technology now does allow you to do, make sure it doesn't get siphoned off on the pipe lauren along the way -- pipeline along the way, there's actually much longer positive effects on poverty alleluation at least in those -- alleviation at least in those parts of the world. i think ideas that are subject to testing and empirical modeling and proof are the ideas we should be looking for these days. >> all right. well, gentlemen, thank you for joining us in tucson. i know we kept you business -- busy this weekend. [applause] and both of them will be out in sales and signing area one at the u of a bookstore tent if you want to engage in some more conversation and, from their point of view, buy their book. i'm sure they'll sign it, so, thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] >> next, a final panel from today's coverage of the tucson festival of books. authors joshua millburn and ryan nicodemus. they provide an alternative route to the american dream. this is about an hour. [inaudible conversations] >> we'll get started now. this is the, well, first of all, welcome to the tucson festival of books, although by this point i should say thanks for coming to the festival of books, because it's almost over. this is the minimalists, is the name of the program today. this room is sponsored by the city of tucson and rick engineering. anyone here from the city of tucson or rick engineering we should wave at? well, i guess it was sponsored by them. after the presentation today, there'll be a signing in the area, signing area number one, and instead of trying to rush up here if you want to with questions afterwards which a lot of people like to do, the two authors will be led, as it were, over to that signing area, and you can have books signed and questions then if you'd like. my name's frank me see ya. our two authors today are joshua millburn and ryan nicodemus. "all that remains" is their book, and it's a study of minimalism, so that's it. go ahead, guys. [laughter] >> i'm going to stand up. hello. thanks for coming out. wow, thank you. [laughter] my name is ryan nicodemus, and this is the joshua joshua millb, yeah, thanks so much for coming out out. josh is going to read from our new book. we are going to do some questions and answers, we've dot the mics there for it, but before we do that, i want to tell you guys a story about how we became the minimalists, if you guys want to hear it. i heard a couple yeses, so i'm going to go with that. thank you, sir. [laughter] so i want everyone here to imagine your life a year from now, two years from now, five years from now. what do you think it will look like? imagine a life with less, less stuff, less clutter, less dress and debt -- less stress and debt and discontent. a life with fewer distractions. now imagine a life with more, more time, more meaningful relationships, more growth and contribution and contentment. a life of passion unencumbered by the trappings of the chaotic world around you. well, what you're imagining is an intentional life. it's not a perfect life, not even an easy life, but a simple one. what you're imagining is a rich life, the kind of rush that has nothing to do with wealth. you know, it's funny, i used to think rich was earning $50,000 a year. that was my 18-year-old self. [laughter] be then when i started climbing the corporate ladder in my early 20s, i quickly began earning 50 grand, but i didn't feel rich, something went wrong. so i had to go back to the drawing board, and i figured out i didn't adjust for inflation. [laughter] so maybe 65,000 was rich, maybe 90,000, maybe six figures. or maybe owning a bunch of stuff. maybe that was rich. well, whatever rich was, i knew that once i got there, i would finally be happy. so as i made more money, i spent more money all in the pursuit of the american dream. all in the pursuit of this thing called happiness. but the closer i got the farther away happiness was. five years ago my entire life was different from what it is now. radically different. i had everything i ever wanted. i had everything i was supposed to have. i had an impressive job title with a very respectable corporation. i managed hundreds of employees. i earned a six-figure income. i bought a shiny new car every couple years. i owned a huge three-bedroom, two bathroom condo, it even had two living rooms. i have no idea why a single guy needs two living rooms. >> he had a cat. [laughter] >> i was living the american dream with a cat. everyone around me said i was successful, but i was only ostensibly successful. you see, i also had a bunch of things that were hard to see from the outside. although i earned a lot of money, i also had a lot of debt. but chasing the american dream cost me more than money. my life was filled with stress and anxiety and discontent. i was miserable. i may have looked successful, but i certainly didn't feel successful. and it got be to a point where i didn't know what was important anymore. but one thing was clear, there was this gaping void in my life. so i tried to fill that void the same way many people do, with stuff. lots of stuff. i was filling the void with consumer purchases. i bought new cars, new electronics, closets full of expensive clothes. i bought home purposeture, expensive home -- furniture, expensive home decorations and the latest gadgets. and when i didn't have enough cash in the banks, i paid with credit cards. i was spending money faster than i earned it, attempting to buy my way to happiness. and, you know, i thought i'd get there one day eventually. happiness had to be somewhere, just around the corner, right in but the stuff didn't fill the void, it widened it. and because i didn't know what was important, i continued to go further into debt, purchasing things that weren't making me happy. this went on for years. it was a terrible cycle. lather, rinse, repeat. [laughter] by my late 20s, my life on the outside, it looked great, but on the inside i was a wreck. i was several years divorced, i was up healthy -- unhealthy, i was stuck. i drank a lot. i used drugs a lot. i used as many pacifiers as i could, and i continued to work 60, 70, sometimes 80 hours a week. and i fortook some of the most important aspects of my life, my health or my relationships or thought about things that i was passionate about. and worst of all, i felt stagnant. i wasn't growing, and i certainly wasn't contributing. my life lacked meaning, purpose, passion. if you would have asked what i was passionate about, i would have looked at you like a deer in headlights. what am i passionate about? i had no clue. i was living paycheck to paycheck, living for a paycheck. living for stuff. living for a career that i didn't love. but i wasn't really living at all. i was depressed. then sometime when i was approaching 30, i noticed something different at my best friend of 20-something years. [laughter] josh seemed happy for the first time in a really long time. like truly happy, ecstatic. but i didn't want understand why -- i didn't understand why, because we had both worked at the same corporation side by side throughout our 20s, both climbing the rings. and he was just as miserable as me. to boot, he had just gone through two of the most difficult events of his life; his mother just passed away, and his marriage ended both in the same month. he wasn't supposed to be happy. and he definitely wasn't supposed to be happier than me. [laughter] so i did what any good best friend would do, i took josh out to a nice lunch -- we went to subway -- [laughter] and i asked him a question while we were sitting there eating. i asked him, josh, why the hell are you so happy? he spent the next 20 minutes telling me about this thing called minimalism. he talked about how he spent the last few months simplifying his life, getting the clutter out of the way to make room for what was truly important. and then he introduced me to an entire community of people that had done the same thing. he introduced me to colin wright, this 24-year-old entrepreneur who traveled to a new country every four months carrying everything he owned, joshua becker, a husband and father of two with a full-time job and a car and a house in suburban vermont. then there was courtney carver, this 40-year-old wife and mother in salt lake city and this guy named leo, a 38-year-old husband and father of six in san francisco. although these people were leading considerably different lives, people from different backgrounds with churn and families -- children and families and different work situations, i noticed that they all had at least two things in common. first, they were living deliberate, meaningful lives. they were passionate and purpose-driven. they seemed much richer than any of the so-called rich guys i worked with in the corporate world. and second, they attributed their meaningful lives to this thing called minimalism. so me being the problem solving guy that i am, i thought, okay, i'll do it. i'll become a money mall u.s. so i look up at josh, i excitedly declawed, all right, man, i'll do it, dude, i'm a minimalist. now what do i do. see, i don't want to spend months paring down my possessions like he had. that was great for him, but i wanted faster results. so we came up with this crazy idea called a packing party, and the idea was this: josh and i would pack all my belongings in my 2,000 square foot condo as if i were moving, and then i would unpack only the items i needed over the next three weeks. so josh literally helped me box up everything; my clothes, my kitchen ware, my electronics, my tv, my towels, my framed photographs and paintings, even my furniture. everything. we literally pretended like i was moving. so after about nine hour cans and a couple pizza deliveries, everything was packed. there josh and i were sitting in my second living room feeling exhausted, staring at boxes stacked halfway to my 12-foot ceiling. everything i owned. every single thing that i had worked hard for over the last decade was sitting there in that room just boxes stacked on top of boxes, stacked on top of boxes. now be, each box was labeled so i would know where i needed to go, junk drawer number one, bedroom closet, kitchen ware, junk drawer number five. you know how that goes. so i spent the next 21 days unpacking only the items i needed; my toothbrush, my bed and bed sheets, some clothes for work, the furniture i actually used, a tool set. just the things that added value to my life. after three weeks 80% of my stuff was still sitting in those boxes. just sitting there, unaccessed. you know, i looked at those boxes, and i couldn't even remember what was in most of them. all those things that were supposed to make me happy, they weren't doing their job. so i donated and i sold all of it. and, you know, i started to feel rich for the first time in my life. i started to feel rich once i got everything out of the way to pick room for everything that -- to make room for everything that remains. a couple years ago josh and i moved from ohio to montana into a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and we started to write a book. and in our new book, "everything that remains," we wrote about our perm struggles, about -- personal struggles, about our journey from suit and tie corporate guys to minimalists. but our new book is not a how-to book, it's a why-to book. while josh and i wanted to tell our stories with this book, we also wanted to help people bridge the gap between a discontented life to a meaningful life. not a perfect life, not even an easy life, but a simple one. so that is, that's our story. i'm going to ask josh to come up -- well, i guess he'll read sitting down, but thank you so much. [applause] >> hello. wow, thank you all for coming out. this is really awesome. i tend to skip past the first two chapters of the book whenever i read aloud, because i can't get through them without crying. it's a very uplifting book. [laughter] actually, it is. but as ryan mentioned, i was kind of at a low point in my life with my mother passing away and my marriage ending, and actually the book starts in, the first chapter starts in the corporate world which makes me want to cry for a completely different reason. but, yeah, and i was at this place where i had to start reassessing my life with those two traumatic events. so i'm going to skip ahead to the third chapter. but be first, just so you know how the book is structured, it's written as a first person narrative, from my perspective. it's about 200 pages, but there are about 100 interruptions from ryan. >> well, we like to interrupt each other a lot. so -- [laughter] >> and so his interruptions i'm not going to read so i don't sound like a crazy person, but know they are there. also there's a social imperative i'm supposed to make eye contact even though i'm reading to you, but i lose my place if i do that, so just know that i am acutely aware that you are there. [laughter] this is a little snippet from the third chapter. it's called "the american tragedy." and it's november 2009 in dayton, ohio. it's sunday afternoon, and i'm busy sulking in my new downtown patch hour pad. it's a dark apartment stocked with brand new furniture and my own sullen disbelief. my mother's death still hangs in the air around me. and now during the same month, my six-year marriage is ending. but even while rome is burning, there's somehow time for shopping at ikea. [laughter] see, when i moved out of the house earlier this week toting my many personal belongings and large bins and boxes and 50-gallon garbage bags, my first inclination was, of course, to purchase the things i still "needed" for my new place. you know, just the basics; field, hygiene products, shower curtain, towels, a bed and, oh, i need a couch and a matching leather chair and a love seat and a lamp and a desk and another lamp for over there. and, oh, don't forget about the sideboard that matches the december success and a dresser for the bedroom, and i need a coffee table and a couple end tables, and a tv stand for the tv i still need to buy, and don't these look nice, what do you call them? throat pillows? throw pillows. well, that makes more sense, doesn't it. and now that i think about it, i'm going to want my apartment to be my style. you know, my own mow tiff. so -- motif. so i need certain decoratives to spruce up the decor. but wait, what is my style exactly? and do these stainless steel picture frames end body that -- embody that particular style? does this sketch capture my edgy but professional vibe? exactly how edgy am i? what espresso maker defines me as a man? [laughter] does the fact that i'm even asking these questions e preclude me from being a, quote, man's man? how many plates and cups and bowls should a man own? i guess i need a dining room table too, right in and bath mats and a rug for the entryway, and what about that one thing, that thing that's sort of like a rug but longer? yeah, a runner. i think i'm going need one of those. and i'm also going to need -- what else do i need? all right, then there's a long section, like 12 pages or so, about my marriage mending which i'm going to skip past. there are no kleenexes up here. i'm going to skip to the end of that third chapter. i don't know if any of you have had a dream that sort of woke you up. not in a literal sense, but a figurative sense. i didn't realize that it was that profound at the time, but going back and writing about it after i literally woke up, i learned system things about myself. so toward the end of that chapter, i'd moved out on my own for about a week, and i was sort of experiencing that aloneness for the first time. and so i was reassessing my life, obviously. so this is from the end of that third chapter. it's hard to sleep in my new apartment. an iceberg moon presides outside my one doe. the stars are out, so bright they've rendered the streetlights redundant. my ikea bed frame and assembled, and i'm alone again, memorizing the ceiling. according to the clock dripping time onto the night stand, it's two a.m. now, and i'm just lying here, supine beneath the stillness of my room, or drowning in every word i never said, a scholar of the past. something has to change. everything has to change. breathing into the room's stale air, i look at the window and feel threatened by the world ponte beyond its paines. eventually -- panes. eventually, my eyes closed. throughout the night i take the dreams as they come, sorting through them one by one, each dream more real and more intense than the previous. most vivid is a dream of my drive home. well, back to the place that used to be my home. down empty back roads and snow-laden fields under drained midwest clouds at twilight. the sky itself appears close to the earth, skull colored, sprawled and stardust and angst. i'm driving faster than my instruments should allow. an unemployed scarecrow stands perched in one of the barren fields waiting to do what he was meant to do with his life. the car seems self-propelled, dissociated from my physical body. the arch lamps on the road are forcing me to rely on my natural instincts and the vehicle's high beams to illuminate the journey. and when the headlights begin to flicker and the blackening sky wins its battle against the day, i can't see where to turn or what to do. my instincts fail. the needle on the dash reads empty, but the journal into the darkness doesn't stop. and then the car seems to buckle beneath me, and the driving surface changes as i veer off the road, making it impossible to know which way was the right way and which way was not. i couldn't have planned for this. i clutched the steering wheel with both hands and jammed the foot brake as hard as i can, waiting for god's wrath and hoping to make it to the other side with the least amount of damage possible. the sound of the cataclysm doesn't pez any to have the sleeks or metal-on metal towering i expect, just sounds of broken glass, the windows shattering in beautiful dissonance, disobeying the physical laws of the car crash, shattering before impact, breaking in prep rawtion for the collision. not waiting for the accident, but bracing for it. there is a cross of flowers on the roadside, and now everything is still. and in the darkness someone is opening the door for me. it's the out-of-work scarecrow. outside the car there is a sternness of judgment in the barrens. one of the road's arch lamps cast shadows on the bleak field les around us. somehow the front of the car has wrapped itself around a telephone pole. the hood is mangled. the rise of the smoke and steam from a half a dozen fluids reaching to the sky and the stars and whatever else is out there spectating this event. my hands are bleeding, and i can't form a clear picture of what has happened. it is cold. i wonder whether it's supposed to be this cold? the scarecrow is standing next to me on the outskirts of the where cannage, and in a dry -- wreckage, and in a dry monotone he says, you were going in the wrong direction. it's impossible for me to disagree. thank you. [applause] >> so shortly after that i discovered this thing called minimalism. i fell down that rabbit hole online, the beautiful, beautiful rabbit hole of the internet and found that whole community that ryan mentioned of people living these radically different lives with the families and different age groups, and they all had this thing called minimalism in common. and that was phenomenal, so i started paring down my life. and i talk about that in the fourth chapter of the book and sort of their separate journeys, those people that i discovered. and i began reflecting on that after i'd spent six to eight months really paring down my life. so the fifth chapter, which i'm going to read a small nip pet from as well and then we'll do some q&a, but i'm going to read a little pit from that after my reflecting on this thing called minimalism. so i was in new york for a business trip which was just an overwhelming city, and so i got to write about that experience. it, this chapter is the fifth chapter, it's called "strong moves slow." the it's june, 2010, new york city, new york. it had been quiet on the subway. what a nice surprise. of course, i don't comprehend the silence until now after already exiting the j train. i'm approaching times square, swimming vigorously against the stream of people and the spill of electric light. everything seems pfaff nateed. caffeinated. somehow all this noise is unable to wake the dead though. heads tilt downward, faces lost in glowing screens, technology turning people into zombies. the lights ripple in the high noon heat, bending and flickering and dancing all around me. a rainbow of neon that rivals the sun and the cerebral sky overhead. it's a new york sunburn summer, 101 degrees with humidity -- which i guess isn't that hot here at all really -- [laughter] that's like winter here. [laughter] 150 degrees with humidity. [laughter] the air -- see that's the nice thing, you can edit as you go. >> the air water logged and dense. it's saturday, a week before my 29th birthday. the world is clearer as of late. the last six months have been spent simplifying, paring down. it's a slow process. by now, i've abandoned a shed-load of material possessions, maybe 90% of my belongings. maybe more. at first, i started small. i asked myself, what if you removed one material possession from your life, just one, each day for a month? what would happen? the result, i unloaded way more than 30 items in the first 30 days, like way, way more. it became a kind of personal chang, discovering what i could -- challenge, discovering what i could get rid of, what i could get out of by way. how many unneeded things i could remove from my hoard. so i searched my rooms and closets, cabinets and hallways, car and office rummaging for items to part with. pondering each artifact in my apartment, i asked one simple question: does this thing add value to my life? once i gained momentum, embracing minimalism got easier by the day. the more i sold or donated, the freer and happier and lighter i felt. and the more i wanted to throw overboard. a few shirts led to half a closet. a handful of dvds led to deep sixing almost an entire library of discs. a few decorative items led to junk drawers who shed their adjective. ultimately, though, the purpose of minimalism is not just to declutter. no, the purpose has much more to do with the benefits we experience once we're on the other side of the decluttering. hence, removing the clutter is not the end result. it is merely the first step. sure, you might feel a weight lifted at first, but you don't experience lasting contentment by just getting rid of your stuff. minimalism doesn't work like that. it is possible to get rid of everything you own and still be utterly miserable. to come home to an empty house and sulk after removing all your pacifiers. so as my belongings fell by the wayside as i moved past decluttering, i had to start facing life's tougher questions. questions like, when did i give so much mooning to my material -- meaning to my material possessions? what is truly important in my life? why am i so discop tented? discop tented? who's the person i want to become, and how will i i define my own success? these are tough questions with difficult answers. but they've proven to be much more important than just trashing my excess stuff. see, if we don't answer these questions carefully, rigorously, then the closet we just decluttered will be brimming with new purchases in the not too distant future. it's weird, with the excess out of the way, i guess that you could say i'm a minimalist now. although if you visited my home, you probably wouldn't leap up and proclaim, this guy's a minimalist. no, you'd probably just say he's tidy. [laughter] and you'd ask how i keep things so organized, and i'd simply grin and tell you that i don't own many things, but everything i do own adds real value to my life. each of my belongings, my witchen ware, my furniture, my clothes, my car has a function. as a minimalist, every possession serves a purpose or brings me joy. and with three decades of clutter receding part into my rear view each day, i think that it's safe to say i'm no longer possessed by my possessions. thank you. [applause] >> so now we'd like to -- [inaudible conversations] we're agreeing it's a half hour left. what we'd like to do now is take requests from the audience for the authors. there are microphones if you want to walk up to those and ask a question. and i'd like to start off by asking, i was very struck when i heard -- when i read that last passage. as an architect, minimalism is something that we kind of embraced when i was a young architect in school. we were actually trained in the old school of architecture, and we even went further back than that to the turn of the last century, and i'm thinking of robert morris' famous advice to designers at that time was never have anything in your life that doesn't serve a purpose or isn't beautiful. and i said, gee, i wonder if this guy's ever read robert morris. it was kind of, did you come to minimummism through -- money mallism through d publish mallism or through acknowledging these people you know? again, being an architect, i'll tell you right now it's not the world's most common criteria when designing someone's life that they want to be a money mall u.s. so i was really interested how you got there. >> twitter. [laughter] >> which, actually is a different kind of minimalism. you're forced to express yourself in this radically attenuated format. it's like 140 characters. anyone here on twitter at all? three of you? laugh a after -- [laughter] minimal. >> yeah. >> we're @the minimalists if you want to follow us on twitter. but i wrote about that the guy, colin wright, that ryan mentioned during his talk who -- it was terrifying because he owned 51 things. and he counted it sort of as a joke because people kept asking, but really the reason he owned only 15 things, it wasn't -- 51 things, it wasn't about the number, he travels to a country every four months, and he doesn't even pick the country. he's a writer and a memoirist, so his read aers pick where he's going to go. they vote and send him to a new country. he's in iceland right now, and he was in romania before that and a bunch of other or places. so everything he owned he had to be able to carry with him. if he had a kitchen table, it'd be really hard to get on the plane. [laughter] and so, yeah, i saw that and -- i said i have no desire to be a peripatetic writer who travels to a new country, but i wrote function for a long time. he said this thing called minimalism allowed him to pursue what he was passionate about. i said, wow, i have no time to pursue what i'm passionate about because i'm so busy acquiring and taking care of my things and working to have this identity, working to buy more things, and i was so focused on the accumulation of stuff that i didn't have time to focus on my passion which was writing fiction. and so i said, well, this sounds kind of cool. let me see if there's anyone else who isn't a young guy traveling the world who's a minimalist, and that's when we stumbled across all these different people and found out that this life sometime of my mallism was applicable to anyone with an open mind. >> yeah. i was really struck by that particular passage where you described him with 51 objects, and be there was someone with 30 objects, isn't there? and i was reading this at home on my i ipad because i never buy book withs. i guess i'm a book minimalist. [laughter] and i really like them electronically. but i was reading it at my desk, and i was sitting there in front of my computer and my ipad and my phone that are all hooked in, and they all have a charger, and that was okay, because they're useful. and then i looked at my pencil cups, and here i am with four pencil cups, and they've each got about 50 pens in them. and i thought how many of those can i write with at once? so it's interesting how this creeps up on you. and as you were going through this and you've talked a little bit about it, talked about money and credit cards and that kind of thing, have you given thought to the economic benefits of a smaller, simpler environment? you know, one of the things i tell clients is, you know, if you do a house and we do it 900 square feet, i'll guarantee you it's going to be cheaper than if we build you 5,000 square feet. >> right. >> yeah. >> so did you guys follow up on that in your own minds or study? >> yeah, no, there are certainly some, you know, natural benefits that come along with living more deliberately and living with just the things that you need. yeah, not just economically speaking. i was able to -- so once, it's not like i just quit my job and started a blog. that's the worst advice anyone could ever give you. it took me a year and a half to really kind of break away from that corporate atmosphere. but during the year and a half i was applying these principles of minimalism, and by was able to pay off a lot of debt, bills in advance, i was getting rid of other major bills that i had like i went from a car payment to getting a car that i didn't have a car payment. there certainly are bin fits, and there's also environmental benefits that come along with it. the less you use, the less you consume, the less things you're putting in landfills and the less of a carbon footprint you use, so there are certainly additional benefits. >> yeah, you're certainly going to have that kind of collateral benefit to yourself and the rest of the world, and that's -- it's an interesting notion to each consider that. what -- to even consider that. what, when you talk about the things you need versus the things you want -- let me get back to that one. i do have another burning question. i was reading book, and you talked about the cbs, you know? you all noticed as you go through any store anywhere that there seems to be three million ways to store cds. none of them ever hold as many c ds as you have, so you have to buy be three of them. so i had previously even before reading your book i had said i hate these things, and i had a 200cd changer to solve the problem, but i had 400 cds, so that didn't work. what i did is i downloaded them all, and they're on an ipod that's this big. do you think that makes sense, that kind of electronic book, cds, photos, all those kind of things? >> i do. i think something that's really neat that is happening with the old digital revolution or whatever you want to call it is we're moving from a culture of ownership, at least in the internet world, to a culture of access. i find that access is so much more important. i could care less whether now i own the dvd than if i just have access to the movie whether that's watching it on your ipad or on your tv or whatever, but having access to that is more important than having the physical object. the cool thing about that is is that's not a new concept, right? i mean, hundreds of years ago we had communities who showered a lot of their own resources -- shared a lot of their own resources. we've become very individualized, although there are a lot of community resources now with the internet where you can have access to things that you may have not had access before like free cycle is one way that, uni, if you really -- you know, if you really need a chain saw for one job, you don't have to purchase a chain saw. you can go to, you know, craig's list or free cycle where someone else has that. and you can bring it back and store it. we had a reader in albuquerque who says he he uses craig's list as his storage lock or. he just -- if he uses that chain saw, he'll take it back to craig's list and give it to someone else who can get value out of it. so i find that that's happened especially in the digital world, but hopefully that will bleed over into the physical world as well. >> you both have been on this tour several tens of cities at this point. >> looking at 120. >> twenty cities, they've done this before. what is your answer to people who say, well, a lot of people don't want to share. like you really could -- how many of you have a guest bedroom in your house? so what if you lived next door to somebody, two other people, and you shareed a guest bedroom because you only use it when your mother-in-law comes anyhow, and what do you say to people that don't think sharing is all that good of an idea? i mean, it's a cultural -- your asking people to bridge a really deep cultural-held belief that they need this stuff, you know? >> right. >> and not just the items, but spaces and all kinds of things. >> yeah. >> is there an answer for that? >> well, i mean, i would say we're not trying to convert or prosthelytize. i don't think you can convert anyone to a minimalist. i wouldn't force them into sharing. but, you know, i will say that there are, there are very similar communities that do just that with, like, air b&b or with couch surfing where you already have the communities who are showering the extra rooms or giving rooms at a discounted price. maybe i would say maybe you can use a few extra bucks a month by representing out that m room when it's empty and someone else needs to use it, something like that. what would you said? >> yeah, man, if you don't want to share, you don't have to. [laughter] >> we're all adults. >> no one has to share their bedroom. >> we're always taught like, you know, in kindergarten, make sure you share with other kids because i think instinctually we tend to hold on to things. but we also all experience the benefits of contribution. if you're corrupting beyond yourself, there's a -- contributing beyond yourself, there's a cliche, giving is living, right? and i didn't realize that until i really started doing it. finding ways to add value to other people's lives. you know, it was really interesting with -- after ryan's packing party we did what any two best friends would do, we started a blog -- [laughter] and it was just because our perspectives on life had changed quite a bit. and so there was this thing that we found a lot of value in. and we said maybe some other people can find value in it. so we started the minimalists.com, and that first month 52 people showed up. it was amazing, 52 people. [laughter] because i wrote fiction for a decade, and the only people who read my stuff were people who sent me rejection letters. [laughter] and then they did my story, ryan's story, our separate stories were resonating with a few dozen people, and then 52 turned into 500, 500 became 5,000, and that was three years ago, and now -- last year two million people visited our web site and found value in our words. when you add value to someone's life, they want to share that message with their friends and family to try to add value to their lives. i think adding value is a basic human instinct. so whether it's finding ways to contribute because you're sharing something in your life or you are finding a way to, you know, donate your time or just find ways to help other people out, it's kind of contagious. >> yeah. i think the value issue is pretty interesting, and you spoke to it a little bit when we were in the author prep room, and i'll mention it again is that -- and ask you to comment on the notion of how would somebody, how would one of you go about determining what's valuable? is there a pattern? is what's valuable to me valuable to either one of you, and is there a judgment, is it something that is really a philosophical decision the individual needs to make? which i can guess the answer, but go ahead. [laughter] >> i really wish it was as easy as saying, well, you know, if you only have a cat, you know, you can own 167 items, and, you know, that's the number. and if you have a child, you can own 30 items per child, and, i mean, it's just not that simple. i would say that it is definitely, it depends on your circumstances and situation, you know, for a single guy i don't need a lot. when i get married and have kids, i'm going to need more because that's going to come along with that. what adds value to my life may not add value to your life. what adds value to my life today may not add value a year from now or two years from now and vice versa. so i think it is constantly asking that question of does this thing add value to my life. josh mentioned that earlier. i mean, so now when i, you know, look at my possessions, you know, i have this junk drawer. i wish, again, that you could just own a certain number of things and you're a minimalist, and here's your certificate, and now everything's fine. i still have a junk drawer that i put cables or pens or whatever. and once it gets to a certain point i look at that, and i think, okay, when's the last time i used that? when's the last time that i wrote with that pen that i stole from the bank on accident? [laughter] and i will start to purge those items that i'm not getting value out of or haven't used. i've got about a 90-day rule. it used to be a year when i first started kind of getting rid of stuff after the packing party, it was very difficult for me to get rid of a lot of things because i wanted to hold on to a lot just in case. you know, like i'm -- after the packing party and after those three weeks of unpacking i asked josh to come over and help me kind of purge some stuff. and like over and he's like sweeping stuff into these trash bags, and i'm like, dude -- >> it's really easy to get rid of other people's stuff. [laughter] >> i'm like, dewed, i might need that mug that says world's number one granddad even though i've got 20 other mugs that i don't use. i thought to myself, okay, i'm not -- i can't sit here and hold on to a bunch of just in case items which are three dangerous words, just in case. so i gave myself permission to get rid of anything that i hadn't used in a year. to so that covered the seasonal items that i had and pretty much everything else. so now i have about a 90-day rule. i guess i have a snowboard that i don't use year round, but i'll hold on to that. if the answer is no, i'll get rid of it. i'm sure there's exceptions to that rule. there's exceptions to every rule, but that's a rule that works for me most of the time. and we came up with a rule for the just in case stuff. so when josh and i went on our first tour with our first book, "minimalism: leaving a minimal life," we were gone, i think, two weeks. we drove down to florida, sprurg, and we're opening up the trunk. and i've got two duffel bags, laundry bag, and i'm just looking at them like, dude, we are hypocrites. our truck is full of crap,, and we're only bonn for two weeks -- gone for two weeks. so it turned out we had a lot of just in case stuff. we called it the 20/20 rule. we found that we can replace pretty much anything. our theory is it works 99% of the time, but for us it has worked 100% of the time. you can replace anything for $20 inless than 20 minutes -- in less than 20 minutes. and we've live inside the middle of nowhere, montana. and this rule still worked 100 percent of the time for us. >> i think the 20/20 rule is pretty interesting. again, i was impacted by this book. i just thought it was brilliant to have somebody voice that stuff. and, of course, i live about five minutes from a home depot, so my 20 clash 20 rule -- 20/20 rule is a lot better. but it is interesting, when you talk about a junk drawer, do you equate or can you speak to the notion of being neat and being a minimalist? they're not necessarily the same thing. in my mind, again, being an architect i pretend all chords should be wrapped the same way, of course, that's not the truth. so speak to that. >> i agree that they go hand in happened. i think there's a certain elegance to minimalism. it's a cleaner's net you can. like i said, you wouldn't say i'm a minimalist, you'd say i'm kind of tidy. i just don't have a bunch of junk to clutter up my house. i used to be a bit of a hoarder. i was a well organized hoarder, so i had these bins in a very ordinal system this my basement and spare bedrooms, so i had a lot of things. you probably wouldn't have said i was a hoarder, you would have just said i had a lot of bins full of stuff. i didn't have, i didn't get much use or value out of the vast majority of the things i owned. and i realized that they were kind of weighing me down, and i was paying -- i even had a storage locker. it's strange, a very strange industry, right? there are these climate-controlled storage lockers. i depress so that's your -- guess that's so your stuff can feel good about itself. [laughter] >> so it can be comfortable. >> right. oh, we have -- >> yeah. just go to the microphone there, and they'll be able to get you on -- >> howdy. >> yes, ma'am, go ahead. >> hi. i really am appreciating your work you're doing. >> thank you so much. >> and you're both very creative in expressing your works. i really appreciate that that too. funny. i was just thinking about my stuff, of course. i'm sure we all are in this room. and i'm also a psychotherapist, so i was thinking about it sort of from that per be spective too. and -- perspective too. and i was thinking about my shed which -- i call it the scary shed because it's got all my stuff in there, but it's stuff from my former -- it's stuff from by identity, of like my backpack which i never backpack anymore. my bicycle. and i don't bicycle anymore. >> yeah. >> but when i think about, okay, you're never going to backpack again, just get rid of it, you're 62, you know? i want comfort or whatever. but i feel so sad. and i wonder if you guys could address that issue of grief. and loss that has to accompany letting go of your stuff that you felt was -- you understand what i -- [laughter] >> yeah. >> good question. >> can i tell a story? >> you don't really have a choice. i was trying to give you the illusion of choice. >> yeah, we're waiting. go ahead. >> no, appreciate that, thank you. so the second chapter of the book is a lot easier for me to talk about than read. my mother passed away, she had just moved from ohio to florida, and when she moved down there, she found out she had lung cancer, and a few months later, she was gone. and i had to go down there to deal with her stuff for the first time. i had to deal with these sentimental audiotape items, right? the emotion that was tied up in these things. so i went down there, it was the first time i realized i actually had to deal with her material possessions. unit realize ital d corrupt realize it until after she passed. and so i went down to st. petersburg. she had about three apartments' worth of stuff in her one apartment. and she wasn't a hoarder, you know? she had nice things. it wasn't like -- i mean, she doesn't have cats in the freezer or anything. [laughter] >> did you even look in the freezer? [laughter] >> yeah. so i had to, i looked at her antique furbture ander kitchen ware, and she had more doilies than you could count. just all the stuff. and i found that i was going to have to do something with it, but i couldn't comingle mom's stuff with my stuff because it was just by wife and i, so i called u-haul, i rented a very large truck, in fact, they didn't have it in stock, i had to wait until the next day for u-haul to show up, and i called a storage locker back the ohio, because i didn't want to mixer stuff with my stuff. and as i was waiting for u-haul to show up, i was going through her things. i found four boxes under her bed, and this sounds like a bad mystery now. they were labeled one, two, three, four. and we're out of time. have a good day. [laughter] no, and so i'm like what the heck would be in these boxes, right? it was my old elementary school paperwork, and these boxes had been unopened. it was grades one through four, and the boxes had been unopened for 20 years. and then i realized that she was trying to hold on to a piece of me and those things. wait a minute, i was never those boxes, right? and so i got a little frustrated. okay, she was trying to hold on to the memories that were in the thing. the first time i realized this, wait a minute though, the memories aren't in the things, they'll never be in the things. the memories are in us. and i got mad at myself because i realized i was doing the same thing. instead of putting a box under my bed, i was putting all of her stuff in a big box with a padlock called a storage locker. and if i'm honest with myself, i knew i was never really going to access it. i was going to pay $150 to have her stuff just in case. and so i spent the next 12 days donating or selling her stuff. and i found that so many other people got value from it, and i never would have gotten value from it. the stuff i donated other people were able to use, the stuff i sold, the money i used to donate to the two charities that really helped her with her chemo and radiation, so other people got value from that stuff. even though it was really hard to part with, i realized that the memories aren't in the things, they're in us. >> yeah. that was, i loved reading that part of the book. i just, i got -- when i got done with that, i just kind of -- i don't know about, well, i can assume most of you have had a parent that's passed on, and you've gone into their house, and you go through that. and i was thinking about my parents when they passed away and how we had to deal with their stuff of, and i said to myself, boy, it would be great if dominic, my son, never had to do that. and i started looking at those boxes. you know, he loves me, i know, but does he really need the program from every high school bl football game i ever played in? i don't think so. i'm not even sure i need 'em. ma'am. >> i guess i have two questions. when you think about collections of things, like i have a record collection, and it's huge, it takes up a lot of space, so -- and i don't think i -- i know i don't need all of them, but i have reasons to keep them, you know? so that's one question. and then the other one is do you find that you, that you've had to kind of minimalize your, the people that you're around? you know, kind of narrow it down to who is really adding value to your life like you were saying? >> yeah. >> yeah. those are good questions. i'll take the first one. [laughter] i'll take the easy one. [laughter] .. >> it sounds like you get a lot of value out of your books are is what i would say about any type of collection. if you get value out of some of them, then keep some of your records. and i still read a lot of hard books. i have a really well curated book collection instead of having a stack of 50 books in my room i have a stack of five books pretty few of them are reference books. once i get done with one hand and onto someone else or give it to a donor or someone. but i have a very well curated book collection. so i would encourage you to do the same with a record to use, what have you listened to in however many years are in make a rule for yourself.