Making Sense - Sam Harris - #345

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking with Amanda

00:00:27.420 Knox. Amanda is a journalist and public speaker and author of the New York Times best-selling

00:00:34.440 memoir, Waiting to be Heard. She is also a co-host with her husband Christopher Robinson

00:00:39.980 of the podcast Labyrinths. Between 2007 and 2015, Amanda spent nearly four years in an Italian prison

00:00:50.880 and eight years on trial for a murder that she did not commit. She has since become an advocate

00:00:57.380 for criminal justice reform and media ethics, and she sits on the board of the Frederick Douglass

00:01:03.540 Project for Justice. Anyway, it was great to speak to Amanda. As you'll hear, she's created a series

00:01:09.380 for us on resilience over at Waking Up, and I just find her story both harrowing and fascinating by

00:01:17.740 turns. It's very instructive of a larger sociological phenomenon which seems to rule our world at

00:01:26.040 present. When she was at the epicenter of it, social media was just taking off, but now in the open

00:01:32.300 waters of misinformation and reputational destruction in which we all now swim, Amanda really strikes me

00:01:40.020 as one of the canaries in the coal mine that we didn't recognize at the time. And now I bring you

00:01:46.680 Amanda Knox. I am here with Amanda Knox. Amanda, thanks for joining me.

00:01:57.260 Thanks for having me.

00:01:58.480 So you've created a wonderful series for us over at Waking Up on resilience, and your qualifications

00:02:06.600 to produce such a series will soon become apparent. We're not going to duplicate what you did there.

00:02:13.140 I'm sure we'll talk about resilience, but I just am pointing people over to Waking Up

00:02:18.960 wherever they're hearing this, because you've done something really wonderful for us there.

00:02:24.800 Thank you.

00:02:25.340 I think we, I can only imagine the boredom and fatigue that must attend your rehearsing all of

00:02:32.960 the details of this really grotesque injustice in your past. But I fear that most people,

00:02:40.420 certainly many people will recall just enough of your story to think that, you know, where there's

00:02:47.080 smoke, there's probably fire. And they will, I mean, they'll know enough to know that you were in

00:02:52.600 prison in Italy, and they won't recall if they ever even knew it, that you were wrongfully accused and

00:02:59.120 that the wrongness of your conviction has been now fully established. So I really do think we should

00:03:05.580 just take it from the top and, and I will ask you what happened in Italy.

00:03:11.000 Sure. Yeah. So what happened in Italy? Well, this was back in 2007. I was 20 years old. I had recently

00:03:20.820 arrived in this beautiful hilltop town called Perugia in the center of Italy to study abroad. And I was there

00:03:30.720 for about five weeks. I had just moved in with these three other young women, two of whom were

00:03:37.660 Italian law interns about, you know, six or seven years older than me. And then there was another

00:03:43.620 exchange student from Britain who was one year older than me named Meredith. And we all lived together

00:03:49.380 in this little cottage, kind of on the, very near the middle of town. It was just a few steps away from

00:03:55.200 my university. And we were doing the exchange girl's life. And then on November 1st, 2007, so the day

00:04:06.820 after Halloween, I went and stayed over at my boyfriend's house and my other two roommates,

00:04:15.060 Laura and Philomena. They also, I think Laura went to Rome and Philomena was staying with her boyfriend.

00:04:22.340 Anyway, long story short, most of the people in our house were gone at the time. It was a holiday in Italy.

00:04:30.440 And so a lot of people were going home to visit their families. And a local burglar took advantage of this

00:04:38.120 fact and broke into our cottage, broke into our home. And it's not fully certain if Meredith was already home

00:04:49.060 at that time or not. My guess is that she wasn't. My guess is that this local burglar named Rudy Gaudet

00:04:56.700 had already broken into our apartment by the time she came home. And he, as soon as she got into her room

00:05:05.000 and got settled, he snuck in on her and attacked her. And he sexually assaulted her and brutally, brutally

00:05:13.620 murdered her, stabbed her many times. And then he fled the country, adopted a false identity,

00:05:23.040 and wasn't arrested until a few weeks later. And, you know, this is a really horrific thing that

00:05:30.800 happened. It definitely shocked the entire town. That said, it's, of all the violences that are out

00:05:38.200 there in the world. It's not the most uncommon. Unfortunately, young women get attacked by young

00:05:44.640 men when they're vulnerable. I think something that was very unusual was that she was home. Like,

00:05:49.820 this happened in her own bedroom. So, you know, it was a shocking crime. And it certainly shocked

00:05:57.000 every one of us. I was the one roommate who first came home to discover that there was a crime scene.

00:06:04.920 And I think one of the things that is a little bit unclear to people is that when I came home,

00:06:13.560 I did not find Meredith's body, right? Like, I came home and I found that my house had been broken

00:06:20.880 into. But I didn't know that Meredith had been murdered. As soon as I realized that my house had

00:06:26.300 been broken into, I went back to my boyfriend's apartment. I grabbed him, had him come and check it

00:06:32.400 out with me. He helped me call the police because I didn't even know how to call the police at that

00:06:36.580 time. And the police arrived. And when they had arrived, when my other roommates had arrived,

00:06:43.180 they all broke down Meredith's bedroom door, which was locked, and discovered her body. And

00:06:49.780 I actually didn't even see into the room. I never saw her body in person, thank goodness. Whereas one of

00:06:57.080 my roommates did, my roommates did, and immediately just lost her mind. And this shocking out of the

00:07:06.800 blue, like seemingly utterly out of the blue violence that we couldn't understand, we didn't

00:07:13.260 know who possibly could have done this. We didn't know why. Immediately, a lot of us started wondering

00:07:19.680 if there was a serial killer on the loose. And my first instinct was, well, first, I guess my first

00:07:29.420 first thought when I was putting together through overhearing people yelling in Italian that Meredith

00:07:37.580 had been murdered was, oh my God, thank God I'm alive. Because if I had been home that night, I very well

00:07:47.380 could have been murdered too. And I want to like emphasize at this time, I was absolutely not

00:07:53.640 fluent in Italian. I had taken two or three semesters of introductory Italian in college. So I had

00:08:00.640 very minimal vocabulary. Like I remember I had learned how to tell a story about Little Red

00:08:08.460 Riding Hood. Like I could recite a story about Little Red Riding Hood, but I certainly could not

00:08:13.460 talk about legal things or police things or I didn't have the vocabulary to describe a crime scene.

00:08:22.420 And so when I was brought into the police station, I did my very, very best to try to describe to them

00:08:30.700 what I had seen when I came home and why I had called the police and everything. And I spent five days

00:08:38.320 with the police pretty much nonstop. I think the hours that they were able to confirm that I was in

00:08:46.420 the police station or in police custody undergoing questioning was 53 hours over five days. So a lot

00:08:56.140 of time that I was just with the police answering their questions, answering a lot of the same questions

00:09:02.920 over and over again with different police officers. I was brought back to my house to sort of go through

00:09:11.420 a knife drawer in my house. They were asking me if I had, I saw any knives missing. And it was an

00:09:21.400 emotional roller coaster for me. I sort of went back and forth between feeling like this was utterly

00:09:27.880 surreal and I couldn't believe this was happening. And then suddenly getting really hit by just how

00:09:33.920 horrible and real everything was. Meanwhile, my mom is calling me and telling me to come home

00:09:41.880 or to go to Germany and stay with my aunt. It was really unclear how safe I was. And I really put myself

00:09:50.080 in the hands of the police at this time. They reassured me that I was not only safe with them,

00:09:57.420 but that I was important to them. They emphasized this multiple times that I was their most important

00:10:04.360 witness because I was very close to Meredith. I lived with her. I was closer to her age. I was

00:10:10.800 also an exchange student and I was the one who came home and found the crime scene before anyone else

00:10:18.120 was able to touch it. And so they really wanted me to relive coming into my house and noticing what

00:10:25.300 seemed off, what didn't seem off, where were things placed. And I spent a lot of time just

00:10:30.740 like racking my brain for just the most tiniest details because they kept telling me any small

00:10:37.480 detail, any little thing that may seem insignificant to you could make or break this case. And when I

00:10:44.540 asked them, for example, if I should go home, like my mom was asking me to go home, they told me that

00:10:52.640 I absolutely should not because they really needed me to be a part of this investigation.

00:10:58.480 Actually, one question, Amanda. So on the point of the language barrier, was there a competent

00:11:04.640 interpreter with you when you were talking to the cops or were you just trying to make the best of

00:11:10.300 your bad Italian at this point for 50 hours?

00:11:12.840 So there were two interpreters who were assigned to this entire case and they were required to be

00:11:22.640 there for to interpret half a dozen people who spoke only English. That included me and included

00:11:30.600 all of Meredith's British friends. Anyone who was close to Meredith was interviewed at this time.

00:11:37.360 And so there were two interpreters on staff. I don't know if they were both there always at the

00:11:43.640 same time. But what that ended up looking like was that sometimes there was an interpreter and

00:11:49.820 sometimes there wasn't. And most of the time, I did not have the benefit of having an interpreter

00:11:56.420 there with me. And particularly in my final interrogation, really crucially in my final

00:12:02.940 interrogation, I did not have an interpreter there with me until the very end. And that interpreter

00:12:10.500 wasn't even actually an official interpreter. They were just a police officer who happened to speak

00:12:15.720 English.

00:12:17.000 Do you think this would have played out totally differently had you not spoken a word of Italian?

00:12:23.760 If you couldn't even begin to have a conversation on your own without a competent interpreter?

00:12:30.840 Gosh, you know, that's a really interesting point. I think absolutely, because it would have required

00:12:39.580 there being an interpreter there. And so much would have changed. First of all, they wouldn't have been

00:12:46.380 able to interview me for 53 hours over five days. It would have been impossible to. So just the pace

00:12:53.640 and the amount of intense conversation with me would have been limited. So and then furthermore, the thing that

00:13:03.480 really that spurred the police to really I mean, I again, what what spurred the police to really suspect me on top of

00:13:10.460 anybody else? There was this text message that I sent to my boss during my final interrogation or not during my final

00:13:20.020 interrogation. Sorry, it came up during my final interrogation. But during the night of the murder, I was supposed

00:13:26.100 to go and work at this local pub. And it was a slow night, again, because it was the day after Halloween, most

00:13:33.000 people were not going out. So my boss texted me in the evening and said, hey, you don't have to come in. And I

00:13:39.500 responded to him in my broken Italian,

00:13:42.040 which means certainly I'll see you later then have a good night. And the problem with my translation was

00:13:53.500 that, again, it was broken Italian. It was my attempt to say what I just said. But the police interpreted what

00:14:00.120 I said to mean, OK, certainly I'll see you. I'll see you later tonight. Then have a good night and or have a

00:14:08.500 good evening. And so they interpreted it radically differently. And had there been an interpreter

00:14:13.920 there, that would have been able to be clarified. But I think your point is really, really important

00:14:20.580 because I thought that because I could speak a tiny bit of Italian, that it was my duty to just tough

00:14:30.580 it out, even when I wasn't sure if I was being understood. And various times I was given the

00:14:36.560 impression that I was not understood. And I also felt like I needed to try my hardest to understand

00:14:42.500 them. And I am absolutely positive that there were misinterpretations on both sides of what was

00:14:50.780 being said. I remember at a certain point in my interrogation when things were getting really,

00:14:55.540 really heated, I said aloud in English, I don't know what the fuck is going on right now. And one

00:15:02.720 of the police officers who was there just yelling at me said, fuck, I know, fuck, fuck you. And he

00:15:08.960 just started yelling at me and swearing at me. And because he didn't understand why I had said the

00:15:15.040 word fuck, he just thought I was swearing at them. So, yeah, I think it was made astronomically worse

00:15:20.500 because the police sort of assumed that they were allowed to interrogate me without an interpreter

00:15:26.320 because I could speak the barest traces of Italian. And I thought that because they were

00:15:32.800 doing that, I should be able to hold my own and be there for the sake of the investigation.

00:15:40.400 Well, it really is a tragic case of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing.

00:15:45.060 Okay, so I don't want to derail you from your timeline here, but one more question at this point.

00:15:51.120 At what point, if you recall, did it dawn on you that you were a suspect? You weren't just being

00:15:59.480 encouraged to be their best possible witness, but you were now under suspicion?

00:16:05.760 So this is going to sound really dumb, but I didn't know that I was a suspect until I was brought

00:16:13.880 before a judge days later. Because in the midst of this interrogation, again, I was constantly being

00:16:22.980 referred to as this witness. And they made it clear to me that they thought that I was withholding

00:16:31.000 information from them. And that, like, I think I need to go take a step back and just say, I was

00:16:38.000 brought in not because they wanted to question me, but actually because they wanted to question my

00:16:43.220 boyfriend, Raffaele, with whom I was staying because my house had been turned into a crime

00:16:48.840 scene. And so they called him in at like 1030 at night. And because I was afraid to be alone

00:16:56.540 anywhere, I accompanied him to the police station. And my plan was just to wait in the waiting room

00:17:04.260 and do some homework while he answered a few questions for them. Well, while his interrogation

00:17:09.840 was taking place, it was going longer than I thought it would. I didn't understand why it was

00:17:15.960 taking so long. And little did I know, I did not know at this time, they were full-blown interrogating

00:17:21.660 him, telling him that he was an idiot for covering for me, that they knew that I was lying and that I

00:17:29.060 was involved somehow, and that he was my alibi. And so they were basically just trying to break him

00:17:36.500 and get him to turn on me. And then here I am sitting in the waiting room and a cop approaches

00:17:43.240 me, asks me what I'm doing here. I tell him I'm waiting for Raffaele to finish questioning. And he

00:17:49.860 said, well, as long as you're here, you might as well answer some questions for me. And they set me up

00:17:55.060 in an office that I'd been in and been questioned in for multiple times. And a woman takes, a woman

00:18:01.760 police officer, sort of takes control of the situation and asks me to recount everything

00:18:06.660 all over again. Where was I the night of the murder? What do I remember? What was I doing?

00:18:12.800 What was I doing in the morning afterwards? Just basically, again, asking me the same questions

00:18:17.540 over and over again. And it started out as if she seemed to think that I just didn't remember

00:18:24.580 everything correctly. Like maybe I had mistaken the days. It had been days since this had happened.

00:18:31.800 So she wanted to make sure that I really remembered if it was this day or that day. And then she wanted

00:18:36.680 me to be very specific about time. Like she asked, what exact time did you have dinner? And what exact

00:18:42.880 time did you watch a movie? And she was very meticulous about this timeline. And I couldn't perfectly

00:18:50.360 give her a timeline. I wasn't looking at the clock every second of that night. So I was imperfectly

00:18:55.940 attempting to establish this timeline. And then she told me that she knew that I was lying and that

00:19:06.420 she knew that I knew more than I was saying. And that...

00:19:11.360 Do you recall, is there an interpreter with you at this moment or is this still in your very basic

00:19:16.080 Italian?

00:19:16.940 This is just me and her talking. And I feel like this is a misunderstanding. In fact, I remember,

00:19:24.200 you know, even years after this, I remember blaming myself for how this whole interrogation went off

00:19:30.620 the rails because I was thinking, oh my God, my Italian's not good enough. And that's why she's so

00:19:36.120 mad at me. What I didn't know is that, you know, already going into this interrogation, they had decided

00:19:41.960 that I was guilty somehow. They had already tapped my phone, for instance. They had not tapped anyone

00:19:48.500 else's phone. They had brought in my boyfriend to try to get him to turn on me. So this was not,

00:19:53.840 you know, just them questioning me offhand. Like they had their ideas about me being involved or

00:20:02.080 having knowledge about this crime that I hadn't shared, I wasn't forthcoming with. And so she was

00:20:07.440 trying to pressure me to be forthcoming with this information. And I, what I understand now,

00:20:13.800 years later, is that she thought I knew who the murderer was and that I wasn't telling them.

00:20:22.080 And so they kept pressuring me to, to like talk about who, even to imagine who could have possibly

00:20:29.120 committed this crime. Meanwhile, they take my phone. They asked me to fork over my phone. I do.

00:20:35.360 And they go through my phone and find this text message that I sent my boss, Patrick Lumumba,

00:20:41.920 the night of the murder. And at first I don't even, I didn't even remember having sent that text

00:20:46.940 message. It was just not at the top of my mind. But they said, yes, you sent this text message.

00:20:52.080 You made an appointment to meet with this person named Patrick. Who's Patrick? Why are you covering

00:20:56.880 for him? What, you know, what did he do? Really insinuating, like, here is this person that we know

00:21:04.540 you met with on the night of the murder and you're covering from him. Why are you covering from him?

00:21:09.380 What horrible thing did he do to you? You know, we know you met with him. Tell us what Patrick did.

00:21:15.200 This went on and on and on. Me insisting that I did not meet with Patrick, but they didn't believe me.

00:21:22.400 And at a certain point, they finally bring in this interpreter who's actually a police officer.

00:21:28.580 And she gets the rundown of what's going on. I try to explain to her desperately that they have

00:21:34.740 misunderstood me. And she looks at me and says, actually, I think I know what's going on.

00:21:42.520 I once was in this terrible car accident. And all I can remember from it is that I was driving along

00:21:49.960 and then all of a sudden I woke up in the hospital. And I think that's what happened to you.

00:21:56.240 I think you were subjected to something very, very traumatic and you don't actually remember

00:22:04.580 what happened. And so now, you know, the conversation sort of shifts and they go,

00:22:12.500 Amanda, try to imagine what the truth is. Like, you don't clearly remember what the truth is.

00:22:19.100 We know that you met with Patrick that night. We know that you know something about this crime,

00:22:23.120 but you don't seem to remember because you're so traumatized. And here I am. I've been answering

00:22:28.900 the same questions for five days. My answers are never sufficient to them. I'm 6,000 miles from home.

00:22:35.200 I'm exhausted. It's the middle of the night. And at a certain point, I start to trust the police

00:22:41.360 more than I trust myself. I start to feel crazy. And I've never felt more insane than I did in this

00:22:50.620 moment because I was trying to remember something that I couldn't remember. And there was a certain

00:22:57.420 point where one of the police officers was standing behind me and she slapped me in the back of the

00:23:03.940 head and just said, remember, and slapped me again and said, remember. And in this sort of state of

00:23:11.020 desperation, I pieced together broken fragments of memory to try to remember what they were asking

00:23:21.640 me to remember. And it wasn't a memory. It wasn't, I didn't, you know, in my mind, see Patrick the

00:23:27.840 Moomba murdering Meredith. It was an, it was kind of like an incoherent montage. I had like the vision

00:23:35.420 of the outside of the outside of my boyfriend's apartment. And then I had a vision of the basketball

00:23:42.300 court that was between my house and the university. And I had a vision, not even of Patrick, but of his

00:23:50.720 coat. And it's so illogical. And, but it was me attempting to make sense of what they were telling

00:23:59.220 me. And from this garbled, incoherent montage, the police then went to their computer, typed up

00:24:10.360 a sort of a version of it that was more coherent and told me to sign it. And I did. And then a few

00:24:18.260 hours later, they brought in the prosecutor who I didn't even know was the prosecutor at the time.

00:24:23.080 They said that it was the Publico Ministero. The Publico Ministero was there to speak with me.

00:24:27.600 And I didn't know who this was. I thought it was the mayor, maybe like public minister. So here he

00:24:34.680 comes in and he just wants to talk to me, I'm told. So I say, okay. And he wants to know if I heard

00:24:42.800 Meredith scream. And I remember telling him, I don't know. I don't think I remember hearing Meredith

00:24:49.300 scream. And then he says, well, how could you not have heard Meredith scream? And I said, well, I guess

00:24:55.760 I heard Meredith scream then. It was so much of me at this point being utterly suggestible

00:25:04.660 and just trying to connect the dots of what they were telling me as if it were true.

00:25:11.400 Meanwhile, my mom, they had taken my phone. They had placed it on the table in front of me.

00:25:17.320 My mom was on her way to Italy to be there. Like, and again, they had tapped my phone. So

00:25:23.680 they knew this to be true. They had listened into my phone calls and they knew my mom was

00:25:28.680 arriving the next day. So the morning rolls around. My mom is calling me from Rome and they

00:25:36.000 won't let me answer the phone. And from there, your question was, when did I know that I was

00:25:42.160 a suspect? And I bring all of this, I say all of this to say that what's potentially this is really

00:25:49.560 hard to understand. But even at this point, I didn't know that I was a suspect. They never said

00:25:56.780 that I was in trouble or like, I guess what they said was I was in trouble for not telling them the

00:26:04.440 whole truth. And they told me that if I didn't tell them the whole truth, I would never see my family

00:26:08.800 again. And they wanted to know why I was covering for somebody. So it very much felt like they again

00:26:15.500 thought I was this most important witness and, and they just needed to help me remember the truth

00:26:22.500 for them. So even when they stripped me naked and took photographs of me and poked and prodded my

00:26:30.340 genitals, and even when they put handcuffs on me and put me into a police car, they told me that I was

00:26:38.400 this witness. And they told me, they told me that they were stripping me to make sure that there

00:26:43.620 weren't signs that I had been sexually assaulted. Like it was still in this sort of space where they

00:26:48.500 were trying to figure out if I was also a victim of the crime as well. And maybe I was so traumatized

00:26:54.560 that I didn't remember being assaulted. And, and then they brought me into this police car

00:27:00.700 and drove me out of the city into the countryside to this prison, which I didn't know was a prison.

00:27:08.500 They said that they were taking me to a holding place for my own protection. And they, you know,

00:27:15.180 photograph, photographed me, they took my fingerprints, and they brought me to a cell. And I wasn't sure

00:27:22.500 how long this was going to be. They told me it was only going to be a few days that I would get to

00:27:27.740 see my mom soon. I kept asking about my mom and they left me there. And then a day or two later,

00:27:34.600 I was brought before a judge who finally said to me, you are accused of murdering Meredith Kircher.

00:27:44.660 How do you plea? And that was the first that I learned what was actually going on. And that was

00:27:51.680 the first time I even was introduced to my lawyers. Like I walked into a room where there was a judge,

00:27:57.280 there were my lawyers, there was the prosecutor, the police officers, everyone was there. I have two

00:28:02.440 seconds where my attorneys say, where are your attorneys? Your mother, we're in contact with your

00:28:07.980 mother. Don't say anything because I hadn't even had a chance to talk to them yet. And then I look to

00:28:14.700 the judge, the judge tells me that I'm accused. How do I plea? And my jaw just drops. And I wanted to

00:28:23.860 say that I'm innocent. And this is all a big misunderstanding. But here are these attorneys

00:28:28.140 that are in touch with my mom. They told me to not say anything. So I say, I don't say anything.

00:28:32.960 And then the hearing's over and I'm taken back to my prison cell. And it's only after that,

00:28:38.260 that I get a chance to speak to my attorneys or speak to my mom. And it was just this from the get

00:28:45.080 go this thing that was so much bigger than me. And it was not a few days. It was 1,428 days that I

00:28:56.360 stayed in that prison because of a huge misunderstanding at the very beginning.

00:29:02.400 Wow. That is such a Kafka-esque experience. It's interesting. So I've just watched the

00:29:11.000 documentary on you on Netflix, which obviously covers all of this ground. But much of what you

00:29:17.640 just said is new to me. And it gives a much clearer picture of the proximate causes of what amounts

00:29:25.520 into a false confession. So the false confessions are a thing. And they really are a disconcerting

00:29:33.860 and hard to understand phenomenon. I'm sure there are many paths into producing a false confession.

00:29:41.740 But the one you just described is one I've never really thought of, which was, I mean,

00:29:47.960 you're basically, it has been framed for you that you are a witness and may yourself be a victim

00:29:54.440 who is suffering some kind of a catastrophic failure of memory. And now that you're, you know,

00:30:00.760 just that the pressure is being put on you to free associate and think of anything that you can

00:30:07.460 piece together to put you, you know, back in the scene of the crime. And, you know, add to that the

00:30:16.040 language barrier and the whatever was on that paper you signed. It's, um, anyway, I mean, this is,

00:30:22.680 you know, I just watched a documentary on you last night. I didn't know any of that. So.

00:30:26.400 Well, it, yeah, now that I know better about false confessions and the psychology that is a part of

00:30:34.160 false confessions, you know, I didn't for a long time. And I spent years in prison just feeling

00:30:40.140 utterly baffled myself because I didn't understand what had just happened to me. And I thought that

00:30:47.140 there was something uniquely broken about me that I had just, something was wrong with me or I was a

00:30:54.800 coward or like, it's, it's not like I was sitting there knowingly and willingly making stuff up just

00:31:00.180 to appease the cops. Right. Like I had internalized what they were telling me and I was trying to

00:31:07.300 genuinely make sense of what they were telling me. And I was scared. Like I was scared at the idea that

00:31:12.660 something horrible had happened to me and that I had witnessed something horrible and couldn't

00:31:17.640 remember it. And I was desperate at that point to, to know what was genuinely true. And I, and I doubted

00:31:24.540 my own sanity at that point. And, you know, there were years that I felt completely alone and like no

00:31:31.460 one would understand what I had been through. I didn't even. And then interestingly, and here's a

00:31:38.320 person that you should, if you're curious about the psychology of all of this, you should interview

00:31:43.200 this incredible guy named Saul Kasson. He's a professor who studies false confessions. And he,

00:31:51.360 he also has talked about the various kinds of false confessions. And he reached out to me because,

00:31:58.240 you know, it's a big clamorous case and one that involves a false confession. So he reached out.

00:32:03.160 And the first thing he did was ask me if I could just recount every detail I could remember about

00:32:10.660 my interrogation. He didn't say, he didn't like prompt me with anything. He just said,

00:32:14.940 just tell me what you can remember. And I wrote, I wrote it all down. I sent him a letter and it was

00:32:19.760 only after I sent him a letter, like explaining everything that I could remember that he sent me

00:32:26.560 a copy of a paper that he had written called The Psychology of False Confessions. Does innocence put

00:32:34.820 innocence at risk? And in it, he details exactly how certain police interrogation techniques

00:32:43.520 break down a innocent person's sort of will and sense of agency and even sense of sanity in the

00:32:51.600 interrogation room. And that includes things like isolating them and, you know, putting in,

00:32:57.940 it's in the middle of the night, not giving them food, not giving them water, you know, all of these

00:33:01.800 various factors. And then it breaks down how different people are broken. Some people are,

00:33:09.440 are broken because the police suggests a mitigating factor and says, Hey, if you, if you just go along

00:33:15.160 with this, we'll take, we'll have your back and you'll only have like a year in jail, whatever. So they,

00:33:19.540 they do it to sort of, they feel like the cops don't believe them. And so they think,

00:33:23.980 I'm just going to say that I did it. And then the cops will be on my side and they'll show me some

00:33:28.540 mercy. I'll say whatever they need me to say to get out of this situation. A lot of people sort of

00:33:34.580 lose their sense of long-term consequences when they're being berated. And so they'll do and they'll

00:33:41.420 do and say anything just to get out of the immediate situation of stress. But then there's this other

00:33:47.600 situation called an internalized false confession where the person is made to genuinely believe

00:33:55.320 that they must be, that what the police are telling them is true. And so very often this

00:34:01.980 looks like you blacked out. You don't remember. We know you're a good person. So we're just going to,

00:34:08.940 we just need to unravel the truth for you and you will confess to it and it'll all be okay.

00:34:15.040 And so it's, that was the kind that I was subjected to. And yeah, so it's a fascinating

00:34:24.320 thing. And of all of the like criminal justice stuff that I get involved in now, the one that I'm

00:34:29.600 most passionate about is false confessions and the things that we can do to like in the interrogation

00:34:38.180 room to make it not as possible. Like there, there's some really just common sense things that

00:34:45.900 you can do, like record interrogations, like videotape them, record them, have some kind of

00:34:53.560 a record so that people can later go back and say, Oh, look at that. The, that person didn't have

00:35:00.260 actual knowledge that only the killer would know. The police told him on hour three that the murder

00:35:07.060 was committed with a rope. And so like, it's stuff like that, that ends up in a lot of cases being

00:35:13.060 just a, he said, she said situation in the courtroom where the police say, well, only the killer would

00:35:18.100 know that the person was murdered with a rope. And so he must have done it. And it's like, no,

00:35:23.320 you actually just slipped that information to him without you even realizing that because it's not

00:35:28.140 like these things happen because police officers are uniquely trying to go out of their way to get

00:35:36.240 innocent people to lie and, and implicate themselves. It's because they have a bias. They think they have

00:35:44.260 the person who committed the crime or they think they know who is not being forthcoming with the

00:35:49.740 truth. And so they do everything they possibly can to gaslight and convince this person to give

00:35:57.240 them what they want to hear. And it just so happens that in a lot of cases, it's not the truth. And so

00:36:03.180 the, you know, my interrogation was not recorded. It was, which is astonishing to me because there are

00:36:11.080 recordings of my phone calls. There are other recordings of me from just in the police station.

00:36:17.560 Like it's not, I wasn't even being questioned. They were just listening in the room to me and my

00:36:23.140 boyfriend talking. So they were obviously like surveilling me. But then when that final

00:36:29.080 interrogation was happening, none of it was recorded. And so it was just my word against

00:36:35.500 the police about what happened. Hmm. Well, one of the most unnerving things about your experience

00:36:44.160 as portrayed in this documentary, again, the documentary is just called Amanda Knox, right? On Netflix.

00:36:49.460 Yeah. And first, how did you feel about that? What it was? Did that, was that an appropriate

00:36:56.220 window onto, at least up until the moment it was shot, the experience? Or is there, I mean,

00:37:02.760 do you recommend that people watch that or not? Oh, yeah, I do. I think that it's a really interesting

00:37:08.860 window for a couple of reasons. It's not like it's a perfect window into my experience,

00:37:16.080 but it's not my documentary, right? It was these documentary filmmakers who were interested

00:37:21.700 in how a story goes so off the rails. And so a lot of the documentary is really interested

00:37:30.960 in how the media played a role in how my case proceeded. And it played a huge role because-

00:37:39.060 I want to talk about that. Yeah. We'll get into that.

00:37:41.380 We can get into that. But I do recommend it because I think the one thing that they did

00:37:45.880 really well was they didn't speak for anyone. Like, they made a point of only making the

00:37:53.940 documentary if the key players were all available and willing to be interviewed. And so that was

00:38:02.660 me. That was my boyfriend. That was the prosecutor. That was, you know, the independent genetic experts.

00:38:08.880 So they were able to get everyone to agree to be interviewed. And before they released this

00:38:15.140 documentary into the world, they showed it to all of us. Everyone who had been interviewed for

00:38:20.180 the documentary had a chance to see it and, you know, comment on it. And I think what's really

00:38:25.460 noteworthy and interesting is that every single one of us, or so I'm told, you know, approved of the

00:38:32.360 way that we were portrayed. Which is absolutely astounding when you watch the footage of the

00:38:40.380 lead prosecutor. I mean, it's some of the most damning footage I have ever seen of just the

00:38:47.660 misfiring of a human brain and the, you know, and a person who had really complete control over your

00:38:57.740 fate. I mean, it's just, I just, it was terrifying to watch a buffoon of this magnitude have control

00:39:05.560 over somebody's life. I mean, I just, I couldn't believe what I was hearing from the prosecutor.

00:39:11.540 Yeah. I remember all throughout the, uh, the first trial. I mean, I was in prison for over two years

00:39:19.200 before I received a verdict because, you know, I was, I was arrested and then there was eight months

00:39:24.720 of ongoing investigation. And then there were a few months before I had my first ever trial

00:39:32.000 hearing. And so, and then my trial lasted for a whole year. So it was a long time before I had any,

00:39:40.920 what I thought was going to be closure over this whole train wreck of a situation. And that entire

00:39:47.120 time, even when things were going horribly in the courtroom and horribly in the media,

00:39:52.140 horrible things were being said about me. I knew it was all false. And so a part of me genuinely,

00:40:01.300 well, no, not a part of me, all of me believed that I was going home. Like it was just a matter

00:40:06.940 of time before the adults in the room figured out what was going on. And it didn't matter what crazy

00:40:13.480 things were being said about me in the media. And it didn't matter that, you know, my prosecutor was

00:40:18.040 in the courtroom, like making up what I was saying to Meredith while murdering her. Like he had this

00:40:25.280 like vision of what I would have been saying to her while stabbing her to death. And he was like,

00:40:31.720 Amanda was probably telling her, this is what you get for being such a stuck up prude. Like that kind

00:40:37.240 of like, it was that level of just made up stuff. And I was sitting there thinking, this is so obviously

00:40:44.880 absurd. I'm, I, and the right thing is going to happen. I'm going to go home. And, and that's also

00:40:50.020 what my parents told me. Like, I think I want to emphasize again, that I was 20 years old when all

00:40:55.960 of this was happening. And so I didn't really know how the world worked. I didn't know what to expect

00:41:00.680 from the situation. And I really relied on my parents in a big way to tell me like, what is going

00:41:06.040 to happen to me? And they always told me there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Like we're going

00:41:11.340 to get through this. I know this is a really dark time, but there is a light at the end of this

00:41:16.240 tunnel. And we all believed that the light was the verdict. We were just waiting for the verdict.

00:41:21.540 And so when the verdict came back guilty, I had the biggest existential crisis of my life

00:41:34.820 life. And everything I thought that I could rely on in the world just shattered. And I was brought

00:41:45.440 back to the prison so utterly bewildered that I wasn't even crying. I just was, I was in shock.

00:41:56.920 And it took me a long time to, to sort of process and unravel what this meant for my life. But in that

00:42:08.320 sort of immediate moment, I realized that what, I was not just waiting to go home. I was, you know,

00:42:18.060 I was, I was not living someone else's life by mistake. Like this was my life. And, and I, that,

00:42:25.980 that was it just like, Oh my God, this is my life. And there's not a light at the end of the tunnel.

00:42:31.820 I'm just in this tunnel indefinitely. I was sentenced to 26 years and that was longer than I had been

00:42:39.580 alive at that point. So I then over the next, you know, days and weeks and months had to re-evaluate

00:42:49.560 what I thought my life was in ways that I didn't really have to before the verdict, because I thought

00:42:56.960 that this was just like some weird limbo that I was in. And yeah.

00:43:02.460 Well, I want to get to how you coped with the verdict and the prospect of just spending 26 years

00:43:09.980 in prison for a crime you hadn't committed. But I, I still want to understand the various causal pieces

00:43:19.360 here because there's just as a sociological phenomenon, it's just astounding what you found

00:43:26.000 yourself in the center of. I mean, just take the case of the, the lead prosecutor for a moment. I mean,

00:43:31.160 he, so people should watch this documentary just to see this guy talk. I mean, he's palpably

00:43:36.680 deranged by his Catholicism as sort of the backdrop to his thinking about the lurid sexuality that

00:43:44.560 must've been the cause of this murder, right? So he's, I don't need to do a full Freudian case study

00:43:50.840 on him, but it's palpable just what this, this guy's imagination is running amok. And one of the more

00:43:59.040 interesting and insidious things that happens very early on is that you are faulted in the prosecutor's

00:44:07.400 mind and perhaps in the minds of, of others for having an inappropriate emotional response to the

00:44:14.340 murder, right? So that people are watching you and, you know, their cameras trained on you, you know,

00:44:20.480 more or less, it seems immediately watching, you know, your demeanor and your, your, your moment to moment

00:44:27.720 expressions of emotion and all that you're not expressing as, you know, the police go, you know, in and out

00:44:34.820 of the house, which is now a crime scene. And it's almost like you're the protagonist in Camus' novel,

00:44:43.380 The Stranger, right? Who gets convicted for not crying at his mother's funeral, right? Like the, like you just,

00:44:48.300 you didn't have this big expression of bereavement, but everyone's ignoring the context. You had known

00:44:56.560 Meredith for what, three weeks at this point? Yeah, I had known her for about three weeks, yeah.

00:45:02.420 Right. So this is not your best friend on, on earth who has been murdered. And also, as, as you pointed

00:45:10.140 out, like you hadn't, you're being studied while you're, you're like, you never saw her body, right?

00:45:16.200 You're not, you haven't witnessed the things people are assuming you've witnessed as they're

00:45:21.820 studying your demeanor to see your reaction to the, you know, the, the horrors that occurred in that

00:45:28.520 house. Again, and to have this all being driven by the intuitions of this, you know, fabulous repressed

00:45:37.400 Catholic, really just proper clown, you know, as, you know, obviously you have much more experience

00:45:45.400 of him than I do, but just to watch this documentary and every, the fact that he could have been pleased

00:45:51.880 with how he came off in it is just a testament to pure delusion on his part.

00:45:59.100 Yeah. I think that, I think he believes what he says. And so he has a lot of bias that colored

00:46:08.800 the way that he viewed me and that he viewed the facts. I mean, I think one of the things that

00:46:14.180 really astonishes me about this case in particular is you're, you know, you're right. I'd love to talk

00:46:20.380 to you about how much emphasis was put on my behavior. And when I did cry or when I didn't cry,

00:46:27.220 like there was so much selection bias in that also, but like one of the things that's really

00:46:33.520 astonishing for me about this case is it's like a lot of wrongful convictions in a lot of ways.

00:46:39.220 There's a lot of things that are just like by the book, wrongful convictions stuff. Like you have

00:46:43.960 crazy witnesses that come forth months later who are completely unreliable. You have jailhouse

00:46:50.020 snitches that come up. Like there's a little bit of all of the things that lead to wrongful convictions,

00:46:55.000 including like bad forensic evidence, you know, all of that. But like one thing that's really

00:47:00.460 unusual about my case is that we know who did it. Like it's not like it's there's now that I am

00:47:09.100 acquitted and my boyfriend is acquitted, the people are like, well, who, who did it then? Like

00:47:14.440 we know who did it. Like there was copious evidence of this known local burglar named Rudy

00:47:21.480 Gaudet. He had left his DNA in the, like in Meredith's body. Like his, his handprint and

00:47:30.460 footprints were found in her blood and he fled the country immediately after the murder and adopted

00:47:38.200 a false identity. Like there, there is so much that is, it's just obvious what happened.

00:47:45.460 But the problem was that they didn't know this at the time that they arrested me. They, they didn't

00:47:52.640 have, you know, the, the fingerprints back from the, the forensic, you know, people, they didn't have

00:47:58.100 the DNA results back yet. So they were really just going like by the time they arrested me and my

00:48:03.660 boyfriend, they, they were just going off of gut instinct and their gut instinct in large part had to

00:48:11.920 do with a lot of pressure. Like there was already TV cameras that were parked across the street from

00:48:17.740 our house, like just zooming in on our driveway, just hours after Meredith's body had been discovered.

00:48:25.120 And so the police felt an incredible amount of pressure to come up with answers as quickly as

00:48:33.260 humanly possible. And there is a lot of discussion about my behavior. When did I cry? When did I not cry?

00:48:41.920 There are assumptions about what I understood or what I knew at various times. Like there's this

00:48:47.680 famous scene of maybe the most viewed two seconds of my life are of me outside of my house in the,

00:48:58.880 you know, a few hours, like an hour or two after this crime scene was discovered. My boyfriend,

00:49:05.000 Raffaele is standing next to me. It's just sort of like holding me. It's cold. So he's sort of

00:49:10.740 comforting me. He put his jacket around me and he looks me in the eyes and we, we kiss each other.

00:49:18.660 And it, you know, it's not like we're making out. We just give each other some sort of kisses to,

00:49:23.760 comfort each other. And that those two seconds of my life were then taken and put in the media on loop

00:49:35.500 in slow motion, just like as if people could read into that moment and say, this is the moment we knew

00:49:43.520 that she was guilty because here she is kissing her boyfriend and not crying. And what people don't

00:49:50.540 know is that that moment I had not seen the crime scene, unlike my other roommate who was there and

00:49:58.300 who was crying hysterically, nor was I fully aware of what was even in the room that they found. I knew

00:50:06.960 that, that something bad was in there because they, people were screaming, people were crying,

00:50:11.500 but I was hearing people yell and speak in very rapid Italian. And so I wasn't sure that Meredith was

00:50:22.020 even killed. I knew that there was something in Meredith's room. I heard a foot. I heard the word

00:50:29.320 for armoire. I heard the word blood. And so I was trying to piece together. Is there like a severed foot

00:50:35.920 in Meredith's room? Like I have no idea what's going on. And I slowly pieced together with Raffaele's

00:50:42.340 help that there is a body found in Meredith's room. It was covered by a blanket. It was near the armoire

00:50:50.380 and there was a foot sticking out from underneath the blanket. Oh my God, the blanket. The prosecutor's

00:50:57.260 belief that only a woman murderer would have thought to cover a woman with a blanket, right? Like that,

00:51:05.040 that proves the gender of the murderer. I mean, this is confirmation bias in action, right? Like

00:51:11.060 you've already, by the time that he's making this claim, they've already arrested a woman, right? Me

00:51:17.940 for a crime. Those sentences could have come out of his mouth in any context, confirming or

00:51:25.020 disconfirming anything. It's just patently insane. And it's just. Yeah. It's like, I'd love to know

00:51:31.220 where the statistics of that are. It's fair. It was incredibly depressing to see that there

00:51:36.560 were no guardrails on within the system to protect from the obvious waywardness of this guy's mind.

00:51:46.980 I mean, it's just, you know, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a clinician, but Jesus Christ,

00:51:53.600 that was a thing to behold watching that documentary.

00:51:55.720 Well, what's like really disconcerting for me is it's not like, you know, the prosecutor is

00:52:02.220 absolutely king in, in the world. Like he doesn't just get to arrest any old person. I mean, he does

00:52:08.900 get to arrest any old person he wants, but the fact that it like, it continued for so long. Like for

00:52:14.700 instance, when I was arrested, my boyfriend was arrested. My boss, Patrick Lumumba was arrested.

00:52:21.320 And, you know, the very next day people are showing up at the police office saying,

00:52:27.820 we know that Patrick is innocent. We were with him the night of the crime. We, there was a whole big

00:52:33.780 group of us at his pub together. Like this is impossible. And instead of releasing Patrick

00:52:40.900 on that evidence, on the numerous, numerous eyewitnesses who, you know, who came forward and,

00:52:48.820 you know, it was, uh, the only thing that was even implicating him was this nonsense confession

00:52:54.900 that was totally incoherent. They held him for two full weeks, I believe. Like he was in prison

00:53:01.540 for two weeks and they only released him once they had arrested Rudy Gaudet. Once they had some,

00:53:08.520 like the limited forensics that they were able to bring back that showed Rudy Gaudet's fingerprints.

00:53:13.540 That was, that was only when they finally let him go. And what for me is really troubling is,

00:53:23.660 you know, a judge signed off on this and later along down the line, another judge agreed that we

00:53:31.940 deserve, instead of just throwing the case out, they sent us on to trial. And then I went through a

00:53:38.100 year's worth of trial and was convicted. And so for me, it's not just the prosecutor. It's like how

00:53:47.420 many people along the way bought into exactly that same sentiment. Only a woman would cover

00:53:55.040 a body with a blanket. Oh, of course no one, like no one stopped to think that there was bias and no

00:54:05.200 one, you know, no one really gave much thought to the fact that I had no motive to commit this crime,

00:54:11.400 that I had no history of mental illness or violence, that I didn't have a relationship

00:54:16.500 with the person who actually killed her, that they had physical evidence of him at the crime scene.

00:54:22.200 And so it really came down to this power of storytelling and this, and the impact of first

00:54:33.400 impression. And, and even, I mean, I hate to say it, but it's like, I felt like people were having a

00:54:42.400 sort of macabre pornographic fantasy about me. And, and on top of that, there was the issue of saving

00:54:49.960 face because I was arrested very quickly. And then the forensic evidence came forward pointing not to me

00:54:57.260 and not to my boyfriend and not to Patrick, but to this known burglar named Rudy Gaudet. And instead of

00:55:03.000 just halting the process there and saying, Oh, we were wrong, we arrested the wrong people. Let's, let's put

00:55:09.880 this, you know, whole thing back on track. They just swapped Patrick out and put Rudy Gaudet in and orchestrated

00:55:18.700 this theory about me having used my feminine wiles to convince these two men who had no relationship with

00:55:28.360 each other to out of the blue, just with no premeditation whatsoever, go to my house and

00:55:36.120 rape my roommate for me and then hold her down so I could stab her to death.

00:55:41.240 Hmm. Well, let's talk about the role that the media played in this. I mean, this is, it comes

00:55:47.320 through pretty well in this film. I mean, the, you know, this was the media, but it was importantly

00:55:53.240 the tabloid press that just had a feeding frenzy here. And, you know, the, the threat of embarrassing

00:56:00.200 the Italy was, uh, obvious and underwriting this, this sunk cost fallacy, right? They, they had,

00:56:07.160 they had committed to you as the guilty party and they didn't want to suffer the public embarrassment

00:56:12.120 of, um, changing their minds, it seemed. But, um, this is entirely pre social media. Is that correct?

00:56:19.380 Or was social media just beginning? So 2007 was the year the iPhone came out. We already had Facebook,

00:56:27.580 but it wasn't your grandma's Facebook. It was, it was still pretty hip at the time. Although we were

00:56:34.760 past my space at that point, I think we had all moved on from my space. So there was no Twitter.

00:56:40.140 Twitter was 2009, right? Yes. So that came afterwards. I, I came home to Twitter and was

00:56:45.640 astonished at the world and how it had changed. Um, but yeah, I, you know, there's, I, I feel like

00:56:52.900 in a lot of ways I'm kind of patient zero of, of a social media conviction because it really was the

00:57:01.780 first time that it wasn't just the media and the tabloid media that was covering everything. It was

00:57:09.100 also these echo chambers that were arising in the social media sphere where they were capturing

00:57:16.780 people's attention and really like funneling very different kinds of information. And this is

00:57:24.000 actually a really important lens to look at when people analyze my behavior, because, you know, people

00:57:30.560 look backwards and justify why the accusations against me make sense. And I think one of the issues

00:57:38.360 is that a lot of people's access to me was strictly mediated by the media. They, I, they didn't get

00:57:45.880 to see me for until I went to trial, like over a year after I was arrested. And so they only had like

00:57:51.600 those glimpses that the media were able to get of me in those five days leading up to my arrest. And

00:57:58.500 that's where the selection bias comes into play because so much of my behavior or my alleged behavior

00:58:06.200 behavior is what, what, what is going to capture people's attention. And so they zoom in on that

00:58:13.280 kiss that between me and Raphael and they interview people who say, oh, Amanda wasn't crying when I hugged

00:58:20.780 her. And they don't know that when I was alone, I would break down and cry. And, or when they hear it

00:58:29.920 from the prosecutor that I did break down and cry, they say, oh, she broke down and cry because she

00:58:34.480 was looking through the knife drawer and suddenly remembered a horrible thing about knives. Like

00:58:39.640 there's so much of people projecting their own prejudice about what my, my behavior meant.

00:58:47.760 And I actually like go in depth about this subject in particular on one episode of my podcast,

00:58:54.420 Labyrinths, when I interviewed Malcolm Gladwell. Um, I don't know if you were able to listen to that

00:58:59.640 because Malcolm Gladwell covered my case in his book, talking to strangers and I, I appreciated it

00:59:09.000 in a, in a big way because he, you know, from the very beginning says Rudy Gaudet murdered Meredith

00:59:15.000 Kircher. Like the number of people in the media who just conveniently forget that, or like the headline

00:59:22.160 is man who killed Amanda Knox's roommate released from prison. Like everyone. So Meredith is

00:59:29.520 completely forgotten in that headline. Then Rudy Gaudet is completely forgotten that headline

00:59:33.540 that again, this whole tragic thing centers around me, even though I am totally peripheral

00:59:40.100 to it. And Malcolm Gladwell's perspective was that some people are just, their behavior is

00:59:47.780 mismatched to their actual reality. So some people act guilty, but are innocent or act innocent,

00:59:56.880 but are guilty. And in my case, I'm just one of those rare people who act guilty, but I'm really

01:00:03.340 innocent. And that wigged me out because again, that is him sort of putting the onus of what went wrong

01:00:14.920 in the interpretation of all of the facts of this case on me, which was the whole problem from the

01:00:21.380 beginning. Everyone was looking at me for answers that I did not have. And he missed the point of all

01:00:27.080 the cognitive biases that shaped how my behavior was perceived because the police were the ones who

01:00:34.200 had the actual agency in this equation. They were the ones who were arresting people. They were the

01:00:38.800 ones who were coming up with a theory of a crime. And then it was, you know, the, the media who was

01:00:45.020 there that was supposed to be this check and balance against this incredible power that the state has to

01:00:51.020 arrest and, and imprison people. And instead of, you know, exercising that power to hold people to

01:01:00.300 account, people in power to account, they just piled on and were like, tell us more juicy details about

01:01:05.780 what crazy things Amanda's doing next. And yeah, so it's, I think that when you go back and

01:01:15.540 retroactively justify your already predetermined conclusion, like Amanda Knox guilty, Amanda Knox

01:01:22.460 crazy, you can find whatever you want in, in the footage to confirm what you already believe. And I

01:01:29.620 think that's one of the, that's what was so scary about the case for me was realizing that the truth

01:01:36.660 didn't matter to people. Like it, it was, I, I was just this blank slate onto which people were

01:01:45.320 projecting their own fantasies. And, you know, it didn't matter that even the physics of the

01:01:52.400 prosecution's theory was impossible. Like they were suggesting that I was in this room being a part

01:02:01.660 of this horrific fight to sexually assault and, and brutally murder my roommate. Like she fought back,

01:02:08.760 like she has defense wounds on her body. I'm supposedly I'm taking part in this brutal crime,

01:02:15.160 but I leave no single trace of myself at this crime scene. And when that is revealed, the prosecution

01:02:23.240 says, well, she must've gone back to the crime scene and cleaned up all traces of herself. And this was,

01:02:30.040 this is just what they put forward. This is, this is their explanation for why there's all this evidence

01:02:35.620 of Rudy Gaudet's DNA, but none of me. And they say, well, Amanda must've gone in and cleaned up all her

01:02:43.520 DNA and left all of Rudy Gaudet's DNA so that she could frame him for the crime. There's no sign of

01:02:50.300 cleaning agents. There's no sign that this crime scene has been cleaned up, but that's just because

01:02:56.160 they are finding a reason to continue to believe what they already believe. And what's so scary

01:03:02.460 about this is I don't think this was some sort of like conscious thing that anyone was doing. I think

01:03:08.980 that this was happening unconsciously, or if we want to get into like the free will question,

01:03:14.420 it was just the thought that came to them and they didn't have control over that thought. And,

01:03:19.500 and they just pursued it and pursued it despite the fact that, you know, even during my first trial,

01:03:26.020 people were beginning to question that, you know, they were told there was all this damning evidence.

01:03:31.580 And when it all rolled out, some people weren't convinced. Others were. So it was tough.

01:03:41.260 I want to return to what life was like for you after the verdict, if you want to talk about that

01:03:48.360 at all. But I'm actually most interested in what life has been like since leaving prison and what

01:03:57.360 you've had to confront. I mean, you're, you're sort of, in some ways you're in a, a new prison. I mean,

01:04:03.220 it's quite a bit better than the old one I can imagine, but you're still in a, in the fairly surreal

01:04:08.780 situation of being in a world where many people's, you know, primary association with you is that

01:04:16.200 something awful happened. And again, probably where there's smoke, there's fire. It's just safe to

01:04:21.940 assume. So, and there, and there are many people who just frankly think you're guilty. And I think

01:04:28.520 if nothing has changed since that documentary, Meredith's family are among those people. So I'm

01:04:34.360 just, I'm wondering what it's like to confront that kind of reputational lock-in where, you know,

01:04:42.500 you're just, you're seeing the evidence of people's unwillingness to change their mind no matter what

01:04:47.080 the counter evidence. Again, again, in this case, the counter evidence is despite the obvious

01:04:52.220 incentives to the contrary, the, I guess it was the Supreme Court in Italy, you know, fully exonerated

01:04:58.620 you and detailed what a, a masterpiece of incompetence the investigation was.

01:05:06.600 Yeah. That's a great question. That's what I call the now what question. And it's complicated

01:05:14.720 in part because I was released in, from prison in 2011, but I wasn't like fully exonerated yet.

01:05:22.420 I had been acquitted, but in Italy, prosecutors are allowed to, um, appeal verdicts as well. And so

01:05:30.820 my acquittal was appealed. Um, it was overturned. I was tried for the same crime again. I was.

01:05:39.080 And did you, did you, you didn't return to Italy for that trial?

01:05:42.020 No, I did not. So this all was happening in absentia and I was convicted again, and I was

01:05:49.340 sentenced to 28 and a half years. Um, so they raised the sentence and it wasn't until March of 2015.

01:05:59.080 So eight years after I had this whole ordeal began that the Supreme court ruled that I was,

01:06:07.540 I was innocent. They said there were stunning flaws in the investigation and that it had been

01:06:12.660 biased from the beginning by all the media pressure. And so I, I returned to the world.

01:06:20.360 I mean, I returned to the world in 2011 as the girl who was accused of murder. A lot of people

01:06:27.500 just didn't know I existed until that moment. And so my, my legacy in the world was

01:06:34.300 association with murder and the anchoring bias that people had towards me was associating me with

01:06:42.200 a horrific crime. And so now I'm, I'm alienated from other people in the world because one,

01:06:49.580 I have no idea if anyone in the world has had my experience. I certainly don't know anyone.

01:06:55.200 And two, like everyone I meet from now on is going to meet this doppelganger version of me

01:07:01.260 that exists in their imagination. And I know that every single person that I encounter is going to

01:07:08.760 have an idea of me that is going to be like a veil that, that is between me and them. And I have no

01:07:17.880 idea what that idea of me looks like in their imagination. I don't know what media they've consumed.

01:07:24.700 I, I, I have no idea. All I know is that people associate me with a horrific thing that I didn't

01:07:32.360 do. And for the worst experience of my life and there's no escaping it. Like I had this brief moment

01:07:38.540 of thinking that I was going to get to go back to being an anonymous college student again. And that

01:07:46.020 was very, very quickly revealed to be a, a very naive hope because I couldn't for months, years,

01:07:55.140 even I couldn't go out in public without somebody photographing me, without people, paparazzi

01:08:00.740 following me. Um, I would bike to school and they would take pictures of me on my route to school.

01:08:06.460 And then once I'm in school, once I'm on campus, they aren't allowed on campus, but other students

01:08:11.560 are, and they're taking pictures of me and posting them on social media. And so I was perpetually

01:08:17.860 under a spotlight that was a spotlight where the worst possible light was on me. It wasn't

01:08:26.020 just a spotlight. It was the worst possible spotlight. Like any interpretation of me and

01:08:31.400 what I did was viewed through the worst possible lens. And this was in part because I was exonerated

01:08:37.560 for murder, but not for slander. So at the same time that I was tried for murder, I was also being

01:08:45.840 tried for a different crime, slander, that was associated with those statements that I signed

01:08:53.200 during my interrogation. Patrick Lumumba, uh, was eventually, you know, released from prison and found

01:08:58.960 to be completely extraneous to this crime. And he was suing me for defamation. And in Italy,

01:09:05.700 slander is a, is not a civil crime. It's a, it's a criminal case. And so I was being tried in the

01:09:12.860 very same courtroom at the very same time for slander and murder. And I was found guilty of

01:09:20.380 slander. And so around the world, I was perceived as this liar who was acquitted of murder, but probably

01:09:30.600 just for a technicality. And even if I was innocent, I was a, you know, an unsavory individual who had

01:09:38.520 put an innocent man behind bars. I was probably racist. The number of people who have accused me

01:09:43.700 of that being the result of racism and not realizing that those interrogations were the scariest

01:09:51.440 experience of my life and that I was 100% coerced and forgetting even that I recanted those statements

01:09:58.620 hours after I was out of the pressure cooker of the interrogation. So yeah, there's been trying to

01:10:06.080 feel like I was a part of humanity again, after going through all of this was a tremendous

01:10:14.940 challenge. I, I, I really thought that, you know, here I am a free person, but I wasn't really free.

01:10:23.660 And in a lot of the ways that counted, I was still living the worst experience of my life.

01:10:31.520 And I was still living a very limited existence defined forever, if not for a horrible thing that

01:10:39.680 I didn't do, then for the worst experience of my life. So what do you do?

01:10:44.260 I know you talk about this, I know, I know you cover this somewhat in your, in your series on

01:10:49.600 resilience, but what has been useful for you in finding some equanimity with all of these forces

01:10:58.480 and events and, you know, the thoughts of others that you cannot control, right? So I mean, you can,

01:11:04.460 you can take me back to prison or it can be, you know, to the current moment in your encounters with

01:11:11.420 social media. How, how have you found a balanced mind given that there's so much you really can't

01:11:19.080 directly influence that's aimed at you?

01:11:21.820 Well, this is the part where I get to thank you, Sam, because you are really the reason why I meditate

01:11:29.540 now. And meditation has been an incredibly huge relief for me, for the myriad ways that I

01:11:41.220 discuss in the series. And in particular, the way that you were able to, like my previous encounters

01:11:49.120 with meditation before your app was a little more on the woo-woo end, which did not really resonate

01:11:56.660 with me. And so I wasn't able to really fully grasp the deep insights, like, is there a self?

01:12:05.880 And what does it mean to not have a self? And what does it mean to look for the looker? And the way,

01:12:12.600 just the way that you were able to make it so practical and, and sort of just put it in the

01:12:20.440 hands of the individual meditator to like just experience it for themselves without any dogma attached

01:12:27.880 to it was what allowed me to really find that those truths through my own meditation practice,

01:12:36.740 which were an incredible relief. That said, there were certain things that I was surprised

01:12:42.500 that I had intuitions about without having had a previous meditation practice. Like even in the

01:12:51.140 prison environment, there were certain intuitions that I had that helped me along the way. One of

01:12:58.140 those big intuitions was that I couldn't believe that the people who were subjecting me to this horrific

01:13:06.880 experience were doing it knowingly. Like I, I absolutely could not imagine my prosecutor and the

01:13:17.740 police officers just sitting there in their offices, like chuckling to themselves about how they had

01:13:23.980 put an innocent person in jail. And so I wasn't living with this delusion that there are just evil

01:13:30.540 people in the world who are out to get you, which would have distorted my understanding of my

01:13:37.120 circumstances and of reality in a way that I don't think would have been helpful to me as an

01:13:43.200 individual learning to be a person in the world. Instead, I had this intuition that there was

01:13:50.000 something deeper at play and that maybe I could even understand it because how many times have I had

01:13:59.440 wrong intuitions about things in the world? And it made me suffer less to have that sort of limited

01:14:08.660 amount of compassion for the people who were putting me through this experience. And it made

01:14:14.220 me feel a little bit less helpless. It made me feel a little more hopeful that there was a possibility

01:14:21.920 of understanding and connection, even if there wasn't right now. And even if I was in a very

01:14:27.900 antagonistic relationship with what seemed like the entire world. Other intuitions that I had,

01:14:34.520 like, I thought I was going crazy. Like, I would have conversations with my younger self in prison

01:14:41.560 because I didn't really know how to survive this situation that I was in. I instead, like,

01:14:49.300 unconsciously or consciously, it's hard to say at this point, would sort of big sister myself through

01:14:55.840 the experience by very vividly imagining a younger version of myself, about 12 years old,

01:15:02.340 who would sit across from me on my bunk in my cell and just ask questions about what was happening.

01:15:10.420 And it was a way for me to process what was happening to me, but it was also like practicing

01:15:16.700 meta. Like, I was wishing well upon this younger version of myself who didn't know that some horrible

01:15:24.380 thing was about to happen to her. Like, she just was completely with—it was almost like I was trying

01:15:30.140 to prepare her for this horrible experience that she was going to go through. And that was the way

01:15:35.840 that I was coaching myself through the experience in the moment. And that feels kind of meditative.

01:15:42.140 So, but yeah, I mean, I've had intuitions that have led me on a path towards curiosity and compassion

01:15:53.180 and pushing myself to have the courage to embrace those ideas and those intuitions against a backdrop

01:16:00.340 of people who are telling me, you know, this is all happening because Italy is corrupt and your

01:16:06.540 prosecutor's evil. And I just felt like that wasn't true. Or, you know, people who are telling me it's

01:16:13.940 all my fault. Like, there's a huge contingent of people who think that even if I am innocent,

01:16:20.920 this whole thing went awry because of me. Like, it's my fault that this bad thing happened to me.

01:16:28.540 And for a while, I internalized that because when you're one lone voice against a million voices,

01:16:36.340 you're probably the crazy one. But when I took a step back, and I've been fortunate enough to be able

01:16:44.100 to do this as a free person, and looked back, I can look back and say, no, I was doing the very best

01:16:52.300 I could in a very scary and uncertain situation that I was utterly unprepared for. And no, this was

01:16:58.860 not my fault. And I feel at peace with that.

01:17:03.400 So what do you make of people's commitment to maintaining their belief in your guilt? Because,

01:17:11.180 I mean, it's a kind of, I guess it might be some version of the sunk cost fallacy. You know,

01:17:18.280 there's a kind of motivated reasoning. But there's, it's almost, this is obviously not unique to your

01:17:23.960 case. We see this everywhere. And this is actually one of my favorite points that Nietzsche ever made

01:17:29.400 was that, you know, he said in some form, when you force people to change their opinion about you,

01:17:35.260 they hold the effort, it takes them very much against you. So it's just a delightful little

01:17:41.580 turn there, where it's just, I mean, you can just see this, like, when you're, whenever you're

01:17:46.340 arguing with somebody, and they're really dug in with their cherished opinion on something,

01:17:50.680 whatever it is, and you present counter evidence, you see this unwillingness, it's this attitude of

01:17:56.600 just begrudging each increment of counter evidence. There's an attachment. It's like a very Buddhist

01:18:03.460 mental framing here, which is, that seems appropriate, which is that people are attached

01:18:08.320 to the way they think things are. And you push on those attachments at your peril, because it just,

01:18:16.440 you're creating, you know, cognitive dissonance for them. And it's just an unpleasant experience for

01:18:21.260 them to look back at all the hours they spent, you know, dancing on your grave, say, for them to have

01:18:29.140 to realize that they were, you know, part of some monstrous misperception, and to feel to some degree

01:18:36.840 culpable in that, or tarnished by that. How do you think about, I mean, there's obviously all the

01:18:44.000 anonymous trolls out there, but then there's Meredith's family. How do you think about the people who are

01:18:50.680 maintaining an apparent conviction of your guilt, even when so much is now known about what happened

01:18:58.420 and didn't happen? Yeah. You know, I actually feel for people, because I think to realize that you

01:19:07.540 were not only so wrong, but so wrong in such a harmful way, is a devastating thing to realize.

01:19:16.840 And it's something that it's totally human to want to rebel against at every point. Like, the sunk cost

01:19:25.640 isn't just that they were wrong, and that's embarrassing. The sunk cost is that they hurt someone in the

01:19:33.780 process of being wrong. And so it's not just the misinformation, and it's not just the ego of wanting to be

01:19:41.900 right. I think that people are afraid of what it means about them if they were this wrong. And it's

01:19:50.420 much easier for them to believe that there's something wrong with me to have deserved the harm

01:19:59.020 that I suffered. And so I think it goes to people identifying with their ideas. And when put on the spot,

01:20:10.260 even when having plain evidence put in front of them that what they believe is wrong, it feels to them

01:20:19.660 like what you're saying is that they're a bad person. And that's why they can't grasp just the plain,

01:20:30.980 hard, cold facts of it. Because it's charged with emotional resonance and with a sense of it implicating

01:20:41.080 them and their identity and who they imagine themselves to be as people. And this is what I think about when I

01:20:47.000 think about my prosecutor. Like, I would not want to be my prosecutor. Like, for my legacy to be what it is.

01:20:58.560 And I completely understand why someone who is not yet fully ready to embrace with full self-awareness

01:21:11.440 the reality of the situation would prefer the delusion and would protect the delusion at all costs.

01:21:18.280 Hmm. Yeah. What is the status of public opinion in Italy around this case now?

01:21:25.800 Ooh. Well, you know, it's interesting. I, because of the messages that I receive on social media,

01:21:35.320 I was under the impression that I'm basically the OJ Simpson of Italy. However, however, there have been

01:21:46.260 some really interesting developments. You know, there have been some podcasts and even investigative

01:21:54.340 journalism done that has explored the side of the events where I'm actually innocent. And it's coming

01:22:04.980 from, you know, like, some fringe people. Like, there's this really famous rapper who is 100%, like,

01:22:11.780 has dug deep into the case and done this really long podcast series about it in Italy. Very famous

01:22:17.000 Italian rapper who takes the very rapper-y stance of, like, fuck the police and uses me as an example of

01:22:25.540 that. But also, there have just been some really interesting legal developments. Like, I appealed my

01:22:32.740 slander conviction to the European Court of Human Rights, and they ruled in my favor. And, you know,

01:22:39.560 that it was going to just end there, except they just passed a new law in Italy that made it possible

01:22:44.380 to revisit old cases or, like, definitive cases based upon international court rulings. And my

01:22:53.220 slander conviction just in October was overturned. So, and then, you know, just recently, like,

01:23:02.900 yesterday or the day before, Rudy Gaudet, so the person who murdered Meredith, he was released from

01:23:08.940 prison a few years ago, having served 13 years of a 16-year sentence, and he was just re-arrested for

01:23:17.680 assaulting his girlfriend. And so, it feels like in, like, tiny little increments, there has been a

01:23:28.960 coming to Jesus in Italy in these small ways. And they're not pronounced. It's not like you're going to

01:23:38.700 see, you're not seeing headlines in Italy being like, oh, my gosh, we were so wrong about Amanda.

01:23:44.220 Instead, you're just seeing this sort of quiet realization of, oh, here's the guy who was,

01:23:54.440 actually, we have evidence who committed this crime. He's now, you know, assaulting other young

01:23:59.080 women. Here's Amanda, you know, living her life and doing the best she can. And everything that she

01:24:07.300 says still is corroborated by the evidence, it's, so I'm hoping that there's this slow change. And I

01:24:15.380 actually have started seeing some people in just, like, DMs, comments to me online of Italian people

01:24:23.600 who have reached out and said that they were really sorry because they believed it all when it was going

01:24:31.380 on. They just believed the media's representation of the case at the time. And only recently did they

01:24:39.280 look back with clearer eyes, with the benefit of hindsight, and realize how wrong they were. And

01:24:47.760 they apologized to me on behalf of their entire country.

01:24:53.060 So has Rudy Gaudet ever acknowledged his guilt and your innocence? Or I know he had.

01:25:00.580 Oh, no. Oh, no. So the first time that he was ever, he ever even mentioned me was while he was still

01:25:08.620 on the run. And he was Skyping with a friend of his who he didn't know was corroborating with the

01:25:17.120 police. So the police had already arrested me, but they then got the fingerprints back. They

01:25:21.780 identified Rudy Gaudet. So they were looking for Rudy Gaudet. And they contacted a number of his

01:25:26.180 friends. And one of his friends agreed to contact Rudy while the police were listening in to their

01:25:32.840 Skype conversation. And when this friend talked to Rudy Gaudet, he asked about me, like, what about

01:25:41.340 Amanda? What does Amanda have to do with this? And Rudy Gaudet said, Amanda doesn't have anything to do

01:25:45.560 with this. And this is while Rudy's, like, run away. He's in Germany. He's on the run. And he says that

01:25:51.520 I had not that Amanda Knox had nothing to do with it. And it's only it at this point, he wasn't

01:25:56.780 admitting to having committed the crime. He was he was admitting to what he was admitting to being

01:26:02.620 there when the crime occurred. And he said that someone else did it. Some man came into the house

01:26:08.960 and murdered Meredith while he was in the bathroom. He said that he was on the toilet listening to a few

01:26:16.220 songs while on the toilet. And while he was in the bathroom, somebody came into the house

01:26:20.440 and murdered Meredith. And then when he realized what happened, he ran out there, confronted the guy

01:26:28.300 and went into Meredith's room and tried to save her. And that's how he got all the blood all over

01:26:35.320 his hands. So this is his claim. And it was only when he was arrested, he was found in Germany, arrested,

01:26:43.260 extradited back to Italy, that he changed his story and said, no, in fact, Amanda was there too. And it was

01:26:51.020 the man that I confronted was Raffaele, her boyfriend. And they're trying to pin their crime on me because I'm a

01:26:59.680 black guy. And so he this is his story. He has a history of breaking and entering. He has a history

01:27:09.640 of confronting people with knives. It's a lie, but it's a lie that he continues to hold on to. And when

01:27:17.460 he has been interviewed even recently about the case, after he was released from prison, he continues

01:27:23.220 to say that I committed this crime with Raffaele and that he had nothing to do with it.

01:27:28.080 Hmm. What has Raffaele's experience been?

01:27:32.300 Raffaele's experience has been awful, just awful, because he knew me for only a few days

01:27:42.740 before this crime occurred. I think we had known each other for five days.

01:27:47.040 Yeah. So you've been, we've referred to him as your boyfriend all this time, but this is a boyfriend

01:27:50.980 of five days.

01:27:52.120 Yeah. It's, I would say it's more realistic to say we were having our sort of romantic fling

01:27:57.660 that young kids are doing. We were like, he really liked me and I really liked him, but we were only

01:28:02.840 five days into this like relationship, even though like we clicked very quickly. Laura, one of my

01:28:09.680 roommates called us pichoncini, which means little lovebirds. And he, so he knew me as of a few days.

01:28:18.980 I think by the time we were arrested, he had known me for eight or nine days.

01:28:23.160 Hmm. And so here's this girl that he's known for eight or nine days. He's my alibi. And his family,

01:28:33.460 the police, everyone are urging him to just throw me under the bus. Because they're like,

01:28:41.820 you don't know this girl from Adam. You only knew her for a few days. You are now implicated in this

01:28:48.460 crime just because you're her alibi. Like just give the police what they want and say that she left

01:28:55.060 your house and committed this crime and, and you had nothing to do with it. And he refused. He stood

01:29:01.780 up and he stood up for me and he stood up for the truth and he refused to lie. And so he ended up

01:29:09.740 getting sentenced alongside me. Perhaps I got confused, but I thought there was a moment in

01:29:15.640 the documentary that suggested that he had turned on you as well, that under, that moment of

01:29:22.840 interrogation that you described where you're also in the, in the police station with him. And then you

01:29:27.360 get, it becomes a kind of a prisoner's dilemma situation where you're each being interrogated

01:29:33.280 simultaneously. And, and they, they come to you saying that he's basically sold you out and said

01:29:39.160 that your alibi was a lie. Had he not cracked in any way? So yes, he had cracked, but under the same

01:29:47.160 kind of pressure that I had. And so yes, the police came to me and, you know, hours into this interrogation

01:29:55.960 and told me that Raffaele now said that I had asked him to lie for me and, and all of that. Meanwhile,

01:30:05.300 they had been telling him things like, how do you know that she was there with you all night when

01:30:10.240 you were sleeping? She could have left you while you were sleeping. And, you know, so he did, he did

01:30:15.120 say in that, or at least that's what the statement says that the statement says that he was, he was

01:30:23.260 lying for me, but very quickly again, he, as soon as he's not in that pressure cooker of the

01:30:28.800 interrogation room, he reverts, you know, back to the truth and defends me.

01:30:35.300 And at his own peril, because I don't think the police were really interested in him in

01:30:40.260 the first place. And so here he is going through this entire experience. He also has no history

01:30:46.440 of violence, no, no motive to commit this crime, has no idea who Rudy Gaudet is. And in his own

01:30:54.000 book about the case, he talks about how he felt like Mr. Nobody, that the media, the prosecution,

01:30:59.700 nobody actually cared about him as a person. He was just a kind of attachment to me. He was an

01:31:06.620 appendage. Which is actually some, in some ways, diagnostic of the psychological motivations of

01:31:15.860 everyone paying attention to the case, right? I mean, the fact that you were so much more interesting

01:31:20.600 than he was is somehow interesting. Yeah. I think, um, the journalist who was interviewed for the

01:31:29.200 Netflix documentary says it best when he was like, it's girl on girl crime. This is, it's sexy. It

01:31:36.280 sells. We don't want to hear about another guy raping and murdering a young woman. We want to hear

01:31:41.520 about a young woman raping and murdering a young woman. Right. And then of course, because we're at this

01:31:46.500 weird juncture in media, what was being reported in the tabloids in Italy was then being recycled

01:31:54.460 into legitimate news abroad because people were desperate to just get any information to cover the

01:32:01.380 case. And they weren't doing a lot of their own independent reporting. They were just reporting what

01:32:07.100 they found. And the people on the ground were not necessarily being the most reliable or, uh, you know,

01:32:15.300 and then you have to look at how this is all a part of the defunding of newsrooms that has been

01:32:21.640 happening since the mid two thousands. Like if they don't have the people to send to Italy to report

01:32:27.580 on this case, well, they're just going to recycle what they see other people reporting on it. And so

01:32:33.340 there was all this reporting, but it was all just echoes of each other, just, you know, veiled copycats of

01:32:41.060 what they were hearing from who knows what station in Italy. And, you know, there were,

01:32:47.400 there were news programs in Italy that were interviewing psychics about me who would, you

01:32:53.440 know, put their hand over a picture of me and, and talk about how I was guilty. Like it, it was.

01:32:58.340 Listen, I would take most psychics over that lead prosecutor. I mean, he's, he's like a,

01:33:03.740 he's an amateur psychic. Was it back to Raffaele for a moment? So what has his experience been,

01:33:08.840 you know, in the aftermath up until the present? I mean, he, he's been in Italy this whole time,

01:33:14.180 right? Yeah. This is his home country, right? And so in a lot of ways, he's been more entrenched in

01:33:22.900 it than I have, because it's not like he doesn't have name recognition. Like people recognize his

01:33:30.080 face and recognize his name there, even if his name is not in the headlines as much as mine is.

01:33:35.520 But is he, is he like the minor OJ Simpson of Italy?

01:33:38.480 Yes. Yeah. And he's had horrible experiences. Like he's been catfished by a reporter on Tinder.

01:33:45.860 He's attempted over and over again to just go back to having a quiet, legitimate computer

01:33:53.180 engineer job and has consistently found difficulty finding work because people don't want to be

01:33:59.600 associated with him. And it's just been this insane uphill battle where door after door after door

01:34:07.640 has been closed in his face. And he still feels in a lot of ways like Mr. Nobody, because even in the

01:34:15.180 aftermath of all of this happening, he doesn't feel like his innocence has been recognized. And I,

01:34:23.600 I, I 100% feel for him and he's, he's still, I think he still, still feels more trapped than I do.

01:34:32.660 You know, when, when I've seen him and I, you know, I've gone back to Italy to see him,

01:34:36.700 I couldn't help but feel just, I mean, here I am with a husband and two children at this point.

01:34:45.060 And in a lot of ways, I've been able to move on and be at peace in ways that he has not.

01:34:53.820 He is not at peace and I'm just devastated for him, but I, you know, I can't, I can't be at peace

01:35:01.440 for him. So it's hard.

01:35:05.200 Well, Amanda, your powers of resilience are, are quite obvious. Is there anything,

01:35:11.560 is there anything that we haven't touched that you would, do you want to say anything about

01:35:16.360 your thoughts on criminal justice reform or any, anything else you've been paying attention to?

01:35:21.320 I mean, I really enjoyed your free will series. And particularly when you talked about how the

01:35:29.900 lack of free will relates to criminal justice in general, it's a position that is, that I agree

01:35:38.040 with. Um, I 100% am on board with the, we don't have free will. And why do we even think we have

01:35:45.280 free will? Um, that doesn't make any sense. It's, it's not coherent. And how we're so deluded to think

01:35:52.440 that, you know, that punishment makes sense as if a person could have done differently. And.

01:36:00.220 Yeah. I mean, for me that the real delusion is that the retributive impulse makes sense. I mean,

01:36:07.120 that there are scenarios where, uh, many scenarios where I think punishment in some form makes sense

01:36:13.880 just along pragmatic lines, because this is the thing that's going to deter that sort of crime.

01:36:18.620 So I mean, everything from giving you a parking ticket, right. That's a punishment. Right. And so,

01:36:22.900 yeah, we want parking tickets because we, we, we don't want people just parking their cars for

01:36:26.860 four days and, and, you know, in front of a store. But, um, yeah, it's the, the idea that people really

01:36:34.840 do deserve to suffer for what they've done, that that's the, you know, the, the vengeance component

01:36:41.440 of it. Yeah. And our criminal justice system doesn't make sense if you remove the, like the,

01:36:50.180 just the severity of punishment that we see doesn't make sense for deterrence. Like I think

01:36:56.840 there are studies that show that like, it's more the certainty of being caught that deters people

01:37:02.060 than the severity of the punishment. And so we need to look, when we think about what works for our

01:37:09.180 criminal justice system, when we think about trying to incentivize good social behavior, which is what

01:37:15.640 we should be thinking when we think about our criminal justice system, we need to, we need to

01:37:19.640 look at what works. And unfortunately just huge sentences and death penalties don't work in a lot

01:37:27.420 of ways. And, and they don't make sense because, and the only reason they're really justified and

01:37:33.400 implemented is because people feel like they want to inflict suffering after suffering has been

01:37:39.860 experienced. And that's their idea of fairness. That's only fair in their mind. And for me, that just,

01:37:47.900 it doesn't make sense. Well, the one thing that does make sense, it's interesting to be having

01:37:53.540 this conversation in the aftermath of what we, what we just talked about, because so you take

01:37:58.760 someone like Rudy Gaudet, right? Like I'm, I'm not especially sanguine about, you know, letting him

01:38:04.100 out of prison after 16 years. I mean, if that, for that sort of crime, unless you can tell yourself a

01:38:09.600 story that he is so fundamentally changed in prison, that he's no longer a risk to the public,

01:38:16.100 you know, I think a life sentence for murder in many cases makes sense because many of these people

01:38:24.220 show every aptitude for reoffending, right? And so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely. In Rudy

01:38:32.640 Gaudet's sense, I think that that makes sense. And I think that when you, you have, it's the quarantine

01:38:39.020 model. You have to be able to do some kind of competent psychological evaluation to assess

01:38:44.700 what the risk factor of this person is. In other cases, there are people who made mistakes when they

01:38:49.880 were 17 years old, who are given life sentences. And when they're 33, they are truly no longer a

01:38:56.500 threat to society. And at that point, we're only holding them in prison again because of that

01:39:01.880 retributive reason. Yeah.

01:39:04.020 And so that's the unfortunate thing that I see is just suffering for the sake of suffering.

01:39:08.500 But, like, when I think about the people who harmed me, and that, you know, includes Rudy Gaudet

01:39:14.880 indirectly, what I care about is not their suffering, but my safety and the safety of other people

01:39:23.680 and their safety and the possibility of incentivizing, you know, their experience of the world where they

01:39:33.540 can be well and not inflict pain on other people. I do not want, you know, Rudy Gaudet to suffer.

01:39:43.420 That's not, that's not what I want. I want to feel safe. And, you know, I would never want to be

01:39:49.620 Rudy Gaudet because I feel like he's someone who obviously is interacting in the world, like, trying to

01:39:56.640 get his needs met in the world in an incredibly brutal and ineffective way. And I feel bad for him

01:40:03.000 at the same time that I'm scared of him. So, yeah, I don't know if I'm making sense.

01:40:08.160 No, no. I mean, well, you're not making, I can tell you, you're not making sense to anyone who

01:40:13.720 has not absorbed the argument against free will, right? So the people who are convinced that free

01:40:20.520 will is a thing and that people are the true authors of themselves and that the buck really

01:40:25.920 stops there with that conscious intention to do bad things, well, then they might be confused at

01:40:32.660 this point in the conversation. But, you know, I've gone around that track so many times and

01:40:36.940 my argument is there for people to find both on my podcast and in waking up that, you know, they can go

01:40:44.240 do that. But it's just the simplest way to see it from my point of view is that if you just imagine

01:40:49.260 a person's kind of lifeline, right? If you just kind of go back in time, even with the worst person,

01:40:56.660 you know, you just, you know, you take Hitler, right? Well, you know, Hitler at 40 years old is

01:41:00.280 exactly the person, you know, you want, you want to assassinate and we, you know, it's a pity no one

01:41:06.240 killed him at that point or even the year before or even the year before that or even five years

01:41:11.700 before that. But at some point when you go back in his biography, you know, at one point he's a

01:41:17.720 two-year-old and he's the two-year-old who's destined to become Adolf Hitler. And at some

01:41:24.260 level you have to count that two-year-old unlucky, right? I mean, unlucky for what reasons? Genes,

01:41:30.200 environment, you know, some combination of those two things. And even if you imagine everyone has

01:41:36.960 an immortal soul, well, he didn't pick his soul. So he got unlucky in the ectoplasm department.

01:41:42.440 So there's just nothing he, there's nothing that two-year-old was in control over. And each

01:41:48.640 increment of time moving forward gives only the illusion of control once you actually get down to

01:41:55.140 the business of honestly tallying, you know, all of the influences for every moment of thought and

01:42:02.620 intention and behavior in a human brain and mind and life, right? It's just, there's no,

01:42:08.860 no one invented themselves. No one's, I mean, no one, no one can pick the next thought that arises

01:42:15.380 all by itself. You know, you don't know what you are going to think next until the thought itself

01:42:20.280 arises. So anyway, that's quite confounding to many people, but it's, the crucial thing is that

01:42:25.860 it doesn't leave us with the ethical and the judicial opinion that everyone is not guilty by reason of

01:42:34.500 insanity, right? And they empty all the jails, you know, and just, there's nothing to do.

01:42:39.320 No, it's just like, you just have to, you view people much more like forces of nature. And,

01:42:47.240 and as I've said before, you know, if we could imprison hurricanes, we would, right? Because

01:42:51.880 they create enormous harm.

01:42:53.500 Yeah. Yeah. And it's another reason why I feel lucky. Like when I think of free will, I,

01:43:00.680 I, I just feel so lucky because even thinking back on, you know, the difference between me and

01:43:06.600 Raffaele and how at peace I am in a lot of ways and how at not at peace he is, I just feel like I got

01:43:16.580 lucky to be the kind of person who was able to find some level of peace. I just remembered one

01:43:24.860 other thing I wanted to ask you about, Sam, because I don't, I don't get to have this opportunity very

01:43:29.340 often to talk to someone who also has a doppelganger version of themselves out there in the world that is

01:43:37.380 very often misrepresented. How have you handled that situation?

01:43:44.640 Well, I mean, you know, I'm quite humbled to be talking to you about this because my

01:43:49.020 version of this problem is, I imagine, you know, infinitesimally smaller than your own.

01:43:56.260 And yet I think I have less compassion for my trolls and malefactors than you have just displayed

01:44:03.940 in this conversation. It's certainly helpful for me to view them as, as sincere, but nonetheless

01:44:11.860 kind of malfunctioning robots when, when, when that is in fact the case. You know, I'm, in many cases,

01:44:18.720 I'm confronted with, with evidence of, of insincerity, which bothers me. I mean, I feel like

01:44:26.440 my moral outrage circuits are probably tuned up too high because I, I view myself as having some kind

01:44:33.900 of public facing responsibility to deal with lots of these issues. So when I run into bad faith attacks

01:44:41.360 and bad faith arguments, it drives me a little crazier than it needs to. I don't tend to take

01:44:47.520 things personally in the way that I think some people suspect, right? Like, so if I'm outraged by

01:44:54.820 something, it's not that I, I've internalized this attack against me. It's more just that I just find

01:45:02.940 it, I mean, it's, it's sort of what, you know, what drives me crazy about Trump, right? It's like,

01:45:07.220 it's a phenomenon in the world that just, I just think is so dysfunctional and creating so much

01:45:13.220 manifest harm to everyone. I mean, we just, it's become almost impossible to talk about important

01:45:20.100 things. And it's this layer, it's the, the, the, the contamination of sort of, you know,

01:45:26.360 reputational attacks, you know, and, and misinformation. We just have such a polluted

01:45:31.880 information landscape and it's the problem, at least in my view, is only growing worse and,

01:45:37.480 and social media really is the main vehicle of all of this toxicity. So, you know, having stepped off

01:45:43.980 of Twitter was just a, produced a sea change in my day-to-day experience. I mean, it's just, there's,

01:45:50.580 you know, I, I have not even one percent of the, the hassle I had in my life around any of these

01:45:57.880 issues now that I've stepped off Twitter. But, you know, stepping off Twitter was a, in some sense,

01:46:02.600 it's just a, an admission that, like, okay, that's this tool, which is in fact a tool in, in many ways.

01:46:09.320 I mean, it's not that it's useless. It has it, it's obvious uses that this tool is no longer

01:46:14.160 available to me, right? I was like, I'm just, I'm going to, I'm deciding to just step out of this

01:46:20.080 arena because it's, for me, it's become too annoying. You know, as much as I could correct

01:46:25.880 for the annoyance, it just, I mean, the, the thing that I've said this before, so apologies to the

01:46:31.800 audience if I'm, if I'm boring them, if they've heard this for the 10th time, but it was obvious that

01:46:36.940 it was a source of stress and toxicity for quite some time for me. But the thing that convinced me

01:46:43.120 to just yank it from my life was that I think it was, it was actually diluting me about other people.

01:46:50.300 Like I was, it was giving me a sense, even though I was kind of consciously trying to correct for it,

01:46:55.440 it was giving me the sense that people are worse than they, they really are. They're more psychopaths

01:47:00.500 than there, than there are, there are. And I just felt I was just meditating on a, on an hourly basis

01:47:07.320 on the awfulness of other people. And it was, it was, again, if it would be one thing to think that,

01:47:15.280 all right, this is, this is really accurate. I'm seeing into people's minds and the people are

01:47:19.880 giving me their otherwise private thoughts and they're, they're exactly this awful. But I really

01:47:26.620 do feel that the incentives of the platform were just making things quite a bit worse than they

01:47:33.380 really are. I mean, it was kind of a funhouse mirror where you're just getting this grotesque

01:47:37.480 distortion that everyone's collaborating and producing, but nonetheless, it is a, it's showing

01:47:43.300 you a digital simulacrum of the public square that is distorted in all kinds of ways toward the worst,

01:47:52.380 toward the worst in us. So I, you know, no longer looking into that mirror on, on it, you know,

01:47:57.840 really ever. I mean, occasionally I'll look at Twitter or some other social media platform just as

01:48:02.900 a, as a news feed, just to see something happening in real time. But even that, I mean, I go for days

01:48:09.320 and weeks without doing that. I mean, that's just, it's, so I, I, it's not part of my, my news diet

01:48:16.000 even anymore. And I'm, needless to say, not putting anything out there. It's really quite

01:48:21.940 humbling to discover what a big change awaited me after getting off Twitter because, and which is a

01:48:29.280 testament to just how unaware I was that it had defined my, my view of the world and my, and my

01:48:38.320 view of myself in the world to some degree for years. Like I, I felt like I had a, I was living with

01:48:45.000 a sense of digital reputation that sometimes is true. I mean, it's still there. I mean, I've,

01:48:52.920 I'm told by people that I'm occasionally trending on Twitter even now, but it, none of it matters to

01:48:59.240 me. I mean, like it has no contact with my consciousness, even when it does. I mean, even,

01:49:04.280 even when someone tells me I'm trending on Twitter, that means nothing to me. Right. I mean, it just,

01:49:08.940 it's, it's, so it's, it was very, it's very weird. I just, I, I, I'm returned to the real world in a way

01:49:14.960 that is surprising and it's quite a relief. Hmm. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I, I feel that. I try to stay

01:49:22.780 off social media as much as possible, although it is also the same place where it's been a conduit to

01:49:28.740 kind people, like people who have, like I said before, have gone out of their way to reach out

01:49:33.940 and say, Oh my God, I was wrong about you. And I'm so sorry. I treated you like a monster or as

01:49:38.520 like entertainment. So there's, there's that, but like, you know, even if you're not on social media,

01:49:45.640 there's still a version of you that exists in people's minds. And that's, you know, so whether

01:49:53.960 or not you participate is not necessarily relevant to you just being a thing, an idea of a person in

01:50:02.120 someone's mind. And it sounds like it doesn't bother you that there are just weird avatars of

01:50:11.340 you that live in other people's minds. And I, I think that's interesting because for me, I also

01:50:17.580 tend to feel like a lot of the, the love and the hate that is projected at the idea of me doesn't

01:50:27.080 really have to do with me. And so I wonder if that's something you relate to.

01:50:32.780 Yeah. Well, it clearly doesn't in most cases for me because it's so mistargeted. I mean,

01:50:40.720 the people who really hate me for my views almost invariably don't understand my views, right? Like

01:50:48.260 they're just, they've been misled by a clip or a meme or something. And so, you know, I have people

01:50:55.940 out there who hate me because they think I want to execute a nuclear first strike on the Muslim

01:51:02.020 world, right? And there's like, there are people, you know, otherwise professional journalists or

01:51:07.580 people who are imagined to be professional journalists who have been going around for 20

01:51:11.360 years saying that that's what I, what I said in, in my first book. And so, you know, I've been dealing,

01:51:18.280 that was, you know, before social media that came out in 2004, I guess that, but it was before

01:51:23.920 social media was really doing much of anything. It was certainly before I had any knowledge of it.

01:51:29.560 So I was dealing with the misinformation problem, even just in a journalistic context,

01:51:34.900 the moment I published anything. But yeah, it's just at a certain point, you recognize that

01:51:40.640 all you can do is try to ensure that you've clearly represented your views somewhere. And

01:51:49.660 in my case, I've, I've repeated those views up to the, to the limits of boredom, my own and,

01:51:55.860 and any, any possible audiences on, you know, this, you know, at least a dozen topics that

01:52:01.040 have been deemed controversial. And then you just have to assume that anyone who really wants to

01:52:06.920 understand whether you're worth hating will do the work to actually encounter your views as you've put

01:52:13.080 them out there. And then you just have to recognize you just don't have control, right? I mean,

01:52:17.040 you just, you just can't control it. The thing that would be more interesting to confront is,

01:52:22.800 which occasionally happens, is a really cutting criticism, you know, even bordering on hatred

01:52:30.000 that is valid, right? Like that you had to recognize it. Oh, okay. That person actually

01:52:36.260 sees something about me that I don't like. Right. And I get why they have written me off as a,

01:52:43.960 as a moron or as a, you know, or as evil or whatever. It's like this, this thing is,

01:52:49.840 I wish I wasn't like that. Right. So that would be, that would be interesting. I can't say I've had

01:52:54.580 that experience much. I mean, I've had glimmers of it where somebody will point out, certainly if

01:52:59.620 anyone points out a mistake I've made, you know, I feel that's, you know, useful. And if it's ever

01:53:05.760 embarrassing, I'm still certainly grateful for it and want to correct all those given a place

01:53:11.820 where that's possible. But I mean, so much of it is just a hallucination on the part of the trolls

01:53:18.660 and the critics based on misinformation that, and a kind of a commitment to maintaining, again,

01:53:25.020 it comes back to Nietzsche's point, you know, like once their view of you has solidified, once they've

01:53:29.300 gone into print with their dunk on this view of yours that you've never even held, then any effort

01:53:36.600 to change their mind is, you know, they hold it against you for all the effort it causes them.

01:53:41.260 And it's, it's just a very weird part of human psychology, the, the double down condition that

01:53:48.040 everyone has, even when it would, it would seem logically or factually impossible.

01:53:54.060 Yeah.

01:53:54.700 Have you been tempted to get off of all social media or?

01:53:57.440 Oh my God. Every single day I've been tempted to get off of social media and I, I set very strong

01:54:04.820 limits, but I've, I've had to really depersonalize it in a lot of ways. And it's to the extent that

01:54:13.460 like, even so at this point now, my husband is the one who will look at my DMs first to sort of

01:54:20.980 protect me and then lets me know if someone has something nice to say, but like, it doesn't mean

01:54:27.460 I'm not exposed to like the headlines that, that come up. And then one of the things that like

01:54:32.720 continues to sort of haunt me, especially with this sort of idea of me out in the world is again,

01:54:39.800 people have this anchoring bias about my identity and my identity is, you know, a counterpoint to

01:54:46.900 Meredith's identity. People sort of associate me being alive with Meredith being dead. And so often

01:54:54.720 I have found that people sort of resent me just for like being alive when she is, is dead.

01:55:04.900 Well, this is something I think you've spoken about what you've called the single victim fallacy.

01:55:09.840 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's really, it's, I feel like her and I are like two sides of a coin

01:55:19.680 and whenever sort of I pop up and live my life or exist, it's, it's viewed in many people's eyes as

01:55:28.860 like an affront to Meredith's memory, which is really tough because she's also an idea in so many

01:55:37.040 people's minds. And in, in some ways I not by choice, I also feel responsible for her image in

01:55:48.020 the world. It's merely because my name keeps getting associated with her death and because people

01:55:55.000 horribly don't really seem all that much interested in her. I don't know. It's, it's a weird thing that

01:56:02.300 I'm continuing to, to grapple with. And I, and again, I don't get the chance very often to talk

01:56:07.780 to somebody who has even a somewhat similar experience to me as being an idea in other

01:56:13.220 people's imaginations. Yeah. That plays into the plot points of their own life story. And like, you

01:56:20.160 know, the number of people who have chosen you to be the, the cartoon villain that they want to

01:56:26.520 take down because they're on their own journey of righteousness is interesting to me.

01:56:33.400 It might be a professional necessity for you or anyone else to maintain a presence on various

01:56:39.800 social media platforms. I mean, I, you know, I, obviously I have a sort of the marketing presence

01:56:44.760 that, you know, my team will send out just, you know, posts on various platforms that I never look

01:56:50.180 at. But, you know, for me, Twitter was the one, the one that I engaged with and used, and that really

01:56:55.120 was me there. And I think, yeah, I'm sure something's lost by not having it, but I just

01:56:59.880 got to tell you, it's, I tend to view life now, like a, it's almost like a vast, you know, dinner

01:57:07.260 party, right? Where you get to decide who you want to sit down with and talk to and, you know,

01:57:12.080 keep company with and who's, who's advice you're going to seek and who's, who's input you really

01:57:16.080 want and who you're going to take the time to debate and disagree with. And you can pick your

01:57:21.800 battles. And, and when you look at what the experience is like for someone like me, or,

01:57:26.900 and I can only imagine someone like you on a platform like X, and you're, you know, you're

01:57:32.940 looking at just random people who decide to tell you what they pretend to think about you

01:57:40.340 on a moment by moment basis. You know, for me, I just step back and think, why would I want to do

01:57:47.700 this? Like, what, like this, this, these, these people are, you know, why would I, why would I

01:57:52.200 invite this person, this anonymous person to the dinner party that I get to, you know, this is,

01:57:59.160 you know, it's Friday, right? This, I'm not going to get this Friday back, right? This is, so how much,

01:58:03.620 how much time am I going to spend contemplating this person's opinion of me, you know, before I

01:58:08.180 then go hang out with my kids or my wife or friends, or it's like, it's just, because it has seemed

01:58:15.240 like a professional necessity for so many people. And because it, you know, again, there, you do get

01:58:20.320 these dopaminergic moments of goodness, where you just, like, it's exactly what you would hope it

01:58:27.260 would be. You get connected with, with a person who you're a fan of, say, you know, so it has its

01:58:33.660 utility, but so much of it is just this insane encounter with people who are deciding to be at

01:58:41.520 their worst, again, because all the variables are tuned so as to incentivize them to be their

01:58:45.960 worst. They're performing for, you know, in front of their crowd at you and hoping to win points for

01:58:53.300 it. And nothing is really at stake in many cases for them because they're, you know, they're living

01:58:59.640 under a pseudonym or it's just corrupting of so much, you know, both in public and in private that,

01:59:06.800 I don't know. I just, you know, I, I'm not, I'm not urging you to delete your X account, but it's,

01:59:13.260 I got to say, it's, it really is quite amazing to just not have that in one's life. You know,

01:59:22.380 it's, it's somewhat analogous to like, if, if there were a protest in front of your house right now,

01:59:27.020 you know, if you had a mob of people, like every time you, you know, left, you opened your front door,

01:59:31.540 there were, you know, 400 people out there, uh, ready to tell you that you're the scum of the

01:59:37.360 earth. And then you got a few people out there who say, you know, yay, Amanda, we love you.

01:59:41.980 Right. But still there's always someone out there who's just going to say you're scum.

01:59:46.320 You know, if you could wave a magic wand and have all those people forget where you live,

01:59:50.460 right. So that you could just walk out your front door and have a nice empty street.

01:59:54.580 Why wouldn't you do that? Right. And so that, and that's, that's essentially what happened

01:59:58.820 when I got off Twitter. Yeah, no, I mean, it sounds like utter relief and something that I

02:00:04.180 hope one day that I can aspire to. I think the big issue for me is that I still feel very, very deeply

02:00:11.320 stuck in the reputational hole. Like I sort of emerged into the, the world as girl accused of

02:00:20.100 murder. And I thought I could like go about my life and not care about that and not have it impact

02:00:28.700 me, but you know, like live the life of an anonymous person, but I was not really given

02:00:34.420 that opportunity. And so instead, like I looked at social media as an opportunity to be one person

02:00:44.060 who was representing me in a sea of people who were already representing me and, and having a,

02:00:51.620 an actual impact on my life and my career and what I was able to do and how I was able to move

02:00:57.620 through the world. And it's been a really interesting journey because I still, you know,

02:01:05.500 walk this line of having, of just offending people by existing and, and being like what they don't

02:01:13.180 expect me to be. Like, I can't tell you a number of people who just seem kind of mad that I don't live

02:01:18.400 up to their expectations of who I am. And they get frustrated or confused or, or look at anything I say

02:01:26.740 in, in, through the lens of the way they expect me to behave. And I don't know, I, I think that

02:01:34.080 I feel a lot of pressure to assert who I am because there was this false image of me put out in the

02:01:42.900 world. So like, that was just on, like on all the billboards. And, and there was just this one story

02:01:49.420 being told about me for so long. And I live with this interesting dilemma of how much do I want to

02:01:56.980 interact with that? And, and not like in a reactionary way, but just understanding that there

02:02:04.240 is a space for me to just exist as I am and hope that that speaks louder than the thing that came

02:02:13.480 before or that the thing that the story that persists. But I mean, here I am talking to you.

02:02:20.880 And that means a huge amount to me because I never thought that after everything I went through,

02:02:27.780 I would end up talking to someone like you about issues like this. And I would have this opportunity

02:02:33.020 to share my work and perspective on waking up, like your, your app has been tremendously helpful

02:02:41.740 to me. Like really it's, it's made a huge difference in my life. And I really, really appreciate you

02:02:50.560 giving me the opportunity just to just be who I am and not an idea of a person just right now. So thank

02:02:58.260 you. Nice. Well, the honor is mine. It's really, um, it's great to have you as a collaborator over

02:03:04.240 waking up and to be talking to you here. And, um, yeah, I am just, uh, I'm happy to be on team

02:03:10.180 Amanda to be continued. Thank you for your time and for everything you're doing. And, um, if people

02:03:18.220 want to pay attention to what's going on for you, I know you've got some, a bunch of other projects in

02:03:23.100 the works that, um, have different timelines associated with them. So if people want to

02:03:28.700 follow you, where, where's the best, is X the best place or do you have another spot? You want

02:03:32.940 people to be logging for you? You know, people can send me, um, just direct messages through my,

02:03:39.480 through the contact form on my website, Knox Robinson.com. But if you want to follow me on

02:03:45.120 social media, I'm on X at Amanda Knox and on Instagram at a mama Knox. And that's a great way to

02:03:51.540 keep up with what I'm doing. And yeah, I have a lot of stuff that's really exciting. That's in the

02:03:57.100 works. And if you haven't listened to, uh, the waking up resilience series, it's in our life

02:04:04.940 section. Yes. Thanks again, Amanda. Thank you, Sam.

02:04:21.540 visit us.

02:04:27.100 You

Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 18, 2023

#345 — Resilience

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