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Hey! Good to see you again. I do. Yeah, I hope you like it. Free. That's a great name for it. Yeah, well, it's on point. Yeah, it's on the nose. Yes. Well, that whole question of what does it mean to be free and what, you know. Yes, there's the physical, like, oh, you're out of prison, but then also... Is your life the thing that you expected it to be? And how do you make your own freedom when you feel hemmed in by all of the things that happened to you?
Yet you're connected to that forever. That's always going to be a part of your life. It's not like anything else that... didn't really happen like you didn't do anything and you're connected to something that you didn't really do forever for people that don't know the story Yeah, yeah, we should do a little recap. Recap, okay. Recap, friends. Real quick.
Recap friends, and you can go back to the episode of Joe Rogan. What number was that? I don't know. Off the top of your head. If you just Google Amanda Knox, you'll go, holy shit. They'll go down a crazy rabbit hole, yes. So in a nutshell. What happened? Yeah. I was studying abroad when I was 20 years old in Perusia, Italy. One of my roommates was raped and murdered by a burglar who broke into our home.
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, or the internet, the social media was really becoming a thing, the iPhone was becoming a thing. I think that that played a huge role of people sort of going into their little echo chambers and fighting online. So I think that there was, yeah, it was a case that for whatever reason, Rose above the
the level of other cases. 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... made at the very beginning by trying to pin a man's crime on me. Yeah, and if anybody wants, there's a documentary. Yes, there's a Netflix documentary. I wrote a book called Waiting to be Heard.
And then more recently, I wrote this book, Free My Search for Meaning, which covers like, you know, you can read it and learn about the case, but it's mostly about how do you come out of an experience like that and make sense of it. one of the big stories in it is how I then developed my prosecutor which I think you'll probably be in the camp of people of thinking that I'm utterly insane for having done that maybe maybe maybe you won't I just remember that when we talked about this
back in the day, you were like, this motherfucker. Yeah. So you become friends with him? Friend is an interesting word. What is a friend? Someone else asked me that. I was like, it depends on what you mean by friend. And they said, well, do you trust me? And I said, well, I... I think that at the point that we are now in our relationship, I do trust him. I trust that he's telling me the truth.
about what he really thinks and feels about the situation. So I feel like I have very privileged special access to... mind of the person who put me in prison and that is a very interesting awkward but also empowering place for me to be because one of the things that really bothered me about this experience was not understanding why it happened to me. Why did this man
Look at a 20-year-old girl with no criminal history, no motivation to commit this crime. Why did he look at me and think, there's my rapist and murderer? And I didn't understand it. And I didn't feel... 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
These were all really simplistic ways of framing his motivations, and I didn't really buy them. So instead, what I was interested in was going to the source. and confronting him. asking why.
But to ask someone, why did you hurt me? Which I think is a really common... thing that people who have been hurt want to know is they want an acknowledgement that they've been hurt and they want to understand why and they they want to know if that person's not going to hurt them anymore or not going to hurt other people like that's really common for people who have been hurt.
The challenge is that people who hurt other people don't like to be confronted with that fact. And so how do you start a conversation that's not going to immediately become adversary? And that was one of my biggest challenges. But I came up with this methodology that I actually became so important to me that I tattooed it on my arm. So this is it. There are four steps. And the first one is find common ground. So it's this Venn diagram, find common ground.
I promise you that every single person on this earth, you have something in common with them. So I asked myself, what could I and my prosecutor have in common? I didn't know this man. I didn't know what his history was, what his background was. But I did know that he, like me, was part of this really big... scandalous in the media case, and he very likely felt misconstrued or misrepresented also in the process, maybe dehumanized in the process.
And so I reached out to him and I acknowledged that fact. I said, hey. I don't know who you are. I only ever encountered you in the police office and in the courtroom where you were someone who was trying to ruin my life. So you were a big scary boogeyman. And I saw you in the media, and I'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. And that was the beginning of the dialogue. This, like, I went out of my way to acknowledge. that he might have had noble motivations, even if he was wrong. And I think this is like a really important thing. I wanted to give him radical benefit of the...
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, like, opened that door, like, hey, you hurt me, but maybe that wasn't your intention. Maybe your intention was something else. he filled that void with his story and his message and and what he wanted me to understand about himself And, I mean, one of the wildest things about this book...
is that I talk about, like, I do not sugarcoat what I went through, like, and especially what he did to me. Like, I very, like, clearly set out, like, here's the fucked up shit he said about me in court. completely without evidence, like totally made up bullshit. Like, and it ruined my life, right? Here's what it is. acknowledge these facts.
And also, and also, here is a person who might have had, like in doing so, might have been coming from a place of trying to rationalize things in his own mind, which is a thing that we all do. We all do on a regular basis. We're all just sort of interpreting our reality in the way that suits us. And so I wrote this book from my perspective.
I translated the entire thing into Italian before it ever got published so that I could share it with him, so that he would know what I was saying about him in public, what was imminently going to come out. And his response was, I have never felt more seen. That's what he told me. That sounds like something a teenage girl would say. Well, that's an interesting observation because it's become quite... emotional, especially on his I shouldn't go there too much.
Yeah, protecting his privacy. That's all that is. Yeah, yeah. AG1 has been a long-time part of the show, and I'm excited to share some big news. The new AG1 next-gen formula is here. They did a bunch of research and improved their formula to make sure it's the best it can be. The same single scoop once a day, same subtly sweet flavors with those hints of vanilla and pineapple, but now with upgraded probiotics, vitamins, and minerals for even more comprehensive formula.
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an AG1 welcome kit, and five of the upgraded AG1 travel packs with your first subscription. So make sure you check out drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan to get started with AG1's next gen and notice the benefits for yourself. That's drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan. You're a very nice person. You're so much nicer than me.
Well, I don't know. I've just had really bad stuff happen to me. And I don't wish bad stuff upon other people. That's a beautiful way to live your life. It really is. You know what I mean? That's what all Christians aspire to. That's what you're doing. Yeah, I guess. I'm not a Christian. Radical forgiveness. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I didn't really set out. People point to that. They're like, forgiveness, forgiveness. You're doing forgiveness. And I was like, is this forgiveness?
Or is this... Just communicating with him is forgiveness in some way and not having extreme anger. Well, that's the thing. I do have extreme anger. Like that's all part of it. And this is where like 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 like... tender, fallible creature. that is capable of violence against you, but is also capable of being hurt.
Just because someone hurt you doesn't mean that they're not capable of being hurt. And I certainly don't want to be in the position of hurting someone. That's just who I am. And if anything, one thing... 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 gonna feel really, really bad. And I just want you to know that I... I don't wish suffering on you. I don't.
Did you ask him if he had gone over any of his previous cases? and wondered whether he did the same thing to other people? Because I don't think that's something you do once. I don't think you are an ethical prosecutor who just really objectively analyzes the evidence. and puts forth a case based on what you think is the facts.
I don't think you'd do that your whole career. And then this 20-year-old bitch, I don't think. She's too cute. I don't like how she's smiling. Yeah, there was that element to it. It has to be. Well, yeah, I think that... I do feel like there was some kind of pornographic nature to it. I don't know. Well, there's a lot of men that have a deep resentment for beautiful women. Just from feelings of rejection? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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. 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, they just want this.
Put yourself in their position. You're gross. What are they supposed to do? Try harder. What are they supposed to do? Be with someone that they're not attracted to to make that person feel better? That's not what people do. You have a short window of life. You're supposed to pursue what you like. And your, you know, your fucking hand of cards sucks. Sorry. You know, this is how it goes. But that thing where, you know.
They look at you like you have it too easy. You have too many gifts. Life has given you too good a hand of cards. You know, and you should be punished. You should be knocked down a pet. You see that in particular in the media with celebrity. It's a big one with celebrity women. If something goes wrong, like they just can't wait to dunk on them, mock them for weight gain, whatever it is.
for getting out of a car in the wrong way and they were the ones who were like showing up to get up their skirt yeah any any sort of stuff was on oh is it yeah i think the paris hilton stuff like back in the day where a lot of women were like It was like an epidemic of girls getting out. And photographers just happened to be on the ground. Like, you're a woman. You've worn skirts. It's not easy to look up someone's skirt. If you're standing up.
And someone gets out there, how the fuck do you get down there? You'd have to be on your knees. I think they were doing it on purpose. I think it was a way of going viral before viral was a thing, because it went away. Like, when was the last time that we had an up-the-skirt shot? Why don't you have any underwear on? That seems weird. Well, panty lines, you know, that's a real thing. Yeah, sure. But that's what g-strings were invented for, right?
Those still create lines, my friend. I gasp. I mean, are you that concerned with lines that you want to go bareback? I have not gone bareback at a premiere. I have to say. With a little skirt on, hopping out of a car, and the way they did it. It's just, I think it was like, you know, the same people that had sex tapes that leaked air quotes. that were engineered I mean the whole thing was it was on purpose like
Sure, sure, sure. 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. you're trying to take beautiful men down a peg is this idea of like pitting women against each other like that was a huge thing in my case where They were suggesting that, you know, here I was, this, like, free-spirited but also hoary, you know, American girl.
versus the uptight, judgmental British girl. And therefore, they hated each other. with you know with a vengeance with a lethal vengeance and then then this idea of like a murder orgy appeared this pornographic fantasy of women expressing their own violent fantasies towards each other.
in real life and using men as pawns in that game of violent hatred towards each other. I think you see that a lot, you know, even in... 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. Also 20 years old. Yeah, 23 years old. Yeah. Who did a very normal thing, which was fall in love with a charismatic, powerful man. And he was handsome as fuck.
that oh yeah i mean he was the president of the united states he was the president of the united states he was charismatic he was handsome he showered her with attention and it makes sense that a young, inexperienced person would fall in love with him. And yet she was the one who got railroaded. She was the home wrecker. She was the...
the one who became the subject of all the rap lyrics, and her entire life and her entire identity became identified with this mistake she had made. And that was not the same thing with the President of the United States. And I think that... that impulse to define women. by their worst moments and to tear them down for their worst moments is
is prevalent from what I have seen. Well, I think because they know it's so devastating to the person. You know what I mean? It's like there's the bully instinct when they know that you're weak and vulnerable. But why? To what end? People are cruel. Because they've been hurt. You know, it's the hurt people hurt people thing. You know, I think it's... Like schadenfreude, just as an audience. Like, we want a story. We want a real-life story where we get to...
you know, passively enjoy the destruction of another human being. Right. And also you don't know her, so you're disassociated. Yeah. Right? Like if she was your friend and you did that, you'd have to be a special kind of mom. Like that woman, Linda Tripp, who did it all. That's a special kind of mom. special kind of monster who trots that out to the whole world to try to take down Bill Clinton.
Yeah. Which didn't even work. No, and that's what's fascinating. It worked to destroy Monica. But also, when you look at Bill Clinton, this handsome president, and then you look at Linda Tripp. Very unattractive.
that's also plays in like i want to take him down too and probably i want to take her down as well like there's a lot of like fuck fuck everybody else there's a lot of that you know when you're you know you're unseen and then you see like other people getting attention and it's just like the fact that she did it and she knew her and she but also this is like this is the game of cards that they're playing this is house of cards
this is literally what they do any time they have a chance in the political realm to use any window any vulnerability it's the dirtiest game in the world it's a disgusting game And if you get sucked into it, you'll find that out. I don't want anything to do with it. It's the most evil. It really is. When I see people that are running for president,
what are you doing? I know. Why would you do that to yourself? Yeah, and then you have to spend the rest of your life with secret service following you around so you can't exist in the world as a normal human being. I do feel like there is a... You have to be a special kind of person in order to be attracted to something like that. Ironically, the kind of person that's attracted to that in general is not the kind of person you want in a leadership position.
Right. You know, which is like, wow, what do we do now? Yeah, yeah. So is democracy completely and utterly flawed because it relies upon the ambition of... the wrong people. Or heroes. Or legitimate heroes. carry the burden of this on my back. But does anyone ever...
actually arrive at the seat of the president as that person? Here's the question. Do they stay that person? Because I used to think Obama... person I really did you know I was like wow we got a good one you know yeah I was sad I missed out on that yeah yeah it was pretty cool but In retrospect, when looking back, probably not really. Probably got corrupted by the system or was corrupt. You know? And is now willing to openly lie. God. Yeah. It's dark. It's dark. You know, and I think...
It's just a... 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 relationship. to have with all of these various politicians and then special interest groups and lobbyists and then foreign leaders. Yeah, how do you manage all of that? Heads of defense contracting companies, like, what? Yeah.
Can I tell you a story? Yes, please. Okay, so this story didn't actually make it in my book, but it is one that I wanted to tell you because it... talks about how my weird relationship with other people who are in positions of power, like police officers,
Right. Like, you know, I'm an advocate of criminal justice reform. I talk a lot about like I go and testify in front of my 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. But that doesn't mean that there isn't, like, I'm not one of those, you know, fuck all the police, we don't need them, you know, abolish the whole system. That's not what I believe. But as someone who has had this...
complicated experience with police, I don't really know what to do when something bad goes down. And I want to tell you a story about something bad that went down. It was in 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. 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 and 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 infant son is crying. My two-year-old daughter at the time is... going what's going on and i'm trying to calm him while reassure her while looking around the room thinking how do i barricade a door and can i jump out of a window with to small children. All of that before I think dial 911. Because the last time that I dialed the equivalent of 911 to call for help, I got thrown into prison. I realize that there's nothing I can do to protect my kids, so I call 911.
And eventually, you know, my husband is able to get this intruder to leave the house. The police arrive. And I have a very strange encounter with them because they are very nice to me. And I was not expecting. And they are very nice to my daughter. And they give her a nice little, you know, police badge. And I'm sitting here thinking, great, now I'm going to have to throw a police.
themed birthday party for her because now she's going to be super into police. And I'm just like, what is happening to my life? And I'm scared that they're going to recognize me. And I'm scared that they're going to think maybe she faked a break. And like all of that is going on in my head. I don't know how to resolve that. Somebody broke into my home once, murdered my roommate, broke into the place I was staying again, thankfully didn't murder anybody.
But like, how do I make sense of my relationship with people who are empowered to protect me, but also are empowered to hurt me? What do I do about it? You tell me, Joe. What do I do? There's no way I could know what's going through your mind. you know, that the experience that you had is that no one can even pretend. have those thoughts in their head because this is not just paranoid fantasy. This is your actual lived experience for years. Yeah, that's good.
What had happened? Like the bang? Was it someone kicking down the door? Yeah, he had kicked in the door through the deadbolt. What was the yelling? The yelling was he was just... Schizophrenic? Yeah, he thought that someone had stole that house from him and he was yelling for some name of a person who didn't live there.
clearly was just like either confused or mentally ill in some capacity um but And thankfully not armed, but like my husband didn't know when he walked down the stairs in his underwear without any, like he grabbed a broom on his way down and that was, he was between putting himself and a broom between. whoever this person was who had just kicked in the front door through the deadbolt and his family. And that might have been the last time I ever saw him. You know? And.
I did not know what to do. I try to like joke about it now. where I actually did a stand-up bit about it a while back, about how I was testing my butt to see if it was bouncy enough to jump out of the window and bounce. But when I think back on it, it's still scary. you know, um, And I don't like how I feel right now that when I'm scared I'm supposed to call the police, but I'm also scared to call the police. Jesus. and so you know when I go and do advocacy work.
I'm now on the board of an organization called the Innocent Center. Innocentcenter.org, which, by the way, just got a bunch of federal funding taken away. Thanks, Elon. You'd think that they would be interested in supporting organizations that clean up the messes of the criminal justice system, but... Apparently not. So if you want to support us, innocencecenter.org. What happened that they got their funding taken away? What was the service?
I mean, there's a federal funding that is designed for innocence organizations. And I think what I heard... is that there are certain words that sort of became taboo within the administration that if you 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 in getting innocent people out of prison, the word fair is going to come up quite a bit. So is this just an algorithm? They're just scanning? the mission statement of whatever these organizations are? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a first step, is they'll just use this They're going to use algorithms and AI to help them identify potential things to cut. And I think as a new innocence organization, we were considered.
not worthy of the federal funding that we have relied on. to help innocent people. Are you one of the founders of this organization? Me? No, I'm on the board. But yes, this is formerly the California Innocence Project that has since sort of turned into the Innocence Project. But you're seeing this all across the board of innocence projects of getting their federal funding taken away. And there's no accusations of impropriety or misuse of funds or high salaries for certain individuals?
Nothing. Nope. Just, it's deprioritized because I think we're considered leftist organizations, potentially. I don't know. But I know that, like... I have always thought that innocence and getting injustice 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 where innocence organizations are now being put into DEI camps and we're being stripped of funding. This episode is brought to you by Paleo Valley. All right, let's talk about snacks for a second. You know how hard it is to find something that's actually good for you but doesn't taste like cardboard? That's why I'm stoked about Paleo Valley's 100% grass-fed beef stick.
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to continue doing you know doing the things that cost money like filing all of their work and going through all of the case work 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 use.
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From ZipRecruiter. Rated the number one hiring site based on G2. Try Zip Intro for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan. Zip intro. Post jobs today. Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. I do a lot of work with Josh Dubin. You know Josh? Yeah. I mean, I've never met him personally. He was with the Innocence Project and now he's... Ike Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice. Same kind of work. Ironically, Ike Perlmutter is very close friends with Trump.
I mean, I would have thought that that would have been of interest to Trump, considering... I think it's a baby with the bathwater type deal. Right. Where there's a lot of... what you would call almost like slush fund NGOs, where they're inappropriately moving funds around and doing stuff. work, but he essentially says that USAID is really there to do things that are too dirty. So the extraordinary amount of money that was being moved around.
there's a certain percentage of it that was inappropriately being used. I imagine so. Yes, an enormous percentage. It's a lot of money. But unfortunately, there's a lot of good that also is coming out of that money. That's what's difficult. That's like, you know, when you round up all the quote-unquote gang... Right. And fly them to El Salvador. are you sure they're all gang members or do you care? Right, exactly. Do you care or is it just like, we're just here to clean things up?
Break a few eggs to make an omelette. Right. Our innocent people, the price of us getting to be efficient. Don't become a monster when you're fighting. Yeah, and that's what I think we're brushing up against right now. and as someone who really is like just interested in keeping especially this issue like this is a human, like we all, we all should be on the same side about this. Um, why, like, why is it being turned into this, a left or right issue? Well, maybe I can get this in front of John.
That would be great. I would, you know, and if you need to put me in contact, like I would be happy to. You know, one of the things through working with Josh and, you know, just through this podcast, we've gotten a lot of people really. 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, uh, Human beings.
Whenever there's a binary position, a one or a zero, you win or you lose. Yes, the adversarial system. It's like, I have to be, I have to win this side, and I cannot at all. like acknowledge some truth that might be to the other side like and then you have this game where you hire like if you are a guilty You hire the best defense attorneys that probably even know you're guilty, but their job is to get you off by any means necessary. Well, their job is to make the government prove you're guilty.
Right? That's what technically a defense attorney who's really good is. But that's not really what they're doing. They're trying to get you out of jail. Yeah, of course. The goal being if you can't actually prove it, then... Well, their goal is to win as often as possible so that they're the person. This is the guy you want. Although I have talked to some really interesting defense attorneys. the defense attorneys who represented Larry Nassar, for example.
famously, for those who don't remember, was molesting young gymnasts. Do you remember him? Yeah, the Olympics guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I interviewed them because it was two women who represented him. And so a lot of people were like, how dare you represent? this man as a woman how could you and their position was well we didn't represent him to prove him innocent we we had him plead guilty to these crimes we just feel that everyone deserves to have
you know, a defender. We're defenders. We represent people in the law. And they were getting like demonized for even taking him on as a client. And I thought that was interesting because they weren't trying to get him on. They were just trying to represent due process. And I felt like that was a really interesting case of... people confusing. What is the role of a defense attorney? And I think you're right. Like some defense attorneys really don't care.
if their clients are guilty or innocent because they are also in this adversarial system. And so they are also in this position of just wanting to win and wanting to make the lives of law enforcement difficult. And they're willing to throw victims under the bus in the process.
I've had really frank conversations with friends of mine in the innocence world where they talk about how they were trained to just... destroy a victim in order to diminish their credibility in court and to really put them in a really bad position so they didn't want to pursue justice for themselves and I think that and they look back and go oh my god I can't believe that that's how I was trained to be a defense attorney
But, like, that was just part of the game. And I think that's where this whole course of justice gets completely distorted. Because it's like, well, what is the point of all of this? Like, it should be about, like... arriving at the truth and then doing and then having there be like some recognized consequences for acknowledging what really happened like we need to address the issue which is somebody got hurt by someone else What do we do? Now what? And instead it's become, well,
I'm 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.
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...
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. And because the prosecutor was... dead set on winning and wasn't necessarily interested in the truth.
What he says, and it's very, again, it goes back to like, what are we telling ourselves and what is the cognitive bias? And I think this is where it gets super interesting because... Winning. is interpreted in some people's minds as doing their duty. The way that my prosecutor has always talked about it with me is that he maintains that. He was doing his duty. This was his job. His job was to make a case that made logical sense to him based upon certain premises.
And then to win that case in court. That was his job. That was his duty. And he believes that he was doing the right thing because that's what he was trained and incentivized to do. In the same way that like, you know, journalists, if you ask journalists back who covered the case back in the day, they'll be like, well, we were doing our job. Our job was to sell the best story that we could to our audience.
And right. And so that's when it gets like fucked up because like how how have our institutions that we've relied on to be truth seeking institutions been corrupted from the inside. Bye. Ultimately, what is a question of money or power? When politics gets brought into the equation with criminal justice, suddenly, you know, your prosecutor is now wanting to win cases, not because they're the right cases to win, but because they want to be elected. Like, all of that gets...
distorted and the motivations behind all our institutions become warped. With the media, it's even more disgusting because it's not about... It's literally just about getting people to pay attention to their story. Right. or click on Right. And then they hold the audience accountable for the kinds of stories that they are then incentivized to write. They say, well...
I wouldn't have been writing this story if we weren't clicking on it. And this was like this vicious cycle. That's crazy. It's like I wouldn't have robbed your house if you didn't have nice stuff. Exactly. Exactly. That's fine. But like that's how if you're in that little echo chamber of a system and that's what your reward structure is, of course, that's what you're going to end up delivering if you're somebody who's not.
who doesn't have the introspection to question like okay wait what am i doing and what is the point of all of this and do you have certain principles? But again, the people who rise to the top are maybe the ones who are willing to question those principles in order to achieve certain ends. Yes. Yeah. And then there's also the problem with you're working for a corporation.
If you're not an independent journalist who has like rock solid personal ethics, you're working for a corporation and your job is to make money for your shareholders ultimately. And the way you do that is to get as many people to clear. And maybe the person who's on the ground has a certain vision for what they want their on-the-ground reporting to do, but then once it gets in the hands of editors and other editors, it becomes completely warped.
from the thing that they were originally reporting on because the person who's over here is so divorced from the actual on the ground story and they know instead the story that's going to sell. Yeah, it's dark. I mean it's the same sort of distortion. Excuse me. Salute. Sorry. It's the same sort of distortion when you were talking about prosecutors just trying to win. It's this thing where 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. 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. And she is absolutely guilty of doing that. Yeah, I know. She tried to withhold DNA evidence that would have exonerated her. I know. She was not a popular choice among the innocence community, I'll tell you that. Oh, yeah. No, Josh Dubin broke her down on my show. Oh, were they here together? No. Oh, okay, no. No, no, no, he broke down what she was guilty of.
And that's why I was so mad that our party never actually gave us a choice. There was no primary. No, there was no primary. They were just like, here's the person now. And if you don't vote for it, you're a bad person. Exactly. You're a fascist. Yes. Okay. Yeah. No, it was that, that. But then again, that's also just trying to win. It's the same kind of thing. The focus is on winning at what cost. And then that's a very slippery slope because if you're willing to accept that, guess what?
Guess what? That slope keeps slipping. And then next thing you know, you don't have brakes. You have to put a fucking blinder on because you're a part of the problem. You're a part of what's destroying society. So then you have to reshape your own personal narrative and lie to yourself about what you're doing and why. Right. A little bit of self-brainwashing. And that fascinates me. In conversations with my prosecutor, how has he convinced himself?
that he's the good guy and, and how has that changed when I have approached him not as an adversary, but as someone who is, uh, I wouldn't say like, Продолжение следует... 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 acknowledging his humanity and the complexity of him and acknowledging that he's not an evil person. Well, what is evil? Intentional malice, maybe? That seems like he was doing it intentionally. If he was paying attention to the facts of the case.
I mean, there was DNA evidence. There was all sorts of stuff that pointed to you not being the guilty party, and they ignored that. If that's not even... I mean, what he did, it's interesting, he wrote a whole book about the case, and he talked about how when he first arrived at the scene, he immediately knew that it was a concern.
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 logical sense if you begin with a false premise. How did he reconcile that in the book? And Hesbok? Yeah. I mean, he makes a logical leap.
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 stayed.
So this is how a person with genuinely good intentions can have false beliefs 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 Gaddai.
And I was like, where are you coming up with that? And he was like, well... And whenever I interviewed Rudy, like he talks about interviewing, you know, interrogating Rudy, Rudy always seemed to have affectionate things to say about. He always seemed to like be interested in you. And from that, I can logically deduce that you guys had a relationship. And I was like, we, we, like, I didn't even know his name. There's no record of us ever communicating with each other. No one ever like.
saw us hanging out with each other like what are you talking about and he's like well if he was involved in the crime and you're involved in the crime and he's sort of talking about you know 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 was like, well, that's what made logical sense to me at the time. I think the issue is an egotistic idiot that has power.
That's really what I'm thinking. It's certainly someone who has a belief and a confidence in their own abilities as a logical... thinker. And I think anyone who is in that kind of position has to believe in themselves in that kind of way. But not just that, like you have too much power. Fair. There's not enough oversight, you have too much power, and then you say something, and if your initial assertion is incorrect, you then have to defend.
So then you do mental gymnastics to try to defend it. Right. At the expense of your fucking life. Yes. He was willing to put you away forever. Like, he had to know. At some point in time, in the back of his stupid brain, he had to know that you were in it. and he was willing to push forward and concoct some sort of a... three-way relationship narrative that he still sticks to, fuck that guy. Well, and sometimes that's what my brain says.
You know, sometimes I... Your brain should say that. You know, I mean, forgiveness is really important, but some people you just can't forgive. Like some people, it's like, no, you need to come to grips with the fact that you're a piece of shit. That's what's wrong here. It's not me forgiving you and you having this hall pass just to be a piece of shit because you had this theory that you're still accusing me of. Now!
That's not, you're bad at what you do. And sometimes people are bad at what they do. Sometimes you get bad teachers. You get bad cops. Sometimes you get a bad electrician, your house catches fire. Some people suck at what they do. And to have this eternal forgiveness. Sometimes it's not smart to do that. Well, certainly. Is he still working as a prosecutor? No, no, he's retired. He has retired. He should be in jail.
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of food plus free shipping just go to thefarmersdog.com slash rogan tap the banner or visit this episode's page to learn more offer available for new customers only Like, literally. I do not wish jail upon him. That's sweet. But that's crime. Like, what he did, it was not just a crime, but it was a conspiracy. Yeah, I would have to say that I agree that 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, when are like the mommies and daddies going to show up and say, okay, kids, Stop your squabbling.
straighten things out there's no mommies and dad there are no mommies and daddies that's the thing that freaked me out yeah it's like we're all adults now and this is all we are we're just a bunch of screaming toddlers just screaming at each other constantly And here I am now, I feel, in a way, trying to mother my prosecutor through his, you know, psychological...
tantrums. Which is a weird position to be in. Because now that I've 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 flawed fragility as a human being. And so on the one hand, I'm very angry at him to this day. And on the other hand, I care about him and I have to give him some props he didn't have to respond to me he didn't have to meet with me he didn't have to sit there and hear me talk about how he had fucked up my life and he shouldn't have I did not like, it's not that like me being kind to him does not mean me.
tolerating injustice and it does not mean me not setting boundaries and it does not mean me sugarcoating what really happened like he knows what i think really happened and he says well You know, we can disagree about our perspectives in some ways, but ultimately what matters is that you reached out to me and saw me as a human being. And in response, I also inevitably came to see you as a human being, and I care about you.
And so in a way, like, we're still in this awkward... dance of like one part of us is stuck in that adversarial system and one part of us is in a non-adversarial, very like accepting of all the things space. and were 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. Like, you know, I'm still fighting to clear my name in Italy. I don't know if you, have you kept up with like the latest with my case? Oh, yeah.
So I've been cleared of like all the crazy, you know, horrible murder, orgy, all of that stuff. Clear. The thing that remains and this is just the bane of my fucking existence is when they cleared me of having anything to do with the crime. They left open the possibility that I was present when the crime occurred. And I believe the reason that they did this
was because they wanted to find me guilty of something. And the thing that they found me guilty of was the way lesser crime on the list of all the crimes that were there, which was slander. They accused me of knowingly and willingly falsely accusing an innocent person of having committed this crime. because during my interrogation, I was coerced into implicating myself and my boss, Patrick Lumumba, of... of committing this crime. And I immediately retracted it, all of that, but...
That was one of the things that they were holding me accountable for. And to this day, I am still convicted in Italy of knowingly and willingly.
accusing an innocent man and for me to knowingly and willingly accuse this innocent man i would have to have been at the house and known who really was the murderer At the moment that I. falsely accuse this innocent person like I would have had to know that he was definitively innocent for this to be the case and for that to be true I would have to be physically present at the crime even if I was not participating in it so the legal standing right now to this day
is that I was there and that when I was interrogated, I knowingly and falsely accused an innocent. I appealed this by the way to the European Court of Human Rights. And they ruled in my favor. They said that because I had been denied the right to have an attorney and an interpreter when I was being interrogated, that none of that should ever have been, I should never have been convicted. 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. This was last year. And I was found guilty. Again. Oh my god. On the basis, not even of the statements that the police coerced me into signing, but on my retracted...
So I hand wrote a retraction of those statements that the police coursed me into signing. And I was like, I'm so confused. I can't testify. Like, I don't know if Patrick did it or not. Like, I just don't know. And they said, well. Even a confused statement where you're not sure what the truth is, if you were physically present at the crime, is
is slander and you falsely accused an innocent man that you knew to be innocent. But they have no proof that you were there. Exactly. So we're in this cyclical thing where they're like... They just don't want to admit that they fucked up. That's what I... And I'm at this point where I'm like, okay, now what?
because I'm definitively convicted of this thing, and the legal truth in this case does not represent the actual truth in this case. Are they trying to protect themselves from some sort of a civil suit? Maybe. I think even more than that, I think they're trying to protect themselves from admitting that they tortured an innocent girl.
So they can say, well, she is guilty. She did do this. She's a guilty person. And so it's not crazy for us to think that she might have been involved in the murder because here she is. She probably lied about being there. Yeah. 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 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, this is, 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... do I have to definitively prove my innocence in a court of law to feel that I have definitively proved my innocence, or do I need to definitively prove my innocence?
in the court of public opinion in order to feel free or to feel like I, like I'm not, regardless of whether I definitively prove my innocence or not, like, am I ever going to be free of that? Is this ever going to be not touching me and impacting my life? And the answer that I've come to... is we'll know 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. I didn't go to four years of master's degree in poetry. I got a master's degree in... whatever this is, being fucked. And I've learned things from this. I've learned things about the criminal justice system. I can see... things that need to be fixed that are really common sense fixes too.
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 um making it so that police officers can't lie to you when you're being interrogated because that was a huge thing that impacted me as like a young confused like overwhelmed human being as police lying to me and telling me that they have proof that I was there when the crime occurred and it made me like
feel like I was insane and so like the problem of police lying to you is not just that it's like a bullying technique but it warps your sense of reality and you start to question yourself and so there's psychological research to show that there are very negative consequences for police lying to you during interrogation but at the very least if you record it you can sort of track
how that is impacting a person who is 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.
like as a person who is being questioned by police you don't really have rights like you don't you don't have like one of the things that they say in my case is that I never had the right to an attorney because I wasn't a suspect I was away And so, to this day, in Italy... there's like this resistance to the idea that i was like coerced into i was i was even interrogated at all because there's this like little loophole where they say oh you weren't interrogated you were inter
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 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. And the amount of resistance to like getting just really common sense changes like that to happen from like law enforcement lobbies is just. so frustrating as someone who like shows up again and again and again to like try to make because it seems like this adversarial thing like we're we're all on the same side it's not like
victims' rights versus defendants' rights. It's not law enforcement versus 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? They're playing a game. I mean, it's your life and it's other people's lives. It's innocent people's lives. But it's also guilty people's lives. But why doesn't like a law enforcement officer look at something that happened to me? Actually, you know, I take that back. Plenty of law enforcement people have.
talked to me and said, like, we are so sorry for what happened to you. Right, the ones who weren't involved. That's the problem. The problem is, do you look away when you aren't? How many law enforcement officers will stick their neck out if they think their partner overstepped their bounds? and got someone to admit to something that maybe they did or didn't do, withheld evidence that may or may not have exonerated.
There's steps along the way on the road to evil. Right. And no one gets rewarded for sticking their neck out or for holding their friends accountable. You get punished. excommunicated from your tribe it's very dangerous you know so how do we motivate any other like it's a real problem it's a it's a giant conundrum it's a real problem in in the way this the system is structured and the feeling that you have to like in order to do the right thing you just have to switch sides like
That really bothers me. Also because 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. Well, that's supposedly where the civil... Supposedly, but you're suing the person who committed the crime, and are you ever actually going to get any money from them? Sometimes money's awarded to families by...
You know, there's those, but I mean, is that enough? Like, is the money? Is that enough? No, I don't think so. I think that people need more support than that. What is the support, though? What would make it right? overall in the system. Yeah. It's really the only way to truly make it right is to find, I mean, if you're a person like, I think,
Your approach to this all, this radical acceptance and forgiveness is very, very, very beautiful. It's amazing that you can do it. It's amazing that you think the way you think.
I used you as an example the other day. We were having this conversation about... horrible things that have happened to people that have made that person a beautiful person because you went through this insane thing but on the other end of it you came out this like really oh you really are you know i use you as an example of Things that don't break you, but that you would never want to wish on anyone else. But then the result of that is this person comes out.
Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of the obstacles. 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... Like, yes, what happened to me is like, oh, crazy story happened to a girl one time. But also there are like universal lessons and truths that I've derived from my experience that may.
And when I communicate them, they make me feel less ostracized or less like singled out as a human being. And one of those is like there is opportunity. in every tragedy. And I think that what my tragedy challenged me to do was Do 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 heart that it requires to have compassion and genuine curiosity. That is what I wanted to define me. I did not want this horrible experience to define me on its terms.
I 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. 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 bitter about it all. And instead, I go, well...
All of that happened. Now what? And by accepting reality and life as it is, I can now become a more effective agent in my life. I don't want to live my life. acting and feeling and thinking in ways that are not going to be effective and so instead what happens and the radical acceptance of it all is truly coming from a place of I'm not trying to be Christian about it. I'm just trying to 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 left the station and was going on its own and there was really nothing I could do to stop it. And so, okay, now what? that's a great way to put it that you can
Yeah, I mean, what you've done is admirable. I mean, the approach that you take is really, I mean, if... Is it admirable? Is it self-serving? No, no, it's not self-serving. Obviously, it's self-serving, but that's a good thing. I mean, you're serving yourself in the best possible way, and to not be completely defined by your being victimized. You've risen above. I mean, just the fact that you've contacted the project. and trying to reach out.
To talk to him as a human being and try to find out. And accept him where he's at. Like, this is where you're at. Well, he's a kind of a victim. in a way, because he shouldn't have had the kind of power that he had. There's no way to tell. 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...
And he's also not in a vacuum. There were other people around him who were building him up and supporting that story. It was also like he's in a position of power. They're underneath him. There's this weird structure that's in place. All of that can be true. And I can accept that as also true. And I think there's this weird resistance that people have. to accepting the contact.
around a person. Maybe because you realize that if you accept the context around the person, that feeling of self-righteousness that you're ultimately grasping onto. dissipates because it does inevitably dissipate but I think that's again a symptom of someone dwelling on the life that they should have lived instead of accepting the life that they have. And I just find that to be a waste of time. It is not just a waste of time. It's the opposite.
it kind of destroys you from within because you know it's not true. Right. Yeah. And so you're bullshitting yourself as you're bullshitting the world. And that's who you are now. Yeah. 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 destructed. I think that is the deepest tragedy of hurt, is how it can then become imploded.
And I did not want to implode. I was scared to implode. I saw a lot of people around me in prison imploding. And I did not want that to be me. It was an insane mental resolve to not. the trap that most And to a lesser extent, he's a victim as well. He's a victim of his own actions, and it will haunt him. I mean, he's defined by that as well. that everybody knows that you're innocent and that you've been proven innocent. And then in the retrial, you got proven again.
And so that's him. That's over his head everywhere he goes. He wrongly prosecuted and jailed you. for a murder you did not commit. And he has to live with that. Every day when he wakes up and he looks in the mirror, that's who you are. Forever. And you could dance around, you know, I was doing my job and this, you can have, you know, that's where you kind of try to find some sort of, no, no, you did this thing. You were wrong.
your ego, whatever the fuck it was that led you to come up with the initial theory and then try to use confirmation bias to... reinforce it at every step of the way, that's you. And if he doesn't admit that, he will go to his grave, huh? 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, is 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. Because of him, this person who has had this outsized influence on my well-being and my personhood and my existence, this guy. I sit down across from him, and I'm nice to him.
And I walk away from that encounter real. 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 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 super 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 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... and where the people are, you know, not building bridges, they're blowing them up. I was like, I wanted to remind people of what happens when you take a chance and you take a stand.
yeah well that kind of kindness is rewarded by the universe and that was the feeling that you got that you were on the right to like the best possible person that you could be what would the best possible version of you do and you did that and then you had that feeling because of that that was the universe Right. This is the battle.
You could yell at that guy and call him a piece of shit and slap him in the face. And feel justified in doing so as well. And you would be. And that might even feel a little good in a way, but it wouldn't feel like that good. Yeah. Negativity always. no matter what, leaves you with this residue, this like icky, even if you're correct, just like slime. psychic slime right that's on you no matter what yeah and that's your power that you could sit across this person and treat them with
And that's why you felt that way. Have you ever felt that way? I've never had anything remotely like your situation. But you've had encounters with people. Like, I don't think you have to have as devastating of a situation. to be in a position to know that you're doing the right thing in a moment. Like, for instance, when my husband got up in his whitey-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. End. 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 and like you, you and the universe are moving in the exact.
in sync yeah and that that was my version of it that was his version of it and i think that all of us have the opportunity to glimpse that in our lives and i'm just curious if you've ever felt like you were moving in sync with the universe. I try to be. Yeah. But again, I haven't... You still feel kind of slimy? Well, I've had moments where I haven't. I've had moments where I was very...
back and I never feel good about it. It's one of the reasons why I don't engage with people online that are negative. you know, especially, particularly, like, the lowest level of it is so... I'm not interested in conflict. I'm not interested in it. I don't want to do it. Even if someone has negative things to say about me, I'm not really interested in engaging. I don't think it's valid.
I think it's a trap. Yeah. But it's not the same situation as what you were in. I don't know how I would be. Because the other danger is like... You know, I don't want to consider myself above criticism. I think the other flip side of that, of having confidence, is potentially having the confidence that my prosecutor had. Was he feeling in sync with the universe when he was prosecuting me?
There's no way. No. But that's not confidence. That's ego. Confidence is an objective analysis of all the facts doing the right thing, having a rock-solid ethical and moral foundation, and knowing you're doing the right thing, and knowing you can do it. what he had was ego, you know, this desire. You know, when people are in a position like that where people's freedom...
hangs on your decisions and what you do and what you don't do. And then you do it for so many years and you see so... you just get 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.
I mean, 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. Wow. 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.
Yeah, because there's... And I think his justification was even more sick. His justification was that he was always taught that you eat what you kill. And in that business, in the business... business of being a doctor like you have to perform this medicine or And this is the incentive structure that's put in front of you. I don't know if you know that, but chemotherapy is one of the most profitable things. actually get an enormous amount of money.
from each individual person that they... Yeah, there's all sorts of very twisted and bizarre financial incentives. Again, these institutions that get warped by these various... Exactly. I mean, this is... with vaccinations, this is the case with prescriptions of various medicines, there's kickbacks. And these kickbacks become incentives. you have the overwhelming burden of the financial responsibility that you have with your medical school debt.
malpractice insurance which is overwhelming you have overhead you have staff you have a bunch of people and then people start justifying things in a very twisted way because of the system, and you have to be an incredibly powerful person to rise above that. This is not what I'm going to do, even if it means I can't do this anymore. I'm not doing this. And then the weakest amongst us just instead they go the other way.
No one is going to know. I'll say, yeah, you're a cancer. Yeah, I'm sorry. You know, we're just going to give her a load. No big deal. Yeah. Just destroy your body from there. And then just like this godlike power that you know that you are imposing this medication.
that absolutely does not need it. And that person doesn't know any better. Yeah. That's fucking dark. Well, you could go darker. You could go darker with medical transition of children. You know, this whole... gender-affirming care thing where you're taking young kids and convincing or physically. And there's a lot of weirdness.
in the world there's a lot of there's evil is a real thing and the motivation to do these things can be very very hidden and masked with all sorts of incentives and the structure in which this institution was sort of created. And that's the world we're living in. And it's not a good world. It's not a perfect world. It's not like, this is ideal. should be no it's not like that there's 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 the system protects you and everyone's protecting you. And not only that, once the wheels are in motion, the train's on the track. We can't turn the train around. What do you want to do? Well, the fucking train has to be on the track. So she's got to go to jail. yeah and there you go can I tell you something I'm conflicted about sure So, um... 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 goes
It's coming out at the end of the summer, late summer. But one of the things that, like, one of the responses that I've had... 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? What? Who's saying that? Well, people who believe that I'm not the real victim of the story. The real victim is my roommate, who was murdered.
And that unless I have the blessing of Meredith's family to tell my story, that I should shut up and disappear out of respect. That's great. You're a victim. Period. Full stop. No if, ands, or buts. You're 20 years old? I was 20 years old. Period. You didn't commit a murder. You went to jail for a murder. You're a victim. Period.
Fuck those people. Are they even real people? Have you talked to those people? Are they humans? Have you been in front of them? Are you just reading things? Are you reading things online? Journalists, certainly, who have interviewed me. I get this a lot. I get this a lot. From who? From people who I feel like are suffering from something I call the single victim fallacy. This idea that you have to...
decide who's the real victim. Oh, because of victim hierarchy. You're not the greatest victim because you're still alive. Right. You weren't raped and murdered, so you're still alive, so you're fine. Like, that is ridiculous. If that's a journalist that's saying that to you, I would just leave the room. Well, I'm trying to have a conversation with these people about it. They're talking to you about that. That's a preposterous thing.
To tell a 20-year-old that went to jail for years for a crime they didn't commit and had their whole life publicly, publicly ruined, worldwide, in a country you don't even live in, or you're not even from. fuck that person. That's a crazy position. And if they're just trying to do that to Just get a rise out of you. Get a reaction. They're bad. They're bad at what they do. It's a bad person. The idea that you're not a victim is preposterous.
That's a crazy position. An actual human being sat in front of you and was saying that? So it comes in different forms. So some people are very explicit and say like... don't you think you shouldn't be doing this when the Kircher family's lawyer says that you shouldn't be doing this and that it's offensive. So they're saying this to your face. Yeah. Yeah. And then I have to sit there and, again, do, like,
experience the rage that washes over me and then go how do I have an effective conversation with this human being how do I convey that My life matters too and that there's room in this world to acknowledge all of the truth of what happened, which included my own... victimization in my own story and the things that I've learned from it that I've had the privilege to learn from it because I'm still alive.
That's such a crazy position. That's like saying if you were in the Twin Towers and you got out right before it collapsed, you should shut the fuck up. 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... So the idea that every one of them is going to be a rational position That's not real. People are silly. 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 million takes on things. That's your world. No, you shouldn't be struggling with that at all. That's great. Anybody who says you shouldn't be talking about it, 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.
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 problem. and this feeling of like being kind who did this thing to you, how it made you empowered, I really do think that's the universe telling you you're on the right track. You just can't listen to the peanut gallery. You can't listen to all the noise. There's just too much noise, and you have to learn how to do that.
On a much lesser scale, I see that with friends who are famous. who read comments about them or read articles about them and get infuriated and it ruins vacations because they have to type up a response. Yeah, the impulse to respond is like, you don't have to. Not only should you not respond, you shouldn't read what they're saying in the first.
you shouldn't pay attention is there an ever like i i wonder if the fear is and maybe this is my fear because i'm always questioning myself is like is there i always want to like at least hear it, and like... cycle the thought through my mind so that i can test the validity of it in my mind yes there's definitely that sure but to a point you should probably do that yourself without the That's the best way. The best way is to have an internal auditing system where you look at your own life.
What did I do? Right. And is there anything about what I'm doing that feels ick? Is there anything about the way I'm capitalizing on this that feels icky or feels conflicted? Is there anything about it that I don't like? But just do that yourself. You're a smart person. You don't need all those... a penny where you have to like, you know. let's take
email today from all Amanda Knox haters. You don't have to do that. Fair, yeah, and thankfully my husband is the one who takes the brunt of that. Oh, he shouldn't do it either. Yeah, let me help. As a person who's been famous for a long time, don't do it. There's no value in it. There's zero value. I mean, there's times where I was forced into responding, like during the whole COVID situation when CNN was saying I was taking veterinary medicine. And you were like,
I need to clarify reality or not. Also, I need to say, hey, fuck you. Because the world should say, fuck you. You're not supposed to be able to do that. You're not supposed to be able to be the news and lie. and then hold yourself to this moral high ground and say we have to stop misinformation.
What about you, motherfucker? Like, what about you? You know? And so there's that. Like, I've had to respond in that way. But I mean, if I responded to everything that everybody ever says about me, I'd have no time. for my children for my family for my life for my job i would have no time for anything but you can't do it you just you have to have an internal auditing system where you look at yourself and you have to be your own worst judge.
You know, anything anybody says about me that tries to make me feel bad, well, guess what? I'm way harsher to me than you are, and I know me. You know all the dark thoughts and the slimy feelings. But that's why I work really hard to be a good person. I work really hard to be a good person because I don't like those feelings. I don't like when I judge myself and I find myself to be lacking. I don't like it.
So I institute a lot of self-discipline and I institute a lot of introspective thinking. Yeah, what's your self-auditing process? Well, first of all, It's like, why are you doing what you're doing with your life? 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-
If I have a bad podcast interview, if I think I interrupted too much or if I didn't ask the right questions, that'll fuck with me for the rest of the day. I don't need other people. I fuck with myself. I really do. So the best response to that is do better every time. Every time. sit when you sit down be as open as possible to try to like and don't let all these little weird mind fucky things enter into your head
Just try to be pure. Try to be genuinely curious. Like, what's your genuine feelings about these things? And then did you handle it well? If you didn't, what could you have done better? Right. Well, then work on that. And that's all you can do. I think one of the things that I worry about is that people... Only feel safe. when they're either being self-righteous or when they're being cynical.
And like genuine compassion or curiosity is looked down upon as naive and a weakness. But I feel like the only way... to be truly ethical. is to be exposed in that way. Cynicism and self-righteousness are shields. They are ways of approaching the world with a barrier. Absolutely. And I can't promise anyone that doing things my way, which is like really trying to like push back against those impulses, which I recognize as being dangerous impulses.
is going to necessarily lead to good things. It's not your job to promise people that. It's not your job. Your job is for you, for your soul, whoever you are. 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.
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 and 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 passion. And you have to find out what's right for you. In doing what you're doing, you are most certainly a role model. And you most certainly will be a role model for me, 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
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... It's a great example to the world of what's possible. If someone is thrust into a horrible... 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 out. That's your responsibility.
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 jobs.
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. It can be done, and those are examples, but the responsibility is to yourself. It's not to these others.
I guess like, I think that's so, I mean, thank you. And I agree. Like I've met very incredible people who have made the most of a bad situation, which ultimately that's what it comes down to. I guess my one pushback might be. that I have come to realize that we are so interconnected. Like we are all influencing each other constantly. And so on the one hand, yes, I'm only answerable ultimately to myself. But when I really sit down and like sit with...
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.
haven't have had direct influences in my life because it's been like this fluid 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 those ripples have been communicated to me. I've had someone tell me that they didn't kill themselves because one day they heard me, you know, in an interview and, and like that they were going to kill themselves and they didn't. And like, I've had someone tell me that.
I never in my wildest dreams thought that me just deciding to like have a conversation with someone one day on a podcast would save a human being's life. But those are the interconnected fluidness of all of us that I also can't discount. You shouldn't. And that I think about a lot. Well, you should. I mean, you are an example. I mean, we are all an example. And if you're a public...
We right now, both of us, are public examples. We're two human beings that are communicating right now to millions of people. It's kind of fucked up if you really think about it. What are we doing? I know. But what we are is we're being real people. Public. So we're thinking publicly, you know, and that is very beneficial to other people that are thinking private.
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. It's not just inspirational. It's aspirational. It provides the universe with positive energy. In a weird way, the human universe, I mean. Sure, sure.
This thing that you said I think is very important. People protect themselves with cynicism and with... People that constantly want to criticize things, they're constantly criticizing things. Finding fault. You're ignoring your own life. That's a part of what's really going on. The real things are, inside their own life, there must be things they're ignoring. If they're spending that much time... and other people and other people's flaws and other people's things.
Especially like trivial, nonsensical things like celebrity beef. Oh, I know. You know what I mean? It's like, what are you doing with your fucking life? I just don't know how anyone has the time, honestly. It's because they're losers. And this is the reality of like some people don't want to hear this because you're a loser, you know, and it sucks being a loser. I've been a loser. I've been a loser many times. You're a loser if you're doing that because you are on with your own decision.
becoming a loser. You're deciding to be a loser by focusing this precious energy that you have in life on shit that should mean nothing. Is there like a... Are they thinking that they're being effective agents in the world by participating? Well, that's the con. That's the con, right. That's the con. Like, yeah, by taking them down a notch. I'm a part of something, and I'm accomplishing something. You're not. You're not. You're not. It's cynicism. It's...
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. 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...
almost always based on your life is not what you want it to be. 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 have great friends and life is amazing.
But yeah, this fucking fat cunt. You know, like, there's no way! There's no way! If you're typing those things, there's no way. Like, that, it's a human flaw, and it's accentuated by this disconnect that comes with social media. This disconnect of being able to send a message to someone and have no consequences and no social cues not to see the person read it and get hurt by it.
You're like sending little bombs over the fence. Yeah, we are primed to be psychopaths. Our algorithms have primed us to be psychopaths. that worries me but that's like a disempowering position you know like you don't have You don't have to do that. Like, no one's compelling you to do that. I don't do that. Why are you? like, why do it? You don't have to do it. Then this is the example that you can lead for other people if you are talking and speaking publicly. Just don't do that.
It's not good for you. It doesn't help anybody. Hurting someone that you don't even know, that doesn't help you. This is what I tell my friends when I talk about reading comments and reading. and engaging with social media. Our friends would 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, is the worst possible, least charitable position on you. You're robbing yourself of these precious units of it.
You have 100 units. Your 100 units should be all on loved ones and friends and things that you love to do and life. That's what your units should be. used for And if some of that sneaks in and it resonates, And you go, oh my god, they're right. Well, fucking correct it. Figure out what you did. Don't do that anymore. It's like, it sounds so simple, but that's it. If you are doing something that people are rightly criticizing,
recognize it, recognize it, of course correct. This is where friends are supposed to come and play. Your friends are supposed to be able to tell you. You didn't have I know the reason why I did it, but don't do that. This is why. This is what I felt. I felt you overreacted. You didn't have to do that. fucked up because of it right but your friends are not going to define you by what they consider the worst thing you've ever done and they're going to recognize that you're an evolving human
And they love you. And they love you. They love the whole picture of you. 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 right to a place of like genuine openness well
This is going to sound so cliche. You have to act out of love. I reached out to a friend of mine recently. They're doing a podcast. It went completely sideways. And I reached out to him. And I sent him a text message. I said, hey. You can't do it. This is why you're doing that. You have to recognize that people are listening to this. You're actually ruining your own product by doing this. And he responded back.
I know. I realize that I felt terrible while it was happening. I got caught up in this thing. That slimy feeling. I got all bunched up. He's like, I got all bunched up, and I just responded. I felt terrible. I was like, it's okay. Just don't do it again. Because he gets to have another chance? Yeah, and the reason why I said it to him is because he's done it before. And I'm like, stop doing this. Stop doing this. You don't have to do this. This is fucking you up. And ultimately, if you...
I hate to use, like, is conversation an art form? I kind of think it is. Right? If people are consuming it... It's a skill. Yeah. If people are consuming it, it's an art form. So if you're being... overbearing and gross and like whatever it is that's like that you're ruining this art that you're creating and I was this real art like that painting is art this is real art this is a weird art
It's like I don't even want to call it art. It's like a dance, but with words. It's a dance. It is a dance. It is a dance. Conversation's a dance. And this is why I have such a hard time. Like I would go on a double date with my wife or something like that with people and they start talking. over everybody else. Sometimes I have to go, stop! Like she's talking. Like he's talking.
haven't you ever listened to a podcast what the fuck are you guys doing it's like playing it was like if you were Roger Federer and you're playing tennis with people like no you can't fucking hit the ball like that like what are you guys doing you can't just do multiple balls at the same time do not listen I know you want to say something but this other person
talking right now and you can't just talk when you want to talk you have to also listen like listening is a part of the dance don't step on people's feet Like, you see that foot there? I want to put my foot there. But the foot's already there. Don't step on their foot. This is crazy. But you have to step on a couple of feet to realize, oh, I stepped on her feet. You have to accidentally fuck up to realize, okay, don't do that again. Back up and figure out what you did wrong. Course correct.
Can I ask you about comedy? Sure. Because I want to do comedy. I'm doing... That's the way you said that. I just wanna, guys. I wanna. I'm actually doing stand-up on Saturday, but on my... On Vashon Island, I'm doing... What's Vashon Island? It's where I live. It's a little island right outside of Seattle that is awesome. Okay, I know where that is. Have you been to Vashon Park? No, I've been to Bainbridge. Oh yeah, okay. Bainbridge Island. Our island is a little more rural than Bainbridge.
Oh, so you're doing comedy for your community. Yeah. That's a terrible idea. Is it? Yes. Is it? Why? Don't do it. No, you want strangers. Really? Yeah, you don't want to interact with those weirdos that you live with. I feel like we have a very supportive community. I've done it before, and it's been great.
Do you have an opening act or just go out by yourself? No, I'm part of like, it's like this Saturday I'm going to be a part, I'm in a lineup of people who have like a seven minute set. Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, that's safe. Seven minutes is safe. Yeah, yeah, you know, walking up there and I'm like, hey. How many times have you done it? This will be like the fourth or fifth time. Whitney actually was the one who first introduced me to stand-up. She...
I love Whitney, by the way. Can we just gush about Whitney for a second? And I love the fact that we both have small kids at the same time. and i just i just love her and so she was the one who first recognized like this girl's been through some shit i bet she's fucking funny And, 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 for you. you know like I get to like lean in to the tragedy of it all but it then goes back to that question of
do people stick you into boxes or are you allowed to be more than what people expect you to be? And I've, you know, in the past, not from my own community, but from strangers received criticism for making jokes about my experience. Again, coming from that place of how dare you joke about... you know, going to prison for a crime you didn't commit when you're not the real victim and whatever. Or you're a true crime figure. You're a...
person who has been, I associate 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. That's the same thing. You're dealing with Comet. You can't listen. I should just do my thing and I'm on business. Yeah. If I listened, I would have never done anything I've done. If I listen to people, I would have never done anything that I've done. Ever. Not one thing.
But we should, yeah, okay. I would have never fought. I would have never got into martial arts. I never would have fought. I never would have done stand-up comedy. I never would have done a podcast. Even my own wife jokes around about it because when my kids were really little, there was one time where my wife wanted to go to Disneyland and I said, I can't, I have to do a podcast. She goes, no, you want to do it.
I go no I have to I told the people that I was going to do it so I have to do it I committed but back then it was It made no money. It was just like nonsense thing that I was doing on the internet. Like, what are you doing? And to this day, we laugh about it. Like, thank God you didn't listen to me. But I don't listen to anybody. I listen to me. I listen to my own mind. I would have never moved to Austin. I moved to Austin in the middle of this giant Spotify.
And they were like, what are you doing? Like, you know, like what? So they gave me all this money and I'm like, I'm going to leave LA. They're like, what? Like, how are you going to get guests? I'm like, I'm flying them in anyway. Like, who cares? I want to do what I want to do. I'm going to just do what I have.
I have a little fucking compass. It's like... Right, as if also, as if everyone only lives in L.A. and you weren't... like the only people worth talking to are going to be in LA also I was like I would rather be broke and not live under the thumb of retarded government than stay in LA and have a successful career are 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 I mean, you can't tell me I can't work. You can't tell me I can't.
You can't tell me I have to put a mask on when I'm walking the dog. Fuck you. Like, the whole thing was just like, I'm out. I'm getting out of here. And, you know, moving to Austin was crazy.
you know like opening up a comedy club everybody's always told me i've always told people be nice to comedy club owners because you don't want to be one like you want to deal with us want to deal with a bunch of fucking crazy people that just travel the country half of them are on drugs they're all narcissists and fucking insane people and they're all just like
You're really selling being a comedian right now. I'm just being honest. Half their mind most of the day is trying to figure out things that are fucked up enough to talk about on stage. Like, and how do I... What's a way to get into people's heads with this idea? How do I make it really funny? What's the best way to do it? That's a crazy way to live. You don't want those people to be your primary source of income. for the comedy club owner all you have
is what the artists create. That's all you're selling. Otherwise, you just have a box. You have a box of the microphone, and you're selling drinks. All you have is other people's creation. And those people, half of them are fucking insane. Like, you don't want to be one of those. But then I came out here and I was like, God damn it, I have to be one of those. No regrets. No, no, it worked out great. I mean I went to your show last night.
Super fun. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Glad you had a good time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to just do. what you think you want to do, and then just do the best version of it you can. But to listen to people say you shouldn't be making jokes because you're a tragic figure, fuck you. Who says who? Says you? Let me look at your life, bitch. Let me go through your fucking pathetic mind and find out what weird justifications you're making.
for the way you think and behave. You're not in any position to be giving out advice. And most of those people are not in any position to be giving out advice. Yeah, and I do worry about people's lack of imagination. It's like, I don't know, I've had enough taken away from me that I'm not going to be limited by a lack of imagination. Absolutely. And it's also people don't want you to succeed. That sucks. Why? Because they're not succeeding.
That's all it is. People that are succeeding, for the most part, want you to succeed up until you get to their level. Hey, you're butting up on my success. Is there a limited amount of success in the world? No! Why then? Well, because they're fools and it's famine. It's a famine mentality. And you could either think in terms of abundance or famine.
But it's a real problem with comedians. Comedians that criticize other comedians. Kind of crazy that they're only criticizing the ones that are way more successful than them. Seems odd. Hmm. Convenient. Seems weird. But they don't think about it that way. They just look at this other person that's getting a lot of attention and they feel bad. So they think that should be them.
and instead of like using it as inspiration, like, wow, look at her. She's fucking selling out arenas. This is crazy. What is she doing that I'm not doing? What can I learn from her? What can I learn from that? Instead, like, fuck her and fuck this and fuck that and what you're doing is stealing bandwidth from yourself that 100 units you're now spending 30 units criticizing other people who aren't even thinking about 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're just trying to make up for the fact that you've fallen short. you don't like how your path has gone
And you're, you know, you see someone, all of a sudden, she's doing comedy now. Fuck that. You know? You shouldn't be doing comedy. These hot takes that people have, you know, while they're on antidepressants and their whole fucking world's in a tizzy. Like, shut up.
you'd 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 its 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 like she felt empowered you know people are gonna listen to what you just said about that and just like Just like when they're alone, like throughout the day, when they're driving their car, when they're sitting on the train, they're going to think about it.
I mean, I'm still thinking about that. I'm still trying to figure it out. And I think that's good. Yeah. Like you said, we're all interconnected. We're all learning together. And the only thing you can do is do your best. Do your best. Do your best. Is that the advice? Yes. Is that advice, Daddy? With everything. With everything. With everything. Do your best. Be a nice person. Do your best.
Yeah, that's all you can do. Done and done. Yeah. We have solved everything. It seems so simple. But, you know, those demons, they never sleep. They'll wake up in the morning tapping you on the head. Again, the thing that haunts me is when people think they're doing their best and they're not. That's what haunts me. Like, and that happens. That is happening constantly. It's people convincing themselves that they're doing their best and they're not.
But then how do you get out of that cycle of convincing yourself? Because that's where the issue of cognitive bias comes in and reaffirming your sense of self to yourself and your identity. Like, I'm a good guy. I can't do wrong. I'm a good friend, I can't be a bat. There are ways that we define ourselves that makes it impossible for ourselves to see ourselves clearly, and that freaks me out. Like, I'm always afraid of that.
Five grams in silent darkness. Prescribed. And you might have to do it more than once. You might have to do a lot of cleaning. Yeah.
clean your closet clean your closet okay throw out all the stupid shit but it's hard for people because you know you're on this path of momentum oftentimes people are ahead of their skis you know they're on this path of momentum and they don't know how to stop that's the train that's out of the station yeah but in a much lesser extent because it's more in their control you know when your situation is beyond your control and a lot of people they're the fucking
They're the engineer. They're the ones who's in the skis. They're the ones who are deciding to go straight downhill.
It's hard. It's hard. And then you have all these things. Once you've sort of created a life, And you have all these pieces in motion and then you realize like, oh my god, this is like kind of beyond my control and I don't like where it's going, but... is 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
What's going on? 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. Get out. 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'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. True. That's very true. I've definitely found myself in the position of...
not being helpable. There's a story I tell in the book about trusting the wrong person and wanting to believe that they were Someone like me, someone who can understand me, and then I realized they were not. That's horrible. When you let someone in and you realize you fucked up. I've had that happen multiple times. Yeah, there's a lot of con artists out there. There's a lot of socios.
There's a lot of slippery people that they're chameleons. They're like little cuttlefish. They kind of adapt to their environment and slip into your world. It's dangerous, you know. There's a lot of people that... that they look at it like like it's a like a game like how do I get close to this person How do I benefit from this relationship? How do I make these connections? And in the business world, you're actually taught to do that. Right. Which is really crazy.
It's called networking. It's a good word in that world. Yeah, you have to bullshit, you know, and you and the wife have to go out and pretend that I know he's an asshole and we're going to sit with him because it's really important for my promotion. And then, you know, that's no wonder why CEOs become sociopaths.
Like, of course. John Ronson has a good book about that. Have you read The Psychopath Test? No, I haven't. Oh, it's so fun. I read The Publicly Shamed book, though. Yeah, that's a good one, too. It's great. Yeah. He's so funny. Yeah. Yeah, it's... I mean... Being a human is weird. There's no guidebook. You have the most complex... interactive machine. that is constantly adapting and changing and it's completely variable.
It's completely variable based on your environment. Not just your environment in terms of the human beings, but even the weather. If you live in Seattle... You're on a very different wavelength than when you're in Austin. It's true. I come here and I feel like I'm in a bath.
all the time just in a bath what do you mean it's so hot and like and that like impacts me in a way where i just feel sort of dreamy like i'm in a bath all the time instead of that's interesting i've never heard it put that way in a bath that's funny that's funny Yeah, I don't think about it that way. I wanted to ask how you slow down though, right? You're talking about slowing down and like taking stock. And the way I do it is by meditating.
But I have found that a lot of people are resistant to the idea of meditating because they have certain ideas about what meditating is. And it's shutting off your thoughts. And it's like, well, you know, eventually you might be able to do that, but ultimately it's just sitting down and noticing. that arise. But I like to say that anyone... who can masturbate can meditate.
And ultimately... Actually, people that can meditate maybe not be able to masturbate because they don't have any arms. You can still meditate. exactly and you get ultimately to a similar place of like just single-minded focus and bliss so go for it don't hold back And the funny things that occur to your brain when you are meditating. Like, I have... Okay, can I tell you something that's kind of off-color? Sure. Well, maybe you know this. Since becoming a mom, my libido...
Really? Oh, yeah. Just because I'm constantly being, like, touched that, like, the last thing I need is for my husband to climb on me like a jungle gym. Like, it's just... It's a chance. not what's on the menu for me. Also, you're probably tired all the time. I'm so tired. My body is different. The chemistry is still working itself out. The one thing that reliably makes me horny... is meditating interesting isn't that wild huh and you know we have this like term and meditation like
monkey mind right like the idea being that like When you sit down, you really notice that your mind is going all over the place and is just like reacting like a monkey, but also another thing that monkeys are famous for. is just masturbating voraciously. And I feel like that's also what's happening in my mind. Like I sit down and notice like how perverted my mind is when I'm actually just sitting there meditating in a nice group of people on a Sunday morning. That's funny.
so a group meditation oh yeah yeah it's not just like when i'm home alone like in my intimate space like i'm like i feel yeah this is i hope no one at my zen knows maybe they're gonna come up to you the next time you're doing like me too but then you don't want to know because then you're going to be meditating like this freak is thinking about sex
Well, I mean, and you're sitting there and you're thinking, like, what else are the uses of these floor cushions? Like, you're just, like, going, like, all of the things in your brain. And then you're thinking, am I the only one? Interesting. Yeah. So, I don't know. There's something, again, one of those, like, weird...
unintended consequences of just trying to like sit back and take stock is like rediscovering parts of yourself that have been sort of diminished or made dormant because of the stress of existence. So... Another reason why they should advertise that. I don't know why they don't advertise that on meditation apps. It would attract the wrong people. Like, I'm trying to get perverted. I'm trying to find my inner pervert. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know. I don't necessarily meditate. that way.
But I do incorporate a lot of voluntary adversity. A lot of it is working out. You've got a lot of Buddhas around you for someone who doesn't meditate. I know. What's with that? 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 a bunch of things that I do that do that. Archery does that, oddly enough. Is that in the art of archery? There's a reason why there's that book. Yes. There's something about... Have you ever done archery? I have done it because my brother-in-law is a Ren Faire guy. He's a Ren Faire performer. So cool. Can I call out Seattle Nights, by the way? He is the director of the Seattle Nights. And yes, he jousts. He like... What a dork. I know. It's so cool. It's so cool. I love it.
And I always, I'm going to go to their show on Woodby Island this month anyway. That's funny. Yeah, they're awesome. But yes, so yeah. What were we saying? Archery. Archery, yes. So I've done it like in his backyard because he has all of the medieval weaponry. That's hilarious. Yeah. I don't use the medieval ones. I use modern ones, but... The thing about it is that it's very difficult to do accurately, especially at distance. So when I practice, most of the time I practice at about 85 yards.
and the amount of movement Like, so if you're at full draw, so you draw the bow back, right? If you're at full draw, if you look at my arm, if my arm does this, I miss by six inches. Wait, what did you just do? I'm missing my six inches. slight I mean a millimeter of movement is for So you're saying that Legolas is a badass, is what I'm hearing. Who? Legolas from Lord of the Rings.
Oh! I'm not. That's not a real person. I'm applying it to human beings. Oh, okay, fine. There's this repeatable technique that you have to do. It involves breathing and focus and concentration. And there's actually a whole process that I go through. There's this guy named Joel Turner who 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 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 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. But you can't be thinking about your bills.
You can't be thinking about an argument. You got in this. Why did my dog shit on the rug? You can't be thinking about those things. You have to be completely focused on what you're doing. And in that way.
like 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 all this angst and 100% which is part of being a human being because we're designed to run away from predators were designed to hunt and gather and look out for invading tribes like this is the genetic
sequence that evolved for hundreds of thousands of years that we still have. It's still a part of us. These human reward systems are all in place. You have to honor And one of the ways you have to honor those is rigorous exercise. Whatever you like to do. You can play squash. You can play tennis. You can run. You can do yoga. You can lift weights. You can...
do jujitsu, but you have to do something. If you don't do something, you're going to always be the most anxiety-ridden people I know are also sad. I don't think that's a coincidence. And I also always feel like whenever I'm feeling really shitty psychologically, I need to go for a run. Yes. Do you find, so here's my question. given that that is your 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 ever resolve. And some kind of unconscious processing coming into your consciousness. So like some kind of new awareness of something that you've been trying to figure out.
And it like is a catalyst for you figuring out what you need, like that feeling of like being in sync with the universe and knowing what you need to do. Do you ever find yourself like in the moment that you are like. immediately exiting that flow state.
Do you feel more clarity about your life or what you need to do or that thing that you weren't thinking about, like your to-do list or your bills or that argument that you've had with somebody that you care about? Does anything come into focus or do you find you walk away from? encounter in jujitsu like knowing not just feeling better emotionally but like knowing what you need to do next I think more so with jujitsu with archery it's just
You know, because it's so hard to do. And it's such a singular thing. You're just doing this one thing over and over and over again. Like, I'll do it like a hundred times in a day. The thing is, like, okay, what did I do right? What did I do wrong? Like, why did that shot go bad? Minute adjustments. Yeah, just minute adjustments. And, again, it's just a clarity. I'm sorry about my throat, people. It's just a clarity of.
analysis of technique and of execution. So it's so overwhelming. It's so singular in the focus that you don't really think about anything else. So there's no room for like, oh. yeah i guess i one of the benefits that i get from meditation is feeling like when i come out of meditation i feel like i i have a clarity of purpose that i might not have had because i was
I had monkey mind and I was busy. I was distracted and I was using my bandwidth was so much. And so my, you just tune down what your bandwidth is like paying attention to. And then you reenter. the world with a renewed sense of clarity and you're not as distracted you're not on that treadmill of thought yeah i think that comes to me at least that comes much more through rigorous
That makes sense. Yeah. That's at the end of a really hard workout and sauna and stretching. Stretching is always great, too. That's a good time. for reflection after it's over and it's like this wind down cool down and then i'm just i always feel so much nicer that's the one thing i really like After I work out, I feel so much nicer. I'm a good person now. I just want to be nice to people. I want to smile and say hi to everybody. All the weirdness of being a man just goes away.
The weirdness of being a man. I do think that I do not envy you being a man. Oh my god, it's the best. I don't have you being a woman. Really? Yeah. Oh, no, I much prefer being a woman. Of course, you're a woman. I mean, testosterone is a hell of a drug, my friend. Like, what the hell is that? Testosterone, I don't want to deal with that. It's interesting, but you have some. You have more testosterone than you have estrogen. What? Yeah.
Yeah, women have more testosterone than they have estrogen. But I've never felt the impulse to punch a wall, you know? Me neither. That's stupid. Okay, well... No punch walls. Well, you have an outlet for your punching energy, but like, I don't know. I mean, what I mean is like that innate elevate, like an elevated level of aggression that just is not like accessible. to me as a woman. Is that wrong? Am I like inaccurate in this? I just feel like
I don't know what I would do if I wanted to just like jerk off all the time. Like I just don't understand what that is like. And that seems over like. That doesn't seem fun to deal with. Yeah. Well, you don't really want to jerk off all the time unless you're a sex addict. And then you've probably got other issues you're dealing with. but the aggression thing
it's not just like aggression for no reason. Like you only have aggression for a reason. Like I never have aggression for, I'm never like walking around fucking mad at everything. There's never, never, that's never the case. and um but i also i work out a lot So I get it out of my system. It's just a thing like you just have to maintain. You just have to maintain your life. You have to maintain your body. You have to recognize that you have biological needs.
And as a man, I think one of those needs is you have to exercise to just calm yourself, to relieve anxiety. And again, that's that term that is used often, but I think it's the right term, voluntary adversity. You show up at class, you work out really hard. You show up at the gym, you work out really hard. And when it's over, you feel better. You feel good. You're nicer. Strong, powerful people.
can be the nicest people because they don't have to be nice. They're being nice because they want to be nice. There's a lot of weak, feeble men that pretend that they're nice, but really what they are is just... vulnerable. They have to be not Because they don't have any choice. And if they were in a position of not having to, then they would drop the nice act in a second. And that's what happens. They're some of the creepiest fucking people when they have power. There's like really weak men.
They're some of the scariest people, and they're the scariest people as politicians. They're just really weak men that all of a sudden have power, and I'm going to fucking show you. Having real power is to be kind when you don't have to. You know what I love about being a woman though? What? That I do think is a genuine thing and a genuine difference is it's easier for me to be nurturing um 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. Right. As a man, like, do you second, like, I know that like, my husband has told me this, that like. He second guesses like hanging out at, you know, with the kids at the at the park because someone might think that he is a pedophile. Oh, that's crazy. Hanging out with his.
Yeah, because if you're just a guy sitting on a bench and your kids are playing, how does anyone know that you aren't just a guy? I think he's really overthinking things. Of course you're a fucking dad at the park. That's crazy.
You see other dads in the park, you say hi. It's like, you're not a pedophile. How old's your kid? It's normal. I've taken my kids to parks a thousand times. You've never felt in some way... that your masculinity inhibited your ability, like your instinct to be like nurturing and affectionate? No.
No, I think that's a weakness. Like if you can't be nurturing and affectionate because you think you're masculine, that's crazy. That's just weak. That's nuts. That's like a distortion of what strength is. That's not... That's weird. Why can't you be nice? The idea that if you're nice and you're affectionate and you're kind, that you're weak, that's crazy. That's crazy. Especially if you have options.
If you don't have to be nice and you're nice, that's real niceness. It's pure. You don't have to be. You don't have to be a nice person, but you're nice because it's a good thing to do. That's the right way to do it. Okay, so what's so great about being a guy? Everything. It's awesome. We fucking build everything. We run the world. It's great.
I don't know. I am a guy. I mean, I can't imagine. And yet, it all comes down to trying to get the attention of some lady. Not at all. No. I already have the attention of a lady. Right. I'm good. I still love being a guy. You know, it's not like that's the primary motivation. No? No. What is the primary motivation? Fun. Fun? Fun. Yeah, life is fun. Okay. Life should be fun. Sounds pretty great. It should be fun if you pursue it correctly. There's a lot of stuff to do. A lot of stuff to do.
That's why I hear people say, I'm bored. Like, I don't even understand you. I don't even get it. How the fuck can you be bored? I wish I had 50 lives to live simultaneously. I would do a bunch of different things. I would have a bunch of different jobs. There's like so many different things that I'd love to do.
Are people sometimes beholden to doing things that they don't want to do just because they... have to make bills or they have to yes but that's all choices that you make too and unfortunately these choices sort of they cascade You can find yourself.
motivated by the wrong things and doing things for the wrong reasons like doing things just for money and just for this or just for that and i've done that before i know it but then you have to realize like what you're doing and not and and stay focused on the prize yeah take the steps to not want to do that You know? But...
You know, it's like... you know people there's people listening to this right now like oh that's easy for you to say because i have to do this and i have to that that's true but You can do things to better your life with your free time. Go open your phone right now and look at your screen time. Okay, now I understand the screen time is 10 minutes here 20 minutes there five minutes here five minutes there, but that screen time It's probably about five hours. Which is crazy.
That's five hours you could have been improving your life. That's five hours you could have been doing something different. That's five hours you could have went to the gym. That's five hours you could have eaten better. You could have taken steps to have better food in your house. 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 this goes back to people commenting and bitching at people online. Well, that's what you're doing. If you're distracting yourself by doing a bunch of shit that's just worthless. And it is worthless. And easy, maybe. And easy. And very easy. Yeah. It's because you need discipline. You need to figure out what do you really want to do with your life and what makes you feel better. Do you feel like you are innately disciplined?
No. No, I've learned that. Okay. I've developed that. Yeah. That's not no one's innate. No, I don't think that's real. I think we look at people that are disciplined like, oh, it must be easy. You're just born with that gene. No, that's not real. No, you recognize the value of discipline and the rewards. You reap the rewards and then you like it. And so you keep doing it, you keep pursuing it. I'm just curious about like... brain chemistry because when i think about you know
You've been very complimentary towards me in this conversation. But a part of me is wondering, am I just lucky that I have the kind of internal chemistry that I have that makes me value the things that I value?
I'm just doing what I feel compelled to do. And I'm curious when people feel compelled to do otherwise. And I don't know where to place... responsibility for that do you know what I mean well you you wouldn't know unless you are them you could look to your own life to times where you haven't lived in an exemplary way or done things. where you're helping yourself and done things, in fact, that are actually sabotaging your life, and you can correct them yourself.
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 process. 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. It's called a sabonim, and it's one who lives.
And that's what you have to do. You have to live by example. Live like someone's watching. Yes. This is what I tell people. And I've said this for years. You want to have a successful life. If you want to live your life like there's a documentary crew around you filming your everyday life and that you want people to be impressed. Do it when no one's watching. Do it when no one...
I think about that when I work out. Yeah. I think about that. Yeah, if people were judging me and they were watching me right now, and they would, what would you think? Yeah, and now I'm wondering if, like, that's one of those weird silver linings to this whole experience is that my life became very, very public very early.
And so I literally do have to walk around living my life as if there is potentially a documentary crew following me around. Yeah, I think that is. I think that's real. I think that's... The gift that I have gotten by being famous. That I have to live. And if I didn't, if I was just some fucking tyrant that no one knew... You know, and I just had all this wealth and power and no one knew me and I could just get away with being an asshole.
Right, yeah, I think the most wealthy and the most powerful do not want fame, because with fame comes accountability. Yeah, but that's good. That's good. Even the haters are good. And then the people that defend you against the haters, that's good too. It's all good. Everyone's just working this out together publicly. And they're doing it through different vessels. And sometimes they do it through other people. They're doing it through me and they're doing it through you.
Would you wish fame on anyone? No. No. No. No, no, no, no, no. You can't handle it. Yeah? No, but you can handle it. But most people. It breaks people. That's why people can't have it when they're young. The worst thing you do to it. The worst thing. I mean, look, there's countless. I've talked to so many of them on the...
They're all broken. Yeah, like who have you talked to? I'm curious. Macaulay Culkin. Oh, yeah. Miley Cyrus. He's doing much better now, isn't he? He's great. Yeah. He's great. I mean, he's as great as you can be to be super famous when you're sick. I'm friends with Ricky Schroeder.
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 something that happens when you have fame and adulation. during your developmental stages as a child when you're supposed to be like figuring out how do I get people to like me? Like what is it about?
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 you that gets ingrained in your brain chemistry when you're a kid like I don't know fuck I don't know anything I don't know fuck all about brains but like it seems to me that like especially developmental when your brain hasn't configured yet that's when you get hardwired to have complexes the rest of your life that you're going to be dealing with. 100%. And if your brain is formulated
with extreme adulation and love for no fucking reason, just because you're a cute kid. But you're a cute kid in front of the whole world, in Home Alone? That's nuts. That's nuts. I mean, he's a very thoughtful person, and he's come through it. I mean, I really enjoy talking to him. He's a really nice guy. Does he regret being in the Home Alone movies?
That's a good question. I'd have to ask him. I don't know. I mean, I don't know, you know. Because, I mean, you know, you can look back. I don't even know how much of a choice that was for him. How much can you choose anything when you're six? How can you choose? So in a way, it was a thing that happened to him that he didn't really have control over. And does he look back on that and go... Would I give up that? If I could get that life back, would I have a different life?
I'm curious what he would say. Well, he most certainly would have a different life. Yeah. Yeah. Would it be better? I don't know. But I don't know anybody that's, again, gone through that. air quotes whole at the end of it you know I just think that There's also this weird thing where you become the provider for the family. As a child, yeah. And then you have this parasitic relationship that your parents have to you. 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 that their parents stole from them millions of dollars. Yeah. And then you have to grapple with that as you're an adult. these monsters. They used you as an ATM. and they stopped working, and they became your quote-unquote manager, really just pushing you out there to try to siphon money off of you. Fucking A. Fucking A, yeah, yeah. I got fame in a slow drip. I got slow doses.
Like snake venom. You get a little bit of snake venom. If you get one big bite from a cobra, you're fucked. That's what I got. Yeah. So. Well, you're strong. So here I am. Well, you're strong. You came through it on the other side. A very durable person. You know, and I think there's, you know, it's a trial by fire and you went through it. You know, that's what... Now, that's what they do.
You go through something very difficult to be strong at the end. And you don't become strong, just wake up one day, I'm strong. No, you have to go through something. And going through some shit when you're a kid and becoming famous is different than going through hardship as a child. I know a lot of children. that went through hardship like all my friends that are interesting all had horrible childhoods
All my most fascinating friends. I'm so grateful that I did not have a fucked up childhood. Well, that's probably what prepared you or helped you. Indeed. I feel like if I had gone through this experience after having a fucked up childhood, I would be a psychopath today. So thank God I had a good childhood. Yeah, I didn't have a bad childhood. I had a complex childhood, but it wasn't bad. You know, my mother and my stepfather are very nice.
It wasn't bad, but it was fucked up. It was moved around a lot, didn't have a lot of friends, got bullied, a lot of different things. But it wasn't the worst. 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 hurdle stuff.
I agree. I think in large part because how do you trust... I think rebuilding your life relies upon... rebuilding yourself in the context of other human beings and how do you do that when you can't trust anyone it's true but i do know some people that have gone through childhood sexual trauma that are also incredibly fat
Because they figured out a way to acquire strength through it all. But what about trust? That's the other thing I was going to say. And then they've also figured out a way to... Well, they're also very... And rightly so. But that's a good thing because a lot of people don't have your intentions in mind, especially if you're a woman.
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. You ever heard of the definition of a gentleman? No. It's a patient wolf.
okay yeah all right yeah and then ultimately the prey sort of acknowledges yeah here you are you're getting into my pants in the end but because you've been the most patient the most impressively patient of all Yeah, you've done the dance correctly. You've put your feathers out like a good peacock. Yeah. I like that. I like that dance, yes. Well, that's the thing. It's like women are designed to like that dance.
Right? Because this person has shown you the respect of not just trying to use their physical force and take it from you and not care about you as a person. They've chosen to acknowledge you as a person, like this is what this person wants. They want to feel comfortable with me. But then you can't be a sociopath, too. It has to be genuine. You have to genuinely like this person. So, you know.
for a woman to feel safe right how do you you know and then that's you got to go through a lot of trial and error with that too you have to figure out like why that relationship fall apart oh Oh, it's a piece of shit. Why did that one fall apart? Oh, she was a psycho. Recognize what do you actually like? Is it just that they're hot?
this is the thing like i've had a bunch of friends that just married hot people and then you know you're going through divorce and it's all chaos you can't just fucking marry hot people like just because they're hot and they're sexy and they turn you on like That's just genes. Like, you gotta understand, like, there's a personality involved. And then there's also, like, when you're hot, you have ultimate power. You have the Willy Wonka golden ticket. Like, everybody's stumbling at their feet.
try to like open doors for you and be nice to you. Put you in prison. Open a certain kind of door and then close it forever. Yeah. It's... It's just flirting. It was flirting in the end. That's all it was. Being a person's fucking weird. You know, it's really weird. It's really weird, and it's tempting. It's like you're always looking at that fucking hourglass, just sands running out.
You know, like, what am I doing? Why am I doing it? What's this about? What do I like? And then you can get overwhelmed with, like, existential angst. Just, what's the point of it all? Yeah, well, you have to find a point. Like, what is man's search for meaning? Like, what is it? What are we doing? Well, that's the subtitle of my book.
My search for meaning. Oh, my God. Right there. In cursive, if you can still read cursive. Some people can't anymore. Is that your actual handwriting? No, I wanted it to be my actual handwriting. Why didn't they use it? Fuckheads. They were like, this looks so much more pretty. Yeah, you could have made it that pretty. I do have great handwriting. What the fuck? It's close. might as well it is odd yeah the the search for meaning search for meaning is very odd and you know and you could
Especially when there's no inherent meaning. You just have to make it up. It means something to you. If it means something to you, it's inherent. It's real. If it means something to you. If you actually care, it means something. Like, what's the point of it all? If you're going to die someday, and who knows what happens when you die? And then there's the real fatalist thing. When you die, it's over. It's just black and emptiness. and then just shut off like
Okay. So you're still alive, bitch. Okay, you gotta figure out what you're doing with your day-to-day. Do you enjoy your day-to-day? If not, Why do some people? How come some people enjoy their life? Why don't you? Like, what does man search for meaning? Enjoy your fucking life. Enjoy this life. You can. It's possible. It can be done. And I think living by example shows other...
can be done and then being like really honest about it like what is what are the steps what's the struggles how do you do it yeah that's actually been a really sort of fun takeaway that I've had from having just an Instagram is like I'll post a silly video of me dancing for my kids. And a lot of the comments are just people being like, I'm so glad that someone like you can be happy. You know, it's like, thank God someone like you can be happy. And I'm like, yeah.
Someone like me can be happy. That means you can be happy, too. It's possible to be happy. Yeah. But, you know, when you're a 500-pound person and you want to be thin... That's a long road. It's not going to come quickly. And if you're a severely depressed, very unhappy person with a disaster of a life, it's not going to turn around overnight. That's a battleship. It takes a long time. around and get it facing the other direction.
And the motivation has to be that you have to see some kernel of opportunity embedded within that darkness, because otherwise, like... How do you even know what direction to go towards? And you have to be enjoying the process. You have to figure out a way to enjoy the process of improving. Even though it's hard. Yes. And because it's hard. Hard can be fun. Yeah, you have to enjoy the hard. And that's why voluntary adversity is so important. You have to force yourself to do hard.
so that you can do hard things no matter what if i do what's up pump up remixes somewhat you gotta get motivated somehow yeah that's true that's true although david goggins doesn't listen to music because he thinks it's cheating Really? Yeah, he gets all his motivation internal. come on external motivations he's a fucking complete psycho you know but he's like i need a good soundtrack when i'm running but that's the spectrum you know the spectrum of discipline you know
That's what he's doing. That's what he's doing. That's what he's doing all day long for no goal other than, like, I talked to him about it. It's like, I'm in the lab every day downloading information. Cool, dude, you're in the matrix. There's a crazy video of him working out with my friend Israel Adesanya. Israel Adesanya is the former UFC middleweight champion of the world, one of the greatest fighters that ever lived.
and he is working out with david goggins and he can't keep up with him and david goggins just break and he's throwing up in garbage cans, and David is putting him through his workout. And it's one of three workouts that David does in a day. And he's like this incredibly fit, world champion fighter. Is he distracting himself?
Oh, you have to talk to him. You have to dig into that brain. You have to dig into that. That's a very unusual brain. But he was 300 pounds and fat at one point in his time. It just has become his purpose. That's his meaning, right? That makes sense to me. that's why he says he's like He goes, I'm downloading knowledge. Like every time he's like pushing himself past the limits that he thinks he's capable of further and further.
he's downloading more understanding of himself we should work out some time by the way i think that would be fun I only studied fighting when I first got back out of prison because I was getting a bunch of death threats, so I did Krav Maga. And a lot of it was just learning how to scream.
Krav Maga? Yeah well the first like my Krav Maga instructors because they were instructing me on a specific for a specific reason wasn't just to work out their first thing that they taught me was how to scream just to like without without holding back the the amount like i was surprised and they were telling me
People don't want to take up space and take and make noise like we're we're taught from a very young age especially women to not do that and so you have to in the first The first lesson was make noise, take up space. and and so we just practiced like screaming as loud and as hard and as long as we could and then once we got through that Then we started doing the fighting moves. And the first thing I had to do before I did anything was...
Scream first, then move. Scream, move. And so that the screaming became part of the movement. So it would trigger so I wouldn't have to think about it. If it ever came down to it and someone actually attacked me, I wouldn't have to think scream. I would just scream. Krav Maga's legit. It gets criticized a lot. Does it? Yeah, by martial artists. Why? Well, because it's a combinatory martial art, so it combines a bunch of different things together, so it's essentially like a jack-of-all-trades.
what's wrong with that there's nothing wrong with that oh okay no no there's nothing wrong with that it's like it's like only being into purebred dogs like what what's up with that well No, it's like, is it effective? There's no Krav Maga artists that have gone on to dominate in the UFC.
Oh, interesting. Yeah. I didn't know that. But it kind of, you could kind of say that mixed martial arts in a sense is essentially the roots of Krav Maga because it's taking the best aspects of various martial arts and training them yeah how is that different well the thing is is that if you are training for self You're training to defend yourself against an attacker. The true, in my personal opinion, The true best way to learn how to fight is to learn how to prepare yourself for train kill.
Not the average person. Really? Yes. Like, how often are you going to encounter trained killers? It doesn't matter. You should be prepared for trained killers because you could run into a trained killer and if you try to do some Krav Maga nonsense on me, I'm going to fucking strangle you. You can't defend yourself against someone who actually knows how to fight. Okay, here's a question. Can I ever ask...
Not against someone like me. So then what's the fucking point? Because you could defend yourself against someone who doesn't know how to fight as good as me, but the odds of someone like me attacking you are very, very, very, very, very small. But you're saying I should train to be able to... to fight against trained killers. Yes. Defend yourself. Jiu-jitsu, you can. Jiu-jitsu, you can defend yourself. You're not going to... The way you would be able to beat me is if I was on train.
I have too many advantages. But also, I don't have advantages if someone's bigger than me and just as well-trained as me. Right. Or more well-trained than I am. Better than me. I'm not going to be. you know, the UFC heavyweight champion. I'm not gonna win. It's not possible. I don't care how long I do martial arts. But you can avoid dying by that. No. No? No. Okay, they'll just murder you. No, yeah, no.
No, I'm completely vulnerable. Okay, great. As an expert martial artist with three black belts, I'm completely vulnerable. Yeah, that's reality. That's physical. that's I mean it's like you against an elephant who's gonna win exactly that's the 100 men versus a gorilla yeah obviously the gorilla would win whoever thought the gorilla would lose retards men who have never seen a gorilla men who think they can fight better than they can which is most men
Who ever brought up that as even a thought experiment? I don't know, but it's funny that it's like viral in 2025. I thought we would have worked that out and that's 50. I feel like people just don't remember what animals are like. We're so out of touch with animals. They don't even know what an animal is.
They have no idea. People know what their dog is. They have no idea what an animal is, an actual real animal. And also, your own dog could fuck you up if it wanted to. Yeah, if it wanted to. It just doesn't want to. Exactly. Yeah, unless you have a little dog. I'll fuck up a chihuahua. My dog Marshall, he's a golden retriever. He's the sweetest dog on the planet.
But he could probably kill me if he wants. He just doesn't know. Right. And he would never think to. Right. But if a rat was trying to attack you, he'd be fucking terrified. Or if he got infected by rabies. Right. You know, and lost his mind. Right. Ciao. It'd be a real problem. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean there's there's the reality but if you're training to defeat a trained killer You're going to be way better off than if you're training to defeat someone who's got lunge at you this way and you're gonna block that and hit him here and hit him there and like
But don't you fight differently against a trained killer versus, like, some dude who's, like, drunk in a bar? No, the right way to fight is the right way to fight, period. Whether it's some drunk dude. If some drunk dude tries to take a swing at me... I'm not going to think, oh, he's a drunk dude. I shouldn't avoid this punch. I should do something different. No, it's 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. Sure. At the drop of a... 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... You know, like a grown man who is of normal size defending himself against another grown man of normal size. A fair fight. Yeah, a fair fight. But in a fair fight, you should be preparing to fight against a trained killer.
If you are a person who just only trains in self-defense tactics, like someone comes at me, I'm going to do this, 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. this way and I'm gonna avoid that and I see his left foot step backwards well now his right leg is vulnerable so
It's language. It's understanding the flow of body dynamics in movies. And it's happening so quickly that the only way that you can actually be effective is if you're fluent and you don't have to think about it. You don't think about it. When you're training, it's like you very rarely think, oh, now I'm going to do this. It's like opportunities open themselves up, especially in strike.
Striking is something that you do where you're doing these techniques so often that as things happen, you're just... responding in a trained way. Your mind and your neural system is completely trained for these actions and these movements.
Do you think that fighting... and you know fighting your friends like not like actual like fighting for your life but fighting for your friends is a crucial part of brain development because i know that i've heard or at least i've read that rough housing with small kids is a really important
part of their brain development, and the people who become more well-adapted, well-adjusted emotionally, just they seem to be more fit emotionally, were kids who... had some rough housing when they were young, especially with their parents. Is that like an elevated form of roughhousing part of a human being's cognitive development? Well, I think physical altercation. are a normal part of human existence that have existed. It's been going on since the beginning.
And to no understanding or no knowledge of it and no experience with it at all. Because I'm not like, I'm not a fighter. I don't like, I've never gotten to a physical fight with anyone. Good. Is that good? Is that good? I haven't either. Okay. Other than ones on purpose. Right, okay. Like, I'm not, I don't get in street fights. I don't, I've never got, I haven't been in a fist fight since I was.
kid i've just they're all martial arts fights okay i i you know and I just think, for- for ma- Being vulnerable is not good. It's just not good to not know how to defend yourself. It just leaves you with this deep insecurity. And that's why I see men that don't know how to fight. They use bravado and they puff their chest out and they yell. They're trying to intimidate people and scare people. It's just posturing. It's just like...
Maybe this is why I feel bad for men because I don't feel any sort of impulse to do that. to to puff up my chest and and like i don't know maybe is it well you shouldn't Men shouldn't either. And the men that do it are generally vulnerable. It's bullies, right? Why are bullies bullies? They're bullies because they're pussies. That's really what it is. That's why they're trying to intimidate. 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. Most men who don't know how to defend themselves are really mouthy. get get loud like they're just vulnerable and that you know our friend and uh 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? And he goes, I don't know, I fucking see red. And I go, you don't know how to defend your... I go, one of these days you're going to do that to someone who's like me, but they're mean.
And they're going to just say, oh, here's a nice opportunity to just fuck this guy up. And you're going to wind up in a hospital or work. 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 shitty. 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 figure out a way to not be vulnerable i got into martial arts because i was getting bullied and i didn't i just didn't i was always scared of altercations like i hate this feeling so i was like okay i'm gonna become what i'm terrified I guess my one sort of poke back at that, though, is I find it interesting that you frame vulnerability in such a negative way. Physical vulnerability is negative. Yeah, but I think the thing that I'm sort of thinking about is how...
It doesn't matter really how strong you are or capable you are. We all are still utterly vulnerable. And... Well, sure. And so I guess, like... But what can you control? Fair. You can control some aspect of that. But you can't control guns, right? If someone has a gun, you're vulnerable. I don't care who you are. It could be Superman. Right. Or not Superman. He's both.
But you can be, you know, UFC heavyweight champion. You're still vulnerable to a gun. One little kid can kill you. Bang, you're dead. Yeah. But how much can you control? You can't control some of it. So is the idea like, oh, you can't control any of it, so why control it all? Why do anything? Why be strong? Well, I guess, no. I guess my thing is, for me, it's...
It's less about like... prepare 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 how do I get up when I am inevitably hurt. So I understand that life is going to hurt me, and I don't know how life is going to hurt me. So there's like a million different ways that I can be hurt. It might be that I'm physically assaulted. It might be some other thing.
And knowing that I can't prepare for all of the ways that I am vulnerable to existence, instead I try to think, okay, I am vulnerable to existence. and I am going to get hurt, how do I not be broken by the hurt? And how do I... Maybe I'm treating the inevitable pain of life as that. as that training to get strong it's just kind of like I almost don't seek out pain because I've had enough pain come at me is that does that make sense I don't know what do you mean by seek out pain though well
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. But not even just for the inevitable things that happen. Just for your own resolve. Just for the sake. Just for you as a human to achieve balance.
We're all vulnerable. There's no invulnerable people. We're all going to die. We all are made of flesh and bone and we're all weak. Right. There's no invulnerable humans. But you can be the last. And you should probably optimize that. Hmm. Especially as...
I think because without it comes a lot of weird insecurities that are not comfortable and they can trip you up in all sorts of aspects of your life. I think maybe this is another like... woman man thing maybe where like women have to accept vulnerability as like and 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 going to win a fight, that's for sure. Right. And so knowing that, I feel like I...
Sure, I prepare myself in the ways that I can, right? And I'm strong in the ways that I can. But I don't think about vulnerability. in negative terms because I've also found that once you've been once you've been once you've been forced to reckon with your own vulnerability that is when you find your I don't know. I see them as interchangeable. I think we're talking about different things. Yeah. Yeah, I think physical vulnerability. Look, I think there's certain...
There's certain roles that males and females ultimately play that are unavoidable, and one of them is when your husband went downstairs to protect you. Right. There's a reason why I wasn't the one who did that. Ultimately, right? In that situation. If you are less vulnerable as a man, it's a good thing. If someone breaks into my house and they're a normal-sized person without a weapon, I'm not scared of-
You know, I'm scared this crazy person is in my house. I'm scared that they might have a weapon. But if I realize that they don't have a weapon and they... they're physically threatening, I have a massive advantage. It's up to me whether or not they die.
And that's better. That is better. That's better than you getting beat to death by some schizophrenic who breaks into your house because you don't know how to defend yourself. Fair. And you panic and you start flailing and you hyperventilate. You don't know what to do. Yeah. That's not good. No, it's not. That's all I'm saying. We're all vulnerable. It's part of what you're doing when you're working out really hard is to try to increase the strength and decrease the vulnerability.
You're trying to increase your resolve to push through difficult things, increase your character and your will. You're trying to fortify. 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 jock. and bullies, and assholes, and aggressive men, and shitty men. Who think themselves superior to people who are more vulnerable. Exactly. Instead of just being nice.
Because, you know, you can kill everybody in the room. Just be nice. Like, that's the real nice person, is the person who can kill everybody and doesn't want to. You know, the really shitty people are the ones that would act. Sometimes you'll run into those and it's better to be prepared.
that's that's all it is like physical vulnerability but what you're talking about like psychic vulnerability and not wanting to go through pain because you've been through so much of course yeah look ideally we should go through zero pain ideally we should go through zero aggression zero shitty deceptive
conniving, psycho people that are trying to ruin everything in your life. Ideally, yeah. Ideally, you shouldn't have to prepare for that. You shouldn't interact with those people. Again, I'm also speaking at counter purposes with myself because I did the exact opposite. with my prosecutor. I didn't have to talk to him. I didn't have to have a conversation with him that was difficult and awkward and hard and forced me to confront all of this pain.
And I did because I knew that there was value in that. Right. So... Yeah, we seek comfort. And we avoid pain. Yeah. But I don't know. Maybe I'm a masochist because I always feel like there's something to gain from pain. Because you've gained so much from your pain.
And you kind of must know that you are who you are. You know you're kind of an extraordinary person, and you've gone through a lot to become that person. You don't just wake up and have this perspective that you have. You have to go through a lot of shit. You know what's fucked up, though? What? I trust pain more than I trust joy.
Because when I'm going through something painful, I know what that is. And I know how to confront it. When I'm going through joy, I'm afraid that something bad is going to happen to me. That happens to people where they self-sabotage. You know? I mean, I don't know. I was having a great time in Perusia and then everything just went really bad.
out of nowhere and so like i don't know like a part of me is like always is trying to see like the the yin yang of it all like the the good that's embedded in the bad but then afraid of the bad that's embedded in the good like that's that's what And, you know, and that's a reality. Like, you know, the more that you now that I have the privilege of being a mom, I know that one day, you know, like if something were to happen to my kids, I would be all the more.
Fucking debt like all the more pain in my life like if I'd never had kids I wouldn't I wouldn't have the opportunity to experience a potential pain that would be utterly devastating and so like that That's where that play goes in my head. I just wonder if it's a trauma response where I'm afraid of good things happening. I'm sure a part of it is going to be a trauma response.
I mean, I think a lot of people that self-sabotage, when things start going well in their life, it's because they're used to things going badly and this idea of things going well. It just scares the shit out of them. It's the unknown. And it's the pain that might come with it falling apart, the pain that might come with you.
hang all your hopes and dreams on, wow, things really actually are better. And then they're not. Like, fuck! 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. I need to get rid of that. I need to lose this. Yeah, but you're aware of it, which is the first step. I don't think you're embracing it.
You know, clearly you're not. You're writing books. Yeah, yeah. You got the Hulu series. You got a lot going on. Yeah. it's like it's not yeah it's not like you just like what yeah i'm still just a little bit like looking over my shoulder like of course who's coming at me imagine if you didn't that would be crazy after all that you've been through imagine if you didn't think
You know? It's understandable. More than understandable. You know? Yeah, that whole, like, lightning doesn't strike the same place twice, and it's like... I can't. I can. It can. Tell that to someone who's been struck by fucking lightning. Yeah, I, yeah. You know, it's possible. You can't think, it's...
The fear of the unknown and the fear of the possibilities can really cripple you. It really can. I'm trying not to let it do that to me. You're doing a great job. Thanks. You really are. Yeah, I'm working on it. It's a struggle, and this is important for people to hear. It's not like it's just like every day. It's hard. Life is hard. Even a guy like Goggins, you know, he told me, and he goes, sometimes I stare at my fucking shoes for like 30 minutes before I put those motherfuckers on.
He goes, because he's like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. But he knows he's going to do this. He goes, but I put him on. I put him on him. It's not easy. Life is not easy. But it's worth living. It's worth doing. It really is. Does he put those shoes on Because he knows that ultimately he's going to be glad that he did it.
If you ask him, he's like, because I'm not a bitch. Okay, well. Because that is what it is. Yeah, he's ultimately going to be glad that he's still got the strength, and that strength needs to be watered every day like a garden. It's not like you just have it and now you have it for life. No. You have to keep at it. Everybody gets lost. Everybody can slide back. It's true. Yeah. As much as we can improve ourselves, we can not. It's not easy. It's not easy being a person.
But it's worth doing. Yeah. Yeah, and you can do it. And everybody can do it. You can do it better than you're doing it. I can do it better than I'm doing it. I'm trying. I can certainly do it. All of us. I'm so grumpy sometimes. It's like so unnecessary. Unnecessary. avoidable but it's good it's good you know struggles good it's good all of it's good it's all we're on the path you know but this is like this all this this all this This idea that you should know better by now. That's also silly.
I know 80-year-old fools. No, everyone, if there's anything I've learned from being a mom, it's that everyone, every human being is a toddler. every single person is a toddler who either hasn't gotten enough attention or hasn't had their nap whatever the fuck and they're just having a tantrum like that is and if you treat everyone like a toddler it is actually a very successful way of interacting with people yeah Yeah, it's true. That is the lesson of parenthood, right?
Yeah, I talk about that all the time. I started looking at people as like babies that grew up. Instead of looking at them like, oh, this is Mike, he's 35. Like, no, Mike was a baby. Like, how'd Mike become so fucked up? Mike got a lot of bad information, a lot of bad experiences. And he still is a baby. He still has the same needs.
that he did as a kid they're just more sophisticated now but ultimately they all derive down to these same things yeah do you need a change of situation do you need some attention do you need to sleep on it like what you know whatever's going on like just If you can identify those like basic human needs.
and just tweak their circumstances. You can change a person's life. And also recognize that if you ignore those basic human needs over and over, they're going to compound and you're going to have more problems. And... They're going to lose their shit in the middle of the grocery store. Amanda, I really enjoyed talking to you again. Thank you very much. Really appreciate you.
And your book is out now. Amanda Knox, free, my search for meaning. Yeah, if anyone wants to reach out, I'm at amandanox.com. It's pretty easy. for being here. Appreciate you.