family and this crazy guy, I feel like maybe he felt that in that moment.
Like, total clarity of purpose.
And it didn't really matter what happened because he was doing...
The thing that had to be done in that moment.
And there was no confusion.
I think that, like, when I talk about it with him today, like, to this day, he's just like, I was just not confused.
I just knew exactly what I needed.
I didn't even think.
It was that flow state, even, that they talk about in, like, Tao, when, like, you and the universe are moving in the exact, in sync.
Confidence is an objective analysis of all the facts.
Doing the right thing, having a rock-solid ethical and moral foundation, and knowing you're doing the right thing, and knowing you can do it, that's confidence.
What he had was ego.
People were in a position like that where people's freedom...
Hangs on your decisions and what you do and what you don't do.
And then you do it for so many years and you see so many people prosecuted.
You just get calloused about it.
You see it with doctors.
Where doctors, you know, they have this...
Some, not all.
Some doctors develop this very...
Callous feeling whether someone lives or dies.
They don't care anymore.
They're so used to people dying.
There's doctors that do surgeries that are completely unnecessary just because they want the money.
We were talking the other day about this guy who is an oncologist who treated people with chemotherapy who did not have cancer because he wanted the money.
And he was convicted.
It was like, I think it was some insane number of people took this horrible poison to try to kill the cancer inside of them and ruin their lives.
You could go darker with medical transition of children.
You know, this whole...
Gender-affirming care thing where you're taking young kids and convincing them they need to be chemically castrated or physically castrated.
There's a lot of weirdness in the world.
Evil's a real thing.
And the motivation to do these things can be very hidden and masked with all sorts of incentives and the structure in which this institution was sort of created.
And that's the world we're living in.
And it's not a good world.
It's not a perfect world.
It's not like, this is ideal.
This is how it should be.
No, it's not like that.
Money is a weird fucking thing.
Money and power are two very, very weird things.
And without some sort of a higher power that you call upon or some sort of a higher power that you are beholden to and that you have to answer to, it's very difficult for people to make Decisions if they know they're not going to get caught.
If they know they're not going to get in trouble.
If you're a prosecutor and you're beyond reproach and all you have to do is...
You know, my book's been out for a month or so now.
And I'm also, you know, working on, I don't know if you knew this, I have a Hulu show that I'm working on that's based on my life.
Yeah, Monica is executive producing it.
Monica Lewinsky is executive producing it.
And I'm really proud of it.
It's coming out at the end of the summer, late summer.
But one of the responses that I've had to my book and to the news that I'm telling my story in this way or in another way, and I write about this in the book, is this question of, do I have the right to tell my story?
So some people are very explicit and say, like, don't you think you shouldn't be doing this when the Kircher family's lawyer says that you shouldn't be doing this and that it's offensive?
Because you didn't die like all those other people that were inside of it.
That's ridiculous.
It's still your life.
It's still your real lived reality.
And the lawyer for the family that's telling you that you shouldn't be talking about it, fuck that guy too.
That's crazy.
That's a crazy position.
You can't listen to that.
You're going to get the most preposterous takes because you're dealing with something that millions of people are commenting on.
So the idea that every one of them is going to be a rational position, that's not real.
People are silly.
Like, people are weird.
They have crazy takes on everything.
There's all sorts of personal justifications and mental illness and there's people who hate women and there's people that, you know, whatever.
Law enforcement's always right.
You're always going to have ridiculous takes if you get a billion takes on things.
That's your world.
No, you shouldn't be struggling with that at all.
That's crazy.
Anybody who says you shouldn't be talking about it, but of course you should be, because there's a lot to be learned.
There's a lot to be learned from, first of all, the admirable positions that you've taken, the way you've formed your life and who you are as a human being because of your struggle, because of this insane experience that you had to go through at fucking 20 years old.
Your brain's not even fully formed.
It's insane.
Your frontal cortex is not fully formed.
And for someone to say that you're not the real victim, well, that's crazy.
That's crazy.
That's a stupid position.
We shouldn't be conflicted in any way, shape or form about that.
And I think there's a great deal that we can learn from your experiences.
First of all, again, learn from the way that you've handled it, where you can sit across from that prosecutor and...
This feeling of like being kind to this person who did this thing to you how it made you empowered I really do think that's the universe telling you you're on the right track You just can't listen to the peanut gallery.
You can't listen to all the noise There's just too much noise and you have to learn how to do that on a much lesser scale I see that with friends who are famous, who read comments about them, read articles, and get infuriated.
It ruins vacations because they have to type up a response.
I wonder if the fear is, and maybe this is my fear because I'm always questioning myself, is like, is there, I always want to like at least hear it and like cycle the thought through my mind so that I can test the validity of it in my mind.
It's like, why are you doing what you're doing with your life?
Like, why do you do a podcast?
Why do you do comedy?
Why do you do anything?
Why do you do what you do?
So the best way I approach it is I do it because I love what I do.
I'm intrigued.
I'm curious.
And I do my best.
Always do my best.
Now, if I half-ass something, It will haunt me.
If I have a bad podcast interview, if I think I interrupted too much or if I didn't ask the right questions, that will fuck with me for the rest of the day.
I don't need other people to fuck with me.
I fuck with myself.
I really do.
So the best response to that is do better every time.
I think one of the things that I worry about is that people only feel safe.
Mm-hmm.
and a weakness.
But I feel like the only way to be truly ethical is to be exposed in that way.
Cynicism and self-righteousness are shields.
They are ways of approaching the Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
And so I can't promise anyone that doing things my way, which is like really trying to like push back against those impulses, which I recognize as being dangerous impulses, is going to necessarily lead to good things.
Your job is for you, for your soul, whoever you are.
It's to speak to what is the right path for you.
You don't have to promise these people.
This is the burden of being a public figure.
Like, you're not a role model for all these people.
If you are a role model for these people because they find you admirable, that's great.
But your responsibility is to yourself.
Your responsibility is to your own mind and the people that you come in contact with.
So your responsibility is not to, like, say, like, don't be cynical, be kind, and, oh, it didn't work out for you.
Oh, fuck, I fucked up.
It's me.
It's on me.
No, it's on them.
It's on them.
Everyone has their own soul, their own mind, their own path.
And you have to find out what's right for you.
In doing what you're doing, you are most certainly a role model.
And you most certainly will be a role model, including me.
I find myself admiring.
Like, when we had the first podcast, I thought about it for a long time.
I would think about it all throughout the day sometimes, like, randomly.
I would just think about...
So imagining myself in your position and how would I be?
I don't know.
I can't answer it.
But I admire the position that you've taken.
I think it's incredible.
I think it's a great example to the world of what's possible.
If someone is thrust into a horrible position, it's totally beyond their control.
But what is in your control?
What's in your control is how you respond to it.
And how you responded to it was incredibly admirable.
That's your responsibilities to yourself, and you did a great job with it, a fantastic job.
Exemplary.
I don't think there's anybody else that I could point to that's ever been through anything even remotely close to what you've been through and come out the way you have.
The only examples that maybe I could point to are some of the people that I've dealt with through Josh.
Where we brought people in that were wrongly accused, that went through these horrible incarcerations and came out on the other side.
These incredibly well-read, brilliant, articulate people that are so thoughtful and so introspective and then made that time in prison empower them.
I've met very incredible people who have made the most of a bad situation, which ultimately that's what it comes down to.
I guess my one pushback might be that I have come to realize that we are so interconnected.
Like, we are all...
Yes.
constantly.
And so on the one hand, yes, I'm only answerable ultimately to myself.
But when I really sit down and sit with it, part of the reason why I was able to approach my prosecutor with the perspective that I had was realizing that there is a fluidity between us and all of us where we're all influencing each other
And people in his life have now, like, the influences in his life, people I will never have met have had direct influences in my life because it's been, like, this fluid path, like, this connectedness between me and him, me and you.
Any person we talk to, any person we encounter is going to then have this ripple effect.
And so, on the one hand, yes, like, I'm a drop.
But I'm also a drop in an ocean that has a ripple effect, and that ripple is going to interact with your ripple and all these other ripples.
And so, yes, I am answerable to myself, but I also feel like I can't ignore the potential impact that my ripple might have on another person.
And I've been really rewarded in the way that I have...
I've had someone tell me that they didn't kill themselves because one day they heard me in an interview and that they were going to kill themselves and they didn't.
I've had someone tell me that.
I never in my wildest dreams thought that me just deciding to have a conversation with someone one day on a podcast would save a human being's life.
But those are those The interconnected fluidness of all of us that I also can't discount.
But what we are, we're being real people, publicly.
So we're thinking publicly, you know?
That is very beneficial to other people that are thinking privately because you get to hear people think publicly and especially a person like you that's very exemplary and that I would love if more people could follow that line of thinking and your example.
It's a beautiful example of someone who did nothing wrong but had wrong done to them and came out a better person because of it.
And that's...
It's not just inspirational.
It's aspirational.
It provides the universe with positive energy.
In a weird way, the human universe, I mean.
And this thing that you said I think is very important.
People protect themselves with cynicism and with...
People that constantly want to criticize things, they're constantly criticizing things.
The flag of moral virtue that you're waving to show that you're better than other people.
But in doing so, you're attacking that person, which is inherently evil.
Like you're using this justification that you're correct to try to ruin someone's lives or ruin someone's reputation or ruin someone's feelings, to hurt them that day, to reach out to them and attack.
And it's almost always based on a feeling of personal inadequacy, almost always based on your life is not what you want.
You know, people leaving horrible comments on someone's Instagram page or Twitter page, there's no way you're living the life that you want to live.
There's no way that you're in an ideal situation of love and harmony and success and, you know, you have great friends and life is amazing.
There's no way!
There's no way!
If you're typing those things, there's no way.
It's a human flaw and it's accentuated by this disconnect that comes with social media.
This disconnect of being able to send a message to someone and have no consequences and no social cues not to see the person read it and get hurt by it.
For other people if you are talking and speaking publicly.
Just don't do that.
It's not good for you.
It doesn't help anybody.
Hurting someone that you don't even know, that doesn't help you.
You should be—you have—I always try to—this is what I tell my friends when I talk about reading comments and reading things and engaging with social media because— I have friends where it will ruin their week, ruin their day.
Like one comment will fuck them up and they'll come to me and talk to me about it.
I'm like, listen, I want you to think about your mind and your attention like it's a number.
Like you have energy and like a battery, right?
Or bandwidth that's on a broadband cable.
You have 100 units.
If you're spending 30 units of your precious time concentrating on someone who's saying something that's not even true, that's mean and horrible, and it's the worst possible, least charitable position on you.
You're robbing yourself of these precious units of attention.
You have a hundred units.
Your hundred units should be all on loved ones and friends and things that you love to do and life.
That's what your units should be used for.
If some of that sneaks in and it resonates and you go, oh my god, they're right.
Well, fucking correct it.
Figure out what you did.
Don't do that anymore.
It sounds so simple, but that's it.
If you are doing something that people are rightly criticizing, recognize it.
Of course, correct.
This is where friends are supposed to come at play.
Your friends are supposed to be able to tell you, Amanda.
And it's coming, like their criticism is coming from a loving place instead of an attacking place.
Exactly.
And so how do we get back to communicating with each other, not from an adversarial place, which automatically instigates defensiveness and sort of refusal to acknowledge anything.
Whitney actually was the one who first introduced me to stand-up.
She, like...
I love Whitney, by the way.
Can we just gush about Whitney for a second?
And I love the fact that we both have small kids at the same time.
And I just love her.
And so she was the one who first recognized, like, this girl's been through some shit.
I bet she's fucking funny.
And, you know...
It befriended me after I got on her podcast.
And then when she did the roast of Whitney Cummings for OnlyFans, I was her, like, special surprise guest.
And I got to do a little bit of a roast of her and a little bit of myself, right?
Like, of course, the one place that I can finally get my comedic, you know, true self out there is on OnlyFans of all things.
And, you know, I get to be, you know, when I go this Saturday, I get to be the ex-con mom on the menu.
And that's a Pornhub search.
You know, like I get to like lean in to the tragedy of it all.
But it then goes back to that question of do people stick you into boxes or are you allowed to be more than what people expect you to be?
And I've, you know, in the past, not from my my own community, but from strangers received criticism for making jokes about.
My experience.
And again, coming from that place of how dare you joke about going to prison for a crime you didn't commit when you're not the real victim and whatever.
Or you're a true crime figure.
You're a...
You're a person who has been—I associate you with a tragedy, therefore you have to stay in tragedy space, and moving into comedic space is not allowed.
And so I'm just curious what your thoughts are about that.
Even my own wife jokes around about it because when my kids were really little, there was one time where my wife wanted to go to Disneyland and I said, I can't.
I have to do a podcast.
She goes, no, you want to do a podcast.
I go, no, I have to.
I told the people that I was going to do it, so I have to do it.
Like, the only people worth talking to are going to be in L.A. Also, I was like, I would rather be broke and not live under the thumb of retarded government than stay in L.A. and have a successful career.
Like, fuck you.
I'll just do stand-up and travel the country and just live in the middle of it.
I'm not doing this anymore.
I mean, you can't tell me I can't work.
You can't tell me I can't go out.
You can't tell me I have to put a mask on when I'm walking the dog.
Fuck you.
Like, the whole thing was just like, I'm out.
I'm getting out of here.
Austin was a crazy risk.
Opening up a comedy club.
Everybody's always told me.
I've always told people, be nice to comedy club owners because you don't want to be one of them.
You want to deal with us?
You want to deal with a bunch of fucking crazy people?
And what you're doing is stealing bandwidth from yourself.
That 100 units, you're now spending 30 units criticizing other people who aren't even thinking about you.
Ha ha.
Ha ha.
Doing it to yourself.
Not only that, but when you're doing it publicly, everybody knows what you're doing.
Anybody who's really worth considering.
Who's an intelligent, objective person knows exactly what your motivation is.
They know why you're doing it.
The least charitable takes on things and the worst possible light that you're shining on things and the worst descriptions of people.
You know what you're doing.
You're just trying to make up for the fact that you've fallen short.
You don't like how your path has gone and you see someone All of a sudden she's doing comedy now?
Fuck that.
You know?
She shouldn't be doing comedy.
These hot takes that people have while they're on antidepressants and their whole fucking world's in a tizzy.
Like, shut up.
You don't have to listen.
But it's okay that they talk.
It's okay.
It's like part of the learning experience of human culture.
Like, civilization has to have a bunch of fucking people talking about stuff, and a bunch of it's noise, and it's up to you to figure out what's noise.
And, like, well, then you see someone who's not noise, and who's someone who's living an exemplary life, and go, okay.
That's not noise.
Okay, what's in that?
What's in that?
Like, oh, she met with a prosecutor.
Wow.
And she felt empowered.
You know how people are going to listen to what you just said about that?
And just like, when they're alone, like throughout the day, when they're driving their car, when they're sitting on the train, they're going to think about that.
They're the ones who are deciding to go straight downhill.
It's hard.
And then you have all these things.
Once you've sort of created a life...
And you have all these pieces in motion, and then you realize, like, oh my god, this is, like, kind of beyond my control, and I don't like where it's going, but everything's still moving.
It takes a lot to pull that back, and you kind of have to slow it down in stages, you know?
You have to, like, throw things off the side of the car.
Like, what's going—got to get rid of this, got to get rid of that.
You're going to have to cut people out of your life sometimes.
Sometimes it's people.
Sometimes certain people, they're not going to learn.
And I think, you know, the universe provides them as an example of how not to live, but also as a puzzle that you need to solve.
If this person is continually bringing negative things into your life and continually tripping you up and sabotaging you, you have to, at a certain point in time, separate yourself.
You have to.
You know, you've got to ghost people.
As horrible as that seems.
Because you don't have enough time.
There's not enough time in the world.
Your time is very precious.
And if people don't want to help themselves, you can't help them.
There's something, again, one of those weird, unintended consequences of just trying to sit back and take stock is rediscovering parts of yourself that have been sort of diminished or made dormant because of the stress of existence.
My friend Duncan has some very bizarre theories about that.
I'm very drawn to that.
I do, though.
It's just I do it while I'm doing other things.
I've always said that martial arts is a form of moving meditation because it's so singular in its focus that it requires all of your thoughts and it cleanses your mind.
There's this repeatable technique that you have to do.
It involves breathing and focus and concentration.
And there's actually a whole process that I go through.
There's this guy named Joel Turner who is a...
He was a SWAT instructor and a lead guy in hostage situations where, you know, someone would, like, have a child hostage.
You had to shoot the guy who was, like, holding a knife to a child.
He's had situations like that where you have to be completely focused on the task.
And so he developed this process of...
Talking yourself through a shot with this.
You have these words that you say and you repeat in your mind while you're going through all of these various techniques.
So when you're drawing a bow back, you draw back.
You have to anchor.
So you put this string in a very particular part of your mouth every time.
My knuckle.
This finger goes underneath my jaw in the exact same spot every time.
My elbow goes up in the exact same spot and then it's staying still.
And concentrating on the target and pulling through.
And you can't think about anything else.
It's so overwhelming that you have to focus...
If you want to be accurate, you have to focus only on that.
And in doing so, the world just goes away.
The world goes away because it requires so much of you.
Martial arts is the same thing.
Like, if you're doing jujitsu...
And you and this person are trying to solve each other's puzzle, and you're essentially trying to kill each other, but in a friendly way, like your friends, because you can tap out.
You don't hurt each other.
You can't be thinking about your bills.
You can't be thinking about an argument you got in this.
Why did my dog shit on the rug?
You can't be thinking about those things.
You have to be completely focused on what you're doing.
And in that way, like, jujitsu people are some of the calmest, most chilled out people you will ever meet in your life.
First of all, because they get all of their aggression out.
Like, all the unnecessary aggression that people carry around with them.
And I also always feel like whenever I'm feeling really shitty psychologically, I need to go for a run.
Yes.
Do you find...
So here's my question.
Given that that is your meditative practice, Do you find that in the moment that you release the bow and that becoming one and that flow state that you have entered into in order to perfectly align yourself with the bow and the arrow, Does that moment of release ever result in some kind of unconscious processing coming into your consciousness?
So like some kind of a new awareness of something that you've been trying to figure out?
Do you ever find yourself, like, in the moment that you are, like, immediately exiting that flow state?
Do you feel more clarity about your life or what you need to do?
Or that thing that you weren't thinking about, like, your To-do list or your bills or that argument that you've had with somebody that you care about, like, does anything come into focus or do you find you walk away from an encounter in jiu-jitsu like knowing, not just feeling better emotionally, but like knowing what you need to do next?
Yeah, I guess one of the benefits that I get from meditation is feeling like when I come out of meditation, I feel like I have a clarity of purpose that I might not have had because I was...
I had monkey mind, and I was distracted, and I was using my bandwidth with so much, and so you just tune down what your bandwidth is paying attention to, and then you re-enter the world with a renewed sense of clarity, and you're not as distracted.
That I do think is a genuine thing and a genuine difference is it's easier for me to be nurturing in the sense that like no one would bat an eye if I saw a kid who was like, I couldn't figure out where their mom was, and I were to approach them and say, come here, honey, let me help you.
As a man, do you second...
I know that my husband has told me this, that he second guesses hanging out at...
You know, with the kids at the park because someone might think that he's a pedophile.
You could find yourself motivated by the wrong things and doing things for the wrong reasons, like doing things just for money and just for this or just for that.
And I've done that before.
I know it.
but then you have to realize what you're doing and And stay focused on the prize, yeah.
Take the steps to not wanna do that anymore.
But it's like, There's people listening to this right now, like, oh, that's easy for you to say, because I have to do this and I have to do that.
That's true.
But you can do things to better your life with your free time.
Go open your phone right now and look at your screen time.
Okay.
Now, I understand the screen time is 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there.
But that screen time...
It's probably about five hours, which is crazy.
That's five hours you could have been improving your life.
That's five hours you could have been doing something different.
That's five hours you could have went to the gym.
That's five hours you could have eaten better.
You could have taken steps to have better food in your house.
You could have taken steps to pursue a career or move in the direction of pursuing something that's different than what you're doing that you would actually find satisfying and fulfilling.
You just have to decide, what are you doing with your time?
And, you know, this goes back to people commenting and bitching at people online.
Well, that's what you're doing.
If you're distracting yourself by doing a bunch of shit that's just worthless, and it is worthless.
I'm just curious about, like, brain chemistry, because when I think about, you know, you've been very complimentary towards me in this conversation, but a part of me is wondering, am I just lucky that I have the kind of internal chemistry that I have that makes me value the things that I value?
And, you know, I'm just doing what I feel compelled to do.
I'm curious when people feel compelled to do otherwise, and I don't know where to place responsibility for that.
You could look to your own life, to times where you haven't lived in an exemplary way or done things where you're helping yourself.
And done things, in fact, that are actually sabotaging your life.
And you can correct them yourself.
But it's very hard.
I mean, you would have to be a fucking counselor that would have ultimate truth access to a person's thought processes to really find out why they're doing things differently and why they're not living in a way.
The only thing you can do is live by example.
You know, there's a term for a Taekwondo instructor.
I think that's the gift that I have gotten by being famous.
That I have to live publicly.
And if I didn't, like if I was just some fucking tyrant that no one knew, you know, and I just had all this wealth and power and no one knew me and I could just get away with being an asshole.
You know, I've had a bunch of them on, a bunch of people on that were famous when they were young and they all are missing something.
It's like when you're making cement and you don't add enough water.
There's like something that happens when you have fame and adulation during your developmental stages as a child when you're supposed to be like figuring out how do I get people to like me?
And that is that developmental stage when your brain chemistry is being configured for the rest of your life.
That is scary.
You want to put that brain chemistry coagulation in the right configuration, in the right set of circumstances, or else you're going to be having a complex for the rest of your life that you're going to be grappling with, because I don't know if you can undo.
The stuff that gets ingrained in your brain chemistry when you're a kid.
I don't know anything.
I don't think you can.
But it seems to me that especially developmentally, when your brain hasn't configured yet, that's when you get hardwired to have complexes the rest of your life that you're going to be dealing with.
And then you have this parasitic relationship that your parents have to you, which is, I have friends that were famous as young people, and they have these very fucked up, complicated relationships with their parents.
One of my friends found out their parents stole from them millions of dollars.
Yeah.
And then you have to grapple with that as you're an adult.
These monsters, you know, they used you as an ATM machine.
And they stopped working, and they became your quote-unquote manager, really just pushing you out there to try to siphon money off of you.
It was moved around a lot, didn't have a lot of friends, got bullied, a lot of different things.
But it wasn't the worst.
Nothing horrible happened to me.
So it's like the trials can't be too hard.
They can't break you.
They have to be just enough so that you...
Gain some strength and you rebuild.
And if they do break you, then it's a very difficult task of rebuilding.
And people that have gone through horrible childhood trauma, particularly abuse and sexual abuse, that they have the most difficult hurdles to overcome.
But I do know some people that have gone through childhood sexual trauma that are also incredibly fascinating people because they figured out a way to acquire strength through it all.
But that's a good thing, because a lot of people don't have your intentions in mind, especially if you're a woman.
If you're a woman, everybody's bullshitting you to try to get in your pants.
It's constant bullshitting.
So you have to figure out, well, who's actually bullshitting me, and who's just being nice, and who's being nice but kind of bullshitting, just slowly playing this game.
Yeah, that's actually been a really sort of fun takeaway that I've had from having just an Instagram is, like, I'll post a silly video of me dancing for my kids.
And a lot of the comments are just people being like, I'm so glad that someone like you...
Because you could defend yourself against someone who doesn't know how to fight as good as me, but the odds of someone like me attacking you are very, very, very, very, very small.
No, the right way to fight is the right way to fight, period.
Whether it's some drunk dude.
If some drunk dude tries to take a swing at me, I'm not going to think, oh, he's a drunk dude.
I shouldn't avoid this punch.
I should do something.
No, it's all the language.
So martial arts is essentially like a language.
And some people only know a couple of words, and some people can eloquently recite Shakespeare at the drop of a hat.
And that's the difference between an expert and someone who doesn't really know what they're doing.
And most people don't know what they're doing when it comes to martial arts.
If you're preparing for someone who doesn't know what they're doing...
That's not the right way to do it.
The right way to do it is to prepare for someone who knows what they're doing.
Now, this is very different when we're talking about women's self-defense versus just a grown man who is of normal size defending himself against another grown man of normal size.
But in a fair fight, you should be preparing to fight against a trained killer.
If you are a person who just only trains in self-defense tactics, like someone comes at me, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.
Good luck doing that to someone who knows how to fight.
Good luck.
Because they're going to recognize all of your movements in advance.
You're going to go like this, and they're going to go, oh, his right arm is coming this way, so I'm just going to step this way, and I'm going to avoid that.
And I see his left foot step backwards.
Well, now his right leg is vulnerable, so I'm going to kick it.
It's language.
It's understanding the flow of body dynamics and movement.
Do you think that fighting your friends, not like actual fighting for your life, but fighting for your friends is a crucial part of brain development?
Because I know that I've heard, or at least I've read, that roughhousing with small kids is a really important part of their brain development.
And the people who become more well-adapted, well-adjusted emotionally, they seem to be more fit emotionally, were kids who had some roughhousing when they were young, especially with their parents.
Is that like an elevated form of roughhousing part of a generation?
That's why they're trying to intimidate people and hurt people.
It's because they're weak.
It's like trained fighters are some of the nicest people.
People that fight in the UFC, they're some of the nicest people you'll ever meet.
It sounds crazy.
My friends that are all jiu-jitsu people, they're some of the nicest people.
They're so friendly.
Because they're not scared.
They're not insecure.
They're not vulnerable all the time.
Most men who don't know how to defend themselves, who are really mouthy and get loud, they're just vulnerable.
I have a friend.
And he has real rage problems, and he doesn't know how to fight at all.
And he was yelling at someone in the parking lot of the comedy store once, and I pulled him aside and I go, "What are you doing, man?" He goes, "I don't know why I fucking see red." And I go, "You don't know how to defend yourself." I go, "One of these days you're gonna do that to someone who's like me, but they're mean." And they're gonna just say, "Oh, here's a nice opportunity to just fuck this guy up." And you're going to wind up in the hospital or worse.
Like, don't do this.
Like, you can't do that.
But, like, some men grow up puffing their chest out and they get away with it.
And they get away with it if they're loud enough or they're mean enough or they yell enough.
And they, you know, that becomes their defense mechanism.
They get shitty with people all the time.
But that's all it is.
And if they don't get shitty with people publicly, they get shitty with people online.
They get it out that way.
But it's all just weakness.
That's all it is.
It's just like you're vulnerable.
And just don't be vulnerable.
Figure out a way to not be vulnerable.
I got into martial arts because I was getting bullied.
And I was always scared of altercations.
Like, I hate this feeling.
So I was like, okay, I'm going to become what I'm terrified of.
I guess my thing is, for me, it's less about, like, positioning myself to not get hurt.
And it's more, for me, my big sort of, like, training that I attempt to do is how do I get up when I am inevitably hurt?
I understand that life is going to hurt me, and I don't know how life is going to hurt me.
So there's like a million different ways that I can be hurt.
It might be that I'm physically assaulted.
It might be some other thing.
And knowing that I can't prepare for all of the ways that I am vulnerable to existence, instead I try to think, okay, I am vulnerable to existence, and I am going to get hurt.
How do I not be broken by the hurt?
And how do I, I don't know, maybe I'm treating the inevitable pain of life as that training to get strong.
I almost don't seek out pain because I've had enough pain come at me.
You were talking about like voluntary adversity, right?
And like to an extent I agree with you because that's a very stoic thing to do, to seek out challenges so that you can test yourself and test your mettle and push yourself to become better for the inevitable things that might happen.
I think maybe this is another woman-man thing, maybe, where women have to accept vulnerability as an inescapable aspect of our lives, even just in our interpersonal relationships.
I know that when I walk into the room, I'm...
Not the one who's gonna win a fight, that's for sure.
It's part of what you're doing when you're working out really hard is to try to increase the strength and decrease the vulnerability.
You're trying to increase your resolve to...
Push through difficult things.
Increase your character and your will.
You're trying to fortify yourself.
And that's not bad.
It's all positive.
It's all positive.
But it gets labeled as negative because there's a lot of things that get attached to it like jocks and bullies and assholes and aggressive men and shitty men.
Like, you know, the more that you now that I have the privilege of being a mom, I know that one day, you know, like if something were to happen to my kids, I would be all the more fucking dead, like all the more pain in my life.
Like if I'd never had kids, I wouldn't have the opportunity to experience a potential pain that would be utterly devastating.
And so like that's that's where that play goes in my head.
And I just wonder if it's a trauma response where like I'm afraid.
So you want it to fall apart so that you can achieve some level of comfort in the understanding of this state that you've been in many times before, the state of failure.
Even a guy like Goggins, you know, he told me, and he goes, sometimes I stare at my fucking shoes for like 30 minutes before I put those motherfuckers on.
He goes, because he's like, I don't want to do this.
Now, everyone, if there's anything I've learned from being a mom, it's that everyone, every human being, is a toddler.
Every single person is a toddler who either hasn't gotten enough attention or hasn't had their nap, whatever the fuck, and they're just having a tantrum.
And if you treat everyone like a toddler, it is actually a very successful way of interacting with people.