In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, we talk about aliens, UFOs, and the Amanda Knox case. We also talk about a man who claims to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, and a guy who thinks he's a black belt in jiu-jitsu. Joe also talks about how to spot a liar, and how to deal with someone who's completely full of shit and totally full of it. And, of course, there's a story about how a guy became a murderer and is now serving a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit, and that's not even half as crazy as it sounds! If you like the show, please consider becoming a patron patron. Thanks to Pale Fire and Mossy Creek for sponsoring this episode! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave us your thoughts and thoughts on whatever you're listening to on your favorite streaming platform. Thank you so much for all the support, it means the world to us and we can keep bringing you high quality, high quality content. Peace, Love, Blessings, Cheers, and Cheers. -Jon Sorrentino and Rory McElroy. --Jon and Rory Jon and Rory, The Joe Rogans Experience Podcast -- The Adventures of Jon Rogan Podcast by Night Shift Podcast by night, by day, All Day All Day, by Night, by Day, By Night, By Day, All by Day by Night by Day -- by Night -- Jon Rogans Podcast by Day - by Night all Day by Day... by Night All Day all Day, Day, and Night, All By Day by Morning, by Morning by Dayday by Day.... -- Jon's Podcasts by Night... by Day and Day, by Night's Day by By Night by Night.... by Day's Day... By Day and Evening, by By Day... -- by Day & Night, Dayday, by Anyday by Night and Night... by Morning.... , by Day By Day.... by Night By Day by Any Day,By Day, Anyday, By Anyday... by Morning... By Night.... by Day ... by Day , by Night , by Anytime, by All Day.... By Night... By Anytime....
00:01:47.000Whether it's radiation or some sort of propulsion system that they had that had some sort of energy that comes off of it, electricity, magnetics, whatever.
00:02:43.000I used to think I was pretty good at spotting bullshitters until I met a guy who wound up becoming a murderer and was completely full of shit.
00:03:05.000And he was a guy who pretended to be a black belt in jujitsu, had made his way all the way into these very close circles of elite fighters.
00:04:43.000So then he lied about a bunch of other things, got ostracized, and then wound up getting arrested for murder because he was dating this woman who was married and he wound up killing the guy and he was driving the guy's car around.
00:05:14.000I used to think that I was good, like that I would meet someone who was full of shit.
00:05:17.000I'd be like, oh, that guy's full of shit.
00:05:18.000But- I thought he was just a regular guy.
00:05:20.000I was used to being around so many guys like that that were legit.
00:05:25.000I just assumed he was legit too, you know?
00:05:27.000Yeah, I think that's the trouble with law enforcement also.
00:05:31.000They tend to feel like they even go through trainings where they're trained to read people using the read technique.
00:05:38.000And they come away with a false idea of being able to understand people's cues.
00:05:44.000And of course, there's also the problem of like cultural differences and cultural cues.
00:05:49.000That came into play in my own case, for instance.
00:05:52.000But just in general, across the board, there is a tremendous amount of just the whole wrongful conviction process kickstarts from the get-go from a detective or a police officer getting a vibe and then following through on that gut feeling,
00:06:09.000regardless of what evidence presents itself.
00:06:12.000I work with, I have a good friend, Josh Dubin, and him and a guy named Jason Flom had come on before and they work with the Innocence Project.
00:06:22.000And I have started doing some stuff with Josh and he's coming on again soon and we're going over very specific cases.
00:06:31.000And I've actually sent him some cases where people reached out to me and friends that I know.
00:06:37.000There's a lot of wrongful convictions.
00:06:39.000There's a lot of really obvious shit police work, corrupt cops, corrupt prosecutors who just want to get a number on their ledger, just want to get a score up on the board.
00:06:55.000And it's scary also because I tend to look at it like this is – it's not like there's just some grand conspiracy, right?
00:07:04.000Like it's not like there's an evil cabal of prosecutors who are getting behind closed doors and evilly cackling about how they're going to wrongfully convict innocent people.
00:07:14.000I think the more interesting fact is that they live in this sort of echo chamber of like, we're the good guys going after the bad guys and so we can't do wrong.
00:07:25.000And they get into this cognitive bias space where their instincts are the right instincts.
00:07:31.000They have better instincts than anyone else.
00:07:33.000And even if the evidence doesn't follow through and confirm their Yeah.
00:08:05.000And if anything, the way that our criminal justice system works incentivizes prosecutors to do those mental gymnastics because they don't get props when they're wrong.
00:08:15.000No one congratulates them for overturning a wrongful conviction that they've done.
00:08:22.000And not to say that they shouldn't be because accountability is important.
00:08:27.000And if you are blatantly going out of your way to suppress exonerating evidence and Suppressing the ability to check DNA, like there's all of that going on.
00:08:37.000But they're coming from a place of, well, we have limited resources in the criminal justice system, so I don't want to waste time looking at DNA from an old case that was like put away a long time ago when I'm dealing with this million murders right now.
00:08:52.000So, I mean, there's like all of these interesting, complicating factors that aren't just this prosecutor happens to be evil.
00:08:59.000And I think that's the more interesting problem.
00:09:02.000Because, you know, in the Innocence community, one of the reasons why I really like the Innocence Project is it's very practical.
00:09:09.000It's like, look, we have DNA. It doesn't cost us that much to, like, check DNA to prove who it was who actually did this crime.
00:09:16.000Let's just do it because, if anything, we've proven that these mistakes do happen.
00:09:21.000Human beings make mistakes all the time.
00:09:24.000But they're also reaching out across the table to try to recognize the humanity of the people who are actually committing these terrible injustices and trying to Have a conversation where everyone wins.
00:09:44.000And there is like a conservatism bias where the first thing that you thought of is the thing that you really hold on to.
00:09:51.000And even when new evidence comes in, you are inclined, you're biased towards not totally throwing out your initial Impression, but you're just skewing it slightly so that you can keep holding on to that thing so that you don't have to be so wrong.
00:10:07.000The idea that you could be so wrong when you mean well is devastating, and it causes you to go through all of these mental gymnastics to reexamine who you are as a person.
00:10:18.000I was watching the Netflix documentary and I watched it two nights ago.
00:10:21.000It was the first time I'd ever seen it.
00:10:23.000I knew about your case, but I didn't know the specifics.
00:10:26.000So I watched the documentary and I watched how assured the Italian prosecutor was when he talked about how the body was covered and that's something that a woman would do.
00:10:39.000If she murdered someone, she would kill someone.
00:10:43.000Acting like he's just a serious, absolutely defined professional.
00:11:12.000Even when I'm watching the lady kick open the door and she kicks her foot through the window, and I'm watching, like, you're shattering glass everywhere, you're contaminating the scene.
00:11:49.000That man, that his DNA was all over the room, that he told a story that he went to the bathroom and came out and witnessed a man cutting Meredith's throat.
00:12:07.000Yeah, Meredith was my roommate and his story is that he and Meredith were hooking up, never hooked up before, like never.
00:12:15.000They were hooking up, he went to the bathroom, he came out and she was already dead.
00:12:35.000I mean, I'm trying to remember all of it because he's changed his story many, many times.
00:12:39.000But I think what he said was that he had met her on Halloween, which was the day before she was murdered, and they had decided that they were going to hook up the next day, which is totally absurd.
00:12:51.000And then he came over the next day and they were hooking up and then he had a stomach ache and went to the bathroom for a while.
00:12:58.000And then when he came out, she was dead.
00:13:01.000Well, he had heard a scream or something.
00:13:02.000Well, he said that he was listening to headphones, so he didn't hear anything.
00:13:07.000The fact that they didn't convict him on that, just the whole insanity of the story, to me, it only seemed like that was even remotely plausible because they were so determined to convict you.
00:14:05.000He showed that he was on his computer.
00:14:09.000There was all of this evidence that he was at home and no one cared because they were like, well, you're Amanda Knox's alibi and you were with her.
00:14:19.000Did they have the ability to track phones back then in terms of cell phone data?
00:14:23.000Did they have the ability to track where your phone was in relationship to a tower?
00:14:27.000They were doing that, but where I lived and where Raphael lived was actually quite close.
00:14:33.000And so it was possible that the towers that we were using were interchangeable, basically.
00:14:40.000So like the main thing that really would confirm or not whether or not we were there when this crime was committed was whether or not there's fucking DNA there.
00:14:50.000And like the thing that's always bothered me about and think about motivated reasoning.
00:14:55.000My prosecutor is like, well, you know, she's covered with a blanket.
00:15:00.000Well, she was also sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.
00:15:03.000That's usually something that If we're talking about what women do when they're committing murder, the vast majority of the time it's going to be something like hitting someone with a car or poisoning.
00:15:15.000If we're going to talk about base-rate reality, what do women do when they're committing murder?
00:15:22.000The telltale signs are not, do they cover a body with a blanket?
00:15:39.000But the fact that if we're genuinely looking at a crime scene where there's a body, young woman, sexually assaulted, stabbed to death, tons of DNA of one dude...
00:15:49.000All over her body, all over his fingerprints in her blood, his footprints in her blood, his DNA everywhere.
00:15:58.000What is the likelihood that three people were involved in that scenario and that only his DNA was left behind?
00:16:06.000Like, that's the thing that, like, really bothers me is my prosecutor having motivated reasoning to not, like, having this bias to not change his perspective about how there were multiple people I had to be involved.
00:16:18.000He said, well, Amanda must have cleaned up her DNA and left Rudiga Days behind so she could frame him.
00:16:28.000Like, I remember a detective friend of mine was like, you should get the Nobel Prize in chemistry if you were capable of doing that, because there's no way.
00:16:52.000They convicted geologists for manslaughter because they hadn't predicted an earthquake.
00:16:58.000It's one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever read in my life.
00:17:01.000These poor people had to literally go to court and spend an enormous portion of their life defending themselves, lost And then had to win on appeal.
00:17:20.000Yeah, no, it's obscene on multiple levels because what you're looking at is someone who's saying, okay, a lot of people died, this horrible tragedy happened.
00:17:29.000And usually, when it's a natural disaster, we all agree that, like, sometimes fate fucking sucks.
00:17:35.000And, like, it's horrible and people die...
00:17:38.000And yeah, there are probably things that we could have done to prevent that, like having better, like, building structures that would, you know, resist earthquakes better.
00:17:49.000But instead of, like, pointing the finger at, you know, could we better protect ourselves from this kind of natural disaster, we're just going to point at the scientists who are supposed to know when earthquakes are going to happen and how bad they're going to be?
00:18:03.000There is that impulse, especially by authority, to point the finger at someone who has fewer resources and power to defend themselves and say, I'm just gonna put this on you.
00:18:16.000The problem is it's so dumb and so arrogant.
00:18:20.000And the idea that they did not consult with scientists to try to understand how this equipment works, try to understand, like, what's the current state of the understanding of this science?
00:18:33.000Like, what do they do to predict earthquakes?
00:18:36.000And then they charge these guys with manslaughter.
00:19:14.000And it should be a public prosecution where you should let people know, like, you're a bad person.
00:19:20.000Like, what you've done, you've abused your position of power.
00:19:23.000Your arrogance has led to the complete total disruption of someone's life who did nothing but study science, did nothing but study geology and try to figure out seismology or whatever it is that they study.
00:19:35.000Yeah, and I'd be interested to know, because my own prosecutor was actually on trial for abusive office while he was trying me.
00:21:21.000So they say that the scenario that my prosecutor painted, and he painted a few different scenarios because he couldn't really, like, his imagination was going wild and there wasn't a lot of actual, obviously there wasn't any evidence to support any of them,
00:21:37.000but he kept thinking, okay, it's the day after Halloween, so maybe it's a satanic sex ritual.
00:21:44.000We know that there's some kind of sex thing involved.
00:21:46.000We know that Amanda has sex with people, so she's probably a sexually obsessed person.
00:21:55.000And Meredith looked down on her for being a sexually obsessed person.
00:21:58.000So what is likely to have happened in his brain is that I was hanging out with Raffaele and Rudy.
00:22:15.000And it's so unfortunate on so many levels because it says more about him than it says about anyone else that he would imagine that that's just how people react to each other and This was not his initial idea,
00:22:32.000I mean, his initial idea was that I was involved somehow.
00:22:36.000He didn't know how, but he thought that I was involved somehow, I knew something, I was covering up for someone, and that's why he interrogated me for 53 hours over five days.
00:22:46.000Which is really scary that they can do that, right?
00:23:35.000And people who I was entrusting my life and safety to were screaming at me that I was wrong, that I was never going to see my family again, that I was super traumatized, that I had seen something so horrible that I must have just completely blocked it out.
00:23:56.000And here's a scenario that would explain that.
00:23:58.000Look, you have a text message from your boss, Patrick Lumumba.
00:24:22.000So were you thinking that you just had to tell them whatever they wanted to hear just so you could get out of there?
00:24:28.000Honestly, I started to question my own sanity.
00:24:31.000I started to believe them that I must have witnessed something horrible and I just couldn't remember it and that's the only explanation for why they would treat me that way.
00:24:39.000How long did that take before you think you started questioning your sanity?
00:24:43.000So, I was, you know, a few hours into that final interrogation that was in the middle of the night.
00:24:49.000I was not prepared to be interrogated at all because, honestly, they didn't even call me in that night.
00:24:54.000They called my boyfriend, Raffaele, but I was staying with him and I was afraid to be alone at home because a murder was on the loose.
00:25:01.000And so I went with him and I was waiting in the lobby, like by the elevator, waiting for him to come out from questioning.
00:25:10.000And then they brought me in and just went on and on and on.
00:25:18.000So the thing that cracked me too was they brought in an interpreter, right?
00:25:23.000Someone who actually spoke English because for a long time I was just talking to people in Italian and I was worried that I wasn't even comprehensible.
00:25:30.000I thought that the reason why they were yelling at me was because I was doing something wrong.
00:25:34.000Like I just wasn't explaining myself correctly.
00:25:44.000I had taken Italian for a year before, so I was about as fluent as—I like to say I had about the fluency of a 10-year-old, but I think that that's even generous because I could speak in certain tenses.
00:25:56.000My vocabulary was totally limited, though.
00:25:59.000So there were limited things that I actually had the words to say.
00:26:02.000And I remember even when I—shortly after I was interrogated and signed the statements that they had written up for me— They finally stopped yelling at me.
00:27:41.000And you were sharing a place together?
00:27:43.000Yeah, so she had moved in before me, but it was basically there were two rooms to let in this little house that was right next to the university and we both happened to pick a flyer.
00:28:11.000I remember we went to, like, there's this famous chocolate festival that's in Perusha where they would, like, take huge refrigerator-sized blocks of chocolate and, like, carve them, which was super cool.
00:28:41.000The moment you found out that she had been murdered, what was that like?
00:28:51.000It's confusing because I knew that something was wrong as soon as I came home and I found that there was a window broken into and Meredith wasn't answering her phone.
00:29:04.000But I didn't understand what was wrong.
00:29:55.000Like, it was outside of the house that someone was telling me her body was in there.
00:30:00.000And someone told me that there was all this blood.
00:30:04.000I remember not actually knowing, like, how she had died until I went to the police office and I asked.
00:30:11.000I was, like, being questioned, and one of the police officers was like...
00:30:14.000And so, like, I sort of learned over the course of that day the details of it, but I didn't fully understand, like, what had really happened.
00:30:32.000I mean, it was clear that there was a break-in.
00:30:34.000Like, the window had been broken into one of...
00:30:39.000All of her stuff was all over the place.
00:30:40.000It wasn't clear to me what had happened, though.
00:30:42.000And it wasn't until over the course of that whole day and piecing together what I was hearing that I understood the gravity of the situation, that she had been sexually assaulted, that she had been stabbed to death, that it was a struggle.
00:31:01.000I remember the first thought and it's a guilty thought that I had.
00:31:05.000I remember thinking, thank God I wasn't home because that could have been me.
00:31:13.000And a part of me like over time felt really guilty about that thought because I thought maybe if I was home and there had been two of us, maybe the outcome would have been different.
00:31:23.000Maybe we would have been able to fend him off together.
00:31:28.000But here's, you know, an athletic guy wielding a knife.
00:31:36.000So it's kind of a thought that comes back to mind a lot when I think about this and how fortuitous it was that I just happened to be in this like brand new romance and hanging out with my new boyfriend all the time every waking moment that I could.
00:31:57.000It's hard for me to imagine the jolt of a 20-year-old life where you are overseas, going to school, involved in this new romantic relationship,
00:32:14.000and then out of nowhere, boom, you're a suspect and a murder.
00:32:43.000I'm thinking, oh, my God, this is all just a horrible misunderstanding.
00:32:46.000Like, I'm sure they're going to figure it out sometime.
00:32:50.000I remember, like, the first two years of my imprisonment, I was convinced that it was all just a big misunderstanding and somebody would figure it out.
00:32:59.000I was convinced that there was no possible way that people could actually believe that I was involved.
00:33:08.000Even just not because it's me, but because there wasn't any evidence there.
00:33:12.000Like, it was so patently obvious to me that, like, this idea of me, this Foxy Noxy character that was being constructed in the courtroom, this Luciferina, like, this idea of a person was obviously made up.
00:33:35.000And that was one of the big sort of regrets that especially my family had was at the very beginning, they were advised to not speak to the media at all, because they were just going to make a field day of it.
00:33:49.000There was, you know, in the same way that there was never going to, once I was accused, there was never going to be anything that I could do to prove my innocence in the eyes of people.
00:33:58.000My lawyers were also worried that there was nothing my family could say but that would not be twisted and turned into something that would just further fuel the scandal mongering.
00:34:09.000And what that meant was there was a void.
00:35:07.000And yeah, I mean, the same way that Great Britain also has a really sketchy tabloid culture, there is a sensationalist bent to it that's very much a result of like the Berlusconi era of news.
00:35:24.000I don't know if you're very familiar with Berlusconi and how his legacy shaped the way media works.
00:35:42.000Like having that sort of reality show, strippers in every show kind of vibe where he's just giving the people what they want and, you know, outrage culture.
00:35:53.000And then he turned that into a political career and then ran the country for a ridiculously, how long do you?
00:38:17.000You have Donald Trump or a man who's got something seriously wrong.
00:38:22.000He's a guy who's had multiple aneurysms, had actual brain surgery.
00:38:27.000And is 78 years old and is experiencing some sort of pretty radical cognitive decline and is in some way controlled by the other people in the party, whether it's Nancy Pelosi or whoever else.
00:38:43.000And, you know, he keeps saying things like, they tell me not to answer questions or tell me not to be like, hey, motherfucker, you're the president.
00:40:12.000Unless something radically changes with him in the landscape, he's not going to be able to do it.
00:40:17.000Ross Perot came the closest to doing it.
00:40:19.000But the problem with that was when Ross Perot did it, he made it so that people that were thinking about voting for George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush's dad, again, didn't, and that's how Clinton wound up being president.
00:40:35.000But do you think that his platform for UBI is going to be the thing that actually ends up speaking to people?
00:40:42.000I mean, I think UBI may become a very important point once automation really does kick in.
00:40:52.000If he's correct, and if many other people are correct, automation is going to take a lot of jobs away.
00:40:59.000That does the job of standard human beings where you could have one person essentially monitoring systems that take the jobs of hundreds if not thousands of people.
00:41:14.000I've been warned by people who do understand it that it's going to be literally a job-pocalypse.
00:41:21.000You're going to have massive amounts of people out of work.
00:41:23.000I have a position on work that's very conflicted because one part of me is very disciplined and I believe in hard work.
00:41:37.000I believe that ultimately there's an element of meritocracy in most businesses.
00:41:44.000I think there's a lot of businesses where cronyism and nepotism and corruption stifle meritocracy, and those are dangerous, sneaky businesses,
00:42:54.000And as a community, which is what a country is supposed to be, it's supposed to be a massive community.
00:43:01.000I'm very interested in helping people that are unfortunate.
00:43:04.000I'm very interested in giving people the opportunity to work hard.
00:43:08.000Because it's not as simple as everybody's on the same starting line and some people just work harder than others and that's how they get there.
00:43:17.000And I think there are some people that...
00:43:22.000They don't necessarily think that hard work is important, that it is a factor at all.
00:43:29.000They want to look at it as an absolute, like that everything is corruption, and everything is fortune, and everything is privilege, and they're grifters.
00:43:38.000And they hop on this idea, and they hop on this idea, and they sell it to people that are unfortunate.
00:43:45.000They sell it to people that aren't doing well, and that it's not about hard work.
00:43:50.000It's not about focus and it's not about like forcing yourself to organize and making sure you get things done and then trusting in the process that eventually that will lead to progress and it'll lead to more success.
00:44:02.000I believe that there's a lot of people out there that are lazy and they blame others for their own failures and I think there's a lot of people that they Latch on to social movements and they latch on to strife and they latch on to people that have Anger about their place in life and they offer them excuses and they offer them reasons for why other people have done better than And so there's so many things that
00:44:37.000There's definitely some very fucking shady laws when it comes to taxes and corporations and there's, you know, there's a lot going on there.
00:44:46.000But I don't think that regular work is necessarily the most important thing.
00:44:53.000The idea of universal basic income to me is that All of your basic human needs would be met.
00:45:18.000I do agree that there is absolutely genuine value in hard work.
00:45:24.000The other aspect of that is dignity, though.
00:45:28.000You can work really hard and feel like a slave and be demeaned and feel like all of the work that you're doing and all the time and all the sacrifices you make, even just in terms of time.
00:45:41.000I have so much respect and I understand the value of time.
00:45:49.000And so, like, for someone to be told my time is worth $7, my time that I could be spending with my kids is worth $7, and I have to sacrifice time with my kids, which is priceless, so that I can get $7 so I can feed them,
00:46:08.000is the most undignified shit that I, like, it's so, like, in a rich society like ours, I feel like that's kind of unacceptable.
00:46:43.000You work all fucking hour, and you get $20.
00:46:46.000I mean, in this day and age, with the prices that things are, the cost of living, it's not a lot of money.
00:46:52.000The idea is that you're supposed to be fresh out of high school, and these are the jobs you get, and this is why you get $13 an hour, whatever it is.
00:47:04.000Right, because also, let's be real, teenagers are not the best workers.
00:47:08.000Well, also, you're getting job experience and life experience, and that's the idea behind it.
00:47:14.000It's a weird idea, though, because would it be better if things cost a little bit more and you paid people a little bit better?
00:47:26.000I mean, how much would a burger have to cost if you want to pay everybody who works their 20 bucks an hour?
00:48:00.000I mean, you're literally dealing with child labor.
00:48:03.000Yeah, there's, you know, I had a friend of mine explaining to me the situation in the Congo where they, cold tan or cold, cold tan, right?
00:48:12.000There's a mineral that's crucial for cell phones that they get.
00:48:16.000It's literally dug out of the ground with sticks by kids.
00:48:20.000Is it like, I also know that there's like toxicity involved, like even when talking about the COVID pandemic, like those miners that were in there like scraping away at like the bat dung when they got sick, like, and they just died and everyone's like, huh, that's an interesting experiment that we just did.
00:48:37.000The worst story that I ever heard was there's two scientists had set up cameras to make, I guess, video and photographs.
00:48:47.000They were going to take shots of these bats exiting this cave.
00:48:52.000And it's a particular cave in Africa that has just millions and millions and millions of bats.
00:48:57.000And every evening they leave this cave.
00:48:59.000So they set up, they set the cameras up, and they're filming this.
00:50:20.000Many flus have jumped from these really super unnatural conditions where we take these animals and we stuff them into these cages together.
00:50:41.000Well, I know they know of some because that was one of the things that the Bat Lady from the Wuhan lab had gone to study.
00:50:50.000And this was one of the revelations that they had perhaps captured some of these bats that were infected with these diseases and done these gain-of-function research projects on them, which just has come out definitively that Fauci lied to Congress about this.
00:52:55.000Anyone who would be like, why would they ever cover that up?
00:52:58.000Go to Sagar and Jetty's Instagram page.
00:53:03.000He was talking about new revelations that it was either September of 2019 or October.
00:53:11.000In the middle of the night, one of the scientists from the lab went in and deleted an absurd amount of data that corresponds with the very first people that got sick there.
00:53:26.000So there was three people that got sick there.
00:53:28.000They wound up infecting people around them.
00:53:34.000And then in that same time period, there it is, September 12th, 2019. As C underscore small underscore discovered, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its bat and rodent pathogen database with 22,000 specimens and sequences offline in the early hours of the morning.
00:53:58.000So that is most likely when, and Sagar's done an amazing job of covering this stuff, and he's the one that had this very detailed description of all the research that he is aware of so far that showed that these three people from that lab who got sick Wound up infecting other people and then they think there was some sort of a sports
00:54:28.000event that it wound up getting into the sports event and then these people from the sports event had come to Wuhan from other countries and they went and spread it by plane to other places and then now we're in lockdown.
00:54:44.000Over the past 50 years several viruses including Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Nipah virus, Henda virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome, coronavirus, which is the first SARS, Middle East respiratory coronavirus,
00:55:00.000MERS, have been linked back to various bat species.
00:55:13.000All those fuckers have come from bats.
00:55:15.000Despite decades of research into bats and the pathogens they carry, the fields of bat virus ecology and molecular biology are still nascent, with many questions largely unexplored, thus hindering our ability to anticipate and prepare for the next viral output.
00:55:31.000That sounds like a fucking sales pitch for gain-of-function research.
00:56:21.000We live in a strange, strange time and this is a very important time for character.
00:56:26.000It's a very important time for composure.
00:56:28.000It's a very important time for ethics and morals and for people to treat people in a kind and considerate way.
00:56:36.000And that is being thrown out the window by a lot of people under the guise of being upset at people's choices, under the guise of the current circumstances.
00:56:49.000There's many excuses for people in this current...
00:56:54.000Very bizarre and unprecedented situation in our lifetimes for people to act horribly and they're doing it and you're seeing very poor character from a lot of human beings very very poor character wishing people dead wishing people to get no medical service wishing people to be ostracized for their choices even wishing people who have superior immunity We're good
00:58:25.000It's not like a traditional vaccine, like a polio vaccine or something like that.
00:58:33.000Your body's getting a version, a dormant version, a dead version of the virus, and it puts it in your system and your body says, oh, we've got to fight this off.
00:58:41.000We know what this is, develops immunity for it.
01:02:15.000And one of the things that actually really bugs me about the case is there actually was DNA that was never tested and it was on the pillow that was found underneath her body and it had semen stains on it.
01:04:20.000And meanwhile, the only thing that anyone has ever heard of me about is in relation to a murder that I didn't even commit.
01:04:28.000So, like, the horrible, frustrating, like, part of this is not only is the actual victim overlooked because everyone's talking about me and I have nothing to do with her murder.
01:04:39.000Meanwhile, the actual murderer is quietly sort of forgotten, tucked away.
01:05:59.000You know, meanwhile, they've gone on to like, I think the lead detective is on is on trial right now for abuse of office in a totally separate case, but no one has ever like brought to them an abuse of office case, in part because I don't really feel like I could bring that potentially,
01:06:17.000but I don't think that I would win because ultimately people look at me and they think, well, This whole thing is probably her fault anyway.
01:06:34.000Do you get a lot of that here in America?
01:06:36.000Yeah, so I get, it's interesting how, like, I used to think that there were two people, there were two kinds of people in regards to this case, I guess three kinds of people.
01:06:48.000Those who had never heard of the case and didn't care, and then those who had heard of the case, the ones who were super convinced I was guilty, totally I'm an evil person, and those who were super convinced that I was innocent, and there was no in-between.
01:07:00.000But what I've actually found is that there's also this middle ground of people who have sort of kind of heard about it, Probably think I'm innocent, but also probably think that I'm responsible for my own wrongful conviction.
01:07:12.000And a great example of this is Malcolm Gladwell.
01:09:22.000You're in an interrogation room and people are coercing you or berating you or confusing you or scaring the shit out of you and making you think that the only way out of that situation is to say whatever they want you to say, sign whatever they want you to sign.
01:10:20.000All they told me was that I was an important witness, that because I was so close to Meredith, I was like really, really important to them.
01:10:29.000And so I kept having to come in and answer the same questions over and over and over again.
01:11:44.000I don't know because like he was an orphan.
01:11:48.000He didn't really have anyone in his life.
01:11:50.000I almost feel bad for the guy because he's just this abandoned kid who's making his way on the streets and is making really, really horrible choices.
01:12:03.000And especially in the lead up because he had this family in Perugia that was actually a very wealthy family that had kind of sort of adopted him.
01:12:11.000But then he started stealing from them and they sort of were like, okay, you're out.
01:12:16.000And as soon as that happened then he went on this burglarizing spree that lasted like the months leading up to Meredith's murder and like basically climaxed at Meredith's murder.
01:12:59.000And there has been some speculation by people that, I mean, here's the weird screwy thing.
01:13:07.000He had been arrested prior to Meredith's murder, like a week before.
01:13:12.000He had actually gone to Milan and broken into a law office, or I think the law office was in Perugia, but he had broken into a school in Milan, and he had been arrested there and found with stolen property and all of that,
01:13:29.000and the Milan police had him in custody.
01:13:32.000And for some inexplicable reason, they let him go.
01:13:36.000And he returned to Perugia, and the next thing that happened was Meredith was dead.
01:13:41.000And no one really talks about that, like why that happened, why this person who had stolen property on him was just let go.
01:13:52.000There's never no one's really looked into that seriously.
01:13:56.000And I think that's in part because there's this saving face issue of who's ultimately responsible for Meredith's death.
01:15:36.000Satan-worshiping slut aspect of it, the sacrificing the girl and murdering her and doing it with the two guys you're in an orgy with, like all that is like so sensational.
01:15:48.000They get caught up in that narrative and once that seed got planted, there's no stopping the beanstalk.
01:15:54.000No, especially when it comes at the cost of a lot of professional reputations.
01:16:03.000Yeah, like I didn't, there was no way that I, looking back, I wish I had known so many of the things that I know now, even just about how human beings work.
01:16:12.000Like I was 20 years old and I didn't like, I just trusted people.
01:16:16.000I had lived a pretty like sheltered life.
01:16:17.000I did not grow up in circumstances that were challenging.
01:16:20.000I grew up in middle class, like I could trust anybody.
01:18:34.000He had every incentive to not admit fault because that says something bad about him.
01:18:39.000But I also thought that he had good motivations, that he was empathizing with Meredith's family.
01:18:44.000And as a father of four daughters, he was like deeply, deeply empathizing with the experience of losing a daughter.
01:18:49.000He didn't empathize with having a daughter accused of a horrible crime, but I think he had sort of written me off as a bad girl.
01:19:00.000I wanted to talk to him about it because it felt like it seemed like if he had ever actually gotten to know me he would know that that wasn't me.
01:19:08.000Like that whatever vision of me that he had in his mind that wasn't me and he never really got to know me.
01:19:14.000Like we had only ever really encountered each other in interrogation room and in the courtroom where he was actively trying to destroy my life.
01:19:23.000He came in at the very end for like, I remember like, I thought he was there to save me, actually, because the detectives told me that the Público Ministero was coming.
01:19:35.000And I didn't know what Público Ministero meant.
01:20:13.000I did go back to Italy and I spoke about trial by media in particular to an Italian audience.
01:20:21.000And I talked about him and how I thought that it wasn't satisfying to just portray him as a comic book villain in this story.
01:20:32.000That didn't actually answer to me why this horrible injustice had happened.
01:20:36.000And I needed to see his humanity and understand his humanity in order to really understand why this had happened to me.
01:20:42.000And it was after that that he finally answered my letter.
01:20:49.000And I can't say what he said to me because I promised to keep that between us.
01:20:56.000But what I can say is that that sentiment that you're pointing to, him saying, if they're innocent, I hope they can forget, is a sentiment that I have felt from him in more explicit terms in our exchanges.
01:21:17.000I guess that's all I can say about that.
01:21:46.000Not because I was feeling an overwhelming desire to kill myself, but because I had had this existential crisis of understanding that the truth didn't matter and that I was not just some kid who was lost and trying to find their way home.
01:22:08.000I was a prisoner and prison was my home.
01:22:12.000And I had to reshape my understanding of what my life was going to be.
01:22:20.000And I had to ask myself if what opportunities I had left, given the constraints that I was under, were worth it to me.
01:22:35.000When you look back at all this, people have moments in their life that are horrific, and then they transcend those moments.
01:22:43.000They recover, they get over it, and they have a deeper understanding of the possibilities of life.
01:22:54.000Because there's lows that they've experienced that the average person will never...
01:23:01.000So they have an appreciation for daily life.
01:23:04.000They have appreciation for freedom, for the taste of a hot dog, for a blue sky with clouds, whatever it is.
01:23:12.000Did you get any value out of being incarcerated?
01:23:19.000And I don't want to romanticize prison because not everyone comes away from that experience with that.
01:23:29.000A lot of people don't come away from an experience where they've had everything taken away from them, feeling like they have a bright, sunny disposition to the rest of the world.
01:23:40.000Like some people come away really broken and bitter and angry.
01:23:44.000Angry and unable to forget everything that they've lost, even when they have everything in front of them.
01:23:51.000So that isn't to say that it's a guarantee that that's what's going to happen to someone.
01:23:55.000What I can say is that for me, it did.
01:24:00.000In part, because I, first of all, got a sense of what I was capable of.
01:24:11.000Which is interesting to say when you're in a situation where you're completely and utterly powerless.
01:24:16.000Like, that was my reality for four years, at the very least.
01:24:20.000I was completely and utterly powerless, had barely any agency in my own life.
01:24:27.000And what I was able to do under those conditions was very humble, but also valuable to me.
01:25:05.000But you give yourself humble goals that you can accomplish.
01:25:12.000And because my goals had been so humble and because my opportunities were so limited and because my horizon was so short, I did get a sense of purposefulness that I wouldn't have otherwise.
01:26:43.000And that's also true about wrongful convictions in general.
01:26:47.000Like the psychological health and well-being of the person going through it doesn't really ultimately depend on their relationship with spirituality or their relationship with like, you know, even the prison conditions necessarily.
01:27:01.000It's like whether or not their mom is there for them and is alive when they get out.
01:28:22.000I became fluent in Italian and I was actually a huge resource for a lot of the women there because most of the women in that prison were not Italian.
01:28:59.000Alright, here's a Chinese to English dictionary.
01:29:01.000I'm just going to point at words in the dictionary to her, and then she's going to point at words, and I'm going to look them up and then translate into Italian so that she can talk to the doctor about how, like, her tummy hurts.
01:29:25.000Most of the people in that space were super traumatized and addicted to drugs and really, really struggling and didn't have support from their family members.
01:29:35.000And a lot of them resented me because I had all of my teeth and had visitations every week.
01:29:43.000And that made me sad because I felt for them.
01:29:50.000It also made me a target for lashing out because a lot of people in that space don't have good emotional intelligence and impulse control.
01:30:00.000But you do what you can and that's the hustle.
01:30:04.000So was there any anger at you thinking that you were guilty in jail?
01:30:12.000No, there was anger at me that I wasn't forgotten.
01:30:15.000That you weren't forgotten, that you weren't abandoned, that there were still people coming to visit you?
01:30:19.000And that, you know, people like on the there is the sort of fame angle like everyone knew about my case was constantly talked in the news, but I think ultimately it came to the issue is it's less the fame issue than the forgotten issue.
01:30:46.000I tried to do what I could, but most of the time I tried to be invisible.
01:30:54.000Unfortunately, I remember I had this really difficult conversation with one of my cellmates.
01:31:02.000She wanted to fight with me in order to...
01:31:05.000We were having a discussion about where to keep the snacks in the cell or something, and she was mad at me and she wanted to fight me in order for us to get the emotions out and get our frustration out and then be cool.
01:35:02.000I would get occasional visits from my attorneys and they would update me.
01:35:07.000But, you know, there were long stretches of time when nothing could be done.
01:35:10.000Like right after my conviction, there was like a year where there was just nothing to be done because I was waiting for the opportunity to take that to appeal.
01:35:20.000So I was just there for a year living as a prisoner.
01:35:27.000When you finally did get through all of it eight years later, how long before you could sleep and not have nightmares about being back in jail?
01:36:09.000So I think maybe, like, a year before I stopped having them pretty regularly.
01:36:15.000And again, like, it's also because you get into a mindset of a prisoner, right?
01:36:19.000Like, there was a long period of time where I was still washing my underwear in the sink just because, like, I had gotten into that rhythm.
01:36:48.000In the bathrooms, there was the shower, there was the toilet, and then there was the bidet thing that was an actual totally different sort of sink setup.
01:36:58.000And I got really used to that being where you wash your clothes, where you wash yourself, where you wash your feet.
01:37:40.000It's not a conversational podcast like this one.
01:37:42.000So I do do interviews, but I shape the narrative, whatever it is.
01:37:48.000Say I was interviewing you, we would have this whole conversation about A time in your life when you felt lost and like you didn't know your way out, you would tell me a story.
01:37:57.000And then depending on, you know, how you tell that story or what kinds of interesting things we could then take away from that story, I might write VO around that, cut and chop the interview so that we got through some parts that were going a little slow.
01:38:13.000And tell a story that frames your experience through your voice, because I really believe that that's really important, that stories are often told about people and not by people.
01:38:26.000And bringing my own perspective into it.
01:38:32.000So, you know, a good example of this is talking to Samantha Geimer.
01:38:36.000Who was raped by Roman Polanski when she was 13 years old.
01:38:41.000She often felt like people were trying to have her be a voice for their narrative and that her voice never fit into anyone's narrative correctly because she wouldn't play just like the innocent victim who was wanting retribution at all costs and she wasn't going to be the person who was making excuses for him.
01:39:00.000She wanted to be this middle ground where she wanted accountability from him, but she didn't get it through the criminal justice system and actually was exploited by the criminal justice system.
01:39:09.000And no one would listen to her when she talked about how the way that the media and the criminal justice system treated her was actually worse than the rape itself.
01:39:18.000And I listened to her and gave her that opportunity to talk, and I was able to relate to that in a lot of interesting ways and bring in interesting—my own insights into that conversation, but through, like, VO. How did she say she was exploited by the criminal justice system?
01:39:32.000So, she never wanted to take that case to trial.
01:39:37.000Because she did not want to have to stand in front of a jury and talk about how, like, to go through the trauma of having to relive that experience in front of an audience.
01:39:47.000What she wanted was accountability from him.
01:39:50.000And she wanted to move on with her life.
01:39:55.000This was how many years after the rape?
01:39:58.000Oh, this was immediately when she was like she never wanted to take it to the authorities.
01:40:42.000And meanwhile, you keep dragging me back into the news every decade and people paparazzi come into my house, like come outside of my house and harass my family because I am the rape girl for you.
01:41:41.000Do you focus on specific types of stories?
01:41:46.000Are you focusing on people that are involved in crimes or wrongly accused or victims?
01:41:54.000Do you have a specific subject that you focus on when you do your podcast?
01:42:01.000So where my passion resides is where people feel like whatever experience they're experiencing, it is overwhelming and it is something that they feel like they don't know the way out.
01:42:16.000And I had this like epiphany very soon after I got home from prison because...
01:42:24.000First of all, when I came home from prison at first, I thought, finally, I can go back to the life that I'm supposed to be living.
01:42:31.000I'm an anonymous student, Amanda Knox, that had nothing to do with this murder.
01:42:35.000Oh, well, I guess that world doesn't exist anymore.
01:42:38.000Paparazzi are showing up outside of my house.
01:42:41.000I can't go to school without other students taking pictures of me and posting them onto social media about how they're taking a class with a murderer.
01:42:48.000And, like, I, my life is not, like, I don't get to go back to my life.
01:42:53.000My life is now within the context of a murder I didn't commit, and my identity is totally always, always, always seen through that lens, no matter what I do.
01:43:07.000I am defined by something that I did not do.
01:43:12.000And that seems like my sort of nightmare scenario is that no matter how much good work I put out, no matter how hard I work and how much good work I try to put out into the world, nothing will define me more than this thing that I had nothing to do with.
01:43:47.000I did have a new understanding and appreciation for not just the experience of being a victim of the criminal justice system, also a victim of crime.
01:43:56.000Someone broke into my house, murdered my roommate.
01:43:58.000But I had an appreciation for, like, How there was the pile on culture and the scapegoating and the tribalism that is very much a part of the media environment.
01:44:09.000I had like an early glimpse into that before it became like the big news of 2016. And I went back to school and I connected with this girl in my poetry class who I didn't really know why we connected.
01:44:54.000And she was like, no, no, no, don't misunderstand me.
01:44:56.000I was raped when I was 16. And everything you talk about, about how it feels to be wrongly convicted, how it feels to have your life taken away from you and your identity stolen from you, all of that really,
01:45:12.000really resonates with me and feels like how I felt when I was raped.
01:45:28.000Actually, there is a lot of common ground.
01:45:33.000And the thing that's in common is that feeling of being helpless, of having your identity taken from you and your physical body taken from you and your freedom taken from you, and by somebody who has way more control and who is never going to be held accountable.
01:45:50.000All of that resonates with a lot of people's experiences.
01:45:54.000And so I like to find the common ground in those experiences and try to give a sense of ownership back to the people who find themselves stripped of their agency in those kinds of situations.
01:46:52.000All the things you talked about earlier.
01:46:54.000But when you speak to wrongly convicted people, what I was going to get to was other people who have been incarcerated for crimes that didn't commit.
01:47:50.000I got to go home to the United States, and I was facing extradition.
01:47:54.000And while that was going on, the director of the Idaho Innocence Project reached out to my mom and said, Hey, we have a conference every year where we invite wrongfully convicted people.
01:48:14.000And, of course, my thinking at that time was, Right now, I'm convicted, and the last thing that I want is to walk into a room full of strangers who know my face and know my name.
01:48:29.000That is the last thing that I want to do.
01:48:57.000When my mom forced me to go down to Portland with her and I remember being in this like hotel conference space like you know the bad lighting and the horrible carpet and these like ballrooms and we walked into that space and these two men ran up to me and they hugged me and they said you don't have to explain a thing little sister we know and Them
01:49:29.000Like they knew what I was afraid of even.
01:49:32.000They knew that I was going to be walking into a space where I would just constantly have to explain myself and that I would be misunderstood and that I would be afraid.
01:49:44.000They recognized exactly what I needed in that moment.
01:49:47.000They told me that they were there for me, that I didn't have to talk to anyone if I didn't want to, but they also wanted to introduce me to a lot of people who already had a lot of love for me.
01:49:57.000And I was introduced to a whole family of people, mostly men, mostly older men who had spent decades longer in prison than me, who embraced me and understood me and who I didn't have to explain myself to.
01:50:20.000What kind of coping skills and what did you have to learn in order to deal with the fact that your life is Is irrevocably changed like the this idea that you were gonna get out and that now you could go back to being Anonymous Amanda Knox and just go to college when when you realize that that was over and that
01:50:50.000your life was it It's just not gonna happen How did you reset?
01:50:59.000How did you change the way you interface with the world?
01:51:07.000In a similar way that I did when I had to reset in prison, right?
01:53:16.000And I think that it's important that, like, it's good to know oneself, but it's also good to remember that you don't just stop being a person and defining yourself in the past.
01:53:28.000Like, you still have a whole other part.
01:53:30.000You're still present, and the present is yet to be defined.
01:53:34.000You're also this thing that fluctuates wildly.
01:53:39.000You know, I mean, that's why morals and ethics are so important because you have to have some sort of consistent framework.
01:53:48.000But who you are right after someone cuts you off in traffic versus who you are after a friend gives you a hug and wishes you a happy birthday versus who you are when you're in love versus who you are when someone breaks up with you versus who you are when you get a promotion versus who you are when you get fired.
01:55:19.000That some people get institutionalized and the day-to-day routine of prison is in some way shape or form more comforting than being out on the street with the unknown and all these random possibilities and chances.
01:55:37.000That happens to a lot of men when they do decades behind bars.
01:55:40.000They wind up doing some sort of petty crime to get arrested again.
01:55:43.000They do it and they wait to get arrested.
01:56:01.000The idea of being trapped into this thing where you accept that you want to have that structure of someone telling you what to do, waking you up at a certain time, you know when the meals are coming, you know when this is coming, and you don't have to deal with the random variables of life on the outside.
01:56:20.000But you don't get to fulfill yourself either.
01:57:00.000And it's devastating because what a loss of humanity that is.
01:57:10.000And it's also a loss of an opportunity.
01:57:13.000I'm actually on the board of an organization called the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, which its sole purpose is to put people who are not in prison in contact with people who are in prison so that there is an understanding of the humanity That is being lost.
01:57:31.000The opportunities that are being lost.
01:57:33.000The potential that is lost behind bars.
01:57:38.000And to let there be more of an understanding.
01:57:41.000I know that I personally grew up feeling so, so divorced from that space.
01:57:46.000Like, that's just where the bad people went and good riddance.
01:57:50.000And having lived alongside people who had committed horrible crimes, even.
01:57:56.000Like, I hung out and played cards with women who killed their children.
01:58:00.000And it gave me a very, very different perspective on the context of their humanity.
01:58:29.000She had no support and one day just lost her mind and put her baby in a garbage bin and just left it there because she couldn't deal with it.
02:00:28.000I mean, it's one of those stories that it's very hard to even tell, like to talk about and just to describe how she described it.
02:00:40.000She was essentially, she was 13 or 14 years old and she escaped and became a sex slave in China and was there for two years and then eventually escaped and got to South Korea and it is...
02:03:05.000She had an acceptance of horrific circumstances that had befell her, that she had fallen upon, that she had been subject to, that she had been a victim of.
02:03:19.000There's nothing she could do about it and she was so nice and so friendly and she giggled a lot and laughed a lot and she was such a like pleasant person to be around and like whatever she had gone through whatever fucking horrific shit she had gone through had made instead of this bitter angry person had made this Wonderful,
02:03:47.000very sweet, very nice, friendly human being who was really well educated.
02:03:54.000I mean, she went, she made her way through university, she graduated, she's like, she speaks perfect English.
02:04:53.000I think you and her would have a fantastic conversation.
02:04:55.000It would be very, very, very interesting to hear your take on her and her take on you.
02:05:01.000Well, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is, so I, this may be a little bit weird, but I don't actually really believe in free will.
02:05:19.000Because, like, the thing that I keep thinking about is how lucky I feel to be the kind of person who is predisposed to when I am subjected to a certain kind of experience, I don't become bitter and angry.
02:05:37.000I feel like when people try to give me props for not being angry, or I am angry actually, but for not like expressing myself with bitterness or anger, it feels, the experience to me feels like It's obviously not what I want to do.
02:05:57.000My experience of being angry doesn't want to express itself through bitterness.
02:06:03.000And I wonder if her experience is a little bit the same way, where she's like, it instinctually feels to me like the way to deal with this emotionally is to be really stoic and practical and mindful about it.
02:06:18.000And not everyone who goes through those kinds of experiences is going to emerge that way.
02:06:24.000And I, again, I feel a sense of, like, compassion for those who don't have, who don't demonstrate resilience.
02:06:34.000Because a part of me wonders whether they can.
02:06:38.000Like, if you were to rewind their life and do something slightly different, would they have made any different choice and been any more resilient?
02:06:50.000Nor can I imagine, like, I guess it makes me a little bit more forgiving of those who don't live up to the way that life, you know, their best selves and the best way to respond to bad situations.
02:07:04.000Because a part of me wonders if they even realize that they had a better choice in that moment or if they did what they felt was the right choice even though it wasn't.
02:07:17.000Being a person is an insanely complex arrangement of genetics and experiences and nurture and nature and positive and negative and you should have went left but you went right and everything changed.
02:07:38.000One of the things that I find most offensive in life is this pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality.
02:07:58.000This swirl of emotions like imagine you're a person who's seen your parents murdered or imagine you're a person who's been sexually abused by your grandfather or something.
02:08:10.000The horrific circumstances that some people are subject to.
02:08:16.000The The mistakes that you made when you were young that haunt you for your whole life.
02:08:23.000We are this weird combination of a person living in the moment and trapped by the past.
02:08:31.000And whatever you are today, however much of you can decide what you're going to do next, Is in many ways based upon factors that are completely out of your control currently.
02:09:16.000It's one of the most horrible things about people being not just judgmental, but publicly judgmental in a sort of performative way where you want everyone else to pile on with it.
02:09:33.000Because you want to be sort of affirmed in your cruelty that there's a reason to act and behave and think this way.
02:10:32.000But then the question becomes a meta question of, well, why does that person who is doing that, who is doing that pile on and is scoring those points, why are they the hero of their own story?
02:10:52.000There's a part of them if they're auditing at all, if they're doing any kind of self-auditing, if they're doing any sort of introspective, objective analysis of their own behavior, they're embarrassed by it because there's nothing heroic about that.
02:11:18.000It's from a person who's never been piled on before.
02:11:21.000Or they have, and they never recovered from it, so they want to get it back.
02:11:25.000A lot of like, particularly online, a lot of online bullies are just, they're echoing the feelings of victimhood that they've experienced in their own life.
02:11:33.000They're just, they're lashing out at other people because of their own, they've been attacked themselves and they still have these scars that they're carrying around with them and they just want other people to feel what they felt.
02:11:45.000And the thing that I feel really bad for, I feel a lot of pity for people like that more than anything else, because I wonder if they feel like they don't have any other way to express, like they just don't have either the intelligence or the resources to express their pain in any other way.
02:12:10.000There's a lot of that where they haven't been exposed to people that can adequately express themselves, where they can kind of mirror that and model that and sort of admire the way a person is able to use language and sincerity to resonate with people.
02:12:31.000It's not just the ability to express yourself, but you have to express yourself in a way that the other person goes, I see what you're saying.
02:13:20.000And so it bugs me out when a reporter puts a microphone in the face of a person who's just walking out of prison and is like, how does it feel?
02:13:30.000It's like that person does not have the words to describe what it feels for them right now and actually like their first thought walking out of prison is not going to be like their best thought about their experience.
02:13:43.000Like they need time to process it and they probably need help finding the words for it because ultimately words are not just this thing that we can take for granted.
02:13:52.000It's a very complex skill that some people are just way better at than others.
02:13:59.000And also, getting someone out of prison and sticking a microphone and intruding like that into their experience and saying, how does it feel?
02:15:01.000It's hard to understand how other people are experiencing you talking.
02:15:07.000That's one of the major problems that people have, particularly people that maybe weren't around a lot of educated people, weren't around a lot of articulate people.
02:15:52.000It's hard work for the person who's across from you, too.
02:15:55.000You have to really be paying attention, and you have to be giving the benefit of the doubt, and you have to be trying to find common ground, and you have to be trying to give reasonable doubt to that person's experience because they also might be trying to tell you something and not finding the right words.
02:16:09.000And you have to say, like, what do you really mean?
02:16:13.000That's why we should be really careful people that are always angry.
02:16:18.000Like really careful of communicating with people that are always expressing disdain and they're always mad at this person and mad at these people and these people are idiots and everyone is stupid and like that's your take?
02:18:52.000I wonder if a hunter-gatherer is actually way better equipped to deal with internal turmoil because they're ultimately foraging around for mushrooms all day.
02:19:28.000I'm on the third chapter now, and it's all about the struggles that human beings are going through right now with what they call hyper-novelty.
02:20:43.000I'm just trying to imagine, if you think about it, a hunter-gatherer spends a bunch of their time just being able to follow the same rhythms and be aware of their own thoughts.
02:20:56.000For a long time, and when an adaptation happens, it's usually a threat to their existence, first of all.
02:21:01.000So if you're constantly adapting, does a primitive part of your brain think, I am under attack?
02:21:11.000Sure, it can be fun, but also, are we a little bit under threat all the time?
02:21:15.000And are we a little bit in survival mode all the time because we're having to constantly adapt and there's no stability?
02:21:22.000There's certainly the potential that we're under threat, right?
02:21:25.000Because a change could lead to an invasion or starvation or it could lead to the development of a new tool that can help you hunt or a new ability to control fire.
02:21:39.000I think that's one of the reasons why people are always seeking out new things and innovation.
02:21:45.000It's like we're obsessed with innovation.
02:21:47.000Look, the new iPhone 13 just came out.
02:23:47.000Because, like, what if we just gain enough technology that we have a whole different form of existence and we create internal worlds instead of exploring external ones?
02:23:55.000Yeah, I don't think Fermi's paradox, we were talking about that before the podcast, I don't think it's correct.
02:24:02.000I just think if you are from a planet or another dimension, like imagine, right?
02:24:10.000If you're in some sort of an environment, some sort of solar system that has less chaos, right?
02:24:20.000So there's less potential for being hit by asteroids, which is a big factor.
02:24:24.000And then let's imagine that the biological diversity doesn't...
02:24:47.000In certain circumstances where some animals or some beings are able to figure a way around their circumstances to develop technology without ever implementing it as weapons upon each other.
02:25:23.000It's weird because they're wild, right?
02:25:26.000So we know these variabilities, like random mutations and natural selection and then evolution drives culture in some strange way that creates these environments where somehow or another they can thrive by not killing each other.
02:25:42.000Whereas the other chimps are fucking plotting and without even a language, they figure out a way to find chimps that are in another neighboring tribe and beat them to death.
02:25:52.000It's weird because they're our closest relatives, but the two chimpanzee tribes that we're aware of, the bonobos and the regular chimps, they exhibit similar behavior to some humans and then similar behavior to the worst humans.
02:26:11.000Maybe it's not the best to just be fucking everybody, but there's something about the fact that they don't kill each other when they're in this environment, the same environment that the chimps who do kill.
02:26:27.000And then there's other intelligent animals that don't get to manipulate their environment, so we get to see what it's like to be a dolphin.
02:26:34.000You follow dolphins and you're like, this is fascinating.
02:26:37.000They have a cerebral cortex that's 40% larger than a human being.
02:26:40.000They have this complex language we can't decipher.
02:26:42.000We don't understand what they're saying, but we do know they have dialects.
02:26:45.000We do know that the sounds they make vary upon their geography, where they live.
02:28:03.000Yeah, so that's a solution that they've come up with to mitigate this issue that exists in many, many, many mammals that are capable of killing babies.
02:28:16.000Bears will always find cubs and kill them, to the point where they think that bears coming out of hibernation, one of the first things they look for is cubs to eat.
02:28:27.000And they think they do it because they think of the cub as competition, but also just plain food.
02:28:34.000And also, there's nothing that keeps bear populations down other than bears.
02:28:41.000Interesting, because no one's threatening them.
02:29:38.000They kind of just protect and then they kill the babies and then it forces the females into heat and then they start having sex with them and then their babies and then a new male lion comes along and kills that male or forces him out and then kills those babies and that's the only thing that mitigates the lion population,
02:29:56.000that keeps the lion population in check.
02:29:59.000There's all these sort of natural, horrific, cruel, and ruthless systems.
02:30:13.000My concern with human beings is when I take logic and I take all the emotions and all the things I love about people and I say, well, what is this thing doing?
02:30:20.000Well, if I was something else from somewhere else and I was looking at this life form known as human beings, I would say, oh...
02:30:49.000We make better shit constantly and then we make these big leaps like the iPod or like the internet or like the printing press or an automobile, the combustion engine.
02:30:58.000We make these big leaps and from there we expand in these large branches that go off of these new innovations and then constant innovations branch off of that and then within Decades, the world you live in is unrecognizable.
02:31:14.000If you go from 1950 to 2021, the world is unrecognizable.
02:31:21.000Somebody put this on Instagram that the difference between 1939 and 1980 is the same difference between 1980 and 2021. And you're like, what?
02:36:04.000It's just like, if you buy a phone and it has an 80 megapixel camera, and then the next phone has a 130 megapixel camera, you feel like, I gotta get that.
02:36:13.000This is part of what I'm worried about with the human experience.
02:36:18.000If I think about it when I'm alone and I'm just anticipating this weird progress, if you extrapolate from where we are now to where we're going, it seems like it's unstoppable.
02:36:32.000We're obsessed with innovation and And technology.
02:36:36.000The big thing is making better technology.
02:38:27.000He's going to be the first to make hundreds of him.
02:38:30.000I don't know if he would, though, because he also likes being the special one.
02:38:34.000Right, but he probably doesn't want to die.
02:38:36.000So if we make a bunch of hims and freeze him and figure out a way to transfer consciousness from one to the other and keep the shell alive.
02:38:42.000Yeah, I was about to say the consciousness problem is the issue because you all of a sudden become an entirely different person as soon as you have a different experience.
02:38:49.000Do you think Donald Trump wants to die?
02:39:52.000Death is some sort of chemical portal into another realm.
02:39:58.000Like, what if we exist in these stages and we go from here, you die, your energy, whatever your consciousness is, transcends this physical body in space.
02:40:10.000And goes into this other dimension, whether it reincarnates or whether it experiences a completely different realm.
02:40:35.000You're stuck in a fucking disk somewhere.
02:40:37.000That's fair, but like if your consciousness is stuck in your body and then it chemically is released into a whole new space that we don't know of, isn't it a prisoner of that space as well?
02:40:47.000Can you imagine going to visit your old hard drive self and you can't get her out?
02:40:51.000She's stuck in there, but you're free and you're in heaven.
02:42:50.000That's what I enjoyed from the experience.
02:42:52.000I was working on a sewing project at the time, actually, and I remember thinking, Oh, I'm just not worried that I'm going to screw this up.
02:43:00.000Because even if I do it wrong, like, I'll just undo it and keep doing it.
02:43:25.000Yeah, no, but there was this thing that happened that I got out of it that was pretty strong was that it alleviated these ruthlessly introspective thoughts that I have constantly.
02:43:42.000Where there's a constant analysis of every thought that I've ever had, every action that I've ever taken, every piece of art that I've ever produced, every word I've ever said on a podcast.
02:44:22.000yeah but you could that will burn your house down like and build it from scratch that's true that's true you got to be careful feeding that beast yeah don't hate yourself while you're doing it well that's a problem like it's uh like i'll have a great show i have a standing ovation from thousands of people but i'll have one word up and that will haunt me for days Like I'll be working out.
02:44:47.000I'll be on a stair mill and that's all I could think of is that one word.
02:44:50.000I'm like 35 minutes in drenched with sweat and all I'm thinking is that one fucking word.
02:44:56.000Because of how it defines you to yourself?
02:46:25.000But the voices that I have in my head, that's one thing that saves me, honestly, is that my own ruthlessly introspective Self-critical thoughts are so much worse.
02:47:06.000If I did, oh my God, that would be the ultimate hate.
02:47:10.000If I really wanted to hate myself, I'd tell myself a false story and then just lie to myself and then eventually catch up to it and go, what the fuck is this?
02:47:20.000Yeah, well, that's, I think, more common experience for people than they'd like to admit.
02:47:26.000There's ways to feel good about life during this whole process, though, and that is to do something that sucks for you.
02:47:57.000Because you realize, like, physical survival that's at question when you're doing something incredibly difficult, like really difficult physical exercise.
02:48:08.000That kind of stress and that kind of...
02:48:55.000Like, if you're doing a round on the bag, and it's like, you have a three-minute round, and you're doing, like, ten of them, like, there's no getting away.
02:49:04.000You have these things that you have to do.
02:49:06.000I have this digital timer in my gym and it goes off.
02:49:44.000And just things that are incredibly physically exhausting because there's like this moment of mindfulness that occurs when you're going left, right, left, right, left, right.
02:49:58.000And your feet hurt and your knees hurt and your back hurts, but you're going to keep going because you know the finish line is way the fuck over there and you know you want to get across it.
02:50:14.000I mean, not to be like, oh, by the way, prison, but it does, because you do.
02:50:19.000You just have to get through one more day.
02:50:22.000And there's a singularity of purpose to get through there.
02:50:26.000And it might be that your way to get through there is, I'm going to do sit-ups and I'm just going to keep going until I'm in pain.
02:50:34.000I have like an interesting relationship with pain because I feel like I'm a little bit masochistic where I grew up doing soccer and doing things like I was I was on like a legitimate team that was the idea was you were gonna go on and become a professional soccer soccer player so like you definitely were pushed to those experiences quite often like every practice you had a moment where you were like I'm just doing this And that sort of prepared me in an interesting way to grapple
02:51:04.000with, like, okay, I have a singularity of purpose today, and that is to live through prison.
02:52:26.000And there's struggles and there's loss and there's love and there's all the terrible things that can occur with any human being trying to make it through life.
02:52:48.000And I wonder if whether it's whatever struggles that we've created in the modern world, when you interface with those, your body is trying to find Your mind, your genes, they're trying to find some way that this fucking makes sense.
02:53:05.000Like, how do I make sense out of this?
02:53:07.000And if you wanted to look at just the large numbers of people that are experiencing depression and just crippling anxiety in this world.
02:53:29.000And you watch someone getting fucked in the ass, and you're like, what is this kid seeing?
02:53:34.000Like, murder, car accidents, people jumping off bridges and bouncing off concrete, and you're seeing this at like six years old, seven years old, whenever they get access to the internet.
02:54:00.000That's what's scary because suddenly they are exposed to things that predispose them to be dehumanizing people that they encounter.
02:54:08.000If you're watching a human being get flattened on some concrete, you have a very different relationship with human suffering than someone who had never been exposed to that from a young age.
02:54:24.000It's also the amount of data that comes their way.
02:54:27.000The amount of information, the amount of like stimuli that hits kids today.
02:54:33.000Whether it's the form of video games or the form of TikTok or the form of whatever the fuck they're finding on the internet their friends send them.
02:54:46.000They're never bored, and they don't have conversations with themselves.
02:54:50.000They're always having conversations with some sort of external stimulus, and that makes them constantly seeking to make an impact externally as opposed to internally.
02:55:08.000And cruelly unusual experience that you've had in life, do you have a feeling of obligation?
02:55:19.000Like when you're talking about doing these podcasts and reaching out to people and discussing these people's lives and stories, do you feel like you have an obligation?
02:55:28.000To try to help other people that are going through something else, whether it's similar or just something else that's difficult, because you've gone through something that's so fucked up.
02:55:42.000I mean, I know that I myself am not going to be rescuing anyone, but what I can do is offer someone the opportunity to be seen.
02:55:54.000And I think that's actually something that we take for granted in a world where we're constantly exposing ourselves and asking to be seen.
02:56:02.000It's often through this filter of judgment.
02:56:06.000And I, like, as someone who has been, like, judged really, really harshly, and I constantly feel like I'm talking to people across a cardboard cutout version of myself, I recognize the immense beauty and gift that it is to just genuinely listen to someone.
02:56:29.000Like, just listen, with no judgment, with no fear, with no need to get something out of it.
02:56:38.000To just feel like someone is bearing witness to you so that you don't feel alone.
02:56:45.000I know how beautiful a gift that is and I know how rare it is today.
02:56:56.000And it's something that I wish I had been given when I was a young kid trying to navigate this horrible situation and it was one thing I feel like I wasn't given.
02:57:09.000So That's the sort of perspective that I bring, and I feel like it's a kind of survivor's guilt kind of thing, but also it's like I feel like if I ask myself what's the best thing that I can do,
02:57:38.000And I don't feel like a lot of people feel like they have a safe space to do that unless they're paying someone, like a therapist.
02:57:46.000I don't even want to tell people how to be.
02:57:52.000I just feel like We don't give each other enough of an opportunity to be human and to make mistakes and to have bad thoughts and to process them.
02:58:10.000I feel like we're constantly having to justify ourselves and I don't think that that actually lends to processing and having better thoughts and doing better things and being at peace I don't know.
02:58:29.000Well, I think you have a unique perspective on this.
02:58:32.000I think what you're saying I'm sure resonates with a lot of people and certainly resonates with me.
02:58:38.000If you want to make the world a better place, one of the best ways to start is just being a little less judgmental of other people's struggles and a little nicer and having an understanding that This world is fucking crazy.
02:59:50.000Constant reevaluation and two steps forward, one step back.
02:59:54.000Which is why I find it really, really sad when it seems like there's a lot of people trying to decide who a person is and what they're about for one moment in their life and having that be the defining thing about them forever.
03:00:15.000I think it's not just unfair, I think it's really cruel.
03:00:17.000And not really based in reality either, because no human being is one moment in their life.
03:00:23.000I think that's one of the side effects of social media, unfortunately, is this disconnect that we have with each other when you're communicating through text to someone who you don't even know their real name.
03:00:34.000They have a fucking fake name on a screen and they're saying something cruel to you and you're saying something cruel to them or you're posting about something that you saw in the news or someone says something and you just want the whole world to put them on blast.
03:00:51.000You're not in the room with that person.
03:00:53.000You're not communicating with them eye to eye.
03:00:55.000This is the way we're supposed to talk.
03:00:58.000And just the way you and I are talking here, as odd as it is that we're talking in front of millions of people, even though it doesn't feel like it is.
03:02:37.000Sometimes people are being really sweet and I appreciate them very much.
03:02:41.000But the ones who aren't, I don't want to take that risk and interface with that kind of energy and the way people communicate online in this sort of callous, non-connected way.
03:03:00.000These kind of conversations that you and I have had for these three hours, that I've had with these people this week, it gives me faith in humans.
03:03:08.000This is how I think people should talk.
03:03:11.000And it would be nice if it didn't feel like...
03:03:13.000I know a lot of people, and myself included sometimes, feel like you have...
03:03:17.000Even though you know it's bad for you, you have to engage.
03:03:40.000Genuinely, anybody could disengage and still, like, achieve their goals in a world that requires us to constantly be in conversation digitally?
03:05:51.000Most people that are in the podcast world or in entertainment or anything where you're in the public eye, you kind of have to have a certain amount of engagement.
03:06:01.000But I also feel like what I'm doing is so expressive.
03:06:24.000I feel like I'm constantly trapped in a conversation with the fake version of me in people's minds that keeps getting recycled over and over and over again.
03:07:01.000I don't get to go and just be Amanda Knox and let my actions dictate who I am.
03:07:09.000I'm constantly in conversation with other people's recycled versions of me that gained traction because they were scandalous.
03:07:18.000I don't want to in any way diminish that, but there's a certain richness to your character and the way you communicate that I don't know if you would have that.
03:09:40.000I've been amazed by how she is such a kind person, and she has been so generous towards me, even just with her time and thoughts and the fact that she put me in touch with you.
03:09:52.000But besides that, I've been reaching out for her for advice ever since I talked to her.
03:11:22.000I didn't have, I actually was initially Amama Knox on Twitter too because someone else was Amanda Knox and they weren't tweeting and so Twitter gave me my name.