525 | The Outliers

Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it And we'll get to that in a minute. But first, I want to tell you a story. We're recording this a day after MLK Day, and my daughter was sleeping in yesterday. And I just discovered, I finally discovered I'm an old man. It has happened. And here's how I figured it out. My daughter's sleeping in, and eventually it's like 9.30, and I want to take her to the park because there's this big celebration thing going on. And so I go in there to wake her up. And of course, I always wake her up with music. And me being me, I put on Girl You Know it's true, but Millie Vanilli, as you do at 930 in the morning. And she just looks up like, what are you doing? Why aren't you letting me sleep? And so to really get into it, I just start doing The Running Man for the entire song. And my knee is destroyed now from three minutes of The Running Man. I can hardly walk right now. But it was totally worth it. Just the look on her face. Anyway, I have a bone to pick with today's guest. Can you guess why, TK? I can think of a lot of reasons, but I'm wondering what yours is. So Steve Patterson introduced me to TK Coleman. End of story. That's the bone to pick. You wouldn't believe how much money you have cost me. No, I'd believe you. I've been a fan of Steve's work for a long time. He has one of my all-time favorite podcasts. It's called Patterson in Pursuit. And this is the first time we've ever met. Yeah. And I'm really glad that you're here today because I wanted to bring you into our world and we could talk about, well, we've got a bunch of questions from our audience, but I also wanted to get to know you a bit as well. You're one of my favorite thinkers. And the first conversation I heard between you and TK, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, we are kindred spirits, even though it's infuriating half the time, it's infuriating in that pleasant way. I listened to all six hours of your debate with TK recently, and by the end of it, I was just like, I love this, and I hate it, and I love that I hate it, and I don't know what's going on. We've got a lot to talk about today. I thought we would talk about being frustrated when people don't understand us. Maybe that's something you can resonate with a bit. Also, the benefits and downsides of being abnormal. TK, that's definitely something you can resonate with. Definitely on the benefits. We're also going to talk about chaos, minimizing chaos at a cultural and societal level, at a system level, and much, much more. This is a listener-driven show, so we'll get to know Steve through our callers today. Let's dive into some of those calls. 406-219-7839 is the phone number if you want to join our show, or you can send a voice recording to podcast at theminimalists.com. Let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message. By the way, big thanks to our patrons. Your support keeps our podcast 100% advertisement free because sing along at home, y'all. Advertisements suck. Yes, they do. Our first question today is from Whitney. Hello, this is Whitney from Indianapolis, Indiana, a Patreon subscriber. I wanted to get your thoughts on the idea of the outlier. According to dictionary.com, an outlier is defined as an observation that is well outside of the expected range of values in a study or an experiment and is often discarded from the data set. Or a person whose abilities, achievements, etc. lie outside the range of statistical probability. As someone who seems to fit well into the category of outlier, sometimes also called an edge case, I have been told well over 100 times in the last decade that I am the exception and not the rule. I have heard it so much, people have taken the time to educate me on how those within the bell curve function. People often dissuade or discourage my ideas initially, and then after years of persistent effort, 2, 5, 10, and 20 years of persisting at the same problem set, they wish to learn how to repeat my results. I have been told by colleagues, supervisors, doctors, friends, that I am not quite normal, but I can get stuff done. To quote my husband, you are at least two standard deviations outside the norm in effort and persistence, and you need to stop expecting people to understand you. When I speak about my efforts, others walk away discouraged, hoping I had somehow gotten lucky, it seems, instead of putting in work. I find myself frustrated that they cannot seem to understand that I'm not doing anything spectacular. I am just persisting longer than most. Basically, one must stop expecting to get something they will not work for or change. You all, as the minimalists, seem to fall into the outlier category. Can you explore your own encounters with edge case individuals or offer your own experiences as being those individuals? Thanks. Now, Steve, you think you're better than everyone. I didn't mean to have to say anything. It just radiates. No, this concept is interesting in terms of outliers. But what is more interesting to me about Whitney's question is she's frustrated when other people don't understand her. Right. Yeah. And I often think about like being understood is really nice, but needing to be understood is like a prison sentence. Maybe you can talk to Whitney a bit about that. My goodness. I feel like we could make a whole episode on that. So that's an amazing question. And I could answer it a few different ways. One, let's. So here's an interesting fact about my history. So I was homeschooled from zero to college. So I didn't go to elementary school or middle school or high school. I just went from homeschool to college. And this was in the 90s. It started in the 90s when homeschooling was of unclear legality. So we actually knew one of the families that was involved in the lawsuit in the state of New York, which made homeschooling legal. So it was early, early days. And so I remember all the time being an outlier. So we'd go out, you know, we did a bunch of recreational activities in the middle of the day because I wasn't in school. All the time was a running joke. What are you guys doing here? Why aren't you at school? Like, well, what's going on? Who are these kids? All the, you know, the infrastructure, the parents, the shopkeepers, everybody's looking at you with a side eye because you're not in school. And you say, oh, I'm homeschooled. And then the next follow up question would be like, oh, OK. So, like, do you get socialized? All the time. It was literally a running joke. So it was, you know, and so one way that we would handle this is, you know, in within the group of homeschoolers, it would be, you know, we would sort of exaggerate and we, you know, we'd be out and be like, oh, what is that thing up in the sky? Is it the sun? Is this what I read about in my books? You know, so I grew up being an outlier, like the rules that apply to kids oftentimes don't apply to homeschool kids because so many of the rules and expectations revolve around school and the assumption that you're just a kid in school. So, I mean, I lived that my whole life pretty much. Yeah, and you want to talk about that at all? Well, I want to talk about the dissatisfaction around being misunderstood. I think that's the thing because you feel, I'm so abnormal, I'm so strange, and I don't fit in. And I think coming up during the question of the week, we can talk about how that can become a superpower. But right now, can we talk about sitting with that dissatisfaction? People don't see me the way that I'd like them to. So the subset of your listeners who are homeschooled are going to really appreciate this. So there was this phenomena that still is going on today, which is that some percentage of homeschooled kids sort of resent the fact that they know they're not normal because they really aren't integrated into the life of peers that they see. They can be friends, but there's always, you know, there's a difference between the public school kids and the homeschool kids. There's another subset, though, and I am blessed to be part of this. I think this might be the minority. I'm not sure anymore that views this uniqueness as an incredible blessing. I had a perspective on the world that is very unique, not due to my own uniqueness personally, not my spiritual uniqueness, just the facts of the circumstance of how I was raised. And that gave me a really valuable perspective. Like I saw things growing up. I interacted with adults in a way that kids don't usually interact with. And that is helping me form concepts of how I think the world works based on these unique experiences. So I really leaned into it then. I loved the homeschooling experience. And it's sort of set me up for a very unusual career path that I would completely point to the unusualness of my upbringing in that way. And I think like Whitney, you are outlier in several ways. One, you're really tall. Generally, I'm the tallest person. He's like six five. And so we had to adjust the camera. Sean's over here climbing up to the ceiling. But you're also an outlier in terms of your intellect. I mean, you're really bright. And I find that with TK as well. He's really bright. And he has you're an outlier when you have conversations with people. You're not straining to get down to their level. you, in fact, you bring them up to your level in a way that is kind and loving and compassionate. And to me, it's some sort of Brazilian jiu-jitsu when you're doing that. You're like helping them up to your perspective. And so I'm wondering with Whitney here, maybe there's something she needs to understand about like feeling like an outlier, feeling abnormal. That's not necessarily a bad thing, you can still have people relate to you. Absolutely. And from the sound of it, Whitney seems to be handling this really well, but does touch on some of those moments where it can be frustrating when people treat you like you're the problem just because you're different, especially when those differences produce really positive results. And when you have a history of being right about something, but you're right too early for other people to recognize it, and they give you a hard time, and then later on, they find out that you're right, it can be difficult to show grace to those people. You gave me a hard time, and now you want to, it's sort of like, hey, fools wouldn't listen to my demo, now they want to ride in my limo kind of mentality, you know what I mean? And I think it can be easy to sort of resent people for not getting you, for not accepting your weirdness or your differences, especially when you know it's producing benefits for them. But I think there's a way to frame this positively and healthfully by saying, if other people could get everything that I got exactly when I got it, what use would there be for me? If all of my solutions, if all of my insights, if all of my contributions were so obvious that anyone could have thought of them as quickly as I thought of them in the precise manner in which I thought of them, then what the heck am I here for? If I'm in the room, my presence should make a difference such that my absence is noticeable. And sometimes we pray for greatness. We seek greatness. We desire uniqueness or we want to know what is my place in this world? What is my role in this company? What can I do to add value? But then when we feel the cost of that, we realize, oh, there are some social consequences for adding value. We are all outliers relative to some contribution we make, and we have to get comfortable having spaces where people just cannot enter and say, I get you, I relate. I want to piggyback on that. So as I was listening to the question, it reminded me of something my mother said, which I think about fairly frequently. And my wife brings up as well because it's very relevant in many different contexts. So I was raised homeschooled, right? And part of the motivation for that is that my parents were both evangelical Christians. They were very religious, and they wanted to instill that in their kids. And so being more analytically minded as I was growing up, I started asking a lot of philosophical, very obnoxious questions about their faith. And I would have these conversations with both of my parents, and it would exhaust them. And then my mother—I definitely got on my dad's skin, I'll tell you that. And for good reason. Okay. I was an obnoxious child. But my mom said something multiple times that I still literally hear. And she said, Steve, keep pursuing truth. You're doing your thing well. Truth matters. She said, not everybody needs what you need. And I'm like, oh, man, I can't refute that. She said, not everybody needs what you need. Implying that when you, like I was projecting on other people. Well, surely you have these beliefs. So you have to understand them. I'm going to ask you all the questions to figure out what you know so that I can see whether or not. Right. And she's trying to say, listen, not everybody needs what you need. So you go as deep as you need to go. But don't it would be a mistake to think that everybody has to walk the path that you're walking. And I feel like that's true. I can't really. I remember thinking this was like this was a devastating counter argument for my mother. Like, what am I supposed to say? No, everybody has to go from A to Z through all the logical deductions and they have to figure out metaphysics in order to say anything. that can't be right. So I was right. That comes up frequently in all kinds of contexts where I need to recognize that people work differently internally. They think differently. In many ways, their intuitions, even if they're not grounded in the heavy analysis, are probably excellent and justified. I'm probably the foolish one overthinking things anyway. So we have a tendency to when we get compelled by something and we then need ever we need to batter everyone else with that teaching or that idea. And there's no one more dangerous than the new learner, like the person who's been a Christian for two weeks or the person who has just started watching MBA. And now all of a sudden, everyone needs to know everything that they think they know, right? And that becomes dangerous. I don't think that's the type of outlier that we're talking about here. I love what you're saying, though, with not everyone needs what you need, but also not everyone wants what you want, Not everyone sees the world the way that you see the world and forcing them to do so would be robbing them of a particular dignity. And it would be a disaster because if everybody was approaching things the way that TK and approach things, the world would fall apart. We spend hours and hours talking nonsense, trying to get one another to define what do you mean by definition? It's like a three hour conversation. The world would fall apart if people were like us. Too many people. Is that not true? Yeah, that's true. We enjoy it. We do. A lot of people don't. And that will drive some people crazy. I'm here basically just to moderate, but I'm going to keep the thing on the guardrails today or the train on the tracks to extend the metaphor. We need that. Thank you. One thing I would say could be helpful, especially if you have a strong sense of yourself being an outlier, is to make it a practice when you interact with other people to try to identify qualities in them that are different from yours so that you can focus on other people's uniqueness as well. Like what is Steve good at that I'm not good at? What seems to come naturally for him that doesn't come natural for me? What value does he add to my life that I really can't quite reciprocate? reciprocate. Because if we go into every experience thinking of ourselves as the outlier and everyone else is the norm, then that makes us hyper-focused on a specific subset of our qualities. And it also makes us hyper-focused on people's normalcy. But when we ask ourselves, how is this person I'm sitting across from different from me and better than me in certain areas? And it sort of levels the playing field. And it's a continual reminder that we are all uniquely brilliant, all amazingly weird, you know, and surprising and unique in different ways. And that can sort of make it a lot easier to not be resentful and to not be prideful. To get back to the heart of the question here, one thing she was saying is that you guys are the minimalist, Josh and TK and Ryan, you outliers I think that becoming an outlier was never the destination that ended up being a byproduct We were living a fairly conventional life Ryan and I We grew up really poor which is pretty conventional in Dayton, Ohio. And then we climbed the corporate ladder throughout our 20s, which is a conventional thing. That's what you're supposed to do. And so conventional is just like doing the thing you're supposed to do. And then you become an outlier when you stop doing the thing you're supposed to do. You were at homeschool. You're not doing the thing you're supposed to do that makes you an outlier. So quite often becoming an outlier just means that you have set down a prescription that was handed to you by culture, society, whatever you want to call it. And now you're going to be looked at differently as a result. Before we get back to our callers, it is time for the Patreon community chats question of the week. That's where we answer questions with a short shareable. We call them minimal maxims, a little pithy aphorism. Don't worry. TK and I, we prepared ours beforehand. And so we'll maunder on a bit. We've got some audience participation here as well. We call them minimal maxims. This is something short, pithy to wrap it up with a bow. You can find this episode's minimal maxims in the show notes over at theminimalists.com slash podcast and every minimal maxim ever at minimalmaxims.com. We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox for free, including seven new maxims every Monday if you sign up for our email newsletter at theminimalists.com. We'll never send you spam or junk or ads, but we will start your week off with a dose of simplicity. All right, question of the week this week. In what ways are you abnormal? What are the benefits? What are the downsides? Now, before we get to our pithy answers, let's hear what some of our audience had to say. Alexis said, I think I'm abnormal because I have a lot of precautionary fears. That term is so fascinating. Precautionary fears. She says, I am always thinking of ways that other people can screw me over. The benefits are I am prepared mentally, physically, and emotionally since I come up with multiple scenarios. But the downsides, I overprepare and overanalyze a lot, which can be exhausting. Then I still have a hard time letting go because I have prepared so much that even if it doesn't play out in a certain way, my brain doesn't let it go because it could have gone differently. TK, why might it be a bad idea to prepare for every potential disaster? You spend valuable resources on things that simply might not be worth your time, energy, and attention. So you take the concept of insurance. You can purchase insurance for anything. If you're willing to pay, someone's willing to take your money for the sake of insuring something. If I want to, I can insure this coffee cup. Now, suppose I looked at everything in my life as if it needed to be insured, not just the car, not just the house or whatever it may be, everything. I'm going to spend a lot of money and I'm going to spend it on things that are pretty easy to replace if they break. But if I cash in on the insurance for this, you know, I got to file the claim. I got to do all of these things. And I run into this highly inefficient process where even though everything is insured, I'm spending so much energy to insure it, so much energy to make a claim on my insurance that my life is inefficient and it's taking me away from things that are more worth my creative energy. And so it's awesome that you can develop the skill of coming up with solutions to problems, but creativity and problem solving aren't the same thing. Problem solving is the management or elimination of that which is not wanted. Creativity is the bringing forth of that which is wanted. Becoming an excellent problem solver isn't a substitute for developing the kind of mindset and the kind of habits that allow you to be the kind of creator that can introduce new possibilities. So how are your possibilities? How is your ability to introduce new possibilities to life being compromised by focusing solely on problem solving? Yeah. Steve, it seems to me there's a lot of problems in our mind that never manifest in the real world. Yeah. There's a direct parallel here just in abstract philosophy that I can resonate with the individual who asked the question. So skepticism is a powerful method in philosophy. Skepticism, meaning you're debating whether or not some proposition is true. And you want to go, I want to poke holes in that proposition. Let's figure out all the ways that that idea could be wrong. And it's very powerful for figuring out why you believe what you believe. Incredibly important to the method of philosophy is skepticism. However, it can go too far. So I've got my coffee mug here. I can say, okay, why do I believe that this coffee mug exists? Well, I'm having a certain amount of sensations. And like, I think that there's this coffee mug out there, but maybe I'm not sure because maybe I could be dreaming. Or maybe actually what happened is TK slipped me a magic mushroom earlier this morning and I'm hallucinating, right? It's possible. It's logically possible. But is that reasonable? And something that happens in philosophy, especially with young people who are just been exposed to philosophy, is they get paralyzed by these possibilities. Well, how do I know? Maybe I am hallucinating. Maybe I am in a dream. How would we know? And they get crippled. And this is called sometimes they get stuck in Cartesian skepticism where they think, well, I can't actually know anything that exists outside of my mind. And I can't learn anything about the world. And I think that's very isolating. I think it can lead to a kind of nihilism, almost a kind of anti-intellectualism as well, because it stunts people's thinking about things. Well, why am I going to bother trying to learn about the world if I really fundamentally don't know anything? Because I might be a brain in a jar somewhere that is just hallucinating all of my experiences. So you have to have judgment to say, OK, these ideas that I'm thinking about could be wrong. Here's why they could be wrong. And then I have to assess the realisticness or the probability that they are wrong. And what you'll find is there's all kinds of things we take for granted that we don't have 100% certainty on, but it's okay to take them for granted because they're probably true. So 80% likely true, 90% likely true. You know, the floor is not going to cave in underneath me if I'm thinking, but it might. And here's the situations where it might. What if the person didn't construct it the right way? that's going to give me a lot of anxiety versus recognizing, yes, this is a possibility. I could fall through the floor, but I'm not going to devote limited brain space to seriously obsessing over that possibility that it might happen, but it's got such a minute chance of happening that it's not really worth thinking about. And you couldn't do anything else if you were fairly certain that floor was getting ready to cave in. You're not going to keep recording this podcast. Why would you, right? And so that's why it can be especially paralyzing. And the story that we tell ourselves I often say to worry is to pray for something bad to happen, because what happens is even if it doesn't come true, like these people are going to screw me over. I get that because people will screw you over sometimes. But it's unreasonable to use your word to think that everyone's going to potentially screw me over so much so that it adds so much uncertainty to our lives. It's paralyzing. We all have a fundamental need for certainty. And I think it varies person to person. There are some people who are really into exciting, thrill-seeking, bungee jumping, parachuting, skydiving, all of these things that you want a higher level of uncertainty, right? But even within that, you have to have a base level of certainty. You're not going to jump out of the plane without the parachute. So I'm just going to figure it out on the way down. And yet that's what we're doing all the time. We're making up these stories about everyone is out to get me. It is true. It could be possible. but it's unreasonable to think that everyone is out to get me. I also think about post-traumatic growth. I don't know if you know this phenomenon. Who's the researcher who did this? Richard something. But he was showing that upwards of two-thirds of people, basically, after they go through a really traumatic, life-altering experience, they grow as a side effect of that. It improves their life in some way. This thing that is devastating, you think that my life is over, it's ruined. It often makes our life better. However, that also means that somewhere around a third of people are still devastated by it. They hold on to it and it alters the way that they think about other people or other things or similar circumstances. So what happens when someone screws you over? You learn from it and maybe you grow or maybe you learn from it and you say, the lesson here is that everyone's going to screw me over. TK, what do you do in that scenario when everyone is out to get me now because one person screwed me over. Well, it's easier to be rational when people are presenting positive possibilities than it is when they're presenting negative possibilities. If I walked up to you or anyone and said, hey, guess what, man? You're going to win the lottery this week. You're going to become a millionaire. That's a real possibility, but no one's going to believe it because they're going to have a healthful dose of skepticism. They're going to say, nah, I need evidence for that. It can't just be a mere possibility. But then when it comes to the negative, I can say everyone's going to try to screw you over. Now, just from a standard, just from like a basic logical standard, that can't be true. It can't be the case that everyone's going to try to screw you over because some people are actually incentivized by selfish reasons to be good to you, not because they love you, but there's no way they can get what they want other than by honoring your rights and treating you with respect. You think your barista actually loves you? But it's so it's, but it's, who's going to tell them? She thinks I'm cute, PK. Yeah, she thinks I'm cute too. She said so, okay. She wrote a heart for my cup. I think she loves me. Heart of the cup. I love that. Oh man, she wrote a heart of your cup. But you know, it's a funny thing. So we easily accept these negative propositions, you know, without demanding evidence. And I don't think the solution is, well, be positive. The solution is be as skeptical of that negative stuff as you are of that positive stuff and say, hey, look, it's possible that the people I encounter today may try to screw me over. It's possible that they may try to help me. We'll deal with each instance as it comes. And I trust in my ability to exercise discernment and to be improvisational, to navigate every situation accordingly. But when it comes to these questions of regret, here's the question I would ask myself. You can't ask, what if this guy tries to screw me over? But you can also ask, what if this guy is trying to really do something good for me and I'm so busy trying to protect myself from being screwed over that I miss out on the opportunity and I look back on that moment and say, I regret not making something awesome happen because I was too defensive. I made this mistake early on in business. I overvalued things that I had to offer. I overvalued what I was trying to sell. And people who are older than me, smarter than me, more successful than me were trying to help me out. But I was too busy being defensive because I thought someone was taking advantage of me. And I looked back on the moment and said, man, that dude was trying to open a major door for me that could have changed my life. And I was trying to be defensive. I wish I could have that moment back. So what if the hole in the floor doesn't open up? What if something bad doesn't happen? Is it possible that you might regret wasting your time and not doing what you could have done to enjoy that moment or made the most of that moment because you were too busy preparing for a disaster that never occurred? I think of the line between skepticism and cynicism. I use those terms colloquially, but to me, skepticism is kind of this healthy questioning of, okay, what are this person's intentions so I can set it down? But if I'm cynical, everyone's out to get me sort of thing. Rob Bell often says that cynicism is laziness. It's because it's dismissing. It shuts things down, right? And it could be anything from, oh, must be nice. Like that's a cynical way to shut down or to maybe put yourself up on a pedestal. And so there are these these shut down phrases like, oh, fine, or get over it or whatever. And now all of a sudden, I've shut down the conversation. I've not left any room for skepticism, healthy questioning of a thing, because I need to protect myself. So I just shut the whole thing down. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, again, it happens all the time in philosophy. We were just talking about this the last couple of days, that when having a conversation with somebody, and you're investigating their ideas. You can ask questions of them that will put them on the defensive. Even basic questions like, okay, what do you mean by that? It can be interpreted in a threatening way where like, oh, geez, I don't know what I mean. I'm going to be exposed as somebody who maybe isn't as well thought out as I'd like to pretend to be. But you see in the world of ideas, one of these shutdown phrases that comes up all the time, even in our culture, is, well, that's just your truth. That's just your opinion. And that's an attempt to say, okay, I don't want to keep going down this road. I don't want to do the difficult, painful, analytical work. We're just going to try to have a truce and say, okay, that's just your truth, aka kind of shut up and let's move along. And there's a time and a place for that, right? We'll agree to disagree. There's a have a place for that. But it can also be a cop-out that really does shut down critical thinking. If you are wrong about something that's important and somebody's pointing it out, well, they could be doing you a favor. So I've definitely seen that in my life, not just in the professional pursuits, that if the individuals that are shutting down things by saying, okay, that's just your idea. I have my idea. Let's go on our own ways. That can result in an unskillfully lived life. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the same is true when I'm always thinking everyone is out to get me in a way. And I get that. I understand. I think it's a protective mechanism. I want to be safe. And there are times I grew up in a really poor neighborhood and it wasn't particularly violent, but relative to where I live now, like you had to watch your back in a way that was not I wouldn't I wouldn't want to do today. Right. It becomes It's commonplace, but after a while, you start to think, like, who's out to get me? Or, oh, he stepped on my shoe. What does that mean? What's the meaning of that? If I'm across the street at the coffee shop now, someone steps on my shoe, I don't think there's any meaning to it. It's an accident, right? But I could ascribe some sort of meaning, like, oh, it's a threat. He's testing me. He's testing my manhood, or he's trying to attack me in some way, or he's trying to one-up me. I can catastrophize everything. and then you're living with your nervous system on edge all the time. And that's not a way that I want to live. Rachel said she answered this question, in what ways are you abnormal? She said, I dislike the term abnormal. Aren't we all just unique? Normal doesn't really exist. Just like his coffee cup. Normal does not exist. I hear you, Rachel. I also have terms I dislike. Branding as a marketing term, really hate that one. Yeah. Why do you hate branding? I, well, I think of the way that it's often used. We talk about a personal brand. This is my brand. And it's a millennial speak now for, I don't know, business acumen. And I don't, the way that it's used often just turns me off. It's right up there with deliverable. It's become part of the corporate speak. Yeah. Yeah. Corporate speak me. Impact as a verb. That is, that drives me nuts. Right. And what else? What else? Oh, content to describe any creation just nails on a chalkboard for me. It gives me the ick when I hear someone talking about content creation. Isn't that redundant? So, Rachel, I totally get where you're coming from. Not liking the term abnormal. Steve is our adjunct mathematician here. does normal exist how long do i have 60 seconds go uh yes why might being abnormal not be a bad thing is that directed at me yeah well i think that it is reality is so complex it's so preposterously complex, that we need a lot of different angles on it to try to understand what it is and how it works. That's kind of how I approach things. So I'm in the middle of opening up a research institute right now. It's called the Natural Philosophy Institute. Hoping to go live in a couple of months here. And what I want to be doing professionally is researching with other experts in their domains to work through different topics and different subjects. And a feature, a feature is a different methodology from my own. Because it's not actually, I know what I think. I know why I believe what I believe. I obsess about these things for hours and hours and hours. So I don't need to hear somebody just repeat back to me something I already believe. Where the value is, is it precisely having an unusual or different perspective from mine. So I think that's, I wouldn't hire somebody that is just gonna repeat back to me what I think is true. I wanna hear, where do we disagree? Give me the disagreement and the uniqueness Give me some challenge and feedback and pushback and that where I think real learning happens Totally TK I use the word abnormal in the question of the week when I said in what ways are you abnormal And it sounds to me like Rachel heard it as like which ways are you wrong or broken or incorrect? And I think that is often how we use that word. So I can understand her allergy to that word. But if you're being charitable to me, what do you think I meant when I put that word in the question of the week? In what ways are you abnormal? In what ways do you think or act that other people may find to be surprising, unexpected, unexpected, or unorthodox? I would take it that way. But I resonate with her feeling there because there is a certain sense in which being abnormal is an illusion if it keeps us from seeing that everyone has it. I do have a problem with there being some people who think of themselves as being abnormal and everyone else is merely normal. I think we are all normal relative to properties and attributes we have in common. And we are all abnormal relative to those properties and attributes that are unique to us. And I'm sure you guys have both seen this. There is a pattern of the people who are pursuing normalcy that makes them abnormal in a negative sense. So if you're so scared of being perceived as abnormal that you can give yourself a complex, I think a better way to approach living and thinking and being around people is just embrace the abnormalness. Because if there really is, I mean, everybody really is abnormal. If you get to know anybody, especially this guy, there's like a bunch of weird things about him. It turns out that the abnormal is kind of normal. So if you're trying to give the appearance of normalcy and everything's put together at all times, that's actually weird. And it's not a good headspace to be in. You're going to give yourself some sort of psychological complex. And some people embrace that pejorative of weird as like, yeah, I'm just weird. And so it all depends on am I going to wear this as a badge of honor or am I going to take it as an insult? For me, the abnormalcy started with the whole eschewing consumerism. because when I climbed the corporate ladder and I sort of got everything I ever wanted, it turns out everything I ever wanted wasn't what I wanted. All of the trinkets of success didn't make me feel better, happier, blissed out. In fact, I was more stressed and in more debt than ever. But ostensibly, I was successful within the normal bounds of success. The magazine advertisement of success, I fit a lot of that criteria, the suit, the watch, the car, the house in the suburbs, et cetera. And I realized I was living this normal life. But if consumerism is the norm, then I want to be flamboyantly abnormal. And that was my pithy answer to this question. Because if debt is normal, I want to be abnormal. If anxiety and stress and discontent is normal, then I want to be abnormal. If spending money that I don't have on things I don't need to impress people I'll never meet is normal, then I'd like to be abnormal. Right. I don't want to be normal if normal is broke and miserable. I want to be abnormal if the norms are, well, if they're giving me grief or they're upsetting me in some way. That's what I always say about being informed. You know, this world kind of defines informed as being aware of everything that's happening in pop culture, being up to date on your TMZ, being up to date on every little superficial controversy, most of which you can't do anything about. And I often say, if that's what being informed is, I am blissfully ignorant. I choose to be informed by focusing on, paying attention to, studying, reflecting on the things that are important to me and the things that help me understand my universe in the sense where I can do something about it. So that's how I feel about being informed, how you feel about being normal. Yeah, yeah. I want to be abnormal when normal no longer suits me. And it can be unskillful to try to bring other people into your abnormality. So I have a funny story. I haven't told you this, TK, but this happened several years ago. So I did not take my mother's advice that not everybody needs what you need here. So I was invited to give a talk, And it was just about philosophy and, you know, trying to make a career at the independent pursuit of truth and, you know, doing blogging and podcasting, that type of thing, how that works. And I'm really excited by philosophy and me projecting onto others. I'm like, you really should be, too. Philosophy is awesome. So I give a talk. And then so at the end of it, I was taking questions. And then everything went well. and then after it was over there was a lady that brought her daughter up and and the daughter was i want to say nine and she was so sweet and then it was sort of like this you know the mother's bringing the child along okay ask your question and and she so at the end she's like okay what what is philosophy i'm like oh that's oh you set me up you ready for this i got this great thing for you. I love that. He knows where this is going. So I'm trying to be like, okay, little girl, let me tell you. Here's a philosophical question. What is a number? And I go, and I'm thinking, for example, we have a physical thing like this. There's a cup. You can put a cup in your back pocket. Can you put the number eight in your back pocket? And she looked like I just ran over her puppy or something. She was like, what is a number? I was like, oh, okay, not everybody needs what you need, Steve. So like terrible, scarring first introduction to philosophy, to this poor little girl. Sorry if you're listening. That was the wrong introduction to philosophy. This was an error of trying to think, isn't this abnormality great? Let me bring you into this world. This is so exciting. And like, she's never going to open that door again because, you know, I terrified her. Yeah, I find this happens with minimalism all the time, where all of a sudden someone's spouse, say your wife, finds minimalism. And all of a sudden you've had 40 years of cluttering your house together. And then over one weekend, she wants to get rid of everything or vice versa. This is gender neutral. And what happens is it becomes traumatizing. So I'm going to bring you into my abnormality by force. And it's like, well, no, that's theft. You're actually just stealing your husband's stuff and giving it to the goodwill. You're not you're not because you're robbing him of the dignity of being able to let go on his own. And same with this girl. I thought where you were going with that is like, oh, crap, I just gave an hour long talk and I didn't explain what philosophy. I'm sure the mother was like, what kind of an answer was that? Totally justified. My version of that is I love horror movies. Michelle just can't stand them. Any bit is too much. and but the funny thing is she loves for me to tell her what happened what happened to the man walking down the long corridor right and so she will literally sit there and have me tell her the entire horror movie I can be like all right I've been talking too much it's 15 minutes let me just race through it she's like no no no I want to know it like scene by scene so she wants to hear it but she doesn't want to watch it and so one of the lessons I gather from that is instead of trying to force other people to be excited about what you're excited about and try instead of trying to make them be, you know, embrace your abnormalities. You can just allow them to experience the benefits that your abnormalities bring to the situation to the degree that they can handle it. And if we don't require people to be able to handle or hold all of us, we can allow them to experience those aspects of us that do genuinely excite them. And we can reserve the rest for, you know, whoever else or whatever else. Yeah. Forcing everyone else to be an outlier, than sort of by definition makes no one an outlier. Let's do one more here. This one's from Naomi. Naomi says, I feel abnormal because I love silence. I realize very few people can be in front of a beautiful landscape without having to say something about it or having a conversation, which used to drive me crazy when I was alone in communion with nature. And then all of a sudden, a group of tourists arrive from nowhere and start chatting. My current luxury is to live in one of the most uncool neighborhoods of my city. But it's so quiet and beautiful that it gives me a sense of peace and harmony. TK, you and I both enjoy silence a lot. And so this resonates with me. I was at a coffee shop this weekend. We're outside. It's at Three Birds up in Ojai. And they have this beautiful garden area with all these seats. And this woman comes up, table right next to me, puts her phone call on speakerphone. And I'm there trying to read the Paris Review. And all of a sudden, it's just, it sounds like I can't get it on my head. It's like the peanuts or something. And it's like, oh, what happened to my silence? My precious silence was taken away from me. But with Naomi here, she makes me wonder, when did peace and harmony become uncool? uncool. She said she moved to the uncool neighborhood to get peace and harmony. That seems pretty cool to me. Yeah, I think peace and solitude has always been cool. And the world has conditioned us to be afraid of it. It's sort of like our freedom lies in that direction. But we have been told a story about how if we move in that direction, it will destroy us. And so I think she's the one that's on to something. But here's a funny little story for me about how my pursuit of silence got interrupted and maybe something that we can learn from it. So I went to the chapel once to pray and I went at a time where I knew no one else would be there so I could enjoy some silence and meditation. And so I'm there and five minutes I'm blissed out exactly how I imagined it would be. And then this woman comes in there and she's carrying this big bag with a bunch of stuff. And so there's already a lot of rustling when she walks into the chapel, which is all right, that's fine. But then she drops a bunch of things out of her bag. And so there's this really loud noise and she doesn't just drop them. She's like, oh, gee, oh my, oh my gosh. And so she's very vocal about what she drops. And it's like, it's fine. It's all right. She picks up her things. And I'm, you know, I'm just sort of like focused on me, right? Like, okay, she's fine, you know. And then she goes to light a candle and she doesn't see anything. And none of the candles are lit. She doesn't have, she's like, where are the matches? And she's talking all out loud about all of her things. She's like, where are the matches? And oh gosh, I can't find any matches. And I'm like, there's actually a lighter, you know, right there. She's like, oh, thank you so much. And she carries on like this. And it just so happens that everything she's doing is so loud. And I'm in this paradoxical position of I'm here to connect spiritually. And I'm just feeling so unspiritual about her loudness. And after she's done with all that commotion, I just feel in my heart the desire to ask her a question. I said, hey, is there anything I can pray for for you? And she begins to bawl her eyes out. And she doesn't go on for a long time. But she tells me about a couple of really difficult things that she's going through. And that's why she came there to say a prayer. And I said, OK, I can. How about I just pray with you right now? And we prayed together. And she went on her way. And I thought to myself, man, life has an amazing way of teaching us lessons. Here I am thinking that silence was the thing, but connection was the thing. And silence is the means to connection. And so sometimes when people don't get the thing that we get, instead of being self-righteous about it or judgmental towards them, it could be an opportunity to say, maybe this is an opportunity for me to connect with them by giving them a little charity, a little compassion, and letting grace have an opportunity to do its thing. What'd she do when you stole her purse? I quit. I quit. I'm walking off the top. I was hoping that's where it was going. Oh, Steve, I guess you're the new co-host. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. This has been like an eight-year plot just to get on this. This is TK. See, this is my abnormality. I ruin the most heartfelt stories. This is me and Nicodemus doing this all the time. When my mom died, I had a little urn of ashes, and he went into my apartment and put his name tag on it, And like he pretended he was dating my mom for months afterward. And yeah, it's just so inappropriate. This is how I deal with trauma, okay, is with humor. And so forgive me, TK, for I have sinned. I'll get us back on track here. I already gave you my pithy answer, and it had something to do with, oh, when consumerism is the norm, it pays to be flamboyantly abnormal. I think that's true in a bunch of places. So, Steve, before we get to TK's pithy answer, what do you think with respect to where does it pay to be abnormal? Well, if the question is where does it pay, it pays really well in everywhere that it is skillfully recognized and embraced. So if you think about the distribution of paychecks, we're talking money, the person who is an outlier, who is abnormal, who's not doing the thing that most of the people in the organization are doing, but they're actually on to something, they're tracking something, they have an insight, they have a skill that's unusual. Well, that's where the paycheck goes up because you're bringing something that's unique to an organization. Is an entrepreneur somebody that is an outlier or is that the norm? Well, that is kind of an outlier individual. To be an employer and not an employee, that makes somebody an outlier. And where does the biggest paycheck go? Does it go to the employees or does it go to the employer? Well, generally, if an organization is skillfully run, it's the owner, it's the employer that is making the largest checks. So if the question is about where does it pay, I think that's kind of what you're after. If you think about it in terms of financial markets, you have some unique insight into a commodity that you think is underpriced. you think the market, most of the people are valuing this asset at a certain amount. I think it's actually underpriced. You take a risk, you take a gamble, you buy the asset. Let's say you hold on to it and sure enough, it goes up. Well, you were the outlier in the short run. And then the market recognizes, okay, the outliers were correct here. And then the price goes up and you make money. That would be an example. Yeah. TK, bring us home here. Let's get back to the question of the week. In what ways are you abnormal? And what are the benefits? What are the downsides? So my pithy maxim is that needing less company doesn't mean giving less love. One of the ways in which I am abnormal is that I'm so deeply introverted that if I love you, there's a really good chance I have never missed you. I appreciate you. I'm glad when you're there, but I've probably never had enough space from you where I got to a point where I would say, I'd rather connect with that person than be alone. And it's not that I can't get to that point. It's just that the world is not set up in such a way that I will ever get to that point before I need it. You know, I'll never get to that point late. And so that creates difficulty for me because it can be very hard with the certain types of people to convince them that I really do love you. I really do value you. I don't know if I ever want to hang out with you, but you're an amazing human being and I care a lot about you. If there's ever anything I can do to support you, I totally got your back. But no, I've probably never missed you. TK and I are very similar in this way. He said that to you directly and I'm like, hang on, is he telling him I don't value you and I don't want to be here? Because that was very convincing. TK knows that doesn't offend me at all. one of uh like like my first month or so here i go um partially out of just kind of habit you know we're both getting ready to go out the door at the same time i say you want to have lunch or together or you just rather be by yourself he goes i'd rather be by myself the beginning of a deep friendship that's good that's a good sign i fell in love with the guy Immediately. Our friendship gets deeper the less time we spend with each other. No, I've been, I mean, that's the thing, though. I mean, what do they say that closeness breeds discontent as well? I think there's, if you take anything to its terminus, even for someone who's like extremely extroverted, like Nicodemus is, Ryan Nicodemus, our founder of The Minimalist, like he's so extroverted. His idea of spending alone time is like him and three people. And it's like, as long as it's four or fewer people, it's basically alone time. And so for him, it's his way. But he also recognizes he I guess at least astute enough to understand that OK not everyone needs what I need Right And because I need to be with people to connect for that energy some people like TK or Josh get that energy from just being alone How about you? Would you say that you're more introverted in that respect? Very much so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I always have been. And though there are some exceptions, and one of the reasons I have a love-hate relationship with T.K. Coleman is that the friendships that I have, I find I generally bond through mutual intellectual stimulation. and uh it's love hate because in i i walk away from conversations with tk being invigorated and that's how people describe normal friendships right you get invigorated through the interaction i 100 feel that way however the hate part of the relationship is that that's after six hours plus of talking about very heavy metaphysics about how one senses concepts and this is very important And it's as an example of many, many, many examples of this. And I was actually just talking to my wife, Julia, about this last night because I was saying, you know, she was saying, how did your conversation with TK go? And I said, well, it went exactly as you expected. You know, we spoke for about six hours about things. And I said, TK is, I think, the only person that I've met that I sort of feel like if you've been around addicts. okay addicts addicts build cultures around themselves where addicts have a way of talking with addicts making each other feel comfortable it's a shared culture okay but it's kind of toxic right the only other person i have ever met where i feel like you share a similar addiction right to me that is in these conversations with tk where i walk away where we're talking about these things. I'm invigorate. I got a rush. I'm like, my brain's going crazy. And I'm like, hang on a second. Is this healthy? Oh, yes. It's like we I would say this is sort of like, would you say that you get you get deep stimulation from ideas? Absolutely. That's very clear. I do, too. Like too much. OK, so it's a real it's a real phenomenon. That's so fascinating. I hate ideas. I did. I was telling Matt this the other day. Like And I think part of it is it just depends on what the idea is. And I've been on so many book tours where this has happened more than once where someone come up to like the autograph line at the end. And they're like, hey, I've got a really great idea for a book. And what they're really saying is, hey, Josh, can you spend the next two years of your life manifesting my idea? That's obviously not that's not what's going on here. But like to me, ideas are worth next to nothing. it's the execution of the idea that is that is worth something although i really deeply admire the the the fact that you guys can just sort of like you know uh i'm trying not to use a uh sexual term but um you guys can really go on you got the heavy drug in the sex analogy for our mutual addiction i'd love to hear him have a conversation with peter rollins uh do you know Peter Rollins at all? Pyro theologian. He's been a guest on this podcast more than anyone else. That used to be TK's title. He was here 11 times and eventually he just stayed. And so I think Peter's been on the show maybe six or seven times at this point. And he's really fascinating. And the last time he was on here, he was talking about community versus communion and how community unites around something. And communion is to unite around a shared lack. And kind of what you're talking about there is like there's a communion of ideas. A mutual lack of common sense, a mutual lack of practicality. We're lacking all kinds of things together. So like church does this. It's like a lack, you know, the death of God or whatever. Or it is like AA does this. Like there's this lack in me. We're all, none of us are the same. We come from different backgrounds, different religious traditions, whatever. But we all have this shared lack. And I would say minimalism often does that as well. When we talk about minimalism, it's often people from a bunch of different backgrounds. And they're all sort of coming to it like our live events, for example. And they're saying, you know what, I feel this deep void in me, this emptiness. And everyone experiences some bit of emptiness. And a lot of people in our modern society try to fill it the normal way through trinkets, through accumulation, through the acquisition of things and status and more, more, more, more. consumerism, the ideology that more will make me complete or happy. And there's a lack there. And what they find out is it doesn't fill the void. It widens it. And I find that maybe that's where the discontent here is. These ideas, it doesn't give me the sense of completion. It gives me more questions in a way. It gives me a literal stimulation. People talk about information junkies. That's a real phenomenon. You're consuming all the news and it's invigorating. It's exciting. It's the same type of thrill. It's a genuine, like, it's a rush to have some of these conversations. And so anyway, at the end of that story, I was talking to my wife and I said, truthfully, I think I told you this actually in the last episode you were referencing in our discussion about theological matters. I said, I'm not actually sure if this is pathological. unironically unironically i really don't know when it's when when every time you get together and you get the opportunity it's like wow this was awesome and then like we go down all these rabbit holes and you know you're exhilarated and it's like is that normal like is that okay is it i don't know i'm gonna ask you tg we're we're outliers we're both kind of we're philosophy junkies you think it's a little too extreme absolutely not see he's got a problem i haven't the slightest bit of doubt that it even might be. I'm 100% fully confident that it is not only permissible, but that it is virtuous, that it is a good. And not everyone needs to embody that good. But I never sit around wondering, do I like oxygen too much? I mean, I literally want to breathe it every second. And every time I breathe it, it feels good. And I feel better than when I hold my breath. No, man, I think it's amazing. I think if you demand that other people be like that, then there will be a problem in how you treat others. But I think in the spirit of find the others, when you connect with a like soul who enjoys some of the same things you've been designed to enjoy, I think there's a mutual celebration. Now, of course, we can be roommates because we wouldn't get anything else done. He's the hot girl that you spend a weekend with a couple times a year and you just go do heroin all weekend. There you go. There's something. Did you hear how he was talking about that? He's like, it's like oxygen. I don't want to be without oxygen. Okay, see what I'm pointing out. But addictions have to have regrets and crashes. Those are one of the essential features of an addiction. How do you? We'll do this later. What I'm saying is that if you just did heroin once or twice a year, you're probably going to be fine. For most people, it turns into an addiction that completely subsumes their life. And this is why it is true to say not everybody needs what we need. And if they did, truthfully, planes would start falling out of the sky. Right. Because you can't have the pilot and the co-pilot start talking about what numbers are and they lose track of that they're flying a plane because they're they're they're getting their fix talking about, you know, these stimulating ideas. it really is something we have to say, okay, we live in a society. People are very different. There's all kinds of skills that people have. And, and you don't want to be in a world in which everybody's just like you and has all the desires and the drives and the goals that you have. That's not a world that we want to live in. Yeah. Spot on. How about you listeners? Let's answer the question of the week here. In what ways are you abnormal? And what way does that benefit you? What are the downside? Let us know your thoughts in the Patreon community chat, which by the way, you can join for free. And while you're over there on Patreon for free, TK and I just did a new audio book. It's called Very, Very Simple. The title's ironic because like, what's simpler than simple? It's very simple. What's simpler than that? Very, very simple. And I'll tell you this, TK, when we recorded the audio book, and it's about 100 minutes long, at the end of it, I was like, man, that's like, it mixed the practical, like the sort of decluttering tip side of things, like going through your house and decluttering with the philosophical. It's the book that I wish I would have put out 15 years ago at the beginning of The Minimalists. And it took 15 years to sort of solidify a lot of these ideas. It's 12 tools for a simpler life. They're sort of tools, rules, heuristics. They're adjustable boundaries, no dogmas really, but just boundaries you can apply to your own life. And then TK and I recorded like a little mini podcast between each one. And at the end of it, TK, you were like, hey, that was actually one of my favorite things that we've done. I was really shocked to hear that. Yeah, I don't know how long it took us to record it, but I felt like it was over five minutes. I came in here prepared for a long day. All right, I'm going to sit here while he reads it. Then we're going to talk and then he'll read some more. You know, let's put in the work and get this done because this is what we need to do. But I was like, wait, it's over. It's already over. That was pretty fun. Yeah, it was it was a real joy. And I went back and listened to it when it came out. And man, you were the best part of the whole thing. It was so good. I brought these sort of practical tips to the table. It's like an e-book you can download for free or the audio book you can also download for free at VeryVerySimple.com. But at the end of it, I was listening to it and I'm like, man, I wish I would have had this 20 years ago. It would have helped my life immensely. And I actually got a publishing offer from Macmillan Audio, and we decided to turn that down and put it out for a limited time for free. So folks can – we wanted to give it to our existing audience for free. You can download it right now over at VeryVerySimple.com. All right, that's almost the end of page one. We still have an entire switchboard of callers to talk to, Steve. But first, real quick, we do this little segment called Right Here, Right Now. We talk about one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalists. Today, which is February 2nd, enrollment opens for our decluttering course. It's called Simplify Everything. Me and Ryan and TK, about a year ago, we came in here with Jordan and the rest of our team, and we filmed this five-week course. And I will say it's the most comprehensive thing that we've ever done. We've never done a course before or anything like that. And we knew if we were going to do it 15 years in, we wanted to do it right. So Nicodemus really stole the show on that one. but I really enjoyed our participation with all three of us. And so it's not just about physical clutter. That's the first week. We also go through emotional clutter, mental clutter, financial clutter, digital clutter, career clutter, calendar clutter, and even relationship clutter. It's five distinct weeks, 17 video lessons, 45 clutter problem areas, 135 decluttering solutions, and 50 minimalism resources. Also, you get a 30-page workbook, and you can interact with all the other students. We just opened it up for 72 hours. You can find all the details, including you can watch the trailer. You can read all the graduate testimonials, all of that over at simplifycourse.com. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Much more coming up, Steve. But first, here's a minimalist tip from one of our listeners. Hi, Ryan, Josh, and TK. This is Thomas Liu, founder of The Sustainabilitist and author of The Personal Sustainability Handbook. I am one of those quiet followers who ascribed to minimalism long before I knew it, so I would like to share a bit about how minimalism can be a key to sustainability, but which is often overlooked. In our personal lives, we see how too much, like too much food, too many possessions, and too many toxic people can lead to overwhelm. There are many people and activists who aspire to save the world, but who often don't realize that they haven't gotten their own acts together first. But here's the thing. This bloat goes much beyond the individual level. If you look at our large-scale systems, like our policies, industries, population, and economy, they're often heading toward chaos because they've become too complex and oversized. When things are becoming too bloated, they can also become potential points of failure. So this is why I believe that for those who sincerely believe in a sustainable world, they have to take minimalism as a founding principle, not just for their lives, but everything humans do. Anyway, just some thoughts that you may be interesting in exploring further. Thanks for your great work and an awesome day to you all. Thomas, thank you so much for that amazing comment. First off, was that Steve who left that message? I thought it was him for a second. And also, it felt like it touched on some things that you often talk about in terms of, I mean, you may not use the same words. He's talking about bloat and complexities at a system level, but that's often, well, a lot of your work revolves around trying to untangle the complexities within an existing system. So maybe you could talk about that a bit, the simplification that needs to happen at a system level, whether it's politics, culture, or society. Yeah, so there's a very common pattern in the world of ideas, which is overcomplication. And when you're examining the quality of an idea or a theory, one of the red flags is that it gets overcomplicated or that the person who is proposing the idea can't explain what they're trying to say simply. They have to use a bunch of jargon that maybe doesn't quite fit right. Or they're saying, well, I sort of have this idea, but like you have to read 15 books to really understand what I'm talking about. That's a red flag. You go, okay, this is a bloated theory to use his language. And I've seen this just a common pattern across domains that if you want to apply the lens of skepticism, like we were talking about earlier, to ideas, then one of the great ways to do it is to examine those ideas which sound excessively bloated. And then, in the history of ideas, it's very common that breakthrough ideas will take that complexity and then they'll simplify it. Well, it's a simpler principle here. It's not this thing and that thing and this thing. It's actually one underlying principle. You go, ah, it looks obvious in hindsight. So that's a critical part of theory development is taking that bloat and making it simple. Without making it simplistic, I think is the key here, right? Because we can oversimplify things to a point where it renders something useless. I think about floss versus rope. So complex just means to interweave two or more things together, right? And simplex, to simplify, means to sort of untangle the root, the one simple, right? And a rope, you want it to be relatively complex. Otherwise, you have a piece of floss and you're not going to climb a mountain with a piece of floss, even though you've simplified it down to its essence. Maybe you've overly simplified the thing. And so when I think about complexity is the question is, what is the appropriate amount of complexity? Usually it's not by adding, it's by subtracting to get down to where you want to be. If you have 100 ropes and they're all tangled together, you're not climbing anywhere either. We've got a lot more to talk about, y'all. For anyone else who has a listener tip like Thomas had or any other tip about any other episode, this episode included, send a voice memo to podcast at theminimalists.com so we can feature your voice on the show. Up next, page two and page three. But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break. We'll be right back. All right, y'all, that's like the first 39%. We've got a lot more to talk about over on Patreon, the full two-hour maximal edition with Steve Patterson, which includes answers to a bunch more questions. Questions like, when it comes to decluttering, what's one thing everyone is doing wrong? What tools will help you respond to people with intention rather than react with emotion? How can I quit social media if I need it for my job or for my hobby? Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Plus, you'll gain access to all of our podcast archives all the way back to the very first episode. Big thanks to Steve Patterson for joining us today. Check out his podcast. It's called Patterson in Pursuit. We'll put a link to that in the show notes, as well as his sub stack and his website, steve-patterson.com. You can find his work there, a link to his podcast, and also the research institute that he was talking about earlier. That is our minimal episode for today. On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, T.K. Coleman, Audio Ben, Spire Jeff and Spire Dave, Jordan No More, Tomcat, Professor Sean, Savvy D and the rest of our team. I'm Joshua Fields Milburn. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this. Love people and use things because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time. Peace. Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it