Sarma Melngailis: Bad Vegan, Fraud, Prison, and Sociopathy | Lex Fridman Podcast #288

he made me think that you know everything was going to be reversed and okay and anybody that money was borrowed from they would get it back you know maybe tenfold and so it was this weird situation of having like one foot in his reality and potentially believing the things he was saying or even over time wanting to believe them more and more because the alternative was so the alternative was worse the alternative was like was increasingly a bigger and bigger nightmare the following is a conversation with sarma melangalis a chef and restaurateur who was the subject of the netflix documentary bad vegan fame fraud and fugitives that documents the rise and fall of her vegan raw food restaurants in new york city that ended in what she called a road trip from hell being arrested in tennessee her pleading guilty for stealing over 2 million dollars and serving 4 months at rikers island jail sarma disputes the veracity of the documentary and its conclusions saying that she was misrepresented so i wanted to talk to her to get the full story and to seek understanding of who she is as a human being the good and the bad this is the lex freeman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's sama mangalas you've said that you did a lot of reading when you were growing up and you mentioned fear and loathing in las vegas by hunter s thompson so from the reading you've done in those early days how did you see the world was it to you a beautiful place or a cruel place i don't think i thought about the world you're focused on family just basic day-to-day life i think i was focused on day to day i had an awareness of not fitting in but i think back then it felt like something was wrong versus some people are just that way and speaking of books i read a book called um party of one by a woman named annelie rufus that somebody gave me and suggested i read and that helped a lot that was that was one book that made me feel like it made me understand things from the past that i hadn't understood before specifically kind of feeling out of place even among my family which is where you're not supposed to feel out of place yeah i'm not sure where i saw it but i think you mentioned that you're a bit of a loner and i also think i saw somewhere pictures of you with the with green hair in high school and a wild haircut what's that about is that was that real am i just imagining no you're not imagining it it's strange because i was kind of a a loner so it'd be strange to do something that calls so much attention to yourself because back then i mean i grew up in a suburb of boston um in newton and anybody that was there around that time probably if you said you know that girl with green hair or blue hair was blue most of the time they would remember like seeing me walking down the street because it stood out like crazy especially back then now it wouldn't stand out so much but back then it really stood out so i was trying to think about why i did that when i i was kind of a kind of shy and on the one hand wouldn't want to bring attention to myself but i did something that did and it wasn't my family to their credit they were fine with it so it wasn't a rebellion against them or anything like that they were fine with it i don't think they loved it but yeah dad was a physicist at mit yes so uh so he was he was cool here with your green hair when you're a rebellion that's just the way of life he was fine with the green hair but i think in some ways maybe they had to be fine with it because i didn't cause problems otherwise and i got good grades in school i was a very low maintenance child i think even with a green hair uh so hunter s thompson uh wrote a lot of good stuff uh he has a lot of just brilliant quotes a lot of brilliant lines um so one of the ones i love is life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body but rather just skidding broadside in a cloud of smoke thoroughly used up totally worn out and loudly proclaiming wow what a ride what do you think about that is that good life advice from hunter s thompson i think so he i think he followed it right somewhere um i heard recently what he consumed in a day yeah and it was kind of astonishing it's funny i when i was in college there were always really interesting people coming through speakers and whatnot and i tended to not go to events and whatnot but in the four years i was there the i mean really interesting people came through and gave talks you know i don't know just a lot of famous people and um but then one day hunter s thompson came to speak and i was the only one i attended oh wow so the only interesting person who came to speak on the campus that i attended was hunter s thompson and he had a you know he had a glass of whatever it was whiskey and i don't remember a whole lot about it but it was it was entertaining and yeah i mean later in his life he started making less and less sense but he was still somehow like embodying the the crazy that he represented throughout his life the boldness the fearlessness the wildness all that kind of stuff and we'll talk about johnny depp a little bit too funny enough there's like a echo obviously he johnny depp played him or he started unloading and they hung out together and it just seemed to somehow like the universe rhymes in these two individuals they're both mad men and in different kind of ways so you also told me that leon the professional is one of your favorite films it's also the reason you named your dog leon so uh what do you find beautiful and powerful about this film i've watched it a bunch of times but it's been a while since i've watched it so for people who haven't watched it it there's a guy named leon played by jon renau there's a um a young girl i don't know 13 14. matilda played by natalie portman and she's abused she has a really hard life her parents are spoiler alert uh murdered and then she finds protection under this um fella uh leon who's also happens to be a professional assassin and he is also kind of a forest gump type character like he's a really simple human uh he almost he seems to be like the immature one or like rather the one who's young and she seems to have a wisdom far beyond her age because of the hard life she had to live through and then and they're here huddling together from the the cruelty of the world um in and finding connection yeah i think it's one of those films where there's so many interesting things about it but you know i'm sure one of them is just the contradiction of him being a caring person and reluctant to get attached to her you know he tries to i think he knows he's he's very reluctant to get attached to her in the beginning um and so you see all of his humanity but yet he's also an assassin that kills people so um that's interesting and i think probably a psychoanalyst would have a field day with why i like that movie so much um and i haven't neces i haven't gone there myself but there's something i think about she even in the brief part that depicts her in the beginning it seems clear that she's sort of out of place in her family um and um and then yeah there's all kinds of interesting things about their relationship along the way what i like about that movie and i had to think about it recently because i've read stuff about it that bothered me or it bothered me the fact that i haven't really thought about it before for people haven't watched the movie so here's a young underage girl who kind of comes onto him first of all i think she actually just doesn't know what like familial love is so this is the only way she knows how to express love that's one and two is you know a lot of bad people in this world would take advantage of that right and the fact that um she finally met a human being who doesn't and is just there to protect her that's a real sort of um i don't know a powerful statement of what it means to be sort of like a father figure i suppose a protector so that that to me i i i love the idea of being the sort of the the protector that there's something like uh something worthwhile in this world to protect amidst all the cruelty that's all around so that's that's a beautiful kind of you're basically saving this young humans or you're repairing this young human's path to love to real love in life because that idea of love was destroyed for her just family everything is is everything is uh sort of uh everything around is broken and he's kind of repairing it by re-establishing what that kind of love can be i don't know and the plant that's spreading they save the plant also well there's also just a simple the simplicity of the film just from a cinematic perspective is beautiful the music the way it looks the minimalism even the violence was beautiful yeah violence it was over the top and also the the bad guy the bad cop played by um gary oldman yeah he was amazing yeah i think he was listening to beethoven or something like that and you're taking some sort of pills and drugs and some kind and uh so there was a kind of like uh like like it's part of the orchestra like the violence was part of the of some kind of musical creation yeah it's interesting because i i turn away from violence or films usually that have violence or tv or anything that has that sort of um element to it except in certain cases where um where the violence is beautiful yeah yeah or um did you see the movie true romance uh yes that's my second favorite movie okay that's probably my favorite movie yeah oh well interesting that's my second favorite movie um that's that's a more uh simple kind of love but also with the violence that is beautiful yeah as you could say yeah and my um my favorite scene is the one with patricia arquette and james gandolfini oh yeah was she there's a shotgun involved yeah yeah and then it actually makes me cry every time i see it for some reason [Laughter] so for people who haven't seen the film i think i think he's actually he think he's hitting her or um like there's blood and violence and so on because he's resisting being murdered yeah there's a lot of violence and then you know he throws her into the glass um the shower yeah thing and she's all cut up and beat up and only and she laughs yeah there's just so much passion in it you know she's she knows she's gonna or in that moment she knows or thinks she knows that she's gonna die anyway yeah because she she knows he's gonna kill her yeah so she kind of gives it her gives it all she has and um but she also just says guts she's not afraid yeah well and also she's um you know she loves clarence yeah the love comes through through that violence yeah yeah just like uh clarence her fella in that film uh has the same kind of thing when he visits well it was gary oldman again it was gary oldman again that's right the pimp looking very drexel drexel yeah yeah and he's also fearless in that interaction saying she's not mine it's interesting that movie is so romantic and that a happy ending spoiler alert in a way that's what i like about it too because i i feel like some movies should come with i don't want to watch a movie if it's going to be devastating usually unless it's worthwhile in some other way but i'm kind of sensitive and i don't want um i don't like movies that have a terrible ending you know i mean there's a book i read because it got so many good reviews and the very last scene the woman steps in front of a train and it was like um so i'm partial to movies with happy endings leon ends with loss beyond the movie right but it's still inspiring a love persists in some kind of form yeah persists and the plant and the plant um okay sure sure true romance does have one of the i mean it's probably unhealthy and the whole scene is just amazing you're so cool was she is that one knowing where she just kind of looks at clarence and her son and child or whatever and she's saying you're so cool you're so cool yeah that's that's love i just that movie has so much in it because it's you know it's funny and there's so many so many good actors in that film and brad pitt uh plays in that film a pivotal role of pothead on couch yeah they're just they're all so good and funny and michael rappaport yeah and um and even val kilmer people don't realize he's in the movie because he doesn't look like himself um wait what what is val val kilmer's in the very end it's um you know when he's there's like the elvis sitting there talking to him in the end yeah that's val kilmer yeah you don't notice it unless you yeah somehow either are very perceptive or noticed in the credits yeah and uh quentin tarantino wrote the film i think yes which is interesting uh directed by tony scott and the music is uh beautiful too and christopher walken and um um dennis hopper dennis hopper dennis hopper plays clarence's dad uh dad and they have this very racist sounding scene but the big uh important aspect of that scene is it's a father willing to die to protect the sun i mean it's so much so much beautiful violence there is there is i love that phil so much uh and she's a prostitute or not really part-time short time no it was her first time first time yeah okay and he saved her and uh hmm my third favorite film has no violence whatsoever what's your third um a room with a view i feel like you'd like it it's um um i forget the author it's a book and i i read the book much later um but it's um helena bonham carter and um uh daniel day-lewis is in it and julian sands daniel day-lewis is a fascinating character he's amazing in this film because he plays he's very funny he sort of plays a he's a comical character which is unlike most of what he does i think i don't watch a ton of movies so um but yeah he played his his role is funny well that's a that's a heck of a top three uh you you brought me some books some bread and books yeah some russian bread russian inspired bread yeah i mean it's latvian but it's similar to close enough similar to what's made in russia and it's made at a russian bakery and your dad is from right my dad is from latvia yeah so you got me some books beautiful ruins yeah and if you never read them who cares that's totally fine you know people give you books and then you feel like you just you're i don't you sort of feel like i i see this is we'll we'll talk about this this is part therapy session i don't feel the need to to satisfy people's happiness that's a good thing okay so but they it could also be a an opportunity to experience something i never otherwise would have so beautiful ruins it's a book that made me laugh and cry and it's just a happy story and for some reason i don't know exactly why but for some reason um when you asked me to come first it just i thought oh i'm gonna bring a copy of that book that's you just felt it came the voice told you yeah there's others darkness visible these are more a memoir of madness compelling harrowing a vivid portrait of a debilitating disorder it offers the solace of shared experience the new york times this is a little bit about this book that reminds me of um the carl deisseroth book because he writes about his own condition in um i mean he's an amazing writer so he writes about it in this beautiful way and oddly enough in some ways it's kind of delightful so it's not at all a depressing book at least i didn't find it depressing at all i don't think it is um but he writes about his own experience with depression in such a beautiful way um my own copy is full of underlines um i would have loved that copy too i i would love to look into the underlines and the and then the books with notes those little secrets that people leave part of why i like paper books is because i underline i tend to underline like crazy the the carl dice book is full of underlines too well i do the same thing on kindle but um and then you can actually more effectively go back to the things you've underlined because you highlight and so on but in fact when you underline in on paper books you sometimes never go back which always makes me sad to the book to the things you've underlined in the paper books yeah in the paper books oh i do i go back yeah i go back a lot do you wonder what what the heck you were thinking about when you wrote something no well sometimes i underline things that are well also what i do is i have a whole file in evernote of transcribed quotes from books ones that i want to save so i might underline a lot of things in a book and then maybe like a third of them i want to write them down somewhere so i i write those down and i think even the time it takes to transcribe it is somehow worthwhile it's like searing it in your brain and um and you're reliving the memory having it read it the first time yeah and then sometimes i'll pick up books i even um and sometimes i just underline sentences that are it's not the content of the sentence it's more that it's just a beautifully written sentence or like a particularly apt metaphor or something that's that's really nice um and i like paper books too because i bought beautiful ruins i would have never heard of it i don't think except one of my favorite things is to go to used bookstores actually goodwill sometimes has really good big book selections and depending on the area where you go um sometimes you find a lot of treasures there and what ends up happening a lot is i end up buying books that i know sometimes also because i lost all my belongings at one point so i'll very often buy books that i've already read just to have them and um but then what always ends up happening is i'll find there'll be a couple of books that i buy that i've never heard of the author i don't really know anything about i don't know anything about the book at all but something drew me to it and what i like about that is you're buying you're buying used books so it costs a dollar or two so if you made a mistake like no big deal who cares so but every time i come back with a book haul there's usually at least one gem that i end up loving and i'm so glad that i read it and beautiful ruins was that book for me and i was drawn to it because of the cover art like i just loved i just loved the cover and the colors and um and then i picked it up and read the bag and and bought it and um i also feel bad sometimes buying used books when the author is still alive because i feel like if you write a book you should get the the royalties so um and but you get to live with that regret well also i mean i'll usually end up putting a picture of leon reading the book online and then other people buy it and read it and so i feel like i've made up for make up for it i've made up for depriving him of the royalties i used to live in cambridge massachusetts i know it well i used to hang out in the pit in harvard square with my green and blue hair when i was very way too young to be doing that by myself and there's a guy that i think has been there for a long time sort of between kendall and central that would just lay out these books and sell them i always loved that guy whoever he was he had a cool hat he's an older gentleman and you could just tell he's seen some things i don't know who he is i always wanted to actually like talked to him for a long time but i was too afraid maybe because i wouldn't be able to handle what he had to tell me i didn't because i almost wanted to maintain the innocence of just okay here's this guy but he's he was so every time you would ask him a question about a book first of all he's read all of them oh that's interesting which means he's traveled quite a few places inside these worlds and then you would tell him i would look at a book right and you just he would catch you being curious about it and then he would walk up to you and then he would start talking about the book and he would always forget that you were there he's almost like he's not trying to sell you the books start talking to himself yeah yeah yeah like almost like an ex-girlfriend he's visiting through this book or something did you buy books from him yeah yeah definitely but the experience of just just being there because he lays them out and people actually that watch or listen to this probably will be able to tell me what his name is because i'd love to find that guy again i'm sure he's still there maybe he'll have him on the podcast i would 100 will uh but this it's almost terrifying um i'm not sure i can handle because he's been through some things i'm not sure if he's homeless or or just looks like it yep that's sometimes a thing and uh some of my favorite people either are harmless or look like it so okay what's the third one the uh a confession of a sociopath by m.e thomas a life spent hiding in plain sight it's a book i recommend a lot um because i've read a lot about sociopathy and i've read all the books by psychologists and um and this one's written by a woman who um understands herself that she is a sociopath and so it's beautifully written but i learned i learned more from that book than from any other book and i think i thought about it a long time ago i think a lot of conversations you've talked a lot about good and evil and you know whether everybody's really good or some people are not good um and i think sociopathy is that is something that i think the world needs to understand much better and so that that book helped me understand a lot and it's beautifully written and she tackles all the really interesting moral questions like um you know like what if we were able to definitively diagnose people in some way like there was a you could immediately identify who's a full-blown sociopath and then what as a society would you do with them because in most cases you know they're just going to cause destruction and pain and harm and or potentially rise to power and become president or something um so it's i just found that book fascinating and we'll return to this idea because it's fascinating we'll return to human psychology and human nature but let's go through um let's go through the timeline of your life let's take a stroll so uh you wrote that the documentary about you called bad vegan fame fraud fugitives is not a documentary it got some things right something's wrong and some were quote disturbingly misleading so let's go through and get things right today um first can i give you a whirlwind summary the way i understand it and also for context of people so 2004 you matthew kenny and jeffrey chattero open pure foods and wine in new york city did i say their names correctly pure food and wine no they're oh theirs well yeah matthew kenny jeffrey chattaro yeah yeah so it's uh and i'll ask about what it takes to to to launch and run a restaurant in new york city that's a fascinating story in itself so it's an upscale raw food restaurant all right that's 2004 2007 you opened one lucky duck juice and takeaway and second and third locations in 2009 and 14. uh all of those things closed in uh 2016 15 16 15 and 16 okay all right 2009 jeffrey lends you 2.1 million dollars to buy the business outright and matthew is out matthew was out earlier than that and then time passed time passed and i had um what was complicated is i had started the one lucky duck brand on my own um at first it was a com that was doing like delivery it was a it was a com where people could order ingredients and things and all of the products that we made and packaged so we made a bunch of cookies and snacks and things that were i think different and if i may say so myself better than other um strong words products already yeah but then about the cookies but i feel like i can brag about our food and products because um i wasn't oh you know a few recipes recipes early on i came up with but it was the people that worked with me that created really good recipes and products and i was just kind of there curating it all or um helping to get it out there what was your favorite thing that you've created maybe yourself eat not you created but this whole all of these efforts have created in terms of meal like you said cookies what are we talking about that's a hard question um it's just okay not the favorite but like something that pops into memory that brought you joy the malomar everybody loved the malamar it was so very often we made like raw vegan versions of things that people are um familiar with so it was a i think it was pecans it was like a salty cookie made with nuts and then covered in chocolate and then there's a big blob of coconut cream um i love coconut which it didn't taste coconutty um our ice cream was made with a coconut also it's like the meat from coconuts pureed and then there's some soaked cashews in there but anyways a blob of vanilla flavored cream kind of like a a you know like a healthy natural version of fluff i don't know if you're familiar with fluff basically every single word you say i'm not familiar with you should see my diet i don't it's like steak and vegetables a fluff is like a thing that i remember it from my childhood like peanut butter and fluff is a ridiculously delicious combination is it fluffy or is it it's like a marshmallow it's basically like like if you softened marshmallows and made it into a luxurious amazing goose it's like a fan and then put it in a jar okay and then they just spreadable it's spreadable marshmallows kind of oh i see i think that's yes so spreadable marshmallows got it yeah so there's a big blob i didn't know that existed that's a thing fluff i know does everyone for you do people know about this oh yeah everybody knows people i mean i think so people know about fluff and see i think i went i i took the road less traveled by you know i went the the peanut butter and nutella road in terms of spreadable things nutella is like the chocolate version and then fluff is like the vanilla equivalent sort of cool but i think commercial fluff that you buy in the store is just like sugar and whatever else they put in there um anyway not actually fluffy it's it's kind of fluffy okay but it's wet because nutella is it's like fluffy yeah it's it so it's like nutella if you whipped it and then kind of got a little bit like a little bit aerated so it's a bit more fluffy so fluff was a part of the formula here so it was fun but so the the coconut cream that we made was like a healthy version of fluff oh kind of nice except it would you know you could make a quenelle like a like a little scoop of it and it would stay in that form malomars were refrigerated and then there's like chocolate um drizzled over that so it had that like salty sweet thing going on um that was probably my favorite that's a dessert yeah it was like a it was like a dessert snack it wasn't as you wouldn't order it on the restaurant menu but in the takeaway you could get them or sometimes some people would get them um shipped on dry ice and pay a lot of money like a lot of money to have them shipped on dry ice people are funny i know i kind of want to like name drop because it was tom brady used to order them oh that's awesome yeah they would order those shipped um on ice to boston um yeah continuing on in 2011 you meet anthony strangers on twitter and then in real life also around this time i think before you got your rescue dog a pit bull named leon yeah 2011 2010. do you remember um it was september so because i think he was born roughly around march i gave him a designated birthday of march 10th 2010. why is that why why march 10th i wrote about the story of adopting him on my website a long time ago and then i reposted it here on my current website and um what happened i got weirdly obsessed with leon before he was leon he was a a dog in a shelter named quinn and um i couldn't stop thinking about him and him specifically him specifically you saw him and there's something very special about him i was trying to convince somebody else to adopt a dog so and i alec baldwin yeah and it didn't occur to me that i like how you didn't name drop him but you know i'm tom brady i like it um so i was trying to convince him to get a dog cause i thought you know he should have a dog i saw leon's picture and just got weirdly obsessed with it in a way that i couldn't really explain and um i was laying in bed one night and thinking i just couldn't stop thinking about him um the dog and the paper or the his description in the shelter bio said that he was roughly five months old or however whatever it gave us his age i went back and it would have been march 20 would have been march of that year that he was born and um i had a cat that i was particularly attached to i had two cats brother and sister but the the boy cat we had sort of like a something that felt like a you know like we'd look at each other and like there was something there i don't know what it was but um and in fact when he got sick i i knew it before he even had any symptoms it was like something in the way that he looked at me i knew something was wrong and then uh was it friendship was it like uh was their power dynamic cats seem to not really give a fuck yeah they seem to dismiss you usually yeah your your entire worth as a human being right in a single look was that there or um he was more dog-like he would occasionally fetch like this little styrofoam thing i had he would fetch it and bring it back and he was um friendly and you know if somebody came over you would jump in their lap um he was less standoffish than most cats but there was just something about the way he would look at me i don't know and i maybe probably in his mind he's just a cat i give him food whereas in my mind it's some kind of you know great soul connection great but not enough long-running uh romance not in his kitty mind but either way so he died in march and i thought um so i sort of concocted this i just thought um you know that well if he died and he died on march 10th and so i thought well maybe leon was born that same day and that's why that's why i'm so drawn to him i don't know that that mean okay that makes sense but then you just found that like sort of when you saw him you just like there's something it was this picture yeah oh the picture and you were drawn something about the personality in the eyes it was something about his picture i don't know what it was and um and everybody at the time was like what are you thinking why would you get a dog you can't you know you can't even take care of yourself you're overworked and busy and why would you get a five-month-old pitbull mix you know why not get an older dog that's easier to take care of and um for me it was like i don't i don't want any dog i don't want my intention isn't to get a dog but there's something about this dog that i have to get and so i went to see him um and then i had already filled out an application it was just i went to see him and then i it was the afternoon and i sort of decided in my head like all right i'm coming back to get him i have to and so the next morning i got on the subway i went back to get him um and i was crying on the subway and i remember thinking that people i don't like crying in public i cry a lot but i don't like crying in front of other people and um i love it i thought people on the train looking at me probably think that you know i just somebody died or sorry you're crying on the way there on the way back on the way there to get him yeah i don't and i don't know why i was crying it was just something about it was overwhelming so tortillas of happiness or tears of something something i yeah i think tears are overwhelming i i know i'm like jumping off but there was some i don't know i'm trying was it in your conversation or the book carl diceroff talks about tears of joy and trying to explain them and he said something about how it was like about you know because tears of sadness could be understood in a having like a evolutionary purpose um but why tears of joy and i think he said it was something about like hope that could be like lost so if you cried at a wedding it might be like you're crying because their love is beautiful and you're crying because you know they could get hit by a bus tomorrow or something you know like it had something to do with that and i thought um but i thought to me it feels like overwhelm because then how would that explain music because music will make me cry because it's it's anything beautiful like love you realize you're going to have it's going to be over one day or it's just overwhelming it could be overwhelming i think it's just overwhelming but over it could like if you had to explain like one way to explain it as you're saying is it's so awesome that it breaks your heart that it's gonna be over this feeling is going to be over the either it's the song or the person you're going to lose them one day but even when you're just watching something that this is completely ridiculous but i remember one time i probably was hormonal or something but it was like an episode of family feud years ago and the fam oh no um wheel of fortune it was wheel of fortune and some family like won all this money and they were so happy like it just they were so happy they must probably needed the money or something and i started crying and i'm thinking why am i crying but i think it's just i think it's just like an overwhelming i think it's overwhelming in some way on the surface because is a relief like you feel better after you cry but that's not doesn't explain the crying you feel better after you cry and you're saying it's overwhelming but that's on the surface the question is what's going on underneath that's the younging shadow and i don't think neither you or i can answer that question right but there's something going on there's probably something that touches you in some specific way yeah um and so you were crying in the subway so i was crying in the subway very it's a very new york thing to do yeah i well that's one of the things i love about new york is people you can be weird and do strange things and nobody's going to look at you strangely or the fascinating thing about new york is super crowded and yet you can still feel super alone but also energized because a lot of other things and places will make me feel depleted but there's something about the energy of new york specifically that feels energizing i mean everybody is going up about their day excited for a future they're building and so on and that that could be energy sure it could be overwhelming though it can be yeah i mean also depending on what neighborhood and what part well i'm just talking about the subway right yeah and then there's the musicians i love new york new york at his best is a special place i've never lived but every time i visit it's so many characters so many fascinating people yeah and and then there's a bunch of people always crying in the subway and you're one of those people i was one of those people one day yeah so i befriended some busking musicians like the the guys that just play out on the street these two young guys playing guitar and i felt like it was one of those moments where it was like handed camera because nobody was paying attention and i thought it was like i was so beautiful i may have cried or almost cried or um but anyway i ended up becoming friends with them and um helping them out in some ways and um and i knew i was like well they're gonna do really well um and now they're like playing large places and it's kind of fun to watch via instagram you know they're going on tour in europe and they were these two scrappy guys well now it's just one of the guys and um but they had like no money nowhere to live nothing and um another and they didn't quit they're on tour no persisted yeah exactly so um but i cried on the subway and i got there and um he was there and i adopted him but it just felt very profoundly um like a force that was beyond me like i couldn't not get him so he was the same in person as he was in the picture like meaning in terms of like something like pulling you towards him like something yeah when i first met him the day before he was really distracted which i think is um you know he is a puppy that spends most of his day in a cage which is not natural so when i think let him they let me take him for a walk and he was kind of you know distracted and all over the place but then when we put him back in the cage he sort of lay down and looked at me and i looked back at him and of course i imagined all kinds of i just looked at him and i thought all right i'm don't worry i'm coming back to get you like i'll i'll get you so um yeah it just it felt like um it felt like something that i i had no choice that i had to do and that was the beginning of a 12-year journey together an ongoing an ongoing one but so i wrote about these things on my website and um and i think it was you know among the many things that was later weaponized by um anthony strange's just oh the fact that because i was so open to heart about it yeah and also just it's not like i believe that he was you know that i was just expressing my feelings about how i felt going to get him that there was something about leon and specifically that i it was like i felt like i had to get him so um is there words you can put to your connection with leon like is it love is it friendship is it some kind of like what is it or or are we getting to the crying and being overwhelmed something you just can't put words to yeah it's probably something that's hard to put words to kind of like i sort of feel like love being something that's hard to define is part of is the definition of love the fact that you can't define it you know the moment you define it you're no longer talking about love sort of something like that um so well my definition of love is whatever's going on in true romance yeah i don't know let me fly through the timeline before we get to any of the interesting details so in 2011 you meet anthony stranges then in 2012 you to get married uh 2015 the staff walk out due to failure to pay from the two restaurants it reopens in april of 2015 and july of that year there's another walkout and so on there's all this kind of confusing timeline well it's not to me that's not even the point is in 2015 there's chaos happening okay uh 2016 in the spring pure foods and wine closes closed in um 2015 2015. okay there's some factual stuff that's not yeah maybe correct man to me it's not that important to me the spirit of the thing is important okay may 12 2016 you and your then husband anthony strange's were arrested after he ordered pizza using his real name okay in may 2017 you pleaded guilty to stealing more than two million dollars from investors and scheming to defraud as well as this is from wikipedia yeah wrong well let me just finish reading it and then you tell me why it's wrong in may 2017 you pleaded guilty to stealing more than two million dollars from investors and scheming to defraud as well as criminal tax fraud charges why is wikipedia wrong and how dare you well it's about i mean i did plead guilty to those things which um i had to oh i was i got a jury duty summons and i had to fill out like what charges i pled guilty to um and i had to go online and look it up because i didn't really remember which is i thought that was interesting i had to go look it up but actually let me finish the time because there's one more point oh yeah march 16th 2022 bad vegan documentary comes out where you're interviewed does they tell the story some stuff is true sometimes some is not some is disturbingly misleading as you said okay timeline over anyway what what's wrong with the um how would you elaborate onto the you pleading guilty for two million dollars stealing so a lot of people plead guilty when they're for reasons other than they're actually guilty so you know it's even right now if i knew that i was gonna have to spend four months or three and a half um at rikers and i was thinking about this recently and even if i knew that i'd be acquitted at the end of a trial i very likely would have just taken the four months because um you know the stress of going through a trial but in particular be incredibly stressful not knowing the outcome um and then money and expense i didn't have and so you know people plead guilty all the time even if they don't think that they that they should um and my situation was so complicated and hard to understand that it just was the easier thing to do but also i just was kind of going on the advice of lawyers and um so the the choice just so i understand was to plead guilty or to go through a lengthy trial and that trial would stretch a long time and it would be extremely stressful and extremely expensive because you have to pay the lawyers right and i didn't have anything right and so a lot of people in that situation might choose to plead guilty and so that doesn't necessarily mean the full heaviness of that statement of guilt right and i think people plead guilty all the time in situations where they're being threatened with uh like a heavy sentence um and they sort of feel like they have no choice but that's kind of part of a lot of things that are messed up about the system overall that didn't necessarily apply in my case but so we'll talk about to what degree you're guilty and what that even means yeah yeah it because it depends on intention i think um yeah yeah but then the word intention also means a lot of things like the word love that's true um all right so the restaurant closed the first time when i was away and told to be off communication um and then i by anthony yes and then um he told you not to talk to anybody he told me not to like open email or look at my phone or whatever um and so when i came back and had to get it reopen which seemed like an unbelievably difficult task and i was kind of shocked that i was able to pull it off um you know i worked incredibly hard to get it reopened and you know because that placement meant everything to me and so i just like i just had to get it reopened are you surrounded by people that were just angry at you at that time not well just the staff and all that yeah but most of them came back a lot of them came back i think what was so unbelievably painful about that whole time um was like not being able to tell anybody what was really going on and in a sense not really knowing what was going on myself but not being able to like having to pretend all the time was just like so you didn't really tell anybody about uh anthony about him and what was really going on in part because i didn't really understand what was going on yeah so what i did was i raised money to reopen the restaurant and i think i raised something like eight maybe like 900 grand and probably 90 of that went to reopen the restaurant um and i even made two um sales tax payments right before we disappeared so it just sort of logically seemed like so i didn't it's not like all of this money was taken and then he and i ran off together with a whole bunch of money it was like i raised a bunch of money to reopen the restaurant you know because i wanted the restaurant to exist again and i wanted to you know i wanted to run it i wanted to reopen the restaurant and most of that money went to reopen the restaurant and then i disappeared so um sort of the the timeline gets a bit wonky so it's you know this impression was created that we ran off with a whole bunch of money and we didn't so you know if i wanted to be a criminal and steal a bunch of money why would i have put it all back into the restaurant and reopened it and then also made two ten thousand dollar sales tax payments that i didn't you know and i also repaid um you know ten thousand dollars of another loan i'm you know i was making repayments and stuff and then boom i disappear so is your mind going through a roller coaster here so could there be multiple use there so one one mind is like i love this restaurant i'm going to reopen it i'm this um chef business owner this person and then the other the other is a human that's in this uh complicated love affair it wasn't a love affair okay these are just words how can i okay what i don't want to uh lo i say that lightly uh but also not because love can make us do dark things and you can say that's not love but okay the thing that traps us the things that pulls us in to a connection with another human being that's love even when it's abusive and dark and toxic and all those kinds of things in some cases i think like if it's voluntary but in other cases um somebody pulls you in so it's not like you're drawn towards them they they pull you in so just to clarify even when it's not physical when it's when the pull is with words so it's emotional yeah okay where is your mind when you raise eight to nine hundred thousand dollars to open the restaurant working your ass off to open this thing okay making payments and then all of a sudden disappearing what where was your mind um if you had a lengthy conversation with carl dice roth in privacy what would you be telling him as your therapist i would probably be asking him questions okay no i don't get carl as part of this well actually i have more questions for andrew hueberman because you know i i've had to investigate all of these things myself like dissociation um and even there's a psychologist who believes that he must have used neuro-linguistic programming on me which is something that keith rainery from the nexium cult he was known to have used that with people um and i think neuro-linguistic programming is kind of the same as like a sort of like hypnotism the only reason i know about what nlp is is because in in what i do there's something called natural language processing artificial intelligence stuff so it has the same uh like three letters right uh what was the other thing that nlp neuro-linguistic linguistic yeah anyway all right well uh we we talked about andrew my friend andrew hubermann offline and you definitely you should do a podcast with him uh he's a he's a fascinating he's such a brilliant and kind human being uh definitely worth talking to yeah i've listened to a lot of a lot of us and you said that you listen to a lot of his instructions on getting light in the morning or whatever during the day it's very important for your mental like there's all these kinds of studies it's good for your for your mind for your oh and also the other thing that he got me to do is to try to delay having coffee so instead of having coffee right when you wake up i always drink a lot of water first yeah but then um instead of having coffee right away if you wait an hour or an hour and a half or two hours then your body is able to naturally do something that drinking coffee too soon would sort of blunt that so then you'll be more tired in the afternoon so if you wait an hour and a half or two hours or as long you know before you have your first cup of coffee then you won't be as tired in the afternoon interesting um there's a lot of does it work yes one coffee addict talking to another coffee addict yes it works and so i try to get up and do other things first um before i have coffee um so and the light thing also makes a lot of sense to me um getting light early in the morning i have a one of those bright light boxes um and i would love to have an apartment that had a little deck or something where i could just step outside because when you live in an apartment you kind of have to like go all the way outside and then there's people everywhere and so to get that early morning light isn't that hard to do when you're are people good for you or bad for you what does andrew humor say about that i'm just kidding it's a joke okay okay so moving back to where was your mind that led you to disappear to uh did you guys go to vegas first and then tennessee no i kind of refer to it as like the road trip from hell it's a very hunter s thompson way to describe it right you went back to the back country maybe it was sort of hunters thompson-esque except without actual drugs um that was one of the first questions my father asked me was was it drugs and i wished that i could have said yes yeah because i didn't know how to explain what had happened um but so really took me away involuntarily except you know of course he wasn't holding a gun to my head but all along it was like a metaphorical gun was there ever physical abuse um no what would qualify as sexual abuse yes um but physically no a couple of times we would get into slightly physical fights but he never um i mean he was big and as large and blubbery as he was he was he was also really strong so sometimes he would like subdue me but other than that no there wasn't physical violence but a lot of people will say that um the psychological violence is um i don't want to diminish physical violence but some people say that the psychological and emotional violence is more destructive it's just that the physical violence is easier to identify teacher identify and and it seems kind of more straightforward whereas psychological you know and you have a bruise on your face or you break a bone and those things hopefully heal in a visible way but psychological stuff you know you can't easily identify or understand or others can't easily identify it and then you find yourself crying for no reason at a beautiful song at some point yes and it's that that has to do something happening in the depth of your mind okay so he took you away but where was the i mean where was your mind that was doing both of those things was able to be taken away but also was pushing to the the the flourishing the reopening and the flourishing the restaurant well you know i wouldn't have reopened the restaurant with and then knowing i was gonna all of a sudden be taken away from it and it was gonna get closed again you know it's like why why would i do that why would anybody do that um and one of the things that i tried to do towards the end was i was trying to get myself off the bank accounts because i didn't want him to be able to get money out of me and so there was uh one time when i tried to get one of the investors we went to the bank together to put her on as the signer and take me off and because we didn't have the operating agreement they wouldn't let us do it so it was like this little snafu and um so all of these things are sort of the opposite of criminal intent but that's a that's a legal thing what's what's going on in your mind at this time i don't know i mean well you always did you give yourself a chance to just think no and i think that's part of one of the things that might have saved me or anybody that's pulled into a cult one of the things that they do is they keep you exhausted overwhelmed confused and afraid um and so you don't have any time to think so you're just kind of constantly running and you're confused and then things are happening it's funny there's i have some quotes in my book draft because i listen to a lot of podcasts i don't know what the logistics are of like crediting a quote from a podcast in a book yeah but i have a couple i think it was um andrew huberman on joe rogan said something about um if a animal if a human or animal i don't know how he would know the human or animal is stressed um and i'm paraphrasing this horribly but they're they're much more easily prone to um be not prone to but forced into delusional thinking um and so that quote resonated for me because you know he kept me in this incredibly stressed out afraid confused state and then whatever he's sort of planting in my mind i'm gonna be that much more likely to just kind of go along with it well we'll see how this whole journey ends let's actually just step back a little bit and just looking at the employees at the restaurant and so on do you have remorse for what happened especially from the perspective of the employees and the staff yeah i mean hurting them was sort of the last thing that i would ever have wanted to do and in part i mean there was financial harm um but i don't i don't know whether it's more important or not but you know it was taking a place that was very much like a family to them um and it was as if i destroyed it and so i think that because we were so much like a family it was almost as if like mom went off the deep end and got together with some cuckoo abusive guy and and sort of abandoned them and they didn't know what was going on and what was happening and so do you regret lying to them i regret lying to anybody in all of those circumstances but i wasn't lying you know he made me think that you know everything was going to be reversed and okay and anybody that money was borrowed from they would get it back you know maybe tenfold and so it was this weird situation of having like one foot in his reality and potentially believing the things he was saying or even over time wanting to believe them more and more because the alternative was so the alternative was worse the alternative was like was increasingly a bigger and bigger nightmare so so there's this whole situation where you're constantly giving them money you're constantly borrowing borrowing money well this idea that'll be repaid like 100x fold right kind of like so sort of like lying to somebody because you're planning their surprise party you think like well i'm lying to somebody but um but it's because there's a good reason yeah you know it's sort of that's not a good example but but you could have not made it a surprise party and be like pull them in onto the planning of the party and be honest about like everything that's happening not in a negative way but like getting in on the fact that okay i just need to give money to this guy but we'll get he is a super rich person of some kind and he'll um repay i mean i wish i well because you're holding onto your time i mean that's part of the torture is that you're isolated and unable unable to tell anybody but you're not unable or he was telling you you're not allowed to say anything to anybody i mean you're choosing not to say anything but it's because of the sort of the weight of it because it's embarrassing to sort of is it embarrassing it's something i mean what why do you not tell others you know what what is that what's what what's happening to the mind where you don't tell others i don't know you're part of why the story you know everything that happened is hard to summarize and talk about in any concise way is that so much of it happens in this very slow slow slow way and um you know people always use the whole like frog and boiling water example um so that by the time you realize you're fucked it's too late um and it and it seems hard to believe or understand to other people because they see where you are or where you ended up and they think well how did you let that happen and well i don't know i yeah would i have willingly destroyed my life and hurt all the people i care about and you know allowed my mother to get hurt and i wouldn't have ever ever willingly done that so something else must have happened and that's um that's the part that's difficult to understand let me ask you about another hearty question yeah do you deserve most or all of the blame for the failure of the business or are others at fault too well the business didn't fail it was doing well and so it's closing closing it's like it was destroyed and who deserves the blame for that i'm asking from your perspective when you think about it in in the privacy in your mind are you angry at anthony are you angry yourself both i think that um in the privacy of my own mind and to everybody listening um it's i feel responsible i feel responsible in the same way that if you kind of did something if you were driving you did something stupid and caused an accident in which other people died you would feel i think horrifically responsible and you'd blame yourself because maybe you looked away or checked your phone or something um but it you didn't intend to kill those people of course so for me it's like i didn't intend to kill you know sometimes i say like my own child i don't know if that's offensive to some people but it's like as if i killed my own child it was it was a business but it was special um so i don't feel guilt i feel responsibility and then um you know i'm angry at him even though that anger is pointless okay because this has come up let's continue uh with the hard questions are they gonna get easier they're gonna get it okay most of them are easy um this is this is fun we're having fun you post it on instagram the ending no i'm gonna cite instagram like it's shakespeare okay the ending is disturbingly misleading but still i'm very grateful for this coverage let's talk about the documentary in quotes documentary i'm okay with the criticism and judgment but would rather be based on what's true and then you say a couple more sentences and then you say leon who has his own instagram account yes one lucky rescue dog says hello he loves you all even if you call me a quote defective arrogant sociopath it's all okay so the hard question do you think you are in part a sociopath no would you know it if you were yes how does this work so what have you learned from reading this book i had all these interesting thoughts about all these sort of questions and thoughts about it because um the book i'm reading now that i'm only about a third of the way through she talks about um some of the things in the brain structure that are particular to sociopaths and so then it makes you think well what if that could be tweaked in some way like could you unsociopath a sociopath is it nature or nurture i suppose is the question i think it's both um i think it's genetic and then it's like genes that are turned on by things like a particularly violent childhood or some sort of dysfunction so i think somebody could have the gene it's not turned on and then um the sociopaths have the gene and it's turned on so so sociopath means that you're not able to be empathetic or you're generally not empathetic to the to the suffering of others or to the emotions of others i mean it's a hollowness so it's like you don't have um just completely lacking the capacity i mean it's tragic because they wouldn't understand or feel love but it's like a hollowness um and and then something also about the wiring and i think also because of that hollowness they're able to incredibly quickly look at others and identify their insecurities and buttons and weak spots so they're incredibly good at manipulation is that because they're just able to objectively observe the situation i wonder probably in part but there was some other explanation related to the brain structure that i read somewhere that made sense to me and i won't like remember it because i don't usually you're not andrew huberman who's no reference like i'll listen to it perfectly yeah every single line from every book or paper he's ever read yes right i don't remember things in that way i try to usually remember the conclusions right so like i might remember that he he might give a whole long explanation about why it's good to do this or to take this supplement that's a bad habit i have sometimes i'll order supplements and then by the time they arrive i've forgotten why i forgot why just take them all supposed to say thompson but the healthy version i hope we get to talk about food because i feel like yes you have a brain that should be fed only the best food oh wow so we can talk about that later i have a lot of philosophies about that but certainly fluff is not in the best what is best we'll definitely talk about food throughout what is best that makes me think of conan and i just talked to oliver stone who i didn't realize wrote conan the barbarian uh do you know that in my head i i pictured conan o'brien that's what he's also saying wait why i love him but i when you said that i was like why did that make you think of conan o'brien yeah yeah i love him so much such a brilliant human yeah sociopathy sociopathy yeah so it's stuff about the brain fine but how do you know you're not a sociopath would you know it am i a sociopath how would i know it how you know well having listened to a lot why wouldn't i be able to be good at faking it isn't that what well there's the master and the cover of this book i don't think we would be doing the work don't worry you'd probably be running for office or you know a trader on wall street or one of the things about sociopaths is they um they kind of need like this stimulation of risk and danger um well i need okay sure more than average i like um okay but wall street there's a fakeness like i don't like the fakeness of what the game of it yeah that's why i left i didn't i just it was a strange environment okay so you're not you're not a quote defective arrogant sociopath what does defective even mean i know well i think that somebody had just called me that and i think that you know it's easy for people to say like don't read the comments but it's hard not to because then also you'd miss the beautiful ones or sometimes like you have to go on there to to check a private message and you just stuff it's there people saying terrible things so um i try to people say you know don't pay attention to the comments it's hard not to but i try to even with the documentary you try to still kind of see to look to look for the for the good ones for the kind ones for the support there were overwhelming kind comments and so that that helped and felt a lot better but sometimes um sometimes the the negative comments are based on you know they're based on false information so if somebody unders if somebody knew everything that happened and then wanted to judge me or say things like that's somehow at least that's all right but um so you think people saying these things based on um things that are totally false it's just it's hard it's it's hard to just let that go um yeah but i know that people also say things you know for their own personal reasons i had a fascinating exchange with somebody who direct messaged me and called me trash um you responded i responded because it was i no it was amazing so okay i would do this wow it's sort of like a i might be procrastinating or but i would scroll through because the private messages were overwhelming and there's still just this massive backlog that i'll never probably get to read but the one that called you trash as a pickup as an opener you're like this is interesting i just was in a mood yeah and so i responded and i wish i hadn't deleted it because i i sort of deleted a bunch and then i was like oh why did i delete that one because i was curious what exactly i said to him but i responded to him um in a nice way and then he responded back and then it started this whole back and forth conversation um so he was kind quickly or no yes and then also like wanted to get to know me and lives in pennsylvania and was like i'll come to you i'm like do you realize if we you know if somehow this just turned into like that would be our how did you meet story well he called me trash online that's pretty good yeah he ended up having such an insightful comment i just found it interesting and i think he at first he said i never imagined you'd reply which is you know it's like part of the whole thing with social media although this guy wasn't anonymous um was not anonymous no he had a i think he had a private account but it's like his name and his face was there and people forget that you're a human being when they message you exactly folks when you message me i'm a human being so i told him that that was you know like that that i was hurtful yeah and um and i guess i wanted to understand more why he said it and it was surprisingly insightful but he said something about again i wish i hadn't deleted it that he um he was like i guess i was just angry because um like that guy he said something like i guess i was just angry because that guy got you and i would have you know so it made me think of the whole like sort of in-cell jealousy thing that can be very terrifying if you're female is that like if you reject a guy they might turn around and be violent or angry at you yeah and um so his well to be fair there's a dormant anger in probably all of us i believe there's a capacity for cruelty and anger and destruction all of us and the whole struggle of life is to uh emphasize the good stuff yeah yeah so it's not just an insult thing it's true for men and women both capable of cruelty that's that is very true but this one guy so and then you put on my therapist hat because we we started what do we start with um i already forgot but the the oh back to sociopath no no just um you know maybe it's not the best idea to answer comments that start with your trash i don't do it all the time it just i happened upon that one and i was just in a certain mood i was just in a certain mood and let's let's and i like further offline sort of yeah um discuss this mood that you're in because it might get you in trouble at some point in your future okay uh um can we just jump back speaking of um guys that say as an opening to your trash how did you and anthony strange's meet can we jump around and tell some of the details here because that i believe the document doesn't cover that that well it's not clear there's some twitter interactions and you've kind of assumed um by the way i do think you need some social media coaching on this because i think you know um i you know i have i have some uh uh books you need to read i think uh some manuals on how to use twitter properly but anyway the that apparently you kind of thought that this person uh who turned out to be what was his name he called himself shane fox but he turned out to be anthony strange's that he was somehow friends with al baldwin because of their friendly interaction on twitter and so you started interacting with him and then there was how did that escalate quickly to um it escalated slowly and i think um i'm sure it was intentional because had i met him right away i would have probably thought like oh he's not what i thought he was and no thanks um but it was a long time it was many weeks of back and forth conversation um digitally one way or another so it was you know via twitter and then via direct message and then we both played words with friends back then and we would message in words with friends and then eventually you know we exchanged phone numbers how does word with friends work what's that i know that's a popular game is that scrabble it's like scrabble and you're playing other people and then there's like a chat function yeah and you can chat with them right so you were this intellectually stimulating game and you were what like flirting and that kind of stuff like witty banter yes aka flirting yes and but but um all of that lasted a really long time and and he would give me like little tiny bits and pieces of information about himself that made him seem kind of mysterious this is a dark mysterious man who was a navy seal strong yeah and he would always imply things versus say them outright so you're kind of always guessing and filling things up clint eastwood type of character he's not going to say it outright he's right he's a clint eastwood type of character he's not going to say it outright right he's just going to act badass yeah okay all right um and plus intellectual because the word words with words with friends is that that's the thing by the way so what is it i think it still exists yeah but i i i um i feel like if i started playing it again i would i'd get a little addicted and yeah um but stick to the coffee one of the interesting things is that i used to think that he like used an app to look up things but then he would do it in front of me he could like look at he was really good at it and he could look at the board and just like come up with you know a hundred point word that i'd never even heard of so i think he had a little bit of that something going on in his brain that was like um i don't know a little rain manish or something in the way that he was able to recall i think his recall is incredibly it's important if you if you lie a lot if you lie a lot yeah to have good recall okay so uh when uh it's okay so how did it escalate slowly from with friends to meeting in real life like what you know what i mean what okay i know i know it's not a love affair that said um when did you kind of get hooked by the oh i wonder you know like fall in love just a slow yeah what did you fall in love it was a slow process and i think um he found me at a time when there was sort of a perfect storm of the right conditions for me to to fall into um whatever i fell into with him um because that was heartbroken for the first time in my life where was the heartbreak coming from i had split with my boyfriend of four years um and that broke out yeah i mean it was i knew it was a relationship that i knew would end even when i got into it in the first place um because he's 15 years younger than me and surely that can't be the only character the only reason it wouldn't work i need to also give you a book on love what's it called i i'm i'm gonna write it i don't know okay just because there's nothing called a joke didn't bring okay there's no book on twitter and there's no book that i love a lot of people keep trying to write love that i really like that i think you might like but um like love languages i still have to read that no it's called on love all right i can't wait but i'm gonna read the cliff notes bye it's short by this guy named alan de botton i don't trust him already no it's funny and it's beautiful and shocking that he wrote it when he was very young um and i first heard him on a krista tippett podcast um that's how i end up reading a lot of books is like you hear somebody in a podcast um so you were heartbroken you knew it was going to work i knew it was going to work because the age difference that's just because the age difference also you know i just knew that eventually he'd want to move on and probably he'd find somebody younger and or was young enough that he still needed to go have a bunch of other experiences and um you know probably wanted a family or whatnot eventually so he was 21 and i was 34 when we first met um but and but then we ended up living together for four years and it was the most drama-free like there's no drama and i had just come off my prior relationship was matthew kenny which was very um dark in many ways and full of all kinds of yeah and i i just couldn't couldn't handle that so can i ask you a personal question yes between us and be two best friends um is there a part of you that's attracted to the drama and the chaos now looking back i feel like that happens a lot and maybe there was at some point but i don't think so because you know part what made that relationship work um with his name was tobin was that there was no drama not at all and i don't think i could have handled it and i feel that way now too like i just couldn't i can't like fighting or any kind of like like people being passive aggressive i can't i can't handle that um so you you've had enough storms now you want the calm yes yeah um so you knew it knew it wasn't work i knew it wasn't gonna be forever well that that could be just uh insecurity and cynicism but fair enough and then the heart was broken yes and now the heart was broken and fragile and um there to be manipulated in some sense yes and there's another person that i heard that i quoted my book saying that when you're heartbroken you're you can't rely on your instincts somehow your instincts are compromised when you're heartbroken um and maybe i'm just like looking for excuses i don't know why this happened but but i was heartbroken and then um i like to see people in their heart broken because it's like um shows how much they really loved somebody you know yeah it's it's it's sad but like sometimes love doesn't reveal itself as richly when you're in it versus when you lose it right that's probably true anyway so your judgment wasn't good great so now you're so you're lonely and you're super busy running the restaurant but when you get home you're lonely or like in between yeah and i was kind of overwhelmed and um but i'm sure you were getting a lot of really positive attention from other guys to while new york or too busy well no because because it was a restaurant there was constantly you're like constantly meeting people um and really interesting people and new york is full of a lot of um interesting people and you're you know attractive yes so you why are you connected to some uh mysterious distant man from somewhere else playing over words was because well i think now looking back i think it's because i felt like he understood me and um you know what was that feeling from coming from you think like what why did you why does one feel that you're understood one thing that made me extra easy to target is that i'd written a lot of very personal blogs and things so in addition to him asking me questions and me probably just being insanely open and answering whatever he asked me i'd also written and posted a bunch of personal blogs some of them i've reposted on my new website and then some of them i haven't but in one of them i go into detail about my frustrations um professionally in growing the business and having read that and being a very smart person he would have known kind of precisely what to say to get me um to get me drawn in so i think by waiting so long before we met in person he'd already he'd already gotten me hooked in a way that was gonna then make it possible for me to you know see him and even though he doesn't look like i thought he did i'll make excuses for it or um i mean it's a dangerous thing about um when people and i'm not saying i fell in love with him in this way that i feel like there's another explanation for the what felt like love um but when people fall in love quickly there's like danger that um because that's what happens first that the more you learn about them you'll sort of rationalize away things that might be red flags or things that you don't like so i think um i think it's safer to fall in love in a when you get to know somebody not in the context of dating them like like jim and pam on the office did you watch the office yeah because yeah of course i watch the office british office is better strong words but yes um but yes so well uh yeah fine true it might be but i also romantic yeah i like the romantic you could fall for you yeah it's fine you but just i think the better lesson is yes that's one thing to say but the other is like when you see the red flags notice them be a little better about noticing them but what if even amidst the passion what if like a brilliant woman kind of threw herself in your path right she she having because talking on a podcast is a little bit like having a blog where you over share because people learn everything about you what you like what you what what you don't like what your wants and dreams and you know so some woman like could pretend to run like throw herself in your path seemingly accidentally and then you meet and she has a russian accent and probably works for fsb no but whatever she is who she is and then um and then she sort of slides into the conversation like a a quote from the idiot right yep yeah yeah yeah and you're like boom yep right and then but then but but she's not who she that's all up pretend and so you very quickly could fall in love with her and she's gonna turn out to like enjoy the game of destroying your life yep uh you know that or it's the love of my life it could be but not if she did all those things intentionally but you you don't really know but you have to then pay attention to that's that's the dark aspect here you mentioned blog like i love i love when people have like stuff about themselves online because you get to really learn i mean i'm a fan of podcasts i'm a fan of people it's i love learning about them the personal stuff and so on um hopefully for for good reasons so the person you can people you connect with the good ones are the ones that are going to be very sort of empathetic and the bad ones are the ones that are going to be fake empathetic like they're going to learn everything about you and use you to manipulate you as opposed to learn everything about you to fall deeper in love with you as a friend or as a romantic partner or like genuine curiosity yeah genuine curiosity like there's something you're drawing like imagine your dog leon had a blog after oh yeah he does not yeah that's true he kind of does yeah as when you met him right then you'd be like what is this what what is there that's pulling me towards this creature this this this entity like what is there and it'd be fascinating to learn more and then you fall in love with the the details not just with this some kind of ethereal thing yeah you don't know yeah you have to pay attention to the red flags you have to yeah i think one of them actually is is somebody who doesn't have that kind of i mean plenty of people are private and they don't put stuff out about themselves online for all kinds of very valid reasons but um somebody who does share a lot about themselves personally is um maybe there's examples but it's probably not a sociopath if they're sharing all kinds of sure sure but i mean on the other side um when you meet people yeah i still like the falling in love because the red flags whether you see them early or later it doesn't matter i'd rather see the red flags right away i go in hard intensely like uh and to clarify by going hard i mean like you know um no small talk just get to know a person get to know quickly get to know the person challenge travel with them travel with them is a really powerful one road trip from hell or not go on a road trip and find out if it's a road trip from hell yeah but you might so if there was somebody i was it was also a male perspective destructive relationship with where we had already fallen in love and then went for the first trip yep um in a situation where we were like had to borrow uh i guess he was sharing he was still sharing his car with his ex-wife so we had to go to the garage to pick up the car to go on his little trip and um so you're literally baggage the egg yes so but but um something happened where the the garage attendant was like wanted more identification and it was a pain in the ass and anyway this guy was so unbelievably rude to the garage attendant like just nasty and i was completely shocked and disturbed and we got in the car for this long car ride and i i was like not saying anything and really shocked and then he noticed that and was very concerned and i explained you know like i just i never i would never treat somebody that way and then he pretended to get incredibly upset and to feel horrible and remorseful about it and it was like all we talked about for the next few hours and then i kind of thought like well okay you know i can get over that and then the relationship continued and it was a dark and destructive one whereas you know had i seen him behave that way before we were in a relationship i would have known to back away okay but at my the lesson you could still walk away you could still walk away but and no you can't well i could have walked away at any point with i call him mr fox because it's sort of de-personalizes him um but i could have walked away from him at any point in time but that's the whole that's kind of the whole point of what they do and the whole reason why people don't understand it um i mean it's it's this it's like being in a cult of one so the people who've been in cults and gotten out we understand each other very well um because the same psychology was used the same psychological tactics were used on us and then we experienced the same thing on the other side of it which is it's hard for us to understand and it's hard for other people to understand and everybody's saying that would never happen to me or they're saying i don't get it because you're smart how could you let that happen why didn't you leave why didn't you walk away and on the other side of it we don't have the answers or it takes a really long time of self-reflection and reading and investigation to try and figure out how it is that it happened and why didn't we walk away um no it's definitely i mean it's definitely hard at every level and i i just think that even for more subtle for sort of not outrageously toxic relationships but like normal toxic not normal like a little bit toxic there are some people that kind of thrive on conflict yeah but you could just still just be self-aware like i think you've talked about give yourself time to think about the red flags and like i pride myself on being able to walk away you have to you have to think like uh is this is this the kind of thing i can live with in friendship and business partners and um and because the little things that bother you turn out to be big things down the line so yeah so it could be less romantic but i feel like getting to know somebody slowly over time is yeah it's a smarter thing it's safer fuck it though but that's again my you know russian slash ukrainian male perspective anyway so meeting mr fox anthony that's a chapter title in my book meeting mr fox meeting mr fox so you're working uh on a book about this i'm almost done it's taken a really long time can you define it almost done because i you know i've said that it's like it's when people say like um you know they're leaving like i'm i'm almost in the car right and they they actually not really they're not really they haven't even started showering yet or something so yeah i do i think i probably need some like therapists to work with me on this um are you usually late to things no okay i'm usually oh i sent you a text message because i was early when i got here yeah and i said that i'm um um because of i think i said my crippling fear of being late i'm like always early so i'm loitering outside like a weirdo but glad to come in if it's not too early the crippling fear of being late makes me chronically early and today is no exception yeah it's interesting i got here before i before i rang the bell yep i was outside for a little while like just killing time going i'm way too early but it's really hot out oh that's true yeah cause i'll yeah i'll i always air like i was very early to the airport and then i had all this time to kill but that's fine with me because that's actually time i appreciate because i can um write things or you know i worked on my book draft on the on the airplane um mostly editing um which it needs a lot because it's really long it's in word count so all the things are already completed and you're just editing down now i wish it's it's in five parts and i've written one through four and five part five is like the chapters are all there but some of them are messy some of them are some of them are just like a few paragraphs some of them are just notes some of them are done so i am kind of almost like five parts and part five is not quite finished um but i've been editing along the way so so this is gonna come out in 2023 i think you mentioned so it won't come off for a bit or we'll figure it out uh what have you learned about yourself from putting some of these things down on paper what's like the darkest thing you've realized about yourself from writing the darkest um well one of the things that was fascinating is reading through all of our the correspondence between him and me that i was able to find because he deleted all our emails but he he didn't i think he thought he deleted all of our g chats but he didn't well so he had access to your email yes deleted on that side too and he yeah he had access to my email most of the time and then at the end was also emailing people as me which was incredibly mortifying to come home and then get back into my old email and find that and i think um he was also texting people as me and those i'll never know unless somebody brings it to my attention because after a certain date in 2015 he had my phone and he had exclusive access to my phone and email so i wasn't looking at it until i got out until after we were arrested um and i was out on bail on my sister's and it took me a long time to get back into my gmail because i had to verify who i am and um and i never got my phone back so i don't know what he texted to other people as me after that time but anyway i was able to recover um a lot of our g chats which we use that'll i don't know why people don't use it anymore but it used to be a thing yeah so it was like if you work with people and you use gmail it's a really easy way to just message back it's a chat client within uh google but i think google shut it down already right now i think it's still there okay and nobody nobody i used to talk to people on there and nobody talked to me anymore and so i i i'd rather you thank you i i just i don't yeah people don't love google social products for some reason the social network they tried several times google plus it just dies out something about it it's like when microsoft tries to do stuff it just doesn't feel right anyway it is it is very lonely in that google chat window it makes total sense though anyway so that was still there so you're reading through them so finding you know being able to go back and read and then i kept finding like more layers of stuff um and including a journal that i didn't find the the d.a the prosecutor found written by me my journal that i thought he'd thrown away i didn't know it existed so um somehow he still had it and they found my my journal which was for the year 2014 and the very beginning of 2015. um this is after you got this is in the middle of it it was in the middle of it yeah so reading that was fascinating um yeah what what's some interesting things there what was it was your mind completely detached it was weird because no like were you concerned were you in love were you afraid i was not in love i was afraid i definitely write repeatedly in there that i'm afraid of him i also rep write repeatedly things like i don't know what's going on like please let this be over please let this be over please let this be over and then in a sort of if i try to remove myself and look at it as if i was a different person it's sort of heartbreaking because i was trying so hard to be positive and um and that didn't work out you know trying to be positive so but when i it turned up later in the process and um my lawyer at the time called or something and said um you know the d.a has your or the prosecutor that they have your journal i haven't read it yet but as soon as i get a pdf copy i'll send it to you so that was sort of weird to think that everybody's reading my journal which you know you don't write it thinking people are going to unless you're like a historical person and then later on you think people are going to print from it but you're not nobody's writing it's just a matter i can just imagine like like a 14 year old thinking they're going to be a historical person right right well no i mean like you know presidents who keep journals and then they're later on sure sure yeah so you write it you don't think everybody anybody's gonna read it and so that was a weird feeling and then also just not knowing having you know not remembering what i wrote um so i think it was the next day i got she sent me a pdf copy of it and i read it really quickly because i could read my own it was a pdf so it was like xeroxes of the pages it was in my own handwriting which i could read really fast because even though it's messy i i wrote it so i could read it really fast and i read the whole thing and was crying because i thought okay finally like surely nobody could read this and think that i intended to commit crimes and so i thought like i thought that journal was just gonna fully exonerate me and they would like you know if not drop the charges like it would just be like okay well you know some bad things happened you're responsible you know here's probation but it didn't seem to make any difference which was strange um but anyway so the journal and then also finding all of the correspondence between not all of the correspondence between him and me but the g chat correspondence between him and me um to me so you know all of that in its entire like i wish that everything could have been kind of put out there as evidence like the more they turned up the better for me because i wanted them to see everything and are just so many examples in the correspondence between him and me where he's you know threatening me and um you know lying to me and telling me that if i don't do what he says my whole life will be destroyed and i'll lose everything i ever cared about all kinds of things like that but what was what i still don't quite understand and what uh one of my lawyers said why all of that wasn't as useful as i thought it might be is because so much of that correspondence i'm um like sarcastically angrily i'm yelling at him i'm mad at him i'm like fuck you i'm making fun of him i call him names um i'll say to him like you're lying why should i believe you you told me you'd pay me back before but you didn't so it seems like it doesn't it seems like it doesn't make sense like how is it that if i say to him you're lying you're a liar that i still but so then what would happen is i'm reading those that correspondence and then it stops for a while maybe because i was with him in person yeah um and then i'll look at like my timeline of things and i'll see like oh i sent him a wire for 80 000 like yeah how do you explain your ability to still uh joke around and also to be like mean to him in a joking way like you know couples can do that i guess like i mean there's r there's like cruel ways of doing that and then there's like humorous ways just like you're talking shit whatever uh you're able to do that still and yet you're sending over the money and are afraid like how can you be those two things like as opposed to completely shutting down well i don't know i mean these are all interesting questions that i have as well like how is it that i was functional yeah and yet also doing these things and so the year that we were gone is like a different level because i no longer was running the business but the thing about dissociation is that you're functioning but like your feelings and your thinking are detached in some way so that like you're functioning and people wouldn't look at you and go that person's dissociating because you're functioning you seem normal but somehow in your head there's you're like disconnecting your feelings and you're thinking so so you're still able to be like like the the the game of social interaction like being witty and so on all that kind of stuff you still for me i think it's like a coping mechanism too because all like if i went i haven't been to a funeral a long time but if i went i'd probably like find absurd thing you know or i'll tend to like either make jokes or want to make jokes at really inappropriate times even in tragic times because it's almost like a like a defense mechanism i think you said uh you told me you like dark humor yeah i i my next-door neighbor is michael malus he's a anarchist i have one of his books the hero deer reader dear reader yeah and he loves he he embodies dark humor trolling and dark humor and and is underneath it the sweetest human being because he's writing a book now the white pill that's really focused on stalin and the holomore there's basically atrocities throughout the 20th century and i think he needs the dark humor to release the valve i think there's something about incredibly good the most offensive comedians tend to have the kindest hearts i think this is my theory people like ricky gervais who you know who goes out and insults people and makes jokes that people find horribly offensive and crude and um and and yet you know is a huge animal rights guy and and appears to be an incredibly sweet and kind person and sensitive and you know howard stern people who are like incredibly crude very often are in my experience to the extent that i've gotten either to know people personally observe them learn about them in other ways but the almost like the the more crude and offensive the the comedian or the person they they tend to have the kindest like yeah i don't know if it's a universal rule but yeah i see what you mean and he lost me with howard stern i he seems like not a good person oh no he's such a good person underneath it oh yeah such a good person he's just said so much so i'm friends with rogan he says so many ignorant things about rogan but i suppose that's um so i haven't heard i haven't i haven't listened to howard stern in a long time and i also think that people who say bad things about rogan don't listen to his podcast right because if i've i've listened to his podcast and like people think that i think people would assume that i don't like him because or the whole like vegan thing and he's all about meat and they would think that i would think no i mean because i've listened to enough of his podcast i've i've heard the one where he talked about why he hunts and um whereas if i if i only knew him via his instagram i might think he's an asshole yeah but having listened to all of his uh not all i don't listen to all of them there's a ton of them um but having listened to a lot of his podcasts enough to know that um you know he's an extremely kind person with all the best intentions and i think that a lot of that judgment comes from people who are just seeing little clips yeah because it's probably easy to take little clips from him that sound yeah the lesson there is just not make judgments on on people without getting to know them especially and you have no excuse when the content is out there like don't be lazy yeah i try that's i'm yeah i'm very careful when um you know a lot of these cases um you know like the the dep herd thing or oh uh johnny depp and elizabeth holmes and anything like controversial and sometimes that makes me i can't think of an example but very often um like when somebody criticizes something or something becomes controversial that's what gets me to want to understand it better so then i'll go like read the book that everybody's mad about yeah it's hard to know what's true though so i i try i try to have humility and always assume i don't really know the full story and keep pulling at the strength keep learning more and more but even then like the more you learn the more you realize things are complex uh what do you think about as a small tangent um johnny depp amber heard trials going on it's a quick pause it's gonna resume next week so again this is one of those situations where you know i have very limited information because i'm also not sitting there watching the trial yeah have you watched any of it uh little bits of it and i it's like i know that if i go there and then i'm gonna want to watch it all yeah it's good i know i really it's raw human relationships it is most toxic at its most deep also because there's you can tell there's love probably still there's love which is the interesting thing they probably still love each other even though they hate each other um and like there's a lot of lying going on it looks like it's amber heard lying to to my foolish eyes it seems like she's lying non-stop but you know i want to know the full story and we'll never get to know it but you see this raw like postmortem on a relationship on a love affair that was clearly passionate there was clearly something deep of a connection there and it just that's the sad thing about love it can destroy you as much as it can uplift you so there that would be also used to destroy people yeah to manipulate and all that kind of stuff yeah right so people who um feel that strongly are i think particularly vulnerable um yeah it's it's hard to talk about because i've dipped into like a podcast or something where other people are we're discussing bad vegan in like a pop culture way and they're analyzing it and it's so annoying to listen to because i'm like oh my god that's totally wrong that's totally wrong well if they only knew this well i have nope that's wrong so it you know yeah listening to other people analyzing um my situation or my psychology when they don't have all the information has been really frustrating the difference i did there's a difference because the world doesn't know much about you except for the netflix documentary right there's a lot more information about both johnny depp and amber heard and the trial is revealing the real people this is so interesting but i haven't watched at all okay but but there's a difference between a documentary and like a raw human being exactly the real trial you can see the body language the it's so interesting that i think you could tell the difference between a person who is full of shit and not no i'm not sure yeah it's another i'm gonna i can't remember and sorry so i keep interrupting you but on top of this they're actors too which is very annoying because right exactly because like i don't know if they're putting it but sure as hell looks like amber heard is putting on um like a soap opera act soap opera meaning like really bad acting and lies but i would say all of these things are really hard people would say about me i don't look like a victim and i don't mind you interrupting me because andrew hueberman said that's that means you're interested in the conversation you said it was a good thing so you don't have to apologize i think interrupting me nobody keeps coming up but i keep thinking of these that that's one of the things that andrew told me that i'm like i are you sure because it just doesn't seem like an asshole thing to do i don't i guess it depends on the context if we're in a business meeting and and somebody you know talks over you to kind of make their point heard but if it's a one-on-one situation then it's not i could argue anyway forever but so a long time ago i listened to there was a audio call um an audio that was released of a taped argument between johnny depp and amber heard um and i don't remember why like which one of them had taped it and if they knew it was being taped but it was like an hour and a half and i listened to it almost like you would listen to a podcast where i was doing other things like cleaning my apartment and i was fascinated listening to it to a fight so and it's interesting too because it's just the audio not so you're not looking at their body language um which can be completely misleading and there was another podcast where they talked about how judges make worse decisions on whether or not somebody deserves you know parole or to be released on bail when they see the person in person versus if they're just looking at the information on paper so i think body language and those kinds of things can be can actually be misleading um or we think that like by looking somebody in the eye will know if they're lying or not but the skilled liars are able to um bypass that or they because i'm jumping all over the place but one of the things about sociopaths is they're not going to have the same tell so like if i was lying somebody would know because i'm like stressed out mortified i'm probably doing all the things that we do when we lie because it's stressful for me whereas they don't have those things so i think that you know they could for example i think that they could pass a lie detector test they also don't have like a startle response so the activity in their brain like if you and i watched something graphic and tragic on tv or watched something happen like things would happen in our brains that don't happen in the brains of sociopaths so they don't react to things in the same way that that we do again but that makes sense keep assuming i'm not associated i didn't say i'm not a sociopath this assumption you keep making it's very interesting then why did i murder all those people let's get back to the um what were we talking about johnny depp and amber heart so the audio that i heard made me without knowing anything else made me very inclined to be team johnny dapp yeah based on that based just based on that audio yeah well that's how the people are feeling about this whole interaction by the way i do think it's a very healthy thing to do in a relationship is to record each other for months at a time uh every time you fight that just seems like a very um sarcasm i don't i don't understand how that because they both recorded each other it it just it's okay i suppose you could look back at all human relations and be like this was ridiculous what was i doing but when you're in it you don't right i wondered that too like who made the recording and why and um and did they both know about it that it was being recorded sometimes they did sometimes they didn't uh all i know is just the poetry of johnny depp's speaking and sort of um movement about the whole thing it's interesting it makes you wonder what's real maybe this is whole maybe maybe they're both in love and this is like a a troll that they played on the world i don't know it makes me wonder what's real at all like i because there you have to remember their actors too yeah i don't think he would have filed the lawsuit if not i mean i'm joking no i know but but no i mean my point is um yes yeah if somebody was trying to make the argument that like he's the abuser and that he's lying and he's full of shit it sort of doesn't make sense that he would have filed a lawsuit unless he's trying to have this all come out in the open because he believes he's in the right you know again i don't i have no idea i agree with you i agree with you as a fan of love and human nature i appreciate the fact that they went through this i know it's probably extremely painful but it's it's fascinating to watch human relationships be presented in such raw way and it made me realize how rare it is to get a glimpse like that yeah and i think one of the reasons i like that book confessions of a sociopath also is it's you know female who's writing it and i think um statistically men are more likely to be sociopaths maybe not i mean these are all things where a lot of times there exist statistics that would be inherently hard to get so who knows but i think that people tend to think of sociopaths more as men and then which probably gives female sociopaths the advantage and that people are less likely to um like the elizabeth homes like people who are really manipulative and really good at it um and and part of how they're able to succeed is that people don't understand their motives or people will assume that people behave rationally even if rationally means it's like anthony strange's you know it would have made more sense if he had gotten all this money out of me and you know put it in an overseas account and then ditched me and got on a plane to mexico like everybody would understand that more whereas you know the way things happened and he dragged me around the country and like what were we doing in tennessee and then why didn't like nothing really makes any sense but and also all the things that he did to me and had me do it was as if all of those things together only make sense if his primary goal was to maximally destroy me and also make it like have me burn all my bridges and make it so i'll never recover and when you read a book like that you understand that that's that's what he wanted like that's his life it's like a game like what what do you think it's about power and it's a game do you think he understood the long-term goals he has or was it the short-term game of it that he enjoyed the ability to destroy you well yeah it was the short-term game of it because control another human yeah and also i think for him like their motivations are just different so you know he spent a year incarcerated because he never got out on bail but then he got out um he's out of prison now he got out before i went in to serve my time which was um particularly you know like psychologically i had to try really hard not to be infuriated and um but anyway so i think for him you know the consequence of spending time in jail sort of like an inconvenience you know it's like life is a game and so he wouldn't feel if you're not capable of being emotionally hurt then you're you know you have immense power because you can go around and do things and people can't hurt you it's like a superpower and he did this for people who are not familiar i guess he did this to other women yes yes i think it was in the documentary that his i guess ex-wife from somewhere else florida florida of course florida sorry strong strong words well it's just like when there's the weirdest story about you know people eating tide pods and then doing crazy it's like it's always in it's always in florida so i feel like whenever crazy so to me it makes sense that he would have spent time in florida before and that's where crazy in a good way and i mean that on an insult on him i also like she's an amazing person yes so it's it's like it's him that i'm making the like florida is not that weird yes he he manipulated her as well lied to her that kind of things um well jumping around but one of the things you said that was disturbingly misleading is the ending of the documentary and the the ending has a phone call i think yeah of you and anthony talking so high level let me ask uh how many times have you talked with anthony since you got out of prison and what did you talk about and why is that quote misleading that uh uh segment of audio misleading my issue with it also was that it was deliberately misleading which was what was particularly um infuriating about it infuriating about it um and then also there was it was like there were thing one major thing that was incorrect that i think helped allow people to make an incorrect conclusion at the end was um in the in the film it talks about i say something about how my accountant made a joke about if i married him he could easily transfer me money without tax consequences and then the film has me saying something like you know and then within 24 hours we were married but that's like audio from here and audio from here spliced together so they made it seem like they're like i married him because it was like he could give me money and that wasn't the case so you're part mastermind of some kind of scheme that involved money transfer and you got married and that kind of right or if nothing else i had like i was trying to get money that's why i married him so which which is absurd because again you know new york is full of legitimate people with loads of money if i really wanted to marry somebody for money in new york it wouldn't be that hard to do but anyway it was like it was just a deliberate making it seem like my intention was you know to marry him for his fictitious money right um okay so that's one and either way let's go to that ending thing because because we're on that sort of topic because when you got out of prison you know the what the film implies is that whatever there's a small aspect of your mind that still wants to continue a relationship with anthony yeah that's not the case and not just that but there's still flirtation and that kind of a body collide like we got the the world like at our fingertips we're playing so i mean one of the exciting things about being like a couple that's fucking with the world that's getting away with something is that there's all these powerful forces that want to catch you in a crime and you keep getting away with it that's exciting uh in some [Music] world it could be although in this case right and also i always have to keep reminding people like get away with what because i lost everything and all these people lost other you know people i cared about lost a lot my mother lost a lot but i lost everything too yeah your um your restaurant and all my dream yeah my reputation my stuff my home you know ending up with millions of dollars of debt like it's not even like i lost it all and then it's a clean slate it's like i lost it all and now i have this like giant boulder of or like this wobbly unclear how to like yeah so when people say well sisyphus got a thing away with something i'm always like got away with what i know destroying my life and ending up in debt because that's it's not even like you can't even sort of point to like as if i was trying to do something and then oops that happened it's like there's no nothing that logically makes sense if somebody was trying to um uh decipher my you know whatever motives i might have had yeah you didn't walk away from the explosion you were inside the explosion okay but that said the movie implied and so i mean it's interesting to ask um not just in and clarifying the movie but just as a human being you're out of prison he's out of prison there was you know there was that um toxic connection but it was there and there was a depth to it so toxic connections could be pretty deep so how what what was the conversation like and how often have you talked with him well we don't speak anymore um and that call on at the end was even on g chat recorded was recorded on like i recorded the call and gave it to them you know so i was like deliberately recording him it's not like i was caught on a hot mic like i made that call it's part of the documentary i reported him intentionally i was trying to get him to repeat some of like the kookier things he would say about like his meat suit or some of the weird like the things about something not being real the more like fantastical things i was trying to get him to repeat those things it was probably like a 40-minute call which i mean it's actually on my phone i still have it i haven't gone back to listen to it but you ever think of publishing that whole thing oh yeah oh i think about publishing everything my entire journal oh you should publish that call unedited just publish it that would be fun no i want to publish like a lot of stuff he took all these videos of me also that they used a couple of clips of and i would yeah i mean i would they're also on my phone i would publish them all i would publish everything in particular um because should i release that with your book skip yeah i probably i mean i've planned to do that eventually if all of that material would be really useful to um psychologists or people studying it so to the extent that it would help other people understand what happened um which is still out there meaningful yeah he's still out there doing weird weird shit with his clean slate i get a little annoyed about that he's got the clean slate well he didn't have a restaurant he didn't have a persona does he have any public persona or no or we don't know he got booted off of twitter we'll put him back on is that a passive aggressive thing no not at all i i find that whole conversation really really interesting um whether to put somebody like anthony on back on twitter well no i think because i used to always think like if only everybody had to identify as themselves on twitter and you could have like a parody account yeah or like like leon has an account but it's very clear that it's me behind it or sometimes there's like you know devin nunes cow like so people have parody accounts but but if we could identify who it is then um a lot of why did he get booted off of twitter i don't know but i used to so in the last few years i would periodically probably like once a month maybe more i would like look at his twitter just to kind of see like well where is he and um you know like just to see like what is he up to and um and i figured out i could tell from the photographs that he'd moved to california and i think he might have told me one of the last times i spoke to him that he was going to move to california but um and then i also screen grabbed a lot of stuff that he put on twitter and he put these creepy videos of himself on twitter at the beginning of covid i screen grabbed those um just and then one day i went and like he was you know account was suspended and then i kept going back and it's like been suspended ever since so he might have started a new account and i don't i don't know what it is probably he's probably in california you're saying he is in california that's been verified somebody who was gonna have to interact with him in an official capacity was gonna go meet him and i said and was nervous about it and i said um he's going to be really likable like you're going to like him he's probably going to like figure out what you're interested in talk sports talk whatever it is that he figures out quickly that you're interested in he's going to be really nice he's going to seem like a nice guy and that person later got back to me was like you're exactly right yeah um so yeah that's the that's the sociopath thing right yeah extremely careful but inside relationship that's even more dangerous like so i think that part of the reason i spoke to him was entirely self-serving and strategic after the fact well even before i knew there was ever going to be a documentary i spoke to him and i and i knew how dangerous it was because i knew that in a situation like this you're supposed to have no contact which makes sense and i understand why which makes it extra tragic when people have kids with a sociopath or in a narcissistic abusive relationship if you have kids then you're tethered which is tragic but why are you supposed to avoid conversations because you you can get pulled right back so they have no contact yeah because they'll continue abuse or they'll you'll be vulnerable to them being able to pull you back in so i knew that to be the case um but why was it self-serving why did you talk to him anyway because he was getting out um he was gonna be out free out in the open while i was gonna be locked up at rikers for three and a half months and the one thing that you know if his motivation was to destroy me then what what else could he do to really like you know hammer that last nail in the coffin yeah that would be leon and so he would have known that leon would be staying with my mother you know he knows where he spent a lot of time at her house he knows where she lives it would be super easy for him to just drive up there you know wait for her to let him out and then you know he'd because out in the country he can be off leash and all he'd have to do is kind of whistle call him over and he could take him away and do whatever so i was completely like gripped with that fear so not fear for yourself but fear for leon well i was gonna be at least safe from him but i was gonna be locked away so oh oh yeah yeah rikers yeah sure so i got it got it got it i would be powerless to do anything and he would be have free reign to go destroy me further by um you know taking or hurting leon um and then when he got out i still um i had unfollowed him from my own account but leon had never unfollowed him so i i was looking at i know i was looking at his um at his account i just love can i just say because uh because joe has a um his he hasn't account for his dog too i just love when people do that it's so great because i actually pretend in my mind for some reason i do think leon has an account like i don't you forget that there's a human behind it you're like oh okay cool yeah i know i love it when people do that anyway so continue so leon didn't unfollow him and what what so i was able to go back and look at his twitter and um he he somehow he quickly got a phone but he very quickly started tweeting right after he got out yeah and um and i was kind of like fascinated because i didn't know what to expect or what he was going to be saying and and um and then he started saying things that i could tell were directed at me you know like little things that only i would know um you know like random things like things that were like the equivalent of like an inside joke that you have just so he was posting things like that and um there's so many things going on at once so another thing that would have in a twisted but i think understandable way in sort of a sick way that i was fully aware of is that here i am having gone through this completely like messed up thing that now i'm in trouble for everybody's looking at and nobody understands right and so there was this unfortunate situation of the only person who understands what i went through is the person who put me through it yeah right so so is it were you also just a little bit seeking closure of some kind probably a lot but also with the awareness that i probably wasn't gonna get it you know and i mean i i know for a fact i would never get it in the same way that which is why um which is why i was able to later on like in the context of recording those calls i was able to talk to him in this detached way because i know he doesn't give a shit that like he doesn't give any shits about what he did to my mother or me or anybody or anything just doesn't care so he's certainly not going to care if i you know he's never going to say like i'm sorry or i did a bad thing or or like he's not gonna be affected if like if i yelled and screamed at him that would just be frustrating for me and he would actually probably be gratified by that so so that that gave you uh that empowered you in being cold and sort of yes and i had a distant prior experience where i had to do the same thing where like if you're if you're able to be very cold and not allow somebody to push your buttons then you're taking away their power and then that feels empowering or feels like we're claiming a little bit of your power so in my talking to him i always had a reason you know like there was always like i didn't want him to hurt leon or i wanted information or i wanted to know where he was i'd rather let him think that you know maybe he could still manipulate me one day or whatever it was like safer to keep that there than to not know where he was and if i was gonna like be walking leon and turn the corner and he's standing there and you know like it like if there's a crazy murderer out on the loose you'd rather know where they are than have no i have no idea so there are a lot of different reasons um why does it upset you why was it wrong to have that audio clip at the end of the documentary like what did it uh well because it implied all kinds of things that were completely not true and it also just didn't make sense and it confused people and um so so for people who haven't watched that spoiler alert as they play the the clip of um sorry i don't even remember what was said but it was kind of that last what we spoke about yeah what was the what was that i only watched like i still haven't watched it i only watched the film once yeah while you know people were looking at me for my reaction and i was crying and it was really weird and strange and surreal and i haven't gone back to watch it again i feel like i'm just gonna get more annoyed but i i will eventually but and when i when the ending happened i immediately blurted out like i hate that i hate that ending but i sort of assumed a lot of people saw it for what it was they saw that it was like the director doing a weird thing and that it was kind of just weird and off and like that doesn't make sense yeah it seemed blue but so it was basically you joking around like flirting almost it made it seem like as if we're still friendly yeah um and there's more to come it's almost like there's going to be a um bad vegan too right or yeah and then also i mean it made it seem like you know if i was laughing with him that i don't take anything seriously you know that i don't take what happened seriously or yeah but it's like a feeling of remorse exactly yeah and they after that he goes the credits with the wild world which is a great song yes oh baby it's a wild world i never got to hear that because the version i watched didn't have the end credits but i knew that they used that song at the end um and uh paid a lot for it yeah yeah i was like oh why you got this song did you ever say what was the darkest thing about yourself that you discovered from the book yes oh we we did we no we took yeah about the g chats and i think um it was i guess it was trying to understand how i was able to be sarcastic and make jokes at his expense dirt while all that stuff was going on ah so what's that that's that have you figured out what that means about you no no it just was interesting to look at and also i think um you know i've i have a tendency i have a tendency sometimes to be sort of like jokingly hyperbolic or sarcastic and it's gotten me into trouble one one time it i got locked up in the harlem psych ward for a day because of my hyperbole and sarcasm and like until the story lost in translation errors that's that's a heck of a loss in translation error yeah did you did you say something funny to a therapist it was um yeah i mean i was sort of making jokes about how bad i was feeling but in a hyperbolic way and so then suddenly somebody told somebody and then the loss in translation and then they were worried that i might kill myself and then did a wellness check and then tried to call me and i was in the shower so i didn't answer the phone so then somebody called the police to do a wellness check on me um things just escalated and then uh not knowing that um if i had handled it the right if i had immediately um if i'd sort of understood what was going on and handled it the right way immediately i probably could have gotten out of it but they err on the side of taking you to the hospital no matter what makes a lot of sense and i didn't know that and it also um so you really leaned into the joke by going to the hospital i didn't it's sort of one of those situations that was both comical and tragic because and would actually make a really good um it's weird how i do this sometimes like it would make a really good scene in a and a filmed version who would play you in the film uh i don't know there is a thing being made that's sharon because um because have you cast the scene yet no but there's a thing being made that i have nothing to do with which is frustrating and weird a film about you about it's like somebody's making a fictionalized drama and it's frustrating because for all kinds of obvious reasons it's like annoying and it can go anyway it could go anywhere you could be like the bad guy inevitably they'll get a bajillion things wrong and they're also a bunch of people like profiting off of it and like thanks guys you know so it's infuriating for all kinds of reasons do you know who's playing who are the actors no i don't even like i just don't like all i'll inevitably know but i don't really want to know the whole thing is just annoying and also i've always people ask me this all the time and i always thought um because of the way everything that happened was such a kind of a slow build and there was so much nuance and it's it's kind of really hard to understand that it could only really be done well in like a breaking bad type of series long like a long series where like you would be taken through these kind of gut-wrenching icky slow build things and then peop that would make it all make sense like that if it was done that way it could be done accurately but the reason why i think um so i made these stupid jokes and then somebody did a wellness check and um or have you ever asked the police to do it well but when they knocked on my door and came in it was like a repeat of getting arrested so i sort of weirdly flashed back to that and then burst into tears which isn't the appropriate response if you're trying to um diffuse a if you're trying to discourage the people coming to do the wellness check from taking you to the hospital starting to cry is not the good the right reaction well the thing is i mean there is it's funny but it could be also through the joke that the joke the best jokes are grounded in truth and pain in this case pain yeah right so there you go um have you ever if i may ask considered suicide yes one well i'm kind of a wimp so i you know i'm afraid of all of the gruesome ways but um one of the things i remember doing is sort of hoarding medications which i had when um around the time and before he took me away because i wanted like i wanted to i wanted the safety of a like an out um and but around that time so when it when anthony went that's the the road trip right before the road trip from hell you were around that time yeah sporting medication and like i yeah like if i could get my hands on any sort of weird medication i would i would kind of hold on to it um and to all the chaos but i think i knew that it would be hard to do it that way but i didn't thought about it but i never um in that really tough time you know you're thinking about you're thinking about taking your own life what gave you hope what gave you sort of because the business the the restaurant that you give so much of yourself to is lost you're lying to everybody you're in the hole financially you're being psychologically trapped manipulated go kill myself now well you're still there um please don't see i made a joke about it like that's there you go um but it's always there it's the uh albert camus you know says you basically always have to be uh aggressively looking for a reason to live otherwise what's the point yeah otherwise it's easy to to go the other way because why live is a very good question um but anyways it's by way of hope by way you know it's it's a dark time that's the dark time if you could sort of look back what um we'll give you just strength i think that just you know just having like a sort of relentless optimism um and i think too that sometimes people assume that suicide is the result of circumstances which may be in maybe in some cases it is but i think one of the things that that book explains well is that very often it doesn't have anything to do with circumstances it's just the the pain which book the the darkness visible um you know because people like to cry so when somebody commits suicide people will very often criticize them like it was a selfish act if they have a family which most people do but especially if they have kids and i think that um yeah everybody's quick to sort of call the person who killed themselves selfish and um it's i think that the type of pain that one is experiencing that leads to that is something that most people and i don't like people don't understand but it's not a selfish thing it's just like quite literally becomes intolerable from what i understand and it can hit you it could be slow it could be fast yes that pain yes so i think because for me it was more just my circumstances were so crappy but also i had an awareness that you know even in rikers i knew how wildly lucky i was to have you know family a support system you know opportunities in like i'll always be okay one way or another um so i felt lucky that i i have that but uh you know also i want you know the shame of everything that happened and you know will i ever be able to crawl out from under it and rebuild something i don't know um so there were certainly times where especially when i would learn something new like reading the emails between mr fox my mother i just wanted a so he i wanted like a meteor to hit my particular spot on the earth right then and there just because it was he was manipulating your mom too because your mom loved you and was willing to give money yeah yeah and it was really grotesque and so and i feel like it's my fault um what's your mom say about this whole situation now looking back we don't talk about it as much as one would think that we would um because i feel sickening because i feel like it's my fault and i think she also feels sick over it and so we don't talk about it as much as one might think sometimes i've had to ask questions in the process of writing the book and then there are other things where like i could ask the questions but i just don't want to because i don't want to put her through that or you know it's not really necessary to ask the questions but there are things that i'm sort of curious about um but when you went on that road trip from hell what was what was that like where'd you guys go first vegas so you drove from new york where it was a series of stops at like hotel motel type places because i did a similar road trip but from boston i drove across the united states with no destination i had always wanted to do that and now again i feel like it's one of those things that sort of like ruined for me because a lot of you can always reclaim it yeah i could but now yeah i did think about like how one day if i did some sort of a book tour or something that i imagine this but leon and i in a car it has to be different than uh uh man book tours they if not if you're not careful can suck the soul out of a human being i think you have to do like a hunter s thompson style um book tour where you miss a bunch of the dates because you got too drunk the night before but anyway or i just what i worry about is that i just would be feeling terrible in some way and not be up for it or for the trip or for off the speaking because for like a certain type of appearance i think i'm always afraid of that in um committing to things like if it involved going to a big public event yeah i think you have to be very careful like podcast is an interesting one i'm always surprised that people just jump on podcasts they haven't really listened to and just just do a lot a lot of podcasts that kind of book tour first of all financially it doesn't make any sense like especially going on a small podcast like what's the benefit like really you want to go on just a couple of big podcasts that you're actually a fan of it's really really really important people don't um like they don't understand the power i mean maybe you just don't understand podcasting but me as a fan of podcasts is like the biggest thing i love listening to is when a guest is a fan they understand that the culture the style the sound the feel the unders of the podcast they understand the other person they feel the pain the hopes of the other person the the the the weird like uh quirks of the other person makes for much better listening and ultimately the appearance itself is not just enough to sell the book you have to you're selling yourself as a human being and that requires having chemistry and all those kinds of things yeah i agree and podcast appearance is exhausting like you're giving a lot of yourself it's intimate it's deep like i don't know anyway road trip you don't remember the motels in the hotels along the way well there are a lot of things where like i'll remember things that happened but i don't remember where it was he just drove without a destination really i assume he must have known ahead of time but he made it seem like like oh funny we ended up in vegas funny how that happened but it now when i see all the places that we stopped they were all places with um where there were casinos so there's a lot more casinos around the country than i knew um and there uh so so he had a gambling addiction yes but i think that it's not a so i think that regular people have gambling addictions and it's a horrible tragic thing and can destroy their lives and i you know i know people who've like it regular people can have a gam a gambling addiction which is explained in the way that addictions are explained um for him i don't think it was so much an addiction as um like a thrill seeking because he could win money lose money and he didn't really care whereas somebody who has an actual addiction and then all normal people with normal human emotions you know would either be elated and relieved or devastated um to lose a lot of money and for him it it it didn't really care it was more again i think it was more just like a game like what what were you what was going through your mind here like would you be on the run did you feel like you were on the run no did you know you were on the run no so i didn't know that um i mean the other thing is the the restaurant was operating and he took me away and then like people weren't paid and it all sort of fell apart and you weren't checking your texts or any any of that no and then he had my phone and my email um i did later on get later on i got a brand new phone with like a an empty phone with no existing numbers in it or whatnot and so that he and i could communicate when i you know i was went to the grocery store or something like that what was the uh what was the reason he had the phone like what was the narrative the story that he he was taking over your phone was it i mean like how how did you allow that to happen or maybe a better way to ask us how did he make that happen well i was conditioned to it before because before he was always checking my phone which was wildly infuriating and i feel like um like you fixed it by giving him the phone well i mean the conditions were different later on but in some sense i didn't want my phone because everything like i was in a state of shock and it was just like take it fine like i give up like i guess i'd given up and and so yeah i'd given up so there was no like i wasn't going to fight back on anything um before when he would take my phone and look through it it was it was infuriating and he sort of forced me to get used to it and this is again something that like people have been in cults would understand because it's like they condition you to not react negatively to things that you would normally react negatively to um and like if i was in a relationship like if somebody i would never ever look in somebody's phone and and if somebody did that to me i would be like goodbye um so i'm pretty sensitive about that and um so it was very infuriating when he would take my phone and look at it and it it got to the point where not only did i feel like everything i you know said or wrote or emailed digitally or whatnot would be read but he he got me to the point of feeling like i was being watched all the time in a non-explainable way yeah what were some of the you didn't mention them some of the documentary touches on some of them what are some of the fantastical stories so he mentioned that he might help make uh leon a more immortal what all of that was always really vague i mean intentionally like a lot of what he talked about was always very vague but a lot of that stuff was very vague and and again like but convincing slowly over time and a lot of those things too are things that um [Music] you know conveniently you kind of can't disprove so it's almost like you know people believe in god or religious people believe certain things um and so one could argue why is it that much crazier for me to have been open to the idea that you know maybe leon maybe we do live forever in some way when so a lot of religious people have similar beliefs so one of the other thing is he was uh what um maybe you can correct me but reincarnated or something like that or he acted like he had lived many lifetimes and had all kinds of wisdom from having lived all these prior lifetimes and being aware of it so was that and it was vague but it was somehow believable or is it just like part of the charm like what how do you how do you not call bullshit i know uh we're not not necessarily bullshit i i understand when you're smitten in whatever way but like one a little more details proof i suppose it's easy to just you know like um put it off for later assume that more details will come later right i think he's a mentalist or an illusionist named darren brown and it was on a joe rogan podcast i think joe interviewed darren brown um i think sam harris interviewed him i got really intrigued and then i was looking for other podcasts or maybe joe interviewed him like right after i may have gone looking for it but anyway it was in the it was in the conversation with joe where darren explains um he's somebody i would love to to meet a mentalist an illusionist because they understand a lot of the ways in which the mind can be manipulated so i feel like they would if they looked at everything about my situation they would be able to understand better how he was able to get me to believe things or go along with things or because darren brown is pretty fascinating what he does and he's really seems like a very kind person and he's very open about it and um when he was talking to joe he said this thing that and i use this quote in my book um and again i'm paraphrasing because i don't have in front of me but it's like he says something about how um we want to believe the lie because we'd rather believe that it's something amazing than just that ugly and pathetic a lie [Music] and i whatever he said was said in a much better way but the point is like that's and so he was explaining it in the context of the way that an illusionist or whatever they're called is able to to pull off certain things which is that they're sort of you know somebody was about somebody who was watching and watched them watch that person um sort of leverage people's tendency to want to believe that something amazing and cool is about to happen versus like this is just a really ugly pathetic lie so i think that a lot of the things um that that mr fox that that he put forward um i couldn't understand it from the perspective of it being a lie because it just seemed too weird and crazy so i think that this happens sometimes where um you believe somebody because it seems so weird that they would lie about it i think that somebody has or it's been said sometimes that like the more fantastical the lie the more believable it is because you don't you don't believe that somebody would tell that lie and i think um something also that mr fox people like him are capable of doing is going out and lying in very brazen ways that normal people would be terrified to do so that kind of also makes it more believable yeah so if somebody could go out on a world stage and lie and not kind of feel weird about that or even knowing that it's a lie that can be pointed out as being a lie um and then there's also the the layer of to what extent is this person in some way also delusional themselves and sort of believing their lies because people have asked me that and i've wondered the same thing to what extent did he believe some of the stuff he was saying and i think probably there was some sort of delusional aspect almost like he was sort of halfway aware of playing his own sort of virtual reality game you know like like he was in some kind of metaverse in his brain so you think he believed some of the things he was saying in some way yeah what uh or he wanted to you know because he wanted to be his own like he wanted to be a superhero you know he never built anything or created anything or accomplished anything in his life yet you know so so in his own brain if he could turn himself into like a movie superhero it's a nice shortcut yeah what about the navy seal thing did that ever get resolved you know the the lie that he he you know he said that he's a navy seal i don't remember i don't know if he said he was a navy seal or that he implied that he like worked with the cia or then it was like he worked with black ops that you know is by definition under the radar right so i mean that's obviously a huge red flag now going forward is like if somebody first of all if somebody tells you that information pretty quickly that's itself a red flag but i mean all right cross i'm you cross that off my list of pick-up lines um but you know conveniently if he say in some world he actually did work for like black water or one of those places or yeah there i wouldn't be able to just call someplace and verify it um anyway yeah so i think that in some psychological way that i don't understand he probably did in some way halfway exists in this world where he was this um you know like fighter and he would say things like it's because of people like me that people like you can sleep at night which is probably a line out of a movie that i've never seen i feel like a lot of things great that's a great that's funny that is a good the um who said that that's a really that's uh is that really a line out of a movie it's not a movie it's uh you know what would happen at rikers is when these things would happen where one of us couldn't think of something and you're like oh who was that actor in that movie and that thing no and so what we'd do is like somebody would be on the phone and you'd be like hey who are you talking to can you ask them to look up on their phone like so we'd ask people on the phone or somebody would go make a call and you know you'd have to call somebody and ask them to google the cast of a movie or something like that i think you would find jail don't ever get arrested or try not to but i think you would find jail fascinating oh i always wanted to go to jail prison because uh there's a lot of elements to it and i'll ask you questions about it but i feel like i can get a lot of reading done i got a ton of reading done yes yeah yes i don't remember now people attribute this to george orwell but they're not sure if george orwell ever said it but it's something like there's a lot of different variations but we sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us and there's a lot of variations of this but basically we depend our entire society depends on bad motherfuckers who are willing to fight to protect our freedoms to protect our well-being and um one of the things about the united states is because we're surrounded by water we don't get to see the violence that's required in part to protect the sovereignty of nations uh you mentioned that i would uh not to go to prison but that i may enjoy my time there let me ask you uh not the i mean by the way i love prison movies you would find it fascinating i don't because it's like still kind of too soon but well how was your time you spent three and a half months at rigers how was that how was your experience in prison how's the food from a chef perspective not good but rikers was um when i got to write because i so i was arrested i spent i think about 10 days in a tennessee small town tennessee jail um oh pigeon forge is also the weirdest place on earth is it a town yes that's the town where i was arrested why is it so weird um in the film they i told them i told them you have to go to pigeon forge you have to go there you have to go there and i i think i was pushing them because it was gonna potentially be the end of the season it's like a summer time or it's a tourist destination and it's so bizarre and weird and trippy that um it doesn't even seem real seems like a carnival is happening there non-stop exactly it's it's car i think i say that in my intro that it's carnival-esque and trippy and weird is there a lot of clowns walking around or not necessarily clowns but there is a video on youtube that i cause i got to the chapter where we arrive in pigeon forge and i'll never forget although i have forgotten but i remember being like weirdly like felt like we were had entered a different universe driving down this strip and just looking at everything on either side and i'm wishing that i could remember in more detail like the names of the places or what was there because i wanted to describe it um in this chapter and i was like i wish somebody i wish there was like a video of somebody going down the street kind of showing what's on one side and then the other side and i was like there probably is and there is on youtube like i found it and i watched the whole thing how does this come up from prison exactly um picture oh okay so that's the town that i went to jail and all right in tennessee right so what was that like the food there and some of the conditions the food made when i got to um that i was extradited and transferred to rikers and when i got to rikers i felt like it was like the four seasons in comparison wow so um and i i really kind of appreciated a lot of things about about new york when i got when i got to rikers even though there are a lot of things that are very scary about it where's uh right located is it close to new york city yes and in a very kind of almost poetically interesting way the the dorm room where i was when i was there for the three and a half months was one of the ones that faced manhattan so i could go across the room and look out the window and see the whole manhattan skyline which was i remember being shocked by the cost per prisoner per year yes that uh new york pays it's like 400 500 000 or something i didn't think it was that much i thought i wrote it down but either way it is no i mean it it elevated uh during covid which is fascinating to that the number i just said yeah during covet i felt sick to my stomach thinking about people stuck there and again so rikers isn't like a long-term prison it's most of the people at rikers are awaiting trial and they've been arrested but not convicted and then if you're convicted and you're sentenced to less than a year then you put on a different color uniform and you go upstairs to different dorms if you're convicted and sentenced to more than a year you're sent to one of the upstate prisons so most of the people at rikers are there in transition they've been arrested but not they've been arrested but not convicted or awaiting trial so you could be perfectly innocent and you're stuck there and that happens to a lot of people or you could be arrested over some kind of comparatively petty thing or non-violent thing and and stuck there because you don't have as little as 500 to pay bail which is completely messed up and unjust and i think most people most reasonable people agree that it's unjust but it's different when you're there and you see those people and you see um kind of the anguish and whether i mean i have no idea if they're guilty of what i mean i usually don't know what people are there for what the situation is but you watch the sort of help helplessness set in um because you're kind of powerless there you have very little contact with the outside world you have these limited phone calls and so for people who had kids in a job and an apartment it's like one by one those things are lost or their kids are now being looked after by their abusive ex-husband or something like that and so watching that is just gut-wrenching and then also knowing that the only reason they're unable to get out is because of you know a thousand dollars two thousand dollars in some cases five hundred dollars there were people um so there's all of these tragic cases but then there was also while i was there i mean if i'd had any money i would have been wanting to bail people out left and right and then in some cases i think there was a woman there snored really loud and her bail was five hundred dollars and i was like i wish i had i wanna bail out she just wanted to bail her out so um because i'm pretty sensitive to sounds and being in a room with 50 people inevitably so you're in a room with a large number of people yeah there are um there are areas there with cells but a lot of the areas there are um rooms with 50 beds so and they're about three feet apart from each other so during covid there was certainly no social distancing um and that just felt kind of sickening especially because so many people are there for non-violent things or drug addiction related or mental health issues um part of that you personally just having spent that time there for three and a half months how did that change you like what did that have an effect on your mind on my mind personally i think i was i was surprised at how well i adapted and then how i was able to um and then i think i sort of took it a next level when one of the books somebody sent me was um the untethered soul by michael singer and it's very much about like observing your mind and um that kind of helped take it to next level so was this like a meditation retreat for you well it's like it'd be like trying to meditate in the middle of a circus or in crazy circumstances because you're never alone there's nowhere to be alone and there's always talking there's noises there's fighting noises chaos um did you feel in danger yes but um i i never i never felt terrified there um you know one of my friends the bathroom is the scary place because they don't have cameras in the um in the bathroom so that's sort of a one has to watch out there and i did one of my friends who i one of the people i was friends with there she did get um beat up a bit in the bathroom one day a lot of weird shit happened in the bathroom um but it was from a if you're interested in human behavior and psychology and it's it can be fascinating to kind of sit there and watch they're saying like you might enjoy prison for that perspective like just you get to watch human nature it's um like at the i don't want to say that it's worse but like the full variety that it can uh take right and there was a lot of beauty there as well i mean was there love people being um well again depends on the definition of love but people being you know incredibly generous and kind to each other um um sometimes people singing at night um there was just a lot of and then there was a lot of you know hilarious stuff it's just it's all there there's like those tragic things um you know interesting things a lot of people with mental health issues which is um can be difficult to witness so very different experience i should ask you this but um somebody that's currently in prison galen maxwell i believe she spent approximately 500 days in isolation so it's a very difficult different prison experience but what do you think about her case what do you think about her and jeffrey epstein she so her brother her family she says that she's a victim not the monster i think this is an especially fascinating case because um and i've i have listened to podcasts about the you know the epstein situation um and there was one that was more focused on her by vicki ward that i would definitely listen to um vicki ward is a journalist i think she'd written an article about jeffrey epstein for vanity fair so she got to know jeffrey epstein and then she knew colleen maxwell um from being sort of part of the social circle in which they would have overlapped have you by the way ever met them since this new york do you remember meeting this you know uh jeffrey or or gillian no i never met them but they're also very much like this sort of upper east side crowd um i did meet harvey weinstein once that made me have all kinds of interesting thoughts later at the restaurant or elsewhere no it was weird it was out on the street and we had this really strange interaction and knowing what i know now it was eerie and and also like had he contacted me after that and made it seem like he could have done something for me like would i have been you know say he said oh i'm gonna finance your whole expansion or something and like come to my you know come meet me at this hotel and then i go to that hotel and then he's like come up to the room and then i would have been like uh and you're wondering whether you would have done it yes and sadly i think i would have and so i felt a lot of compassion for um those who you know didn't yell at him and leave or didn't storm out and because i think what happens in those situations is um you know there's all kinds of uncertainty in the moment and you sort of freeze and then you'll if i'm probably one of those people that would sit there and somehow in the moment without clarity just instinctively feel like somehow i must have done something wrong and it's my fault and and like i led him on and or just being afraid and then and then you don't know how to deal with it and so you freeze um so i think that you know if you're somebody that maybe was raised differently or you have a lot of self-confidence or um you might have reacted differently and kind of pushed them away and stormed out um but i am probably not one of those people but i did not ever meet jeffrey epstein but he seems very straightforwardly um you know just a classic the way he was able to charm people the way he could step into these roles um you know i think he was teaching at dalton and then just kind of the way he would get himself into the the academic crowd within harvard and i think also mit right he sort of so he's playing a role but he's doing it so well that he fools all these people and what and the things that people would in hindsight say about him are just the same things that people say about it's like you hear the same things over and over again you hear the same thing said about those people who were taken in by elizabeth holmes is that they were like it was as if he was under a spell it was as if i was under a spell is something you hear a lot and so it's like they have this powerful charm that's almost over it's overwhelming in that they overwhelm your better judgment or they overwhelm your like normal otherwise normally functioning capacity for rational thought and they sort of overwhelm that with their charm so you know when you look at i think it was like james mattis invested a bunch of money with elizabeth holmes and all these people were involved with her and nobody really did their due diligence where they just sort of trusted her and jeffrey epstein i think it's still unclear where he got all of his money but the guy wexner les wexner who had you know an enormous amount of money and somehow very quickly turned over management of it to jeffrey epstein and so people wonder like why would he do that that's insane and and and then other people have commented about that relationship like it was as if he was under jeffrey's spell you know observers would say i couldn't understand it it was as if he was under his spell and so somebody observing me and mr fox could have possibly said the same thing about me but it's a bit different because it wasn't all charm i think um epstein used his charm and then was probably very very very crafty and getting um another thing that people like him do and cults do also is to get um is to get you somehow compromised because then they've got you so i think some kind of usually sex related yeah and with epstein certainly you know he was known to have cameras everywhere and so if he got any of these people on camera doing something compromising and all very powerful people then he's got them um and i think he was also very smart to do that to target people of both parties so that politically that he was able to maintain his power like no matter like nobody wanted him to be totally exposed because then people a lot of people would be exposed um by the way that part you know that's all kind of conspiracy right right we don't know that i so a lot of people believe that and you know i tend to kind of naturally believe that because that makes sense but it's also possible that straight up with charisma i mean he did record people and there were recordings so i listened to an interview with a woman who i mean was a girl back then maybe she was 15 or 16 back then um and subsequently years later was able to see some of the video of i mean i think it's a verifiable thing that there were video cameras all over his house yeah the degree to which it was used right we don't know that and um to the degree of how many people were involved and so on there's all kinds of conspiracies around the man but the question about her her galen so i only know what i know from the inputs which are the vicky ward it was it's a pod it's one of the podcasts it's a narrative podcast so it's like a um it's like an audio kind of a documentary or journalistic piece that she did and put out i thought it was really really well done i think it's called chasing galen um and i listened to that whole thing i didn't intend to listen to it all in one stretch that's how you know it's good i mean it was like a weekend and i basically was you know cleaning and doing other things and walking leon and listening to it and i got through it pretty quickly but i got really fascinated by it because um i don't i don't know but i think i feel like i find the whole situation gut-wrenching because i think jeffrey epstein is a straight-up like straight-up sociopath like no question with her everybody's calling her evil and for her to have enabled and done a lot of the things that she did could potentially require one might say that it could require a lack of empathy to be able to do those things knowingly um but at the same time i think the the information that was conveyed in the vicki ward piece was fascinating to me because it's clear that at the very least it's like it's like all of these things could be true she could maybe be not enough of a good person to have you know horribly victimized these young girls and destroy their lives but she could have all i feel like i'm going to get bashed for saying this but she could have in some way have not quite known what she was doing or been a bit out of her mind i'm just saying people i i would hope that people would be open to that's to exploring that as a possibility well her family and friends are making that case they're they're painting a broad picture of who she is as a human being and showing that she couldn't have done any of those things without being like systematically manipulated that's their right what i listened to in that podcast about her relationship with her father the how her father died um her things about her childhood and then epstein coming into her life and basically kind of pushing all those buttons and becoming like the father figure and so she would be in a position of kind of always wanting his approval and um and just the way that things that are described about the way that she um like was so subservient to him in this kind of astonishing way that seems really weird and abnormal and yet i think she had a lot of money and connections and i think she lost the money but had all the connections either way there was a lot that a ton that epstein gained via his relationship with her like a ton so it makes sense that he would have manipulated her he manipulates everybody so he without question i think one could argue he definitely manipulated her and again i want to be like careful not to be saying like that's an excuse for what she did i just think that that's one possibility it's important to like explore these things and be open to them as opposed to just like broad brush painting her as a horrible person i mean because people could say that based on things they've read or things that i did that like i'm a horrible person and it's very it's com very different because what she did involved um you know young girls whose lives were destroyed um but i think that people could be a bit open to understanding how somebody could be manipulated there's a there's a psychologist that i'm friends with that i got to know after i watched him on um leah remini's show so leah remini is the actress who was in scientology got out and has really been speaking out about it and trying to expose um what they're all about and how diabolical that organization is and a lot of people are exposing them and um you know doing this type of work and so she had this guy on her show who was in the moonies and his name is um steve haasen and um so he was in a cult and then he got out again by extreme circumstances he got in a car accident almost died and that's what ended up getting him out of the cult that he was in but really smart guy um was targeted when he was young got pulled into the moonies but watching this interview of him on her show he said he's talking about his experience and he said if they had told me to kill somebody i would have and i that in that moment made me cry but i also felt like i understand that and not that if mr fox had told me to kill somebody i don't think i would have but again i understand how it could get to that point so that makes me feel like with her like i would be curious what steve hassan would think kind of analyzing the entire situation because it's hard to understand that unless you've been in it and i understand with him how he could have said that if they had told me to kill somebody i would have yeah that's pretty intense i mean that's pretty extreme and it's interesting how you can get into it how far you can go just one day at a time like gradually right just like the frog in the boiling water yeah so fascinating i mean all of these cases are fascinating like patty hearst that whole story well i'm just also i just uh it's already a while ago re-read the rise and fall of the third reich i've been reading a lot a lot about hitler and gubbin for a long time working on a series about hitler and the third reich because it for me it's like returning so much of my family was destroyed or impacted by this time in history that is somehow a way to find out more about myself is going back to that time have you ever thought about inherited drama this the sounds not to mock people but this sounds like a thing that um like a woke thing like like a woke thing yeah i don't mean it that way at all but i get it because sometimes now when i say now i almost have to put air quotes when i say something's triggering because i feel like i'm using a word that's now like overused or used in less serious so now when i say something's triggering it's like i use yeah it's funny because good good words get get uh taken up and then they get people are overusing gaslighting yeah and i worry that that would happen with sociopathy like i think people need to understand sociopathy i think it's critical for humanity that people understand it yeah so just because you're being an asshole doesn't doesn't mean you're a sociopath exactly and i feel like it's going to be this thing where now everybody's going to start calling everybody else's sociopath and it's like oh you know and right now everybody calls everything gas lighting if somebody's lying it's not gas lighting i have to talk we started talking about i already forgot fluff is it fluff it's fluff right fluff yeah yeah okay so that was that was great that's a new discovery for me what um let's talk about food a little bit if we can you know what let's talk about restaurants first what that's the fascinating part of the story before anything else which is opening exceptionally successful restaurant in nyc new york city what's that take what does it take to to open up from the very beginning from the idea stage to the launching it both the finances and the skill of actually getting people super excited by it and then running it all that chaos i mean to me am i over romanticizing but it seems like new york city is a really tough place yes to to to launch a restaurant in yes very well i think because it's extremely competitive and the standards are so high so i think that's why there are so many good restaurants in new york because if they're not good they're not going to survive so even like you could walk into what looks like a hole in the wall and it's going to have amazing food um that happens a lot so what was the menu so was it a raw was it vegan and raw from the beginning yeah it was and raw means what now i'm getting thrown back to all the interviews i did when people ask me these questions it was so long ago um at the time i like being vegan it um so nothing was cooked over roughly 118 degrees it was this very like the world of there were people who are hardcore raw foodists and um and there's also people who are hardcore vegans and i was never any of those things so i think what we did you weren't the hardcore part or you you weren't but you like what parts of your life were you're a vegan are you still a vegan do you eat meat do you are you a vegetarian are you raw good question i don't apply labels so none of those labels would apply because it's male and female that's i those i'm beyond those labels myself as well but i'm a carnivore most of the time there you go it's the opposite of vegan unfortunately but no judgment i think that's a beautiful thing to be as vegan likewise i think that it's people who are very adamantly one way or the other i think that after all my years in this world and in this world in general and also consuming an enormous amount of um inputs and podcasts about health like i love listening to different points of view so i love when like somebody's arguing vegan and then somebody's arguing carnivore and like or even with other issues i like listening to what other people you know opposing sides assuming they're both you know intelligent interesting sources especially when they're i love it when they're sort of really testing that diet meaning they're athletes or in some way really testing it not just like vaguely saying what's healthy or not for you but like really what is life like under this particular diet yeah and i think that probably everybody's different and so in the same way that some people tolerate like some people can't tolerate nightshades or some people can't tolerate certain spices or some people can't tolerate gluten or some people thrive off of this or that and i've heard it said and discussed that there's a great deal to sort of what your body's used to what your ancestors ate where you where because it seems like the human body is pretty adaptable so you can adapt to eating a certain type of a food and so that if you're you know if your family comes from a certain part of the world where certain things aren't grown or or more meat is eaten or because there's people who are vegan their entire lives and they're incredibly healthy and they thrive and there's athletes and there's people like rich roll who i like who's vegan and an athlete but it might be something where that's that's working really well for him but it wouldn't work well for somebody else and i think there's also an element of people who try these things and then feel really good or feel really bad and they make a conclusion based on that initial period of time when it might be something where it makes you feel really good temporarily but then over time you're going to be depleted of certain things and then we also live in a world where like our soil is depleted and there's a lot of processing that takes out of foods a lot of things that we need so i just think that there's no kind of one right answer you can look at it from just a health perspective and then you can also look at it from like a morality and ethics perspective and then also like what's the impact on the environment and all those things are important and i think that i've watched a lot of films and things and for a while right after that i might think oh my god i can't believe i ate this thing last week and now i'm going to go back to being 100 vegan because i just watched this thing and it's fresh in my mind and now i'm thinking about it in a certain way but then over time that sort of fades and then you start to get a bit more loose and for me i i will end up eating a lot of things that aren't vegan usually in the context where i'm not adding to the consumption of it so um like at rikers there was most of the meat there was kind of weird and fake but there was like a chicken every thursday and sunday there was um it was actual chicken like the leg was that the most exciting thing for people oh yeah oh and then the most fights broke out on chicken day because it was like heightened thursday and sunday said yeah chicken day so that was the the most uh real meat you're getting is the chicken yeah a lot of compressed or duck duck white white or dark meat dark is the the leg in the thigh and it was cooked surprisingly well and so i would always eat it i don't know i mean yeah it's there and it's not from a health perspective one could say well that's probably the shittiest of the shitty chickens that are full of antibiotics and hormones and terrible things and so it's not optimal from that point of view um but it's like if it's otherwise going to be thrown in the trash then yeah you're not adding to it right or you know like i've been drunk at a party and eaten a bunch of stuff that one would think i would never eat yeah but it's not like i ran to the store and bought it or went to a restaurant or same liquor makes me eat things i shouldn't be eating oh yeah or or maybe should well my life is caught as you wrote me in the email life is complicated and fascinating and and so was our decisions when we're drunk i actually am a big fan of 7-eleven i go there sometimes late at night to think about life and i'll eat i'll eat whatever the stuff they have i also think it's fascinating how our bodies intuitively know what if you're like quiet enough and you think about like what you're craving yeah as long as it's not like if you're craving like some processed junky food that's probably something that's not quite functional but if you're crazy like sometimes i'll i'll i'll be like i must have avocado or like i'll want to eat an entire parsley salad and then it's happened i went through a phase where um and here i'm like do i say this out loud i went through a phase of are you gonna say it where i was i know now i have to say it um where i couldn't get enough um i don't know where it started like whose house i was at or whatever but grass-fed butter i just i was like i could tell that my body wanted whatever was there yeah and so i suppose i could have investigated it and thought like well what's in there is it like vitamin k vitamin d what is it in the grass fed butter because it wasn't regular but like regular butter ew no but like this grass-fed butter like i felt like i just wanted i needed it so there's probably something in there and maybe i could have gone and just taken a lot of vitamin k and then not eaten the butter but um but there is something in there that's fascinating i had that last night actually with um i went to grocer grocery store and i had i had a craving for tomatoes i was like what the hell is this like what i don't know right so i think it's weird you should listen to that and then just get a bunch of tomatoes because it's probably something in there it was like it felt right when i was little my mother no but that that's exactly what i was saying is that somehow your body knows without you knowing and today i have zero interest in tomatoes yeah did you eat the tomatoes though yeah okay well then you probably i ate way too many but that's all right or maybe not enough there you go see what you were saying anyway i think these things like shift and change and there's not like a right answer and then there's something where it's like one person might do well on something another person doesn't or you might do well on something for like i might you know maybe if i ate a bunch of liver i'd feel better because i'm getting vitamins that i don't that i that i'm lacking but then once i get them i'm fine and i don't need that anymore and i could potentially get those from other sources or um but yeah when i was little i used to crave my mother said i craved um not craved but she said i would always eat sardines but i wouldn't eat the pieces i would only eat the whole ones which have the bones in them and i used to chew on chicken bones and try to eat eggshells when i was like a top like little so i think all of those things have um calcium and other minerals and commons there's probably something there that i needed because you'd think as a little kid i wouldn't be drawn to oily fish and bones and eggshells yeah it's interesting because like you're saying the explanation for the craving is probably the nutrients you're getting but when you're imagining the craving you're not obviously imagining the nutrients you're imagining the texture the taste the feel the i mean a lot of the things that we actually experience as we're eating that's our brain probably tricking us right but do you love tomatoes well um i think we determined that love is impossible to define so are you extremely fond of do you think tomatoes are like one of the most delicious foods no no but maybe but yet you crave them maybe it's generational because it's a big russian thing with potatoes and tomatoes and because it's good with vodka right salted uh we were talking about the menu and the early days of the restaurant in new york so what was on the menu what was what kind of foods were you playing with do you remember um was that one of the challenging things is putting together because you're you're like crafting a new thing in new york where it's extremely competitive but over time it got easier and easier and then also i had you know it was i wasn't coming up with new dishes it was the people that work there so i feel like if i could take credit for something it would be recognizing talent and um you know and when dishes were developed this is when i was there on my own so i it was opened with matthew and jeffrey and then um within a year matthew was out um and jeffrey was still involved as like the you know the corporate sort of side of it but then over time um i separated from that infrastructure as well and then was completely on my own and part i did that because i was growing one lucky duck on the side and that was growing and growing and growing and i knew there was something there and yet the two businesses were completely intertwined and so um potential investors would come at me and they would see this very messy situation where i owned one lucky duck and jeffrey chatter owned the restaurant and how do we move forward from there and then people would say i should shut down the restaurant and just focus on one lucky duck and i wanted them all to be together under one umbrella and to move forward where everybody's incentives were aligned and what was the magic why was it so successful so quickly would you say i want to half jokingly but not joking but sort of say that it was about the the love and the food and the space uh can you define love but it's it's there was something special so i always when people ask me about opening a restaurant i say i don't want to get back into the restaurant business unless it's the same restaurant in the same space because there was something about that space that felt um i guess felt magical for lack of a better word and the energy of a lot of the people there and i think that people really cared about it and so for whatever reason it just there was an energy about the place would you ever do it again yes you ever consider it uh that's a tough thing in new york but you're thinking okay well it's there it's there let me ask you this question because i've been searching for that myself like asking myself this question if i you know the last meal question like what's the best meal you've ever eaten in your life like if you had if i had to murder you at the end of this and you get one meal but you can travel anywhere in the world um what would you what would you eat it's one of those questions where i feel like it i should have an answer prepared no it's too it's too difficult to sort of pick favorites but if somebody would you know force you to choose i was eating something once and i had the thought that if i was going to die this i would come here and order plate after plate of this and eat this do you remember what it was yes some diner in the middle of nowhere no it was um pure food and wine was on irving place and then and then the the kitchen connected to the one lucky duck juice bar which had an entrance on 17th street so it's kind of like this l shape and then there was a huge garden in the back on the corner was casimono and barhamon which was mario batali and joe bastianich were behind that and it was very focused on meat but also like organ meats and strange unusual finished restaurant wow lots of good reviews yeah it was really good um this is just a funny that we surrounded it but barhamon was um was it this tiny little bar and i went in there once with tobin late and i don't know why we ended up going there but it was right before they closed and drank red wine and they had tomato bread and it's just like a baguette although it's a spanish whatever it's like a bread like a baguette like a thin that they toast and i think they rub it with garlic and they don't even put tomato slices on it it's like they rub it and the tomato juices all over it it was just bread and tomato juice and probably some garlic flavor and really good salt and with some wine and red wine and we sat there and ordered a plate ate it ordered another one ate it or another one i think we had like six plates and i remember sitting there thinking i could just eat this until my stomach bursts and then and so if this is like if somebody was like what's the last i would just want to sit there and eat plate after plate i think if you went back there and ate the same thing it wouldn't taste nearly as good like was there something magical about that night about the way that bread was made in that night the way you felt at that night the wine the something or do you think like where's the power from that food come from is it the food itself or is it the environment i'm sure it's both but like if somebody brought a plate of it here right now it would be completely delicious yeah but it might not feel as kind of that it felt magical but it was the whole warmth of the experience and and the red wine and see how i'm doing in texas right now so it's different and if i keep forgetting and thinking it's late at night yeah we're surrounded by this is this whole place is anti-huberman there's no light uh well it's it's pro-huberman if it's in the afternoon or the evening except for these bright lights if they were lower down if they were like down below then they're hitting the tops of our eyes but it's the light coming from above that's destructive at night because it's hitting the bottom of your eyes so it's like mimicking the sun which is signaling your body that it's time to be awake so as much as possible so i do this in the evenings i shut off all the overhead lights i try to dim the lights as much as i can and and i turn on like a lamp versus an overhead light are you also doing the caffeine thing like not not consuming much caffeine way before bed oh i can't yeah i usually don't have caffeine late i try not to have it so ideally i would drink into the night cafe 2 pm would be my last i wouldn't ideally i wouldn't drink coffee after two but plenty of times i do especially if i haven't had midday coffee then i worry i'm gonna get a headache that makes you way more responsible than me let me return to love what do you think makes for a good romantic relationship given your experience i mean this question i think a mutual respect is a big part of it mutual respect that's interesting well and understanding it in a way that you want what's best for the other person not in a way that you would sacrifice yourself for them necessarily but in a very healthy way so i think a healthy relationship is where you know you want what's best for the other person so i always find it tragic um like say you started dating somebody who then would get jealous or upset if you spent too much time working on something right and but but that's like your life so if you're working on some robotics thing and you're having some breakthrough and so you just want to spend a lot of time wherever you spend a lot of time doing those things and then that other person got all bent out of shape and it became like a competition that to me seems very unhealthy because if somebody if it was if it was like a genuine healthy love she would want you to be doing those things yeah that's a good observation but to me i think the way to achieve that is actually or the easiest way to achieve at least for me is actually legitimately be excited by the things the other person is excited by so like not in some generic sense it's good for them to be doing the robotics thing like it's more like you become a fan of all the cool things that they're doing in their life so like i i definitely have this i somebody told me recently there's a term for this but i love like watching other people like um succeed be excited about shit like i like celebrating other people like it's fun for me to watch people do the thing they love doing so like i you know in some sense that's reinvigorating to me and exciting to me and so one of the things for me in a relationship is like you get excited by watching another person do the thing they're excited about it's not like i intellectually know it's good for them to have their own thing and they you know it's like i legit get excited by their own thing because otherwise that's what i mean it's like that person would be excited because you're excited yeah and but they would i think the easiest way to achieve that is actually be like what am i trying to it's like it's not like saying that you should be excited it's like you i can't help yourself but be excited that's why right but i think that's possible but it's possible for that to be the case for somebody that like might have an appreciation for what you're doing but isn't like that's not what that person's gonna go spend their time on them yeah they were by themselves yeah right so they might the other person might you know be really good at a musical instrument that requires a lot of practice and you're not interested in playing that musical instrument but you appreciate the beauty of the music and understand that that person is getting something out of it so you would be excited when they get a chance to practice or or whatnot you know so it's that kind of a do you think loves should be simple or complicated in a relationship well it might be inherently complicated i think i i may have asked huberman the exact same question forget what he said i thought it was interesting when you asked elon about love oh boy yeah he that that's a that's that's that's gonna be conversation number like seven that he actually answers it well what was interesting that i found admirable was this sort of like a duty to humanity i think you asked about it not in a about person but about the work and so it was like it was like a to do to put all this energy to try to kind of like move things forward knowing that he will probably die before it gets there you're talking about like a something related to the science of rocketry yeah right he's kind of a rocket scientist but whatever you were asking him about whether something could be accomplished and he said yes but not in his lifetime but he's going to keep pushing it forward anyway so i felt like that was a really you know to put so much of yourself into something just to kind of move the baton forward for humanity it was a struck me as an admirable thing you know where there's no great reward in in terms of you're gonna you know you're gonna see that invention happen or you're gonna see mars colonized or whatever it is but you'll you'll you're willing to put in all the work and brainpower to try to push it along like thinking about the biggest possible impact on the world just thinking about humanity i think all of us when we do cool things are contributing to humanity and it's it's good to think of it that way when you run a restaurant and you make all the people happy i don't know that's part of that it's good to think big like that and elon does definitely but when i asked them about love i'm you know just knowing him personally now i'm asking about the personal question about love but i'm giving him the freedom to escape it which he he always does that's very generous because i don't want to trap him i i understand it's it's a difficult so you know he's better at solving engineering problems than talking about love uh the other thing he's really good at is um going to the joke so for him um you know for him love and all those kinds of things especially those kind of cliche sounding things are are are the stuff of memes it's the stuff the easiest way you can talk about it is humor the same with trauma like personal trauma easiest stuff for him to talk about is the it's taken his laugh about it he has he's been very tough uh privately or on podcast to talk about personal like difficult stuff and for me obviously that's often the most interesting stuff as humans like where's your darkness you know but uh for him it's tough for a lot of people it's tough but it's important to go there maybe maybe first in the privacy of your own mind and i think you know bringing it back to the relationship thing is wanting to um like understand and accept those things about somebody else i mean sort of cliche to say that you can't change somebody um and you don't want to also like try to change yourself for somebody but you can sort of figure things out and be willing to make adjustments and navigate for the sake of something working and sometimes that comes from understanding and which might require a lot of effort and yeah open-mindedness if somebody's kind of very different from you yeah and being uh being fragile yourself revealing your flaws and getting to learn about theirs and getting to see the beauty in them because that's the good stuff or if if if the flaws are too much of a red flag then you walk away that's the hard stuff you either the red flags might be the thing that you actually get to love deeply because they're a flawed human or it might be the reason to walk away quickly and you don't know it's it's although if it's like if it's a if it's a red flag then it by definition is something that's telling you to walk away if it was just like something about their character that's challenging you could appreciate that or understand it but it's not something that like they're intentionally trying to use to deceive you i think red flags it's like i guess it's more about like manipulation and or like somebody's kind of extreme dysfunction or something would be red flags but i think there could be things that are quirky or weird or even dark about somebody um that are acceptable yeah but they might look like red flags if if there's a if there's someone crying on on the subway that's a red flag for me that she might be like an emotional basketball yeah this is a high maintenance crazy person yeah yeah that's true but you know it could also be there could be a deeper story to it so that's what i'm trying to tell you that's true all right what advice would you give to young folks today if they want to launch a restaurant in new york city and then message somebody on twitter i was before you finished the sentence i was about to say read a lot of books but then you then because you said what advice would you give to young people today and i was like read a lot of books yeah and then you got to the restaurant part yeah oh no i mean that's i was joking about the restaurant i said yeah about life i would say uh not just about a career as a restaurateur but just in life how to be successful how to be how to live a life that can be fulfilling and how to live a life they can be proud of i read a lot of books it's complicated because have you figured it out yet no but i think self-awareness is key but i also think there's some of those things where like people kind of have to learn their own lessons but i think in part because i never had kids and i never wanted kids i feel like through my book i keep thinking that i want a lot of the lessons that i learned to be useful to other people particularly younger people and in many cases younger females to maybe understand themselves a little better along the way because i think that you know a lot of mistakes that i made and things that happened or things that i did that i'm embarrassed about um or things that i stepped into that i wouldn't have otherwise stepped into or allowed to happen were a result of in many cases like insecurity um like a lack of confidence and um and i think in the context of moving forward with relationships being really careful to understand why you're there or if you're repeating a pattern that's something that is sort of cliche but i feel like it's very i mean art cliche cliches are things that are true they're just repeated a lot but they're but anyway the idea that people repeat patterns right yes so i think that's very true right and so to be aware of that and to figure it out sooner rather than later so you don't keep stepping into the same thing over and over again you mentioned sort of giving yourself time and space to think yeah which sometimes isn't possible but don't let momentum of life sort of carry you away right and i think for me one of the things that would have scared me about having kids is the chaos of it um or not being able to handle it but i think that's like that's just me not most people you ran a restaurant i know which is probably why i would go home at night and lie on the floor and cry or how often do you do that um what's do you like a good cry i do music usually or what can we can you paint the scene what and just in general yeah is there candles i cried this morning okay not intentionally not fabulous or just overwhelmed it was like a you know i looked a little bit at instagram and saw what was it very often they're like like these little animal rescue stories or whatever but this is a this guy matt who used to be my trainer years ago and put this little montage video to music that was interesting if there hadn't been music i probably wouldn't have cried but it was um showing his wife having their second child not not showing it but like the sort of before and then you know the baby in her arms right afterwards and then bringing the baby home it was this very short little clip but set to music yeah and i watched that and started to cry but like it's not i didn't sob or anything so i think i cry easily um interestingly though in actual horrifically tragic things or when they apply to me i might not cry and then people find that unusual and that was in the film that i was my sister my father described that when my parents got divorced i didn't i didn't cry and i just whereas my sister bawled her eyes out and i i didn't cry at all ever and i just didn't say anything i want to talk about it um and um you know like when i was sentenced to jail i didn't cry um so a lot of times when something really big happens i get a little bit weirdly um i don't know but i very often too much to feel it all directly so you kind of cry it out later slowly right maybe years later maybe years later yeah maybe that's what i'm really crying about when i cry at these little videos or something yeah i don't know but i'm glad for it because i feel like it always feels like kind of a relief well let me ask this because it's interesting what you would say do you have regrets about things in your life like what do you regret if there's a one day you could live again or which day would you pick like relive and make different choices um well like one obvious thing could be the day that i let anthony strange is in the door if i'd instead you know if at any time early on i instead just pushed him out you know that my life would be wildly different um it's hard to so that's the biggest mistake of your life i would say just letting anthony to your life i think yes i think one could argue that's the biggest mistake but then at the same time you never know because like when i um i was in a sort of a dark relationship that then led to the restaurant am i having the one lucky duck brand so i felt like that darkness it's like if you married a horribly abusive person but you had a beautiful child and then you go on and you have this beautiful child and you think well if i hadn't been with that horribly abusive person i wouldn't have this beautiful child so i wouldn't go undo it so i feel like a lot of things are like that and i guess i could optimistically hope that there are good things down the road where i'll think well i'm here and i'm appreciate i'm grateful for it and therefore i'm grateful for the things that got me here which include a lot of dark things it's hard to say because a lot of people were hurt in my case but i am optimistic that i can make those things up and there also hurts that were um i mean in some cases emotionally but also very much financial and i feel like those are numbers and the um employees were all paid back so anybody else that is out money because of everything that happened isn't somebody that's like not able to um you know feed themselves everybody most of those people have plenty of money and it's like not a big deal but i still want to repay all of it um and it's numbers it's not um you know like nobody died and sometimes when i think about my own challenges um they feel sort of inconsequential in comparison to other things going on in the world so um you know like yes it's hard being humiliated or it's hard to have people say nasty things about you on twitter instagram but really who cares because that's just words and things and i'm not like fleeing my home and watching people get shot so and they're still out of this darkness are out of this you can still that you still have a lot of time to create something beautiful in the world yeah maybe something even more beautiful than you've ever done before i am optimistic and i also feel like you know part of the reason i like having these conversations because i feel like people will learn stuff from my shitty experiences to avoid going through their own shitty experience and i've heard a ton of that from a lot of women and some men um you know writing to me saying that they went through something similar and nobody understood and you know my story help them or um you know might help them get somebody else out of a situation so making it useful feels good so through all of this leon was with you he uh recently had a birthday march i guess yes 12. yeah i made him a phenomenal meat cake or a a layered cake that involved a variety of animal foods he's not a vegetarian no he's not okay but i also give him like really high quality stuff but yeah he's not a vegan a vegetarian let me ask you a hard question do you think about the tragic fact that dogs live much shorter lives than us humans do you think about his mortality all the time i kind of try not to but all the time because he told me in traveling here to austin texas you're not in the habit of leaving leon by himself uh well he's not by himself but i no i haven't been away from him in certainly since before covid um so i'm not used to it and so i people always say that dogs have um like that dogs have attachment issues or get separation anxiety but in my case at least it's like i think he's fine i'm the one that is you know he's like fine i'm the one that gets anxious about it um being away from him you're the one who acts like a dog when you say you come back and you're super excited to see him yeah i can have people be on the floor and wiggle your tail and drool and all that kind of stuff but do you think about the fact you know that you might lose leon soon i do i think about it all i mean i i try not to think about it but i'm scared and i um yeah it's scary but then i also just try to understand that it's inevitable and um i mean yeah assuming i'm still around then um that's i think one of the things about having adopting a dog or getting or caring for an animal unless it's one of those animals that lives a really long time i just found out that parrots live an extraordinarily long time um but they're annoying so you get it's a trade-off the ones we love live a short time the ones that enjoy right live a long time so i just think it's one of those things that you just know what's gonna happen and it's just part of life and i think it's one of those pains that's it's painful but you just kind of have to go through it um and what's the alternative you're not gonna it's like saying you would never want to fall in love because of the heartbreak that's gonna inevitably come yeah so some people do that they just avoid exactly ever you're saying screw it i'm diving right in yes it was all worth it what about your own mortality you think about yourself dying less so than i was before um i think i i wrote about that and i put this letter dear mr fox online which i never intended to do but i did because of all the misconceptions about the film and our in our relationship and so i put this thing up online that i'd written on my phone on multiple subway rides and at the end of it i talk about because especially then when like it was the height of everything was gone and you know what do i have to live for i sort of noticed and wrote about how differently i felt about things whereas i used to be afraid i used to have like a healthy fear of you know being pushed in front of a train because that happens you know in new york or anywhere or you know i had a healthy fear of like i don't know walking down a dark street at night but i noticed that at the time i didn't really have those fears because i was like yeah what do i like what do i have to lose like who cares you know i'm i don't have anything anymore what i have to lose so i certainly feel much less that way but something about those feelings lingered where i'm less afraid of it or more just less afraid of it but hoping it's not some sort of a gruesome way i mean some people are really afraid of flying and i feel like well statistically it's extremely safe and if it's going to happen it's going to happen there's nothing you can do like there's really nothing you can do unless you're gonna like do what that guy and that small plane did the other day and like leap over and was able to take control of the plane but i mean like a commercial flight so it's like if you're gonna die you're gonna die and it's just your time and all you can do is hope that i would i would probably prefer to have as little awareness about it as possible you know it's like if you'd rather have somebody if you're gonna get shot you'd rather have somebody shoot you in the back of the head and you didn't see it coming and just boom lights out versus somebody holding a gun to your head and then you're gonna feel all this fear um and have to like feel all of that which also made me think of um you know animals and animals suffering in the way that some people argue that because of the conditions and the fear that that's like that's like in their bodies when they're killed which is an interesting thing to think about um yeah i clearly struggle with the ethics of i just i think about it a lot about um you know like our current food system which involves uh a system that everybody has sort of accepted and normalized where um like say aliens did come down yeah and looked at us and realized that were a particularly good source of whatever fuel they need so then they imprisoned us all in cages that were like the equivalent of like sardines and jammed in an elevator and then we were bred and we would get sick and we'd go crazy and we'd do the equivalent of like pecking and then we'd get abused and then like grotesquely and brutally killed and that was like our entire lives and so if like aliens came down and started and did all of that we would have to be okay with that which is something that my um was said to me after watching this movie called our daily bread many years ago um but it's an interesting way to think about it because i mean we would have to be okay with it because that's kind of what we're doing now right yeah we've normalized certain kinds of cruelty and i don't people think yeah people think that like i would object to hunting uh hunting for sport i think is grotesque but if you're hunting and then you're gonna eat the entire animal and you're hunting in a way where it's kind of like you know that that animal like lived a free and happy life until that moment in the same way that the animal lived a free and happy moment lived a free and happy life or we don't know maybe they were depressed but they lived a free life until like the lion came and took it down so is a human shooting an animal for food somehow more tragic or horrible than a lion attacking an elk yeah well so there's a lot of complexities to it on top of all of that so one you said so hunting for sport is bad but there's this like complex ethical equation of the fact that hunting for sport is the thing that often funds the preservation of a species that's well no that's another complicated layer there's like the um maui venison all the deer in hawaii and um i might have gotten maui venison treats for leon um but they're they're hunting those deer is a way of preserving the yeah so i mean these things are complicated but that's why i don't have a problem with somebody shooting an elk or bringing it home and eating it like my um you know like i've eaten elk jerky and things like that from that's one of those situations where like i wouldn't morally have a problem with it and for me it's also i'm not one of those people where i think like you i wouldn't eat meat it's more like i don't want to add to the consumption of it and i wouldn't want to eat sort of like the factory farmed meat necessarily unless i'm in prison and it's otherwise going to get thrown away but uh hashtag uh a lot of a lot of things you know you know you make do things differently there but yeah um so you know it's just these things are complicated but so it's not about like you i don't want that in my body it's sort of like what where did it come from and and what's going on here and um i think that like if you just followed joe rogan's instagram there's sort of a bit of a glorification of meat that because i listened to enough that i heard the one where he talked there was a recent one where he's talking about anthony bourdain and in that conversation i think it was that one he explained that he sort of did it in summary so i feel like he talked about it in the past but did all this research and came to the conclusion based on all his research came to the conclusion that he was either going to be vegetarian or shoot his own meat yeah and hunt and so that that's totally different that's something i mean that's very like admirable i think and he has the means to do it but but if you not only that but he does it with a bow right even more so so it is a good question it's it's a good question how we uh get out of this factory right because i do like i i like i like meat i think it's delicious i i we're dependent on the not just uh on the the nutrients and the taste we're also dependent on the cost a lot of people have gotten used to a particular kind of cost that they pay for meat right but i think if we wiped out all the government subsidies it would be a completely different story because why why are vegetables so expensive and subsidizing some tomatoes yesterday i'm i'm protesting why is salad so expensive right but none of the the if you if you look at the subsidies that are given to um the all of the inputs to the meat industry like the grain and soy and whatnot and then to the meat and dairy industries and all the subsidies that prop up those industries and allow those products to be cheap and and sustainable from a business perspective not environmental it's government subsidies so what if we took all that away and then also what if we gave that to um you know the the kale and hemp and fresh greens farmers then and made those foods more affordable and then had meat reflect its actual true cost then you know then people would just eat more vegetables and less meat because of the cost you mentioned that you crossed off one item from your list i forget what the item was but um oh it was i had previously thought that i would want to go to vegas one day just to cross that off my list it's not like i was like ooh one day i want to go to vegas it was just like i imagined i would only go there once just to see it and then be done with it yeah that's a good one that's a good one and i i still think you can do it because there's a particular vegas experience that's worth having and there's maybe a couple of vegas experiences that are worth having i find casinos horribly depressing because i think they're just predatory everything about them is predatory not it's not it's not the casinos that are important it's the people culture and the whole the people crazy the people you meet the people you meet in the chaos that is las vegas can create a memorable experience you lose track of what is what is day what is night you can get drunk and make all the mistakes that somehow create a beautiful masterpiece at the end of it that's for another time what else is on the bucket list what items on the bucket list you haven't done yet you really really would like we talked about mortality that that there's a finite deadline what pops in your head is something that you want us to do what i want is to not die and owe people money so so whatever mistakes you make i wanna i wanna live to write those things and i also felt really strongly about my what i'd what i and everybody in the business had built and um so a big part of me wants to um resurrect the brand because when i i felt really strongly about it like i had that feeling that this was this was going to be a thing that i i wanted to build and grow and could have a really positive impact and outlast me and um would you bring it back as the same name yeah well i i put the logo on my arm that's kind of how strongly i felt about it and so when i did that and around that time and all of that time i felt really really strongly that um quietly because it feels like a little bit bold but quietly felt really almost with a certainty that it was going to be something really big and it was growing and growing and all signs were pointing towards there i was just sort of stalled and couldn't figure out the logistics and then enter mr fox so the universe can be quite absurdly cruel at times but yeah but that that is something uh that's something worth reaching for is repay the debts of the past and then people have said to me that leon achieved some kind of immortality via being in the documentary and then i might i don't understand this world at all but i might do like an nft thing related to leon's image which would be another way of kind of immortalizing his image at least yeah but that's a um i mean it's a potentially in progress kind of a crazy leap but and potentially relaunching the restaurant possibly yes there's a restaurant and there's one lucky duck in that brand and they're sort of separate but related um and they could each exist independently i liked it better when they existed together because i felt like they were very complementary in a lot of ways and they made sense together but either one could be done separately without the other do you think you will find love again given the chaos yet to go through um i have and i never talk about it i've never talked about it you have fallen love again yes but also in a kind of possibly doomed temporary way which you don't like it simple do you it's not that it's not simple it's actually quite simple it's just that again there's a large age gap i am the older one which in itself isn't a problem because again i wouldn't i wouldn't want to like if somebody wanted kids and a family i wouldn't want to hold them back from that and so if i sort of wanted to be with somebody who wanted those things i even if i was completely in love with somebody i would have to kind of like you know hurt endure the pain to be like no i'm gonna keep you from those things so you should go do those things so that's that's the source of the temporariness no it's a bit related to like logistics and living one place and having it like extremely different lifestyles is this a prince of some sort no does he have a castle um no okay all right no no you're gonna say who it is or we're gonna keep that a mystery i don't on the one hand like i feel like it's a it's protective for me to talk about it in some ways but i also worry because very often i avoid saying anything because for a lot of reasons but one being that people freak out and just assume that i'm gonna step into something horrible again because i did step into something horribly destructive again after mr fox and what happened was i allowed something to happen and so going back to that what advice would you give to people i would i would tell people to be very careful to be deliberate about who they're getting involved with and thoughtful about it and making sure that they're not just allowing something to happen so it's like you know men can sometimes be and i suppose women can be as well but people can be very persistent sometimes that's a good thing but it could also be a dangerous thing because sometimes somebody might just and this has happened to me a lot where somebody just wears you down and you're like ugh fine you know um that's funny and yeah yeah no i mean but it works it's shockingly like the things that i've done in the spirit of like or not wanting to hurt somebody's feelings that's another that's another dangerous be nice let's get married just to be nice that's another dangerous thing and also maybe he's just i feel like i'm like circling back to all these unanswered questions from before but um i didn't marry i married i married him he like convinced me to marry him in this very quick annoying way and as if it was like something i had to do and i'd be protected and all kinds of weird reasons and it was just like my response to my my agreeing to marry him was like ugh fine yeah and and then i remember being embarrassed at city hall going to get the license you know people who are in love and wanting to get married aren't sitting in city hall mortified and embarrassed you know so yeah but so it was so i sort of cringe when people call him my ex-husband because i don't think of him that way it's sort of is even though technically that's correct yeah but there's a there's a powerful romantic notion to the thing and do those words and that that had nothing to do with you getting married it was more it was just like another thing that he made me do like a chore that just had you know unfortunate consequences of like then having to get divorced in the whole yeah i think i think even weddings are romantic like um the whole the cheesy thing there's you know yeah they are those are cool uh i agree we don't get many many of those in life um well you know what let's keep it a mystery let's keep the person a mystery uh to be continued season two conversations with some like a known person or anything but i feel like people always worry that i'm stepping back into something and i don't have the energy to be certain should they be defensive and no there you go don't worry friends no and also just remember that thing i was saying about how like it's good if you get to know somebody really slowly over a long period of time yeah it's kind of one of those situations so i feel very confident that i'm like certain it's i'm not stepping into something where i'm gonna be surprised and somebody turns out to be not who they presented themselves to be so it's that wise way to do it especially for me yeah and also again it's like i would i would i would caution people to be careful about um you know wanting to go into something deliberately versus kind of getting caught up in something and or rushed or that said i would i would suggest people take that cautionary advice but uh you know sometimes you just fall in love yeah love at first sight is a thing there are those stories of you know sweet stories of older people that i don't know you can get hurt for it too but don't don't listen to your heart this was an incredible conversation uh we talked for way over four hours we did yeah and uh yeah i feel like i can keep talking to you this was amazing uh summer thank you so much for being honest for for being fearless in answering all the questions all the difficult questions and thank you for trying to create something special with your restaurant and maybe create something special still in your future yeah i hope so thank you for having me i kept thinking um i kept thinking that like i was gonna get a message that was like just kidding i just i've listened to your podcast a lot and so i've certainly felt very intimidated knowing who's sat if not in this actual chair in this chair in another location or maybe here very are you nervous yes and um yeah i was nervous too yeah but at the same but also because i've because i know the way that you speak in your style i felt like it was gonna feel like a good natural conversation as opposed to sometimes you have conversations where it's like anyway so i didn't feel nervous because of like what i was walking into i felt nervous that i was gonna you know sound stupid and boring and everybody would be like why did he interview her like it was exciting you happy with it how do we do yeah i think so very often after are you self-critical after stuff yes when you go home tonight are you gonna be like happy with yourself or not i mean i feel good i don't feel like i can't think of anything that i said that i regret maybe there's things that you know somebody's gonna yell at me because i said something that i said like meat is good or something or i don't you know i guess like vegan judgment yes um yes but i think it's more useful to be honest about the contradictions and conflicting feelings because i feel like that's what most people have and so if you want to help people shift a certain way yeah you were raw honest it was beautiful it was beautiful to watch thank you for the books your darkness today was visible but the beauty too it was it was an amazing conversation um i'm i'm really really happy with it i'm honored that you sit down with me that was awesome i'm floored that you're honored and i'm honored that you asked me to be here so thank you sarah thanks for listening to this conversation with sarma melangalis to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from playwright august wilson confront the dark parts of yourself and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing thank you for listening and hope to see you next time