AMANDA PALMER Launches Weekly Podcast The Art Of Asking Everything

AMANDA PALMER
The Art Of Asking Everything

Episodes 

1. Elizabeth Lesser (author and community leader): Bullshit is Everywhere

Elizabeth Lesser is an author and activist who co-founded Omega Institute in 1977.

She is the author of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, Marrow: Love, Loss & What Matters Most, The Seekers Guide and, most recently, Cassandra Speaks.

In 2008 she helped Oprah Winfrey produce a ten-week online seminar based on Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth. The webinar has been viewed by over 40 million people worldwide.

She has two TED Talks, “Take The Other to Lunch” and “Say your truths and seek them in others.”

In this episode, Lesser and Palmer talk about memoirs, telling other people’s stories, The Omega Institute, patriarchy and leading an examined life.

2. Lenny Henry (comedian and writer): Humor, Trauma, and Flipping the Cosmic Spatula

Lenny Henry is one of the most successful British stand-up comedians of all time.  In 1975, at just 17, his career took off when he was a repeat winner on the weekly TV talent show, New Faces.  He hosted sketch comedy program, The Lenny Henry Show, starting in 1984.  Lenny stared in the 90’s BBC sitcom Chef!  Lenny is a founder, front-man and a creative force behind the charity Comic Relief.

This episode covers the paradoxes of celebrity and social media, how The Internet is a buffet, starting an entertainment career in working mans’ clubs, using humor as armor against racism and the history of minstrelsy in the UK. We also discussed 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.

3. BJ Miller (doctor and death expert): An Expert on Death Talks about Life

BJ Miller is a palliative care physician at UCSF Medical Center. At the age of 19, BJ was electrocuted and lost 3 of his limbs. This accident led him down a path of studying art and eventually towards his career of palliative care, comforting the dying.

His 2015 Ted Talk, entitled “What really matters at the end of life?”, presented BJ’s perspective on death.

BJ is also the subject of the 2018 Netflix documentary End Game.

His book, A Beginner’s Guide to the End: How to Live Life to the Full and Die a Good Death, was released last year.  The Washington Post called it “A gentle, knowledgeable guide to a fate we all share.”

Miller and Palmer talk about art history as therapy, living life as an art composition, the relationship between limitations and creativity, making the best of your situation and the allusion of independence.

4. Laura Jane Grace (musician, writer and trans-rights activist): Punk Guilt

Laura Jane Grace is the founder, lead singer, songwriter and guitarist of Against Me!, The band has released seven studio albums and Grace is one the first highly visible punk rock musicians to come out as transgender. Her column, ‘Mandatory Happiness’, was published by Vice for years.

Her autobiography is entitled Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout.

Her debut solo album, Bought to Rot, was released in 2018.

Grace and Palmer talk about enjoying music as an individual, musicians working in cycles, the relationship between speed and creativity, and punk guilt.

5. Eli Pariser (voting and internet activist): How We Can Actually Use The Internet for Good Things

Eli Pariser is an author, activist, and entrepreneur focused on how to make technology and media serve democracy. He became executive director of MoveOn.org in 2004, where he helped pioneer the practice of online citizen engagement. Eli is the co-founder of Upworthy, a website for meaningful viral content, and Avaaz, a large, global citizen’s organization.

He is the author of, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You.

Pariser has two TED Talks published online: “What obligation do social media platforms have to the greater good?” and “Beware online ‘Filter Bubbles’”

He is currently an Omidyar Fellow at the New America and co-directs the Civic Signals project at the National Conference on Citizenship.

Pariser and Palmer discuss applying urban planning theories to The Internet, inviting in the things you want in your life, why it is so hard to be an artist in America, having 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.

6. Leslie Salmon Jones (founder of Afro Flow Yoga): The Heart Doesn’t Lie

Leslie Salmon Jones is a professional dancer, yoga instructor, wellness coach, public speaker and community activist. Along with her husband, Jeff W. Jones, she is the cofounder of Afro Flow Yoga. The pair work with community organizations to help develop mastery over their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing.

Jones talks about growing up black in an affluent Toronto neighborhood, learning how to speak your truth, the legendary artists’ oasis The Cloud Club, 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 your breath.

7. Nadya Tolokonnikova (performance artist and Pussy-Rioter)

Nadya Tolokonnikova was a member of the ground-breaking Russian anarchist punk group Pussy Riot. In August of 2012, she was convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for a Pussy Riot performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ The Saviour and spent over a year in prison.

Tolokonnikova continues to be a beacon for political activism. Her book Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, was released October 2018.

In August 2020, The New York Times published a powerful op-ed from Tolokonnikova titled “I’m an Activist in Russia. I Can’t Believe What My Life Has Become.”

8. Jamil Zaki (professor of psychology and empathy expert): Tuning Your Empathy Fork

Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory.

He is the author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.

Jamil’s 2017 TED Talk is entitled “Building Empathy: How to hack empathy and get others to care more”.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

Zaki and Palmer talk about flexing your empathy, acting as an extreme sport of emotional control, art as performance-enhancing drug for empathy, post traumatic growth and the high wire act of having empathy for those who cause us harm.

9. KT Tunstall (musician and activist): The Land of I Don’t Give a Fuck

KT Tunstall is a Scottish singer-songwriter and musician. Her award-winning debut album, Eye to the Telescope was released in 2004. Her latest album, WAX, was released in 2018. She has released 6 albums, which have all been met with critical and commercial success. Tunstall has toured the world and has performed on talk shows in the US and Europe.

Tunstall also composes music for film and television including the movie Bad Moms.

Tunstall and Palmer talk about hidden rooms in your inner world, our shared love of Tom Lehrer, being narcissistically hungry, our pet peeves as performers, Tunstall’s hearing loss and how it changed her life for the better.

10. Storm Large (author, singer and activist): Knowing Who You Are Not

Born in Southborough, Massachusetts, Storm graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York before moving to San Francisco and later to Portland. Storm is the co-lead vocalists for the band Pink Martini along with China Forbes. Her band, Storm and the Balls, has toured the world playing mash up covers of rock hits of the 70s and 80s.

In 2006, she appeared as a finalist on the CBS show “Rock Star: Supernova”.

Her musical one woman show, Crazy Enough, premiered to rave reviews in 2009. She released her memoir of the same name in 2012.

In 2014, her band, Le Bonheur, released a self-titled album of classics from the Great American Songbook.

In this episode, Storm and Palmer discuss growing up in Massachusetts, the isolating horrors of writing a book, our shared obsession of Madonna, imposter syndrome and parallel parking as a feminist statement.