Professor Nick Sousanis on New Ways of Thinking

Full Episode 23 Transcript

Hello everyone today is June 9th 20-21 and welcome to another edition of the Well-Read Investor, the podcast that profits your mind and your money. I’m your host Mike Hanson.

Today we have Eisner award-winning comics artist, author, and educator, Nick Sousanis in to talk about his book, Unflattening.

How to explain this strange book? Well, written and drawn entirely as a comic book, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking using graphic art to illustrate the ways we construct knowledge. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, the book uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. Full of graphic innovation, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Nick calls “flatness.”

I believe this is an important book—I’ve read it three times and recommend it often to others. To me, “unflattening” your ways of thinking is vital to good investing. Everyone is taught the same things in this industry, as if knowledge about it were set, and news cycles all talk about the same stuff and in the same ways. Think, for a moment, about the fact that most of our representations of about markets and the economy are done with two-dimensional charts. We do all this work and data-crunching just to represent the huge complexity of our world into these little price graphs. Of course that’s a useful thing, but we should never forget that our charts aren’t the world itself, which is much bigger, broader, and open to revelation than anything a line chart can reveal. Unflattening won’t do that work for you, but reading it consistently gets my mind in a space to think and see differently.

A little more about Nick. He’s an associate professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he has started a successful Comics Studies program. (Had this been around when was 18 I very well could have been a pupil.) Nick received his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comic book form—that dissertation was this book, Unflattening and was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. The book has received numerous awards and has been translated to many languages. Nick’s work has been featured in The Paris Review, The New York Times, the LA Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Publishers Weekly, to name a few.

Nick is also just a great and humble guy who I enjoyed speaking with immensely. So let’s get into it, and I’ll come back with some additional commentary on what to make of this wide-ranging conversation. Enjoy!

Mike Hanson:

Nick. Thank you so much for being on the program. I know this is a little bit out of the box for you. You've never really talked about finance very much before, but I have to tell you, I've shared your work with people I work with frequently, and I think it's quite enlightening, but if you would just give our listeners a little bit of background, tell us about who you are and how you came to this work, especially with Unflattening.

Nick Sousanis:

So I'm Nick Sousanis, I'm a professor of humanities and liberal studies at San Francisco state university. And I run a comics program there. I think the thing I'm most known for is I did for my doctoral dissertation as a doctoral student at Columbia university, I did my dissertation entirely as a comic book, arguing that maybe there's other ways to make meaning besides solely text. And that was subsequently published as a graphic novel from Harvard University Press. I make other things related to that and more to come, but that's the general intro to me, I think.

Mike Hanson:

I want to talk about all that, including your entry into comics, but first tell us in your words, because I sometimes struggle to do it. What is Unflattening about?

Nick Sousanis:

Yeah, I struggled to do that and that's partly intentional. I think my return to comics really wanted to find these ways to speak and draw in metaphorical terms so that I could invite readers into a conversation, rather than keeping them out with exclusive language. And that's certainly true in academia or I think the language can be the barrier and it's not necessarily that their ideas are too difficult. So really trying to thread this needle between trying to get across what I meant to people who knew where I was coming from, but also let other people in on it and make their own meaning. So I think at its core, it is very much an argument for itself and argument that scholarship education learning could come through other forms beyond the written word or the spoken word, and that drawings, that comics, that our bodies ourselves that are really important sources of meaning. And we need to include that in the ways that we learn and the ways that we make meaning possible.

Mike Hanson:

You know, Nick,  I don't know if you've ever would've thought of it this way, but for me the first time I read your book because I studied a lot of complexity theory in studying capital markets and so forth. And to me, it really struck me as a complexity book. To me, the multiplicity of views, the changing of perspectives, the sort of moving of consciousness away from the regular containers of thinking, that's all very complexity-ish to me. And what comes out of it are things that will emerge. You know, that's what complexity is.

Nick Sousanis:

So my undergrad is in mathematics, but I did an honors thesis on complexity fractals, and there's a little bit that sneaks in.

Mike Hanson:

Now, you alluded to this quite a lot and I think this is part of the title, but Edwin Abbott's Novella Flatland is kind of the impetus for this. Why is that? What was interesting you?

Nick Sousanis:

So Flatland is a story of the two dimensional inhabitants, so, squares and circles and lines and triangles of this infinite plane. And they're capable of moving east and west and south and northwards, but they have no concept of upwards. The truth is it feels like my title came from Flatland, but it's actually not the case. I came up with this word “Unflattening” early in my doctoral time, as a way of thinking about how comic books, I could present information in such a way that sort of layering and different kinds of juxtapositions between images and images and texts. I can make a single sheet of paper somehow denser and deeper than it seemed possible. So I kept thinking, you know, I'm making the paper not flat. And as I was developing my ideas, I have an undergraduate degree in mathematics. I'm an art maker. I was a pro tennis player and teacher of tennis.

Nick Sousanis:

I thought a lot about interdisciplinary coming from multiple directions. And so this metaphor I had of unflattering started to fit into multiple pieces. And as I developed the book, I always knew like, well, I've got this word, I've got to find a way to put flatland into it somewhere. Like, you know, in my, my crazy maps of ideas. And actually the back of the book, I reproduced some of those and the flatland is the only thing that makes a giant move. It was at the end and it shows up near the beginning. And so it feels like that was an impetus for it. In fact, it was like, I have to include it because I like it. It didn't occur to me until I had the word and was playing with it. But it's a really useful metaphor. I mean, it's a simple thing, you know, you look down on a flatlander and he'd say, well, of course there's upwards, but what are the directions that because we can't see them that we're just not aware of. So it was a really, really useful metaphor to help me frame all the other metaphors I was tying together.

Mike Hanson:

Yeah. It's a huge problem in investing in economics in general, because we basically look at everything on two dimensional planes, just two variables and you struggle to get the totality of things or they get the actual felt experience of an economy or what's going on in a market versus literally the flatland experience. So I want to go just a little while with your actual creative methodology. You talk about how the material itself, once you engage with it and start working it, it starts leading you in a direction and then it starts in a way, telling you what to do. Just talk about that a little bit and how you come up with a page or a concept.

Nick Sousanis:

I was a comics maker as a kid, right? Like I made comics and it was a big, big part of my growing up. But you know, you come to university and like comics, weren't a thing, right? You couldn't study comics. It couldn't like I want to do intellectual things. So I studied mathematics. And when I found my way back to comics, I mean, I never really stopped, but I didn't produce anything finished for a long time. When I found my way back, I made some political comics and then I made a comment on games and education. And what I saw in doing that is that I could make these really complex ideas accessible and not by dumbing them down, but letting the images carry some of the meaning and letting these juxtapositions, like I said before, carry the meaning.

Nick Sousanis:

And so that, that my goal with the work was to make it accessible, but in making the work, what I think I really discovered, and this is what I see with my students and things I advise people in workshops and things is that the very act of drawing, first of making marks on a sheet of paper, it engages your visual system, which your doing, you know, all the time that we're walking around the street and you look at your phone for a second, you run into something it's because you've made yourself blind. You've turned off all these processes that are calculating distance and figuring out can I fit through this space? We're so good at seeing, we're so good at figuring out depth and where we can move that we don't realize we're so good at it.

Nick Sousanis:

We're not aware of it. And so when I think I've really found in my drawing is that, I make marks. I'm like, all right, I have some idea I want to explore. And I'm just going to start putting some things down and I have some things I've read. So I'm going to make some notes there. And when you see it, and I tend to work on large sheets of super cheap newsprint and it's cheap. So I don't get like invested in caring what I do with it. But in having this big space, all of a sudden you can start to see things in your eyes, discover connections that you didn't intend. And in fact, I think it's really important. One of the reasons I reproduced the sketches in the back of the book, is I want people to see how badly I draw to see a finished drawing.

Nick Sousanis:

And it feels like, you know, it came out of Zeus's head like Athena, all fully finished, but the real truth is it's this messy process. And it's really in that messy process, your visual system sees things. You don't expect. You reinterpret your drawings in ways. Even me as the maker of the drawing. I see the thing. And I say, oh, well, I thought I meant this, but in fact this could be that. And so I start to make discoveries. And so I'm not particularly sort of mystic in any way, but I really feel in sort of having this conversation with my drawings, that it can take me places that I don't know without it. So if you said, could you write this book? Well, I, maybe I could write a lot of the ideas I had, but it would be a dramatically different thing. You said, write this book and then add pictures to it.

Nick Sousanis:

It would be a dramatically different thing. But if you said, get this piece of paper and start doing things and then iterate it and see where it takes you, it takes me in directions that I'm always surprised. And so that's true of the whole thing. And then once I sort of know, here's a chunk, that's going to be a chapter. What kinds of things am I going to draw? What kinds of ways do I want the reader to move? What does this idea feel like? So each page has its own kind of movement. So then I'm like iterating there and iterating the drawings. And I'm always surprised, like if you see where I start and where I end up, it's very rarely do they resemble each other. There's some seeds in there, but most of it takes me in a path. I don't expect.

Mike Hanson:

It sounds to me very much like a process of discovery. Is that a process of discovering sort of the totality of what's in you? Is it an interaction with the world around you? How do you think about that?

Nick Sousanis:

I think it's absolutely a process of discovery. I think that is really the key. And I think it's possibly a discovery that everybody can do. You know what I mean? I think there's a tendency to see things like my work or other kinds of art work and say those people have skills. They have certain things. I can't do that. But I think when you see take students who are non drawers or workshops, non drawers, like everybody can make marks and everybody knows sort of a jagged line needs something different than a smooth line. And when you start to do that and you start to let your visual system, which we all have this amazing capacity for, I think we all can see things that we don't expect and not everybody's going to sit down and then turn it into a comic book. Right. But I think everybody can benefit from working in this way and starting to discover things about their own thinking that will surprise them, that you're maybe ignoring something you could bring into it.

Mike Hanson:

Mathematics. And let's say comic books or the artistic endeavors, as well as being a tennis pro. I'm wondering, because I've heard you speak before is art as almost a way of pedagogy as a way of knowing or learning. Tell me about the differences in your mind between learning and doing mathematics and doing the artwork that you do. How are they similar and different?

Nick Sousanis:

I think there's some part of us that says, well, art people are here and math people are here and athletes are over here, right? Like there's this need to like put them into separate boxes. And I, I don't believe that at all. And I don't say that just because I want to justify my own existence. We've sort of very early on said, well, the kid who can make eyes that look like eyes, well that kid's going into art. Right. And the ones who have a knack for this. And, you know, I can mostly speak to my own experience. I studied mathematics because I liked, it was interesting. It was an interesting way for me to think about the world and to think about solving problems. I was an extremely talented mathematician, you know, and that's a word we usually reserve for artists, right. Like we usually say, oh, you're so talented.

Nick Sousanis:

And mathematicians are usually, oh, you're so smart. But I think my art making allows me to be so much smarter than I could be without it. And so I feel like those kinds of words, like they aren't officially separate sides of us and they divide us into boxes. That, that aren't really true. As for what the processes are. I mean, I think about it had a wonderful proofs teacher in my undergraduate and proofs. It's so much about like making things that look beautiful. Like there's an aesthetic thing to how you organize your ideas. And I've been thinking about, because I do get this question, like how does your math play into it? And I think putting that box, you know, the little square at the final end of the page and how I organize and redraw it until you start to see it, I think it's really quite similar. And I think there's a lot of sort of visualization in mathematics of putting marks down. I mean, obviously like doing sums in your head and drawing lines, they are different things. I accept that, but I think they are our creative force.

Mike Hanson:

I want to then get back to a little bit of the theme of unflattering, because it seems to me that the crossing over of disciplines are putting interesting things together as part of what all about. And I would say that, you know, one of the themes of this book is people are sort of, pre-taught certain things or they're put into systems sort of on an operatory basis and they're put into these boxes. Would you talk a little bit about that today, given your experience with education and what you're trying to do with expanding those horizons and so forth?

Nick Sousanis:

I do think that's one of the things I speak to the most strongly in the work, certainly in my own teaching, again, that sort of smart, talented divide. I think that happens to us so early. And I think it really robs so many people of, you know, not to being fine artists. Not that everyone needs to go show art on a wall. You know, that's a very specialized thing and we're all supposed to be literate, right? We're all supposed to be able to read and write, but after seven, we're not all supposed to draw and paint, you know, like only the talented kids are. And I think it really robs us up this way of thinking and way of expressing that just isn't true. And I can say absolutely, you know, a lot of things that made it into the book were things I learned while I was teaching that everybody can do this.

Nick Sousanis:

The final slides I tend to share at public talks is this students work very shy student, not a drawer, not technically a drawer, but what her piece could profoundly reveal about her own thinking and her own life. Because she started to understand that drawing was not about like getting a nose, right. But it was about how you organize your ideas and how you spatially constructed your thinking. And I think once we open that people like blossom, they just do. And I see it in my students that I have over the course of this semester, go from like this. Guy's going to make me draw in class. I didn't sign up for that to showing us something about their lives in this way that, you know, just wide open. And, and I had a student this past two terms, first-generation college student just took my class on a whim. Like I need a class that sounds fun. Right. But we draw all the time. And so she made a final project about this sort of experience as a first gen student. And it was like, it went up to the Dean's office again, not because it was so well-drawn, but because she like brought out all this stuff about her life and her experience that really needed to be heard. And I don't think she would have had the tools to do it otherwise. And I just think that's true of all of us. I really do.

Mike Hanson:

You know, I feel like a lot of the more serious let's call them graphic novels or comic books, whatever you liked, they tend towards interiority and sometimes they tend towards autobiography. You agree with that? And why do you think that is?

Nick Sousanis:

There’s definitely this rise of sort of the memoir autobiographical comics? And I certainly see it in my own students, you know, like when you're introduced to that, you're like, oh, well, here's things that happen to me. And I think there's something about the sort of immediacy of making a mark about yourself and maybe it's safe a little bit, but I think that genre of comics is certainly caught on, you know what I mean? It's quite a term from superhero comics, right? Like, which is totally not interior. So I teach in my class is something called the graphic medicine, which is comics as health narratives. And I think the memoir trend and overlaps with that in a lot of places. And I think that people need to get these things out, making marks about yourself, you start telling things about like, I've had people tell me like incredibly personal things about themselves that I don't know these people. And I didn't ask any of these questions. I just say, we're doing this abstract exercise. Here's some ambiguous instructions make it about your day. And then all of a sudden people are like sharing this enormous thing about themselves. And I think something about making those marks, like all of a sudden things come out, but I think something about comics is definitely right for that. But you know, it's right. For all kinds of stories, right. For comics about investing, I don't think there's anything that colleagues can.

Mike Hanson:

Yeah. You know, one of the things I was taken by is your description of how we're taught to think in sequence and linearly comments of course can do. But that, there's also a way in which when you just look at the totality of a page, you can learn to think in a more holistic fashion, which I just thought was so important because that's certainly does apply to economics and investing in general, getting back to education. You know, I've heard you say that comics is a good literacy tool, which I really believe in. And I have young kids in my own who I'm starting off with comics because it's such a great way to pick up narrative. And yeah, I wonder if you just say a little bit about that and your own experience, because you talked about how you started off with comic books and superheroes and all that and set it up.

Nick Sousanis:

Mean it's interesting. I would always say like comics or this great literacy tool for me, a very early reader. My first word is Batman. Right. I have much older brother who read comics to me or let me read his comics. And so with my daughter, who's now seven, but I think we started reading comics together at about two and a half and concert, like hard to read, but your books are easy to read here's texts. And here's a picture like we know where you are, but comics are complicated, you know, and there's sound effects. And you're like, when does this take place? And you have to pay attention a lot. What I found with my daughter who ended up becoming an super early reader, because some of it is you get read to a lot, right? Like kids get read to a lot. That's just a known thing, but it's also, I think comics forced her to pay attention. And I can recall her at like three and a half still pointing out when I'd miss things. She was paying attention. So, you know, so on one hand comics have less words, but the words they have really matter, right? Like have some specific meaning. I see it in students and I definitely have seen it in my own family experience that it can really accelerate reading.

Mike Hanson:

So who are some of your favorites then in now and what is the state of the more serious world of comics today in your view?

Nick Sousanis:

From my own work, coming into doctoral school, I was hugely moved by Alan Moore's work and all his brilliant collaborators over the years, I studied that a lot that sort of use of comics for this sort of interplay of image and texts that I think he's really fantastic at that. I learned a lot of habits from that as a young maker. I certainly like Frank Miller's dark Knight returns because it sort of seminal work and anybody who is 13 or 14 at the time.

Mike Hanson:

I mean, I tried read the dark Knight returns when I was probably about 12 and I probably wasn't ready for it, frankly.

Nick Sousanis:

Yeah. And it's a tough formerly, it's a really interesting thing. And visually it's a stunning work, but comics have exploded in so many other forms. I mean, I think about the works. I teach them again. I'm looking at my shelf, your for younger readers, Raina, Telgemeier mile and drama and guts. And even my six now seven year old is digesting these and they're cartoony, but they're really sophisticated looks at what life is like. And the college form invites you into those conversations and lets you sort of see some of yourself in them. And I think that's a really powerful part of it. You know, I was obviously hugely influenced by Scott McCloud's understanding comics. My use of the form, I think went in a very different direction, but Scott really blew my mind for what comics could be. John Lewis memoir, but John Lewis, Andrew aide, and Naipaul, you know, brilliant work that's being taught in schools across the country. And like, we need that. Right? We need it. Not because it's easy, cause it's not easy, but because it helps some people get into that conversation and makes them want to stay. And I think seeing things sort of invites you in, you can see yourself in them. I mean, I think that's a big change in comics that other kinds of diverse voices and faces are being represented. I think that's really a big change in comics from what you and I would have read as kids growing up.

Mike Hanson:

Yeah. There's no doubt. And I think that's a theme of unflattering as well, which is, it seems to want to invite many, many different points of view, which for me has always been a truism for truly well-functioning markets, which is what they do is invite many points of view and for people to express them in the form of a price. But it's interesting, the things you were influenced by, I mean, Alan Moore's Watchmen, which is widely considered to be one of the best books of the 20th three to this day continues to reveal interesting things to me every time I pick it up.

Nick Sousanis:

Every time, every single time.

Mike Hanson:

So what's next for you? And then your program teaching comics at San Francisco state, tell us about what you have going on next.

Nick Sousanis:

So I've been at San Francisco state for five years now and they had no comics class when I got there. My chair was really open to me, pitching a class. So we pitched to the first to taught some classes. And by the first year we had a minor on the books and graduated students by the end of my second year. And we now have a pretty thriving minor, even in this awful times. The students are really into it. We've got about 15 courses and I have big goals to say, I think comics are sort of a subset of visual communication, right? And I think visual communication ought to be everywhere on campus. And I think comics are a good way to get you into it because it's accessible. In some ways you can tell stories about yourself. You can tell stories about whatever you want to do.

Nick Sousanis:

You can sort of see your way into it. And I think comics allow everything from very draftsman, skilled things like Dave givens to stick figure or more word, heavy comics that don't need that kind of skill and comics can allow you to come from any direction really and still tell the kinds of things you want to tell. So I see our program. I mean, we're trying to just keep connecting to other people on campus and let's expose this to you and really think about comments as a form of education and how we can educate with comedy. Again, the comics that you and I might've read growing up, you know, there's a few outlets that made these right, a few publishers today. All my works have been published by places that don't make comments like Harvard hadn't published any comics before me. So I'm trying to get my students to understand, like if you've got these skills and you find yourself in a situation, maybe that's what you do.

Nick Sousanis:

Brian fees is a comics artist in the area and he sadly lost his home in one of the fires three years ago. And she went to home Depot the day after and got some paper and Sharpies and made this like six page comic about losing his home in this devastating. Like that's what he knew how to do. He went viral and he made a whole book on it. And I think it's an incredibly helpful book to people. And I, I don't want my students to go through that, but I do want them to be ready when something in your world is there. You want to explain something to people, whatever it is that you're kind of ready for it. And then in my own work, there is a very painfully slow CQL to, I don't know if sequel makes sense for a philosophical book about thinking, but there's a follow-up book.

Nick Sousanis:

That's certainly inspired by conversations I've had from an flattening. You know, I talk a lot about how much the body is central to our thinking when I talk about the work, but that's not really in there and having small children, watching small children sort of navigate the world and come to learn about the world. So this book is quite different in tone, but it's really about how we can return to what we understood like between ages zero and seven, how we learned with our bodies, how we learned with our hands, how we just tried things. And so it's a, it's an exploration of where we came from both as children and as a species and as creatures period, and then take a deeper look at what thinking is and how we might apply that to what education could be. When I say apply. I mean, my work never tends to answer those questions. I'm happy to let people make up the answers themselves, but in my head, I'll be thinking about that.

Mike Hanson:

Yeah, it was all worthwhile art does. And so I got to ask you though, before I let you go. Yeah. Do you prefer working on paper or is the trend towards moving, you know, drawing and so forth on computer screens? Is that something that you do

Nick Sousanis:

Well, I'm going to guess that means you don't know how the first book was drawn, which most people don't that's good. So I work digitally. You do my sketches, all my sketches, you know, from my notebooks to those big sheets of paper, all my thinking tends to be done on paper. And when I moved to New York city, before I did the doctorate, I didn't really have room for a drawing table. And I had experimented some with digital comics and I was really, and continue to be really bad at lettering. So digital lettering was an easy thing. And the fact that the books been translated a lot was kind of a benefit. It's made that a lot easier. That first book is drawn entirely on a Waycom tablet, which I sat on my lap while I looked at his screen for this book because I upgraded, I have a year of this black slab on my desk, is this antique, which means it has its own screen.

Nick Sousanis:

So I now draw on it. There's things I love about it. And I watch my students come to class with iPads and do just amazing things. There's things that you can do with your hand and a piece of paper that you did. You feel it in ways that the screen, you know, like I can fix things and I can change and I can zoom. And you know, there's a lot of toys I can play with, but I do miss the feel of paper there's times that I feel like I could go back, but, but the sort of post-production is fast.

Mike Hanson:

Yeah. I'm sure. Well, speaking of the embodied experience, yeah. I guess staying with paper and pencil at times is definitely worthwhile. Nick Susannah is, this is such a pleasure to speak with you. I recommend your book to so many folks to open their minds about the subjects and those pleasure to have you on thanks for taking the time today. Oh, it was great. Thank you so much.

OUTRO: That was our talk with Nick Sousanis. This was great fun on a lot of levels. Listeners hear me speak about complexity theory often as a gateway to thinking about how markets work, and the first time I read Unflattening I saw it as kind of a complexity textbook. Turns out that Nick in his mathematics studies dabbled in complexity as well, and it certainly shows.

Putting all that aside though, I’ve been a lifelong comic book reader, and I credit much of my love of literature to folks like Stan Lee and Denny O’Neil, who wrote Marvel and DC comics when I was a kid. I believe in comics as a learning mechanism to excite children about reading, and Nick’s been a great supporter of that as well. After our recorded conversation we continued talking about some of our favorite comics stories of the recent past, and Nick’s knowledge is very deep and goes far further than mine. What a treat—his students are very lucky.

Ok. we’re back in two weeks on June 23rd with another great episode. Remember to find us on Twitter @wellreadpod and Instagram at @wellreadinvestorpod or just google the Well Read Investor to see what I’m reading, reviewing, and talking about week in and out. And as always, may all your reading profit your mind and your money.

-DISCLOSURE-

Investing in securities involves the risk of loss. The content of this podcast represents the opinions and viewpoints of Fisher Investments, and should not be regarded as personal investment advice. No assurances are made we will continue to hold these views, which may change at any time, based on new information, analysis or reconsideration. The opinions and viewpoints of podcast guests are not necessarily those of Fisher Investments. Copyright Fisher Investments, 2021.