Drawing from Life (and Death) (Update)

At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arizona.edu.

A rich life isn't a straight line to a destination on the horizon.

Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn with detours, new possibilities,

and even another passenger.

Two or three.

And with 100 years of navigating ups and downs, you can count on Edward Jones to help guide you through it all because life is a winding path made rich by the people you walk it with.

Let's find your rich together.

Edward Jones, member SIPC.

Of all the podcast episodes I've ever done, no guest has surprised me more than artist Winnie McNaughton, which is why her episode is without a doubt one of my all-time favorites and why we're doing an encore presentation of that episode today.

Going into the interview, I worried we'd have nothing in common, nothing to talk about.

Within minutes, I already felt a bond with her.

By the end, she felt like one of my best friends.

It was just plain weird.

Listening back to the episode now, I couldn't help but cry at various points.

My seven-year-old daughter Anna, she didn't know what to think.

I don't think she's ever seen me cry before.

I'm curious whether you, as a listener, can feel that bond developing.

I hope you can.

The advice Wendy McNaughton gives about saying goodbye to the dying might be the best advice anyone ever gave on this show.

My guest today, Wendy McNaughton, is an artist and graphic journalist.

Her work appears frequently in the New York Times and she's had a handful of best-selling books.

But the main reason I wanted to talk to her today is that she has produced a stunningly touching book called How to Say Goodbye.

I'd grab it off the shelf and be like, oh, it's going to tell me how to do this thing.

But then the first thing you learn is there's no right way to do this.

There's no one way to say goodbye.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

There is no doubt that Wendy and I are very different types of people.

Conversations between opposites can be really good or really bad.

Let's see if we can figure out how to talk to one another.

As I headed over to this interview, I tried to think about the last time I had talked with an artist, someone who earns their living with a pencil or painting or sculpture.

And this will be shocking to you, but the last conversation I remember happened 25 years ago.

Are you kidding me?

I just don't have any artists in my world.

Really?

But I bet you don't talk to a lot of iconists either, though, right?

When's the last time you talked to an iconist?

That's a really good point.

No, I don't.

We can be each other's exceptional friends.

The universe might have to rearrange itself.

Something magical is going to happen.

Oh, I'm sure something will.

I mean, I was trying to think.

I mean, why don't economists act artists?

One theory is that capitalism doesn't treat artists very kindly, and economists are usually defenders of capitalism.

And that might be one reason that we're pushed away from one another.

Maybe.

I have a lot of friends who are journalists or scientists.

There seems to be more of a natural intersection there.

I don't know.

And the fact that I've never even noticed that before

something.

It does, because you're a seer, right?

I mean, part of what you do is you see things as an artist.

You see things other people can't see in the world around us.

Yeah.

Now I'm actually a little intimidated by our conversation, realizing I've never really spoken to an economist before.

I think economists, at least me, I'm a little bit afraid of artists because number one, I tend to like things that I can quantify.

In art, it's hard to quantify.

And number two, economists are very literal.

Economists look at the world and then what we try to do is strip away everything complicated down to a handful of mathematical equations, which are obviously nothing like the real world, but maybe capture some element of it.

And I know artists strip away too, but I think everything the economists strip away is what the artists try to keep.

And everything the economists keep, the artists try to get rid of it.

That would be my hunch.

And yet we're still both using our set of tools that we've honed over the years.

And they're pretty blunt in their own ways and limited.

But yeah, you're probably trying to exclude all the things that make life interesting to me.

That's right.

In my work, sometimes I do like diagrams and I do like my version of data sets.

They are hand-drawn and completely inaccurate, but humanly true.

So I'm breaking out of my fear of artists mode to talk to you today because you have created something that's incredibly beautiful and that touched me so deeply.

It's a book of illustration in the prose, and it's called How to Say Goodbye.

How do you describe that book?

It's a really personal project, and it's interesting to begin to talk about it more openly.

is kind of a combination between a conversation starter and a poem.

It's like a visual poem, but it's also an introduction to how we can approach sitting with people at the most vulnerable time of their lives and when we're very vulnerable to when someone we love is dying.

And I'm somebody who's a big doer.

I'm a big kind of fixer, let's make everything okay in the room.

And I didn't know what to do and I didn't know how to be.

And this is the little book that I wish that I had had to at least open up a space for me to quiet down, to look at what's going on, be present, and just really pay attention and be there with the person I love.

The book is in part based on your experiences in the Zen hospice, but it sounds like the genesis of this started before that with a more personal grieving process.

Yeah, most of the drawings are made within what was at the time a guest house of Zen Hospice Project, which is a caregiving hospice group.

I had an artist in residency there for about a year and I drew everything in the house and the residents who were there who were dying, their families, and I interviewed the caregivers.

And the book is a combination of those drawings and the wisdom, the words that I heard from the caregivers.

There are also drawings of my own aunt in there.

Before the residency, my aunt passed away, and she's that person for me who was the first person I just loved very deeply and was able to be there as she was dying.

And I didn't know what to do with myself, but I'm a drawer and I don't draw from imagination.

I draw from life.

Drawing from me is a vehicle for looking closely at things, but it's also a way for me to look at things that I'm scared of.

And I didn't know what to do, but I had my sketchbook and my pencil.

And my aunt had been a kindergarten teacher and an artist.

And I'd been drawing her actually for some time.

So she was cool with it, I knew.

And I drew her each day leading up to her death.

That opened up a space of presence and also curiosity.

And the little book combines those drawings done in the guest house and of my aunt as well.

Did you reach out to the hospice or did they reach out to you?

How did that connection get made?

The darn universe.

They reached out to me literally within, I think, a day or two of my aunt passing.

I got a call from them and they asked if I was interested in this residency.

And

when the universe speaks, you'd be foolish not to listen so i know bj miller who's a palliative care doctor who's associated with zen hospice but for people who aren't familiar with it could you just explain it's a really unique take on dying

zen hospice project was an organization they had a six-bed guest house where people would go who are in hospice care and it was a really unique hospice setting that approach the residents as a human being,

as a person who was at a stage in their life, not who was at the end of their life.

It was a chapter of their life, and they considered things like aesthetics.

They had a beautiful kitchen where there was always food being made.

So the smell of food being cooked was there.

There was always fresh flowers there.

There was beautiful art on the walls.

And so it was a meaningful place for the residents to be and also for their families to be.

It's since closed and transformed into the Zen Caregiving Project.

And I believe they're still doing trainings with that perspective in mind.

It's so rare in modern medicine for there to be someone other than a loved one around.

I mean, my experience with modern medicine is it's mechanized, it's sterile, everyone's in a hurry.

How did the patients, did they understand you?

How did they react to your just being?

I mean, like anybody else, some people were really excited that there was an artist around and that we could talk about drawing and they were excited to be drawn.

And some people said, What the heck?

I have no interest in being drawn.

Get out of my room.

There was one woman in particular named Jenny, who was an artist herself, who was always making beautiful beaded paintings.

And I was so excited to engage with her and maybe collaborate on some stuff.

And she was not having it.

She's like, I'm doing my art.

And by the way, I don't really like your drawings very much.

Okay, that's fine.

There was another woman, Catherine, who herself had drawn in her life.

And I asked Catherine if I could draw her, and she agreed, and she asked if she could draw me at the same time.

She didn't have much dexterity, you know, in her hands, but it didn't really matter how my drawing or her drawing turned out.

It was that experience of sitting together and looking closely at each other and also being seen by one another.

That was a moving experience for both of us.

This book, it's kind of a meditation on being present and using drawing to be present with somebody because essentially drawing is just slowing down and looking really closely.

And when we're doing that, we're paying attention to another person in a way that

we don't.

in our lives because whether you're a doctor and you have a long list of people who you're going to see later and stuff to take care of or you're just somebody who has a meeting that you have to rush off to, we're trying to like achieve an end goal all the time.

But when we really slow down and use something like drawing, we can be present with each other in a really different way.

And at the end of life, I can't think of a more important time to do that.

It's interesting because in the world of the iPhone, photographs have become so dominant, so easy, so high quality.

And I hadn't really paused to think about the difference between a drawing and a photograph.

Partly you mentioned it takes time, but it's more than that.

I think we have this sense of a photograph is objectifying and a drawing is something different.

It sure can be.

When somebody puts a camera in my face, well, literally, you're putting a piece of machinery in between two human beings in order to document a relationship.

That's an interesting way to do it.

When I'm drawing somebody, I'm holding my sketch pad at waist high so there's an open channel between me and the person I'm drawing.

And then there's a physical document of that looking experience.

And to me, it's kind of magic.

It holds the energy of that time and of that exchange.

Do you tend to talk to people while you draw them or is there silence?

I tend to use drawing as a way to talk to people.

It's a great conversation starter.

But if I'm really concentrating, I don't really hear much.

Are you a drawer at all?

Have you ever drawn?

No, I'm physically incapable of drawing.

It's interesting because I talk a lot about math and how people declare themselves.

They're not a math person and how we need to fight that, but I'm really not a drawing person.

And I remember the moment at which that became clear to me.

And it would have been in either fifth or sixth grade.

I had an art teacher and we were drawing monsters.

And I had the arms coming out of the side of the body rather than the shoulders.

And with complete disdain, she said to me, my God, you're old enough to have the arms come out of the shoulders, aren't you?

And I remember what I said was, well, it's a monster, the arms don't have to come out of the shoulders.

But what I actually thought was, Gutchi's right.

Of course the arms should come out of the shoulders.

I hadn't thought about the body very well.

But look, I'm not very good at making a pencil or a pen go where I want it to.

Now, obviously, that's not the only prerequisite for being an artist, but I would say I 100%.

self-identify as a person who cannot draw.

And only under the duress of the demands of a five-year-old will i ever draw anything and usually it's crumpled up by my five-year-old in disgust and she goes to her mother to get a better version

okay you just said i know i tell people all the time who say they can't do math that they can't but i really can't do art and you're saying that to an artist who literally like says that to people all the time

you can you absolutely can just a couple things happened that made you think that you can't i mean 95 of the world has this, that around the age of five or six or something like that, some adult put some judgment into it and said, you're doing it wrong.

And you're so right when you said, oh, it's a monster.

But there was some adult who probably had some other adult when they were five tell them there's a right and a wrong way to do things and that drawing is all about the outcome, not the process, and that your imagination is wrong.

Like way to close off.

an entire way of thinking and being in the world, you know, five-year-old you is still waiting there anytime.

You can come out and draw that monster because drawing is like the number one way that kids can build up this flexibility and adaptability and all these kinds of things that are like a monster with arms coming out of the side of its body.

And when that's closed down early, it makes us think that we can and we cannot do things.

So I just want to offer that if we took the idea of you doing a good drawing, whatever that means, a good drawing off the table, and said drawing is actually an experience that you have with your body and just experience that and see after 10 minutes how you feel, I think you'd have a really different experience.

Okay, so I'm going to take that as my homework for tonight.

Can I give you like a formal assignment?

Great.

Yes.

One of my favorite things that I like to do, and I guarantee you it will produce a terrible drawing.

So let's just take that off the table, is set a timer for three minutes, okay?

Okay.

And choose an object or a person.

It can be either, but let's just start with, I don't know, like a lamp.

Look at your lamp.

You're going to draw that lamp for three minutes with one rule.

You're never going to look down at the paper on which you're drawing.

You're going to draw the lamp without looking down.

What happens is it takes the pressure off of the expectation that a lamp is supposed to look like this thing you're looking at, right?

And it brings you into your body and you start to notice all the details about the lamp that you don't usually see.

So, everybody's homework is to draw either a thing or a person for three minutes without looking down.

And I cannot wait to see what it looks like and how you feel afterwards.

I guarantee it'll look ridiculous, okay?

We'll be right back with more of my conversation with artist Wendy McNaughton after this short break.

People I Mostly Admire is sponsored by LinkedIn.

As a small business owner, your business is always on your mind.

So when you're hiring, you need a partner who's just as dedicated as you are.

That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs.

When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in.

They make it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage, all in one place.

And LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

You can post your job for free or choose to promote it.

Promoted jobs attract three times more qualified applicants.

At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates.

And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best.

Post your job for free at linkedin.com/slash admire.

That's linkedin.com/slash admire to post your job for free.

Terms and conditions apply.

apply.

People that Mostly Admire is sponsored by Mint Mobile.

From new shoes to new supplies, the back-to-school season comes with a lot of expenses.

Your wireless spill shouldn't be one of them.

Ditch overpriced wireless and switch to Mint Mobile, where you can get the coverage and speed you're used to, but for way less money.

For a limited time, Mint Mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless service for $15 a month.

Because this school year, your budget deserves a break.

Get this new customer offer and your three-month unlimited wireless plan for just $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash admire.

That's mintmobile.com slash admire.

Upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month.

Limited time new customer offer for first three months only.

Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan.

Taxes and fees extra, see Mint Mobile for details.

Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Why, what's happening?

The Walmart Wellness Event.

Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

All that at Walmart.

We can just walk right in.

No appointment needed.

Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Check the calendar Saturday, September 13th.

Walmart Wellness Event.

You knew.

I knew.

Check in on your health at the same place you already shop.

Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.

Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Age restrictions apply.

Free samples while supplies last.

Going back to your book, How to Say Goodbye, I have to admit the first time I opened it, I was in completely the wrong frame of mind.

I was under a little bit of deadline pressure.

I was in work mode.

Okay, let me pick up this book.

Let me extract the information from it and get on to the next thing.

And fortunately for me, there's a foreword by BJ Miller, who is a doctor who focuses on dying, who was a guest on the show.

One of my most cherished episodes and one of my favorite people on the planet.

BJ sprinkles magic and joy on everything he touches.

And the Forward Year book is a great example.

I've read it now three or four times, and every time it relaxes me, it slows me down, it makes me smile, sometimes it makes me cry.

And he says one thing in particular that sticks with me.

He says dying is difficult, but in his experience, it's harder for the people who are at the bedside observing the death than it is for the person actually dying.

I mean, you saw a lot of people dying.

Was that your take on the situation as well?

Yeah, when we're at the end of our lives, There's a lot going on inside, I'm sure, that we don't really have access to, but the body's going to do what the body's going to do.

And all of the family, friends, and us around the bedside, we're carrying a lot of expectations.

We're carrying a lot of fear.

And we're putting that on that person.

Something that BJ speaks about so beautifully was letting go of those expectations and just being present with that person in the moment that they're in.

I think that's part of our challenge, you know, at the bedside in those moments and also in our day-to-day life is just letting go of those expectations and really being present with all of the senses that we're experiencing with the person who's in front of us and just being there with them.

It's like time stops and to sit in that space is

hard for me at least.

So maybe that's why like it's a practice.

Some people are practicing for their death and also maybe some of us are practicing to be present with people.

I had the music producer Rick Rubin on the show, and he said one of the most difficult parts of the creative process is the stripping away.

And I have to say, your book is maybe the best example I've ever seen of stripping away because there really aren't very many words.

And what is left, I think, by virtue of that, is super powerful.

I mean, I've read the book now over and over.

And it's, at least for me, impossible to read the book without being deeply moved.

I'm happy to hear you say that.

To describe it physically, all the words are handwritten, and sometimes there's just four words on a page.

And the drawings, they're watercolor and pen drawings that were done from life, meaning that I was in the room with the person drawing who was in front of me.

And they're done with a lot of white space because I was trying to focus closely on that person and on that moment and arrange it in such a way for myself and for you who's looking at it so that you can really pay attention to that person.

The details of the way they're sitting in a chair and their shoulder might be falling slightly and the way their sweater is hanging down.

To me, there's a whole story in that.

It's a picture of a moment and a feeling of a person at that time.

And I tried to help the reader focus on that.

So that's why I said it's like a poem in a way.

There's a lot of intentional pacing to it.

And I'm hoping that book will slow us down so that you enter a space of presence.

You're not trying to like get to the end and get the answer.

You know what I mean?

There's no answer, folks.

And the irony of this book, I think it's kind of funny.

It's called How to Say Goodbye.

I'd grab it off the shelf and be like, oh, it's going to tell me how to do this thing.

But then the first thing you learn is there's no right way to do this.

There's no one way to say goodbye.

There's no one right way, but there is actually incredibly valuable practical advice in the book, much more so than I expected.

I expected it to be a poem.

I didn't expect to have the urge, which I've fought, to actually take notes.

So the first piece of advice is let the person lead the conversation, follow their lead.

And it's interesting because not two or three days before I first opened your book, I was having a conversation with someone who had just been with someone dying, and another person in the room repeatedly tried to include that person in the conversation.

in ways that were incredibly awkward.

Every once in a while, the person who was dying would say, Peter, that's you.

Peter, so good to see you.

And then maybe 20 minutes later, it would do the same thing.

That was the level at which this person's brain was operating.

And yet another person in the room kept on saying, Hey, what did you think of what happened in the Super Bowl or whatever it was?

And I think it was just completely misguided, a complete mistake.

I suppose that's partly what you mean by follow the lead of the person who's dying.

So I'm trained as a social worker, and there's this principle and social work of meet the client where they're at and

that can be really hard to do when we enter a relationship and we want something out of it

sounds like your friend just wanted to connect with that other person in the way that they've always connected with them But when we're meeting somebody, whether it be somebody who's dying, somebody who has like a cognitive impairment or something like that, if we want to be present with that person, we've got to meet them where they're at.

And that means slowing down and taking our expectations out of the way, sitting,

listening, and being together.

The second piece of advice you have is: if you don't know what to say, say, I don't know what to say, which I think at one level seems obvious, but I would have never done it absent you giving me permission to do it.

So let's explore that.

What do you think the vulnerability is in saying that?

You know, I have to confess, I've never exactly been around someone who's dying.

I had a sister who died, but she was very much alive the last time I talked to her and really not present after that.

My own misguided inclination would be to pretend that things aren't so bad.

And I feel like saying, oh, I don't know what to say, is an admission that things are really, really bad.

Yeah, it's scary.

I'm no expert in this either.

And I think that's part of saying, I don't know what to say, is I don't know what to do.

And I don't know how to be, and I can't take care of you.

I can't physically do anything or say anything that will like fix this.

It's interesting because in the book that Stephen Dubner and I wrote called Think Like a Freak, one of the things we say is nobody ever in a business context says, I don't know.

Everyone always masquerades and pretends.

And I very much have abandoned the need to be an expert in that space.

But having never been there someone died, it's interesting that my natural inclination is not to go to that same vulnerable place, which I so easily get to in a lower stakes context.

You're making me think of a conversation I had with somebody recently who is sick and told me they were scared.

And I wanted to take care of them and I wanted to make them feel better.

But I took a deep breath and opened up my heart and said, I'm scared too.

And then we held hands and it opened up this space of connection.

And sorry to like go big here, but what are we here for if not that, right?

That's it.

That's the point.

And maybe when we say we don't know and the other person doesn't know either, we cannot know together.

Another point you make is that it's okay to be silent.

And that again makes perfect sense once you say it.

I can also imagine the desire to fill the air.

I mean, humans in general have that deep desire to fill the air with noise.

The silence, I assume, is hard.

I mean, I think we're there all the time in our lives, constantly.

In every conversation, we're always trying to make connection through filling in space.

I do this workshop where I teach a listening technique, and a lot of it has to do with resisting the impulse to make everything that you say about me.

It's like actually takes hard work not to do that.

If you say it's hot here, I say, oh my gosh, and it's hot here too, right?

Because I'm just trying to make a connection with you and trying to find something in common.

But that's a really different experience than sitting and being present with somebody right you tell me it's hot where you are and i'm just sitting being present with you i want to hear more about how that feels for you is it muggy do you need to open a window like it's a different experience and so that quiet space I think leaves opportunity for somebody to step forward who might not.

And also just to not always be using our heads to fill in this space,

to be using our other senses and our hearts.

The last one is cry.

Cry a lot.

And I was just curious whether you meant that on your own or with the person who's dying or both.

I don't know if there's a right answer to that.

Some people cry alone.

Some people cry in groups.

Some people cry at Kodak commercials.

Everybody's a different kind of crier.

But I think what is important is crying.

It moves our emotions through our bodies.

I've been crying a lot lately, to tell you the truth.

I'm like in a crying phase.

And boy, when I enter a big cry, I think this is it.

This is my last cry.

I'm going to die in the middle of this crying.

This is too much.

I can't take it.

And then on the other end of that, ooh, boy, does that feel helpful.

And then you start all over again the next day.

But, you know, the words, this is a very important point.

The words aren't mine.

The words in there.

These words are literally the words of hospice caregivers.

I interviewed hospice nurses, folks who are working at Zen Hospice, social workers.

I spoke with people and I wrote down everything they said verbatim and put it together into something that aligns with what I deeply heard from people.

And so that's what you're reading.

You're reading kind of my

reshaping.

of the wisdom that I heard directly from the mouths of people who have an incredible amount of experience and wisdom.

So, separate from the practical advice, you talk about something called the five things.

And I was surprised I had never heard this before.

Could you just say what the five things are?

The five things are: I forgive you, please forgive me, thank you, I love you, and goodbye.

So, these are are five things I learned from somebody named Roy who was working at the guest house.

And he explained to me that these have been used across many cultures in different forms for a really long time as these things that we can say to fully say goodbye to somebody so that there's nothing that's left unsaid.

I was so moved reading the book.

I can't imagine the process of creating it,

how hard that must have been for you.

You're obviously an empath, and this couldn't have been easy to put together.

You're getting to me, man.

I have so many different kinds of work I do.

It's always drawing to connect with folks, but this was a toughie.

I've drawn in some tough situations.

I've drawn in Guantanamo Bay, you know, it's been hard, but this one, so personal.

We answer our own questions and keep asking them, I guess, with our work.

Maybe that's what you do.

Maybe that's our overlap between economics and art, perhaps.

But yeah, can you tell that it's a personal project?

It must have forced you to think about your own mortality, your own death.

Do you have thoughts about that?

It's not something I don't want to think about anymore.

It's not something I want to put off.

It's actually something that I am trying more and more to embrace.

I'm still scared of things and I'm still worried and sad and all of those feelings, they don't go away.

But along with that, I think by being more cognizant and thoughtful about my impending death, I

am living my days fully in a way that I didn't before.

This is the first public conversation I've had about this, like in any real way.

And it's so meaningful to me, this book, and to go from something that's private to public is,

I don't know if you've done a project that you never thought you'd share with the world, but thank you for being so sensitive to it and careful with it.

Yeah, of course.

I feel really lucky to be the first one to get to talk to you.

I feel really amazing to be able to see the rawness and to feel the authenticity behind it.

Yeah, I don't have any talking points yet.

There's nothing worse than talking about a hard issue.

with someone who's talked about it so many times that they've forgotten it's a hard issue.

I don't know.

I feel really, really lucky that we're having having this conversation.

So thank you.

That I'm so ungraceful right now.

That I'm so unschooled.

Thanks for being generous.

And you're a wonderful person to talk with.

If I understand correctly, after you graduated from college, you went to Rwanda.

Is that correct?

And what brought you to Rwanda?

Oh, that's a deep cut.

We're going back.

Yeah, I was working in advertising after I got out of art school, and I was miserable, to tell you the truth.

I'm not surprised.

You seem like someone who would have enough sense not to go into advertising.

How did that happen?

You know, I'm surprised actually how many people I meet who had a stint in advertising.

But I went into advertising because I was frustrated with the whole art world and that the goal seemed to be to make stuff that you hang on a wall and 12 people end up seeing.

That didn't make any sense to me at all.

Whereas advertising, if you make something and it goes on a billboard, everybody sees it.

So imagine the kind of conversations you could start on a billboard.

I learned quickly from my creative director that the point in advertising is not to make people think.

It's in fact to stop them from thinking.

So I was not a good fit.

Let's put it that way.

How long did you last in advertising?

I think

two years with a big chunk of time off when

a friend of mine who was working as an election observer for the first free and fair democratic elections in rwanda this was in 1999

i'm dating myself called kind of out of the blue and said hey you're a drawer and also you know how to create campaigns and USAID needs an educational campaign to sensitize the population of Rwanda to how to vote, how to use a secret ballot, why it's good to vote, all this kind of stuff.

You hear this kind of like affect in my voice because at the time, I didn't know anything.

I was a baby.

Looking back, I'm like, my God, there was so much wrong with this.

I'm the last person who should have been going and doing this.

Okay.

But I was like, what, 22, 23 is my

young and dumb enough.

to like think I could do it, which is the gift of youth.

And I said, heck yeah, I'll go.

Got a leave of absence and went and found myself in a place I'd never been with people who I'd never met creating an educational campaign for the country about how to use a secret ballot.

So this is in the shadow of a genocide that had occurred only five or six years earlier.

The challenges to doing this must have been immense.

or doing it well, at least.

Yeah, again, it's so good I didn't know because I never would have done it.

And I'm very grateful grateful that I had the experience.

There were so many challenges.

The whole thing had to be in drawings for two reasons.

One is because at the time literacy was a really big issue in the country.

About half the population was non- or semi-literate.

And so everything had to be drawn.

And also,

because of not wanting to identify people as being Hutu or Tutsi or Tua, which are the different ethnic groups in the area, and we were so close to the genocide back then, one could use drawings to make a generalization of a person without any kind of like features or anything like that in there so drawing does all these things that you can't do with a photo the photos were banned we couldn't use a photo in this campaign because it would be like a person as opposed to a generalized person okay gotcha we ended up creating a huge campaign of like posters and smuggled spray paint in from the Congo I don't even know if I should be saying this we like got these orphan kids they're called my Bobo who were the orphan kids at the genocide and taught them how to use the spray paint and use stencils and go all over.

And there was no graffiti at the time, so they're putting on that side of the building.

It was amazing, and it was a big success.

As I think about the 22-year-old you in Rwanda, and I think about the students I teach at the University of Chicago, one thing I have felt more and more is that the things that we're teaching the students in the university are utterly useless for the tasks they'll actually have to face.

And it sounds to me like going to Rwanda was a crash course in real life, probably in so many different dimensions you haven't even talked about.

And probably

few experiences people have could match it because not only were you put into a different culture, you faced really hard problems.

With really high stakes, you know, talking about learning in public and real time, and there was real ramifications to this.

I learned how to defer real fast.

I learned that I wasn't an expert real fast.

but also I learned how to build something, how to make something, how to have an idea and then take it through every step of the way, how to collaborate with people, how to manage all this stuff.

I talked to some students just a couple of days ago and they were talking about going to graduate school and then what kind of job they wanted and finding the right job that's like exactly what they're interested in versus their best skill set.

And I was like, no, that's the wrong job for you.

You want a job where you don't know what you're doing.

You're completely in the deep end, and you end up quitting in six months because that means that you just had a crash course, you just learned so much in all these areas, and that you don't think you're going to use right now.

But I think we all know in retrospect as we move on in our lives.

My mom says this thing, and I used to roll my eyes at all the time.

She said, When you go through life, you carry a basket, and each of your experiences you put into your basket.

I'm like, Mom, that's the dumbest thing.

And now I look at it, I'm like, Thank goodness

I had all of these experiences because I'm constantly pulling from this now ginormous, oddly shaped, well-worn basket to apply to the different circumstances that I go into with my work now.

Okay, so let's continue the list of places that you've spent time at.

The next one that comes to mind is Guantanamo Bay, where you were drawing the trials of the detainees who were held there.

How did that come to be and what was that like?

Carol Rosenberg, who is the journalist who's been reporting on Guantanamo Bay for the New York Times and another paper, basically since before day one at Guantanamo Bay, she had an idea for a story about kind of the culture of the courtroom.

And there are no photographs allowed in Guantanamo Bay.

Everything that's been documented, especially in the courtroom, is done through drawings.

And the New York Times hadn't sent somebody to draw there before.

There'd been courtroom artists, but nobody who'd gone there on assignment to document.

And so I went there to work with Carol and spent a week in Guantanamo Bay in the courtroom drawing basically everything, not everything, because it turns out there's a lot of things you're not allowed to document there.

And that was a big challenge.

Are you allowed to say the things you're not allowed to document or is that classified?

I don't really want to take that risk with you right now.

Sorry.

I mean, I think you're great and this is an incredible podcast, but not worth going to jail over.

I'll say it instead of you.

So I would imagine it's things like where doors or windows are located.

The fear is that some kind of attack will happen and by using your drawings, the people who attack the courtroom will find a weakness or something.

I imagine.

I'm just trying to.

think what the logic might even be other than that.

I imagine that could be true.

Redact, redact, redact.

I'll tell you, I was so nervous about going.

Totally, unlike Rwanda, I was very well prepared.

I knew a lot about that place, you know, enough to be nervous.

And also I still felt an incredible sense of responsibility.

Why were you nervous?

A sense of fear of safety or a fear that it would be too much?

I had never been there.

I didn't know what it was going to be like emotionally.

This is a terrible place.

Like there's an emotional weight that's there.

And there's no edit button on a drawing.

There's no delete.

There's no do-overs.

You just have the time you have and you get what you get.

And I wanted to do a good job.

So I wanted to practice a lot.

I went to some courtrooms here in San Francisco just to get the idea of different angles and how people moved about.

And then when I got there, I mean, this is what it always is.

It doesn't matter if it's Wanted Guantanamo Bay or a street corner somewhere.

Once you actually get on site and you're doing something, everything goes out the window.

There's a million more challenges you could never anticipate.

So there were certain things I couldn't draw.

I had to have my paints kind of on a folding chair off to my side and I had a tiny cup of water.

And at the end of each day, everybody, all the viewers who were like journalists and NGOs would leave the viewing room and then a communications officer would come and sit with me and go through my drawings and make sure sure that I hadn't drawn anything that I wasn't supposed to.

And then they would put a stamp of approval with a signature on my drawing that says, this has been approved and it cannot be altered after this.

No change is allowed.

So even though I draw from life, I am used to being able to like crop something out or change a little something here and there.

You know what I mean?

I mean, this is going in the times.

I want it to be accurate and be good.

And

it just was what it was.

One of the stories I've heard you tell is how Mr.

Lavender, you said, was the name of the person who was giving you those stamps.

And at the end, I think you said to him with sort of joy and a sense of sharing that because his stamps were such a part of this picture, that he was a co-creator.

And I think he wasn't very amused by that.

I mean, come on.

This man was not amused by much.

You know, you sit with somebody at the end of every day and look at this artwork dealer.

You get to know them.

You become friendly.

So this gentleman, I called him Mr.

Lavender.

I thanked him because those stickers are such a part of the artwork.

They literally couldn't exist without that sticker on it.

So I thanked him for being a collaborator on this.

And I do not think he was too happy or amused about it.

He didn't want an art credit.

I don't know.

The New York Times, apparently.

He could have added that to his resume.

I don't know.

There wasn't much art or creativity or senses of humor going on around that place, I will say.

You described it as a terrible place.

In what ways was it terrible?

I was not expecting it to feel so bleak and run down and ill cut and tucked away and steel and metal and rust and hard and inhuman.

It's very inhuman.

One of the hardest terrible things for me about it was the drawing.

When I was given my rules of what I could and couldn't draw, another rule was that I was not allowed to make eye contact with the people that I was drawing on the other side of this glass that's separating the viewer room from the courtroom.

And in particular, the detainees.

And this is very complicated.

I mean, as an artist and as a human being, the foundation of everything is eye contact.

That's how we connect as humans.

And as I'm drawing somebody, I'm not a camera.

I'm a drawer.

And it is about humanizing, not dehumanizing, no matter who it is.

And And so to be told that if I were looking at somebody and they looked back at me, I was to look right through them, just keep looking and look through them.

That

is

too much for this person.

It's not my area.

When I left, I did not want to go back because it undermined my entire purpose of drawing.

I'm so honored that I was able to go and do the job.

And I think I did it well.

And I think I did a service to the newspaper and to the readers.

But that's not what I do.

I can't put myself aside.

I think I'm my best tool.

And I had to put that away.

Within a few days of getting to Guantanamo, you started smoking.

Is that true?

No.

So I just like realized my parents might listen to this.

Yeah, I totally did.

I was a smoker for so many years and I was, oh, boy.

Yes, I started smoking again.

How long had it been since you had smoked?

And then why are we talking about?

What I find interesting about this is that it brings home how hard this would be.

I mean, because honestly, you and I are very different people.

And this doesn't sound hard to me at all.

The logistics of how you draw and doing it well might be hard, but the human part of it to me doesn't seem like it would be that hard.

I'm not that connected to people anyway.

I hardly ever look anybody in the eye in the first place.

So this a little bit more context for the challenge of it.

I would be surprised if it wouldn't be challenging for you because in the viewer room, not only was there journalists and NGOs, but there was also family members of the victims from 9-11.

And on the other side, there were the detainees.

who have been accused of orchestrating and perpetrating that.

And so sitting in the middle of that and the role of a journalist in this is to really not have any kind of emotional response, not to make the eye contact, not to create the relationships with anybody, because that's a vulnerability to really having objective truth telling.

This is why I say I am not a journalist.

I use the term drawn journalism for lack of a better term, but I don't have that skill.

Do you think in that situation that you'd be able to just, I don't even know, I don't want to say turn off, but you know what I'm saying?

Just do the job.

Yeah.

I'm mostly turned off anyway.

So I think it wouldn't be that bad for me.

I'm unfortunately not very empathic and I'm detached.

So who knows?

But going to Rwanda, that sounds hard to me.

Being in the Zen hospice center, that sounds hard to me.

Of those three things, Guantanamo Bay seems like a piece of cake.

That's so interesting.

I think that I went into both Rwanda and the Zen hospice experiences with less expectations.

And in Guantanamo Bay, I had a lot of expectations.

The effect that had on my work, I don't know.

It certainly had a lot of effect on my mental health.

You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with artist Wendy McNaughton.

After this short break, they'll return to talk about how to have fun.

This is the Chase Sapphire Lounge at Boston, Logan.

You got Clamp Chowder.

In New York, Dirty Martini.

Over 1,300 airport lounges and one card that gets you in.

Chase Sapphire Reserve, the most rewarding card.

Learn more at chase.com/slash Sapphire Reserve.

Cards issued by J.P.

Morgan Chase Bank and a member of FDIC, subject to credit approval.

Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Why?

What's happening?

The Walmart Wellness Event.

Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

All that at Walmart.

We can just walk right in.

No appointment needed.

Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Check the calendar, Saturday, September 13th.

Walmart Wellness Event.

You knew.

I knew.

Check in on your health at the same place you already shop.

Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.

Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Age restrictions apply.

Free samples while supplies last.

At RXBar, they believe in simple nutrition without the BS.

That's why they said no to artificial ingredients and yes to deliver intentional, transparent nutrition.

Try their original 12-gram protein bar, the nut butter and oat bar, or minis.

RXBar, the proud sponsor of Nobi S.

Use code rxbar on rxbar.com for 25% off, subject to full terms and conditions and to change, valid until September 30, 2025, and may not be combined with other offers.

See rxbar.com for full details and limitations.

In the last part of our conversation, I'm going to ask for Wendy McNaughton's help on what has been a frustratingly difficult task for me, my ongoing quest to relearn how to have fun.

despite the fact that you choose to spend your time in places other people would avoid you also put a lot of emphasis on fun i know i was gonna say you're making me under this like very serious person

you've written about the fact that we as a society have forgotten how to have fun can you riff on that for a little bit

I did a lot of different books that are all about having fun, whether it be in the kitchen or the outdoors or whatever.

I've drawn a lot about it and also did a piece in the New York Times called How to Have Fun Again.

I don't know where you're at with this, but there was this time when we were coming out of the pandemic and we still are in a lot of ways.

And there's just kind of a heaviness and we're not putting ourselves in places and in spaces to like be kind of spontaneously creative or have super present moments.

And I certainly was in that space.

I was kind of down.

And I was visiting a friend in Oregon and we were at the top of a hill and it was covered in grass and like something came over me and I'm like can you hold my stuff and then I just dropped down on the ground and I rolled just like I rolled like a six-year-old you know like all the way down and screamed and laughed and almost threw up and it was

the best antidepressant ever.

It was like all of a sudden I just felt so in the moment and so happy and so joyful.

And I realized, my God, when's the last time I had fun?

So I did a little deep dive and asked a bunch of people about how they have fun and then did a piece encouraging folks to do it because it is pretty healthy.

So roughly every three months, I make a pledge to myself to try to have more fun.

Really?

Yeah.

And it came out of some episodes I did here.

And what I've come to realize is that I am almost completely incapable of playful fun.

And so my latest iteration, I set the bar so low for about the last week, each night when I climb into bed, I ask myself, did I have one episode today where I had playful, joyful fun?

And more days than not, the answer is no, even though I'm trying and I'm seeking.

For so long, I have put an enormous emphasis on investment in the future.

So, in academics, there were so many projects to do.

There was always a sense that I should be working on these things towards a long-term goal.

And then, so then to offset that, I would get hobbies.

But I found I was incapable of just having fun with a hobby.

As soon as I get into a hobby, I start scheming about, okay, wait, now I play golf.

Wait, I shouldn't just play golf.

I should try to be on the professional golf tour when I'm 50.

And I cannot in myself

unlock the ability to go back to childlike fun I try and I don't know I need some advice how do you you have some advice I love this we can share a list of all the ways that you found and that I've found rolling down a hill fantastic rope swings are great for me

that always has to do with laughter almost always.

Being outside really helps and being around other people is key.

I mean, I can make myself laugh.

Don't get me wrong.

I can tell myself a mean joke and I think I'm hilarious.

But when I'm laughing with a group, that's like what gets my endorphin or whatever.

Now, let me just say also, I think having a conversation about deconstructing fun

does not fall on the list.

So I thought it was kind of like hilarious that there's this piece out there instructing people, this is all you need to have fun.

Can I tell you the irony I saw in that piece?

Please.

It was clear from the message that social media was not fun, right?

And yet the piece ended with your call for people to post on Instagram with hashtag NYT opinion fun.

And I wondered, you must have thought about that.

Was that forced upon you or did you willingly go in that direction?

No.

i just i can only be who i am in all my imperfections

i think there's always an opportunity for community building in social media

there's a lot of irony there and i don't know if that came from me or the paper or what but it's pretty silly

Social media is the whipping boy for everybody now and everything bad.

But the flip side side is that social media and technology have opened up enormous opportunities.

So you teach tens of thousands of people to draw online.

You'd never be able to do anything like that in a lifetime without it.

Our conversation, so many people will get to listen to it because of that.

It's a change in society that has profound implications.

And it's interesting because I think this is one where both artists and economists have a really deep well in which to dig to try to make sense of it

yeah i'm interested in hearing your take on it like what's your hot take on social media so i'm not a big consumer of social media myself but what i will say is when i do go on social media it is amazing the quality of what you find there in terms of entertainment the fun and the creativity is remarkable and no economist would have ever imagined that you could have a technology where you would mostly pay nobody anything to produce enormous amounts of content that are out there.

Yeah, that makes no sense to an economist.

Yeah.

On the other hand, my friend Sendal Mulanatin, who's an economist and one of the smartest people I know,

he deeply believes that boredom is the key to everything.

And my kids have never experienced that.

My kids don't have a moment where they're alone or bored.

They are constantly connected and they never have to face the scariness that is being by yourself.

And I suspect that has profound implications on development and what life will be like for my children and people beyond.

I would agree.

I think it's the upside for me of being an only child.

I had a lot of space and time to play games and make up stories on my own and create things.

And I find personally now, many years later, that I do want to fill space and social media is a great way to do that.

And I have never come up with a good idea while looking at social media.

Ever.

I do not leave that experience having created anything or grown.

I can take something from that and then go off somewhere and have some space and be bored.

And that's when some ideas might come up related to that that experience.

Another irony, like you mentioned, I'm teaching kids and now grown-ups too about drawing and I'm using social media to do it, whether it be on YouTube or like a, I do something called the Grown-Ups Table on Substack and do drawing lessons there.

So it's dependent on social media for communication.

But then what I hope I'm doing is I'm teaching people tools there and giving them the experience to hook them.

Like they can practice on their own and they can build that muscle independent of social media.

And in my experience, if somebody does that on their own enough, the benefit that they get there outweigh the benefit that they get on social media.

It's longer-lasting, it's deeper, it creates community.

And those are the things that ultimately we're looking for on social media, but we don't get right.

So, it's probably an an illusion, as I talk to you and as I've read about you, that when you plot your path forward, you don't seem very concerned either about whether the things you're doing will take a lot of time or whether they'll earn you any money.

You somehow seem immune to these two forces which drag everybody down.

Is that true?

Do you somehow operate in a world in which those two things don't act as constraints on what you do?

I can't believe you're asking me that.

Like, that's so funny.

I don't think anybody's ever really put such a fine point on it before, except for my therapist.

Other parts of my life would be a lot easier if I cared more about efficiency or about making a good profit.

That's not what excites me.

And that's not where my talents lie.

I've said often, if you want to make a lot of money, don't hire me.

Don't come talk to me.

But if you want to make a big difference, let's chat.

I have like a weird, what are these called?

Antennae.

Yes.

I have a weird antenna.

I'm a good responder to being like of service or useful and using drawing to be of service or useful in situations.

I feel like, oh, this is this thing I have to do in this moment.

And for better or worse, I don't really say, but you have more responsible things to do.

I don't know how to do that.

I do the thing that I feel I'm drawn to do, you know?

I tried once to make a little matrix, like when I was first starting drawing, when I said this is going to be my job, I quit my job and I drew full time.

I made this little matrix of like, in order for me to say yes to a job, it has to check like the purpose box, the money box, the will this take me forward in my career box, and is it fun or something like that?

And I think it quickly became like,

does this feel right purposefully?

And is it fun?

And the other two disappeared.

And while it might not take me to having a summer house or something like that, that's okay.

I get a lot better stuff out of my work than that.

Seems like it's taking you somewhere better.

You have joy, you're fun, you enjoy your life in a way that most people don't.

I mean, it's interesting because even though we're far away, we're doing this remotely.

In my own self, I feel this lightness and this joy that is just wonderful.

I laughed more with you today than I laugh usually in a week.

So you can tonight, like you can check this out.

Oh, yeah.

When I lie in bed tonight, I'm like, today I had some fun.

Well, if that's what it's like to talk to artists, I should definitely not wait another 25 years to talk to the next artist.

I did take Wendy up on her drawing challenge to draw objects without looking at the paper.

You can find the drawings I made on our website, freeconomics.com, in the blog post for this episode.

You can judge for yourself, but I stand by my claim that I am no artist.

The worst part isn't how badly these drawings turned out.

It's that I actually wouldn't have done much better if I were allowed to look at the paper.

And if you're interested, check out Wendy's book, How to Say Goodbye.

It really is very, very special.

A book I will always cherish.

cherish.

Knowing we'd be replaying this episode, I reached out to Wendy and I asked if she could give us an update on what she's been doing.

Hello, people.

I mostly admire Crew, all you amazing humans.

I miss you guys.

I really did love our talk, Steve, so much.

It meant a lot to me.

Thank you again.

A few things.

Over here, I have been working on a book.

It is Shocker about drawing and people and connecting.

And it's it's super fun and I'm excited about it.

I hope you like it.

I hope everybody likes it, but it also means I've been tearing my hair out.

You know how that goes.

And I've been doing my weekly drawing lessons and assignments with my drawing community over at club.drawtogether.studio.

We have folks all over the world drawing together.

It's so awesome.

And I've been doing a project that I think you might especially appreciate called Draw Together Strangers, where I ask strangers in public spaces.

I should say I cajole them even to come and sit across from each other at a table just a couple feet away and draw one another without ever looking down.

And it's silly and it's fun and the drawings look amazing and ridiculous, but what's really going on is people are looking at each other closely.

They're slowing down, paying attention and seeing each other.

and they're allowing themselves to be seen.

And that is just something we do not do in this hurried, distracted, avoidant time.

So I've been doing that all over the country.

The National Gallery of Art in DC invited me to take over their atrium and do it with thousands of people.

And the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, I'll be doing it there in the near future.

So keep your eye open for that.

Oh, and people can actually do it themselves in their own community because everybody should do this.

I created a toolkit so that people can do it themselves.

And you can find that on my website, WendyMcNaughton.com.

Thanks again for sharing your airtime and space with me.

It is always

a joy and an honor.

Big hugs.

Next week, we're back with a brand new episode featuring Ken Ono.

He's a University of Virginia mathematician who has been using his talents not just for research, but to help the best swimmers in the world swim even faster.

As always, thanks for listening, and we'll see you back soon.

People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, No Stupid Questions, and The Economics of Everyday Things.

All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.

This episode was produced by Morgan Levy with help from Lyric Bautich and mixed by Jasmine Klinger.

Our theme music was composed by Luis Scara.

We can be reached at Pima at Freconomics.com.

That's P-I-M-A at Friconomics.com.

Thanks for listening.

I think you are totally an empath.

There's no way that I could feel comfortable like I feel with you.

if you weren't reflecting my feelings too.

So you're wrong.

Okay.

Also, I hope that we have, for both of us,

removed this barrier between the economist and the artist.

For me, for sure.

For me, too.

I'm actually still a little bit intimidated.

The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

Stitcher.

This is the table, the one with the view.

This is how you reserve exclusive tables with Chase Sapphire Reserve.

This is your name on the list.

This is the chef sending you something he didn't put on the menu.

This is three times points on dining with Chase Sapphire Reserve and a $300 dining credit that covered the citrus pavlova and drinks and the thing you didn't think you liked until you tasted it.

Chase Sapphire Reserve.

The most rewarding card.

Learn more at chase.com/slash Sapphire Reserve.

Cards issued by J.P.

Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC, subject to to credit approval.

Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Why, what's happening?

The Walmart Wellness Event.

Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

All that at Walmart.

We can just walk right in.

No appointment needed.

Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Check the calendar Saturday, September 13th.

Walmart Wellness Event.

You knew.

I knew.

Check in on your health at the same place you already shop.

Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.

Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Age restrictions apply.

Free samples while supplies last.

Change is always happening.

But no matter what changes in five years, there's one thing that will stay the same, the price of your internet.

With the Xfiniti five-year price guarantee, you get five years of the most reliable Wi-Fi, with our best equipment included, for a price that stays exactly the same.

Restrictions apply, new residential customers only, taxes and fees extra and subject to change.

Most reliable Wi-Fi based on Open Signal Awards USA.

Fixed Broadband Experience Report, August 2024.