How play is the secret to success at work (w/ Maxwell Pearce)

Why is it so fun to watch your team win in the World Cup or to be a Knicks fan as they finally get an NBA championship? There’s a collective joy in sports that can also be found in art, theater, and comedy. In this episode of How to Be a Better Human with Maxwell Pearce, Chris talks to him about his accomplishments as a mixed media artist and a Harlem Globetrotter. Maxwell integrates playfulness into his art and in sports—whether it’s using shoelaces as texture in his artwork or training his body to perform a basketball trick shot. Maxwell shares how play is the secret ingredient in his career and how changing the way he thinks about the rules and mistakes allows him to have more fun and more successes. Find more ways you can make more room for play in your life with PLAY@TED. Learn more from conversations, ideas and moments at ted.com/play http://ted.com/play Featured guest Follow Maxwell Pearce on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/maxwellpearce/ and at https://theartofanathlete.com/View Maxwell's Harlem Globetrotter's profile https://www.harlemglobetrotters.com/world-tour/roster/hops/ Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDAudioCollective https://www.youtube.com/TEDAudioCollectiveFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Chris Duffy?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Look, most businesses want their customers to feel heard, not stuck waiting around for someone who can help. Nothing makes you feel less important than sitting on hold for hours, explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up. But here's the thing. The bigger you get, the harder it becomes to show up the way you want to in each customer interaction. Parloa solves that problem. Their voice-first AI agents handle customer conversations in a way that feels natural, personal, and helpful. They work 24/7 across voice chat and email in any language with zero wait time. Plus, your team gets access to features like Lens,

• 1:33Speaker 01

  which flags issues in real time, and Navigator, which figures out why those issues are happening and what to do next. It's secure, scalable, and built to serve the customer. When AI works well, it shouldn't feel like AI. It should feel like you're being seen and heard and valued. Unhold your customers with Parloa. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P A R L O A dot com.

• 2:03Chris Duffy?

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I recently had the opportunity to host a day of talks and activities all about play at Ted's headquarters in New York City. And I got to rub shoulders with everyone from an internationally acclaimed accordion musician, to a high schooler who is an origami master, to academics who study just how important play is for our lives. I don't really know anyone who is against play. It's a pretty easy thing to be for. There isn't like a big band-aid lobby pushing for more people to get outside and skin their knees so they can make profits on the bandages. But even though most of us think play is a good thing, I don't think many of us realize just how big a difference play can make in our lives in terms of helping us to make connections

• 2:46Chris Duffy?

  with other people, helping us to change how we feel in our day to day, and the way that we handle the things that get thrown at us that are unexpected and maybe even unpleasant. Today's guest, Maxwell Pierce, is one of the people who I met at Play at Ted. He was giving a talk. And Maxwell has achieved huge success in two of the biggest fields where we think about play: sports and art. But what impresses me most about Maxwell isn't just his incredible, very challenging accomplishments. It's the way that he thinks about what a regular person can get from play. How can we experiment with bending the rules? How can we see what happens when we define success just a little bit outside of the box? And how can we become more resilient by having fun?

• 3:28Chris Duffy?

  Maxwell has so much to offer, even if, like me, you are so, so, so very far from ever becoming a professional athlete. Here's a clip from Maxwell's talk.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  I am a member of the Harlem Globetrotters, a legendary exhibition basketball team that is credited for integrating the NBA, popularizing new moves like the alley-oop, and creating so many others. These are the new moves that have advanced the game, but they've also given joy to the people that come and watch us perform. And that right there is precisely how we have lasted for 100 years while also earning a spot in the Hall of Fame. Getting to this point in my career certainly was not a straight line. I've always struggled with high-level sports coaching. There's a certain

• 4:17Speaker 02

  culture that has excessive cursing, yelling, and also a hyper seriousness that can really stunt your growth. Although we were playing sports, ironically, we were coached not to be very playful. I learned that there was a seriousness in respecting the quality of the game. Whether it was basketball, football, baseball, or cross-country, all of my coaches emphasized honoring and respecting the essence of their sport. And that meant taking every drill and every exercise seriously and not doing anything that will challenge the traditional way of doing things. This is exactly what led my high school coach to telling me to

• 5:01Speaker 02

  stop trying to dunk the basketball. But ironically, it was my playfulness that got me to this point in my career.

• 5:23Chris Duffy?

  And we are back.

• 5:25Speaker 03

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• 6:23Chris Duffy?

  This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Planet Visionaries is the podcast celebrating the people creating practical, hopeful solutions for our planet's urgent conservation challenges. Season six launches this fall with bold, real solutions. Hear from Anna Rathman of the Jane Goodall Institute on protecting wildlife, Tom Pachak on his epic 396 day journey documenting the entire Amazon, and Lydia Oshie, a Guatemalan leader, opening doors for Indigenous girls to access global education. Hosted by legendary climber and advocate Alex Honnold, each episode goes beyond the headlines to show what's actually working and who's making it happen.

• 7:06Chris Duffy?

  In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 7:16Chris Duffy?

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• 8:00Chris Duffy?

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• 8:14Chris Duffy?

  On today's episode, we're talking about play and creativity with Maxwell Pierce. What's going on, everybody? My name is Maxwell Pierce.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  I am an artist and also a member of the Harlem Globetrotters.

• 8:24Chris Duffy?

  Okay, so we have a lot of listeners who are based in the US, but we also have a lot of listeners around the world. And for people who have never heard of the Harlem Globetrotters before, can you describe what the Globetrotters are?

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Oh, man, the Harlem Globetrotters, they are an exhibition basketball team. That is very well known for their creativity on the court. A lot of what we do separates ourself from a normal basketball game because of how we interact with the fans. So sometimes we'll call people out to dance on the court with us. We throw water on each other, confetti, all types of stuff like that, that really interact with the people that come out to see us. So in that way, it makes us very unique.

• 9:11Chris Duffy?

  I also think about Globetrotters as being uniquely talented at doing tricks and amazing unbelievable dunks. And being able to spin the ball on our finger or all these things that kind of bring a real sense of wonder and delight to the game of basketball. Not that you don't also take the game very seriously, but there's all these things that you would never expect that are really fun about the way the Globetrotters play.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  When I think of a Globetrotter game, it's like the perfect blend of almost like basketball cinema. Mixed with a little bit of comedy, mixed with like what you see is truly what you get. Like nobody's secretly jumping off of a like an invisible trampoline to do these dunks. Like everybody is really doing these dunks and making these shots. There's no magnet that's in the ball. That stuff is all real.

• 10:03Chris Duffy?

  And then for people who haven't already seen your artwork, can you describe your artwork so they can get a sense of what your artwork looks like?

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, my art is also a mixture. It's a mixture of materials that have shared experiences with me as the user of those materials. So sometimes they're basketballs or, you know, shoelaces, footballs, baseballs, pretty much any kind of sports equipment that I have used in my journey as an athlete. But when I say shared experiences, the emotions that I have experienced while using them.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Are also shared, you know, from their point of view as an inanimate object. But nevertheless, you know, they have their own history of how many times the ball was bounced or that ball was bounced, how many different people it was passed to, how many countries that basketball may have traveled to, how many times it went through the basket, things like that. Those are all the things I try to consider when I'm incorporating those materials.

• 11:05Chris Duffy?

  Well, what about the subject matter? What are the things that you're using those materials to describe and to visually represent?

• 11:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, the subject matter can really vary. A lot of times I'll try to highlight a particular moment in history that was important, whether it was to me or to the betterment of a specific group of people. So like, one of the ways in which I try to keep my family's history is through creating artwork around it so that, you know, when the generations after me look at it, they can know the story of that person who is being highlighted within that work.

• 11:39Chris Duffy?

  If I was going to describe how it looks to me, I would say it, the, there are very beautiful, realistic representations of people or of scenes. And then when you get closer, you see that it's not just an oil painting, it's actually a mixed media artwork. And there's so many incredible details in the way that a shoelace or a net or a piece of cloth or a piece of rubber can be transformed. There's a lot of layers to the artwork. I mean, literally, but also figuratively in the sense that it looks different when you look at it close and when you look at it far away, which the viewer just has this natural reaction to say, I'm so amazed. And every time I look at it, I see something new.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I also think like, going back to the element of trying to incorporate the history behind these materials, it's, it really is why I prefer used materials. If it's brand new, there's not much of a history, you know, behind its usage. But it's, it's a way, particularly with the shoelaces, it's a way for me to have a little bit more of a universal representation.

• 12:48Chris Duffy?

  I have a lot of ideas about connections between the two, but I'm curious to hear your take. What do you see as the connections between your work as an artist and your work as a Globetrotter?

• 12:58Speaker 04

  The play is kind of like the glue between both of those worlds for me. The play or the playful mindset allows me to view those materials as something more than what we put in a basket or what we, you know, score in the end zone. Like it's just something way more than that.

• 13:15Chris Duffy?

  You have excelled at the very highest levels in two extremely difficult fields, right? Like, no one would say that working as a contemporary artist or working as a professional athlete, no one would say that those are easy. And so you have to be very serious to get to the the level that you've gotten to. But also, there's a real lightness and play to you as a person and to the work that you do in both of those fields. So I would love for you to talk more about that relationship.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, I think what's interesting is so much of my athletic experience has been, you could say, weighed down with a certain seriousness. And once I was able to view play as more of a tool, rather than the antithesis of seriousness, then I think it was a lot easier for me to combine them. The healthiest balance that you can have is keeping a certain level of seriousness, but combined with play. I think if it's all play, sometimes you can lose sight of the direction. But, you know, if you maintain a certain level of seriousness,

• 14:23Speaker 04

  more so in being serious about achieving like a certain outcome, or serious about kind of expanding your boundaries, then I think that balance can really be helpful for any, you know, field that you're in. It doesn't have to be sports or art.

• 14:41Chris Duffy?

  But I feel like this is the magic part, right? It's the like, where is that relationship? Because one way to look at play, right, is like, I'm working on this artwork. It's not fun anymore. I'm gonna stop. I'm not having fun. It's not feeling like play anymore. So I'm gonna stop. And I think that comes from like, Sometimes like being too on the play side where like it should it should be fun all the way through and and not pursuing something all the way through the part where it feels hard and feels like work. And I know that's not how you work. So how do you keep the play? And how do you also like follow through?

• 15:16Speaker 04

  That's a good question. I think there are certain, there are different forms of play, at least in my, from my perspective in this. I'm very playful with the materials that I use, both physically, but also conceptually. Like, I view basketball as something more than, you know, something that you dribble and I put it on the canvas. When I get to a creative block, my, I guess my focus on what I'm playing with shifts. So I'm not playing with the materials as much as I'm playing with the perspective or with my approach on how I can use those materials. And I think being a little bit more playful and loose with your

• 16:00Speaker 04

  approach allows you to get around or through a lot of those creative blocks that you have. Because sometimes if you're so married to one particular approach, and you're not willing to be open enough or playful enough to see it in a different way, then you're just going to continue to be standing behind this wall, you know, until you just decide to walk away from it. But I think the play element allows you to just look at it different.

• 16:28Chris Duffy?

  I think that's such a great answer. It also makes me think, in order for you to do the playful parts when you're playing basketball or when you're working as an athlete, right? You, again, for people who aren't super familiar, and I know many people who are listening to this are already going to be really familiar with your work. But if you're not, one of the things that that Maxwell is famous for is these incredible videos of trick dunks and shots with the basketball that just seem like they can't be believed, right? Like a dog passes it to you, or you're dunking a basketball while also catching a baseball.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  A baseball.

• 17:02Chris Duffy?

  Now, those are obviously playful. Those are so fun. They're also incredible. But the part that you don't see in the video, I imagine, is you have to do a lot of exercise, you have to do a lot of training, you have to do a lot of physical work to be able to jump that high in the air and to be that coordinated.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:21Chris Duffy?

  There's not a lot of play of like going to the gym, at least for me. Maybe there is for you. I, I, can you talk about that part of it?

• 17:27Speaker 04

  That's, that's a really interesting point because I think, especially when it comes to those very specific like actions, like dunking a baseball and, I mean dunking a basketball and catching a baseball is a very niche action.

• 17:41Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, that's about as niche an action as it could possibly get.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  I don't know if it gets a little, any more niche than that, but my, my point is that it requires a very niche way of, you know, training your body. Like you literally have to train your body to get comfortable with the duality of that motion. Like, because both of those things are happening simultaneously. It's not, it's not really one after the other. Like if I only focus on getting my arm above the rim to dunk the ball, by the time I'm on the way down, if I haven't already raised my arm with the glove to catch the ball, I'm going to miss the baseball and vice versa. So as it relates to the exercise part,

• 18:26Speaker 04

  viewing the like exercises in a way that is a little bit more like

• 18:35Speaker 04

  open and incorporating of what the end goal that I have in mind is, it's a little bit easier to change up, you know, my approach in the gym as far as like training to jump a little higher. Now, I'm not just, I'm not trying to get repetitions of just dunking a basketball. I'm trying to get repetitions where I'm focusing on like separating the intention of what I do with my right arm versus what I do with my left arm, uh, but at the same time. So I think that seeps into the exercise realm all the same in that like, you really have to find new innovative ways to train your body and also your mind. Like it is very much a

• 19:18Speaker 04

  uh, mental task to, to do something like that as it is a physical one.

• 19:24Chris Duffy?

  We're going to be right back after this quick break.

• 19:33Chris Duffy?

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• 20:15Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Look, most businesses want their customers to feel heard, not stuck waiting around for someone who can help. Nothing makes you feel less important than sitting on hold for hours explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up. But here's the thing. The bigger you get, the harder it becomes to show up the way you want to in each customer interaction. Parloa solves that problem. Their voice-first AI agents handle customer conversations in a way that feels natural, personal, and helpful. They work 24/7 across voice chat and email in any language with zero wait time.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Plus, your team gets access to features like Lens, which flags issues in real time, and Navigator, which figures out why those issues are happening and what to do next. It's secure, scalable, and built to serve the customer. When AI works well, it shouldn't feel like AI. It should feel like you're being seen and heard and valued. Unhold your customers with Parloa. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-A dot com.

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• 22:04Chris Duffy?

  And we are back.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  When a globetrotter makes a mistake, they can have it be overlooked because of how they playfully embrace its direction. They recognize that something went wrong, but they actually welcome the unfamiliarity that comes with that new position.

• 22:24Chris Duffy?

  You and I met at this event, Play at TED, and you were giving a talk and a bunch of other people were giving talks. And so there's a day before where there's rehearsals.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:33Chris Duffy?

  And then there's the day of the event. There's only, it's only 48 hours. And I was really struck by the fact that you came in and you had this incredible talk. From the start, it was a really great talk. You'd worked on it already a lot by the time I saw it. But you were really struggling to remember the talk off book, right? Because you're not allowed to have notes when you give a TED Talk. And so in your rehearsal, you had to stop a bunch of times. You were clearly unhappy with the way you were delivering it because you hadn't memorized it 100% fully. And I was really struck by how you were positive and supportive to all the other people. You know, you felt like a, you didn't at all feel like you were bringing people down or taking it out on other people or taking it out on yourself. But I also saw this real like determination in you,

• 23:18Chris Duffy?

  where you said like, "I'm going to go and I'm going to work on this." And then you came back the next day and you absolutely nailed it, right? No one would have ever known that there had been a rehearsal where it was kind of rough. So very few people in the world are going to be globetrotters. Even fewer probably are going to be professional artists. But many people are going to have an experience where you're trying to do something that is big and intimidating and new and different for you. And it's not going very well. You had a lot of grace for yourself and you were like, I'm gonna do this and it's gonna be fun. And then it worked. So can you talk to, talk to me about how you, how you approach things like that?

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I appreciate that observation. I think my experiences with being playful have also relieved the weight of pressure in a lot of ways. I think that's one of the beauties of play. It's like, if you take things too seriously, you're, I feel like that's when you get into moments where you're almost in your own way because you're, the pressure that you put on yourself is becoming an additional obstacle to what you're already trying to, you know, master. So I, I feel like dunk contests are the perfect analogy for this because in dunk contests,

• 24:39Speaker 04

  you do have more than one attempt to complete the dunk. But most of the time, if you're not on that day, if you're not capable of doing that dunk, you could try it nine times. It's, it's not gonna make a difference. So really, you know, like achieving the dunk happens in the work before the actual contest. And so I think that has taught me that like play and keeping a certain level of, of like openness has allowed me to not put a ton of pressure on myself. I, I am definitely hard on myself, but I am not as hard as I used to be on myself

• 25:23Speaker 04

  because I, I know that I am somebody that does not do well under any added pressure, you know, internally. Like I, I certainly still do feel pressure, but not as much as I used to because.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  I know that as long as I remain, you know, open and playful, I can kind of pivot in in different ways. When like things go wrong, especially for myself, in my past, I have let the pressure and the reminder, like the self reminder that, oh no, things are going wrong. Like that has become like a distraction for me. And one of the ways that I am able to

• 26:09Speaker 04

  detach from that is just by being playful. So like, I feel like playful improvisation is easily the biggest lesson that I've learned from being a globetrotter, more so in the like physical sense. So for example, let's say, you know, like you, most of our lives, we go through, from our visual perspective, we go through it on our own two feet. But what if one day you accidentally tripped and you fell and now you are on the floor? You have a totally different vantage point of what you have been observing and looking at for the last however long. I

• 26:52Speaker 04

  think we should value those moments more because it's an, it's a natural opportunity to view things from a very different perspective. And that is what I deem as being playful. You know, when whenever those accidents happen, it's like, whoa, I'm, I'm in a new space right now. Things, I don't, I don't normally look at these things from this perspective, but let me, let me embrace this. And I think that's what allows people to playfully improvise because you, you can, you know, actively scan what's around you and interpret what's around you rather than panicking and just

• 27:36Speaker 04

  like glossing over, you know, what you're seeing.

• 27:39Chris Duffy?

  Speaking of that, I, something I learned from you that I had never known before is that dunking, like the art of dunking a basketball was actually for many years, looked down upon. It was, it was like a, it was actually banned in NCAA, in college basketball is banned. You were not allowed to dunk the basketball. And that's one of the things that people like me who are not the most avid sports fans, right? Like that's our favorite part of the game. That's what we watch basketball for.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  For so many years, All-Star Weekend's, you know, most beloved event was the dunk contest. Um, and at one point, you know, it was something that was like so ridiculously frowned upon in the game of basketball. Because two points is two points. So you, you, why are you dunking when you could just lay it up? It's all worth the same. But if it wasn't, you know, for those people remaining playful and continuing to advance how we dunked the ball, we wouldn't have that in the game. So I, I think that's just one of the most prominent examples in my life of how

• 28:49Speaker 04

  playfulness can really, really expand the boundaries of, of what we know and love.

• 28:55Chris Duffy?

  It makes me think about how

• 28:59Chris Duffy?

  a lot of times when we're doing things that are supposed to be fun, we can get really stuck in the way that it's supposed to be. And in the rules and in how things are supposed to be done. I mean, with art or music or sports.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:15Chris Duffy?

  Or, you know, anything, it, it's very easy to, to lose sight of the fact that this is supposed to be joyful. This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be playful. And to instead kind of make it a very serious, rules-based, right or wrong scenario.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think like

• 29:36Speaker 04

  the pressure that we put on ourselves to, you know, so a lot of people are just perfectionists. And I think it's great to, to strive to be as great as you can. Uh, but I think we lose sight of remaining authentic. Like a lot of people lose our authenticity in trying to be like pristine and perfect. And so to your point, like approaching a lot of, you know, what we do with the acceptance that it's not going to go as perfectly as planned. That's what makes everything relatable. That's what makes, I think that's what draws people in more than if something was perfectly delivered because

• 30:21Speaker 04

  who is doing anything perfectly?

• 30:24Chris Duffy?

  The things that you do.

• 30:27Chris Duffy?

  That you have had such success at. There's play to them, but as you've talked about, there's also a lot of discipline. There's also a lot of skill to them. How often do you feel like people underestimate you? Or don't see the real effort and skill that you've developed until you have to win them over or something like that?

• 30:46Speaker 04

  All the time. I think one of the struggles in living or in trying to live in these two worlds that I'm in, which is the sports realm, but also the art realm, is that, yes, I have absolutely leveraged one to uplift the other. But a lot of times when I step into one space and it's exclusively an art space, for example, I've gotten a ton of interactions from people that are like, oh, so did the Globetrotters get you here? Like, I'm assuming you're here because you're a Globetrotter, not more so because of the time and the work that you

• 31:29Speaker 04

  put into your artwork. It is frustrating because I want my work to be recognized for the art that it is rather than for the profile that I have, particularly on the sports realm. But at the same time, part of my mission, I guess, or like my North Star in life, is to bridge this gap in society where so many of our expectations are placed on athletes to be one dimensional. Like, just like everybody else, everybody is multi-dimensional. The only difference is that some people just are afforded the opportunity to discover their

• 32:11Speaker 04

  other dimensions and some people just never got a chance to discover those. And so, as an athlete who was afforded the exposure and the opportunity to discover my other passions and interests, I want to make that crystal clear that athletes are not just people that put the ball in the basket. So it's a very interesting dance that I'm constantly doing.

• 32:38Chris Duffy?

  I certainly can think of You know, the people who are most coming to mind are people who are kind of like famous actors, who then say like, actually, I'm also a musician. And then you listen to their music and it's very bad. Or like, actually, I'm also an artist. And you look at their art and you're like, well, you're mostly an actor. Like, and I think something that's different for you, right, is I would challenge anyone to look at your artwork and not say, this person is an incredibly talented, unique artist. Like, this is not you being a dilettante. And also, it has a lot of deep thought and consideration and meaning behind it.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  Definitely. And, and I'm still learning it like, the one thing that I can confidently say is that although I have been creating artwork since probably like the third grade or something like that, showing in a professional manner and selling work in a professional manner is still on the newer side to me. Like, I've, I've only been operating in that way as an artist for probably the last four to five years, as opposed to creating for the last 25, 20 to 25 years. So I'm still learning, you know, like, what is acceptable in those realms, what is not? And then also, what is like, what are some rules that I can play with?

• 34:01Speaker 04

  Part of anybody's process in getting a full concept of, you know, the landscape that they live in is identifying what boundaries are not to be crossed? And what boundaries are meant to be expanded for the betterment of whatever it is, you know, that thing that you're doing. Like, obviously, you don't want to compromise the well being of anybody or any space. But there certainly are boundaries, more so social boundaries, that we may be able to, to experiment with for the betterment of everybody.

• 34:35Chris Duffy?

  One thing that it makes me think about is how a lot of your art is depicting black people in a really beautiful way, with dignity, with history, with nuance. And obviously, many depictions in popular culture of black people do not view them in multi-dimensional ways and instead are very one dimensional. So can you talk about that piece of this as well?

• 34:56Speaker 04

  That's a great segue into kind of the point that I always try to make, which is that the stereotype

• 35:05Speaker 04

  That places athletes or pigeonholes athletes into being one dimensional is exponentially higher for black athletes. And that is because of the incorporation of the fact that they are black. So if you compare, you know, how like how black athletes are considered and afforded space to do other things in comparison to their non-black counterparts, it is very different. Particularly in the WNBA, you see a lot of that because they live in, I think, the most complex social intersection because the W is predominantly full of black and brown

• 35:49Speaker 04

  women, many of which who are LGBTQ plus. Uh, so you have the intersections of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, all of those things that are socially just like the floodgates are wide open, you know, and make them subject to that because of the platform that we can watch them all. So, you know, like much of my work really stands and puts a spotlight on black women in particular because I definitely can appreciate how although they sit at the forefront of

• 36:33Speaker 04

  a lot of the fights against these different forms of oppression, at the same time, they're also like at the dead center of, you know, like a lot of people's targets or a lot of systems targets. And so one of the ways in which I started um kind of paying that back was by honoring the black women that I come from. So like, you know, this is my grandmother, both of these pieces are my grandmother here.

• 37:01Chris Duffy?

  And for the listeners, Maxwell, you're pointing at the art behind you.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  And it's just my way of. Giving her her flowers and and her credit and letting her know that I appreciate the sacrifices that she has made. She's ninety four, so she has lived through several different versions of this country and this world. She lived through Jim Crow, segregation, so many different things. And um, she's a huge part of where I am and who I am today.

• 37:30Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Uh, my grandmother's name is Lovely Hill. She, like I said before, she's ninety four. She still walks through the bar and everything. She was a model in the early fifties and late forties. She was one of the first black models for Pepsi, Clairol, uh, some other publications. She modeled the cover for Jet magazine twice. And then she retired from modeling and she went into education. And at the time of this retirement, maybe it was like nineteen fifty seven or something like that. This was around the time where sterilization of black women was rampant, particularly in the United States. So one day she sets a doctor's appointment and the doctor basically tells her that her ovaries were bad and that they needed to be removed.

• 38:15Speaker 04

  So she got on the schedule for their removal procedure. And a few days before that procedure happened, Ebony magazine called and asked if she would come out of retirement to shoot a new cover for hats. So she skipped the procedure to have her ovaries removed. She shot the cover with Ebony magazine and shortly after that, she got pregnant with my mom. And so that Ebony magazine cover, along with her decision to get back into modeling, literally saved my mom's life and my life and my siblings' lives and everybody after that. You know, stories like that can really shape the intention and the direction of

• 38:58Speaker 04

  the work that people create. And in my scenario, that is absolutely reason, number one, why I have decided to recreate her entire modeling portfolio.

• 39:10Chris Duffy?

  Wow. It's it's such a powerful story. And then for you to be able to turn that into not only, you know, the true beautiful story of your family.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 39:19Chris Duffy?

  But also into the beautiful artwork. To me, that is one of the reasons why not just the representation you've made of your grandmother, but also the way that you make it is so powerful because it is not just an image of her, not just a recreation and an honoring of what she did, but then you look closely and it's she is made up of these pieces that don't define her, but are a part of her.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  But in fairness to that doctor, I just want to be clear in that I can't definitively say what that doctor's intentions were. I just know what was a common practice in the US in that time as it relates to black women. So I just want to make sure that I'm fair to that doctor.

• 40:04Chris Duffy?

  Sure, I appreciate that.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  That may not have been the case, but um, I do know that for a fact that was a very common practice. Separately, the relationship between the materials and my grandmother has another layer to it that I did not explain in the initial story. So her first Jet magazine cover was in 1955 and the cover said Lovely Hill New York Beauty Models Ideal Hats For Ladies Who Like To Globe Trap.

• 40:35Chris Duffy?

  Oh, that's so cool.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  And that was literally written in 1955. And so in her educational career, she worked for the American Federation of Teachers and that required her to travel all across the world. So she was a globe trotter in her own right for sure. And one of my favorite memories of my childhood is her writing these postcards to my siblings and I from the destinations that she would travel to. This is before we could travel. So you know, she would write a postcard from somewhere, you know, in Europe or in Africa and be like, this is where I am. This is what it's like here. This is what I'm experiencing. So you know, in a way,

• 41:19Speaker 04

  she really was prepping me to, you know, become a globe trotter. It's just a really cohesive way for me to tell her story while also telling my story, while also explaining the relationship within the two of us and how.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  The decisions that our elders make have an impact on us.

• 41:40Chris Duffy?

  I think, you know, the connection between dehumanization.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 41:46Chris Duffy?

  And reclaiming dignity and joy and identity feels like such a powerful theme in the stories that you're telling and in your artwork and in the history here.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And I think that's one of the things that I try to intentionally lead with when I'm creating work that doesn't have to do with my grandmother, like my grandmother's collection is just, it's one collection, but it's certainly not the extent of the kind of subject matter that I'm focusing on. I think the first collection that I actually exhibited highlighted professional athletes that use their platform to speak out against social and racial injustice. And so the work that they do, although most of them, I don't think any of them were like visual artists per se, but like people like Muhammad Ali

• 42:42Speaker 04

  or like Serena Williams or Althea Gibson, they were very vocal with their platforms. And a lot of their platform, most of their platforms were gained through their, you know, athletic excellence and their ability to transform that to be a power for the betterment of people that are beyond the sports realm is definitely something that I aspire. It's an effect that I aspire to have in my practice as an artist as well.

• 43:16Chris Duffy?

  Can you give us, let's say, three tips for how you can explore your creativity, explore your play, find some of these venues of self-expression that you have found so much meaning and success in? What are three ways that the people listening can try and kind of put this into place in their own life?

• 43:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think first, identifying the things in your life that you

• 43:42Speaker 04

  Stay away from, but for a bad reason, for not a valid reason. So like, you know, this is a, this is a poor example, but like there are, when I was younger, people would rave about these shows that they were watching. And I would instantly be like, oh no, I'm not, I'm not gonna watch that because everybody else is already doing that. And I, I think that's a silly reason to not watch the show. Yeah. So if you can identify what those things are that you've been consciously avoiding for silly reasons, those are the things that I think you should attack first. And you'll be surprised to find out whatever it is that you like about it. Um, or just to confirm that I actually didn't like it.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  But I think more often than not, when I've spent time in those uh kinds of things that I initially tried to stay away from, I understood why a lot of people loved them so much. And um, I think that's also part of what builds passion is like, it's a shared appreciation. There's a good amount of people that, you know, appreciate all of these different avenues, like art or music or acting, or whatever it is. So I think if you can find something that also has a community that can help to um,

• 45:02Speaker 04

  encourage, you know, your passion and your interest, I think that's, that's really helpful as a first step. Secondly, I also think that people should reevaluate what they already are interested in. Just again, from a different perspective. The first 25 years of my life, I did look at basketball as pretty much something that I just dribbled and shot in a basket. You know, I always saw it as a tool to, to open doors, but from a physical perspective, I only saw it as something that, you know, you could play basketball with. It wasn't until. Maybe five years ago that I was like, let me cut one of these up and put it on a canvas and let's see what that's like.

• 45:46Speaker 04

  And that was life changing. And it was just, it was mind boggling to me because here I was thinking that like I knew everything that there was to know about using a basketball and it's like, I'm wrong. I was wrong. And all I had to do was just reevaluate how I looked at this thing that I had already known for 25 years. So I think everybody should try to take that approach, which is by the way, a playful and open approach to what it is that they already know. So those are probably be my two biggest pieces of advice.

• 46:22Chris Duffy?

  Maxwell Pierce, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for making the time and for being on the show.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  Likewise, Chris. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

• 46:32Chris Duffy?

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Maxwell Pierce. If you want to learn more about how to invite more play into your life, Ted has an entire site dedicated to ideas, practical tips and more that can help you do that. You can learn more by visiting ted.com/play. Again, thank you to Maxwell Pierce. You can find his art and his basketball videos by following him online at Maxwell Pierce. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my book, Humor Me, is out now. You can find out about the book and my live show and all of the other things that I do online at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by the audio equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters. On the TED side, a podcast mic is being spun on the pinky fingers of Daniela Balarezzo, Ben Ben Chen,

• 47:17Chris Duffy?

  Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lot, Tansika Sungmanivong, Antonio Le, and Joseph DeBryan, Ryan Lash alley oops our videos, and Mateus Selis dunks the facts to make sure that everything is correct. On the PRX side, they are the art world elite. The top of the top, the most exclusive audio artists in the world, and they're introducing a new gallery show that's just audio. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and the art world director, Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks so much to you for listening. You are also part of our team and we are so happy to be playing with you. Please send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care.

• 48:08Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today.

• 48:47Chris Duffy?

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