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February 22, 2021

help make the PODCAST SEASON 1 ROUND-UP…send a voicemail or comment!

Hallo Loves……

Greetings from Waiheke island.

It was a rough weekend and yesterday. I was doing okay there for a second, and made some music with a stranger hooray, and then I just ran out of gas. And I ran out of gas without expecting it…that shocking OH FUCK moment that happens when you are zipping along on the highway and the engine cuts out and you go OH MY GOD I FORGOT TO GET GAS and there you are, desperately pulling off to the side, hoping you don’t get hit or hit. thanking christ you made it to the breakdown lane. I’m still kind of in the breakdown lane.

Come to think of it I feel like I’ve been in the breakdown lane all year.

I think a lot of you are in the breakdown lane.

This is the Breakdown Lane Club. Don’t worry. Stay in your car. You cannot get back on the highway. Those people you are seeing on the highway, zooming along? That feeling of shock when their car barrels by you going 85 MPH and almost blows your car over with their wind-power? Let it happen.

You’re not them. You’re in the breakdown lane.

And now because I SAY SO, WE ARE AWESOME, here by the side of the fucking road.

We are in the Breakdown Lane Club and Amanda Has A Sandwich and a Hug for you. You’re not alone. Here’s a medal. Stay in your car.

Someone (with time) please design the medal/trophy/logo. You can hit me on the shadowbox (I actually made a thread) or tag me on IG.

I imagine a back to the future delorean with smoke coming out of the hood stuck on the side of the road, blazing glorious and halted. That’s Us.

Someday, we will figure out how to get the gas station.

B+ metaphors there, but you know what I’m getting at.

……………..

SO, the business of the DAY!!!!!

The season one of the “Art of Asking Everything” podcast came to a kind of an accidental abrupt public end. First we decided to make the erika moen episode patron-only (a great choice, in the end, and god is it a powerful episode if you haven’t listened to it)….and we were supposed to drop a final episode with TED star and introvert-and-inspiration expert susan cain, but she asked us to please hold on the release until her new book is out. and that meant….BAM!

The first season is done and wrapped, and we didn’t even really tell the listeners, it sort of just fell off a cliff.

SO….here’s what’s happening, and I need your help. 

We are going to take a little breather and come back in march with a once-a-month-or-maybe-more version of the podcast with even better production.

We have a couple guests lined up already: Dr. Rola Hallam, a british-syrian doctor who crowdfunded a whole goddamn hospital (!!), Ani Difranco, one of my music and life heroes (who is NOW ON PATREON), Sherry Turkle, an old-school wizened MIT expert on empathy, the internet, social media…..and many more exciting guests.

I’m REALLY looking forward to doing these conversations IN REALTIME. what a fucking relief after all these OLD EPISODES.

I’m gonna ask you to start thinking about IDEAS FOR GUESTS, BUT HOLD THAT THOUGHT….DO THIS FIRST.

Also, down the road, we are probably going to do a survey monkey (type-thing) as well, to pick y’alls brains about how you’re listening, and anything else, podcast-wise, that you’ve got feedback on. AND A FANTASY PODCAST GUEST LIST, of course. Sky’s the limit at the moment. I have a phone and a hot rolodex.

But for NOW….

HELP ME:

There’s a small hole to plug: the “public” stream of the podcast is going to just be blank for a whole month if we don’t put something out…and because of the bungle with the erika/susan episodes not coming out to the public, we didn’t say we were taking a break! We need to ANNOUNCE THE END. We need say something to the world of the public listeners who don’t read the patron-feed and just tune into me on apple and spotify. SO….

Me and the whole podcast team (Hayley, Fannie, Alex, and Kelly) have struck upon the idea that maybe instead of just me recording a little update, we MAKE a little audio collage of the “best of the first season”.

Something that’s sort of a impressionistic montage of the best moments, plus reflections from me, plus good clips from the audio crowdcasts, plus…YOU!!!

I have two things to ask you:

1) IF YOU’VE BEEN LISTENING TO THE PODCAST….TELL US WHAT YOU LOVED HERE IN THE COMMENTS:

Which means….in the comments here below in this post, can you name one or two moments that really stuck with you? Please be as specific as you can, so we can pull the exact audio. Like: “When Storm talked about her mother dying and talked about walking through broken glass” or :When Eli Pariser talked about the internet being like a city”….or “When Erika talked about struggling and feeling indebted to the people helping her” or “When Lenny Henry talked about being abused and making jokes about frying pans…”. YOU GET OUR UNDYING GRATITUDE AND NEVER-ENDING LOVE if you can actually give us a time-stamp , OMG, that would be wonderful.

AND/OR

2) EXTRA FUN….CALL ME AND LEAVE A MESSAGE ABOUT THE PODCAST!!! HERE’S A PHONE NUMBER: +1 (937) 738-3732 

We have set up a google voice number with a limit of three minutes! Call us, leave a message…ABOUT ONE OF THE PODCASTS. Follow the rules, peoples. Name the podcast and the guest, and talk about WHAT YOU TOOK AWAY, WHAT YOU LEARNED, OR WHAT YOU FELT! You can address “dear everyone…..”, or address the guest (“dear storm/tim/masarat…you changed my life when you said…”, or address me (“hey amanda…”). WE WILL USE THESE LITTLE AUDIO CLIPS IF WE CAN!!!

you can call the number below and leave a voicemail, or you can text the number a voice memo file:

+1 (937) 738-3732

if you are unable to text a file or call the phone number, we invite you to record a voice memo or short audio file and email it to us at: AFPPOD@GMAIL.COM

……….

Last but not least….to jog your memory, HERE IS A LIST OF ALL THE PODCASTS FROM SEASON ONE!

If you are overwhelmed and don’t know which ones to start with….may I recommend starting with Lenny Henry, moving onto Storm Large, then Tim Minchin….and then listening to the Erika Moen patron-only one that just came out. That’ll keep you busy for a day or two. OR….just keep peeking at the comments here and you’ll probably get a good idea of what might pique your interest.

As always you can stream these episodes on the podcast player of your choice (find it on your favorite player here: https://linktr.ee/AskingEverything), or on my website:
http://amandapalmer.net/podcast

HERE WE GO A-ASKIN’! It isn’t a coincidence that I chose Elizabeth Lesser to be the inaugural guest of this podcast. She’s a bestselling memoirist who attacks dark and difficult matters of the heart. She’s written candidly about her divorce and her struggles with life, work, people and feminism, and she’s one of the most unapologetically compassionate people I’ve ever met. We discuss the difference between telling your own story versus somebody else’s, what it’s like to navigate life as a single mother after a divorce, how the patriarchy gets passed down through the generations, and how BULLSHIT IS…EVERYWHERE!!! I left this conversation so inspired; I hope you do, too. Her new book, Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes, just came out this September 2020….we will be discussing it in the podcast book club, so GET READING.


Humor. Armour. Racism. Voice. How our youth really shapes why we want to do what we wanna do, especially when we are drawn to the stage…this long yarn with Sir Lenny Henry, one of the most celebrated comedians in British history, was one for the books. We talk candidly about the paradoxes of celebrity and social media, how The Internet is a buffet, starting a career in entertainment in working mens’ clubs, using humor as armor against racism, the history of minstrelsy in the UK, making your work the structure of your life, giving your loved ones fair warning when you publish a memoir, the beautiful meld of words and images in comic books, the power of masks and fiction and why giving advice to younger artists is so important.

Why are we so bad at death, dying, dealing with it, talking about it? Dr. BJ Miller is a palliative care physician who has spent his whole adult life trying to figure that out. His own traumatic experience has informed his ability to know compassion, see the far grander picture, and help people sort out the blurry lines between care, pain and reality. In college, BJ lost both of his feet and one hand in a tragic accident, and despite becoming a triple amputee, he still returned to university and got his medical degree. Now he’s a doctor who helps people deal with dying, and he’s got a lot of thoughts on the matter….we talked about art and beauty as therapy, mindfulness, coping skills, and a topic so needed right now: how independence is really an illusion. This is a really great episode for people who may be dealing with a recent loss, or an imminent one.


Laura Jane Grace is the lead singer/songwriter for Against Me! and author of the recent memoir Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. She’s been powerfully open about her own experiences with gender dysphoria, transitioning, imposter syndrome and – most interesting to me – what it means to be truly authentic in this world. Our conversation went all over the place, as you’d expect, from how we write songs and deal with “finishing” things, to how we deal when the head-weasels come scurrying.

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.

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.

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.


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.

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.


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!


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.

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.


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.

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’.

We had little to do in 2020 but contemplate our connections. To our planet, to our lives and most importantly, to the flesh-and-blood humans who surround us. And yet with every day that passes, the spaces we inhabit feel increasingly intolerant and hostile, progress towards a more inclusive, thoughtful world crushed beneath the weight of internet-yellings and fake news-wars. My guest this week, TEDx curator and education activist Masarat Daud, has dealt with the consequences of exclusion on the basis of her appearance since she began wearing a burqa at 17… and she has much, much, much to teach us about the way our judgements and biases form, manifest and harm others. We talked about everything from how to flip expressions of hatred into resilience to the casual removal of agency by the feminist who told her ‘you’re oppressed but you don’t know it yet’. Ooh boy. There’s never been a better time to stop and reflect how we look at the world, at other people and wonder whether we ourselves could be more compassionate – and more willing to embrace difference – than we imagined. I hope you find this conversation (and Masarat’s penguin headscarf) as enlightening as I did. Enjoy!

Twelve months ago, the Australian bushfires were center stage. I was in Australia for the final leg of the “there will be no intermission” tour and all that mattered was raising money to help the effort. With the support of my patrons, we made Forty-Five Degrees: Bushfire Charity Flash record and on March 8th 2020, we staged a fundraiser. I recorded this interview with Fred Leone, who participated in both the record and the fundraiser, two days before that show, and less than two weeks before Covid really upended the globe. A conversation about the marginalization of first nations Aboriginal Australians and their culture might have lost its impact after the craziest year in living history, but you know what? It’s all so fucking RELEVANT. Our ability to communicate with each other well  – through words, through music – is the glue that holds us together and if we can learn anything from recent events in the US, it’s that Western culture’s glue is no less vulnerable to erosion than any other. Fred has worked for years to preserve the language and rituals of Aboriginal culture, through the traditional means of storytelling, music and art. We talk about how tech has usurped these channels, how it might be repurposed to reopen them and how swiftly their disruption leads to extinction. It’s weird how a conversation can be so sad and yet full of hope. And Fred’s voice…I could listen for days. I hope you hear the music under it all. It’s more important than ever to keep sharing our stories and singing our songs. It’s our light in the dark.

This may seem like a weird one, but it’s a great one. My therapist also happens to be a best-selling author and comforting, insightful and beautiful conversationalist. Wayne writes mostly about the upsides of making it through trauma, the tricks our minds play, and the power of slowing down. He’s also hilarious. And a minister, and a photographer…and a pretty good guitar player. So after leading a week-long retreat with him for my patrons, I lured him into the recording studio to talk with him for over an hour about the human condition. Cheapest hour of therapy I ever wangled.

lies, shoes, grief and mixtapes. we recorded this episode in my home in woodstock back in September 2019. like the best long-yarn conversations with good friends, it roams across an ocean of emotions. we share war wounds from the mainstream media, Rachel talks about what it means to be ‘Dapper Q’, the church of LL Bean and the joy of finding music that’s as angry as you are.

pleasure, porn and procreation. ok, maybe the answer to the question ‘can porn be feminist?’ doesn’t require a spoiler in this context. maybe a conversation between a porn star, activist and noted expert on sex and BDSM and I would only ever be a celebration of kink and pleasure? you’re not wrong, but Madison Young is so much more than that. she’s a tower of burning energy that, having spent an hour with her, you’ll feel the flames on your skin. get dressed and hit ‘play’.

Reading is an empathy factory. When I read Australian singer-songwriter Clare Bowditch’s memoir, “Your Own Kind of Girl”, I related deeply to her struggles with insecurity, self-worth and sanity. We had so much in common it was uncanny, like finding an accidental lost twin sibling through a bookshop. Join us as we talk (and laugh, and cry) about owning your own self-doubt and self-hatred, how books can actually change your life, the emotional cost of telling your own true story….and more.

This is a very unusual, new, different, patron-only podcast release, which sort of goes against the initial concept of the podcast, which was to use the Patreon to fuel a big, badass, free, worldwide, giant, fancy podcast. But, shit happens, and shit changes, and if you know anything about me, you know that I never follow any rules, even my own rules that I set for myself.

So let me explain to you why this is happening, and also what I think it means, and why it’s really important that we’re putting this out as a patron-only podcast. And it’s kind of a long story, so hang in there, but we will get to the podcast itself… (read the patron-only post for the full story).

………

and…..THANK YOU ALL!!!

I know I’ve said it a million times, but this podcast wouldn’t have happened without you, the patrons.

THANK YOU FOR MAKING IT HAPPEN.

xxx

AFP

——THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS———

1. if you’re a patron, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol. that’s always nice for me to see, so i know who’s reading.

2. see All the Things (over 100 of them) i’ve made so far on patreon:

http://amandapalmer.net/things

3. JOIN THE SHADOWBOX COMMUNITY FORUM, find your people, and discuss everything: https://forum.theshadowbox.net/

4. new to my music and TOTALLY OVERWHELMED? TAKE A WALK THROUGH AMANDALANDA….we made a basic list of my greatest hits n stuff (at least up until a few years ago, this desperately needs updating) on this lovely page: http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/

5. general AFP/patreon-related questions? ask away, someone will answer: patronhelp@amandapalmer.net

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