Hard Knox with Amanda Knox
Amanda Knox has been many things—accused, convicted, exonerated, tabloid villain, true crime icon, best-selling author—and she's still figuring out what to make of it all. Hard Knox is warm without being soft, funny without being light, and intellectually serious without being academic. Amanda argues with her guests, changes her mind, and brings the kind of hard-won perspective that you can only get from someone who's a connoisseur of Italian prison food. To submit your questions and comments, subscribe at www.amandaknox.substack.com, where you’ll also gain access to ad-free and bonus episodes, subscriber-only essays, and more. www.amandaknox.com Twitter: @amandaknox IG: @amamaknox Bluesky: @amandaknox.com.bsky.social
Episodes
October 20, 2026 • 45 mins
Dr. Ethan Russo is a neurologist and psychopharmacology researcher, who in the medical community, is a self-described “salmon upstream against the current.” After a transformative experience with natural medicine in the Peruvian rainforest, the pharmacologist now spearheads cannabis and psychedelic research in an effort to treat the untreatable.
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October 6, 2026 • 65 mins
What happens when who you are becomes the evidence against you? Valena Beety says that three-quarters of exonerated women were convicted of crimes that never happened, and that the same machinery now targets pregnant women, mothers, and queer families. Valena digs into junk science, false confessions, the "bad woman" trial, and the uncomfortable question of who gets to be considered a worthy innocent.
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September 22, 2026 • 43 mins
Despite the best efforts of healthcare professionals, medical errors are responsible for tens of thousands of annual deaths. Today, Richard Pallardy, a freelance writer from Chicago, tells us the story of the medical odyssey his mother went through in the fall of 2015.
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September 8, 2026 • 72 mins
Amanda met comedian Jamie Kilstein at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and found an unlikely kindred spirit. Both arrived at Fringe to prove themselves, battle misconceptions, and reclaim their narratives through art. Both know what it's like to have the world decide who you are before you get a chance to speak.
Kilstein was a prominent progressive stand-up comedian and co-host of the political podcast Citizen Radio, with a rising ...
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August 25, 2026 • 46 mins
The emergency room and the ICU are not just emotionally draining and traumatic environments for patients, but for healthcare workers as well. ER doctor Kat Moore tells us how Zen Buddhism is working its way into emergency rooms to improve the wellbeing of both patients and doctors. Learn more about the Contemplative Medicine Fellowship at: https://zencare.org/contemplative-medicine-fellowship/
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August 18, 2026 • 33 mins
When you finally deliver a creative project you've been working on for a long time, how do you cope with the emotional hangover, how do you make space to reflect, and how do you give yourself grace to not have the answers or know what's next? Amanda and Chris reflect the day after the final performance of her sold out run of Cartwheel, her one-woman show, at the Edinburgh Fringe festival.
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August 11, 2026 • 64 mins
What happens when fighting for your life becomes a crime? Why are thousands of women and girls who defend themselves against violence prosecuted as offenders, sometimes for life.
Amanda sits down with journalist Justine van der Leun to discuss her new book Unreasonable Women which investigates "criminalized survival". They dig into the "reasonable man" standard, the believability problem facing survivors, and why the legal syst...
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July 28, 2026 • 55 mins
"Trauma" has become a controversial word in the current culture wars. It's a point of pride for some, an excuse for others. But trauma is undoubtedly real, and it effects the body. Dr. Christy Gibson, author of The Modern Trauma Toolkit, has studied the neurophysiological effects of trauma and how we can alter the body's reflexive responses to find post-traumatic growth.
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July 14, 2026 • 63 mins
What if a quiz show could fix America's political divide? Amanda talks with Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene about the neuroscience behind moral decision-making, why people don't donate to the charities that do the most good even when they want to, and how a simple cooperative quiz game is measurably reducing animosity between Republicans and Democrats.
Amanda and Joshua also dig into effective altruism without the guilt trip,...
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July 9, 2026 • 16 mins
As she prepares for the premiere of her one-woman show, Cartwheel, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this August, Amanda has been thinking about the relationship between tragedy and comedy. This episode from her 20-part Resilience series on the Waking Up app is a look at why finding humor in tragedy is more than a coping mechanism, but a genuine survival skill, and how that idea has shaped her approach to bringing her story to the ...
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June 30, 2026 • 52 mins
Seth Ferranti is a former LSD kingpin and fugitive on the US Marshall’s Top 15 Most Wanted list who faced a highly publicized and lengthy prison sentence due to the DEA's early-'90s crackdown on LSD. The self-described outlaw and ahead-of-his-time activist is now a journalist and filmmaker whose past life informs all aspects of his work.
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June 23, 2026 • 48 mins
Amanda woke up to good news and bad news arriving at the exact same moment — again. In true Hard Knocks fashion, that personal experience sends Chris and Amanda down a rabbit hole exploring one of life's most disorienting puzzles: is there really such a thing as good news or bad news at all?
From the Buddhist parable of the farmer to Stoic amor fati to Mel Brooks playing ball with the universe, they dig into what Zen, Taoi...
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June 16, 2026 • 62 mins
The death penalty is often sold as justice. But what if it's just a very expensive decades-long process, doesn't deter crime, and gets it wrong often enough that 190 people have been exonerated from death row?
Amanda sits down with Laura Porter, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty and former public defender of 12 years, for a conversation that refuses to stay on the surface. They get into the histori...
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June 9, 2026 • 15 mins
Amanda Knox is a multi-linguist and self-described word nerd. In this essay she explores the fascinating world of untranslatable words, the ones that exist in some languages but not others, and what they reveal about the cultures that invented them. And at the end of it all, Amanda makes one of her own.
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June 2, 2026 • 53 mins
Greg Lukianoff is one of our nation's foremost defenders of free speech, co-author of "The Canceling of the American Mind," and president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. His journey to this place wasn’t easy, on a personal level, but the depressive spiral Greg eventually transcended gave him insight into the problems plaguing our public discourse.
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May 26, 2026 • 69 mins
What happens when your creative partner is also your spouse? Amanda and Chris dive into the messy, rewarding world of creative collaboration,from co-writing a book of love poems to navigating the high-stakes pressure of building a one-woman comedy show headed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
They get real about the tension between structure and spontaneity, brutal feedback vs. the compliment sandwich, and what it actually means t...
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May 19, 2026 • 60 mins
What happens when a culture decides that visibility is power and then punishes women for being visible? Amanda sits down with Sophie Gilbert, staff writer at The Atlantic, and author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, for a conversation that gets personal fast.
They trace the arc from riot grrrl to the Spice Girls to Britney's breakdown to the Manosphere and make the case that what ...
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May 12, 2026 • 15 mins
In this monthly Hard Knox essay Amanda explores the "third way of being": not alone, not truly together, but that warm middle state where you want someone near without the obligation of actually meeting them. It's the feeling of knowing your mom is down the hall at 2am. It's reading on the couch while someone cooks in the other room.
What begins as a parenting anecdote unfolds into a sharp, philosophical meditation on technology...
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May 5, 2026 • 59 mins
We are now routinely faced with a dilemma: News breaks hat an artist beloved has done something horrible. How does that change our experience of their art? There’s no one better to help us explore this thorny territory than Claire Dederer, author of "Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma."
Get a copy of Claire's book at:
https://www.powells.com/book/monsters-9780525655114
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April 28, 2026 • 44 mins
What happens when confronting the person who hurt you doesn’t bring the closure you hoped for?
In this episode, Amanda responds to a listener wrestling with whether to confront an abusive family member and what to do when that conversation goes nowhere. Drawing from her own experience facing her former prosecutor, she unpacks the crucial difference between healing and accountability, and why tying your recovery to someone el...
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