Amanda Palmer On Radical Compassion & The Power Of Vulnerability

Today's guest is many things. A fiercely independent singer, songwriter and musician. A bestselling author and blogger. A playwright and director. A riveting speaker and a viral TED Talk-er. A crowdfunding mom. An ardent feminist. And a fearless activist. Living and breathing at the cutting edge of expression in all forms, Amanda Palmer is an iconic, bold and sui generis performer constantly innovating what it means to be an artist in the modern age. Getting her start as a busking eight-foot bride statue in Harvard Square, she would go on to form one-half of the inventive, punk cabaret act The Dresden Dolls before launching one of the most successful crowd-funded solo careers in music history. Leaning into her devoted audience to support her seemingly endless fount of creativity, Amanda helped resuscitate the ancient art of artistic patronage, giving us all permission to ask. And more importantly perhaps, the encouragement to receive. Further to this idea, The Art of Asking, Amanda's sensational 2013 TED Talk, would go on to be viewed over 20 million times and led to her New York Times bestselling memoir, The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help*. Leveraging her legion of 15,000 Patreon supporters, Amanda’s career is wholly devoted to her adoring fans eager to support her creations. Her latest offering, There Will Be No Intermission, is a beautiful, haunting and powerful solo album and world tour that grapples with the very personal and social emotional landscape of abortion, miscarriage and death. This past May I had the good fortune to witness Amanda's epic 4 1/2 hour show at the Ace Theatre here in LA. I was extremely moved by it. And even more privileged to host this conversation with her the following day. This is a conversation about what it means to be radically compassionate — open-hearted to even those we deem undeserving — and why humanity depends on empathy for its survival. It's about the strength that can be gathered when we're courageous enough to be truly vulnerable. It's about the perniciousness of perfectionism — the true enemy of creative expression. Why asking help is so hard, but crucial — also welcome. And some uncomfortable truths about my hero Henry David Thoreau. Hint: it involves donuts. In the spirit of vulnerability, I'll freely admit I was a bit nervous and intimidated — I mean who wouldn't be? Nonetheless, it was an honor to spend an hour with one of the great creative voices of our time. I'm delighted to share the experience with you today. The visually inclined can watch our entire conversation on YouTube here: bit.ly/amandapalmer459 (please subscribe!) Enjoy! Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  An artist's job is to offer up some form, some kind of reflection of what's going on. What's going on out there? What's going on inside us? What's going on inside me right now? And to organize it in some kind of way, whether that is painting, dance, sculpture, film, music, you name it. To organize that reflection into an offering, back to everybody else. You might see you in this. This might make you feel something. You might recognize yourself in this. For me, with music and art, it's always gonna circle back to why we needed it in the first place.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  The platforms will change. Who we trust will change. The middlemen will change. The gatekeepers, the filters, will change. But why we do it, and why we need to feel it, that will not change. Art and music, for thousands and thousands and thousands of years of human history, were just useful tools of the tribe.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  We needed it for ritual, for grieving, for transition, for celebration. None of that was about selling shit. It was about doing and being and connecting.

• 2:23Rich Roll?

  That's Amanda Palmer, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:38Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. Good to be with you here today. Quick reminder, my big live show plus podcast is coming up quick. It's going down Friday, September 27th at the beautiful, the historic Wilshire E-Bell Theater. Special guest to be announced. Really excited about this. We're working hard behind the scenes to craft and create this immersive, entertaining experience. Tickets are still available, but they're going quickly, so grab yours while they're hot. And you can find them by clicking on the appearances tab on my website, richroll.com. I'll also put a link up in the show notes as well. And

• 3:22Rich Roll?

  you can sign up for my newsletter, and I'll send you an email about it. In any event, very excited about today's guest. A true artist who, in so many ways, defies any attempt to define her, but I'm gonna do my best. Amanda Palmer is many, many things. She's a singer, a songwriter, a musician, a playwright, an author, a pianist, a director, a blogger, a TED Talker. What else? A feminist, an activist, a crowdfunder, and really a performance artist who lives and breathes at the cutting edge of expression in all forms. Amanda got her

• 4:05Rich Roll?

  start as a busking eight-foot bride statue in Harvard Square, and

• 4:11Rich Roll?

  Went on to form one half of the inventive punk cabaret act, The Dresden Dolls, before launching one of the most successful crowdfunded solo careers in music history. And the crowdfunding part is super interesting and compelling in this case because Amanda is iconic, not just for her fearless artistry, but also for how she has reinvented and embraced and really leaned into her audience to support her creativity. Towards this end, her 2013 TED Talk, "The Art of Asking", about this very subject, would go on to be viewed over 20 million times, leading

• 4:53Rich Roll?

  to her New York Times bestselling memoir, "The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help". Now leveraging this legion of Patreon supporters that she has, I think it's about 15,000 at this point, Amanda's career is devoted to her adoring fans. And her latest creation is "There Will Be No Intermission", and it's this beautiful, haunting, and really powerful solo album and world tour that grapples with the very personal and social, emotional landscape of abortion, miscarriage, and death. I had the opportunity to see the epic four and a half hour show

• 5:35Rich Roll?

  at the Ace Theater here in Los Angeles in May. I was very moved by it and was fortunate enough to have this conversation with her the following day. More about all this in a minute, but first.

• 5:56Rich Roll?

  Okay, Amanda, what an honor, what a privilege to spend time with this incredible human being. This is a great conversation. We talked about a lot of stuff. We talked about compassion, the power of vulnerability, the importance of empathy, why perfectionism is the enemy of creativity, and why asking for help is so hard, but crucial, and generally almost always welcome.

• 6:22Rich Roll?

  We also talk a little bit about Henry David Thoreau, a little myth busting there. And donuts, yes, donuts. You're gonna have to hear the story. I'll admit, I was a little bit nervous on this one. I don't know if it comes across or not. This was a big one for me. I just, I was geeking out, fanning out on Amanda. I was just so delighted to talk to her. But I think it's a good one. Final note, Amanda had a flight to catch, so this one is a little bit more truncated than my usual conversations, but nonetheless, amazing. So, without further ado, let's talk to the powerful and amazing Amanda Palmer.

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  Following you for a long time, but I'd never seen you perform before. And I was deeply impacted by it. But I think the thing that moved me the most was just the love from the audience. Like, the connection is so deep with your peeps.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it's a long-term relationship we've had.

• 7:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  You know, I wouldn't be able to do a show like this if I didn't have an audience that I had grown up with for so long.

• 7:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's no small thing. And it was, it was very, very evident, the amount of love that was, that was moving in two directions.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:50Rich Roll?

  You know? And four hours.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Four and a half.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I do like, I do, I'm an athlete. I do like ultra-distance stuff, like ultra-marathon-type stuff. That was the ultra-endurance version of Amanda Palmer last night.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Well, and ironically, I, I feel that the show should be a little longer.

• 8:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, you were, you were, yeah, you would've kept going.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I had to rush, I had to rush to get to curfew. I didn't get to play the encore.

• 8:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, I, in the original draft of the show, I had more songs and stories. They had to get cut and cut and cut.

• 8:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I loved it. I loved everything about it. And I'm delighted to be able to talk to you today. So, thanks for making time.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  I'm really glad you came.

• 8:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Radical compassion is what I want to talk about.

• 8:44Rich Roll?

  If you're open to it. When we were, um, when Greg and I were chatting during the intermission, Greg said something that I think is totally on point, which is that you can't be radically compassionate on the level that you are without the vulnerability or the willingness to be as vulnerable as you are. And so I'm just interested in kind of how you think about that.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think compassion and vulnerability just sort of go hand in hand. And, you know, I also think that the thing that makes radical compassion radical is that, um, by definition, you can't be selective about it.

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  I mean, this is the thing, and this is what I see in the feminist movement all the time, too. It's like, you can't decide to be compassionate, you know, just for those people or just in this moment. Or, you know, I'll be compassionate if everything lines up for me, if it's convenient, whatever. And, um, you know, in order to empathize with somebody, anybody, especially the difficult people, and by the difficult people, that could be the strange people in strange lands that you have very little in common with culturally, or your mom.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  You know, the leaps of compassion that are the most difficult do take a certain kind of vulnerability because it's in that moment where you're sort of opening yourself up to potential harm or actually fear, which is like the fear of what's going to happen if you open yourself up to empathizing with this person or what's going to happen in your own head if you open your imagination up to empathizing with someone who could do something terrible to you.

• 10:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, being willing to embrace the fringes of what our social contract is willing to endure, right? The idea that, uh... We can all agree that compassion is a good thing. And everyone likes to think of themselves as compassionate. But how sturdy is that concept? You know, and your willingness to test that. At the outer edges of it is, you know, what leads to poem gate.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:19Rich Roll?

  And then that's where you're tested, like your resolve. Like, is your compassion truly radical enough to withstand the criticism? Not just from people from a different political perspective, but your own people.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yes, well, your own people failing to have compassion for you, or your failure to have compassion for the people immediately around you. I mean, I feel like those are the most difficult moments.

• 11:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so maybe explain like the poem thing briefly for people that are listening that might not be familiar with what went down.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  I'm from Boston. And so in the spring of 2013, my husband Neil and I were renting a place in Boston not far from my apartment. We had just gotten together, a relationship that was still pretty new. And we had moved to Boston because my best friend had cancer and I was taking him to chemo. And the Boston bombing happened a few blocks from my apartment, where I had lived for many, many, many years. And there's a lot of layers. But I think the most important thing is, you know, I live on the internet a lot. My community gathers on the internet.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  And when the Boston bombing happened, this is also 2013, so I was on Twitter a lot.

• 12:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  And we were all told by the government to stay in our houses. I mean, everyone was literally told, don't go outside. And the news was horrific. And there's literally a bloodbath at the marathon finish line. And it was, it was just sort of unimaginable. Like, nothing like this had ever happened in Boston. This was a mass murder. And it was, and the images were particularly horrific. You know, these limbless dying people and the manhunt going on at the same time. I don't know if you remember the news, but you know, there's a city lockdown and a manhunt for this kid.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And this kid, Joe Hart Sarnaya, was nineteen. And I grew up in Lexington. He grew up in Cambridge, you know, the next town over. And it was so close to home, like the idea that this, you know, this kid, just like me, from a lefty liberal town, could carry out an act so horrific. And he was friends with kids of my friends. Like, this was someone from my community. And we followed as the manhunt happened. And, you know, I finally found him. He was found bleeding in the bottom of a boat, hiding in someone's backyard in Watertown.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  And I, I tried to imagine what it must have been like in that moment to be that kid. I mean, he was a kid. He was nineteen. And he had just murdered a bunch of people and was just lying there, waiting to be caught. And I wrote this spur-of-the-moment poem on my blog, trying to, you know, not even so much trying to empathize, but just sort of doing this exercise of imagination, like, what is it like to be in the bottom of that boat? And I got crucified by the Boston press for even daring to offer up what appeared to be empathy for this kid.

• 14:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Did you have a sense that that could be perceived in that way? Or did that take you by surprise?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I was totally shocked.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And also, you know, I posted it to my blog, which is not a blog with a huge readership and to a very specific set of people, you know, my, my tribe, my community, many of whom had been with me on Twitter for the past few days, watching this unfold. You know, we were all holding each other in this really horrifying moment. And this was mostly for them. And the poem actually sort of stitched together my own feelings of lostness and confusion in the world with this kid's, which I think was what people found mostly offensive. And You know, the first comments sent on my blog were from my fanbase, my community. And, you know, people read it, they liked it, they understood it.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  But then, you know, when the outside world got ahold of it and this crazy right-wing blog found it and put it up, I was all of a sudden branded, you know, a terrorist sympathizer. And, and there were lots of very, very, very, very, very nasty words and languages that I do not want to repeat.

• 16:04Rich Roll?

  Do you think part of that was due to timing?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was all timing.

• 16:09Rich Roll?

  Like if you had done that a year later?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I had done it a year later, I don't think anyone would have cared. But this was, I mean, this was like, three or four days after the bombing. So it hurt, of course, a little bit to get yelled at by all these right-wing people. But what, what really hurt was getting yelled at by my own, you know, by the left-wing people who, you know, screamed at me that this was inappropriate and too soon. And especially what hurt the most was that, you know, Amanda, we get that you believe in radical compassion, and that's great, but there are people who we do need to exclude.

• 16:47Rich Roll?

  Right. It begs the question of whether compassion is a zero-sum game. Like, if you're apportioning compassion to one person, does that mean that you are neglecting compassion for somebody else? And is compassion tantamount to, to endorsement? Right? That's where it gets sort of confusing and confounding.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's not. And I mean, this was my defense, and I, you know, I felt so wildly misunderstood. And, you know, the first thing I did is I put my hand up and I was like, you guys, you guys, you guys, you do get that I do understand what just happened. And my friend Dylan Maron, who has his own great podcast, it's called Conversations With People Who Hate Me. And he connects people with their internet trolls and haters. It's a really beautiful podcast. And he has a great maxim that empathy is never endorsement.

• 17:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Empathy is not endorsement. Empathy is just empathy. And, you know, and you've got, I mean, the more I think about these sorts of things and the more I look at it from, you know, through different facets, we have to have compassion for the worst people.

• 18:00Rich Roll?

  Well, I think we're, we're in a cultural moment right now where these, how we talk about these things has become so highly sensitized as we retreat into our silos and, you know, virtue signal to our respective audiences. And what's kind of interesting is the juxtaposition of that kind of cultural gestalt in that direction versus your relationship with Twitter, which is like this incredibly positive, you know, community oriented kind of collective experience that raises the vibration of all the people that you touch and impact. Yet at the same time, there's this other, you know, ecosystem that's going on, on that

• 18:42Rich Roll?

  same platform that's contributing to the problem that ultimately you had to kind of weather through.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's a fear driven system.

• 18:51Rich Roll?

  So what's the antidote? Keep it just doubling down on?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Put your head down and, and, you know, it's, it can be very tempting to give in to, you know, anger, judgment, that silo that you were talking about. But it never works. It doesn't, it never pans out well.

• 19:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but we're just seeing it continually amplifying, like 10x every year. So what, we just need more Amanda Palmers on Twitter, I guess?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Well, actually, it might be useful to mention that I did not come by that immediately. I learned.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  You know, I've been on the internet since 1999 and the, the early Dresden Dolls blog, you know, you know, soon had a forum and this was all pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-Myspace even, pre-LiveJournal, like in the, the o'er days of the internet. And I learned, I learned gradually that feeding, you know, feeding the monsters of hate and judgment on the internet were not really yielding good fruit. And I learned these lessons through my blog, you know, and through, all of a sudden, through the power that I wielded, having this platform.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  I learned it on Twitter and I would probably be pretty ashamed of some of the things that I posted in the early days because I just didn't get it yet. You know, and I, and I, I didn't fully understand yet the importance of not telling other people's stories for them. I didn't understand yet the importance of not, you know, like immediately picking up my sword when someone was challenging me and, and go, and having a go at them. I was very reactive and years and years and years on the internet of, and also, you know,

• 21:08Speaker 01

  my own work and my own mindfulness work finally led me to like realizing that there's a kind of a jujitsu.

• 21:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  That you can do without leaving the internet and without saying, fuck everything, I'm deleting all my social media. There is a way of reaching back out to people to, to de-charge a situation, you know, to...

• 21:32Rich Roll?

  Neutralize.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  To neutralize and, you know, the best, um...

• 21:39Speaker 01

  What's the word I'm looking for? You know, the best weapon, really, can often just be burying your own throat and showing your own vulnerability to someone who's charging at you. Because they're never expecting that.

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  And when people are coming at you with intense hatred, they're never expecting that you're just gonna calmly try to engage them in a loving conversation.

• 22:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  That's not what they want.

• 22:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, wait, what? What, you just changed the rules here?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, I like that practice. You know, that's not something I was ever expecting to get good at when I got into rock and roll. But that wound up being a kind of a side effect of being a public musician on the internet.

• 22:22Rich Roll?

  How do you feel about the, the kind of hair trigger that we seem to be on in this kind of cancel culture? Where a mis-

• 22:33Speaker 01

  I find it really annoying.

• 22:34Rich Roll?

  A misstep, you know, can result in, you know, basically the ruination of somebody for something they said or something that gets misconstrued.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  I think it's very dangerous. And in, in a lot of instances, very stupid.

• 22:46Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. But it's a reality.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Sure, I mean, it is a reality and there, there... It is important to keep our hand on the throttle of, you know, what gets amplified, who gets attention, what we consume, you know, what stories we wanna continue to tell and who gets to tell them.

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  So I would never say, like, let's just keep it a free-for-all and, and not be discerning. But to just cancel everything that has a whiff of badness would basically mean, ultimately, if we took that to its endgame, the cancellation of all art. And I'm not, I'm not a fan of that idea.

• 23:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because-

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Because nothing is pure. It just doesn't exist.

• 23:40Rich Roll?

  And the compassion is the, is the facility and the willingness to be able to see the whole person beyond the misdeed.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Sure, and I, and you know, part of our job, you and I, anyone with a platform, as media makers, culture makers, is to always add context.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  You know, this is what this is. This is where this came from. We have the internet. We can fucking put anything in context if we're not lazy.

• 24:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Um, and so, you know, something of dubious origin, let's say, a short film directed by a serial killer. It can still have its place in society, but it needs to be put into context. We need to talk about, why are we watching this? What is it? What does it mean? What can it teach us? If it has nothing to teach us, fuck it. Throw it out. Burn it. Good. But if it has got something to teach us, and usually, almost always, it does, um, we need to be more careful curators of what culture is and is going to be. And that means not just throwing everything in the dumpster.

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and an appreciation for subtlety and context. Right? Like, we've just decided that context is not important, you know, as long as it serves my, you know, agenda, or whatever it is that, you know, I stand for.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Well, like, everything else in culture right now, there's, like, there's a death of nuance.

• 25:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Right.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  And a death of satire and a death of irony, and that's not good for anybody.

• 25:20Rich Roll?

  No, it's not. It's not.

• 25:28Rich Roll?

  Last night, you said, uh, there was criticism in the wake of this poem situation. And part of the criticism was that you were accused of, like, making light. And you said, "That's my job. The job of the artist is to make light." And you then wrote this other, like, this other more recent poem reflecting back on that same individual in Boston, and it was the most beautiful thing. You said, "We will stay crippled in the darkness if we cannot feel compassion for the heart that is the darkest."

• 26:05Speaker 01

  I really did rhyme darkness with darkest. Such a fucking lazy poet.

• 26:09Rich Roll?

  It's still pretty fucking good, though. I love that. And I think we need more of that.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'll double down on that any day.

• 26:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Beyond, you know, making light, like, how do you define the role of the artist?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  I don't. That's not my job.

• 26:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How do you think of it for yourself, though? Like, if you were to elaborate on that?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, an artist's job is to

• 26:41Speaker 01

  is to offer up some form, some kind of reflection of what's going on. What's going on out there? What's going on inside us? What's going on inside me right now? And to organize it in some kind of way. You know, whether that is painting, dance, sculpture, film, music, you name it. To organize that reflection into an offering back to everybody else. You might see you in this. This might make you feel something.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  You might recognize yourself in this. And, you know, the I find myself, especially lately, I've been working through so much of my own grief through making art, that I find myself wondering, like, God, like, what the fuck do other people do? I'm really lucky. I have a full-time job where I get to, like, work through and try to make meaning of what is happening to me. I get to spend all day and night doing that.

• 27:54Rich Roll?

  But most people would would would think of that as a nightmare. Like, most people spend a lot of energy trying to, like, erect a wall in between themselves and whatever that is.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Well, and mostly

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  Avoiding looking at that.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  And mostly, that doesn't work.

• 28:10Rich Roll?

  No, it doesn't. But people will pursue it to the grave.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and mostly, it doesn't work. You've got to sort through. You've got to make meaning. You've got to,

• 28:25Speaker 01

  you know, when grief happens, there has to be space and time to heal.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  It could be through, you know, through, through any form of exercise or creation, but you have to do it. If you don't do it and you compartmentalize, we see what happens. We're seeing it all over the place.

• 28:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was, was it, it was Anthony who said to you that, that those, those issues left unattended are doing pushups in the dark.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he said, if you don't deal with your grief and trauma, or your demons, they go into the cellar of your soul and lift weights.

• 29:00Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I've experienced that.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  I think we all, we all have. Yeah, you've got to deal.

• 29:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. When I look at like what you do and all your various expressions, though, it's, it's, it's almost like you, Amanda Palmer, the person transcends the art. Like you are the art. I think your person is art in its own sense. Like just, you know, just everything that you are in, in like a Warholian sense. Like you are the expression of all of these things. You're a representation of all of these offerings, but it's a performance in its own right. You know what I mean?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  I would say that if that's true, it's no more or less true for me than it is for you or anyone else in this room.

• 29:48Rich Roll?

  What do you mean by that?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  I mean, we're always performing our own lives, all of us.

• 29:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  You know, this gets into a really heavy duty philosophical, uh, rabbit hole of, you know, what's real, which one of you is real, like this one, the one who woke up in the morning, the one who was brushing his teeth, the one who is visiting with his family, like which is, you know, which one is persona and which one is real. Well, we're all multifaceted and we show up with different masks and different persona, you know, for different situations. And, you know, for me, as an artist, I really like

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Feeling like when I sit down on stage and the closest version of my authentic self and I'm showing the audience the closest thing to quote unquote real that I can come up with. But, you know, it's still show business.

• 30:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  I still have to be on stage at seven thirty and deliver a show like no matter what's going on. And in order to do that, I do what anybody else who has to show up, you know, to their job to deliver, which is like, you know, pull it together.

• 31:01Rich Roll?

  At the show last night, I was thinking, I had like conflicting thoughts. One was the way that you carried yourself on stage and made yourself comfortable, created this sense of intimacy where it really felt like we were just in your living room hanging out, even though we're, there's fifteen hundred people there or whatever. Like, that was immediately established, that level of intimacy. And just the, um, just, just the relaxed demeanor that you had. And the way that the show unfolded felt like very spontaneous, like it just occurred to you in the moment. You were just channeling whatever inspiration came to you in that instance. And then I thought, yeah, but she's on tour.

• 31:43Rich Roll?

  Like, there's, like, I'm sure the show varies a little bit from evening to evening, but essentially she's doing the same thing over and over and over again. And having to, you know, try to keep it fresh, but also there's some rehearsed aspect to it, of course.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when I was putting this show together, I, um,

• 32:04Speaker 01

  first of all, I was incredibly inspired seeing Hannah Gadsby's show, which I saw in London and, um, I don't know if you've seen it.

• 32:12Rich Roll?

  No.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Having, you should, you should see it. She, um, she, she brought a level of authenticity to that performance that I'd just never quite seen before. And, you know, her show is purportedly a stand-up show. And she sort of goes meta stand-up and she explains comedy and she explains laughter and how it's a physical release and how she has used laughter. And she talks about trauma and, you know, and she's uproariously funny. And then at a certain point in the show, uh, she tells you about being raped.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  And the laughter just stops. And she allows it to stop. And then this whole room, this whole group, sort of goes through a kind of a cataclysmic experience of having to sit with the discomfort

• 33:12Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  of not being able to laugh.

• 33:16Rich Roll?

  Right, in defiance of all expectations of

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:21Rich Roll?

  what this kind of show is supposed to be like.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  And then, and then she just doesn't let up.

• 33:26Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And watching her, you know, I thought a lot about her watching the show. I sort of knew her from Australia and from Twitter and I'd asked her if she wanted to get together after the show and she says, I, she, she wrote back to me and she said, I just, I just don't, after this show, I need to be not with people.

• 33:48Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  And, you know, when I first got that message, I was like, ah, pretentious. And then I saw the show and was like, I get it. I, I get how you wouldn't want to code switch and then five minutes later being, you know, chatting in the green room about this, that and the other thing. And I've actually had to deal with my own version of that experience after this show. I find it really hard after doing this show to just be bubbly and sociable. And I still do it every night, but it takes

• 34:18Rich Roll?

  I can't, yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  immense amount of energy.

• 34:20Rich Roll?

  I, I mean, in addition to it being four hours, just the emotional toll of having to share, you know, so openly and honestly and vulnerably about, you know, the abortions and all these things that have happened to you, like night after night after night has gotta be.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Well, there's also a way in which it's really therapeutic. And it actually is like, I leave a little bit lighter every single night. And one of the other things I was going to mention about the scriptedness is that watching Hannah's show was a reminder. Having built my own TED Talk actually sort of set me off on this path. But we, we have this crazy idea, as indie rockers especially, that scripted is bad. That it really needs to feel that like every night, you know, even if you've got the same setlist, your banter between songs needs to just be totally off the cuff and fresh and new. And if you're telling a story, you're just sort of making it up as you go along so that everybody feels comfortable because this is not theater, you know, this is a

• 35:19Speaker 01

  rock show. And I, I had to jump that hurdle for this show and remember that doing this show more or less scripted, and it's not really scripted. I mean, there are beats in the show and I improvise a lot of the stories, but that that's allowed and that that's actually a kindness to the audience because otherwise the show would be seven hours.

• 35:41Rich Roll?

  Well, also, you have these people's attention for a certain period of time and you have an intention and something that you want to convey. How do you do that most effectively and concisely? Like, you have to know where you want to take them and the best way to get there.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Well, and I really learned that with my TED Talk because when I was first putting my TED Talk together, I had this naive belief that I would just loosely script it, but then I would be my charming spontaneous self and that I had to be my charming spontaneous self in order to be real. And I learned very quickly that that was the least generous performance I could give, that actually the best performance I could give was to absolutely script that motherfucker down to the second and to every word and every adjective so that I could deliver the most bang for the buck with the 12 minutes that I had with these people.

• 36:38Rich Roll?

  How long did it take you to put that together?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  A long time.

• 36:41Rich Roll?

  Did it?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it was, it was effectively, it was a 12-minute monologue that I had to memorize. And I had to have it memorized inside, out, up, down, backwards and forwards. So I worked on that TED Talk for two solid months.

• 36:57Rich Roll?

  Well, 12 minutes is infinitely harder than an hour and a half.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's just no, no room for, for anything, right?

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even after all of that rehearsal, it's still veered towards 13 minutes.

• 37:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But you, you talk about creating in these, I see you as this, this person who kind of creates and bursts and flurries. Like, you're like, ah, I had a thing and I just banged this song out, or I had two hours and it was the best song I ever wrote. Like, what is that process like for you? Like, the writing process and the creative inspiration aspect of like, how you, you know, make the things? Do you have like a discipline where you're like, I show up for the page every day, sometimes I don't have it? Or you're just, you get struck by lightning and you have this gift or this facility and it just pours out of you?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  It's changed over time, actually. So I used to just wander around getting struck by lightning constantly, like, you know, 10 times a day. And occasionally I would grab that lightning and run it over to the piano and start a song. But I was very, very bad at finishing songs. And I always carried around a lot of guilt that I was great at starting songs, but bad at finishing them. And finishing a song is no fun. Starting a song's really fun.

• 38:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  You know, it's sort of like a relationship. It's like that first few days of like really hot sex. And then like, oh, then you have to actually work on the relationship. And that's just no fun.

• 38:30Rich Roll?

  You want a key?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  You have problems? And I finally, about three years ago, realized that if I was going to get songs finished, that I should really just follow the formula that seemed to be presenting itself to me anyway. Which I was, which is, you know, seeing that the best songs I had ever written were all written in one sitting. And I, and I wasn't very good at going back to a song unless it was about 70 or 80% done. I just started sectioning off time. And...

• 39:11Speaker 01

  You know, knowing that lightning is pretty much available to me, I mean, I can turn on inspiration like a faucet, you know, give me an instrument and I can write a song.

• 39:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  That's not a problem. It's really just a question of can I finish it?

• 39:24Rich Roll?

  So writer's block is not a thing?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never had writer's block.

• 39:27Rich Roll?

  Never had that.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I think writer's block can be confused for other things. You can always write something. It might just be bad.

• 39:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  You can always write something.

• 39:38Rich Roll?

  I think it's a fear, it's a fear thing. It's a fear of thinking, you know, you're not good enough, or being judged.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Perfectionism is definitely the enemy of creation.

• 39:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And so lately, you know, what I have found is really helpful is I just have these blocks of time. I also have a kid now, so I really have to commit to, you know, a block of time because my time is just not my own anymore. It belongs to my family. And I sit down and instead of vaguely pondering, is this idea really the one that I want to follow? I guess I could, like, I just have stopped being wishy-washy and I go with the first thought and I follow it and I, you know, I really shove perfectionism out the door

• 40:34Speaker 01

  and I just, I just try to finish the thing.

• 40:37Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  And I think there's also a luxury that comes with being an artist who has made a lot of shit. Because once you've made a lot of shit, you're not so precious about each and every little offering because there's thousands of them out there.

• 40:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  When you've only offered the world five or 10 songs, you know, any given song is going to be a huge percentage of your catalog. So you're way more precious about it. But once you've proven yourself time and time again and you've written hundreds of great songs, like, whether or not this next song is the best thing you've ever written isn't very important.

• 41:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  You want it to be. You still hope it will be.

• 41:13Rich Roll?

  If you were, if you were gonna do a second TED Talk, though, right? Like, because that was such a sensation, right? That, it's like that, that one-hit wonder thing, like, can I repeat that? Can I catch lightning in a bottle again? Would be probably a different...

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Well, I would never do that TED Talk again. But, oh my god, yeah, give me, give me another, I mean, I've got ten TED Talks I could do. I'd love to do a TED Talk about patronage.

• 41:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  And the relationship over time through history and into the future about

• 41:44Speaker 01

  our lack of imagination around helping each other. I'd love to give a TED Talk about miscarriage. I'd love to give a TED Talk about childbirth. I'd love to give a TED Talk about the stupid rules around breastfeeding. Like, I could just go on and on and on. I just don't really wanna do that right now.

• 41:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  So I'm not.

• 42:00Rich Roll?

  Well, can we talk about patronage, though?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  We can talk about anything.

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Like I said at the outset, like, your relationship with your audience is, is like, something I've never seen before. And it really, and I've heard you speak about this, like, your, how you think about the, um, how you think about patronage and the relationship is unique, but it's also more ancient, right? Like, what's, what's not functional is the relationship of industry to artist now and how we think about what that exchange looks like. And yours is one of depth over breadth, right? Where the industry kind of is driven by breadth in terms of like, how big is your audience? How many can you sell and all of that?

• 42:47Rich Roll?

  Rather than the intimacy and the connection that you can create with the people that are super into what you're doing.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Sure, because capitalism. I mean, we're all, it's just like what's going on with the rest of the country and the problems that we're running into everywhere. Which is, it's not about, it's not always about growth. It's not always about being the biggest and the best. And, you know, we're, we've really been fed at the

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Painfully unhealthy diet of unsustainable ways of being. And that, all of that applies to the art world.

• 43:30Rich Roll?

  Elaborate.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I grew up watching MTV. That was my education and what it meant to be a performer and a musician. You know, I was like raised on, at the altar of Prince and Madonna and Michael Jackson and, you know, these massive mega-stars were, you know, my guiding light, like, that's where you're supposed to head. Be massive. That's, that's what success looks like. I didn't have many models, even in my immediate little community, of musicians, uh, just making a living. You know, musicians just helping out their tribe members with,

• 44:13Speaker 01

  you know, small, helpful, connective reflections of what life in this town was like, of what, you know, what we are going through now. And, you know, wind the clock back a little bit, and that's how human beings have been using art and music for thousands of years. This scale thing that we have just been experiencing in this teeny sliver of, of human time is bananas.

• 44:41Rich Roll?

  Well, we, we forget, and this is what you reminded me of, is that we forget that art and music really had nothing to do with commerce.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  No, and, and, and we're never supposed to.

• 44:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Art and music for thousands and thousands and thousands of years of human history were just useful tools of the tribe.

• 45:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  We needed it for ritual, for grieving, for transition, for celebration. None of that was about selling shit.

• 45:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  It was about doing and, and being and connecting.

• 45:13Rich Roll?

  And so how do you think we lost that initially?

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I mean, you get capitalism and money in the mix and things start to get very weird very fast.

• 45:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but we're in this interesting time now where, you know, in the MTV era, you're, look, you're either, you either have a video on MTV or you're on the radio or nobody could possibly have any sense of what you were doing.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:39Rich Roll?

  That's all changed. Everything has been disintermediated. The middle man and the gatekeepers are now gone. Everybody can be a creator and distribute their wares worldwide. And, you know, the, the, the possibility that you can be this massive band, that, you know, that, that isn't even really a reality, except for a few acts these days anyway.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Well, that was always true. I mean, and what I have found fascinating is how little things have changed. Because I think it's foolhardy to say that the, that the, that the gatekeepers are gone. They've just shifted faces. And, you know, we still have our mega pop stars. They're just, you know, the gates have just sort of changed materials. And, you know, in this era, we still have massive stadium pop stars and giant machines and we, you know, we just, we've just sort of shifted the way those people climb up the ladders and they climb to the top of the mountain. But they still climb to the top of the mountain. You've still got your...

• 46:45Rich Roll?

  Right, but I think that the infrastructure is still fractured. You know, like you said in your book, like, we are the media. Like, that's a radical concept. That's also very true. And we're still in the very early stages of that. But it's undeniable, you know, with you leading the charge and we're seeing more and more people kind of blaze this, the path similar to yours, that this is the future. Like, finding your tribe and honoring that is the path.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, I mean, I, I adopted the internet really early on as a community tool, but none of us saw any of this stuff coming. You know, none of us back in the, you know, 2000, 2005 era could have forecasted that in 2019, we would be talking about deep fakes and talking about, you know, and looking at a generation of kids who... It's very possible we'll never trust an image.

• 47:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Or even a moving image, because who knows if that image is really real? And their cultural literacy, their media literacy is going to be so different from yours and mine. You know, we grew up in an era where like, if you saw someone saying it on a TV, it was obviously happening.

• 47:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  That's not true anymore.

• 48:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So playing that out, like, what does that look like?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Very strange. I mean, I don't know. And if I had the answer, oh, my God, like, that would be my TED Talk. I don't have the answer. Um, but I do think, you know, it's all, for me, with music and art, it's always going to circle back to why we needed it in the first place. The platforms will change, who we trust will change, the middlemen will change, the gatekeepers, the filters will change. But why we do it and why we need to feel it, that will not change.

• 48:34Rich Roll?

  No, nor will the expression, the impulse to say something and the appetite for story and art and people who are, who are grappling with trying to find meaning in this crazy thing that we're doing called life, right?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's not going away.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 48:55Rich Roll?

  Out of curiosity, it was interesting that you did your book with a traditional publisher, because I would have thought, like, of all people, like, why didn't you self-publish your book?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  I really thought about that, um, because I got a lot of attention and a lot of offers and people knocking on my door after the TED Talk.

• 49:15Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  And I knew that I already had a big audience and that I had tended the, you know, that garden very meticulously and I had a great relationship with my crowd. And that if I wrote a book, they would absolutely be on board to buy it directly from me. And I knew that I could do that if I wanted. But I had also sort of raced that course once, uh, with, with music publishing and, and, um, basically starting my own record label.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  And I know that it is not uncomplicated to learn how to do an entire industry out of your own office, out of your own bedroom. And I knew that book publishing was probably just as complicated, if not more complicated, than record, record releasing. So I knew that there was, and I just knew that there was a glass ceiling there. So was I capable of like finding an editor, writing a book, making a cover, binding it, mailing it out to 25,000 people? I was probably capable of doing that. Did I want to learn how to do all of those things and do them really well? And then also probably, you know, not necessarily be able to find a good distributor for that

• 50:38Speaker 01

  book, to get it in bookstores all over the world and get it translated and then have people know that that book was out. And I was like, no, I'll let someone else do that.

• 50:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I think also it boils down to your intention too. Like if you wrote the book just to serve your audience, that's one thing. But, but when you go with the publisher, you have the opportunity to broaden that aperture a little bit and, and reach people that might not know who you are.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it, and it worked. I mean, I, I stand by that decision and it is really rewarding to see someone in Russia or China, you know, picking up my book, translate it into another language, connecting with the ideas, coming back to me and telling me on Twitter that something that I said shifted something for them or changed their life. And I don't think that would have happened if I had published the book myself.

• 51:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Can we talk about asking?

• 51:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:34Rich Roll?

  No. We're not going to talk about that.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:38Rich Roll?

  I asked.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  I know. That's, that's why it was funny.

• 51:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You know, there's this, this idea that like you're the, you're the DIY queen, like do it yourself queen, but it's not about doing it yourself. This is about like doing it. It's, it's the exact opposite of that.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  I tried to explain this in the book, that DIY is such a misnomer.

• 51:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  You know, what it really means, DIY, especially, you know, as, as applied to the world that I came out of, like the punk world and stuff. DIY was, you know, we will do it. We're not going to use the system. Do it without the system would have probably been a better acronym, but not as sexy.

• 52:26Rich Roll?

  Tell the story about Thoreau and donuts.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 52:30Rich Roll?

  Because I think that captures it.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  That's a great story.

• 52:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  So I actually heard that story. Someone else gave a talk at the XO conference and I saw that talk. And I actually wrote to him to ask if I could steal the anecdote.

• 52:42Rich Roll?

  It was very upsetting to me.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  So Henry Thoreau, and you know, especially Walden, he's seen as this American hero of do it yourself, go off grid, connect with nature, self reliance. Right? You know, and everyone knows who's read Walden or knows this sort of piece of American history. He went and built his own little shack on the side of Walden Pond. And just like, everyone knows the quotes, right?

• 53:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. I wanted to suck the marrow out of life." And everyone is just like, punk rock. You know, he just did it himself, picked his own food, you know? Like, well, actually, it's bullshit. He was so helped. He did have his little cabin by the woods and he was sort of off grid, but also he was a total preloader. And he was constantly going over to Emerson's house where they had great dinners. And he was just constantly welcomed in and hosted. And the donuts story is the best. His mom and his sister, every Sunday would bring him a basket of donuts.

• 53:59Rich Roll?

  It's so crushing to hear that.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Fucking donuts, hell. Spoiled child.

• 54:04Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  But also, you know, I take it one level further in the book. So there's a few things about Walden that are really beautiful. One is, he actually lived at Walden for three years, but he condensed the story. For, you know, the story of Walden is one year.

• 54:23Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  He condensed it down. He took huge artistic liberties with his memoir to deliver, you know, again, like something economically palatable that we could flow with and understand. He was an artist. He took the experience and he made art. And he left out the story about the fucking donuts. It just wouldn't have squared with the Walden brand.

• 54:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  But when you look at it, the, the book worked. Walden worked. People got on board with the idea. They felt him. They got it. It's not that Walden is inauthentic.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  But we can also look back and ask, well, like, what, what fuel fed his ability to send that message into the world, into the canon of American literature? And the donuts are part of that.

• 55:19Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  The generosity of, of Emerson and his mother and his sister and all the townspeople who just thought he was a kook but helped him out, like, they fed that vision.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Is Walden authentic? You know, maybe by some measure it's not. Maybe there's like a little bit of early American charlatan in there. Or maybe it's just art. And art is never, getting back to this conversation from earlier, it's never totally pure. It doesn't work that way.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  An artist usually has a vision and then, you know, does whatever he or she has to do to, to, to create this offering. And it's always messy. Always.

• 56:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a distinction between truth and fact, right? Like, the artist's job is to extract the truth out of, you know, a, a, a certain perspective. And that doesn't mean fidelity to a factual timeline. It's about trying to discern from an experience what is universal. So to take that three years and condense it to one, to speak to something that he was passionate about, I don't think diminishes the work that he did. But it is interesting, you know, because, you know, part of, part of that legacy Is, you know, Americana, like rugged individualism.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Right, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and do it yourself.

• 56:53Rich Roll?

  And, and it, it, you know, it's a lie, basically, because everybody has relied on everybody else to make their way in the world.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Well, and look at Trump. I mean, look at Trump's story about himself as compared to what we now know is the truth of, or whatever, the truth as we could possibly know it. Self-made billionaire, self-made billionaire. It's all just bullshit. But God, his own belief in his story and his ability to just unapologetically stick to his story is what I think people find so incredibly attractive.

• 57:36Rich Roll?

  Well, and, and larger than that, it's, it's, it's this sensibility that we have that that's what's to be celebrated. Like, we celebrate that, that rugged individualism. And the person that doesn't have to raise their hand and ask for help and did it by themselves is this fabrication that, you know, we've decided is laudable and what we should aspire to.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  And it's insane.

• 58:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, from, you know, you point out like, well, you look at Steve Jobs, like, his parents had to give him the garage, right?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Totally, the garage was the donut.

• 58:09Rich Roll?

  There's nobody who didn't, you know, who didn't advance without the help of whoever.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Well, and to think that we're supposed to do this life without help, without being interconnected, is insanity.

• 58:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I grew up, like a lot of people, you know, intuiting that. My, I mean, my dad, I vividly remember, you know, going on family vacations in the station wagon and my dad getting lost and refusing to ask for directions and just getting into fights with my mom because he just would not go to the gas station and ask the guy where to go. And, you know, that's the, you know, emotional landscape that I inherited. And, you know, as you point out in your book, like, this is, this is, you know, right in the, in the wheelhouse of Brene Brown, like, this idea that... You know, to ask for help is to show vulnerability, which in men, you know, is very shame provoking.

• 59:10Rich Roll?

  Makes us feel like failures and in women, it makes them feel like they're not enough to raise their hands.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, whereas if you, if you just do a quarter turn, you could look at every potential for asking for help as an opportunity to connect, which is what we actually like.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  You know, this is the, this is, I write about this in The Art of Asking.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  When you start asking, um, and you take the charge and the shame out of it,

• 59:45Speaker 01

  life becomes really bountiful because people generally like being asked. You know, I mean, the gas station attendant who only gets asked, maybe not so much. But people really like feeling useful. People like sharing knowledge. People like sharing, period.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it's the other side of the myth that, you know, the, why would you ask for help? Why would you ask for someone to share their thing? Why would you want to do that? Well, that's actually how we function best. You know, is as a community, as a tribe, as an interconnected tribe. You do that, I'll do this. You know, we'll, we'll figure this out together. None of us clearly, you know, look at us from the early days of our mammalhood. We're not rugged individuals. We were not physically built to walk through this life alone. No way, no how. This is not the way we're constructed. We're built as tribal beings who are supposed to be interconnected and interdependent. That's literally how we're built. And so fighting that is just a form of self annihilation.

• 1:00:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and yet that sensibility is what has driven, I think, this epidemic of loneliness and isolation and everybody, you know, living in their ticky tack houses, separate from each other and non communicative and. And ultimately depressed and medicated.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Depressed lowly and on opiates. Hooray.

• 1:01:14Rich Roll?

  But this all begins with you, like, like for you, you know, when I think of your story, like, it all starts with you making eye contact with one individual in Harvard Square. It's like that intimate connection really created the foundation for everything that you do now. Can you talk about that a little bit?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  So I was a street performer for a lot of my early twenties, and I was a living statue, and I had a lot of great intimate moments with many, many, many, many strangers. But in the cause and effect of my life, I'm not sure that that was the cause of where I headed after that so much as, you know, that was something that I-

• 1:01:56Rich Roll?

  But like, the, sorry, I don't want to project on you at all, but like, that idea of like, like, you talk about, you know, making eye contact with people and like, and seeing them, like, and the value of like, being seen, right? And that seems to be a theme that resonates throughout how you interact with your audience today.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Rich Roll?

  Like, your willingness to see them.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think you could probably find an answer to my, you know, why I had a hunger for being seen, as I think we all really do. But, you know, it might have been amplified in me because I was the youngest of four kids. And I also, I, for a lot of reasons, felt very unseen as a kid. And also had a talent for performing and for music and loved the stage. And I really grappled with a lot of pain and agony as a teenager and into my early twenties about my desire to be seen, because I had been really punished.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  By a lot of different adults for wanting to be seen. Like, I got smacked around for wanting to be seen and told that I was, um, that I was being distracting, that I was just trying to get attention, that it wasn't all about me. And so I constantly second guessed and was suspicious of my own desire to be seen or my desire for any attention because, um, I was afraid of it and I was afraid that it was wrong and bad. And so it wasn't until I really started performing and connecting with people on a, on a like profound level that I got to sort of smooth those rough edges away and

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  actually see my desire to be seen as a positive force instead of as this like terrible negative need.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And when did you kind of begin to really form this sensibility around asking? You know, when, when you, when you give your TED Talk, it's so eloquently, you know, kind of considered. But was there like a moment where you realized like this is, the path for me is laid out in my willingness to, you know, rely upon these people as patrons of, you know, what I do?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I think a lot of it I just picked up from, um, the music communities and the art communities that I wanted to emulate. And the music and art communities that I wanted to emulate were the, were the interconnected ones. The ones where I saw people helping each other. Where it was about the music and about the connection, about the togetherness and about the progress and the evolution and the, you know, the folk scene.

• 1:04:53Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  That was all based on like brothers and sisters. Let's hold hands and do this together. Let's try to share our truths. Let's try to affect change. The punk scene was the same way. The punk scene was about like, forget about those people, like we'll do this. We have truths to tell. We will do shows in basements. We will, you know, we'll carry around our own gear. We will help each other do this and we don't need the system. And

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Those were the scenes that I gravitated towards and the people and the systems that I wanted to emulate. And those systems were based on asking. They were based on asking, like, do you have an amp I can borrow? Can we use your basement? Will you come to my show? Will you go, will you get on your bike with me and go around town with duct tape and flyers and put signs up? Like, let's do this. Let's us do this.

• 1:05:47Rich Roll?

  Right, and the answer always being yes.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's fun.

• 1:05:50Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, one of the things you talk about is, is, you know, this initial desire to be a rock star and then realizing like, well, rock stars are the antithesis of what I want to be because they're isolated.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Those rock stars.

• 1:06:05Rich Roll?

  They're disconnected.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Well, and now we can actually, you know, we didn't have a control back then, but we can now look at some of my heroes from the, you know, days of MTV as alter. And, you know, Michael Jackson, my hero, and Prince, my hero, and Madonna, whatever, the jury's out on Madonna, who knows if she's happy. But I think we can say with some degree of certainty that those guys were not very happy.

• 1:06:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  That being up on Rockstar Mountain, disconnected and unable to just be among and with the tribe, did not make those guys happy.

• 1:06:49Rich Roll?

  And because happiness is a direct function of your connectivity to the tribe.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:06:55Rich Roll?

  Right? And that's like, you're, I mean, you're immersed. It's like your life is crowd surfing with these people that holds you up.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, and then the question there becomes like, well, is that, is that scalable? And that's sort of-

• 1:07:14Rich Roll?

  Scalable for yourself or other people, you mean?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Oh, for anyone.

• 1:07:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Why, why wouldn't it be? Why, why, I mean, there's got to be legion of, you know, young Amanda Palmers out there at the early, in the early stages of creating what you've created.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Sure. And then the question is, you know,

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Can you hold that level of intimacy and that level of connectivity to the tribe? And the normalcy that is required of you and the tribe in order for you to just stand there? When you're playing to an arena of 30,000 people?

• 1:07:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Do you worry about that?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  No, because I don't think I'm ever going to be playing to an arena of 30,000 people.

• 1:07:58Rich Roll?

  But if you were to, I mean, has that thought crossed your mind? Like, I don't want to be that big because I don't want to lose that connection?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  I like to think optimistically that if I lived in a universe in which this kind of music attracted a crowd of 30,000 people, we'd be living in a universe where I would be okay.

• 1:08:20Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, you can't fake it either. Like, that, you know, that love that you have for your tribe is visceral, right? It's not something you can be fake. And I, and, you know, look, you know, even these words, vulnerability and community and connectivity, like, they've been co-opted. These have been commercialized. Like, there is a

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Gain more connectivity with your fans.

• 1:08:45Rich Roll?

  Well, it's like, on social media, there's a, there's a, there's a performative vulnerability. Like, people who are like, you know, sort of oversharing, but really kind of just to build their audience or get clicks. Like, it doesn't feel real. Like, there's a certain lack of, lack of authenticity in this seemingly, quote unquote, "authentic" post, right? I mean, do you notice that? Do you see that?

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:09:11Rich Roll?

  So there's a difference between the real thing and kind of this rise of, you know?

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, the, you'll, you'll get back what you put out.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  You know, you can't really get away with faking it. And for good reason, you know, because you just can't.

• 1:09:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  And it won't feed you back if you put out empty calories. You're not going to, you're not going to be nurtured in return.

• 1:09:42Rich Roll?

  Yoga and meditation.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  I'm a fan.

• 1:09:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What is the relationship between those things and kind of your creative sensibility? Like, how does it fuel that?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I, um...

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  I started my yoga and meditation practice in earnest in my early twenties. And I don't, I don't think you can disentangle any of my career and my path from my practice. I just, I don't have another one of me who didn't do that, so I'll never know.

• 1:10:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  But I, you know, I credit my mindfulness practice to, you know, any of the insights that I've had about any of this stuff probably wouldn't have happened.

• 1:10:32Rich Roll?

  And what does that practice look like?

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Depends on, depends on the time.

• 1:10:37Rich Roll?

  Typically.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Well, I just had a child, so one of the first things that went out the window was my morning meditation.

• 1:10:44Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Because child.

• 1:10:46Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  But I still, I sit when I can. I try to go to yoga when I can. And I, you know, I also am, I'm a firm believer that you practice off the mat. That, you know, that you just try to live mindfully. And that it's possible at any time. It's possible during a podcast. It's possible while brushing your teeth. It's possible, it's possible while driving a car. And actually, the danger is in separating and thinking that your practice is, you know, when you're sitting in lotus position, being all, you know, meditatee.

• 1:11:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Can you take it into the world?

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's the only point of the practice, isn't it?

• 1:11:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  But I was lucky, you know, in my, in my early twenties, my mentor, Anthony, he gifted and ushered me into meditation retreats. And those were galvanizing experiences, doing silent meditation retreats in my twenties for, you know, six, seven days at a time.

• 1:11:56Rich Roll?

  Like the Vipassana retreats?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:11:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that also, you know, that plus a regular yoga practice in my twenties, you know, I just had the proof right there that when I practiced. I was more able to deal with life. And when I didn't, I wasn't. And I knew, you know, I could either go left or I could go right. And I chose to go towards practice.

• 1:12:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So we're in an interesting moment right now with reproductive rights and everything that's going on in Georgia.

• 1:12:31Rich Roll?

  And I'm interested in how you see the future of the female empowerment movement? And how you see your role in that? And, you know, what the next generation of this looks like?

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  I wish.

• 1:12:46Rich Roll?

  How's that for like a really broad day?

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  I wish I had an answer.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  I have, I have hopes.

• 1:12:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it may get worse before it gets better.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  But I'm starting to see people rising up, standing up, speaking out, organizing.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Like I have not seen before, and it's going to be necessary.

• 1:13:14Rich Roll?

  It's kind of amazing.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, it's like so many other things happening right now. I mean, there's going to have to be a revolutionary pushback against the climate disaster. There's going to have to be a revolutionary pushback against, you know, the human rights violations, whether it's reproductive or, you know, what is happening with immigration. Like, there is going to have to be a pendulum swing as hard and as, you know, and as powerful as, as the one that's taken us into the dark. And the, you know, the world is moving really fast right now.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Everything just feels like it is going at a sort of a critical, urgent speed. And I, I hope, I can sense, I might be wrong, but in the art and music world, especially when it comes to reproductive rights and women, that you are going to start to see. Stories coming out at an alarming rate. Because it is the sharpest weapon we have right now. And we can take political action of this kind or that. But actually, the most important thing women can do right now is just to get up and shamelessly tell their stories, tell the truth.

• 1:14:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what your show is all about, right? Like, in you doing this and showing, "Look, I'm gonna share this." Like, it gives everybody else permission to do the same. And it's visceral and it's powerful to hear that coming from you. And, you know, as a white man, to really understand, like, the universality of this kind of story that you told last night. And how many people are impacted by it and from it. And sharing it in that kind of very first-person, experiential kind of way. Like, this is what it's like. When you have to, like, go on Google and find where the place is. And then you got to, again, like, are you supposed to call anyone? Like, what are you supposed to do?

• 1:15:23Rich Roll?

  Like, to really, like, walk in those shoes to feel what that must feel like.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to remind people that information is power. You know, and the history books don't lie. I mean, we can look at it across time. When fascism is on the rise, anywhere in the world, the first thing to go is reproductive rights. It's just hand in hand. That's the way it works.

• 1:15:59Rich Roll?

  And never has there been, you know, that's when the role and the importance of the artist kind of gets pushed to center stage.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  It's our job to just get up and go like, "Oh, God, we don't really wanna have to do this. We'd so much rather be doing other things, but, like, fuck this. This is not good for us."

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  Fuck this.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Fuck this.

• 1:16:20Rich Roll?

  All right, I think that's a good place to stop. Gotta get you to the airport. Thank you. Thank you for everything you do. Keep making all the things.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Can't help it.

• 1:16:32Rich Roll?

  All right, cool. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Peace.

• 1:16:39Rich Roll?

  What a beautiful, powerful font of creativity that Amanda is. So much respect. Hope you guys enjoyed that. I really did. Please check out the show notes on the episode page at ritual.com to extend your experience of the conversation beyond the earbuds. Let Amanda know how you felt about this conversation. You can share your thoughts directly with her on Twitter and Instagram, @amandapalmer. And that's it. If you're struggling with your diet, if you're really desiring of mastering your plate, but feel like you just don't have very many skills in the kitchen, or you don't have a lot of time to devote to this, or perhaps you feel like your budget won't allow for it, please check out our Plant Power Meal Planner.

• 1:17:21Rich Roll?

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• 1:18:03Rich Roll?

  and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you're enjoying the program and you want to support what we do here on the podcast, just tell your friends about your favorite episode, or the podcast in general. Share the show on social media. Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or a comment on YouTube. And you can support the show on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. I appreciate my amazing team that works hard behind the scenes to put on the show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing and editing the podcast. Jessica Miranda for graphics.

• 1:18:44Rich Roll?

  Ally Rogers for portraits. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music by Analemma. Love you guys. Appreciate you so much. Thank you for listening. And I will see you back here very soon with an incredible conversation with Anika Harris, all about her new book, Conscious. Super great. You guys are gonna love it. Until then. Peace. Plats. Namaste.