I think what's happening right now is Ryan and I for the last decade have been asking this question what is essential and now a lot more people are all of a sudden asking in fact the terms even out their essential worker, right? But what is essential in my home? What is essential my life? What is essential on my calendar? What is essential and that's why I hope to illuminate with with this film how people ask that question. What is essential
minimalism is not about owning nothing. It's just about
about breaking free from that attachment. You can turn your life around on the dime when you have the power to let go of anything in your life.
We all have the opportunity though to restart Our Lives to start over and this film was about starting over with less that can be less stuff. But it can also be less distractions fewer commitments
Etc. It's about starting over. I mean is this film for every single person? I think every single person will get something out of it, but I think who it's going to help the most as someone who's in a situation right now.
And they need some emotional leverage to start over. I think this film will help them do that. Hey everybody. I'm Joshua Fields Milburn and I'm Ryan Nicodemus and together. We are the minimalists and we are here on the Rich Roll podcast
the Rich Roll podcast. Hey, everybody Welcome to the podcast
good news voicing change.
My coffee table artbook podcast compendium featuring Timeless wisdom from 50 featured guests over the years is restocked and we are shipping worldwide soon. The book is only available on my website not on Amazon. So to learn more and snag yours visit Rich world.com /vc. I should probably mention that Joshua Fields Melbourne and Ryan Nicodemus aka the minimalist.
Are here in the house for a powerful powwow on how to live better with less given that a verbose introduction feels a little inappropriate. It would be weird. Right? Anyway, I will say that I've known both these guys for years. I'd love them. I have so much respect for their work their mission of empowerment and this conversation which is coming up is really stellar and potentially even life-altering but
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Okay, the minimalist so these guys Ryan and Joshua are the dynamic duo behind a slew of books a very popular blog and podcast called as you might suspect the minimalist where they write and talk about living a meaningful life with less stuff the entry point into these guys world for most people including me was their 2016 hit Netflix documentary minimalism, which is a fantastic watch directed.
Nat D of fella who's gone on to become a good friend and a massive Creator on YouTube in any event. Now the trio is back with a great new follow-up Netflix doc called less is now so this is a conversation about all things minimalism, of course and how to live more deliberately. It's about creating more by consuming less. It's about prioritizing experience over accumulation.
It's about growth contentment love and it's about the deep personal satisfaction that comes with contributing Beyond ourselves. This is all a long way of saying that minimalism isn't about martyrdom instead. It's about Freedom. So here we go. This is me Joshua Fields, Melbourne and Ryan Nicodemus.
What's up, guys? What's up? This is a long time in the making. Yeah, it's good to have you here. Great to see both of you. Good to be bad. Joshua's hair is looking perfect as always always, you know, Joshua gets a lot of attention for his hair and this whole Christopher Walken thing but not enough attention is paid to your hair. You have excellent hair in between you guys I cut my hair. I had long hair like yours, but you're looking fabulous. Thanks, man that you know, I felt like I was having a bad hair day today, so that really
Up lifts my spirits. It's all good, man. It's all good people who've been on this podcast Journey for a while will likely remember podcast value with Joshua way back in the day. But Ryan, this is your first time here. So I was expecting you at the time, but I don't know what was going on between us but we worked it out. You guys have been gracious enough to host me on your show several times and I'm delighted to have you here on the eve of your new documentary coming out. It's exciting man. Thanks for having us. Yeah, that's cool.
Hmm your story is well told but I think it would be good to at least contextualize everything. We're going to talk about by sharing your personal stories and also in particular Ryan since yours, you know, you haven't you haven't had an opportunity to share yours here. So, how do we how do we launch into that? What's the best place to start? Should we start at the beginning you guys seen 81 I'll set this grade best friend. Yeah. I think we should start with uh, G kids sitting in the corner. Yeah exactly plotting world.
Domination that's
that's not far from the truth, except the world domination part. It was more like what your work is over towards baton domination, right? And yeah
her way towards it. How many kids from Dayton have documentaries on Netflix.
I mean the Wright brothers.
Yeah, brother. All right. So there's the other thing Martin Sheen he is
from because the doctors know you might be might be in a documentary right? Here's where we start. I think I'll Tee It Up.
So Ryan and I grew up really poor in Dayton, Ohio. We've known each other as you said since we were fat little fifth graders and literally I was the fattest kid in school Ryan was the second fattest
so hard to believe but when you watch the documentary, you're like, wow, he was telling the truth. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean it was it was impressive or depressive. Anyway, we knew each other we grew up really poor dysfunctional homes before that term dysfunctional was in Vogue and
we were pretty discontented growing up. And of course we thought well, how do we get how do we become happy? And of course that was make money and so we climb the corporate ladder throughout our 20s and had ostensibly successful careers, but of course, we weren't successful. We were overwhelmed and stressed and and and sort of discontented by the lives we created and you know was fascinating now Ryan is the the life we were living growing.
It was so chaotic. Mmm.
We traded that
chaos just for a different type of chaos. Controlled. Chaos is still is still chaos, right? In fact, it's an oxymoron. And so yeah, we were working in Corporate America making really good money spending even better money and so had massive amounts of debt and knew we needed to make a change.
Well, yeah, I mean you both grew up in alcoholic All Souls essentially, right? Yeah food stamps.
Poverty. Yeah, so it's not surprising that you would seek out security and you know an upward kind of financially secure trajectory and that's what you know, most people would do trying to emerge out of a situation like that. Yeah. I just I remember working for my dad just out of high school. He just have like small painting and wallpaper company and he worked his butt off in like he made nothing and now I was there working my butt off making nothing.
I'm like, I know there's a way I can work just as hard but make more money and that's when I went into Telecom with with Josh and yeah, like he said we started making really awesome money and I thought I figured it out. I finally figured out I remember because even during like high school. I worked for my dad painting and hanging wallpaper and I remember early on when I was working for him. We were in this really nice house. It wasn't like a mansion or anything, but it was
Like something nicer than my mom or dad ever owned and I looked at my dad. I'm like, this is a really nice place man. Like how much do I need to make in order to live here? And he's like if you can make $50,000 a year, you could probably afford a place like this. So for me that was like yeah, that was the number for happiness 50 Grand a year. And when I went to the Telecom company, I think that very first year I made like 50 mm or something and I was really proud of myself and like happy that I was making more money. I went out and like, you know
Bought a new truck. I guess it wasn't technically mine because like, you know, I got a loan right, you know got a car payment basically, but I wasn't happy and I realized why I wasn't happy it was because I didn't adjust for inflation the 50,000 number had grown a little bit. So I'm like, ah, maybe 60,000. Maybe it's 80,000. Maybe it's six figures or maybe just owning a bunch of stuff. So yeah, that's what I pursued. But I mean my story really with minimalism. It's it kind of starts with Josh.
- because when we were in the corporate world, we were miserable. We had accumulated so many different burdens like whether you know, whether it's debt or whether it's you know, an overabundance of clutter whether it was a you know, chasing a job title. I mean that it was it was it was very very depressing right, but I noticed Josh who started being a little bit less depressed and that's
I went to him and I asked him like hey, man, what are you doing? That's making you so happy. Why the hell are you so happy right? And that's when he introduced this thing called minimalism. Well walk me up to the the point of this Epiphany Joshua because I think they're you know, it's important to understand that inflection point that you know, introduced you to this new way of
living sure. Yeah, but my mom died my marriage ended both in the same month. So it was like sort of this double car crash, right? It's like you get hit by one thing and then it swerves you into this other thing.
NG and and at the same time my corporate career I was really discontented by I was managing a hundred and fifty retail stores, which I know is ironic with the whole minimalism thing now, but maybe it took that in a way for me to to recalibrate but these two big events happened to me and and I started questioning everything and literally everything the things in my life, especially because I had spent the last Dozen Years of 30 at the time and and as I began
Questioning those things in my life. I realized I had worked so hard to buy a bunch of things to make me happy and those things aren't doing their job. And so they had become my priority though. Hmm. And so, of course my priorities were totally out of whack achievement success now, it's not that Ryan and I are against material possessions and we don't think it's morally wrong to own things. Right? We own stuff. I got here in a car today.
I have a bad and ground nice
jacket. Yeah, thank you and money spent on hair
products. But the thing is I had such an attachment to the things but also the perception of other people and a lot of that has to do with ego and and and and so ultimately what I figured out at the time was oh my priorities are really out of whack and thankfully I stumbled across minimalism. Thanks to the internet at the time.
One tweeted Colin right A friend of ours who's in our first minimalist documentary and he lived with 52 items and I I didn't aspire to that but it made me realize there was a relatively normal person doing very abnormal things and I wasn't I didn't want to live his life, but that exposed me to a bunch of other minimalist people like Leo belt off Courtney Carver and Joshua Becker more normal people.
Who had like families and
houses and rightly has got like five kids for something like that 6 6 yeah of condoms, right but he was some of the - what's interesting about this to me is you could have given a different set of circumstances like ended up at a Buddhist Monastery or joining the Peace Corps, like clearly you were having an existential crisis about how you were living like you would premise your entire life on this idea that this very traditional upward corporate.
Trajectory would deliver on its promise of making you happy you you know achieve those things you're lacking that you know sense of connection that you thought it would deliver and you go searching right and you stumble upon minimalism, but what if it had been some other thing there are other paths to, you know, sort of finding a little bit more fulfillment and purpose but you for whatever reason like minimalism was the thing that you connected with.
Yeah, by the way, I think that I
Acting with it because there wasn't a particular Dogma among the people that I saw there wasn't like a 12-step thing and I look at a lot of the stuff
now on dare talk that on the 12-step
thing. No, no, no stops. Yeah, but like the five steps to declutter your call, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, and and so like it wasn't it wasn't like the hell to side of things wasn't that appealing to me. It was the why to side of things that really made me
Denies what I was doing even now you won't see me and Ryan talked about the 17 ways to declutter your kitchen where I could do a video about that someone else wants to do that. That's fine. I don't think that actually addresses the problem. I think those types of solutions are all they often calls new problems because we begin to focus on return those things into into the main focus and it removes our Focus from whatever the the underlying problem is. And so I was fascinated by what
These people were doing and how they were doing it but I was much more focused on the why that's what the new film Les is now it it really starts with that question. How might your life be better with less now. That's a how question but it's a disguised question. Right you like what you see that in
the anecdotes and the stories of the kind of everyday people that have undergone this process and how its emotionally changed their lives or their perspective on how they live day to day but
it is true and we've talked about this before that on a surface level. It's about getting rid of your stuff, but it's really not about that at all. And I think a lot of the focus or the kind of news narrative around it is is around decluttering but decluttering the process of decluttering is really just a way to clear space so you can you know, Marshall your awareness on to the things that are important that you want to focus on. Yeah, is that fair or accurate? Yeah. No, I think at that is totally fair. It's interesting.
No makes me think how the media wants to sell a solution to a symptom rather than address the problem. I mean, I know that doesn't really speak to what you were talking. I mean what you were asking but well the problem is so massive and we're all living, you know, amidst this Grand Illusion, you know that we it's our entire Society is founded upon the idea that you know, you played out in your own life and had to figure out for yourselves wasn't delivering on the promise right this idea that we should be seeking.
Security and comfort and you know salary increases in the new car and all the messages that bombard us everywhere. We turn our head reinforces that and yet what it doesn't do in the movie does a beautiful job of illustrating. This is remind us about what's most important which is you know, community and the connection to the people that we love and and you know pursuing your life with some level of intentionality. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean any letter and talks about about
The documentary about deficit advertising so, you know advertisers big corporations, whatever they go out of their way to make you feel like you're missing something in your life. So that's why we chase the bigger paycheck is so we can go out and buy those things that subconsciously were like, oh man if I just had like a little bit of a nicer car, I'd have a better ride to work and write and enjoy my commute a little bit more and if I just a little bit bigger of a house, I could have that.
Pilates studio and I mean, yeah, just Notch it up and then you get there and then you're like, well, I don't feel that way yet, but it's because there's a guy's living a little bit higher up on the hill than I am. Yeah.
Yeah, by the way, I don't want to moralize any of this either. I don't want to say it's it's better or worse to own fewer possessions. Right? I'm not saying that it's good that Ryan and I own less than we used to own right? I'm not saying it's bad. Either it is.
Is probably more appropriate for us given the constraints but to the point you were asking about rich our material possessions are sort of this physical manifestation of what's going on inside us, right? That's that exit to existential crisis you talked about and so the external clutter is a way that we sort of visualize the mental clutter or the psychological clutter the emotional clutter the spiritual clutter this internal clutter and we found that like with minimalism
awesome. Yeah, it could have been Buddhism or Christianity or anything else that we would have stumbled into but some bling into minimalism allowed us to deal with the thing that had become this priority in our lives stuff had become this this priority and so it started with the stuff but that's sort of the initial bite at the Apple right and then it goes to simplifying all other areas of life.
Right? But there's this moment that you experienced and that you see in the people profiled in the film where
The lights kind of go on like as they begin this process. There's like an and in enervating that occurs in their lives. Like they become very emotionally involved in the process of decluttering their lives and it becomes like exciting and there's a momentum that kind of occurs. Yeah. Yeah, you're talking about the like the everyday minimalists that we have in our Yeah in our film. Yeah. No, it is encouraging. There's one gentleman in there. He talks about how once he started simplifying and got to where he you know,
Like he wasn't living in a bunch of clutter. He kind of realized like oh like I've had everything I ever needed this whole time and he gets emotional. He's an older guy not like a millennial, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No, it's I love having those kind of every day of a minimalist and there to kind of talk about their own personal experiences, especially because you know Josh and I we can tell her stories all day long, but you know, you need other people to resonate with and just you know, two dudes with really great hair routine is really great, though.
We didn't want it to be the Josh and Ryan story. Right like the first film minimalism. It was sort of exposing people to different ideas of attentional living and different areas of minimalism. There were minimis Architects and their Buddhist etcetera and this film we didn't want to just be oh Josh and Ryan tell their story but it's sort of circle around that initial story of us, but we brought in some experts but then we also had those 30 of those everyday minimalist. We wanted all these different perspectives. You probably noticed.
The diversity in the film but it's not just like an ethnic diversity. It's like we have a 17 year old and a 17 year old and the film and all we did was we put a call out and said hey does anyone have a story about how they were how they've been affected by our first film and and they've simplified their lives and how did that work out for you? And we just started bringing those people into the right of the film, right?
So taking it back you have this experience in the wake of your marriage dissolving in your mother's
passing where you decide that you're going to basically change your lifestyle top to bottom. Yeah, you get rid of all this stuff. You have that lights going on experience you seem lighter in your shoes. We assume you're still at the job at that point, but you were just showing up with a little bit of a bigger
smile. Yeah. That's what I was doing a better job setting expectations. So we were on call like doctors, but I wasn't saving anyone I couldn't even save myself and and yet I had the answer the phone at 10 p.m.
If my boss's boss wanted to know something about the sales transactions for any of the stores that day. So the regular occurrence the last thing I did when my head hit the pillow was check my Blackberry the first thing when I got up in the morning is check my Blackberry and throughout the day all throughout the day. I was checking and I started setting expectations and that was sacrilegious where we work that I call my boss. I'm not going to take phone calls in the evening anymore and I could audibly hear his jaw drop on the phone because what do you mean?
That's not like you realize that he didn't realize that was an option. Yeah, even for
himself. I got a call from our boss. We had the same boss and he was like is Josh like is he depressed like maybe planning on killing himself or something?
I'm giving away my
stuff right giving away stuff. Right saying hey, I don't care what you think. I kept my taking phone calls at 6:00. Yeah, but isn't that isn't that kind of sad? Like, that's the reaction
though. Yeah instead of like post. Like wow. Is he doing something to change his life? So
He experiences more peace or more contentment. Like I said this I don't think this is an indictment on stuff or even on Corporate America. It's an indictment on chasing. I'm craving on
attachment. Mmm. Well also on your relationship to externalities. Hmm, right? Yeah. Yeah. So Ryan at some point you begin to Cotton On to this like what's going on with Joshua, right? Yeah. I mean it was it was after him setting boundaries.
Freeze it was you know after that phone call from our boss because I did not see a depressed Josh. I saw someone who was like taking control of something that he that he had no control over and it wasn't until so he moved into a new place after he split up with his wife and it was like a two-bedroom one-bath, maybe two baths, but it was only half full but the one thing that was missing that really stood out to me was the TV and every time I'd go over I'd be like dude when you get into
What kind of TV are you going to get because that's how we like compared success in the corporate world. Like what kind of TV you got in your house? How many TVs do you have? How big is that TV right
here Freud would say about
so to certain points. Like I'm like, I'm gonna get a TV like interesting and yeah, eventually I wanted whatever he was doing and when he said minimalism, you know, I don't know you ask that in the beginning about would have been a different path.
You know could it have been a different path if we didn't find minimalism, right? Well if he shaved his head and disappear to a monastery for a while and came back. Maybe you wouldn't have been so yeah, probably not probably not. Yeah, so but you know, he introduces her minimalism to me and if you know to be honest if it was someone else I don't know how seriously I would have taken it but him and I have very it's where we have like exact opposite Myers-Briggs personalities, but we have very similar similar personalities and other ways. So I was like if this works for him all at least give it a shot.
Look at it and see if it'll work for me. So the first video he sent me was Colin right with the 50 things that he owned and I'm like, okay like this is a little weird but then like I got into other minimalist Courtney Carver leave about Joshua Becker and all you know, what I saw is common sense. I saw a lot of people talking about all these common-sense things that I knew internally, but for some reason I never listened to and minimalism for me. It was an opportunity for me to start over.
It was an opportunity for me to will do a Josh it and gain control of what I had lost control over. So I got really excited. I'm like dude. I want to be a minimalist like this is awesome. Like I get it. What should I do? Right. So do this packing party, right? So yeah, exactly so, you know in the excitement he's like, well, what if we pack up all your stuff and then unpack it as you need it? I'm like that's a great idea, especially because I'm a very extreme person when it comes to things like Josh.
Pared down over several months. He made some very slow changes over months time. But for me, like I needed faster results. So the packing party was perfect for me. I think probably most of your listeners right now. I don't know if the packing party would be the best option for especially they got families and stuff. Although we have totally seen families do yeah, I'll say this. Well, everyone's at home thinking of interesting things to do. There's a lot of people rearranging the furniture in their houses right now because they are mind. Yeah. This is like the perfect time for them to come.
Don't overstuff the
one time you're really confronted with everything like truly confronted is when you move to a new house and so that was sort of the impetus of the packing party idea was like when you move you actually have to go through
everything you own and do something with it and whether in
store it box up, whatever doesn't matter you have to do something with that stuff and now is the sort of the second time where this has happened where people have been in their homes for way more than they anticipated and we all we thought the beginning is like people were like reaching out to us. Hey,
You guys you probably upset that you got rid of all that stuff, aren't you now? You're stuck at home and I'm like, yeah, the broken waffle iron is really third bread maker that I got as a wedding gift. And so anyway that packing party we've had dozens of people do in fact, we have a book coming out next year called love people use things. It's like the whole sort of synopsis of our message and in that book, we had 47 different families do a packing party. So it may seem radical but
But it's not so radical that we've had a lot of
people do it. Yeah, the idea being you pack everything up and then you slowly unpack and deliberately decide which items you actually need to use whatever the rest gets donated or sold. Right? Yeah. I mean Josh should ask me he's like what if you unpack things as you needed it like that would really hope I'm like that's a great idea. That's that's what we should do. And so you can imagine yeah my clothes for work bed and bed sheets toothbrush so forth and so on, but I'll tell you
The packing party. It was something to like change my state, but I honestly didn't realize how powerful that was going to be until it was over and it was confronted with all my things and the biggest Revelation was I had this dream of retiring early, but I had like very little retirement, you know, very little in my retirement accounts. But here I saw tens of thousands of dollars that I wasn't using, you know worth of stuff and I'm like, I could probably be sitting in my retirement.
Account right now, but I but I remember going to Josh I'm like dude. This is we have to do a website and talk about this packing party because this is this is something so that was the original impetus. Yeah, start the blog. Yeah. It's sort of ten years ago yesterday. Uh-huh. I know I saw an Instagram your 10-year you bet you guys have been doing this for 10 years believable, man. Yeah. How do you what's the difference between your relationship to minimalism?
Then in the early days to now like how has it evolved or changed? Mmm. I think it's changed quite a bit
recently. I've become more allergic to the sort of how to side of things. I've never been a giant fan of it, but I've realized that it's actually before I was somewhat neutral on it just wasn't for me. But now I think it's it's often a problem. And I think it's an opiate in a way because it helps us Ryan alluded to earlier the sort of the symptoms.
If I show you how to declutter your kitchen, but you know why you're doing it's going to be really cluttered a month from now and so getting a deep understanding if you understand the why truly understand the why the hell takes care of itself. And so we'll talk about some of the house stuff that we've done that may not be applicable for Everyone. By the way. My my-y looks different from Ryan's why and that's why starting out with that question how might your life be better with less is really the foundation of it. Then I can
talk about
but it's but it's the process. It's the it's the how that opens the portal to the Y right like if you're living your life in a certain way with blinders on and just moving in a particular direction. It's very hard to answer that question of why I like you gotta shake things up and do something different in order to you know, kind of confront that right like short of you doing the packing party. Would you have been you know, if confronted with the why question, how are you going to answer that? So it's almost like there needs to be
You know a deconstruction of your life a little bit and there's some practicalities
that
it's interesting. Yeah, you know, it's it's almost like the why
was so much in my face at the time. Hmm of how miserable I was. Hmm. It was like but also you're holding onto it so hard because your whole life was one of my son invested in that. Yeah, but if it wasn't for that amount of or that level of stress and discontent and depression, I don't know if I would have right because the problem is sometimes seen as the lover. Yeah, ultimate level and comfort is like, I don't know the Comfort to me.
Is don't get me wrong. I like being comfortable but it's fuel for denial. Absolutely. Yeah.
Well the thing I look at with what Ryan I think Ryan's actually the perfect example of if you understand the why the hell takes care of itself. No one gave him a howl to hmm. There was not a prescription for a packing party ever. Like it didn't exist. Right what did exist were a bunch of decluttering tips and other things that we had seen for decades and never paid any attention to because that's not that compelling. It's compelling in the moment at the checkout line.
In the same way candy is appealing at the checkout line, right but it's not nutritious in anyway, and so when Ryan truly understood the why like, I don't feel at peace. I feel chaos.
Let me let me sort through this. Let me not fix it because nothing is fixed. Right ever. There's always change right? It's not about fixing something. It's about addressing the problem. And I think that's what the packing party did. It was the impetus now. Yeah, we talked about the how but you can Ryan always talk about how what we share is like a recipe and you can sort of tweeze out your own ingredients and create
your own version of it adjust for Taste. Yeah. We'll be right back in a sec, but first were supported today by
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get back into
it.
So how long after this
packing party and this decision to write about these things before you guys are no longer working at the corporation? Right? Like I know you got laid off. I got laid off. Yeah months after Josh Josh technically got laid off to I laid myself
like it was well, they came to me that so this was 10 years ago as well. They came to me right before Christmas at a soon as we close our soon as we finish out the holiday shopping season.
Season which by the way, we've turned the holiday season into a shopping season. Think about that for a moment. But it soon as we do this, you know, I need you to close eight stores and layoffs 42 employees. I'd done this a bunch of times. It's it was never fun, but it got easier over time. So I laid off a bunch of people and fired people wasn't that big of a deal, but then with this new perspective I had been simplifying my life that entire year I
They said you got two weeks to put together this plan. Give us the 42 names that you're going to lay off. And so I went home and within two days. I was putting the spreadsheets together, but looking at the spreadsheet.
It
was like looking at a rainbow in black and white and gray scale, right? Because these are just names and statistics and I get that's how you're going to make a decision like this but these weren't just names these were husbands and fathers and daughters and mothers and these were people and my livelihood was in their hands and I knew that like there was some sort of discontent, but at that point I realized the corporation we were at no longer aligned with my personal values and
I turned the plan in my name was the first name on the
list. You see you really did lay yourself off.
Yeah, and I didn't really I didn't have a plan. I just had reduced my bills. So significantly living in Dayton, Ohio $500 a month apartment and I was like, you know what I'm going to try this writing thing out for a while. There's a coffee shop in my neighborhood. They actually end up in a doctor and repress. Yeah, and I'm just going to I'll just work there and I have enough money to pay my bills and I'll write for the
the rest of the time I won the write fiction initially thanks to Ryan. This was a beautiful accident in a different
direction, right? So you guys start meeting at press. You start working on this blog. Yeah. I mean, that's what we did for the first year, right? We just wrote wrote on the blog and yeah, put our put our thoughts out there. Was there a moment like a Tipping Point moment with the blog where you're like, wow, like this could be a thing like we could actually craft a vocation around this point I think for me.
The San Francisco event.
It was for me before that before that. Yeah it for me it was.
Leo about a shared something that we did and
that when I was reading his blog back then too I mean right addict, you know, that was like everyone was reading his stuff
and we had like more people show up in one day I wasn't a lot of people who was like 9,000 people or something for me it was like, oh we haven't seen so we talked about this in the film how like 52 readers that first month turn in the 500 which turned into you know, 5 million or whatever and so there there was a moment there, but around that same time it was
You guys are the minimalist aren't you? Did you write a book about minimalism as I guess we should do that,
huh? We are the minimalist. Yeah,
and so we did we put out a book. We at the time we just self-published a book at the end of our first year and we went on tour, but it was really just we went around the country to coffee shops and and brought it made me realize like, oh we can get eight people to show up and by far most
stuff's really yeah 228 people. Yeah, if we sell if we sell 10 when you're living minimally and you don't need
Much right exactly yourselves. We can sell 10 books. Then. We
have a place to stay for the night. If not, we just sleep in Ryan's Toyota Corolla and that's how it worked out for us.
Yeah. Well the first movie did such a great job at you know, spinning that yarn of you guys going on the road and you know showing up at places and three people would show up and then slowly a few more a few more and you see the build but you know, it's the grittiness of the early days that you know, so fun. I'm just thinking about the self by then.
Minimalism documentary because I remember being so excited for that South by Southwest of it. Like we made it right. We finally we finally like it's a buddy movie Road Trip on you know, like like a Wizard of Oz movie with South by Southwest bring you guys going to meet Oz and I was thinking this was like, you know the Apex of our jerk like we were at South by Southwest this is and then like the three people showed up to her.
Everybody. Yeah, that was great land your is
big room with like three people in it. Well that movie is so well done. And I have to imagine that that had to be, you know, life-changing in some regard. I think it's most people's introduction to your work because Netflix put it right out front and so many people watched it the first question I have about that first movie is how did you connect with Matt develop because Machiavelli, he's had his own like crazy.
Yeah trajectory blowing up on YouTube and being this massive Creator on that
platform Lucent. He is all grown up. We actually want to know Twitter when he was a wedding videographer. Yeah, and I saw this video he made called most wedding videographer suck and I still I still bring that up to him constantly, but he was doing that and he was doing like other commercial work for like on Toyota or Subaru or something and we hired him to do.
Do the trailer for our second book everything that remains and we did an event out in New York to sort of celebrate this and he filmed that event and made a trailer for that book that we put up on YouTube and that was sort of it and then a few months later. I say we're getting ready to go on the road 2014. We did a hundred City tour right and say hey, do you want to come on the road with us and try to make a documentary and he had been wanting to do something with his creative skills other than commercial work, right? And so he's like, yeah, give it
Not at the end of the tour it was like he just had a few hard drives with like a thousand hours of footage was like hey good luck with that. And then
so he just went away and came back with a cut. Yeah for you guys.
Yeah, I remember dropping
off at the airport and I remember thinking to myself like like this is a movie. Yeah, like I have no idea how he's going to pull this together. Uh-huh, but there was no budget for it. I mean we were just, you know, we're just passionate about it. So it's not like we
Had a lot to lose, but then he said that first cut and yeah, I was instantly like, oh, wow like Matt knows what he's doing and I always make sure and tell people that because people will come up to me and be like, oh, yeah, you're the guy from the minimalism documentary great doc. You did such a good job and I'm like, I wish I could say it was me but I really met the eval who did that old are you didn't unbelievable job and all the accolades and success that he's he's enjoying on YouTube are
well-deserved. Oh, yeah, he does is amazing. Yeah YouTube and
And he has built up this this amazing following especially young people right? Whoo-hoo really, he's brought the message of minimalism to a crowd that that maybe we Ryan and I were never going to reach. Yeah either sprightly. Yeah. He does such a he makes he's like many
documentaries. I know every one of his his videos is like should enjoy a theatrical release. All right. Yeah. That's all they're all there. I hope they're working hard. I'm going to tell my car. Yeah, and he's a guy who walks.
The talk like he just this past week gave away all his stuff yet again. He and his wife are on the road. And now in Sydney like they're just going to travel they literally everything they own is in like little carry-on suitcase has yeah. It's a beautiful example of how you can turn your life around on a dime when you have the power to let go of anything in your life and that I mean that's exactly what he displayed with that it was cuz it's not about minimalism is not about owning nothing.
It's just about breaking free from that attachment Breaking Free from that. I don't know that that I don't know what other word for just that affectionate way. There's a sense that oh, if you're going to be a minimalism minimalist that you're self-flagellating or you're some kind of martyr when in truth you're just purchasing freedom for yourself absolutely absent choices. Yeah right to be able to you know, self-employment is such a gift but it gives him with the things that he does the
It just you know, pack it up and go wherever he wants. Yeah, which is unbelievable. Yeah, and you see
him work. It's amazing. You wouldn't think he's able to he has the strangest sort of he's like hiding under the table looking up with the camera. Yeah. What is he doing? Is he is that a crotch shot? I'm not sure what's going on, but somehow he just he
has and a total one-man show when I did his I was one of the early guests on his podcast and he's got all these cameras and and he's got
he's doing it all himself. Like he's Manning the cameras. He's asking the questions. He's got the monitor there. I'm like, this looks stressful like yeah get a little help but he's like, no he knows what he's doing. He's like a master of his domain and his hidden
secret is his skill at editing. So we had we had some help on this film Angus wall and his Tiana Angus wall. He he's David Fincher's editors Wow fight club. He edited the social.
Work one some Academy Award for that he added. What's the one with what's the other big one? He did with
something on the tip of my tongue to Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo. You did the opening sequence to that. Anyway, his company did the animation and less is now and he was actually we were going to bring him in that team on to edit the film and but Matt was just like no, I'm good. Like I mean, I got it covered. Yeah, and that's the thing like here the weird thing about it is I don't think Matt like
it's editing at all. Hmm But that is his hidden. Like he's the he's the Mozart of editing and he even like when we went from like fourth cut to V cut Angus solid and he was like this looks like went through 60 different cuts of right? Oh, yeah. So yeah kudos to him.
So the movie explodes and you guys kind of ride this wave you have used the books and you started the podcast your now 10 years into this.
thing you've got millions of people all over the world that care deeply about the things that you talked about and what's really cool and compelling about this platform that you now manage is that it's completely audience supported like you start all your podcast and you know advertisement suck and and you have this population of people that adore you and basically, you know are willing to subscribe to your wisdom and you've been able to craft out live it making a
Living off of this for a decade.
Most of all we do is free and available to the public right and there's you know a small portion where we sort of dive deeper and your private podcast is on patreon. And yeah, we do have an audience that supports us there. But that's also it's almost like when you go to well back when we could go to The Comedy Store places like that where people sort of workout ideas, right? We work out things and sometimes Ryan I just start argue on the private podcast about things because we don't
Agree about something or we bring a guest on and we argue with them about it and I like to think of it as talking things out. Yeah, and and so but most of what we do is whether it's the blog
or
or the main podcast. Anyway, it's act. It's accessible to anyone
right when you were touring. How many cities did you do? I'm you get you guys invited me to come when you did The Fillmore in San Francisco, which was like so cool man you guys
We fill in theaters like all across the country. Yeah, you're at the Superfund was great.
Yeah, the most we've ever done was a hundred City a hundred nineteen events and one year we canceled at or lat this year my Swanee, right because of 2020 is reason and yeah, I mean we've done what nine tours in 10 years. So so anywhere from a few cities like the Simply Southern tour was three cities went with Dave Ramsey's team and did
Small tour in the South to a hundred cities everywhere in between but yeah, it just became a part of and by the way, all those tours are different as well. Sometimes it's a podcast or sometimes we do a talk sometimes will do book readings and book signing. It kind of just depends on what's going on.
So Dave Ramsey features pretty prominently in the new movie. So how did that relationship develop? How does he fit into the minimalist
ecosystem? His daughter really likes
us that what it is. Yeah.
Works for him. She's a very talented author name is Rachel Crews and she has a great YouTube show and she invited us to come on her YouTube show. It's a Nashville and it's a whole production have a whole studio set up there. I'm here's a thousand employees at his compound. It's a really impressive setup and they they work really hard to to teach financial literacy. They're now being taught in 25% of the high schools around the country.
The Dave Ramsey curriculum, he has a whole team a hundred a hundred people on that
team his whole thing is about living fiscally responsible. Yeah, like not living outside of your means and making sure that you're making prudent Financial just like essentially like conservative prudent financial decisions. Yeah. I feel like he's like a minimalist Finance guy basic because you know minimalism, it's funny when I first, you know, heard it and heard about it looked into it. I kind of felt like it was this Niche type thing and then like once
Got into it. I'm like, oh like this is a this can be applied to anything and I think Dave Ramsey essentially implies minimalism to finances and right and yeah, right. He's got some great fun and his whole team though.
They're they're gray Anthony. Onio Chris Hogan. Yeah. Yeah the whole lot of them John Delaney. Yeah. So
we're, you know well into this pandemic cycle fraying at the edges as we crawl towards 2021, and I'm interested.
Rested in how you're thinking about the relationship between consumerism and minimalism with this very specific moment the way that I'm kind of thinking about it. Is that on the one hand like nobody's going to the mall or not shopping there at home. So it's forcing people to perhaps be a little bit more reflective about those habits on some level yet at the same time. We're all empowered by these tools and we're spending, you know, these technological tools were well,
Front of our screens way too much and that habituation to shopping has just migrated to the devices. I don't know what the statistics are but I suspect I'm certain that online shopping has skyrocketed but has consumerism overall increased during this moment. Like how are you thinking about people's habits? What does that look like?
Couldn't we mean by consumerism? So I do think consumerism is the right way to frame it. That is one of the problems right consumption isn't the problem. We talked about this and less
now because we all need to consume some stuff consumerism, which is what we could just identify as compulsory consumption on away as though we feel that as we must buy this in order to either be complete Ryan talked about the deficit deficit advertising earlier or the what else is an occult in the film The the vertical integration. Yeah, and so it no longer. Are you just competing with your next door neighbor? It's
your yeah talk about that. That's a really fascinating important idea. I
think so. Here's the new
Of consumerism is one problem. We relate that to stuff materialism is really that the other side of consumerism is is distraction, I think and so the thing that Ryan and I will say is scrolling is the new smoking and this Epiphany hit me when I was walking outside of like a Chipotle or something. I see someone outside in the cold like in the midwest scrolling on their phone cigarette in hand at the same time and it's not the judge that person is to see myself in that person like I don't
Don't smoke but like I could see you know, my habits are showing right and it's not just the smoking Now 50 years ago. Everyone sort of casually puff cigarettes. We'd be at this table right now. Just smoking right talking, right? Yeah Cloud, right and but you did that now would seem nutty if I just lit up a cigarette right now. You wouldn't know how to respond to that. I mean the only person who can do that is Dave Chappelle, by the way, but besides him like it would seem nutty and and yet it doesn't seem that strange.
If I would because of the three of us, but your average setting if I were to pull out a phone and just check it
really quick. Mmm, but it's just as
bothersome in many ways. Yeah, it's secondhand distraction. And so I think over the last decade in particular what we've seen is a lot of new ways to distract ourselves Ryan and I distracted ourselves back in the Audis and in the late 90s with with stuff, but now the distractions are digital and they're right there and they're more
Dicing than ever and the the same thing happens right in the material world. It was high-paid demographers statisticians marketers aggregating your eyeballs on to the product or service. Now, since you're the product it's aggregating your eyeballs on to the product and service to sell you products and service and and so in a weird way dystopian way it elevates the problem it amplifies the
problem right? I mean without without a doubt in the
Subject matter and terrain that movies like The Social dilemma go into at length. It's not just enticing it's truly addictive and it's designed to be that way the revelatory idea that I had not thought about before until I saw your movie was this idea of the kind of exponential expansion of keeping up with the Joneses write like this. This consumerist impulse originally derived from you know, perhaps something genetic within us to try to
You know keep Pace with our neighbors so and so has got that refrigerator or that car. Like I've got to get that too. But now by dint of these technological tools everybody's our neighbor, so it's not just the person living next door, but it's you know, the celebrity on Instagram and you get to peek into their world or now on Zoom you get to see you know, what everybody's you know study and living room looks like and it's almost impossible to not run that comparison against what you have or don't have and how does that
Impact your your consumer choices or your sense of innate discontent when you attempt to measure yourself against that impossible standard. Yeah, I think comparison is the killer of Joy regardless of you know, kind of how you're comparing yourself or what you have to other people. It is interesting with the whole social media. It's like, you know my sister when I was in Ohio a year ago, you know back when we were traveling without any fear. Yeah. She was like do
I feel cool because you got you know, x amount of subscribers on Instagram and I'm like no I was like to do you think I'm cool because I have that many subscribers. She's like, yeah, I think it's pretty cool. And I'm like if you're looking at subscribers, like I have I don't even know what have I know it's not a million, but I'm like, you know, if if you got to where I'm at with however many subscribers The then you'd be looking at a million. And then once you had a million you'd be looking at three million. It's like a never-ending comparison wheel that we put ourselves.
Was on right failure and it's in a weird way all success is failure.
So what are the tactics that you deploy to prevent yourself from, you know indulging in that kind of, you know, fruitless mental exercise because it's hard, right it is it is I mean, I don't look at specific numbers. Like that's one way because I think I'm a numbers guy in general. I love math. I love spreadsheets so I could very easily get wrapped up in
To it just to like make a game out of it, but I try to not gamify it as much as possible, but I'll be honest like because of man, this is going to sound like some you know Buddhist hybrid thing but because of how destructive my ego was in the corporate world at any time I start to feel the ego kicking in which it kicks in all the time. But when I start to feel it kicking in with like, oh how many subscribers that I gained today or how many because I did feel that in the early days. I try not to
Um stroke that ego and by practicing that over the last ten years I am able to just you know, kind of still feel like I fell 10 years ago. I don't feel any more popular or successful. I mean even it's funny you were talking about, you know us having a lot of people who adore us I think is what you said and like they're willing to support us and I appreciate those people so much but I like hearing you say it like my ego is like, oh, wow, that is amazing. We do have all these people who adore us and who will support us but uh, but yeah,
Yeah, so, you know, I guess just to reiterate like when my ego starts to get out of control, I will try to like put it in check a little bit because ultimately when I know if I ever start to play that game it'll never be enough Mmm
Yeah, I don't have any tactics.
I you guys aren't getting into Twitter spats and things like that like you you seem to just I can tell by the way that you you know, share your content online that it's kind of at an arm's length like you put it you make sure that your stuff is being shared, but you're not you know in
Are you know going back and forth with people and stuff like
that a healthy Detachment or not? I'm not in the Buddha right like Buddha would be non-attachment. Right? But but not needing to be not needing the outcome and not needing any of it. By the way, the by being attached detached you realize that that
this is going to sound like a value judgment, but it's not it's all a scam and it really like
it.
Who cares like
it's all ego, even by the way was I changed my mind about recently helping people? I don't want to help people. Let's be honest, like helping people. That's just my ego saying I want to help people now. I feel it's still viscerally because I've program has a
externally validated if you say that out loud, right right. It's my no
no, no, but maybe maybe the truth behind that is well. I want to I want peace I want to
Speak the truth and if that helps some people that's wonderful. If it doesn't it can still be wonderful. I don't need that because if once I become attached to needing to help someone it's a different type of prison. It's a Well decorated prison cell, but it's still a prison
cell you can you can help people for selfish reasons though, too because it makes you feel good. It actually makes you hurt me. So you give your life a little bit more meaning and and it builds self-esteem. So even if your impetus your impulses,
Is selfish it's still a good thing to follow through on.
Yeah, by the way, I'm not saying that helping people is good or bad right? It's not a and also not helping people is not good or bad but by default then right, I don't want to throw that judgment out there. I'm simply saying that like I have to be honest with myself that like, it's my ego that's involved where I'm like, it's what Ryan said, you know, if I have 10 million Instagram followers. I'm helping more people.
Well, where is that the truth or is that just a statistic? Mmm.
I feel like there's two interesting things things happening right now, which is the undeniable rise of popularity around minimalism and related ideas. Like there is a Groundswell of people who are feeling disconnected and dissatisfied in a way and are discovering this way of living that is giving their lives greater meaning and purpose but in tan
Adam with that we're also seeing this acceleration of our materialistic consumer culture. I mean you you see it in the film to the kind of Rapid ization of home delivery and Amazon and the drones and you know, how everything is just seems like it's on steroids right now almost like this war of ideas that are that are like bumping up against each other. Yeah.
Well you also see those sort of corporatization of Simplicity as well right when Maria congress-led co-opted
Or and yeah exactly
The Container Store is actually one of the biggest problems right The Container Store allows us to hide our hordes and this is an indictment of Marie. Kondo. I think she really does get to the Y and in her book The life-changing magic of tidying up like she does talk. She obviously discusses the how to stuff that's her shtick, but she gets to the why but when I see, you know tuning forks for several hundred dollars and and crystals and the commodification of simplicity.
Don't need anything to simplify right that organizing is just well-planned hoarding. And the thing we talked about the film is the average American household has 300,000 items in it right now. I had a really organized version of that. I had basements with basement full of bins and boxes and ordinal alphabetize system of CDs and DVDs and but it was just well-planned hoarding the easiest way to organize your stuff is to get rid of anything. That's no longer.
Adding value get rid of most of it. It's so much easier to quote unquote organized because you don't have anything that you have to organize your getting to the essence and your stop worrying about the
form. Yeah. I love that quote that you shared recently. Everything is a hundred percent off if you don't buy it. Yeah,
I think we should that be about Black Friday or yeah, and I told
my 25 year old self that mmm. He may have not been ready for thought you said something about
I'll briefly about minimalism bringing meaning to people's lives and actually
I don't know if minimalism brings meaning to people's lives. I think it's minimalism helps someone Etch A Sketch a sketch a new life. It helps them start over and then from there they can start to do meaningful things. And that's I mean that's really what less is now is about it's about, you know, being able to start over but it's I've never yeah, thanks for having you phrase. It made me think of it in a way of I don't think minimalism is by getting it wrong. Right? I mean I was alluding to that but I hear what you're saying. No, that's that's a that's a very good point.
The question I was going to ask was what would you tell yourself, you know five years ago when you were well into this the minimalism thing that you understand better now that maybe you didn't then as you kind of mature hmm five years ago.
Drop drop the
prescriptions. Yeah, right not the actually medical prescriptions.
But you mean that that back to the how to
thing. Yeah, but yeah, but also lightly
The desire to give advice to people that's also an ego thing. Right? I've no more advice have some observations if you want to hear my own observations about my own life, but even then going back and giving advice to my 35 year old self would be
Almost counterintuitive now if I could show him some things it would it be the piece that's related to letting go of some of the attachments because I think Ryan and I we picked up new attachments along the way especially when that film came out talk about serving your ego when you get recognized on the street a dozen times a day all of a sudden you start to believe that you're better than what you are.
And Ryan, I for a period of time I think we went three years without doing any media as a result. Like I was just I it doesn't feel good to need this. Mmm. And because it does it feels like you're creating for the wrong reason. It's it feels as though like it's that externality. It's all
right. Well, that's a healthy dose of
self-awareness.
Maybe I mean, I'm still I'm still yeah working on eradicating that
right. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Let me know.
That's the thing. I don't think we don't figure it out. I think it's it is the eradication thing right? It's you don't figure out heart disease. You try to eradicate it away. Yeah.
Hmm. So the first movie came out in 2016. What year was that? Yeah,
so Netflix actually turned us down twice.
That film we put out on our own we did a theatrical release through a company called gather at the time. I don't even know if they're still around but it was like theatrical on demand that 2016. Yeah, that was May 2016 1 and we before hundred theaters US Canada Australia. And then from there we put out on we went back to Netflix. They said no again. And so we just put on our own and it did relatively well.
Well resonated with people on iTunes and Amazon and other places and so that Flex ends up saying yes to it and that really started the the conflagration because we sent the rest of our audience there who had been listening to the podcast or reading the blog and they whatever sparked one of our algorithm it does and it showed up on a lot more people's radar. I think it's how we showed up
on your radar even. Yeah, I think so. I mean I saw well, I think you were doing a few podcasts. I saw you guys Papa.
Up on some friends and people that I knew and then I saw the movie I was very struck by the movie and then we did one of our retreats in Italy and we screened it for the group that we had there, which was really cool. I was just remembering that today. Awesome and I can't remember whether I did that. I think I had interviewed you and then we went on the trip, or maybe I interviewed you right back right afterwards. I can't remember but I just I just remember being very moved by that film and then we did the podcast and
And I believe that you might have even alluded either on my car off that you guys were working on another documentary. Like if there was going to be a follow-up right? And here we are five maybe almost six years later before less is now Premiere. So what was going on? What happened? Yeah, we ran into some technical difficulties.
Well Ryan, and I surely after that came out with to Matt again, and we did another tour the less. It was called the lessons now torn and
We went out filming that trying to sort of recreate the magic of the first film and we put it together. We actually we did an event at the Wilbur Theater is where Joe Rogan shot his like most recent comedy special beautiful spot. Yeah, we filmed it. I we gave a talk there and we were going to like sort of build the film around that talk and we kind of end up doing that in this this later version of the film and the talk look fine, but it kind of look like a stand-up comedy special without
D you're like waiting for the punch because it was the venue right it was and so it just it fell flat. It didn't work. So we did it again. We actually brought you out. We rented out this giant
warehouse space right that was like two years ago. Now was there there was a Hans it was it was it that was it was three? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was the think shoot. You got a live audience. I mean that warehouse space is in the movie. Did you was that from that evening or did you guys end
up re shooting with somebody and a half
later year and a half later. We went to the same.
You because I was like I was telling Julie were watching. I was like, yeah, I was there that night when these guys were doing this but I'm like is it doesn't look like there's
people there like what I was there there was a
lot of people there so something was weird. Yeah, something was different about it. Yeah, so we'll verbal comedy special to know comedy to a really well-done tedx talk is what yet. That's what it looked like. Yeah. It's
so so that night you were there. You actually came up your gracious enough to do the intro for us and we gave a talk in front of two different crowds.
Because we figured well the Wilbur Theater static was the problem and so will we film this in front of ya a beautiful aesthetic? This old abandoned warehouse will build the set for it bring a crew out film it and it'll it'll work out that way. We that's the problem. Well then so we get there and then we start interspersing it with these documentary elements and it was like mixing vegan cheesecake.
Shout out to Rich row and and sweet and sour tofu and just motion into together and you're like, I really like both of these things but they don't work when I smush them together. And so we had to go back to the drawing board. And we said hey, we're just going to scrap. So that was the second time. We did the film we scrap the whole thing and start it over again. And so this project we thought was going to take us about four months ended up taking about four years.
From the Inception until because when we
when I was there that night my sense was that you guys were in the final throes of wrapping this thing up. Oh we were right. Yeah
of that version. Yeah, and those two will never see the light of day. I saw that they were were terrible. They just didn't it didn't work for what we were trying to communicate and we wanted to we knew it wasn't it wasn't.
We weren't really putting our best foot forward as Ryan said it's either like a it was like a would have been a really good YouTube video editing great YouTube
video. Yeah, I would just say like just to add on to it when we got those two films back. I don't remember not getting the feeling that I got with minimalism Matt for what we gave Matt. He did an amazing job for what we gave him. But yeah, it was it's been a long road, but well, it's tough too because the first one had a built-in narrative and you guys are these underdogs and you're going
This trip, right? So there's there's a kind of a Tempo or a propulsion to that and in the follow-up it's in then the challenge is like well, how do we you know, what's the next chapter of this? And how do we make that compelling
and that chapter in the being the chapter before I was in a weird way is first-ever documentary prequel, right? It doesn't require you to see the first film obviously. I'm not at all. But but in there are two independent things and this one we were really aggressive about keeping it under an hour and the hole
whole Spirit of minimalism and but in doing that we had to cut out a lot of a lot of amazing that Ryan's whole sub narrative about this we can talk about it here because you're talking about it publicly. No, I don't
think I was like you rich I love the party. Yeah. I mean this was this is something that I I know about you, but I've never heard you actually talked about like you've had your run-in with drugs and alcohol for sure. I do I talk about whenever it comes up like I'm totally okay to talk especially coming from Ohio because like I hope so
In Ohio who is hooked on you know pain pills right now is listening to this and knowing that they can totally pull themselves out of that situation because I mean Dayton Ohio where we're from. I don't know if it still is but it was the the overdose capital of the world. So there's a lot of just a lot of drugs there. But yeah to Josh this point there was this beautiful Arc in the film that we couldn't put in there that I really tried to get men. Matt tried to put
It just didn't work, but it was about kind of going down that road and what pain that cause me and how I was able to you know, kind of start over but it's really it's those stories again unfortunate kind of make the phone. But it I think it's those stories that really mean the most to people like they want to hear about like, oh Ryan isn't this perfect person who is just like one day like I'm going to simplify my life. And I mean it was a lot of work and it was a lot of pain and it was a lot of discomfort and
I did get through it. But yeah, I was living in the is it an opiate is that what pain pills are are they there opiates many of them? Are you? Okay? All right. Yeah. So yeah, I mean opiates were real easy access and when you're when I was working 60 70 sometimes 80 hours a week. I would caffeinate myself didn't do a lot of coke mainly because my mom like turned me off to that drug because I saw her go through her own thing went and I talked about that in the first documentary.
Um, but I would caffeinate myself Adderall, you know, whatever productivity thing. I could get in my body, but then you get home at nine o'clock at night and you it's hard to unwind but it's really easy with like a pain pill and a beer and yeah, so I guess it wasn't going out to the bars and get loaded. It was no some of that tumor like I want to be a yeah, right? Okay, okay feel
better. Unfortunately, we even did re-creation scenes Ryan getting beat up at a bar one. So yeah, that didn't make the film we're here to find.
Way to put a lot of the sun on patreon or somewhere where I actually just got permission from Netflix today to use some of these these scenes somewhere and Ryan talked about in the film but it was spending upwards of $5,000 a month on. Wow. I remember
telling it what opioid like I might have a problem. It's like my therapist about it and I remember mentioning that to to them and she was like, yeah. She's like I've seen worse I've seen people spend ten fifty thousand dollars a month of drugs time for
A new therapist.
Yeah. Well, I think she was
just trying to like make me not feel so yeah, but so did you just go cold turkey and oh, no that would rear view or how did you how did you I went past it. I probably should have done a 12-step program but I just went off I went off of opiates to get on there's a product called likes Suboxone. Yeah, and you don't really yeah. It's not like methadone like methadone is something that you just
Go from illegal addictions to Legal restrictions or Suboxone Works a little bit different in the brain. So I was on that program for a little bit seeing getting a lot of therapy and I remember one time I like was going on a trip and I forgot to bring my Suboxone. Mmm, and I went like two weeks without it and I was like, oh, I'm free. I'm done. I don't have to do this anymore. And you just never went back never went back. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's it was a long road like
it's I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst. Enemy. The detox from opioids is horrible. It's miserable. I still don't think I've recovered a hundred percent like mentally mean like brain function wise or lengthwise. Hmm. I think
yeah your deep sleep still way off.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm like got you guys are both rocking that were around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so yeah, it was a long road, but when I started Living intentionally and like really facing
These things head-on that wasn't like the magic answer, but it certainly gave me some leverage, right? Yeah. Well, you know alluding to something that I asked you about earlier. I mean both you guys survived quite a bit of childhood trauma. Hmm. Do you like are you in therapy? I have you like work through you seem to have a pretty healthy relationship with your past now like you don't it doesn't feel like you're holding on to a lot of resentment and those kinds of you know negative.
Turns so how did you work through
that yet traumas perspectival in many ways right? Like I talked about this in the film so we can my very first memory as a child is my father extinguishing a cigarette while mom's chest now, of course, I'm going to remember something like the whole right, but I also don't think it traumatized me the same way that other things trauma and so like it's weird like I do remember that and I'm sure it was awful or whatever but there are other things that seem
Less consequential but traumatize me even more I was much more worried of like Child Protective Services taking me away because my mom was an alcoholic. I think I was far more traumatized by that. Yeah. I yeah, I certainly have a lot of forms of sort of OCD like Lowell. I've been diagnosed with OCD but it's like low-level. I'm not like painting my floor every day or anything like that. But like, I'm sure that's a whole thing about control right? Because the
Chaos of of
childhood. It's almost like you have this bar of like, well, I'm not painting my floor like yeah, it's yeah, but you could have just like anything you can have an unhealthy relationship to a good thing. I'm sure that you could have an unhealthy relationship to minimalism where it is. I am absolutely in control of my environment all the time. Yeah, the
solution becomes the problem, right? And that's that's why the whole anti prescription thing for me now is like, yeah. I've been doing a lot more exploration this year around
Around that but when we are looking for we don't actually need the solutions if your chair is on fire right now, Rich, you're not going to say hey, can you hand me that fire safety manual over there? Because it would really help me out right now. You don't need three steps to get out of a flaming chair. You're going to do it. You're going to do it like that because your why is so powerful. You don't the Hal takes care of itself. Right? And and so the problem is not a lack of instructions the problem. Is that your butt.
Is on fire and and so I think that that too often. We any answer I give you here will sort of be like a narrative overlay with respect to the trauma or whatever, but I think it does have to do with Detachment ultimately and and maybe there was a healthy Detachment and unhealthy Detachment. I don't know but but a healthy Detachment from
I don't I don't cling to
that anymore. Mmm. I'm so glad you asked this question about like our childhoods because I did hold on to a lot of resentment for my mother and father and it was mainly because I felt kind of depth of like
Why would they do those things? You know, like why didn't they like they're the parents? I'm the child. They should be able to know what to do and you know any normal parent would put their child first and I had all these, you know narratives and all these questions and through therapy. I was and I got to this recently within the last few years. I mean, I've always tried to have a good relationship with my parents with that resentment, but I was able to like let a lot of it go
And it was a couple of years ago seeing a therapist here in LA and he just kind of helped me get to this point of when things really started to like hit the fan. My parents were probably 3332, you know, like they weren't there younger than I am now. Yeah, and that's a trap when you realize that right? Yeah it is it was and I was like, wait a minute here. I am and with this Narrative of like they should have
known what to do and I'm like, I'm 37 years old. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing and like for me to put that pressure on them is wasn't fair. I didn't see it as fair and I find I finally looked at them. I'm like, oh like he's you know, I'd love to sit here rich and be like, I've got a perfect life become a minimalist and you're gonna live a perfect life, but I still struggle with a lot of things and I've got my own battles that I'm fighting and my parents I finally was able to see like, oh,
Got their own shit going on. They've got their own battles that their fight and they're still fighting in to this day. And I'm really glad I don't have those battles. However, understanding that like, I'm 39 years old. I'm from intensive purposes just as confused as they were at 32 years old and seeing that in them really help me drop those, you know, poor me why me? Why didn't they they should have really helped me drop a lot of that. Right? Right, right and and that those behaviors are
Not necessarily a referendum on on how much they love you or didn't love you rice, but they just their own personal limiter time when I think like I was 30, I was a disaster. Yeah.
Yeah. I definitely felt like it at the time though growing up. You know, like if you loved me you'd stop drinking sort of thing, right? Yeah, and and yeah, I mean, I think it Ryan and I grew up in similar sort of situations I would argue his situation was far worse than mine and me.
Respects let's let's battle right now and the SWAT team never raided my home. It's
true.
All right, you guys happy but but what I'll say, is that like Ryan so the party and growing up as a fun thing. He saw his mom in particular having fun with drugs and alcohol. I saw my mother being depressed with drugs and alcohol. I've never had a drink in my life.
Because I saw the surest Terminus of this thing, right? We're Ryan. So what he thought was the the Terminus the excitement The Joy the pleasure. It wasn't real Joy. It was it was confusing Joy with pleasure. Yeah, Mom's house
was like the party house. I mean, I mean people just pop in random will get a pool and like fenced-in backyard like it was an above ground pool and have a good time. Right exactly. But I bet that's all you needed and a bunch of drugs and alcohol.
And right. Yeah, everyone's having a good time. So it's fascinating to me that you guys have been friends best friends since fifth grade. You've now you're now in 10 years of doing this thing together. So you're in business together. Mmm. I've never seen you guys argue or act short with each other. You must have your moments. I mean, come on, right? But I mean, how have you how do you take care of this the Malaysian ship expose? That was how did I mean? What are they?
What you know, how do you make sure that you guys are good with each other? Right? I think got to be challenging at times. I think Josh is the most tolerant person. I know so he just able to put up with all my crap. That's what it is. That's what it is as much to do with me. It's a
job. We have this we have we have an acronym that we often talk about shout out to Patrick Roan who spurred the conversation that but that we had the conversation with us a spurred This Acronym, it's Tara T-ara, but if you
If I really want to understand
someone.
truly
understand them
It's that's the sort of the process that that I go through of tolerating the person first. It's a week virtue and it's not going to get you very far tolerance, right? There's a was on the I-10 whenever we're driving an L is like acting crazy in the car. There's a sign says Museum of Tolerance and I was joking. All right. Yeah, the Robertson that our cars the Museum of Tolerance whenever she's in the car the mobile anyway tolerate and then we go.
There you go. We take these steps getting tolerance is a good first step and then we move on to to acceptance respect and then ultimately appreciation and Ryan and I have radically different beliefs. I'm trying to let go of those beliefs. I don't think believe serve us very well, but that's a different conversation. We have the same values as though and because we have the same values when we have different beliefs to get you know, so we get there via different path.
'The so to speak we have different opinions. We have different personalities. We certainly have different preferences but I don't say well his or preferences are right or wrong. I think it at first but like that's also my ego talking. Hmm, and I don't want to just tolerate his preferences that's not going to make for a good friendship a good business relationship. It probably doesn't ever feel like a business. I mean, I don't think we had business paperwork is about four years into the thing even now.
We don't have like it's not yeah, it's just it's not something we think about that way it. Yeah, it's a business. We employ some people but
we
go beyond tolerance. We accept the fact that we're both going to be different. I'm not trying to change you it's not about here's what you must do. Right? And and then of course the respect thing, of course, I respect your preferences. I don't always completely understand them, but that's okay.
And ultimately if you can get to that level where you actually appreciate the idiosyncrasies, then that's like full sort of Detachment not needing to change someone. Yeah, I think
in this goes with for any relationship like when first off if Josh comes to me with something, it's not accusatory. It's like something you want to talk about.
And when you approach a situation like that, you know, you can interpret it.
A lot differently than like. Oh and Josh is trying to shame me. Like I never feel like he's trying to shame me and I think that is where arguments come in when people start to try and shame other people and that's oh you just say me now. I'm going to shame you and now we're going to trade shames back and forth right where I try to be the Zen Buddhist that Josh is when it comes to confrontation, but sometimes I'll go to Joshua something and I'll be like, I know you don't mean to say it that way. I think what you're trying to say is this and I'm like
You're absolutely right. And it's so it's not when I say, it's Josh it truly is like he when he comes to me. It's absolutely non-confrontational and if I go to him and I'm like accidentally being confrontational he's able to like process and be like, yeah. I know Ryan's not being a jerk right now. Uh-huh. So yeah, let's get to the root of that some Ninja Chef though. It really is really it's hard to master that and have that kind of, you know, presence of mind to its really inspiring like I mean for me and my wife like I really go out of
My way to try and have that approach with her again. I'm not perfect but I do better. Yeah every day. I get a little better. I think
I used to be competitive. But that's like saying I used to be mentally ill. I was doing a sauna in Montana when we lived in Montana for five years as a accident and a beautiful accent.
Some nice photos from that.
Yeah. Yeah it all we did it for the photos did it for the gram
not do it for the gram.
I think we even had Instagram. But anyway you I was in a sauna with an American Indian named Tom, and he he said yeah I do and there's like a basketball court right next Asana to the YMCA and Missoula and he and of swimming and also stuff and he goes, yeah, I don't understand. Um,
Americans like you have this this idea of like if in order for you to win?
You have to lose he's ever where I come from if you win he wins and if he loses you lose and I of course my first knee-jerk reaction to that was like that's a silly way to think about life because I'm winning right and it's like well knows haven't won enough. That's your problem. Yeah, but even think about that we talked about like winning, you know, obviously Charlie Sheen is sort of the the the parodic exaggeration of that.
Right, but that's it's not far off from how or where our culture is, right? We talked about winning as though it's a good thing but by default if someone wins someone else has to lose now, maybe it's a semantic thing and we can change our language around it. But I think language is really important. I think it's a real big problem too. But I think our language it canvases are days right? It's language is responsible for more misery than anything else in human
history. Well that idea.
I mean the the most successful people I know maybe not all of them, but I know a lot of successful people who do approach the world with that idea of largess that you know, it's not a zero-sum game and if I win you win two and and not only you know, are you able to you know, basically succeed in whatever it is that you're trying to do those people tend to be much happier people and grounded and you know,
More conscious in general
you had the thomaswguy on recently Blake. Yeah Blake he strikes me as
he's definitely someone like that. I also had Kurama from queer eye on and he was talking about the audition process for queer eye and and there were like, you know, they spent like years trying to find like the five dudes or whatever the four Dudes that do the show and most of the guys were super competitive and they'd go in and audition and then they come out and and the other guys
Be like what they ask you what and they'd be like, they wouldn't say, you know, because they're like I'm competing against you. I'm not going to tell you any secrets, but there were a couple of them that would come out and be like, here's what happened. Here's what you need to look out for and those are the guys that ultimately all ended up getting chosen. Well, that's a show which obviously changed their lives and the lives of you know, a lot of people that watch that show through which is cool. Right? I love that idea makes me think of like Google when they hire people they like bring them on the bus.
And then like whether or not they think the bus driver is like a huge like a litmus test. Yeah, I see. Yeah, that's interesting. Like what how do you behave when no one's watching? Because the in this in this context there were casting people who are paying attention to this behavior. And it's like we want people that you know approach the world with that kind of, you know, arms outstretched perspective of gratitude and giving me men and to reward that yeah.
We were talked about Dave Ramsey earlier, but
He was team. They interview the spouse and one of the interviews it's a rather rigorous process, but your spouse gets interviewed as well. I think separately well and
it's
fascinated me because I think maybe they're like trying to figure out what are your how do you handle conflict? How do you make decisions? What how do you make some of your biggest Life Choices or they can grow up with the person that we want to
To hire now. I can imagine that might be a train wreck for some people. But yeah, I know a few if you interviewed backs like I would totally get the job no matter what the job was.
How do you know what she's gonna say you think you know, let's talk a little bit more about about the movie. I mean, you know, I was I came into this thinking these guys have been working on this thing for years because I know how long ago it was when I was there at that event.
Aunt but you are featuring these individuals the kind of Everyday People minimalist people that are highlighted in the movie. Yeah, and they're on Zoom calls. So I was like, well clearly you're executing this project like during the
pandemic pandemic was the best and worst thing that happened in this film. Yeah, so we had this entire day set up in Los Angeles. We had a whole crew booked we had location and we were bringing what it was 22 or 32.
People in to be interviewed that day the majority of them were these everyday minimalist right? In fact that it was a two-day shoot early or mid March, of course, you know what happened right at the
beginning? Yeah starting line of a whole thing.
Yeah, but the original thing that we wanted to do was have you seen YouTube reaction videos and people sort of react to a music video or they react to a product or service or something. I might have seen one or two.
To yeah, so like we kind of wanted to do that but with minimalism in a way like and so it was Chris's idea. Chris is our Director of Photography on the film. And so that actually worked out better by bringing a sort of into their homes in a way. In fact, we had them do some b-roll of some other houses that shows up in the film as well. So you get to see the sort of decluttering process. They went through some of them even had footage. They took when they simplify their life, you know a year or two ago.
And we got to include all of that in the film even though we film the rest of it and
yeah, well it gives it it gives it in addition to this verret a touch like it's heartwarming because it's so authentic, you know, it's like they're actually shooting at themselves sharing it as opposed to a sterilized film crew coming in and trying to make everything look just so right. Yeah, we sent them cameras
and stuff. So it looked like congruent with with each one didn't feel like it was out of place. But yeah it was
Then doing the thing on the
wrong. Yeah, we got most of the cameras back
just get more
stuff. All right, right talk to me about some of the other experts that you have featured in here because it's an interesting grouping of people you in addition to Dave Ramsey. You've got TK Coleman who I know, you know, he was on your podcast not that long ago Annie Leonard from Greenpeace didn't a Berra hona simple families. Yeah, so she's kind of in
you know squarely in the minimalist space it feels like but it was intriguing like this person from Greenpeace like she's about sustainability. Yeah, but you know is interested in the how you made these
choices. She was the she did the story of stuff if you recall she's lady who did that video. I mean, it's been really a million times at this point
because I saw her and I was like, she looks really familiar and I couldn't Point shit. There's an actress that looks kind of like her as well, but I couldn't put my finger on
it. Yeah.
Yeah, so she's an executive director of Greenpeace USA. And yes, we wanted sort of their five. We only wanted five experts in the film and we want to sort of the from these different perspectives. So one was the environmental side of things. There's obviously overlap with all of all of them. We wanted the economic side of things. So TK Coleman, he is an education director at fee. We had Dave Ramsey this sort of the money side of things the debt, especially how it's tied to consumerism then a bear hona
She is she runs an organization called Simple families and really focus on parenting and kids and and so we wanted to bring the family side and there as well no matter when or when McManus who is a pastor here in rice Angeles who probably was it's hard to pick a favorite but he had some my favorite lines in the entire
film is an interesting dude. Good wasn't he like a fashion designer or something like that? He has he has his whole other disease like a designer. He does all this other
stuff. Yeah, and he still does he just launched a new?
Like super minimalist clothing line and he's he talks about intentional living in ways that they're just really profound and I was just really grateful to have that opportunity to sit with him. He's been on our podcast a couple times to TK has been our podcast. I think you're the your you've been on the second most TK has been on there maybe like eight times if in fact if I can introduce you to anyone TK, go blow yourself.
Talks about how cool the best person you can speak to it about just about anything but especially like but I'm
clear on his like so he's an education but I'm unclear about the Nexus between that and minimalism. Hey, so he's
he was sort of our economy expert in a way and he I wanted to juxtapose be you could call him a capitalist all that word doesn't really mean what you would you know, it's taken on a pejorative frame in the last, you know, five ten years.
But I wanted to juxtapose Annie who has probably radically different beliefs from TK and show that they overlap and literally overlap in the film together. And even though they disagreed about some things where she talks about growth and infinite growth and then he immediately sort of robots that bye-bye talking about. I don't think the problem is growth and he goes into what he thinks the problem is and so we wanted some opinions that we didn't want to be like the the Yes, Man Show
Show right I wanted to learn something from these people and Irwin. He really helped solidify the theme of the film. It's a film as Ryan said earlier about starting over. He has a line in there about the shaking the Etch-a-Sketch thing that Ryan talking about but that we should all we all have the option of there's no should we all have the
opportunity? I like how you caught
yourself? Here's here's here's my problem I have is like I keep setting these things down like the shoulds and
But I have the pattern I pick them back up repeatedly, we all have the opportunity though to restart Our Lives to start over and this film was about starting over with less that can be less stuff. But it can also be less distractions fewer commitments Etc.
I love that. Yeah. What is the the main idea that you want people to take away from the film? Mmm.
I mean, I think Josh said it's about starting over. I mean it is this film for every single person. I think some every single person will get something out of it, but I think who it's going to help the most as someone who's in a situation right now and they need some emotional leverage to start over. I think this film will help them do just the nudge they need. Yeah. I think that
I think some people I don't think the film is for everyone as Ryan just said but it's for anyone who's sort of dissatisfied by the status quo, whatever status quo. They have created for themselves. We're overburdened. Right and a lot of that has to do with stuff but I think it also has to do with toxic relationships. I think it has to do with debt. They're all these burdens we've taken them on we've picked up all this baggage, but we can also set it down. It might take some time to set it down, especially with that, you know in the first
My minimalism I talked about late. I had almost half a million dollars worth of debt. I was making 200 Grand a year in Dayton, Ohio, but I was spending like two hundred and twenty Grand a year like whatever they would let me Spin and so I had massive amounts of debt as a result and I had to sort of set that burned down took some time. But the the the best way to do that is to stop spending right the to stop whatever excess is going on. We we can't add
Our way to contentment to Joy to peace. It's always about
subtraction. Mmm. The timing is very interesting because we're all at home. And I think with that comes a natural inclination to do a little bit of inventory, you know on how we're living our lives and what is our relationship to our job to our profession when you're not going into an office everyday or into a workplace in the manner in which you're accustomed to.
That Interruption of the flow or the routine I think is triggering a lot of people to be more reflective about how they're spending their time and their resources Etc. So to the point about like the nudge or the you know, the kind of the the gentle, you know, push towards these ideas. I feel like people are primed for this now and it is a moment of of radical change, you know, I everybody's like or not everybody but, you know a lot of
People are thinking about this in terms of when are we going to get back to the way? It was it's not going back to the way it was We Are Forever altered some things will normalize to a certain extent but the idea that everyone's going to migrate back into Office Buildings, I think is lunacy like that's not going to happen. We've now figured out how to pursue livings from zoom in these tools that we have. So what does that look like down the line and how can we reflect on this to too?
No, reform our relationship with the outside world so that it can be healthier and it can be more fulfilling and more purposeful and the movie, you know, really speaks to that in a profound way. And I think it's going to help a lot of people. Thank you. Yeah, thanks
normal wasn't working for a lot of us and this gave us the opportunity to realize that it was a forced pause for many of us. Even for me and Ryan. Yeah, we had a whole tour plan this year and and with the film was going to come out earlier, etcetera and
And we had a bunch of speaking things we were going to do all you there aren't corporations that are meetings. We couldn't go speak it at these places and and so it was a pause for us as well, but it's not to take away either. What is
What some people are faced with my brother, you know, he is back in Ohio. He works in a factory worked in a factory building cabinets. This is a well-paying job and he was talented and skilled and and he was doing that that whole thing shut down. It's not coming back. He went and got part-time job at Amazon and so they could pay you know feed is his daughters and and now he's working third shift at a Meatpacking plant because that's like his only reality right now that's how and talk about one of the most difficult jobs.
You can have and doing a third shift. No last but so a lot of people are affected by this and so well, I don't want to go back to where we were. I also don't want to see more more suffering and and so
I think what's happening right now is Ryan and I for the last decade have been asking this question. What is essential?
And now a lot more people are all of a sudden a skin. In fact the terms even out their essential worker, right? But what is essential in my home? What is the central my life? What is essential on my calendar? What is essential and that's why I hope to illuminate with with this film how people ask that question. What is
essential? Hmm? Yeah. I think that's a good place to put a pin in it for now until you guys come back next time
Rachel. Love you, brother. Thank you so much
you guys to I've so much.
Love for you guys as people and respect for this mission that you've shouldered for the world. You guys are great servants to humanity, and it's a privilege to talk to you. So thank you right back at you brother and your sales my friends. Thank you, brother. Thank you so much before we sign off. Where's the best place for people to learn more about you guys? Where would you like them to connect in addition to obviously checking out less is more on Netflix. And also if you
See it the first time around minimalism the original movie.
Well, Ryan has an only fancy just
started. That-that-that's here. I am so here for that. You said he wouldn't say a word about that enriches podcast audience supportive. That's right. So many people Adore Me
talk about minimalism. All right. All right, just about minimalist Stockholm you found our podcast books films everything else. It's all in one Hub. The minimalists.com.
Nice.
Cool. Thanks you guys. Thank you. Peace. See ya.
Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show to learn more about today's guests including links and resources related to everything discussed today. You can visit the episode page are rich world.com and you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter at Rich Roll. If you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify and YouTube sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social.
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