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

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27:59Tom Sachs:I wanna talk about how you got interested in consumerism and aspirational brand. and iconography as like your kind of tableau. 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 used BMW.

28:53If I mowed the lawn enough, I could save up my allowance and buy a pair of Nike waffle trainers. that movie American Gigolo had just come out and there was this fashion designer this relatively unknown fashion designer named Giorgio 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 wanted who aspired to be like Richard Gere in American Gigolo took the train in from Manhattan to Barney's New York and bought Giorgio Armani clothes, and Giorgio 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.

29:50And who's sexier than Richard Gere to represent those values and 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 in the values of the Dead Kennedys, perhaps the most impactful about eschewing consumerism and eschewing the idea of finding our identity through our consumer products, followed by liberal arts education and Marxism.

30:38And 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 so you could play basketball like Michael Jordan or a skateboard so you could skate like Mark Gonzalez. And you'd want to get those, it's called the associated value, the clothes of Richard Gere, 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 Margiela and seeing like virtue in those things.

31:38And even seeing, I remember being really confused, going to the Stephen Sprouse boutique in Soho 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 Stephen Sprouse was stealing the cool from the punk kids who were doing this to be free of that, Or if you go back to their origins, they didn't have any money, so they were using safety pins to pin up their clothes and made that a virtue.

32:23Instead of having one safety pin, I have 100. And it became a fashion 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. Like I love the way Chanel makes my wife look 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 because they represent no limits to materials and construction.

33:20That'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 it's no different from what I do and even a ready to wear beautifully made piece of like Alaya is in my view the same level as one of my sculptures it's just 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 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 the landfill.

34:13Maybe you're more likely to throw it in the washing machine or get a new pair of shoelaces. Or you love it because it's been on a journey with you, so you rock the stain or you repair it.

34:22Tom Sachs:How do you live with those conflicting emotions of allowing yourself to be uplifted and inspired by, you know, 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? How can those two things coexist and 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 with the contradictions. and I don't just mean like the structuralist writers of the 70s like Roland Barthes and Foucault but I mean going back to Baudelaire and the beginning of surrealism where paradox and contradiction are paramount walking a lobster on a leash in the Tuileries 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.

35:48All 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 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.

36:16Tom Sachs: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. It's funny, too, at the same time. But 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. You went to London. I think you were still in Bennington, and you went to London to study architecture and thought maybe I'll be an architect.

36:59Tom Sachs: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 gonna provide for your middle-class family and like start being an artist and live your life. And it seems like he not only encouraged you, but that he kind of opened up your eyes that there was another way of living that perhaps was more consistent with the bands that you were seeing at Anthrax. You know, when you were in high school that spoke to you and changed your lens on how you wanted to pursue your artistic sensibilities. Well, that's pretty close to the way it happened.

37:39And 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 with 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.

38:48So through the back door, I kind of got to my original ideas and also became really bourgeois. huh? So, it worked out.

38:58Tom Sachs:You took around the outside to get there. I mean, 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 Barney's, but you have this opportunity to step in to designing one of their windows. And this becomes like an inflection point. And just for people that don't know, during this period of time in the late 80s, early 90s, the Barneys window displays were a big fucking deal. They were the best window displays in the world at that time.

39:38And 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 year we did like a window display about prince the artist and it was a fantastic prince tribute i did another one about madonna like these were like giant dioramas that we spent months working on so there were works of commercial art that people would really queue up and look at there there were 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.

40:24Tom Sachs:So walk us through this experience of creating this very transgressive window display. So I think it was 1995. And also, you have to remember that we are in the head of the AIDS pandemic. It was a very scary time. And people in my community, especially at Barney's, were dying of AIDS and Paris's burning had just come out. It was a very heartbreaking and difficult time. So there was a holiday window called Red Windows, which was they asked all these world-famous artists to make something to go in the holiday windows and it was going to be auctioned off and the money would go to Little Red Schoolhouse, which is an elementary school on 6th Avenue.

41:15and because I'd worked so hard as a window display artist underneath Simon Dunin and Adamo DiGregorio 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 in the crash was Hello Kitty as Baby Jesus mother Mary was Madonna was Hello Kitty but as Madonna with the sex bustier with six breasts the three kings were Bart Simpsons and the creche 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.

42:21And I was invited to that. And there was this other one for all 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 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.

43:09It was a picture of the nativity and Barneys 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.

43:22Tom Sachs: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's hard in retrospect looking back to understand Barney's capitulation to that and the apology that followed. But I think in the context of the time, I mean, I don't know, what is your perspective on that now? It seems like they wanted to take advantage of the happening artists of the time without having to take responsibility for the message that makes that artist so palpable and relevant.

44:09At 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 ten. And 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.

44:56And I remember feeling really betrayed because I really put my heart into this thing and I believed in my community at Barney's and the people that I worked with. And I worked with them before and after for years. It was part of 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 in Christianity, and that's why we get Kelly bags and 9-11s and sneakers on Christmas.

45:45Tom Sachs:But this puts you on the map as like New York's new bad boy artist 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 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. You're just calling out what it is. It's like, okay, Christmas is this just capitalistic kind of mad rush, and this ritual that we all kind of follow every single year is being driven by our consumer impulses at the cost of the sort of real origin story behind it, which isn't exactly like a revolutionary idea.

46:51And 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.

47:11Tom Sachs: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 – And it still is. Yeah, it 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, you know, pick whatever lights you up.

47:54Tom Sachs:Like, it's amazing how that iconography can communicate such an exponential emotional response. We associate it in our human brains as something aspirational that we want to embody. And it causes us to spend money in order to get it, deluding ourselves that if we have it, that we will then 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 is a cousin of sympathetic magic.

48:54I call it as -

48:54Tom Sachs: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, right? Because they're basketball sneakers and they're the same ones that Michael Jordan wears. And if you wear them, you can play, the promise of advertising is that you get to play as well as the best player of his time. And that's a form of magic because you're buying the association.

49:30And 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 him feel more powerful and confident. And being a pro artist or athlete or whatever, you have your little rituals that mean something to you. And if they work a little, that's a lot because the advantage is you just need to have every little advantage you can because you've done everything possible. So why not care about your sock color choice if it matters? That's associated value.

50:13And should I try and 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

50:43that'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 and Papua New Guinea, when some evangelists, anthropologists came to study some Aboriginal folks who were using stone axes.

51:44and the anthropologists and the missionaries came with iron axes and they traded. And the Aboriginal people said, well, what about those metal boxes that you have that are powered by propane and you open it and food come out of them? And they said, well, those come from the sky, from cargo parachutes. And it's called cargo cult is what this is called. And they said, well, why can't those planes land here? or those ships that you get stuff from, why can't they land here? And they said, well, because we don't have runways and you need big docks for big ships. And they said, well, we'll just build them.

52:20And 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 did the cargo planes bring? They brought iron axes. They brought propane-powered refrigerators and clothes and all this Western goods. So not, the thing about magic and any kind of magic, it doesn't always come out the way you intend.

53:00But 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.

53:32That wasn't my intention. It was just always do the work and make the world the way you want it to be, make your life the way you want it 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 you or anyone, it's the work.

53:50Tom Sachs:Translation, if you say you're an astronaut, you are an astronaut. And when Tom Sack says, I'm gonna build my own space program and we're gonna 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 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? I'm asked to be the unofficial artist in residence at - 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.

54:34And through my space program, I became the unofficial artist-in-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.

54:53Tom Sachs: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 JPL notepad. Why do you make this available for us to buy, Tom? I stole that from Tommaso Rivolini's desk at JPL. Tommaso Rivellini is a very close friend who invented the airbags that bounce Pathliner down to Mars and the sky crane that lowers the – if you look Tommaso Rivellini up, you'll see the patent for a Mars landing device, entry-descent landing device. And he and Kevin Han and Adam Stelzner and Greg Vane all became friends. But I stole that from Tommaso's desk because Tommaso is kind of like my Michael Jordan.

55:43So Tinker Hatfield, the designer of the Air Jordan, sort of Michael was Tinker's muse. And Tommaso is my muse. So the shoe, the Mars yard shoe is for Tommaso 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 funding 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, they're really the only people that know how to navigate without satellites onto other worlds.

56:31Like landing on the moon is pretty easy because we've got tools to do that. But you have to be totally self-sufficient and autonomous to land on Mars. So it's pretty high-end stuff. And so that's the paper that you use to think it all up. So if you want your own space program, you better have the right tools. Right, the right pencil and the right pad.

56:51Tom Sachs:So this pad is then, this is a sacred object in your mind. It represents something very meaningful about the human spirit and 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 on its regular paper. But the front of that, and 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 or something. But my point is you have the power through that paper to fulfill your dreams. I do. And I use that every day for my to-do list.

57:41So every day before I look at my phone, I write new 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.

57:58Tom Sachs: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.

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59:28Tom Sachs:That's betterhelp.com slash richroll. Our youngest goes to school about a three hour drive from our home in this tiny little town up high in the mountains. So when we drive her back to school or we pick her up for a break, we could do the drive back and forth in the same day. But sometimes I like to stay up in the mountains for a day or two, either before I pick her up or after I drop her off, just to change my environment, connect with nature, do a little bit of writing and reflection and peace and quiet. And what's great about this little town is that there are all these fantastic little cozy wooden A-frame homes hidden in the woods to choose from that I can book easily on Airbnb that make for this perfect little retreat.

1:00:17Tom Sachs: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.

1:01:08Tom Sachs: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 Sachs 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 an unbelievable thing that was directed by Van Neistat, who's here, friend of the podcast.

1:02:00Tom Sachs:It's quite a remarkable film, but also 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. five, but also drawings of it exist in 99. And we're still working on it. We've done five missions, five major missions to the moon, Mars, Europa, Vesta. And we even went to an alien spaceship called Infinity. And this is where like the cheekiness comes in.

1:02:52Why 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 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.

1:03:37And 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 arch right video in my art piece.

1:04:23So 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.

1:04:33Tom Sachs: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 extreme degree that the experience for us becomes real. And when you're in the live demonstration, and by the way, sometimes they're like eight hours long. They're exhausting, but you suspend your disbelief, and there are stakes.

1:05:17And we've had some Apollo 13 moments where we're drilling into an ice pond and the drill got stuck. And we had Tommaso Rivolini and Adam Stelzner on stage screaming like Apollo 13 style, like, use WD-40 on the ice.

1:05:30Tom Sachs:Oh, you actually had the real JPL people. Because they're friends. They happen to be in the front row. And Guy Vertoli 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.

1:06:03And the authenticity of that and the boringness of it, because 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 Mythbusters a lot and Adam Savage is a really good friend. And not the idea that it is possible, that it's plausible, is enough in art to get the idea across. I mean, I think of the martial artist who spent his whole life training and never got into a fight.

1:06:51And then one day was surrounded by assailants in a dark alley. And instead of using his martial arts, he just fake dodged 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.

1:07:38That's the reward.

1:07:42Tom Sachs:And the collaborative aspect of it. I mean, as an artist in this studio, like you are creating art, but you're also, you also serve as this teacher and this mentor for young people. And 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. done well when it's when the studio is great it's better than what i could do by myself i mean van and i argue endlessly about details and i don't and we have these wonderful arguments and i don't i'm not always right i 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?

1:08:47But 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.

1:08:56Tom Sachs:You've said that the studio is your greatest work of art. I think in many ways that's true. I mean, the relationships, the people, these shelving systems, the libraries of books and tape and other materials. It's an ongoing struggle to keep it all organized, keeping the flow, and eliminating. There's some materials I really don't like, sheetrock. So if you don't have sheetrock in your life, it's tough. 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 their life, your life gets much more interesting and complicated.

1:09:43Tom Sachs:Yeah, I mean, 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.

1:10:24Tom Sachs:And in 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, you know, what is this?

1:11:05what do we do a lot of this work came out of a book that van neistat and i started called the tom sock studio manual which is kind of like a part emily post part dictionary um but i think that got really too complicated i think a lot of those ideas that we worked on got into spirited man and um van's movie series and but this is really a guide to all the work and there are 25 essays in here that i that i worked on with howie khan and the design was by yeju choy there are stories of my process so in a way like some of the ideas behind the tom sack studio manual are in here but it's really more about my motivations and methods to achieve and some of the tricks that I've used to get through the day, like when I'm really stuck, I sometimes just take a break and make a lamp.

1:12:04That's like one of the, because a lamp is like a lower order of thing opposed to a sculpture. A sculpture or 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 um uh sculptural problems to solve so it's just a way of like uh it's like doing free throws or warming up yeah

1:12:42Tom Sachs:if you're stuck on a on a problem like build a lamp that's like one of your rules and there's a whole chapter on how that works in here. And that's, 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 like what the piece is. Like it's so immediately identifiable as yours.

1:13:26Tom Sachs: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, you know, artificial intelligence is auguring?

1:14:15Authenticity is everything.

1:14:17Tom Sachs:I remember when Mickey Drexler and I first became friends, it was because of a letter that I wrote to him about authenticity and 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 and the smell of tatami or of matcha.

1:15:19And stuff is all the stuff, the cathedral itself, the rocket ship, the Chawan T-Bowl that you drink the matcha from, the crucifix, all those things. And as a maker, I make stuff, right? 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.

1:16:07And 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 logistics of all that. Then I can let go of the ego trip of flying to space and concentrate on supporting those who do and building good storytelling for them and telling 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 a distant future of what could be on Earth.

1:16:47And that's what science does, is 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 in high school wearing those stupid three-quarter length baseball t-shirts, you know, 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.

1:17:26And 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.

1:17:57Tom Sachs:There's the maker who is the, you know, kind of primary leading, you know, character. in the multiplicity of Tom Sack's 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. There is a sacred quality to these objects that speaks to the ritual, like these workstations or the idea of organizing your space. This is all about creating an environment for a transcendent experience. And whether that's the discipline of your work or the higher ambition of we're going to Mars, it's all of a piece with this idea that we should have a more reverent relationship with the extensions that we use every single day as an expression of our imagination and our discipline and our daily work.

1:19:06Tom Sachs:You have these boom boxes and you have these, you know, kind of cabinets and the display of televisions for 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 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 like that might sound like a brag or a flex, but when it's successful, it works.

1:19:59But 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 so that when inspiration strikes, I can just go for it and catching the big fish. David Lynch talks about when you don't know what to do, organize your paint so that when inspiration strikes, you don't have to take time, go to the store 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.

1:20:41It's kind of like...

1:20:41Tom Sachs:Always be knolling is your version of that. Explain what that means. So, gnolling 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 gnolling 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. 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.

1:21:23So I made a bet with my son because we were 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 needed 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, dada, dada, 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 a big mess and I said it's there on the table null everything and you'll find it and he said no and I said okay if you null everything and it's not there I'll give you a thousand dollars and I was really I was kind of like shitting myself a little bit because I wasn't I didn't see it either that's a pretty big incentive for a young person and he nulled the entire table and he found it and it was there and the message is Always be knolling.

1:22:32Always be knolling. Always get your environment perfectly organized, and then things will appear. And if you ever do a Lego set, it's worth it to knoll the entire kit, and it goes together faster.

1:22:41Tom Sachs: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.

1:23:18And it's very, very, very difficult. And we don't give ourselves enough credit for how difficult it is. And so things like knolling 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 a hole in concrete and I was hammering and chiseling 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 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.

1:24:00A drill is another word for a chisel. And I was like, no, the drill's 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. He'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 his 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 tenacity in one little point.

1:24:38He loaded all of his strength onto one point and finally built a hole big enough and once the hole 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.

1:25:12And I didn't know how to do it.

1:25:14Tom Sachs: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. What's the name? Utilization. Utilization, which is basically like use what you have. Like you should always be knolling, but it's not about going out and getting the tool that you don't have.

1:26:00Tom Sachs: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 or repair with available limited resources. ISRU is in-situ resource utilization, and it's a protocol that NASA has been working on since the late 1950s during the invention 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.

1:26:57run 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.

1:27:34If 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 it's an app, and you can get it on the App Store under Tom Sachs or Google Play or under ISAU.

1:28:24And it's a game and we do rituals. The idea is to break your habits by building rituals. And what it does is help you get in touch with your creativity in a positive way. So my number one most famous favorite one is 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.

1:29:13Bingo point is when the rescue helicopter goes out to sea 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 runner's log, what I saw, the route I take, what sneakers I ran with, the weather, who I was with, if I was hungry, any data.

1:29:46So I have this beautiful notebook of all the, and those are also available on the web store, which is shameless self-promotion.

1:29:56Tom Sachs:You are the self-help artist. Yeah. Creating like 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 your cell phone 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. Like, you know, you have this legendary, you know, kind of like history with them of creating these, you know, sneaker lines and apparel lines with them.

1:30:45Tom Sachs: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, I 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 of it. And I find that as a way to express my apprehension, ambivalence, contradiction.

1:31:34But 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 furshiki, 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.

1:32:08Tom Sachs: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 industrial design or fine art, or do you not even think about those distinctions? Art's 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. I think all of those things are very different and they have different qualities and benefits and attributes and advantages and disadvantages and making something in industry is a lot harder than making something in the studio but you get to make a lot more of them and reach more people than the one-off that's in the studio so all these things have different pros and cons but the approach is exactly the same and one of the great things about getting to work with Nike is that it's an amplifier for the values of the studio, but on a larger scale.

1:33:17And 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, like all the things you can do with a piece of fabric, like a hundred different things from one piece of fabric. And those are just suggestions. They're probably more.

1:33:52Tom Sachs:Well, what's great is that, you know, before the book even begins in 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.

1:34:27Tom Sachs: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, 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's trying to say something relatable and evocative that could be, you know, revelatory for the observer. I despise the elitism of the art world. Of course, I benefit from it because I get to do all this great stuff. But it's not where I come from.

1:35:10I 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 Fela Kuti and James Brown and Ella Fitzgerald. I mean weird artists like Chris Burden and Yoko Ono and Saul LeWitt, conceptual artists.

1:35:57But the ideas are for everyone. and there's almost, it sounds like, almost 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 pedagogical department to eliminate that but it seems they're there 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 crosshatch duct tape.

1:36:48And 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 and the history of abstract expressionism and how the CAA weaponized abstract expressionism in the Cold War to prove, to say things like, even this ridiculous art is what you can do in America. That's how great we are. 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.

1:37:32I 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 be not a crime. It takes time. But I'm impatient, so I want that to happen now.

1:38:18And that's why I work really hard to make these ideas accessible and to not use fancy art words. I love art theory. I grew up with it. It's how I found my calling. By reading, I don't know, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing that One Sees by Lawrence Weschler, 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 helped me to get excited about making things.

1:38:56Tom Sachs:And for the person who has, the average person who has the kind of arm's length relationship with art, maybe a couple of times a year, they go to a museum or when they're 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 - Well, the vernacular around it, the languaging too, it's like it's more, it makes it even more difficult to penetrate.

1:39:45Yeah, 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 Tufte 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.

1:40:22People, please stop doing this. I would say that's the most important thing. I don't use wall text. 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. And 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.

1:41:01You 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 consumerist objects from the very beginning.

1:41:38Tom Sachs: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?

1:41:47Well, 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.

1:42:09Tom Sachs: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 we go back into it and work on it and prepare for the next mission. Is there going to be another space mission? I hope not. But, 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, it's just, sometimes it's just inevitable. I don't know. I want to end with one of your 10 bullets for life.

1:42:57Tom Sachs:Now this is, this is a, like a laptop bag made out of, this is Tyvek, right? It's a cousin a Tyvek called Dyneema. Dyneema. It's another flash spun 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 are a couple left. There are probably six left, but they're so special because it's the only laptop, It's the lightest laptop bag ever. And someone might say, but there's no padding.

1:43:37And my answer is, of course there'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.

1:43:46Tom Sachs:I just like how excited you got, like, when I pulled this out and you looked at it and you were 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.

1:44:21Tom Sachs: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 buy 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.

1:45:08Education will not. The world is filled with educated derelicts. persistence and determination alone are omnipotent i love it man i think that's a

1:45:21Tom Sachs: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 really appreciate the time uh the tom sacks guide available everywhere uh follow tom on instagram are you still like out on book tour for a while or what's the what's your next um i'm not sure when this airs but we're on book tour now we're in los angeles um and uh i feel like book tours forever so find them on instagram uh if you want to uh 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.

1:46:21And 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.

1:46:30Tom Sachs:All right. Thanks, man. Thanks. So good to have you. Thanks again. Cheers. Peace.

1:46:40Tom Sachs: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 gotta do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review or drop a comment.

1:47:15Tom Sachs:Sharing your show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome as well and extremely helpful. So thank you in advance for that. In addition, I'd like to thank all of our amazing sponsors, without whom this show just would not be possible, or at least, you know, not free. To check out all their amazing product offerings and listener discounts, head to richroll.com slash sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show is produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, along with associate producer Desmond Lowe.

1:47:52Tom Sachs:The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music, as always, was created all the way back in 2012 by my step-sons, Tyler and Trapper Pyatt, along with their cousin, Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support, and I'll see you back here soon. Peace, plants.