#802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/9b8ecaa88e1870bb

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show where I explore the strange, the edge, the practical.
The nuance, the tactical. And my guest today is a dear friend. I've wanted to have him on the podcast for a very long time, Craig Maud.
Craig mod M O D.
He is a writer, photographer, and walker.
We'll talk about that a lot. Living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan, he is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa.
K I S A. Don't worry about it. We'll get to it. He also writes the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more. He has walked thousands of miles across Japan in every conceivable place, and since 2016 he has been co running
Walk and talks with Kevin Kelly.

interesting man in the world. In various places around the world, the Cotswolds
Northern Thailand.
Bali.
Southern China. Japan.
Spain, which includes the Portuguese and French Caminos, and much more. Today's episode
is wide ranging.
And I had so much fun with this. We ended up discussing Craig's early life, his path to Japan, his struggles with self worth and alcoholism, and how he overcame both of them, creative development.
His writing experiments, his initial experiences with walking and writing, and so much more.
I really think you will get a lot out of this conversation as I did. I took copious notes.
And I also decided to keep some of the behind the scenes banter before the interview in the recording that you're gonna hear, which I thought might be fun.
Four.
Shits and giggles, just for the fun of it. Why not? You can find Craig Mod at Craigmod.com. That's the HQ for everything, Craig Mod, C-R-A-I-G-M-O-D.com. You can find him on Instagram at Craig Mod and on Blue Sky as well, Craigmod.com.
And with that
And just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible.
We'll get right into the meat and potatoes of Craig Mod.
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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I asked you a personal question.
No, we're just seeing it. What if I did the eyes?
My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and the scale.
Sure.
Good morning. More does I'm beso.

You're good, you're good. Uh Japan yeah, Japan US is always a little tricky with the time zones. I typically do kind of end of day my time
Early morning.
Japan time?
Yeah.
But uh this morning's good. It's getting me back on central standard. I'm I was coming from mountains, so this is like three hours before I usually get up. Okay, which is totally fine.
It's good. No, it's good. I mainline some caffeine and
We are ready.
Yeah.
Go off to the races. This is gonna be fun, man.
I uh
Always love an excuse to do creepy internet sleuthing on my friends.
Yeah.

Oh.
What would make this? I asked this question always.
You know all the housekeeping rules, bathroom break, water break. If you start something like we try that again. We can clean it up in post, since this isn't Carnegie Hall.
Yeah, what would make this
Time well spent. I know you got the new book.
What
Else anything come to mind? Like this comes out, you've done interviews, you're pro
You know how to weave prose your man in the public.
To some extent, what would make this time well spent?
I mean
Probably the most like affecting story of the last year or so of me is the adoption stuff. Like me for sure.
So I think that
That's pretty fecund.
Of emotion.

I wanna work on that headline, but I like it.
So
Yeah, that's a thing. And then
All the stuff that's happened with the cities has been really kind of a weird journey.
I got like the very short kind of summary
T's but I don't know the story, which always makes it more fun for me as well.
Yeah, so I think
In terms of like what will listeners get the most out of, I think like that that story about
The cities and the New York Times stuff and what's come out of that.
Because it encompasses a lot of like what does travel mean today? Why are we traveling? What does overtourism mean? How do you
Handle these
Massive tourism surges that are happening. Is there a way like
Yeah. Different parts of the country. So I think that's like really interesting. I think the adoption stuff is really interesting.
I mean, everything ties into the walking.
What about you?
What like this comes out and three months after it comes out. I appreciate you being so listener focused.
Because God bless my dear listeners.
But
As far as this interview.
Like it comes out, what would make it? You look back and you're like, God damn, I'm so glad I did that.
I'm gonna point people to that interview.
I think it aligns very much with what I think would be
Interesting for listeners to listen to. I mean, think the adoption stuff is so basically I haven't talked about
The adoption stuff in English anywhere.
Yeah. I haven't written about it.
Awesome.
This is like the first time me doing anything public about that and
The debut of the fecundity. So I th you know, I think
That
Being able to like kinda crack that nut well.
Would be really nice.
Yeah, and everything else I don't know.
I'm just happy to chat.
Let's just chat, man.
Let's just chat. I mean, we never have trouble doing that. I was trying to think how we initially connected. Do you even remember?
I mean.
I remember maybe.
I don't know.
Well,
There was there were two moments that we met.
One in twenty.
Eleven, right in the beginning of twenty eleven I was at.
What's the neighborhood you lived in in San Francisco?
Glenn Park.
Down south.
Just south of the mission.
Isn't there another one kind of up where like Ev lived up on the hill like you kinda go up not specific heights or anything like that, but it was close to Burnall Heights.
Yeah. West. Boy. I'm a left right kinda guy. Embarrassingly. Anyway, let's see.
I was working in a cafe there with one of the Flipboard engineers.
F must have been in a fancier place. Okay, flipboard. Right.
Yeah, as good a place as any. Yeah. Let's keep going, okay.
So th then I said hi to you there. I said, Hey, oh hey, it's yeah, that blah blah blah. And you're like, Oh, cool, yeah, flipboard's great. Then we
Exchange words in the bathroom at
Food camp. Oh, thank God. I was like, Oh shit. What happened here?
Power exchange. Power exchange. Kidding. Yeah. Yeah. So and then I think it was just, yeah, I think it was the Japan walk. That was the first time we ever really
Talked.
So it was got to Two and Mega Hang. Yeah, that's bananas. I was looking at the
Printed.
Book of the walk with the photographs.
Just the other day and I was like wow.
That's
Wild. I don't wanna sound like too much of a
old gezer, you know. Although I am every day turning into more of an like Oyazi. But the
fact that it was two years ago is just mind blistering in a sense. It does not seem that long ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, well let's just hop into it then.
And
You mentioned flipboards, so let's start there.
You lived in Silicon Valley.
Yeah, I did for a lot of people, that's the dream.
But
You left Silicon Valley.
Ended up
Back in Japan.
Could you just give us a bit of a thumbnail sketch? Doesn't even need to be a thumbnail, we have all the time in the world.
But
Where did you grow up?
Well make it the really boring
Back in childhood.
Intro but
Where did you grow up?
How do you end up in Silicon Valley and why didn't you stay in Silicon Valley?
So yeah, I mean it's funny to start with Silicon Valley because that was probably like that was the shortest period of anything I did my life.
For the most part. It was very truncated.
The reasons for which it's truncated, I think.
Might be interesting though.
I mean, I grew up in this sort of like
Lower, middle class.
post industrial town. Like I grew up in this town where like an air airplane engine factory was
The heart of the town.
What state was that?
This is in Connecticut, weirdly. We really don't think of Connecticut as like an industrial state, but
There is
There's stuff happening.
Yeah.
You know, ever since I was really
young I mean I loved books, I loved writing. I was sort of like drawn to that, but I was also
really drawn to video games and like I did not grow up in a place where people were reading, like no one around me was reading.
Ulysses. It was pretty like culturally a bit of a desert. But
There were video games and you know, those came from Japan.
And that was
sort of intriguing to me. That was like my first contact w I'd say with
A culture outside of
The town I came from.
And
There were computers, and I was really, really lucky. Like we did not have much money.
And our school districts were not well funded and you know, it was just I look back on it and I was
Extremely, extremely lucky with
These chance opportunities I had, which basically enabled me to do everything I'm doing now.
Very, very, very sliver sliding doors.
style, chances of opportunity.
Like
My family couldn't
really afford a computer, but my neighbor bought one.
And my neighbor was divorced.
And he lost his son in the divorce, so he was kinda like lonely and I was like
really hungry to be using computers. I was like, you know, eight or nine years old, ten years old.
I
started going over there so much to use his computer that he just gave me the key to his house and he bought me my own phone line and like this guy's
Tiny S.
And it w he was really kind. He was just genuinely
Just a kind guy.
I want to go.
About ten years ago I went to go find him and just say thank you.
for having me lent me his computer. I mean, it really changed my life, this computer thing.
And he passed away. It kinda it really it had a heart attack.
So if you have someone in your life
That you really want to say. Go thank them while they're they're around.
But you know how it is when you're a kid you don't realize
The lot that you've
fallen into with something like that.
For sure.
So that was going on and then I started using at his place, I s I got onto IRC, I started
Using PPP emulators to be able to use mosaic. I was in the ANSI art scene. I was like, What does PPP stand for? Just gonna take a brief side quest here. We don't need to get into the
Hyper specifics or what was it?
It's so funny that we're starting here because this is like such a bizarre
Almost like a footnote to like everything I'm doing now. Like nothing everything I'm doing now.
Feel so removed.
I like starting with the footnotes.
This is a pretty serious footnote. So
I don't even remember what PPP stands for. Basically you had shell accounts, right? So you had these text based shell accounts. These were like the first ISPs. I swear to God, this is gonna get more literary. If anyone's listening, it's gonna get more literary. Internet service provider. Even I know that one.
Yeah. No, but like we're gonna talk about books and walking in Japan and stuff, that's all coming. But this kind of Genesis story is sort of interesting in that, you know, you have these text based things, you could use IRC, which is like chat. It was like Discord. Sure, old school Discord.
Not owned by anyone. It was totally open, you know, like hosted on
University servers, stuff like that. And I got connected with the ANC art scene in there.
And I started doing antsy art. I was really
kind of captivated by design and by computer programming.
In the sense that what it could do for storytelling. That's kinda how I how I saw it and that's what sort of really captured my attention.
And so I started working you know, doing artwork with these guys. I was like
twelve, thirteen, these guys were all like five, six years older than me. They were mostly in California, a lot of them more.
And they were all
Sort of getting into the internet. And so when I
Graduated high school.
I had these weird connections that I had made on this
Text chat.
Room when I was thirteen. And these guys were like, Hey, we've started like a design agency, we're doing a startup, whatever. Come out for the summer, be an intern. So that was my connection. And
Essentially like
You know, I didn't grow up with money and no one around us had money. There was no wealth. There was no real
Looking back now, I mean, there was absolutely no real wealth.
happening in our town.
If you look at the GDP.
Statistics and stuff like that. I mean, it's sort of like
twenty percent of the national GDP was the average.
sort of GDP per capita of our time. America's GDP is really high. Like per capita GDP is like eighty five thousand dollars.
Way higher than
Japan, for example. Japan's like forty, forty five, something like that.
Didn't realize that was such a high discrepancy.
The Delta's pretty insane. So
I
Did not come from money. And so
I saw two ways
To get out, essentially.
From a very early age, I'm adopted
So there's a sense of disconnection from that. And then from a very early age I realized
The place that I was growing up in
was very, very tiny and I needed to get far away.
For a number of reasons, but I knew I needed to get away and I saw money as critical
For that.
Escape.
And I saw two ways of making money and one of'em was the stock market.
I joined the stock club as soon as I could at high school and
Was super geeking out as soon as
I think when I was eighteen or nineteen
I was nineteen when I opened
an E Trade account. I think I was like one of the first probably like 10,000 people to have an E Trade account. I was just like I was like yes, okay, I need this. So very weird. I mean, because there's no one in my family that had ever bought a stock.
You know.
I was raised by my mother and my grandparents. My father was sort of out of the picture.
Even though it was an adoption
This is your adopted mother.
These are my adopted yeah, my adopted parents.
Even though they adopted me, they got divorced when I was like two. I mean, which was good. My father wasn't
A great guy. So it was good to kinda push him to aside. But like
There was no archetypes for me of like, oh, this is how you generate wealth or create wealth or cultivate wealth or grow wealth. There's absolutely none of that.
Or even just how to engage culturally with the world.
No, to think about literature or to think about art.
So I was just kind of like scanning the horizon, you know, and it's like what do we knew like
Lifestyles are the rich and famous. You know, think about like what is in the as an eighties kid. I remember watching that eating TV dinners with my parents watching the rich and famous. I mean, like I didn't eat a single meal that wasn't like it that didn't involve TV.
My entire basically childhood. Yeah. Same.
I'll do that differently when it's my turn to set the rules, but yeah.
So you know, it's like y you think about when you come from a place like I come from
Like, what are your archetypes who establishes what's possible in the world? And it really is like pop culture. Like those are the things you kinda reach for.
Anyway, so you have like lifestyle and famous. What do those people do? They buy stocks, you know, they invest in stocks, blah, stuff like that. So I was like, Okay, I need to do that to get out. That's like
Step one. And then
I just loved the potential of the internet. Like as soon as I saw
The World Wide Web, I was like, yes, this is where I want to write. This is what I want to build on top of. Like it was just so obvious to me. I was like 14
When I used mosaic for the first time and it was just
Oh, okay, great. I don't have to think about anything. This is like just what I do. And
Very quickly I realized like if I became good at web stuff.
I would be making more money than anyone in my
Town. You know, it was it was just like this weird, again, this arbitrage of kind of information and skill. And like I just saw this very early on. The ability to kind of go out.
Silicon Valley as like an intern. I drove my Honda Civic
There's an like a ninety three Honda Civic with
No power, anything. It was like all I basically had to like crank the thing to get going. Drove across America.
And went out there and interned. And I just I really loved it.
And I loved
The people and the culture and the opportunities and it really
Just set my mind ablaze. I mean, it was really exciting. And I was kind of working on
Blogging software before blogger launched. I mean there's definitely
When I talk about like
Opportunity.
And
Yeah, they say.
Basically.
wealth is unevenly distributed, but really what you're talking about is opportunity being evenly distributed or not.
When you'd like listen to the generous story of someone like
Bill Gates.
He's just
surrounded by this like abundance of opportunity. You know, like the fact that the university had these
Terminals he could use and like it was just
People were all kind of cultivating his ability to take advantage of these opportunities.
And there's definitely an alternate reality where like
I had a little more opportunity. I was in Silicon Valley a little bit earlier and like I just had the
sense of self worth and confidence, I think to do things differently and build stuff.
That was like one timeline that didn't happen.
I went out there and I loved it and I enjoyed it.
At the same time I
I really
wanted to live abroad. I knew I needed to get away.
And because of certain things that kinda happened.
And things that I felt in my town, but not being kind of the
People of my town not being supported by the greater whole.
I kind of had this
From a very early age.
A lack of I would say
belief in the American system. And I just felt like I had to leave America. There's a very strong impulse. Like I have to get outside of this country.
To see things differently. This felt important to me for some reason, intuitively. What about the system? When you say system.
What specifically? Because we'll
Spent a lot of time talking about Japan, I am sure.
But Japan is

North Korea, right? It's similar to the US in some respects.
So what do you mean by the American system in that context?
Could just be a sense of something. Right. It doesn't have to be super Wikipedia.
In the moment I had absolutely no
words for it. I had no way to describe it. It really was just a few just because like you're operating from a lack of experience. Like you haven't seen enough of the world.
But you just intuitively there's a sense of okay, we aren't being supported. And then when I went to college
That was the big shock for me.
was getting to college and meeting everyone else and immediately filling this gap.
Of kind of abundance.
I was lucky I scored really well. I could
Even though I'm bad at tests.
Taking I don't like taking tests. I
Tested well.
A good college, really some you know, a really good university.
And it was just
The first three days, four days, I was just
In shock. I was like, Oh, these people are from a different planet.
The resources they had.
The archetypes they clearly had in their lives, the way they've learned to learn to speak.
To
move through the world like what they expect. I was just like, this doesn't
Compute for me at all. And it was immediately I bounced off of it so fast.
I was just like I need I can't be here. I I shouldn't be here. There's something fundamentally missing, broken.
sort of like lacking inside my inside my chest.
And I get it.
That's what drove me to just go, Okay, I should live
Abroad, I need to leave this country.
In part to rebuild that on my own.
Got it. Okay. So
When did you
Move to Japan.
At what year, what age?
I was nineteen and it was
Two thousand.
Two thousand. Yeah. Which is insane. I can't believe it's been twenty five years now. It is
Okay.
It's got time.
And you just to paint a picture for folks, so you you moved to Japan when you're nineteen.
And then you bounced around after that. You didn't stay in Japan the entire time, am I right?
Course, because we met after that.
Yeah, sort of. So
Just give you like the the macro timeline.
I go when I'm nineteen I stay for a year.
I go to university there. I love it.
While I'm there, the Silicon Valley bubble the first bubble pops.
So there really isn't a Silicon Valley to go to my plan was to go to Japan.
I applied on a whim.
To university there.
And I applied independently, so I wouldn't have to normally when you kinda do study abroad, you're you keep paying your American university fees. Right.
International. And I looked at the fees for Japanese universities and for like
A year with home stay, it was like a you know
Eight thousand dollars, five thousand. It was like an absurdly
Affordable.
Yeah.
And you know, there's scholarships available. It was like why wouldn't I just go do this? Of course I'm gonna do this. But I my plan was to drop out and move to Silicon Valley.
And just
Build.
Stuff. Mm-hmm.
Okay, so Japan for like a year or two and then go back to Silicon Valley?
Yeah, Japan for a year, and then in the middle of it, everything collapsed, and then I was like, Okay, well, maybe I should graduate.
university. So I applied in the middle of it.
As a transfer student to a university I thought I would like
Better than the one I was at before.
And
I got in.
I ended up going to UPen.
And so for me, I was
The first
person in my family to go to university.
Certainly big university. My mom went to community college.
She worked her butt off to become an elementary school teacher. But I was the first person to go to like university, university. My father didn't go anywhere.
My grandparents were both working at the airplane engine factory.
So this is a big deal and
Should I have gone to Pan or not? I mean, honestly, it was just the Ivy.
So this incredible sense of
I have to
Create or generate
On my own.
A sense of self worth.
And
The draw of
And Ivy was just too big. So anyway, ended up
Getting in.
Much to my shock.
And so after that first year in Japan I went back
Went to UPen.
I did that for two years. In the summer between I came back to Japan, did an internship at a magazine. And then as soon as I graduated UPenn, I was back to Japan, going back to Wasada.
Doing another year.
of intensive language studies in their in a grad program.
And then I basically just stayed.
Since then.
Alright.
Side quests. Not really a footnote.
I know
Quite a few people who've moved to Japan.
You're the only
non Japanese person as an adult I know who speaks exceptional Japanese.
As you're aware, there are a lot of foreigners who kind of stay in
The expad bubble, which is fine. People do that in the US too when they move here, for instance. Plenty of examples of that.
How did you
Learn your Japanese. If there are people listening.
who think to themselves, Man, I would really love to learn Japanese.
Any thoughts?
Based on your own experience?
Well I think a general
Language learning is easier if you have a m musical background.
And I
Grow up
All through my teens.
obsessively playing drums, just drumming, drumming, drumming, playing jazz, playing classical, playing in big band orchestras, playing everything. So
I think
Listening, being a good listener, obviously is is paramount. But when I got to
Tokyo.
I did a home stay, they couldn't speak one word of English.
And
I immediately just joined the music
circle at university, which was only Japanese people.
I wasn't trying to avoid the international crowd, and in fact the international group I was with were amazing. It was actually
I got to the school, I got to Wasada.
And the international programme was what I had always dreamed and hoped.
University would be.
It was super international, super mixed, kids from all over the world.
They were all
extremely serious about their studies. They were all way better
Japanese speakers than me. I'd had like one year of
University.
Japanese before it came.
To give you an example, there are thirteen months. Yeah. Which is not a lot. It's nothing. I mean basically I could barely say hello.
And even that was
Probably not.
Correct.
So there are thirteen levels of Japanese class at the university. I was in two.
There were kids who came from SOAS in London.
Who had done one year so as
They came there and you said soas and I thought about the muscle and
That causes me so many problems. What the hell is SOAS?
So as is the school of
Oriental and African studies in London. Wow, unfortunately. But yes.
They have the most
Total badass language program. Like honestly, if you want to learn Japanese, go to S.
Just go to S. Those kids, they had done one year at SOAS, they arrived in Tokyo, they were in level ten, level eleven. Holy shit. Good for that. It was insane. Must be a brutal boot camp.
So they were they were amazing. Yeah, it is it's
Seventy percent of kids drop out of it or something like that. Yeah.
Babysitting mutants. The kids were there were amazing speakers. And so when we hang out.
It's great to hang out with people who are a few levels above where you speak because then you're able to pick it up. You're like, Oh, what's what's that little grammatical thing you're doing? What's that word you're using? And then I just hung out with Japanese people constantly and played music. And music was really
You know this
Lingua franca sort of thing where I could just
Hang with all these incredible.
musicians, I had been playing drums for so long. I was in the studio all the time. And you just start to pick up
Slang and
Casual Japanese. It also gives you
A context through which you can develop Japanese friendships without having a lot of Japanese.
Right.
Which was judo for me, because I came from wrestling.
And

You know a a caveman with traumatic brain injury. They didn't care. As long as I could actually help the team and do something. They were like, Great, we'll support the savage. And
That worked. And I'm curious to know, did you end up
At least in my case, way back in the day, this was probably in
I think it was in Shinjuka maybe where I
Found Kino Cunha and I went there
to the Japanese language learning section.
Mm-hmm and found English language
Judo textbooks.
Right. So it also became a way for me in terms of motivation.
To learn.
How to
Read because once I
made it through those textbooks. I was like, Well, all that's left
Are judo textbooks in Japanese.
Which means I'm gonna need to learn to read Japanese, which is its own thing. I'm very envious that you had the students who were a few levels above you because that just seems like the perfect recipe, right?
Because to teach if you're at a at a home state like
I was when I was fifteen.
I had three different host families, not because I was a delinquent, but that's how it was set up. You would rotate through different families.
over the course of a year.
And the first
Let's just say.
First family pretty much a wash because
I couldn't communicate at all, nor could I ask them questions in Japanese to clarify what they were saying.
And then the second family probably took me a month before I found my legs and could finally start communicating with them.
My host family was
Very lovely, but completely, completely bonkers.
I'll let me paint this picture for you. So they ran an Udon noodle shop, right? So every meal was Udon. So
So Udon or you should explain with just like these very thick noodles, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like a soba is sort of Soba is weird because it's both like the fast food of Japan in the sense like there's Tachigu Soba in front of stations that you can go to at seven in the morning and just slurp something up before you go to work.
And it costs two bucks standing and eating, literally. Right. You're on the countertop standing.
Yeah.
But at the same time, Soba can also be incredibly refined where you spend$30 on a bowl and it's like two slurps and you're done. And so anyway, Soba's got that weird.
gamut. But Udon is like firmly just like working class food. Like it doesn't really
Get fancy.
And so there's some places I try to make it fancy, but it's really not that fancy. So anyway, this is a working class family. So it's it was it was sort of ironic.
I left my working class town to go across the world and I get plopped down basically in
In a place that felt really
I was like, Oh, okay, I know these people, I know this part of town.
It was a very working class part of Tokyo.
And um, you know, there was like kind of homeless people out walking around that I'd like to say hi to all the time and like I'd go to the arcade and there'd always be, you know, these weird like
Middle aged people that just clearly didn't have jobs playing Street Fighter all the time, so we just play together.
I was like, I get this. These are these are totally my people. So they had an Udon shop and there was an eleven year old son
And
Unfortunately, for me, he slept in a
His parents' bed?
So he didn't have any privacy.
And he decided
He had discovered his penis soon after I arrived. And
He decided that he was going to release frequently around the house in different places. So Oh my God.
So it would be

Try to send an email at the kotatsu. So it's you know, it's like November, it's kinda chilly. I'm sitting under the kotatsu. We'd had like there was the house was so cold.
What's a cottage?
Kotatsu is a low table with like a heater underneath it. So basically you put your legs under it, there's like a big
Heavy blanket. Like everything that's under the table's kind of a mystery. You don't know what what's lurking under the table. Oh no. This house was so cold. This house got
I swear to God, probably like three minutes of sunlight a year. Like it was just I don't even know how they architected it to have so little sunlight. It was just so freezing, no insulation. One of the people I met at the arcade, I was like complaining about like how how cold it was, and they bought me a full body snow suit to wear to bed.
You're like Kenny from South Park when you went to bed. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, Well how what am I supposed to do? This is the literally the coldest I've ever been in my life. Anyway, so we're we're sitting under the kotatsu. I'm doing emails.
The little eleven year old's like reading manga, and then suddenly I realized he's doing a little more than reading. So he's just jerking off everywhere. This kid is just he's just masturbating.
All over the house.
And like
I don't know how to
Say don't masturbate. So I f I came home from school the next day and we were alone
And I was just like
I gotta tell him to not jerk off everywhere. And so I was like, I mimed it.
I had to like mime don't masturbate under the table, you know, and like his brain. I'm like I'm sure
If Japan had therapy, you know, which no one goes to therapy in Japan, we could talk about that too, like, which I think is like a great
travesty of Japan. But like if Japan had therapy, this kid definitely I probably caused him some therapy. He probably
He hasn't masturbated one way or another, he was gonna need some therapy or an equivalent. But yeah. Oh wow. So that was insane. And then now in your mind are you like these people are insane, you're like, wow, this is Japan.
No, I was like, Oh my God, I I sort of pulled the short straw on my homestead. Like other kids' homestead families, it was like they were like oh I live on the thirty fourth floor of this beautiful, you know, tower apartment block and my family's taking me skiing next weekend. My my family, they they're like, Oh, we're gonna go to our summer home. You wanna come? I was like, Yeah, great, summer home. They take me to their summer home. It's like a shack.
by the river like with cockroaches. I was like what
What is going where who are these people? They were very sweet, but it was
I was like, I don't know if these people should have home stays, dudes.
Well my guess is they got paid by
Was it or whoever.
Right. So it's a gig.
It's a gig.
And they had so many gigs that they had
Another gig was
They were like hosting a Korean
Kid?
Who was just working, I guess, like as like a
Laborer at the Udon restaurant? Like you but he lived he slept in the closet? So they're getting a two for one. They get free labor. So the I've got the eleven year old son jerking off all over the place. And then there's this Korean guy
It was like maybe twenty five.
He sleeps in the closet.
He was super Christian because you know, it's like Christianity is sort of like a it's a huge thing in Korea. It's a national sport there, yeah.
And so he would come into my
Bedroom.
Every night. And you kneel in the entryway of my bedroom and go
Craigerson.
I want will you please come with me to church? Like every night he would ask me to come to church. So I'm like, I'm just in the most
And I'm trying to like figure out who I am. I'm trying to like recreate this like a personal identity. And I'm just like there's ejaculate flying everywhere, there's cockroaches like shooting across the room. I'm going to sleep in a snow suit. This Korean kid is asking me to go to church with him.
All I'm eating is your dome.
It was it was a weird it was a weird landing.
All right, so you can see why I like to explore the footnotes. We could have skipped that whole story. We could have skipped all that.
I
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Yeah.
I wanna point out a few things to folks who have not spent
A lot of time in Japan. Or maybe they just went to Japan and stayed in some fancy hotels.
There are a lot of cockroaches in Japan. Oh yeah. A ton a ton. Oh yeah. My second host family
Who I'm still very close to. I'm actually going back to see them next month. I'm very excited.
This is
God, f I mean this is more than thirty years later. I'm still close to my host parents and my brothers.
It's just an amazing blessing in my life.
Talk about it.
Inflection points were real.
Moments that at the time seemed special, but you don't realize quite the significance. Kind of like the computer.
Way to rub it in, Tim. Yeah, just rub it in. I'm glad you had a good host day. Hold on, hold on. I had a good host day. But the house was full of cockroaches. And uh
This is in Tokyo. It's very common. And these cockroaches not to

Probably betting on getting a lot of cockroach talk in this conversation, but
The cockroaches also in Japan
are very fond of flying.
They will
Not just scurry, but they'll take off and just fly right into your face.
And so my host mom, when she went into the laundry room, the dog's name, this little
Tiny
Like miniature Shiba was called I Town.
And
She would walk in there and then a bunch of cockroaches would like fly out of the laundry into her face and she'd go, Ai Chad, Ai Chan, Cookie Booty, Cookie Booty. She'd be like, Cockroach, cockroach.
And this little miniature Shiba would storm in
And kind of
Horpus nose these cockroaches to death.

This was like a daily at least multiple times a week kind of thing.
But yeah, that home stay sounds pretty formative.
It's funny now, but it was pretty stressful.
It speaks to how much I was enjoying everything else. And it was so clearly a business for them, too, because I was like for a spring break.
I hitchhiked across the country.
And
I told them, I said, Hey, uh I'm gonna go hitchhike to Fukuoka now and they're like Oh yeah, good luck. Bye. It was like there was no
It wasn't like hey, do you want do you need some supplies? Do you want us to drive you somewhere? She like you know It was like oh yeah, good all right, we'll see you in a month.
I have to just
Tell you one story, which I don't we we've never talked about, but we've talked a lot, but we haven't covered this. So my very first host family.
I got the distinct impression they didn't really want me there. They were also being paid.
And they were reasonably polite.
But there's a difference, you learn this, I think, pretty quickly in Japan. Like there is a difference between polite and nice. There is
Like taning yogi, right? Like the like stranger formality.
Where you're like, Oh, so polite. Yes, very polite. But they didn't really want me there.
And
My host mom really begrudged
Having to make me
Lunch. School lunch. So basically I got these like mayonnaise sandwiches on
like white bread every day for lunch. And after
A week or two of this, I was like, I can't I just can't do this. So
I would go to lunch in my uniform. I was the only
American student for most of my time there.
It was very easy to find where's Waldo.
In my school uniform.
And
There were other kids though who had been given the same like curry rice by
their mom every day and they're pretty sick of it. So I started trading my breakfasts.
And when this was discovered by my host brother
He actually started a fist fight with me. He was so offended that I like dishonored his
Mother by trading her mayonnaise sandwiches. Oh my gosh. Because a lot of folks who've never been to Japan or if they've just been in the hotels, right, they have a certain image of the Japanese.

Here, here's my advice. Okay, you're listening to this, you're like you're a teenager, whatever, you think you want to go to Japan. Go to Japan, don't do a home stay. That's my advice. Like I think you know, all my friends who were in the dormitories, I was so jealous of them because it was just sane and like controlled and like you had heaters and stuff like that. Now I'll push back though. If you were in a dormitory
Depending on how it was configured.
Especially in this day and age with smartphones and so on, you might not learn as much Japanese.
I mean, there's a chance. I don't know.
I would do a home stay again, even though I took some bruises, not as many.
Moments of ejaculate flying as you experienced, but nonetheless.
Yeah, so
This is such like it inside baseball, but holy shit are houses in Japan cold a lot of the time. Yeah, they're I mean.
Yeah. And uh I just remember getting up to go to the bathroom.
And if you think like my parents were very cheap with electricity growing up.
On Long Island and it was cold.
But if you think that's cold.
Go to Japan and experience the lack of insulation in the middle of the winter.
Yeah. And get up and it is freezing, freezing cold.
Yep. All right. So we've covered a bunch of that. That was
Now tell me when you left Japan.
to go back to UPen. I guess we can kind of peg it in your
Macro timeline.
You get back, what happens
After
UPen.
The summer between
Junior and senior year. I did an internship in
Tokyo had a magazine and the editor in chief there was like hey
I wanna start a publishing company. Do you want to like be the art director? And I was like, Yes. Just because one of the summers in Silicon Valley I did
an internship with like a startup, like a small design agency, and it was great.
And then the second summer I got a job with a bigger company.
And I got a taste of
being in a company and what does that mean and like being part of the system and and I I was just immediately like okay I can't do this. So I had no intention. I just couldn't do it. I was like, Okay, this is information. This is information. The system is broken, whatever this is. I can feel it's like
I can't do this. And I remember walking around San Francisco that summer that I had I was working at the big company and I was just like talking with my friend Rob and I was just like
And they offered me they're like, Hey, we'll pay for
College, like stay with us. They really you know, I was like
Whatever, I was kinda talented. I
doing web crap like back then not many people were and I was like no I can't do this and I was like I'm running away to Japan
I had always had this fierce independence and it's connected with where I come from because like where I came from, I saw
Th there was no health care. People were
fairly struggling. You know, a lot of my friends, their sisters were pregnant
As teenagers. It was like kind of endemic, like people just weren't really being supported. So from a very young age, I was like, I have to be independent. I have to control
My destiny, I have to be
Sort of.

Making sure I'm secure till I get to the next stage. And so being independent was really important to me.
My buddy, you know, the editor in chief's like, Hey, let's start a publishing company. I was like, Great, let's do that. I'll move back to Tokyo as a student.
I wanna go do grad school stuff anyway.
We can start like
getting the publishing company up and running and
When I was at UPenn
I had a couple of amazing professors.
The reason why I picked UPen was because I it had a computer science
And it was called the DMD, Digital Media Design.
That's cool. I didn't realize that.
That's early.
Yeah, super early.
Super late.'Cause you had the MIT media lab, but that was only grad school.
And I loved
John Midas stuff, Ben Fry's stuff, Casey Ray's stuff. That was all coming out of MIT Media Lab. And I was so into all that.
But I was
too young to go to MIT as a grad student and I was like, okay, where can I do this? And you know, and it was like NYU.
Kind of had a program that was like technology, I think in maybe
Or CMU technology and theater.
And UPenn had
Fine arts and computer science. So I was like, Great, let me do that.
And the fine arts
component was incredible.
And I had two professors that kinda changed my life. One was Joshua Mosley.
who he was an acclaimation animator guy. He runs the department now. He was just he was just this incredible
archetype of like the artist.
Doing these bizarre clamation things. Wait a second. So even at that time he's doing like claimation stop motion stuff in this digital media lab. Yes. Yes. Okay. And teaching us how to use
the latest three D programs. It was just totally
Interesting kind of like analog digital thing happening.
I had uh some amazing photography professors. My focus was photography, but I also had a design professor, Sharka Highland, who
Who was like this Eastern European
I
Don't really know what her background was, but
She was like the meanest
Unless she liked your work and was she loved you. You know, it was like one of these teachers that like she would not pull any punches and so like everyone has their
You know, designs like I remember we had to like design a book cover and I had like the Sun also rises or something. I think it was a Hemingway cover. Everyone's got their stuff up on the wall and like kids are like crying because she's like, This has gotta be I hate this. You this you're this sucks. This is terrible. This is bad. This is you know, and like but like being very specific.
More specifically than I big. Let me tell you the ways I hate this. Yes. So many. Where do I start? She was amazing. She was so great. She
Blew open my mind about design and about book design, and it got me obsessed with wanting to make books. I had always loved books, I had always loved technology.
You know, all the tech stuff, the blogging stuff.
You know, the online writing, whatever the newsgroups, all this was interesting, but nothing really captured my attention like physical books. And around the same time, McSweeney's
The publisher out of San Francisco, Dave Eckers.
He's got Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius comes out.
In the moment that was like, what is happening? It's this book is so meta. This is like, you know, this is so much fun. You know, he's funny, it's a moving story.
And he founded McSweeney's and McSweeney's was doing so many interesting things with the book as a form and design.
And basically this editor in chief and I were like, Hey, let's
Do like mini mix sweeney's that's kinda connected with Japan.
That was kind of the thesis. Well, let me pause for a second here. So Sharka, was that the name? What a fucking name. I think I'm getting that roughly right. Sharka Highland. Yeah.
Sharka Highland. That is straight out of a comic book. So Sharka Highland.
What was it that she taught you or show you or imbued into you that got you excited about?
book covers or that type of design.
It could be a feeling, it could be her enthusiasm, like what was it?
That clicked for you.
So I think I'd spent
A lot of my teenage years
in this like autodidactic way of trying to understand design. I didn't know
Any of the greats. And I remember well the first summer I was out in San Francisco, I remember going to Razorfish.
Back in the day, yeah.
I printed out a portfolio.
At Kinko's, this really terrible design portfolio.
And I went to Razorfish. I went in there, I was like, Hey, I'd like to talk to someone about
you know, maybe interning here or working here.
And they like brought over this manager and he just
He was this really nasty guy and he just he was like who are your favorite designers? Who do you like?
And I was like
Uh
You know, I hadn't gone to design school at this point. I was like eighteen years old. I was nineteen years old. I came from this place that like literally no one
Yeah.
picked up like a John Updike book, let alone looked at the cover, let alone thought about who designed it.
And I'm like, you know, I was really into internet design. So I was like K 10K, and like I was naming all these handles of like antsy artists and stuff, and he's like, Who's that?
So
I was just like Yeah, he was totally he was terrible. He was terrible. But like this is the thing I think that's difficult for people to understand. If you come from a place
where you aren't surrounded by a kind of a a sense of culture or a sense of archetypes or whatever, and then you leave and you go into the bigger world and you realize people aren't
sort of operating with the same deficit you might have in those ways.
That your sense of self worth to ratchet that up is a really difficult, long process. And that's basically what I spent all my twenties doing. And I think Sharka
saw in me that I had a certain intuitive s like eye for design.
And she was
Able to
Even though she was so critical.
And she was critical of some of the things I remember. She asked me, she's like, Why did you make that red? And I was like, I don't know. I kinda like great. She's like, look at this idiot. He doesn't even know why he made it red. You know, I was like, I was like, oh man. But really, the reason was I, you know, I'm colorblind and like I don't really see that many colors. And so I was like, Oh, red is like a color that like is easy for me to use.
Well, hold on a second. So let me just double click on that. I I know I this is my habit, but when I think of colorblind, usually I think of red as one of the most commonly missing colors. Yeah. Because you don't have the cones. Right. Red, green. Yeah, red, green, but uh like a strong, vibrant red I can see really well.
So that's kinda what
What I was drawing to the U.S.
design slash all of my design. It's like red
plays a pretty it's basically black, white, and red. That's like
That's what I've been riffing off of for twenty five years. The Sin City color palette. Yeah. But Sharka, I would say, you know, saw enough of like
potential slash an intuitive sense of design that she elevated. And she and I did some branding work. I did branding work for the publishing company that I started with this guy, the editor in chief.
And you know, she kind of reviewed it and she like gave me all this amazing feedback. So she really she made me feel like I could do it.
Which is
Incredible.
I had one teacher in elementary school kinda like that. It was like a brutal woman.
But if she decided she really loved you
Then she paid attention.
And I don't know if this is true with Sharka, but
Was it your intuitive sense?
Or was there part of you did you reflect in what you did in the class?
in some way pointing to you caring more than other students. I'm just curious about that. Cause I remember the moment when this teacher went from
Brutalizing me to actually
deciding okay, now I'm gonna give you a little extra attention. It's because I spent a
Like ten times more time than I needed to on this
class project where I illustrated all of these different
components of it. She was like oh
Okay.
All right, fine.
I'd like to say that I was caring more, but I'm not sure I'm not sure I knew how to work yet.
Yeah, when I think back to who I was back then, I don't think I understood what really truly committing to like a creative project felt like.
Like I wish I could go back in time. Like going to university, I think when you're eighteen, nineteen, twenty is such a waste.
You just don't
know what you're doing. I certainly didn't.
There's a part of me that's like I would really love to go back.
Two
school. You know, I just dropped my as a footnote, I just dropped my stepdaughter off at
Boarding school.
Big backstory to all of this, but I dropped her off. I w she's going to school in New Zealand.
We wanted her to kinda like
Find a interesting places like my ex's kid. So it's like this
We can talk about this and and adoption and like what blood means for family or whatever, but like I consider her she's my daughter, you know, even though whatever, like it's a complicated situation. Anyway, into New Zealand and I brought her there in January, the two of us. I took her down to school. I went to like the parent
Initiation and all that stuff.
She's fifteen.
And
I was
So
Excited for her. Yeah, I mean it was a little bit embarrassing. I was probably too excited. But I was just like, Oh my God, I would have cut off, I would have literally cut off a finger.
to have had this opportunity when I was fifteen.
To be able to come to a place like this. It's not
that fancy. It's like, you know, whatever. It's like I didn't want her surrounded by a bunch of bricks. So it's like it's very like
Sane. It's like a sane boarding school. It's not it's not fancy. But there's resources and there's like a great music program and she can take piano lessons and guitar lessons and there's like a great sports
program and all this stuff. And I was just like, Oh my God, you're so
I'm like, you don't understand. I'm like shaking her. She's like, please stop. You're embarrassing me. Like, why? Go leave, please, dad, get out of here. But I was just like, I was like, This is so, so incredible that you can do this. So I and just
as like the sense of like I know how I could use those resources.
In a way, I think even when I was at UPenn, I didn't quite understand. But I did. I worked hard. I was committing to these things. I was working hard.
You know, I think we're gonna weave in and out of Japan, so
I feel like we can pause on that for a minute. I ultimately want to get an idea of what it is, like what are the things in Japan that attract you so much to it that keep you there.
maybe things that people miss.
But I wanna ask you as maybe a segue into some of your
Huge walks.
And trips in general.
Tell me if this makes any sense'cause I have not
read the full context on this.
Because I didn't know this story, but I wanted to
Ask you about it.
Two thousand nine hike to Nepal. Is that enough of a cue?
Can you tell this story?
Yeah, that's an inflection point.
I just got like goosebumps, actually.
So I I really struggled with alcohol in my twenties.
My teenage years I didn't touch anything. I was militantly
straight edge ish. And basically with looking back now, I realize
I had such a strong impulse to make sure I could
Get to whatever the next place was.
Anything I saw that could hold me back, which included falling in love or doing drugs, or anything like that. That was like a a retarding agent.
As a teenager, I was like
immediately I was like, Okay, I I don't need this. And I got to Japan
And it was like, Oh, this is a place to reinvent myself. And I started drinking'cause as you do,'cause people drink so much here. Sure.
And it turns out that I can drink
A lot. I can have fifteen, twenty drinks, not throw up.
I lack out.
Sure, but like there's something in my genes.
That allows me to just drink and then after two or three drinks something activates where it's just
All we live for is more drink.
And I think
You know, from most of my twenties because I had
Such a low sense of self worth.
Because of where I came from, because of I felt this abundance of people around me that I didn't feel I had.
And I didn't know how to ratchet that up. And I had this desire
to produce culture or to produce art.

Literature.
at a level that I didn't know how to and I didn't know how to bridge that gap. And what I ended up doing was
Because I didn't have mentors, because I didn't have archetypes near me, I just drank.
Like a fish.
And I played a lot of music'cause that was one thing I did have mastery over.
And I played a lot of music and I played a lot of that blacked out. And I you know, it was just I'm really lucky I didn't die. I mean, it would be one of these things where many, many mornings of my life I've woken up and it's just been checking.
Is my face okay? Did I break my skull open or you know, something like that. And
I was madly in love. I fell madly, madly in love. I was twenty six, twenty seven years old, and I just
I had the most incredible
love connection I'd ever felt. This like otherworldly
sense of being in love with this person.
And we
Connected
So intensely and immediately went on a forty day
Trip.
Ever like a week after meeting. A forty day trip through Tibet.
We went to Tibet. I was possessed by a spirit.
I like I spoke in tongues. Like there's a lot of things. We hiked up to a glacier.
I mean we can't really skip over getting possessed by spirits.
I mean
It was Yeah.
We stayed at this one.
Little hotel in Laza that
had not always been a hotel, you know, it was this old structure.
And
Woke up.
The next morning and
My girlfriend was being very
strange. She was being very weird. And I was like, What's going on? She's like
I'll tell you when we get outside. I was like what? You'll tell me when we get outside, like what's this about?
We go outside and she goes.
Okay.
Last night.
We have to get out of there because last night
I woke up in the middle of the night.
You were
On your side of the bed cradling something.
That was not there.
You were speaking in Tibetan.
I couldn't get you to wake up.
And
I
Just trying speak to you in English, trying to speak to you in Japanese, you wouldn't respond.
And I finally crawled over on your side of the bed.
And I kind of took
The air that you were holding.
And
I turned you
on your side and you were able to like calm down and go to sleep.
And
I was like
Oh my God, I had this'cause I had this
vision slash dream of this woman in white standing in the doorway and fr at the foot of the bed
the night before and
I don't know what was what was happening.
And like even now I'm like full body goosebumps right now.
God, this is like straight out of paranormal activity or something. I was like, Oh God. It was so bizarre. And we had been, you know, and you have to imagine, like
I don't know if you've ever been in love to this degree where it just feels like everything in the world is fated, like everything is a sign that you need to be together, that this is magic. Like
Only these things can possibly happen because you're connected, you're together. We both bought I remember
We like pulled out our books on the first day of the trip. We had both brought
The Stranger by Camus.
You know, it was like it was like Oh my God.
We're faded. I went back to the hotel and I went to the manager and I was like, Hey, uh I don't think we could stay here tonight. He's like, Oh, what's wrong? And I was like, Well, you know, I was kinda possessed, saw this. He's like, Did you see the woman? And I was like
Yeah.
He's like oh
Oh yeah, yeah. No, I d we know what's going on with that. Here, we'll take you to the dream reader.
And so
I was like, what you'll take me to the dream So I ended up
I'll try to try to
Truncate this because it can it can kind of get a little bit long. But I mean, I'm not sure anybody listening wants you to truncate this particular story. So I mean go wherever you want.
One of the workers there is like you know, the manager's like, Okay, take him to the Dream Reader. So
And I'm thinking, okay, this is a scam, I'm getting scammed. Something that's like weird's going on
And um
He takes us and we go to like the outskirts of Laza. We go to this like really
kind of weird apartment block that was just made of concrete. It was maybe like two or three stories tall.
And he takes us
To this.
room on the third floor and there's a line of people, line of Tibetans.
Waiting at this door.
And they were all
Waiting to have their dreams read.
So it was like okay, this is bizarre. So we wait, we stand in line, we go inside, we sit down inside. The most beautiful
I don't know how old she was. She was anywhere between
Fifteen and a thousand years old.
Like she was just this this creature of
just the most bizarre light walks out. It was like being in the Matrix, you know the the scene in the Matrix where they're like with the spoon and the bending and you're in this random apartment and the TV's on. You know, it was like that situation.
She comes over, brings some
Yak buttermilk tea, some cookies.
'Cause someone's in the dream reader room and we're waiting for them to get out.
And then our term comes up. I go in there, you go into this room, it's all candles, Dalai Lama photos, like all this stuff. It's like you feel like in this really holy space.
And the
Guy from the hotel interprets for us, and I tell her the dream, I tell her what happened, and she gives me this blessing, puts a white
Wreath around my neck. Gives me this
Little satchel of seeds and tells me to put them under my pillow.
When I sleep and then writes me a prayer.
And she says, Okay.
Here's these three pieces of paper. You have to take them to these three temples, and they will burn them for you tonight. They'll know what to do. Just tell them the dream reader sent you.
And you'll be okay. You'll be fine. Everything will be good.
And I was like
No one's asking me for money.
You know.
And the guy the hotel guy's like, Oh, you can like leave a tip if you want or whatever and like you know, it was like
Two dollars or something. I like put two dollars in a little thingy.
And then we go to the temples and like it ended up becoming this
Incredible adventure. This connects with a lot of my walking as well. You know, it's like having experiences like this, I think informed this sense of like just give yourself up to what the day.
Could potentially
Give to you.
And so I ended up going to all these temples I would have never gone to. I went to the Dream Readers Apartment, which was like the most bizarre, beautiful place I went to in in all of Tibet in that entire trip.
We went to these temples, you know, met these monks, say, Hey, can you burn this for me? Oh yes, of course, absolutely. You know, give'em like a a dollar.
You know, fifty cents or whatever.
Yeah, the whole thing cost nothing. It was clearly not a scam.
It was clearly this thing that
a lot of locals were participating in and
It was magic. It was just pure magic. So anyway, things like that were happening with this woman.
And
I screwed it up because of my drinking. I ruined the relationship. She punched me in the face at one point, very rightfully so, you know, and
She was like, Hey, I can't be with someone like you. This happened on that trip.
Not on that trip. That happened a couple months later.
We end up staying together for about three months.
And basically, I mean it was just it was about ten years worth of
Lifetime. Twice.
Ha ha ha ha.
But losing her was
Probably the biggest
psychic
damage I had ever encountered in my life for the you know, as an adult.
And
I remember just lying in my tiny apartment in Tokyo, my six mat Tatami Room apartment in Tokyo, it was three in the morning.
I wanted to die.
It was rock, rock, rock, bottom.
This isn't like a rich role story. I didn't like get up and run 40 miles or anything like that. But I was like, I'm gonna start running. And I went out and I ran like five K.
At three in the morning, through the street of Toko.
And
I was like, that felt good.
And I was like, okay, I need to stop drinking. And to stop drinking, I'm gonna run this marathon in November. I think it was like July when this happened.
And I just started preparing for that.
These were actually the first steps for me.
To deliberately address.
This lack of self worth that I've been carrying around for all of my adult life.
And that had I think driven me to drink the way I drank.
That to give into whatever those genetic impulses were.
And to start to go, okay.
We're gonna run. We're gonna be someone who runs. A lot of this is also like very atomic habits style stuff. It's like who are you gonna be and how are you gonna set yourself up to be successful? I'm gonna be a person who runs, I'm gonna be a person who doesn't drink, I'm gonna be a person who
Charges a lot.
So
I was
At this time, you know, with the publishing company thing, we were producing these books that were winning awards and
making absolutely no money. And so I was consulting
doing like web design consulting and stuff like that. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna start charging
Absurd amounts of money for my time.
The worst that can happen is people reject. And they started
Accepting it.
And I was like, Oh, little by little.
All these stupid little steps.
From the time I was basically twenty seven
to thirty. These were the most important
Years of tiny little steps of my time is more valuable.
I'm gonna be a person who runs, I'm gonna be a person who can take care of himself.
I still drink.
Even though I tried to not drink, but I I started lowering it. It took me about four
full years to completely get off the sauce in a really dangerous way.
And it kinda
Part of it culminated in going to Nepal.
And climb up to Annapurta Base Camp.
And that was after we had broken up and I felt like all the magic of my life was done. I felt like there was no way for me to experience magic again. I felt like she
And again, it's this totally irrational sense of scarcity.
The amount of scarcity I felt
As an adult in my twenties,
Is just shocking. It was this fathomless sense of scarcity. Like
The money is not gonna be there. The love isn't gonna be there, the support isn't gonna be there.
And then when I lost her, I was like, I'm never gonna have anyone
Will ever love me like this person loved me and like w I'm never gonna be able to create like I created with this person.
And I had to start proving myself that that wasn't true.
And I climbed up, I was like, Okay, I'm just gonna go to Nepal and I'm gonna climb up Annapurna.
Go to base camp. It was a pretty random choice. What's the elevation on something like that, roughly? Do you have any idea?
It's headache elevation. That's the elevation. You're definitely you're definitely not comfortable. You're you're definitely at altitude sickness levels.
It's like thirteen thousand five hundred and fifty feet. That's high.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's gonna be enough for altitude sickness for sure.
Yeah, so
I fly out there. I go to
Pocata, which is the town that kind of everyone starts the trek from.
I wasn't gonna hire a guide.
At the last second, I thought, okay, maybe I shouldn't do this alone. And I went to like the random guide shop and I said, Hey, do you have a guide? I just want him to be there to make sure I don't die. I need to be alone. This needs to be kind of like a solo thing.
I'm being like a weirdo.
And he's the guy's like, Yeah, no.
No problem, no problem. Yeah.
He gives me this young guy, he must have been like eighteen.
And he was the sweetest.
Most compassionate
Incredible human.
We bonded
as brothers. But you know, he was calling me older brother, I was calling him younger brother.
Die anders.
And
I got to
Base camp.
On my twenty ninth birthday, it was and it was a full moon.
And I put this thermos of
coffee or hot water in my jacket, and I walked out to the edge of the marine
Looking out over
Essentially you're on the moon up there. I mean it's the edge of the what did you say? Moraine.
What is a moraine?
Right a sort of like
When a glacier pulls back and it leaves this kind of valley, essentially. Got it. And
You're kind of at this lip.
It's a huge fault.
Yeah.
Not Caldera, but you're in this cradle.
You're surrounded by Inapurna and Mach Pachare and like all these other mega peaks.
It's just amazing. The basecamp is in this cradle of
beauty and lifelessness. It's like you're on the moon. And I sat up there and it was just
A really important
Moment to sit there and not have a smartphone and not to be like
Taking photos and like trying to tweet or whatever.
That trip was so powerful to me. I came back and I was like, I have to write about this. And I have to write about the camera.
that I was using and
I have to create something from this. I have to rest something from this experience, give it form.
And I wrote this
Ridiculous camera review. That was kind of one of the first
I don't wanna say it was the first
Field review. You know how like everyone does like the field review of like iPhone cameras and stuff now?
This was early. I mean very early. This is two thousand nine.
And it was the Panasonic G F one.
It was this tiny little camera that was actually made I think it was made
To market to women.
Because it was like meant to be this like really tiny cute camera, but it was also this amazing camera.
And it was micro four thirds, this new technology, this new sensor.
And I was like, this is really kind of exciting, really cool.
I wrote about that.
And the article went bananas.
What happened as a result of that article going bananas? Like what dominoes did that
Tip over.
That article was the first
I think long form ish. It was mixing design.
It was mixing the web.
And when you say mixing design, that means you had multimedia components or a mixture of photographs and texts.
What do you mean by that?
There's a lot of designers on the web, like Zeldman, Jason Svanamaria, Danzigo working in the
early mid two thousands, late two thousands, like refining the CSS spec and like showing, you know, CSS Zengar and showing what you can do with design and stuff like that. But it was always
Yeah, there was blogs and stuff, but
There weren't
really articles that were like
Long form design in the same way you do for like a magazine.
Mm-hmm.
There was a guy in Tokyo who I was sharing a studio with Oliver Reichenstein, who's running this thing called information architects. And he was doing it. And again, this is like the power of archetypes. I would sit next to Oliver.
I watch him work on these mega articles about typography or whatever and
design these beautiful pages. And I was like, Oh, that's how the work is done. This is how long it takes.
This is how much you have to refined.
So
I took that archetype of Oliver, who was generous enough to give me studio space in his studio.
I applied it to this walk.
Into this camera review.
This guy too, he was like there's this love that I wanted to give this thing because you know, we came down from the mountain.
The guide his name is Home Home H O M.
We come down and we're both
We're saying goodbye and it's like such an emotional goodbye. We don't want to say goodbye.
He goes die.
Older brother he goes.
Like a month before we met.
My older brother died in a motorcycle accident.
Oh and
I have not had any happiness since then.
And meeting you
It was like meeting
Him coming back.
And it f we're both just like sobbing, like, Oh my God, I love you. Oh you know. And so I came out of that Nepal experience believing in magic.
And believing in that kind of love and being able to like generate it on my own.
Not
having to have that person again rationing up the sense of like self value and like I can
Yeah.
And I wanted to give that to the article and so I just worked on it for weeks and weeks and weeks, which is like
It was a long time. It wasn't that big of an article. Refining I remember
Hilariously. I I was in New York for part of this. I was in New York City and a friend was like, Hey
Do you want some Adderall? I was like, I'm working on this thing. And they're like, You want some Adderall? And I'm like, Yeah, sure. Like I'll try some. Give me some Adderall. So I remember it's like I'm in Harlem. I'm at my friend's apartment in Harlem
Like it's like eleven o'clock at night. I
I had never taken Adderall before. I was like okay, okay, I take it.
You take it at eleven.
I think at eleven and I'm just like up. I'm like writing this like camera review, eating carrots and stuff. They had like a bag of carrots. I'm like eating carrots like a rabbit, writing this camera review. I remember I we were in Harlem and it was like a it was almost like a basement apartment. I'm looking out, there's like people's feet walking out outside the window and I'm like I gotta write this review, gotta write this. This is like Stephen King back in the cocaine.
In sprint days. Yeah. So I committed to this thing.
And it came out and it just got picked up everywhere. And it, you know, it turns out there's a reason why there was all these camera review sites because
I was smart enough to put affiliate links on it.
And basically in a month it generated like, I don't know, twenty thousand dollars in revenue. Shit in affiliate fees.
For me.
Back in two thousand nine.
Yeah, that's wild. They're selling like millions of dollars with these cameras. And
I had always lived because of the sense of scarcity, I had always lived
Pathologically below my means. My cost of living, one of the reasons I stayed in Tokyo
Throughout my twenties was my cost of living was so low. I could live in the center of this incredible city, and I needed to make
A thousand dollars a month, that would cover my rent, all my food.
And like entertainment.
It was just like
unexpected for a lot of people listening, right? Because
When we were growing up, it was like, Oh, Tokyo is the most expensive city in the world, right? As a kid growing up on Long Island, like that was what you heard.
For sure. And like if you want to buy a hundred square meter apartment in Ginza.
Yeah, it was a lot of money.
Sure, right. That is the interesting thing about Tokyo is that there are options. You don't have to live far in the outskirts, and every neighborhood still to this day.
There are affordable options. Yes, it's small or whatever. Sometimes they don't have baths. You have to use the public bath, things like that. But there are options, which is what is so powerful about the city. And and again, it's
We can talk about what I felt here that kept me here, subconsciously.
About kind of just
being supported by society and
Having those options.
to live in this place and to get the benefits of being in a big city.
And only needing to make a thousand dollars a month. So anyway.
Getting twenty thousand dollars was like oh great.
There's like two years of ranking, two years of living. And I got that, you know, in a month doing this thing. And it taught me
There's a s financial sustainability to this.
If I commit to these things, I try to transmute these experiences, these kind of
personally transcendent experiences into something that
I give to other people.
There's a
a response to that. It resonates. So that was exciting. Again.
These slow like
You can just hear this creaking, this ratcheting up of like this meter, this weird old meter of like self-worth. Like, oh, I have value. I don't have to operate on such a scarcity.
Mindset.
And I did that, and then that led
Like a month after that, the iPad came out and I had been doing
All this book design, I've been winning awards as a book designer.
When I was twenty four, I was
Asked to be
A judge in the art director's club in New York City.
I thought it was a joke email. It was
One of the winter house people. Again, talk about these like
People picking you out. Remind me Winterhouse. This is
Winterhouse was this
Just an incredible early
Late nineties.
two thousands design studio. And one of the directors there was
One of the people
Board of directors for the Art Directors Club, and he had just been watching my work online. I was doing these kind of experiments, we were putting out these books.
And he's like, Oh, this kid
Is doing interesting stuff. He should
Come and be a judge.
Yeah, I had these things that were happening that were sort of
Signals that were hard for me to believe in. That always this is a fluke, this is a fluke, I I'm not valuable, this is uh happened accidentally.
And then I'd go to the art director's club and I'd
meet all the people there and I'd be like, Oh my God, I'm not supposed to be here. It's just this incredible infinite imposter syndrome.
Anyway, but there's a slow rationing up and the iPad comes out, and then I was like, Okay, I've been doing these books, I've been
doing a lot of digital work.
I'm like I can write about
The future of books on the iPad.
And I wrote
Again.
Committed to this article?
I wrote this thing called
Books in the age of the iPad.
I hit
Publish.
Here
In Japan at night, I went to bed and I woke up.
The New York Times had written about it. I had like
Hundreds of emails in my inbox.
It really changed my life. It was just suddenly I went from being this invisible
Person.

This voice about
Books and digital media and where things were going.
I went to South by South West like a month later and it was just
Insane. Everyone I wanted to meet
Wanted to meet.
All of them these heroes, these design heroes, these design figures.
A week later, right? I mean that's incredible timing.
It was like a month later, but it was just like the energy, yeah.
But the half life of that article was still
Yeah. Alive and well. Yeah. Right.
question, how much time did you put into that particular piece?
Did you pour over it?
Yeah.
Well, I remember writing and rewriting the intro, like
Fifty times.
The reason I'm asking.
Is that
It strikes me and this is this is a hugely uh
leading question slash commentary going into a question, but
The fact that you're
Camera review.
And your experience.
Climbing Anapurna.
Was
rewarded after so much effort, sort of along the lines of I guess it was Oliver who put so much work into a creative project. And you said earlier with Sharker, like you didn't really
know how to work yet.
The fact that you were rewarded
after putting so much into it is such a
Blessing in a sense, right? Because when I think of the work that you do.
It's like quality, quality, quality. There is like a Jiro Dreams of sushi aspect to it.
But it could have cut a different way, right? I mean, like you could have done something.
That was done.
Kind of fast and cheap and dirty.
And
Holy shit, your life would be very different.
Potentially, you know?
Yeah.
I mean
Part of what I was doing, you know, I listened to you the
Randon Sanderson.
Interview. Yeah. Yep.
I mean, that's an incredible interview. Just talk about
Tenacity. It like infinite, infinite tenacity. What, like six writing six, seven books before you go to the market to even try to sell them? Oh my God. That's great. Did didn't even try, right?
It's crazy. He's like, Okay, so I just won't even
Try to sell them.
It's totally bananas.


My tenacity was plowed into
Creating
A lifestyle where I could always say no to things that I didn't want to do and I knew I could there'd always be another
creative or fine art project that I could commit myself to and could do so uncompromisingly.
When did you decide that? Was that after raising your prices and you're like oh okay, wait a second.
No, when I was like thirteen.
Oh you like it. Well because like I grew up
in an environment where we didn't have an abundance. It's not like I was like, you know, we were going on these crazy vacations and like had a yacht and like, you know, it was like we had six houses and like fifteen cars, and I was driving around it was like there was I wasn't coming from this place of incredible abundance.
And then like having to sacrifice
I'd all through my life I've been sort of trained aesthetically.
Right. Right.
You were like a
An accidental monk in training, like you said, pathologically living below your means.
And then as soon as I kind of felt I had that one summer why intered at the bigger company that paid me really well.
And I was like, Okay, this doesn't work for me. This totally does not jive with my
Soul.
And so when I got to Tokyo and I realized, oh wow, rent is this cheap, cost of living is this cheap, it just felt like it was like a wormhole in reality where I could live in the biggest, most incredible city in the world.
And I could pay.
So little.
And I could focus
Uncompromisingly, again, uncompromisingly on creative work. And it was like I was doing programming experiments, I was working on those books that paid decently well, but not
I was literally making fifteen thousand dollars a year.
Twenty three, twenty four, twenty five.
And I would kinda supplement that by like doing some CSS for
A6 or something. But the point was always to be able to do the bookwork. To be able to do the experiments
On the web digitally.
To do that stuff.
And so
You know, all of my twenties I had cultivated that asceticism and I knew that
I'd done plenty of things that didn't
Explode like those articles did.
And so I was like, Oh, I'll just keep you know, I was just gonna keep doing it. I don't know. I was just gonna keep doing those things because
There's so much inherent value to me doing them. I felt so I felt so drawn to it. And the process of learning to do them better, watching Oliver.
Then learning from other people, meeting folks like Rob Gampetro, who's an incredible designer and design thinker, Frank Camero, who's an incredible designer and design thinker, Liz Danziko, who I mentioned earlier.
who's an incredible designer and just amazing human.
Meeting these people and watching them work and getting close to them, and then just realizing how much value there was in feeling that.
And just being
Happy with the ride.
The fact that these articles did well.
And took off.
It was bonus.
It was deserved.
So we're gonna bounce around chronologically for a second.
What are your main
Creative
Focuses now.
Or
Just in the last.
Handful of years.
Making books. That's it. Writing books.
Okay, why?
Why why because a lot of people listening, right, they'll say, Wait, books?
Thought books are kind of dead. Like you just talked about the iPad.
What kind of books are we talking about?
So why books?
So look.
Books have always been the f the focus since I was eight, nine years old.
You know, it's like I've just always been drawn to them as objects. It's always been there.
Everything else has been
A kind of side quest.
In support of the books, in support of like
Building up.
Self.
Worth in support of building up a financial foundation, in support of like
Becoming independent, all of that.
And I mean th there's a reason why I like left
College. I didn't go back to Silicon Valley. I didn't go to Silicon Valley.
I immediately
Help start this independent publisher.
I felt so drawn.
To the power of these objects and the immutability of them.
And even in the face of like the rise of the internet.
that still to me felt like there was so much value there and that value wasn't gonna disappear.
Got it. And and just for clarity, because you're implying it, but these are physical books. These are physical physical beautiful artifacts.
Right that people can interact with.
And the whole thesis of that iPad piece too was like look
Don't make throwaway books. Make incredible physical books. Make beautiful physical books that lean into all of the qualities that make physical things amazing. You know, the books that I'm producing, the books that
that I make, you know, it's like cloth bound, how do you do cloth bound with silk screen?
You know, with beautiful papers that open
You know, full bleed, just
Every page, every spread is a lay flat.
Spread.
Yeah, it's like
How do you lean into this stuff?
These qualities that can't be replicated elsewhere.
And
You know, I've just been lucky in the sense that
There's still
Valuable and people are still really into books. Like we didn't we didn't entirely throw them away.
And the digital stuff kind of ended up being a red herring.
And it never really went
where we thought it would go, in part because of monopolies, and part because of Amazon over controlling the market, and part because there just isn't that much money to be made in digital books. And so the investment side of things just really isn't there. Like
You almost need
Like a Rockefeller who'd just be obsessed with digital books.
And they would fund it, you know, to great personal loss.
You know, it's like they they always say, How do you make a a good fortune, start with a great fortune and found a publishing company?
Yeah. Or a restaurant. Yeah. It's the same These aren't profitable things, so all the money in tech kinda goes to other places. So anyway.
The digital book thing kind of puttered out.
You must have like just as a a quick side note, you must have, I imagine, enjoyed the Brandon Sanderson segment when he talked about the leather bound books. Yes.
And the beautiful collector's edition because
Who in publishing would have spotted it, I should say.
In fairness.
the larger publishers, say in New York.
They wouldn't have. They're not incentivized. They haven't done it. And then he creates these collector's editions with tons of artwork. I have one on my shelf right back there.
Sells them for two hundred bucks a pop and lo and behold, boom, like immediately sold out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not only sold out, but sold a lot of them.
Yeah, yeah. Tens of thousands. Yeah, just bananas. No, I mean
That story is is interesting. You know, and so all of my adult life, certainly books of
been a huge part of it. And I've been making them. I've been working with printers, obsessing about paper and inks and you know design margins and all this stuff. Reading Robert Bringhurst's elements of typographic style over and over and over and over it's so dog eared my copy of it. And so you know, this is not like a new thing. It wasn't like a couple of years ago I was like, Oh books, yes, let me do that. It's just always been there.
Always been there.
It was really
In about twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen
When I started doing the big walks.
And
The big walks
gave me purpose to being in Japan.
Because I was kinda flailing. I was like, Why am I here? What am I doing?
And then the big walks were so
For me transformative, exciting, fun.
that I thought okay, I need to start giving these things
Form.
In much the same way doing Anna Purna, coming back, writing that article, giving that shape.
Digitally.
But those containers that you can they're still up on my website though. All the you know, those articles are still up there from fifteen, you know, sixteen, seventeen years ago.
And
You know, the design, the container was always really important.
And I was like, Okay.
These walks are becoming more and more
profound for me personally.
How can I give them shape?
So let's we're gonna double click on the walks. I hate to interrupt, but I'm gonna do it because I don't wanna gloss over something you said, which is
I guess around
If I'm remembering what you said fifteen seconds ago, two thousand thirteen or so.
You were flailing a bit in Japan, wondering why you were there.
Was that always somewhere in the back of your mind or your thinking, Why am I here in Japan? And if not.
How did that surface? Like why did that?
Become an element.
As an adoptive person, I think my entire life is defined by that flailing.
Mm.
You just don't
Feel like you belong.
Anywhere. Mm-hmm.
Got it. So it could have just as easily been in
fill in the blank city in the US. It was just, ah, what am I doing here?
It could have been anywhere, but obviously like Asia
Living in a country where you are obviously the minority
And where you can never become
Excepted
As
A true
citizen where you're forever gonna be an immigrant.
You're never ever gonna be integrated.
Is a weird choice. And I mean it comes from again, it just comes from all this
Scarcity, trauma, self worth, like all this stuff. Like for me
I think being adopted, the narrative I concocted in my head
was that I was thrown away. I had very few facts about who my birth mother was. I knew she was 13.
I just assumed it had been terrible circumstances, so I was born from a certain kind of violence in the adoption paper.
That we had.
It's a the father
There had been a car accident and then he got in a fight at it and was murdered at the
Scene of the car accident. So I was like, Okay, there's just violence everywhere. So I
I'm kinda thrown away. So
My genesis story that I concocted.
was one of just pain and kind of like
Y you don't belong here. And so I think part of what
What's great about Japan.
was that as soon as I landed
I felt a few things. One was
Society was taking care of people. I was walking past so many people every day in the street.
Who were so much better taken care of than
Where I came from.
I immediately felt it.
And I was like, Okay, this is interesting. And across like all socio economic kind of strata.
It wasn't like oh everyone here is super rich. It was like no, I like get these people, but everyone is kind of
Being taken care of in a way that like I
Felt subconsciously.
And because I will never be able integrate fully.
They can never throw me away.
And I think as an adoptive person.
That
Yeah, there's a safety in it.
There's a huge safety of being in a place that can never throw you away because you're never gonna be part of the thing.
I mean, it's a really sad way of framing it, but that is a hundred percent I think what
For me, made me feel comfortable here.
I think that will actually resonate with a lot of people because there are plenty of people who have
their heart's broken or they feel
Like they've been hurt in some particular way. So they
Hush.
Falling love away.
It's like if you never fall in love.
It's hard to have your heart broken. So therefore
Right. It's all connected.
It's all connected. Yeah.
It's all the same thing. And so
The entire time I've been here, the plan wasn't like, Oh, I'm gonna stay here forever. It was always, Oh, there's an interesting opportunity. I'm doing this publishing thing, it's kinda going well, it's I'm having fun. Cost of living is so low, I can be uncompromising about
What I'm doing.
I was very lucky I was going to New York quite a bit because of the publishing stuff. And so I didn't feel trapped here. I think a lot of expats or a lot of immigrants
To Japan.
In particular develop this kind of
anger or frustration connected with it, you know, because you can never be fully integrated. You can never be part of this place. And yet
A lot of people are just here as English teachers or headhunters.
And they're
I think
options for personal growth are severely limited, but then they get to a certain age where they can no longer go back home.
And they can no longer kind of
reintegrate back from where they came from, or they don't have the skill set, or they're too old to go back. And they develop this kind of anger and this frustration. I was very lucky
In that I was always engaging on kind of an international
level.
With people.
And I was able to go to like these publishing conferences because of the publishing company that I was part of. And I was able to kind of do, you know, art director's club stuff. And I was able to give little talks at universities about the books I was designing.
I always felt like I had a tether to the greater world.
And I was able to use Japan as this incredible tool.
To uncompromisingly work on the work I want to
To do.
And to build up this asceticism, the sense of asceticism. But you know, I went to Silicon Valley because at the end of my twenties, as I developed this sense of self-worth, I ran out of people that I wanted to collaborate with here. And I just wanted to work on a bigger scale with people that were thinking bigger.
And Japan and Tokyo for all of its
Megalopolisness is a very provincial place. It
Does not think internationally.
And if you want to kind of work on projects that are
Bigger.
And be around archetypes of people that are just thinking bigger, you kinda have to leave. So that was why I I went to Silicon Valley. And it was dovetailing with all those articles, and I developed this kind of
A little bit of online celebrity and mystique, and that allowed me to join Flipboard.
as employee number like eight or nine super early.
And just learn. You know, Mike McHugh is this incredible guy. What was Flipboard for people who don't know?
I know it's so long ago now.
The iPad came out, Flipboard came out six months later.
And it was
The most beautifully designed social media magazine.
It was a very big deal at the time. It was very, very

Buzz heavy.
Right. I mean, this is something people were talking about.
It was the first app that needed a waiting list.
'Cause the service couldn't handle.
People.
It was the first waiting list app. It was like you'd give it your Twitter feed and it would create a magazine out of all the articles. And it was just pages flipped, Marcos West Camp designed. It was just gorgeous. It was just beautiful. It was it epitomized like
There was the Berg group in London doing like future studies about what books could be
There's a push pop press people Mike Mattis doing
Experiments around digital design on the iPad. All these beautiful design experiments. And Flipboard was kind of part of that malew of
folks that were experimenting, right? And
It was like great. Yeah, this is like totally my wheelhouse of like digital publishing, book design, beautiful design.
And I get to hang out with
People who are the top, top, top of their class. Just incredible.
Pulsing humans, like generous and brilliant. I mean
I moved out there.
I moved out
To a house.
Two blocks from Steve Jobs.
Old Palo Alto.
I
Two roommates, these two guys, Stanford D school grads, who just graduated, they were twenty four.
I was
Thirty. I just turned thirty when I moved out there. D school is the design school. Design school at Stanford. These guys were
Such
Incredible people. I moved out there.
And I I had gone from I hadn't realized
What a dearth.
Of hugs I had had in my life.
Sorry. You mean in Japan.
Just I had had no hugs.
Hug withdrawal, yeah. I got to this house in Palo Alto.
And it was just
These two guys we had no furniture, our refrigerator just had like hummus and kombucha in it.
No one knew how to cook anything.
And I was sleeping on a yoga mat for the first like two months and then it's a Tommy mat and it's like yoga mat. What a youthful back you have. So resilient. Just pure asceticism the whole way.
And that house living in those that house with Enrique Allen and Ben Henry Tig, these two guys
And feeling their love.
And these are two people who came from incredible families full of love and brilliance. That was life changing to me. I met up with Liz Danzigo a couple months.
After I moved in there, we went to have pizza in New Haven.
at Sally's I think a pizza. And Liz after dinner, she
Took my shoulders and she just says.
Craig, you are a different human.
'Cause we had known each other since I was about twenty six.
That was thirty.
They moved into this house.
And
It was like a sponge. I was so ready.
To accept this love of people.
And to work with these incredible people and to just
Again, believe in that.
Self worth ratching up. But the entire time I was at Flipboard
Every weekend I was getting paid
Thirty thousand dollars a month.
Twenty five thousand dollars. Nice. Two years of Japan. No, I mean again, the rent in Palo Alto was a thousand bucks a month for me for my share of the house.
I didn't have a car.
I just walked to the office, I was spending no money.
I was like, this is great. I'm just gonna bank all of this. This is like pure future freedom. That's all I saw it as. I was like, and I, you know, I told
Mike McHugh, the CEO, I was like, Mike, look, I'm
Not out here to work at this company forever.
I'm so hungry to do
X, Y, and Z, all these things I want to work on, all these things I want to do. And
You know, being out there and being close to everyone, every weekend I would book a hotel in San Francisco
And I'd go up there and I'd lock myself in the hotel room from Friday night
I do a late check out on Sunday.
Every weekend.
I would go up there and I would just write
New essays.
about digital books and publishing.
I couldn't compromise. I that part of me felt so
That writing part of me, the literary part of me, I could not compromise that paycheck. What are the three most addictive substances, carbohydrates,
heroin and paychecks, right? That's what they say. Right. It's like
And you feel it.
Getting thirty thousand dollars a month, you feel that changing
the programming changing your chemistry and I had spent all of my twenties building up this asceticism.
And building up this ability to be uncompromising. And I didn't want that to be broken. And so I I forced myself to just keep writing militantly. And
By the end of I spent fifteen months
The flipboard and
Towards the end of it, Liz Liz was like, Hey, you should apply for a writing fellowship.
All the writing was connecting me to amazing people. I connected to Kevin Kelly because I was writing these essays. And I and I was giving a talk in New York City.
Kevin Kelly's gonna be a call back for later.
He's gonna be a callback.
And I was on stage giving a talk with the New York Times people about the New York Times app, and I was talking about digital publishing. And I got this email when I got off stage and it was from this guy, Kevin Kelly, I'd never heard of. And I was like, Who's this guy, Kevin? I like again, I just didn't have no one was teaching me about these things. I did not have a background. I didn't Silicon Valley as much as like I admired it and would want to be out there.
I didn't know the history of it.
I showed it to someone I was like, Do you know this guy and and the person was like, You don't know Kevin Kelly? He's like, Yeah, you should beat up Kevin Kelly.
And I met up with Kevin and he was like, I like the way you think about publishing. What uh tell me about some tools. And I was like, Who is this guy? It's a good Kevin impersonation. Do you want to give just like two lines on Kevin, just for people who have not heard my
Multiple interviews with him.
Yeah, I mean he's like the sage of
The valley, right? He's just got a big white Amish beard, built his own.
Tiny guy.
Tiny guy.
Co founder Wired.
Exactly. It goes on and on and on. He along with Stuart Brand are sort of like the
four scumps of Silicon Valley.
who've just been there for everything.
Yeah.
And so
I'm following my nose. I'm like out here, I'm in the mix, I'm with these incredible people.
I'm holding my own for the most part.
But I keep writing and the thing I notice is like the more I do the writing, the more it opens doors, the more it connects me to even more people.
Who are the kinds of archetypes I want to be in my life. And like meeting Kevin was
Just a clear example of that.
And I met Kevin probably eight months after I joined.
And he's like, Come up to my house, let's do a walk.
In Pacifica.
And just talk. And I was just like, Oh my God. I went up there, I did that walk with him.
And I was like this is what writing
Does it be right.
Everything that's happening in my life that
is blowing my mind that's connecting me to me to people who I wish I had known when I was a teenager.
Well, I wish I had my life when I was a kid.
It's all happening because of writing.
And so
I apply for this writing fellowship at McDowell.
I was like, where should I apply this? And she's like, McDowell and I was like, Okay, great, I've never heard of McDowell.
This is the oldest writing.
Residency in America.
One of the oldest in the world.
Of like these kind of formal writing residency places.
It's the hardest to get into. I didn't know any of this when I applied.
I apply on a whim.
I get in.
Which
I'm still not sure how I got in. It was pure luck that I got in.
And I use that as my baby.
Maybe.
It feels like luck.
And I use that as my way of
being able to get out of the company.
I didn't know that was the way out. Okay. Here we go.
Because you know, these things become like family and you feel terrible leaving them and it upset a lot of people. I was one of the first people to leave and I was like
Liz, it's not you, it's me. I need to do these other things. Wait, Liz was upset after recommending it to you?
No, no, no, Liz wasn't everyone at the company was. Liz wasn't at the company. No, no, no, no. Okay, got it. Liz was in New York. Liz was founding the interaction design program at the school for visual arts. Okay, I was trying to put it together because you said New Haven Pizza I was like is New Haven.
Outside of where I think it is? Okay, got it. No, no, but the flipboard people were super upset. And so like that's one of the hard difficult things is like these aren't easy conversations to have to like leave these things. I remember
Being like okay, this is a great
Excuse. This is the the most prestigious writing residency in America.
And I need to go do this and I'm gonna use it as a break, but it's like a forever break. And I did that. And I went out there and again
Connecting me to these archetypes, I'm out there. I get to this
Place.
And I'm just surrounded by
Booker award winners.
Where is the writing residency? McDowell. New Hampshire. New Hampshire. Okay. Up in New Hampshire.
And you basically get a cabin.
You're out there from anywhere from a month to two months.
Uh they
Cook all of your meals, they deliver you lunch in a picnic basket.
To your cabin.
Ha ha
A lot of the cabins have like
Grand pianos and fireplaces and you know, it's just
This ideal.
You're and you're surrounded by the best
Composers and poets
Artists.
Novelists, non fiction writers.
And I went out there and I met a few people, one of whom was
This woman Lynn Tillman.
And
From day one, it was just being so hungry and so ready and so accepting of being able to be around these people.
I was just soaking it in. And one of the first books Lynn recommended to me was Dennis Johnson.
Train dreams.
I've since gone on to read that book. It's a novella.
I've read that book probably
Fifteen, twenty times. I've
mapped it out. There's very few books I've like actually like
Sketched out.
Why so impactful?
Why so interesting?
The language.
The poetry of it.
The story.
the conciseness of it, the economy of the language. I mean, Dennis Johnson's first and foremost a poet.
He does novels as well. There's a lot of people that fall into this
Category that I love. Like well, Dennis Johnson's a big one. Ocean Vong is a more contemporary one. Ocean Vong.
Mega poet.
Who then
Catapulted into novel auto fiction land.
Michael on Dange.
You know, he's first and foremost a poet. You read things like Coming Through Slaughter and this is like a book of poetry.
In a form of
novel slash historical fiction. I mean it's it's it's just incredible. These are the things that that spoke to me.
I have to just selfishly hijack for a second here to recommend a book.
That I always hesitate to recommend because it fails for nine out of ten people, maybe ninety nine out of a hundred people.
And I failed reading it three times before I finally crossed the Rubicon, which
Is
Yeah.
scene in the book where there's a talking fish. That's all I'll say. You gotta get to the talking fish.
But John Crowley, also poet.
Little big.
Is the name of the book.
It checks the boxes that you're talking about. So
Just a recommendation. A little big by John Crowley. He takes a lot of time. There's a lot of foreplay before you get the momentum needed, but
I will recommend that one as well. So
You're there train dreams, you're getting your picnic baskets. I wanna bookmark that to just ask.
The hotel rooms. Booking.
The hotel rooms in San Francisco.
From what was it, Friday to Sunday.
Was that something you came up with on your own? Was that a recommendation from someone else? I'm very curious because
I've done this before only a few times. I was inspired by Maya Angelou, who used to do this all the time.

for writing. Even though she had space at her house to write, she would go to a hotel and she would do this.
How did that
come about and why did you need to do that? I guess but it's maybe better than a yoga mat in a crowded apartment, but
What's the backstory?
It's a classic trope, right? I mean the writer locked in the hotel room until by the editor until he finishes the manuscript, you know, it's just the classic trope. And I was living in Palo Alto and I was like I wanna
Explore the city a little more. So
You know, I'd kind of write all day and then I'd go walk a around at night, which maybe in San Francisco isn't the smartest thing to do, but that was that was my strategy. It just again felt intuitive, like okay, it removes me from
The scene. All my friends in California were in
The Bay.
And so
I could go to San Francisco, I didn't know anyone.
I could just be up there. And there's a mystery to it. And I'd be in kind of like I'd say like the four seasons, you know, and it would just kind of there'd be this like
You know'cause I was making all this insane money. I was like, Okay, I can spend
Three, four hundred dollars on a hotel room, sure, let's go. This will be my treat.
And I'd be in these kind of opulent bizarre
kind of like very non aesthetic spaces.
But uh the city would be out there and I'd just be working and then I'd go walk and you know, downtown kind of walking
North Beach at night. Jesus. Going into legend. Going going into weird little bars. You know, I still
I would still have like a whiskey every now and then and it would just kinda like to be able to go out and be in the mix and be mysterious and kind of be on yeah, I don't know. It all fed into being able to do the work well.
Dig it. Okay.
Flash forward.
Yeah one hell of a memento like montage that I'm
Painting here.
Now
Fireplace New Hampshire.
Picnic baskets.
What does that do for you?
Like what does that
Fellow, and by the way, they're gonna hate me for this, but every time you say McDowell, I think of McDowells from coming to America. They've got the the golden arches, we've got the golden M. But what does that do for you?
Being part of that.
I mean the biggest part was being around people who were doing quote unquote serious art.
And
Feeling like you had been selected to
Hang with them.
And so the structure of it's really great because basically you don't talk to anyone
from the moment you wake up until dinner. And then dinner you have to have you're forced to kinda eat with everyone.
Which is great.'Cause it's like at the end of the day, y you know, there's kind of like a tether to
reality out there outside of your book or your composition or whatever.
We would have dinner and then we'd have very fierce ping pong competitions. But you know.
I which would get sometimes almost like violent. Like there definitely were some friendships that were like broken up because of because of creative angst.
It's like nowhere to go but ping pong. There's very little like sexual activity as far as I could ascertain, but like there was a lot of ping pong like sort of repression like coming up. With any of these things, it's like
Being in a room with people doing
Great work, committing to great work.
And hearing them talk about it, hearing talk about what they had worked on that day, what they were struggling through, again, it just set these archetypes. I mean, it just that deficit I felt when I left.
And I got to school was just a deficit of archetypes, deficit of templates.
Of how to live and how to be in the world.
And like each of these things, you know, from when I was age basically twenty-nine, thirty, thirty one.
Connecting with Kevin Kelly, being g asked to give these talks, you know.
going and the art director's club is this weird little coda when I was twenty four.
Going to McDowell, hanging out with these people who are winning these incredible awards and working on great
Really truly great work. They were giving readings, you know, at night, and I was just like, Oh my god, I can't believe I'm here with these people, like reading this level of work.
And it just feeds into that.
Sense of oh, maybe there's value here and maybe I have something to bring to the table.
That was the biggest takeaway.
So I've got a couple of thoughts I'll throw out for you.
Craig, number one is I suggest we just do two recordings. We're not gonna cram everything into this conversation. There's no fucking way. Okay. And I don't think we should try. I think we should just do two episodes and we can put them out very close together, maybe back to back. That's that's my suggestion because we have so much
to talk about and there's no reason to rush it. There's just zero reason if you're open to it. Sure. Yeah. That would be the first recommendation.
And I think we
get to I mean the huge walks are such a huge chapter.
In such an important chapter, and I think people will benefit from that so much.
I think we get there. We will talk about the new book before we wrap, but we're already at one hour forty five minutes. So if you're if you're cool with it, I'd just say we do too. And maybe we record tomorrow, maybe we'll record the day after and just
Perfect.
Rage. I think I think that's what we do. Love it. And uh because people are gonna want more. And trust me, folks, if you're listening, you want
the round two. And you want to continue listening, but I
I wanna ask you
for the I don't know what label to apply here.
For the creatives or aspiring creatives listening.
And on some level, maybe I will
Put aside, and this is not to denigrate anyone who self-identifies this way, but content creators because I think that that can
turn into like a shrimp farming exercise where volume is the game. And I want to maybe just put that aside for a moment, but for people who are
drawn to some
art form, some medium. Could be photography, could be
Writing could be fill in the blank.
You didn't have an archetype. Let's say you're teaching a class. Now you're the archetype.
You're up in front. You're the Sharka. Maybe you're not as brutal, but
You're up there. What are the types of things that you would
Teach or focus on or assign.
As
exercises or readings or anything else, like what might be some of the ingredients in that class.
All of the work that I'm most proud of and
The work I'd say that is the first real work of mine that I feel like is truly
Me finding my groove, hitting my stride. Has all happened in the last
Six years.
And
It's all connected with walking.
Mm-hmm. So
If I was running a class, we'd be doing a lot of walks.
Walking I say.
All of this.
Meeting these archetypes.
Going to McDowell.
Working in Silicon Valley, getting all these hugs from Enrique and Ben.
All of this was leading up to allow me to lean into the walking in the way that I did.
And
It was in the walk.
That I kind of found
How to truly commit to the work.
I know this sounds very woo woo and weird and circulated because I actually know more of the story. So Yeah. Yeah. People will get it when they get it. Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, lots of walking.
Lots of walking.
I mean honestly.
A big part of I think for most young people today is just getting offline. Like just block the internet using like freedom apps like Freedom.
Turn your smartphone off. Don't sleep with your smartphone in your bedroom. I mean, these are very easy things, but like most people don't do them. I haven't slept with a smartphone in my room. I haven't slept with this with a phone in my room.
Ever in my life. I've never had the phone in my room. Sometimes
You know, I lived in such small apartments, I just put it in like the
kitchen like on the stove because that was the only other unit of my house that was not my bedroom.
And
It blows my mind that so many people have the smartphone in the room. Yeah, just having it on the table.
So like when I am in serious
writing mode. When I need when my deadline I need to get stuff done.
I have the phone in such a place that I will not look at it or touch it.
Or engage with it until at least after lunch.
That is the soonest I'll touch it. And I feel palpably
The chemicals in my mind shift as soon as I look at it, as soon as I touch it, as soon as I
Acknowledge it as an option.
And I feel that those chemicals that get activated, the dopamine, whatever casino
Those chemicals are a hundred percent
Hundred percent destructive of the creative impulse that allows people like
Dennis Johnson to produce Train Dreams.
Or to do that kind of deep.
Poetic work?
They're at odds.
And I think the thing you're talking about, like content creators
There's a certain kind of ephemerality there.
And like the work that I'm trying to do and I think the work that speaks to me.
Is not ephemeral. It's immutable. It's sort of out there. It's the thing you keep coming back to. There's nothing I like more than rereading books. I mean, this is it's sort of like.
Bad I reread.
So many books.
And I just keep coming back to them over and over and over again. And that to me is kind of the greatest
Gift of art.
is to be able to re watch things to reread things and
You know when's the last time?
you re watch like a YouTube
short or something like that. You're like, Oh yeah, let's go back, you know, whatever. There's like goofy things that you'll rewatch, but
This relationship over decades you can have with an object.
With a story, I think is
really powerful and to me that's that's always been the thing.
Besides train dreams, what books
Have you re read
A lot.
Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Chinker Creek.
Pilgrim at
Tinker.
Creek. Creek. Yes. Okay.
And it's really frustrating because like this is I think the first book she published. She was in her twenties when she wrote this.
She went to live in this cabin.
She went to live at this in this cabin near Tinker Creek.
And she just wrote the
Most beautiful
Poetic.
Sort of.
Diary, nonfiction, narrative nonfiction.
Description of what it was like being out there. You know, and it's like her book is
I don't believe in
mental blocks or like writer's block or anything like that. If I wake up in the morning
Make a nice cup of coffee.
My phone is out of sight. I'm not thinking about any of that crap and I'm not looking at notifications.
Make this nice cup of coffee. I'm smelling these beautiful Ethiopian beans. I sit down
If I'm like, Oh, I don't really feel like writing or I don't feel like the juice is f
I pick up Annie Dillard, I literally flip to any page.
I read two paragraphs. I can't stop myself.
from running over and starting writing. It activates something in my brain so
Strongly, so immediately.
I love it. I mean like
I I've never met her.
I would love to buy her.
A beautiful steak dinner, if that's the sort of thing she's I don't eat steak, but maybe she does. That I feel like that's the thing you're supposed to buy people. I'd love to buy an amazing dinner. I feel she is
Her book.
Her writing, her voice
Her way of looking at the world, her way of showing me what's possible in terms of like creativity of prose.
of looking at the most mundane thing and making it so beautiful and quirky and weird, the opening scene of a cat
With blood on its paws.
walking over the blanket and her waking up to find that. You know, it's like like little sort of flower petals. It's like
Just all of it, finding that beauty, that's that is so infused how I I try to engage with the world when I'm out on my big walks.
I love it. I just and my my thing now.
Is I try to find
First editions of these books
And then I go through and I try to mark'em up again. I love there's nothing I love greater
than marking up a first edition. Because I think
That's the greatest honor you can give to a book. Like this idea of being precious with it, like what am I gonna do? Like hold on to this stupid thing for thirty years and sell it and like give my stepdaughter like two hundred bucks that I got for this first edition so she can buy like a bowl of ramen or something, which is like probably gonna cost 200 bucks in 30 years. It's like no, like what it like mark up the books.
My books, like if you buy my books, please write in them, dog ear them, like use them. That's that is the greatest part of like them as objects is like kind of putting your imprint on it and then coming back to it.
Year after year.
Decade after decade coming back to these things. So anyway, Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
So moving. Lynn Tillman, one of the people I met at McDowell.
Any of her stuff.
She has a great
book that just came out called Thrilled to Death, which if you're gonna start anywhere with Lynn.
She's
So funny.
She is so
No bullshit. I love her so much, like just as a human, I love her voice.
You can look up how old she is on Wikipedia. She's in her seventies
She's been in the same East Village apartment.
For like forty years.
She is this like
institution of the New York literary community and you just feel her
pulsing with that New York voice. And it's so funny and incredible. And this thrill to death is a collection of her short stories over her entire career. And it's amazing.
Amazing.
Stuff like that.
Other contemporary writer, Sam Anderson.
Writes for the New York Times magazine, Sam Anderson is
Amazing. He also his favorite book is

He has the most generous, hilarious voice. He just wrote this incredible narrative nonfiction piece for the magazine about the the legend of Leatherman, who is this guy who roamed
He walked the circle.
In Connecticut.
in the eighteen hundreds and he wore a suit of leather and he became
Folklore.
of like all these towns and like people would like give him like bread and like give him coffee and like he got so sick he couldn't chew things and he would like dip everything in coffee and he'd eat cakes
By dipping him in coffee.
I've done Sam for like
Six or seven years.
Again we connected because of writing. Again, like literally everyone in my life that I love
that I wanna hug, that I'll die for, that I wanna protect with all of my life force. It's all connected to writing.
All of it, every single thing. It's like shocking. So it's easy. You know, you asked early why books. You know, we like an hour ago, you asked me why am I doing books? And it's like
It is just undeniable but that a fullness of
Of life.
That I find
Is found through
the writing and who that connects me with and the adventures it brings me on.
Well let's talk about your own writing.
And specifically.
Let's talk briefly about things become other things.
And then we'll
Not try to cram too much into this. I mean we've covered a hell of a lot of ground. We're already at two hours. So let's talk
You don't have to be sorry. I mean, this is what I want when you're like I'll truncate this. I'm like, Don't truncate it. This is not TikTok. This is long form. So
I want to encourage my listeners to engage with long form because if you're playing the short game
Even as a consumer, you are training yourself. You are being trained, maybe is a better way to put it to become something that I'm not sure you want to become. So
Things become other things.
Tell me and tell us.
About things become other things.
It's my
Forthcoming book.
Coming out with
Random house.
So this is a huge
Leap for me.
I've always been fiercely
Independent.
I produce my own books that are kind of fine art editions that sell for a hundred bucks a copy.
That are
Printed and bound in Japan, like I showed earlier.
silk screen, foil stamp, stuff like that. But I was working on this story for this book.
And this book is about a walk I did during Covid.
on the key peninsula of Japan, which I've been to many, many, many, many times. And this is the peninsula south of Kyoto.
So if you look at Honshu
I describe it in the book as the dangling penis of Japan.
This peninsula.
If you look So Honshu for people who don't know, yeah, just do you wanna just lay out the main islands of Japan so people know.
Where we are.
So you have Hokkaido up at the top, then you have Honshu, which is the big banana.
With the little dangly penis, which is the peninsula. You've got next to the penis, you've got Shikoku, which is where the eighty eight temples pilgrimage is. And then next to that, you've got Kyushu, and which is kind of the the bottom part of Japan. And then
Far away you've got Okinawa. But
The Key Peninsula is south of Kyoto, south of Osaka.
It's me.
In Wakayama in Nada, part of southern part of Nata prefectures. And I've been going there for
About twelve years, thirteen years.
And I'd say that most of my walks have taken place there. I've walked thousands of kilometers of the peninsula.
And
Probably my most profound walk happened during Covid, the height of Covid.
It was twenty twenty one, Japan was still locked down.
We still didn't know where this was going.
Vaccines I think had
Not even arrived here yet.
May of twenty twenty one, we didn't have vaccines in Japan yet.
They came in July, July, August.
I was like, Well, I'm gonna go on a big walk.
It's like I'm being careful.
I'm tested.
I'm not gonna spread anything.
I went on this walk and I did it was about six hundred kilometers. It took about a month.
And I was writing and we can talk about
My walking and writing practice. I have this like whole aesthetic practice connected with how I walk and how I write. But this walk in particular, I was writing every day.
Two, three, four thousand words.
Photographing every day.
And I was thinking about life and one of the things I started to
Reflect on.
Partially because in
This Covid
moment where I think uh uh for a lot of folks it was this moment of reflection. Everything slowed down, everything stopped.
And
It was the first time as an adult I went back to my childhood. I thought back to this childhood friendship I had.
As I was walking the peninsula, I'd see little kids every now and there aren't
That many kids left.
In Japan, certainly not on the peninsula.
And I'd see little kids every now and then coming back from school at the end of the day.
It started.
Me thinking about this friendship I had with this kid.
Brian, when I was in elementary school, he was my best friend.
He was the closest thing to a brother I had.
And we grow up side by side.
In elementary school.
And I happen to test
A little bit better than he did, and it kind of put me on this different track.
We still had a gifted program back then. I was lucky I was able to go in the gifted program because I test it a little better. That exposed me to
Computers, they had like one Commodore sixty four or something, and I use Logo Writer, and that got me thinking about it's like you see how these things kind of compound.
Is small
chances, these small luck, these small opportunities. And I got them and Brian didn't get them.
And
By the end of high school, we were so separated.
My high school
Was called out during the Trump first Trump administration by
Betsy DeVos, I think that was the secretary of education.
She called up my high school as one of the worst high schools in America.
Like on a national
Speech.
And
My friend Brian was going to the high school that
Bad kids went to
That couldn't hang in my high school.
So it's like you can imagine where Brian was. And we graduated high school.
And just a few weeks after he graduated, he was murdered.
And
Them.
Murderer.
That loss.
We basically stopped
Talking after middle school just because of you know, you
You get separated and then your friend groups change. Yeah, you drift.
You don't know how to bridge that gap. You don't have the emotional intelligence as a kid to think about that gap.
And I always thought
At some point we would be able to reconnect and half of my childhood.
Lived in his brain.
His death was like losing
Half of my childhood was losing this
Brother.
You know, being adopted again, like what does blood mean? You know, well how does family get
created and he was absolutely as much of a brother as anyone.
And
I try to engage with
Um
Friendship, our brotherhood.
In short stories. Actually the first short story I ever had published was published
When I was eighteen at university in this national writing competition, it was a short story about
Me and Brian and our some of our antics. And so there was an impulse in in me to write about him, but I didn't know how to. And I tried a couple more times in my early twenties. It never worked. And then on this walk, I started thinking back about him.
And it just
It
Was the right time.
And so
I basically ended up doing this walk.
I wrote about this walk and Brian
snuck into the narrative in a way that I did not expect.
So this book is about
It is this walk, but it's also about our friendship, our childhood. It's about
Being filled.
by the systems. Like why were we cleaved apart? Why, you know, we're side by side in first grade.
How should two kids side by side end up in a position where I feel like I have to run away halfway around the world?
And he gets murdered. And it's like him getting murdered wasn't
The the crazy thing is that wasn't a big shock.
When you saw kind of what was you know, there were gangs
We had a um
The head of security. We had like security guards in my high school, you know, like I people, you know, there was like
Whatever. It we didn't have metal detectors. We weren't quite at like
Baltimore the wire level of like intensity, but it was like
Serious. You couldn't wear certain colors'cause they were game related. You know, and the head of security, it turns out
Uh the FBI
Bust it in.
One day and like
Tackled him, arrested him.
It turns out that he was a bank robber. It's like
It was just insane, right? So so like
Um

Me and Wakayama are both
working class in industry
Prefixures that have lost the industry, have lost the workers, have lost the jobs.
And yet
There is a foundational
social support network in place where the people aren't falling as far as I saw people fall.
And certainly people aren't getting murdered.
And certainly the people aren't
you know, joining gangs or whatever. And certainly people aren't
dealing with opioid crises and things like that. And so
It's a joyous memory of this friendship I had with Brian.
And it's also like this elevation of all these wonderful characters I meet.
on the peninsula. I love everyone I meet. I'm talking to fishermen. I'm talking to old farmers. I'm talking to women, you know, who are
running old cafes, Kisoten, you know, in the in the countryside who are super surly in chain smoking. And I'm like, you know, the first person who's come in in days, you know, and they're just like, sure, come on in. I ain't got no toast, but I got a lot of cigarettes and coffee for you, kid. You know, that sort of thing. And
I just love all these people and it's a book about elevating who they are, elevating this peninsula.
And the paths I'm walking are these thousand year old, two thousand year old pilgrimage routes.
And the history, you know, I'm walking past stone markers that are two thousand years old. I'm walking past pilgrim graves. I'm going to these, you know.
The holiest shrines, these foundational myth shrines of Japan, I say
Jingo. I'm walking you know, down
past Kumano, I'm walking past the most holy rock, the foundational rock, where
The sun goddess was born from you know, it's like so this history of the country comes from this peninsula.
It's so
Atavistic in so many ways.
And so it's a book about celebrating that, celebrating the people who live there, celebrating the industry, and celebrating this beautiful friendship I had with this kid, Brian, because
no one is gonna be able to remember him like I can. And I feel like I have a I had a duty
To remember this guy.
When does the book come out?
Comes out May f
Six.
The reason why it's coming out with Random House is I just felt like this story deserved a bigger platform.
Than I could give on my own.
And so I kind of went around and I was able to
Connect with
An amazing editor.
Who really got the book?
She
You know, helped me elevate it to a place that I couldn't have gotten it to on my own.
Yeah, I hope.
Through Random House, they're gonna make a lot more books than I could make. It's gonna cost a lot less than my books cost.
uh my goal is to to really expand
the ideas of uh you know, my walking, my walking practice. I write about my walking practice in this, but also just exposing this part of Japan. Like you are not gonna be able to go and engage with this part of Japan.
On your own.
Unless you've lived here for a long time and can speak the language.
And can understand the dialects.
And get the history. You're not going to be able to show up and go to this place and kind of dig in it in the way that I've been able to in this book for you. And so
You know, like whatever, William Gibson blurbed it for me. And that was like the hand of God coming down and saying, Yes, oh like I approve of of your work. And you know
It's about this illuminating this part of Japan that you're not going to have access to. I'm proud of the book. I'm proud of where we got it.
And I'm excited, so excited for people to read it and I wanna engage with people about it.
Amazing. So for people that don't know William Gibson.
Who is William Gibson, briefly? I mean, he has a quote that people see in Silicon Valley quite a lot, which is pulled from Neuromancer, I believe.
Which is the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed something along those lines.
Might be from that book.
But legendary writer.
Basically.
Whatever the progenitor of cyberpunk.

But also he's a guy who's just who has seen I think the
Coolness of Japan before most of the world saw the coolness of Japan. And he's written great books that involve Japan.
Like pattern recognition.
It's an incredible book. I read it like once every couple of years.
It's beautiful.
There's a lot of poetry in it. It's a cool story and it
It captures this like quirky early
Two thousands Japan.
Which is really cool. So anyway, so William Gibson, he's a big deal. And like the fact that he played it was like was pretty good. So fun.
Yeah. And for people who are listening, I checked on this. So things become other things. Beautiful cover.
I am sure the writing is beautiful. I encourage people to read everything they can of yours.
And it is available for pre order. So go pre order the book. You will not regret having this book. I can say that with very, very high degree of confidence, and I very rarely, maybe ever, say something like that. But
Having
A number of
Your books.
behind me, maybe about uh bookshelf behind the wall that is behind me. And having spent time with you, having watched you write, you glossed over something that we'll talk about in part two, but two to three to four thousand words a day. What fucking hell that's that's after walking thirty kilometers.
Yeah, that is a lot of words. You and Brandon Sanderson.
What am I gonna do with you guys? So we'll talk about that.
Where else can people find you if they want to dip their toe into
Modland.
And get a taste.
Craigmod.com
Craig Mod.com, you know, in service for twenty three years. No, I think that don't make it. In service. The big thing I do that's enabled a lot, and again, like to
Maintain this fierce independence.
And we can talk about the
Random house deal in part two as well, because there's some interesting things about it that actually dovetails with what Brandon was talking about as well.
I have a membership program called Special Projects.
That have been running now for six years.
Since twenty nineteen.
And that
Combined with the walking. And actually that gave me the permission to start
Committing to these big walks. So it's like everything builds on
Everything else. Slow, slowly, slowly, slowly, slow and then you realize you've kind of created this
pretty big ladder of stuff. And so the membership program
If you join that, not to like
Shell.
But
The membership program.
It gives you access it gives you access to
All of the archives of all the writing I've done on my walks and a hundred and twenty hours of
videos where I run board meetings every six months
And I talk about what I've done.
the projects I've worked on, how they've gone, what we're gonna do in the next six months and then I filled Q and A's from the members.
And they're incredible Q and the mem my members I'm so lucky, my members are
Smart?
They ask great questions, they're creative, they're wonderful people.
And so you get kind of access to this huge archive and the whole reason I make
Wha everything I do in in the membership program
Is me
Speaking to myself when I was twenty.
And desperate.
And Hungary.
And drinking myself into the pavement.
And wishing I had an archetype, wishing I had some kind of flashlight to show me how to do the work I want to do. This is me wishing I could give this to myself back then. And so.
It's free for students. If you're a student, you just email me and say I'm a student. You get it for free. I'm very loose.
About.
what constitutes a student. If you think you're a student, you're probably a student. Just email me and say, hey, I'm a student. I believe you. You don't have to I've had people like send me photos of like their student IDs. Don't send me a photo of your student ID. It's free. I'm happy to give you those memberships to get access to that stuff. But what the membership allows me to do by keeping some of the stuff behind
A curtain.
is I can be a little more vulnerable than when I'm out in front of my big newsletters where I send out to fifty thousand people or sixty thousand people or whatever. When it's a smaller group, I'm able to be more vulnerable, more honest.
And the Q and A's and stuff like that feel a little more intimate.
artificial scarcity, artificial friction to enable us to have a deeper conversation, I hope.
And people can find that at CraigBod.com as well.
Craigma.com slash membership.
That's where people can find it all. So we were
Going to discuss so many things, and we are going to discuss those things in round two. One of them
is the membership community because you have
Very clear rules.
They also make it vibrant.
And prevent it from becoming a monster you need to feed that
Consumes rather than enables.
Your creative life.
You figured it out over time. And we are gonna talk about that.
There are so many things we're gonna talk about.
It was just foolish of me to think that we would be able to cover all of it in two hours. Fucking ridiculous. There's no way. So
Anyway, go ahead. You were like, Hey, let's start with eight years old. I knew there was I w I don't want to say a risk.
I knew there was a possibility.
Distinct possibility.
that that would take us afield, but we never would have gotten to being possessed by demons.
If
Spirits. I'll be I don't wanna spray. Whatever happened. Yeah. Wh whatever happened to end up
in you when you were cradling some invisible object.
Asleep overseas. But
This is the fun of long form for me.
Yeah, you can I love it.
I don't want to know exactly where it's going.
So much of my life is regimented. So much of it is planned.
There's so many times when I
Execute to spec.
And
part of what I'm trying to inject more in my life, whether it's playing with fiction and just starting with a few characters in a scenario.
And letting it rip.
Or having conversations like this, especially with someone I've spent time with.
is ending up in unexpected corners.
There's so much to that. And it's similar in a sense. I mean this is a
Perhaps not the best comparison, but when you say
All of the best things or so many of the beautiful relationships.
have all come from your writing.
Part of that is not
over planning.
Right. You focus on the work.
You create
Beauty and quality.
And then you release it into the wild and you see what happens.
It becomes theological.
It really is. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's totally faith based.


I mean I mean yeah what cre what creative practice isn't what great creative practice isn't I mean my favorite
Moment of um a documentary about photographers is the Sally Man documentary.
How do you spell that?
Solid.
Lally?
Uh and then a woman, M A N N I think, is our last is her last name?
And she yes, if I say it fast, it sounds
Salaman. Sally No, Sally Sally Mann. You know, she has all these
gorgeous ethereal black and white photos of her family that she took and she gained
So much notoriety. And anyway, there's this documentary about her.
And in the middle of it she's working on
A new set of works.
And she's getting rejected by gallery. She has this total breakdown.
And you just go, Oh my God, someone like Sally Mann.
Uh
Peak of her career.
can still have a breakdown. Like it really is so
theological, this belief you just have to believe and keep pushing and keep pushing. And she, you know, she pushes through it and she creates some great work and it whatever has a great show and blah blah blah.
You have to cultivate that belief.
Having your cost of living be a thousand bucks a month for everything all in.
Is an easy way.
To help cultivate that belief. It's like you could be uh you could be uncompromising about it.
Mm. All right, Craig. We are going to very quickly
record and release around to everybody who's listening to this should
Tune in for that for sure, my God. I mean, honestly, in part because I'll just give people a a quick teaser.
With the exploratory bullets and I ask all guests to send ideas for exploratory bullets.
We literally didn't get to
Effectively.
Any of them. Right. I mean the the the huge walks.
Walking as a tool.
for focus, reclaiming attention, your rules for walking, the art of slowness.

your wild strange celebrity in Japan around mid sized cities didn't get to that.
The Kevin Kelly
Saga continues. We did not get to that.
The very wild, incredible
Stories related to adoption.
Sort of adult chapters.
All that and more we're gonna cover.
Tons and tons, and I promise everybody I won't start at eight years old. So we'll stick to the script a little bit more.
Craig, at least for this conversation, anything else you would like
To say
Any
comments or
Anywhere you'd like to point.
The people listening.
Yeah, it's difficult.
Because it's like the people who probably need to hear these things won't be listening to this podcast or maybe don't even know this podcast.
exists. Yeah, so that's a that's often sometimes the difficulty in getting
Getting information to folks. But like
I think the residencies, artist residencies.
Are one of the coolest things.
That we have.
And
Most people overlook them or think that the bar to entry is so insurmountable that like why should I even try?
Go out and
There are huge lists, and once you start to crack the code, once you start applying, and you should get aim to get rejected by a billion of them.
But once you get into one or two of them, you start to understand the code a little more.
And my God, they're so much fun and so interesting. And they are such a way to level up your practice.
Whatever your practice might be.
To be surrounded by people who are also
committing themselves to it, working hard.
And providing unexpected archetypes. I've had so many great friendships come out of
I've done McDowell
V C C A
Tinhouse.
Ragdale.
as a few of them. And
All of them I've come out with just amazing friendships and uh got a lot of great work done too.
So please go investigate and if you're
A rich
Mother F or listening to this thing.
Donate to
support these things. I mean, like, these are incredible, incredible institutions that don't
require a lot of money to have a huge impact. And so being able to get like
Provide more scholarships and and things like that.
It's pretty powerful. Pretty powerful stuff.
Love it. All right, everybody. The end.
Craig Mod, Craigmod.com. You can find all things there.
Um
So nice to see you, Bud.
You've been a minute.
And uh we will
We will tomorrow. And for people listening, of course, we'll link to everything we discussed.
In this episode of Tim
Dot blog slash podcasts. There will not be another person with the last name mod. So you can search for Craig Mod.
And he will pop.
Right up, of course, and until next time, which will be pretty soon, round two with Craig or
Be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. We'll talk more about cultivating a rational belief and faith in oneself in round two. So
Until then. Thanks.
For tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading.
albums perhaps gadgets gizmas all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short
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