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

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Tom Sachs is a contemporary artist and cultural provocateur known for turning branded consumer objects into high art. This conversation explores the paradoxes that define Tom's art and his iconoclastic philosophy of living; why creativity is the enemy, the power of sympathetic magic, consumerism as secular religion, the infamous Barney's nativity scene that launched his career, and why persistence — not talent — is omnipotent. And in doing so, Tom dismantles the intransigent myth that artists are a different species and makes a compelling case that we're all creative beings irrespective of what we do for a living. Tom is equal parts Werner Herzog and blue-collar craftsman. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up  Today's Sponsors: Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.com Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRoll BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF the first month👉🏼https://www.betterhelp.com/richroll Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at👉🏼https://www.airbnb.com/host  Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors  Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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 Sacks is an artist. He's a sculptor. He is a designer. The prolific New York-based artist whose work defies 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 story. 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?

It's a real honor to have you here. I've wanted to meet you for quite a long time. I've been a fan at arm's length for many years. One of your banger quotes is, if at 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 at 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 readdress that problem or wall or crisis or situation

through the information that you glean through the hard work and lifting of the second two when you loop around. of course it all depends on you having enough time it might be an all-nighter so you 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 tautology 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 direct 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 is 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 got everything that we think we want on it or everything that we think we need and 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 cut out so much noise from our life and have a 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 mess. mouth of any artist. Yeah, and there's nothing, I stand 100% behind that statement. Creativity is absolutely the enemy. But what I mean is eliminate caprice, indulgence.

Do the work and just do the work. Find the value in the work. Do not change the project midstream. Do not change your intentions midstream. Otherwise, you're bound to repeat 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 when 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.

Yeah, I mean, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Like, just a little bit, a little bit. It'll sneak in there. It's irresistible. But try and eliminate it, because that's why we have all these disgusting industrial design, unnecessary curves and things that are designed to sell things. It takes a great temerity and courage to have something.

thing that's less. As an industrial designer and an industrial design is 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 that 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 like perfect in the kind of conventional wisdom, you know, idea of what that, of what that means. I think you just try. I think it's a little, if I'm understanding your question, right, 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 league. If you had it 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 evaluated subjectively. And you go into these projects. 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 footprints that are on it.

Like, it's not about, like, creating something with a shiny veneer as much as it is an artifact that reveals the, you know, the process of how it was made. Like, there's a transparency. Like, 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 artifact. So if I miss a, 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 the style in the way I make things but I get a little bit of evidence for it so there's some credibility authenticity artifact from my fuck up and I think that's why I use the athletic analogy because it's just about keeping 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 like an iPhone 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 as 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 apex lifestyle. And engaging the flow state, the athletic flow state in my sculpture is 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 mechanisms to do that,

especially in sculpture, because a sculpture just takes but a moment to conceive and then many, many, man hours to execute. That's why I really believe that you don't need a huge studio, with assistance, 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 into 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 it 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 the sphere 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 hard to bungle a good idea. Yeah, among the paradoxes are, it's sort of a Zen Cohen. 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, workspace, you treat it as something that is almost sacred, and yet at the same time, in order to be able to, you know, 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, you know, with the organic world and the messiness of the other aspects of life that ultimately are informing the expression that is kind of 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 an 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 where 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 an artist's 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 practice 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'm nervous about it.

I know, right. It'll be waiting for you. Thank you. Before looking at my phone every day, I do output, which is touch clay, write in my journal, draw, something where the thoughts come out of my mind

through my hands onto 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 our regular day. There are even some cultures that believe that the dream is the real life, and 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. When we think about the wonderful and horrible things

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 how we make 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 as touching clay, so that I have a connection with that. Sure is shit. Email, Instagram, even online shopping, whatever, it'll come into my day. It's unavoidable. But to take a moment to just even mark with your pencil an X 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 and it's the best tool ever. I use mine for scraping paint. I love that iPhone that had the edge on it. The new ones you can't scrape paint as well.

It's definitely a hammer. Always looking for the utility, the hidden utility in an object. Like Adam Savage says, within 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 myth that I'm different from everyone. else. We all have these, 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 on 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 and 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-conforming.

So you look at a piece of art and you're like, wow, this person, Hieronymus Bosch, did 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, you know, 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 disabuse us of that idea. And yet it's a pretty intransigent kind of like notion that like your life is so different from ours, like what can we glean 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, you know, 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, you know, screw things together and, you know, saw wood and assemble these pieces. Isn't it a lot like regular people and professional athletes, right? Like, you're a professional athlete. Not really. No. Wait.

How do you say that? I don't even know. No, I'm definitely not a professional athlete. Ultramarathon. 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,

I'm constantly banging on about the fact that, like, 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, talent is, is it over, is totally overrated. It's all about persistence.

Like, you don't need to be talented to be a great artist or athlete. You just have to show up. I mean, talent is one of the attributes and one of the qualities. But if you look at like an artist like Richard Serra, it doesn't scream talent. It screams tenacity and courage and domination and, and largesse. But you don't, that's not the first word that comes. I mean, in fact, was also talented,

but it kind of doesn't matter. What matters is persistence. And when you do an ultramarathon, which is the crazy, you must hate yourself so much in order to do that. But 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 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 an 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, like, an objective sense of, like, what is right? Like, you pulled out your pencil.

Like, this is the pen... Objectively, this is the best pencil. And if you're going to 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 most valuable to come away from this podcast or finding Ultra or reading the Tom Sacks 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. outbooks, but they're all, whether it's like Dale Carnegie or my favorite is Uncle Bumblefuck, which is AVE Analog versus Arduino. He's my favorite podcaster. He does breakdowns of machines. And he's the smartest idiot on the internet who does. He's 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 only see his hands in his voice. He lives in Canada. And he does this, there's 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 like the 30 things that I do is before going to sleep, at night, I meditate into my subconscious, into my sleep about what I'm gonna do tomorrow. And that lulls me to sleep really quickly, and I get excited about the kind of the next moves I'm gonna make in 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, 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 told you the story about being late, right? So that is a way that's negative.

I'm 59. I've got two kids. With the same age. I have forever a sense of inadequacy now with kids because I'm never enough of a, enough time for my children, never enough time for my studio. There's never enough time for the dentist and the haircut and getting the cat scan of my lungs that I'm supposed to do at this age and the colonoscopy and going to the Mayo Clinic to make sure that everything's going to be as good as it can be for as long as it can be. And 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. This episode is sponsored by Rivian. Our phones get better over time. Our watches do. Even our thermostats do. There's no reason why our cars shouldn't. And That's one of the things that really sets Rivian apart. These are deeply intelligent, connected vehicles that evolve over time through over-the-air updates. One day, it's a refined interface.

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So go to c.com slash richroll and use code Richroll 20 for 20% off your first month of DSO1. I want to talk about how you got interested in consumerism and aspirational brand iconography as like your kind of tablo. 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. I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, an affluent suburb of New York City. And the dinnertime conversation was mom's new laura ashley dress dad's new use bmw if i mowed the lawn

enough i could save up my allowance and buy a pair of nike waffle trainers that movie american jigolo had just come out and there was a this uh fashion designer this relatively unknown fashion designer named georgia Armani made these clothes that Richard Gere wore, and there were these elaborate shots of his closet in Beverly Hills. And people like my father, who aspired to be like Richard Gere and American Gigolo, took the train in from Manhattan to Barney's, New York, and bought Georgia Armani clothes, and Georgia Armani 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's sexier than Richard Gear to represent those values,

decadence and glamour and murder and intrigue and all of 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 that I've been really connected with. Well, at the time was the American hardcore punk scene, which was very anti-consumerist and the values of the dead candidates, 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 wove broke both back and forth where I would find my identity with the kind of labels on 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 those,

that's called 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 moved there, like 89, 91, working at Barney's New York as a window display artist, wearing punk clothing,

being exposed to seeing the beauty of Hermes and Chanel and Margella and seeing virtue and those things. And even seeing, I remember being really confused going to the Stephen Spouse boutique in So on Green Streets and watching a video of the Minutemen 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 to kind of unpack that. But I didn't understand that that was cultural appropriation, that Steven Spouse 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 instead of every one safety pin have 100.

And it became a fashion, a gesture authentically. So these are kind of some of the things that I was exposed to, and they're very, very different. And I think the kind of big breakthrough for me was when I was able to synthesize both perspectives. I love the way Chanel makes my wife look and really elegant, but it's disgusting how its advertising contributes to her body dysmorphia. And buy this dress, you'll get the man,

look like this model, and you'll be happy. All the lies of advertising is really disgusting and negative. But at 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 no different from what I do. And even a ready-to-wear beautifully made piece of, like, is in my view 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 immediately throw it in a landfill. you're more likely to throw in the washing machine or get a new pair of shoe laces or you love it so you

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 while also being repelled or repulsed by the means of production and what that represents and the predatory aspects of that. Like, how can those two things coexist and, you know, marinate together? And your work is like an expression of that internal conflict. Yeah, I mean, I give full credit to France and the great people, 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 of the 70s like Roland Bart and Foucault, but I mean going back to Baudelaire and the beginning of surrealism, where paradox and contradiction are paramount. You know, walking a lobster on a leash and the touleries to offend the petite bourgeoisie is hilarious. And what a pain in the ass and difficult thing. or 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 displaying a urinal as a fountain, calling it fountain. All of these works of art have this paradox to them. Imagine in 1918 going to a fancy art exhibition at the armory in New York City and seeing a urinal on a table

and someone calling it fountain. It was on the front page of the New York. 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. Well, you're at the same time. But like take care of the luxuries, 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 were struggling with that idea. Like you were, you went to London, I think you were still in Bennington and you wanted to London to like study architecture and thought maybe I'll be an architect.

And there was some point at which your teacher or mentor was like, let go. of this bourgeois idea of like being somebody who's going to 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. 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 of society, but I also felt like it was my duty to make the world a better place. And when I was living in Thatcher's 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 of my existence, then I kind of said, this world is fucked, we're going to hell in a hand basket, I'm just going to have the best time I can,

and that's when I really took my art 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.

I mean, you never, That's the thing. You never really know how it's going to turn 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 all these odd jobs, you were a janitor at Barneys. 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 like window displays were like a big. fucking deal. There were the best window displays in the world at that time. And also it was a different time. I'm sure there were great window displays, but we didn't have the internet. So things like a Christmas window display, it might sound really provincial now, but I remember

one year, I worked there for many years, one years, we did like a window display about Prince, the artist. And it was a fantastic Prince tribute. I did another one about Madonna. 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. People took it really seriously. It was a valid art. And Andy Warhol did them and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. They all had careers doing that. So walk us through this experience of creating

this very transgressive windows display. So I think it was 1995 and also you have to remember that we are in the height of the AIDS pandemic. It was a very scary time and people in my community especially at Barneys were dying of AIDS and

Paris's burning had just come out. It was like a 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 in the holiday windows and there was going to be auctioned off and the money would go to Little Red Schoolhouse, which is a elementary school on 6th Avenue. And because I'd worked so hard as a window display artist underneath Simon Dunin and Adamo DiGrigario, 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, was Hello Kitty, but as Madonna with the sex boostier with six breasts. The three kings were Bart Simpsons. 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 Christmas 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, and that was at someone's house. And I was invited to that. And there was this other one for all like the window display artists that was on the street. And 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 the, this holy day. And there were 300 death threat letters. 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 apology to all the people that 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, you know, 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 just, it's, it's hard in retrospect looking back to, you know, 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, you know, kind of the happening artists of the time without having to take responsibility for the message that makes that artist so, you know, 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 wasn't even thinking about the possibility of. offending anybody. I was just making a pure and true expression of my experience. And I'd been watching The Simpsons a lot, so I was informed by this kind of cultural critique in seasons one through

10. And we were, I don't remember what year that was. It was probably like season six or something or five. If anything, I could be accused of being a 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 Barneys and the people that I worked with. And I worked with them before and after for years. It was part of those years in New York City. And it was heartbreaking and also kind of scary.

But people even in my family were mad. They said that I wasn't respectful. to, which I wasn't. That wasn't a priority to be respectful to the degradation of the highest. I guess Easter is a bigger deal, right, because it's 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 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 Healy 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. Yeah.

It's essentially just a critique. Like, you're just calling out what it is. It's like, okay, Christmas is this just, you know, capitalistic, you know, kind of like mad rush. And this ritual that we all kind of like follow every single year is being driven by our consumer impulses at the cost of, you know, the sort of real origin story behind it. Which isn't exactly like a revolutionary idea.

No, but if you think back about it, if you care about Christianity, God's son being born, and that's like your main 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. Which is the way that you were raised. I mean, didn't David Foster Wallace, He said something like, you know, we all worship something.

And essentially, like, consumerism has become our secular religion. Yeah. Which is a core. That's like the theme of that piece and essentially so much of your work. But it speaks to go ahead. And it still is. Yeah, still is. And so beneath that is this idea of the, you know, 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 pick whatever lights you up. 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 sort,

spend money in order to get it, diluting 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 in its ability to do that. Just a color or a simple, tiny symbol can have that impact on a single human being and on culture writ large. it's a form of magic that form of magic it's a cousin of sympathetic magic

I call it as you haven't defined sympathetic magic though because this is like a key piece I will but first I just want to define another term that'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 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 skinny, or whatever little or the red and the black gave him, color helped to 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 because you've done everything

possible. So why not care about your sock color choice if it matters? That's associated value. And should I try talk about sympathetic magic? So sympathetic magic has two definitions.

The first one, I'm not sure if it's the first or the second, is proximity. So steal 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, it's closeness. The other one, the sympathetic magic that 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, 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 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 they those come from the sky from cargo parachutes and it's called cargo cult is what this is called but and they said well what why can't those planes land here or those ships that you get stuff from, why can 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 laughed 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 control towers and runways and say, wow, they are copying our methods as a religious form of magic. And sure enough, what do the cargo planes bring? They brought iron axes. They brought propane-powered refrigerators and clothes and all this Western goods. So 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 out of faith. But it doesn't always come the way you intended. 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 in galleries and museums? Like, I have now, of course I did. I didn't understand for a second that 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 Sack 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. And I do that for... So explain that. It's exactly the same. That's a good. That's a great connection because 20 years later, I'm asked to go to space with SpaceX. I'm asked to go on a lunar mission. Oh, is that right? Yeah, I'm asked to be the unofficial artist and residence set. 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, I don't think I really...

But it speaks to the power of what you're trying to communicate. And through my space program, I became the unofficial artist and residence of the entry descent landing team of Mars, 2020 at 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. What I love about your art is that you have these incredible pieces that we can only see in installations or in museums, but you also can buy your own like JPL no pad. So why is this so like, why do you make this available for us to buy, Tom?

So I stole that from Tomazzo Rivalini's desk. at JPL. Tamaza Rivalini is a very close friend who invented the airbags that bounced Pathliner down to Mars and the sky crane that lowers the...

If you look Tamaza Rivolini up and you'll see the patent for a Mars landing device, entry descent landing device. And he and Kevin Han and Adam Stelster and Greg Vane all became friends. But I stole that from Tamazzo's desk

because Tamazzo is kind of like Michael Jordan, so Tinker Hatfield, the designer of the Air Jordan, sort of Michael was Tinker's muse. And Tamazo is my muse. So the shoe, the Mars yard shoe, is for Tamazo 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, D.C., to sneak around the hallways to try and get fun. for the next mission. It's a shoe for both of those realities. So that JPL notepad is the paper that the smartest minds on planet Earth, right? Like the people from Caltech and JPL, the guys who land us in other worlds. And they're the only people at JPL are they're 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 got it 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 path. So this is, this pad is then, this is a sacred object in your mind. And I use,

it represents something, you know, very meaningful about, uh, 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 and it's regular paper. But the front of that, and it is, it's an 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 lists. 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. And I have three meters of binders of just that paper. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, I was reflecting this morning on how my life and really the life of my kids, our family altogether. 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 underappreciated 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 BetterHelp, 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. BetterHelp connects you with fully licensed therapists who work according to a strict code of conduct. They start by asking a few simple questions to understand what you're looking for, and they handle the initial matching so you can focus on your goals. If the fit isn't right,

you can switch to a different therapist at any time. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the largest online therapy platform in the world, having served more than 6 million people with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Your emotional well-being matters. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash richroll. That's BetterHELP.com slash rich roll. Our youngest goes to school about a three-hour drive from her 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. That's what you're really offering when you host your home on Airbnb, 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 slash host. We should clarify for the audience who doesn't know what we're talking about that 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 Sacks 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 launch these women into space, land them on Mars to be the first women ever to land on Mars, and they go out and they take samples and they return. It's like, it's an unbelievable thing that was directed by Van Nystad, who's here, friend of the podcast. It's quite a remarkable film, but also like just a remarkable piece of performance art. Like, 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. to 99, and we're still working on it. We've done five missions, five major missions, to the moon, Mars, Europa, Vesta, and we even went to an alien spaceship called Infinity. And this is where, like, the cheekiness comes in.

Why is it cheeky? It's real. I mean, we take... 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 kerosene 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 ascent 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 a Nixon impersonator to read that speech on video. And 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 astronauts

saying if you don't, if you screw up the landing with the Atari emulator, we're going to play this video. And the Nixon impersonator that I hired 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 anyone to see the video I didn't want to show a Nixon William Sapphire Archwright 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 in practice but no one's crashed yet

So the landing for people that don't, I mean, you literally have that Atari joystick that we had when we were 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 crash. And it's hard. It's not that easy. And it's one of the things that the astronauts practice. But the value of this is that we work really hard to realize these details to such an extent. to such an extreme degree that the experience for us becomes real. And when you're in the live 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 and the drill got stuck. And we had Tamazo Rivlini and Adam Steltsner on stage screaming like Apollo 13 style,

like use WD40 on the ice. Well, you actually had the real deal. JPL people. Because they're friends, they happen to be in the front row. And Giever Tully from Brightworks in San Francisco, they were all like screaming and we were arguing about how to do this. And the drill was stuck in the ice for like two hours. And 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 theater, if it was theater, 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 changed in their cooling suits and batteries so that they wouldn't suffocate into these airtight suits. All create opportunities for us to make the stuff real. I think we all grew up watching MythBus a lot and Adam Savage is 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 the I think of the martial artist who spent his whole life training and never got into a fight and then one day was a surrounded by

assailants in a dark alley and instead of using his martial arts he just fake 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 to Mars on a SpaceX mission or whatever, or you do all the training. That's just a few moments in the journey. The journey is all the research, the physical fitness, the science, the sacrifices that you make to your family for not being there and all that training. 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 also serve as this teacher and this mentor for young people, and you're in this collaborative relationship with a lot of people. So it's kind of multidimensional 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 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, you know, 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 a 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 great, 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 sheetrock. 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. I 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 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 Sack's Guide, like, 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, gird 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. the back, you have, you know, kind of this glossary of, you know, resources, but you even have,

like, your color palette and, like, these are the colors I like, and these are the colors that are off limit. And, like, you know, that gets to that kind of obsessive objective. Like, there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things, and there's my way of doing things. This book is a lot of things. And one of the things that I intended to be is 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 Van Nystad and I started called the Tom Sucks Studio manual, which is kind of like a part Emily Post, part dictionary. But I think that got really

too complicated. I think a lot of those ideas that we worked on got into Spirited Man and Van's movie series. But this is really a guide to all the work and there are 25 essays in here

that I worked on with Howie Khan and the design was by Yeju Choi. There are stories of my process. So in a way, some of the ideas behind the TomSack Studio manual are in here but it's really more about my motivation. and methods to achieve.

And some of the tricks that I've used to get through the day, like when I'm really stuck, I sometimes just take a break and make a lamp. That's like one of the, because a lamp is like a lower order of thing imposed to a sculpture. Sculpture is a painting is 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 a sculpture, what do you do? You contemplate it. That's like a pretty hard thing. Like what does contemplate mean? but a lamp creates illumination for eating or working or making other art objects. And its utility makes it easier to comprehend, but there are still sculptural aspects and sculptural problems to solve.

So it's just a way of like doing free throws or warming up. Yeah, if you're stuck 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. And it's akin to at first you don't succeed, give up immediately, build a lamp. And there's 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 that you should, 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. 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 kind of careening off the cliff of artificial intelligence and 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 artificial intelligence is auguring? Authenticity is everything. I remember when Mickey Drexel, 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 with that, whether it's khakis or cargo pants. And it started a dialogue that continues to this day about finding your identity through 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 do 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 and the sound of the reverb that makes you feel small, the touch of a, and the smell of tatami or of macha and stuff is all the stuff the cathedral itself the rocket ship the chawang tea bowl that you drink 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 q the guy that makes all the cool gadgets and stuff but it doesn't mean shit without the philosophical underpinnings without the spirituality 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. These are big questions. But nevertheless, as individuals, we specialize in one of these three categories. And for me, it's stuff making. And by coming to terms and accepting that I am not an astronaut, I am more the guy that figures out the legit.

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 a 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 our 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. It's comparative. All that to say is 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 I think this goes back to early childhood stuff where I was always trying to fit in and high school wearing those stupid three-quarter-length baseball t-shirts with a ringer neck and a different color on the sleeve because all the kids wore those in painter's 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 it took years to find my own sense of identity through study 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 kind of primary leading character in the multiplicity of Tom Sacks' 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 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 world. 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 boomboxes and you have these, you know, kind of cabinets and the display of televisions for the the Mars program, like all of these things are, 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 in a museum or see in a book, but finding a way to make my own authentic. One is kind of preposterous. Like, everything in this book, if you're to describe it in 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. 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, my studio is the best artwork, it's because I spend so much time organizing my tools. 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 and buy red paint. It's just there with your left hand, you put it in your right hand, you apply it 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 noling, is your version of of that. Explain what that means. So nolling is just organizing your tools. 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 nolling isn't really cleaning up at all, but it is a form of meditation and becoming at one with your environment. And I think it's always worth doing so. I mean, you could 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 there's a reason for it. So I made a bet with my son, because we're building a Lego set, and I don't know if you've built a Lego set recently. Not enough. My kids are older.

There's always this moment where you're like, fuck, those motherfuckers didn't include a black one-by-one tile that 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 him. I said, he's like, Dad, I can't, Dad-da, I can't find this one-by-one tile. And I said, have you looked everywhere? And he said, yeah. And I looked at the table, it's just array, a big mess. And I said, it's there on the table,

null everything. And you'll find it and he's like no. And I said, okay, if you know anything, everything and it's not there, I'll give you $1,000. And I was really, I was kind of like shitting myself a little bit because I, because I wasn't, I didn't see it either. That's a pretty big incentive for a young person. And he knolled the entire table and he found it. And it was there. And the message is, always be knolling.

Always be knowing. 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 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 wall is 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. You'd just be copying it. But 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 gnauling your tools is a way of making it easier for you to get through something or for when you have just a glimmer of an idea to expand on it. I remember once I was breaking all, hole in concrete and I was hammering and chisling and I and I was like shit I got to go to

Home Depot and rent one of those giant hammers that are really expensive and it was like 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 enough he's like no a drill is he's from Montego Bay a drill is another word for a chisel and I was like no the drill is the machine he's 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 like, it's still called a drill.

And I was like, okay, why? And he took it and he put it onto the ground and he made a tiny little chip this big, like a quarter of an inch with this cold chisel. And then he did one next to it. He did six or seven hits. And then finally he got a hole that was the size of a quarter. And then he built it into a hole this big. And he, with a tiny chisel, built a hole out from a,

just from tenacity in one little point. He loaded all of his strength onto one point and finally built a hole big enough. Once the whole got big, I could hit it with a big hammer and it broke apart. But my point is the trip to home depot and back and returning it

would have taken three hours or something. And he just focused onto something that was really hard. And he hit that little corner like 20 times before that little chip came out. But it worked. And I think that'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 tenacity, strength, and 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'd given up and I was going to go this wimpy way out and go all the way to Home Depot to rent a drill, a jackhammer. It seems so dumb. And it was.

But this speaks to this acronym that you have, this ISRU idea, which stands for in situ resources. Utilization. Utilization, which is basically like use what you have. Like you should know your always be noling, 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's been working on since the late 1950s during the invention of 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. kind of like on a 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 is the heaviest thing and you need a lot of it when you're camping. 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 all of a sudden you have resources? Well, I would say even the great NASA is underfunded, If we had unlimited resources, we'd be on Europa now checking out the octopuses that are swimming beneath the frozen two-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 have your limited resources or you push your resources to the max, you start to get artifact, evidence, fingerprints, scuffs, truths of how the process is. made that shows a human being was there.

So ISRU is a protocol that NASA's used, 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 Sacks or Google Play or under ISAU, and it's a game. And we do rituals, the idea is to break your habits by building rituals. 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 output before input. We've spoken about it before. So every day before you look at your phone, do a drawing, build something in clay, even just 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 your 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 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 victims of the disaster, they have to turn back or else everyone dies. So that bingo point's really critical. And also, if you run the same route every day out and back,

you can measure your speed by how far you've traveled, which is an interesting vector. And then so when you get back, I always write in my journal, in my runners log, what I saw, the route I take, what sneakers I rent with, the weather, who I was with, if I was hungry, any data. So I have this beautiful notebook of all the, and those are also available on the web store, which is shameless self-promotion. You are the self-help artist.

But you can practice. Creating like, you know, accountability. habit-building apps when you're not building space programs. But the irony isn't lost on me that we are using an app to help you beat yourself on addiction, right? But we do this and we have a leaderboard

and there's a contest and people at the top of the leaderboard have access to buy sneakers and other studio stuff. Well, 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. You have 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 what that says about us as human beings. Yeah, there's some paradox there. But I also think that, If consumerism is our religion, it's certainly my religion, speak for myself, then if I'm going to be a critique of consumerism, in order for that to be an authentic gesture, I 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 all of it, and I find that as a way to express my... apprehension, ambivalence, 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 fur shiki, which is a Japanese traditional cloth that's 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. Is there a line between what one would consider design, industrial design, or fine art? Or do you not even 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 students 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 make this ISRU instruction manual to help give you a window into that. Not to explain it away, but to help give you some inspiration, all the things you can do with a piece of fabric, like 100 different things from one piece of fabric.

And those are just suggestions. They're 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 recontextualizing. These terms seem pretentious because you rarely need them in everyday life. but they do clarify with precision the ideas, techniques, and methods we use all the time. We're stuck with them. 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 in 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, you know, 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 get to do all this great stuff. But it's not where I come from. I didn't come from an art family. I went to the Museum of 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 most 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 are some artists who have really brought me to great places. And I don't mean artists like Falakuti and,

and James Brown and Ella Fitzgerald. I mean, weird artists like Chris Burden and Yoko Ono and Saul O'Hitt conceptual artists. But the ideas are for everyone. And it sounds like an art world conspiracy to protect these ideas and keep them from reaching mass audience. And there's a, there's some museums have a peddle. The pedagogical department to eliminate that,

but it seems 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 cousin Marty, who is a used car salesman from Long Island, who said to one of my, he said, 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 talked and acted like someone from Goodfellas. And he said, Tommy, I got a personal question for you. What does it mean? And I found myself fumbling to explain Barnett Newman in the history of abstract expressionism and how the CIA weaponized abstract expressionism,

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. And the whole history of abstract art. And I realized I completely lost the guy. And what I should have said was something like, I just like duct tape. I just think it looks cool. And I like things that are simple.

I'm not sure that I would have completely won them over either. But 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 Jean-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 me, not a crime. 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 artworks.

I love art theory. I grew up with it. It's how I found my calling by reading, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees by Lawrence Westler, or reading Clement Greenberg or Rosalind Krauss. These are like really difficult things to work your way through. They're 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 arm's 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 in whatever city they're in. And that's kind of it. what is the message that you want to convey or the call to action around the urgency or 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 explanation because art is so bewildering that it's... The vernacular around it, the languaging too. It's like it's more, 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 it even lines up with your perception of it, you're immediately confused. Edward Tufti said, 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 this.

People, please stop doing this. I would say that's the most important thing. I don't use wall texts, and sometimes in museums, it's always 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 art goes to die,

but there's no other place to see these non-compliant objects, which are very important because they expand our understanding of what something can be. And I think one of the reasons why I love the art of Yoko Ono is because you can't buy it. There's nothing ever for sale. You might be able to buy a book about her, but it's all experiential.

It's all performance-oriented. There's no thing there. It's just ideas. And it exists without the economic 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 money. They were bought and sold.

But not to diminish the quality of what he achieved on the canvas, but they were consumer subjects from the very beginning. Where is all your stuff? Like, where is the lunar land? Where do all these things live? Like, where do you keep all this shit? Well, a lot of it isn't my responsibility anymore. It's out there in public and private collections globally.

But a lot of it is in... You ever see Indiana Jones, the first one? and at the end they put the Ark of the Covenant in this giant warehouse at the end and it goes on forever. I've got six of those. 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, and we go back into it and work on it and prepare it for the next mission. Is there going to 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't. Sometimes it's just inevitable. I don't know. I want to end with one of your 10 bullets for life. Now, this is like a laptop bag made out of.

This is Tyvec, right? It's a cousin of Tyvec called Dyneema. But it's another flash spun of non-fabric fabric. Super strong, waterproof. That is the best laptop bag ever because, and I think there are probably like six of them left on the website. I got one off your website, but I knew they were, I got this a while ago, but I don't know if they're still available. I don't know what's, there were a couple left. They're probably six left, but they're so special because it's the only.

It's the lightest laptop bag ever. And someone might say, but there's no padding. And my answer is, of course it's no padding. It's a $6,000 supercomputer. 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, you know. And it's the white one, which is 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

and we're not going to go all the way through them. But I wanted to end this with one of them, which is persistence. Yeah. And I 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, by this book, this book because it's...

Look at 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 buy one and write your own. This is my version of that.

I'm going to 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 that'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. I really appreciate the time.

The Tom Sacks Guide, available everywhere. Follow Tom on Instagram. Are you still out on Book Tour for a while? Or what's your next project? 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 Tour is forever. So find them 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 at tomsax.com and the ISRU app. Yeah, I would encourage you to sign up for the ISRU app because it's a way of using the phone to work on your cell phone addiction, 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. All right. Thanks, man.

It's so good to have you. Thanks, again. Cheers. Peace. 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 richroll.com, where you will find the entire podcast archive, as well as my books, Finding Ultra, the Voicing Change series, and the Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is free, actually. All you've got to do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review or drop a comment. Sharing your show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome as well and extremely helpful.

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