I think what's happening right now is 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 there, a 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 breaking free from that attachment. You can turn your life around on a dime when you have the power to let go of anything in your life. We all have the opportunity, though, to to restart our lives, to start over. And this film was about starting over with less. And 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 is 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, Millburn and 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 Art book, 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 Roll Dotcom Slash v.C. I should probably mention that Joshua Fields, Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, a.k.a. the Minimalists, 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 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 first, let's check in on those New Year's nutrition goals. How's it going? Did you already go off the rails? Well, one thing that might help is getting on board with Athletic Green's ultimate daily, the all in one nutritional insurance.

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Blankest dotcom slash rich roll. OK, the minimalize. 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 Minimalists, 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 by Matt Dávila, 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 stock 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, Millburn 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. Joshua's hair's 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.

Excellent hair, I'm sure, between you guys.

I cut my hair. I had long hair like yours. But you're looking fabulous. Thanks.

You know, I felt like I was having a bad hair day today, so that really uplifts my spirit. So it's all good, man. It's all good.

People who've been on this podcast Journey for a while will likely remember our podcast with Joshua way back in the day. But Ryan, this is your first time here.

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.

Thanks. Exciting man. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, it's cool to hear your stories 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, 1881, I'm fifth grade best friend, but yeah, I think we should start to hug kids sitting in the corner. Yeah, exactly. Plotting world domination.

That's not far from the truth except the world domination part. It was more like the inner workings of fate and domination. Right. And yeah, our way towards it.

How many kids from Dayton have documentaries on Netflix? I mean, the Wright brothers.

Yeah, brothers. All right. So there's no who's the other Martin Sheen he is from? I think he's a doc. You know, you might be you 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.

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 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 climbed 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 sort of discontented by the lives we created. And you know what's fascinating now, Ryan, is the the life we were living growing up. It was so chaotic. We traded that chaos just for a different type of chaos. Controlled chaos is still is still chaos. Right. In fact, that'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.

Yeah, well, yeah.

I mean, we both grew up in alcoholic households, 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. I mean, 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 had, like, small painting and wallpaper company and he worked his butt off and he made nothing. And now I was there working my butt off, making nothing. And 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, uh, with Josh. And yeah, like he said, I started making really awesome money and I thought, oh, I figured it out.

I finally figured out I remember because even during like high school, I work 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 had ever owned. And I looked at my dad. I'm like, this is a really nice place. I'm like, how much do I need to make in order to to live here?

And he's like, if you can make 50000 dollars a year, you could probably afford a place like this. So for me, that was like, yeah, that was the number for happiness was fifty grand a year. And when I went to the telecom company, I think that very first year I made like fifty two thousand 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, 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 50000 number had grown a little bit.

So I'm like, oh, maybe sixty thousand, maybe it's eighty thousand, 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 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 of clutter, whether it was, 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 when I went to him and I asked them, like, hey, man, what are you doing that's making me so happy? Why the hell are you so happy? And that's when he introduced this thing called minimalism.

Well, walk me up to the point of this epiphany, Joshua, because I think there you know, it's important to understand that inflection point that introduced you to this new way of living. Sure. Yeah.

My. My mom died, my marriage ended both in the same month and so it was like sort of this double car crash, right? So you get hit by one thing and then it swerves you into this other thing. And and at the same time, my corporate career, I was really discontented by it. I was managing one 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. I was 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.

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 bed and a nice jacket. Yeah, thank you. A lot of 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 so ultimately, what I figure it 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. Someone tweeted Colin, right.

A friend of ours who was in our first minimalist documentary, and he lived with 52 items. And I, 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 Babalawo, Courtney Carver and Joshua Bekker, more normal people who had like families and houses and. Right. Leo's got like five kids or something like six.

Six. Yeah, yeah. He didn't even have condoms. Right. He was the one.

What's 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 had premised 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 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 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 connected with it because there wasn't a particular dogma among the people that I saw. There wasn't like a 12 step thing. And and, you know, I look at a lot of the stuff and wonder talk about on the 12 step thing.

No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. But like the five steps that you cover your clothes. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And and so like, it wasn't I wasn't like the health side of things, wasn't that appealing to me. It was the why to side of things that really made me scrutinize what I was doing. Even now you won't see me and Ryan talk about the 17 ways to Decatur, 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 they often cause new problems because we begin to focus on and we turn 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 Less is now.

It it really starts with that question. How might your life be better with less now? That's a hard question, but it's it's a disguised question.

So why can't you see that in the anecdotes and the stories of of the kind of everyday people that have undergone this process and how it's emotionally changed their lives or their perspective on 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 cluttering, but de cluttering the process of de cluttering is really just a way to clear space.

So you can. 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 that is totally fair. It's interesting, though. It makes me think how the media wants to sell a solution to a symptom rather than address the problem. I mean, that doesn't really speak to what you were taught. I mean, what you're asking.

But well, the problem is so massive and we're all living, you know, amidst this grand delusion, you know, that 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 of of intentionality.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, any Leonard and talks about this in the documentary about deficit advertising, so, you know, advertisers, big corporations, whatever, that 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 so we can go out and buy those things that subconsciously we're 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, it 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 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 probably more appropriate for us given the constraints.

But to the point you were asking about, our material possessions are sort of this physical manifestation of what's going on inside us.

Right. That's that existential crisis you talked about.

And so the external clutter is a way that we we sort of visualize the mental clutter or the psychological clutter or the emotional clutter, the spiritual clutter, this internal clutter. And we found that like with minimalism. Yeah, we could have been Buddhism or Christianity or anything else that we would have stumbled into. But stumbling into minimalism allowed us to deal with the thing that had become this priority in our lives. Stuff had become this priority. And so it started with the stuff.

But that's sort of the initial bite at the apple. Right? Right. And then it goes to simplifying all other areas of life. Right.

But there's this moment that you experienced in 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 and in enervating that occurs in their lives, like they become very emotionally involved in the process of discovering 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, yeah. In our film. Yeah. No, it is encouraging. There's one gentleman in there who talks about how once he started simplifying and got to where he felt 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. He's not like a millennial, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, it's it's I love having those kind of everyday minimalists in there to kind of talk about their own personal experiences, especially because, you know, Josh and I, we can tell our stories all day long. But, you know, you need other people to resonate with and just, you know, two dudes with really great hair.

Yeah. It is really great that 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 minimalist architects in their Buddhist cetera in this film. We didn't want to just be old. Josh and Ryan tell their story, but it sort of circled around that initial story of us. But we brought in some experts. But then we also had those 30 of those everyday minimalist. So 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 70 year old in 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 film.

Right.

So taking it back, you have this experience in the wake of your marriage dissolving in your your 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 light going on experience. You seem lighter in your shoes. I 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, I was.

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 yet I had to answer the phone at 10:00 p.m. if, you know, my boss's boss wanted to know something about the sales transactions for any of the stores that day, so was a 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 was 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 called 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 with the same voice, and he was like, this is Josh Legacy depressed? Like maybe planning on killing himself or something.

I'm giving away my stuff. Right. Give it away is the right saying, hey, I don't care what you think I get when I take a phone call. Yeah, but isn't isn't it kind of sad. Like that's the reaction though. Yeah. Instead of like, wow, is he doing something to change his life?

So that he experiences more peace or more contentment. Yeah, you could.

Like I said this, I don't think this is an indictment on unstuff or even on corporate America, it's an indictment on chasing, on craving, on attachment and well, also on your relationship to externalities, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So, Ryan, at some point you begin to cottoned on to this, like what's going on with Joshua, right?

Yeah, I mean, it was it was after him setting boundaries. It was, you know, after that phone call from our boss because I did not see the price of 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 bathroom, 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 are you going a TV? What kind of TV are you going to get? Because that's how we compared success in the corporate world. Like what kind of TV you got at your house? How many TVs do you have? How big is that TV right here?

Freud would say so. At a certain point he's like, I think I'm going to get a TV like, interesting. And yeah, eventually I, I, 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 it have been a different path, you know, could it have been a different path if we didn't find minimalist minimalism.

Right. Well if he shaved his head and disappeared to a monastery for a while and came back, maybe you wouldn't have been so.

Yeah, probably not. Probably not. Yeah. So, you know, he introduces her minimalism to me. And, 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 we have like exact opposite Myers Briggs personalities, but we have very similar similar personalities in other ways. So I was like, if this works for him, I'll at least give it a shot and look at it and see if it'll work for me.

So the first video he sent me was Colin, right, with the things that he owned. And I'm like, OK, like this is a little weird. But then, like, I got into other minimalist Courtney Carver leave about Joshua Becker. And, 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 listen to and minimalism.

For me, it was an opportunity for me to start over. It was an opportunity for me to, well, do adjusted 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. Right. So do this packing party. Right. So yeah, exactly. So you know, in the excitement he was like, well, what if we pack up all your stuff and then unpack it as you need it? I'm like, it's a great idea, especially because I'm a very extreme person when it comes to things like Josh had 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, the packing party would be the best, especially if they got families and stuff. Yeah, although we have totally seen families.

Well, yeah, I'll say this. Well, everyone's at home thinking of interesting things to do. Right. There's a lot of people rearranging the furniture in their houses right now in their minds. Yeah.

This is like the perfect time for them to confront all their stuff. The one time you're really confronted with everything I truly confronted is when you move to a new house that was sort of the impetus of the packing party idea.

It was like when you move, you actually have to go through everything you own and do something with it, whether and store it, box up, whatever.

It doesn't matter. You have to do something with that stuff. And now is sort of the second time where this has happened, where people have been in their homes for way more than they anticipated. And we we thought began it's like people were reaching out to say, hey, you guys, you're 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 real.

Yeah. The third breadmaker 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 like the ah, the whole sort of synopsis of our message. And in that book we had forty seven different families do a packing party. So it may seem radical, but it's not so radical that I mean we've had a lot of people do it.

Yeah. Yeah. The idea being you pack everything up and then you slowly unpack and deliberately decide which items you actually need to use. The rest gets donated or sold, right? Yeah. I mean, Josh had asked me, he's like, what if you unpack things as you needed it? Like, that would really help. And I'm like, yeah, 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, 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, hmm, I could probably be sitting in my retirement account right now.

But but I remember going to Josh, I'm like, dude, this is we we have to do a website and talk about this packing party, because this is this is something.

So that was the original impetus to start the blog. Yeah. It started 10 years ago yesterday. I know I saw on Instagram your 10 year event. You guys have been doing this for ten years and 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?

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. It just wasn't for me. But now I think it's it's it's often a problem. And I think it's it's an opiate in a way, because it helps, as Ryan alluded to earlier, the sort of the symptoms if I show you how to Decatur your kitchen, but you know why you're doing it, 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 how takes care of itself.

And so we'll talk about some of the halal stuff that we've done that may not be applicable for everyone. By the way, my my wife 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 the foundation of it then we can talk about.

But it's but it's the process. It's that it's the how that opens the portal to the why. 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, like, you got to 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 after that, it's interesting. Yeah. You know, it's it's almost like the why. With so much in my face at the time of how miserable I was, it was like, but also you're holding on to it so hard because your whole life was a hundred percent 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 love or the ultimate love and comfort is like I don't a 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 Mariah, I think Ryan's actually the perfect example of if you understand the why the how takes care of itself. No one gave him the how to. There was not a prescription for a packing party ever.

It didn't exist. Right. What did exist were a bunch of de cluttering 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, the same way Candy is appealing at the checkout line. Right. But it's not nutritious in any way.

And so when Ryan truly understood 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? There's always change. 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 talk about the hassle, but you can always talk about how what we share is like a recipe and you can sort of tease out your own ingredients and create your own version of it and adjust for taste.

Yeah. We'll be right back in a sec, but first, we're supported today by Karl the designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life, because as I'm always hammering home, solid shut eye is a superhighway to improving your overall health and happiness.

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All righty. Let's 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 a few months after Josh. Josh technically got laid off, too. I laid myself out like you did. It was well, they came to me.

So this was 10 years ago as well. And they came to me right before Christmas, said, hey, as soon as we close or as soon as we finish out the holiday shopping season, which, by the way, we've thrown the holiday season into a shopping season, think about that for a moment. But as soon as we do this, you know, I need you to close eight stores and lay off 42 employees. I've 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. It 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 forty two names that you're going to lay off. And so I went home and within two days I was put in spreadsheets together. But looking at the spreadsheet.

Was like looking at a rainbow in black and white and greyscale, right, because these were just names and statistics and I guess 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 are people and, you know, 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 so I turned the plan in. My name was the first name on the list.

So you really did lay yourself off? Yeah. 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 dollars 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 this press. Yeah.

And I said, I'm just gonna I'll just work there and I'll have enough money to pay my bills and I'll write for the rest of the time. I want to write fiction initially. Thanks, Arien. 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 it on the blog and.

Yeah, put our put our thoughts out there, was there a moment like a tipping point moment with a blog where you're like, wow, like this this could be a thing like we could actually craft a vacation around the tipping point?

I think for for me, it's the San Francisco event. It was for me years before that. Before that. Yeah, for me it was.

About to shared something that we did and that I was reading his blog back then, too, I mean, you know, that was like everyone was reading his stuff and we had, like, more people show up.

And one day I wasn't a lot of people. It was like nine thousand people or something. For me, it was like, oh, we haven't seen. So we talk about this in the film how like 52 readers that first month in the five hundred which turned into, you know, five million or whatever. And so there there was a moment there. But around that same time it was like, hey, you guys are the minimalists, aren't you?

Did you write a book about minimalism? And it's like, oh, I guess we should do that.

Oh, we are the minimalists. 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 round the country to coffee shops and and brought and made me realize like, oh, we can get eight people to show up and buy a book. Most of us were like, yeah, to two to eight people.

Yeah. If we sell, if we sell ten, when you're living minimally, you don't need much.

Right. Oh feed yourselves.

Yeah. We could sell ten books and we have a place to stay for the night. If not, then 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, it's so fun.

I'm just thinking about myself by then in that minimalism documentary because I remember being so excited for that South by Southwest event.

Like we made it right. We finally we finally it's like it's a buddy movie road trip on, you know, like like a Wizard of Oz movie with South by Southwest Rain. You guys going to meet Oz?

And I was thinking this was like, you know, the apex of our like we were at South by Southwest. This is and then like the three people showed up to it.

So I don't know if was so great on a Sunday morning to try to talk about living with, like, everybody. Yeah, it was great near 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 Macchiavelli? Because Macchiavelli, he's had his own, like, crazy trajectory blowing up on YouTube and being this massive creator on that platform.

He he he's all grown up now on Twitter when he was a wedding videographer. And I saw this video he made called Most Wedding Videographer. 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 Toyota or Subaru or something.

And and we hired him to 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 for that book that we put up on YouTube. And that was sort of it. And then a few months later, I said, hey, we're getting ready to go on the road. 2014, we did a hundred city tour, right. And said, 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, I'll give it a shot. At the end of the tour, it was like he just had a few hard drives with like a thousand hours of footage. It 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 just remember thinking to myself, like, I don't think this is a movie.

Yeah. Like I have no idea how he's going to pull this together, but there was no budget for it. I mean, we were just, you know, we were 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, you're you're the guy from the minimalism documentary, great talk.

You did such a good job. And I'm like, I wish I could say it was me, but it's really Matt who did that old I did an unbelievable job.

And all the accolades and success that he's he's enjoying on YouTube are well deserved. Oh, yeah.

What he does is amazing. Yeah. YouTube and and he has built up this this amazing following, especially of young people. Right. Who who really he's brought the message of minimalism to a crowd that that may be Ryan and I weren't ever going to reach either side. Yeah, he does. And he makes these like mini documentaries. I know every one of his his videos is like should enjoy a theatrical release. All right.

Yeah. It's like that's why they're there while they're working hard. I'm going to tell them like. Oh yeah. And he's a guy who who.

Walks the talk, like he just this past week gave away all his stuff yet again 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 suitcases.

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 because it's not about minimalism. It's 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 another word for it, just that actually there's a sense that, oh, if you're going to be a minimalist minimalist, that your self flagellating or you're some kind of a martyr when in truth, you're just purchasing freedom for yourself.

Absolutely. And 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 ability to 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 would think he's able to he has the strangest sort of he's like hiding under the table, looking up at the camera like, you know, what is he doing?

Is that a crutch? I'm not sure what's going on here, but somehow he just he has 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 it. 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. Aengus Wall and his Giannakou Angus WALGA. He's David Fincher, his editors. Oh wow. Fight Club. He added The Social Network. He won some Academy Award for that. He edited what's the one with what's the other big one he did with. I know it's on the tip of my tongue too. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Oh wow.

He 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 and that team on to edit the film. And that was just like, now I'm good.

Like I got it covered. Yeah. And that's the thing. Like the weird thing about it is I don't think Matt likes editing at all, but that is his hidden lie. He's the he's the Mozart of editing.

And he even like when we went from like fourth cut to fifth cut, Angus saw it and he was like, this looks like I went through 60 different cuts. And so. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, kudos to him.

So the movie explodes and you guys kind of ride this wave. You have you, you have the books and you started the podcast. You're now ten years into this thing. You've got millions of people all over the world that care deeply about the things that you talk 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 podcasts, you know, advertisements 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 living, 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 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 it's almost like when you go to well, back when we could go to the Comedy Store or places like that where people sort of work out ideas. Right. We work out things and sometimes. Right. And I just 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. Yes.

And and so but most of what we do is, you know, whether it's the blog or. Mm. Or the main podcast, it, it's, it's accessible to anyone. Right.

When you were touring, how many cities did you do. I mean you get you guys invited me to come when you did the Fillmore in San Francisco, which was like so cool.

You guys were filling theaters like all across the country. Yeah.

Yeah. You're at the super fun. Yeah that was great. Yeah. I mean, the most we've ever done was one hundred city, 119 events and one year. Wow.

We cancelled a tour this year. It's funny right. Because of twenty twenty for obvious reasons. And yeah. I mean we've done what, nine tours in ten years. So, so anywhere from a few cities like the simply southern tour was three cities. Well with Dave Ramsay's team and did a small tour in the south to 100 cities everywhere in between.

But yeah, it just became a part of and by the way, all those tours are different as well. Sometimes as a podcast or sometimes we do a talk, sometimes we'll do book readings and book signings. 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 the minimalist ecosystem?

His daughter really likes us that what it is like. His daughter works for him. She's a very talented author. Her name's Rachel Cruze and she has a great YouTube show and. She invited us to come on her YouTube show, and it's in Nashville and it's a whole production, have a whole studio set up there. I mean, he has a thousand employees at his compound. It's a really impressive setup.

And they I mean, they work really hard to, you know, to teach financial literacy. They're now being taught in twenty five percent of the high schools around the country, the Dave Ramsey curriculum. He has a whole team of like minded people in 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 like essentially like conservative, prudent financial decisions.

Yeah, I feel like he's like a minimalist finance guy because, you know, minimalism it's funny. When I first heard it and heard about it and looked into it, I kind of felt like it was this niche type thing.

And then, like, once I got into it, I'm like, oh, like, this is a this can be applied to anything. And I think Dave Ramsey essentially applies minimalism to finances and. Right. And yeah. Yeah, right. He's got some great fun and his whole team. So they're great. Anthony O'Neill or Chris Hogan. Yeah. Yeah. The whole lot of them. John Villone.

So were were, you know, well into this pandemic's cycle or fraying at the edges as we crawl towards twenty, twenty one.

And I'm interested in how you're thinking about the relationship between consumerism and minimalism with this very specific moment. Hmm.

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 these technological tools where we're all in front of our screens way too much.

And that habituation to shopping has just migrated to the devices.

And 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, what we mean by consumerism? So I do think consumerism is the right way to to frame it. That is one of the problems, right? Consumption isn't the problem. We talk about this and this is now because we all need to consume some stuff, consumerism, which is what we could just identify as compulsory consumption in a way as though we feel that we must buy this in order to either be complete. Ryan talked about the deficit deficit advertised earlier or the what else is and we call it in the film the vertical integration.

Yeah. And so in no longer are you just competing with your next door neighbor. It's your your. Yeah, I talk about that. That's a really fascinating, important idea.

I think. So here's the new problem of consumerism was one problem. When 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 to judge that person. It's to see myself in that person. Like, I don't I 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 puffed cigarettes. We'd be at this table right now just smoking, talking right to a cloud.

Right. And but you did that. Now, it would seem nutty if I just lit up a cigarette right now. You wouldn't know how to respond to that.

I'm 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.

Mm hmm. But it's just as bothersome in many ways. It's second hand distraction. And so I think over the last decade in particular, what we've seen is a lot of new ways to distract ourselves. Right. And I distracted ourselves back in the eighties, in the late 90s with with stuff. But now the distractions are digital and they're right there and they're more enticing than ever. And the same thing happens right in the material world. It was high paid demographers, statisticians, marketers aggregating your eyeballs onto their product or service.

Now, since you're the product, it's aggregating your eyeballs onto the product and service to sell you products and services. And so, in a weird way, a dystopian way, it elevates the problem. It amplifies the problem.

Right. I mean, without without a doubt and this is subject matter and terrain that movies like The Social Delamar 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. Right. 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 he's got that refrigerator or that car, like I've got to get that to.

But now, by dint of these technological tools, everybody is our neighbor. So it's not just the person living next door, but it's the celebrity on Instagram. And you get to peek into their world. Or now on Zoom, you get to see what everybody's, you know, study in 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?

I think a person 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, back when we were traveling without any fear. Yeah, she was like, do you feel cool? Because you got, you know, X amount of subscribers on Instagram?

And I'm like, no, I was like, 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 I 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, 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 on.

It's failure. 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 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 into it just to, like, make a game out of it. But I try to not game ify it as much as possible. But I'll be honest, like because of. And this is going to sound like some, you know, Buddhist hybrid thing, but because of how destructive my ego was in the corporate world, any time I start to feel the ego kicking in, which it kicks in all the time, but when I start to feel like kicking in with, like, oh, how many subscribers that I gain today or how many, because I did feel that in the early days, I, I try not to stroke that ego.

And by practicing that over the last 10 years, I am able to just, you know, kind of still feel like I felt 10 years ago. I don't feel any more popular or successful. I mean, even it's when 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 but yeah. So, you know, I guess just 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. And yeah, I don't have any tactics. I you guys aren't getting into Twitter spats and things like that. Like, you seem to just I can tell by the way, that you 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 there, you know, going back and forth with people and stuff like that.

A healthy detachment know I'm not in the mood. 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 the.

This is going to sound like a value judgment, but it's not it's all a scam and it like. Who cares? It's all ego, even, by the way. What if I change 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 still viscerally because I've programmed externally validated.

If you say that out loud. Right.

Right. It's my. No, no, no. But maybe maybe the truth behind that is what 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 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, too, because it makes you feel good. It actually makes you you give your life a little bit more meaning and it builds self-esteem. So even if you're empathies, your impulses is selfish. It's still a good thing to follow through on.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I'm not saying that helping people is good or bad, right. It's not a a and also not helping people is not good or bad, but by default then. Right. I don't want to throw that that judgment out there. I'm simply saying that like, I have to be honest with myself that way 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, is that the truth or is that just a statistic?

And I feel like there's two interesting 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 tandem with that, we're also seeing this acceleration of our materialistic consumer culture.

I mean, you you see it in the film, too, 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. We also see the sort of corporatization of simplicity as well. Right. When Merican right.

Co-opted or. 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 on Marie Kondo. I think she really does get to the why in her book, Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up like she does talk, she obviously discusses the how to stuff that's her her schtick. But she she gets to the why. But but when I see, you know, tuning forks for several hundred dollars and crystals and the commodification of simplicity, you don't need anything to simplify.

Right. Organizing is just well planned hoarding. And the thing we talk about the film is the average American household has three hundred thousand items. Right. Right now. I had a really organized version of that.

I had basements with a basement full of bins and boxes and ordinal alphabetized 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 organize because you don't have anything that you have to organize. You're getting to the essence and you're stop worrying about the form.

Yeah, I love that quote that you shared recently. Everything is one hundred percent off if you don't buy it.

Yeah, I think we should think about Black Friday. Yeah, we should go.

Told my twenty five year old self that he may have nothing ready for now.

You said something about real briefly about minimalism bringing meaning to people's lives and actually. I don't know of minimalism brings meaning to people's lives, I think it's minimalism helps someone at Etch 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 lessons now is about. It's about being able to start over. But it's I've never. Yeah. Thanks for however 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 you saying, no, that's a 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?

Mm hmm. Five years ago. Drop the drop the prescriptions, yeah, but not the actual medical prescriptions, you mean back to the house, you think?

Yeah, but also lately I. The desire to give advice to people, that's also an ego thing, right? I have no more advice. That's my 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 would be the piece that's related to letting go of some of the attachments, because I think Ryan and I, we you 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 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 like I it doesn't feel good to need this mom.

And because it doesn't, it feels like you're creating for the wrong reason. It's it feels as though it's that externality you talk about. Well, that's a healthy dose of self-awareness. Maybe I mean, I'm still I'm still, yeah. Working on eradicating, right? And we'll figure it out, let me know.

That's the thing. I think we have to figure it out. I think it is the eradication thing, right?

It's, you know, figure out heart disease. You try to eradicate it in a way. Yeah.

So the first movie came out in twenty sixteen. What year was that. Yeah. So Netflix actually turned us down twice on that film. We so 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. Well and we did 400 theaters, US, Canada, Australia. And then from there we put out we went back in Netflix.

They said no again. And and so we just put it on our own. And it did relatively well. It resonated with people on iTunes and Amazon and other places. And so Netflix ended 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, you know, whatever sparked whatever algorithm it does. And and it showed up in a lot more people's radar.

I think it's how we showed up on your radar.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I saw well, I think you were doing a few podcasts.

I saw you guys popping 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. It's 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 I I believe that you might have even alluded either on mic or off that you guys were working on another documentary, like there was going to be a follow up. And here we are, five, maybe almost six years later before less is now premier.

So what was going what happened? Yeah, we ran into some technical difficulties. Well, right.

And I you know, shortly after that, you know, with Matt again, and we we did another tour. The last it was called The Last is now touring. 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 Theatre is where Joe Rogan shot his, like, most recent comedy special, Beautiful Spot. Yeah, we filmed it.

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 looked fine, but it kind of looked like a stand up comedy special without comedy, you're like waiting for the punch because it was the venue, right? And so it just it fell flat. It didn't work. And so we did it again.

We actually brought you out. We rented out this giant warehouse space.

Right. That was like two years ago. That was there.

There was tons. It was it was it. That was it was three. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And this was the big shoot. We had 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 reshooting this from a year and a half. A year and a half later we went to the same studio.

Yeah. Because I was like I was telling Julie we were watching and I was like, yeah, I was there that night when these guys were doing this.

But I'm like, it doesn't look like there's people there. Like when I was there, there was a lot of people there. So something was weird. Yeah. Something was different about it.

Yeah. So whatever big comedy special to know comedy to a really well done Ted talk is what that sort of look like.

And so, so that night you were there, you actually came up, you're 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 Theatre aesthetic was the problem. And so. Well, we film this in front of. Yeah, 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.

That's 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, shut out the retro and and sweet and sour tofu and just mushing in two 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 say, hey, we're just going to scrap subs. A second time we did the film, we scrap the whole thing and started over again. And so this project, we thought was going to take us about four months and ended up taking about four years from the inception until because when when I was there that night, my sense was that you guys were in the final throes of wrapping this thing up.

We were like, yeah, of that version. Yeah.

And those two will never see the light of day. It's all there 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 we weren't really putting our best foot forward, as Ryan said, either, like it was like it would have been a really good YouTube video. It's a great YouTube video. Yeah, yeah. I would just say, like just the add on when we got those two films back, I just 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 on 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 and 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 you've got chapter ended up being the chapter before. I was, in a weird way, is the first ever documentary prequel. Right. Right. It doesn't require you to see the first film, obviously. Yeah, not at all. But but and there are two independent things. And this one, we were really aggressive about keeping it under an hour and the whole spirit of minimalism. And but in doing that, we had to cut out a lot of a lot of amazing, Ryan, for this whole sub narrative about this.

And we can talk about it here because you talked about it publicly.

No, I was like you, Rich. I love the party.

Yeah. I mean, this was this is something that I know about you, but I've never heard you actually talk about like you've 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 OK to talk, especially coming from Ohio, because like, I hope someone 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's point, there was this beautiful arc in the film that we couldn't put in there, that I really tried to get men that tried to put it. It just didn't work. But it was about kind of going down that road and what pain that caused me and how I was able to, you know, kind of start over. But it's really it's those stories, again, unfortunately, couldn't make the film. But 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 they're opiates. Many of them are. OK, all right. Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, opiates were real easy access. And when you're when I was working 60, 70, sometimes eighty hours a week, I would caffeinated myself. I didn't do a lot of coke, mainly because my my mom like turned me off to that drug because I saw her go through her own thing. And I talk about that in the first documentary. Yeah. But I would caffeinated myself, Adderall, you know, whatever productivity thing, I could get my body.

But then you get home at nine o'clock at night and it's hard to unwind, but it's really easy with like a pain pill and a beer and. Yeah, so I wasn't going out to the bars and getting loaded.

It was something that's like I want to be like, yeah, right. OK, ok, I feel better.

Unfortunately we even did recreation scenes. Ryan getting beat up at a bar once. Oh that didn't make the film. We're going to find a way to put a lot of this on on Patriota somewhere. I actually just got permission from Netflix today to use some of these these scenes somewhere. And you know, Ryan, you know, talked about in the film, but it was spending upwards of five thousand dollars a month on. Wow.

I remember telling him an opioid like I might have a problem. I was talking to my therapist about it and I remember mentioning that to to them.

And she was like, well, she's like, I've seen worse. I've seen people spending ten, fifteen thousand dollars a month on drugs to give her a new therapy. Yeah. Yeah, she's like that. But I think she was just trying to like make me not feel so. Yeah.

So did you just go cold turkey and. Oh no. rear-View or how did you, how did you. I went back.

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 like 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 addictions or Suboxone works a little bit different in the brain. So I was on that program for a little bit. It's getting a lot of therapy. And I remember one time I was going on a trip and I forgot to bring my Suboxone 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 in. Wow. I mean, good for you, man. Yeah, it was a long road.

Leggett'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 100 percent. Like mentally.

You mean like brain function wise? Sleep wise, I think.

Yeah. Your deep sleep still way off. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, you guys are both rocking that world right now. 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 of you guys survived quite a bit of childhood trauma. Hmm. Do you like are you in therapy or how have you, like, worked 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 patterns. How did you work through that yet?

Traumas, perspectival in many ways. Right. Like I talk about this in the film so we can my very first memory as a child is my father extinguishing a cigarette on mom's chest. Now, of course, I'm going to remember something like horrible, right?

But I also don't think it traumatized me the same way that other things trauma and so, like, it's real. I do remember that. And I'm sure it was awful or whatever, but there are other things that seem less consequential, but traumatized 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 little 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 because of 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 just like anything.

You can have an unhealthy relationship to a good thing. I'm sure you could have an unhealthy relationship to minimalism. Where 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 entire 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, you're not going to say, hey, can you hear 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 wife is so powerful. You don't. The house takes care of itself. Right. 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. And 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 you. I don't I don't I don't cling to that anymore. And 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. Hmm.

And it was mainly because I felt kind of gypped of like. Why would they do those things, you know, like why didn't they, like, they're the parents of 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 when it was a couple of years ago seeing a therapist here in L.A. and. He just kind of let me get to this point of when things really started to hit the fan. My parents were probably 30, maybe 30 to, you know, like they weren't there younger than I am now.

Yeah. And that's a trip when you realize that, right?

Yeah, it is. It was.

And I was like, wait a minute, here I am 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 it wasn't fair? I didn't see it as fair and I finally looked at them, I'm like, oh, like, you know, I'd love to see the rich and be like, oh, I've got a perfect life, become a minimalist and you can 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 my parents, I finally was able to see, like, oh, they've got their own shit going on. They've got their own battles that they're fighting and they're still fighting them to this day. And I'm really glad I don't have those battles.

However, understanding that, like, you know, I'm thirty nine years old, I'm for all intents and purposes, just as confused as they were at 32 years old.

And seeing that in them really helped me drop those, you know, poor me.

Why me? Why didn't they they should have really help me drop a lot of that. Right. Right, right. And that those behaviors aren't necessarily a referendum on on how much they loved you or didn't love you. Right. Just their own personal limiters.

When I was 30, I was a disaster. Yeah. Yeah. So me both. Yeah.

I definitely felt like 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. Right, and I grew up in similar sort of situations, I would argue his situation was far worse than mine and respects was battle right now, and the SWAT team never raided my home.

I asked you, all right, you guys have heavy.

But but you know what I'll say is that like Ryan saw 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 sort of terminus of this thing right. Where Ryan saw 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, people just pop in randomly at a pool and, like, fenced in backyard. But it was an above ground pool.

Yeah. Good times. Right, exactly. But 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 you've known that you're now in 10 years of of doing this thing together. So you're in business together.

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 exposed how do I mean, what are they what you know, how do you make sure that you guys are good with each other? It's got to be challenging at times.

I think Josh is the most tolerant person I know. So you just able to put up with all my crap.

That's what it is. That's what it has nothing to do with me. It's a job. We have this we have we have an acronym that we we often talk about. Shout out to Patrick Roen, who spur the conversation that we had. The conversation with us spurred this acronym, its territory. But if you. If I really want to understand someone. Truly understand the. It's that's the sort of the process that that I go through of tolerating the person first, it's a weak virtue and it's not going to get you very far tolerance, right?

There's an ITIN when we're driving in L is like acting crazy in the car. There's a sign says Museum of Tolerance.

I was joking about the robbers that our cars, the Museum of Tolerance, whenever she's in the car, mobile anyway, tolerate.

And then we go from there, you know, 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 beliefs serve us very well, but that's a different conversation. We have the same values, though, and because we have the same values when we have different beliefs to get. So we get there via different paths, 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 might think it at first, but that's also my ego talking and I don't want to just tolerate his preferences. That's not going to make for a good friendship. A good business relationship, by the way, doesn't ever feel like a business. I mean, I don't think we had business paperwork with about four years into the thing now. Even now, we don't have. It's not.

Yeah, it's just it's not something we think about that way. 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 then, of course, the respect thing, of course, I respect your preferences. I don't always completely understand them, but that's OK. 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 and this goes 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, Josh is trying to shape 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 shame me now. I'm going to shame you. And now we're going to trade James back and right where I try to be the Zen Buddhist that Joshes when it comes to confrontation. But sometimes I'll go to Josh with something and he'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, yeah, you're absolutely right. Right.

And it's so so it's not when I say Josh, it truly is like when he comes to me, it's absolutely nonconfrontational. And if I go to him and I'm like accidentally being confrontational, he's able to, like, process it 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 what some ninja shit, though.

It's really it's really it's hard to master that and have that kind of, you know, presence of mind, you know, 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 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, uh, accident and a beautiful actress, some nice photos from that.

Yeah, yeah. That is all. We did it for the photos, did it for the gram.

Did not do it for the green. I don't think we even had Instagram.

But anyway, uh, you know, I was in a sauna with an American Indian named Tom and he he said, you know, there's like a basketball court practice on it to the YMCA in Missoula and indoor swimming and also stuff. And he goes, you know, I don't understand you Americans like you have this this idea of like if in order for you to win. You have to lose, but where I come from. If you win, he wins, and if he loses, you lose.

And 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, you just haven't won.

That's your problem. But think about that.

We talk about, like, winning. You know, obviously, Charlie Sheen is sort of the the the parodic exaggeration of that. Right.

But that's that's it's not far off from how our culture is. Right. We talk about winning as though it's a good thing. But by default, if someone win, 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, you know, it it canvasses our days, right?

Its 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 largesse that, you know, it's not a zero sum game. And if I win, you win to me. And and not only 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're the Toms guy on recently, Blake.

Yeah, Blake, he strikes me. He's 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 the four dudes that 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 would be like, what do they ask you? 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 were 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, which is cool.

Right? I love that idea. Yeah. Makes me think of like Google when they hire people, they, like, bring them on a bus and then like whether or not they think the bus driver is like a huge it's like a litmus test.

Yeah. Oh I see. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Like how do you behave when, when no one's watching. Because 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 in and to reward that.

Yeah, we were taught by Dave Ramsey earlier, but he was team. They interviewed the spouse and one of the interviews, it's a rather rigorous process, but your spouse gets interviewed as well. Separately, well, and it's fascinated me because I think maybe they're trying to figure out what are your how do you handle conflict? How do you make decisions about 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 if you if you interviewed backs, I would totally get the job no matter what the job.

How do you know what she's going to 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.

But you are featuring these individuals, the kind of everyday people, minimalist people that are highlighted in the movie. Yeah, and they're on Zoome call. So I was like, well, clearly you're executing this project.

Like during the pandemic, a pandemic was the best and worst thing that happened in this film. So we we we had this entire day set up in Los Angeles. We had a whole crew booked. We had location and we were bringing I don't know what it was, twenty to thirty two people. And to be interviewed that day, the majority of them were these everyday minimalists. Right. In fact, I think it was a two day shoot early or mid March.

Of course, you know what happened right at the beginning, the starting line of the whole thing.

Yeah, but the original thing that we wanted to 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. Yeah.

So, like, we kind of wanted to do that, but with minimalism in a way. And so it was Chris's idea, Chris, our director of photography on the film.

And so that actually worked out better by by bringing us sort of into their homes in a way. In fact, we had them do some B roll of some of their houses that shows up in the film as well. So you get to see the sort of D cluttering process they went through. Some of them even had footage that they took when they simplified 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 verité touch, like it's heartwarming because it's so authentic.

You know, it's like they're actually shooting at themselves. You're 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 looks like can grow up with with each one. Didn't feel like it was out of place, but yeah, it was them doing the thing on their own. Yeah. We got most of the cameras back.

Just get them all the more stuff. Oh 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. In addition to Dave Ramsey, you've got Teekay Coleman, who I know.

You know, he was on your podcast not that long ago. Annie Leonard from Greenpeace, Danny Barahona, simple family.

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, I was interested in how you made these choices. She she was the she did the story of stuff. If you recall.

She's the lady who did the video.

I mean, it's been so easy a million times at this point this year because I saw her and I was like, she looks really familiar and I couldn't point she 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 yeah. So we wanted sort of their five we only wanted five experts in the film and we wanted to sort of 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 to talk. Coleman, he is an education director at Phee. We had Dave Ramsey is sort of the money side of things, the debt, especially how it's tied to consumerism.

The neighbor 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 man or woman or man who is a pastor here in Los Angeles who probably was it's hard to pick a favorite, but he has some. My favorite lines in the entire film is an interesting dude. Wasn't he like a fashion designer or something like that?

He has he has this whole other he's 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 of times to talk has been our podcast. I think you're the you've been on there the second most decade going on.

There may be like eight times. In fact, if I can introduce you to anyone, think he'll blow your socks off the best person you could speak to about just about anything but especially.

But I'm unclear on his like. So he's an education, but I'm unclear about the nexus between that and minimalism.

So he's he was sort of our economy expert in a way. And he I wanted to juxtapose you could call him a capitalist. 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 Teekay and show that they overlap, 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 rebuts that by by 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 Yes Man show.

Right. I wanted to learn something from these people. And Irwin, he really helped solidify the theme of the film. You know, 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 talked about, but that that we should all we all have the eye should there's no.

Should we all have. The opportunity I like how you caught yourself there. Here's here's the problem I have is like I keep setting these things down like they should, and then but I have the pattern. I pick them back up repeatedly. We all have the opportunity, though, to to restart our lives, to start over. And this film was about starting over with less. And that can be less stuff, but it can also be less distractions, fewer commitments, cetera.

I love that. Yeah.

What is the the main idea that you want people to take away from the film?

Hmm. I mean, I think Josh said it's about starting over. I mean, it 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 is 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've 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.

There are all these burns we've taken them on. We've picked up all this baggage. But we can also set down it might take some time to set it down, especially with that. You know, in the first film in minimalism I talked about, we 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 twenty grand a year, whatever they would let me spend.

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 you know that the best way to to do that is to stop spending, to stop whatever excess is going on. And we can't add our way to contentment, to joy, to peace. It's always about subtraction.

And 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 every day 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, et cetera.

So to the point about like the nudge or the, you know, the kind of the gentle push towards these ideas, I feel like people are primed for this now. And it is a moment of of radical change.

You know, 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 try to 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 if you you know, things 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. You know, we we had a whole tour planned this year and and with the film was going to come out earlier, et cetera. And we had a bunch of speaking things that we're going to do all year.

There aren't corporations that are meetings.

We couldn't go speak at these places.

And and so it was a pause for us as well, but.

It's not to take away either what is. Well, some people are faced with my brother, you know, he is back in Ohio, he works in a factory, he worked in a factory building cabinets. It was a well-paying job. And he was talented and skilled and he was doing that. That whole thing shut down. It's not coming back. He went and got a part time job at Amazon so he could pay, you know, feed his 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 less. 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, I also I 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 asking, in fact, the terms even out there, a central 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?

Yeah, I think that's a good place to put a pin in it for now until you guys come back next time you love your brother, you so much these guys to have 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. Wind in your sails, my friend.

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 didn't see it the first time around, minimalism, the original movie.

Well, Ryan has an only. He just started that. That that's here. I am so here for that. You said you wouldn't say a word about that unreligious podcast audience supported.

Right. So many people adore me. Talk about minimalism. All right. Just Spellman was stuck on you. Find our podcast, books, films, everything else. It's all in one hubbub and most stuck up. Nice.

Cool. Thanks, you guys. Thank you. Peace. See you. Thanks for listening.

Hope you enjoyed the show to learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, you can visit the episode page Rich Role Dotcom, and you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter at Rich Role. 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 media is of course awesome and always appreciated.

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Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace, Lance.