The Emerging Women Podcast

Today my guest is Amanda Palmer.

Amanda Palmer is a rock star, former street performer, and a crowdfunding pioneer, who knows all about asking. Performing as a living statue in a wedding dress, she wordlessly asked thousands of passersby for their dollars.

After creating the world’s most successful music Kickstarter campaign for her album with the Grand Theft Orchestra, she has written a book titled: The Art of Asking: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help. In her new memoir she tells the story of an artist struggling with the new rules of exchange in the twenty-first century and inspires readers to rethink their own ideas about asking, giving, art and love.

There are so many cool things about this woman – not least of which is her post-modern retro punk cabaret band called the Dresden Dolls. She is also married to Neil Gaiman, my favorite comic book illustrator and writer of all things. But perhaps what I love the most about Amanda Palmer is the fact that her nickname is Amanda Fucking Palmer – somehow it just feels right!

In today’s episode, Amanda and I spoke about:

• The Art of Asking and how she learned this art
• A constant theme in her life: balancing vulnerability with control
• Dealing with the fear of rejection – and how to ask anyway
• Relationship based communication and the need to still ask for help
• The Art of Receiving as an integral part of the ask

Here is my conversation “The Art (and Power) of Asking” with the wildly inspirational: Amanda Fucking Palmer.

Transcript

Hi, welcome Amanda. How are you?

Amanda Palmer: I’m wonderful, how are you?

CP: I’m a little bit outside myself, because I feel like I’ve been stalking you a little bit. [Laughs]

AP: [Laughs]

CP: So I’m so excited. For the listeners who are tuning in here, this is my first time really talking to Amanda. I think we spoke for a half a minute prior to this, and I’ve been “reading” your book—I’m saying that in quotes here because I love to listen to books on audio—

AP: Oh, great!

CP: Yes, and I want to say that I’m promoting the audio version of The Art of Asking, because there’s so much in there that’s not in the book. I feel like I’ve really gotten to know you through it, and your voice. So I feel an intimacy.

AP: Yes, it’s really nice, as a musician, to put out an audio book, because that’s my medium. That’s what I’m used to, and it’s really nice to add the music and the songs to weave within the story. They really belong there.

CP: I love that you sang your intro. It was fabulous.

AP: [Laughs]

CP: [Laughs] It was so great!

AP: Thank you. I’m glad you like it.

CP: I just thought it was so unique, and you—just by way of full disclosure, I’m just going to get this out here now so we can get the stalking vibration out. I am also a huge fan—when I was in college, it was Love and Rockets and The Sandman. I mean, that was my deal. So [I’m a] huge fan of your husband, Neil Gaiman, and his work. And when I saw you coming forward on the fabulous TED talk, and I realized who you were, I was like, “Oh my God.” Can you be in love with a couple?

AP: Totally! If your polyamorous.

CP: Right? So I was in love with Neil, and now I’m in love with you, and the two of you together just makes so much groovy sense, it’s off the charts. I feel especially honored today.

AP: Thank you. It makes me really happy when people love Neil’s work, because I love him. And the really lucky thing was I wasn’t a Neil Gaiman fan, and I think that might have been a deal breaker. So I got to fall in love with the weird guy, not The Sandman author. [Laughs] I had to catch up.

CP: Right. Oh, great. What I thought we would start with today is maybe a little background on how you came into this work. I know a lot of this stems from your experience as a traveling musician and a performing artist, but the work I’m referring to is this art of asking, and how that emerged inside of you and what the journey was and where it [plays] out in different parts of your life.

AP: Oh my—that’s like an hour-long [story]!

CP: You’re going to talk and I’m going to interrupt! That’s usually how these podcasts go. [Laughs]

AP: Well, the first thing it makes me think of is the fundamental training I got, without totally realizing it as it was happening, when I was a street performer. And I grew up in kind of a basic, suburban situation. Not a lot of artists around me. But [I was] very, very into music and theater and record collecting and everything I could get my hands on. Politically liberal, but a somewhat conservative family in that there was one path: you went to college and went to a liberal arts college. That’s what all my older brothers and sisters did, and that’s what you did in my family.

I kind of went kicking and screaming because I just had no desire to go to college, but I went. And I didn’t have the best of times. I suffered through it. But as soon as I got out the other side and was finally free to make my own decisions in life, I went straight to the street and became a street performer. And no one guided me. I didn’t have a street performer mentor. I didn’t even really know any street performers. I just saw people doing it and thought, “Who’s going to stop me from doing that if I get up and do it?”

So from the time I graduated college, I made money in a ton of strange ways. My primary income for four or five years was in Harvard Square as a living statue standing on a box. I talk about that in my TED talk and I talk about that at length in the book. I definitely started out with a particular bent, but standing on a box and standing still until strangers give you money and then having a moment of connection with them year after year after year really did pound in the philosophy that I kind of tentatively started with to begin with, which is the idea that human beings, if given the opportunity, are fundamentally generous, do want to connect with each other, do like helping artists. It’s maybe naïve, but definitely an optimistic outlook. If I wanted to be an artist, I would find the people who wanted to help because I knew they existed.

And that’s the attitude that I brought to music when I started a band, which was my real passion, because I was a songwriter and I knew I wanted to fundamentally follow that path. And I sort of just took my street performing attitude into rock ‘n’ roll. It didn’t feel strange to me and didn’t seem odd to constantly invite my fans on the stage and ask them for help and constantly connect with everybody, answer every fan letter, stand in the midst of my fans and not separate myself.

As I traveled through the world more and more, I realized the way the Dresden Dolls—which was my band—I want to say it was unique, but it wasn’t even unique. It was just a different lineage. Even though we were working in the world of rock ‘n’ roll, we were sort of like a folk band with rock music. We were about the community and we were about staying with our fans and we were about trying to help everybody. And we had a lot more in common with the folk scene and the punk scene than we did with the rock scene and the rock circuit that we were mostly touring on.

CP: And so, just to clarify, [when you were] the human statue, you were a mime bride, which I think is lovely. Is that correct, you were dressed in a bride’s outfit?

AP: Yes, I was all white, covered in a giant white gown with white gloves and a black wig. Unless I was at a crazy festival where I just couldn’t keep up with the demand, I handed out daisies. I handed out white daisies. A work shift was just as long as the flowers lasted, then I was done.

CP: There’s something—and this, I know, plays out also when you’re playing music, but there’s something about that that’s both intimate and isolating, and I’m wondering if you could express that a little bit. You’re frozen—and you say this in your book—where it’s almost like protection, or you can retreat, even though you’re out there in the middle of Harvard Square, and you’re totally exposed, and sometimes it’s raining, and sometimes people are not so nice. But at the same time, you refer to it as almost a protection, that you can hide behind your stillness. And I thought that was so interesting and I’d love to hear more about what that’s like for you.

AP: You know what’s fascinating about that is that there’s such a parallel between what you just said, that aspect of being a living statue, and what it’s like to be on stage singing these really vulnerable songs and pouring your heart out and bearing yourself. But simultaneously, you’re kind of in control. You’re the one in the spotlight, you’re the one behind the piano, you’re the one deciding how far you want to push things and how much you want to reveal yourself and how much you want to pull back. Which you decide moment to moment, depending on the venue and the audience and how much you are able to give in that moment, how much you trust that particular audience.

It’s almost the same thing. And [it’s] one of the things—just one of the themes of my life that I’ve been so fascinated by, because it shows up everywhere: in my marriage, in my job history, on stage. It’s a real tightrope between control and total vulnerability, and balancing between these two extremes all the time. I mean, look who I picked for a husband. [Laughs] I picked the gigantic guy with huge fame and busyness and stuff, but who was also really vulnerable. Neil is a perfect example of the extremes in himself, and that’s part of why we really recognized each other.

And in all of the jobs I’ve done—you know, I was a dominatrix, for Christ’s sake. That’s a job—and I actually just finished reading a fantastic book by Melissa Febos, who details her four years of working in a dungeon in New York City, and it’s the same thing. There’s this façade of ultimate control, but also you’re the employee, you’re the one getting paid. There is this kind of crazy dance between who actually is in power here. And I felt that as a statue, and I felt it as a stripper, and I felt it as a dominatrix, and I still feel it on stage. I feel it with my husband. It’s that amazing yin/yang of dancing between control and no control.

CP: In that art of asking, is there a certain ratio of control to vulnerability that actually yields better results? Not that one is always asking with a specific result in mind, but sometimes—and I think you’re a master of this, you ask in ways when you don’t even verbally ask for things. We’re going to get to that. But what is it, if you ask with more vulnerability you’ll get what you want? Or is it if you have more control over the messaging when you ask? What is that inner play between control and vulnerability in the art of asking?

AP: The crazy thing about that is that it’s so specific to the situation. And people who are good at asking know that wherever you are, in whatever position or situation, you’re standing and facing somebody else, whether you are the asker or the askee, part of being good at asking is knowing that the ecosystem of the balance of power is different in every moment, with every situation. There are moments when being vulnerable just approaches the idiotic and the masochistic, and then there’s moments when showing your vulnerability actually pulls you up to a place of real empowerment.

Because there are times where being truly vulnerable—not just faking it and not just saying the words and not just offering up the token because you think you’re going to get what you want. Those moments, and knowing how to shift those gears—that is just the work of life, and that is the work of every single human being I know who’s decided to be in relationship with other people, which is, uh, everybody. [Laughs] One of the things that I found so lovely about this book is when it came down to it, I realized that the stuff that I was talking about was so fundamental to everybody I knew in a relationship: when do you face your pride, swallow your pride, and just ask for what you need? And what’s getting in the way if you find yourself unable to do that?

And, on the flip side, what’s too much to ask for? When do you turn into that needy asshole instead of someone who is really stepping up to the plate and making yourself vulnerable and asking for something reasonable? And we all torture ourselves with these questions all day. Am I asking for too much from my husband? Am I taking too much? Am I being too selfish? Am I being too greedy? All those things.

CP: Well, how do you know?

AP: Oh my—search me! [Laughs] I don’t know! I think if I knew, I’d explode in a beam of light and never be seen again. [Laughs] I don’t think you know. I think it’s like the meaning of life, you search for it, but you know you’re never going to find it.

CP: I wonder though, after reading your book, I feel like the default is to ask and then deal with the repercussions after, rather than not ask.

AP: Yes, I think that’s a pretty safe default, when in doubt. If you’re in actual, serious doubt, then chances are, for the vast majority of people I know, yes, the default should be, “You’re probably afraid, and if you’re really on the fence, eat it and ask.” Because that’s usually the correct door.

But, again, that really depends. In certain situations—I face this with younger musicians all the time, who see the flip side of that, because they sometimes ask before they’re ready. They ask before they have enough to give. They ask before they’re ready to do the work. They ask the universe to pay for their tour bus, but they don’t have a fan base yet. And it’s in cases like that where I’m like, “Eh, you know, you’re not ready yet.” You can’t ask before you have an audience. You can’t go out on a first date with someone and be like, “So, do you want to have kids? Do you want to get married?” That’s actually not the best bet. It’s context.

CP: How do you deal with rejection?

AP: Badly, usually. [Laughs]

CP: [Laughs] Thank you!

AP: You’re welcome! Oh man, it’s definitely gotten easier, and I don’t just say that to be corny. I’ve dealt with my fair share of it in the industry, within the music business, and certainly Internet lives and personally. I’ve been rejected as a person with ideas, as a woman who won’t  cop to the beauty standard, as a million things. And one of the things I’ve found about life is that if you trudge on, it just gets easier. It gets easier to be rejected because you just stop taking it so personally.

Neil said something funny, didn’t he, once, when he was talking about reading reviews of his first book, or his first big book, when he put American Gods out. And the reviews started to come in, especially the user reviews, the customer reviews on Amazon. And they were either really glowing or really, really shitty. He was just stacking up all these one-star and five-star reviews, and there was nothing in the middle. Which feels very much like my life. My life seems to be a sea of one-star and five-star reviews. And he said he got to a certain point where he stopped reading any of the reviews and just started counting them. And he figured if he was getting a lot reviews, whether they were one-star reviews or five-star reviews, the book was probably doing well.

And that’s a great metaphor for dealing with rejection and criticism, especially when you start realizing that life isn’t personal, and that most people who are out there aggressively rejecting me are dealing with their own fears and their own issues. It all starts to feel a lot easier. Especially when you’ve built up your own community of smart and interesting people who actually do understand me and know where I’m coming from and are happy to have a dialog about ideas instead of an outright rejection of who I am. There’s plenty enough to feed me while all that noise goes on in the background, and it gets a lot easier to ignore.

CP: Let’s talk more about that. That is also another theme throughout the book, and just the way you market, is this really what I consider a new approach to the economy, really, is relationship-based communication, where you’re not just sending out communication in a one- way vehicle. You have a lot of—you’re working with Reverb. It seems like it’s a conversation. And I’m curious how that has helped shape your work on asking through building this wide net that you’ve cast in relationship and dialog. How does that art of asking play out in that arena?

AP: Well, it’s been everything, because if I had started the band and then moved on to my solo career, which I did in 2008—if I hadn’t gotten the response that I did, and I hadn’t had the conversation partners that I had on the Internet, whether it was by blog comments in the early days or Myspace later and then with Twitter and Facebook and all the various forms of social media, if I hadn’t had an intelligent dialog partner in my fans, I would kind of be working in a vacuum. I wouldn’t feel like I was collectively part of something.

Which I have to say is something that really fascinates me about huge pop stars who have giant social media followings. They have such big followings with such a giant percentage of vapid conversationalists, that I wonder if I’m not just really lucky to be in a sweet spot where I post a photo on Instagram or I post an article on Facebook and all of the responses that I see are intelligent responses about the content and about the ideas, about life and about love. They’re smart responses. And then you go to an Instagram post by Katy Perry or Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga or a huge pop star, and all you see is, “Oh my God, I love you! Oh my God, I love you! Oh my God, when are you going to come to Brazil? Oh my God Oh my God Oh my god!” I’m like, “Man, that must be so lonely.” Because you don’t get to talk. You don’t get to go back and forth. You get showered with unconditional love, but you don’t get to engage in a conversation.

And that’s what I love. What I love is that I’ve been engaged in an awesome, funny, intelligent conversation with my fans since 2001, since I first started my blog. And that’s made everything possible. If that conversation hadn’t been happening, my Kickstarter wouldn’t have been successful. I wouldn’t have been able to launch a Patreon yesterday and get everyone in the community saying, “Of course we’re going to help you! We’ve known you for years. We trust you, we think this is great.” And that speaks as much for the caliber of the fan base than it does for me, because you don’t get to pick your fans, they pick you, and then you just hope that they’re good, intelligent people.

CP: Yes, but there’s also, I think, something in the way that you’re delivering your art, which is, like you said, very back and forth. It’s a dialog that creates the space, not only for asking—in other words, there’s a lot that happens through the community that you’ve built where you’re manifesting, so to speak, a lot of what’s useful to you as an artist through just having relationships, instead of just having to ask all the time. I think that’s the magic: watching you lead with your dialog leading with relationship. The rest, it’s almost like, do you even really need to ask when you have that?

AP: Yes, except that you do. Because if you don’t ever ask, you never get paid.

CP: Got it, right.

AP: And at the end of the day, I still need to run a business. And I have to decide—I could just go out, put all my music up for free on YouTube and chat away on Facebook all day, but I’d never be paid for anything. And everyone would be very happy to engage. My way of getting paid a couple years ago was Kickstarter. My way of getting paid nowadays is going to be Patreon. And that’s also a choice, [to] not go get a giant label advance, [to] not get paid by the industry, but to ask my fans to just pay me directly so that I don’t have to fight with a label, so that I don’t have to go through a bigger channel and a middle man. Even though that’s got its advantages. I certainly did that with the book. And I could have chosen not to.

I could have just gone straight to my fan base and said, “Hey, who’s going to preorder a book for $30? Preorder it now, I’m going to write it for the next year, you guys will get this book in a year.” I probably would have made a killing at the outset, but I kind of wanted people outside my fan base to read the book. I didn’t want to just mail it to the choir. I wanted to work for a publisher who could bring in people outside my fan base, because I wanted this book to be for everybody. So I chose to work within the system, and I took an advance from a publisher and I worked for them, and I did it really happily. I was glad I did it that way.

CP: A lot of your messaging and your music, and also the way that you’re promoting yourself through this heavy community-oriented dialog, there’s opportunity there to address issues that are important to you and to dialog on issues that actually make a difference in the world. And recently, you had a—there’s reference to political correctness. I’m just curious to see what you think of that, and how art can reflect different mindsets and how that’s an edge for you at times, being PC, so to speak, but also having the freedom to be artistically expressive.

AP: Yes, I mean, that’s a huge topic right now for everybody in a lot of ways. I’ve always been a real champion of art being able to be as politically uncorrect and as risky and as brave and as offensive as it needs to be, as possible, because I think that’s what art is for. I think the forum and the stage for art is where we are allowed to go crazy.

That being said, I believe deeply in compassion for everybody, and I do not like seeing anybody harmed. So certainly that cannot include performance art where you slice people’s throats open. And it shouldn’t include a world in which political cartoonists are getting gunned down for expressing themselves. I think the dialog that popped up after Charlie Hebdo was definitely one worth having, but it was painful to me to see people saying, “Well, wait a second, maybe the problem here is that we should dial back on the art, because maybe this art is dangerous.” And it’s like, “No, that’s a really slippery slope, guys.”

The minute you start deciding to censor a little bit of art over here and a little bit of art over there—we’ve seen what happens with that in the past. That’s when you wind up in a dictatorship eventually, and it’s just too dangerous. I would rather live in a world where art is allowed to be offensive and then we argue about the ideas and we declare our offendedness, than a world where we just zip it and don’t create things that might cause waves. Because that’s when we all go down together, and it’s just too dangerous.

I sort of feel the same way about political correctness. I’m a huge feminist and I’m a  champion for anybody who has been victimized in any way. The one thing I see happening constantly nowadays on the Internet is women, especially, tearing each other apart when they should be helping each other. And a lot of it is over political correctness and language. It’s really disheartening to see so many people intentions—which you can kind of feel out are all fundamentally good—clashing with each other so badly that you feel like the whole ship is just sinking.

Because people are so unable to be tolerant of the slightest difference in approach, the slightest difference in language. And then you just wind up with everybody divided and you wind up with black feminists screaming at white feminists and white feminists screaming at transpeople who are using the wrong fucking language. And you’re just like, “Guys, this isn’t going to work.” There really needs to be a larger umbrella of understanding and compassion and tolerance, and I feel like it is backsliding at an alarming rate, and it really worries me.

CP: Well, that’s why I feel like the opportunity lies in the hands of the artists because this is so complicated, and the more that we try to put it into boxes and put labels on them and try and come up with rules of engagement and diction, I think we just keep pinning ourselves further and further away from the core and the intention of our desires. And that is on the women’s side to really [create] a world where we can have free expression across all colors and sectors. So to me, the mess is an opportunity for artists to really just unleash themselves in these arenas and let the conversations ensue from there, rather than the policy makers or, like, “Let’s get this feminist thing right, she didn’t mention women of color, she didn’t mention transgender.” It just feels so oppressive, and quite frankly, masculine![Laughs] I want some chaos around it!

AP: It’s like the weird uniform of oppression. Well, me and my super hippy-dippy way, my approach is always, “If we all just were able to step back and practice hardcore compassion and really, really take the worldview that everybody deserves compassion—I mean everybody, from the left to the right, every single human being, no matter what they’ve done, no matter what they’ve perpetrated.” If you can take a worldview that extreme, that everyone deserves compassion, including the people who’ve wronged you, harmed you, hurt you—that’s been my life practice, and it has changed everything. And it does change everything. You find yourself just unable to hate people, unable to judge people without feeling really terrible about it, unable to scream at anybody. Because the feedback is just so fast, that it’s not helping, you’re not being compassionate, that the greater good is not being served when you engage with anger and with fear.

And anger has its place. When it’s time for change and you really have to move, anger can be a great motivator. But it can also eat its own tail pretty quickly, and that’s what I feel like I see happening all the time, anger getting so misguided and so overused and outrage being such an instinctive reaction on the part of so many people so fast. But you’re like, “Man, we should be saving this for the big one.” Because if we’re all just using up our outrage daily on Tumblr yelling at this person, that person, and the other one for being slightly imperfect, we’re not going to have the energy we need when it comes to really putting the energy where it matters: saving the planet, taking care of each other, doing the things that are hugely important and don’t just have to do with the verbiage on an Instagram post.

CP: OK, I’m going to switch back here to this asking. So you’ve cultivated an art, and the saying goes that we end up teaching on things that we need to learn the most for ourselves, and just listening to this story with Neil and how your relationship’s playing out, I just know how hard is has been for you to ask. But here’s my question: what about receiving? How are you as a receiver?

AP: It’s also really hard!

CP: Right?

AP: I mean, it is ultimately the same practice. It really is. If you’re looking at the art of asking, you might as well call it the art of receiving, because you can’t master one without trying to master the other. Because you’re never just on one side of the fence. You’re always switching back and forth. And they are one in the same. They are the opposite sides of the same coin. The same way that you can’t claim to be practicing compassion but you won’t allow other people to have compassion for you because you’re too wrapped up in the masochistic, you feel that you’re undeserving or whatnot. You really have to let it flow both ways or it doesn’t work.

And the art of receiving—I discuss this in the book. One of the things that is so hard about asking is that somewhere under there you feel unworthy to receive, and that can be the biggest thing that trips you up. It’s not that you feel rude, it’s that you feel like, “Maybe I don’t deserve to ask for this. Maybe this is too much. Maybe this is not right.” A lot of it is—especially in this culture—[that] things are so wonky and we’re sent this bizarre-o split message, especially as women. On the one hand, if you look at all the marketing that’s aimed at women, it’s all about, “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, you’re so powerful, you can do anything you want, you’re so great.” It’s kind of all of this over-bloated, mad, independent self-confidence.

And then almost in the same breath, you’re told, “You’re completely inadequate unless you are perfect, unless you look great, unless you have money, unless, unless, unless, unless. You’re kind of unworthy.” And you wonder why everyone is freaking out nowadays and living in a permanent identity crisis. [Laughs] Because we’re constantly being sent a mixed message.

CP: Yes. That’s, to me, the power of really having strong relationships around you, to just make the world sane. As these inputs come in, we need to process them, and having that dialog with people we admire is probably the only way to get through all of that before it changes. So my next question—this will be our last—I’m curious if you have words of wisdom for women that are emerging. They’re on the edge. The emergence process, when you’re about to create something huge or you’ve got an idea and you’re on fire about it, you can’t sleep, you’re expanding—but with that comes fear. With that comes self-doubt. With that comes, “I don’t want to ask,” and feelings of isolation. What advice would you give to women who are on that precipice of that great emergence?

AP: I think the best advice there is to remind women—or anyone, really—that fear is not the enemy, and that you’re really normal. And that the real practice and the wisdom comes with just working with the fear. Because anybody who tells you they’re trying to—whether they’re an artist or a business person or whatever—change the world and they’re trying to break paradigms and they’re trying to create great art—anyone who tells you that they did is fearlessly is just lying. There’s always a fear of rejection or that you’re not going to be able to get it as perfectly as you saw it in your mind or that it’s going to piss somebody off and you’re not going to get it right. The fears are endless. They’re just limitless. But you do it anyway.

And I think one of the problems that a lot of artists have, and a lot of women have, is they think they’re not supposed to be afraid. And they think there’s somehow something wrong with them if they’re approaching the precipice and they’re heart stops beating and they freak out. Nope, that’s totally normal. That’s kind of the way it plays out. And the difference between the choice you make in that moment to just take a deep breath and sit with the fear and do it anyway, and risk failure, and risk being shamed, and risk people looking at you like you’re crazy, and risk losing money, and risk getting yelled at—whatever it is, taking the risk while you’re afraid anyway, that is the work.

And it can be really comforting to remember, from giant CEOs to huge rock stars, we’re actually always a little afraid when we step up to the podium, but we do it anyway. And you’re like, “Yep, I’m afraid. Yep, there’s that huge afraid feeling. Yep, I recognize you. Here we go anyway.” And there’s something in not feeling alone in your fear that’s really nice. I have to say, having met so many other women, huge performers and women who run giant companies and women who are off changing the world in a million way, [now I] know that they’re just as insecure and freaked out and often indecisive and constantly struggling with regret and whatever.

The more I’ve traveled and talked to these women, and the less alone I feel, the easier it is to do my work. Because I get it. Because I get that it’s not like you emerge one day out of your cocoon and you’re Super Woman. It just never happens. You just learn to walk with the fear and almost befriend it. Which is not to say it becomes easy. It never becomes easy. But it does become manageable. And for the women I know who are just like warriors out there battling, that’s the key they’ve learned. It’s not that they’ve become fearless, it’s that they befriend the fear and manage it.

CP: Damn, that’s good! Thank you! [Laughs]

AP: Thanks! I should write a book, man!

CP: Boom, baby, boom!

AP: I’m on a roll! I haven’t even had my coffee yet and I spit that out!

CP: Yo. Well, we got it here, and I’m so happy to have connected with you, and more to

come. Thank you so much, Amanda.

AP: Thank you. This was great.

CP: Take care.