Episodes - Amanda Palmer

Art&Music

Podcast

Art&Music

Podcast

September 22nd, 2020

WELCOME TO THE ART OF ASKING EVERYTHING, the PODCAST

Do you know that I love to talk to people? About hard and uncomfortable things? Well, I do. For this podcast, I sit down with (or occasionally, phone) guests from all walks of life: doctors, sex workers, musicians, writers, teachers, painters, parents, activists, TED speakers, friends….basically anyone who wants to have a deep and honest conversation with me about The Big Stuff. This podcast is professionally produced and includes music, tangents, and best of all: NO BRANDING OR PAID ADVERTISEMENTS because we are 100% patron-supported. My patrons also get access to the podcast book club, blogs and behind-the-scenes stuff, plus a live chat with me and almost every guest to ask us their own questions and catch up with each other, so please join to support us...and keep us ad-free! Listen and subscribe to the podcast: https://linktr.ee/AskingEverything and join the Patreon: http://patreon.com/amandapalmer.

December 29th, 2020

Tim Flannery: The Need for Drawdown

When I met up with mammalogist, environmentalist, explorer and conservationist Tim Flannery in 2019, the world was a different place. Thanks to the work of activists like Greta Thunberg, humans were finally acknowledging climate change as a threat and policy makers taking note. There was more action, and more hope. Then 2020 happened and everything changed. The plight of the Great Barrier Reef and rising greenhouse gases pale almost to insignificance when you’re watching family, friends and neighbours suffer, but the negative effects of our presence on this planet continue relentlessly. Tim CARES so very much, and hearing him offer solutions to the greatest existential threat of our time may give you back some hope. As he says in the episode, ‘This isn’t a game. This isn’t about tribalism. It isn’t about identity. It isn’t about politics. You are threatening my children. So justify that, or get out of the way’.
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December 22nd, 2020

Tim Minchin: Accidentally Brave

Tim Minchin is one of the smartest, weirdest, silliest musicians I know. You may know him as the guy who wrote the music for the hit musical “Matilda”, but I know him as the guy who has always written deeply gorgeous, inappropriate and searingly intelligent songs. A few times in my career, people have said “You’re a female Tim Minchin”, and I’ve taken it as a high compliment. But is it more that Tim Minchin is a male Amanda Palmer? WHO KNOWS? We talk about our strange jobs, empathy, our own self-loathing, decoupling "intellectualism" from emotion, the power of The Internet to share the stories of the disenfranchised, and about the gift of being told that you are not fucking special. And America. We had a hard talk about America.
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December 14th, 2020

Dan Savage: Sex Rules Us

The Queen of Openness talks to King of Sex Advice, and we make a Truth-Sex baby! No, really, this one's good. When I made my first wishlist, Dan Savage was one of my fantasy podcast interviews. He's an author, LGBT community activist, and long-long-time writer of Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column. For decades, both Dan and I have been trying to navigate truth, love, hate, and how to navigate (and explain) open relationships - especially when you have children. Also: master-level compartmentalization, how to weed out toxic critics, ACTUAL weed....and the power of the mute button.
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December 7th, 2020

Tim Ferriss: The Fear of No

Tim Ferriss is a bestselling author (his book "The Four-Hour Body" was a menu and health bible for me a few summers ago) and a superstar podcaster. But look closer; he's not a health guru so much as a general SEEKER. He's been through his own trauma and knows what the bottom feels like. And he desperately wants to know why, why, why we do the things we do, and what we can do to heal ourselves - inside and out. He's one of the most compassionate, interesting people I've ever met, and our conversation about life, mental health and how hard it is to say NO is one for the books.
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December 1st, 2020

Storm Large: Know Who You Are Not

If you want a mainline injection of self-love, balls-out hilarity and basic life inspiration, look no further. Singer/writer Storm Large is one of the most unapologetic and liberated human beings I have ever had the pleasure of talking to. She is forceful but full of compassion and heart, she’s opinionated, loud and indomitable, and she knows how to wield the magic tools of art and stage performance to chase away demons. She’s a hero to me. This is also possibly the absolute FUNNIEST conversation I’ve ever had. Really. Pee first!
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November 23rd, 2020

KT Tunstall: The Land of I Don’t Give A Fuck

There is a road to the land of No Fucks Given, and this episode’s guest, award-winning songwriter KT Tunstall, has found that road. And she, like me, has found that the Road to the Land of No Fucks is also the Road to the Land of Many Fucks…and, well, it gets really profound, trust me. KT has recently lost part of her hearing, and also just lost her dad. We swear a lot, and we go deep fast, sharing our experiences of loss and how it catapults us into growth.
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November 16th, 2020

Jamil Zaki: Tuning Your Empathy Fork

Empathy is very hard to talk about nowadays without – poetry intended – pissing someone off. It’s easy to empathize with people we like and “get”, but what about people we can’t stand? What about having empathy for your right-wing, QAnon-supporting, openly racist uncle? What about having empathy for someone who hurts you, your family, your friends? My guest this week is Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and the author of a fantastically needed book called The War For Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Drawing from our life experiences, we dive deep into the engine room of kindness, empathy and why it’s more necessary than ever right now.
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November 10th, 2020

Nadya Tolokonnikova: Pussy Rioting Now

Nadya Tolokonnikova is not fucking around. A member of the anarchist feminist group Pussy Riot, she was convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" after a performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. She was 23 years old. Her unapologetic art, activism and outspoken opinions about the state of the world have defined her as one of the leading voices in the new feminist freedom fight. She published a book in 2018 called Read and Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism. We caught up over over zoom - I was in New Zealand and she called in from an undisclosed location - and talked about everything under the sun from insecurity, keeping our heads together, and what punk means in 2020.
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November 2nd, 2020

Leslie Salmon Jones: The Heart Doesn’t Lie

Bodies are weird, and feeling at home in our body can be, well, complicated at the very least. Leslie Salmon Jones is a trainer, a wellness coach (but don't let that scare you off), an accomplished dancer and the founder of Afro Flow Yoga. I've known her for over 15 years, and she was one of the first people on my podcast wish-list. We talk about Leslie’s incredible family and what it was like for her growing up in one of the only Black families in an affluent Toronto neighborhood; we discussed learning how to speak your truth, how bodies remember trauma, the importance of self compassion, finding your light in the darkest times...and why the best way to mend your mind and body is through something real simple: your breath.
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October 26th, 2020

How We Can Actually Use The Internet for Good Things

IT IS THE EVE OF THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION and things are crazy and scary on the Internet right now. Information is nine-dimensional and hard to trust. If you've seen "The Social Dilemma" and learned more about the dark-profit side of the internet, you may be considering throwing your laptop off a bridge. Eli Pariser has been paying attention to this stuff for ages. He's an author, activist, and entrepreneur focused on how to make technology and media serve democracy. He became executive director of MoveOn.org in 2004, and then he went on to co-found Upworthy.com, and he wrote a book called "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You". We met up at a TED conference in Scotland and talked wide and deep about how the Internet is like a coity, why it is so hard to be an artist in America, how to have empathy for people you don’t agree with, the struggle to raise children with the right amount of determination and grit, and how shame is a cultural tool to create conformity.
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