Happy Sunday, y'all.
Elise Hugh here.
And today we're bringing you a Sunday pick where we share an episode of another podcast from TED handpicked by us for you.
Liana Fink's cartoons explore life's big predicaments.
What to make for dinner.
How to leave a party without being rude.
How to feel like more than a snack machine once you have a child.
In this 2023 episode from How to Be a Better Human, Liana speaks with host Chris Duffy about how drawing has become a practice for her to answer questions and solve problems, and why creating art helps us understand ourselves better.
She also discusses why she's not bothered by imposter syndrome and how she navigates the feelings of doubt we all experience with honesty and humor.
How to Be a Better Human looks in unexpected places for new ways to improve and show up for one another.
If you want to hear more insights like this, listen to How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn all about Ted's podcasts at podcasts.ted.com.
You're listening to How to Be a Better Human.
I'm your host, Chris Duffy.
When I think about the artists, comedians, writers, when I think about the people that I admire the most, they run the gamut when it comes to the topics that they cover and their styles and the formats that they work in.
But the thing that ties everyone who I admire together, the thing that they all share is that they found a way to be distinctly and uniquely themselves.
That is the trait that I admire the most.
And that is why I am so excited about today's episode of our podcast, because our guest, the cartoonist Liana Fink, makes work that could only be made by her.
You can see her cartoons in places like The New Yorker, but her style is so distinct from what a classic New Yorker cartoon is.
You would never mistake her work for something by anyone else.
Because Liana's drawings, they're much simpler, but they're also more impressionistic and they convey so much emotion.
And they're also very, very, very, very funny.
Liana is hilarious and her humor comes from this deeply honest confessional place.
It's some of the best proof I've ever seen that the more specific and the more true to yourself you go, the more universally your jokes will connect.
Whether it is Liana overthinking what to say at a party or analyzing the pressures of adulthood or motherhood, she is always so funny and she is always 100% herself.
If you can't already tell, I am a huge fan and I'm so excited to talk to her.
Here's a clip from Liana's TED Talk.
When I first started making cartoons for The New Yorker about a decade ago, I kept my ideas light and quirky.
I didn't draw anything too personal.
I figured I was too specific, too hard to relate to and read possibly too female.
It took a breakup to get me to start drawing more autobiographically.
The pain I was feeling, although objectively pretty run-of-the-mill, was impossible to ignore.
I knew that drawing was my strongest problem-solving tool, so I decided to diagram what I was going through.
By making these drawings, I could see how my ex and I had hurt each other and move on.
Drawing from my own life was a revelation to me, not only because it helped me understand myself better, but because it made me see for the first time that people could relate to me.
Now that I had this amazing tool, there were so many problems I wanted to solve with it.
We're going to be right back with much more from Liana after these quick ads.
Don't go anywhere.
Today, we're talking about humor, creativity, and cartoons with Liana Fink.
Hi, I'm Liana Fink.
I'm a cartoonist, which in my case means that I make New Yorker cartoons and graphic novels and a lot of random freelance stuff.
One of the things that is kind of the driving idea behind the interview, which is also a big part of your TED Talk, is how drawing and how art more generally can help you to figure out who you actually are and be more yourself.
So could you talk to us a little bit about that?
That journey of how your cartoons let you be more yourself or figure out who that self really is?
I think for me, drawing coincided with wanting to figure out who I was.
I'm not sure that they need to go together for everyone.
I think
Some people draw and some people are on a desperate quest to figure out why they are the way they are.
And some people are both and some people are neither.
And there's room to be creative in all in each of those quadrants.
Where do you put yourself in those quadrants between just drawing and desperately trying to figure out who you are?
Both of those things for now.
Lately, I feel like I've done enough figuring out and I don't really need to do that more.
So I'm trying to figure out.
I really hope drawing is a through line in my life.
So I'm trying to figure out new reasons to draw.
One of the challenges of being...
In the public eye, especially the way you are, I imagine, is that you get known for one particular thing and people feel really connected to you.
But then when you change, it's hard to figure out if you're allowed to be a different person than your audience expects if they got to know you a long time ago.
Yeah, I feel that.
And it's hard to talk about because everyone has a different journey with their art career.
Yeah, mine is that I was known in this very flimsy way as I'm not sure this was the main thing.
But it felt like the main thing that I was an Instagram personality.
And I posted a lot of drawings every day on Instagram, and they were somewhat autobiographical.
And
I feel like that is ending for me to some extent.
I don't know if I chose for it to end without admitting it or if it ended and I was forced for it to end.
But I feel like I'm being forced to choose something new.
I can't go on the way I was going on, even if I wanted to.
I'm hoping there is something new that I'm allowed to choose.
I'm not sure yet.
Does it feel like it was a choice in the first place?
Like, did you choose cartoons and drawing as your medium?
I chose drawing, I drew as a little kid and I was always kind of praised for it.
And I think as a sad teenager, I wanted to be a writer, but I used the tiny shred of canniness that I had to realize that I had a better chance at getting into art school than getting into school to write because I had nothing to show for writing.
So I chose drawing.
Even though it was something that I had done as a younger and not sad kid.
And I think I'm glad I did, although graphic novels are kind of cumbersome.
Yeah, it's also interesting because the drawings in your cartoons, I think sometimes people get really hung up on the idea that everything has to be like photorealistic and you have to draw like a hand that perfectly resembles the photo of a hand.
And it's clearly not what you're going for when you draw your cartoons.
Yeah, I'm against that ideologically, but I think also I can't do it.
So it's lucky that I don't want to.
That's my favorite kind of ideological stances.
I both technically can't do this and I am ideologically opposed to it.
It's a little self-serving.
But also who has the time to draw like that?
Why?
Why would you draw like that?
Like, because I think for a lot of people like me included, I think if you draw something that doesn't look, I'm just going to put this in quotes, right?
Perfect.
It feels like, well, I'm not a good artist.
Yeah, I really disagree.
So I don't remember, actually, if I read the new Temple Grandin book about different ways of thinking, but I do know maybe from reading about the book, or maybe from reading it without realizing I was reading it, that she puts visual thinking in two categories.
One category is like people who think in very...
Involved photorealistic pictures and she puts herself in that category.
And then she has another visual category of people who think in symbols and kind of boil that like they're like idea people, but they
Put visuals to each idea and like the simpler and more direct the better and I resonate that that category resonated with me
I don't know if the categories are real but I like that and um I think that's what I use drawing for and that's a really good thing to use drawing for if that's your bent
It also makes your work feel approachable, I think, because there's this sense of like people can relate to not just the ideas that you're conveying, but the way that you're conveying
It also feels approachable.
I don't know if that's something you consciously think about or not.
I think consciously about everything.
Drawing the thing you want to get across and not cluttering up your drawing with things that you're not caring much about.
So like I care a lot about emotion.
So if I'm using body language or facial expression or some kind of symbol to convey
The emotion or the points that I'm trying to get across.
That's all I need for my drawing.
I think though there's a lot to be said for using drawing to explore a little bit.
And I think you need a slightly different mindset for that.
You need to be able to just kind of chill and not know where you're going with something, which has never been,
Good for me but um because i freak out and i overwork things but um i've been reading good night moon several times a day for the past year and
There's just more and more details that you see in that book every time you read every time you look at it and and that's like a very novelistic way to draw just where like there's all these details and the reader can.
Learn more and invent more every time they see them.
So I think neither of these is a photorealistic thing.
I just think of photorealistic drawing as like really different.
It's more like some kind of engineering or something where you're like,
Crafting something and it's not it's very far into me, I admire it, but it's not.
To me, you don't need that to get ideas across.
So if someone is listening and they have this sense like it would be fun to try to make cartoons, it would be fun to draw, it would be fun to express myself in that way.
What are three things that they should keep in mind as they get started?
What would you tell someone who's just getting started?
Even if they were like a kid.
I think there are a lot of different ways to do this, but the ways that I do are one, when I have something that I want to get across and two, when I just want to make a cartoon and I don't have anything in mind.
So for the first way, when there's something that's just eating you up and you need to solve it and, and you want to maybe solve it by drawing.
It could be a drawing or it could be words.
If there's a problem you're trying to solve in your life to tell yourself, I'm going to solve this by summing it up and understanding it and how can I diagram it for myself?
And I used to draw them the minute I had those ideas, but lately I've
Put them in words just because it's more convenient for me.
So I email myself an idea when there's something I'm trying to figure out and I'm like, why is this stressing me out?
And then I'll think about why and I'll write it down in a line and maybe I'll turn it into a drawing later.
The other way that I make cartoons is
When you want to be a cartoonist so you have to make cartoons
I like to be somewhere where I don't, where I feel like I can just sit still and doodle.
And in my case, I love to sit in a cafe or on a train or somewhere where people are just allowed to sit and kind of observe the scenery without getting out of people's way all the time.
And then I'll just doodle and like maybe after an hour or two of doodling,
Something will happen and the ideas will start to make sense.
And then those ideas that make sense, it takes a lot more pushing and pulling before it's actually a good cartoon.
But I like to do the ideas all in one day and do the pushing and pulling another day.
I love that.
I think about the idea first and then try and sum up the thing that is troubling you in your life or that you're struggling with, try and sum that up in its simplest form by the drawing.
Those feel like...
There's so much more doable than when someone is like, start by drawing three orbs and then connect the orbs with an oval.
Eventually you'll have a horse.
How would you describe your visual style?
Do you have like words that you use to describe it?
I have a few different styles, but lately they're all really the same style.
It's just a question of whether I magnify it before presenting it or not.
My more complicated and illustration-y drawings are not magnified, so they're drawn at the same scale that someone would see them.
And my New Yorker drawings and my graphic novel drawings are usually like that.
But my Instagram drawings, they're really essential, really, really simple drawings.
I draw them like, let's say, one to two inches tall and then I.
Magnify them either by photographing them up close with my phone or by scanning them in and blowing them up.
So it looks like they're drawn much more confidently than they are.
It looks like they're drawn with a thick line, but they're actually drawn with this thin pen.
I like a Muji gel pen, but everyone is different.
I don't feel like pen recommendations really transfer from person to person.
Yeah, it also feels like...
I feel like it's kind of counter to the whole thing that we've been talking about, which is the idea that like if you get the perfect tool, then you'll be the perfect artist as opposed to just what do you like and what is the thing you're trying to express?
And that is the closer you can get to that is the closer you get to perfect.
Yeah, I think so.
I think if there's something that makes you feel like you're speaking in your normal voice in a way that people can understand you, but withdrawing, then that's a good tool for you.
OK, well, we're going to take a quick break for me to speak in my not normal voice.
Instead, I'm going to switch over to my ad voice and we will be right back with more from Liana after that.
And we are back.
I want to go back to something you said earlier, which is that if there's something that you want to explore through drawing, you send yourself an email.
I'm always really interested in how people, especially people who are doing work that is
Yeah, yeah.
You think that they'll stick with you and they just disappear.
Like I have a notes app on my phone that I just like have a running doc and I always start a new one.
It gets too long because just in the course of a day, there'll be, you know, 30 things that are the seed of something.
And when I look back, most of them are worthless and don't even make sense.
But a few of them are.
So is that how you keep track of your own ideas or the little seeds you send an email to yourself?
Yeah, I send an email to myself.
I'm experimenting with having a separate email address just for ideas so that I don't have to see annoying emails I have to write back to.
I love that.
I'm so tempted to ask what that email address is, but that would be a horrible thing to do because then people start emailing you ideas to that email address.
That's so funny.
Yeah, I've never I've actually never told anyone that I even have this email address.
But I think that the important part is that it's like something that is like clean and separate where it's like you go in and it's just ideas.
It feels like it is a way of keeping it almost like sacred, like that sacred space for just the ideas and the possibilities.
Do you have seasons when you have a lot of ideas and then seasons when maybe you're too busy and you don't?
And how on earth do you save your ideas for the time when you need ideas?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I actually feel like right now I am in one of those seasons where I have fewer ideas and I'm just trying to execute.
And so these days when I'm like, I should find something funny to put up online, I'm like scrolling back so far.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not a good feeling to me.
I'm like, oh, my God, I'm not I'm not creative at all.
I have to go years back before I find something good that I haven't put out yet.
And the reason I didn't put it out then is because it wasn't good enough.
But now I think it is.
It's really confusing for me.
I wish I had like I could find a math person to like really diagram it.
Yeah.
What type of season do you think you're in right now?
Oh i i just took like you caught me at the end of i think the longest period i've ever taken without doing any work because i just i have a residency in berlin and i have a little kid and i'm alone here with him and so i just spent
One week being a tourist with my husband and kid, and then one week getting my kid acclimated to his daycare here, which is this whole process
In Berlin that usually takes eight weeks, but they fast tracked me.
And then one week of, like, a lot of formal meetings at the residency.
They're really nice, but also it's been too many reasons to not work.
Yeah.
And I have all these different streams of work that I'm supposed to be doing.
Technically, I'm here to be working on a book that isn't serious, but I'm pretending it's serious.
It's supposed to be a funny, light book.
But also, I make cartoons every week, so I really want to have ideas for my cartoons every week.
And those aren't coming.
I wish they would come.
So I'm not I'm in a no phase right now.
There's nothing happening.
How do you think of the balance between like finding that perfect inspiration and using it for something versus making the inspiration come?
Because it's that day of the week where the inspiration has to come.
I'm very much in the camp of making it come, but I have really, really mixed feelings about making people read it.
I think I'm pretty weak and I don't think I would make anything unless I knew I had an audience.
I end up like roping nice people into looking at my stuff when it's not good.
And I feel so bad about that.
And it kind of spirals into badness.
And I also like feel that I owe the New Yorker a weekly batch of cartoons and
So I feel less guilty about sending in bad cartoons every week because I know they like that I send things in every week.
And if they're bad, at least I made them.
But then if they don't buy a cartoon because they were bad, that makes me spiral also because I'm like, I'm worthless.
I was supposed to send them good cartoons and they were bad and everyone knows and whatever.
Yeah, a lot of mixture of guilt and shame.
And I think it feels like sometimes when you get to the end of the line and you don't have the cool, impressive idea and you just have to be honest about where you are, those are the most authentic ones.
Yeah.
You wrote one a few weeks ago that literally is just called If I'm Being Honest.
And it's like, I've been feeling really blank lately.
And then you have you don't even have the word.
You're like, I can't quite figure it out.
Is it empty?
Is it closed?
Is it dense, internal, not verbal?
And you talk about how when you feel like that, it's really hard to come up with anything to draw.
And so this is it's kind of a meta thing where you're sending out a drawing that.
That is of how hard it is to I couldn't relate to this more.
This is so funny, but also so clearly you being honest about like sitting in front of the computer and going like, what am I going to put out?
How do you get yourself over that hump of like, I'm going to put out a cartoon that's about not knowing what to write in a cartoon?
For me, the hump with that kind of cartoon is not like admitting failure, but it is
This fear of repeating myself.
The one he described was on my Substack newsletter, so it's like a three-page comic, let's say, as opposed to a single-panel cartoon.
I think one can really repeat oneself with single panel cartoons, but it takes a while.
I feel like I'm just starting to hit that wall after making cartoons for over 10 years.
But with the longer comics, you get to kind of explore a feeling you have.
And I don't know about you, but I think I have about 10 feelings ever.
So I'm like I think like I'm sure I've made that cartoon that comic several times already because it's a strong feeling it makes for a good comic but like that like that kind of
Kind of essential feeling
Comic gets really repetitive if you're making a new comic every week and I've been making these for like a year I think and I'm already really repeating myself so that's really interesting and that's an argument for making like an even longer comic because then you can kind of
Sink into one idea instead of pretending that you have a new idea each week.
It's interesting because even that sense of repeating yourself is also a really relatable idea.
Even someone who's not an artist in any way.
I think in therapy or with a diary or something, it's really freeing to realize that the problem you have is the same problem you've always had.
And then recognizing that can help you just sidestep it.
But if the problem is your art, what are you going to do?
What does sidestepping it mean?
But then also, yeah, if you put the pressure on the art to always have a revelation, sometimes it's not necessarily going to be revelatory.
It's just going to be a drawing.
Yeah, I do feel a little bit like I could be at the point where I just stopped drawing because I've solved the problems that I wanted to solve through drawing.
And what was the problem that you were originally trying to solve?
One was social anxiety, just like figuring out the...
I don't know, the hundred forms of social anxiety that torment me.
And then one other thing had to do with like gender stuff that I think I've had like a thread of like feminist rage in me that has...
I'd like to make a longer project exploring this, but I think it has a few aspects.
One is feeling expected to live for others, and then one is eating issues like I had
I was kind of ruled by eating stuff for a decade there and I think I'm still dealing with it.
So I talk about it like it's universal.
I think it's pretty personal.
One was dating.
Like, how are you supposed to have a partnership with another person that you love?
Like, if the history of such partnerships are really, really unequal, like if you're in a heterosexual relationship, it wasn't working smoothly for me and I was trying to figure it out.
And I'm not saying I figured any of these things out, but like, I think I outlined the problems for myself to the point where I don't need to keep outlining them.
I think like comedy and honesty probably come from the same source.
But like, okay, I think here's a really wonky theory that, um,
Comedy is a, maybe all comedians actually know this and it's boring, but that comedy is a one-two punch and honesty is a one punch.
I always think of like a New Yorker cartoon with a picture that's a setup and then the caption that's usually the punchline.
As a one-two punch, but then when you just make a single simple drawing, it's just honesty.
It's not funny because it's all there and there is no saying one thing and then shifting it.
We talked about how sometimes
Sometimes drawings will come to you from like an idea or an emotion that you're trying to express or something that you're processing.
You put a cartoon out that has it's basically a chart or a graph.
And on the.
I'm really pushing my math understanding to the test, but on the Y axis is rage and on the X axis is age and you have it going down.
Rage is decreasing with age.
So I've been told that I do all my axes backwards.
So perhaps it should be age on the Y and rage on the X, but I can't fathom why.
You are certainly asking the wrong person for that one, but it seems right to me.
I think time is supposed to go on the X. Yeah, that seems right to me.
Yeah.
Do you feel like your rage has been decreasing just as a natural product of getting older or also as like moving and all of those other things?
I know it's really different for everyone, but I think I had some things that I wasn't dealing with that were bad, and then I had a crisis and started dealing with them.
So I had this glowing pinnacle of clarity and rage for a while, and that's where my Instagram drawings came from.
And I think I've worked through that thing.
And it's, I think I'm seeing a bit more broadly, but a bit less like arrow sharp.
So for me, rage has decreased with age, maybe it'll be back, like there's lots and lots to be enraged about.
Yeah, it makes sense, too.
Right.
I think sometimes the more that you know about life and situations, the more rage there is to have.
I think sadness has increased.
So it's not like I'm like just very Pollyanna.
But yeah, I think I feel more helpless about the things that I'm angry about right now.
Yeah.
Well, we crossed paths at the TED conference and at the in-person TED conference, which I don't know about for you, but for me is always like I've only been twice.
But it was extremely it's extremely like intimidating and overwhelming because I checked into my hotel.
And genuinely, this was the line checking into the hotel.
The person in front of me is an astronaut.
And the person behind me is...
Were they wearing the thing?
He was not wearing his bubble suit, but I, someone said like, oh, that's an astronaut.
Like they were like pointing it out.
And then the person behind me was Esther Perel, the famous therapist.
And then I'm in the middle and I, you know, it's like impossible to be in that situation and not be like, why am I here?
And the thing that I'm I guess I'm asking is like you sometimes end up in situations where it's like everyone else kind of is feels big.
And some of the power of your work is like admitting that you feel small and not confident.
And I wonder how you navigate the like the disconnect between like being in a place where it's like everyone is impressive and confident.
And then you're like, but that's kind of not my thing.
There's not much of a precedent for it, for like maintaining a career on speaking
Like saying a lot of things in kind of a small, normal voice.
I want to outline the problems and the benefits.
I think together, I'm going to add something to the benefits category.
And that is that I don't have too much like imposter syndrome because I take pride in being an imposter.
Yeah.
Tell me more about that.
How do you take pride in that?
When people tell me I draw badly, I'm like, what kind of a bougie are you who cares about drawing?
That's so weird.
It wouldn't even cross my mind to try to
Draw better.
And like, I think because of that, I believe that I could draw really, really well if I wanted to, which isn't true.
Yeah, I think you could be burdened by too much, by too much skill in something.
Although I really wish like, I don't have an MFA in writing, I have no idea how to structure a longer
And I do wish I had a little more knowledge without all of it, but I don't know how to ask for it.
You have a cartoon that that's kind of got me thinking about that, that idea of like being in spaces where people are really impressive, which is it's
It's two people talking and one says to the other, why aren't you bragging?
Are you some kind of loser?
Yeah.
That's really relatable to me.
And I bet you it's relatable to a lot of other people is the idea that like if you're not bragging about yourself, that you might as well like it means that there's nothing to brag about or like the only way to be out in the world is to be like loud and impressive and big.
How do you find how do you balance those?
Or how do you find the spaces where you don't have to feel like you're a loser for not bragging?
Or what do you do when you feel like you have to brag?
I'm really bad at bragging.
I was really bad at dating.
That was part of why I was bad at dating is that I think on a first date, people just in here, or even on their like dating profile, people inherently want to show their best side.
And I,
Inherently want to show my worst side because I think it's like more connecty but it does not work
And I did feel that at the TED conference I don't present myself well and like yeah my husband's a good photographer and he is good at being photographed and I find like when I compare myself to him I find that I'm
Absolutely the opposite.
And I almost hope to look terrible and to photograph things so that they look terrible.
And it's some kind of defense mechanism.
And don't look at me.
I look terrible.
So don't even judge me.
Don't even compare me to other people.
I think there's the defense mechanism part that makes total sense to me.
We've talked a lot about your cartoons that have been about like social situations or emotions, but you also have done.
A lot of work that is about faith and your most recent book, let there be light centers around a, a God that's a woman, but also an artist with self-doubt.
And you talked a lot about that.
I love that.
And I just, I guess I'd wonder how the idea of believing in something is
Bigger than yourself and struggling with that belief?
How does that tie into your work and into things that make you laugh?
Oh, that's a really good question.
I've never believed in God.
I'm of the Jewish
Sector that i don't
I don't even know how to pinpoint it
I think it's like a specific part of eastern europe that we come from or at least that like some of our jewish souls come from um where it's not an issue and like we don't talk about that
It's like in bad taste to like even consider god but um we believe in custom and we talk about god but we don't
Think about whether we believe in them or not but um
It was important to me to not believe in a female God rather than a male God.
My mom is Jewish, so I have Eastern European Jewish background as well.
And my wife was like, got really interested in Judaism.
And so she took like a Judaism 101 class, which I've never seen my mom and aunt happier in their lives.
Two Jewish women being like...
She's going to learn about Judaism.
And something that the rabbi said in the Zoom class that I just happened to walk by is he goes, in Judaism, we believe there is at most one God.
And I was like, I love that that's what the rabbi said.
He's like, look, there's definitely not two.
There might not be one, but there's certainly no more than one.
That's amazing.
I want to take that class.
I love the idea of it being important to you to not believe in a female God.
That's fantastic.
That's a perfect sentence.
I think there have been moments in my life where I believe in like art and eternity and things.
And I think I'm not in one of those moments for better or for worse.
I think when one is like sad, one is more likely to believe in
Something more mystical but yeah it does affect your art when you're believing in something
Well leona it's been such a pleasure talking to you thank you so much for making the time to be on the show
I really appreciate it thank you so much this has been an honor and a huge joy
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human.
Thank you so much to today's guest, Liana Fink.
I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and upcoming live shows at chrisduffycomedy.com.
How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniela Balarezo, Chloe Shasha Brooks, and Joseph DeBrine, who are, all kidding aside, genuinely each creative and unique artists in their own right.
This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who frequently reject my excuses that I am not going for, quote,
Hyper-realistic audio facts but instead trying to make impressionistic line drawings for the ears.
They do not accept that and neither should they.
On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team that is almost mystical in their godlike powers to create podcasts.
Morgan Flannery, Norgale, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez.
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We are always so excited to see what you have to say.
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We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human.
