The Tim Ferriss Show - #368: Amanda Palmer on Creativity, Pain, and Art

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

"I'm just so fundamentally optimistic, and I barrel forth in life with this attitude that everything is going to be absolutely fine and go my way." — Amanda PalmerAmanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) is a singer, songwriter, playwright, pianist, author, director, blogger, and ukulele enthusiast who simultaneously embraces and explodes traditional frameworks of music, theatre, and art. She first came to prominence as one half of the Boston-based punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, earning global applause for their inventive songcraft and wide-ranging theatricality.Her solo career has proven equally brave and boundless, featuring such groundbreaking works as the fan-funded Theatre Is Evil, which made a top 10 debut on the SoundScan/Billboard 200 upon its release in 2012 and remains the top-funded original music project on Kickstarter. In 2013 she presented The Art of Asking at the annual TED conference, which has since been viewed over 20 million times worldwide. The following year saw Palmer expand her philosophy into the New York Times best-selling memoir and manual, The Art of Asking: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Let People Help.Since 2015 Palmer has used the patronage subscription crowdfunding platform Patreon to fund the creation of her artwork. This has enabled her to collaborate with artists all over the world with over 14,000 patrons supporting her creations each month. Palmer released her new solo piano album and accompanying book of photographs and essays, There Will Be No Intermission, on March 8, 2019, followed by a global tour. Recorded in late 2018 with grammy-winning Theatre Is Evil producer/engineer John Congleton at the helm, the album is a masterwork that includes life, death, abortion, and miscarriage among its tentpole themes.Please enjoy!Click here for the show notes for this episode.***This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact.With a community of more than 575 million professionals, LinkedIn is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. LinkedIn has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to job title, company name, industry, etc. Why spray and pray with your marketing dollars when you can be surgical? To redeem your free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com/TFS.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed like a good time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home.

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Could be all of the above. I've had Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn on this podcast a number of times, often called the Oracle of Silicon Valley for many different reasons. And he, among other people and friends of mine, have made me more and more interested in LinkedIn as a platform, as an ecosystem in the last few years. And it's very nuanced. It's very subtle, but can be used in some very powerful ways. With a community of more than 575 million professionals, LinkedIn is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. You have access to a very

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Why, hello, my sexy little median and lads and lasses and all things in between. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job and pleasure to interview world-class performers of all different types to tease out their lessons learned, habits, routines, favorite books, you name it, I try to get it out of them. In this episode, we have Amanda Palmer, a multi-hyphenate. She a singer songwriter playwright pianist author director blogger and ukulele enthusiast who simultaneously embraces and explodes traditional frameworks of music theater and art she is one hell of a character and this is not the first time we've met she first came to prominence as one half of the Boston-based punk cabaret duo,

yes, that's right, Read 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly, the Dresden Dolls, you might have heard of them, earning global applause for their inventive songcraft and wide-ranging theatricality. Her solo career has featured such groundbreaking works as the fan-funded Theater is Evil, which made a top 10 debut on the SoundScan Billboard 200 upon its release in 2012, and it remains the top-funded original music project on Kickstarter. In 2013, she presented The Art of Asking, that's the name of the talk, at the annual TED conference, which has since been viewed more than 20 million times worldwide. That is a lot of views. The following year,

she expanded her philosophy from that talk into the New York Times bestselling memoir and manual titled The Art of Asking, subtitle, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help. It is a fantastic book. In fact, I upgraded my life after an afternoon of reading that in a bunch of different areas. So very, very wholeheartedly recommend. Since 2015, Palmer has used the patronage subscription crowdfunding platform Patreon, that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N, to fund the creation of her artwork. This has enabled her to collaborate with artists all over the world with more than 14,000 patrons, i.e. fans, supporting her creations every month. Palmer released her new solo piano album

and accompanying book of photographs and essays titled There Will Be No Intermission on March 8th of this year, 2019, and it will be followed by a global tour. It was recorded in late 2018 with Grammy-winning Theater's Evil producer-engineer John Congleton at the helm. You can find Amanda on Twitter at Amanda Palmer, on her website, amandapalmer.net, and on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Amanda Palmer. This is almost certainly one of the rawest and most emotionally intense episodes of this podcast that I've recorded. And we will cover a lot of topics and a lot of extremes in different areas. I really enjoyed it. I found it very powerful in person, and I hope you find that to be the case as you listen. Without further ado,

please enjoy this conversation with Amanda Palmer. Amanda, welcome back to the show. I am so happy to be back on the show. It has been almost four years since we last spoke, and there is so much that we can talk about. The interview that we last did seems simultaneously like it was yesterday and also seems like a thousand years ago. Like life. Like life. thousand years ago like life and like life and uh we've we've been chatting offline before recording and i thought we'd start somewhere light which is with books and last books are heavy books

literally heavy sometimes thematically less so and there's a book that you had mentioned also very kindly in tools of titan so thank you well i suppose it was removed from the audio but nonetheless dropping ashes on the buddha which is is a book by an author whose name i still don't know how to pronounce korean zen monk that you have gifted to many, many, many, many people. Could you give us just a very brief explanation of why that is, and then any new books, and I suspect I know one that might come up, that have had a large impact on you, your thinking, or anything else? Sure. So I read Dropping Ashes and the Buddha when I was 24, I think. My mentor, Anthony,

gave me his copy. And he gave me a lot of books. And it was one of those coincidences where, who knows, there was probably a pile of books. I was going on a trip to Australia as a street performer. This is before I was a musician, professionally at least. And I remember being in Australia. It was a very difficult trip. I wasn't making much money. And that trip actually wound up being really like catalyzing in a lot of ways that I wouldn't fully realize until later. And I remember lying on the beach, this shitty beach outside Adelaide where I was at the fringe, and reading this book and just looking around and going,

oh, wait, like, I get it. Do these people get it? Like, just having, you know, there are few moments in your life where, like, things actually really just seismically change and all of a sudden you're a different person. And it wasn't like I got hit with a ton of bricks because I read one sentence. But the book did do a kind of a number on me.

And then I was actually really fortunate. I don't know if I've ever told this story. I got to actually grab all the lessons from this book, which were basically just the lessons of Zen Buddhism, non-attachment, being able to just sit with what is, the inability, the ability to not freak out and to just watch it, watch life pass. And I got arrested right as I was finishing the book for shoplifting when I wasn't really shoplifting, but sort of I was. So here's the weird story. The weird story is I was street performing a living statue character. I talk about it in my TED Talk called The Eight Foot Bride, where I'm dressed all in white, white gloves, white face paint, white dress, black wig.

And I showed up in Australia, and I had forgotten one of the tools of my trade, which was a wig cap to gather all my hair up so I could put this black wig over it. And I was like, oh, fuck, I don't have a wig cap. It's a weird thing to buy. They don't sell them in your average store. Usually in Boston, where I lived, I would go to this bizarre hair salon store. And I was like, oh, where am I going to get something like this? I went to Woolworths. I bought a ton of other stuff, you know, whatever whatever $60, $100 worth of other items and then I noticed there was

a display of stockings of nylons that was like half torn apart and it kind of had this thing that I needed just hanging off it so I took it and I left the store and the cops

came and they arrested me. And there I was arrested in Australia. I was 23, 24, whatever. Like a five cent piece of material. Yeah. And it was weird because like I hadn't stolen an item for sale. I had just kind of taken this thing that looked like no one was using it. Right.

What I did was definitely wrong. It's not the sort of thing that as a more responsible 42-year-old woman I would do. I'm not that stupid anymore. And I had my sort of indignant feeling, but I also knew I wasn't an idiot. I was like, you did something wrong. That was stupid, Amanda. Oh my God. Now here you are being interrogated by the police. And everything that I had just read in this book by this Zen Buddhist monk flooded into me. And I felt like in that moment, if I've ever had a cataclysmic human change, in that moment, I found myself acting like a different human being than the human being I had been up to that point. Because I think the human being I had been up to that point would have been defensive and explanatory and kind of freaking out and trying to convince the... And I just just like i remember just sitting back

and and going like what would sung song the zen monk do and i just remember looking at the cop and saying i i'm so sorry that you have to go through this what i did was incredibly stupid i hope that you can understand that I didn't feel that I was stealing because I just, I had all these other things I was purchasing. And if you need to put me in jail, you should. But I'm very sorry. And I'm not just saying, I'm sorry, don't put me in jail. I'm just saying, I'm sorry that I have inconvenienced you in this way. And the cops were like, oh, okay, you can go. And I was like, I'm a Jedi master. I walked out of there and was like, but I mean, we laugh about that, but that is, you know, Star Wars really hits people deep for a reason. The Jedi lessons, the lessons of Yoda, are the lessons of Zen Buddhism.

Non-attachment, you know, non-attachment to the outcome, sitting with what is, knowing that the power is not coming from some outside authentication. And all of these things, the lessons of Zen and the book and Anthony, my mentor in life, they all sort of flicked me along that path. That's an amazing story. Yeah. Thanks for letting me tell it. Yeah. Thanks for starting, kicking off the conversation with it. So that is one book that's had a big impact. In the last four years, are there any others that come to mind that perhaps you've gifted to other people or not?

Well, there's a book I'm absolutely obsessed with right now, so it's hard to think of any other books because I'm having a passionate affair with this one. It's called Why We Sleep, and it's by Matthew Walker. I had never heard of him. I saw the book in a bookstore and just picked it up because I thought that looks interesting. And it feels, again, like this seismic, you know, life-altering.

The information that's coming at me in this book is literally physically technically changing my life on a day-to-day basis and i really want you to read it um i will i i will and you showed me the book it's it's just unbelievable and the you know i'm not a person who reads constantly about self-improvement. I mean, I'm interested in it. I read a lot of nonfiction. But this book is just a collection of sleep studies, basically, and what this researcher has taken away as a sleep scientist from whatever, 25, 30 years of doing

sleep studies. And also, you know, what we've learned about other mammals, how they sleep, why we sleep, what happens when we are asleep. And I mean, I find myself, I've now bought a dozen copies of this book because I want everyone I love and I care about to know that this information is available. And I mean, it feels a lot like waking, no pun intended, like it feels a little bit like waking up from a bad dream where it occurred to me, I was lying in bed this morning, and I was actually thinking about some stuff that was quite dark, and I was like, human beings have been alive as a species doing this thing for so long. It's astounding to me that we on planet Earth right now are so fucked up that we haven't just been on this ever-increasing curve of more knowledge, more understanding, more compassion. We haven't been on some linear

march of progress as mammals. And it just astounds me that I learn the simplest things and look back at the entirety of my life and I'm like, no one told me about this. Human beings have all of this knowledge, all of this other knowledge, and no one told me about this. And I felt the same way about a lot of reproductive female issues. Like, I live at, you know, I'm in the 1% of Western civilization, and no one taught me about this. And people know, the studies are out there, the knowledge is out there. There's also, you know, knowledge that's been handed down from generation to generation to generation. Like, you're trying to tell me that it really is just stopping now, that we're sharing information, that we're doing it right, that we're actually taking care of each other?

How did this happen? And the sleep book is kind of making me feel like that like you know mammals have been pretty good at this human mammals have been pretty good at sleep and then everything got pretty fucked up and we're just you know we're just sort of like it's like pulling up the rug and looking at the insane creepy crawlies of how we've damaged our mental health, our emotional health, our physical health by doing something as simple as not ever sleeping right. It's insane. I am going to read it. And I should say for people who are wondering, or skeptical, maybe, possibly, as I am often, I looked at the back of the book, you might remember this, and I saw a name on the back under one of the blurbs, Adam Ghazali, who's been on the podcast,

who is a neuroscientist out of UCSF, one of the sharpest and also most skeptical people I know, who had a glowing review, which tells me that the science and the descriptions of the science are highly, highly, highly credible. Yeah, it's a very credible book, and it's also beautifully readable. And it's, you know, there's no woo. It's pure science, which, for a skeptic. I can handle a little bit of woo sprinkled in my books, but mostly I have a woo allergy. So, let's talk a bit about interviews. And this is going to be a segue. Well, I think this will be a segue into a lot of fertile ground. You said something to me before we

began recording, which is, I've done many, many different interviews. You said something to me before we began recording, which is I've done many, many different interviews. You've done hundreds, probably thousands of interviews. And you recently had one of the most, I think the word you used was profound interviews, uh,

with a German radio host. Yeah. Well, I mean, I just mentioned that because that was the interview that happened this morning. I've been having profound interview after profound interview for three weeks since I started doing promo on this new record. And I mean, I've been putting out music for a long time

and doing a lot of interviews in cycles, the way you do when you put a book out you know you've got your media cycle you talk about the thing you made you go away you make another thing you talk about it this this record that i just made i didn't even think about it but going into the media part um and the the interview part, I mean, this is the most personal and most direct record by a long mile I've ever made. I talk about the death of my friend,

my best friend from cancer. I talk about abortion. I talk about miscarriage. I mean, it is a balls-to-the-wall, unapologetically open, vulnerable record. So you can imagine being the journalist on the other side who gets sent this album and then has to do an interview with me, or gets to do an interview, depending on which way you're looking at it. And it has been a fascinating process

to be the person on the other side of the phone. Can I pause you for one second? Yeah. Can you repeat what you said to me, maybe it was an hour or so ago, about your metric? Oh. I said to Tim,

the metric that I am using to measure the success of this record is not in numbers or stars granted to me by magazine critics, but it is number of human beings crying when they hear it or see me play it, which is a way more satisfying way to judge the worth of a record and it's working. So I've had, I've had two kinds of interviews there. I've done a few, I've done interviews with journalists who just keep it very light and superficial,

you know, so tell me about your record. What kind of space were you in when you wrote these songs? You know, and, and a few quite a few of the interviews have been kind of unprecedented in my experience of just doing music interviews with journalists and i've found weirdly especially uh european interviews um uh a german austrian i think, Austrian journalist the other day.

He was talking to me about the record, and he told me about the miscarriage that he and his wife had gone through and what it felt like. And I don't think he's going to include that in his piece, but he wanted to tell me, talk to me about it. And I did an interview with a German radio station this morning, and I was like, ugh, God, radio station. Like, it's going to be very fluffy and superficial.

It's the radio. Those are never good. And this German journalist was sort of just talking to me about vulnerability and the shamelessness of the record and what it feels like to share this kind of material. And she told me that she found out she had breast cancer, chose to have a double mastectomy. And she talked to me about, you know, in Germany, there's a lot more nudity. There's what they call Freikultur, Freikörperkultur, you know, the idea that we shouldn't be ashamed to be naked, which is great.

I agree. And she talked about being in saunas and going to lakes where, you know, everyone has their tits out and how she feels when she emerges from the water and people see that she doesn't have any breasts and she just has these scars. And then I expected her to say something different than what she actually said.

She said, I actually think it's a lot of fun. Do you? And I was like, well, I don't know if I would call it fun. I'm not sure if she said spas. I was like, I'm not sure that that's really the word. But there is definitely something kind of delicious about like baring your neck, baring your pain,

talking about your abortion, talking about your miscarriage, talking about your grief, showing your scars, that doesn't, it doesn't feel narcissistic. Actually, if you do it right and you're in the right place, it actually feels like a generous act. Because you act as a reminder to the other human beings when you're getting out of that lake, that any shame they may be feeling is unwarranted, unnecessary, really.

And if they're feeling discomfort and you're not made uncomfortable by their discomfort, you can offer them a gift. And being able to do that with music is, you know, feels like my job right now. Like the ability to get up there on stage and kind of bare my throat as a as a kind of a gift i think it's a huge gift i think that by sharing or showing scars whether they're physical or emotional you give people permission to do the same, even if that is someone who only trades with another person, like the journalist you mentioned, who finally felt free to divulge what happened with a

miscarriage. Yeah. I think there's tremendous, tremendous value in that. And the more you get to know people, all people, they're all carrying something. Everybody. Maybe not right at that moment, but there just isn't anyone out there who isn't going through some kind of suffering

or has or will. If you don't mind, because I really want to underscore how much has happened, and this isn't an exhaustive list, but this is in a book in front of me, which I've been reading since you gave it to me. There will be no intermission.

But just to put in perspective what has transpired the last few years. You're going to ask me to read my book. Would you mind reading this portion? Because we're going to dig into some of it. So this book is kind of written to be a performance. It says, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. This performance will last seven years. And actually, this piece gets read as a recording

before my show, before I am seated at the piano when I tour this stage show, and it's read by Neil. Wow. And it's also sort of my way of bringing him with me on the tour. For those who don't know, Neil Gaiman, one of the most hypnotic voices you shall ever hear. He's got good radio voice. He does have good radio voice.

This performance will last approximately seven years. You will experience two abortions, one out of your control, another totally your choice. The death of your best friend after a four-year dance with cancer. You will hold him in your arms as he takes his last breath two months before your first child is born. The unexpected death of another beloved friend. You will stumble across him sitting there on his favorite chair in the living room. You will hold his cold dead hand in your

own. One ex committing suicide with a handgun. One childbirth, a 24-hour labor in the woods with no drugs. Parenthood during which your baby will fall from a shelf, a few beds and other high places. One miscarriage alone in a hotel room on a very cold Christmas night. Strobe light, smoke and other special effects may be used. There is adult content and graphic language. There will be no intermission

so that's a lot just some light reading for you on a sunday uh which of those and it may not be clear was most difficult for you if that's even a decent question i don't know if any stick out. Oh, Anthony's death, for sure. Anthony, the same mentor who gave you the book we discussed. He was. Yeah, Anthony and I had a really unique, blessed relationship. He came into my life when I was nine. I lived in a leafy green suburb with my very pretty normal household. My sister, my older two step-siblings would come

over sometimes. They didn't live with us. My stepdad and my mom. And Anthony moved in when I was nine. And he was probably 35. He was a grown up. And he and his new wife, Laura, was his second wife, didn't have children and opted not to have children. And Anthony and I kind of adopted one another. And he

became to me first nice grown-up neighbor friend, then mentor, then important confidant, best friend by the time I was in my 20s. And he, you know, he opened a bunch of doors that would have been otherwise completely unopened. Because, you know, in Lexington, Massachusetts, I just wasn't stumbling upon this kind of stuff. My teachers weren't really showing me the way. My parents weren't really showing me certain ways. And I cannot imagine what my life would have looked like

if this guy hadn't moved into that house. And when he, our relationship was so fundamental to me that if I ever needed to make myself cry for a project, for theater, whatever, all I would have to do is cast my mind into the possibility that he might die and I would be brought to weeping. And then right around the time of my, right before my Kickstarter, so around 2011, he started having all sorts of strange health problems, one bizarre symptom after another, until finally he was told that he had a very rare form of leukemia and had six months to live.

And then it was a shit show, because it was second opinions, third opinions. No, you're going to be fine. No, you're going to die in six months. No,

yes, this, that, the other thing. Um, ultimately he, he died about four years later. It was a very rough ride to the,

to the end. He was on steroids, heavy steroids. And you probably speak steroid. He was on 100 milligrams of prednisone a day, which is crazy making. I feel like I lost my friend not even to death, but to steroids, because his attitude towards life and towards me and towards everything became so vicious. And that was almost harder to see than death. And I changed my life. Neil and I were completely uprooted. We had sort of had a plan. Our relationship was still quite new. We uprooted ourselves. We moved to Boston, and I nursed my friend. I took him to chemo. I watched him die. And in the midst of all that, I had an abortion and I got pregnant and I,

you know, I was seven months pregnant when I had to let go of Anthony. They were, you know, I was this close. And, you know, nowadays, if I want to make myself cry, you know, I can't think about Anthony dying anymore. He's gone. That ship has sailed. But I can really get myself going thinking how close I got to being able to introduce Anthony to my son, to Ash. They never got to Ash. They never got to meet.

And Anthony would have been so incredibly proud to see me incarnated as a mother. But I also, you know, he was my teacher and almost feels like the last huge teaching that he gave to me was his death and sitting with it and absorbing it and being okay with it and letting him go and not attaching. Grieving, weeping, but not regretting. How did you feel the day after that? Oh, I let myself get hit with the full weight of mourning.

I woke up. It was so interesting. No one's ever asked me that question, actually. It's such a good question. Neil and I had raced home to be there at his deathbed because things got very bad very fast. And we flew home from London. We were there. We were working on something or other.

I don't even remember what. And we raced home and then we sort of sat, you know, we sat deathbed for about two or three days with Anthony's wife, Laura, and a few other really, really close friends. And he died at night. And it was right around the time of the June equinox. I think it was the day before the longest day of the year. And he went at night. And I mean, I had never really sat and just watched someone die. Because it's a process.

It's a physical, physiological process. I had never watched someone die. And there was someone else in the room, our friend Nicholas, who had watched his wife die. He had lost her a few years before, and he had sat by her deathbed and he had the knowledge. He knew that certain things happened in a certain order when someone is just slowly checking out what happens with your eyes, what happens with your breath. And I was like, wow, like once again, like no one, no one ever told me any of this. Nicholas knows because he just went through it.

But all of this hidden knowledge that I'm sure people who work in hospice must have down pat because they're taught. And he went at night, Neil and I went to bed together. We were all exhausted because we had basically been up for a few days waiting for this moment to happen. And I also felt a really strange kind of peace. And I woke up without an alarm the next day at dawn. And Anthony's body was still there. And I went, I slept at my parents' house, you know, across the driveway. It's just like childhood in reverse. And I walked, I snuck into Anthony and Laura's house. Anthony was just laid out in his hospice bed.

And I sat there, and I looked at his dead body and I thought, why are we told to be so afraid of this? I just remember feeling like, oh, wow, I'm just, there's no fear. There's this whole narrative about death and dead bodies, and it's also creepy and gross and scary. And I just felt an incredible kind of peace. And I sat down, and I started to meditate. And then our friend Nicholas, the one who had buried his wife, he had also woken up. It was bizarre. It was like 6 in the morning, 5.30, 6 in the morning, and I never wake up early. And he came in, and he didn't say anything to me.

And he picked up a guitar, and he started playing. And I just spent the rest of the day with my phone off, as much as off as I could make it, and I was like, I know enough about fucking life at this point. I know that my only job right now is to feel, feel this grief as deeply as I can. This is not something I want to defer or repress. I spent the whole day crying. I fucking, you know, I went to downtown Lexington,

I went into Pete's Coffee, crying. I went up to get a coffee, crying. The guy behind the counter actually knew Anthony. He started crying. Everyone cried all day. But it didn't, you know, it felt really natural. It felt really normal. And, you know, not to skip too far ahead, but it actually isn't until now talking to you that I realized that that experience resonated right along with how I felt when I had a miscarriage. It was the same sort of experience. And also that same feeling of being kind of

feeling like I'd been kind of gypped by culture that, you know, no one told me that these things were so natural and that we come equipped to deal with them and that there's nothing scary about it. And that you don't need anyone to protect you from it, that actually taking it in is a lot better for you. The end. No, I'm just listening. Thank you for sharing that. You asked. Well, not everybody gives the real answer.

So thank you for giving the real answer. Would you like to say anything more about the miscarriage? To people who have experienced it, maybe felt shame, maybe never told other people. Yeah. There's been a fair amount of that in my family. Not that I've experienced directly, but I've seen it just kept secret for years, decades.

Yeah. I mean, there's so much I could say about it and I mean, I could talk about it for hours, but I, um, I found out that I was gonna, I was very happy to be pregnant. I was, I was coming up on three months. Ash was two and Neil and I were, we were over the moon. We were a little scared, but we were really excited. Why were you scared? Because we were just barely holding it together, juggling kid number one. Because the two of us, if you haven't noticed, we are like relentlessly workaholic and productive and figuring out how to do the dance with one child

was just starting to feel workable. And I was like, okay, well, if I also believe the parents around me, this is going to be a game changer. Like a lot of parents will tell you having a second child isn't like multiplying, you know, it isn't one plus one and then you've got two and it's just twice as much work. It's like 10 times as much work. You have to change the whole ecosystem if you want to support two

children. And I, and I buy it and I've seen it firsthand and I think that's true um and neil was in london and i went for uh i went for a um what do you call it ultrasound and there had been a little bit of maybe things aren't totally okay because the baby's heartbeat had been a little slow so it was already a bit on edge. And it's actually, it's worth adding a part of this story that I'm not sure I've told. I remember walking from the ultrasound with the midwife down the hall of this clinic. And I was like, I'm just so fundamentally optimistic and I just, I barrel forth in life with this attitude that everything is going to be absolutely fine and go my way. And I just had that feeling. I just felt this like gut instinct, instinctive certainty that things were good. And so we're walking down the hall of this clinic and the midwife looked at me and she said, what, why are you smiling?

And she didn't say it in a mean way. She was really curious, like as if I had just thought of some funny joke that I was going to tell her. And I looked at her and I said, I'm just waiting for my good news, which I know is coming. And five minutes later, she told me, I'm really sorry, but the baby has no heartbeat. And I have to say, one of the things that occurred to me in that moment wasn't just, oh my God, I'm not going to have a child and I'm having a miscarriage. And I remember thinking in that moment, oh my God, am I going to become the kind of person now who does not move through the world with optimistic certainty? Like, is this going to be my other game changer where I just move with a different kind of certainty or something? You know, is this going to make me bitter?

I remember thinking that in that moment. And Neil was off in London at Terry Pratchett's funeral, his friend who had just died, and I called him, um, and this was a few days before Christmas, and, you know, the, uh, the midwife, uh, you know, gave me a bunch of information, and she said, you're gonna start, you know, this is sort of what the process is gonna be like, you're gonna start bleeding as soon as you start bleeding, here are the numbers to call. It's Christmas. Things are a little weird. You might need to do this. You might need to go to a hospital. You know, if you haven't started bleeding and, you know, within six days,

we're going to need to do a DNC, which is basically where they just go in and take everything out. And I'm being told this, you know, 10 minutes after getting this news, and my head is just like swimming in grief and confusion and all of the plans I had made in my life literally collapsing in one moment. And Christmas happened, and I had a really, you know, I had a really rough Christmas morning. It was me and Neil and his kids and I was, they all knew what was happening and it was, you know, it was kind of hard as you can imagine to deal with like the joy of Christmas and let's all do this when you literally know that this is happening and about to happen. And I had bought myself two nights at Kripalu, which is like a yoga hotel in Western Massachusetts, as a gift to myself Christmas night and the day after. And I was going to go there. It was like an hour and a half drive from our house. I was going to go there,

be alone, do some yoga, sit in a sauna or, you know, sit in a, you know, in a whirlpool or whatever. Probably wasn't going to sit in a whirlpool because I was pregnant. I was just going to do some self-care. And I had scheduled two pregnancy massages. And I just really wanted to get away from everyone because I was overwhelmed by feeling like I had to host all these people and be cheerful and be hosty. So, I told Neil, I'm splitting. I'm still going to go. I'll be back in a day. So Christmas day, I drove over to Kripalu. I checked in. I went to my seven o'clock pregnancy massage. I hadn't called to say, hey, by the way. And this woman met me in the lobby and she was so beautiful. And she came up to me, and she said, I'm so excited to massage you and your little one.

And I was like, let's not talk about it right here, but when we get to your room, I have a conversation I need to have with you. And we got into her treatment room, and I said, listen, I probably should have called ahead. I'm going through a miscarriage right now. And she looked at me, and she said, this may sound weird, but I'm really relieved because I just had a miscarriage, and I was not looking forward to this appointment. And she laid me on her table, and she canceled whatever she had next. And I said, just take care of me. And she found every labor-inducing spot on my body. She just treated me like her sister. We wept together. She gave me this enormous hug. She wished me well. I went back to my room. I fell immediately asleep. And about an hour or two later, I woke up in labor having a miscarriage. And I was like, oh, right. All

of those things the midwife told me, like, do I, I'm on a mountain in Western Massachusetts. It's Christmas night. Am I really going to call a hospital right now? Or can I do this myself? And I had been through a natural childbirth two years before. I know what it means to give birth to a child, whether, you know, alive or dead. And I didn't know exactly what to expect because no one had really told me. But I also, I imagined what it would be like to pick up the phone and call an ambulance. Or I, you know, I was like, I guess I could get in my car, but I'm not in good shape. I'm in labor and I'm bleeding. And I just projected forward what that would look like and what it would feel like. I was like, I would get in an ambulance, I would be treated a certain way, I would be surrounded by all these strangers, I would be taken to a hospital, I would be strapped into things, or I could just stay here in this room

and deal with whatever is about to come at me and probably face some very dark images. But I actually know that I'm equipped to do this. And I know that women have been equipped to do this for tens of thousands of years. This is not news. And nothing bad is happening to me. I'm not in danger. So I walked the halls of that yoga hotel all night, ran a bath, had a miscarriage with blood everywhere, stared death in the face, went to bed, and woke up actually feeling like the most powerful version of myself I think I've ever felt. And it's so weird saying this to people. And it's so weird explaining it because miscarriage is incredibly dark. And I don't want to say that my miscarriage was fantastic. But it was also, it really was one of the most powerful experiences of my life because I really centered myself and did something very brave. And again, like, felt that sense of, like, loss for everybody else.

Like, we're, you know, in health class as women, you know, you sit there in seventh grade and you're told that you're equipped to have a baby and that you should use a condom and that's pretty much it. But there's so much more and there's so much wisdom about the human body, what we're capable of containing, what we're capable of containing emotionally, all the other things that happen. And no one tells us, no one teaches us, which is when you think about it and given what we all go through, it's absurd. The knowledge is there.

It just doesn't get passed along. Have you found anything in particular after that experience to be helpful in any way? Talking with other women. I mean, sharing this story. All you need to do is mention to almost any woman anything about reproductive drama, abortion, miscarriage, stillbirths, you know, problems with pregnancy. And most women have a story. And most women don't talk about it openly. But the minute you invite them, they will tell you. And I mean, now that I'm talking about this stuff openly, it's like the floodgates have opened. I had a miscarriage in a gas station

bathroom. I had a miscarriage in my car station bathroom. I had a miscarriage in my car with my kids in the back seat, and I had to deal with all of it at the same time. I've had 10 miscarriages. And, you know, I mean, it's just rampant. It's everywhere. But we're really scolded by society to keep this stuff under wraps because it's not part of the cultural conversation. And I mean, it is, it's part of culture. It's happening every day as we speak in these buildings. And sharing anything, sharing any kind of grief, trauma, loss, sharing any kind of grief trauma loss sharing any kind of experiences uh you know that's how i heal i share i mean and i do it through art i do it through conversation i do it in cafes and pubs i do it over dinner parties like i will you know i'll talk to anyone about anything and i i find it really gratifying i find it constantly healing so i'm listening to you

is this exactly what your podcast interview with neil was like just asking highly complimentary and not overlapping uh but this this has become more and more in a way what this podcast is about in the sense that i want to talk about the things that people are dealing with whether or not they choose to deal with them does that make sense oh yeah you don't get to choose yeah like you're going to have to metabolize it somehow and you can do it in a proactive hopefully healthy constructive way that leaves everyone better off or you can stuff it down you can repress and deny and you will deal with it nonetheless well and it will it will come out in in way less pleasant

yes ways sort of metastasize and rupture in ways that are very unpredictable. Anthony had a great saying. I don't know if it was an Anthony original or he picked it up from someone else, but he said, if you don't deal with your demons, they go into the cellar of your soul and lift weights. That's a good one. Yeah.

That is a really good one. That is a great, that is a great one. And so this actually brings up a question. Hearing you speak so candidly about all these things, and you just said, I'll talk to anyone about anything. There's a woman named Tara Brock, who I haven't spoken with in years, but she wrote a book called Radical Acceptance, which I found very powerful, which was referred to me by a female neuroscientist who is even more skeptical than the Adam I mentioned earlier.

They happen to be friends also. And so it does, based on the book description, have a fair amount of woo, but nonetheless, she found it very powerful. And I can't remember if it was in that book or in separate conversation with her when she mentioned to me, and I think this is probably apocryphalal but that there was a wise sage who at one point said there's really only one question that matters and that is what are you unwilling to feel so my question for you then is historically maybe you figured it out maybe even still today has there been a particular emotion or anything that you've been unwilling to feel? Oh, that's a really good question. I used to be very afraid to be alone. Um, and I'm not anymore.

But I think if there's an answer to that question, it's somewhere in there. I think we always hide in plain sight, right? You're not doing this podcast for no fucking reason, and I don't do the work that I do for no reason. And Neil didn't pick science fiction, fantasy, and Sandman for no reason. And I think, you know, my, the course of my career and my work to find deep, passionate, unbridled connection with others belies my fear of being alone. And in the department next door,

and I know that it's true because even saying it makes me uncomfortable, I have a very deep-seated fear of feeling unbelieved. And I think, you know, the spots where I'm still uncomfortable to sit and the stuff that I'm still uncomfortable feeling lies in there. I actually, I can tell you one of the things I'm grappling right now that probably answers your question. There's a journalist out there who writes for a paper that I regard very highly and read. And she hates me. And she hates me. She just hates me. Hates everything I stand for. Has done nothing but criticize me

and just state openly that she thinks I'm a terrible, awful, narcissistic person. You have these people, I am sure. Oh, I have more than a handful. More than a handful myself. I have these too. But this woman is authenticated because she's not just a shitty YouTube comment. She's a journalist at a really respected outlet.

And she's cock-blocked my record. It won't ever be written about or reviewed in this paper. And I'm obsessed with her. I can't stop thinking about how I want to win her over and change her mind and force her to love me and connect with me and see the light. And it's almost bordering on a mental obsession. You know,

I found, I found this out, whatever, eight, nine days ago, and it's plagued my thoughts every day, even as the record gets critically hailed, even if it is,

you know, like every other review is great everyone is crying every tear is shed every show is sold out like none of it matters because i have been unable to capture this one person's love and acceptance and attention and like, the fact that that's my Achilles heel, that like, that's the bear trap that my leg is in right now, speaks a lot about what I am unwilling to feel. Like, I'm unwilling to feel unloved by everyone. But I'm also way better at it than I used to be. I can at least sit here and pontificate about that, examine it, and go, oh, hey, that's that thing that you do.

That's cute. Enjoy that. Wait a couple weeks, it'll go away. You mentioned, or I should say used, a phrase just a few minutes ago, and I can't remember the exact wording you used, but it was something about being unbelieved. With any of these, whether it's the fear of being alone,

the fear of not being believed, do you have any memory, do you have an earliest memory of feeling that way yeah it's my first memory i even write about it at the beginning of the art of asking um and it actually uh it was only thanks to a rich a yoga retreat that i was on in my, probably in my early 30s. We did an exercise, a really beautiful exercise as a group. You know, there's maybe, whatever, 50 people at this retreat. It was actually, it was a retreat specifically for yoga teacher training, but I was just there as a civilian.

And the question, we had gotten into a very quiet place and everyone was, you know, feeling very connected with themselves. And I think this was an exercise that we did at night. And the question was, when was the first time in your life that you felt that things were not okay? That was the way it was phrased. And I was like,

I remember. It was the first thing I remember, which was I was probably around Ash's age, probably around three years old. And we lived in this teeny little house and there was a long wooden staircase that connected the second to the first floor. And I was at the top of it and slipped to the top and tumbled down the entire staircase, like a cartoon, like boom, boom, boom, boom. And also like a cartoon was actually fine at the bottom, but completely freaked out. Like I had just literally fallen down a set of stairs, but you know, I was three and bouncy and chubby and whatever. I, you know, there was no blood, there were no broken bones. But I was shocked. I had the wind knocked out of me. I was disoriented. I was terrified. And I ran straight to the kitchen.

And I don't remember exactly who was there, but probably my family, my mom, my stepdad, my older brother and sisters. Whoever was there, it was like them, the big people. And I told them what had happened in whatever way a three-year-old does that. And they didn't believe me. And I remember the degree of pain that I felt not being believed was pretty seismic compared to the pain of falling down the stairs.

It was, that was shattering. Like, all of a sudden, things are not okay. Like, I just, my world was blown apart. And I remember being in this yoga retreat and thinking like i think i literally laughed out loud like belly laughed when i started thinking about that incident and then the fucking line of work i chose which is to get up in front of thousands of people and scream about my pain to paying customers. It's like, nailed it! But, you know, it's not connected. Do you, I would say you're completely right.

Do you feel like you have overcome or addressed that? And if not, do you not want to address it deliberately? And the reason I ask is that I've met in particular comedians or stand-up comics, but also quite a few artists in different disciplines who are afraid that if they take their pain away, they will not be able to create. Yes, that is such a tyrannical and destructive myth. I think Neil believes that, and I spend a lot of time trying to convince him that it doesn't work that way. I think a lot of time trying to convince them that it doesn't work that way. I think a lot of artists and writers and stand-ups and whatever,

they think that if you pull on the thread of self-knowledge and healing, then the entire artistic architecture of their life will just fall and disappear. So, you actually, you have to take a bizarre faith-based leap and just believe that that's not true. But, you know, as mammals, you know, in our habits and in our, like, in our small-minded way, if we've done something and it's worked, we're just going to continue to repeat that. We're not going to try some new combination and try to, you know, fuck with the chemistry. And this is a real problem in our culture because of the, is profligation a word?

It sounds believable. I think that's a word, but then again. Let's say proliferation. Because of the proliferation of this myth, artists suffer and they should not. We should be taking care of our artists the way we take care of any other valuable cultural tool. Artists are really fucking necessary for us to make it through this veil of tears. And if we don't take care of them and the art that they make and the music that they make, we all collectively suffer. And I, I mean, I believed in that myth for a really long time. I was a super self-destructive, self-styled artist, bohemian weirdo in my teens,s and well into my 30s and you know i still have my moments but i really bought it i was like i need to have a dangerous destructive life of sex drugs and rock

and roll so that i can be awesome and have great things to write about um and my pain is valuable. And I feel like if you're an artist, maybe if that's the door you come in through, great. That's step one. Yes, your pain is valuable. Good. Like starting kit. Step two, your pain is valuable to others.

That's like master level. And, you know, the, the interesting thing about being not believed and going into this line of work is I, you know, I, I didn't go in thinking that music was,

was a service industry. I went in thinking it was what I needed. I needed to express myself and be believed by these people. Will you believe me? Great. You'll buy the ticket, you'll buy the CD, you will understand this pain. Great. This is a job I want to do. But it did not take long for the next curtain to open and for me to see that the people in the audience and the people buying the CDs, they weren't just validating my pain and they weren't there to validate my pain and to believe me. They were having their own experiences. I hadn't really totally clocked that. I mean, of course, I subconsciously knew

because I had listened to music all my life. I knew that other musicians had done it for me. But I think I was too... You know, I think I was too... What's the word I'm looking for? Not scared, but like, I didn't ever believe that I would be that person for someone else. Intimidated? Intimidated. Yeah, I just felt too,

I felt too small. You know, I know that the Cure did this for me, The Legendary Pink Dots did this for me, Leonard Cohen did this for me. I'm not sure I'll ever be doing that for anyone, but I know that I want to be like them. I know that I want to write music about my pain. But then, like, it's kind of like a magic trick. Then it worked. Then people were crying at my shows. Then women were coming up to me and telling me about their pain, their abusive relationships, their rapes, their struggles, and men of all ages, sizes, and genders. And I thought, oh, like, I guess this is the way it works. And I stumbled into this job. Now I guess I do it.

And I learn how to get better at it. And one of the things about this record is that it actually, it sort of feels like my final exam in songwriting. It's the most raw, unedited offering from a place of grief, but also empowerment and enlightenment that I could offer up to anyone out there who would need it.

In a way, it way it's like, it's the most medicinal record I've ever made. And I know because I needed it. If, and if I needed this medicine, it's probably going to work on other people. Here, you try it. Is this going to work on you? And that's been what it is. So I want to underscore a few things I think I heard you say because they strike me as very, very important. And I'll use my words because I don't have the memory to repeat what you said verbatim, but the first is that you can use your

pain without always allowing your pain to use you in the sense that we could tie it into the experience you had on the beach before your shoplifting and even during and after, which is for using a metaphor from meditation. If your pain is say, if experiencing your pain and being driven by your pain and being reactive to your pain is being inside the washing machine, you can actually do a better job of seeing what is inside by zooming out 12 inches and being outside of the washing machine. Yeah.

And that allows you to use the content of your suffering, to use the content of your pain while having a better understanding of it and being able to shape it like a sculptor so that you can better wield it and impart it to other people you befriend it almost um one of the one of the most powerful lessons i have had um in the pain department and the understanding what we're calling pain was going through a natural childbirth, which when people ask me to describe it, the best thing I can come up with, and it not uh necessarily an analogy that works for all people but it's like an acid trip like you you have to let go of the wheel or you will really suffer

and um what what gets in the way a lot I think, when women go in to have babies is that they are told that this will be extremely painful. But there's a difference between the kind of pain that is childbirth and the kind of pain that is someone just sliced your arm open with a razor blade. One is danger. You are in danger and your pain is sending you a very, very specific loud message that you are in danger and you need to take action. And the other kind of pain is really more describable as a kind of a discomfort. But it's not danger. And the more I think about our bodies and the messages they send us, because our body, any kind of pain or discomfort is always a message from somewhere. As soon as I really, you know, as soon as I was in labor when I was having ash, and my labor was 24 hours, as soon as I went into labor, I really clocked and took on board the idea that this wasn't dangerous pain.

And because I was sort of able to flick a switch in there and have a conversation with myself and my own body in which I said, self, you're not in danger. This is just uncomfortable. It didn't really feel like pain. It felt like discomfort. And that made me much more able to just sit with it and deal with it. But so many women, when they go into the experience of having childbirth, are just frightened to death by people, by doctors, by narrative, by whatever bullshit TV dramas they've seen on your average soap opera where there's a woman shrieking in agony, being wheeled on a gurney with six people around her with a baby inside of her that like you are going to be in pain and pain is bad and you need to stop this pain which is why most women will just race to take drugs and get an epidural which winds up being very very you know negative and with a knock-on effect for both baby and mama and what a classic metaphor for our entire fucking society. If you're feeling pain, just stop the pain.

Don't think about why you might be in pain. Don't think about where it might be coming from and why you might need to feel it or feel this discomfort. Just fucking get rid of it and and we and we have a handy product for you that we're willing to to sell you at great expense to yourself to just make that pain go away but as you said earlier you know that's never a sustainable option ever the the polar opposite also isn't sustainable which we we've been talking about uh as it relates to a lot of artists but not just artists that's the fetishizing of pain and using pain as sexy pain or creative pain which, but you don't want to be a,

a vessel or a hammer looking for a nail everywhere. Uh, because you're going to end up hammering a lot of screws and that doesn't make a whole lot of fucking sense. And I would say also that as someone who's, who has or had for decades fetishized pain, and I took great pride in having a very, very high pain tolerance, that it's important, I think, if you identify strongly with pain, if that is a primary driver in your life,

if it's something you romanticize or fetishize or view as your friend, which it sometimes is when it's giving you a message, ask yourself, am I putting pain in pole position because I'm unwilling or unable to feel other things? So I just want to feel something. Yeah, well, because pain can become a kind of a mosaic that drowns out the other conversations that you should maybe be listening to. Because pain can be annihilating, and annihilation can feel great if you're annihilating other things. Yeah. Well, there are different ways to numb yourself. One is by taking away the pain using different agents and the other is to use pain so frequently or to make the volume so loud that it drowns out other things. And for those people who feel like they might in some way identify with what

I'm saying, the book I mentioned earlier, radical acceptance is very, very, very helpful for this. Yeah. I had a, I had a thought flash through my head that day that I woke up from the

miscarriage and it was also minus five degrees on the mountaintop that night and that day. It was that sort of like, you don't even go outside kind of cold. I remember walking outside and thinking, my relationship to endure, and what we do endure. And I found myself thinking, men, you know, there's, in the male narrative, especially recently, and when I say recently, I mean, like, whatever, the past few thousand years of patriarchy, there's this real, there's this real machismo and this male narrative around violence and war and strength and the ability to withstand pain for a noble cause and bloody battle after bloody battle. And I thought about all of that. It was sort of like I had this flash,

like the montage of male violence through recent history. All the wars, all the battles, all the bloodshed, all of the comrades. And while holding that image in my mind, I thought about being up in the hotel room alone, like as a woman, surrounded by blood and holding this dead baby and thinking no man has ever done that, gone through that particular battle. And that is one deep fucking battle to grow life and then hold it in your hands and say goodbye.

And I thought one of the reasons that we are not doing so hot as a culture is this thing that women are fundamentally equipped to do and are really quite good at when we are given the space to do it and create it and share it. And the thing that men are, you know, come just equipped with DNA-wise, and I don't want to get into gender politics because things will get very dangerous. But we're so bad at taking care of each other in these departments, at supporting each other. And the strength that women have had for thousands of years to deal with the dark side of reproduction and to deal with the real, like, visceral, bloody life and death of periods and stillbirths and abortions and dead babies, you know, it's not nothing.

It is badass. It requires an incredible fortitude and strength of body and mind to go through experiences like that. And women go through it, but they don't really get a ton of credit. And they're also, you know, they're disempowered at every turn by men taking charge of the narrative and infantilizing women, patronizing them, you know, and taking charge of things that women could very well do for and by themselves, for and with each other as they have for millennia, until doctors marched in the room and said, step aside, ladies, we have a better plan, and it's going to cost you a lot of money.

P.S. Fuck capitalism. fuck capitalism i think it's i think it's important to and feel free to disagree but to to recognize that there are exceptions in the sense that it's not all men right oh no no no i'm making it i'm making it are the bad guys and there are the the bad girls and the men and women there's no monopoly on bad behavior. I've seen some horrifying behavior on both sides. Men certainly more than have their fair share. But in part, if I'm looking at it from my perspective, this is stuff I wanted you to talk about, right? And I think that speaking from the vantage point of someone whose own family would not talk about these things.

What do you mean? For instance, miscarriage. These are experiences that I think many people, men included, are very open to hearing. But it's, it's not part of the cultural conversation. And there is a lot of social pressure one way or another. There's a lot of censoring and there's a lot of self-censoring also. Yeah,

absolutely. And it's one, one thing that's become so clear to me in the last handful of years, especially since I've written publicly about family and personal struggles with major depressive episodes and near suicide in college. I mean, the most important thing I've ever written is some practical thoughts on suicide, which is a blog post about that. And much like your experience putting out this record and this book, I suspect, and even before that, but I think especially with this, you realize that everyone you bump into, every person you see,

we're up here on a high floor in a high rise looking down at these thousands of ants. And every single one of those people is fighting a battle we know nothing about. And the scale and depth of suffering, the experiences, male and female, and everything in between, that people have endured or suffered or had inflicted upon them is enough to boggle the mind. I mean, it's so valuable to have you sharing your experiences and to have other people. In a few weeks, I'll be having someone from the Special Forces come on to talk about a lot of what is suppressed or not openly discussed, even in those worlds,

when it comes to PTSD and a lot of the struggles. They should read the sleep book. The sleep book. Yes, this is a longer conversation. Actually, there's a Kirk Parsley separately for people who are interested in sleep. His former special forces who focuses on sleep specifically. For those people who want to Google that later.

But without rambling too long, I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that the way we all become more comfortable talking about pain and simultaneously recognizing the courage and the capabilities and the incredible strength that people can bring to bear on this situation, certainly including women, is by talking about them. Yeah. And it sort of gets back to what I keep seeing the major theme nowadays with everything politically, with feminism here, there with art, which is that it feels like a paradox, especially given the cultural Kool-Aid that we've all been raised with. But vulnerability is incredible power. And we're hammered so hard with the opposite message that it can be very hard to really believe that until you do it and do it again and do it again and practice doing it and realize that actually the knock-on effect and the... What is the knock-on effect? I actually don't know what that is. You mentioned it earlier.

Well, by the knock-on effect, I just mean the effect period. When you actually take the plunge and make yourself vulnerable, whether that means discussing your suicidal thoughts or being open with your community about your abortion or admitting to a paralyzing fear or whatever your bag is, the effect of that, you know, we're taught that that's such a terrifying thing to do. And we fear whatever is waiting on the other side of that every single time. And I've now been practicing it for long enough that I don't have to believe it anymore. I just know and at least in my experience one thing i realized not too many years ago is that when you keep when you put armor on and you keep it on long enough it's true that can keep a lot

of scary things outside but it also can keep a lot of scary things inside and it's heavy it's a it's a barrier uh how has and this is something that i know you're at least based on our conversations quite passionate about but how has moving to a fan supported model changed you or your art or both? It's changed both and it's, and it's impossible to discuss the life without the art and the art without the life at this point. I was actually pretty blindsided at how profound the effect on my life on my day-to-day life on my artistic life um switching to a patreon model was i thought that it was going to be like a good convenient

you know nice sustainable way of giving my fans an avenue to to to pay me you know once and then kind of not be bothered because i would have their credit card and i could charge them at will instead of bugging them every 18 months with a crowdfunding scheme um and i knew that i would appreciate the predictability of having a certain amount of money every month and that they would appreciate not being assaulted with an NPR style fundraiser that was going that was going to irritate the hell out of them once a year um and I also knew that like my fans are my fans it's not like I'm going to find a new batch of 25,000 people the next time I do a Kickstarter it's not like i'm going to find a new batch of 25 000 people the next time i do a kickstarter it's those people it's one community so going back and going back to the well every year to

do another to kickstarter another record just seemed like it was going to be exhausting on both sides so when patreon came along and for those for people who don't know what Patreon is, it's basically a kind of a sustained subscription to an artist. So I have 15,000 people right now backing me at about $3 a month just to work, to do what I need to do, to podcast, to release demos, to write, to film.

And I offer back a lot. You know, there's basically a channel of my work and I, you know, and I blog and there are little perks here and there, but mostly it's a non-profit, you know, not a non-profit model, it's an NPR model. You're just paying for me to broadcast and I will send you my broadcasts personally, you know, with a bow tied on them if you're my patron and everyone else in the world basically just gets to tune in. But I did not get, I did not understand how disorientingly liberating it would feel to all of a sudden not have to have the second thought every time I had an artistic thought of, how am I going to sell this? How am I going to market this? You know, this idea is pretty good. This idea is genius. This song is great, this album is great. And every artist grapples with

this tightrope between art and money constantly. And it's such a bizarre combination of things to think about. Here you are writing a song, bearing your soul. That's thought number one and activity number one. And then activity number two is, okay, how are you, how is this thing going to pay your rent? How are you going to get this thing, you know, from your soul out into the marketplace, into the hands of someone who will authenticate you, sell it, and then give you a paycheck. And I actually hadn't realized that you know being part of the major label system which I was and then being an independent artist which I was but still out there doing like the daily grind and the daily hustle to make sure that there was money coming in so that I could pay my staff and make my work and pay my recording studio bills I just did not realize how much of the pie chart in my brain

was the hustle versus the art. And even though I still do the hustle and I still need to run my Patreon, as soon as thousands of people said, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, just relax. We've got your back. We're going to pay you. So, take your time, say what you need to say, sing what you need to sing, and we're in. We've already bought the song. Now tell us what you have to say. It was almost like being punch drunk. When did that become real for you? Because there's a shift at some point where you're like, maybe I'll try this.

Maybe this will be a thing. Yeah. And where did it hit the boiling point where you're like, oh, wow. Well, I mean, the boiling point's a good metaphor because like everything else

in my career it wasn't like one day i woke up and said oh my god crowdfunding has liberated my artistic voice it's been a i've been in a i've been in a long-term relationship with my community of listeners, readers, audience for 20 years. And I have experimented with every dial in that relationship. And I went through, you know, crowdfunding independently off my website. I went through using Kickstarter as a model. Now I'm using Patreon. And the platforms and the tools keep changing. But the fundamental is that I think that when we can divorce art from money, and when artists can just let go of that lever... And by divorce, you mean not have to think about money?

Not have to think about it so much. There's a great blog out there by a woman named Wendy Ice who crowdfunded a book of her husband's. He was a fantastic illustrator, and he did a book of illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, like a new illustrated version of it that publishers wouldn't take, but people wanted it. Wendy Ice, I-C-E?

E-I, okay, I-C-E. And I forget the name of her husband. It's escaping me. We'll put it in the show notes. And I'll summarize her blog, because it's a little bit of a tangent, but it's really important. And enough people convinced her to go to Kickstarter and do a crowdfund for this book,

and she was very scared. Because they were used to working in the world of publishing, where everything was authenticated, and there was a system, and there was an order of things. But they just weren't, the book wasn't getting picked up. So they went to their community and they did this crowdfund and they were overwhelmed and overjoyed with the amount of support that they got. And then her husband got cancer shortly after that happened. And she was very afraid to go to her Kickstarter backers and say, things are going to be held up. Something very bad has happened. And then her husband died. And she said she had never felt more supported emotionally by a community than she felt from these Kickstarter backers who were purportedly

there to get a book, but were actually really there to support the artistic entity behind the book. They wound up supporting her family. They wound up supporting her. They supported her journey. And she talks so succinctly in a way that I have never managed to do about what it feels like to be held by a community like this and how it actually feels safer sometimes than the community of your own friends and the community of your own family, because it is an unconditional love that asks nothing in exchange. And I feel that way so often about my patrons. They're just there for me. They ask very little in return, but they're very happy for what I have to give them. And we do not have any entanglements. There's not a whole lot of passive aggressive behavior. There just is this kind of unconditional acceptance and love for what I do and what

I have to offer. And it's such a beautiful, delicious, uncomplicated relationship. And if I want a complicated relationship, I've got my marriage, I've got my parents, I've got my family, I can go there anytime, that channel is open. But when it comes to art, which is so fragile, and doesn't sometimes just needs an unconditional support system. Oh my god, like having 15,000 people who are there with a giant net to catch me in my spectacular failings as an artist or my successes or whatever they're going to be, feels like the apex of artistic freedom. I'm so happy for you.

I know. I'm doing it. And who knows? It might change. Platforms change. Companies get eaten by Facebook. You just never know. know but the the point is actually not the technology not the platforms not the companies not patreon not indiegogo not facebook it's what human beings are capable of doing for and with

each other the platforms whatever they'll change they'll evolve they'll be more or less helpful in our endeavors. But what I am exhilarated by right now and really inspired by right now is that Kickstarter seems to have kicked down the door for people understanding that this kind of support and patronage was available and started to chip away at the stigma. And now Patreon is kind of picking up whereage was available and started to chip away at the stigma. And now Patreon is kind of picking up where Kickstarter, at least for me, kicking up where Kickstarter left off. And, you know, now thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are out there thinking that it's totally okay to just support an artist because you want to hear what they fucking have to say. Not because you want an object or a piece of plastic to put in your disc man, but because you want to hear what Tim Ferriss

has to say about the world and you want the message out there and you want to see what music Amanda Palmer is going to make. And it's worth it to you for $3 a month to just have it exist. That's amazing. That feels like artistic evolutionary progress happening very fast right now in the world i'm excited for you and happy for you i think this is i think this is also if we're just looking at one example of the output that is enabled by that type of support i think i think this is really important i don't say that i don't say that lightly like how sweaty my palms are just having this emotional conversation. It's wild.

The sweat is all over the death book. This is important. I gave this talk at South by Southwest a couple of days ago, talking about how never, ever, ever in a billion years would have had the fortitude to make a record like this. If I had known that somewhere in there, I would have had to walk it up to Steve in marketing and say, this is what I've got because I know Steve for marketing and I know what the response would have been, which is, you've got to be fucking kidding us, and this is not going to play well at radio. And what do you mean your first track is 11 minutes long?

Back to the drawing board, lassie. And instead, I just got to, you know, sail over, under, and around all of those hurdles and just say, this is my offering. Where can people find your offering? Where can they learn more about all of this? Well, this is the vinyl. Most people don't have vinyl, but I mean, the album is available on vinyl and on CD and pretty much any anywhere on

the internet where you get music and one of the things that my patronage amanda palmer for those people who are not watching but listening yeah there will be no intermission there's boobs on the cover there's boobs and full frontal nudity sorry sorry grandma um uh one of the things that the Patreon makes possible is my ability to keep my music very cheap for the public, for people who don't have a huge budget to spend on music. So this album, which clocks in at about 80 minutes, is a dollar on Bandcamp. And you can pay more on Bandcamp if you want. It'll come directly to me because I own my own fucking music. But when you go and if you download this record for a dollar at Bandcamp, keep my patrons in mind because it's their funding that made it possible for me

to put a giant, expensive, really well-produced record on Bandcamp for a dollar and feel no pain. The army of Medici for the modern artist. Exactly. Yeah, the crowd Medici. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Say hello. Anything that

you'd like to suggest people perhaps take a look at? What's your website? Well, if I'm going to send people to me me my community is mostly hanging out on patreon right now yeah how do they find you patreon.com slash amanda palmer or you could just google um amanda palmer patreon um i have a big website with a lot of information on it that's easy to find amanda palmer.net and i'm on all the socials at amanda palmer i tend to

respond and discuss the most on twitter um i i am i am trying to wean myself from the evil bloody tit of facebook right now i'm just not a fan sorry facebook, Facebook. You're scoring low marks in my book right now, and you have been for a while. And I'm around. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Tumblr. But chances are, if you want to chat with me, find me, wave something in my direction, I'll see you on Twitter,

and I'll shout back. And don't be dicks, people. Be nice. Yeah, just don't be a dick. That's our office team logo and mantra. Just don't be a dick. Yeah, try being nice. And I'm very lucky that my audience,

I feel really blessed with the audience have somehow managed to have form around these ideas that I borrow from other people and share and blend together and put out there. They tend to be very, very, very supportive and mostly constructive. Except for that one guy on Twitter today who was like, shut up, Ferret, go away.

And I'm like, you follow me. Listen, if everybody loved what you did all the time, I would say you're doing something very wrong. Yeah, that would be cause for greater concern. Amanda, this is so much fun. Thank you for having me. So lovely to see you again. And is there anything else you would like to say, suggest, ask?

Any closing comments before we wrap up? I don't think so. I mean, maybe it's actually worth mentioning to your people specifically that I'm starting my own podcast to have conversations mostly with artists about process and about asking and about how we do what we do but i'm also having conversations with people from every possible field um i talked to david eagleman who's a

neuroscientist i'm going to be talking with people from plant parenthood i'm going to be talking to social scientists and um you know any anyone who has anything interesting to share i i want to hunt them down and chat with them and i'm i'm calling it the art of asking everything um and i'm i'm figuring it out right now but if you want my voice in your head if you can handle more just stay tuned to whatever channels of mine. It will, it will probably be hard to avoid when I launch it. Step into the Palmer verse.

You shall hear the noise and the news. There will be no intervention. I'm also going to start a death metal band. Uh, well, my death metal band will write the theme song for my, for my, uh,

happy hippie podcast. Amanda, thank you for making the time. I think you are an awesome human being, Tim Ferriss. Thank you for existing and doing this. Thank you, Amanda. And I hope we have many more conversations. We will be having more conversations, in fact. Things coming up. And

to everybody listening, you can find links to everything we talked about in the show notes, as always, at Tim.blog forward slash podcast, just search Amanda's name, and it'll all pop right up. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you for listening. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you

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