The Minimalists: Less Is Now

How might your life be better with less? Not so many years ago, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus were mired in the corporate grind, banking six-figure salaries in pursuit of the American Dream. Expiating for the satisfaction their careers failed to provide, they did what most humans would: They bought stuff. Lots of stuff. When that didn’t work, they bought more. And when that didn’t work, they hit bottom. What came next was a search for meaning that would forever alter the trajectory of their lives—and ignite the spread of minimalism across the world. Known today as The Minimalists, Joshua and Ryan advocate for the pursuit of living less materially and more deliberately. Through their website, books, podcasts and films, they share practical, experience-based insights on how minimalism can lead to freedom—providing the foundation for a life built not on consumption, but instead on conscious purpose and mindful intention. With a devoted readership in the millions, they’ve written several books, given TED Talks and spoken at places like SXSW and Harvard Business School. They’ve been featured on every major television network and profiled in major publications like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and TIME. In 2016, Ryan and Joshua made an unexpected splash when their Netflix documentary Minimalism enervated audiences around the world. Now they’re back with a brand new, must-see follow up, Less Is Now. Given what these fine young gentlemen represent, I will restrain inclinations verbose to simply say that this is a conversation about how to live with greater intention and purpose. It’s about creating more by consuming less. It’s about prioritizing experience over accumulation. It’s about growth, contentment and love. And it’s about the deep personal satisfaction that comes with contributing beyond ourselves. In other words, minimalism isn’t martyrdom—it’s freedom. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll577 YouTube: bit.ly/theminimalists577 Joshua, Ryan and their message is a gift. Receive it graciously. Then put it to work. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  I think what's happening right now is Ryan and I, for the last decade, have been asking this question: What is essential? And now, a lot more people are all of a sudden asking. In fact, the term's even out there: Essential worker, right? But what is essential in my home? What is essential in my life? What is essential on my calendar? What is essential? And that's why I hope to illuminate with this film, help people ask that question: What is essential?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Minimalism is not about owning nothing. It's just about breaking free from that attachment. You can turn your life around on a dime when you have the power to let go of anything in your life.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  We all have the opportunity, though, to restart our lives, to start over. And this film was about starting over with less. And that can be less stuff, but it can also be less distractions, fewer commitments, et cetera.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  It's about starting over. I mean, is this film for every single person? I think every single person will get something out of it. But I think who it's going to help the most is someone who's in a situation right now, and they need some emotional leverage to start over. I think this film will help them do that.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Hey, everybody. I'm Joshua "Phil's" Millburn.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  And I'm Ryan "Nicodemus." And together, we are the Minimalists, and we are here on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:25Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Good news. Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, aka The Minimalists, are here in the house for a powerful powwow on how to live better with less. Given that, a verbose introduction feels a little inappropriate. It would be weird, right? Anyway, I will say that I have known both these guys for years. I love them. I have so much respect for their work, their mission of empowerment. And this conversation, which is coming up, is really stellar and potentially even life-altering. But first...

• 3:14Rich Roll?

  Okay, The Minimalists. So, these guys, Ryan and Joshua, are the dynamic duo behind a slew of books, a very popular blog and podcast called, as you might suspect, The Minimalists, where they write and talk about living a meaningful life with less stuff. The entry point into these guys' world for most people, including me, was their 2016 hit Netflix documentary Minimalism, which is a fantastic watch, directed by Matt D'Avella, who's gone on to become a good friend and a massive creator on YouTube. In any event, now the trio is back with a great new follow-up Netflix doc called Less

• 3:55Rich Roll?

  Is Now. So, this is a conversation about all things minimalism, of course, and how to live more deliberately. It's about creating more by consuming less. It's about prioritizing experience over accumulation. It's about growth, contentment, love. And it's about the deep personal satisfaction that comes with contributing beyond ourselves. This is all a long way of saying that minimalism isn't about martyrdom. Instead, it's about freedom. So, here we go. This is me, Joshua Fields Millburn, and Ryan Nicodemus.

• 4:41Rich Roll?

  What's up, guys?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  What's up?

• 4:43Rich Roll?

  This is a long time in the making.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:45Rich Roll?

  It's good to have you here. Great to see both of you.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Good to be here.

• 4:49Rich Roll?

  Joshua's hair is looking perfect, as always.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Always.

• 4:51Rich Roll?

  You know, Joshua gets a lot of attention for his hair and this whole Christopher Walken thing, but not enough attention is paid to your hair, Ryan. You have excellent hair.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  My hair looks horrible today.

• 5:01Rich Roll?

  I'm sort of in between you guys. I cut my hair. I had long hair like yours, but you're looking fabulous today as well.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Thanks, man. You know, I felt like I was having a bad hair day today, so that really uplifts my spirits. So thank you very much.

• 5:11Rich Roll?

  It's all good, man. It's all good. People who've been on this podcast journey for a while will likely remember podcasts with Joshua way back in the day, but Ryan, this is your first time here.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  I was boycotting you at the time, but now...

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know what was going on between us, but we worked it out. You guys have been gracious enough to host me on your show several times, and I'm delighted to have you here on the eve of your new documentary coming out. It's exciting, man.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us.

• 5:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  We're excited to be here, too, man.

• 5:41Rich Roll?

  Your story is well told, but I think it would be good to at least contextualize everything we're going to talk about by sharing your personal stories. And also, in particular, Ryan, since yours, you haven't had an opportunity to share yours here. So how do we launch into that? What's the best place to start? Should we start at the beginning with you guys?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  1981.

• 6:03Rich Roll?

  Fifth grade, best friends.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we should start with Joshua.

• 6:06Rich Roll?

  Two pudgy kids sitting in the corner.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:09Rich Roll?

  Plotting world domination.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  That's not far from the truth, except the world domination part. It was more like the suburbs of Dayton domination.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And, yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Working our way towards it.

• 6:21Rich Roll?

  How many kids from Dayton have documentaries on Netflix?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  I mean, The Wright Brothers.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:28Rich Roll?

  All right, so there's now.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Who's the other? Martin Sheen? He is from...

• 6:32Speaker 01

  I don't think it's a doc, though.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  No, he might be in a documentary.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Right. Here's where we start, I think. I'll tee it up. So Ryan and I grew up really poor in Dayton, Ohio. We've known each other, as you said, since we were fat little fifth graders. And literally, I was the fattest kid in school. Ryan was the second fattest kid in school.

• 6:51Rich Roll?

  It's so hard to believe, but when you watch the documentary, you're like, wow, he was telling the truth.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was it was impressive or depressive. Anyway, we we knew each other. We grew up really poor dysfunctional homes before that term dysfunctional was in vogue. And we were pretty discontented growing up. And of course, we thought, well, how do we get? How do we become happy? And of course, that was make money. And so we climbed the corporate ladder throughout our twenties and had ostensibly successful careers. But of course, we weren't successful. We were overwhelmed and stressed and and sort of discontented by the lives we created. And you know, what's fascinating now, Ryan, is the the life we were living growing up, it was so chaotic.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  We traded that chaos just for a different type of chaos. Controlled chaos is still is still chaos, right? In fact, it's an oxymoron. And so, yeah, we were working in corporate America, making really good money, spending even better money. And so had massive amounts of debt and knew we needed to make a change.

• 8:04Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah, I mean, you both grew up in alcoholic households, essentially, right? Yeah. Food stamps, poverty.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:10Rich Roll?

  So it's not surprising that you would seek out security and, you know, an upward kind of financially secure trajectory. I mean, that's what, you know, most people would do trying to emerge out of a situation like that.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just I remember working for my dad just out of high school. He just had like small painting and wallpaper company and he worked his butt off and like he made nothing. And now I was there working my butt off, making nothing. And I'm like, I know there's a way I can work just as hard, but make more money. And that's when I went into telecom with with Josh and yeah, like he said, we I started making really awesome money and I thought, oh, I figured it out. I finally figured it out. I remember because even during like high school, I worked for my dad, painting and hanging wallpaper. And I remember, uh, early on when I was working for him, we were in this really nice house. It wasn't like a mansion or anything, but it was like something nicer than my mom

• 9:10Speaker 02

  or dad had ever owned. And I looked at my dad, I'm like, this is a really nice place, man. Like, how much do I need to make in order to, to live here? And he's like, if you can make $50,000 a year, you could probably afford a place like this. So for me, that was like, yeah, that was the number for happiness. It was 50 grand a year. And when I went to the telecom company, I think that very first year I made like 52,000 or something. And I was really proud of myself and like happy that I was making more money. I went out and like, you know, bought a new truck, I guess. It wasn't technically mine because like, you know, I got a loan, you know, got a car payment, basically. But I wasn't happy. And I realized

• 9:51Speaker 02

  why I wasn't happy. It was because I didn't adjust for inflation. The 50,000 number had grown a little bit. So I'm like, oh, maybe it's 60,000, maybe it's 80,000, maybe it's six figures, or maybe just owning a bunch of stuff. So yeah, that's what I pursued. But, I mean, my story really with minimalism, it kind of starts with Josh, because when we were in the corporate world, we were miserable. We had accumulated so many different burdens, like whether, you know, whether it's debt, or whether it's, you know, an overabundance of clutter, whether it was, you know, chasing a job title. I mean, that, it was, it was, it was very, very depressing.

• 10:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  But I noticed Josh, who started being a little bit less depressed. And that's when I went to him and I asked him like, hey, man, what are you doing that's making you so happy? Why the hell are you so happy?

• 10:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  And that's when he introduced this thing called minimalism.

• 10:47Rich Roll?

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

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, my, um,

• 11:00Speaker 01

  My mom died, my marriage ended both in the same month. And so it was like sort of this double car crash, right? It's like you get hit by one thing and then it swerves you into this other thing. And, and at the same time, my corporate career, I was really discontented by it. I was managing 150 retail stores, which I know is ironic with the whole minimalism thing now. But maybe it took that in a way for me to, to recalibrate. But these two big events happened to me and, and I started questioning everything. And literally every thing, the things in my life especially. Cause I had spent the last dozen years, I was 30 at the time. And, and as I began questioning those things in my life, I realized like I had worked so hard

• 11:45Speaker 01

  to buy a bunch of things to make me happy. And those things aren't doing their job. And so they had become my priority though. And so of course my priorities were totally out of whack. Achievement, success. Now, it's not that Ryan and I are against material possessions. And we don't think it's morally wrong to own things, right? We own stuff. I got here in a car today. I have a bed and a couch.

• 12:10Rich Roll?

  Wearing a nice jacket.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 12:13Rich Roll?

  A lot of money spent on hair products.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  But the thing is, I had such an attachment to the things, but also the perception of other people. And a lot of that had to do with ego and, and, and, and so ultimately what I figured out at the time was, oh, my priorities are really out of whack. And thankfully I stumbled across minimalism, thanks to the internet at the time. Someone tweeted Colin Wright, a friend of ours, who was in our first minimalism documentary. And he lived with 52 items. And I, I, I didn't aspire to that, but it made me realize there was a relatively normal person doing very abnormal things.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  And I wasn't, I didn't want to live his life, but that exposed me to a bunch of other minimalists. People like Leo Babalt, or Courtney Carver, and Joshua Becker. More normal people who had like families and houses and.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  Right. Leo's got like five kids or something like that?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Six.

• 13:14Rich Roll?

  Six, right, yeah. He didn't even have condoms. He was so minimalist. But what's, what's, what's interesting about this to me is you could have. Given a different set of circumstances, like ended up at a Buddhist monastery, or joining the Peace Corps, like clearly you were having an existential crisis about how you were living. You had premised your entire life on this idea that this very traditional upward corporate trajectory would deliver on its promise of making you happy. You achieve those things, you're lacking that sense of connection that you thought it would deliver, and you go searching, right? And you stumble upon minimalism, but what if it had been some other thing?

• 13:56Rich Roll?

  There are other paths to finding a little bit more fulfillment and purpose, but for whatever reason, like minimalism was the thing that you connected with.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, by the way, I think that I connected with it because there wasn't a particular dogma among the people that I saw. There wasn't like a 12-step thing. And I look at a lot of the stuff now on-

• 14:19Rich Roll?

  Don't you dare talk that on the 12-step thing.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I'm not talking about 12 steps. But like the five steps to declutter your closet, right? And so like, it wasn't like, the how-to side of things wasn't that appealing to me. It was the why-to side of things that really made me scrutinize what I was doing. Even now, you won't see me and Ryan talk about the 17 ways to declutter your kitchen. We're not gonna do a video about that. If someone else wants to do that, that's fine. I don't think that actually addresses the problem. I think those types of solutions, they often cause new problems because we begin to focus on, we turn those things into the main focus, and it removes our focus from whatever the

• 15:04Speaker 01

  underlying problem is. And so, I was fascinated by what these people were doing and how they were doing it, but I was much more focused on the why. That's why the new film, Less Is Now, it really starts with that question. How might your life be better with less? Now, that's a how question, but it's a disguised question. It's actually a why question.

• 15:25Rich Roll?

  You see that in the anecdotes and the stories of the kind of everyday people that have undergone- This process and how it's emotionally changed their lives or their perspective on how they live day to day. But it is true, and we've talked about this before, that on a surface level, it's about getting rid of your stuff, but it's really not about that at all. And I think a lot of the focus or the kind of news narrative around it is around decluttering. But decluttering, the process of decluttering is really just a way to clear space so you can marshal your awareness onto the things that are important that you want to focus on. Is that fair or accurate?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think that is totally fair. It's interesting, though, it makes me think how the media wants to sell a solution to a symptom rather than address the problem. I mean, that doesn't really speak to what you were talking, I mean, what you were asking, but...

• 16:22Rich Roll?

  Well, the problem is so massive and we're all living amidst this grand delusion that we, it's, our entire society is founded upon the idea that you played out in your own life and had to figure out for yourselves wasn't delivering on the promise, right? This idea that we should be seeking security and comfort and salary increases and the new car and all the messages that bombard us everywhere we turn our head reinforces that. And yet, what it doesn't do, and the movie does a beautiful job of illustrating this, is remind us about what's most important, which is community and the connection to the people that we love and pursuing your life with some level of intentionality.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, Annie Leonard talks about this in the documentary about deficit advertising. So advertisers, big corporations, whatever, they go out of their way to make you feel like you're missing something in your life. So that's why we chase the bigger paycheck, so we can go out and buy those things that subconsciously we're like, oh, man, if I just had like a little bit of a nicer car, I'd have a better ride to work and enjoy my commute a little bit more. And if I had just a little bit bigger of a house, I could have that. Pilates studio and I mean, yeah.

• 17:40Rich Roll?

  You just notch it up and then you get there and then you're like, well, I don't feel that way yet, but it's because there's a guy who's living a little bit higher up on the hill than I am.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  By the way, I don't want to moralize any of this either. I don't want to say it's, it's better or worse to own fewer possessions, right? I'm not saying that it's good that Ryan and I own less than we used to own, right? I'm not saying it's bad either. It is probably more appropriate for us, given the constraints, but to the point you were asking about, Rich, our material possessions are sort of this physical manifestation of what's going on inside us, right? That's that existential crisis you talked about. And so the external clutter is a way that we, we sort of visualize the mental clutter,

• 18:30Speaker 01

  the psychological clutter, the emotional clutter, the spiritual clutter, this internal clutter. And we found that like with minimalism, yeah, it could have been Buddhism or Christianity or anything else that we would have stumbled into. But stumbling into minimalism allowed us to deal with the thing that had become this priority in our lives. Stuff had become this, this priority. And so it started with the stuff, but that's sort of the initial bite at the apple, right? And then it goes to simplifying all other areas of life.

• 19:01Rich Roll?

  Right. But there's this moment that you experienced and that you see in the people profiled in the film where the lights kind of go on, like as they begin this process, there's like an enervating that occurs in their lives, like they become very emotionally involved in the process of decluttering their lives and it becomes like exciting and there's a momentum that kind of occurs.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, you're talking about the, like the everyday minimalists that we have in our, in our film. Yeah. No, it is encouraging. There's one gentleman in there who talks about how, once he started simplifying and got to where he, you know, felt like he wasn't living in a bunch of clutter, he kind of realized like, oh, like. I've had everything I ever needed this whole time. Mm hmm.

• 19:45Rich Roll?

  He gets emotional and he's an older guy. He's not like a millennial.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, absolutely.

• 19:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  No, it's, it's, I love having those kind of everyday minimalists in there to kind of talk about their own personal experiences, especially because, you know, Josh and I, we can tell our stories all day long.

• 20:00Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  But, uh, you know, you need other people to resonate with than just, you know, two dudes with really great hair.

• 20:07Rich Roll?

  It is really great, though.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  We, we didn't want it to be the, the Josh and Ryan story, right? Like the first film, Minimalism, it was sort of exposing people to different ideas of attentional living and different areas of, of minimalism. There were minimalist architects in there, Buddhists, et cetera. Um, in, in this film, we didn't want it to just be, oh, Josh and Ryan tell their story. But it, it sort of circled around that initial story of us, but we brought in some experts, but then we also had those 30 of those everyday minimalists. So we wanted all these different perspectives. You, you probably noticed the diversity in the film, but it's not just like an ethnic diversity. It's like we have a 17 year old and a 70 year old in the film. And all we did was we put a call out and said, hey, does anyone have a story about how they were, how they've been affected by our, our first film?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And, and, uh, they've simplified their lives and how did that work out for you? And we just started bringing those people into the, into the film.

• 21:00Rich Roll?

  Right. So taking it back, you have this experience in the wake of your marriage dissolving and your, your, your mother's passing, where you decide that you're gonna basically change your lifestyle, top to bottom.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:13Rich Roll?

  You get rid of all this stuff. You have that lights going on experience. You seem lighter in your shoes. Were you, I, I assume you're still at the job at that point, but you were just showing up with a, a little bit of a bigger smile.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was also, I was doing a better job setting expectations. So we were on call like doctors, but I wasn't saving anyone. I couldn't even save myself. And, and yet I had to answer the phone at 10:00 PM. If, you know, my boss's boss wanted to know something about the sales transactions for any of the stores that day. So it was a regular occurrence. The last thing I did when my head hit the pillow was check my BlackBerry. The first thing when I got up in the morning was check my BlackBerry. And throughout the day, all throughout the day, I was checking. And I started setting expectations and that was sacrilegious where we worked. I called my boss, I'm not gonna take phone calls in the evening anymore. And I could audibly hear his jaw drop on the phone because what do you mean?

• 22:08Speaker 01

  That's not like, you realize that he didn't realize that was an option?

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Even for himself?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  I got a call from our boss, we had the same boss, and he was like, is Josh, like, is he depressed? Like, maybe planning on killing himself or something?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  I'm giving away my stuff, right?

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Giving away stuff. Right. Saying, hey, I don't care what you think, I'm not taking phone calls at six, yeah. But isn't that kind of sad? Like, that's the reaction, though?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Instead of like...

• 22:33Speaker 01

  As opposed to like, wow, is he doing something to change his life?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  So that he experiences more peace or more contentment?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Like I said, I don't think this is an indictment on stuff, or even on corporate America. It's an indictment on chasing, on craving, on attachment.

• 22:52Rich Roll?

  Well, also on your relationship to externalities. Right?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:58Rich Roll?

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

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was after him setting boundaries, it was, you know, after that phone call from our boss. Because I did not see depressed Josh, I saw someone who was like, taking control of something that he had no control over. And it wasn't until, so he moved into a new place after he split up with his wife. And it was like a two-bedroom, one bath, or maybe two baths, but it was only half-full. But the one thing that was missing that really stood out to me was the TV. And every time I'd go over, I'd be like, dude, when are you getting a TV? What kind of TV are you gonna get? Because that's how we like, compared success in the corporate world, like, what kind of TV you got at your house? How many TVs do you have? How big is that TV, right?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  What did Freud would say about this?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  So at a certain point, he's like, I don't think I'm gonna get a TV. I'm like, interesting. And yeah, eventually I wanted whatever he was doing. And when he said minimalism, you know, I don't know. You asked that in the beginning about would it have been a different path? You know, could it have been a different path if we didn't find minimalism?

• 24:11Rich Roll?

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

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably not. Probably not. So, but you know, he introduced the term minimalism to me. And if, you know, to be honest, if it was someone else, I don't know how seriously I would have taken it. But him and I have very, it's weird. We have like exact opposite Myers-Briggs personalities, but we have very similar, similar personalities in other ways. So I was like, if this works for him, I'll at least give it a shot and look at it and see if it'll work for me. So the first video he sent me was Colin Wright with the 50 things that he owned. And I'm like, oh, okay, like this is a little weird. But then like I got into other minimalists, Courtney Carver, Leo Babauta, Joshua Becker. And you know what I saw is common sense. I saw a lot of people talking about all these common sense things that I knew internally,

• 25:01Speaker 02

  but for some reason I never listened to. And minimalism, for me, it was an opportunity for me to start over. It was an opportunity for me to, well, do what Josh did and gain control of what I had lost control over. So I got really excited. I'm like, dude, I want to be a minimalist. Like, this is awesome. Like, I get it. What should I do?

• 25:22Rich Roll?

  Right, right. So you do this packing party thing.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Right, so, yeah, exactly. So, you know, in the excitement, he was like, well, what if we pack up all your stuff and then unpack it as you need it? I'm like, that's a great idea, especially because I'm a very extreme person when it comes to things. Like Josh had pared down over several months. He made some very slow changes over a month's time. But for me, like I needed faster results. So the packing party was perfect for me. I think probably most of your listeners right now, I don't know if the packing party would be the best option for, especially if they got families and stuff. Although we have totally seen families do.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I'll say this.

• 25:58Rich Roll?

  Well, everyone's at home thinking of interesting things to do, right? There's a lot of people rearranging the furniture in their houses right now, losing their minds.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is like the perfect time for them to confront all their stuff.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  The one time you're really confronted with everything, like truly confronted is when you move to a new house. And so that was sort of the impetus of the packing party idea was like. When you move, you actually have to go through everything you own and do something with it. Whether it's store it, box it up, whatever, it doesn't matter. You have to do something with that stuff. And now is sort of the second time where this has happened, where people have been in their homes for way more than they anticipated. And we thought at the beginning, it's like, people were like reaching out to us, like, hey, you guys, you're probably upset that you got rid of all that stuff, aren't you, now that you're stuck at home? And I'm like, yeah, the broken waffle iron is real, I'm missing that right now, right?

• 26:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Like, uh, the third bread maker that I got as a wedding gift. And so, anyway, that packing party, we've had dozens of people do it. In fact, we have a book coming out next year called Love People Use Things. It's like the whole sort of synopsis of our message. And in that book, we had 47 different families do a packing party. So it may seem radical, but it's not so radical that, I mean, we've had a lot of people do it.

• 27:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The idea being, you pack everything up and then you slowly unpack and deliberately decide which items you actually need to use. And the rest gets donated or sold.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. I mean, Josh had asked me, he's like, what if you unpack things as you needed it? Like, that would really help. And I'm like, yeah, it's a great idea. That's what we should do. And so you can imagine, yeah, my clothes for work, bed and bed sheets, toothbrush, so forth and so on. But I'll tell you, the packing party, it was something to like change my state. But I honestly didn't realize how powerful that was going to be until it was over and I was confronted with all my things. And the biggest revelation was, I had this dream of retiring early, but I had like very little retirement, you know, very little in my retirement accounts. But here I saw tens of thousands of dollars that I wasn't using, you know, worth of stuff. And I'm like, hmm, I could probably be sitting in my retirement account right now.

• 28:08Speaker 02

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

• 28:18Rich Roll?

  So that was the original impetus to start the blog?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. It started 10 years ago yesterday.

• 28:23Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. I know, I saw on Instagram, you're 10 year, you guys have been doing this for 10 years.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  10 years.

• 28:28Rich Roll?

  Unbelievable, man.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:30Rich Roll?

  How do you, uh...

• 28:33Rich Roll?

  What's the difference between your relationship to minimalism then in the early days to now? Like, how has it evolved or changed?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  I think it's changed quite a bit recently. I've become more allergic to the sort of how-to side of things. I've never been a giant fan of it, but I've realized that it's actually... Before, I was somewhat neutral on it. It just wasn't for me. But now, I think it's often a problem. And I think it's an opiate in a way, because it helps, as Ryan alluded to earlier, the sort of the symptoms. If I show you how to declutter your kitchen, but you don't know why you're doing it, it's gonna be re-cluttered a month from now. And so, getting a deep understanding, if you understand the why, truly understand the why, the how takes care of itself. And so, we'll talk about some of the how stuff that we've

• 29:23Speaker 01

  done. That may not be applicable for everyone, by the way. My why looks different from Ryan's why. And that's why, starting out with that question, "How might your life be better with less?" is really the foundation of it. Then we can talk about the how.

• 29:37Rich Roll?

  But it's the process. It's the how that opens the portal to the why, right? Like, if you're living your life in a certain way with blinders on and just moving in a particular direction, it's very hard to answer that question of why. Like, you gotta shake things up and do something different in order to, you know, kind of confront that, right? Like, short of you doing the packing party, would you have been, you know, if confronted with the why question, how are you gonna answer that? So, it's almost like there needs to be, you know, a deconstruction of your life a little bit, and there's some practicalities that get baked into that.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  It's interesting, yeah. You know, it's almost like the why was so much in my face at the time of how miserable I was. It was like...

• 30:28Rich Roll?

  But also, you're holding on to it so hard, because your whole life has been invested in that.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. But if it wasn't for...

• 30:36Speaker 02

  That amount of, or that level of stress and discontent and depression, I don't know if I would have.

• 30:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Because the problem is sometimes.

• 30:45Rich Roll?

  Pain is the lever.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:46Rich Roll?

  The ultimate lever.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and comfort is like, I don't know, comfort to me is, um, don't get me wrong, I like being comfortable, but.

• 30:54Rich Roll?

  It's fuel for denial.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 30:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Well, the thing I look at with Ryan, I think Ryan's actually the perfect example of if you understand the why, the how takes care of itself. No one gave him a how to. There was not a prescription for a packing party, ever. Like, it didn't exist, right? What did exist were a bunch of decluttering tips and other things that we had seen for decades and never paid any attention to, because that's not that compelling. It's compelling in the moment, at the checkout line, the same way candy is appealing at the checkout line, right? But it's not nutritious in any way. And so when Ryan truly understood the why, like, oh, I don't feel at peace, I feel chaos, let me, let me sort through this, let me not fix it, because nothing is fixed, right? There's always change, right?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  It's not about fixing something, it's about addressing the problem. And I think that's what the packing party did, it was the impetus. Now, yeah, we talk about the how, but you could, Ryan and I always talk about how what we share is like a recipe, and you can sort of tweeze out your own ingredients and create your own version of it, adjust for taste.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:08Rich Roll?

  So how long after this packing party and this decision to write about these things, before you guys are no longer working at the corporation, right? Like, I know you got laid off.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  I got laid off, yeah. Months after Josh. Josh technically got laid off, too.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  I laid myself off.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  You did?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was, uh, well, they came to me, so this was 10 years ago as well, they came to me right before Christmas, said, hey, as soon as we close, or as soon as we finish out the holiday shopping season, which by the way, we've turned the holiday season into a shopping season, think about that for a moment.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  But they said, as soon as we do this, you know, I need you to close eight stores and lay off forty-two employees. I'd done this a bunch of times. It's, it's, it was never fun, but it got easier over time. So I laid off a bunch of people and fired people. It wasn't that big of a deal. But then with this new perspective, I had been simplifying my, my life that entire year. I, they said, you got two weeks to put together this plan, give us the forty-two names that you're going to lay off. And so I went home and within two days, I was putting the spreadsheets together. But looking at the spreadsheet was like looking at a rainbow in black and white, in grayscale, right?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Because these were just names and statistics. And I, I get that's how you're going to make a decision like this. But these weren't just names. These were husbands and fathers and daughters and mothers and these were people. And, you know, my livelihood was in their hands and I, I knew that like there was some sort of discontent. But at that point, I realized the corporation we were at no longer aligned with my personal values. And so I turned the, the plan in. My name was the first name on the list.

• 33:52Rich Roll?

  You say you really did lay yourself off?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I didn't really, I didn't have a plan. I just had reduced my bills so significantly, living in Dayton, Ohio, five hundred dollar a month apartment. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to try this writing thing out for a while. There's a coffee shop in my neighborhood. They actually end up in the documentary.

• 34:12Rich Roll?

  Press.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Press, yeah. And I said, I'm just gonna, I'll just work there and I'll have enough money to pay my bills and I'll write for the, the rest of the time. I wanted to write fiction initially. You know, thanks to Ryan, this was a beautiful accident in a different direction.

• 34:24Rich Roll?

  Right. So you guys start meeting at press. You start working on this blog.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  I mean, that's what we did for the first year.

• 34:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  We just wrote, wrote on the blog and yeah, put our, put our thoughts out there.

• 34:37Rich Roll?

  Was there a moment, like a tipping point moment with the blog where you're like, wow, like this, this could be a thing? Like we could actually craft a vocation around this?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  I think for, for me, it's the San Francisco event.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Well, it was, for me, it was before that.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  It was before that, okay.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, it was. Leo Babalt shared something that we did. And um.

• 34:59Rich Roll?

  I was reading his blog back then, too. I mean, he had a, you know, that was like, everyone was reading his stuff.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  And we had like more people show up in one day. It wasn't a lot of people. It was like 9,000 people or something. For me, it was like, oh, we haven't seen. So, you know, we talked about this in the film, how like 52 readers that first month turned into 500, which turned into, you know, 5 million or whatever. And so there, there was a moment there. But around that same time, it was like, hey, you guys are the minimalist, aren't you? Did you write a book about minimalism? And it's like, oh, I guess we should do that, huh?

• 35:29Speaker 02

  We are the minimalist, yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  And, and so we did, we, we put out a book. Uh, we, at the time, we, we just self-published a book at the end of our first year. And we went on, on tour, but it was really just, we went around the country to coffee shops and, and brought, and it made me realize like, oh, if we can get eight people to show up and buy a book.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Most stuffs were like, yeah, two, two to eight people.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. If we sell, if we, if we sell 10 books.

• 35:52Rich Roll?

  When you're living minimally, you don't need much, right?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Oh, exactly.

• 35:55Rich Roll?

  Feed yourselves.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, we can sell 10 books.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Then we have a place to stay for the night. If not, then we just sleep in Ryan's Toyota Corolla. And that's how it worked out for us.

• 36:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, the, the first movie did such a great job at, you know, spinning that yarn of you guys going on the road and, you know, showing up at places and three people would show up. And then slowly a few more, a few more, and you see the build. But, you know, it's the grittiness of the early days that, you know, was so fun.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  I'm just thinking about that South by event and that minimalism documentary. Cause I remember being so excited for that South by Southwest event, like, we made it.

• 36:30Rich Roll?

  Right. We finally, we finally. It's like, it's a buddy movie road trip on, you know, like, like a Wizard of Oz movie with South by Southwest being you guys going to meet Oz.

• 36:41Speaker 02

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

• 36:51Speaker 01

  And they're like on their phones. By the way, it's 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Ryan's trying to talk about living with less.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Hi, everybody. Yeah, that was great.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Lanyards.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  This big room with like three people in it.

• 37:02Rich Roll?

  Well, that movie is so well done and I have to imagine that that had to be, you know, life-changing in some regard. I think it's most people's introduction to your work because Netflix put it right out front and so many people watched it. The first question I have about that first movie is, how did you connect with Matt D'Avella? Because Matt D'Avella, he's had his own like crazy trajectory blowing up on YouTube and being this massive creator on that platform.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  He, uh...

• 37:31Speaker 02

  He's all grown up.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  We connected with him on Twitter when he was a wedding videographer.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And I saw this video he made called "Most Wedding Videographers Suck", and I still, I still bring that up to him constantly.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  But he was doing that and he was doing like other like commercial work for like Toyota or Subaru or something and we hired him to do the trailer for our second book, "Everything That Remains", and we did an event out in New York to sort of celebrate this and he filmed that event and made a trailer for, for that book that we put up on YouTube. And that was sort of it. And then a few months later, I said, hey, we're getting ready to go on the road. 2014, we did a hundred-city tour, right? And said, hey, do you want to come on the road with us and try to make a documentary? And he had been wanting to do something with his creative skills other than commercial work, right? And so he's like, yeah, I'll give it a shot.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  At the end of the tour, it was like, he just had a few hard drives with like a thousand hours of footage.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  It was like, hey, good luck with that. And then...

• 38:34Rich Roll?

  So he just went away and came back with a cut?

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:37Rich Roll?

  For you guys?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  I remember dropping off at the airport and I just remember thinking to myself like, I don't think this is a movie.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Like, I have no idea how he's gonna pull this together.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  But there was no budget for it. I mean, we were just, you know, we were just passionate about it. So it's not like we had a lot to lose. But then he sent that first cut and yeah, I was instantly like, oh, wow. Like Matt knows what he's doing. And I always make sure and tell people that because people will come up to me and they'll be like, "Oh, you're the guy from the minimalism documentary. Great talk, you did such a good job." And I'm like, "I wish I could say it was me." But it's really Matt Diavella who did that whole documentary.

• 39:14Rich Roll?

  He did an unbelievable job. And all the accolades and success that he's enjoying on YouTube are well deserved.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. What he does is amazing on YouTube. And he has built up this amazing following, especially of young people.

• 39:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Who really, he's brought the message of minimalism to a crowd that maybe Ryan and I weren't ever going to reach either.

• 39:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does such, he makes these like mini documentaries.

• 39:41Rich Roll?

  I know, every one of his videos is like, should enjoy a theatrical release.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. That's an awesome, I'm gonna tell him my compliment.

• 39:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and he's a guy who walks the talk. Like he just, this past week, gave away all his stuff yet again. And him and his wife are on the road. And now in Sydney, like they're just gonna travel. They literally, everything they own is in like little carry-on suitcases.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a beautiful example of how you can turn your life around on a dime when you have the power to let go of anything in your life. And that, I mean, that's exactly what he displayed with that. It was, because it's not about, minimalism is not about owning nothing. It's just about breaking free from that attachment, breaking free from that, I don't know, that, I don't know another word for it, just that attraction.

• 40:34Rich Roll?

  There's a sense that, oh, if you're gonna be a minimalist, that you're self-flagellating or you're some kind of martyr, when in truth, you're just purchasing freedom for yourself.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 40:46Rich Roll?

  And choices, right? To be able to, you know, self-employment is such a gift, but it gives him, with the things that he does, the ability to just... You know, pack it up and go wherever he wants.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:59Rich Roll?

  Which is unbelievable.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you see him work, it's amazing. You wouldn't think he's able to. He has the strangest sort of, he's like hiding under the table, looking up with the camera. You're like, what is he doing? Is that a crotch shot? I'm not sure what's going on here, but somehow he just, he has.

• 41:17Rich Roll?

  And a total one man show. When I did his, I was one of the early guests on his podcast and he's got all these cameras and, and he's got, he's doing it all himself. Like he's manning the cameras, he's asking the questions, he's got the monitor there. I'm like, this looks stressful.

• 41:32Rich Roll?

  Get a little help, but he's like, no, he knows what he's doing. He's like a master of his domain.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And his hidden secret is his skill at editing. So we had, well, we had some help on this film. Angus Wall and his, Tiana Angus Wall, he's David Fincher's editor.

• 41:49Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Fight Club. He edited The Social Network. He won some, you know, Academy Award for that. He edited, what's the one with, what's the other big one he did?

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  I know it's on the tip of my tongue too.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He did the opening sequence to that. Anyway, his company did the animation in Less is Now. And he was actually, we were gonna bring him and that team on to edit the film. But Matt was just like, no, I'm good.

• 42:20Rich Roll?

  I got it covered.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's the thing. Like, the weird thing about it is, I don't think Matt likes editing at all. But that is his hidden, like, he's the Mozart of editing. And even like when we went from like fourth cut to fifth cut, Angus saw it and he was like, this looks like it went through 60 different cuts of the film. Yeah, so, yeah, kudos to him.

• 42:43Rich Roll?

  So the movie explodes and you guys kind of ride this wave. You have the books and you started the podcast. You're now 10 years into this thing. You've got millions of people all over the world that care deeply about the things that you talk about. And what's really cool and compelling about this platform that you now. Manage is that it's completely audience supported. Like you start all your podcasts, you know, advertisements suck. And, and you have this population of people that adore you and basically, you know, are, are willing to subscribe to your wisdom. And you've been able to craft out, living, making a living off of this for a decade.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Most of what we do is, is free and available to the public, right? And there's, you know, a small portion where we sort of dive deeper. And our private podcast is, is on Patreon. And yeah, we do have an audience that supports us there. But that's also, it's, it's almost like when you go to, well, back when we could go to the Comedy Store, places like that, where people sort of work out ideas.

• 43:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  We work out things and sometimes Ryan and I just argue on the private podcast about things because we don't agree about something. Or we bring a guest on and we, we argue with them about it and.

• 43:59Rich Roll?

  I like to think of it as talking things out.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:03Speaker 01

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

• 44:15Rich Roll?

  Right. When you were touring, how many cities did you do? I mean, you, you guys invited me to come when you did the Fillmore in San Francisco, which was like so cool, man. You guys were filling theaters like all across the country.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're at the Fillmore with us.

• 44:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  That was great. Yeah. I mean, the most we've ever done was a hundred cities, 119 events in one year.

• 44:35Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  We canceled a tour this year, 2020.

• 44:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Because of 2020.

• 44:41Rich Roll?

  For obvious reasons.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  And, um, yeah, I mean, we've done, what, nine tours in 10 years? So, so anywhere from a few cities, like the Simply Southern tour was three cities. Went with Dave Ramsey's team and did a small tour in the South to a hundred cities everywhere in between. But, uh, yeah, it just became a part of, and by the way, all those tours were different as well. Sometimes it's a podcast tour, sometimes we do a talk, sometimes we'll, um. Do book readings and book signings. It kind of just depends on what's going on.

• 45:11Rich Roll?

  So Dave Ramsey features pretty prominently in the new movie. So how did that relationship develop? How does he fit into the minimalist ecosystem?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  His daughter really likes us.

• 45:22Rich Roll?

  Is that what it is?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. His daughter works for him. She's a very talented author. Her name's Rachel Cruz. And she has a great YouTube show and she invited us to come on her YouTube show. It's in Nashville. And it's a whole production. They have a whole studio set up there. I mean, he has a thousand employees at his compound. It's a really impressive setup. And they, I mean, they work really hard to, to teach financial literacy. They're now being taught in 25% of the high schools around the country. The Dave Ramsey curriculum. He has a whole team, a hundred, like a hundred people on that team.

• 45:58Rich Roll?

  His whole thing is about living fiscally responsible.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:02Rich Roll?

  Like not living outside of your means and making sure that you're making prudent financial, like essentially like conservative prudent financial decisions.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel like he's like a minimalist finance guy, basically. Cause you know, minimalism, it's funny when I first, you know, heard it and heard about it and looked into it, I kind of thought like it was this niche type thing. And then like, once I got into it, I'm like, oh, like this is a, this can be applied to anything. And I think Dave Ramsey essentially applies minimalism to finances and.

• 46:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  And yeah, yeah.

• 46:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  He's got some great financial. His whole team though, they're, they're great. Anthony O'Neal, Chris Hogan. Yeah. Yeah. The whole, the whole lot of them. John Deloney. Yeah.

• 46:41Rich Roll?

  So we're, we're, you know, well into this pandemic cycle.

• 46:49Rich Roll?

  Fraying at the edges as we crawl towards 2021.

• 46:54Rich Roll?

  And I'm interested in how you're thinking about the relationship between consumerism and minimalism with this very specific moment. The way that I'm kind of thinking about it is. That on the one hand, like, nobody's going to the mall, they're not shopping, they're at home. So it's forcing people to perhaps be a little bit more reflective about those habits on some level. Yet, at the same time, we're all empowered by these tools and we're spending, you know, these technological tools, we're all in front of our screens way too much.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:26Rich Roll?

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

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:32Rich Roll?

  I don't know what the statistics are, but I suspect, I'm certain that online shopping has skyrocketed, but has consumerism overall increased during this moment? Like, how are you thinking about people's habits? What does that look like?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  It depends what we mean by consumerism. So I do think consumerism is the right way to frame it. That is one of the problems, right? Consumption isn't the problem. We talk about this in lessons now, because we all need to consume some stuff. Consumerism, which is what we could just identify as compulsory consumption in a way, as though we feel that, as though we must buy this in order to either be complete. Ryan talked about the deficit advertising earlier. Or the, what else does Annie call it in the film? The vertical integration. Yeah. And so, no longer are you just competing with your next door neighbor, it's your...

• 48:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, talk about that. That's a really fascinating, important idea, I think.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  So here's the new problem. If consumerism's one problem, when we relate that to stuff, materialism is really that. The other side of consumerism is distraction, I think. And so, the thing that Ryan and I will say is scrolling is the new smoking. And this epiphany hit me when I was walking outside of like a Chipotle or something. I see someone outside in the cold, like in the Midwest, scrolling on their phone, cigarette in hand at the same time. And it's not to judge that person, it's to see myself in that person. Like, I don't, I don't smoke, but like, I could see, you know, my habits are showing, right? And it's not just the smoking. Now, 50 years ago, everyone sort of casually puffed cigarettes. We'd be at this table right now, just smoking, talking, right?

• 49:07Rich Roll?

  You're a cloud.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Right. And, but you did that now, it would seem nutty. If I just lit up a cigarette right now, you wouldn't know how to respond to that. The only person who can do that is Dave Chappelle, by the way. But besides him, like, it would seem nutty. And, and yet, it doesn't seem that strange if I, it would, because of the three of us, but in your average setting, if I were to pull out a phone and just check it really quick?

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  But it's just as bothersome in many ways. You know, it's secondhand distraction. And so I think over the last decade in particular, what we've seen is a lot of new ways to distract ourselves. Ryan and I distracted ourselves back in the aughties and in the late 90s with with stuff. But now the distractions are digital and they're right there and they're more enticing than ever. And the same thing happens, right? In the material world, it was high-paid demographers, statisticians, marketers, aggregating your eyeballs onto the product or service. Now, since you're the product, it's aggregating your eyeballs onto the product and the service to sell you products and services.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And so in a weird way, a dystopian way, it elevates the problem. It amplifies the problem.

• 50:22Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, without without a doubt, and this is subject matter and terrain that movies like The Social Dilemma go into at length, it's not just enticing, it's it's truly addictive and it's designed to be that way. The revelatory idea that I had not thought about before until I saw your movie was this idea of the kind of exponential expansion of Keeping Up With The Joneses, right? Like this this consumerist impulse originally derived from, you know, perhaps something genetic within us to try to, you know, keep pace with our neighbors. So and so's got that refrigerator or that car, like, I've got to get that too. But now, by dint of these technological tools, everybody's our neighbor.

• 51:04Rich Roll?

  So it's not just the person living next door, but it's, you know, the celebrity on Instagram and you get to peek into their world. Or now on Zoom, you get to see what everybody's, you know, study and living room looks like. And it's almost impossible to not run that comparison against what you have or don't have. And how does that impact your your consumer choices or your sense of innate discontent when you attempt to measure yourself against that impossible standard?

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think comparison is the killer of joy regardless of, you know, kind of how you're comparing yourself or what you have to other people. It is interesting, like with the whole social media, it's like, you know, my sister, when I was in Ohio a year ago, you know, back when we were traveling without any fear.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  She was like, do you feel cool because you got, you know, X amount of subscribers on Instagram? And I'm like, no, I was like, do you think I'm cool because I have that many subscribers? And she's like, yeah, I think it's pretty cool. And I'm like, if you're looking at subscribers, like I have, I don't even know what I have. I know it's not a million, but I'm like, you know, if, if you got to where I'm at with however many subscribers, then you'd be looking at a million. And then once you had a million, you'd be looking at three million. It's like a never ending comparison wheel that we put ourselves on.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  It's failure. It's, in a weird way, all success is failure.

• 52:29Rich Roll?

  So what are the tactics that you deploy to prevent yourself from, you know, indulging in that kind of, you know, fruitless mental exercise? Because it's hard, right?

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, I don't look at specific numbers, like that's one way because I think, I'm a numbers guy in general. I love math, I love spreadsheets. So I could very easily get wrapped up into it just to like make a game out of it, but I try to not gamify it as much as possible. But I'll be honest, like because of, man, this is going to sound like some, you know, Buddhist hybrid thing, but because of how destructive my ego was in the corporate world, anytime I start to feel the ego kicking in, which it kicks in all the time, but when I start to feel it kicking in with like, oh, how many subscribers did I gain today?

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Or how many, because I did feel that in the early days, I, I try not to stroke that ego. And by practicing that over the last 10 years, I am able to just, you know, kind of still feel like I felt 10 years ago. I don't feel any more popular or successful. I mean, even, it's funny, you were talking about, you know, us having a lot of people who adore us, I think is what you said, and like, they're willing to support us. And I appreciate those people so much, but like, hearing you say it, like, my ego was like, "Oh, wow, that is amazing. We do have all these people who adore us and who will support us." But, uh, but yeah, um, so, you know, I guess just to reiterate, like, when my ego starts to get out of control, I will try to like, put it in check a little bit, because ultimately, when I know if I ever

• 54:04Speaker 02

  start to play that game, it'll never be enough.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't have any tactics. I-

• 54:09Rich Roll?

  You guys aren't getting into Twitter spats and things like that. Like, you seem to- Just, I can tell by the way that you, you know, share your content online, that it's kind of at an arm's length. Like, you put it, you make sure that your stuff is being shared, but you're not, um, you know, in there, you know, going back and forth with people and stuff like that.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  A healthy detachment. I'm not, I'm not, you know, the Buddha, right? Like, the Buddha would be non-attachment, right? But, but not needing to be-

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Not needing the outcome, and not needing any of it, by the way. The- By being attached, detached, you realize that, that-

• 54:53Speaker 01

  This is gonna sound like a value judgment, but it's not. It's all a scam, man. It really, like, it-

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Who cares? Like, it's all ego. Even, by the way, I- What have I changed my mind about recently? Helping people? I don't wanna help people. Let's be honest. Like, helping people, that's just my ego saying I want to help people. Now, I feel it still viscerally, because I've programmed myself-

• 55:17Rich Roll?

  You will be externally validated if you say that out loud.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Right, right. It's my, no, no, no, no. But maybe, maybe the truth behind that is, well, I want to, I want peace, I want to speak the truth, and if that helps some people-

• 55:33Speaker 01

  That's wonderful. If it doesn't, it can still be wonderful. I don't need that because if, once I become attached to needing to help someone, it's a different type of prison. It's a well-decorated prison cell, but it's still a prison cell.

• 55:46Rich Roll?

  You can, you can help people for selfish reasons though, too, because it makes you feel good. It actually makes you, it gives your life a little bit more meaning and, and it builds self-esteem. So even if your impetus, your impulse is selfish, it's still a good thing to follow through on.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. By the way, I'm not saying that helping people is good or bad, right? It's, it's not a, a, and also not helping people is not good or bad by default then, right? Um, I don't want to throw that, that judgment out there. I'm simply saying that like, I have to be honest with myself that like, it's my ego that's involved where I'm like, it's what Ryan said, you know, if I have 10 million Instagram followers, I'm helping more people. Well, is that the truth?

• 56:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Or is that just a statistic?

• 56:33Rich Roll?

  Hmm. I feel like there's two interesting things, things happening right now, which is the undeniable rise of popularity around minimalism and related ideas. Like, there is a groundswell of people who are feeling disconnected and dissatisfied in a way and are discovering this way of living that is giving their lives greater meaning and purpose. But in tandem with that, we're also seeing this acceleration of our materialistic consumer culture. I mean, you, you see it in the film too, the kind of rapidization of, of home delivery and Amazon and the drones and, you know, how everything is, just seems like it's on steroids right now.

• 57:16Rich Roll?

  Almost like this war of ideas that are, that are like bumping up against each other.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you also see the sort of corporatization of simplicity as well, right? When Marie Kondo is selling things at the container store.

• 57:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Um, the container store is actually one of the biggest problems, right? The container store allows us to hide our hordes. And this is an indictment on Marie Kondo. I think she really does get to the why in, in her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Like, she does talk, she obviously discusses the how-to stuff. That's her, her shtick, but she, she gets to the why. But, but when I see, you know, tuning forks for several hundred dollars and, and crystals and the commodification of simplicity, like you don't.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Need anything to simplify, right? That organizing is just well-planned hoarding. And the thing we talk about in the film is the average American household has 300,000 items in it, right? Now, I had a really organized version of that. I had basements with a basement full of bins and boxes and ordinal alphabetized system of CDs and DVDs and but it was just well-planned hoarding. The easiest way to organize your stuff is to get rid of anything that's no longer adding value. Get rid of most of it. It's so much easier to quote-unquote "organize" because you don't have anything that you have to organize. You're getting to the essence and you're stopped worrying about the form.

• 58:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I love that quote that you shared recently. Everything is 100% off if you don't buy it.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think we shared that maybe on Black Friday or something.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Man, I wish you could have told my 25-year-old self that.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Hmm. He may have not been ready for it, though.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  No, you said something about, real briefly, about minimalism bringing meaning to people's lives. And actually, I don't know if minimalism brings meaning to people's lives. I think it's minimalism helps someone etch a sketch, a new life. It helps them start over. And then, from there, they can start to do meaningful things. And that's, I mean, that's really what Less is Now is about. It's about, you know, being able to start over. But it's, I've never, yeah, thanks for, however you phrase it made me think of it in a way of, I don't think minimalism is...

• 59:27Rich Roll?

  By getting it wrong.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:29Rich Roll?

  I mean, I was alluding to that, but yeah, I hear what you're saying. No, that's a, that's a, that's a very good point. The question I was gonna ask was, what would you tell yourself, you know, five years ago when you were well into this, the minimalism thing, that you understand better now that maybe you didn't then as you kind of mature?

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Hmm. Hmm. Five years ago?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Drop the, drop the prescriptions.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Like, not the actual medical prescriptions, but like...

• 1:00:00Rich Roll?

  You mean that, that, back to the how-to thing?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, but also like, like, I...

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  The desire to give advice to people, that's also an ego thing, right? I have no more advice. I have some observations if you want to hear my own observations about my own life. But even then, going back and giving advice to my 35-year-old self would be almost counterintuitive. Now, if I could show him some things, it would it'd be the peace that's related to letting go of some of the attachments. Because I think Ryan and I, we picked up new attachments along the way, especially when that film came out. Talk about serving your ego. When you get recognized on the street a dozen times a day,

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  all of a sudden, you start to believe that you're better than what you are. And Ryan and I, for a period of time, I think we went three years without doing any media as a result. Like, I was just like, it doesn't feel good to need this. And because it feels like you're creating for the wrong reason. It feels as though like it's that externality you talked about.

• 1:01:12Rich Roll?

  Well, that's a healthy dose of self-awareness.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Maybe. I mean, I'm still, I'm still, yeah. Working on eradicating that, right? Yeah. Aren't we all? If you haven't figured it out, let me know. Well, that's the thing. I don't think we ever figure it out. I think it is the eradication thing, right? You don't figure out heart disease. You try to eradicate it in a way. Yeah.

• 1:01:40Rich Roll?

  So the first movie came out in 2016? What year was that?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Netflix actually turned us down twice on that film. We, so we put it out on our own. We did a theatrical release through a company called Gather at the time. I don't even know if they're still around, but it was like theatrical on demand.

• 1:01:58Rich Roll?

  Was that 2016?

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was May 2016. And we did 400 theaters, US, Canada, Australia. And then from there, we put it out on our, we went back to Netflix. They said no again. And so we just put it out on our own. And it did relatively well. It resonated with people on iTunes and Amazon and other places. And so Netflix ended up saying yes to it. And that really started the The conflagration because we sent the rest of our audience there who had been listening to the podcast or reading the blog and they whatever sparked whatever algorithm does and and it showed up on a lot more people's radar. I think that's how we showed up on your radar even.

• 1:02:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, I saw, well, I think you were doing a few podcasts. I saw you guys popping up on some friends and people that I knew. And then I saw the movie. I was very struck by the movie. And then we did one of our retreats in Italy and we screened it for the group that we had there, which was really cool. I was just remembering that today.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:03:04Rich Roll?

  And I can't remember whether I did that. I think I had interviewed you and then we went on the trip, or maybe I interviewed you right back right afterwards. I can't remember. But no, I just, I just remember being very moved by that film. And then we did the podcast and I, I believe that you might have even alluded either on mic or off, that you guys were working on another documentary. Like there was gonna be a follow up. And here we are five, maybe almost six years later before Less is Now premiere. So what was going, what happened?

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, we ran into some technical difficulties.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Well, Ryan and I, you know, shortly after that came out, we went to Matt again and we, we did another tour. The last, it was called the Less is Now Tour. And we went out filming that trying to sort of recreate the magic of the first film. And we put it together. We, we actually, we did an event at the Wilbur Theater is where Joe Rogan shot his like most recent comedy special.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  Beautiful spot.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we filmed it. We gave a talk there and we were going to like sort of build the film around that talk. And we kind of end up doing that in this, this later version of the film. And the talk looked fine, but it kind of looked like a stand up comedy special without comedy. You were like waiting for the punch because it was the venue, right? It was, and so it just, it fell flat. It didn't work. And so we did it again. We actually brought you out. We rented out this giant warehouse space.

• 1:04:27Rich Roll?

  Right. That was like two years ago. Matt was there. There was tons of, was it, was it that long ago?

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Almost three, yeah.

• 1:04:35Rich Roll?

  This was the big shoot, you had a live audience. I mean, that warehouse space is in the movie. Did you, was that from that evening? Or did you guys end up reshooting that? No, it was from a year and a half later.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  A year and a half later, we went to the same studio.

• 1:04:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cuz I was like, I was telling Julie, we were watching, and I was like, yeah, I was there that night when these guys were doing this. But I'm like, it doesn't look like there's people there. Like, when I was there, there was a lot of people there. So, something was weird, yeah, something was different about it.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we went from a comedy special to no comedy, to a really well-done TEDx talk, is what that...

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  That's what it looked like, right? And so, so that night, you were there, you actually came up, you were gracious enough to do the intro for us. And we gave a talk in front of two different crowds, because we figured, well, the Wilbur Theater aesthetic was the problem. And so, we'll refilm this in front of, yeah, a beautiful aesthetic, this old abandoned warehouse, we'll build the set for it, bring a crew out, film it. And it'll, it'll work out that way, that's the problem. Well, then, so we get there, and then we start interspersing it with these documentary elements. And it was like mixing vegan cheesecake, shout out to Rich Roll, and, and sweet and sour tofu.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  And just mushing them two together, and you're like, I really like both of these things. But they don't work when I smoosh them together. And so, we had to go back to the drawing board, and we said, hey, we're just gonna scrap. So, that was the second time we did the film, we scrapped the whole thing, and started over again. And so, this project, we thought was gonna take us about four months, ended up taking about four years from the inception until...

• 1:06:14Rich Roll?

  Right, cuz when we, when I was there that night, my sense was that you guys were in the final throes of wrapping this thing up.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Oh, we were, of that version. And those two will never see the light of day, it's not like they were, were terrible, they just didn't, it didn't work for what we were trying to communicate. And we wanted to, we knew it wasn't, it wasn't, we weren't, we weren't really putting our best foot forward. As Ryan said, it was either like, it was like, it would've been a really good YouTube video or something.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would've been a great YouTube video. I was just gonna say, like, just to add on to, when we got those two films back, I just remember not getting the feeling that I got with minimalism. Matt, for what we gave Matt, he did an amazing job for what we gave him. But yeah, it was, it's been a long road.

• 1:07:04Rich Roll?

  Well, it's tough too, because the first one had a built-in narrative, and you guys are these underdogs, and you're going on this trip, right? So there's a kind of a tempo or a propulsion to that. And in the follow-up, then the challenge is like, well, how do we, you know, what's the next chapter of this? And how do we make that compelling?

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that chapter ended up being the chapter before. Like, it was in a weird way, it's first-ever documentary prequel.

• 1:07:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  It doesn't require you to see the first film, obviously.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, not at all.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  But, and they're two independent things. And this one, we were really aggressive about keeping it under an hour, in the whole spirit of minimalism. And, but in doing that, we had to cut out a lot of, a lot of amazing. Ryan had this whole sub-narrative about this. We can talk about it here, because you haven't really talked about it publicly, the whole drug thing.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  I was like you, Rich, I love the party.

• 1:07:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, this was, this is something that I know about you, but I've never heard you actually talk about. Like, you've had your run-in with drugs and alcohol.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  For sure, I do, I talk about whenever it comes up. Like, I'm totally okay to talk, especially coming from Ohio, because like, I hope someone in Ohio who is hooked on, you know, pain pills right now is listening to this and knowing that they can totally pull themselves out of that situation. Because, I mean, Dayton, Ohio, where we're from, I don't know if it still is, but it was the overdose capital of the world. So, there's a lot of, just a lot of drugs there. But yeah, to Josh's point, there was this beautiful arc in the film that we couldn't put in there, that I really tried to get. And Matt tried to put it, it just didn't work. But it was about, kind of going down that road, and what pain that caused me, and how I was able to, you know, kind of start over.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  But it's really, it's those stories, again, unfortunately couldn't make the film, but I think it's those stories that really mean the most to people. Like, they want to hear about like, oh, Ryan isn't this perfect person who is just like, one day like, I'm gonna simplify my life. And, I mean, it was a lot of work, and it was a lot of pain, and it was a lot of discomfort, and... I did get through it, but yeah, I was living in the, is it an opiate? Is that what pain pills are? Or are they? They're opiates.

• 1:09:18Rich Roll?

  Many of them are.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Okay, right. So, yeah, I mean opiates were real easy access. And when you're, when I was working 60, 70, sometimes 80 hours a week, I would caffeinate myself. Didn't do a lot of coke, mainly because my, my mom like turned me off to that drug because I saw her go through her own thing. And I talked about that in the first documentary.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  But I would caffeinate myself, Adderall, you know, whatever productivity thing I could get in my body. But then you get home at nine o'clock at night and it's hard to unwind, but it's really easy with like a pain pill and a beer. And yeah, so I got.

• 1:09:55Rich Roll?

  So it wasn't going out to the bars and getting loaded. It was more like, I want to be. Right, okay.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, we even did recreation scenes, Ryan getting beat up at a bar once. That didn't make the film. We're actually gonna find a way to put a lot of this on Patreon or somewhere. I actually just got permission from Netflix today to use some of these, these scenes somewhere. And Ryan talked about it in the film, but like was spending upwards of $5,000 a month on.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  I remember telling it.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  On opioids.

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  I'm like, I might have a problem. I was talking to my therapist about it and I remember mentioning that to them. And she was like, she's like, I've seen worse. I've seen people spend $10, $15,000 a month on drugs.

• 1:10:39Rich Roll?

  I'm like, for a new therapist.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. She's like, you're not that bad. I think she was just trying to like make me not feel so bad.

• 1:10:45Rich Roll?

  So did you just go cold turkey and?

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:10:48Rich Roll?

  Put it in the rearview or how did you, how did you?

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  I went through. I probably should have done a 12 set program, but I just went off, I went off of opiates to get on. There's a product called like Suboxone, yeah. And you don't really, yeah, it's, it's, it's not like methadone. Like methadone is something that you just go from illegal addictions to legal addictions. Where Suboxone works a little bit different in the brain. So I was on that program for a little bit, seeing, getting a lot of therapy. And I remember one time I like was going on a trip and I had forgot to bring my Suboxone. And I went like two weeks without it. And I was like, oh, I'm free. I'm done. I don't have to do this anymore.

• 1:11:34Rich Roll?

  And you just never went back?

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Never went back, yeah.

• 1:11:36Rich Roll?

  Wow, good for you, man.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a long road. Like, I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst enemy.

• 1:11:43Rich Roll?

  The detox from opioids is horrible.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  It's miserable. I still don't think I've recovered 100%.

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  Like mentally, you mean? Like, brain function-wise?

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Sleep-wise, I think.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, your deep sleep's still way off, right?

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:57Rich Roll?

  You guys are both rocking the Ora Ring.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it was a long road, but when I started living intentionally and like really facing these things head-on, that wasn't like the magic answer, but it certainly gave me some leverage.

• 1:12:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Rich Roll?

  Well, you know, alluding to something that I asked you about earlier, I mean, both of you guys survived quite a bit of childhood trauma. Do you, like, are you in therapy? Like, how have you, like, worked through? You seem to have a pretty healthy relationship with your past now. Like, you don't, it doesn't feel like you're holding on to a lot of resentment and those kinds of negative patterns. So, how did you work through that?

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  I think trauma is perspectival in many ways, right? Like, I talk about this in the film, so we can... My very first memory as a child is my father extinguishing a cigarette on my mom's chest. Now, of course, I'm going to remember something like that. Right, but I also don't think it traumatized me the same way that other things traumatize. And so, like, it's weird. Like, I do remember that, and I'm sure it was awful or whatever. But there are other things that seem less consequential, but traumatized me even more. I was much more worried of, like, Child Protective Services taking me away because my mom was an alcoholic. I think I was far more traumatized by that.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I certainly have a lot of forms of sort of OCD, like, I've been diagnosed with OCD, but it's like low level. I'm not, like, painting my floor every day or anything like that. But like...

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  I'm sure that's a whole thing about control, right? Because of the chaos of of childhood.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  It's almost like you have this bar of like, well, I'm not painting my floor.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  It's, yeah. But you could have, just like anything, you can have an unhealthy relationship to a good thing. I'm sure that you could have an unhealthy relationship to minimalism, where it is, I am absolutely in control of my environment all the time.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, the solution becomes the problem, right? And that's, that's why the whole anti-prescription thing for me now is like, yeah, I've been doing a lot more exploration this year around, around that. But when we are looking for, we don't actually need the solutions. If your chair is on fire right now, Rich, you're not going to say, hey, can you hand me that fire safety manual over there? Because it would really help me out right now. You don't need three steps to get out of a flaming chair. You're going to do it, you're going to do it like that because your why is so powerful. You don't, the how takes care of itself, right? And, and so the problem is not a lack of instructions. The problem is that your butt is on fire.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  And, and so I, I think that, that too often we, any, any answer I give you here will sort of be like a narrative overlay with, with respect to the trauma or whatever, but I think it does have to do with detachment ultimately. And, and maybe there was a healthy detachment and an unhealthy detachment. I don't know. But, but a healthy detachment from, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't cling to that anymore.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  I'm so glad you asked this question about like our childhoods because I did hold on to a lot of resentment for my mother and father. And it was mainly because I felt kind of gypped of like, why would they do those things? You know, like, why didn't they like, they're the parents, I'm the child. They should be able to know what to do. And, you know, any normal parent would put their child first. And I had all these, you know, narratives and all these questions. And through therapy, I was, and I got to this recently, within the last few years. I mean, I've always tried to have a good relationship with my parents with that resentment.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  But I was able to like, let a lot of it go when, it was a couple of years ago, seeing a therapist here in LA. And he just kind of helped me get to this point of. When things really started to like hit the fan, my parents were probably thirty? Maybe thirty two, you know, like they weren't, they're younger than I am now.

• 1:16:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  And

• 1:16:16Rich Roll?

  That's a trip when you realize that.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, it is, it was. And I was like, wait a minute. Here I am, and with this narrative of like, they should have known what to do. And I'm like, I'm thirty seven years old, I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. And like, for me, to put that pressure on them is, it wasn't fair, I didn't see it as fair. And I finally looked at them, I'm like, oh, like, cause you know, I'd love to sit here rich and be like, oh, I've got a perfect life, become a minimalist, and you're gonna live a perfect life. But I still struggle with a lot of things. And I've got my own battles that I'm fighting. And my, my parents, I finally was able to see, like, oh, they've got their own shit going on. They've got their own battles that they're fighting, and they're still fighting them to this day.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  And I'm really glad I don't have those battles. However, understanding that like, you know, I'm thirty nine years old, I'm, for all intents and purposes, just as confused as they were at thirty two years old. And seeing that in them really helped me drop those, you know, poor me, why me? Why didn't they, they should have, it really helped me drop a lot of that.

• 1:17:21Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. And, and that those behaviors aren't necessarily a referendum on, on how much they loved you or didn't love you.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:17:30Rich Roll?

  Just their own personal limiters. God, I felt like it at the time. When I was thirty, I was a disaster.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Me both. Yeah, I definitely felt like it at the time, though, growing up, you know, like, if you loved me, you'd stop drinking, sort of thing, right?

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  And, and yeah, I mean, I think it, Ryan and I grew up in similar sort of situations. I would argue his situation was far worse than mine in many respects.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Let's battle right now.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  The SWAT team never raided my home.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's true.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  All right, you got it.

• 1:18:04Rich Roll?

  It's heavy.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  But, but, um, what I'll say is that like Ryan saw the party and growing up as a fun thing. He saw his mom in particular, having fun with drugs and alcohol. I saw my mother being depressed with drugs and alcohol. I've never had a drink in my life because I saw the sort of terminus of this thing, right? Where Ryan saw what he thought was the, the terminus, the excitement, the joy, the pleasure. It wasn't real joy. It was, it was confusing joy with pleasure.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, mom's house was like the party house. I mean, people would just pop in randomly, get a pool and like fenced in backyard. It was an above ground pool.

• 1:18:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but good times.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. But I bet that's all you needed and a bunch of drugs and alcohol. And, yeah, everyone's having a good time.

• 1:18:57Rich Roll?

  So it's fascinating to me that you guys have been friends, best friends since fifth grade. You've now, you're now in 10 years of, of doing this thing together. So you're in business together.

• 1:19:11Rich Roll?

  I've never seen you guys argue or act short with each other. You must have your moments. I mean, come on, right? But, I mean, how have you, how do you take care of this relationship?

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  The minimalist exposed.

• 1:19:23Rich Roll?

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

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:36Rich Roll?

  That's what it is.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  That's what it is. It has nothing to do with me.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  It's a joke. We have this, we have, we have an acronym that we, we often talk about. Shout out to Patrick Roan, who spurred the conversation that, that we had the conversation with us that spurred this acronym. It's Tara, T A R A. But if you, if I really want to understand someone.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Truly understand them. It's that's the sort of the process that that I go through of tolerating the person first. It's a weak virtue and it's not going to get you very far. Tolerance, right? There's a what is it on the I-10? Whenever we're driving and Ella's like acting crazy in the car, there's a sign that says Museum of Tolerance and I always joke with Ella that our car is the Museum of Tolerance whenever she's in in the car.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  The mobile Museum of Tolerance.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Anyway, tolerate and then we go from there. You know, we take these these steps, getting tolerance is a good first step. And then we move on to to acceptance, respect, and then ultimately appreciation. And Ryan and I have radically different beliefs. I'm trying to let go of those beliefs. I don't think beliefs serve us very well, but that's a different conversation. We have the same values though, and because we have the same values, when we have different beliefs to get, you know, so we get there via different paths, so to speak. We have different opinions, we have different personalities, we certainly have different preferences. But I don't say, well, his preferences are right or wrong.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  I might think it at first, but like, that's also my ego talking. And I don't want to just tolerate his preferences. That's not going to make for a good friendship, a good business relationship. By the way, it doesn't ever feel like a business. I mean, I don't think we had business paperwork. It's about four years into the thing. Even now, we don't have like, it's not, yeah, it's just, it's not something we think about that way. Yeah, it's a business, we employ some people, but we go beyond tolerance. We accept the fact that we're both going to be different. I'm not trying to change you. It's not about, here's what you must do, right? And and then, of course, the respect thing, of course, I respect your preferences.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  I don't always completely understand them, but that's okay. And ultimately, if you can get to that level where you actually appreciate the idiosyncrasies, then that's like full sort of detachment, not needing to change someone.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think, and this goes for any relationship, like, when, first off, if Josh comes to me with something, it's not accusatory. It's like, it's something he wants to talk about. And when you approach a situation like that, you know, you can interpret it a lot differently than like, oh, Josh is trying to shame me like I never feel like he's trying to shame me. And I think that is where arguments come in. When people start to try and shame other people and that's, oh, you just shame me. Now I'm going to shame you and now we're going to trade shames back and forth. Where I try to be the Zen Buddhist that Josh is when it comes to confrontation.

• 1:22:55Speaker 02

  But sometimes I'll go to Josh with something and he'll be like, I know you don't mean to say it that way. I think what you're trying to say is this. And I'm like, yeah, you're absolutely right.

• 1:23:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  And so, so it's not, when I say to Josh, it truly is like, when he comes to me, it's absolutely non-confrontational. And if I go to him and I'm like accidentally being confrontational, he's able to like process it and be like, I know Ryan's not being a jerk right now.

• 1:23:18Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  So yeah, let's get to the root of.

• 1:23:20Rich Roll?

  That's some ninja shit though. It's really, it's really, it's hard to master that and have that kind of, you know, presence of mind to.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  It's really inspiring. Like, I mean, for me and my wife, like I really go out of my way to try and have that approach with her. Again, I'm not perfect, but I do better.

• 1:23:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Every day I get a little better, I think.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  I used to be competitive, but that's like saying I used to be mentally ill. I, I was doing a sauna in Montana when we lived in Montana for five years as a accident. And a beautiful accident.

• 1:24:02Rich Roll?

  Some nice photos from that though.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. We did it for the photos, did it for the gram.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  He did not do it for the gram.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  I don't think we even had Instagram. But anyway, I was in a sauna with an American Indian named Tom and he, he said, you know, I don't, and there's like a basketball court right next to the sauna. It's the YMCA in Missoula. And he ended up swimming and all this other stuff. And he goes, you know, I don't understand you Americans. Like you have this, this idea of like, if in order for you to win. You have to lose. He's like, but where I come from, if you win, he wins. And if he loses, you lose. And of course, my first knee jerk reaction to that was like, that's a silly way to think about life. Because I'm winning, right? And it's like, well, no.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  You just haven't won enough. That's your problem. Yeah, but even think about that. We talk about like, uh, winning, you know? Obviously Charlie Sheen is sort of the, the, the parodic exaggeration of that. Right? But that's, that's, it's not far off from how our, where our culture is. Right? We talk about winning as though it's a good thing. But by default, if someone wins, someone else has to lose. Now, maybe it's a semantic thing and we can change our language around it. But I think language is really important. I think it's a real big problem too. But I think our language, it, it canvases our days. Right? It's, language is responsible for more misery than anything else in human history.

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  Well, that idea, I mean, the, the, the most successful people I know, maybe not all of them, but I know a lot of successful people who do approach the world with that idea of large S, that, you know, it's not a zero sum game. And if I win, you win too. And, and not only, you know, are you able to, you know, basically succeed in whatever it is that you're trying to do, those people tend to be much happier people and grounded and, and, you know, more conscious in general.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  You had the Toms guy on recently, Blake?

• 1:26:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Blake.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  He, he strikes me as.

• 1:26:16Rich Roll?

  He's definitely someone like that. I also had Karamo from Queer Eye on, and he was talking about the audition process for Queer Eye. And, and they were like, you know, they, they spent like years trying to find like the five dudes or whatever, or the four dudes that, that do the show. And most of the guys were super competitive and they'd go in and audition and then they'd come out. And, and the other guys would be like, what did they ask you? And they'd be like, they wouldn't say, you know, because they're like, I'm competing against you. I'm not going to tell you any secrets. But there were a couple of them that would come out and be like, here's what happened. Here's what you need to look out for. And those were the guys that ultimately all ended up getting chosen.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  Wow, that's incredible.

• 1:26:57Rich Roll?

  Which obviously changed their lives and the lives of, you know, a lot of people that watched that show.

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:27:02Rich Roll?

  Which is cool, right? Like, I love that idea.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Makes me think of like, Google, when they hire people, they like, bring them on a bus.

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  And then like, whether or not they think the bus driver is like, a huge...

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  It's like a litmus test.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Rich Roll?

  Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Like, what, how do you behave when, when no one's watching? Because in this, in this context, they're work casting people who are paying attention to this behavior. And it's like, we want people that, you know, approach the world with that kind of, you know, arms outstretched perspective of gratitude and giving.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  Amen.

• 1:27:35Rich Roll?

  And to reward that.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  We, we were talking about Dave Ramsey earlier, but he, well, his team, they interview the spouse in one of the interviews. It's a rather rigorous process, but your spouse gets interviewed as well.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Like separately.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  And it's fascinating to me because I, I think maybe they're like, trying to figure out, well, what are your, uh, how do you handle conflict? How do you make decisions? What, how do you make some of your biggest life choices? Are they congruent with the person that we want to, to hire? Now, I can imagine that might be a train wreck for some people, but...

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  I know if you, if you interviewed Beck, so I would totally get the job, no matter what the job was.

• 1:28:24Rich Roll?

  How do you know what she's gonna say?

• 1:28:27Rich Roll?

  You think you know. Let's talk a little bit more about, about the movie. I mean, you know, I was, I came into this thinking, these guys have been working on this thing for years, because I know how long ago it was when I was there at that event. But you are featuring these individuals, the kind of everyday people, minimalist people that are highlighted in the movie.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49Rich Roll?

  And they're on Zoom calls. So I was like, well, clearly you're executing this project like, during the pandemic.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  The pandemic was the best and worst thing that happened in the film. So we, we, um, we had this entire day set up in Los Angeles. We had a whole crew booked. We had location and we were bringing, I don't know what it was, 22 or 32 people in to be interviewed that day. The majority of them were these everyday minimalists, right? In fact, I think it was a two-day shoot. Early or mid-March. Of course, you know what happened.

• 1:29:21Rich Roll?

  Right at the beginning, the starting line of the whole thing.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the original thing that we wanted to do was,

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  have you seen YouTube reaction videos and people sort of react to a music video or they react to a product or service or something?

• 1:29:38Rich Roll?

  I might have seen one or two of those.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  So like, we kind of wanted to do that, but with minimalism in a way. Like, and so it was Chris's idea. Chris is our director of photography on the film. And so that actually worked out better by bringing us sort of into their homes in a way. In fact, we had them do some B-roll of some of their houses that shows up in the film as well. So you get to see the sort of decluttering process they went through. Some of them even had footage that they took when they simplified their life, you know, a year or two ago. And we got to include all of that in the film, even though we filmed the rest of it.

• 1:30:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it gives it, it gives it, in addition to this verite touch, like it's heartwarming because it's so authentic. You know, it's like they're actually shooting it themselves and sharing it as opposed to a sterilized film crew coming in and trying to make everything look just so.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  Right. We sent them cameras and stuff, so it looked like congruent with, with each one didn't feel like it was out of place. But yeah, it was them doing the thing on their own.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got most of the cameras back.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Just kidding, we got them all back.

• 1:30:47Rich Roll?

  More stuff, right? Talk to me about some of the other experts that you have featured in here because it's an interesting grouping of people. In addition to Dave Ramsey, you've got TK Coleman, who I know, you know, he was on your podcast not that long ago. Annie Leonard from Greenpeace, Danae Barahona from Simple Families. So she's kind of in, you know, squarely in the minimalist space, it feels like. But it was intriguing, like, oh, this person from Greenpeace, like she's about sustainability. But, you know, I was interested in how you made these choices.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  She was the, she did the story of stuff, if you recall. She's the lady who did that video. I mean, it's been seen probably a hundred million times at this point.

• 1:31:31Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's weird, because I saw her and I was like, she looks really familiar and I couldn't point. She, there's an actress that looks kind of like her as well, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so she's an executive director of Greenpeace USA. And yeah, so we wanted sort of, there are five, we only wanted five experts in the film. And we wanted sort of them from these different perspectives. So one was the environmental side of things. There's obviously overlap with all of them. We wanted the economic side of things. So TK Coleman, he is an education director at Phi. We had Dave Ramsey, a sort of the money side of things, the debt especially, and how it's tied to consumerism. Danae Barahona, she is, she runs an organization called Simple Families and really focused on parenting and kids. And so we wanted to bring the family side in there as well.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  And then we had Irwin McManus, who is a pastor here in Los Angeles, who probably was, it's hard to pick a favorite, but he had some of my favorite lines in the entire film.

• 1:32:28Rich Roll?

  He's an interesting dude, because wasn't he like a fashion designer or something like that? He has, he has his whole other, he's like a designer, he does all this other stuff.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he still does. He just launched a new, like, super minimalist clothing line. And he's, he talks about intentional living in ways that, they're just really profound. And I was just really grateful to have that opportunity to sit with him. He's been on our podcast a couple of times too. TK has been on our podcast, I think. You're the, you've been on there the second most. TK's been on there maybe like eight times. In fact, if I can introduce you to anyone, TK, he'll blow your socks off. The best person you could speak to about, just about anything, but especially like economics.

• 1:33:14Rich Roll?

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

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  So he's, he was sort of our economy expert in a way. And he, I wanted to juxtapose, you could call him a capitalist, although that word doesn't really mean what you would, you. It's taken on a pejorative frame in the last, you know. Five, 10 years, but I wanted to juxtapose Annie, who has probably radically different beliefs from TK and show that they overlap and literally overlapped in the film together. And even though they disagreed about some things where she talks about growth and infinite growth and then he immediately sort of rebutts that by, by talking about, I don't think the problem is growth and, and he goes into what he, he thinks the problem is.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  And so we wanted some opinions that, we didn't want it to be like the, the yes man show, right? I wanted to learn something from these people. And Erwin, he really helps solidify the theme of the film. You know, it's a film, as Ryan said earlier, about starting over. He has a line in there about the shaking the etch a sketch thing that Ryan talked about, but that, that we should all, we all have the, not should, there's no should. We all have the opportunity.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  I like how you caught yourself there.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 1:34:57Rich Roll?

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

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  Hmm. I mean, I think Josh said it. It's about starting over. I mean, it is this film for every single person. I think some, every single person will get something out of it, but I think who it's going to help the most is someone who's in a situation right now and they need some emotional leverage to start over. I think this film will help them do that.

• 1:35:22Rich Roll?

  Just the nudge they need.

• 1:35:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  I think that, I think some people, I don't think the film is for everyone, as Ryan just said, but it's for anyone who's sort of dissatisfied by the status quo, whatever status quo they've created for themselves. We're overburdened, right? And a lot of that has to do with stuff. But I think it also has to do with toxic relationships. I think it has to do with debt. There are all these burdens. We've taken them on. We've picked up all this baggage. But we can also set it down. It might take some time to set it down, especially with debt. You know, in the first film, in Minimalism, I talked about like, I had almost half a million dollars worth of debt. I was making 200 grand a year in Dayton, Ohio. But I was spending like 220 grand a year, like whatever they would let me spend.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  And so I had massive amounts of debt as a result. And I had to sort of set that burden down. It took some time, but you know, the best way to do that is to stop spending, to stop whatever excess is going on. We can't add our way to contentment, to joy, to peace. It's always about subtraction.

• 1:36:34Rich Roll?

  The timing is very interesting because we're all at home. And I think with that comes a natural inclination to do a little bit of inventory, you know, on how we're living our lives and what is our relationship to our job, to our profession, when you're not going into an office every day or into a workplace in the manner in which you're accustomed to. That interruption of the flow or the routine, I think, is triggering a lot of people to be more reflective about how they're spending their time and their resources, et cetera. So to the point about like the nudge or the, you know, the kind of, the gentle, you know, push towards these ideas. I feel like people are primed for this now.

• 1:37:18Rich Roll?

  And it is a moment of radical change. You know, everybody's like, or not everybody, but you know, a lot of people are thinking about this in terms of when are we going to get back to the way it was? It's not going back to the way it was. We are forever altered. Some things will normalize to a certain extent. But the idea that everyone's going to migrate back into office buildings, I think, is lunacy. Like, that's not going to happen. We've now figured out how to pursue livings from Zoom and these tools that we have. So what does that look like down the line? And how can we reflect on this to, you know, reform our relationship with the outside world so that it can be healthier and it can be more fulfilling and more purposeful? And the movie.

• 1:38:04Rich Roll?

  You know, really speaks to that in a profound way, and I think it's gonna help a lot of people.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Normal wasn't working for a lot of us, and this gave us the opportunity to realize that. It was a forced pause for many of us, even for me and Ryan. You know, we, we had a whole tour planned this year and, and, and the film was gonna come out earlier, etc. And we had, you know, a bunch of speaking things we were gonna do, all, you know. There aren't corporations that are meeting, so we couldn't go speak at, at these places. And, um, and so it was a pause for us as well, but it's not to take away either what is,

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  what some people are faced with. My brother, you know, he, he is back in Ohio. He works in a factory, he worked in a factory, uh, building cabinets. It was a well-paying job and he was talented and skilled, uh, and, and he was doing that. That whole thing shut down, it's not coming back. He went and got a part-time job at Amazon so he could pay, you know, feed his, his daughters. And, and now he's working third shift at a meatpacking plant because that's like his only reality right now. That's how he, and talk about one of the most difficult jobs you could have.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  And, and doing a third shift, no less. But, uh, so a lot of people are affected by this. And so, well, I don't want to go back to where we were. I, I also don't wanna see more, more suffering. And, and so I think what's happening right now is Ryan and I for the last decade have been asking this question. What is essential? And now a lot more people are all of a sudden asking, in fact, the term's even out there. Essential worker, right?

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  But what is essential in my home? What is essential in my life? What is essential on my calendar? What is essential? And that's what I hope to illuminate with, with this film. Help people ask that question. What is essential? Yeah.

• 1:40:01Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good place to put a pin in it for now, until you guys come back next time.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  Rich, I love you, brother. Thank you so much.

• 1:40:07Rich Roll?

  Love you guys too. I have so much. Love for you guys as people and respect for this mission that you've shouldered for the world. You guys are great servants to humanity and it's a privilege to talk to you. So, thank you.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  Right back at you, brother.

• 1:40:21Rich Roll?

  Wind in your sails, my friends.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  Thank you, brother. Thank you so much.

• 1:40:25Rich Roll?

  Before we sign off, where's the best place for people to learn more about you guys? Where would you like them to connect in addition to, obviously, checking out Less is More on Netflix and also if you didn't see it the first time around, Minimalism, the original movie?

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Well, Ryan has an OnlyFans he just started.

• 1:40:45Rich Roll?

  That, I am so here for that.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  You said you wouldn't say a word about that on Rich's Podcast.

• 1:40:53Rich Roll?

  Audience supportive.

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  That's right. So many people adore me.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  Talk about minimalism. All right, all right. All right, just theminimalists.com. You can find our podcasts, books, films, everything else. It's all in one hub, theminimalists.com.

• 1:41:09Rich Roll?

  Nice. Cool. Thanks, you guys.

• 1:41:11Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:41:12Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  See you.

• 1:41:14Rich Roll?

  Thanks. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, you can visit the episode page at richroll.com. And you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter at Rich Roll. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the

• 1:41:58Rich Roll?

  footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis. Portraits by Ali Rogers and Davy Greenberg. Graphic elements courtesy of Jessica Miranda. Copyrighting by Georgia Whaley. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Piotte, Trapper Piotte, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Blatz. Namaste.