Technology now does allow you to do, make sure it doesnt get siphoned off on the pipe lauren along the way pipeline along the way, theres 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. Im sure theyll sign it, so, thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] next, a final panel from todays 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] well 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 its 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, therell 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 youd like. My names frank me see ya. Our two authors today are Joshua Millburn and ryan nicodemus. All that remains is their book, and its a study of minimalism, so thats it. Go ahead, guys. [laughter] im 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, weve 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 im 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 youre imagining is an intentional life. Its not a perfect life, not even an easy life, but a simple one. What youre imagining is a rich life, the kind of rush that has nothing to do with wealth. You know, its funny, i used to think rich was earning 50,000 a year. That was my 18yearold self. [laughter] be then when i started climbing the corporate ladder in my early 20s, i quickly began earning 50 grand, but i didnt feel rich, something went wrong. So i had to go back to the drawing board, and i figured out i didnt 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 sixfigure income. I bought a shiny new car every couple years. I owned a huge threebedroom, 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 didnt feel successful. And it got be to a point where i didnt 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 didnt 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 id get there one day eventually. Happiness had to be somewhere, just around the corner, right in but the stuff didnt fill the void, it widened it. And because i didnt know what was important, i continued to go further into debt, purchasing things that werent 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 wasnt growing, and i certainly wasnt 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 didnt love. But i wasnt really living at all. I was depressed. Then sometime when i was approaching 30, i noticed Something Different at my best friend of 20something years. [laughter] josh seemed happy for the first time in a really long time. Like truly happy, ecstatic. But i didnt want understand why i didnt 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 wasnt supposed to be happy. And he definitely wasnt 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 24yearold entrepreneur who traveled to a new country every four months carrying everything he owned, joshua becker, a husband and father of two with a fulltime job and a car and a house in suburban vermont. Then there was courtney carver, this 40yearold wife and mother in Salt Lake City and this guy named leo, a 38yearold 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 purposedriven. They seemed much richer than any of the socalled 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, ill do it. Ill become a money mall u. S. So i look up at josh, i excitedly declawed, all right, man, ill do it, dude, im a minimalist. Now what do i do. See, i dont 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 12foot 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 couldnt even remember what was in most of them. All those things that were supposed to make me happy, they werent 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 howto book, its a whyto 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, thats our story. Im going to ask josh to come up well, i guess hell 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 cant get through them without crying. Its 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 im going to skip ahead to the third chapter. But be first, just so you know how the book is structured, its written as a first person narrative, from my perspective. Its 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 im not going to read so i dont sound like a crazy person, but know they are there. Also theres a social imperative im supposed to make eye contact even though im 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. Its called the american tragedy. And its november 2009 in dayton, ohio. Its sunday afternoon, and im busy sulking in my new downtown patch hour pad. Its a dark apartment stocked with brand new furniture and my own sullen disbelief. My mothers death still hangs in the air around me. And now during the same month, my sixyear marriage is ending. But even while rome is burning, theres 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 50gallon 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, dont 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 dont these look nice, what do you call them . Throat pillows . Throw pillows. Well, that makes more sense, doesnt it. And now that i think about it, im 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 im even asking these questions e preclude me from being a, quote, mans 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 thats sort of like a rug but longer . Yeah, a runner. I think im going need one of those. And im also going to need what else do i need . All right, then theres a long section, like 12 pages or so, about my marriage mending which im going to skip past. There are no kleenexes up here. Im going to skip to the end of that third chapter. I dont 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 didnt 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, id 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. Its hard to sleep in my new apartment. An iceberg moon presides outside my one doe. The stars are out, so bright theyve rendered the streetlights redundant. My ikea bed frame and assembled, and im alone again, memorizing the ceiling. According to the clock dripping time onto the night stand, its two a. M. Now, and im 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 rooms 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 snowladen fields under drained midwest clouds at twilight. The sky itself appears close to the earth, skull colored, sprawled and stardust and angst. Im 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 selfpropelled, dissociated from my physical body. The arch lamps on the road are forcing me to rely on my Natural Instincts and the vehicles high beams to illuminate the journey. And when the headlights begin to flicker and the blackening sky wins its battle against the day, i cant see where to turn or what to do. My instincts fail. The needle on the dash reads empty, but the journal into the darkness doesnt 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 couldnt have planned for this. I clutched the Steering Wheel with both hands and jammed the foot brake as hard as i can, waiting for gods wrath and hoping to make it to the other side with the least amount of damage possible. The sound of the cataclysm doesnt pez any to have the sleeks or metalon 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. Its the outofwork scarecrow. Outside the car there is a sternness of judgment in the barrens. One of the roads 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 cant form a clear picture of what has happened. It is cold. I wonder whether its 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. Its 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