MALE SPEAKER: I'm not going to spend a lot of time
introducing Amanda Palmer.
She didn't ask me to do so, so I'm not going to do it.
And so she's going to play her self.
So everyone please welcome to Google,
the Authors At program-- "Authors" At,
but you could sing, too.
You're musical.
Please join me in welcoming Amanda Palmer to Google.
[APPLAUSE]
AMANDA PALMER: Hi.
I'm not sure what to do.
You guys are all at work.
If you're not, what are you doing here?
Why are you at Google?
She's your date?
Are most of you in the middle of your work day?
Except for you.
OK, I know, I know, I know, I know.
Shh.
What can I do for you?
What would you like?
Because I have-- read?
Read and sing?
Do a little bit of both?
OK.
I want to alleviate you of whatever needs alleviation.
I don't actually play the ukulele,
a fact of which I am proud.
And if you want, I can give you--
I've been giving little flash ukulele lessons to people.
I'm actually-- now that I can maybe quit my day job,
which-- whatever.
If you knew me, it would be funny.
I'm thinking of just whoring myself out
to different corporations as a ukulele healer.
It's just like going from Google to Twitter to Microsoft
and bringing giant truckloads of ukuleles
and teaching everyone on staff the basic three chords that you
need to know to play all rock songs ever at lunch hour.
(SINGING) In my mind, in a future five years from now,
I'm 120 pounds, and I never get hungover
because I will be the picture of discipline,
never minding what state I'm in, and I will be someone
I admire and it's funny how I imagined
that I would be that person now but it does not
seem to have happened.
Maybe I've just forgotten how to see
that I'm not exactly the person that I thought I'd be.
And in mind, in the faraway here and now, I've
become in control, somehow, and I never
lose my wallet because I will be the picture of discipline,
never fucking up anything, and I'll be a good defensive driver
and it's funny how I imagined that I would
be that person now, but it does not
seem to have happened maybe I've just
forgotten how to see that I'm not exactly the person
that I want to be.
And in my mind, when I'm old, I am beautiful,
planting tulips and vegetables, which I will mindfully
watch over.
Not like me now, I'm so busy with everything,
that I don't look at anything, but I'm
sure I'll look when I am older, and it's funny
how I imagined that I would be that person now, that's now
what I want-- that's I wanted that I'd be giving up somehow
how strange to see that I don't want
to be the person that I want to be.
And in my mind, I imagined so many things,
things that aren't really happening,
and when they put me in the ground,
I'll start pounding the lid, saying, I haven't finished yet,
I still have a tattoo to get, that
says I'm living in the moment, and its funny how I imagined
that I would win this, win this right,
but maybe it really isn't funny that I've
been fighting all my life.
But maybe I have to think it's funny
if I want to live before I die, and maybe it's
funny as [INAUDIBLE] to think I'll die before I actually
see that I am exactly the person that I want to be.
Fuck, yes.
I am exactly the person that I want to be.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
So what's better for you guys-- if I read here
or at the reading thing?
This is good?
OK, then I'm not moving.
I just landed here from Portland.
I did a reading and a show in Portland last night
that was really wonderful.
And I'm doing one tonight and tomorrow in this area.
And I've been doing nothing for a week and change but just
this book and signing it and talking about it.
And I've had all these fantastic interview guests every night
of tour and all of these incredible discussions
about the internet-- mostly the topic with all these people
who are my friends and other artists--
the topic keeps just snaking back to internet trolling.
Especially the guests I have on stage has any kind of following
or is even just a small local artist,
it seems to be the bane of everyone's existence.
And what do we do about it?
And how do we deal with a culture that
seems to be addicted to outrage.
And can you guys fix that?
[LAUGHTER]
I'm asking for real.
Like is that a-- maybe that's not actually a good idea.
Don't fix-- OK.
If you have ideas, though, talk to me.
Because it's a pain in my ass and my friends' asses.
What?
AUDIENCE: Try not controlling people's speech here.
AMANDA PALMER: What does that mean?
AUDIENCE: If people want to say stuff,
by and large you're not going to-- the internet's free
and all that.
AMANDA PALMER: Yeah.
I know, I wasn't suggesting that Google should just
become this giant fascist censor that-- that would be bad.
It would be fun to create a nice filter,
like if you decide one day you could just
surf the "nice" internet.
That might be hard to do.
AUDIENCE: Well, we could do a lot more sort
of justice-type stuff, like try to encourage people
to do hash it out in a nice way.
AMANDA PALMER: I do that.
I do that a lot.
AUDIENCE: Somewhere else.
AMANDA PALMER: It can be really hard
trying to direct angry traffic, and that can sometimes
be a really losing battle.
But I kind of do-- I write about it a lot in the book.
This is a section of the book that
takes place towards the end and I'm just going to read it.
"I loved being the center of attention when I was a kid,
and I still do.
And sometimes it makes wonderful things happen,
like when I convinced the neighborhood girls
to enact an a capella production of 'Fiddler on the Roof'
on my back porch.
I played Tevye, obviously.
And sometimes it made terrible things happen,
like when I wore a bra to school Madonna-style
on the outside of my dress and got sent to the principal's
office, and the principal delivered a lecture that I
would absolutely kill to have a recording of just
to be able to use the line, "You think you're so special,
Amanda, but you're not actually special" in my techno remix
of 'Creep' by Radiohead.
As I moved through my life as a street-performing statue
and later as a musician, I started
to understand something-- there's
a difference between wanting to be looked at
and wanting to be seen.
When you're looked at, your eyes can stay blissfully closed.
You suck energy.
You steal the spotlight.
But when you're seen, your eyes must be open
as you are seeing and recognizing your witness.
You accept energy, but you generate energy.
You create light.
One is exhibitionism.
The other is connection.
Not everybody wants to be looked at,
but everybody wants to be seen.
Following the success of my TED Talk, Microsoft called."
I don't know why I was expecting a reaction,
but-- just, like, crickets.
No, it's cool, it's cool, it's cool.
"Microsoft called.
They were offering to fly me to Seattle
to speak to a group of women who worked there.
Apparently, a whopping 16% of the employees at Microsoft
were female.
I asked the speaker coordinator what I would be speaking about.
'Whatever you want,' she said, and I started to panic.
I had no idea what to talk about.
Crowd sourcing?
Music?
Surely I could wax poetic for a half an hour about something,
but these women were actually smart
and the fraud police were paying me a call."
A fraud police is my own personal version of what
y'all might call "imposer syndrome."
"So for two months, I avoided coming up
with an idea worth Microsofting.
And the night before the talk, I was
pacing frantically around Jason Webley's Seattle houseboat
where I was staying, still having written
nothing, when it occurred to me-- my mother.
She'd been retired for a decade, but she
worked as a freelancer for almost 40 years
applying her math whiz brain to the emerging
field of computer programming.
And growing up, I'd had no idea of what she actually
did all day after she threw her heels in a bag
and drove her car into the rush hour traffic.
And whenever she started trying to explain to me what
her job entailed, the words blurred into a wall of noise.
I hadn't called my mother in a while,
but now I had something to ask her.
And I needed her.
She talked for two hours straight
while I furiously scribbled notes
about what it was like for her to be one of the only
female computer programmers at various companies
around Boston in the '60s and '70s.
I poured myself a glass of wine.
On the other end of the phone, on the opposite side
of the country, so did my mom.
And for the first time, in earnest,
it was like we were drinking together.
I listened to her stories about the sexism and the judgment
and the weird harassment.
She told me the story about the guy she programmed
with who got fired for looking at too much porn on his office
computer.
'In 1970?' 'No, no, no, no, no, no, honey, this was way later,
when we were working on Y2K.
There was internet porn by then.'
I couldn't believe my mother had just said the words
'internet porn,' and I asked for more stories.
'Well, you had to work harder than the men just to keep
the job,' she said matter of factly.
'And, you know, you had to be perfect.' The way she said it
hit a nerve.
'What kind of perfect?' 'Well, if a guy messed up a project,
there was always another job waiting for him.
But a woman?
Forget it.
You'd never get a job in that town again,
and Boston was a small town.
There were only a few of us and the men all stuck together.'
And she told me the story of the accountant, Jerry,
who paid all the male freelancers on time but kept
withholding her paycheck, claiming off-handedly that
because she 'had a husband,' she probably didn't need the money
as badly as the men did.
She ask nicely for months, persistently,
and a check she was owed still didn't arrive.
So one day, she called him up 'At 6:02,' she said.
'when I knew the switchboard operator had gone home
for the day, and I would get him directly.' And she said,
'Hi, Jerry.
It's Cathy.
Just wondering when we're going to be
able to process that check.
It's eight weeks late.' And when Jerry made some grumblings
about how they would send it out as soon as possible,
my mother said, 'What are you having for dinner tonight,
Jerry?'"
I love my mom so much.
"And Jerry said, 'Excuse me?' And my mother said,
'I need that money to buy groceries to feed my family
and if you don't cut my check, I'm coming to your house
for dinner tonight.
And I don't like salmon and I don't like peas.'
The check was on her desk the next day.
I'd never known any of this stuff.
But then again, I'd never asked.
And as we were wrapping up our two-hour conversation and well
into our second or possibly third glasses of wine,
she said, 'You know, Amanda, one thing always bothered me--
something you said when you were a teenager.' Whatever this was
going to be, it was not good.
I was a terrible teenager-- an explosion
of hormones and nihilism.
'What, Mom?' She can do this imitation of me as a teenager
that makes me want to crawl under a table,
and she did it now.
'You said, "Mom, I'm a real artist and you're not."' Oh,
god.
And then she added more kindly, 'You know, Amanda,
you were just being a typical teenager.' I winced and I felt
my neck tighten and my teeth grit down into Mother fight
or flight mode.
And she continued, 'But you know, Amanda, you would say,
"I'm an artist.
Fuck you, Mom.
What do you know?
You're just a computer programmer."'
I had to admit, I could totally imagine
myself saying that as a teenager.
Maybe not the 'fuck you, Mom' part, but still.
And then my mother said something
that absolutely demolished my defensiveness.
And I don't think it all the years
I've known her that I've ever heard
her sound more vulnerable.
'You know, Amanda, it always bothered me
because you can't see my art, but I'm
one of the best artists I know.
And it's just that no one can see the beautiful things I made
because you couldn't hang them in a gallery.'
And then there was a pause and I took a deep breath.
'God, Mom, I'm sorry.' And she laughed and her voice turned
cheerful again.
'Oh, don't worry, sweetie.
You were 13.' As I related the story the next morning
to a small theater filled with 200 women of Microsoft,
I added a confession, which was that in all my years of rock
'n' roll, touring around and supporting people
and advocating for women and giving all these strangers
and fans permission to embrace their inner fucking artists
and to express themselves fully and look at their own work
and lives as beautiful, unique, creative acts--
I'd somehow excluded my own mother.
And maybe, by extension, a whole lot of other people.
And I looked out at the women of Microsoft
seeing present-day versions of my 1970s programmer mom.
Maybe they all felt thoroughly misunderstood
by their own bitchy teenage wannabe-poet daughters.
Who knew?
So I thought about all the things
she told me over the phone, I said to the room,
and I thought about her work that I couldn't possibly
comprehend-- about the actual creative work she had done.
All of that delicate, handmade programming she
did into the dead of night to switch one platform
to another on some critical company deadline, how
outside the box she said that she would think and venture
to fix a problem, and how insanely proud
she felt when it worked, and the true beauty of those things.
And the sadness, too, because nobody
ever clapped for her at the end of the night.
And as I looked out into the audience,
I saw that three or four of the women of Microsoft
were sniffling and dabbing their eyes,
and my own throat tightened up.
And she couldn't hang her work on a wall.
I can.
I do my art in public and people applaud all the time.
And my mom never really got that.
And she's retired now.
After the talk, I hugged a handful
of the women of Microsoft, got back in my rental car,
turned the radio up to 11, and peeled out of the office park.
Take that, Fraud Police."
[APPLAUSE]
Do you guys want one more?
Or do you want to ask questions?
It's really up to you.
I'm here for you guys.
You want another one?
OK.
This is a shorter one, but I think you'll like it.
"While I was working on the first draft of this book, which
I did over a few thousand coffees
in various cafes in Melbourne over about seven weeks,
I shared a coffee with Samantha Buckingham, an Australian indie
guitarist.
And during the coffee, I picked her brain
about her process and her relationship
with her own fan base.
Sam is typical of a lot of indie musicians eking out a living.
She's not on a label, she crowdfunds
and she releases music directly to the internet,
and she plays house parties in her fans' living rooms.
We were comparing notes about the pros and cons
of patrion.com, which is a new subscription service Sam was
using which allows fans to automatically deposit money
into a musician's account every single time the musician
releases a piece of content, kind of like
a book-of-the-month club for weirdos.
And the artist can then rely on a somewhat predictable income
instead of praying that their Kickstarter will get funded
every single time they have something to release or make.
And at the time of this writing, she's got 44 patrons,
including 19 $1 backers and one backer at $50,
and is paid about $200 every time she releases a song.
Patrons can choose how much they pay per song
and they can cap their monthly bill,
so she doesn't all of a sudden dump 1,000 songs on them
and run off to Mexico.
Although running off to Mexico when
your Australian seems weird."
Because-- far.
So I'm thinking she would more run off
to Papa New Guinea or something like that.
"Sam was, in fact, about to travel
to Asia with her boyfriend and she
was fretting about what her backers would think
if she continued releasing her songs on a schedule on the page
fan website while she was on vacation.
She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping
a Mai Tai while simultaneously releasing content for money
was going to make her look like an asshole.
'What does it matter where you or whether you're drinking
a coffee, a Mai Tai, or a bottle of water,' I asked,
'aren't they paying for your songs so you can also live?
And doesn't living include wandering and collecting
emotions and possibly drinking a Mai Tai so that you got stuff
to write about-- not just sitting in a blank white room
and writing songs without ever leaving the house?'
I told Sam about another songwriter friend
of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct support
website through which he fans pay her monthly at levels
from $5 to $1,000.
She also has a running online wish list
of musical gear and costumes, like a wedding registry
to which are fans can contribute any time.
Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn't
mind charging her backers during what
she calls her 'staring at the wall'
time, which she thinks is essential to have before she
could write a new batch of songs.
And her fans don't complain.
They trust her.
These are new forms of patronage and it's messy.
The artists and the patrons are making up the rules
as they go along.
But whether these artists are using
crowdfunding or subscriptions or pay-per-piece of content pledge
services, it doesn't matter.
The fundamental building blocks of these relationships
boil down to the same thing-- trust.
If you're going to ask your fans to support you--
you as the artist-- it doesn't really
matter what your choices are as long as you're
delivering your side of the bargain.
And you might be spending their money on guitar picks
or on Mai Tais or baby formula or college loans or coffee,
as long as the art is coming out the other side
and making the people who have paid for it happy.
The money that you need to live and 'need to live'
is hard to define.
It's almost indistinguishable from the money
you need to make art.
Like me, Sam, and thousands of new-school artists,
Kim is in daily communication with her fan base,
and her ongoing arrangement with her 200 supporters functions
because she shares her songwriting process
and her bad days and her heartaches and her travels.
And so they trust her decisions.
And what she posts a photo of herself
in a vintage dress she just bought,
nobody scolds her for spending money
on something other than effects petals.
It's not like her fans' money is an allowance
with nosy and critical strings attached.
It's a gift in the form of money in exchange
for her gift in the form of music.
The relative values are messy, but if we accept the messiness,
we're fine.
If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil
in order to play guitar tracks on his new crowdfunded album,
I technically shouldn't care if the money that I've fronted him
isn't going towards two turntables or a microphone.
Just as long as the art gets made, I get the album,
and Beck doesn't die.
But that doesn't mean observers are
going to stop criticizing artists in their processes
any time soon.
No less than Henry David Thoreau has been called a poser.
Thoreau wrote in painstaking detail
about how he chose to remove himself from society to live
by his own means in a little 10 by 15 foot hand-hewn
cabin on the side of a pond.
But what he left out of 'Walden,' however,
is the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his
wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph had him over for dinner
all the time, and that every Sunday,
Thoreau's mother and sister brought him a basket
of freshly-baked goods, including donuts.
The idea of Thoreau gazing thoughtfully over the expansive
transcendental Walden Pond, a bluebird alighting on his
threadbare shoe, all the while eating donuts that his mom
brought him just doesn't jive with most people's picture
of him as a self-reliant, noble, marrow-sucking,
back-to-the-woods folk hipster.
In the book 'An Underground Education,' Richard Zacks
declares, 'Let it be known that Nature Boy went home
on weekends to raid the family cookie jar.'
Thoreau also lived at Walden for a total of two or three years,
but he condensed the book down to a single year--
to the four seasons-- to make the book flow better,
to work as a piece of art, and to best reflect
his emotional experience-- a poetic license that I also
took with this book.
And I told this story to Sam over our coffees.
'Poor Thoreau,' said Sam.
'The donuts are totally the Mai Tai.' Taking the doughnuts is
hard for a lot of people.
And it's not the act of taking that's so difficult-- it's more
the fear of what other people are going to think when they
see us slaving away at our manuscript
about the pure transcendence of nature
while munching on somebody else's doughnut.
Maybe it comes back to that same old issue
we just can't see what we do is important enough
to merit to help, the love.
Try picture getting angry at Einstein
devouring a doughnut brought to him by his assistant
while he sat slaving on the theory of relativity.
Try picture getting angry at Florence Nightingale
for snacking on a donut while taking a break from tirelessly
helping the sick.
These are difficult things to do.
So a plea to the artists and the creators, the scientists,
nonprofit runners, librarians, strange thinkers, start-uppers,
programmers, inventors, to all the people everywhere
afraid to accept the help in whatever form it's appearing--
please take the doughnuts.
To the guy in my opening band too
ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money in his hat,
even though people wanted to give it-- take the doughnuts.
And to the girl who spent her '20s
as a street performer and a stripper living
on $700 a month who went on to marry
a best-selling author whom she loves unquestioningly--
but even that massive love can't break her unwillingness
to accept his help-- please, everybody,
please just take the fucking donuts."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
How much time have we got?
MALE SPEAKER: 20 minutes.
AMANDA PALMER: Great.
Let's just talk for 20 minutes.
And if any of you guys want to grab a book and get it signed,
I'll take a couple minutes at the end to do that.
I'm happy to do that.
Yes, if you have a question, use the mic.
Hi.
AUDIENCE: Hey, Amanda.
I'm curious how this has been for you to go from a street
performer to an ever-growing circle of influence,
and how that's changed the way you
interact with the world and the responsibility that
maybe comes with that.
AMANDA PALMER: The responsibility
that comes with what?
AUDIENCE: With having influence and people following
what you do, what you say.
AMANDA PALMER: Well those are kind
of two different questions, I think,
but I guess they're related.
I think to distill it down, one of the things
that happened gradually as I street-performed for five, six
years is I just became really comfortable.
And I tell musicians this a lot--
it really breaks you in a certain way, in a good way,
I think, to be a street performer.
Because there's just no stage and there's
nobody taking care of you.
And you just can't have any sense of entitlement
because you're in the fucking street
and there's billions of people passing by.
And if you spend an ounce of energy
getting angry at the thousands of people who aren't stopping,
you can't do your job and attract the one person who
does want to stop and give you a dollar.
So really, you're shaped into this different kind of vessel
that just doesn't happen.
Even starting off in a band-- it's
a way safer space being in a bar on a stage,
even if people are talking and not paying attention to you.
It's not like the street, where it's you
versus all of humanity.
And I think it's really good for a musician's ego
and general stage presence which is--
this is so much easier than the street.
At some point during the day, you chose to be here.
And so I've already won.
I don't have to sit here and win you over and convince
you to sit down.
And I think that kind of comfortableness
just came with me.
I took that kind of comfortableness onto my blog
and onto the internet and then out on the road
with The Dresden Dolls.
And I was so thrilled to just have any human entities coming
to me by choice.
That was thrilling.
And it's why it's always been pretty easy for me
not to focus on the people who don't like my music
or don't like me or don't like the way I do things.
I'm like, that's fine.
You guys are in it the typical 99%
of the population passing by.
And the people who criticize and troll me just
remind me of the people who would take time out
of their day to be like, you suck!
And you're just like, OK.
There's a little circle of people around me watching what
I'm doing and enjoying it, and I know
that my job is to just pay attention to them.
And I think this can be intellectually something
that artists know, but emotionally it
can be really hard to get to that place--
that you just are dealing in a relationship
with those who want to be there who appreciating your work, who
appreciate you, and not spending your time shaking
your fists at the rest of humanity.
Because that can be so tempting.
And I think the street really prepared me for that.
And as far as the responsibility goes,
I actually write about that in the book.
I talk about how unwieldy that was in the beginning
and how I fucked up plenty in the early days.
And actually when I was in New York about a week ago,
my guest was Brandon Stanton.
Do you guys know him?
He runs a blog called "Humans of New York"
that's just wonderful.
And we shared our stories of clumsily wielding
the hammer of justice when we first had blog power
and thinking that we could use our blogs
and our new found platform of fans
to go out and sort of be like justice-seeking superheroes
any time we saw-- and how stupid that was.
Because it doesn't really work.
And so I have an anecdote-- he told a great anecdote
about in the early days of "Humans of New York."
he asked this woman if he could take a picture of her
and she was really excited to do it.
But her boyfriend sidled in and was like, no, no, no no,
don't do this thing with this guy.
And she was like, but I want to do it.
I said yes.
I want to do it.
Leave me alone.
Let me do it.
And the guy wouldn't allow her to do it
and photo-bombed the picture with his arm
around her making a really stupid face.
And Brandon was so irritated by this entire exchange
that he just told the entire story of everything that
had happened and then posted the picture of them.
And it got millions and millions of hits and the guy
became a villain.
Like, he was now the most hated man in New York.
And he now had his own sub-sites of hatred directed against him.
And I had my own moments like that on my blog.
I tell a story in the book-- my first real taste
of mishandling crowd power.
I was very, very small.
I had just started my blog, but I
knew I had a few hundred really dedicated readers.
And we had just gotten our first label check-- our advance--
and we were on top of the world and feeling legitimate
all a sudden because we'd finally gotten signed.
And Brian went off and bought a really fancy drum kit
for the first time in his life.
And I had a budget to go get a piano.
And I was thrilled.
It was the first time in my life I had money.
And I was like, I have money, I have power.
I'm going to go buy a piano and I'm real.
And I shopped all over Boston.
And then one day I went to a store in Brookline
and it was a little mom and pop piano shop and I went in.
And I had been sort of comparison shopping
all over town, and I sat down at this piano
and I started playing some really loud Dresden Dolls
songs.
And there was two other people in the shop.
And this guy came up to me-- the meek piano shop owner came up
to me-- and said, ma'am, I'm going
to have to ask you to leave.
I'm sorry.
And I was like, but-- (CRYING).
I'm real.
(STAMMERING) I-- I-- and I went home and I blogged about
it and I gave the guy's address.
And it was like, if you want to stand up for what's right,
write them a letter about who I really am.
And I was 25 or something and I was so hurt.
And it's such a perfect example of-- I
was just this wounded, weeping mass of pus.
And I had a choice in that moment-- I could deal with it,
or I could lash out to the only possible object
that I could aim at, and it was this guy.
And the next day, I checked-- and this was back
when I just emailed directly back and forth with all
my fans-- like five people had written me proud
emails being like, I wrote him a three-page letter about how
amazing you are and how wonderful your music is
and what a dick he is.
And I was like, oh my god, I'm actually--
I'm now going to ruin this guy's life.
I have to put a stop to this.
So I took the address of the blog
and wrote like a cease and desist to my fans
and was like, that was a really weak moment,
please don't bother the guy.
He doesn't deserve your vitriol any more than I deserved his.
And I had a few of those early days.
And I still-- I feel like I see so much
negativity and nastiness on social media
and on blogs and in online journalism.
It's so shitty.
And it just cycles and gets worse and worse by the day.
I almost feel like I can't go on the internet
without losing my mind nowadays.
And I think people don't realize even just
by making a snarky, off-handed comment,
they're contributing to the cesspool of the internet.
And so I feel like if I have a responsibility at all,
it's just to remind people you have a choice.
You can live a life of outrage constantly look around
the internet looking at who you can be pissed off at,
or you can not.
And you can just back away and have those angry conversations
in bars with your angry friends.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you for being here.
So you've talked about connecting
with people and your experiences with the diverse people you've
met.
And I feel very sheltered in the tech world and generally having
been to a top university and then coming to Google.
And I'm wondering if you have any tips or thoughts on how
to reach out to different people or connect with more people
than just those who are just like me and already around me.
AMANDA PALMER: Wait, do you really
feel like the people of Google are just like you?
AUDIENCE: In certain ways, yes.
They come from different backgrounds,
but they're here because they reason
about things in similar ways as me and they think
in similar ways to me.
And I think we try really hard to get diversity,
but we get diversity that all contributes to tech.
And so it's diverse in the domain it needs to be,
but I think it's still narrowing.
AMANDA PALMER: Well the obvious answer-- and it may
seem like a stupid answer, but how much time
do you spend outside of work?
Period.
Because it may just be that the change of environment
is more about what you need.
I mean, I feel the same thing in my life sometimes.
Especially on tour where I met like a bubble of Amanda Palmer
fans, which is not a very-- they're
diverse in their own way, but when they interact with me,
they're not fucking diverse.
When they interact with me, all they want to talk about
is Amanda Palmer.
And that can get really irritating.
Not that I don't want to give them what
they want, but they don't generally come up to me
and just chat about other totally unrelated, interesting
things.
And so I go out of my way to stay connected
with those outside of my bubble.
Also just so I don't start living my life
with celebrity blinders on.
And I feel like that has happened to me,
and I have to constantly self-police
so that I don't just turn into a machine of my own ego.
And I look around at my life and who feeds me
and what friends I have from other areas who
don't give a shit about the capital
Amanda Palmer, who just know me as a person.
And I reach out to them and I email them and I text them
and I try to stay in touch with people outside of my bubble,
just to make sure.
I remind myself on a daily basis that I am actually not
very special.
I'm special to these people in this building who
bought a ticket to see me, but that's
a very small sliver of the population.
And even though my ego is wonderfully fed by it
and I think it's fantastic, it's not
a representation of the world at large.
And so whoever your friends were pre-Google
or whoever is around you in your environment outside work,
making actual friends with those people
is probably a step in the right direction.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AMANDA PALMER: You're welcome.
And if you got the book-- it just hit the best seller list
yesterday, which is against--
[CHEERING]
Thank you.
And that was against all odds, I wasn't expecting it necessarily
to because it wasn't sold on Amazon,
because the book's on fucking Hachette.
And so if you are following the Amazon-Hachette wars,
I was one of the prime victims of that war
and my fans went crazy helping me promote the book.
And it was one of the best-sold books in indie bookstores
last week.
Because my fans just grassrooted the shit out of it.
So it's still not easily available on Amazon,
but it's getting there.
But you guys can really do me a solid and if you like it,
spread it around or pass the copy on.
And it's also an audio book, it's
an e-book, it's all the various book, book, books that exist.
And if he doesn't make it here and you
happen to run into Michael Gaiman, my stepson who
works here, give him a hug for me.
You'll embarrass him.
It'll be great.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for speaking with us today.
AMANDA PALMER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AMANDA PALMER: It's been a pleasure.
Thank you guys.
[APPLAUSE]