Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 75: JOSHUA FIELDS MILBURN on Saying "No" to Almost Everything

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

In today's episode, I talk with Joshua Fields Milburn, who along with Ryan Nicodemus make up the powerhouse duo known simply as the Minimalists. You probably know Joshua from the wildly successful Netflix documentaries, MINIMALISM and LESS IS NOW, or the popular podcast he co-hosts with Ryan. The story of how the Minimalists got started is well-told, so I thought I would focus on a natural follow question: what happened next? Starting with when I first met him in 2012, I ask Joshua to walk us through the building of the Minimalist brand -- how they went from an amateur blog to being recognized on the street a dozen times a day. In doing so, we learn a lot about the inspiring, value-driven approach that Joshua and Ryan have taken in their careers, in which living right is more important than making the most money or accusing the most likes. Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 75. Quick announcements. So my new book, A World Without Email, comes out tomorrow. That's Tuesday, March 2nd here in the U.S. It's released in the UK on March 4th. So that's good news in part because it means I don't have to keep talking about it soon during these quick announcements.

Two quick points on the book. First, if you pre-order the book, you know, again, you have my appreciation. You get access to this Email Academy course. We're going to keep that open all day on March 2nd. So even if you buy the book at any point on March 2nd, you'll still be able to register your purchase and get access to that email Academy course. I just finished actually the final video today for the course. It's cool. It's about 45 minutes, spread over five videos.

it really gets to the heart of the matter. Here's the big ideas. Here's how you do the changes. Here's how you adapt the changes. It's the big ideas from the book plus some extra sort of practical knowledge, some additional ideas not in the book. We're probably going to,

I think the way we're going to do this is these videos are really going to be, they're going to be posted unlisted, but in a shareable way. So there's a little benefit to getting access to this academy is if you're trying to convert someone over to the Cal Newport mindset

and you're not sure if they're going to read the whole book, you will probably be able to just surreptitiously, send them one or two of these videos. You think they'll get right to the heart of the matter. So anyways, if you pre-ordered the book, even if you buy it on March 2nd, just go to Calnewport.com slash pre-order. And as I mentioned last time, honestly, just the biggest bonus I can give you as my thanks. It's just useful for the book launch, the more people who buy it in advance.

Also, as I mentioned last week, I'm doing a live virtual event hosted by Politics and Pros the bookstore here in D.C. with Jason Freed. So we're going to discuss a lot of issues about email, the future of work, etc. You have to register to attend it. So go to Calnewport.com slash blog. I wrote a little blog post about it recently. You can get the link to register. Also, if you buy a copy of the book through Politics and Prose and the link is there on that registration page, you will get a signed copy. So basically, Politics and Prose is keeping track of everyone who buys the book and attends the event. And then the day after the event, I'm going to go over there and sign a bunch of copies so that you can get shipped to sign copies. So if you want to sign

copy, you can buy it through politics and pros, and it helps that bookstore. I really want to help these local bookstores. I really like that particular bookstore. All right, enough about the book. Let's get going with today's episode. Today is an interview episode. So instead of the normal format, we will be doing an interview. In particular, I will be talking to Joshua, Fields Milburn, who along with Ryan Nicodemus makes up that powerhouse duo known as the minimalist. You probably have heard about the minimalist. I would say that of the various people I know, these are the people that most impresses. Let's say various friends or family I have. They're like, oh, you know that you know the minimalist? They're like the most well-known people

I know. I've known Joshua and Ryan since 2012. I've known him for a long. time. I've done events with them when they were here a few years ago doing a big event at the Sixth and I synagogue here in D.C. I was to fill in for Joshua, so I got to be like a less, less well-quaffed version of Joshua for an event. But they really kicked off this movement of minimalism. That is a focus on less, but doing the things you do better, which is obviously a very influential idea for me. They really kicked off a movement around this here in the States. they got started with a blog that became really popular. They began really hustling in the sense that they went on the road all the time.

They would just go to cities, city after city, and gather people in person and talk about this stuff. It's really amazing. The old-fashioned way in which through person-to-person connection, they really built up this movement. Now, a lot of people know them from their first Netflix documentary Minimalism, which is very popular. As we talk about in this interview, that documentary went on to be the number one indie release of the year before Netflix even a quality. wired it. You know, they just, they put in the theaters and book the, book the seats themselves, and it was a runaway hit. And that was a huge success once Netflix actually released it. They have a new Netflix documentary out now. And now this one is called Less is Now, the Minimalist,

less is now. So you probably know them from these documentaries. You probably also know them perhaps from their podcast. I was out there to the podcast a couple years ago when I was promoting digital minimalism. I look forward to getting out there to talk about the new book as well. They're only doing in person, so I have to find my way out to California. But I'm really looking forward to that and seeing them again. But they really have had a big impact on the culture. And so I was looking forward to talking to Joshua. What I did in this interview you'll see is I didn't ask about how they got started in minimalism, mainly because in their documentaries, in their hundreds, if not thousands of speeches they've given around the country on their podcast. They've told a story so many

times about their soulless corporate job and how they left and why they left and what they were going on that I thought it would be more interesting to focus on what happened next. So I met them right after they left their jobs, right after they started the minimalist.com, right after they started this new movement, this new mission. And I was curious in this interview to pull out, how did this unfold? How do we get from there to them being a three or five? four-time repeat guest on the Today Show, to them having one of the number one documentaries on Netflix, for them getting to a point where now, you know, Josh or Ryan, they'll get recognized a dozen times a day just walking down the street. Now, how did that, how did that happen?

I think it was a really interesting discussion. So you find out some about the business of creating a brand and a movement. But as you'll also see, what I'm really impressed by is the integrity with which they have built this out. They are not working from a frame of, how do we maximize growth? How do we maximize money? How do we maximize popularity? They are really working backwards from what is going to make our life meaningful. They say no to lots of things, you know, that they could do. They're really cautious about bringing in new things. They ignore a lot of the conventional wisdom about what you need to do to grow an audience. They're driven by values and interest. They're fiercely lifestyle designed in the sense that they really

think about what do we want our lives to be like and how does this fit within it. They've got this really interesting philosophy of being able to walk away. They don't like getting locked into things. If they don't like something, let's say the podcast is not going too well, they don't like it anymore. They've set it up so they can walk away. Let's say they don't like doing movies anymore. It's fine. They're not committed. They can walk away. They have a very small reliance on a particular amount of money coming in, so they're not staffed up in such a way that now the flywheel has to keep turning. It's fascinating just seeing them in addition to just a story of how do you become such an impactful brand from basically nothing. You've got this general story about how do you

craft the life around values. It sounds a lot like the deep life. So I think it's a great demonstration of the deep life in action. So I really think it's an interview that everyone will enjoy. Certainly watch the minimalist less is now documentary, watch their original minimalism documentary. You have to be watching or listening to their podcast. It's fantastic. But hopefully you will enjoy this interview with Joshua Fields Milburn. Now here's the one thing. This is going to be a little bit different. And this is out of respect for Joshua. So Joshua is, as you'll see in the interview, does not like advertising. It's a philosophical stance that I understand and has a lot of integrity. So what I normally do,

obviously, in my show is I'll do an ad up front right now. then I'll have an ad break later. As a show or respect to Joshua, I'm going to do all three ads right now. So that I'm not interrupting a conversation with someone who has a very strong stance about advertising with advertisements. I think that would just be in bad taste. So we're going to do the mid-roll ads right now. And then we will have our uninterrupted conversation with Joshua Fields Milburn of the minimalist. Let's take a brief moment to talk about my friends at Blum.

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That's ladderlife.com slash deep. That's ladderlife.com slash deep. And now, on to the interview. All right. I am happy to welcome Joshua Fields Milburn to the Deep Questions podcast. Joshua, how are you doing? Hey, Cal, thanks for having me. Look, I'm a little bummed. Why's that? Look, I got this book coming out. If there was not a pandemic, I would have been able to come out to California. and I'm sure we would have had some fun could have come on the show

and now I got to just stay here in cold DC and my window list. And you probably would have been out here because of your new Netflix documentary you would have been on tour probably so we would have been able to see each other twice. So that's my personal bummer of the pandemic.

Yeah, we actually canceled two of our speaking tours. Our tours are all different. I don't even know why I call it a speaking tour. Sometimes it's a podcast tour. Sometimes it's a book tour. Sometimes it's a documentary tour. It kind of just depends on what we're doing. We've been doing the whole minimalist thing for 10 years now.

We've done nine tours in those 10 years. And you've actually participated in several of those. And so I, yeah, I was definitely hoping to get out there. We already had plans to do this big launch with lesses now and go to a bunch of different cities. But, of course, that's on hold for the foreseeable future. We got a book coming out this summer as well called Love People Use Things. And we have a tentative tour scheduled with that. But who knows what the summer will bring.

Yeah. Well, you're still in a lockdown L.A., right? It used to be called sunny L.A. And now we have to temporarily call it lockdown L.A., I guess. So it probably seems hard to imagine a time when, but it's coming. Yeah, both is and isn't. It is both in lockdown and it is also, well, you know, we're still sunny regardless of the lockdown. status. Yeah. So do you, have you had people all fall trying to convince you to move to Austin?

Because that's been my fall is like every writer I know, every comedian I know everyone who's moved out there has been giving me the hard sell. I haven't heard from them recently for obvious reasons. But have you been getting that hard sell? Yeah, I've had quite a few people that. And I would consider Nashville before I considered Austin. But it's just closer to Dayton, Ohio, which is where I grew up. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are sort of, you know, talking about leaving California in a mass exodus. I don't know that's actually going to bear out in the statistics. And you move to California for a few reasons, one of which has to do with the weather. And so you're not going to get that in Austin.

Yeah. You know, I feel like what I've been, what I've been trained to understand from having a whole bunch of kids is during hard moments, when you're in the moment, you feel like, well, this is going to last forever. And everything has to change. And then when you leave the moment and look back, you know, with a little bit of separation, it's like, oh, that wasn't that long. And so I have this sense that this year in the moment is feeling like the longest year ever. But like, let's fast forward to a few years from now. We'll look back and it'll seem like this compressed time. Like there's that one brief, you know, in other words, like we think everything is going to change.

But like one year is probably not enough to disrupt everything. You know, back in my corporate days, I spent 12 years sort of climbing the corporate ladder going through middle. middle management, and it's all a bit of a blur from age 18 to 30. So what was that, 1999 to roughly 2010, 2011, somewhere in there. I couldn't tell you what happened in 2006 or how that was different from 2003. I mean, maybe there's something in there. I could, I could dig far enough back, but it was sort of like, you know, really, it was the, the cutting room floor version of of Groundhog Day. And now, ever since, sort of walking away from that and embarking on this whole minimalist thing, every year has been marked by something.

And, you know, 2020 is no different from that. It just happens to be, it happens to be a time when there's a whole lot of uncertainty. But guess what? There was a whole lot of uncertainty for the last several millennia. Really, ever since the agriculture revolution, I think we've injected uncertainty into our lives. This is just a different kind of uncertainty. Yeah, if that's your expectation is once we get past uncertainty, then I'll be able to be happy.

It's going to be a pretty unhappy existence. So what I want to talk about, I mean, obviously I want to get to your new Netflix documentary, less is now. What I typically do on this podcast is start with people's backstories because I'm inspired by Steve Martin's memoir, born standing up, where he said, look, everyone always skips to that part where they're playing at the Copa. and leave all the steps of how did they get from, I wanted to become a performer to being on stage.

And so he wrote his whole biography about how he actually broke in and made his career. And so I do like to tell that story with people. In your case, though, your original origin story, that is how you left the corporate life to embrace a life of minimalism is already really well known. Yeah. You had your original Netflix documentary. You've had all these tours you've done. you've had your very popular podcast and blog.

You are, by the way, like one of the single most impressive people as far as my circles are concerned. More when I talk about people I know, I can't tell you how many times you and Ryan come up all the time and how people are not very impressed by me, but they're always impressed of, you know, the minimalist. So, so you're, that story. Yeah. So what I'm going to try to start with here is the part that came after that. Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, I want to start with when we met.

So we met in 2012. Yeah. At the World Domination Summit. Right. If I remember not right. We were sitting in these little children's chairs. It was a very, you and I are both rather tall. And I remember being in some sort of child's classroom.

I'm not sure why we were there, but I felt like a giant. We were just sitting around. I don't even know what we were talking about. I just remember there was, I felt really good. leave in there. Like there was a meaningful connection with what we, you know, what, what you were doing and what I was trying to understand, you know, I've really been a seeker for these last, this last decade. And, you know, your work in particular has, has helped me on, on that, that seeker's journey in a way. Yeah. And, and that was a cool event. I mean, it was one of those things, you know, you look back in time and say,

oh, oh, everyone was there. So we met there. That's the first time I met Bray Brown. You know, she was there. Kane was there when Quiet was just starting to, I think in that classroom, maybe it was like Josh Kaufman was teaching us how to learn things fast or something like. So it was a really, it was a really interesting get together. But that was 2012. Where were you in the minimal, the minimalist TM? Where were you at that part? You had the blog and was that it? So put us into bridge the gap from you left your job. Yeah. You, I, meet you, I think you already had the trademark. I think Ryan was already in the black t-shirt. There was a, there was a blog that had a very distinctive look with the white. So what's the,

what's the gap in between there? What happened? Well, that distinctive look was kind of a beautiful accident. I couldn't even spell HTML. So when we first started the blog, it was just like, cobbling things together. I couldn't make it any more complex, which ended up being a blessing, right? But yeah, yeah, we actually started the blog before we left the corporate world. I discovered of minimalism back in 2009, but it wasn't until a year and a half later that Ryan and I started the minimalist, like you said, everyone sort of knows that origin story. It has to do with a packing party and my mother dying, my marriage ending, et cetera. But that was 2010 when we started the blog, sort of on the heels of a few revelations that Ryan had when he was dealing with his stuff.

He was sorting through a lot of things and also sorting through a pretty pernicious drug habit that he was sort of pacifying himself with opioids and in order to sort of sustain a to tolerate a mediocre life. And so I think it was 2011 where I ended up walking away from the corporate world, but we had already been doing the whole minimalist thing for a while. At 2012, we actually, the end of 2011, about a year into doing the whole minimalist thing, we published our first book called Minimalism Live a Meaningful. life. And we went out on a book tour with that. Over the course of the next year, I think we did

33 different cities all over the U.S. and Canada. We basically just got into Ryan's Toyota Corolla and two people would show up, five people would show up. We had one event where I think a few dozen people showed up, which was way beyond any expectation I ever had. And from there, we, I don't know, I sort of became vehicle agnostic. You know, I always wanted to be a writer. And in my life, that was writing fiction. So I wrote fiction throughout my 20s as a sort of hobby. It didn't get to write it that much. I was an aspiring writer, but I just aspired. I didn't actually do much. I was procrastinating a lot with my life. And so I found that as I made writing a priority, it was really fulfilling, but sometimes it wasn't the best medium through which to communicate. And so, yeah, since the sort of

starting of the minimalist. It started with the blog and then we had a book and love people use things is going to be our fourth book over the course of 10 years. And so we found all these different vehicles. Eventually there was the podcast, which is often what we're most known for now, either that or either one of our Netflix documentaries. So I became vehicle agnostic. It was like, okay, what is the best medium through which to communicate the thing that I'm trying to communicate? And also, what's what's the best vehicle for me to understand better? And so it's been a 10-year journey of really understanding, if nothing else. I mean, 2012, shortly after you and I met, Ryan and I moved out to Montana to work on our second book,

called Everything That Remains, it was sort of this memoir of these two suit and tie corporate guys who became minimalists and eventually the minimalists. And we ended up staying in Montana for about five years. And it was beautiful, but the winters were brutal. and we eventually came out here to Los Angeles because this is where people go to tell stories. Yeah. What was the plan in 2011? So just even from a pay the bills perspective was to play,

like let's live off savings at first and then we'll feel out, we'll feel out the market. Yeah. I don't know that there's ever been an actual plan. There still isn't. Like I don't have a five-year plan, 10-year plan. And I tend to look at each year as here's one creative project I want to work on this year. And so, you know, whether it's a film or a book.

And sometimes it bleeds over into the next year. But I tend to look at it one year at a time. And initially, no, I didn't have any savings. In fact, I still had a little bit of debt. So when I realized it was time to leave the corporate world, I stayed for an extra two years longer than I would have liked. And in doing that, the only reason I did that was to pay off debt. Now, I did a bunch of really radical things to make sure that I got out of debt because I was so, I made really good money in the corporate world. Yeah, I made a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in Dayton, Ohio.

But I was broke. I was worse than broke. I had massive amounts of debt. If you count my mortgage, I had half a million dollars worth of debt. And, you know, a ton of credit card debt, 14 credit cards, you know, everything from like Banana Republic and Macy's to Diners Club and Discover and Master card. It's no coincidence. They call it a master card. And I was slave to the lender, right?

And I was overwhelmed, working really hard to attain status, I guess, success, achievement, you know, whatever we consider to be the American dream. You know, I think success doesn't really exist anymore. You know, it was sort of faux success. It was everyone else's idea of success. And the pursuit of happiness is kind of the problem, right? And so, no, I didn't, when I walked away from the corporate world, the thing that was critical for me is I had reduced my bills so far down that I could live on a barista salary. And so people thought I was insane when I walked away from the corporate world.

I was the youngest director in our company's 140 year history. I managed 150 retail stores and had all of these sort of trappings and of ostensible success, right? And I looked successful. big house in the excerpts, three luxury cars, more toilets than people in my house, and sort of all of the accoutrements of success. And yet, man, I was living paycheck to paycheck. I made really good money, but spent even better money. And so, no, when I walked away, I still had about two years left to pay off the rest of that debt. But I moved into a really small apartment. It was like 500 bucks a month and had virtually no bills. I got rid of home internet. I got

rid of, you know, I'd never ate out. I just, I got myself down to what was, you know, we're talking about this now during the pandemic, right? Like, what is essential? We hear these terms. Essential worker, essential travels. Well, that's the question Ryan and I have been grappling with over the last decade. What is essential? And, and, you know, I, I believe that everything that we own, you know, minimalism sort of starts with the stuff, but I believe everything that we own can fit into one of three piles. We call it the no-junk rule. It's either essential, non-essential, or junk.

Well, the essentials are, I think, pretty much the same for all of us, right? Food, shelter, clothing, vocation, education, transportation. And then you have non-essentials. These vary widely by the individual. These are things we don't actually need, need. Like, I have a couch at home. I don't need a couch. I could live without it, right?

But it does add value to my life. Same with my kitchen table. Same with my dresser, whatever. I have some non-essentials. Unfortunately, most of the things we own are junk. These are things that masquerade as value-adding, but they actually get in the way of what adds value to our lives. You talk about this acutely with technology.

and technological distractions. Quite often, Facebook can seem like it's one of those things that adds value. And it may on some level, but it might actually be junk. And it might be getting in the way of creating something worthwhile. And I think that is true with our stuff. I also think it's true in all other areas of our life. And so for me, with my bills, I was like, okay, if I'm really serious about wanting to not be tethered to this lifestyle anymore, or not to be anchored by everyone else's expectations,

then I have to figure out a way that I can afford to walk away because I couldn't afford it before. And I don't know how terrifying that is. I remember the first time I actually went to leave my job. My boss told me no. He said that I couldn't. Nope. And at first in my mind, I was like, oh, that's the most terrifying thing ever.

And I believed him for a second because of the way that he said it. And I was like, oh, no, I didn't realize that someone could turn me down when I'm quitting my job. And, you know, eventually we sort of navigated those waters and we set forth a plan to have a healthy transition to someone else because it was just no longer, and no longer aligned with the person I wanted to be. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people who aren't familiar with that period of Internet history, so the period leading up to that departure for you, they don't know that there was this strong online minimalism community. And it was actually one of the stronger communities within the first waves of blogs.

Right. So you had Leo Babuda, you had Joshua Becker, you had Courtney Carver. Minimalism was one of these big ideas. I remember finding it very influential as a grad student at MIT. I still have memories of being in the back of the distributed algorithms graduate seminar. I was TA and reading about Leo leaving his job. Yeah.

Because his Zendadun had generated just enough money that he could pay off his debt and leave cheaply. Remember, that was very influential. These ideas were very influential. So I'm sure you were in that milieu. But also what you guys did was a little bit different. And so I'm curious about how you thought about your place in that world when you started the minimalist.com and we're thinking about leaving because what I noticed, is that the existing blogs were very in the old school of here's like a person and I'm kind of

bearing my life and it's a homebrewd type look like you know here's me let me talk about what's going on kind of cluttered type thing and you guys had a I don't know like a visual brand I mean it was the first thing I saw when I started reading you guys that seemed visually aspirational So there was like a split, right? It wasn't like a cluttered sort of here's my. I mean, Leo had a had a very nice sort of minimalist blog, but you guys had like this black and white. You dressed in a certain way.

And it for whatever reason made it really effective. So you're saying, is that all accidental or how did you guys think about it? When you were looking at that existing online world and saying we want to enter it. Yeah, I don't know that it was accidental. I think thankfully I was somewhat naive to the size of how many other minimalists were out there. I actually was familiar with the three you mentioned, Courtney, Leo, and Joshua and Kim Becker, he and his wife. And then there was also Colin Wright, who was actually the first person who introduced me to minimalism. And, well, I liked all of their stories.

I found them fascinating. I also knew that my life and also Ryan's life, you know, I've known Ryan since we were fat little fifth graders. And so I knew that our lives were different from theirs. And so we brought a few things different, a few different things to the table. One is I do have a serious appreciation for aesthetic. So I'm a fan of minimalism. But before I was a fan of minimalism as a lifestyle, I was an actual fan of minimalism in terms of like architecture and even interior design.

You know, someone like John Paulson, the architect or Axel Vavort, who is an interior designer, but also other types of minimalism. You know, minimalist writers from like the eight. 80s, Brett Easton Ellis and Lori Moore or Raymond Carver. And I found a lot of value in minimalism in the sense that the bones of the thing are the beauty, right? And so if you strip something down to its essence, that's where the real beauty comes out. And so minimalist art, you know, Agnes Martin, for example, her paintings are visually stunning to me. And they evoke some sort of visceral feeling that I wouldn't get from a

personally wouldn't get from a Jackson Pollock painting. Not that one is better than the other, or one is right or wrong. It's more of a preference thing. And so I think I've been drawn to minimalism in terms of aesthetics for a long time. And I agree with you. I think that played a significant role in everything we were doing early on. But also, I wanted to make sure it wasn't overly simplistic. Our friend Leo, his website to me is aggressively minimalist. That's what I remember. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do remember that.

And so I really like that, but it wasn't appropriate for me. And so the question is like, well, what is the most appropriate thing? And I tend to look at things from the, not from my perspective, but if we publish something, it's more from a readers or a listener's perspective. What would I have wanted 10 years ago? The book that we have coming out this summer, Love People Use Things. I look at that now. I'm just finishing up the eighth draft of that thing.

And it's been done for a year, but I keep going back to it because the question is like, what would I have wanted to read when I was, you know, I'm 39 now? What would I have wanted to read when I was 29 years old or even 35 years old? What have I learned and how can I best communicate? that to someone. So I don't think that minimalism is necessarily for everyone. I think it's it's for anyone who is discontented by the status quo. But also when I saw Leo and Courtney and everyone else, I saw recipes. And instead of trying to recreate the recipe, it was like, oh, I'll take an ingredient from that recipe, take an ingredient from that recipe, take one here. And then let's look at

Brady Stenellis. Let's look at John Paulson. Let's look at all these different minimalists, right? and create our own recipe for simple living or intentional living. Yeah. Well, you know, one of the threads I throw into your story that you don't often mention because you're modest, but it often seems to me looking at what you did once you and Ryan did once the minimalist got started is part of the explanation for how you ended up so successful in the world of business at the young age, you know, doing what you're doing before you left for minimalism.

It wasn't just the attraction of the consumer's lifestyle. There's these latent talents that I think come through because when I looked at what you guys did, you're the innovators, I would say, of that space. So for example, with your first book, I'm assuming you did with that book. I think the first book tour I connected with you guys was probably the everything that remains to her when you were at politics and pros and I introduced you. But I'm assuming you had the same model for the first book. You had this idea of like, let's get a book out. Yeah.

And I think you might have self-published it, but you had this idea of, let's do this tour. Like, let's go places. We'll do this tour. And then when we do the tour, we're going to do local press at every location. You know, there's a business instinct in there that,

uh, that, uh, that, like, I don't have that instinct. Leo didn't have that instinct. Like it, it's, I don't know where these ideas come from,

but I think this was, anyways, where did that come from? Like, when you decide, like, this is what we're going to do. And we're going to get in the Krola,

we're going to go to 30 states or whatever it was. Yeah. And get local press in every place and talk to people in every place. Like, we are going to make this movement we're doing, we're going to will it into something that exists. Yeah, you know, you're right. It came from, when we were in the corporate world, I was doing things that were, felt

inauthentic to me. At least they felt inauthentic once I started to get clarity around what my values were, right? But in a way, I look at the business side of creating as a piece of creating. I think once upon a time, there was a time where an author would. write a book and then someone edits it and someone does the layout and the and um you know there's proof readers and then there's a marketing team and all this but like i've i hate waiting around for someone else's permission right and and so yeah initially that first book minimalism live a meaningful

life we did self-publish it but then we actually when we republished it i think it was in 2015 we republish it we had formed a publishing company by then so in 2013 We and our friend Colin Wright, we had learned a lot about publishing. In fact, Colin had published something like 30 books on his own. And he's a really talented writer. And we had learned a lot. And so we started our own publishing company called Asymmetrical Press. At one point, yeah, we had like 20 interns.

And Ryan was managing all of the interns. He's the people person of the group. And we'd have someone who did design and layout. We had someone who did PR. And so we had. And we had, I think we've published the work of nine different authors, not in counting the founders, six other authors. So whenever we went to them, we made sure we didn't own their art.

Like I didn't want to own anything that they were doing. But I also let them know, like, hey, we're going to fail together. We want to help you fail better because that's what's going to happen here. You're probably not going to have some giant New York Times bestseller with this thing. But we're going to, we're going to learn how to do this. And every time we screw up, we're going to figure that out. You know, people can call it iteration or whatever other business term there is. But to me, it felt, well, not felt, it was much more authentic, right?

It was like I wanted a level of sincerity in what we were doing because it felt so insincere to be, you know, we worked in telecom. So selling cell phones to five-year-olds, you know, convincing their parents that they needed one. The convincing thing just never felt great. And so Ryan and I have not been in the convincing business. And I think in many ways we're not in the advice business either. We're not proselytizing. I don't want to convert anyone to minimalism. I don't think this is something you must do or should do.

I don't think I'm better than you because I'm a minimalist and you're not. It never occurred to me that this was the way to be. It was these were things that I had a deep desire to do. Ryan and I were the minimalist because it was like, hey, when you get a group of more than one person together, you know, like a band, you name them something, right? And so a lot of what we did was music is very much an inspiration and what we have done. You know, my first novel I wrote back in my 20s was about a sort of failing singer-songwriter. And so we sort of took the lessons from music. And some of our favorite musicians, they were going around.

touring, you know, my friend Matt Carney or Griffin House, they would tour 300 tour stops a year. Well, I never aspired to do that. I saw that, oh, here's one way they really get this, their music out there. And what do you do when you tour? Well, you hit up the local media. Now, there have been some beautiful byproducts of that as well. The 2014 tour that you mentioned, everything that remains. That was our biggest tour in terms of number of cities. We did 100 cities, 8 countries, 119 events. And, yeah, we did over 400 interviews that year. Now, some of it, you know, you see some of it in our first documentary, minimalism, that, you know, we'd show up at 5.20 a.m. to the AM radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And you know that maybe eight people were listening to that. But that wasn't the point. The point was that we had the opportunity to share something that we felt really passionate about. We had cultivated a passion, as you would say. And also it was wonderful practice. So when the Today Show came knocking and, you know, we've done Today Show, I had five, six, seven times at this point or Good Morning America or any of these other places.

But we had the repetition in before all of that. And so, yeah, going out there and giving these talks has been a beautiful way for us to better understand what resonates with people and really better understand people. the in the new book in fact we we collect a bunch of stories from different people who have you know like had a dumpster fire in their house and what that meant for them or you know just different stories that we've picked up on the road and also figuring out the things that I thought were so profound and would resonate some grand metaphor about channel surfing or something like it was just crickets right but then when Ryan would start talking about his packing party

we thought that was a throwaway idea like who wants to talk about about moving their stuff, right? How stupid is that? No, no, no. That thing became the thing that everyone fixated on because it's such a visual representation. And so when you get out there, you really understand, you get to understand people's perspectives. Right. So what you were learning on the road would then come back and influence what you wrote about

and what you did, which would influence. And so basically you were putting in the road hours, like a band would put in or, or professional comedian would put in that's so crucial to the honing your point of view, and probably a lot of us don't. Yeah, yeah. I think so. I mean, I think the same is true with writing, right?

I mean, writing is one of those rare professions where, what do we say? We have, we have, we have a writer's block, right? Yeah. And like,

what a, what a strange excuse. Other creators don't have that. When I go to a, a nurse, I've never heard a nurse say she has, um, nurses block or a bricklayer say she has bricklayers block right like that's I would look at that

person and just sort of blink and not know what to say but we we have this excuse of writer's block well no you just if you're a bricklayer you show up and you lay bricks my my brother he manufactures cabinets and he just shows up and he builds cabinets every day he doesn't have cabinet makers block and so I think the same was true with writing there's a really talented fiction author his name's Donald Ray Pollock. He wrote the devil all the time. And I was fortunate enough to have lunch with him. He lives in Chilicothe, Ohio. And I drove out to Chilicothe, from Dayton. And he told me four words. I was in my late 20s at the time. Four words that changed my life. Sit in the chair. And it made me realize like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that's the only thing you actually have

to do. Before I was so worried about productivity and word count and page count. No, no, no, no. Like, the only count that matters is can I sit in the chair for at least an hour a day and soon an hour turns into two or three hours. And it's the repetitions. Otherwise, yeah, you can aspire to be a writer, but, you know, it's not going to do much. My theory on writer's block is that the problem with writing is that you occasionally get a flow state. Right. And it's like, oh, this is great. I love it. I'm locked in and the words are flowing. And you get it just every once in a while. which gives you the taste. And then you can get the belief,

like, well, it should always feel like that. Like, if I don't feel really jazzed up and ready to write and feel really good about it, then there's a problem or I'm blocked or I shouldn't really do it. Whereas if you're building cabinets, you probably don't fall into the state where you're like, everything's flowing. It's like, yeah, it's work. I'm used to the work. Or if you're laying bricks,

you're not going to fall into a sort of a flow state where you feel like the muses are singing to you. So it's almost like we are tortured by the occasional grace that we get a feel in writing because it's easy to hope or do. extrapolate and say, oh, that's what, that's what should always feel like. But I think in nonfiction writing, we underestimate the importance of what you're talking about. I do this virtually. I mean, my whole book writing career is based on the fact that I'm blog writing all the time. Everything I ever end up being in a book is going to have been talked about for a long time

in articles. And I would say when podcasting came along and I started getting more involved in podcasting, that also became important because I would, I was a, a year. round podcast guest because I'd written a couple books that were sort of evergreen, right? They had long tails, like deep work and so good. And I was just unrelated to the book. I was always doing podcast. Yeah. Got ideas. And so I'd find myself working out material being really critical. And so, you know, it seems like you and Ryan had something similar going on. But when was the point, one of the things was good about your early website is that it was very well designed to, it gave off the look of this is a big deal. Like very early on you had the as seen on NPR and whatever.

And I remember being like even before I met you like, okay, these guys are really well known. It's sort of a big deal. What was a turning point in your story where you started feeling that? Like what is what was it when you and Ryan were like, wait, this is a bigger thing? Yeah. I wanted to be careful that it wasn't like those things can be egoic pursuits, right? And there's nothing wrong or bad about the ego. So I'll just put that out there.

But yeah, it also does establish some sort of legitimacy to an outside viewer, right? And without beating people over the head with it, you know, if you go to our website now, it'll probably say something at the top in a short box that says, you know, as featured on, you know, the New York Times and the New Yorker or whatever, right? It's there, but it doesn't have to be in your face because it isn't, it isn't. a true marker of quality. That's a marker of, um, I don't know, uh, PR aptitude, I suppose. Um, when, when did, you know, and by the way, many of those, you know this. Many of those things don't really get you much, right? I mean, you can do, uh, you can do the today show on Christmas day and supposedly

nine million people tune in. I know because I've done it, but then, you know, what, 2,000 people come to the website from that. It's like, well, wait a minute. Oh, it's because it's sort of just on in the background like a fireplace. It's not as deep as if you were to be on a podcast with Cal Newport or if you get featured on Leo Babata's blog. And in fact, I think the first big thing that happened to us in the eyes of your everyday person is out of nowhere CBS this morning called and they flew us out to New York.

This is back in 2011, I think. and how they were attracted to us. I'm not sure. I may have been from Leo Babata's website. He was gracious enough to share an essay I wrote called A Day in the Life of a Minimalist. And that thing went viral for the time. It wasn't an actual viral thing. It was like, you know, thousands of people saw it.

So it wasn't, I've never had anything, you know, truly go viral, I don't think. And not that it's bad. it's just not my aim. And so, yeah, there was a moment around, actually, I can tell you the exact moment where I knew personally. It was December of 2012, so about two years after we had started the website, we were on a tour. We did a 10-city holiday tour. It was called the Holiday Happiness Tour. And we just went to 10 cities.

And we didn't charge any money. We didn't have a new book out. We just went to 10 cities and did 10 different events. And we did media in each city when we were there, driving around in Ryan's Toyota Corolla. And in Toronto, we showed up to the venue. We had this co-working space that agreed to let us use their space. And it held maybe 60 or 70 people, which was way bigger than we had needed up to that point. So we show up in a gal who was organizing the event for us.

She, she, like, users us over because when we pull up, there was another event that was going on there at the same time. And it was upstairs in that same venue, that co-working space. And I panicked because I was like, how are we going to get into this venue? There's so many people here. And I talked to the gal about, she's like, you idiot, they're all here for you. And it must have been a thousand people there. It was way more people than we could, you know, fit into a room. and somehow we got the co-working space to let us use their entire top floor and we made it work.

It was, I'm sure we broke every fire code violation in the city. But it just sort of, our message spread the most in Canada before it even spread in the United States. And it was some media outlets to pick that up. And I think it was at a time that minimalism was really starting to resonate with people because it was post-crash. right, the 2008 crash. And people were beginning to question their so-called success and achievement and their desire for so-called success and achievements and trophies. And our society, that's usually marked by the accumulation of stuff.

And people were beginning to question that because, you know, they were miserable and they kept chasing happiness, not realizing like, well, it's the chase of happiness that is actually making me miserable in the first place. But that's really the first time that I recognize like, oh, oh, this is, this is way bigger than we ever intended. And so at that point, this would have been blog readers, though many of whom maybe had been pushed your blog because of some press had already happened. But at this point, this was just a concentration because that was the main media outlet you had in this sort of 2012. It would have been your blog, basically. Yeah, that was it.

Yeah. those thousand people that they had just, they had known your blog and they felt a real connection with what was going on. And so when they just heard, okay, you guys were going to be in town. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's exciting. So then you knew you were on to something.

When you went, I was ignorant because we didn't have like an email list even. Like we had like a little feed burner thing, but like we didn't have, you know, a, an email. So it's not like we were like reminding people to come to our events. Like we just put it up on our events page on the website and people showed up. It's also the reason, you know, that very first tour we did back in 2011 and 2012, it was, there were times when two people, literally two people showed up.

There were two cities, Salt Lake City and Knoxville where two people showed up. And most people would see that as a defeat. But like Ryan and I were like, oh, my God, like, there are people showing up in Knoxville, Tennessee who know who we are. How crazy is that? Yeah, yeah. Well, by the way, I think it's an interesting data point for, For those who today say, like, look, without Twitter, without Twitter, I can't, I don't, I won't have a, uh, the ability to let, you know, I need to tell people on Twitter that I have events, right? So like comedians were getting up with a lot, but, you know, you look at this data point and say, okay, you were doing none of that. I mean, you weren't on Twitter. I assume you just would sort of post on your blog. My big memory is like here's a tour. Like we have, we have these sites. But yeah, it seemed like the people who are going to come are going to come. There's like the content connecting people liked you.

They were invested in you. They saw your coming and they wanted to come. And whether they got 19 tweets about it or just saw it once on your blog, this is just an aside. I use every aside I can to make a sort of backhanded slight at Twitter. So you know me. I think it's an interesting data point, right? That it's a counterfactual world where you're trying to do a tour and have events. But Twitter doesn't exist.

Yeah. I mean, I've had a healthy sort of detachment from, I'd like to say non-attacks. but I don't think that's true. A healthy detachment from social media, for the most part, since the beginning. I used it sort of as a voyeur. So I had Twitter back then. I don't want to pretend like I did. And I still do.

I still have a Twitter account, but I don't have social media apps on my phone. You know, I learned that from you. And I, I don't know, I just don't. We have a healthy distance between us and those broadcast mediums. And so in many ways, they're an extension. of the blog, but it's easy also to get caught up in the Bermuda triangle of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. But yeah, I do think that, you know, if you, the metaphor I like to think of is if you're

juicing, you know, something, like let's say you're juicing orange juice. And so you put a bunch of oranges into a juicer. And then at the end, you have juice, right? Now, you could run that pulp back through and get another three to 10 percent more juice possibly. I don't know. But is it really worth the squeeze, right? And I don't think it is. And so, yeah, like you said, the people who were going to show up, we're going to show up. Could we have had more people if we really had the targeting marketing efforts and, and, you know, A, B, split tested, the emails and all these. Yeah, we could. But like, oh, my God, that sounds like a nightmare, man. Who

wants to do that? Yeah. I know there's a lot of people online taking courses that probably probably do. But your model has been one that's been an inspiration to me. Like, I point to you and Ryan, right? Because we're similar in this sense, right? We, we like to create thoughtful content about stuff we're interested in. We try to live what we write about. And we're not much interested in stuff that's not that, right? So you have your podcast. You do your document, you write books and do your documentaries. I just write books. We write articles sometimes for the blog. I'm not that interested in, you know, clubhousey my TikTok. I know you guys aren't that interested in that either.

And it seems to work out. And I don't know if long term, it's probably better. Who knows? But like long term, especially if you write about the things you write about, right about the things I write about, actually living what you talk about year after year probably does more good in terms of impact anyways. Then, as you said, getting that 10% extra juice, you know, out of the pulp today. When did you?

Oh, go on. I just want to, you know, helping other people is great. And it sounds really virtuous or whatever. But ultimately, like, what I want to do is, is illuminate the truth. And if that helps people great, if it doesn't help people, you know, then too bad. It's really not, it's up to the receiver to determine the reception. And so, you know, I think Ryan and I, what we've done is we've determined what is enough for us. So, by the way, enough changes in time.

I think really that's what you could call minimalism enoughism, because it's identifying what is enough for me or maybe another way to say that as what is appropriate for me. I think in our culture we often talk about like we think about more. Always, it's always about more, more money, more followers, more status, more success, more cars, more square footage, more, more, more, more. We rarely stop to consider less. And almost always enough is uncovered by,

reducing, especially in our world, our fire hose world. That's reducing distractions. That's reducing technology. It's reducing the number of things. It's often reducing the number of relationships, especially the toxic relationships. It's certainly reducing our obligations. Now, it doesn't mean becoming a ascetic or a Luddite, right? In your case, you're not a Luddite, but people might often mistake us as ascetics or Luddites because we're really intentional and we don't we don't subscribe to all of society in fact I think society is one of the greatest problems that we have right because it's it's everyone else's beliefs and opinions that are thrust upon me their expectations that are thrust upon me and you and it's not to say that I mean I think our tools are only as good

or as bad as the person using them. Unfortunately, when it comes to social media apps, there are high paid demographers and statisticians and engineers who are, I mean, everyone already knows this. I'm just trying to echo it a bit here. But everyone knows that there's thousands of people behind there trying to aggregate your eyeballs onto their product or service in order to sell you products or services. I think advertising is the most pernicious. It's the most pernicious thing going on in our lives right now. There's a reason that Ryan and I start with every podcast with this episode of The Minimalist is brought to you by nobody because advertisements suck. It's not because I'm allergic to money. I'm not. I'm totally fine with my. I think money's an

amplifier. If I'm making poor decisions, it's going to make me far worse off. If my habits are relatively good, I say that in quotes, then it's going to, if I'm already kind, it's going to allow me to contribute more. And so money is not evil. It's not the root of all evil, as they say. But I think what advertising has done, today's advertising model, is it has propped up this whole generation of influencers, right? Now, I've never been influenced by an influencer.

What is an influencer? I think the more honest term is it's an infomercial host. That's all an influencer is. they're on their Instagram or TikTok or whatever hocking products or services in order to make money. And it's not something that they necessarily get value from. And so I think it's quite dangerous. I think it changes our political landscape quite a bit, right? I think that it promotes outrage.

I think it indoctrines our kids through advertisements. You know, I see kids now. My daughter will be eight this year. And, you know, kids she hangs out with sometimes, they'll say, you know, make sure you like and subscribe at the end of a conversation. Yeah. And it's like, well, what, that's what it's come to. And I run the risk of sounding like the, you know, the old guy in the room who is, you know, bah humbugging everything. But I think it really, these advertisements, more than anything, are one of the greatest problems we have.

They disturb the peace. They make us feel adequate. They encourage people to go into debt. to buy things that they don't need. And so, man, I think that we're so driven, the word you use is content. I try to avoid that word. But we create content in order to really get more eyeballs onto our, it incentivizes us to get more eyeballs onto our products.

I don't have that incentive. And so I don't care if we have 10 million or 30 million people. Like it doesn't, because with the. is not a measurement of depth. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think just a good time to thank our sponsor on it, performance enhancing drug. I'm joking.

The only performance enhancing drug did Joshua Fields Milburn trust to get that minimalist zeal. You know, we've had so many people offer us sponsorships, and it'd be easy. I mean, with the number of listeners we have, I'd make a million dollars a year. And okay, like, that sounds wonderful. I want a million dollars. I don't have a million dollars now. I want a million dollars. But I don't want it enough.

I don't have a deep desire for a million dollars so much so that I'm willing to sacrifice my, my own values in order to get it. What was, I mean, speaking all of this, what was the, when looking out through a minimalist frame, what was the decision process you and Ryan went through when you decided to do a podcast? because I'm assuming it wasn't, you like me would not be the type of person who would just say, oh, here's this new thing, let's just do it. No. It's another thing. Well, actually, can I ask you about that? I will answer your question, I promise.

But, you know, new technologies pop up all the time. I don't know you've written about this, but since you've written about it, something like Clubhouse pops up, right? And I heard you take a slight shot at Clubhouse a moment ago, and I haven't. I know what it is, to be honest. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's. It's real-time podcasting. Really, it's old-time party lines, but on the internet.

That's all it really is. And, you know, I haven't started using it yet. I mean, I've set up an account, but, like, I haven't used it. And the question is, is this an appropriate use of my time, right? And if so, is it the most appropriate use of my time? Can I afford this? I think it was Seth Godin who said if we spent, if we spent, if we spent our money like we spent our time, we'd all be bankrupt, right?

And I feel that, you know, of course I worry about jumping down that path with something like Clubhouse and I could see how it could be a gigantic time suck. But there are times where does it not make sense to test something out for a period of time to see whether or not you're going to get immense value from it? Yeah. I think it could be useful. I think it would be useful. I mean, I worry about, what I worry about is committed obligation, right? So testing something where it's let me go to a clubhouse tonight or whatever, if that's how it works. Like, fine.

Like, you're no committed obligation. But, like, podcasting I was very slow to because there's no, it's not something you do one episode of, right? Like, you feel like there's going to be some sort of commitment. You're going to have to see it through for a while. And so I was slower to it. So I think data is good. personally generated data. I've looked into this thing.

Now, it could be actual personal exposure, or in some cases not. Like, I think with a lot of social media, I studied them pretty carefully because I was writing about it and looking into them.

I didn't actually try them myself, but basically the same thing, right? Like, let me really understand Twitter. And maybe I didn't actually use Twitter. But again, you know,

it's not rocket science. I think you can kind of watch enough authors and feel like, okay, I see what's going on here. I see what the dynamic is. I see the pros and cons. So I'm generally in favor

of data gathering and then making a careful decision. Podcasting seems like it's a high overhead. And so I know, so you and Ryan like me are minimalist in terms of, let's be careful about what we get obligated to do. Or if we do something, let it be like a short-term thing. Let's do a tour. It might be really hard, but it's like, let's try and it'll be done. Yeah.

How did you think I'm worried about it or was it really experimental? Like let's just whatever. Let's just put some things up. Yeah, I think it was, it was both. It was an understanding that this is a, commitment if we're going to put out an episode every week. And we actually do two episodes every week. We do a minimal episode and a maximum episode. So we have our podcast is, is listener supported. And so we have a public episode that's absolutely free. And then we have a private podcast episode.

It allows us to put our hair down a little bit and talk about things we wouldn't usually talk about in public. So it's kind of a, it's, when a stand-up comment goes and tests out some, some crowd work or some sort of new bits in front of a audience, a small, you know, club audience of 50 to 100 to, in our case, you know, six or seven thousand people. It's a small group of people relative to the public offering. And we are able to sort of test out some things. It's a weird space where it's sort of semi-public and semi-private. At the same time, we call it the minimalist private podcast, but obviously it's public to that small group of people. But yeah, I think we went into it knowing that I can walk away from

anything at any time. I think that's the greatest superpower that minimalism provides us is the ability to walk away from anything. Remember the movie Heat? Yes. So, yeah, Pacino De Niro. De Niro's character, Neil McCauley, he has a line in there. He says, never bring anything into your life. You're not prepared to walk away from third from, you're not prepared to walk away from in 30 seconds flat.

Yeah. And I've sort of mapped that onto my own life. Now, I'm nothing like Neil McCulley. He's the bad guy in the movie. But I am, I found immense value in that. And I include that even in. the more difficult to talk about things like relationships for example maybe i can't walk away from my marriage and 30 seconds flat but backs my wife and i um she and i we have conversations all the time

about do you still want to be in this i i don't believe until death do us part and and and all of those cliches right i i believe that if we want the if we want this thing to thrive then we want to show up deliberately and we want to be able to continue showing up. I think obligation is awful, period. I don't want to be obligated to anything. It's the reason that gift giving is absolutely worse on December 25th. Because if I get you someone on December 25th, there's an obligation. It's an obligatory gift. But if I get that same gift on March 13th, and you're like, why did you give this to me? Oh, because I thought it would add value to you. All of a sudden, it's a surprise and it's not birthed out of obligation. And I think

the same is true with anything. If we're willing to walk away from it, and I'm willing to walk away from anything, even if it's writing, which is the thing that I'm absolutely most passionate about, I get up and do it every morning. But I would be willing to walk away from that if it was no longer adding value to my life. I don't want to feel obligated to any of it. So was it, was it stressful for you? It was a little bit for me, but when you, you have a nice studio, I've been to it. You have a very good producer. You know, you have a multi-camera video set up. You have multi-mic set up well lit studio. There's some obligation there, right?

Was that stressful? I don't know how early you jumped into the well-produced space, which I think was the right move. But how early did you did that? And was that stressful? Because now you're thinking, okay, now we're going to invest. We have to identify what well-produced is. I think our podcast has been well-produced since episode number one, but it didn't start in a

nice studio space. It started in what I would call a closet. They called it a conference room, but it was really a closet at the University of Montana. They let us use this little closet. It may have been, I don't know, 60 square feet. It was tiny. And the three of us barely fit in there. It was me and Ryan and our producer, Podcast Sean.

He had some recording experience already. He had already worked with us for a while. He does our operations. And so he's sort of the fact totem for the minimalist, everything. He wears many hats. and he already had some experience recording in the past. He had worked for a radio station back in Dayton. And so when we decided to do it, we're like, okay, we're going to do audio-only thing.

We wanted to sound as good as any radio show. That was our minimum commitment. But there was no video. It didn't have to be in a beautiful studio space. We just needed to find somewhere where we could record. And so really, it sounded great from episode one. It continues to sound better. I think he has the best sounding audio of any podcast out there.

It's not because of me. It's because he continues to refine the audio on that. Yeah, we were, I think, maybe 140 episodes in before we added a video component. And so it was already going relatively well. And we decided, hey, the people obviously find value in some of the video stuff we're doing, especially the documentaries that we have on Netflix, that why not try this as a video component? But even then, in fact, right after this. call. I'm meeting with Jordan, our filmmaker, and asking, I'm going to ask them a question,

hey, do we continue doing the video for the podcast? Because it's not a must. I don't have to keep doing anything. I'm not tethered to any sort of obligation there. And so does it make sense to continue to do the video portion of the podcast? If so, great. Why? And if not, great as well, let's move on. I like that mindset. I mean, is right now, is that the economic engine of the empire? Is it the subscription piece to the podcast? Or is it the performance enhancing drugs you sell? The podcast advertisement? Is it the hair products?

Because you're a black box to a lot of people. I think the minimalist, right? It's like because you're so independent, right? And you do things your own way. So is that the, is that the, for the aspiring media moguls out there, is that the secret? Is that direct support from your listener? who are the subscriber only content?

I think the narrative overlay here is that we, it's, what do they call it in business? Diversification, right? I mean, that's a fancy word for saying, no one thing pays our bills. So, yeah, I think we have a steady income from our private podcast, and that's great, allows us to pay Sean and Jess, who managed our social media, Jordan,

who does all of our filmmaking and our YouTube channel stuff. And so it allows us to pay them. And also Ryan and I earn an income and pay for our studio space, et cetera. But yeah, we do speaking gigs. We sell books. We sell audio books. Oh, I teach a writing class four times a year. And so there are different things that we do in order to earn an income.

And the nice thing about that is any of those things, I could walk away from one of them because I'm not forced to be tethered to it. Because if all of a sudden I'm like, you know what, I hate teaching a writing class. Not true. I actually really enjoy teaching a writing class. But I think one of the reasons I enjoy it is because I don't have to do it. It generates a nice amount of revenue. But I think we fool ourselves when we say that, you know, I don't let money make decisions for me.

That's true, right? I don't want money to be the primary. I don't want the money to be the driver in the car, but it's still going to be a passenger in the car. And we lie to ourselves because it's either one or the other. It's driving every decision we make or no, no, no, none of my decisions involve income whatsoever. Okay. Well, then you probably don't live within society, which is fine, but or you're lying to yourself. Yeah, you can, yeah, you can Ted Kaczynski.

I mean, I don't think you had income. But I like, I mean, what I appreciate about about. what you do and I've written about this and try to model it is it's this lifestyle centric approach. What you do is you figure out, okay, at this stage of my life is sort of what is important to me in my life and what I want it to be like. Okay, what's the financial picture that makes that possible? And then you're able to shape what you do around getting that picture, which is a very different, I would say a very different approach than how do I maximize the amount of money

I'm making off of the things I do, right? If you come at it, let me maximize the money. I can possibly make and then let the lifestyle trail the earning. You have ratchet. Yeah, you get the more toilets than people. You get the three electric cars. Things can spiral out of control.

But I, you know, I wrote this post years ago when I was still a grad student for students, right? I said, here's what you should do. Think about what you want your life to be like first and then work backwards and say, okay,

how do I get there? Because for most people, that answer is not, uh, the excerpts. Yeah. Or 5,000 square foot. It's like,

oh, I want to spend time outside. And I want to, you know, whatever. have a family and we make canoes or I want to write and it's a completely different thing. You're like, oh, great, though. How do I have a diversified stream of incomes that add up?

It's why, for example, people like me or I have some other author friends in similar situations that confuses people, non-author friends of ours. When like a book goes well and we make some money, like I will put a lot of it into my house, like my mortgage. I'll be, well, wait, you need to invest that or buy or whatever. And I'm like, no, no, because I'm thinking about, I want to keep my monthly nut as low as possible so that in the future when my books aren't selling that well, I can still write books. And it's like a thing authors do a lot that confuse other people. They're like, wait,

you made this much money this year. Like, well, first of all, you need a bigger house and you need to vacation more. I need to get a better car and this time to ratchet up. And I know a lot of writers with the refugee mindset of like, no, I need to pay down expenses. I need to buy my house outright. I need to make my life, use this to make my life as cheap as possible so that four books from now and I really want to write this, I'm not making this much money. I can still write. write this and I'm going to be comfortable. It's foreign to a lot of people, but that's minimalism, basically. It is. It's, I would just say, what is enough, right? And so we talked about that briefly, but, but rephrasing it that way, I think we just don't think about like, what is enough.

And so we, when our income adjust, we sort of adjust our lifestyle. It's like inflation, but lifestyle inflation in a way where it's never enough, right? And by the way, it never will be, right it's you see it because you know before it was you know we talk about this in less is now the annie leonard's in there she's uh uh director at greenpiece and she talks about the uh vertical integration of our reference group it used to be keeping up with the jones is but now you're keeping up with everyone on your your glowing screen and and so the fake version of their lives the rented jet yes and by the way it There's nothing. I'm not, I don't want to moralize any of this. Like, I don't think that it's

wrong to have a private jet. I don't think it's wrong to make a million dollars a year. I don't think that it's wrong to work 80 hours a week in, in the corporate world. I think those things are inappropriate for me. And, and, and, and, and, and, but it also doesn't make me a better person because I, I, I, I've, I've chosen not to pursue it. And so there's a big difference between wanting and a deep desire in a thing. And so, like, yeah, if I would want a million dollars or $10 million or $100 million to arrive in my bank account today, would that be fine? Yeah, that'd be fine. But I don't have a deep desire to go out and make that happen.

Yeah. Though people who work backwards in the lifestyle, that approach, like, this is what I want, or life values. I don't know the right terms. But they have a clear picture of enough. Like this is what I want. I want like this type of connection with friends. I want to live in this type of environment. I want to spend my time in these ways.

When they do have unexpected paydays, they give a lot of money away. Yeah. Because they literally, because when you're working backwards from like, okay, I'm living in the place I want to live surrounded by the people. I want to be surrounded by spending my time on the type of things I want to spend my time on. And then, you know, the $10 million comes your way. And I've seen this. For people who know enough, like, I literally don't know what to do with this.

And they give a lot of it away or whatever. They have these, you know, portfolio somewhere with stocks. They've thrown stuff that's like, I don't know what to do with this. There's just a lot of money in there. I find that fascinating to see that. I find that aspirational. Like maybe there's an affirmism there. You want to have an approach to life whereas if someone gave you $10 million,

you would be confused as to what to do with it. Yeah. You know, I contribute a lot. And I don't know. It's weird to talk about because it is, there's some part of it that is, I mean, I don't believe in true altruism. Like, of course, like I get something out of it. It makes me feel good to be able to contribute. You know, over the last decade, Ryan and I have done all kinds of stuff.

We built an elementary school in Laos. We, well, most recently, we funded a nonprofit grocery co-op on the west side of Dayton because it's the second largest food. desert in the country. And, you know, there isn't a single grocery store to serve something like 40% of the population of one of the largest cities in the country. And so it's astonishing that it doesn't exist there. But so we do things like that, but it doesn't, I don't think it's inherently good either. I don't think that makes me a better person than if I didn't do it. I'm compelled to do it. I have a deep desire to contribute beyond myself in a meaningful way. And, And yet I'm not prescribing that to anyone else.

What I realized when I was climbing the corporate ladder throughout my 20s and up until about age 30, I made good money, but I barely contributed at all. The first year I walked away from the corporate world, I made $23,000. So about a 90% pay cut almost. And here's the strange thing about it. Because I had reduced my bills so much, I contributed more that year than I had any of the previous 30 years. contribute more monetarily, but also there are other ways other than check writing, right, that you can work for Habitat for Humanity, which I've done quite a bit of work with,

or different organizations, soup kitchens, et cetera. And so there are ways for us to contribute, but I think a lot of that has to do with, like, what do I have the deep desire to do? And contribution is one of those things for me. It's not something I can simply prescribe. I think some people need to find what, is the appropriate way for them to contribute. Because there's an aphorism there as well.

Like the more that you give, the more that you grow, the more you grow, the more you have to give. But, you know, there's something about these platitudes that end up being true. Yeah. So let me let me get your counsel here. You get your advice. So should I, should I move my podcast to a subscription model? I was saying my point being that I have ads because I didn't want I was thinking a subscription model means the entire thing is just for subscribers right and I was thinking well

it's new I wanted to be accessible to a lot of people and I needed to pay it for the studio but there's two a week idea where one so so you're still open to people there's a free episode and then a subscription what you're in my business manager now what should what what should I do? I'll take you seriously. You know, I, um, any advice that I give would be sort of putting myself up on a pedestal. So I'll try to avoid that. But I don't have any advice. I have some observations.

Um, the, it has worked really well for us. I have seen it not work well for other people. I've seen it work way better for some people than others. In fact, I have some friends who have giant podcasts who have a, a Patreon version of their podcast as well. and they're wildly successful. In fact, they even run ads on their regular version

and then it's ad-free on the subscriber version. And, you know, I think that works well for a lot of folks. I think there is probably a critical mass. If I had to guess, I'd say it's fewer than 10% of our audience supports the podcast monetarily.

Now, what's the cost? It depends on what, what tier you are. It's two bucks an episode basically, so two bucks a week. And so you have, you have other people who will spend more than that if they want the video version of the private podcast. It's five bucks a week. And you have this other tier of people that pay $8 a week. But then they also get all of our books and everything. In the performance enhancing drugs and the hair products. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything we advertise. And so I don't know whether or not

that would work. And so I guess the question is, is like what am I trying to accomplish out of this right and and for us in order to pay for the filmmaking the studio space etc we I identified some non-negotiables early on like advertising non-negotiable I'd rather just not do the podcast yeah so you had to wait you had to wait until your subscription like to switch the video for example you were you were basically saying when the when we make enough yeah off the subscriptions to support the video we'll switch we'll add that's exactly what happened yeah pay as we go Yeah. Yeah. And so that, you know, I guess the business term is unique value proposition. Like, what do people get from that? Like, are people clamoring for a second episode from you every week? If so, then great. Then it might make sense from a business perspective to do that. But as you said, far fewer people are going to see that. I do another podcast with my wife. It's called How to Love. And it's exclusively private. There are no public episodes out there. And as a

result for our fewer people come to it. But we do it as sort of like this fun little side project. And by the way, there are things that we wouldn't want to talk about in a broad public context. So it's a few hundred people that listen to the podcast and they pay 10 bucks a month to hear two episodes a month. And, and you can talk about your jet on that episode is what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. That's when you talk about the jet. Yeah. It's mostly sex toys, but yes. Yeah. The sex toys you keep on your jet is the main theme. The main theme of it. Yeah. Yeah, so that works well for us, but we don't really have an expectation. Like, if 12 people listen to it, I'd keep doing it just because we really enjoy doing it.

I always would say, like, I felt like she and I recorded. It's like we had the best podcast episodes that we never recorded throughout our entire relationship. And it was like, hey, well, we could put a microphone in front of our faces and record some of these. And so we do that and still professional quality. but I don't have a particular expectation or need for it to go. I already have enough. And so anything else beyond this is it's gravy and it's fine. I don't have any debt at all and I won't have any debt.

It's a non-negotiable for me as well. And so I'm not beholden to needing to make more money as a result. Yeah. Well, you know Dave Ramsey, right? You do a show sometimes. It reminds me of that. the no debt. Better than I deserve.

I need the chance to say that. All right. So let's live vicariously. So catching up to the sort of the point of the episode. You had your first Netflix documentary, you and Ryan minimalism, was very popular. And I'm sure it sort of put your public persona into like an even higher stratosphere.

It's a world that everyone knows about in the sense that they all have Netflix. But no one knows how that world operates behind the scene. So how did that, what is the backstory? It's a call. It's an email that arrives. What does it look like to end up as a very popular Netflix show? Well, you know, I'm a DIY guy, right? And so we filmed that most of that documentary in 2014, the rest of it in 2015. We sort of need to fill in the gaps once we had the bone. And by the way, talk about minimalism. We went on the road with Matt and we just literally had a zero dollar budget for the film. We spent money on post-production. but in production itself. Like, we spent no money. We brought Matt, our talented director on, by the way, who has blown up since that

film came out. He has a beautiful, giant YouTube channel. And the size of the audience is great. But what is really, really great is his, what he basically puts together, this little 10-minute documentary every week or every other week. And they are gorgeous. And he talks about a lot of the stuff that you talk about in terms of productivity, et cetera. And anyway, we took him on the road.

2014 and we didn't know what to expect after that we said hey we thought we would make this documentary he had about a thousand hours worth of footage and it was just like all right good luck and he came back with with something that was workable and it sounded good and and we figured out where the gaps were we finished filming it and we said all right well what do we do with this now i've we've already developed a sizable audience enough to we at least can we could put this up on youtube if we wanted to we didn't have a youtube presence at the time In fact, the reason we started our podcast initially was like, hey, this will help us get the word out about the documentary. It actually ended up being the other way around.

The documentary helped get the word out about the podcast. Yep. And it was strange how we didn't anticipate that obviously, right? And so when we decided to release the film, we're like, okay, well, we will go to Netflix, see if they want it. They said no. You know, we went through an intermediary and Netflix said no. okay, fair enough. I don't need anyone's permission to do anything. We said, you know, I'd like to do. I've never done this before. Let's do a theatrical release on our film. So we did 400 theaters, U.S., Canada, Australia. I remember this tour. Yeah. Okay. So this was before you had no, you were the distributor. Yes. It was like you carrying the film, like, like you were literally distributing the film in the sense that you had it with you as you brought it to the theater. Yeah, yeah. So I forget what the technology is called, but it's no longer. Yeah, I guess it's electronic now. But yeah. But no, it is electronic. But no, it is electronic.

but it's on this this thing you bring with you. It's like a hard drive, basically. And, yeah, we, we did, so we did 15 live events. So we did, simultaneously, we did 400 theaters across the U.S., Canada, Australia. We worked with a company called Gather. I don't know if they're still around. By the way, I wouldn't recommend doing this to anyone. I wouldn't do it again.

We didn't do it with this film, the new film. But, you learn quite the lessons. One of the lessons you learn is the term Hollywood math is real. When everyone has their hand in the, cookie jar, you realize like, oh, this film actually, it was the number one indie documentary of 2016, which sounds way more impressive than it actually is because when's the last time you went to a theater to see a documentary? But it did have the largest opening of any indie doc in 2016. And that theatrical release then turned into, well, let's go back to Netflix. We have some proof of

concept here. They said no a second time. And so we're like, all right, well, we don't need anyone's permission. Let's go ahead and put this out on our own. And so we released it. We did an exclusive thing on Vimeo, I think, for 60 days, 30 or 60 days with six hours of bonus footage. In fact, that six hours are still out there on Vimeo. People could pay like 10 bucks for six hours of additional interviews, et cetera, things that didn't make the film. And then we put it out on iTunes and Amazon. And it did really, really well on iTunes in particular. Shot up to number one on iTunes because we had that established audience. And that's when Netflix said yes. They came back through the intermediary and they worked out a deal with them through our agent, basically. And then it, you know, it hit Netflix

that December. And oh, my God, I did not, we had no, I didn't anticipate anything. And I'll get recognized in public from time to time before that came out. But now it's, you know, a dozen times a day. and and so that that changed in terms of recognizability it's it went much broader and then it brought a lot of people to our work it brought people to the podcast i think that first month we had something like seven million people come to the podcast at a month it was an obscene number of of downloads and new people showing up and a lot a large swath of those people stuck around and um and yeah and so with this new film though we had we knew we wanted to actually spend some money in production. And so we went to Netflix beforehand and say, hey, here's, here's what we want to do.

We actually tried to film it on our, on our own again. Back in 2017, we went out and we did the less is now tour. We gave this talk and we basically just wanted to do a sort of Bray Brown thing where you film a talk. It's an hour long thing and you put it up on Netflix. And we did that. We did a talk at the Wilbur Theater. But the Wilbur Theater is where Joe Rogan filmed his last special and it looked like a stand-up comedy special without comedy. It just, it didn't look right. Aesthetically, it wasn't right for us. And so we had to go back to the drawing board. Eventually, we got Netflix involved. They gave us enough money to actually make a beautiful piece of art. And man, that took, we thought it was going to take about four months. It took us four years to make it.

And it's aggressively short. We made it less than an hour long, it's 53 minutes. But we wanted every sort of line, every moment to to be really effective. Now, didn't you get disrupted? You hadn't quite finished filming when the pandemic started, or were you in editing at that point? Both. So remember you complained at the time talking early in the pandemic, you were saying, like, okay, everything's on production halt. Yeah, yeah. So we actually, at the very beginning of the pandemic, we had a, we had all the interviews that are in the film. So Dave Ramsey's in there.

Annie Leonard, T.K. Coleman, Dr. D. N. J. N. J. J. Barah. Arana, Erwin McManus, and then we interviewed 30 everyday minimalist, people who were profoundly affected by our first film. But we had all of them scheduled for like a two-day period to come into L.A. And we were going to interview them in person. And of course, then the pandemic hit and we couldn't do it. And so we had to sort of pause everything. And then in a few months later, we decided, okay, let's get these people in. We got the experts back in, film them in person.

And then those everyday minimalists, we sort of did the, we, we sent them cameras and we interviewed them over, you know, whatever medium it was, FaceTime, Zoom, whatever it was. But we wanted to look more like a sort of YouTube reaction video in a way where they were reacting to minimalism. And so it worked out really well. It actually surprisingly made the film better because it took us into their homes and we got to see a few of those people sort of dealing with their stuff and the overwhelm. emotion. I don't think we would have gotten that in the bright lights camera crew setting. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I noticed, I noticed that with the at home. But so the experts, that's interesting. You had to do filming with them in person. I'm sure that was a pain, right, because of, uh, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. It was. Test and distance and whatever. You have to wipe down the

camera. I don't know. I'm sure it was a pain because there's probably, uh, regulations and yes, there were protocols involved and masks. and attenuated crews and all of these things. And, yeah, we made sure that we stuck to those different guidelines, depending on the state we were in. We did have to travel for one. We went out to Nashville to interview Dave Ramsey at his. So that's why you were on his show.

So when you were on his show most recently, were you out there for, because you were filming him? Yeah, we've been on his show, I think a couple times now. His daughter, who's amazing, Rachel Cruz. Sure. She had us on her show. And then we ended up just going through the whole Ramsey car. We've actually become really good friends with a few people on their team.

We did a whole tour with the Ramsey team back in 2018. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, we called it a Money and Minimalism tour. It was all throughout the South. And so we had Anthony O'Neill and Chris Hogan, Rachel Cruz, and we've done stuff with Ken Coleman and John Deloney. Chris Hogan has the best voice in podcasting by far. Oh, my God.

It's not even fair. You could just be like, let me read the instruction manual for my SM 5B or whatever. You'd be like, I love it. Yeah, it's the best. That's great. That's great. So that's out. Now you have the book coming.

Now you said summer. Yeah, I think it's July 13th. Yeah. That's exciting. All right. So then it just rolls. It just rolls, basically. And it's like one thing at a time that seems interesting and fits within, you know, whatever standards you have, whatever non-negotiables.

And then you look up and say what's next, basically. Yeah. And everything else needs to. serve that, which means I say no to almost everything. I've gotten really, really good at saying no. In fact, I canceled this the first time because I had some health problems, this interview. I was really looking forward to this. And I think we, for this film, we didn't do a whole bunch of press. We just said yes to the things that made the most sense. So GMA or Today Show or Rich Rolls podcast. And then Cal Newport was just like, hey, this would be a great conversation.

I'm eager to have this conversation. I'd love to have this conversation with you, even if we didn't have these mics turned on. And so it makes sense sometimes just to record these. But there are a handful of people where I have, just have great conversations. And you're certainly one of those people. And hopefully you can get back out here to Los Angeles

so we can talk about, I can't wait to talk about the email book. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we got to do that. I feel like we'll be out there soon. I don't know. We'll figure it out. We figure out.

I have things on the books for the summer. So that's where I'm optimistic. That's the first time when people have at least tried to book events. So I'm optimistic. Get a couple vaccines in my arm, you know. Take some airborne, jump on the playlist, rock and roll. I'm game. By then I think I'll be punchy.

Well, this is good. So we've gone, we've gone pretty long and I want to respect your time. But this was great. And I am very looking forward to when we can, we'll do this again. We'll do this in person soon just because I need some sunshine. I need some melody time.

Yes, I'm looking forward to that. In the meantime, less is now on Netflix. You're all watching Netflix anyways, so you have to watch it. The podcast is a must listen or must watch. And Joshua, thank you for your advice.

Thank you for your stories. And until next time, I am going to go buy some more of your products. So you have a 900 number, right, where I can get advice from you on the phone for a dollar a minute while I order. All right. Thanks, Josh. Kyle, thank you. Appreciate you.

All right. Always a pleasure to talk with Joshua. I will be back on Thursday with a habit tune up mini episode. And until then, go by a world without email. And while you read it, you can stay deep.