# Transcript: Keynote: Sympathetic Magic – How to Get Other People to Believe in Your Vision By First Believing in Yourself **Date:** March 14, 2026 · 10:00 PM **Session:** [Keynote: Sympathetic Magic – How to Get Other People to Believe in Your Vision By First Believing in Yourself](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1149256-keynote-sympathetic-magic-how-to-get-other-people-to-believe-in-your-vision-by-f) ## Summary Tom Sachs delivers a keynote on 'sympathetic magic'—the idea that believing deeply in a vision and building it with obsessive craft can inspire others to believe in it too. Drawing from his career making bricolage sculptures, fake luxury goods, a handmade space program, and his Nike collaboration, Sachs argues that the act of making transforms consumption into creation, and that committing to ideas matters more than possessing physical objects. ## Topics `sympathetic magic` · `bricolage` · `world building` · `creative process` · `craftsmanship` · `space program` · `nike collaboration` · `art practice` ## Key Takeaways 1. Learning to live with deep and consistent disappointment and failure is one of the key strategies for long-term creative success. 2. Commitment to ideas is more important than the physicality of objects—spending time deeply studying a masterwork gives you greater ownership than buying it. 3. The concept of 'sympathetic magic' comes from cargo cults: building a runway won't land planes, but it attracts the anthropologists who study the runway, fulfilling the original vision in unexpected ways. 4. 'Output before input'—do something creative every morning before checking your phone to access your subconscious mind and channel intuition. 5. We go to other worlds not because we've ruined this one, but to better understand our resources here on Earth. ## Full Transcript Thank you, Rich, for the kind and generous introduction. So today, I'm going to talk about sympathetic magic: how to get other people believing in a vision by first believing in yourself. This is me as a little boy. This is a shameless plug for my new book called The Nonsensical Guy. And I would say that all these images are in this book, and some of these ideas are in there. But I'm hoping that this talk can be a way of helping you understand how I did it, so that you can see how you do it. One of the first words is proximity. You say the religious practitioner helps you to believe that you might heal. You believe you might heal, and you might heal. If you believe that you won't heal, you will not heal. They've won one out of four times, so they're mostly losers. But they're just losers less than the next guy. And I think one of the key strategies that I've used is learning to live with deep and consistent disappointment and failure over time. Once you kind of come to terms with that, you can really achieve a lot. So this little guy made this sculpture. Later in life, my dad gifted me the Olympus one and I bought the Nikon FM2. When I became a professional artist—not photographer, but a sculptor—and photography is an ongoing important part of my process. In fact, today if you go to the ISRU app, you can see Mario's twenty pieces on Zach's photography. When I left school, I was really into Piet Mondrian, the Dutch De Stijl artist. And I really wanted to get this painting. And I realized that I'd have to go down Wall Street or work for millions of dollars and dedicate my life to the obsession of money in order to afford it. Instead, I went to the Museum of Modern Art and I studied this painting. I made a model of it—not paint but duct tape. And I realized that I spent more time with "Boogie Woogie" than Eli Harburg, who was the man who sold billions of dollars in real estate to get enough money together to buy this painting to enjoy it later at the Museum of Modern Art. So in a way, I have a greater sense of ownership and possession over it. And I think this kind of commitment to ideas being important over the physicality of it is a theme that keeps running through the things I've done. I got thirty years living near Canal Street in New York City where you can buy fake Gucci sunglasses. You have to figure out—do you own those sunglasses? Or do they own you? There is one distinction to make—the Kelly bag is the most coveted. There is a rule that you don't get a Kelly bag before your forty, because where are you going to go from that? Nothing beyond that. And the same with a Porsche 911; I think you shouldn't get one before your forty. When I made this sculpture, I didn't have enough money to buy one. So I went up to Hermès with my credit card and had a walk on it. They sell it and return for thirty days. I was committed to returning it. I eventually sold this on and used the money to buy another piece. And that's another moment of that magic where I use my obsession to create something. Through the work of making something and realizing every extreme detail, the consuming something evolves and morphs, transforms into the love of making. And that's an important transformation because sympathetic magic is something that is transformative. The origin of the term comes from post World War Two anthropologists, who went to New Guinea and studied with Aboriginal people. They were interested in the cargo that soldiers brought—food would come out of boxes, axes made of iron instead of stone. The local people made runways and docks and control towers out of wood. And the anthropologists kind of laughed and said they're never going to land on these. But sure enough, other anthropologists came to study, and the runway itself became the support for the original idea. This was about nineteen ninety eight. And it's worth noting that this is in the permanent collection of the Pompidou Center in Paris. I think it's important that we remember that part of building conviction includes seeing both sides. I've had people come and say to me the same day, 'I don't know how much you hate fashion,' and 'I love how much you love fashion.' Two separate people within seconds of each other. I like to say 'world building.' In my world, I compare Le Corbusier—who makes all this disgusting food but somehow weirdly fed more people and killed fewer people than anyone else—to the genius mastermind of steel reinforced concrete, whose ideas were very pure but then became corrupted by greedy developers. Work is for exploration, but in the meantime, we have to do some wonderful things. My greed and ambition for physical stuff is not limited to Earth—it includes the cosmos. My next major philosophical work has been the space program since 2007. We've gone on five major missions to the moon, Europa, and Mars. I am the only one who's made a lunar module without a central column holding it up, which means these legs are built the same way that the ones on the moon are. We do this all through 'bricolage,' a French word that means to build or repair with available, limited resources. In the aerospace industry, we use the word 'kluge' or jury-rigged. But please use 'bricolage' because we're trying to engage a culture of repairing rather than replacing. And I think Americans don't take enough pride in that tradition. We had a meeting with Craig Fain, who got a knock on the door one day. He said, 'Hi, I am Craig Fain. I work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and I am a director of solar system exploration for Planet Earth.' Craig invited me to be an artist in residence for the entry, descent, and landing program. One of the many things that I learned during my time at JPL is that we go to other worlds not because we've messed up this one and are looking for a new home, but to better understand our resources here on Earth. I think it's really important that we take care of this planet, and we go to the other one. I met Buzz Aldrin once and he said, 'Yeah, my space program has real spacesuits.' We make the experience more authentic by having incredible details. We make it real. We do demonstrations—not performances—that are eight hours long. If you want to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. This is a tape dispenser saw made out of tungsten hook nails encapsulated in epoxy resin and fiberglass. The hardest part of the tape dispenser is the blade because we want to cut tape without actually cutting into it. When you make the world from scratch, all of these struggles are part of the process. Using their ability to defeat their opponent, they simply run away. And on their deathbed, they think about the accomplishment. But then they remember that their job is to learn and to teach. It's not important that you go to other worlds, but astronauting is a lifetime commitment, just like teaching is a lifetime commitment. Spirituality, sensuality, stuff. Spirituality: climbing the highest mountain, going to another world. Asking the big questions: Are we alone? What happens when we die? The materials—the chawan, the tea cistern, the spaceship, camera—they're common to all of those. I'm a curator who actually makes this stuff. But it doesn't mean anything without the rituals. I was studying spacesuits. They're kind of like a sock, and then an inner boot, and then an outer boot. I thought it'd be cool if you could wear shoes over your shoes in bad weather. So I made the Mars Yard overshoe—if you cut this open, you'll see inside is a Mars Yard sneaker. When I first started working with Nike fifteen years ago, I wanted to make something meaningful. Now, I don't care if it's a sneaker or a sculpture or a video or a painting or a presentation. It's all the same. Bricolage is everything. Even this iPad presentation where I'm able to pinch and zoom is an opportunity that PowerPoint and Keynote do not provide. So you might ask, how do I do all this stuff? One of my key strategies is channeling my intuition. And the most important thing that you have to do is learn to truly accept yourself. One strategy that I use is called 'output before input'—every morning before looking at my phone, I touch type, make one of these, or I write my journal, or I write new notes so that I have access to my subconscious. Every day nature provides us with an opportunity to take a psychedelic experience. It ironically challenges us by giving us amnesia right after. But in those few moments between sleep and consciousness, you have an opportunity to tap into your subconscious mind. People write their dreams down—that's totally viable. But for me, doing anything creative with my hands or my words before the world of email invades is essential. We have a platform called ISRU, and some of you signed up. Two hundred thousand people have done this—over four million submissions every day. People do a little drawing or touch clay or build something, or they do ten free throws, or they run and then they run back. All these things help us to be more human. I just want to leave some time for questions. But I want to conclude by saying that my strategy is to make the world not the way it is, but the way I want it to be. Ten years ago we did a show here at the Contemporary Austin. Technology is about the touch of materials—that's what drives the work. And if you don't know what that is for you, your job is finding what that is. So I want to thank you for listening and maybe give a few minutes. --- *Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6* [← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1149256-keynote-sympathetic-magic-how-to-get-other-people-to-believe-in-your-vision-by-f)