Every little thing that you think that you think that you need 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.

Yes, welcome to the minimalist podcast where we discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with less.

I'm here in West Halle, with my good friend T.K. Coleman.

Hey, man, it's a beautiful day.

Man, I have, it's the weather's changing, the season's changing. It is sneezing season for me. So I'll do my best till I've got red eyes right now, but we're going to make this work today. Because today we're joined by our returning champion. Dr. O'Ryan-Taraband is here, y'all. Dr. O. This is great, man. Thanks for having me back. It's good to have you back. I always love talking to you guys. Likewise. Orion, you put a new book out, and we'll talk about it. It's called Story Night. It's a novel, and boy, was I worried, T.K. Can you imagine why I might have been worried here? A little concerned. I have no idea. A lot of people try to write fiction. It's hard. Yeah. I've been teaching you writing class for 14 years now. And my very first book was a novel, and it is difficult. It's a different thing. I'm a fiction reader primarily. I don't read a whole lot of nonfiction, but also your last book, The Value of Others, was so good. And we had you on the show to talk about it. I was like, this guy's in his lane. And now he's totally getting out of his lane. And it's a book about Vincent Van Gogh. And so I picked it up. And I started reading it. It's called Story Night. Here I'll hold it up for the camera if y'all want to see it. And it's a short book and I open it up and the first

chapter is like super dense. It's very well written, but it's so well written. I'm like,

oh, it's going to be hard to read this whole book like this. The metaphors and similes, it's just, it was really dense.

And I kept reading it.

I realized, oh, no, that's just a narrator voice.

And then we moved to a different narrator.

And all of a sudden, I am just drawn into this thing.

You wrote a book that is really, really good, O'Reilly. And on page three, I have a

whole list of sentences from the book that I want to go over with because you were able to

incorporate philosophy in a way where it didn't feel heavy-handed. I didn't feel like you

were beating me over the head with profundity.

There were these moments, though, of breath.

And the writing is gorgeous.

And I will just say that early on, it reminded me a bit of like the muscular writing of like Don DeLillo.

And the body artist is one of my favorite books. I saw little traces of that. And then,

I don't know if you know, Lionel Shriver, she wrote, she was written a bunch of books, but her writing

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