 I'm glad we could have this conversation. I think for many in our audience, when it comes to adding, they're adding relationships, they're adding words to their communication and conversations. We have this innate urge to add more friends, more connections, more things on the calendar. If I talk more, then people will be more impressed. So we're excited today to jump into your book about subtraction because I think Johnny and I, as Johnny was sharing with you a little bit earlier, we're both going through a subtraction phase in our lives that I think our audience will be interested to hear about as well, and I know we've shared a little bit around it. So it's like perfect timing, the book, looking at the science of it and why we have these innate urges and then these cultural pressures and economic pressures to add more. So welcome to the show, Ladi. Excited to dig into the book today. Yeah, thanks. This is gonna be fun. I didn't know we were gonna get your stories too, so that'll be fun for me. Yeah, I know as Johnny was sharing with you as an artist, subtraction is a big part of his creative process and he's tried to get me to subtract more over the years. COVID forced subtraction in our lives around the business and then coming out of it, there's been opportunities for me and my wife to work more remote and out of those opportunities came this realization like moving, packing. Why do we have all this stuff? And then subtraction becomes a big part of the equation but it was really forced. It was not something that we innately decided to do. So I'd love to first hear from you what your journey into the science of subtraction has been like, because what I found really exciting about the book was walking through the science of testing this hypothesis, taking a level deeper, removing other variables. And as a former scientist myself, I really appreciated that in this book because I find often when we have scientists on, we don't hear the backstory of how the hypothesis became the finding and the research that went into it. So I'd love to start with your story. Yeah, that's awesome. I appreciate being able to share that because I think that the science is a story, right? And so, I mean, I've always been interested in less and kind of paid attention to it in my own life like you, right? It's like, do I really need all this stuff? How's my time doing? I read the books like digital minimalism like how Newport and all these things that seem counterintuitive because they're basically telling you less can be more. My professional background is in like architecture and engineering. And so one place that I really liked subtraction was in elegant designs, right? It's like, oh, here's this really cool streamlined modernist house that doesn't have all these frills and it creates a really neat design aesthetic because of that. So, I mean, I had thought about it a lot. I'd never really been able to kind of get it into something that I could study. And really the breakthrough in studying it, I was playing, I was looking around to see if I have my Legos. I don't though, but I was playing Legos with my son and we're making a bridge. And so he was three at the time. And so we're making a bridge out of the duplos, not even the little Legos, the big Legos. And the bridge wasn't level. So one of the bridge support columns was shorter than the other bridge support columns. So I went to fix this problem. I turned around behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column. And by the time I had turned back around, my son Ezra had removed a block from the longer column. And so, like right there in front of me was like, okay, yeah, what I'm interested in is not necessarily like the end state of simplified or stripped down or minimal, it's this act of taking away. And it also framed the question really nicely because in that case, it was a bridge, right? You're trying to make this unlevel bridge better. But more broadly, it's when we're trying to make anything better. If you're trying to make physical things better, whether it's your life, you're trying to strip down or mental things, right? The ideas in your head or words on paper or your calendars, your social things, your work life. When we try to take something from how it is to how we want it to be, when we try to make something better, our first thought tends to be, hey, what can we add? That's not necessarily a problem. We have lots of first thoughts. The problem is when we do what I did, which is, hey, what can we add and move on without considering whether this whole other class of options would be beneficial. So the Lego bridge was the genesis. And then we did some more serious studies after that. So what stood out to me is that exact idea that we as humans just naturally reach for more. And as you started studying this, it wasn't until you started priming individuals that they could add and subtract that subtraction actually went up in the solving of these problems that you had designed. So let's talk a little bit about that and how innately we just are like, okay, I'm approaching a problem. Well, it's gotta be the extra Lego. It's gotta be the extra box. It's gotta be the extra event. Yeah, and we studied this in all kinds of ways. So we did some initial studies inspired by the Legos which is like, okay, let's give people Legos, see what they do. And of course everybody added. Then give people summaries of writing. Say, okay, can you, how would you make this summary better? And I was thinking maybe more people will subtract on this one, because there's a lot of editing advice that says, omit needless words. That's classic, shrunken white, right? People added, Johnny would appreciate this one. It didn't make it in the paper, but we use lupimoles. It's like a music, a mixing app that little kids use. Everybody added to that too. Adding more notes and arrangements and things. But so we kept studying it that way. And it's just like, okay, every context we do, people add, but we can't really say anything about it because you're just like, well, maybe they just like to add with Legos or maybe just adding with Legos is better. We even gave people the most ridiculous one was this like 14 item itinerary in Washington, D.C. And you could drag and drop the activities. And this was huge things. It was like, visit the Lincoln Memorial, go to the Smithsonian, eat Monch at a five star bistro. 14 things like that in a single day in Washington, D.C. I calculated the traffic or the travel time. It was like two and a half hours of travel time. And people added activities to that impossible day. So you get to the priming and we needed to be able to say like, well, people are doing this to their detriment, right? I mean, it seems like you're doing this to your detriment if you're adding activities to the Washington, D.C. day, but deep down you don't really know. Maybe somebody just really wants to be super stressed out and doing all these activities running around Washington, D.C. So the reminder was one of the ways that we kind of primed people to think about subtraction. And this is like, I love this one because it seems so obvious, but it is also really meaningful. So you said, one of the paradigms we used, this is worth explaining just because it shows that we weren't just staying grounded in everyday activities. We developed this grid thing that you could look at on your computer screen. And basically the task was to make the grid symmetrical from left to right and top to bottom. And there were different versions of this, but the common thing was that the grids had extraneous marks in one of the corners. So basically it's this thing that people have never dealt with before that you could improve by adding or subtracting. And if you subtracted marks from one corner, it took fewer actions than if you added marks to three different corners. And we told people, do this in as few clicks as possible, even incentivize them in different ways. So we're giving people these things and people are still adding. And so we're like, okay, what if we give them a reminder? Hey, remember you can add blocks or subtract blocks and the rates of subtraction went up. And you're like, well, of course, when we get reminders about things, we're more likely to do it. But the funny thing was the rates of adding stayed the same, right? So what that is evidence for is that the reminder is bringing, subtracting to mind because we hadn't thought of it otherwise. But it's not bringing new additions to mind because we're already thinking of that. So that was a long-winded response to your question about the reminder. But I think it kind of shows why it's important. Yeah, and with that, obviously, when we talk about things in the physical world, we assign value to them. So it starts to overcome that idea, well, the Legos have value, I wanna use all of them. And then what was interesting is when you added a cost to addition, people still were adding even to their detriment. So I'd love to talk a little bit more about that experiment because that one really feels counterintuitive. Like you're priming and you're letting them know that there's a cost to the addition here. It's gonna cost you and we're still following through with the addition. Yeah, and again, that's, you know, so we had this another setup where people would pay for the blocks that they added, right? So we give them a dollar upfront and they'd pay 10 cents for each block. And of course, they wanna keep the full dollar and they'd solve it by adding four blocks or seven blocks or two blocks. And the correct way to solve it, which would give you the most money was to take one block away, which would still accomplish all the objectives. So again, it's like the reminder, it's evidence that, hey, the people who aren't doing it, it's not because they like it. It's because they're not thinking of the other option. And there's multiple forces going on here that you highlighted in the book. So there's biological force, there's a cultural force that I found fascinating and then there's an economic. So let's talk a little bit about the biology, what's going on here evolutionarily and why are we primed in this way to add? Yeah, I mean, some of the biology like made intuitive sense to me when I started to look into it. It's like, okay, we acquiring things has helped us pass down our genes in the past, right? I mean, if you stockpiled food or you ate more food, you were more likely to survive through lean times. What was more surprising on the biology side for me was like this idea of competence, which I mean, that's the one that really resonates with me when I think about why do I add? And so I knew that competence was an issue and a part of it, I just didn't realize how biological it is. So the classic example is bower birds. So the male bower birds will go build nests and they're pretty nests with different shapes and they'll attach even ornamental things to them. And then the female bower birds go around and look at the nests and decide which male to mate with based on how much they like the nest. And then the female bower bird goes and builds a nest to raise the young. So the whole point of the first male bill nest, and this is like fun because it bokes fun at males, but this is like competence, both genders, it applies to both genders. The whole point of building that first nest is just to show, hey, I can effectively interact with the world. That's something that's been a really robust finding throughout psychology, throughout the history of psychology. And then recently, well, relatively recently extended into task completion. So when you're sitting in that meeting so that your colleagues can see you sitting in that meeting, I mean, that's, hey, you're showing competence by task completion. When it feels good to check stuff off, I do this. I'll like write something on my to-do list after I do it so I can check it off. It's like that's feeling competence by task completion. You know, so how does this disadvantage subtraction? Well, you can interact with the world effectively by subtraction, but then the evidence of it is often gone, right? So if you take notes out of music, nobody knows that you thought of those notes and then decided to take them out when you spend all the great time editing this show, that's like people don't see the work that goes into that. And so that competence is actually like a really biological thing, this desire to display competence and it leads us to add in a lot of cases. That's funny you should mention that because later in the book, there's a graph that is that you had put up about the writing process in which I have a lot of experience and I had done a lot of writing for The Art of Charm. And this goes with music as well and where there's a lot of thought in writing just enough because you don't wanna spend excess effort and energy. And so everyone goes into writing of trying to be perfect so that they can stop at a concise time and when the message is clear, it's like, okay, I am done. But in the book, you also say that trying to write that perfectly so that you're not expending this excess energy also takes more time because it's more thought process and trying to make this perfect. And I also found myself when I've tried to do that and would have to knock myself out of that mindset due to I would be staring at a blank page for an extended amount of time trying to figure out how to go about it where if I would just let all of my thoughts go and flow through me onto the page, now I have something to work with. And I was laughing when I saw that graph because it just rung so true to me in that process. Yeah, that's amazing. That's even deeper level than I usually think of it at which is that, I think what you're saying is that this act of when we're trying to do the mental subtractions in our head, it's harder so we're effectively stopping ourselves from making any progress. I see this with students all the time, right? It's like, hey, the teacher wants a 100 word discussion post. Like once they've written a hundred words and that baby in, right? What's the incentive in trying to make 70 good words? It's like maybe the 30 are extraneous but maybe there's something in there. So yeah, it definitely applies in writing. Yeah, I've never had worse writer's block than an intro to philosophy class at Michigan where there was a word count limit to your answers. That's cool. But we're discussing existentialism and you wanna just go on and on to show competence that you read the work. And now I'm staring at a blank screen with the cursor blinking and I'm like, I don't know how I'm gonna get this down to 500 words. So that self-imposed limit leads to more energy expenditure than just throwing everything at the page. Yeah, you're blowing my mind here. I think because like I tell a story in the book there's one of the students of mine was applying to Harvard and she knew of my interest in subtraction and they had a word limit, but it was 300 words. But the question was, what's your reaction to the aphorism less is more? And she's like, why are you making me write 300 words about this lesson? And so she wrote a haiku and sent it in. And of course, I mean, you never get any feedback of like how it was received. I think this is like where it leads to like some practical things that we can do, right? Like you guys have figured out how to build that into your process. And then as a teacher, as I'm thinking about it, it's like, okay, it's hard to subtract initially, but also I don't want the 20,000 word paper that doesn't have any thought in it. I want some editing to happen and I wanna like help students experience the value of that. So maybe it's like, okay, first draft, 10 pages, second draft, a month later, five pages. And then final draft is the 500 words and kind of like, lead yourself through that process. And I think, you know, that's a teacher student example, but surely you can figure out how to translate that into everyday examples too. Well, one of the reasons that AJ and I were really excited about this conversation and certainly in diving into the book is as we work with our clients in our X Factor community, there's always a lot of indecision going on about paths that they wanna make through life and trying to make certain things happen. And this comes with a lot of the technology that we have because we have infinite paths that we can take. It's the paradox of choice. And because of that, people are stuck, they're not making any progress and they feel that in their lives that they're just spinning their wheels living out these monotonous days that are rolling into each other. And it was a book that I had gotten at which by Russ Harris called The Happiness Trap. And he goes on to discuss about our core values and how those core values are to us leading a very engaging fulfilling life and how if you are removed from those core values, you can feel that you're sort of just drifting through life and not making any headway. And of course, everything's gonna be monotonous because you're not really engaging in the things that bring you fulfillment. And upon reading that, to me it was a mind-blowing moment. It was the moment where I was like, wow, I have so much stuff going on in my life that I'm not really engaged with. What are those things that I need to be doing to extract the most enjoyment out of life? And he wants you to pair those down to five. Now everyone can think of tons of core values that they want to hold dear to them. And you might start this exercise off, you might have three or four right out of the gate. And then you're like, well, I only have one or two spots left but there's all these things that matter to me. Well, do they matter? And so once you get your five together, then you start arranging your days and your tasks and tying them to these core values. So then it becomes this editing process. Well, at least it did for me where I had these routines and habits, all these things that were going on. And as I was trying to tie them to these five core values, I needed a process in which to figure out what should stay and what should go. And I narrowed it down to three specific criteria. What are the tasks that are adding to my life? And they also have to be adding to a long-term goal as well so that doing them daily compound into achieving that goal. And so is it adding to my life? Is it taking away from my life? Or is this redundant? And I used the editing process that I used from editing some simple films for the art of charm. If you have all this film, but you have to make a point when in two or three minutes you have to pare that down so it's impactful and hits. And then from there, everything else is too superfluous. You can get rid of it, it's just redundant. So I went through all these tasks and then my day became simpler. Then I was able to arrange everything and then not only the side benefit. So we were talking about with subtraction comes the addition of something else. And what I found was all this extra time and that extra time was then spent on the things that actually mattered to me. So we've been laughing about this process and now AJ has been working in this process since COVID as well, which is it may from the outside seem like you're a bit of a minimalist. You have these certain things or do these certain things and everything else is a no. It's only a no because what I'm adding is fulfillment into my life. I'm adding more time for the things that I can engage in that extract the most enjoyment out of each and every day. And so part of the X Factor is helping our clients perform this task in their lives and they're always amazed of like, because they'll come in thinking, I don't have time for anything. But yet I feel like that I'm busy and I'm just coasting through life. Was like, well, let's get rid of all this stuff that doesn't matter and start making time and for the things that do. What I find interesting about the process for many of us this realization, I feel happens in the physical world and biologically speaking, collecting possessions led to safety and security, resources were scarce. So we're wired to hold on to things and then we'll watch a show like Hoarders and go, you know what, I need to do that spring cleaning or I should empty my closet. But we also now live in a digital world and we look at, will we go to get the next iPhone? Well, I got to get double the memory. Not because I'm going back through and deleting all the blurry photos and the videos that don't matter but I'm carrying this digital load with me. And then in the X Factor accelerator with our members, there's also a lot of these relationship ties that we hold on to because we're like, well, I know this person isn't great for me now, doesn't have the same values. They were a great friend in college but they care about different things but I can't subtract this person from my life. I have to keep this relationship and you ask, well, was that a fulfilling experience spending time with that person? Is it fulfilling to be sinking this much energy into a relationship that you don't feel good about? That time could be better spent finding a new relationship, finding a better partner, finding a better social circle for you and who you are currently. But it's interesting that we look at our closet first, we look in the freezer first, we don't look at our time and we don't look at the digital world and how it's impacting us and weighing us down as well. Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit about the, you know, the same visibility that hinders subtraction, right? You don't see it so you don't think of it and it's the same with the activities. I also like what you said about the vision slash values, right, because people will often ask me, well, should I subtract this thing? And, you know, most of the time I don't have a strong opinion on whether they should subtract X, you know, do you like it? Does it align with what's fulfilling you? Does it pushing you in the direction that you want to go? And, you know, that the vision and the values, those are the filters that tell you what's good to subtract and what's good to add for you. I've also heard it put kind of similar to what you said, Johnny, where when you choose to add something to your calendar, you're basically saying no to every other single thing during that time, which is, you know, framing it that way, then you're like, oh man, I better really be careful with what I add. And I found that it's, in the moment, it feels good, right? It's like, well, I took some free time, I made myself busy, I'm accomplishing something, right, the competence piece, I'm adding something to my calendar, and busy feels good. It feels like we're moving forward. Unfortunately, on the hedonic treadmill, a lot of this busy time is not really moving this forward towards the core values. And asking yourself, how will I feel about this when that day actually arrives, right? So like, I feel good now saying yes to this person, maybe I don't wanna get in conflict, I don't wanna say no to lunch. But next Tuesday, when I still have this project looming and I haven't finished cleaning out the closet for my wife, am I really gonna feel good driving, parking, sitting down for lunch, not having an agenda, then getting back in the car and dealing with LA traffic? So just that simple ask, how will I feel in the moment that I'm actually committing to? Not the moment in time where I'm actually saying yes, where I get that hit of dopamine and I feel good, can combat some of that busyness that we feel. Yeah, it's funny, I mean, there's all kinds of research showing that we just get progressively more busy. And so then if you think, if your current self wouldn't do the thing, don't assign it to your future self because you're only gonna feel more busy in the future. So looking at the biological piece, the second part that I found really fascinating is just culturally speaking as civilizations, right? And you look, you're talking about Mesopotamia, you look at the Romans, like there is, as we go from hunters and gatherers to society supporting one another, there is this signaling that we wanna showcase that we have competence civilizationally speaking. Like we can build things, massive things, we can accumulate massive wealth. I mean, as the engineer architect part of me, of course I love big structures. I mean, when we went to Rome and see the Colosseum, I'm like, this is amazing. And my wife's like, what, what's the big deal? But so now I can explain that there's a reason for this. So, but then like the people who study this, there's this cool place in Turkey where they found rock structures, basically as big as a giraffe arranged in a circle. And what's interesting about that is that it predates like agriculture and civilization. And so like there's a theory that I think is probably more the prevailing theory now among the people who, you know, study civilizations is that like the, this monumental architecture, this architecture that, you know, exceeded, it's defined by not that scope and size exceeding any practical function, this predated civilization. And so like the theory being that, okay, to actually move around and mine and put into place a stone as big as a giraffe and then do that in, you know, in a whole circle, that required coordination. Like no single band of hunter-gatherers could do that. And then it required coordination to do it. And then you've got to maintain it, right? And so people are like, well, we better stay near our big monuments. And now, well, how do we get a more constant food supply? And so I think the, you know, building the body of civilization also kind of built the mind of civilization. That's the theory is like, first came the temple, then came the city. Yeah, I think in going to visit those monumental architecture pieces, you're just blown away, especially with the passing of time on these structures are still standing. I mean, we look currently at some modern architecture and it won't survive an earthquake here in LA. Yeah, that's true, right. Also just like extending out the civilization piece. It's like, well, what does that matter for us? Well, for a long time adding has been a better option, right, even just more like practical of building of civilization. When you've got the first government, it makes sense to add laws. It's only after you've been adding laws for hundreds of years where you're like, hey, maybe we should take the laws off the books that say, you know, no more than two women can live together. So, and it's the same with highways. I tell a story in the book about the Embarcadero in San Francisco where, you know, that's an amazing tourist destination that used to be covered by a highway. Well, when there aren't any roads between cities, it makes sense to build them, right? And so a lot of these opportunities for subtraction culturally are relatively new. So that could be another reason why we're not as likely to think about them. Do you feel that there's an additive effect when people get together? So the forces are larger. You know, it's like, I think of Johnny as a single guy and Johnny's like, throw me in the studio and I'm happy in my space. And then it's like, I got married and now we're looking at, okay, well, this space isn't large enough. What if we want kids? And then the family and you know, then you look at the second home, the vacation. It's just like, as humans start to collectivize together, does the addition effect compound along with that? That's really fascinating. It has for me, it's like, and I'm thinking about it now, like now that my son's eight and his sneakers smell, I'm like, man, we got to get this guy his own more space, separate it off. But we renovated my house when we moved to Virginia. We had moved into this old student rental that's like 1500 square feet, which was fine for my wife and I. And we had, as it was like one and a half when we moved in, but then we have since had a daughter. And so we're doing this renovation and we're like, okay, how are we going to, I actually ran a design competition titled addition by subtraction. So the hope was that we could try to do this renovation in the same amount of square footage or less square footage. And we had a lot of really like smart architecture and engineering students look at different designs. And they came up with some creative things, but ultimately we added like 1000 square feet onto the back of our house because we just needed more space. And there is a big financial incentive there too, right? If you look at how real estate's valued and when the realtors are like, it's basically just how many square feet do you have and what neighborhood is this? It would have been really hard to invest a lot of money in not adding at any square footage. But yeah, for us it's been, the kids have been additive, but I guess our per person square footage is going down maybe because now we've got four people in the 2,500 square feet. I also, we need to study a little bit, like it'll be interesting in like group decision-making whether that multiplies this factor or whether it cancels it out. Like does it, if one person thinks of subtraction, does everybody else be like, oh yeah, good idea? Or does the adding kind of run even more rampant when there are multiple people? Yeah, so looking at the initial studies and the percentage of people who even thought to subtract being low, I wonder if across groups adding groups to solve those puzzles, if there is the power of subtraction that cut through the noise of addition or if we're just compelled the larger the group gets to add. I think in the cases where it's written, this is just speculation, but in the cases where it's effectively a reminder, right? Where it's like, if you have 10 people in a group and adding is obviously wrong once the one person points it out, I imagine they could win people over, but it would be interesting to test that and also interesting to see how it works in kind of more open-ended types of questions like most of the things that we encounter in life. When you touched on real estate and this economic factor also drives a lot of these decisions here in LA, looking at real estate, it's interesting as the law is relaxed around ADUs, you'll find housing listings on the market where they advertise X amount of square feet and then they really just put two, three extra structures that are completely unconnected that aren't really usable if you were to try to live there and grow a family to have to walk across the backyard to go to the office and walk across the backyard again to go to the kitchen, probably not how you would design it for functionality, but again, there's the economic force of we got to get the square footage up so that the cost of the real estate is worth it and compelling. What are these economic forces at play here that lead us to add versus subtract? Obviously, there's always one person when I go talk about this who's just like, well, this is just capitalism, right? And then I'm like, yeah, I don't know. That's pretty, we didn't make the causal connection there. And I think certainly there are some additive things about capitalism, but if you look at the foundational tenets of capitalism, it's not like add, add, add. Or it's, hey, we've got to hit our quarterly or earnings report, right? And we've got to grow the company. And so there are certainly things in the system that make us add, but it seems from the evidence and my perspective after doing all the research for the book, it's like that's much more symptom than cause, right? It's like the adding tendency was there way before capitalism. So yeah, I think you got to beware of those economic levers and their levers you can push too. It's like if we can figure out some way to disconnect house prices from the amount of square feet because fundamentally what you care about, AJ, is like functional square feet is more important than just gross square footage. And so I don't know, just things like that to try to kind of have those metrics more accurately reflect what the core human need is rather than just some blind quest for more, I guess. Well, I think that's the important piece of this, which is to figure out what is the most important things for you and then to begin to structure your life from there. Just looking at our phones and everything that it can do, it's replacing your album and DVD collection, your VHS tapes and clocks and cameras and stereo systems and everything that it has been advanced to do. And so it's like it's never been easier to subtract. And we're now, as we were discussing earlier, subtraction and everything that comes with it should be part of the process just as much as all the options that adding is because now we have both of them. And so it's about priming the public of figuring out what is important to them and then going from there. I still think we're probably stuck like a lot of laws that were passed for certain reasons in the past that are antiquated now. And we're trying to get our brains to wrap around this idea so that everything else can fall in line. The understanding of economics, well, everyone has the thought of needs for this. It's not going to change. But if people start to change themselves and their environments around them, everything else will follow. Well, I think the mimetics of it all, right? Just understanding these three forces. You have biology, you then have culture and then you have the economics. Looking at the lifestyle changes that Johnny and I have made as the company moved more remote, less location dependent in our coaching services and we have always over-indexed on freedom and freedom being travel as a core value. Well, we start questioning, do we need this much physical office space? Do we need this much personal real estate space? Would we be better spending time and energy on travel than maintaining this massive amount of square footage? But yet, when I share this with friends, when I share this with family, I mean, the puzzled looks, the questions I get around home ownership and why you're downsizing, is everything okay? Are you struggling? Like, do you need a handout? Can I loan you something? And I'm like, no, actually like this to me is thriving, making these decisions. And once you have this epiphany around subtraction, you start to look in other areas. So it's like, not just the pantry now, it's like, okay, well, the home situation, but then also the calendar. Now I'm looking at, do I really need to have that standing meeting? Is that essential? Do we need the full 45 minutes every week? It seems like the meetings wrap in 15 minutes. How can I get some of that back through subtraction has been a real eye-opener for me. But when I share it with others, there is a lot of pushback around those decisions. And it feels like a step backwards to many to be adding subtraction to your life. It's interesting, because I thought of that earlier when you were talking about the example of, it doesn't feel good to stop going to meetings and do deep work, right? Until you've had enough of that experience to maybe realize some of the outcomes, realize how it feels in the long run. Like I remember working on the book and it's like, this is 10 times more influential than anything I've ever done in my academic career in terms of like creating and sharing knowledge, which is what we're supposed to be doing. And yet the whole time I felt like I was cheating, right? I've had to go through that experience, come out the other side and I'll still, I mean, I still kind of feel like it when I'm working on other things. Yeah, there's gotta be something where you kind of help people go through those experiences and realize that it's okay and come out on the other end. Because I can empathize with the people who are sitting there like, what is everything okay, downsizing your apartment? Because until you've experienced it, you don't know. Well, I think in the book you laid out a few things and so I'd like to start to prime our audience to be able to look at subtraction just as well as they look at addition. And one of the things that you brought up unless you wanna move to something else first, but which was the words that you were using to describe that experience. And it was brought up with Orif's presentation for the city or the town that she was putting together to redesign. Yeah, so Kay Orif is a, she's like literally a genius landscape architect. She's done some managed retreat in like the New York area after Superstorm Sandy, but one of her first projects was in Lexington, Kentucky. And it was basically going in Lexington, like a lot of cities built up along a river and then had been basically built over the river and Kay's project was to go uncover the river and some of the other green space. So it was fundamentally a subtraction, right? It's like you're getting rid of human built stuff and restoring some of this area to make the whole place better. But she never obviously uses the word subtraction speaking of things that computers can do that maybe we don't need, but you can go and computers, they can classify the valence around words, right? And so you look at how different words are used and whether they have a negative or positive valence. Most words have positive valences. Subtracting obviously has a negative valence. It's not as bad as moist, but it's doesn't have a great feeling when it comes off the tongue for people. So Kay Orif, she's got her four words that she uses to describe the design. And one is clean, one is carve, one is reveal, and I'm gonna blank on the other one, but they're all essentially synonyms for subtracting, and but they all have much more positive connotations. So number one, that makes you feel better about what, connect, thank you, thank you, Johnny. And so that makes you feel better about what you're doing, but it also, when you're communicating this to other people, they're like, why are you charging me money to subtract something? Right? Your brilliant idea is to subtract. So using some of these synonyms can be helpful. And it also kind of directs the attention towards what you're getting as opposed to what you're losing, which as we know is a really surefire way to make things more appealing. Absolutely. For me, the concept of leverage is how I view subtraction. Interesting. So how do I leverage having less space? How do I leverage having fewer things? How do I leverage my time? What are ways that I can bring leverage into my life? And often that involves subtraction. That involves deleting the extra meeting. That involves shrinking things down so that we can get to the point. We go in with an agenda instead of open-ended. And that has really stood out for me now around whether it's investing financially, what's the leverage? It's my time within the business. What's the leverage? And it's property. What's the leverage? How can I make this the best use of the resources that I have? When I talk to a lot of friends and family members, they start to feel because they've added, added, added, added, added to their lives that they're removing freedom. They feel imprisoned by all of the addition. And it's like, well, you added the three extra rooms thinking you're gonna grow your family into that. Was that the right time to carry that mortgage? Well, that kind of traps you in a job that maybe you don't like. Or, well, I had to move to this area because I'm close to my core group of friends, but now I can't get on a plane and travel or I can't actually live in the city that unlocks more income for me. And it's very easy to build a prison for yourself around adding, adding, adding, and much easier to break out of the prison by using the tool of subtraction. Yeah, I love the leverage. That's not something that I thought of because it's, you know, it doesn't just position this as kind of the same, you know, opposite sides of a coin. It's actually like more powerful, right? Like the options that you leave are more powerful than the thing that you're blocking it with like that. Yeah, so when we're making decisions now, my wife and I sit down and discuss exactly that, right? So what does this mean in the near term? Like is it just satisfying a need, a desire? Are there memetics at play? And then what does this mean in the long term? And is this a decision that leads us to that leverage? For me in starting a family, I want to have more time available to spend with them. So my core value is in investment in raising my family. And I know that's not for everyone. Some people would rather have the help and are completely encompassed by their career and that's massive value add. But for me, I really want to focus on being present in my kids' lives. And because of that, well, time is that one lever that I have but is shrinking. So how can I look at the calendar? How can I look at the travel plan? How can I look at what we're doing as a company and leverage my time within the limited amount of time that I have each and every day that we all have? And if there are ways then economically I can add leverage to it. Or even in my social life, it's funny when we coach people in the X Factor Accelerator, so many of us chase relationships by spending one-on-one time with people that maybe aren't a good fit for us. Maybe they will never move beyond an acquaintance. Maybe we'll never actually share the same values versus leveraging your time and hosting a party, hosting an event, hosting a poker night and seeing who in that all of that group time spent together is a better fit for one-on-one time with you. When you start to realize that there are all these ways to shift your perspective around leverage, it doesn't feel like subtraction. You're not sharing it as subtraction. People don't recoil like, whoa, what's going on here? AJ, why do you not want to spend one-on-one time with me? They're excited to come to the party. They're excited to come to the poker night and it still creates the space in my life that I need to tackle those core values, as Johnny talked about. Now I know if I get invited to AJ's poker night I'm not worthy of one-on-one time. We're still acquaintances. It's a terse period. Well, when we think about group behavior, so valence comes up in a lot of different areas and I think the one that's on a lot of people's mind with the environment is recycling, reducing, reusing, how we look at the group behavior, not just our own personal, but how do we influence a group to make subtraction a part of their life? So what are the dynamics that go into now outside of just one-on-one, but movements and getting people on board with subtraction? I mean, the environmental one, I think is the biggest implication of this idea, right? If you look at all of our problems related to the environment are too much stuff, too little space, whether it's carbon dioxide or something else. And yet so many of our solutions are like, how do we shoot, put mirrors up into space that are gonna reflect the sun's rays and save us from, and that should, we should actually be looking in that based on where we are right now. So shifting that mindset is, I think would hold a lot of promise for some of these big societal problems. You can also look at it with racism or discrimination and our diversity in the workforce. And I get that that needs to be like a multi-pronged approach. I don't wanna like oversimplify it, but so often we don't even like, you're like, oh, how do we create a better work environment? It's like, well, everybody knows that that one dude's an asshole, like how are we getting rid of it, right? I mean, and it's like, we so often, we're like, let's improve the environment with one person who's actively working against an improved environment. And so, you know, that's like, we're not subtracting racism before trying to improve diversity. So back to the question about how does it tie to movements? And I think, you know, at movements, the mindsets are so critical, right? And to the extent that this is a fundamental mindset, and it's a very basic question about how are we going to make change? And if you can make small changes or even big changes to that mindset, then hopefully it would kind of percolate out through the movements. So at this point, I love asking at a very personal level, now that you understand these forces, you've researched this, you've run tests on numerous experiments and people inside of your lab, what have you done personally to bring subtraction more into your life? How have you made this practical for you, understanding how additive subtraction can be? You know, the time really ruthless with my time. And I'd always been very focused on my time where it's like, okay, I'm getting up at five, I'm gonna write for three hours, then I'm gonna do my workout, but not necessarily spending as much time thinking about stuff that can get pruned from the calendar. And, you know, so something as simple as when you're sitting down to do your to-do list, also force yourself to have stop-doings, right? And then that kind of goes back to the reminder we talked about. You're building it into your process, you're making sure that you don't overlook subtraction and it kind of is a way to keep myself in balance. I'd say, you know, and it sounds like you're headed this way, AJ, but the parenting is one place where it's been the hardest because like you, I think, you know, one of my values is, hey, I don't wanna look back 10 years from now and be like, man, I wish I was at that thing for my kid, but I wasn't. And at the same time, now that Ezra's eight and my daughter's almost four and they can like play together and when they're in the living room playing together, sometimes I'll come in and it like ruins it, right? Like all of a sudden now they're like complaining to me or asking me something. Yeah, it's like, okay. And I think in that case, I think it is, it's okay because I thought of it, right? It's like, okay, I thought of, hey, I could have done this, but no, I'm not going to do it. But also just as they kind of pass new milestones, realize like, okay, I'm coaching my kid's soccer team now, right? That's a cool milestone. Maybe he can carry his dishes from the table to the dishwasher now. Like maybe it's time for him, me just subtract my, you know, dishwashing role now that I'm adding the soccer coach role. So I think that's been hard because I think, you know, the more you care about something, the harder it is to like not be showing competence. So that's, I give you one good example of my time and one that I'm still, and I think we'll still be working on with my parenting. In our coaching with our clients, we hear I'm trying to, I would like to, and then it's usually add something activity, right? Add something to their plate. And in those moments, I'll ask them, okay, well, how are you making space? What are you doing to remove something that might be blocking you from that? Or what consistently is showing up as a reason that you have been unable in the past to add this? Because as you said, we just get busier. And there's really, if you're trying to do something, if you want to do something, even when we look at New Year's resolutions, very, very rarely does loss ever get shared as a New Year's resolution. I want to spend less time doing something. I want to lose this thing from my life. I want to remove this thing from my life. So having that ability to balance out, okay, I'm thinking of adding something, well, it's got to come from somewhere. So where can I commit to the loss? Where can I commit to the subtraction that I know is going to feel difficult in the moment? And when we decided that we were going to be a bit more remote and flexible and move around, we made the decision to downsize and some of that downsizing meant putting stuff in storage. I ruthlessly created an air table, an inventory of everything, took photos, much to my wife's chagrin. Why are you asking me to take photos of all these individual items and why is everything organized with QR codes? And we came back from three months in Europe and even as diligent as I was with my inventory, I still ended up getting a cable that I had packed away. I still ended up buying that thing that I had stored thinking, oh, in the future, I could use this. And yet it's interesting when we go back to our families and we see them holding onto things that were like, you could get rid of that. It's so easy to see it in others. It's so much more challenging to really live that life of subtracting and being focused and intentional on some of these things, especially physical possessions that we carry with us. I want to add to that as well. I think there's something in a man's DNA where that cable that you decided, I'm going to need this later and that you actually do remember that and it's in that junk drawer that you save and you're like, ha, ha, ha. And in that moment, you're the smartest man on the planet, but those moments are the most rare. Yeah. Meanwhile, you've spent all the time storing it, thinking about it, like there's some part of your brain that's devoted to remembering where that cable is. Well, in prepping for this, my wife was asking, can we do a pass on the freezer and can we subtract some of these items that have been put in the freezer in again in that out of sight, out of mind situation? When you're seeing it around, you understand the clutter, but oftentimes we compartmentalize, whether it's the hard drive on our phone, we're not thinking about all the things stored or those closets that we don't open throughout the year. Well, when my wife listens to this, she's going to want to do a pass on the freezer too. I have like every like an ice pack for like specific to every part of the body. She's like, does your like lower right back still hurt or can we get rid of this special ice pack? So, yeah. I'm glad I'm not alone in that one. Yeah, I'm going to preempt it. I'm going to clean it out before she notices. There we go. Well, we'll delay this episode a little bit. So we'll give you some time to clean some things up. Can you figure it out? We love asking every guest what their X factor is. What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary? Well, a subtractive one is just like not watching TV. And it's a simple one. Had a lot of heady conversation, but I think that's a really good one to pass along. Yeah, Johnny's nodding along with that. When we were running programs, we would often need a TV to display the slides and Johnny's completely anti TV. So we had this TV and I was like, well, can you store the TV? You don't have to watch the TV. And he's like, I don't want it anywhere near me. Can you get this TV away from me? Get it out of here. Just gonna take over my brain. Yeah, we'll talk about, I mean, and I do watch sometimes with the kids, talk about saving time, but also the leverage time, right? It's like, and like Johnny was saying that he wants to devote, you know, do things that will have multiplicative impacts. And TV has like no multiplicative impact. All you did was kill that time. Consumely consume, yeah. Yeah, and the thing that really upset me was that one in my core values is one of them is being creative and one of the avenues that I do that is music, playing guitar, writing music. And the idea of watching television, right? Watching this movie, that's two hours that I could be extracting the most joy from my day and playing music, playing my guitar, getting better, discovering the instrument to even a farther degree than I do now. And at this point in my life, I don't remember when I wasn't playing guitar. I grew up in a musical family. And I remember when I came to that conclusion and that was when, and AJ was there for me, I was like, this is, I don't need, no, no more. And the guitar now sits on, it goes, it's on a stand next to the couch. So if I sit on the couch, it's a natural instinct to pick up that guitar and then to begin playing because that's gonna give me a better return than a mind-numbing movie to just kill time. Or even worse, with all the streaming services sitting there with the paradox of choice and wasting hours and never actually choosing something to even consume. And of course, as we get older, we start to realize, oh, wait, I now have less time than I had and I'm moving towards the end of that. And it's like, well, now each one of these seconds means more to me than it has before. And where is that energy going to go? And of course, as I mentioned, for me, it wasn't an idea of minimization, it was the idea of addition. And in addition to the things that matter most to me and the things that allow me to get the most out of each and every day. Thank you for joining us. This was a fun conversation and inspiring many of our audience members to look at subtraction in your light. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It was fun for me too. I got some new ideas, so I'm sure your audience will too. Is there anywhere you'd like our audience to check out? My parents gave me a good Google name, so that's the easiest way to find out what's going on. The book has all the best ideas about subtraction and then I have a website. Okay, we'll link it up in the show notes. Thank you for joining us. This is great. Of course.