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

24:28And I got in. I ended up going to UPenn. 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 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 Penn 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 an Ivy was just too big.

25:06So anyway, I ended up getting in, much to my shock. And so after that first year in Japan, I went back, went to UPenn. 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 at UPenn, I was back to Japan, going back to Waseda, doing another year of intensive language studies in a grad program. And then I basically just stayed since then. All right. We're going to take yet another side quest because it's not really a footnote. I know quite a few people who've moved to Japan. You're the only non-Japanese person as 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 expat bubble, which is fine.

25:51People do that in the U.S. 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 in general, language learning is easier if you have a musical background. And I grew 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 paramount.

26:24But when I got to Tokyo, I did a homestay. 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. In fact, the international group I was with were amazing. It was actually, I got to the school, I got to Waseda, and the international program 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.

26:58I'd had like one year of university Japanese before I came. To give you an example, there are 13 levels. Which is not a lot. 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 13 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 at SOAS. They came. Sorry, you said SOAS. And I thought about the muscle that causes me so many problems. What the hell is SOAS? SOAS is the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Oh, wow. Unfortunate branding.

27:33But yes. they have the most total badass language program like honestly if you want to learn Japanese go to SOAS just go to SOAS those kids they had done one year at SOAS they arrived in Tokyo they were in level 10 level 11 it was insane must be a brutal boot camp so they were amazing 70 % of kids drop out of it or something like that babysitting mutants basically 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. For sure. Like, oh, what's that little grammatical thing you're doing?

28:10What'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've 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 they didn't care if I sounded like a caveman with traumatic brain injury.

28:44They 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 Shinjuku maybe, where I found Kinokunya. And I went there to the Japanese language learning section and found English language judo textbooks. 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.

29:27Which means I'm going to 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. Huge. Because to teach, if you're at a homestay like I was when I was 15, 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.

30:04And 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. Let me paint this picture for you. So they ran an udon noodle shop, right? So every meal was udon. So udon, you should explain, it's like these very thick noodles, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like soba is sort of, soba is weird because it's both like the fast food of Japan in the sense like there's tachigui 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.

30:42And it costs like two bucks. Which means standing and eating, literally, right? You're at a countertop standing. 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 that try to make it fancy, but it's really not that fancy. So anyway, this is a working class family. So 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.

31:15I 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 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'd just play together. I was like, I get this. These are totally my people. So they had an udon shop and there was an 11-year-old son. And unfortunately for me, he slept in his parents' bed. So he didn't have any privacy.

31:46And 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 I would be Try to send an email at the kotatsu. So it's like November, it's kind of chilly. I'm sitting under the kotatsu. The house was so cold. What's a kotatsu? Kotatsu is a low table with a heater underneath it. So it's basically, you put your legs under it. There's a big, heavy blanket. Everything that's under the table is kind of a mystery. You don't know what's lurking under the table. Oh, no. This house was so cold. This house got, I swear to God, probably three minutes of sunlight a year.

32:30I 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 complaining about how cold it was. And they bought me a full-body snowsuit to wear to bed. You're like Kenny from South Park when you went to bed. I was like, what am I supposed to do? This is literally the coldest I've ever been in my life. Anyway, so we're sitting under the kotatsu. I'm doing emails. The little 11-year-old's reading manga. And then suddenly I realized he's doing a little more than reading. So he's just jerking off everywhere.

33:03This 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 came home from school the next day and we were alone. And I was just like, I got to 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, 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.

33:35He probably, he hasn't masturbated in 24 years. I mean, it sounds like one way or another, he was going to 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 sort of pulled the short straw on my homestay. Like other kids' homestay families, it was like, they were like, oh, I live on the 34th floor of this beautiful tower apartment block. And my family is taking me skiing next weekend. My family, they're like, oh, we're going to go to our summer home.

34:06You want to come? I was like, yeah, great, summer home. They take me to their summer home. It's like a shack by the river with cockroaches. I was like, what is going, where, who are these people? They were very sweet, but I was like, I don't know if these people should have homestays, dudes. Well, my guess is they got paid by Wasila or whoever, right? So it's a gig. It's a gig. And they had so many gigs. So they had another gig was they were hosting a Korean kid who was just working, I guess, as a laborer at the Udon restaurant. But he slept in the closet. So they're getting a two-for-one. They get free labor.

34:44So I've got the 11-year-old son jerking off all over the place. And then there's this Korean guy who's maybe 25. He sleeps in the closet. He was super Christian. Because Christianity is a huge thing in Korea. It's a national sport there, yeah. And so he would come into my bedroom every night, and he would kneel in the entryway of my bedroom and go, Craig-san, will you please come with me to church? 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 figure out who I am. I'm trying to recreate this personal identity. And I'm just like, there's ejaculate flying everywhere.

35:20There's cockroaches shooting across the room. I'm going to sleep in a snowsuit. This Korean kid is asking me to go to church with him. All I'm eating is udon. It was a weird landing. All right. So you can see why I like to explore the footnotes. Because we could have skipped that whole story. We could have skipped all that.

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36:49i want to 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 i mean this is more than 30 years later I'm still close to my host parents and my brothers. It's just an amazing blessing in my life. Talk about inflection points were real moments that at the time seemed special, but you don't realize quite the significance, kind of like the computer.

37:29Way 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 this is in Tokyo. It's very common. And these cockroaches, people weren't 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 miniature Shiba was called Aichan. And she would walk in there and then a bunch of cockroaches would like fly out of the laundry into her face.

38:12And she'd go, Aicha, Aicha, Gokipuri, Gokipuri. She'd be like, cockroach, cockroach. And this little miniature shiba would storm in and kind of porpoise nose these cockroaches to death. And this was like a daily, at least multiple times a week kind of thing. But yeah, that homestay 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 spring break, I hitchhiked across the country. And I told them, I said, hey, I'm going to go hitchhike to Fukuoka now. And they're like, oh yeah, good luck.

38:48Bye. 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? It was like, oh yeah, good luck. We'll see you in a month. I have to just tell you one story, which 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. There is a difference between polite and nice. There is like tanyingyogi, right?

39:22Like the 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 mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread every day for lunch. And after a week or two of this, I was like, 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.

40:04And they were 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'd like dishonored his mother by trading her mayonnaise sandwiches. Because a lot of folks who've never been to Japan or if they've just been in the hotels, They have a certain image of the Japanese. Here's my advice. Okay, you're listening to this. You're a teenager or whatever. You think you want to go to Japan. Go to Japan. Don't do a homestay. That's my advice. I think all of my friends who were in the dormitories, I was so jealous of them because it was just sane and controlled and you had heaters and stuff like that.

40:45Now, 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 homestead again, even though I took some bruises, not as many moments of ejaculate flying as you experienced. But nonetheless, also, this is such like inside baseball, but holy shit are houses in Japan cold a lot of the time. I mean, it's like... And 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.

41:25But if you think that's cold, go to Japan and experience the lack of insulation in the middle of the winter and get up. And it is freezing, freezing cold. All right. So we've covered a bunch of that. That was now, tell me when you left Japan to go back to UPenn. I guess we can kind of peg it in your macro timeline. You get back. What happens after UPenn? the summer between junior and senior year i did an internship in tokyo at a magazine and the editor in chief there was like hey i want to start a publishing company do you want to like be the art director 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.

42:19And 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 isn't for me. This isn't for me. This system is broken, whatever this is. I can feel it in my chest. 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 kind of talented at doing web crap. Like back then, And not many people were.

42:47And I was like, no, I can't do this. 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 where I came from, I saw there was no health care. People were fairly struggling. A lot of my friends, their sisters were pregnant as teenagers. It was kind of endemic. 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 pathological about making sure I'm secure to get to the next stage. And so being independent was really important to me.

43:19My buddy, 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 want to go do grad school stuff anyway. We can start 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 UPenn was because it had a computer science and fine arts program. and it was called the DMD, Digital Media Design. That's cool. I didn't realize that. That's early. It was super early. Super early. Because you had the MIT Media Lab, but that was only grad school.

43:49And I loved John Mita's 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 it was like NYU kind of had a program that was like technology, I think, and maybe CMU had 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 kind of changed my life. One was Joshua Mosley, who he was a claymation animator guy. He runs the department now.

44:23He was just this incredible archetype of like the artist doing these bizarre claymation things. Wait a second. So even at that time, he's doing like claymation stop motion stuff in this digital media lab? Yes, yes. Okay. and teaching us how to use the latest 3D programs. It was this totally interesting kind of like analog digital thing happening. I had some amazing photography professors. My focus was photography, but I also had a design professor, Sharka Highland, 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 wish she loved you.

45:01It was like one of these teachers that she would not pull any punches. And so everyone has their designs. I remember we had to design a book cover and I had the Sun Also Rises or something. I think it was a Hemingway cover. Everyone's got their stuff up on the wall. And kids are crying because she's like, this is, God, I hate this. This sucks. This is dead. This is bad. But be very specific, more specific than I'm being. Let me tell you the ways I hate this. Yes. So many. Where do I start? Yeah. 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.

45:36I'd always loved books. I'd always loved technology. You know, all the tech stuff, the blogging stuff, you know, the online writing, whatever, the news groups, 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 Eggers, he's got his heartbreaking work of staggering genius comes out. In the moment that was like, what is happening? 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.

46:08And basically this editor-in-chief and I were like, hey, let's do like mini McSweeney's that's kind of 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. All 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 showed 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. What was it that clicked for you?

46:46So I think I'd spent a lot of my teenage years in this autodidactic way of trying to understand design. I didn't know any of the greats. And I remember 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?

47:18Who do you like? And I was like, uh, you know, I hadn't gone to design school at this point. I was like 18 years old. I was 19 years old. I came from this place that literally no one had picked up a John Updike book, let alone looked at the cover, let alone thought about who designed it. And I'm like, I was really into internet design. So I was like, K10K. And I was naming all these handles of 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 this is the thing I think that's difficult for people to understand. And if you come from a place where you aren't surrounded by a kind of 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.

48:06And that's basically what I spent all of my 20s doing. And I think Sharka saw in me that I had a certain intuitive eye for design. And she was able, 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 kind of like red. 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.

48:37Well, hold on a second. So let me just double click on that. I know 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 cons. Right. Red, green. Yeah. Red, green. But like a strong, vibrant red, I can see really well. And so that's kind of what I was drawn to. If you look a lot of my early 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 25 years. The Sin City color palette. Yeah. But Sharka, I would say, saw enough of potential slash intuitive sense of design that she elevated.

49:18And I did some branding work. I did branding work for the publishing company that I started with this guy, the editor-in-chief. And she kind of reviewed it, and she gave me all this amazing feedback. So she made me feel like I could do it, which is incredible. I had one teacher in elementary school kind of 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?

49:58I'm just curious about that. Because I remember the moment when this teacher went from brutalizing me to actually deciding, okay, now I'm going to give you a little extra attention. And it's because I spent like 10 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 knew how to work yet. When I think back to who I was back then, I don't think I understood what really, truly committing to a creative project felt like. I wish I could go back in time.

50:33Going to university, I think, when you're 18, 19, 20 is such a waste. But you just don't know what you're doing. I certainly didn't. There's a part of me that's like, I'd really love to go back to school. As a footnote, I just dropped my stepdaughter off at boarding school. Big backstory to all of this. But I dropped her off. She's going to school in New Zealand. We wanted her to find an interesting place. This is my ex's kid. So it's like this, we can talk about this and adoption and like what blood means for family or whatever. But like, I consider her, she's my daughter, you know, even though it's a complicated situation.

51:07Anyway, to 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 15. And I was so excited for her. 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 15 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 wander surrounded by a bunch of pricks. So it's like it's very like sane. It's like a sane boarding school.

51:41It'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 are so I'm like, you don't understand. I'm like shaking her. She's like, please stop. You're embarrassing me. Go, leave, please. Dad, get out of here. But I was like, this is so, so incredible that you could do this. Just as the sense of, 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.

52:11I was committing to these things. I was working hard. I think we're going to 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. What are the things in Japan that attract you so much to it. They keep you there. Maybe things that people miss. But I want to ask you as maybe a segue into some of your huge walks and trips in general. Tell me if this makes any sense, because I have not read the full context on this because I didn't know this story, but I wanted to ask you about it. 2009 hike to Nepal. Is that enough of a cue? Can you tell this story?

52:53right? Yeah, that's an inflection point. I just got goosebumps, actually. I really struggled with alcohol in my 20s. My teenage years, I didn't touch anything. I was militantly straight edge-ish. Basically, 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 a retarding agent. As a teenager, I was like, immediately I was like, okay, I don't need this. And I got to Japan and it was like, oh, this is a place to reinvent myself.

53:27And I started drinking because as you do, because people drink so much here. And it turns out that I can drink a lot. I can have 15, 20 drinks, not throw up. I black 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, for most of my 20s, because I had such a low sense of self-worth, because of where I came from, because 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, to produce literature at a level that I didn't know how to, and I didn't know how to bridge that gap.

54:12And 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 because 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'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 something like that? And I was madly in love. I fell madly, madly in love. I was 26, 27 years old, and I had the most incredible love connection I'd ever felt, this otherworldly sense of being in love with this person.

54:52And we connected so intensely and immediately went on a 40-day trip. Like a week after meeting, a 40-day trip through Tibet. We went to Tibet. I was possessed by a spirit. I spoke in tongues. Wait, hold on. We hiked up to a glacier. I mean, we can't really skip over getting possessed by spirits. I mean, it was, yeah, there was, 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? And she's like, I'll tell you when we get outside.

55:41I was like, what? You'll tell me when we get outside? Like, what's this about? And we go outside and she goes, okay, last night we had 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 was trying to 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.

56:19And I was like, oh my God, I had this because I had had this vision slash dream of this woman in white standing in the doorway and 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. Oh God, this is like straight out of paranormal activity or something. I'm just 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.

56:50Like 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. 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 kind of possessed. Saw this. He's like, did you see the woman? And I was like, yeah, he's like, he's like, Oh, Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I, we know what's going on with that here.

57:21We'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. Cause 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 go wherever you want. One of the workers there is like, you know, the manager's like, okay, take them 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 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.

57:53It 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, a 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 15 and a thousand years old. Like she was just this creature of just the most bizarre light walks out. It was like being in the matrix, you know, the scene in the matrix where they're like with the spoon and the bending and you're in this random apartment, the TV's on.

58:27It was like that situation. She comes over, brings some yak buttermilk tea, some cookies, because 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, all this stuff. You feel like you're in this really holy space. And the guy from the hotel interprets for us. 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.

58:58And 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. And the hotel guy's like, oh, you can leave a tip if you want or whatever. It was like$2 or something. I put$2 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 the sense of like, just give yourself up to what the day could potentially give to you.

59:36And 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 all of Tibet in that entire trip. We went to these temples, you know, met these monks. Hey, can you burn this for me? Oh yes, of course. Absolutely. You know, give them like a dollar, you know, 50 cents or whatever. You know, 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.

1:00:05And 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 ended up staying together for about three months. And basically, I mean, it was just, it was about 10 years worth of lifetimes in three months. Twice as bright. But losing her was probably the biggest psychic damage I'd ever encountered in my life as an adult. And I remember just lying in my tiny apartment in Tokyo, my six mat to Tommy room apartment in Tokyo.

1:00:45It 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 going to start running. And I went out and I ran like 5K at three in the morning through the streets of Tokyo. And I was like, that felt good. And I was like, okay, I need to stop drinking. And to stop drinking, I'm going to 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.

1:01:20And 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 going to run. We're going to be someone who runs. A lot of this is also like very atomic habits style stuff. It's like, who are you going to be and how are you going to set yourself up to be successful? I'm going to be a person who runs. I'm going to be a person who doesn't drink. I'm going to be a person who charges a lot. So I was at this time, with the publishing company thing, we were producing these books that were winning awards and making absolutely no money.

1:01:49And so I was consulting, doing web design consulting and stuff like that. And I was like, okay, I'm going to 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 27 to 30. These were the most important years of tiny little steps. My time is more valuable. I'm going to be a person who runs. I'm going to be a person who can take care of himself. I still drank, even though I tried to not drink, but I started lowering it. It took me about four full years to completely get off the sauce in a really dangerous way.

1:02:30Part of it culminated in going to Nepal and climbing 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. The money's not going to be there. The love isn't going to be there. The support isn't going to be there. And then when I lost her, I was like, I'm never going to have anyone who will ever love me like this person loved me.

1:03:05And I'm never going to be able to create like I created with this person. And I had to start proving to myself that that wasn't true. And I climbed up. I was like, okay, I'm just going to go to Nepal and I'm going to 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. Headache elevation. You're definitely not comfortable. You're definitely at altitude sickness levels. It's like, whoa. Yeah, that's 13 ,550 feet. That's high. Yeah. Yeah. it's going to be enough for altitude sickness for sure.

1:03:39Yeah. So I fly out there. I go to Pocata, which is the town that kind of everyone starts the trek from. I wasn't going to 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 like, no problem. No problem. Yeah. He gives me this young guide. He must've been like 18. And he was the sweetest, most compassionate, incredible human. We bonded as brothers.

1:04:17He was calling me older brother. I was calling him younger brother. Die and bye. and I got to base camp on my 29th 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 Moraine, looking out over the, essentially you're on the moon up there. I mean, it really is incredible. The edge of the, what did you just say? Moraine? What is a Moraine? Moraine is sort of like when a glacier pulls back and it leaves this kind of valley, essentially. I see, got it. and you're kind of at this lip. It's a huge fall down, but you're also in this, not caldera, but you're in this cradle.

1:04:56You're surrounded by Annapurna and Machu Picchu and all these other mega peaks. It's just amazing. The base camp 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 taking photos and 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 wrest 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 want to say it was the first field review.

1:05:37You know how everyone does the field review of iPhone cameras and stuff now? But this was early. I mean, very early. This is 2009. And it was the Panasonic GF1. It was this tiny little camera that was actually made, I think it was made to market to women because it was meant to be this really tiny, cute camera, but it was also this amazing camera. 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? What dominoes did that tip over?

1:06:10That article is 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 was a lot of designers on the web, like Zeldman, Jason Santamaria, Liz Danzico, working in the early mid-2000s, late-2000s, refining the CSS spec and showing CSS ZenGuard and showing what you can do with design and stuff like that. But it was always, you know, there was blogs and stuff, but there weren't really articles that were like long form designed in the same way you do for like a magazine.

1:06:48There 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 and 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 refine. 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 and to this camera review.

1:07:17This guide too, there was this love that I wanted to give this thing because we came down from the mountain. The guide, his name is HOM, H-O-M. We come down and we're both saying goodbye. And it's such an emotional goodbye. We don't want to say goodbye. he goes die you know 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 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 generate it on my own, not having to have that person.

1:08:02Again, ratcheting up the sense of self-value and I can produce these kinds of experience on my own. And I wanted to give that to the article. And so I just worked on it for weeks and weeks and weeks, which was a long time. It wasn't that big of an article. I was refining. I remember hilariously, 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 you some Adderall. So I remember it's like, I'm in Harlem.

1:08:29I'm at my friend's apartment in Harlem. Like it's like 11 o 'clock at night. I had never taken Adderall before. I was like, okay, I'll try it. I take it. You take it at 11. I take it at 11 and I'm just like, 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 we were in Harlem and it was like a, it was almost like a basement apartment. I'm looking at, there's people's feet walking out outside the window and I'm like, I've got to write this review. This is like Stephen King back in the cocaine sprint days.

1:09:00So I committed to this thing and it came out and it just got picked up everywhere. And 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,$20 ,000 in revenue. Holy shit, in affiliate fees. For me, back in 2009. Yeah, that's wild. We were selling 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 20s was my cost of living was so low.

1:09:35I could live in the center of this incredible city. And I needed to make$1 ,000 a month that would cover my rent, all my food, and entertainment. Which is so unexpected for a lot of people listening. Because when we were growing up, it was like, Tokyo is the most expensive city in the world. As a kid growing up on Long Island, that was what you heard. For sure. And if you wanted to buy a 100-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 on the outskirts. And every neighborhood, still to this day, there are affordable options.

1:10:11Yes, 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 this city. And again, 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$20 ,000 was like, oh great. There's like two years of rent to get two years of living. And I got that in a month doing this thing.

1:10:40And it taught me, there's a 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 response to that. It resonates. So that was exciting. Again, you could just hear this creaking, this ratcheting up of this meter, this weird old meter of 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 of this book design. I'd been winning awards as a book designer.

1:11:17When I was 24, I was asked to be a judge in the Art Directors Club in New York City. I thought it was a joke email. It was one of the Winterhouse people. Again, talk about these people picking you out. Remind me, Winterhouse. Winterhouse was this just incredible early, late 90s or 2000s design studio. And one of the directors there was one of the people, board of directors for the Art Directors Club. And he'd 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.

1:11:53You know, I had these things that were happening that were sort of signals that were hard for me to believe in. I always, this is a fluke. This is a fluke. I'm not valuable. This happened accidentally. And then I'd go to the Art Directors 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 ratcheting 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.

1:12:23And I wrote, again, committed to this article. And 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 hundreds of emails in my inbox. It really changed my life. It was just suddenly I went from being this invisible person to being this voice about books and digital media and where things were going. I went to South by Southwest a month later, and it was just insane. Everyone I wanted to meet wanted to meet. All of these heroes, these design heroes, these design thinkers. It's good timing a week later, right?

1:13:02I 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 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 50 times. The reason I'm asking is that it strikes me, and this is a hugely leading question slash commentary going into a question. But the fact that your camera review and your experience climbing Annapurna 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.

1:13:49And 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 Giro 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 the Brandon Sanderson interview.

1:14:28I mean, that's an incredible interview. Just talk about tenacity. Like infinite, infinite tenacity. What, like writing six, seven books before you go to the market to even try to sell them? Oh my God, he didn't even try, right? It's crazy. Because he heard that your first five books are garbage. 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 there would always be another creative or fine art project that I could commit myself to and could do so uncompromisingly.

1:15:03When did you decide that? Was that after raising your prices and you're like, oh, okay, wait a second. No, when I was like 13. Oh, really? Well, because I grew up in an environment where we didn't have an abundance. It's not like I was like, we were going on these crazy vacations and had a yacht. And it was like we had six houses and 15 cars. and I was driving around. It was like, I wasn't coming from this place of incredible abundance and then having to sacrifice. All through my life, I had been sort of trained ascetically. Right, right. You were like an accidental monk in training, like you said, pathologically living below your means.

1:15:39And then as soon as I kind of felt, I had that one summer where I entered 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$15 ,000 a year, 23, 24, 25.

1:16:17And I would kind of supplement that by like doing some CSS for ASICs or something. But the point was always to be able to do the book work, to be able to do the experiments on the web digitally, to do that stuff. And so all of my 20s, I'd 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, I was just going to keep doing it. I don't know. I was just going to keep doing those things because there was so much inherent value to me doing them. 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 Gampietro, who's an incredible designer and design thinker, Frank Camaro, who's an incredible designer and design thinker, Liz Danzico, who I mentioned earlier, who's an incredible designer and just amazing human.

1:17:01Meeting 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 going to 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? Because a lot of people listening, right? They'll say, wait, books? I thought books are kind of dead. Like you just talked about the iPad. What kind of books are we talking about?

1:17:39So why books? So look, books have always been the focus since I was eight, nine years old. 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 building up self-worth, in support of building up a financial foundation, in support of becoming independent, all of that. And I mean, there's a reason why I left college and I didn't go back to Silicon Valley. I didn't go to Silicon Valley. And I immediately helped start this independent publisher. I felt so drawn to the power of these objects and the immutability of them.

1:18:16And even in the face of the rise of the internet that still, to me, felt like there was so much value there and that value wasn't going to disappear. Got it. And just for clarity, because you're implying it, but these are physical books. These are physical, beautiful artifacts 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 the qualities that make physical things amazing. You know, the books that I'm producing, the books that I make, It's like cloth bound.

1:18:47How do you do cloth bound with silkscreen, with beautiful papers that open full bleed? Just every page, every spread is a lay flat spread. It's like, how do you lean into this stuff, these qualities that can't be replicated elsewhere? And I've just been lucky in the sense that they're still valuable and people are still really into books. 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, in part because of Amazon over-controlling the market, in part because there just isn't that much money to be made in digital books.

1:19:23And so the investment side of things really isn't there. You almost need like a Rockefeller who'd just be obsessed with digital books and they would fund it to great personal loss. It's like they always say, how do you make a good fortune, start with a great fortune and found a publishing company? Yeah, or a restaurant. Yeah. These aren't profitable things. So all the money in tech kind of goes to other places. So anyway, the digital book thing kind of puttered out. You must have liked, just as a quick side note, you must have, I imagine, enjoyed the Brandon Sanderson segment when he talked about the leather-bound books and the beautiful collector's edition because who in publishing would have spotted it?

1:20:03I 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 200 bucks a pop. And lo and behold, boom, like immediately sold out. Yep. Not only sold out, but sold a lot of them. Yeah, a lot. A lot. Tens of thousands. Yeah, just bananas. No, I mean, that story is interesting. And so all of my adult life, certainly, books have been a huge part of it. And I've been making them. I've been working with printers, obsessing about paper and inks and design margins and all this stuff, reading Robert Brighurst's Elements of Typographic Style over and over and over and over.

1:20:46It's so dog-eared, my copy of it. And so 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 2013, 2014, when I started doing the big walks. and the big walks gave me purpose to being in Japan because I was kind of 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. Much the same way doing Annapurna, coming back, writing that article, giving that shape digitally.

1:21:26But those containers, they're still up on my website. Those articles are still up there from 15, you know, 16, 17 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 going to double click on the walks. I hate to interrupt, but I'm going to do it because I don't want to gloss over something you said, which is, I guess around, if I'm remembering what you said 15 seconds ago, 2013 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?

1:22:06And if not, how did that surface? Why did that become an element? As an adoptive person, I think my entire life is defined by that flailing. You just don't feel like you belong anywhere. Got it. So it could have just as easily been in fill-in-the-blank city in the US. It was just, 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 accepted as a true citizen, where you're forever going to be an immigrant, you're never ever going to 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.

1:22:50Like 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 said 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'm kind of thrown away. So my Genesis story that I concocted was one of just pain and kind of like, you don't belong here.

1:23:26And so I think part of what was 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 that. And I was like, okay, this is interesting. And across all socioeconomic strata, it wasn't like, oh, everyone here is super rich. It was like, no, I get these people, but everyone is being taken care of in a way that I felt subconsciously. and because I will never be able to integrate fully, they can never throw me away.

1:23:58And 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 going to be part of the thing. I mean, it's a really sad way of framing it, but that is 100%, 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 hearts broken or they feel like they've been hurt in some particular way. So they push falling in love away, right? It's like, if you never fall in love, it's hard to have your heart broken.

1:24:32So therefore, right? It's all connected. It's all connected. It's all the same thing. And so the entire time I've been here, the plan wasn't like, oh, I'm going to stay here forever. It was always, oh, there's an interesting opportunity. I'm doing this publishing thing. It's kind of going well. 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 developed this kind of anger or frustration connected with it, you know, because you can never be fully integrated.

1:25:05You can never be part of this place. And yet a lot of people are just here as English teachers or headhunters and their, 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.

1:25:35And I was able to kind of do, you know, art directors 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 wanted to do and to build up this asceticism, the sense of asceticism. But I went to Silicon Valley because at the end of my 20s, 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.

1:26:02And Japan and Tokyo, for all of its megalopolis-ness, is a very provincial place. It does not think internationally. And if you want to work on projects that are bigger and be around archetypes of people that are just thinking bigger, you kind of have to leave. So that was why 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. Mike McHugh is this incredible guy. What was Flipboard for people who don't know?

1:26:36I 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 because the servers 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 Westkamp designed. It was just gorgeous. It was just beautiful.

1:27:11It epitomized, there was the Berg group in London doing future studies about what books could be. There was 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 milieu of folks that were experimenting, right? And it was like, great, yeah, this is totally my wheelhouse of 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.

1:27:45I moved out to a house two blocks from Steve Jobs, old Palo Alto. I had two roommates, these two guys, Stanford D school grads. We just graduated. They were 24. I was 30. I just turned 30 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 had gone from, I hadn't realized what a dearth of hugs I had had in my life. Sorry, you mean in Japan? 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.

1:28:29No one knew how to cook anything. And I was sleeping on a yoga mat for the first like two months and then a tatami mat. in this little background. Jesus, yoga mat. What a youthful back you have. So resilient. Just pure asceticism the whole way. And that house, living in that house with Enrique Allen and Ben Henretig, 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 Danzig a couple months after I moved in there. We went to have pizza in New Haven at Sally's, I think, a pizza.

1:29:00And Liz, after dinner, she took my shoulders and she just says, Craig, you are a different human. Because we had known each other since I was about 26 and I was 30 and I 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 just, again, believe in that self worth ratcheting up. But the entire time I was at Flipboard, every weekend. I was getting paid$30 ,000 a month,$25 ,000. 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.

1:29:41I just walked to the office. I was spending no money. I was like, this is great. I'm just going to 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, 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 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'd do a late checkout on Sunday.

1:30:12Every weekend I would go up there and I would just write new essays about digital books and publishing. I couldn't compromise. 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$30 ,000 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.

1:30:46And so I forced myself to just keep writing militantly. And by the end of, I spent 15 months at Flipboard. And towards the end of it, 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 was giving a talk in New York City. Kevin Kelly is going to be a callback for later. He's going to 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.

1:31:16And it was from this guy, Kevin Kelly, I'd never heard of. And I was like, who's this guy, Kevin? 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 wanted 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 the person was like, you don't know Kevin Kelly? He's like, yeah, you should be Kevin Kelly. And I met up with Kevin and he was like, I like the way you think about publishing. Tell me about some tools. And I was like, who is this guy?

1:31:44It'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 - Yeah, he's got a big white Amish beard, built his own house. Amish beard, tiny guy. Tiny guy. Co-founder of Wired. Exactly. It goes on and on and on. He, along with Stuart Brand, are sort of like the Forrest Gumps of Silicon Valley who have 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.

1:32:22And the thing I noticed 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. Everything that's happening in my life that is blowing my mind, that's connecting me to people who I wish I had known when I was a teenager, who I wish I had in my life when I was a kid, it's all happening because of writing.

1:32:58And so I applied for this writing fellowship at McDowell. I was like, where should I apply, Liz? 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 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 - Maybe, maybe. Continue though. It feels like luck. And I use that as my way of being able to get out of the company.

1:33:33I didn't know that was the way out. Okay, here we go. Because these things become like family and you feel terrible leaving them. And it upset a lot 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. I was like, wait a second, Liz. 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. I see. Okay, I was trying to put it together because you said New Haven Pizza.

1:34:03I was like, is New Haven a neighborhood outside of where I think it is? Okay, got it. No, no. But the Flipboard people were super upset. And so that's one of the difficult things is these aren't easy conversations to have, to leave these things. I remember being like, okay, this is a great excuse. This is the most prestigious writing residency in America. And I need to go do this. And I'm going to 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.

1:34:34Where is the writing residency? 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. They cook all of your meals. They deliver you lunch in a picnic basket to your cabin. A lot of the cabins have like grand pianos and fireplaces. And, you know, it's just this ideal, you're in, you're surrounded by the best composers and poets, artists, novelists, nonfiction 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.

1:35:19I 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 15, 20 times. I've mapped it out. There's very few books I've actually 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. Dennis Johnson's a big one. Ocean Vong is a more contemporary one.

1:35:55Ocean Vong, mega poet who then catapulted into novel autofiction land. Michael Andange, 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 just incredible. These are the things 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 10 people, maybe 99 out of 100 people. and I failed reading it three times before I finally crossed the Rubicon, which is this scene in the book where there's a talking fish.

1:36:35That's all I'll say. You got to get to the talking fish. But John Crowley, also a poet, Little Big is the name of the book. It checks the boxes that you're talking about. So just a recommendation, 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 want to 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?

1:37:13I'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 suppose 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 by the editor until he finishes the manuscript. It's just the classic trope. And I was living in Palo Alto and I was like, I want to explore the city a little more.

1:37:46So I'd kind of write all day and then I'd go walk around at night, which maybe in San Francisco isn't the smartest thing to do, but 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 was a mystery to it. And I'd be in kind of like, I'd stay at like the Four Seasons, you know? And it would just kind of, there'd be this like, you know, because I was making all this insane money. I was like, okay, I can spend$300,$400 on a hotel room.

1:38:15Sure, let's go. This will be my treat. And I'd be in these kind of opulent, bizarre, kind of like very non-ascetic spaces. But 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. I am legend. Going into weird little bars. You know, I still, I would still have like a whiskey every now and then. And it would just kind of like to be able to go out and be in the mix and be mysterious and kind of be on. I don't know. It all fed into being able to do the work well. Dig it. Okay. And then, flash forward, this is one hell of a memento-like montage that I'm painting here.

1:38:54Now, fireplace, New Hampshire, picnic baskets. What does that do for you? What does that fellow, and by the way, they're going to hate me for this, but every time you say McDowell, I think of McDowells from Coming to America. Sure. They've got the golden arches. We've got the golden them. But what does that do for you, being a 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 kind of eat with everyone, which is great because it's like at the end of the day, you know, there's kind of like a tether to reality out there outside of your book or your composition or whatever.

1:39:38We would have dinner and then we'd have very fierce ping pong competitions. but you know I would get sometimes almost like violent like there definitely were some friendships that were like all that pent up because of creative angst 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 worked on that day what they were struggling through Again, it just set these archetypes.

1:40:13I mean, it just, that deficit I felt when I left and I got to school was just a deficit of archetypes, a 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 29, 30, 31, connecting with Kevin Kelly, being asked to give these talks, you know, going in the art director's club is this weird little coda when I was 24, 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 at night and I was just like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm here with these people reading this level of work.

1:40:46And 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 going to cram everything into this conversation. There's no fucking way. And I don't think we should try. I think we should just do two episodes so we can put them out very close together, maybe back to back. 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.

1:41:18Sure. Yeah. That would be the first recommendation. And I think we get to, I mean, the huge walks are such a huge chapter and 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 45 minutes. So if you're cool with it, I'd just say we do two. And maybe we record tomorrow, maybe we record the day after and just... Perfect. Rage. I think that's what we do. Because people are going to want more. And trust me folks, if you're listening, you want the round two. And you want to continue listening.

1:41:54But I want to 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 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.

1:42:37You'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? 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. So if I was running a class, we'd be doing a lot of walks. Walking, I'd 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.

1:43:33And 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. No, it's not because I actually know more of the story. So 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.

1:44:22And it blows my mind that so many people have the smartphone in the room, just having it on the table. So like when I am in serious writing mode, when I need 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, a 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.

1:45:05They'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, 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 rewatch things, to reread things. And when's the last time you rewatched a YouTube short or something like that?

1:45:38You're like, oh yeah, let's go back. Whatever. There's 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 always been the thing. Besides Train Dreams, what books have you reread a lot? Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Creek. Yes. Okay. And it's really frustrating because this is, I think, the first book she published. She was in her 20s when she wrote this. She went to live in this cabin. I think I see where this is going. And she went to live in this cabin near Tinker Creek, and she just wrote the most beautiful, poetic, sort of diary, narrative nonfiction description of what it was like being out there.

1:46:27And it's like, her book is, I don't believe in mental blocks or 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, 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 juices. 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.

1:47:02I love it. I mean, I've never met her. I would love to buy her a beautiful steak dinner if that's the sort of things. I don't eat steak, but maybe she does. I feel like that's the thing you're supposed to buy people. I'd love to buy her an amazing dinner. Her book, her writing, her voice, her way of looking at the world, her way of showing me what's possible in terms of 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. It's like little flower petals.

1:47:35It's like just all of it, finding that beauty. That is so infused how I try to engage with the world when I'm out on my big walks. I love it. And my thing now is I try to find first editions of these books, and then I go through and I try to mark them up again. 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. This idea of being precious with it, what am I going to do? Hold on to this stupid thing for 30 years and sell it and give my stepdaughter 200 bucks that I got for this first edition so she can buy a bowl of ramen or something, which is like probably going to cost 200 bucks in 30 years.

1:48:10It's like, no, like what? 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 going to start anywhere with Lynn, she's so funny. She is so no bullshit.

1:48:43I 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 40 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 writers, Sam Anderson, who writes for the New York Times Magazine. Sam Anderson is amazing. Also, his favorite book is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

1:49:19He has the most generous, hilarious voice. He just wrote this incredible narrative nonfiction piece for the magazine about the legend of Leatherman, who is this guy who roamed. He walked this circle in Connecticut in the 1800s and he wore a suit of leather and he became folklore of all these towns and people would give him bread and give him coffee. He got so sick he couldn't chew things and he would dip everything in coffee and he'd eat cakes by dipping him in coffee. I've known Sam for like six or seven years. Again, we connected because of writing. Again, literally everyone in my life that I love that I want to hug, that I'll die for, that I want to protect with all of my life force.

1:50:01It's all connected to writing. All of it. Every single thing. It's shocking. So it's easy. You asked early, why books? An hour ago, you asked me, why am I doing books? And it's like, it is just undeniable that a fullness 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.

1:50:38I mean, this is what I want. When you're like, well, 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.

1:51:16I 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 stamps, 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. Do you want to just lay out the main islands of Japan so people know where we are?

1:51:52So 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 88 temples pilgrimage is. And then next to that, you've got Kyushu, which is kind of 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 Miei and Wakayama in Nara, southern part of Nara prefectures. and I've been going there for about 12 years, 13 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.

1:52:32It was 2021. 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 2021, we didn't have vaccines in Japan yet. They came in July, July, August. I was like, well, I'm going to go on a big walk. It's like, I'm being careful. I'm tested. I'm not going to spread anything. I went on this walk and I did, it was about 600 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, 4 ,000 words, photographing every day.

1:53:12And I was thinking about life. And one of the things I started to reflect on, partially because in this COVID moment, where I think 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 then. 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. And it started me thinking about this friendship I had with this kid, Brian, when I was in elementary school, he was my best friend.

1:53:50He was the closest thing to a brother I had. And we grew up side by side in elementary school. And I happened 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 into the gifted program because I tested a little better. That exposed me to computers. They had like one Commodore 64 or something, and I used LogoWriter, and that got me thinking about it. It's like, you see how these things kind of compound, these small chances, these small lucks, these small opportunities. And I got them and Brian didn't get them.

1:54:24And by the end of high school, we were so separated. My high school was called out during the 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 graduate, he was murdered. And that murder, that loss, we basically stopped talking after middle school just because you get separated and then your friend groups change.

1:55:08Yeah, 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. And being adopted again, what does blood mean? How does family get created? And he was absolutely as much of a brother as anyone. And I tried to engage with our friendship, our brotherhood in short stories. Actually, the first short story I ever had published was published when I was 18 at university in this national writing competition.

1:55:48It was a short story about me and Brian and some of our antics. And so there was an impulse in me to write about him, but I didn't know how to. And I tried a couple more times in my early 20s. It never worked. And then on this walk, I started thinking back about him. And 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 failed by the systems. Like why were we cleaved apart? Why, you know, we're side by side in first grade.

1:56:28How 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 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 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 gang related, you know, and the head of security, it turns out, uh, the FBI busted in one day and like tackled him, arrested him.

1:57:04It turns out that he was a bank robber. it's like it was just insane right so so like the book just meditates on the fact that like me and wakayama are both working class in industry prefectures 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 people aren't 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.

1:57:44And 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 who are running old cafes, Kisaten, in the countryside who are super surly and 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.

1:58:15And the paths I'm walking are these thousand-year-old, 2 ,000-year-old pilgrimage routes. And the history, you know, I'm walking past stone markers that are 2 ,000 years old. I'm walking past pilgrim graves. I'm going to these, the holiest shrines, these foundational myth shrines of Japan. You say, Jingu, I'm walking down past Kumano. I'm walking past the most holy rock, the foundational rock where the sun goddess was born from. 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 going to be able to remember him like I can.

1:58:59And I feel like I had a duty to remember this guy. When does the book come out? It comes out May 6th. 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 helped me elevate it to a place that I couldn't have gotten into on my own. And I hope through Random House, they're going to make a lot more books than I could make. It's going to cost a lot less than my books cost. My goal is to really expand the ideas of my walking practice.

1:59:37I write about my walking practice in this, but also just exposing this part of Japan. You are not going to be able to go and engage with this part of Japan on your own unless you've lived here for a long time and could 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, I approve of your work. And, you know, it's about this illuminating this part of Japan that you're not going to have access to.

2:00:11I'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 want to engage with people about it.

2:00:49Amazing. All right, 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 is 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 captures this like quirky early 2000s 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 cool. That's so fun. Yeah. And for people who are listening, I checked on this. So things become other things. Beautiful cover.

2:01:21I'm 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 a 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 4 ,000 words a day. What the fucking hell? After walking 30 kilometers.

2:02:01Yeah, that is a lot of words. You and Brandon Sanderson. What am I going to do with you guys? So we'll talk about that. Where else can people find you if they want to dip their toe into mod land and get a taste. Craigmod.com. Craigmod.com. In service for 23 years now. I think that don't matter. In service. The big thing I do that's enabled a lot, and again, 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 2019.

2:02:44And 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, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. 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 shill, but the membership program gives you access. Yes, you may as well. It gives you access to all of the archives of all the writing I've done on my walks and 120 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 going to do in the next six months.

2:03:23And then I filled Q &As from the members and they're incredible Q &A. 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 everything I do in the membership program is me speaking to myself when I was 20 and desperate and hungry 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 wanted to do. This is me wishing I could give this to myself back then. And so it's free for students.

2:03:56If 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. I've had people send me photos of 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 give 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 50 ,000 people or 60 ,000 people or whatever.

2:04:26When it's a smaller group, I'm able to be more vulnerable, more honest, and the Q &As and stuff like that feel a little more intimate. I create a little bit of artificial scarcity, artificial friction to enable us to have a deeper conversation, I hope. And people can find that at craigmod.com as well? craigmod.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 that also make it vibrant and prevent it from becoming a monster you need to feed that consumes rather than enables your creative life you've figured it out over time and we are going to talk about that there are so many things we're going to talk about it was just foolish of me to think that we would be able to cover all of it in two hours.

2:05:18Fucking 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 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 want to smack talk, whatever happened. 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, I love it. I don't want to know exactly where it's going. So much of my life is regimented.

2:06:02So much of it is planned. There are 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 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, You focus on the work, you create beauty and quality, and then you release it into the wild and you see what happens.

2:06:50It becomes theological. It really is. It's totally faith-based. I mean, what creative practice is and what great creative practice is? My favorite moment of a documentary about photographers is the Salimann documentary. How do you spell that? S-A-L-L-Y, Sally. Huh? M-A-N? A woman, M-A-N-N, I think, is her last name. Got it. And she, yes, if I say it fast, it sounds Salomon. Sally, no, 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.

2:07:37and she's getting rejected by gallery, she has this total breakdown. And you just go, oh my God, someone like Sally Mann at the 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 pushes through it and she creates some great work and 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. You could be uncompromising about it. All right, Craig, we are going to very quickly record and release a round two.

2:08:18Everybody 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 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? 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 of that and more.

2:09:04We're going to 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? You know, 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. So that's often sometimes the difficulty in getting information to folks. But I think the artist residencies are one of the coolest things that we have.

2:09:44And 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 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.

2:10:18I've had so many great friendships come out of, I've done McDowell, VCCA, Tin House, Ragdale as a few of them. And all of them, I've come out with just amazing friendships and I've got a lot of great work done too. So please go investigate. And if you're a rich mother effer listening to this thing, donate to support these things. I mean, these are incredible, incredible institutions that don't require a lot of money to have a huge impact. And so being able to provide more scholarships and things like that, it's pretty powerful, pretty powerful stuff. Love it. All right, everybody. The end. CraigMod.

2:10:55CraigMod.com. You can find all things there. And so nice to see you, bud. You too. It's been a minute. And we will... See you tomorrow. Yes, see you tomorrow. And for people listening, of course, we'll link to everything we discussed in this episode of Tim.blog.com. 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 Gregor, 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.

2:11:35So until then, thanks for tuning in.

2:11:512 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 kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, 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.

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