Adam Moss
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
At the end of the meeting, they would leave and cry because the editors in charge were kind of unstinting in their withering comments.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Well, the point is that I learned from my own mentors that this was the way you conducted a meeting. It was much more efficient to be brutally honest. That's an idea that doesn't work because blah, blah, blah, blah. One thought of that as teaching. I tried to bring some of that stricter method, and people were aghast.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And I would say, look, when I was growing up, you used to cry at the end of these meetings. And they said, I don't want to cry at the end of the meetings, and it's not going to work. And they were right.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
It wasn't necessarily the better way to do it, but because it was the way that I learned how to sharpen my mind as an editor, I had an expectation that I should do the same with those people I was trying to get to do the work a certain way. In that case, yeah, they taught me. Meaning the younger people taught you like this doesn't feel good.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
But did you stop? Well, I found workarounds. I found other ways to try to accomplish the same thing. For instance, just different language. Probably I learned to praise and then to withhold. So that was a strategy. Come over. It wasn't a conscious strategy, but I realized that's what I was doing. I was certainly told it enough times that I came to realize that, oh, yeah, this is what I do.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
The book is 43 cases of building something from first notion to finished product with all that kind of torture in between.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
care about you anymore because you were not going to be a long-term asset for me? Was I that calculating? I wouldn't say it was that.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Now, is that just natural? Or do you think that you learn certain attributes of a boss person from me? Not natural.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
You may have learned some methods from me, but your taste and sensibility was not something I had much influence over at all because it's just who you were.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Even hearing it back to me, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's something that... You should wear proudly. I'm very glad to hear that what you felt as a person working with me, for me, whatever. You can say for you. It's okay. Was that you found delight in making something great. That's the main thing that I was trying to teach. Even though it's painful in the moment,
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
you're going to feel so good at having made something that you put everything into and that you can be proud of at the end. I hope that I conveyed that and that I worked with the kind of people who would feel that and who would be willing to work pretty hard because they wanted to make something they felt really, really good about.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
That's not everybody, but that is a certain kind of person and you're that kind of person and I'm that kind of person. And there's a reason we ended up in the same place.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Yeah. One other aspect of this whole business is that artists or any, when we're talking creative people, they need to not be bored. It is incredibly difficult to make something. And you have to have reasons to go on. And one of those reasons is simple interest. You have to feel stimulated.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And if you do the same thing over and over and over and over again, you're just going to bore yourself to tears. The artistic person, creative person, I don't know what you want to call them, person who wants to make something, will constantly... find new ways to do it, because they're trying to keep themselves engaged.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
In my book, I mean, everybody remembers their childhood as lonely, of course, but it is definitely true that one after another, they describe childhoods of isolation and of need, and then something came along to fill that need. Among other things, they learn to talk to themselves. This is a big theme of my book.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I think of all of this as ways of talking to yourself, as ways of translating what your imagination produces.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Whatever lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my painting life, I didn't.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
When I thought I wanted to paint, I was up in Cape Cod, a place, and without any schooling whatsoever, didn't know how to do a thing. My schooling was really when I went to buy paints, I talked to the salesperson and asked them how this worked. I didn't understand what a medium was. I didn't understand any of it.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Nevertheless, I had this idea that I would do a painting a day, and that's what I did. One day I'd do a flower, and then the other day I'd do some crazy, stupid abstract, and then I would just make an effort at doing a person or something. The whole idea was that at the end of the day, painting would be finished and thrown away and started over. It was fun.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Came back, and I thought that was the end of it. I thought it was just a sort of fun little summer thing. And a friend of mine said, well, you really seem to have liked it. You really should get some training. She then connected me up with the head of painting, I think, at the Yale School of Art. I can hear many listeners' heads exploding. First teacher, head of painting, Yale School of Art.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Well, no, she wasn't my teacher. She had a student who had just graduated who she thought was really good. Her name was Maria De Los Angeles, and she's in the book. She is a beautiful artist, but also a really lovely person. She would just come over to my house. She taught me how to draw and she taught me how to paint at the beginning.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
It wasn't a particularly structured learning process, but she was my friend, my painting friend. Was it built around ideas or mostly execution technique, etc. ? There was a certain amount of technique. There was a lot of just helping me find my confidence as a painter. And there was just a certain kindness that I found empowering and a sense that she had that I had something to make.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Certainly there is an expectation that this person can do better. And I guess that can be experienced in a lot of ways as being stern and forbidding and all of that kind of thing. And I've had mentor types like that. But I personally respond to kindness. I need to feel a little loved.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I think there has to be a bedrock of they have a belief in you and you have to feel it. Otherwise, the mentorship doesn't work. You have to believe that they are rooting for you.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I've always loved process because essentially I love narrative and the act of how something comes to be is just a perfect story. Starts with nothing and then ends up something. But there's a whole other part of this book that's trying to understand the personality attributes that make someone successful as an artist.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
It's about half visual, and it works almost like a giant diagram where the text itself winds around the images. Commutic, but also magazine-ish. And it has all this footnote material, which is the me in the book for the most part. Although you're in the— I'm in the introductions.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
But it was a new pursuit. It was new and yet I hope it had the benefit of a lifetime's experience as a magazine maker.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
i had never written a book before and i was really scared of writing it's harder than it looks it's so hard unlike you i never wanted to be a writer i would never have left magazines for writing but i did leave magazines at a certain point because i just felt that i didn't want to be a boss anymore I started to write this book, and I was just a terrible, terrible, terrible writer, really.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And I had to teach myself. I had to use my editor head. At first, my editor head recognized that it was terrible but didn't have any solutions in mind. And then over time, I just began to strip it of its ridiculous ornamentation. Was that all by yourself, though, or did you go to people for it? No, I did that most of myself.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And then eventually, okay, I got to a place where I was happier as a writer, and also the work itself was better.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Well, okay, let me, I created the book in the way that I created the book in order to assemble a community. I wanted the group thing, which I always loved in magazines, and I wanted a sense of a lot of people doing something together. And so I kind of And that invention was a whole part one, which was to engage all these artists in my project.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Okay, Amy Sillman, show me how you made a painting, and we'll go from beginning to end. Okay, George Saunders, let's talk about how you wrote Lincoln and the Bardo, and David Mandel, how you wrote a joke, or Kara Walker, how you built this magnificent sculpture, or Stephen Sondheim, how you wrote a song.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And that process was essentially me recreating a context of group creation because I thought of them as my collaborators, not as my subjects. So that was part one. Part two was writing. I described already what a hell that was. And was it hell because the collaborator is no longer there? I'm just alone in the room again. It's the aloneness.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
It's the dialogue in your head that was driving me completely crazy and why I never was a writer in the first place. I just found it unbearably lonely. And also, I didn't know how to act all the parts in my head where I could talk to myself and make myself better, which I didn't know how to do when it's different people, but I didn't know how to do in my own head.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Yeah, possibly never met. You know, Gregory Crutzen, who talked about his work as almost a mathematical formula from like William Eggleston to Ray Carver's short stories to David Lynch and Blue Velvet, some combination of people with sensibility that in his own mind came together. Describe what a Crutzen photo looks like. A Crutzen photo is a gigantic...
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
photograph that resembles a movie still, lit like a movie, with enough narrative portent, but with no before or after. So the viewer is meant to supply the narrative by looking at this picture and putting it into a context of his or her own imagination.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Yeah. I, in general, don't much care about the strict definitions of anything. This book is a book about artists, but really I've bent the term artist pretty much as far as it can go. And I also believe that about mentorship, which in the end, it doesn't matter.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Well, one interesting thing about the book was I kept looking for who is the person who encouraged you when you were young. They weren't necessarily the person who was by your side when you were an adult, but there had to be somebody who could be a parent, could be an art teacher, could be anybody, who basically saw something in them.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And that seeing was crucial to the development of their confidence that they could make the thing, which is, of course, confidence and what I, in the book, call faith, the faith that they are actually able to make the thing that's in their head, which they can't, but you have to believe you can in order to go forward.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Oh, seriously? Well, just the word sounds so ugly. It's so beautiful, the thing that it's describing. And the word itself is so crude, really.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I sound maddening from your description. I sound like I must have been just a horrible person to work for, but okay. Maddening maybe a little bit.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Yeah, the book is not self-help, so I'm not sure a lot of these things can be learned. I mean, you can get better at everything, but you're either a person who can focus or you can't. You're either obsessional or you're not. You have a high tolerance for tedium, which you need to to be an artist, or you don't. You have drive or you don't. What about taste? You have taste or you don't.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Or you have a certain sensibility or you have a certain sense of humor. These are all things that you acquire... for all sorts of mysterious reasons that you and I don't understand. No one has ever understood how personality is formed.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
That all said, the book is, I hope, very encouraging to artists because I think most people who are trying to make things don't need to be James Joyce or Pablo Picasso or Louise Gluck, even. They can be themselves, and they can find... immense joy and satisfaction in making art. They improve their ability to focus. They improve their ability to persevere, to not give up when things get hard.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
A lot of art making comes down to something as rudimentary as being able to learn to fail. Again, like parenting, it's a little bit like a child learns to walk because they understand how they can get up from falling. They have to fall.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And I was very well aware of that, that this is a retrospective history of success. And so everything has to be viewed through that lens.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I wanted very much to give people permission to fail because failure is, if you go through the narratives in the book, there's just failure right and left. When you're trying to create something, your brain is trying to subvert you in so many ways. There are so many obstacles, and there is this kind of animus you need to have in order to barrel ahead. An animus toward what?
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Animus is the wrong word. You have to have a fighting spirit, I guess I would say, where you're just not going to be daunted. Which, as I was going through this, I found very reassuring. Because, of course, the reason I did the book was because I... I had recently taken a painting and felt enormous frustration, enormous sense of failure in that. And truly, what I didn't understand is in a group,
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
There is a conversation that happens that's external. You and I, if we're working together making a magazine, we talk about something. There's a phrase that came up in the David Simon chapter called the bounce. Our method of making something better is by bouncing. I say something to you, you say something to me, bang, bang, bang.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
In the end, something happens which is better than it was when we started. In most artists' lives, that conversation has to happen in their own head. I became very confused. How does someone have this kind of inner dialogue? And that's what I was trying to understand.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
So would this book exist had you been a better painter? Probably not. I would not have had The Drive, which was born of my own frustration. Also, I would have been satisfied painting all day because I would, I hope, have taken a certain kind of satisfaction from the painting itself that, you know, why do you want to do anything else?
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I just want to do this all day long, which now I feel actually not because I've gotten to be a better painter, but because I understand something about my relationship to painting that I learned from the book. Which is what? When you say this in this context, it sounds so banal, but here I'll say it.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
No, well... There's a way in which that's a description. But what I would really say is that I was trying to create narratives, and so for the narrative to work, I wanted a happy ending. I wanted an exaltation. I wanted that moment in the rom-com with the big kiss at the end where everyone lives happily ever after.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And the artists themselves, when they would get to that point in their own storytelling of their own work, refused to give me that. They would express a certain amount of relief that the thing was over. Maybe they would say, yeah, it was nice. I was glad other people got to see it and I heard some nice things about it. But you never got the big firework.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And I found that as a writer of the book somewhat frustrating. I kind of needed it for closure. I needed it for my own purposes, but I also needed to feel that they made something great. I was rooting for them. There was a great deal of transference involved in this book, and I fell in love with all of my subjects. So I wanted something spectacular for them in the end, and it never came.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
When I would talk to him about that, I said, well, you don't sound like that was very important. And they said, it's not about the thing I'm making. It is really about the work. I just get up every day because I like or I need more than I like to work in this way. And the end point is not that relevant to me. And I just thought this was bullshit. And I thought it was bullshit over time.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
A long period of time. And then I was just worn down. And I came to kind of grok the truth of it. I absorbed that. And suddenly my relationship to my own work changed.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I got enormous pleasure from what I like to think of as the verb of it rather than the noun of it. Making one mark. as a painter just like one little shoe that pleased me for whatever reason release me from this incredibly punishing attitude I had toward the work itself I do care about the work itself I really still want to be a good painter but I can get pleasure out of the making
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
That's one of the things that's fantastic about magazines. You always have next week. Or, you know, in a digital world, you always have five minutes from now. It's why I was particularly... suited to magazines, but none of us know ourselves very well. Whatever lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my painting life, I didn't.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Well, certainly not zero and certainly not five. So somewhere in that two to four range. Did you become more self-aware over time and experience as an editor? Yeah, I think so. Maybe to a fault. What do you mean by that? Sometimes experience can be a hindrance. You stop yourself from making something.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
The Samin chapter, Samin Nosrat chapter, the title of the chapter is With Beginner's Eyes because she makes this observation about salt, fat, acid, heat that when she very excitedly at the beginning of her cooking life Tells a fellow chef, the fellow chef says, well, everybody knows that. No, they don't. They don't know that. And anyway, I've never seen that anywhere.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And I think people need to hear this, that this is really how you should think about cooking. And she goes on and builds this fabulous book and then a little empire off of it. Sometimes experience stops you from doing something because you know it has failed too often and you don't want to go through that failure again. You have to believe you can in order to go forward.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
So many things. First of all, when I came to love magazines, it was the late 60s, early 70s. It was a heyday of the magazine form, but also it was a really interesting time. The world was blowing up in some ways that to a young kid... Which is very attractive. And the magazines that I loved, like the New Yorks and Esquires, et cetera, they're a little smart ass. They were funny.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I mean, my first magazine I read was Mad Magazine. So it had this kind of fabulous fractured idea of what the world was that really appealed to my adolescent brain. And there was the feeling that the whole thing was created by someone or something that felt very distinct. It had a personality. And that personality... If it appealed to you, it was very powerful. It felt very personal.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And then who... Okay, so I had all of this stuff in my head, but it was unformed. And I went to work at Escort. I was very young. I was a very unformed person at that point. What were you good at? I was probably fairly intuitive. I certainly was eager. And I'd read a lot of magazines. I had a lot of data in my head based on my own fan taste.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
And this guy named Lee Eisenberg, he just, for whatever reason, took an interest in me. It could have been that he just wanted me to do his work for him because he recognized that my enthusiasm was potentially valuable to him. But he also saw that my brain worked a certain way and he wanted to encourage it. It was an act of kindness. Name some things that you would do there on a given day.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
My name is Adam Moss. That's easy enough. I am an editor by lifelong profession and recently an author and sometimes a painter.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
We started a section on the entertainment industry. And one of Lee's ideas was that he would put a movie store with a big literary person. I remember William Styron and Candice Bergen. My job was to...
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
go to the thing and set up the tape recorder and then make sure everybody was happy but then he would give me the transcript he would say what do you find interesting in this slowly but surely i would see what he thought was interesting in it and then i would watch him as he constructed this thing into a exciting little bit of conversation that worked in a printed form he was extremely good so just being able to watch him
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
took all of that data in my head and started to organize it. That was invaluable. One of the things that I hear a lot from younger editors is that they really resent doing the older editor's job for them because they feel it's exploitive, and it is. However, it's an incredible way to learn. I mean, it's apprenticeship.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Yes, and you talk it through, and in there is sharing of ideas, but also a kind of teaching. And sometimes the teaching goes both ways. This is really, I think, actually crucial. In almost every case where there is a mentor and mentee kind of thing, it goes both ways.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
There was a generational difference, not a huge one, but I brought a bunch of generational assumptions to the table that he didn't have. I think there is that element of... New eyes, fresh eyes. Yeah, fresh eyes. And as you get older, you begin to dismiss certain things that aren't fully dismissible.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
It's chiefly the person who decides where the magazine's going to go, what the magazine covers and doesn't.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
shaping the magazine's identity and its relationship to its readers it's a manager job the magazine is very very much a group enterprise that's one of the most wonderful things about it and it involves getting a whole bunch of people story editors like you were visual people copy editors production people all sorts of different kinds of people to work together as one so in that sense it's like a conductor of an orchestra
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
It's very rarely what people think of as editors, which is the person who fixes sentences. Although you did your share of that. I did my share of that, but that's not the chief job description. The chief job description is the overall direction of the thing.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I agree that I'm exacting. I would like to think that I was a little bit more clear about what it was that I was looking for, but I recognize that that's probably completely not true. And what I was doing was a kind of maddening mind control. It's a spectrum.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Being an editor, it's both an act of grandiosity and humility at the same time. So it's like you have to think big, but you have to understand that it really is a group project. And for any group project to work, everybody has to feel like there's some of them in it. And they have to feel invested in it, and they have to feel proud of it.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
They have to want to make it just as badly as you want to make it. And so part of the exacting hood was not just getting people to a certain standard that I thought was appropriate, but also getting people to care as much as I did. How much of that was in the hiring, though? A lot of it's in the hiring, but a lot of it's also in the sort of day-to-day way that you all get together as a group.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
A lot of it is just familial as opposed to directed towards a particular task. A lot of it is helping people find their own independence as thinkers, but also obviously think the way you want them to for the purposes of this project. Like a parent, I suppose, I would always... relish the first moment that a story editor was willing to fight with me because I just felt, okay, they've got it now.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
They have their strong point of view, getting people to feel independent within an environment that they weren't entirely independent. It's a kind of weird little equilibrium, but that was what I was after.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I recognize that there's mentorship going on. It sounds pretentious to call yourself a mentor unless it's like an actual title. One's a little bit squeamish about using language like that, but the act of teaching someone, I do recognize, is crucial to being, definitely to leading, but also just, you're learning all the time.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
There's a kind of mentor-mentee-ship that happens in every dimension of life.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
You hope that everybody feels that they're the favorite child. That's what you're trying to do. But everybody responds to different kinds of help, prodding, embracing, all the various things that make for mentorships. Just back to the family thing, you have a different relationship with each of your children, right?
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
That's not to say that somewhere in there you don't have people that you think have more potential. Generally, they're people who show that they're eager to learn. They kind of put their hand up and say, teach me. And there's no teacher who isn't moved by that.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
Import it, yeah, that's nice. I don't have advice except to recognize that it's an essential part of learning, to be open to learning and to teach. Then maybe you have to make a slightly more active effort at it. You certainly have to be open to it. You certainly have to know what you don't know and find ways to ask, maybe not out loud, but to signal your openness to being taught.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
I mean, it's an interesting period because... What I witness in younger people these days is that they love their parents and they have, you know, they're very... And very different relationships with their parents. Yes, very, very different. And also they're very comfortable with adults. in a way that was different from when I was young.
Freakonomics Radio
616. How to Make Something from Nothing
But there are certain things they resent, and there's a kind of parenting, as it exists in a workplace, that they would bristle at, which I found very valuable growing up. You know, it's a sort of famous thing at Esquire when I was there, there would be these story meetings, and people would cry.