Ethan Waldman [00:00:01]: Alright. I am here with Nathan Murphy. Nathan is currently the founder and lead researcher at Pre Politica, a research group that takes a science first approach for the development of political theory. In the past, Nathan has invented, patented, and sold medical products, lobbied the highest levels of government for prison reform, founded 3 technology businesses, been a sponsored rock climber, built a large social media following, sold tens of thousands of books, created online courses, renovated a dilapidated house DIY, and over the past 5 years, he has been working in political theory, writing academic papers, and presenting at conferences. Nathan Murphy's new book, The Ideas That Rule Us, explores the profound impact that societal ideas and ideologies have on our personal lives, choices, and well-being. Murphy delves into how these often unexamined beliefs shape our reality, influencing everything from the way we live to the structures of our communities. Nate actually was on the show maybe about a year ago to talk about, van life guide and and renovating, a dilapidated house in Spain.

Ethan Waldman [00:01:08]: But, I'm excited to have you back on to to talk about the book. Welcome back to the show, Nate.

Nate Murphy [00:01:14]: Well, thank you, Ethan. Thank you for having me back. This is the first time I've been on a podcast twice, and it's quite interesting. It's gonna be quite different, subject matters. Yes. But but it's really interesting. But, yeah, interesting to see see your thoughts on the latest.

Ethan Waldman [00:01:29]: Yeah. Well, I really enjoyed our first interview, and I'll put a link to it for for those who maybe haven't heard it. And I felt like there was a very strong kind of philosophical, backbone to everything that you were doing. So I'm glad to see you kind of flush it out into into this book. So I think I wanna start just with you know, in the book, you discuss how consumerism drives our personal choices. So I was curious if you could share an example of how adopting a minimalist ideology, such as through, you know, van life or tiny house living, can lead to more fulfilling life choices.

Nate Murphy [00:02:14]: Yeah. I mean, that that's a very good question. I think when we look at consumerism and how consumers are if we're looking at it from an ideological perspective, how it is quite deeply embedded in our culture and affects our desires and therefore behaviors and and the things we do to move towards the idea the the desires that we have. It it comes up with a lot of some problematic ideas, and potentially one of the biggest one is without stuff, we're not valuable. Like, we use, belongings or items that signifiers of wealth or success or or personal worth or personal validation through the eyes of others. And that that kinda traps us into this cycle of purchasing or working towards purchasing objects, which ultimately aren't going to fulfill us. And and and I think that's largely the the problem. So I think when people look at consumerism and they try to reject some of these core tenants of of the ideological structure that drives it, they look towards things like minimalism is one of them.

Nate Murphy [00:03:22]: And by recalibrating what you're working towards, it's not more stuff. It's not a bigger house. It's not this fancy car. It's not a $30 watch. It's okay. What do I want to be able to live the life that I want to live, and how do I get there in the most effective way? And minimalism is like a great conduit and a great vehicle to to take you there. But to to do that isn't necessarily easy because you have to start to let go of some of the the concepts, which might be quite deeply embedded within us through, childhood for our civilization. The idea is that we need to have these things to to to be valuable, and they've gotta be new things, and they've gotta be big, and they've gotta be comparable to other people.

Nate Murphy [00:04:04]: So I think moving towards minimalism, part of it is an ideological deconstruction of the ideas that we hold. And then once we're sort of free of those, then we can embrace different ways of living.

Ethan Waldman [00:04:15]: Yeah. And it's it's always interesting to me, you know, having interviewed, you know, 300 plus people for this show that, you know, some people come to van life or tiny house living because they are minimalists, and others become minimalists after they start living tiny or start doing van life. It kind of forces you more or less into minimalism just because of the physical constraints of the space.

Nate Murphy [00:04:43]: Yeah. I can I can totally see that? I I think I mean, if you're coming into then, like, be closer to a minimalist, that means that you've gone through that journey somehow already.

Ethan Waldman [00:04:54]: Yeah.

Nate Murphy [00:04:54]: And I think it's quite hard. If you've got a big house and a permanent and you've got all the things, it can be quite hard to to make that move, to a van or to tiny living, without. Yeah. That makes sense.

Ethan Waldman [00:05:10]: So you mentioned the emotional toll of conforming to these society norms when they don't align with your personal values. What are some of the emotional challenges that people face when breaking free from these norms like consumerism? And how do you overcome that?

Nate Murphy [00:05:34]: Yeah. So I I think when people but basically everyone's affected by the ideas that we grow up with us. That's just a a fact of living in society. So when you want to change or you find or you could find reason to change from the ideas that you you're brought up with, you're gonna come across all sorts of different forms of resistance. But, firstly, there's, you know, the resistance of your self identity. Maybe you identify as someone who is has these things or will have these things, someone who is, like, wealthy and can afford all of the consumer consumerist trap ends. And that might be hard to overcome.

Nate Murphy [00:06:12]: Then the other one is this issue one because there's a constant stream of, you know, from advertising, from social media, from TV and film, which is kind of curating the ideas that that we live by As a change away from that, that's a constant draw of something we always have to be kinda mindful of and push back on because it's very easy to slip back into kind of an like a previous way of thinking or a very consumerist way of thinking where if I have these things, I will be better. And then obviously, thirdly, there's your actual social environment. If you start acting in a way which is completely different from your social environment, the people you're around, people you've grown up with or your family, then it can appear to be a judgment on their value systems or the things that they buy into. And and that can be difficult to counter because if you do something which is contrary to how other people live their lives, immediately people can be defensive or offensive because because they just can't understand it. And the fact that you're doing something different, it's it's kinda implicitly a criticism of them, and people struggle to deal with that quite often.

Ethan Waldman [00:07:23]: Yeah. I mean, I think that people are really sensitive to the social pressures of kind of keeping up with or or conforming to the way that their friends and family are living. And I know that that in a way, you can become ostracized. You know, people there's almost like a pecking order or there's a tendency to want to criticize friends or family for, you know, doing something different, such as deciding to live tiny or doing van life or just becoming a minimalist in their current living situations. Yeah.

Nate Murphy [00:08:05]: And I think we have to, like, if you're in a situation where you've made this change into any part, any different area, of any area of your life, you've made a change in your lifestyle and you come across people who are kind of, like, slightly aggressive about just the way you want to live your life, even though it doesn't actually affect them in any way whatsoever.

Ethan Waldman [00:08:25]: Right.

Nate Murphy [00:08:26]: I think you can just sort of take pause. You can notice people's behavior, and and you're making this choice. And some people just wouldn't like it, and you just have to recognize it's not actually to do with you. It's to do with them. They're struggling with the challenge you're making to the way they live their life, and and people don't like that. There's a lot of people will find this in many areas. So people who sort of go vegetarian and when they're surrounded by people who eat meat, that they kind of you often get this aggressive pushback, and it's nothing to do with you. It's nothing to do with your lifestyle choices.

Nate Murphy [00:08:56]: Yeah. It's to do with how you're implicitly challenging what they do and how they think. And people don't like it because of your subconcious and and how you see yourself is made up of ideas, essentially. And if one of these ideas is, you know, that you're the guy, you've got the big house, you've got the car, you've got the luxury objects, and someone's rejecting all of that, then you're challenging the ideas and form that self-concept. And implicitly, in that same time space, you're challenging them as a person, and that's what people struggle with.

Ethan Waldman [00:09:29]: Yeah. That's interesting. So, I mean, is it up to us to soften the blow for them, or is it up to us to essentially continue to be who we are and kind of let them deal with it.

Nate Murphy [00:09:47]: Yeah. I mean, I think if you recognize that self-concept or that, you know, this you gave sort of thing. It's happening in some way when based on your challenge or your rejection to their concepts and the concepts that make them who they feel they are. I think you can treat that with a bit of kindness and maybe vest just some light humor or self depreciating humor. You know, you say, well, I'm gonna be tiny living a while, so I'm just too poor. You know? Like Yeah. I can't afford a giant house, so I'm gonna get small. I'm gonna, you know you can you can find a way which makes them still feel good about themselves even though you're challenging, like, these these foundational concepts of of their being.

Nate Murphy [00:10:25]: I like, depends who they are, depends on your relationship with them. Sometimes it's worth challenging. Sometimes it's just not. And and you can just let them see how it plays out. I think that's probably the best thing. I've, you know, when I left the city and then I was traveling and then I bought a van, I was living in a van for a few years. And I think some people in my social environment would probably like, this guy's, like, a totally weird hippie. You know? They just didn't get it.

Nate Murphy [00:10:54]: But then, you know, when a few years I'm actually now 9 years down the road from that journey. And people look at my lifestyle and, like, well, I'm basically totally free. I've got remote business. I live in a beautiful house in the mountains. My life is my own. And people, they have a different viewpoint. They see it in different way now. And that to me is the easiest way to to argue.

Nate Murphy [00:11:17]: It's basically kinda not argue and just go down that road and, you know, perhaps you're debt free, and they're still slaving under a giant mortgage. And you're happy. You have more freedom of your time. You've got better, you know, more money to invest in your children or whatever it is. Yeah. I think the easiest way is to confront that down the road with reality of example.

Ethan Waldman [00:11:38]: Nice. So in the book, you talk about how capitalist ideologies promote kind of short term gains over long term sustainability. And you kind of propose a shift towards a more ecologically sustainable ideology to kind of transform our relationship with consumption and waste. And so I'm curious, like, how do you think how do you think the shift from a capitalist ideology to a more sustainable one can transform that approach to consumption and waste?

Nate Murphy [00:12:16]: So firstly, I would say that the way I see capitalism is fundamentally a system of economic cooperation. And we're a very cooperative species, and capitalism works very well. It works very well in this way. It's lifted, you know, hundreds of million people out of really horrible life conditions and all these things. I'm definitely not an anti capitalist under that banner. But what is lacking in capitalism is concepts of fairness, and care, which are also fundamentally human preferences.

Nate Murphy [00:12:47]: And when we look at capitalism, it doesn't intrinsically have these properties. It's definitely not intrinsically caring, and it's definitely not intrinsically fair because you need capital to pay. So Yeah. And then when we're looking at care, then it depends on who we're caring for. So there's care within our community, then it's a global perspective of caring for people from other nations, but there's also, the perspective of the environment as well. So I think if we want to make capitalism sustainable, you have to view it with concepts of fairness and care. And the only way you can really do that is through government intervention, which is obviously a politically, contentious point. But it we can see it in a lot of societies where capital has, like, too much, influence over the government.

Nate Murphy [00:13:33]: When it can do that, it remodels the government within its image, which is essentially you need capital to play. And then, for example, in the US, you have these elections with vast sums of money and limited political donations, and then you end up with a dysfunctional political system. And eventually, you end up with a disintegration of a of a true capitalist system because it becomes corrupted by capital, corrupted by government, and so on. So coming back to your question of the environment, at the same time, if we want to have a capitalist system that cares for the planet that we live in, then we also need to be thinking about how the government can effectively manage that or help, regulate or constrain taxes in such a way that it does actually care, for things other than owning profit.

Ethan Waldman [00:14:22]: Yeah. Yeah. You could see how everything is everything is connected together. What you made the point about, you know, the the political system, especially in the United States. And I just you know, as you were talking, I just thought about how much physical waste that whole cycle leads to. Not to mention just how exhausting it is emotionally as somebody who lives in the United States to have an election with that much money and that much kind of media focused on it for so many months beforehand. But also just all the yard signs, all the, you know, all the crap that gets made for it with all that money. Just, you know, it's all made for this one thing, this one day, and then afterwards, it's just completely valueless.

Nate Murphy [00:15:13]: Yeah. Yeah. It's a horrific amount of money. I think, that's one of the stats in my book is looking at how capitalism remodels governments when it's unrestricted or unconstrained. And I think Germany's for the election of their chancellor, the whole budget for that entire campaign, which is like the the main, so the president in the state in the US, the whole campaign for that, the budget was less for, like, one senator in Colorado. So the the the money in politics I mean, you can thank ... pretty much for that. It's gross, and it's corrupt, and it's obviously corrupt. And people who don't pay hundreds of millions of dollars not to have influence.

Nate Murphy [00:15:52]: And the influence comes at the cost of everyone else. Yeah. So

Ethan Waldman [00:15:59]: Well, you know, a lot of the things that we're talking about, and my next question is kind of about eco villages and co living spaces.. Many of these concepts and ideas that you introduce in the book are ideas that didn't originate in the tiny house movement, but have certainly taken hold in the tiny house movement, you know, minimalism, environmental consciousness, you know, co living, eco communities. I'm curious how you came to these concepts. Was it through your your experience living doing the van life thing? Or, you know, so it's like, did you get introduced to this through van life, or were you already kind of here and van life fit in nicely with where you were going?

Nate Murphy [00:16:46]: So, I mean, I don't think my moving towards van life wasn't really a philosophical drive. I wanted the cheapest way to go climbing for the longest period of time. So There you go. It's not very exciting in that perspective. But I think, in terms of the coliving community, I think what came for me to realize that the importance of this, especially in relation to consumerism, is trying to look at the ideological opposite of of consumerism. And a lot of people would say, well, okay. It's like minimalism. It's part of it potentially.

Nate Murphy [00:17:21]: But really, actually, the opposite of consumerism is contributionism. It's like I you through contribution, you gain value rather than through owner owning things or buying things, you gain value in the community. And I think consumerism because because it leads us to have this, idea that we can buy anything and have everything ourselves and that reduces how we feel dependent or reduces our actual dependence on anyone else because everything can be purchased, everything can be bought. We can feel like we did everything ourselves, And that leads us to feel like community is not that important. Yeah. But but in fact, actually, generally, we're as people, we're happy. We're better off when we do things. We get contribute to our community.

Nate Murphy [00:18:06]: People love us for our contribution. That makes us wanna do more, and it just makes our lives better and our community better. Whereas the consumer, experience of buying something, people might think you're cool for an instant, but they don't care. They just don't care about it in reality. They might appear like they care for a minute, but no one cares if you've got a fancy car.

Ethan Waldman [00:18:26]: Right.

Nate Murphy [00:18:26]: They just don't. It's amazing. But they do care if you do something cool for them o if you help people. These things that move people and that's what makes you valuable. That's what gives you worth.

Ethan Waldman [00:18:38]: Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of a nice dovetail into this. You know, what are some of the benefits of eco villages and co living spaces? And how do they contrast with, you know, the current housing model, especially in the United States, which is, you know, single family homes?

Nate Murphy [00:18:58]: Well, I mean, I think as soon as you have people living, you know, if you have communities of tiny hands or something like this, you end up with close to more dependency on people around you. And I think that you implicitly, you're gonna end up with a more like a village sort of a scenario where kind of you sort of know everyone, and hopefully you get on with everyone. But, in a general sense, you end up with more community. For example, you and I know a lot of people who live in the city, and they've lived next door to someone in the an apartment block, and they basically never spoke to the person who's a direct neighbor for years. And that is potentially this sort of I mean, it's almost like an optimization, but it's this complete disconnection from your actual physical community and people around you is something which you can't really have that in a small village scenario. Like, the village life is I mean, I live in a very small village in the mountains. We know everyone in the village.

Nate Murphy [00:20:00]: We help each other out. In general, we all get on. Inevitably, as, you know, some people roll up people different ways, but in general, you know, there's you know, I've got a guy who's borrowing a bunch of my scaffolding right now because he's renovating a barn. And this sort of it's like real tangible value exchange. And when I lived in the city, I didn't really exist. So I think this this this small community live in can actually make actual communities. I I think that's probably the long and short of it. And through community, we can more more easily find value.

Nate Murphy [00:20:31]: We can more easily help people in need because we can understand what their needs are, and we can see where we can contribute. And when we contribute, we feel good.

Ethan Waldman [00:20:39]: Nice. Nice. So what are some practical steps that people can take to become more self aware and more open minded when they are kind of questioning their their current ideologies?

Nate Murphy [00:20:55]: Mhmm. Thats a good question. So, I mean, firstly, the problem of ideas and ideologies, especially the ones that we grow up in, is they're sort of like a background noise. You know? We're there, they're there. That noise is there since we're once we're a baby. And as we grow up into an adult, that noise permeates everything. And it's sometimes hard to see what it is or hear what it is until you've somehow turned it off. And I think that's actually genuinely a really fun thing to do.

Nate Murphy [00:21:25]: And one thing you can look at potentially is look at your behavior and how you spend your time. Because although we might not really understand our values or we might feel like we have values, but they're not actually how we spend our time. The bottom line of everything is behavior communicates values. So one of the things we can do is try and understand, okay, there's all the things we say we believe in or we have, but then there's, like, actually, what are we spending our time doing? What are we working towards? What do we spend our money on? Who do we associate with, and how do we associate with them? What, you know, experiences do we do with other people, and what are those experience based around, and what is the structure of those things? And then through that, we might go to peel back some of the understanding of, like, actually, what are my values? What are the ideas I'm actually living to compared to the ones that I would like to live to? And then through changing our behavior or directing our life in a different direction or making effort to do something different, then we can actually change our actual values and through behavior, we're more likely to better change how we see things and how we believe or what we believe, over time. But it's not an easy process, I I would say.

Ethan Waldman [00:22:39]: No. No. It's not. And I do think kind of what I said earlier about, like, you know, sometimes tiny house dwellers become minimalist, and sometimes minimalist become tiny house dwellers. I think that with these ideological changes, I would imagine that taking the kind of radical step of maybe deciding to do van life for a couple of years or live in a tiny house or Take on a big project like DIY ing something, that can kind of accelerate those ideological changes just out of necessity, just because the experience

Ethan Waldman [00:23:18]: Or that the experience will just change you. And you don't have to necessarily be so in your head about it. You don't have to think about the change. It just kind of happens because of the because of the setting or because of your experiences.

Nate Murphy [00:23:34]: I think you're right. I think what action does, is it take away the buts. You know? Like, oh, I'd like to do that but..... You know, I need an extra room in my house or whatever. I'd like to do that, but, you know, what would my friends think of me? Or I'd like Yeah. If there's for anything that we wanna do or we think would might be better, even if it's just like a purely rational thing, we're not really very rational. We mostly base our behaviors on on what we feel.

Nate Murphy [00:24:00]: But even if you're like, okay. I've got this crushing mortgage debt. I'm working all the time to pay that thing, and my bills are really high because I've got this enormous space to heat, but if I had this tiny house, actually, I could be, like, mortgage free in, like, 2 years, and I'm free from that. Yeah. Maybe eventually down the road, you you build up some you build up some wealth and you buy a house again. Yeah. But it is is a stopgap or a way just to get out of the rut of being stuck in it.

Nate Murphy [00:24:27]: that's a really logical decision, but then you have the buts. But, you know, I like this thing and, you know, how if all my friends wanna come to say, what would happen? You know? And these things, if you just go for it and then you find out, oh, it's fine, you know, that pops a bubble of, like, all the perceived needs we had before. You know? I moved in a van. I was traveling, climbing, and I had, like, one solar panel and it was all the power I needed. And I'm traveling and I'm having a freaking great time, plus very little. My life traveling in a van is unbelievably cheap compared to renting an apartment in London Yeah. Having all the bills, yeah, and all the essential costs of of city living. And it just it really opens well, I mean, I knew before how cheap you could live, but then when you actually do that, you're like, this is really cool.

Nate Murphy [00:25:15]: If I ever have any, like, financial problem in my life, I could just build a van. Boom. I'm done. I'm living cheap.

Ethan Waldman [00:25:21]: Yeah. It's like a quick ...it's a quick way out.

Nate Murphy [00:25:24]: Yeah. Essentially.

Ethan Waldman [00:25:27]: So you make some predictions in The Ideas That Rule Us, one of which is a kind of a shift towards, you know, digital nomadism. And we've seen it happen. You know, I think COVID really accelerated the remote work trend. But does it does it go beyond just, you know, just remote work?What do you see as the the future of of kind of living? Is is it going to be as sedentary as it was?

Nate Murphy [00:26:08]: Well, I I guess it depends, well, it depends on where people are living. I mean, I think one thing we can see is wherever you have high speed Internet. And I'm in the mountains here. We have fiber. It's actually about 8 times faster than the Internet. So my brother has in the Central London. Wow.

Nate Murphy [00:26:32]: You can live here and you can work here. For example, my wife, she's started a biotech company from this little village in the mountains. She's got a lot now working near London. She's raised 2,000,000 pre seed, and she's been able to do all of that from here, in this, like, mountain environment. There's, like, a tiny village, 18 people, rural Catalonia. Yeah. And so I think these things show that the opportunities exist now to do quite serious stuff.

Nate Murphy [00:27:02]: But, like, you didn't have to be in London or the Bay Area. It makes a huge difference just the the the culture shift towards accepting Zoom calls and things. So if you can do that, if you can start a Biotech company from scratch from the mountains and still be based in the mountains, you can pretty much do anything as long as you've got a decent passed Internet connection. And I think over time, people realizing that, and they can realize that there are different opportunities to live different places and have different life experiences. For example, you mentioned some having a sedentary lifestyle. Now if you're in the city, then your 2 options are you go for a run, which can be like, you know, running along the road with diesel fumes around and around the same park, or you've got the option of going to a gym, which, I don't know. That never really inspired me. There are obviously other forms of exercise.

Nate Murphy [00:27:54]: But when you live in the the countryside, you know, I can just go out. I can hike up a mountain. I can go and, you know, work on some development for climbing crags. It's very easy to access high quality relaxation. And I think that's something which when people realize or they're able to access that, they can have you know, they can do serious work and very quickly have high quality rest essentially in beautiful places, in nature. My wife, she's got a garden. She loves gardening. And, like, in in one minute, she's in the garden with her hands in the soil.

Nate Murphy [00:28:28]: And it's affordable because it's not in central big city.

Ethan Waldman [00:28:32]: Yeah.

Nate Murphy [00:28:33]: So I think that possibility is going to become more attractive with people over time, and it's gonna spread out where people can live in relation to cities. People, if you only have to travel in to the city to be in your office 1 or 2 days a week, you can accept a longer commute potentially, and you can live somewhere a little bit more remote. So I think there's gonna be a general shift over time towards that, but probably it's gonna be slow. Because there's a lot to change. A lot of people to change their habits, change how they feel, and and realize that, but it will take time.

Ethan Waldman [00:29:09]: Yeah. Well, in our last interview, we touched on the idea that tiny houses don't appreciate in value in the same way that that vans do. And, you know, that whole idea of, like, oh, is this an asset that's appreciating or depreciating is a is a very capitalistic kind of ideology. And I know you said you're not anti capitalist clearly. But I'm curious, based on The Ideas That Rule Us, what's your current thinking on, you know, how much should somebody care? You know, whether a tiny house appreciates or depreciates or a van appreciates or depreciates?

Nate Murphy [00:29:55]: Well, I mean, a van is gonna depreciate. Definitely depreciate asset. There's nothing you get around it. You put a little smile on it, and eventually it breaks out. A tiny house, however, I didn't see how that should be any different than another house, as long as you maintain it. There's always a cost to have a house to keep it in good order, and you always have to maintain it. That's a fact of life.

Nate Murphy [00:30:16]: The same removing parts in a house, don't you say? And but I think, the way I see it and and I wrote about this at length in the book about the hot property, like cost of property, which in a lot of western countries, it's just completely insane. It's a piece of absolute collective insanity to have allowed property prices to get to this point. It makes no sense. Harms basically everyone, apart from people who own lots of properties or banks who can, you know, get interest for more years out of more people.

Ethan Waldman [00:30:48]: Yeah.

Nate Murphy [00:30:49]: So I think my my perspective on housing, it should really ideally, houses aren't seem to be like the most important investment of your life. Ideally, a house is somewhere you live, and it's a tool for you to live your life. It shouldn't be this most scary financial twist you make in your life because if you get it wrong, then it's a disaster. Or you shouldn't be sitting in your house expecting that it's gonna go up by 10% a year. I mean, it's obviously unsustainable. Aside from that, it's just not good. It's not a good way for you to live. When I bought this house in Catalonia, some people said to me, oh, I think you overpaid on that.

Nate Murphy [00:31:29]: And actually, you know, because I bought a ruin, it was already cheap. And, like, whether it's 10,000 one way or another because I saw it as a long term thing.

Ethan Waldman [00:31:38]: Yeah.

Nate Murphy [00:31:38]: I didn't care. And then I put whatever money into the house I needed to build it to have good systems. I saved obviously a lot of money by building myself, but I just put in the good system. So I'm like, well, I wanna have a really good house. I wanna be efficient. I wanna be environmentally friendly. I wanna have cheap to run, good solar systems, and that's it. And I didn't really plan on selling it.

Nate Murphy [00:32:00]: That was never the aim. I'm not flipping it. It's not an investment. It's like it's a way to live somewhere beautiful and have a relatively cheap house and get that debt got rid of as fast as possible. And that's done. So I've got this it's incredible. You know? Like, very low cost of living.

Nate Murphy [00:32:16]: If things change up and down with my business, which does happen over time, it doesn't bother me so much. I can just I'm not stressing about it. Like, no. Where's my money going? I need to need to earn. I need to grasp. I I can just look at it in a very calm way and be like, oh, I made money less money this month, which essentially just means I save less money. Yeah. But it's it's not stressing me because because life costs are saving.

Nate Murphy [00:32:37]: Nice. So, again, it's like coming back. Houses shouldn't be investment. It should be a tool. And the tool should be to live the life you want in the way that you wanna live. And ideally, in my perspective, it fosters some sense of freedom, and and and doesn't tie you to some massive financial burden for the next 35 years.

Ethan Waldman [00:32:56]: Yeah. Well, I think that a lot of these ideas, you know, will resonate for people who are interested in tiny house living or or van life or, you know, any of these kind of alternative smaller living footprints the book is called The Ideas That Rule Us. Is it currently out now, or is it coming out?

Nate Murphy [00:33:19]: It's out now, in basically all the workshops. Okay. We're looking for it. This is how it looks. The Ideas That Rule Us.

Ethan Waldman [00:33:26]: Nice.

Nate Murphy [00:33:27]: And it yeah. You can get Amazon Barnes and Noble, pretty much all of them, all the e book sites as well. Awesome. E book. And there's an audiobook coming soon.

Ethan Waldman [00:33:36]: Excellent. Read by the author?

Nate Murphy [00:33:41]: Unfortunately, no. It's so much work to make an audio, but I just I just don't think I can make my voice insane for that period of time.

Ethan Waldman [00:33:50]: Ah.

Nate Murphy [00:33:51]: I didn't exactly know how we would do it. And anytime I've done, like, b roll or voice over for videos

Nate Murphy [00:33:57]: If I didn't film all in one session, the next day, I sound totally different. So I just figured I've got so much to do with the book and the promotion. Yep. I just outsourced it.

Ethan Waldman [00:34:05]: Nice. Well, I will put links to The Ideas That Rule Us, on the show notes for this episode, which will be episode 303, I believe. thetinyhouse.net/303. Nate Murphy, thanks so much for for coming back on the show.

Nate Murphy [00:34:23]: Thank you, Ethan. Really appreciate it.