The Handyman of High Art: Tom Sachs On Why Creativity Is The Enemy, Why Talent Is Overrated, & The Disciplines That Define A Life

I make stuff.

“I don't care if it's a painting or a poem or a podcast or a book.”

It's all sculpture to me.

Tom Sachs is an artist. He's a sculptor. He is a designer. The prolific New York-based artist who's worked to find categorization, the very, very human artist.

Beneath that is this idea of the power of storytelling. I despise the elitism of the art world. There should be a sign on every work of art on the wall that says you don't need to read the sign to understand this art. Authenticity is everything.

Artists do not have a corner on creativity. What are the kind of things that I want to make? What are the stories that I want to tell? [MUSIC PLAYING] It's a real honor to have you here.

I wanted to meet you for quite a long time. I've been a fan at Arms Lanks for many years. One of your banger quotes is, if it first you don't succeed, give up immediately. Yes.

So important. So important. And this is, if anything comes from a place of privilege,

it's that because we don't always have time.

Sometimes we have to get through the problem and make a decision. But if we have a little bit of extra time, giving up immediately is the equivalent of sleeping on it. If you have a problem and you sleep on it, sometimes your subconscious mind can work on the problem.

So this is how, if it first you don't succeed, give up immediately it works. Work the problem until you get stuck. Give up immediately and move on to another problem. Another project.

Work that problem until you hit a wall. Move on to the third project. Work that project and problem until you hit that wall. Then circle back to the first one. Your subconscious mind, while it was working on the first two

projects, may have worked on that first one. And you may be able to re-address that problem or wall or crisis or situation through the information that you glean through the hard work and lifting of the second two and loop around.

Of course, it all depends on you having enough time. Like you might be in all night or see might not be able to sleep on it. But what it does is it breaks the reptilian linear thinking and helps turn it into a circular thinking pattern

and the topology and looping around of solving of not knowing the answer and circling around something helps literally circling around the problem helps you see it from different perspectives. You have to indulge the unconscious mind

to solve the problem that your director approach is not able to. And the only way to do that is to redirect your attention onto something else. Yeah, and that's also the power of psychedelics.

I mean, drugs are incredibly powerful, dangerous tool.

But they help us and are really just a window to what we can achieve through work.

“And that's why output before input so important”

because it is a psychedelic state that's naturally made that's not harmful that everyone does every day. But we have to make an effort to prioritize it because we're being blocked by our phone, which is irresistible because it's gotten everything

that we think we want on it or everything that we think we need, everything that we want but nothing that we need. And that perspective shift and the efforts towards non-linear reptilian thinking is an incredible discipline and if we can take the time to do it,

we can achieve so much more and we can cut out so much noise from our life and have the much more gratifying experience. I think the most counterintuitive of your bold statements is creativity is the enemy.

Like that is not a sentence that you would expect to come out of the mouth of any artist. Yeah, and there's nothing, I stand 100% by in that statement. Creativity is absolutely the enemy. But what I mean is eliminate complete indulgence.

Do the work and just do the work. Find the value in the work. Do not change the project, miss midstream. Do not change your intentions, midstream. Otherwise, your boundary of peat past results.

“You must be totally persistent and consistent”

and keep going. Creativity is inevitable, it will come in. But it's kind of like chili pepper. If you put a little bit, it makes it spicy and delicious. But if you put too much, it ruins it.

Yeah, I think the corollary that you've said on this topic is that creativity is not a leading strategy, use only one necessary. So creativity is sort of a byproduct of being engaged in this process.

It will percolate up as a consequence of the doing, but the important piece is like the assembly aspect of it.

It's still a little bit, a little sneak in there.

It's irresistible. But try and eliminate it because that's what we have all these disgusting industrial design, unnecessary curves and things that are designed to sell things.

It takes a great to merit and courage to have something that's less as an industrial designer and industrial design as my hobby.

“The only thing that I do that very few other people do is less.”

That's my one thing. I just try and do less. How do you reconcile the obsessive aspect of your perspective on your work with having a different or an interesting relationship with perfectionism?

Because what you do in the way that you do it

can never be perfect in the conventional wisdom idea

of what that means. I think you just try. I think it's a little, if I'm understanding your question, I think it's a little bit like sports. I mean, you're still mostly failing.

You're just failing a little bit less than the other guy, if you win. And in baseball, if you hit it one out of four times, you're in the major leagues. If you hit one out of five times, you're in the minor leagues.

If you hit it one out of three times, you're like the greatest of all time. They're all still mostly losers. You're still mostly missing it. You're just missing it a little bit less.

But in that world, it's a very objective metric

of success and failure. And what you do is evaluate it subjectively. And you go into these projects like the art you make is the most tactile form of art possible. You approach it with this obsessive kind of perspective.

And yet at the same time, what makes it uniquely you, yours, and uniquely valuable is the human fingerprints that are on it, it's not about creating something with a shiny veneer, as much as it is, an artifact that reveals the process of how it was made.

There's a transparency. If you look at the minutia of your work, you can see how it was assembled and perhaps the mistakes or redirects along the way in order to create it. I'm not sure I'm going to answer it right, but I'll try.

And that's all those failures, those failure points. They have evidence and artifacts. So if I miss this, put a screw in the wrong place and back it out, and there's a hole, and I fill it with resin, that was kind of like a miss.

But I get a little bit of, with style in the way I make things, but I get a little bit of evidence for it. So there's some like credibility, authenticity, artifact from my fuck up.

“And I think that's why I use the athletic analogy,”

'cause it's just about keeping things showing up and just doing kind of the best you can. And the kind of work that I love most is when it shows when those errors and marks show, because in a way it's like an expression that I am somebody

that I was there, that it's got a fingerprint, that it is that I exist versus something, 'cause I found that has no evidence of a human being, being there in any way, including the software. That's its strength, it's lack of humanity.

The way I reflect upon your work is that it is much about what you're trying to express through your art as it is about the art of living. Like I see you as almost, this Werner Herzog of the Art World

who has a lot to say about the art of living. And you have a very specific canon when it comes to how you live a principled life. How do you articulate your overarching life philosophy, which is a big question, I get?

- Well, everything that will follow is laced with paradox. So on one side, I want the finished product to be the best thing it can be.

“But it's also important that the experience”

of making it be rewarding. I have a lot of friends like you who are professional athletes and that's like an apex lifestyle. And engaging the flow state that the athletic flow state in my sculpture or something that I aspire to

and I use all of my efforts to try and put myself into that position, a place where time stands still and I'm only with the materials. And it takes a tremendous effort to get to that place. And there's a lot of bureaucracy and mecan mechanisms

to do especially in sculpture because a sculpture just takes about a moment to conceive

That's why I really believe that you don't need

“a huge studio where the systems all you need”

is a piece of paper and they're just the right pencil. Pentel P209. Because in drawing, the idea happens the fastest. It's instant, it's the fastest possible way including photoshop and procreate in any digital medium

or maybe words, depending on what the idea is. So my goal is just to get as much time and go as deep as I can until like the raw sensuality of making stuff. Also, it doesn't mean shit without a good idea, right?

So there is conceptualizing it and the discipline of the ideas behind it

and making something that resonates first with me.

And then if I'm lucky resonates with the people around me in my studio, my family and friends and then the people who are paying attention enough to this podcast that are listening and aren't clicking away.

And this fear of influence expands farther and maybe perhaps becomes less intense as it gets farther from the core. But as long as the intent is authentic and direct, it's a hard to bungalow good idea.

- Yeah, among the paradoxes, it's sort of a zen coin.

“Like on the one hand, you have to have this very blue collar”

workmanship attitude about the thing that you do. You show up and you do it, you show up on time. You have an organized workspace. You treat it as something that is almost sacred. And yet, at the same time, in order to be able to

kind of fulfill your potential and say the things that you want to say, you have to make room and space to engage with the unconscious, with the organic world. And the messiness of the other aspects of life

that ultimately are informing the expression

that is downstream of the workmanship aspect of what you do. - Yeah, so if you ask any of the people close to me, they'll tell you that I really into the idea of being on time, yet I'm late all the time. And that's the ongoing struggle because,

I think there's no excuse for being late. It's completely rude and disrespectful. The times that I'm late are because I have completely immersed myself in the process and have gone into a different dimension when time doesn't exist.

And I forget, that's not an excuse or an explanation, but that is the paradox, right? Between completely submitting to the subconscious mind

“and not worrying about time, which is important to do.”

And being on time to change diapers and do all the things we have to do in our lives. It's a great paradox, but in our best work lies beyond their ability to understand it. So we must constantly make huge efforts

to engage our subconscious mind and put bills and bookkeeping and feeding your body and all the responsibilities out of your mind so that you can connect with your intuition. And because only through connecting with our intuition

and trusting ourselves, can we have the courage to make just the right wrong decisions? Because that's where the ideas in art really lie. I mean, if it was just engineering, but even in engineering, there's incredible innovation and ideas

that don't exist, people come up with things all the time. The right kind of crazy, just the right wrong thing. But this is why I practiced output before input every day. So before looking at my phone every morning, like everyone else, because I'm completely addicted.

Where is it?

It's over there, I've never said that.

It's okay, I'm not right. I'm only waiting for you, thank you. Before looking at my phone every day, I do output, which is touch clay, write it my journal, draw. Something where the thoughts come out of my mind

through my hands on paper or clay or something. And the reason I do that is because every day, we have a psychedelic experience that's deep and profound, followed by immediate amnesia. And that's called our dream state, sleep.

That's the place where our subconscious mind makes sense of the nonsense of a regular day. There are even some cultures that believe that the dream is the real life in our waking time is the subordinated state.

The truths that come through our dreams help us make sense of the insanity of our everyday lives.

that happen to us every day. There's no way to explain it.

“Why does God let bad things happen to good people”

and good things happen to bad people? We live in a world of this. So our dream state is what makes sense of it. Or we have some problem about some interpersonal thing and our dreams tell us the truth.

Anyway, my strategy always is to immediately access

my subconscious mind upon waking. Even if I'm doing something as non-intellectual is touching clay so that I have a connection with that. Sure, shit, email, Instagram, even online shopping, whatever it will come into my day, it's unavoidable.

But to take a moment to just even mark with your pencil and ex on a piece of paper tells me that for even a moment, I'm better than my device. I can have the discipline that I exist without this thing. Because it's definitely the phone doesn't help my art

in any way. It's a tool, like anything else. It's the best tool ever. I use mine for scraping paint. I love that iPhone that had the edge on it.

The new one's you can't scrape paint as well. It's definitely a hammer.

Always looking for the utility, the hidden utility,

and an object. Like Adam Savage says, if it's in every tool, there's a hammer. Given that your livelihood is contingent upon the health of your imagination and your relationship with your unconscious,

how can you delineate the importance of that

“for the average person who isn't living the artist's life?”

I think it's a good time in this conversation to debunk the bit that different from everyone else. These are all how these are universal problems. Artists do not have a corner on creativity. My lawyer is more creative than most artists that I know.

I know plenty of artists that are not creative at all. They're just really persistent. And that's a form of art, too. I think these strategies that we use in the studio

are universal, output before input works and everyone,

because we all have problems to solve. We all have inspiration. We all have dreams. We all have nightmares. We all have goals. Some of them are met in some aren't.

And the strategies are universal. I think the reason why people look to artists is because what they do is so crazy and doesn't fit. It's so non-forming. So you look at a piece of art and you're like, wow,

this person, her own image Bosch to this insane painting of all these crazy things, it's really inspirational. But it's no different from anybody else. We've all got problems to solve.

I 100% believe that we're all creative beings. And I think in our human proclivity to categorize people and set ourselves apart from other people, this is something that happens a lot with artists. It's like, those are those people.

They were born special. They have a different relationship to the world. And we can admire their work and respect their work and go to museums and see it. But they're not like me.

And I think I've had many people on the show over the years who have done their best to disapuse us of that idea. And yet it's a pretty intransigent kind of notion

“that your life is so different from ours.”

What can we clean from how you see the world that would be applicable to ours? And what you're saying is essentially like, no, it's no different. I've created a career out of it or a profession out of it. But we would all benefit from kind of nourishing ourselves

in this same way. Irrespective of whether you work in a cubicle at an insurance company or you go to a studio like you do every day and screw things together and saw wood and assemble.

But as these pieces, isn't it a lot like regular people and professional athletes? All right, like your professional athlete, not really. No. Wait, how do you say the--

I don't even know, no, I'm definitely not a professional athlete. Ultramarathon. A professional podcaster, at this point. But you've achieved elite status in your athletics and you pursue that and continue to pursue it.

Sure, but if you read Finding Ultra, you know, like I'm constantly banging on about the fact that I don't think that I'm particularly talented at all as an athlete. If there is a kind of attribute that I've taken advantage

of that allowed me to succeed in that realm, it's a certain degree of obsessiveness. But it's not talent. But talent is totally overrated. It's all about persistence.

Like you don't need to be talented to be a great artist

You just have to show up. I mean, talent is one of the attributes and one of the qualities. But if you look at an artist like Richard Sarah, it doesn't scream talent.

It screams tenacity and courage and domination and large S.

But you don't, that's not the first word to come.

I mean, in fact, was also talented,

“but it kind of doesn't matter what matters is persistence.”

And when you do an ultra marathon, which is the craze, you must hate yourself so much to do that. That's not true either. Like there's a joy to it.

You know, there's a joy of indulging your obsessive, you know, tendencies and seeing where they will take you. It's not a sustainable strategy for life, but in temporary doses, you can, you know, discover the outer edge of your potential

on capabilities and that's a beautiful thing. That's art. To me, that's exactly what art is. The outer edge of your capabilities. That defines it better than anything I've ever heard.

Do you think that you have to be on some level and obsessive personality to achieve great things? Because when I think about you and your work, like there is an obsession aspect to your relationship with what you do.

Like there is an obsessiveness.

“And within that, there's also an objective sense”

of like, what is right? Like you pull that your pencil. Like this is the, like, objectively, this is the best pencil. And if you're gonna do this, this is the way you do it.

There are rules, right? That are kind of like locked in. And you have the ability to put these blinders on and apply these rules in a certain way that has allowed you to persevere over many years.

But is that a necessity? - Well, it's something that works for me. I don't know if it's for everyone. And I think the thing that's maybe must be valuable to come away from this podcast

or reading, finding Ultra, reading the Tom Saks guide is, or any self-help book, not that there's strictly self-help books, is that you're seeing the author's perspective. I love self-help books, but they're all whether

it's like Dale Carnegie or my favorite is Uncle Bumblefuck which is A.V.E. Anologue versus Arduino. He's my favorite podcast or he does breakdowns of machines. And he's a smart estate aide on the internet who does, is a probably by trade, he's a hydraulic engineer

for construction equipment, who flies around the world

fixing big machines, but you'll never see his face.

You'll only see his hands in his voice and lives in Canada. And he does this one self-help episode. And he says really clearly, all self-help books are the same. Pick one and stick with it or write your own. It's all about finding your discipline.

I don't think that creativity or obsessiveness are the only ways. For me, I don't know how to define obsessiveness, but I will say this. One of the strategies, one of the 30 things that I do, is before I go into sleep at night,

I meditate into my subconscious, into my sleep, about what I'm going to do tomorrow. And that allows me to sleep really quickly. And I get excited about the next move. So I'm going to make my sculpture the next day.

And that is something that I love to do. And it feeds me emotionally and sets the goal for the next day. And sometimes, if I'm lucky and things go, well, I wake up excited to do that thing. And not always.

How do you make sure that your obsessiveness doesn't start to infect the other aspects of your life that are important in negative ways?

“Well, I mean, I tell you the story about being late, right?”

So that's a, that is a way that it's negative. I'm 59. I've got two kids. That's an image. I have forever a sense of inadequacy.

Now with kids, because I'm never enough time for my children,

never enough time for my studio. There was never enough time for the dentists in the haircut and getting the cat scan of my lungs that I'm supposed to do at the stage. And the colonoscopy and going to the Mayo Clinic

to make sure that everything is going to be as good as it can be for as long as it can be in all the insane opportunities that we have in our lives. I just think that there's no way to win that. There's always something that gets left off the edge.

And I think this is maybe the part of the conversation where I don't really know the answer. But I think it lies somewhere in picking your battles and finding a sense of balance of what's important. And there's no, nothing's perfect.

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- I want to talk about how you got interested in consumerism and aspirational brand iconography as your kind of tabloat. Like everything speaks to our cultural relationship with consumerism and these ubiquitous brands

that we all know and trying to say something very specific about what that relationship means. But what's the origin story?

“Like how did you get interested in this as your subject matter?”

- As a child, the religious experience of my family was consumerism around, I grew up in Westport, Connecticut and affluent suburb of New York City. And the dinner time conversation was, mom's new Laura Ashley Dress, Dad's new use BMW.

If I mode the lawn enough, I could save up my allowance and buy a pair of Nike waffle trainers. That movie American Jigalo had just come out. And this fashion designer, this relatively unknown fashion designer named George E. R. R. Manney made these clothes

for the Richard gear war. And there were these elaborate shots of his closet and it really hills. And people like my father who wanted to aspire to be like Richard gear in American Jigalo.

Took the train in from Manhattan to Barney's New York and bought George E. R. R. R. Manney closed and George E. R. Manney became a gigantic international brand. And the aspiration of the Mercedes SL convertible

that he drove and the whole style was for that generation a real icon of what became Yuppie culture, like the ultimate Yuppie uniform in the whole style. And who sexier than Richard gear to represent those values and decadence and glamour

and murder and intrigue and all that stuff? So that was kind of where I came from and then shortly after in 1984 I was exposed to really the only grassroots art movement

was the American hardcore punk scene,

“which was very anti-consumerist in the values”

of the dead Kennedy's perhaps the most impactful about issuing consumerism and issuing the idea of finding our identity through our consumer products followed by liberal arts education and Marxism. And so it kind of woke both back and forth

where I would find my identity with the kind of labels on the my skis and skateboards and stuff because it was aspirational. You wanted a pair of sneakers. You could play basketball like Michael Jordan

or a skateboard. So you could skate like Mark Gonzalez

and you'd want to get the associated value.

The clothes of Richard gear, the wristwatch of James Bond and then rejecting all of that. And then sort of finding my way back in New York City around the time that you move there, like 89, 91. Working at Barney's New York as a window display artist.

We're wearing punk clothing, being exposed to seeing the beauty of RMS and Chanel and Margella and seeing like virtue in those things.

“And even seeing, I remember being really confused”

going to the Stephen Sprouse boutique in Sohong Green Streets and watching a video of the minute men who were wearing flannel shirts that they'd bought in the thrift shop just like I was wearing in that moment. But then seeing a $600 flannel shirt.

And I was really confused. And it took me years just kind of unpacked that. But I didn't understand that that was cultural appropriation that Stephen Sprouse was stealing the cool from the punk kids who were doing this to be free of that or if you go back

to their origins, they didn't have any money. So they were using safety pins to pin up their clothes and made that a virtue and so if I were one safety pin of a hundred and it became a fashion gesture authentically. So these are some of the things that I was exposed to.

And they were very, very different.

“And I think the kind of big breakthrough for me”

was when I was able to synthesize both perspectives. Like I love the way Chanel makes my wife look really elegant. But it's disgusting how it's advertising can tribute to her body dysmorphia. And by this dress, you know, get the man.

You know, look like this model and you'll be happy. All the lies of advertising is really disgusting and negative. But the same time, things look beautiful and I love high quality things

and because they represent no limits to materials and construction. That's the promise of couture is that the really great things are made like art objects. And if you see a couture dress and the options and the possibilities are, it's no different from what I do.

And even a ready to wear beautifully made piece of like a lia is in my view at the same level as one of my sculptures. This is a different utility and when I work in industrial design capacity,

I'm always trying to deliver best practices

so that the $100 sneaker really can deliver like something of much more cost. And so you can feel a greater connection with your stuff so that maybe you're less likely to meetly throw it in a landfill. Maybe you're more likely to throw in the washing machine

or get new parachute laces or you love it. See, because it's been on a journey with you so you rock the stain or you repair it. - How do you live with those conflicting emotions of allowing yourself to be uplifted and inspired

by something well made that is beautiful? Well, also being repelled or repulsed by the means of production and what that represents in the predatory aspects of that, like how can those two things co-exist and you know, marinate together?

And your work is like an expression of that internal conflict. - Yeah, I mean, I give full credit to the two friends and the great people, the great think, the great French thinkers because they really helped me come to terms of the contradictions.

And I don't just mean like the structuralist writers

but I mean going back to Baudelaire

and the beginning of surrealism where paradox and contradiction are paramount. Walking a lobster on a leash and the tweleries to offend the petite bourgeoisie's hilarious and what a pan of the ass and difficult thing

were making a cup out of fur and imagine drinking out of fur and the disgusting nature of that but then seeing a beautiful cup or just playing a urinal as a fountain calling at fountain. These all of these works of art have this paradox.

Imagine in 1818 going to a fancy art exhibition at the Armory in New York City and seeing a urinal on a table and someone calling at fountain. I was on the front page of the New York Post,

the shock and horror that this was accepted.

And I think that's true today.

“I think that both can be true and it's important.”

- Speaking of shock and horror. So in this early phase of your career, I mean like not for nothing also, like you're also speaking to like the cheekiness and there's a comedic levity also

to some of these pieces that infuses your work. Like it's funny too. - But at the same time, but like take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. - Just go for it.

- That idea of going for it correct me if I'm wrong but that was sort of you are struggling with that idea like you went to London, I think you were still in Bennington and you wanted to London like study architecture and thought maybe I'll be in architect

and there was some point at which your teacher mentor was like let go of this bourgeois idea of like being somebody who's gonna provide for your middle class family

“and like start being an artist and live your life.”

And it seems like he not only encouraged you but that he kind of opened up your eyes that there was another way of living that perhaps was more consistent with the bands that you were seeing at Anthrax, you know,

when you were in high school that spoke to you and changed your lens on like how you wanted to pursue your artistic sensibilities. - Well, that's pretty close to the way it happened. And this might sound like a little bit of a cynical adjustment

to the mythology and that's that I really wanted to provide not just for my family that I didn't have and be a bourgeois contributing member for society but I also felt like it was my duty to make the world a better place.

And when I was living in Tatchers, England which was really broken, it was hard to eat and get through the day and stuff, it was so bleak that at one point, it wasn't a professor, it was my own frustration

with my existence. Then I kind of said, this world is fucked, we're going to hell in a hand basket. I'm just gonna have the best time I can and that's when I really took my heart seriously.

But like sympathetic magic happens, I wound up finding ways of making the world a better place through industrial design and sharing the values of real values of sustainability through my art and making helping myself first

and then hopefully others see how we can embrace paradox and find value and virtue and inspiration behind hard work. So through the back door, I kind of got to my original ideas and also became really bourgeois. So it worked out, he just, you took the around the outside

to get there.

You never really know how it's going to work out.

But you move back to New York and in the early phase of your career, when you're trying to figure it out, like you had always had a job, you were a janitor at Barney's, but you have this opportunity to step in

to designing one of their windows and this becomes like an inflection point. And just for people that don't know, like during this period of time in the late '80s early '90s, like the Barney's window displays were like a big fucking deal.

- There were the best window displays in the world at that time. And also, it's a different time, I'm sure there were great window displays, but we didn't have the internet. So things like Christmas window display,

it might sound really provincial now,

“but I remember one year, I worked there for many years,”

one year, we did like a window display about Prince, the artist. And it was a fantastic Prince Tribute. I did another one about Madonna. Like these were giant dioramas

that we spent months working on. So there were works of commercial art that people would really queue up and look at.

It was a valid art and Andy Warhol did them

“in Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns,”

they all had careers doing that. So walk us through this experience of creating this very transgressive window display. - So I think it was 1995. And also, you have to remember

that we are not at the AIDS pandemic. It was a very scary time and people in my community, especially at Barney's were dying of AIDS and Paris's burning had just come out. It was a very heartbreaking and difficult time.

So there was a holiday window called Red Windows, which was, they asked all these world famous artists to make something to go on the holiday windows

and there was gonna be auctioned off

and the money would go to Little Red Schoolhouse, which is a elementary school on six avenue. And because I'd worked so hard as a window display,

“artists underneath Simon Dunan and Adamo D. Grigario,”

they invited me to participate in this art show, even though I was totally unknown. And I decided to make, because it was like, Christmas windows, a crash. And then the crash was Hello Kitty as Baby Jesus.

Mother Mary was Madonna. It was Hello Kitty, but as Madonna with the sex boostier with six breasts, the three kings were Bart Simpson's. And the crash was inside of a McDonald's. And it was all made out of duct tape.

And I really tried my hardest to make an earnest dichrismist nativity scene. And it was called Hello Kitty nativity scene. So opening night happened, and there were two parties, one for all the elite artists like Bryce Martin,

who, and that was at someone's house. And I was invited to that, and there was this other one for all the windows display artists. So that was on the street, we had hot chocolate. And then the next day, the letter started coming in,

the death threats, the protests, the Catholic League, which was an organization that was anti-gay, that was trying to ban condoms, that was insensitive to the AIDS pandemic, went after us, and said that we were desecrating Christmas.

From my perspective, I was just commenting on the consumerism of this Holy Day. And there were 300 death threats letters. People, I got phone calls, it was very scary. And on the front page of the New York Post,

was away with a manger, it was a picture of the nativity, and Barney's capitulated, and removed it from the show, and offered a full page of apology to all the people who were offended.

And that was kind of the first time that anyone saw my art.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's a perfect setup for the New York Post to make a big stink. And then for the Catholic Church to insert itself into this, in the midst of what was going on culturally in New York City at the time, it's hard

in retrospect, looking back to understand Barney's capitulation to that and the apology that followed. But I think in the context of the time, I mean, I don't know what is your perspective on that now, like it seems like they wanted to take advantage

of kind of the happening artists of the time without having to take responsibility for the message that makes that artist so palpable and relevant. I mean, at the time, that's how I felt. And I still feel that.

I still don't think they took responsibility for it. I mean, art is a hard job. And I wasn't going out to offend a bunch of people. I was even thinking about the possibility of offending anybody. I was just making a pure and true expression

of my experience. And I've been watching the Simpsons a lot. So I was informed by this kind of cultural critique in seasons one through ten.

“And I don't remember what year that was.”

It was probably like seasons six or something or five. If anything, I could be accused of being derivative in my political outlook of Matt Groening and the brain trust that created those years of the Simpsons when they were so good.

And I remember feeling really betrayed because I really put my heart into this thing and I believed in my community at Barney's and the people that I worked with. And I worked with them before and after for years.

It was part of my, that those years in New York City. And it was heartbreaking and also kind of scary. And but people, even in my family were Matt,

That wasn't a priority to be respectful to the degradation of the highest, because Easter is a bigger deal, right? Because of the resurrection. But the birth of Jesus is a pretty big deal on Christianity.

“And that's why we get Kelly Bags and 9/11s”

and sneakers on Christmas, yeah. But this puts you on the map as like New York's new bad boy artists at the time. Does it not? I don't know, it wasn't like that overnight.

But I did my first exhibition about a year later. And at a gallery called Morris Haley Gallery, which was one of the first galleries in Chelsea. And I did my next exhibition there. But it's a gradual, but yeah, I mean,

I think people paid attention. And I guess I'm kind of lucky that my first piece of art that people saw was something that I put a lot of time into. It's essentially just a critique. Like you're just calling out like what it is.

It's like, okay, Christmas is this just capitalistic, kind of like Mad Rush and this ritual

“that we all kind of follow every single year”

is being driven by our consumer impulses at the cost of the sort of real origin story behind it.

Which is an exactly like a revolutionary idea.

No, but it's with you to think back about. If you care about Christianity, like the God's son being born, that's a, and that's like your main like faith myth. That's a big deal.

But I don't think that anyone ever seems to talk about that part. And they're just into the stuff. Mm-hmm, which is the way that you were raised. I mean, didn't give it foster wallace. He said something like, you know,

we all worship something. And essentially, like, consumerism has become our secular religion, that's just a core. That's like the theme of that piece and essentially, so much of your work.

But it's unique to, and it still is. Yeah, still is.

“And so beneath that is this idea of the power of storytelling.”

Because when you, there is nothing like, when you see whether it's that specific color of blue on a Tiffany box or a Nike swoosh or, you know, pick whatever lights you up.

Like, it's amazing how that iconography can communicate

such an exponential emotional response. We associate it in our human brains as something aspirational that we want to embody. And it causes us to spend money in order to get it. Deluding ourselves that if we have it,

that we will then, you know, be able to kind of embody the ideal of what that iconography is trying to communicate to us. And there's nothing else like it, like it is so powerful and it's ability to do that, just a color or a simple, tiny, simple can have that impact on

a single human being and on culture writ large. It's a form of magic. All right, that form of magic is a cousin of sympathetic magic. I mean, but you haven't defined sympathetic magic, though, because this is like a key piece.

I will, but first I just wanted to find another term. It's a little complicated called associated value, which we talked about a minute ago, which is James Bond's wristwatch.

Right, or a pair of, I always think,

the ultimate is a pair of air Jordans, right? Because they're basketball sneakers and they're the same ones that Michael Jordan wears and if you wear them, you can play the promise of advertising, is that you get to play as well as

the best player of his time. And that's a form of magic, because you're buying the association and even MJ had things like that that he would do, like he would wear his special colored socks or two pair of socks because he was insecure about his calves being skinnier,

or whatever little or the red in the black gave him color helped him feel more powerful and confident. And being a pro-artist or athlete or whatever, you have your little rituals that mean something to you and if they work a little, that's a lot,

because the advantage is you just need to have every little advantage you can 'cause you've done everything possible so why not care about your sock color choice, if it matters. - That's associated value.

And so I try and talk about sympathetic magic. So a sympathetic magic has two definitions.

is proximity.

So steel lock of your betrothed hair,

pray to it so they fall in love with you. Eat the heart of your adversary to assume their power. That's proximity's closeness. The other one, the sympathetic magic, is a little more complicated and that's more like

build it and they will come or a voodoo doll or an ex-voto. Build a model of your ailing arm, bring it to your religious practitioner who helps you find ways of praying to that arm, believing that you will heal. If you believe you will not heal,

you will not heal, you will get sick and die. If you believe that you will heal, you might heal. And the idea of possibly achieving something, possibly healing is infinitely better than not healing. So the origin of sympathetic magic,

as I know it is, it was after World War II in Papua New Guinea when some evangelists, anthropologists came to study some Aboriginal folks who were using stone axes and they came with, and the anthropologists and the missionaries came with iron axes

and they traded and the Aboriginal people said, well, what about those metal boxes that you have

“that are powered by propane and you open it and food come out of them?”

And they said, well, those come from the sky, from cargo parachutes and it's called cargo cult, it's what it's called. And they said, well, what, why can't those planes land here? Or those ships that you get stuff from why can't they land here

and they said, well, because you don't have runways and you need big docks for big ships, and they said, well, we'll just build them and the anthropologists laugh and said, you're not going to build runways and they're not going to land on them.

But the local guys built runways and they built control towers and anthropologists came, not to land on them, but to check out these controlled towers and runways and say, wow, they are copying our methods as a religious form of magic and sure enough,

what are the cargo planes bring? They brought iron axes, they brought propane power refrigerators and clothes and all this western goods. So not the thing about magic and any kind of magic,

it doesn't always come out the way you intend.

But sympathetic magic is a way of building something out of faith because you believe in something

“and that's what everything in this book, it's all right.”

Out of faith, but it doesn't always come the way you intend it. Like I didn't expect my art career to take off by building that. I just wanted to make the, I had an opportunity to participate in this thing in my culture and do it with love and I gave 100% to this art piece.

And then did I want to have a gallery, a career showing and galleries and museums like I have now? Of course I did, I didn't understand for a second of that would be the path that wasn't my intention. It was just always do the work and make the world the way you want to be,

make your life the way you want to be and you may succeed or you may die trying, but the operative thing is the work that you do and you can't take that away from me. Or do you or anyone, it's the work. Translation, if you say you're an astronaut, you are an astronaut.

And when Tom Sachs says, I'm going to build my own space program and we're going to go to Mars. This is you practicing sympathetic magic on some level. As Anne, and I do that. Explain it.

It's exactly the same, that's a great, that's a great connection because 20 years later, I'm asked to go to space with SpaceX. I'm asked to go in a lunar mission. Oh, is that right? Yeah, I'm asked to be the unofficial artisan resident

said, so this may actually pan out at some point. I don't even know if it's a priority for me because it's like, yeah, I don't think I really speak to the power of what you're trying to do. Yeah, can't do it. And through my space program, I became the unofficial

artisan residents of the entry descent landing team of Mars 2020, a JPL, which is the most pinnacle elite part of a gigantic scientific entity known as NASA. I got to work with some great folks there. I have a JPL pad here.

Oh, yeah.

I love about your art, is that like you have these incredible pieces

that we can only see in installations or in museums. But you also, you can buy your own like JPL, no pad.

“So why do you make this available for us to buy that?”

So I stole that from Tomasel Rivalini's desk at JPL. Tomasel Rivalini is a very close friend who invented the airbags at Bounce, Pathfinder down to Mars,

if you look Tomasel Rivalini up, and you'll see the patent

“for a Mars landing device entry descent landing device.”

And he and Kevin Han and Adam Stelston are a Greg Vayne, all became friends. But I stole that from Tomasel's desk because Tomasel was kind of like my Michael Jordan. So, Tinker Hatfield, the designer of the Air Jordan,

sort of Michael was Tinker's muse. And Tomasel is my muse. So the shoe, the Mars Yard shoe is for Tomasel to work in the Mars Yard at the Pasadena in Pasadena at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And also for him to go to headquarters in Washington, DC, to sneak around the hallways to try and get funding for the next mission. It's a shoe for both of those realities. So, that JPL note pad is the paper

that the smartest minds on planet Earth,

like the people from Caltech and JPL, the guys who land us another world. And the only people at JPL are the really the only people

“that know how to navigate without satellites”

onto other worlds. Like landing on the moon's pretty easy, because we've got tools to do that. But you've got to be totally self-sufficient and Autonomous Land on Mars.

So it's like, it's pretty high-end stuff. And so that's the paper that you use to think it all up. So if you want your own space program, you better have the right tools. Right, the right pencil and the right pad.

So this pad is then, this is a sacred object in your mind. And it represents something, you know, very meaningful about the human spirit and the, you know, the striving to do something

never before done. Yeah, and it's, I mean, on the back of each of those pages is blank. You can turn it up in a regular paper. But the front of that, and it is, it's a exact reproduction of the paper that they have at JPL.

I added some little information at the bottom about my studio. But it's available on my web store.

“I think it's like 10 bucks or something.”

But my point is, you have the power through that paper to fulfill your dreams. I do, and I use that every day for my to-do list. So every day before, I look at my phone, I write do drawings and lists, and my meditations,

and my dream interpretations, or whatever I want to write down on that paper. I have three meters of binders of just that paper. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. Now, I was reflecting this morning on how my life,

and really the life of my kids, our family, all together. It really just doesn't work without my wife. She quietly carries so much. And I think this is the case for women across the board who go wildly under-appreciated for their gift

to hold space for others while selflessly spinning a zillion other plates at the same time. And that kind of emotional labor is very real. And it deserves care, it deserves support, which is why I'm so bullish on Better Help,

because it provides this place to pause, to reflect on the roles that you're playing and to make space for your own well-being. Better Help connects you with fully licensed therapists, who work according to a strict code of conduct.

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Our youngest goes to school about a three-hour drive from our home in this tiny little town up high in the mountains. So when we drive her back to school or we pick her up for a break, we could do the drive back and forth in the same day. But sometimes I like to stay up in the mountains for a day or two,

either before I pick her up or after I drop her off, just to change my environment, connect with nature, do a little bit of writing and reflection and peace and quiet. And what's great about this little town is that there are all these fantastic, little cozy wooden A-frame homes hidden in the woods to choose from that.

I can book easily on Airbnb that make for this perfect little retreat. I love the lived-in authenticity of these experiences, and it occurred to me that I could actually provide that for someone else.

Not just a place to stay, but access to a personalized experience of a specific place

in a way that no hotel can.

“Hosting is a great way to earn some extra income that can help fund your future trips,”

but you're also giving someone else what you look for when you travel. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com/host. We should clarify for the audience who doesn't know what we're talking about. Tom has created his own space program and done many installations with his creations

and his collaborations with his studio team. You've created your own lunar lander, your rover vehicle. You've got all sorts of elaborate fabrications here to recreate your version of what a space program

“would look like in the Tom-Sax aesthetic.”

Last night, I had the opportunity to go to a screening of a film version that chronicles the Mars Space Program project that you did where you took over the New York Armory and it was an entire operation where you launched these women into space land them on Mars

to be the first women ever done Mars and they go out and they take samples and they return.

It's an unbelievable thing that was directed by Van Neistat, who's here from the podcast. It's quite a remarkable film but also just a remarkable piece of performance art. There's a performance aspect to this aspect of your art that is so incredibly elaborate. Like it must have taken years and years and years to get that to where it was for that to be filmed in that way.

“Yeah, I mean that was 2012 and we had started working on it in 2005, but also drawings of it exist in”

'99 and we're still working on it. We've done five missions, five major missions to the Moon Mars, Europa, Vesta and we've been went to an alien spaceship called Infinity and this is where like the cheekiness comes in. Why is it cheeky? It's real. We don't use the word performance, we say live demonstration of our systems. It might seem cheeky because we use cardboard and duct tape instead of carousine and titanium or whatever, but we have all the same problems and we

have all the same stakes. There's even a moment when in the other NASA where the astronauts landed on the Moon and there was a contingency if the sent engine did not ignite because there was some question about that that the astronauts would be marooned on the Moon. So Nixon hired William Sapphire to write a speech in the event that they were stuck on the Moon and you can Google it. It's out there and so I hired Nixon impersonator to read that speech on video and in the in the

desk at Mission Control we have a DVD of that video. That was kind of the threat to my landing crew, to my astronaut saying if you don't, if you screw up landing with the Atari emulator, we're going to play this video and the Nixon impersonator, the hard did such a terrible job of impersonating Nixon and it's so awful and awkward but it is the correct words that I didn't want it. I didn't want anyone to see the video. I didn't want to show a Nixon William Sapphire arch

right video in my art piece so that was always kind of the threat and in doing this for 20 years

now no one has crashed in a live demo. Tons and practice but no one's crashed yet. So the landing for people that done I mean you literally have that that Atari joystick that we have landed over kids and yeah like you see the screen and it's the video game of the landing coming down and you have to do it just right or it'll cry and it's hard yeah it's not that easy and it's one of the things that the astronauts practice but the the value of this is that we work really hard to

realize these these details to such an extreme degree that the experience for us becomes real and when you're in the fly of demonstration by the way sometimes they're like eight hours long. They're exhausting but you suspend your disbelief and there are stakes and we've had some Apollo 13 moments where we're drilling into an ice pond in the drill got stuck and we had Tomozo Rivlinian and Adam Steltzner on stage screaming like Apollo 13 style like used WD40 on the

give her totally from bright works and San Francisco they're all like screaming and we're arguing

“about how to do this and the drill was stuck in the ice for like two hours and we”

the live demonstration was two hours extra long because we were trying to get it stuck out of the ice and it's no different than guys trying to change a carburetor underneath a shade tree not knowing what they're doing arguing about how to get the car started it was just a bunch of friends arguing about how to solve this problem and the authenticity of that and the boringness of it because it wasn't feared it was feared we'd find a way to make it entertaining

made it real for us and the astronauts had cooling suits and they were getting hot and they had to have ice change in their cooling suits and batteries so that they wouldn't suffocate into these in these airtight suits all create opportunities for us to make the stuff real.

“I think we all grew up watching myth busters a lot and Adam savages are a really good”

friend and the not the idea that it is possible that it's plausible is enough in art to get the idea

across I mean he I think of the martial artist who spent his whole life training and never

gotten to a fight and then one day was it surrounded by a salants in a dark alley and instead of using his martial arts he just faked dodge and ran away and then years later he was on his deathbed contemplating the moment like oh man I could have used my martial arts and kicked those five guys ass or whatever but really what he was his whole life was a student or teacher of this discipline so it doesn't really matter if you think about it if you fly

tomorrow's on a SpaceX mission or whatever or you do all the training it's that's just a few moments in the journey that the journey is all the research the physical fitness the science the the sacrifices that you make to your family for not being there and all that training that's the that's the that's the reward and the collaborative aspect of it I mean as an artist in this studio like you are creating art but you're also you also serve as this teacher and this

mentor for young people and and you're in this collaborative relationship with a lot of people so it's it's kind of multi-dimensional in that regard it isn't just like everybody's showing up and does what Tom wants like there's almost this community aspect to that ecosystem well when it's when the studio's great it's better than what I could do by myself I mean van and I argue endlessly

about details and I don't and we have these wonderful arguments and I don't I'm not always right

I want to win the argument like everyone does but I only care about the best solution the greatest privilege of the studio is working with people who are smarter than I am and where we can use our combined intelligence to find something that's maybe even more authentic than just doing it myself which sounds crazy right but we are community so if it's an expression of the community that is more authentic than me just working alone like Vincent Van Gogh you've said

that the studio is your greatest work of art I think in many ways that's true I mean the relationships the people these shelving systems the libraries of books and tape and other materials it's an ongoing struggle to keep it all organized keeping the flow and eliminating there's some materials

“I really don't like sheet rock so if you don't have sheet rock in your life you have to it's really”

it's tough it gets things get expensive and weird I also don't like molding also don't like the color purple so if you eliminate these kind of basic things that everyone has in your life your life gets more much more interesting and complicated yeah I'd be part of the book which you know we haven't even really gotten into the book specifically but like Tom Sachs guide like it is it is part like what you would expect in an art book with like beautiful photographs of your work

but it's really you know very practical in the sense that you are sharing your wisdom and the principles that you know good like your perspective on life and your work and so there's a functionality and a utility to this book that you don't normally you wouldn't find in a typical art book but that speaks to your art because your art is about utility and function as much as it is about anything else and in the back you have you know kind of this glossary

of you know resources but you even have like your your color palette like these are the colors

obsessive objective like there is a right way to do things in a wrong way to do things and there's

my way of doing things it is book is a lot of things and one of the things that I intended to be is for a guide to a guide to the work not just to me personally but the work that me and the studio have been able to achieve collectively to answer the question of what is this what do we do a lot of this work came out of a book that then I sat and I started called the

“Thompson studio manual which is kind of like a part Emily posts part dictionary um but I think”

that got really too complicated I think a lot of those ideas that we worked on got into spirit demand and um vans movie series and but this is really a guide to all the work and there are 25 essays in here that I worked on with how we con and that the design was by Yeju Choi there are stories of my process so in a way like some of the ideas behind the Thompson studio manual are in here but it's really more about my motivations and methods to achieve and some of the tricks that I've

used to get through the day like when I'm really stuck um I sometimes just take a break and make a lamp that's like one of the one of the because a lamp is like a lower order of things and post with sculpture sculptures or paintings really high like a lamp what is it you do you pull a string and light comes out a chair you put your ass on it a painting or sculpture what do you do you contemplate it that's like a pretty hard thing like what is contemplate mean but a lamp

creates illumination for eating or working or making other art objects and it's utility makes it easier to comprehend but there are still sculpture aspects and um sculptural problems to solve so it's just a way of like uh it's like doing free throws or warming up yeah you're like if you're stuck on a on a problem like build a lamp that's like one of your rules and there's a whole chapter on how that works in here that and that's absolutely it's a

akin to if first you don't succeed give up immediately build a lamp and this a chapter on how I do that

and you know if this part of this is a self-help book I would say like a couple of things might be useful to you finding something in your life not you yeah I highly recommend against doing

“it my way but if you want to yourself you're one of those people for whom it almost doesn't matter”

like what what what the what the piece is like it's so immediately identifiable as yours like there is you know there's just something indelible about your fingerprint on your work where you can see it immediately and identify it which gets into this idea of authenticity the word has kind of like come up a couple times it's one of your three rules for life so I wanted to spend a few minutes talking a little bit more in depth about that particularly as we're you know kind of you know

creating off the cliff of artificial intelligence and what that what that means not just for artists or creative people but for all of us how do you think about authenticity and the importance of authenticity particularly in our digital age and kind of what you know artificial

intelligence is arguing authenticity is everything I remember when Mickey Drexler and I first

became friends it was because of a letter that I wrote to him about authenticity in making military clothes fashionable and the problem without whether it's khakis or cargo pants and it's sort of dialogue for the continues to this day about finding your identity through you the stuff around you right and I make stuff there are three reasons people make things for spirituality sensuality and stuff so spirituality is the big questions are we alone where we come from what

“happens when we die that's what religion and science do sensuality is climbing the highest mountain”

flying to another world the smell of the incense the awe that you feel in a cathedral in the sound of the reverb and that that makes you feel small the the touch of it and the smell of tatami or of matcha and stuff is all the stuff the cathedral itself the rocket ship the charwon table that you drink the the the the the matcha from the crucifix all those things and as a maker I make stuff right like I'm not James Bond I'm cute the guy that

underpinnings without the spirituality like you don't make a cathedral without believing in God

you don't build a spaceship to go to other worlds without trying to understand the importance of reflecting on what we're doing here on earth like these are big questions but nevertheless as individuals we specialize in one of these three categories and for me it's it's stuff making and by coming in terms and accepting that I am not an astronaut I am more the guy that figures out the logistics of all that then I can let go of the ego trip of flying to space

and concentrate on supporting those who do and building good storytelling for them and telling story and help people to see the importance of it we don't go to Mars because we've fucked up planet earth and are looking for a new home by colonizing Mars we go to better understand a resources here on earth and Mars is our sister planet and we can see in Mars

“of distant future of what could be on earth and that's what science does is imperative all that to”

say is that I find my authenticity by really studying and understanding who I am and then the objects that come are an expression of who I am and and I think this goes back to early childhood stuff

where I was always trying to fit in and in high scoring those stupid three quarter length baseball

t-shirts you know with a ringer neck and a different color on the sleeve because of all the kids wore those in painters pants and always feeling like such a douche but like I wanted to fit in because I didn't want to be alienated I wanted to be part of the community and took years to find my own sense of identity through study to to find ways of both dressing myself with clothes that I wear but also finding an expression through my art of what are the kind of things that I want

to make what are the stories that I want to tell like what's authentic and along the way finding all kinds of failure and rejection but learning to tolerate those bad feelings to support what I know is true to me there's the maker who is the you know kind of primary leading you know character

“in the in the multiplicity of Tom Sachs you know personalities but there's also I think”

what I see in your work is a deep reverence and spirituality because the things that you make are almost invariably like some form of altar you know there is a there is a sacred quality to these objects that speaks to the ritual like these workstations or you know the idea of organizing your space like this is all about creating an environment for a transcendent experience and whether that's like the discipline of your work or the higher ambition of we're going to Mars it's all

of a piece with this idea that you know we should have a more reverent relationship with the extensions you know that we use every single day as an expression of our imagination and our discipline and our daily work you have these boom boxes and you have these you know kind of cabinets and the display of televisions for the the Mars program like all these things are they're they're

“sort of cathedrals in their own right I think it's taken a while to find something that's totally”

unpretentious like all the things that I make you can go buy or visit an museum or seeing a book but finding a way to make my own authentic one is the kind of preposterous like everything in this book if you're describing words sounds kind of dumb or remedial but through the execution the work it resonates for me and maybe others with kind of with like the sublime like that might sound like a brag or a flex but that's when it's successful it works but it only comes through being really honest

with what your motivations are so for me when you ask a my studio is the best artwork it's because I spend so much time organizing my tools so that when inspiration strikes I can just go for it and catching the big fish David Lynch talks about when you don't know what to do organize your paint so that when inspiration strikes you don't have to take time go to the store on buy red paint it's just there with your left hand you put it in your right hand you apply in the

canvas because the muse the inspiration is so fleeting so when you don't know what to do when

you've got a writer's block spend time organizing your stuff it's kind of like always be no

so lining everything up in 90 degrees or parallel lines so that it looks clean and organized so that your mind isn't caught up with the mess in front of you sometimes knowing isn't really cleaning

“up at all but it is a form of meditation becoming at one with your environment and I think it's”

it's always worth doing so you can call it OCD or you can call it procrastination or you can call

it warming up like I do this like I am meticulous about this and and there's a reason for it so I made a bet with my son because we're building a Lego set and I'm a few delta Lego set recently not enough like it's older there's always this moment where like fuck those motherfuckers didn't include a black one by one tile and I need it for this move I know they didn't include it and I can't find it anywhere and they never miss it you just misplaced it so I made a deal with it

and I said he's a dad I can't dad I can't find this one by one tile and I said if you looked everywhere and he said yeah and I looked at the table just array a big mess and I said it's there on the table null everything and you'll find it and he said no and I said okay if you know anything everything and it's not there I'll give you a thousand dollars and I was really I was kind of like shedding myself a little bit because because I wasn't I didn't see it either that's a pretty big

incentive for a young person and he know the entire table and he found it and it was there and the

message is always be no link always be no always get your environment perfectly organized and then

things will appear and if you ever do a Lego set it's worth it to null the entire kit and it goes together faster set the environment up that's conducive for the inspiration and the workmanship in advance perfectly said because it's hard making art there's there are problems along the way there are tons of pitfalls and you will get stuck the wall will be there because it's fleeting you get tired you get hungry thirsty and the walls inevitable because you're doing something new

if you had already done it before it would be easy or if someone had already done it before it would be easy to be copying it because it's something new there are inevitable problems and pitfalls

“that you have to work through and it's very very very difficult and we don't give ourselves enough”

credit for how difficult it is and so things like knowing your tools is a way of making it easy or for you to get through something or for when you have just a glimmer of an idea to expand on it like I wonder once I was breaking the hole in concrete and I was hammering and chiseling and I and I was like shit I got to go to home deep on rent one of those giant hammers that are really expensive and I was going to take two hours and my friend Vincent said go get a drill I'm like

I got a drill my drill's not powerful and he's like no a drill is used from Montego Bay a drill's

another word for a chisel I was like no the drill's the machine is like no it's the drill bit and what you're doing is you're drilling I'm like but it's not turning it's still called a drill and I was like okay why and he took it and he put it into the ground and he made a tiny little chip this big like a quarter of an inch with this with this cold chisel and then he went did one next to it he did six or seven hits and then finally he got a hole that was a size of a

quarter and then he built it into hole this big and he with a tiny chisel built a hole out from it just from tenacity and one little point he loaded all of his strength onto one point and finally built a hole big enough and once the hole got big I could build it with a big hammer and a broken part but my point is the trip to home depone back and returning it would have taken three hours or something and he just focused onto something that was really or any hit that

little corner like 20 times before that little chip came out but it worked and and I think that

“it's a great analogy for breaking through the wall it's a tiny little crack that you have to expand”

but you have to have the the tenacity strength and an experience to know how to do it and I didn't know how to do it staying in it and not taking yourself out of it until you see yourself all the way through it with the tools that you have available to you yes but also not being ashamed I was ashamed because I was I'd given up and I was going to go this whimpy way out and go all the way to home depone a rent a drill a jackhammer it seems so dumb and it and it was but this speaks to

this acronym that you have this ISRU idea which stands for in situ resources what's the utilization

be knowing but it's not about going out and getting the tool that you don't have it's about

“using what you have in creative ways it's the idea of like the movie on a low budget that's”

better because it was crafted under constraints right like the creativity comes out of the constraints not out of having all of the resources available to you yes it's another word for bricolage which means to build a repair with available limited resources ISRU is in situ resource utilization and it's a protocol that NASA has been working on since the late 1950s during the invention the Cold War which is instead of bringing the resources of earth to Mars make a machine send it

a generation before the astronauts are born to generate breathable air drinkable water and rocket fuel

for a return trip home run this thing for 50 years and then use it slowly collect the natural

resources come on we're going to camping trip you don't bring a bottle of water you bring a water

“filter and you can drink out of a stream because water's the heaviest thing and you need a lot”

of it when you're camping um I'd say that's the most common ISRU tool but the entire studio is ISRU and everything we do comes from not having resources and scavenging them but then how do you be authentic when you've been doing something for 40 years and you all the sudden you have resources well I would say even the great NASA is underfunded if we had unlimited resources we'd be on your rope and now checking out the octopuses that are swimming beneath the frozen 2 meter thick

crust of the smoothest object known in the universe the planet known as Europa the icy moon of Jupiter but what you get is what you just described is when you when you have your limited resources or you push your resources to the max you start to get artifact evidence think your prints scuffs truths of how the process is made that shows a human being was there so ISRU is a protocol that NASA's use but we also use it in the studio as a way of teaching ritual it's a project that we do and

you can it's a it's an app and you can get it on the app store under Tom Sachs or Google Play or under I say you and it's a game and we do rituals so the idea is to break your habits by building rituals and what it does is help you get in touch with your creativity in a positive way so my number one most famous favorite one is I'm output before input we've spoken about it before so every day before you look at your phone do a drawing build something clay even

image make a mark and take a picture of it and upload it and you get a point for doing it or another one that I like to do is out and back set your watch run for 10 minutes when you when you're watch goes off in 10 minutes mark the ground with chalk or take a photo if you have a

“camera with you or mark it with a stone or just maybe even just look and remember and that's”

called your bingo point bingo point is when the rescue helicopter goes out to see and it uses exactly half its amount of fuel and it has to return back even if they can see the the victims

of the disaster they have to turn back or else everyone dies so that bingo points really critical

and also if you run the same route every day out and back you can measure your speed by how far you travel which is an interesting vector and then so when you get back you I always write in my journal my in my runner's log what I saw the route I take with sneakers I ran with the weather who I was with if I was hungry some any data so I have this beautiful notebook of all the and then those are also available on the web store which is shameless so far there's a self-help

artist but you can read it like you know accountability you know habit building apps when you're not building space programs but you know the irony isn't lost on me that you we are using an app to help you beat yourself on addiction right but we do this so we have a leader board there's a contest and people the top of the leader board have access to by sneakers and other studio stuff so well it's you know it speaks to the core contradiction at the heart

of the work like as much as you have something to say about consumerism you're doing collaborations with brands like Nike like you know you have these this legendary you know kind of like history with them of creating these you know sneaker lines and apparel lines with them so you know while you're also you know kind of speaking about our relationship to you know our spending habits and

also think that you know if if consumerism is our religion it's certainly my religion speak for

“myself then if I'm going to be a critique of consumerism I first for that to be an authentic gesture”

must be a participant and I am an active participant and I do have a car and I do have

sneakers and stuff and I'm very critical of it and I find that as a way to express

my apprehension and bivalence contradiction but with ISRU it's an opportunity to utilize this incredibly powerful storytelling apparatus known as Nike to share conceptual art so for example this semester we're teaching you how to tie knots and take photographs and how to use a first shiki which is a Japanese traditional cloth is used to wrap a gift or to carry something that's too big or dirty to go in your backpack so finding a way with just a regular piece of fabric

to tell a story of carrying something you have furniture designs you're working with all

“different kinds of materials you're working with brands and creating consumer products like”

is there a line between what one would consider you know design industrial design or find art or you not even like think about those distinctions arts a verb and not a noun I don't care if it's a sculpture or a painting or a poem or a podcast or a book or a sneaker or a chair it's all sculpture to me and I think all of those things are very different and they have different qualities and benefits and attributes and advantages and disadvantages and making something in industry

is a lot harder than making something in the studio but you get to make a lot more of them and reach more people than the one off that's in the studio so all these things have different pros and cons but the approach is exactly the same and one of the great things about getting to work with Nike is that it's an amplifier for the values of the studio but on a larger

scale and one of the problems is making sure that we always do that with a degree of authenticity

because the studio's strength is in the handmade and in the one off so finding ways of telling

“that story that's consistent it just takes a little bit extra time that's why we sort of we”

make this ISRU instruction manual to help give you a window into that like not to explain it away but to help give you some inspiration like all the things you can do with a piece of fabric like a hundred different things from one piece of fabric that's those are just suggestions that are probably more well what's great is that you know before the book even begins and guide to the guide you say this is a book about art which is not the same thing as it being an art book it's a guide

it is not for display it takes you places still that it contains some of the art world's patois of pseudo intellectual bullshit could be seen as being inevitable you'll see words like bricolage and re-contextualizing these terms seem pretentious because you rarely need them in every day life but they do clarify with precision the ideas techniques and methods we use all the time or stuck with them oh so there's a resistance to kind of the tropes of the art world and the

pretension you know that you know is you know kind of this environment which you operate that's so off-putting to the average person and makes it difficult for them to connect their own human experience to the expression of you know someone like yourself who's trying to say something relatable and evocative that could be you know revelatory for the observer I despise the elitism of the art world of course a benefit from it because I got to do all this great stuff but it's it's not where

I come from I didn't come from an art family I went to the museum modern art for the first time

when I was in college and it's not where I come from and art still is super alienating and almost art writing is this is going to sound really cynical but it seems to conceal the lack of intelligence of the art writer by using unnecessarily complex words yet I've been really inspired by art there's some artists who have really brought me to great places and I don't mean artists like Velikuti and James Brown and Elephids Gerald I mean weird artists like

Chris Burton and Yoko Ono and you know saw the way conceptual artists but the ideas are for everyone

keep them from reaching mass audience and there's a there's some museums have a pedagogical

department to eliminate that but it seems they're they're more to reinforce it. So I'm always

working very hard in my work to make sure that everyone can understand it there's an incredible essay in here about my my cousin Marty who is a used car salesman from Long Island who said to one of my he said he looked he was looking at a painting of mine that was like a duct tape painting it was made out of it was a monochrome just a square out of cross hatch duct tape and he said Tommy and he was like a kind of like a wise guy like he like talked and acted like

someone from good fellows and he said Tommy I got a personal question for you what does it mean and I found myself fumbling to explain Barnett Newman and the history of abstract expressionism and how the CIA well weaponized abstract expressionism in the Cold War to prove to say things like

“even this ridiculous art is what you can do in America that's how great we are in the whole history”

of abstract art and I realized I completely lost the guy and I what I should have said was something like I just like duct tape I just think it looks cool and I like some things that are simple I'm not sure that would have completely won them over either but it it's hard and I think that was a moment when I really struggled with what art meant to me but I also remember when John Michel Basquiat was alive it was I loved his art but people just thought it was garbage now there's almost like

nothing more expensive than that and so but it took time for what he was doing to be assimilated by the mainstream for graffiti to be a sanctioned activity for skateboarding to be not a crime it takes it takes time but I'm impatient so I want that to happen now and that's why I work really hard to make these ideas accessible and to not use fancy art words I love art theory I grew up with it it's how I found my calling by reading and seeing is forgetting the name

of the thing that one sees by Lawrence Wechler or a reading Clement Greenberg or Rosslyn Kraussies are like really difficult things to work you way through their their books but unlike this with pictures they've got words in them I don't know if we even read anymore but those are the kind of books that really help me to like get excited about making things and for the person who has the average person who has the you know kind of arms length relationship with art maybe a couple times a year they

go to a museum or when they're you know on vacation they go to the museum and whatever city they're in and that's kind of it what is the message that you want to convey or the call the action

around the urgency or the the importance of having a relationship with art I think the first thing is

there should be a sign on every work of art on the wall that says you don't need to read the sign to understand this art and when we go and we see people looking at the the explanation because art is so be well-during that it's it makes it even more difficult to penetrate

“yeah because you have to read an interpretation of the thing look at the thing”

see if you if even lines up with your perception of it you're you're immediately confused and we're tough to say if you want to confuse someone project the words onto the wall and read them out loud at the same time they will not be able to read it or hear your voice you can say the words and have a picture of something else to evoke a feeling but if you do both you will lose them and it's something that happens in every PowerPoint presentation everywhere

throughout the world it's the most moronic thing ever and we've all experienced as people

please stop doing this I would say that's the most important thing I don't use wall text and sometimes

in museums I'm sort of kind of so it's a battle because the pedagogical department wants that because art is extremely threatening because it's a non-compliant experience it doesn't fit in you go to this museum where you know art goes to die but it's there's no other place to see these non-compliant objects which are very important because they'd expand or understanding

“of um what something can be and I think one of the reasons why I love the art of Yokohono”

is because you can't buy it there's nothing ever for sale you might be able to buy a book about

ideas and it's exists without the economic um constraint and even if you look at the great

“Pablo Picasso he was perhaps the ultimate art world artist because his things existed in his time”

as like money you know that they were bought and sold but not to diminish the quality of what he achieved on the canvas but um they were consumer objects from from the very beginning where is all your stuff like where is the lunar land where are all these things live like where do you keep all this shit um well a lot of it isn't my responsibility anymore it's out there and in public and private collections globally but a lot of it is in the University Indiana Jones

the first one and at the end they put the um the arc of the covenant in this giant warehouse

in the end and it goes on forever I've got to I've got six oh you do okay because I'm really focused on building things that I want to build and the space program is in dry dock in Philadelphia right now and it's it's and we go back into it and work on it and prepare for the next mission is there gonna be another space mission I hope not but you know we you know they say about leadership in the other NASA those who command missions are usually not the ones who desire to command them

they're just the ones who are best suited to do it so it's like you can it's just sometimes it's just inevitable I don't know I want to end with one of your 10 bullets for life now this is this is a like a laptop bag made out of this is Tydeck right it's a it's a cousin of Tydeck called Dinima don't you it's another flash spun of non fabric fabric super strong

“waterproof that is the best laptop bag ever because and I think they're probably like six of them”

left on the website I got one of your website but I knew they were I got this I got this a while ago but I don't know if they're still available I don't know what's there are a couple left there play six left but they're so special because it's the only laptop it's a lightest laptop bag ever and someone might say but there's no padding and my answer is of course it's not padding it's a $6,000 super computer like don't drop it protect it with your life put it

inside of another bag I just like how excited you got like when I pulled this out and you looked at it and you're like you're like oh you know and it's the white is the white one which is

it's basically it's translucent material so you can see your computer through it I brought it

out though because it has a patch on it and on this patch are these 10 bullets and each one of these bullets represents one of your you know kind of principles for life or rules for life and you know we've kind of danced around a bunch of them when we're not gonna go all the way through them but I wanted to end this with one of them which is persistence yeah I don't think that's a good way to kind of take us out if I wanted people watching this to take anything away from this I would say

buy this book because it's good to you you capitalist yeah of course get your plug in yeah I would say buy this book because it's the story of how I did it but use it to find how you did it and don't keep buying self-help books just by one and right your own this is my version of that I'm gonna end with a quote nothing can take the place of persistence talent will not nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent genius will not unrewarded genius is

almost a proverb education will not the world is filled with educated derelicts

“persistence and determination alone are omnipotent I love it man I think it's a fantastic”

way to put a pin on it for today man I appreciate you you're a legend you're an icon a real privilege and an honor to spend time with you my friend thanks Rich yeah I appreciate the time the Tom Sachs guide available everywhere follow Tom on Instagram are you still like out on book tour for a while or what's the what's your next I'm not sure when this air is but we're on book tour now we're in Los Angeles and I feel like book tours forever so find him on Instagram

if you want to maybe if there's a few laptop bags left or JPL pads you can go to Tom's website

it's a way of using the phone to work on yourself on addiction which is which is the pandemic

“really is how much time and energy we're spending on the device and it's you know the irony of”

using a phone to deal with your phone addiction isn't lost on me but it is a window to what you can achieve through work hmm alright thanks man thanks so good to have you thanks again thank sure's base all right everybody that's it for today thank you so much for listening I really do hope

“that you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources”

related to everything discussed today visit today's episode page at ritual.com where you will find the entire podcast archive as well as my books finding ultra the voicing change series and the plant power away if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do

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