The Daily Stoic - Why Amanda Knox Turned To Stoicism After Being Wrongfully Convicted of Murder

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

In November, 2007, Amanda Knox was 20 years old and had been studying abroad in Italy when her roommate, Meredith Kercher, was brutally murdered. Around the world, all eyes (and cameras) were on Amanda as the main suspect and she was wrongfully convicted of the murder. After spending four years in an Italian prison, the verdict was overturned and Amanda was able to come home to the United States.In 2013, a new trial was ordered by the Italian court and ultimately Amanda was found not guilty a second time. Then just a couple of months ago in June, she had to return to the same courtroom for a re-trial on charges of slander.Today, Amanda talks with Ryan about how being introduced to Stoicism and The Obstacle is the Way completely changed her perspective while navigating her unimaginable situation.  “In the eyes of other people, I was the girl accused of murder and I felt like they didn't really say anything true or real about me as a human being. And I had to really think about that idea, the obstacle is the way, to understand how that played a role in my life. It is a very defining part of my life, but also how I've reacted to it is even more defining about my life and how I've chosen to exercise my agency” - Amanda KnoxFollow Amanda Knox on Instagram: @AMamaKnox and on X: @AmandaKnox🎙️ Listen to Amanda’s Podcast: Labyrinths with Amanda Knox | Apple Podcasts, Spotify📚 Pick up a copy of Amanda’s memoir: Waiting to Be Heard📕 Check out our premium leather edition of The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday at dailystoic.com/obstacleleather✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Right Now on audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. This message comes from Viking. Committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and on shore.

And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at viking.com. Discover more at Viking.com. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful.

With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On one level, doing podcasts should be really easy.

You're just talking to someone, right? You're asking them questions. It shouldn't be that hard. But it actually is. And whether you're doing it remote or in person, it can bring different challenges. But one of the things I find, whether I'm either one, is you have this thought and you're like, okay, I want to make sure the conversation touches on this. But then in person, you're like, okay, I wanna make sure the conversation touches on this. But then in person, you're like, no, I'm not ignoring you. I'm just writing something down. And then when you're doing it remote, you're like, oh, I need to look this up.

It's like weird. You're trying to be present for this person that you're having this conversation with. I have to, by definition, not be present because I'm thinking of things that maybe I wanna cover that I know I only have a limited amount of time with them and I want to make sure that I touch on for you guys. And I'm also trying to think, hey, am I talking too much?

Am I getting honest answers from them? There's just like a lot of variables. And in this conversation that I had, there was something I was like, oh, I'm definitely going to tell them about this because I bet they would love it. And then it wasn't until I hit stop record. So when you record, we use Riverside, single Riverside.

When you hit stop, then you have to upload the files and you kind of stay there for a second as you wait for the files to upload. I was like, hey, have you ever read this book? And she had not. And as it happened, I have a whole chapter about it in part three of Right Thing Right Now. It's actually one of my favorite chapters in the whole book.

It's not the Give Them Hope chapter, which is also one of my favorites in part three. It's the Be an Angel story. And it's about someone who was persecuted and unfairly convicted and spent years in a dank, terrible European prison. Let me just read you this little story because when I mentioned it to my guest, she lit up

and now I'm gonna send her a copy of De Profundis. He had been persecuted, he had been ruined, he had been humiliated. Nearly everything that could be taken from a person had been taken from Oscar Wilde in 1895, including his freedom, his wife gone, his children he'd never see again, his reputation destroyed. Even the copyrights to his writings had been taken. For what? Because he loved another man? Because of unjust laws that would stand in England for another a hundred years?

There he was, dragged from his prison cell to bankruptcy court for one last hearing, one last abject degradation. A broken man, he walked handcuffed down the long prison corridor, jeered at and judged by the crowds who had gathered to see him brought low, the guards shoving him roughly to move faster. His head sagged in shame for every step of the terrible journey, except once, just once while looked up. And when he did, he beheld the sight that he would store forever, he later wrote, in the treasure house of his heart, something embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia

of many tears. Robbie Ross, a fellow writer and old friend, had staked out a place in that horrible hallway so that he might offer something as small as a smile and a nod of respect to the man at his lowest moment. I have not forsaken you, he said wordlessly. You are not alone, he was saying with his presence. You are not worthless. Do not give up.

When wisdom has been profitless to me and philosophy barren and proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, Wild reflected, the memory of that little lowly act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity, made the desert bloom like a rose, and brought out of me the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world." Maybe that sounds like a bit much, but maybe that's because so few of us have fallen that hard going as Wild said of his life, from eating all the fruit from all the trees in

the garden of the world to a dark dungeon of shame and pain. What Robbie Ross did for Oscar Wilde was more than an act of friendship or loyalty, more than just the nothing that everyone in his life had offered. It was an act of grace. Wilde himself would compare the act from his friend to the saints who had washed the feet of the poor or kissed a leper. Surveying the depravity that was the Holocaust, Israel sought to recognize the angels who saw evil and decided to try to stop them. Righteous Among the Nations is given out in recognition of non-Jews who saved Jews from extermination.

Three queens have received it, but then again so have journalists, philosophers, and a department store employee. It's a reminder that decency knows no rank or social position, that the responsibility to do good is not limited to the powerful, but stands there beckoning to all of us. Roughly 30,000 people answered that call, angels, all of them. And the vast majority of people who turned away, who refused to acknowledge, let alone try and do anything to stop the monstrous crime happening in front of them, call them what you like. Ross's grace continued past that moment in the hallway.

When Wilde was released, Ross was there. When the rights to Wilde's work went up for sale, Ross bought them all with his own money, managing a literary estate on behalf of Wilde's children. When Wilde lay dying, Ross was there again, summoning the priest and comforting him in his last hours. The Carter family met a woman named Mary Prince when they moved into the Georgia Governor's Mansion in 1971. She had been assigned to their staff as part of a work program for incarcerated inmates. Rosalind Carter quickly became convinced of Prince's innocence and was appalled at the details of her conviction.

Prince, a black woman, had been convinced by her lawyer to plead guilty to manslaughter. The lawyer then had her plead to murder, for which she had received a life sentence. The Carters asked that Prince be assigned to Nanny, their young daughter, Amy, and eventually secured her parole and a full pardon. She came to live with them in the White House, and after his presidency, Carter bought her a house down the street from the Carters in Plains, Georgia, and Prince, now in her late 70s, remains a close friend. Carter would dedicate a book called Our Endangered Values to her in 2006. One official wrongly takes away someone's freedom, another welcomes a stranger into

their family and fights for their freedom. Which will you be? We should strive, Seneca once said, to treat others as you wish the gods would treat you, which is to say with compassion, with endless patience, with infinite understanding, with love and generosity, God knows we need it, so at the very least we can try to give it. Who knows if angels actually exist? What is true is that you can do something close to that here on earth. You can be one of the good ones, especially for the people you love and care about. I was so moved by that and then obviously Oscar

Wilde lives a long time ago. I don't get to talk to him. I don't know what it felt like to be him, but Amanda Knox would know at some level what that walk felt like, what it felt like to be abandoned, what it felt like to be judged, what it felt like to be publicly humiliated for totally private, personal things, and to be scared to be terrified to not know what was to become of her. In November of 2007, Amanda Knox was 20 years old, and she'd been studying abroad in Italy for only a few weeks when her roommate was brutally murdered and

Because of how Amanda was perceived by the cameras by the prosecutors This harsh cruel an interrogation that would have never been allowed in America where there's also this language barrier on top of it She's taken to trial in an extremely controversial trial and wrongly convicted of murder. She spends four years in an Italian prison. And then in October of 2011, following the lengthy appeals process, the conviction is overturned and she immediately flies home to the United States. But then in 2013, they ordered a new trial and in 2015, the convictions were again overheld. And then in June of this year, like the saga continues, she was recently reconvicted of slander and had to return to the same courtroom in Italy. It's a farce beyond farces and it would be funny if it

wasn't real, if it didn't horribly affect a person. And I learned about Amanda Knox because I watched the Netflix documentary like everyone else. I've heard about the story in the news, but my old research assistant, Christo, sent me this link where Amanda was talking about stoicism and being introduced to Mark Streus, and she said the expression, the obstacle, is the way.

I was really excited to chat with her. As I said, she is an exoneree, a journalist, a public speaker, and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Waiting to Be Heard. And she's a tough lady. Imagine four years in an Italian prison, eight years on trial. But what was so remarkable to me about this conversation and what you sense in the book is, at some level, this is a testament to the inherent grit and spirit of the person, but also hopefully some of the stoicism.

You don't see grievance, you don't see resentment, you don't see this life-defining event at the same time defining or warping the personality of the person. So I thought this was a fascinating conversation. I was really excited to have it. And it's actually funny when we logged in, her daughter was sitting in her chair in the studio

and it was just very, very cute. And then it sort of humanizes and brings real to you the costs of something like this, which happened not just in the Italian justice system, but in the American justice system and every justice system all over the world. And it's been happening for hundreds of years back to the time of Oscar Wilde.

That kid that I glimpsed on the screen would not exist or almost did not exist because of the events detailed in the book and because of some of the timeless things that we ended up talking about in the episode. Now I'm going a little long in this intro, but I bet you will be surprised at how much stoicism and how much of a deep dive we do into philosophy into this, in this interview.

I thought it was really great. You can connect with Amanda at a mama Knox on Instagram, at Amanda Knox on X. And anyways, I'll link to everything in the show notes. Check out her book, Waiting to be Heard, and enjoy. So I was wondering, I don't know if you know this, but there was a Stoic who was wrongfully accused. Do you know about Rutilius Rufus? No, do tell.

So there was a Stoic named Rutilius Rufus. He's living right around the time of Julius Caesar, Cato Cicero, and he's a governor in one of the provinces of the empire. And at that time, that was like a cush job. That was where you would go to get rich. You were expected to be as corrupt as you could be to take home as much money as you could. You would basically plunder the provinces. And so Rutilius Rufus is sent and he decides to do an honest job.

Like he decides not to steal from the people he's responsible for. So this is the decision he makes, but as you can imagine, deciding not to be corrupt is bad for people who are corrupt. So he thinks he's doing the right thing, but what he's actually doing is pissing off a lot of very wealthy, powerful people who are saying, I don't think you understand how this is supposed to go. So they bring him up on corruption charges. That's how they decide they're gonna get rid of him.

Wow, okay, that's a very Trump move. I'm gonna accuse you of what I am guilty of. Okay, got it. Every accusation is a confession, as they say. And so they accuse him of corruption. They bring him up on these charges. And he decides that the stoic thing, that the charges are so spurious and so obviously bankrupt

that he's not even gonna defend himself. He's not gonna say anything throughout the whole trial. So he doesn't. Meanwhile, all of his friends are pleading, begging him to stand up for himself. Cicero jokes that his lawyers must have thought that if they were to mount a vigorous defense and get emotional, they would be accused of not being stoic. He willingly goes to his fate, he's convicted of the charges, and they give him one

small mercy, which is they tell him, you get to choose your punishment. We're going to exile you, but you can choose where you would like to be sent into exile. Okay. Where does he go? He chooses the province that he was brought up on corruption charges in. And so they sent him back where the people receive him with open arms because he was a good governor and that's where he lives out the rest of his days. Is he living out the rest of his days? Obviously not as the governor, just like one of the folks.

Just a beloved private citizen. Amazing. Who, a man of the people. Wow. What a great story. I love that he was like, I don't need to defend myself because this is crazy. And then, like, was he anticipating though that he would get convicted anyway?

Because it seems like he had to know. I imagine his sense is this is a show trial. It doesn't matter what I say or do. So I might as well make a statement about the legitimacy of the proceedings altogether. What I found fascinating about it is that his peers, his fellow Stokes, didn't necessarily agree with this, right? And so a generation or two later, there's another Stoke named Musonius Rufus. This is Epictetus' philosophy teacher.

And he's exiled, I think, on three, possibly four occasions. So this is just what would happen. Like you would be a threat to the powers that be, they would bring you up on these charges and then you get sent away. And he says, they ask him, are you going to go down like Rutilius? And he says, like, not a chance. He says, look, Socrates died because he didn't defend himself well enough. He says, I will. And so it's not as if we had this understanding or this perception of stoicism being simply passive. I think it's interesting that amongst the stoics, there was some argument about whether, how do you respond to a hopelessly corrupt, bankrupt

proceeding, which may be a matter of life or death for you? What is the proper response? And they don't necessarily have a clear cut answer. Totally. Yeah, that makes sense. Because I'm curious to know if back in the day, public perception would have had any kind of role in how the proceedings played out, or if it was really just whoever was judging

was going to judge the way it was going to go, and it didn't really matter like he thought. Yes. That we wouldn't say anything, yeah. Well, and clearly public perception matters to a degree because the place where he's from, you know, they see through what's happening and decide to receive him with open arms. Right. And they know that no one can claim that he committed any corruption crimes against them because he didn't.

Yes. Were there, like, did they ever bring up any witnesses? Like, what was the, quote, evidence against him? I don't know. I don't know. I it's not a super well documented case. I think the historians at that time were just more interested in the kind of the pose of the defiant defendant as opposed to, you know, the actual merits of the case.

But it is funny, I was writing about this, and I wanna ask you a million questions, but I thought you might like this too. I'm writing about a similar thing in one of my books right now, just because Mussonius mentions Socrates. What I thought was so interesting is, okay, so Socrates, it's not like a 10-person jury or whatever.

In Greece at that time, it's 500 jurors. That's how many weigh the case. Oh, it's a Greek chorus. Okay. It's like a huge, it would be like a large chunk of public life in Athens at that time, right? Wow. So these 500 jurors are there and a good portion of them would have known him,

would have met him in the street. So Socrates is convicted, but by a pretty slim majority. It's like, I don't know, 300 out of the 500 vote to convict. And then Socrates is, again, given the chance to name his punishment. He's able to sort of explain his motivations, what he feels like actually happened. And so Socrates gets up and he says,

well, not only do I think I should not be punished, he says, I think you should award me a pension, the pension that they would typically give to like the famous athletes. He's like, I think you should, you should pay me because I performed such a great service for Athens over the years. And anyways, he so misreads the room that more jurors vote to sentence him to death than did the conviction. So like, he so misreads, like we think of Socrates's,

you know, sort of final words as this inspiring thing, but in the room, they were so bad that some people who had just said they thought he was innocent said, I think we should kill him. Yeah, they were like, humble yourself, sir. You don't understand what this whole thing was. It was to make you feel small. said, I think we should kill him. Yeah. They were like, humble yourself, sir. You don't understand what this whole thing was. It was to make you feel small. You really don't get it, do you?

Oh, well, I mean, he believed in himself, I guess. That's one way to spin it. Good for him. Alice and Matt here from British Scandal. Matt, if we had a bingo card, what would be on there? Oh, compelling storytelling, egotistical white men and dubious humour. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you will love our podcast, British Scandal, the show where every week we bring you stories from this green and not always so pleasant land.

We've looked at spies, politicians, media magnates, a king, no one is safe. And knowing our country, we won't be out of a job anytime soon. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenpem. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season we are revisiting the life of Cecil Rhodes.

From sickly child to diamond tycoon to leading colonialist in South Africa, he was a bastion of British imperialism. Over the past few years campuses around the world have been met with students chanting roads must fall. His legacy has been completely transformed. Follow legacy now wherever you get your podcasts. Socrates thinks he's this essential public service to Athenian public life. And then he gets up in front of a jury of his peers. And it is made indisputably clear

that the feeling is not mutual. Which is, I wonder how he felt about that when he was sort of sitting in the prison waiting to drink the concoction. Like, did he ponder that at all? Do we know? Yeah, you know, so often we conflate a message with the delivery of the message,

or we don't separate the two. And does he have some creeping realization that while the truths that he got at might have been essential, the way he went about it, like the Socratic method is really annoying and nobody likes it. Absolutely. It's the most annoying. Yeah. Do really annoying and nobody likes it. Absolutely. It's the most annoying.

Do not talk to a person like Socrates. And also I think maybe one thing that he forgot was he had introduced a method and a way of thinking, but was he the person essential? And that maybe was what he sort of got caught up in, is this mistaken idea that his ideas must live through him and they couldn't live without him. And you know, he's brought up on these charges of impiety, which he was, like he was asking these questions. And then he's also brought up on charges

of corrupting the youth. And his protege, Alciabites, you know, basically in a generation, like in a few years leads Athens to a ruinous invasion of Syracuse. And so he was kind of guilty there too, you know. Oh, poor Socrates. Well, maybe this is a good place to start in that I think what's interesting about it is like, if you read, you know, we have some of the trial transcripts of that.

We know something about the proceedings of these cases. Like we have some of Cicero's closing arguments, just like obviously so much has changed. And at the same time, a morally bankrupt illegitimate show trial happening in Italy, you know, you have some familiarity with what that must have felt like. Yeah, yeah, how the politics and the public perception plays such a huge role and has this, like, lingering ongoing trauma. I think the thing that I found so fascinating in my experience

was how the stories that were being spun in court seemed to matter more than the actual evidence. Or even like I was shocked that just my appearance and what I was wearing and whether or not I had my hair combed that day was reported upon so extensively and complete evidence that exonerated me or that was really important was overlooked. So I think that it's interesting when we talk about these cases and how they're in the public interest, what does that mean? And is it legitimate to say, well, people are clicking on it because

I'm talking about what you look like and what you wear, and therefore that kind of is the public interest. It's not really the truth, it therefore, that kind of is the public interest. It's not really the truth. It's the story, and it's the character. That was a really shocking realization for me as a 20-year-old kid who is going through this, because I was 20 years old. I had very little life experience,

like no perspective about the criminal justice system. I was going around. I was traveling. I was studying abroad, trying to just engage with people and have conversations in Italian. And then this happened and I was given a very, very sudden and life-altering lesson in human psychology and the consumption of human stories and how that all plays out in the criminal justice system, which I never thought I'd have to think about before. Yeah, or just to go back to what we were just talking about

with Socrates, how much of it had anything to do with what he did and how much of it had to do with how he dressed or some weird rumor that the jurors had heard or just some vibe that's going on in the world in that moment. How much is known about who the judges and the jurors were? Because I think it's interesting how, in a lot of these cases,

so much of trying to unravel why things played out the way they did, the focus is on the defendant, which makes sense. But also, I think a huge part of this is who are the people who are actually doing the judging and the accusing? And I feel like that doesn't really get looked at quite enough, especially in a case like mine, where I feel like, again, I was a 20-year-old kid, all of a sudden somebody broke into my house and murdered my roommate, and then I was accused. And then so much time was spent examining me and putting every little moment of my life under the microscope as if to explain this, like, what was happening, even those who believed

in my innocence. And not as much attention was paid to the detectives or the town where this was taking place, the context, the prosecutor, what is his history? Some people looked into that, but I feel like so much of the attention was put on me and I felt like the explanatory burden of the wrongful conviction was put on me and my behavior or what I was saying or what I looked like. And I'm curious to know if there's more known in the Socrates trial about anyone else besides Socrates. Well, that must have been a surprise for you as an American with the idea that it's sort of on you to explain this stuff when we're sort of raised with this idea of the presumption of innocence, however naive that actually is.

Right. But here you are having to defend things that you didn't think would ever be known by people, let alone be caught up in such a horrendous series of events. You are having to explain something that you don't know anything about. Yes. And then having to explain really personal, private circumstances, like this is what is in my toiletry case, including my little vibrator.

Now I'm going to have to talk to the court and all of the world about my little vibrator that has absolutely nothing to do with the crime, and yet here we are talking about it. It was really surreal and frustrating that so many things that felt so irrelevant were used to prolong this trial and to support, again, this idea, this story that was crafted right from the very beginning before there was even any evidence at hand, and how that story stuck.

The story of sex game gone wrong was there from like the very beginning before anyone knew anything. And the fact that it stuck was the thing that really stuck with me because you look at this crime scene, you gather the evidence and here is a classic crime scene

of a young woman who was raped and murdered in her own home by an intruder. Like that's what the evidence shows. And yet, because this sex game thing was going on from the very beginning, this idea of a sex game, it's stuck and it's stuck in people's imaginations. Again, because of that sense of the public interest in scandalous stories. I have never heard that phrase and every accusation is a confession. Yes. But I had that explains Trump in every way.

I mean, it's so, it explains also, I have had this like unsettled feeling that the people who were investigating me and prosecuting me also were like attracted to me. I have been really like disconcerted by the idea that maybe part of this motive, or part of the fact that there was so much attention put on me, was because I was physically present in,

consciously or unconsciously, there was something about me that titillated them. And that translated in the context of the situation to, oh, we're going to accuse her of a sex crime. And like my little sisters, I have one little sister who is 100% convinced that this is psychologically at play, at least in part, if not consciously, then unconsciously. Yeah. To me, the most timeless part of the whole story, you know, the through line between

the examples we were just talking about and what happened to you is the sort of the way in which events can take on a life of their own and the way that human beings can sort of accumulate into a mob, into a frenzy, and that even in the ancient world, they're aware of this and trying to counteract it. One of the early Stokes, his name was Chrysippus, and he said once, look, if I wanted to be part of the mob, I would never have become a philosopher. And this idea of like, are you someone who sort of joins in when the energy and the pitchforks and the sort of tide is turning, or are you someone who kind of comes up with your own view on things,

who feels sort of either suspicious or feels a little uneasy when people are rushing to conclusions about stuff? And that kind of being two parts of the human condition or two parts of human society that's always been there. And although we can develop institutions that can mitigate it, the risk of it is always right there under the surface. Sure. Especially since I think that it's a more sophisticated position and maybe unnatural

or not instinctual position to feel uneasy about judgment. Because I think that intuitively, instinctually, that is an automatic reaction. That's why we all love, or presumably we all love sports. That is the appropriate setting to have the mob mentality and to express it and to enjoy it where nobody gets hurt, hopefully. Although even that can get crazy. I mean, the fact that people can get murdered in a soccer stadium because they were rooting for the wrong side is indicative of how instinctual and how potent that feeling is. Yeah, that energy is right there and it just takes a couple little things to get it to

break it loose. Mm-hmm. Yep. I'm curious to know, I've never had the impulse to punch a wall, right? I know some people have had that impulse before. I get it. I've seen holes punched in walls. I've always thought that that might be a testosterone thing, maybe. But I'm curious to know what comes first, the mob impulse and that impulse to judge, or is it the impulse to want... Is it an aggressive impulse that then finds expression through judgment? What's the ch- is it a chicken and the egg question?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I don't, because sometimes the mob thing isn't actually, even if what they're doing seems driven by anger, the individuals in it, they actually don't feel that strongly about it, that it doesn't feel real to them, right? So like a lot of what we would call like cancel culture or like the people who are following what was happening to you, just passively through the tabloids or through the news, it was very, very entertaining. And maybe they had strong opinions one way or another, but what they definitely didn't think a lot about was what it would be like to be you or the families of the people involved or anything.

That this is the same as a fictional television show, but it's not. Yeah, I think that's really key. And it's one of the reasons why true crime in general makes me very squeamish, because it is a, like like morality soap opera that we all get to partake in and all the people involved end up being ideas of people rather than actual people who have real lives and felt experiences. I don't know. I mean, a part of me is really

sad that I had to experience that so strongly, that I was an idea of a person in people's minds, and then that idea of a person was who they convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison. But at the same time, it was me, real me, that had to go back in the prison van and had to go sit in a jail cell again for years on end. So it makes me sad. And on the other hand, looking back in retrospect, I'm a little bit grateful for the experience because it always, always reminds me that there is a distinct difference between what people think about me

and what even I think about myself and what is actually real and what is actually happening in a present moment. And I mean, I think that's part of where my stoic perspective comes in, where I don't get hung up on this idea of, like, my life depends upon what people think of me. Or even, my life depends on what I think about myself in this moment, because everything is an idea and not necessarily reality.

Does that make any sense? It does. And I even think about the stories I was telling you about. So Rufus, he's like, I'm not gonna defend myself, blah, blah, blah, blah, we're going to exile. There's something about even that where we, obviously everyone involved is long since dead, but we're sort of like, what a badass way to respond.

And then we're like, but he's also probably married. He probably also has kids, there are other people affected by the consequences of this kind of like, performative, you know, righteousness, right? And so I sometimes think about that too, is like, all this stuff was real. And there's like, there's sort of the the the symbol you, and there's sort of the symbol you, and then there's the you as a person, and hey, if you just accept this plea deal,

it'll all go away, and then you have this sense of right and wrong, so you don't wanna do it. I'm not trying to imply by your case. I'm just saying, we think about what the right thing to do is, and then obviously also there's how our decisions affect other people. There's the precedent that we set.

So all this stuff, these morality plays, if you read true crime or you follow the news or you read history and what it gives you is a very clear sense of black and white, you're missing the point. Because actually the morality play, the Shakespearean drama of what's happening should be teaching you

just how fucking complicated and contradictory life can be. Yes, and also that there are lots of powers at play. Like the person who finds themselves in the position of the defendant to the accused is up against not just a person, but like a social construct and is up against a history and precedent.

And so them as a person, like the person is who's gonna feel the consequences. It's not the idea. Yeah. It's not the idea of the person. And yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to me that, historically you think about the big philosophers and the big gurus and you're not typically thinking about their families

and their kids and how they're affected by what's going on. And yeah, I mean, I think that's true also in my case. It's true in all wrongful conviction cases really, because the way that the media portrays it is that you, the accused are this eye in the storm, when in reality, you belong to people. And those people's lives get put on hold or are put into limbo or are completely destroyed as they try to, they are dismantled as they try to like hold you up so

you don't just plummet into an abyss of judgment and, you know, punishment. And every one of those people have to re-find, rediscover themselves and redevelop their relationship with their role in the world, given the consequences that that idea of a person faces. Yeah, because I think when they gave Socrates the chance to defend himself, I suspect they were hoping he would ask for a small fine, which one of his rich friends would pay, or that he would accept exile and just fine, which one of his rich friends would pay, or that he would accept exile and just go away and not be their problem. Right.

So when he chooses- So he could have had that. Yes. That's not what I think about when I think of Socrates. And I think this is what's interesting. So he chooses the harder thing, which is death, the braver thing, he stands on principle, and then, as you pointed out though, he has a wife and two sons.

And so is it actually the principled thing? Is it the brave thing? Is it the right thing to die for this, in this case, kind of meaningless principle? It's not like he's being asked to sort of like, kiss the feet of the emperor or something. He's not being asked to do anything, really. And so he doesn't, and obviously he lives for all time

as this kind of immortal hero. It was probably hard for the people that he left behind. And so, yeah, I think the idea that the individual is a real person who's sitting in that prison cell, we kind of glib over because, again, this feels like a spectator sport to us. We forget that the athlete we're watching has a new baby and they haven't been sleeping.

Right. I think I'm really fascinated by this choose your own punishment adventure that they offered, the ancient Greeks offered. Because I will say that there were times, especially right after my conviction when I had this sort of existential crisis and I realized, oh, the truth doesn't matter.

They just really wanted to convict this idea of a person that is me. I had fantasies about alternative punishments to the ones that I was subjected to. And I was like, you know what? Like I had this vision of, it's not like I just get to go home, right? Like I just wanted to go home.

I just wanted to go back and be an anonymous person again. Like I needed to be hated. Like that was the point. Everyone just wanted to hate me. And I had this like vision before Game of Thrones came out and Circe had to do like the naked walk down the street with her hair all cut off and everyone throwing shit at her. Like I had that vision of myself. And I was like, you just have to like just open the prison door and let me walk naked and like ashamed all the way back home. Like

make me swim across the ocean to get back home. I will do it. Just, like, hate me on the way. I can see you have bloodlust. What do you need me to pay to make this go away? Exactly. Oh, man. So when do you end up getting introduced to the Stoics, then? I'm fascinated.

Mm. When was I first introduced? Well, you know, so a lot of people sent me a lot of literature when I was in prison. Like, that's one thing that you get. A lot of, like, spiritual and religious literature, I was sent a little bit of everything, including a little bit of Stoicism. I also was very good friends,

ultimately, with the priest in the prison, who understood that I was not Catholic, I was, with the priest in the prison, who understood that I was not Catholic, I was not Christian, I was agnostic. And yet we had really great conversations about philosophy. And occasionally, so he, but he would, you know, he would quote anybody from like a Socrates kind of person to a St. Ignatius kind of person. Like he, he was a little bit all over the place, but of course he was really into ancient, you know, philosophy.

So we would talk about that together. And then doing actual reading of Stoics happened more when I came home, which is a shame because I had so much reading time in prison and I read, you know, hundreds of books while I was in prison, a lot of them just novels. But I would have loved some Marcus Aurelius. That would have been very satisfying when I was in prison. I would send someone that now. Is Marcus Aurelius the stoic you were introduced to first? Oh, God. I think that was the first one that I read. But as far as just being introduced and talked about, especially between me and the priest, I don't even remember who was the first one that I read, but as far as just being introduced and talked

about, especially between me and the priest, I don't even remember who was the first one. He would just quote, and he would always quote in Greek or in Latin at me and then do the translation, which sounds really pompous, but I actually loved that because I love language, so I just liked hearing different languages come out of his mouth. So when you did read this, I'm just curious what strikes you because I imagine it would hit you differently than it's going to hit the alternative version of you that doesn't go through this ordeal. Right.

And I think what's fun is that everything that I was reading was hitting me different than I think other people would intend it. So, you know, one idea that I was really interested in, especially when I was grappling with the, oh, I'm not living the life that I thought that I should be living. I'm living this completely different life. I loved this idea of just, you know,

shit or get off the pot, like you're living your life. Like this is it. Yes. So you might as well just live it to the best of your ability and seek opportunities to be your best self, whatever the circumstances may be. That really resonated with me, particularly as I found myself immersed

in a social situation that was extraordinarily different than anything I had ever experienced before. Like prison was a very, very different place than the world that I came from. It was closed off, it was really structured, and you had very limited choices. But beyond that, there were people in there who had lived drastically different lives than me and had drastically different skill sets and resources. So on the one hand, I could read and write and tell them and translate for them. And on the other hand, they could give me a lot of life experience advice that I was

completely ignorant about. And so I think that was a really interesting, the Stokes really helped me to like conceptualize, no, this is not just like I'm in the wrong place. Like there is no wrong place. Every place is an opportunity and you can find your place. But at the same time, I read things like, I was reading Harry Potter and the, you know, and let's see what the fifth book, which is The Order of the

Phoenix. And I don't know if you're a fan of Harry Potter or not, but like there is like that book is like an extremely angry Harry Potter who is just getting trashed in the media the whole time. And I was like, I get you, Harry. I know that harness it. So yeah, I, I know that anger. Harness it, harness it. So yeah, I was reading and experiencing things in a very different way. And like escapism was also a huge part of it. Like allowing myself the opportunity to immerse myself in stories like the Hitchhiker's Guide

to the Galaxy, which was fantastical and stupid and silly. And it was exactly what I needed when I found myself in a cell with four other women, one of whom was threatening to beat me up every day. So, yeah. Well, it's interesting because when Marx really says, you know, the obstacle is the way, I think if your life is cushy and awesome and wonderful, you're like, oh, this is a chance for me to do this awesome thing or to grow my business or to get stronger.

You can have a very sort of glib understanding of it. And then I have to imagine going through something much more profound and earth shattering. There's another level that you understand what he's saying, which is there's an opportunity to practice those virtues that you can only practice under extreme pressure. Endurance, forgiveness, selflessness. And so I imagine when you're thinking,

oh, hey, there's an opportunity to do stuff here, you're not just like, oh, this is a chance for me to improve my Italian. Although I do say one of the one of the side benefits is that I did get fluent. So I did accomplish what I went out to Italy to accomplish. But yeah, no, the obstacle is the way is one hundred percent. And at the same time, I've I've grappled with that because a part of me is

has mourned the fact that the worst experience of my life has become such a definitive part of my life, like in the sense of defining me. And I've had like, for a long time, I mourned that fact, the fact that like I would forever be associated with a horrible crime that I had nothing to do with. And that in the

eyes of other people I was the girl accused of murder and there was nothing that and it for a long time I felt like they didn't really say anything true or real about me as a human being and I had to I had to really think about that idea the obstacle is the way, to understand how that played a role in who I was and in my life. That's why I'm talking to you today, because I'm willing to acknowledge how it is a very defining part of my life, but also how I've reacted to it is even more defining about my life and how I've chosen to exercise my agency and my understanding that has resulted from it

has been a hugely defining part of my life. And I feel like that is where the obstacle is the way comes true. And at the same time, I've had these weird thoughts of like, would I be this cool if this didn't happen to me? Would my husband love me if this didn't happen to me? Like, would my husband love me if this didn't happen to me? I've had those thoughts,

and I don't know really what to make of them. I mean, have you ever had thoughts like that? Yeah, it's like this terribly unfair thing, and then also a gift, is I think. And those are not mutually exclusive, right? And maybe another paradoxical way to think about this, and I bet you would have some insights here. So the Stoics would talk about the idea of acceptance, right?

And acceptance is a tricky word, because if that priest came up to you in prison and said, you've got to practice acceptance, if you took that to mean you have to plead guilty and accept that your life is over and now you need to rot in this prison, that's not what the Stokes are talking about with acceptance, but accepting that this is something that is happening to you and that this is the situation that fate found you in and now you have to figure out what

to do about it. You cannot do something until you first accept the reality and the gravity of the facts as they are. That's the paradoxical reality of the sort of virtue of acceptance. Yes. And I'm so glad you brought acceptance up because I think it's really hard for people to understand it in their own lives because there's actually like, there's so much we have to accept as just a reality in our life, but they seem like things we don't have to accept. Whereas with me, I had a very, very stark reality that there was no choice but accepting.

I had a barred door that I could not open. No matter how much suffering I put myself through, just sitting at the, I could shake the bars all I wanted. I would drive myself crazy trying to open a door that I could not open. There was a literal door. And so I very quickly had to adapt to this idea that this is where I am.

This is it. Like these walls are what I have available to me in this moment. And so I might as well accept that and do what I can within these four walls and behind this door that I cannot open. And that for me is the acceptance part. And something that I cannot open. And that for me is the acceptance part. And something

that I actually pushed, I had like a little butting heads moment with my mom when I was in prison after I was convicted because for her, she was hearing me talk about, you know, imagining how I like, I would think very long and hard about how I was going to try to make my life worth living within that context. And so I would imagine, I would think, okay, if I'm here for 26 years, that means I'm going to get out when I'm 46. It'll be too late for me to have a family and to have children. I'll probably never have a career and I'll probably be really poor. But in the meantime, what can I do in here that is worthwhile? Maybe I can write. I'll do a lot of reading, like all of this. And my mom, when I talked to her about this, she would be like, no,

like, you don't have to think about that because we're going to fight this and we're going to get you out. And I was trying to explain to her, like, look, mom, me thinking about this and how I'm going to make my life worth living within this context doesn't mean that I'm not going to do everything I can in a court of law to overturn a wrongful conviction. It just means that right here, right now, this is what I have available to me. And this is how I am going to confront what I can confront and not torture myself over what I can't do.

And I think that for me, what that means is becoming a more effective agent within reality. Instead of thinking that you can operate within this optimistic, like my life as it should be reality, you instead acknowledge, accept or acknowledge what the reality is and then become an effective agent. from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder,

rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History hit on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the

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Wondery app. Did anyone talk to you about James Stockdale during or after your imprisonment? Is this the guy that was like torture, like, yeah, the soldier? I read about him, gosh, when did I, kind of recently, like maybe six months ago, I came across his story, but like in the chat, like a few pages in a book, he was mentioned.

Yeah, he's sort of a famous figure because, so he's introduced to Epictetus, one of the stoic philosophers. He's doing a postgraduate degree at Stanford while he's in the Navy. And then he's sent to Vietnam where he's in prison. He spent seven years in the Hanoi Hilton like with John McCain and a bunch of other figures. But he sort of coins this thing, speaking of paradoxes, it's called the Stockdale paradox. But basically, the idea is that he's accepting that he's there. And at the same time telling himself that if he gets out, or when he gets out, he will transform this thing into something that

in retrospect, he would not trade away. And that being the sort of paradoxical idea of like, I'm here and it's horrible and I never would have chosen this. And yet I can make it a defining life event that makes me great, powerful, important, meaningful, have done good for others. And on the face, those ideas are totally contradictory. And at the same time, maybe the only way

to navigate something where somebody else literally has you under lock and key. Right. I think the other thing that I remember from that story was that he also looked at the other prisoners and saw that those who did accept the circumstance were the ones who survived. And those who were telling themselves, I'll be home by Christmas, I'll be home by Easter, were the ones who ended up

not surviving the experience because they were giving themselves these benchmarks that were never, like that couldn't be fulfilled. And it just crushed them, like psychologically and spiritually. crushed them, like psychologically and spiritually. The thing I, yeah, so I agree with that 100% and this paradox of acknowledging reality for what it is and accepting it and allowing it to be more than just the horrendous experience that it is, is like this grand understanding that first of all, nothing stays the same and we can gain perspective

from past events. And even we can gain perspective as events as we are experiencing them, if we're willing to sort of detach ourselves enough. Like one of the things that I did in prison was I thought I was going crazy and I would have conversations with my younger self where like she would sit in front of me and she couldn't see what was happening so I would just describe to her what was happening

and just the mere act of describing what I was feeling or what was around me or what the circumstances were made it feel like it was less of this weight that I was carrying on me and more of this interesting puzzle that was in front of me that I couldn't necessarily solve, but I could look at and talk about and then gain perspective from even in the moment that I was experiencing it. I wonder if that worked because it had the effect of making it very objective. But obviously, it's it's somewhat stranger describing a

situation to a non-existent version of yourself. But instead of saying, this is so unjust, this is so awful, this is the worst, you're just saying, I'm in a prison cell. I have a window over here. I've been here for 23 months. As you're just describing it in sort of stark but clear terms, you're just making it a situation as opposed to this horrendously unfair, surprising, whatever situation, and you're just talking to someone about what they're going to need to know to be in this situation in the future. Right. And even making an object the unfairness of it all. It's not like I would be like, oh, you're just

going to find yourself in a jail cell. I was telling my younger self, this terrible thing is going to happen. It's very unfair. But let's look at that. And what does it mean for something unfair to happen to you? Well, did you think you were special, that nothing unfair was ever going to happen to you? Well, did you think you were special that nothing unfair

was ever going to happen to you in your life? Like the reason why this sucks so much is because you had a vision of your life and this is not it. And that the discrepancy between your vision of what your life was going to be and what your life really is has caused you so much anxiety and grief. And the thing that I think was really key for me was, and maybe this, I don't know how

the Stoics would think about this, but allowing yourself to grieve, like it's okay to grieve and it's okay to be angry. That's all part of it. That's all part of what reality is. And you just accept that as part of the experience, and that allows you to move on from it. I think that it's that grasping onto the grief and that grasping onto the life that you should have had

as opposed to the life that you do is what leads people to being ineffective agents in their lives. And that's ultimately, I think, the more frustrating thing that someone at the end of their life might experience leads people to being ineffective agents in their lives. And that's ultimately, I think, the more frustrating thing that someone at the end of their life might experience is the realization that they've been grieving their entire life, a life that they thought

they should have been living, instead of living the life that they were living. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, one of Stockdale's favorite quotes from Epictetus, and Epictetus sort of knows this intimately because he's a slave, and he says, you know, he says, a prison and a podium. So like the highest place in Rome and the lowest place in Rome,

he says, each of these is a place and inside of them one has a certain amount of freedom of choice. And so I think it's so fascinating, right? On one end of the sociological spectrum, you have Epictetus who's talking about, hey, look, there's some things that are up to you and some things that are not up to you,

and you just gotta focus on what's up to you. And then you have Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, and he's going, look, there's some things that are up to you and some things that are not up to you, and you just gotta focus on what's in your control. And that this is fundamentally a problem you're having to deal with in prison, but it's not that dissimilar to the fundamental problem of human existence.

To anyone, yeah. Which is some things are up to us and some things are not up to us, and you've got to accept what isn't up to you and let go of the unfairness and the unexpectedness and the expectation and all that, and focus on what is up to you in this moment. What can I do? Yeah, and what you can do may well be get yourself out of prison by a variety of different means, but creating a world in which no one is ever wrongfully accused and awful people don't exist and shitty things don't happen to people, especially you, that's not one

of those things. Right, right, exactly. Man, so you mentioned earlier not understanding the impulse to punch a wall. I would think you would understand that impulse quite well. You know, I, my impulse is sadness. I don't get angry that much, I get sad. And this is an interesting part too too, of a lot of discussion about my behavior in the aftermath of finding out that my roommate was murdered. A lot of people

said that I didn't react the way that an innocent person would, which, whatever that means. But I think one of the things that was really tough for me in that moment was being a 20-year-old kid and finding out very suddenly that something way horrific that I had never anticipated would happen, happened. But not having seen it myself, like I think one thing that people forget is that I never saw into the room where my roommate was murdered, unlike my one of my roommates. I had two other roommates.

One of them was there and she saw into the room. And so outside of the crime scene, like outside of our house, the news media is focused in on us. And I'm standing there sort of looking bewildered as people are like screaming around me in Italian and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And they're saying, look, there's one roommate who's crying and one roommate who's not crying and she's just bewildered. And I look, I try to point people to the fact that like, remember the context, like here's

a 20 year old kid who's like, what the fuck is going on? I don't know what anybody's saying. Oh my God, is someone dead? Like what is happening? And then like not knowing like our emotions require us to have the ability to process information. And for me, the information that I was processing in prison was that for some reason, people seemed to hate me. I didn't understand why. but at the same time, I intuitively understood that it's not like there, I didn't imagine the detectives and my prosecutor

back at the police station tackling to themselves about how they had just put an innocent girl in prison. So I didn't have this vision in my mind that would make me angry. I had a vision in my mind of my helplessness to make myself understood by people. And therefore, that's why they were accusing me of heinous crime, because they didn't understand me.

And that made me sad because I felt powerless. And so I experienced a lot of my journey, not in anger, but in sadness. And my emotional default setting even was set to sad. Like, I woke up sad, I spent the whole day sad. And it was okay in the sense that it was not like this grasping sadness, this like suffering sadness where I was wanting, I was expecting to be happy.

You know, I was just like, that was just where it was. It was very tepid and still. It allowed me to have a sense of clarity because I was looking objectively at the situation. So was the risk for you then like despair as opposed to rage? Yes. Like what you could get eaten up by was despair and hopelessness as opposed to anger and frustration.

Yes, yeah. The feeling that like there was nothing, like so again, back to like you wanna be an effective agent in the world. There were times where I struggled with the idea that there's not like, again, you know, you go into court, it doesn't matter what you say, they're going to find you guilty anyway. So that feeling of there's nothing I can

do to change my circumstances, the only thing I can do is accept whatever is going to happen. And that and I struggle, I pushed against those impulses, because I thought, is that despair talking to me? Or is that reality talking to me? Which one is right? Is there something I can actually do? And sometimes I was right, there was something I could do, and sometimes, again, it didn't matter what I said.

So my despair was right. And I continue to this day to have those moments where I sort of optimistically think there is something I can do in this situation and then I find out, oh, that person sitting across from me was not able to hear me, so it wasn't about anything that I could do. And I think about this a lot when I think about my prosecutor. I don't know if you know this,

I've been in communication with him for a long time. Oh, yeah, it's not like a huge news thing. But, like, again, I assumed that the person who was accusing me was not doing it because they were an evil, cackling sociopath. It was because they thought they were doing the right thing. He is the hero of his own story, and somehow I'm the villain, and I wanted to understand why.

And so I reached out to him and tried and have the villain and I wanted to understand why. And so I reached out to him and tried and have spent a long time trying to understand his perspective and give him the grace of being a flawed human being. And it's been like at times there have been times where I've, I've tricked myself into thinking like, oh, if I could just say the right thing to him, he would like have an epiphany and figure it out and tell the whole world that he was wrong and everything would change. And then I have to like pull back and go, you know what, Amanda, like that's a really fun fantasy. And that's probably not the case. Like let's be realistic of what the situation is and how deeply entrenched

people's ideas are, especially when they're wrapped up in their egos and in their sense of self. Or their profession, right? I don't think I could be a prosecutor because I don't have the certainty that would allow me to say, hey, I've looked at this and I know,

and therefore I'm going to suggest this person be put to death or put in prison for a certain amount of time, or the ability to say, hey, I know this to 60% confidence, but I can intellectually go it's the jury's problem from here. If they get it right, it's on them, right? There's a certain personality type, just like there's a cop personality type, there's an investment banker personality type. There's different

people who are capable of different things, and then having to accept that probably also means they are incapable of certain things. Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm actually curious to know if there's anywhere that I could find out more about the psychology of prosecutors. Like, if anyone has done a study of, like, what kind of personality is the type of person who goes into that profession? Because you're right, like I would never do that job.

Like that is the opposite job of anything I would do. So it is curious. And I mean, I think there's definitely been insights into who goes into a cop profession, but it's a very different, it's a distinct thing to be a prosecutor because it's not like you don't have the rush, the adrenaline rush of being on the street and like interacting potentially with criminals as crimes are taking place. You're not solving puzzles by talking to the man on the street.

You are an entity who represents the state, who is there to present a narrative that is attempting to convince a group of people who are ideally the most ignorant people that you could find of an idea so that you can then impact another human being's life in the most strong way that a person can because you have the force of the state behind you. Like, that is scary. I don't want to do anything like that. Who would want to do that?

Yes. Right. The kind of person that could stare in the face of a serial killer and stare them down and beat them, and then also the kind of person that could probably see that same personality in an innocent 20-year-old foreign exchange student, and as every plea and countervailing piece of evidence

and little strip of doubt creeped in, to be able to push that away, right? It's just like the kind of person to be, like first off, who becomes a soldier and then what is the training that you undergo to be able to effectively be a soldier. This isn't a thing that you can naturally do or you can't naturally do at the level

that you're being asked to do it. And there's a culture and also probably a predilection, and all these factors go in there. And yeah, it's... You have to be a competitive person, for sure. What do the Stoics say about competition? Well, one of my favorite quotes in Mark Sturiles' meditations, he says, you know, ambition is tying your success to what other people say and do. So like, I want to be console or I want to be Senator. So I got to get these people to vote for me. I want to be a bestselling author. I have to sell a certain number of copies. The bestseller list has to accept me, etc. But he says sanity is tying it to

your own actions. And so like he's saying like, look, it's better to have goals that are up to you versus goals that are up to the market or other people. Right. And so this is kind of a stoic idea throughout, you know, Epic fetus says something about only entering competitions where winning is up to you. And so if you're someone who like, look, I want to be the best that I'm capable of being, I want to fulfill a certain amount of potential, I want to do this thing, like I want to climb this mountain. As opposed to, I want to be the fastest

to climb this mountain, or I want to beat all the other people that are climbing it at the same time. To me, that's kind of where they come down, because ultimately it's that same fundamental distinction of are you interested in things that are in your control or are you after things that are outside of your control? Totally, love that.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I'll climb a mountain. How do you deal with, like, I feel like lately I just kind of have this low level and it's starting to not be so low level, but just dread of what, you know, talking about knowing what could happen, right? Like this sense like, hey, if this happens,

then this will happen, and then this will happen, and that's not gonna be good for anyone. You know, this kind of, and I imagine you must have felt, because what's interesting about your experience, it wasn't like this horrible thing happened, and then like six weeks later, this horrible verdict was handed down, and then that was just it. And just the powerlessness that you must have had over affecting the outcome one way or another. As you've come out of this, what advice do you have for people who are in the same situation? And I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question.

And I think that's a really good question. And I think that's a really good question. And I think that's a really good question. And I think that's a really good question. And I think that's a really good question. And I think that's a really good question. and just the powerlessness that you must have had over affecting the outcome one way or another. As you've come out of this, what advice do you have for people who are like, oh man, the next four years could be fucking horrible?

Well, one, I would say that as someone who spent four years in prison, I would say that you'd be surprised how fast four years can go. The days are long, but the years are short. Everything is impermanent. So don't feel like it is the end of the world. This is going to last forever. The other thing that I would say is it is frustrating because especially in the political climate, it tricks you into thinking that you matter because your vote matters and your vote does matter. But ultimately, there's this lie that's pitched to all of us that any one thing that we could

do would make a difference in the entire outcome. And I would say that, look, we are better equipped to, of course, interest yourself in what is happening nationally because we are a part of this nation. But also really hone in on what it is that you can actually affect change on, recognize your place in this broader scheme of the political climate, whatever it may be. So like to give an example, when I think about what my role is in all of it, it is not to be

an expert in every single fricking thing that is going to be of concern to every single one of us. I am concerned with criminal justice related matters because I have personal experience with that. And I also have an opportunity to affect a certain kind of influence that might be beneficial to other people. So that's where my focus is. And it is recognizing that if it's, even though I may be concerned about climate change,

nobody really gives a shit about what I think about it. So instead try to like find those people who might have something that could be influential and see how you can support them or support their work. So there are a lot of great things that people are doing, especially on the local level. I think people really overlook the power of things that are happening locally around them,

and we don't really feel like we're a part of a community very much in these modern times. I'm very fortunate because I live on a little island in the Pacific Northwest, and so because we're an island, we seem to recognize that we, each individual one of us, plays a role in our community and has an impact. Like, you as a person in whatever your community looks like has in our community and has an impact. Like you as a person in whatever your community looks like has a role and can have an impact on the people that are directly around

you and that impact then can magnify as they impact others. So I would say like focus on what is close to you. And is that something you found I imagine being in a prison cell with a number of people, and you're like, well, I can't do anything about what's happening in the outside world, but I can help this person write a letter. Yes. Or I can help them, you know, read something or you can help the individual across from you in some small way. Yes.

And in a way that no one else can. Like there's really, it's, I think the most fulfilling work you can do is when you realize that you were the only one who could have stepped in and done it. So find that. Yeah that's beautiful. So last question, we talk a lot about the sort of collapse in of institutions or belief in institutions. You watched an institution degrade itself in front of you, right? Not just like, hey, this abstract idea is there problems with the justice system. In this case, it's a foreign country, but you watched it do the opposite of what it's supposed to do. And it stole from you the most valuable thing there is in the process.

As you come out of that, thinking of despair like we were talking about earlier, how do you go through the world and not just be cynical and nihilistic and doubt and hate everything? Or maybe you do, but how does that inform your worldview? I don't doubt and hate everything, and I'm not cynical. I would say that the thing that I realized was not that these institutions that I had faith in before no longer deserve to have faith in them. Instead, what I recognized was these institutions are not ideas of institutions, they are constructs that are created by people. And they are tools that we as human beings have developed to help us function in these ginormous societies that we now belong into. And so we are ultimately responsible for how those tools are wielded and whether

or not we can't just take them for granted. Right? So I think that is the thing that I took for granted that the justice system was something that took the guilty people and put them away and let the innocent people free. And I also took for granted that the media was, their job was to report the truth. And instead what I found was that these are institutions that are populated by people who are flawed, who have, who are influenced and who are biased and who have incentive structures that may not necessarily influenced and who are biased and who have incentive structures that may not necessarily be poised to arrive at what they were intended to arrive at. So I think that for me, that leads me to recognize the fragility of these institutions, but also

their potential and how more literacy and more awareness of how the sausage gets made in any of these institutions can only make us better, again, effective agents within that reality. That's fascinating. One of the things Epictetus talks about, he says, you know, every situation has, has at least two handles. Which handle are you going to grab it by? So you could grab, yeah, the US Supreme Court by the Dred Scott handle, or the presidential immunity scandal, or a handle, or the overturning of Roe v. Wade handled, or you could say this is the same Supreme Court

that desegregated the schools, or gave women the right to begin with. And the idea that it is an institution that's not neither good nor bad, but the people in it can be good or bad, and there can be corrupt terms and moral terms and, you know, it could be heading in the right direction or wrong direction. Sometimes the same justice can make a good decision one day and a bad decision the next day. And yeah, it's up to the individuals who have influence over that.

We can't make it be what we want it to be, but we can try to make it good more often than it is not good. Well, this is fascinating. I loved your book and I'm so glad we got to have this chat. Yes, thank you so much for inviting me. I also loved your book, so thank you. Well, that is surreal and strange for me to hear because, you know, obviously I wrote

these books about Stoke philosophy, but then when I hear from people who like actually had to apply Stoke philosophy in real situations, not just my sort of piddly nerf life stuff, it's always a surreal thing. Does a part of you wish that you had struggled more? I mean, no. Sometimes people say that. They go like, like, do you think I should, like, seek out obstacles, or do you think I should, like, design them for my kids?

And I go, like, I think life's gonna take care of it. Yeah. It's just, you know, when someone goes, hey, you know, I have terminal stage five cancer, and, and, like, your book's been very valuable to me. I just don't really know what to say because like, I mean, I just go, I hope it works because like I have not personally,

it's like I made a car engine that's supposed to go at a hundred miles an hour and you're telling me you're regularly driving it at 250. I hope it doesn't fall apart, but I have not personally taken it that fast. I mean, that's great. not personally taken it that fast. I mean, that's great. It means that it's working. So good for you. And that's something to be proud of.

Well, thank you. No, your question is interesting, though, because I do think people tend to think of obstacles or adversity as these big life puncturing events, like you are thrown in prison or a car accident puts you in a wheelchair or cancer or you're born a discriminated against minority. These are, of course, all forms of profound adversity for which philosophy is designed and perseverance is demanded. But then life's not a piece of cake for just a regular person. No, being a person is hard. We're all our own worst critics. We all are experiencing the world

and not being our best selves all the time. So, yeah, people have asked me that, too. Like, would I want my children to, like, go through some kind of adversity in order to, like, arrive at their best selves? And I'm like, no. The world, like, life, their own brains are going to torture them enough.

So like, I do not wish anybody any kind of bad situation. Yeah, like just, like you don't have to be bullied to just also experience the judgment of people, right? Like one is just a more extreme version of the adversity that is also inherent in the other. Right. Well, this was amazing. Thanks so much. Let's stay in touch. more extreme version of the adversity that is also inherent in the other. Right. Well, this was amazing. Thanks. Thanks so much. Let's let's stay in touch. Sounds great. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review

on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some and hopefully make you

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