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

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Craig Mod is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He also writes the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more.Sponsors:David Protein Bars 28g of protein, 150 calories, and 0g of sugar: https://davidprotein.com/tim (Buy 4 cartons, get the 5th free.)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where I explore the strange, the edge, the practical, the nuance, the tactical. And my guest today is a dear friend. I've wanted to have him on the podcast for a very long time. Craig Maud, Craig Maud, M-O-D. He is a writer, photographer and walker. We'll talk about that a lot living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the writer, photographer, and walker. We'll talk about that a lot. Living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kisa by Kisa, K-I-S-S-A. Don't worry about it, we'll get to it.

He also writes the newsletters Rodin and Ridgeline and has contributed to the New York Times, the Atlantic, Wired, and more. He has walked thousands of miles across Japan in every conceivable place and since 2016 he has been co-running walk-in talks with Kevin Kelly, perhaps the most interesting man in the world, in various places around the world, the Cotswolds, Northern Thailand, Bali, Southern China, Japan, Spain,

which includes the Portuguese and French Caminosos and much more today's episode is wide ranging and i had so much fun with this we ended up discussing craigs early life is path to japan his struggles with self-worth and alcoholism and how he overcame both of them creative development his writing experiment is initial experiences with walking and writing, and so much more. I really think you will get a lot out of this conversation as I did. I took copious notes and I also decided to keep some of the behind the scenes banter before the interview in the recording that you're going to hear, which I thought might be fun for shits and giggles, just for the fun of it. Why not? You can find CraigMod at CraigMod.com.

That's the H-Q for everything, CraigMod, C-R-A-I-G-M-O-D.com. You can find him on Instagram at CraigMod and on Blue Sky as well, CraigMod.com. And with that, and just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible, we'll get right into the meat and potatoes of CraigMod. I am always on the hunt for protein sources that don't require sacrifices in taste or nutrition. I don't eat sawdust. I also don't want a candy bar that's disguised as a protein bar.

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$350 off of the pod for ultra they currently ship to the United States Canada the United Kingdom Europe and Australia At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now or soon at the perfect time. What if I could be the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living to show a metal endoscopy. Me, Tim, Ferris, Joe. Good morning, Good morning. I'm sleepy.

Why? Anyway, you're good. Japan. Yeah, Japan. US is always a little tricky with the time zones. I typically do kind of end of day, my time, early morning Japan time. Yeah. But this morning's good.

It's getting me back on central standard. I was coming from mountains. So this is like three hours before I usually get up. Okay. Just totally fine. It's good. No, it's good. I mainline some caffeine and we are ready to go off to the races.

This is going to be fun, man. I always love an excuse to do creepy internet sleuthing on my friends. And what would make this, I ask this question always, you know all the housekeeping rules, bathroom break, water break. If you start something, you're like, ah, let me try that again.

We can clean it up in post since this is in Carnegie Hall. What would make this time well spent? I know you got the new book. What else? Anything come to mind? Like this comes out, you've done interviews, you're pro. You know how to weave pros, you're a man in the public to some extent. What would make this time well spent? I mean, probably the most like affecting story of the last year or so of me is the adoption stuff. Like me. So I think that's pretty fecund of emotion.

It's got a lot going on there. AC I want to work on that headline, but I like it. CB You know, that's the thing. And then all this stuff that's happened with the cities has been really a weird journey. I got the very short summary tease of things, but I don't know the story, which always makes it more fun for me as well. Yeah. So I think in terms of what will listeners get the most out of, I think that story about the cities and the New York Times stuff and what's come out of that. Because it encompasses a lot of like, what does travel mean today? Why are we traveling?

What does over tourism mean? How do you handle these massive tourism surges that are happening? Is there a way to mitigate them or to send them to different parts of the country? So I think that's really interesting. I think the adoption stuff is really interesting. I mean, everything ties into the walking. What about you? What? Like this comes out and three months after it comes out, I appreciate you being so listener focused because God bless my dear listeners. But as far as this interview, like it comes out, what would make it you look back and

like, God damn, I'm so glad I did that. I'm going to point people to that interview. I think it aligns very much with what I think would be interesting for listeners to listen to. I mean, I think the adoption stuff is... So basically, I haven't talked about the adoption stuff in English anywhere. I haven't written about it. BF Awesome. AC This is like the first time me doing anything public about that and... BF The debut of the fecundity. AC The emotional garden.

So I think that being able to like kind of crack that knot well would be really nice. Yeah. And everything else, I don't know. I'm just happy to chat. Let's just chat, man. Let's just chat. I mean, we never have trouble doing that. I was trying to think how we initially connected.

Do you even remember? I mean- Was it through- I remember saying- Wrong way at some point. Maybe? some point? Maybe. No. Well, okay. So there was, there are two moments that we met one in 2011, right? In the beginning of 2011, I was at what's the neighborhood you lived in in San Francisco Glen park down south, just south of the mission.

Isn't there another one kind of up where like I've lived up on the hit, like you kind of go up, not Pacific Heights or anything like that. But it was close to Bernal Heights. Yeah. West boy. I'm a left, right kind of guy. Embarrassing. Anyway, let's see. I was working in a cafe there with one of the flip.

I've must've been in a fancier place. Okay. Flipboard, right. Yeah. This isn't as good a place as any. Yeah, let's keep going. Okay. So then I said hi to you there. I said, hey, oh, hey, it's, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you were like, oh, cool. Yeah, flipboard's great. Then we exchanged words in the bathroom at food camp. Oh, thank God. I was like, oh shit. What happened here? Power exchange? How do we end up with power exchange? Kidding.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and then I think it was just, yeah, I think it was the Japan walk. That was the first time we ever really talked. So that was two and a half years ago now already, which is- Got to mega hang. Yeah. That's bananas. I was looking at the printed book of the walk with the photographs just the other day and I was like, wow, that's wild. Now I don't want to sound like too much of a old geezer, you know, although I am every day turning into more of an like, oh yeah, but the fact that it was two years ago is just mind blistering in a sense. It does not seem that long ago.

Yeah. Yeah. it was two years ago is just mind blistering in a sense. It does not seem that long ago. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's just hop into it then. And you mentioned Flipboard. So let's start there. You lived in Silicon Valley and for a lot of people, that's the dream. But you left Silicon Valley, ended up back in Japan. Could you just give us a bit of a thumbnail sketch? It doesn't even need to be a thumbnail. We have all the time in the world, but where did you grow up? We'll make it the really boring back in childhood intro, but where did you grow up? How did you end up at Silicon Valley and why didn't you stay in Silicon Valley?

So yeah, I mean, it's funny to start with Silicon Valley because that was probably like that was the shortest period of anything I did in my life for the most part. It was very truncated. The reasons for which it's truncated, I think might be interesting though. I mean, I grew up in this sort of like lower middle-class post-industrial town. Like I grew up in this town where an airplane engine factory was the heart of the town. AC What state was that? CB This is in Connecticut, weirdly. You really don't think of Connecticut as an industrial

state, but there's stuff happening. Yeah. Ever since I was really young, I mean, I loved books, I loved writing. I was sort of drawn to that, but I was also really drawn to video games. And I did not grow up in a place where people were reading, no one around me was reading Ulysses. It was pretty culturally a bit of a desert, but there were video games and those came from Japan and that was sort of intriguing to me. That was my first contact, I'd say, with a culture outside of the town I came from. And there were computers, and I was really, really lucky. We did not have much money, and our school districts were not well-funded. And I looked back on it, and I was extremely, extremely

lucky with these chance opportunities I had, which basically enabled me to do everything I'm doing now. Very, very, very sliver sliding doors style chances of opportunity. My family couldn't really afford a computer, but my neighbor bought one and my neighbor was divorced. And he lost his son in the divorce. So he was kind of lonely. And I was really hungry to be using computers. I was eight or nine years old, 10 years old. I started going over there so much to use this computer that he just gave me the key to his house and he bought me my own phone line and like this guy's kindness. And he was really kind. He was just genuinely just a kind guy. I went to go about 10 years ago. I went to go find him and just say, thank you for having lent me his computer. I mean, it really changed my life, this computer thing. And he had passed away. It really had a heart attack. So if you have someone in your life that you really want to thank, go thank them while they're around. But you know how

it is when you're a kid, you don't realize the luck that you've fallen into with something like that. AC For sure. CB So that was going on. And then I started using at his place, I got onto IRC, I started using PPP emulators to be able to use Mosaic. I was in the ANSI art scene. I was like- What does PPP stand for? I'm just going to take a brief side quest here. We don't need to get into the hyper specifics or what was it? It's so funny that we're starting here because this is like such a bizarre, almost like a footnote to like everything I'm doing now. Everything I'm doing now feels so removed.

I like starting with the footnotes. This is a pretty serious footnote. So I don't even remember what PPV stands for. Basically you had shell accounts, right? So you had these text-based shell accounts. These are like the first ISPs. I swear to God, this is going to get more literary if anyone's listening. Internet service provider.

Even I know that one. Yeah. AC. No, but like we're going to talk about books and walking in Japan and stuff. That's all coming. But this kind of Genesis story is sort of interesting in that you have these text-based things. You could use IRC, which is like chat. It was like Discord, old school Discord, not owned by anyone. It was totally open, hosted on university servers, stuff like that. And I got connected with the ANSI art scene in there and I started doing ANSI art. I was really kind of captivated by design and by computer programming in the sense that what it could do for storytelling, that's kind of how I saw it and that's what sort of really captured my attention. And so I started working, doing artwork

with these guys. I was like 12, 13. These guys were all like five, six years older than me. They were mostly in California, a lot of them were. And they were all sort of getting into the internet. And so when I graduated high school, I had these weird connections that I had made on this text chat room when I was 13. And these guys were like, hey, we've started a design agency, we're doing a startup, whatever, come out for the summer, be an intern. So that was my connection. And essentially, I didn't grow up with money and no one around us had money.

There was no wealth. There was no real... Looking back now, there was absolutely no real wealth happening in our town. And if you look at the GDP statistics and stuff like that, it's like 20% of the national GDP was the average sort of GDP per capita of our town. America's GDP is really high. Per capita GDP is like $85,000, way higher than Japan, for example. Japan's like 40, 45, something like that. CB. Didn't realize that was such a high discrepancy.

AC. The Delta is pretty insane. So I did not come from money. And so I saw two ways to get out essentially. From a very early age, I'm adopted. So there's a sense of disconnection from that. And then from a very early age, I realized the place that I was growing up in was very, very tiny and I needed to get far away for a number of reasons, but I knew I needed to get away. And I saw money as critical for that escape. And I saw two ways of making money. And one of them was the stock market. I joined the stock club as soon as I could at high school and was super geeking out. And as soon as, I think when I was 18 or 19, I was 19 when I opened an E-Trade account. I think I was like one of the first probably like 10,000 people to have an E-Trade account. I was just like, I was like, yes, okay, I need this. So very weird. I mean, because there's no one in my family that had ever

bought a stock. I was raised by my mother and my grandparents. My father was sort of out of the picture even though it was an adoption. This is your adopted mother. These are my adopted, yeah, my adopted parents. Even though they adopted me, they got divorced when I was like two, I mean, which was good. My father wasn't a great guy, so it was good to push him aside. But there was no archetypes for me of like, oh, this is how you generate wealth or create wealth or cultivate wealth or grow wealth. There was absolutely none of that, or even just how to engage culturally with the world, to think about literature or to think about art. So I was just scanning the horizon. It was like, what do we know? Lifestyles are the rich and famous, you know, think of like what is, as an eighties

kid. I remember watching that eating TV dinners. Yeah. My parents watching like the rich and famous. I mean, like I didn't eat a single meal that wasn't like, that didn't involve TV for my entire basically childhood. Yeah. Same.

I'll do that differently when it's my turn to set the rules, but yeah. So, you know, it's like, you think about when you come from a place like I come from, like, what are your archetypes who establishes what's possible in the world? And it really is like pop culture. Like those are the things you kind of reach for anyway. So you have like lifestyles of rich and famous. What are those people that do? They buy stocks, you know, they invest in stocks, blah, blah, stuff like that. So I was like, okay, I need to do that to get out. That's like step one. And then I just loved the potential of the internet. As soon as I saw the worldwide web, I was like, yes, this is where I

want to write. This is what I want to build on top of. It was just so obvious to me. I was like 14 when I used Mosaic for the first time and it was just, oh, okay, great. I don't have to think about anything. This is just what I do. And very quickly, I realized if I became good at web stuff, I would be making more money than anyone in my town. It was just like this weird, again, this arbitrage of information and skill. And I just saw this very early on. The ability to go out to Silicon Valley as an intern, I drove my Honda Civic. It was a 93 Honda Civic with no power or anything. I basically had to crank the thing to keep going, drove across America and went out there and interned. And I really loved it. And I loved the people and the culture and the

opportunities. And it really just set my mind ablaze. I mean, it was really exciting. And I was kind of working on blogging software before Blogger launched. I mean, there's definitely, when I talk about opportunity, and they say basically, wealth is unevenly distributed, but really what you're talking about is opportunity being evenly distributed or not. When you listen to the generous story of someone like Bill Gates, he's just surrounded by this abundance of opportunity. The fact that the university had these terminals he could use and people were all cultivating his ability to take advantage of these opportunities. There's definitely an alternate reality where I had a little more opportunity. I was in Silicon Valley a little bit earlier and I just had the sense of self-worth and confidence, I think,

to do things differently and build stuff. That was one timeline that didn't happen. I went out there and I loved it and I enjoyed it. At the same time, I really wanted to live abroad. I knew I needed to get away. And because of certain things that had happened and things that I felt in my town, but the people of my town not being supported by the greater whole, I had this from a very early age, a lack of, I would say, belief in the American system. And I just felt like I had to leave America. There's a very strong impulse, like I have to get outside of this country to see things differently. This felt important to me for some reason, intuitively. AC What about the system? When you say system,

what specifically? Because we'll spend a lot of time talking about Japan, I am sure. But Japan is, it's not exactly North Korea, right? It's similar to the US in some respects. So what do you mean by the American system in that context? Could just be a sense of something, right? It doesn't have to be super Wikipedia. In the moment, I had absolutely no words for it. I had no way to describe it. It really was just because you're operating from a lack of experience. Like you haven't seen enough of the world, but you just intuitively, there was a sense of, okay, we aren't being supported. And then when I went to college, it was the big shock for me was getting to college and meeting everyone else and immediately feeling this gap of kind of abundance. I was lucky. I scored really

well. I could, even though I'm bad at tests, taking, I don't like taking tests. I was lucky. I scored really well. Even though I'm bad at tests, I don't like taking tests, I tested well. I was able to go to a good college, a really good university. And the first three days, four days, I was just in shock. I was like, oh, these people are from a different planet. The resources they had, the archetypes they clearly had in their lives, the way they've learned to learn to speak, to move through the world, like what they expect. I was just like, this doesn't compute for me at all. And it was immediately I bounced off of it so fast. I was just like, I can't be here. I shouldn't be here.

There's something fundamentally missing, broken, sort of lacking inside my chest. And that's what drove me to just go, okay, I should live abroad. I need to leave this country in part to rebuild that on my own. Pete Slauson Got it. Okay. So, when did you move to Japan? At what year? What age? Jared Slauson I was 19 and it was 2000. Pete Slauson 2000. Okay. Jared Slauson Which is insane. I can't believe it's been 25 years now. It is. Okay. It's got it. And you just to paint a picture for folks. So you, you moved to Japan

when you're 19 and then you bounced around after that. You didn't stay in Japan the entire time. Am I right? Of course, because we met after that. AC Yeah, sort of. So to give you like the macro timeline, I go when I'm 19, I stay for a year. I go to university there. I love it. While I'm there, the Silicon Valley bubble, the first bubble pops. So there really isn't a Silicon Valley to go to. My plan was to go to Japan. I applied on a whim to university there and I applied independently so I wouldn't have to. My plan was to go to Japan. I applied on a whim to university there and I applied independently. So I wouldn't have to normally when you kind of do study abroad, you keep paying your American university fees. Yeah, right. International. And I looked at the fees for Japanese universities. And for like a year with homestay, it was like, you know, $8,000, $5,000. It was like an absurdly

affordable amount of money. And you know, there was scholarships available. It was like an absurdly affordable amount of money. And there were scholarships available. It was like, why wouldn't I just go do this? Of course I'm going to do this. But my plan was to drop out and move to Silicon Valley and just build stuff. Okay. So Japan for like a year or two, and then go back to Silicon Valley? Yeah, Japan for a year. And then in the middle of it, everything collapsed. And then I was like, okay, well, maybe I should graduate university. So I applied in the middle of it as a transfer student to a university I thought I would like better than the one I was at before. And I got in. I ended up going to 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 IV was just too big. So 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 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 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. People do that in the US too when they move here, for instance. Plenty of examples of that. How did you learn your Japanese?

If there are people listening who think to themselves, man, I would really love to learn Japanese. Any thoughts based on your own experience? AC 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. But 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. And in fact, the international group I was with were amazing. 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. I'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. Yeah. Which is not a lot. It's nothing. I mean, basically I could barely say hello and even that was probably not correct. So there are 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 and that causes me so many problems. What the hell is SOAS? So as is the school of Oriental and African studies in London. Wow. Unfortunately, but yes, they have the most total bad-ass language program. Like honestly, if you want to learn Japanese, go to SOAS. Just go to those kids. They'd done one year at so as they arrived in Tokyo. They were in level 10, level 11. Holy shit. Good for them. It was insane. Must be a brutal boot camp.

So they were, they were amazing. Yeah. It is, it's really like 70% of kids drop out of it or something like that. Yeah. Babysitting mutants. The kids were, they were amazing speakers. And so when we hang out, it's great to hang out with people who are a few levels above where you speak because then you're able to pick it up. You're like, Oh, what's that little grammatical thing you're doing? What's that word you're using? And then I just hung out with Japanese people constantly and played music. And music was really, you know, this lingua franca sort of thing where I could just hang with all these incredible musicians. I'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. They didn't care as long as I could actually help the team and do something. They're 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. Right, so it also became a way for me, in terms of motivation, to learn how to read, because once I made it through those textbooks, I was like, well, all that's left are Judo textbooks and Japanese,

which means I'm gonna need to learn to read Japanese, which is its own thing. I'm very envious that you had the students who were a few levels above you, because that just seems like the perfect recipe, right? Because to teach, if you're at a 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. And then the second family probably took me a month before I found my legs and could finally start communicating with them. My host family was very lovely but completely completely bonkers. 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.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like a soba is weird because it's both like the fast food in 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 and it costs like two bucks. CB which means standing and eating literally, right? You're at a countertop standing. Yeah. But at the same time, soba can also be incredibly refined where you spend $30 on a bowl and it's like two slurps and you're done. And so anyway, soba has 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 doesn't really get fancy. And so this is 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 sort of ironic. I left my working class town to go across the world and I get plopped down basically in a place that felt really, I was like, oh, okay, I know these people. I know this part of town. It was a very working class part of Tokyo. And there was homeless people out walking around that I'd say hi to all the time. And I'd go to the arcade and there'd always be these weird 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. Unfortunately for me, he slept in his parents' bed, so he didn't have any privacy. He 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 trying 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. TG. What's a kotatsu? AC. Kotatsu is a low table with like a heater underneath it. So basically you put your legs under it. There's like a big heavy blanket. Like everything that's under the table is kind of a mystery. You don't know what's lurking under the table. AC. Oh no.

AC. And this house was so cold. This house got, I swear to God, probably like three minutes of sunlight a year. I don't even know how they architected it to have so little sunlight. It was just so freezing, no insulation. One of the people I met at the arcade, I was complaining about how cold it was and they bought me a full body snow suit to wear to bed. You're like Kenny from South Park when you went to bed. Yeah. 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. This kid is just masturbating all over the house. 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, his brain. I'm sure if Japan had therapy, which no one goes to therapy in Japan, we could talk about that too, which I think is like a great travesty of Japan. But if Japan had therapy,

this kid definitely, I probably caused him some therapy. He probably, he hasn't masturbated 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? Are you 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, you know, tower apartment block. And my family is taking me skiing next weekend. My, my family, they they're like, Oh, we're going to go to our summer home.

You 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 like with cockroaches. I was like, what, what is going where are these people? They were very sweet, but it was, I was like, I don't know if these people should have home stays, dude. Well, my guess is they got paid by was it or whoever, right? So it's a gig. It's a gig. AC. And they had so many gigs. So they had another gig was they were like hosting a Korean kid who was just working, I guess, like as like a laborer at the Udon restaurant. But he lived,

he slept in the closet. AC. So they're getting a two for one. They get free labor. AC So I've got the 11-year-old son jerking off all over the place. And then there's this Korean guy who was maybe 25. He sleeps in the closet. He was super Christian because Christianity is a huge thing in Korea. AC It's a national sport. There I am. AC 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 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. There's

cockroaches shooting across the room. I'm going to sleep in a snow suit. This Korean kid is asking me to go to church with him. All I'm eating is Udon. It was a weird landing. Oh my God. 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. Because we could have skipped that whole story. We could have skipped all that. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could

only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.

So take advantage of this exclusive offer for you, my dear podcast listeners, brain, gut and immune system. for a free one year supply of liquid vitamin D plus five travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Learn more at www.drinkagone.com slash Tim. I want to point out a few things to folks who've 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 way to rub it into him. Yeah. Just rub it in. I'm glad you had a good host. Hold on, hold on. I had a good host today, but the house was full of cockroaches and this is in Tokyo. It's very common. And these cockroaches, not to, 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 like miniature Shiba was called Ai-chan.

And she would walk in there and then a bunch of cockroaches would like fly out of the laundry into her face. And she'd go, Ai-chan, Ai-chan, go keep her, go keep her. 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. AC 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. Cause 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, bye. It was like, there was snow. 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. Like there is a difference between polite and nice. There is like Taning Gyogi, right?, like this like stranger formality where you're like, oh, so polite. Yes, very polite. But they didn't really want me there.

And my host mom really begrudged having to make me lunch, school lunch, right? So basically I got these like mayonnaise sandwiches on like white bread every day for lunch. And after a week or two of this, I was like, I 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 curry rice by their mom every day and they were pretty sick of it. So I started my school uniform. And there were other kids though, who had been given the same like curry

rice by their mom every day and they were pretty sick of it. So I started trading my breakfasts. And when this was discovered by my host brother, he actually started a fistfight 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, right, they have a certain image of the Japanese. Here, here's my advice. Okay, you're listening to this, you're like,

you're a teenager or whatever, you think you wanna go to Japan, go to Japan, don't do a homestay. That's my advice. Like I think, you know, all of my friends who were in the dormitories, I was so jealous of them because it was just sane and like controlled and like you had heaters and stuff like that. Now, I'll push back though.

If you were in a dormitory, depending on how it was configured, especially in this day and age with smartphones and so on, you might not learn as much Japanese. I mean, there's a chance. I don't know. I would do a homestay 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, 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 but 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 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 be the art director? I was like, yes. Just because one of the summers in Silicon Valley, I did an internship with a startup, 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 being part of the system. And 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 is it for me. The 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 not many people were. And 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 like where I came from, I saw there was no healthcare. People were fairly struggling. You know, 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. My buddy, the editor-in-chief is 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. It was called the DMD, digital media design. AC That's cool. I didn't realize that. That's early. AC It was super early. Super early. Because you had the MIT media lab, but that was only grad school. And I loved John Midas stuff, Ben Fry's stuff, Casey Ray's stuff. That was all coming out at 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 NYU kind of had a program that was technology, I think, and maybe CMU had technology in 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 an acclamation animator guy. He runs the department now. He 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 analog digital

thing happening. I had some amazing photography professors. My focus was photography, but I also had a design professor, Sharca Highland, who was this Eastern European. I don't really know what her background was, but she was the meanest unless she liked your work and which she loved you. It was 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 gotta be, I hate this. This sucks. This is terrible. This is bad. But be very specific, more specific than I'm being. Let me tell you the ways I hate this. This sucks. This is terrible. This is bad." Be very specific,

more specific than I'm being. Yeah. 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. I'd always loved books. I'd always loved technology. All the tech stuff, the blogging stuff, 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 this heartbreaking work of staggering genius comes out. In the moment,

that was like, what is happening? This book is so meta. This is so much fun. He's funny. It's a moving story. And he founded McSweeney's. He's funny. It's a moving story. And he founded McSweeney's. And McSweeney's was doing so many interesting things with the book as a form and design. And basically this editor in chief and I were like, hey, let's do 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 Sharca, was that the name? What a fucking name. I think I'm getting that roughly right. Sharca Highland. Yeah. Sharca, was that the name? What a fucking name. I think I'm getting that roughly right. Sharca Highland. Yeah.

Sharca Highland. That is straight out of a comic book. So Sharca 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 your enthusiasm. What was it that clicked for you? AC So I think I'd spend a lot of my teenage years in this autodidactic way of trying to understand design. I didn't know any of the grades. And I remember the first summer I was out in San Francisco, I remember going to Razorfish. AC I back in the day, yeah. CB 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 maybe interning here or working here. And they brought over this manager and he was this really nasty guy. And he was like,

who are your favorite designers? Who do you like? And I was like, 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, like 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 like anti-artists and stuff. And he's like, who's that?

So I was just like- What a prick. Yeah.ists and stuff. And he's like, who's that? So I was just like, yeah, he was totally, he was terrible. He was terrible. But like, this is the thing I think that's difficult for people to understand. If you come from a place where you aren't surrounded by 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. Your sense of self-worth to ratchet that up is a really difficult long process. And that's basically what I spent all my 20s doing. And I think Sharca 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, you know, I'm colorblind and like, I don't really see that many colors. And so I was like, oh, red is like a color that like is easy for me to use. Well, hold on a second. So let me just double click on that. I 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. 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 Sharca, I would say, saw enough of potential slash an intuitive sense of design that she elevated. And I did some branding work. I did branding work for the publishing company that started with this guy, the editor-in-chief. And she kind of reviewed it, and she gave me all this amazing feedback. So she really, she made me feel like I could do it,

which was 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 Sharca, but was it your intuitive sense or was there part of you? Did you reflect in what you did in the class in some way pointing to you caring more than other students? I'm just curious about that.

Cause I remember the moment when this teacher went from brutalizing me to actually deciding, okay, now I'm going to give you a little extra attention. 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. And 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. Going to university, I think when you're 18, 19, 20 is such a waste. You just don't know what you're doing. I certainly

didn't. There's a part of me that's like, I would really love to go back 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 kind of like find an interesting place. This is like 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 whatever, like it's a complicated situation. Anyway, in 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 want her surrounded by a bunch of pricks.

So it's like, it's very like sane. It's like a sane boarding school. It's not fancy. But there's like, it's very like sane. It's like a sane boarding school. 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. Like why go leave, please dad, get out of here. But I was just like But I was like, this is so, so incredible

that you could do this. So I lay in just as like the sense of like, I know how I could use those resources in a way. I think even when I was at UPenn, I didn't quite understand, but I did, I worked hard. I was committing to these things. I was working hard. You know, I think we're 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, like what are the things in Japan that attract you so much to it that keep you there? Maybe things that people miss, but I 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. Cause I have not read the full context on this because I didn't know this story, but I wanted to ask you about it. 2009 hike to Nepal, is that enough of a cue? Can you tell this story?

AC Yeah, that's an inflection point. I just got goosebumps actually. So I really struggled with alcohol in my 20s. My teenage years, I didn't touch anything. I was militantly straight edge-ish. And basically, looking back now, I realized I had such a strong impulse to make sure I could get to whatever the next place was. Anything I saw that could hold me back, which included falling in love or doing drugs or anything like that, that was like a retarding agent as a teenager, I was like immediately 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. And I started drinking 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 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. And what I ended up doing was, because I didn't have mentors, because I didn't have archetypes near me, I just drank like a fish. And I played a lot of music because that was one thing I did have mastery over and played a lot of music and I played a lot of that blacked out. 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. And we connected so intensely and immediately went on a 40-day trip. Like a week after meeting, 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 like, I spoke in tongues. Like this. We hiked up to a glacier. I mean, we can't really skipped over getting possessed by spirits. I mean, it was, yeah. There was, we stayed at this one little hotel in Lhasa that had not always been a hotel, you know, it was this old structure. And woke up the next morning and my girlfriend was being very

strange. She was being very weird. And I was like, what's going on? She's like, I'll tell you when we get outside. I was like, what? You'll tell me when we get outside. Like, what's this about? 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. 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 calm down and go to sleep. And I was like, Oh my God, I 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 happening. And 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 you have to imagine, 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. Everything is a sign that you need to be together, that this is magic. Only these things can possibly happen because you're connected, you're together. We both bought, I remember we 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 fated. I went back to the hotel and I went to the manager and I was like, hey, I don't think we could stay here tonight. He's like, oh, what's wrong? And I was like, well, I was kind of possessed, saw this. He's like, did you see the woman? And I was like, yeah. He's like, oh, oh yeah, yeah. No, we know what's going on with that here. We'll take you to the dream reader. And so I was like, what, you'll take me to the dream. So I ended up, I'll try to try to truncate this because it can, it can kind of get a little bit long, but I mean, I'm not sure anybody listening

wants you to truncate this particular story. So 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 weird is going on. And he takes us, and we go to the outskirts of Lhasa. We go to this really weird apartment block that was just made of concrete. It was maybe two or three stories tall. And he takes us to this room on the third floor, and there's a line of people, line of Tibetans waiting at this door.

And they were all waiting to have their dreams read. So I 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, 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, it 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 turn comes up. I go in there, you go into this room, it's all candles,

Dalai Lama photos, all this stuff. It's 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. And she says, okay, here's these three pieces of paper. You have to take them to these three temples and they will burn them for you tonight. They'll know what to do. Just tell them the dream reader sent you and you'll be okay. You'll be fine. Everything will be good. And I was like, no one's asking me for money. And the hotel guy's like, oh, you can leave a tip if you want or whatever. And it was like $2 or something. I put $2 in the little thingy.

And then we go to the temples and like it ended up becoming this incredible adventure. This connects with a lot of my walking as well. You know, it's like having experiences like this, I think informed this sense of like, just give yourself up to what the day could potentially give to you. And so I ended up going to all these temples I would have never gone to. I went to the dream reader's 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, met these monks, say, hey, can you burn this for me? Oh yes, of course, absolutely. Give them a dollar, 50 cents or whatever. 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 were participating in. And it was magic. It was just pure magic. So anyway, things like that were happening with this woman. And I screwed it up because of my drinking. I ruined the relationship. She punched me in the face at one point, very rightfully so. And she was like, hey, I can't be with someone like you. AC This happened on that trip? CB 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 about 10 years worth of lifetimes in three months. 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 tatami room apartment in Tokyo, it was three in the morning. I wanted to die. It was rock, rock, rock bottom. This isn't like a rich roll story. I didn't 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. And that had, I think, driven me to drink the way I drank, 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 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 at this time with the publishing company thing, we were producing these books that were winning awards and making absolutely no money. And so I was 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 of 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. And part of it culminated in going to Nepal and climbing up to Annapurna 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 20s is just shocking. It was this fathomless sense of scarcity. The money is 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. And I'm never 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. And like, 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. You're definitely not comfortable. You're definitely at altitude sickness levels. It's like, yeah, that's yeah. 13,550 feet. That's high. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be enough for altitude sickness for sure. Yeah. So I fly out there. I go to Pokhara, which is the town that kind of everyone starts the truck from. I wasn't going to be enough for altitude sickness for sure. Yeah. So I fly out there. I go to Polkota, which is the town that kind of everyone starts the track 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 them to be there and 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 said like, the guy's like, yeah, no problem. No problem. Yeah. He gives me this young guide. He must have been like 18. And he was the sweetest, most compassionate, incredible human. We bonded as brothers. He was calling me older brother, I was calling him younger brother, die and by. And I got to base camp on my 29th birthday 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, essentially you're on the moon up there. I mean, it was incredible. What. The edge of the what? Did you just say moraine? What is a moraine?

AC. Moraine is sort of like when a glacier pulls back and it leaves this kind of valley, essentially. 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. You're surrounded by Annapurna and Machapacharya 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 try to tweet or whatever. That trip was so powerful to me. I came back and I was like, I have to write about this and I have to write about the camera that I was using. And I have to create something from this. I have to rest something

from this experience, give it form. And I wrote this ridiculous camera review that was kind of one of the first, I don't want to say it was the first field review. You 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 and it was micro four thirds, this new technology, this new sensor. And I was like, this is really kind of exciting, really cool.

I wrote about that and the article went bananas. AC What happened as a result of that article going bananas? Like what dominoes did that tip over? BF That article is the first, I think long form ish, it was mixing design. It was mixing the web. AC 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? AC There was a lot of designers on the web like Zeldman, Jason Santamaria, Liz Danzigo, working in the early mid-2000s, late-2000s, refining the CSS

spec and showing CSS end guard and showing what you can do with design and stuff like that. But there was blogs and stuff, but there weren't really articles that were long-form design in the same way you do for a magazine. There was a guy in Tokyo who I was sharing a studio with, Oliver Reichenstein, who was running this thing called Information Architects, and he was doing it. And again, this is 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. This 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, 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. Older brother, he goes, a month before we met, my older brother died in a motorcycle accident. And I have not had any happiness since then. And meeting you, it was like meeting him coming back. And we're both just sobbing like, oh my God, I love you. 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. Again, 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. They're like, you want some Adderall? I'm like, yeah, sure. I'll try some. Give me some Adderall. So I remember it's like, I'm in Harlem. I'm at my friend's apartment in Harlem. 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'm just like up, I'm like writing this like camera review,

eating carrots and stuff. They had like a bag of carrots. I'm like eating carrots like a rabbit, writing this camera review. I remember we were in Harlem and it was like, it was almost like a basement apartment. I'm looking out, there's like people's feet walking out outside the window and I'm like, I got to write this review. I got to write this review. This is like Stephen King back in the cocaine sprint days. Yeah. So 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. It was just insane. JG Holy shit. In affiliate fees. AC For me, back in 2009, JG Yeah, that's wild. AC We were selling like millions of dollars of these cameras. And I had always lived, because of this sense of scarcity, I had always lived pathologically below my means. One of the reasons I stayed in Tokyo throughout my 20s was my cost of living was so low. I could live in the center of this incredible city and I needed to make a thousand dollars a month that would cover my rent, all my food,

and entertainment. It was just like- AC. Which is so unexpected for a lot of people listening, right? Because when we were growing up, it was like, oh, Tokyo is the most expensive city in the world, right? As a kid growing up on Long Island, that was what you heard. AC. For sure. And if you wanted to buy a 100 square meter apartment in Ginza, yeah, it was a lot of money. AC. Sure, right. AC. That is the interesting thing about Tokyo is that there are options. You don't have to live far in the outskirts. And every neighborhood still to this day, there are affordable options. Yes, it's small or whatever. Sometimes they don't have baths. You have to use the public bath,

things like that. But there are options, which is what is so powerful about the city. And 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 $1,000 a month. So anyway, getting $20,000 was like, oh great, there's like two years of living. And I got that in a month doing this thing. And 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 weird old meter of self-worth,

oh, I have value. I don't have to operate on such a scarcity mindset. And I did that. And then that led, a month after that, the iPad came out and I had been doing all of this book design. I had been winning awards as a book designer. When 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. AC- Remind me Winterhouse. This is- AC- 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 had just been watching my work online. I was doing these kinds of experiments. We were putting out these books and he was like, oh, this kid is doing interesting stuff. He should come and be a judge. I had these things that were happening that were sort of signals that were hard for me to believe in. This is a fluke. This is a fluke. I'm not valuable. This happened accidentally. And then I go go to the art director's club and I'd meet all the people there and I'd be like, oh my God, I'm not supposed to be here. It's just this incredible, infinite imposter syndrome. Anyway, but there's a slow 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. And 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. 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 figures.

It's good timing a week later, right? I mean, that's incredible timing. It was like a month later, but it was just like the energy. Yeah. But the half-life of that article was still alive and well. 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. Yeah. Well, I remember writing and rewriting the intro like 50 times. The reason I'm asking is that it strikes me and as this is a hugely a 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 puts so much work into a creative project. And you said earlier with the shark, 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 a quality, quality, quality. There's 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.

Yeah. And I mean, that's an incredible interview. Just talk about tenacity, like infinite tenacity. What? Like six, writing six, seven books before you go to the market to even try to sell them. Oh my God. It's crazy. 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 I could there'd always be another creative or fine art project that I could commit myself to and could do so uncompromisingly.

When did you decide that? Was that after raising your prices and you're like, oh, okay, wait a second. No, when I was like 13. Are you like, oh really? I was like, well, because like I grew up in an environment where we didn't have an abundance. It's not like I was like, you know, we were going on these crazy vacations and like had a yacht and like, you know, it was like and we had six houses and 15 cars and I was driving around. I wasn't coming from this place of incredible abundance and then having to sacrifice.

I'd all through my life, I had been trained aesthetically. AC Right. You were like an accidental monk in training, like you said, pathologically living below your means. AC And then as soon as I 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. And I would kind of supplement that by 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 had cultivated that asceticism and I knew that I'd done plenty of things that didn't explode like those articles did. And so I was like, oh, I 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 Gampetra, who's an incredible designer and design thinker, Frank Camaro, who's an incredible designer and design thinker, Liz Danzigo, who I mentioned earlier, who's an incredible designer and just amazing human, meeting these people and watching them work and getting close to them, and then just realizing how much value there was in feeling that and just being happy with the ride. The fact that these articles did well and took off, it was bonus. It was deserved. So we're going to bounce around chronologically for a second. What are your main creative focuses now or just in the last handful of years?

RG making books. That's it. Writing books. TG Okay. Why? Why? Why? Because a lot of people listening, right? They'll say, wait, books? Thought books are kind of dead. Like you just talked about the iPad. What kind of books are we talking about? So why books? RG So look, books have always been the focus since I was eight, nine years old. I've just always been drawn to them as objects. 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. And 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. AC- 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.

CB 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. The books that I'm producing, the books that I make, it's like cloth bound. How do you do cloth bound with silk screen, 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 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. And so the investment side of things just really isn't there. You almost need a Rockefeller who just be obsessed with digital books and they would fund it to great personal loss. They always say, how do you make a good fortune start with a great fortune and found a publishing company? RG Yeah, or a restaurant. AC Yeah. These are 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, 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? I should say in fairness, the larger publishers say in New York, they wouldn't have. They're not incentivized. They haven't done it. And then he creates these collector's editions with tons of artwork. I have one on my shelf right back there, sells them for 200 bucks a pop and lo and behold, boom, immediately sold out. AC Yeah. Not only sold out, but sold a lot of them. BF Yeah, yeah. A lot. AC 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 Brinkhurst's elements of typographic style over and over and over and over. It'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. Hmm, yes, let me do that. It's just always been there. AC It's always been there. 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 in much the same way doing Annapurna, coming back, writing that article, giving that shape digitally. But those containers, you can, they're still up on my website. You know, 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 from 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 bit in Japan wondering why you were there. Was that always somewhere in the back of your mind or your thinking? Why am I here in Japan? And if not, how did that surface like, why did that become an element? As an adoptive person, I think my entire life is defined by that flailing. You just don't feel like you belong anywhere.

AC 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? AC 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, again, it just comes from all this scarcity, trauma, self-worth, all this stuff. 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. And 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 them. 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. And I think as an adoptive, that- resonate with a lot of people because they're 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. If you never fall in love, it's hard to have your heart broken. So therefore, right?

AC 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 because you can never be fully integrated, you can never be part of this place. And yet, a lot of people are just here as English teachers or headhunters, and 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 can no longer reintegrate back from where they came from or they don't have the skill set or they're too old to go back. They develop this kind of anger and this frustration. I was very lucky in that I was always engaging on an international level with people. I was able to go to these publishing conferences because of the publishing company that I was part of. I was able to do 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 tethered to the greater world and I was able to give little talks at universities about the books I was designing. I always felt like I had tethered 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, this 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. And 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 have to leave. So that was why I went to Silicon Valley. And it was dovetailing with all those articles,

and I developed this little bit of online celebrity and mystique, and that allowed me to join Flipboard as employee number eight or nine, super early, and just learn. Mike McHugh is this incredible guy. I know, it's so long ago now. The iPad came out, Flipboard came out six months later, 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. I mean, this is something people were talking about. It was the first app that needed a waiting list because the service couldn't handle people. It was the first waiting list app. It was like you'd give it your Twitter feed and it would create a magazine out of all the articles. It was just pages flipped, Marcos Westcamp designed it. It was just gorgeous. It was beautiful.

It epitomized there was the Berg Group in London doing future studies about what books could be. There was a PushPop 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, generous and brilliant. I mean, I moved out there.

I moved out to a house, two blocks from Steve Jobs, old Palo Alto. I had two roommates, these two guys, Stanford D school grads who just graduated. They were 24. I was 30. I just turned 30 when I moved out there. CB. D school is the design school. Mm-hmm. CB. 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. AC. Sorry. You mean in Japan. Just for- AC. I had had no hugs. AC. Hug withdrawal, yeah. AC. I got to this house in Palo Alto and it was just these two guys, we had no furniture or refrigerator just had hummus and kombucha in it. No one knew how to cook anything. And I was sleeping on a yoga mat for the first two months and then it's a Tommie mat and it was like in this little back room. 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 were two people who came from incredible families, full of love and brilliance. That was life changing to me. I met up with Liz Danz ago a couple of months after I moved in there. We went to have pizza in New Haven at Sally's, I think, a pizza. And Liz, after dinner, she took my shoulders and

she just says, Craig, you are a different human. 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. AC – Nice. Two years of Japan. AC – No, I mean, again, the rent in Palo Alto was a thousand bucks a month for me for my share of the house. I didn't have a car. I just walked

to the office. I was spending no money. I was like, this is great. I'm just going to bank all of this. This is like pure future freedom. That's all I saw it as. I told Mike McHugh, the CEO, I was like, Mike, look, I'm not out here to work at this company forever. I'm so hungry to do X, Y, and Z, all these things I want to work on, all these things I want to do. And 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. Every 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. 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 20s building up this asceticism and building up this ability to be uncompromising and I didn't want that to be broken. And 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. AC and RG Kevin Kelly is going to be a callback for later. AC 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 and 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. What, uh, tell me about some tools. And I was like, who is this guy? It's a good Kevin impersonation. Do you want to give just like two lines on Kevin, just for people who have not heard my multiple interviews with him. Yeah.

I mean, he's like the sage of the Valley, right? He's just, he's got a big white Amish beard, built his own tiny guy, tiny guy, co-founder of wired. Exactly. It goes on and on and on. He, along with Stewart brand or sort of like the forest gumps of Silicon Valley who've just been there for everything. Yep. And so I'm following my nose. I'm like out here, I'm in the mix. I'm with these incredible people. I'm holding my own for the most part, but I keep writing. And the thing I notice is 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 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 to 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. And so I applied for this writing fellowship at MacDowell.

I was like, where should I apply, Liz? And she's like, MacDowell. And I was like, okay, great. I've never heard of MacDowell. 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. I 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

of people. I was one of the first people to leave and I feel terrible leaving them and it upset a lot of people I was one of The first people to leave and I was like listen, it's not you. It's me I need to do these other things. Oh wait Liz was upset after recommending it to you No, no, no, this wasn't everyone at the company was Liz was in New York Liz was founding the interaction design program at the school for vision. Okay I was trying to put it together because you said New Haven pizza. I was like, is New Haven neighborhood outside of where I think it is? Okay. Got it. No, no, but the Flipboard people were super upset. And so like, that's one of the difficult things

is like, these aren't easy conversations to have to like leave these things. I remember being like, okay, this is a great excuse. This is the 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 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. CB Where is the writing residency? AC New Hampshire.

CB New Hampshire, okay. AC 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 grand pianos and fireplaces. And you're surrounded by the best composers and poets, artists, novelists, non-fiction writers. And I went out there and I met a few people, one of whom was this woman, Lynne Tillman. And from day one, it was just being so hungry and so ready and so accepting of being able to be around these people. I was just soaking it in. One of the first books Lynne 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. AC Why so impactful? Why so interesting? CB The language, the poetry of it, the story, the conciseness of it, the economy of the language. I mean, Dennis Johnson's first and foremost a poet. He does novels as well. There's a lot of people that fall into this category that I love like Dennis Johnson's a big one, Ocean Vong is a more contemporary one, Ocean Vong. Mega poet who then catapulted into novel, auto fiction land. Michael Andonje, 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. AC I have to just selfishly hijack for a second here to recommend a book that I always hesitate to recommend because it fails for nine out of ten people, maybe 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. That'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? I'm very curious because I've done this before only a few times.

I was inspired by Maya Angelou, who used to do this all the time for writing. Even though she had space at her house to write, she would go to a hotel and she would do this. How did that come about and why did you need to do that? I 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. So 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. 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 a state like the Four Seasons. And there'd be this like, because I was making all this insane money. I was like, okay, I can spend three, $400 on a hotel room. Sure, 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 in downtown, kind of walking North Beach at night. Going into weird little bars. I would still have like a whisk Gary down 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. Wow.

Okay. So then flash forward. One hell of a memento like montage that I'm painting here. Now fireplace, New Hampshire picnic baskets. What does that do for you? Like what does that fellow and by the way, they're going to hate me for this, but every time you say McDowell, I think of McDowell's from Coming to America. They've got the golden arches, we've got the golden them. But what does that do for you being part of that? AC 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, there's kind of like a tether to reality out there outside of your book or your composition or whatever. We would have dinner and then we'd have very fierce ping pong competitions. But, I would get sometimes almost like violent. Like there definitely were some friendships that were like, all that pent up because of creative angst. It's like nowhere to go about 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. 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'd worked on that day, what they were struggling through. Again, it just set these archetypes. 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 each of these things from when I was aged basically 29, 30, 31, connecting with Kevin Kelly, being asked to give these talks, 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. And it just feeds into that sense of, oh, maybe there's value here and maybe

I have something to bring to the table. That was the biggest takeaway. AC 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. Okay. And I don't think we should try. I think we should just do two episodes and we can put them out very close together, maybe back to back.

That's, that's my suggestion because we have so much to talk about and there's no reason to rush it. There's just zero reason if you're open to it. Sure. Yeah. That would be the first recommendation. And I think we get to, I mean, the huge walks are such a huge chapter 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, if you're cool with it, I just say we do too. And maybe we record tomorrow. Maybe we record the day after and just. Perfect. Let's do that. 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. But 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 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, it could be writing, could be fill in the blank. You didn't have an archetype. Let's say you're teaching a class. Now you're the archetype. You're up in front. You're the shark. Maybe you're not as brutal, but you're up there. What are the types of things that you would teach or focus on or assign as exercises or readings or anything else? Like what might be some of the ingredients in that class? AC 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. And it was in the walk that I kind of found how to truly commit to the work. I know this sounds very woo-woo and weird. AC No, it's not because I actually know more of the story. So people will get it when they get it. All right, lots of walking. CB 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 most people don't do them. I haven't slept with a smartphone in my room. I haven't slept with a phone in my room ever in my life. I've never had the phone in my room. Sometimes, I lived in such small apartments, I just put it in the kitchen on the stove because that was the only other unit of my house that was not my bedroom. And it blows my mind that so many people have the smartphone in the room, and just having it on the table. So 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 100% destructive of the creative impulse that allows people like Dennis Johnson to produce Train Dreams or to do that kind of deep poetic work, they're at odds. And I think the thing you're talking about like content creators, there's a certain kind of ephemerality there. And 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? You'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. B.F. Besides Train Dreams, what books have you reread a lot?

C. Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. B.F. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? C. Creek, yes. B.F. Okay. C. 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 near Tinker Creek, and she just wrote the most beautiful, poetic diary, narrative nonfiction description of what it was like being out there. Her book is, I don't believe in mental blocks or writers 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 juice is... I pick up Annie Dillard. I literally flip

to any page. I read two paragraphs. I can't stop myself from running over and starting writing. It activates something in my brain so strongly, so immediately. I love it. I've never met her. I would love to buy her a beautiful steak dinner if that's the sort of thing she's... I don't eat steak, but maybe she does. 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 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. It'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 onto 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 like a bowl of ramen or something, which is probably going to cost 200 bucks in 30 years. It's like, no, mark up the books, my books. If you buy my books, please write in them,

dog ear them, use them. That is the greatest part of them as objects, is 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 MacDowell, 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. I love her so much just as a human. I love her voice. You can look up how old she is on Wikipedia. She's in her 70s. She's been in the same East Village apartment for 40 years. She is this 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. Stuff like that. Other contemporary writers, Sam Anderson, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, Sam Anderson is amazing. His favorite book is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. He 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 the 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 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. It's all connected to writing. All of it, every single thing. It's shocking. So it's easy. You asked early, why books? You know, like 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. the writing and who that connects me with and the adventures it brings me on.

Well, let's talk about your own writing and specifically let's talk briefly about things become other things. And then we'll not try to cram too much into this. I mean, we've covered a hell of a lot of ground. We're already at two hours. So let's talk. You don't have to be sorry. I mean, this is what I want when you're like, well, I'll truncate this. I'm like, don't truncate it.

This is not tech talk. 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. I produce my own books that are kind of fine art editions that sell for a hundred bucks a copy that are printed and bound in Japan like I showed earlier, silk screen, foil 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 at it. 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? So you have Hokkaido up at the top, then you have Honshu, which is the big banana with a 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 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 Mie and Wakayama in 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. It 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 whole ascetic 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, and I was thinking about life. And one of the things I started to reflect on, partially because in this COVID moment where I think 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 in the peninsula, I'd see little kids every now and there aren't that many kids left in Japan, certainly not in 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. He 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 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 one Commodore 64 or something, and I used LogoWriter, and that got me thinking about Brian. You see how these things compound, these small chances, these small lux, these small opportunities. And I got them and Brian didn't get them. And by the end of high school, we were so separated. My high school

was called out during the first Trump administration by Betsy DeVos. I think that was the secretary of education. She called out my high school as one of the worst high schools in America, like on a national speech. And my friend Brian was going to the high school that bad kids went to that couldn't hang in my high school. So it's like you can imagine where Brian was. And we graduated high school and just a few weeks after he graduated, he was murdered. And that murder, that loss, we basically stopped talking after middle school just because you get separated and then your friend groups change. 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, like 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. It 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 it is this walk, but it's also about our friendship, our childhood. It's about being failed by the systems. Why were we cleaved apart? We're side by side in first grade. How should two kids side by side end up in a position where I feel like I have to run away halfway around the world and he gets murdered? And it's like him getting murdered wasn't… The crazy thing is that wasn't a big shock. When you saw kind of what was, there were gangs. We had the head of security, we had security guards in my high school. There was like whatever. We didn't have metal detectors. We weren't quite at Baltimore the wire level of intensity,

but it was serious. You couldn't wear certain colors because they were gang related. And the head of security, it turns out the FBI busted in one day and tackled him, arrested him. It turns out that he was a bank robber. It was just insane, right? So the book just meditates on the fact that Mia and Wakayama are both working class industry prefictures 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. And it's also like this elevation of all these wonderful characters I meet on the peninsula. I love everyone I meet. I'm talking to fishermen, I'm talking to old farmers, I'm talking to women who are running old cafes, quesatons in the countryside who are super surly and chain smoking. And I'm like, the first person who's come in in days, 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. That sort of thing. And I just love all these people and it's a book about elevating who they are, elevating this peninsula. And the paths I'm walking are these thousand-year-old, 2000-year-old pilgrimage routes and the history. I'm walking past stone

markers that are two thousand years old. I'm walking past pilgrim graves. I'm going to these the holiest shrines, these foundational myth shrines of Japan, Issei, 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. And I feel like I had a duty to remember this guy.

CB When does the book come out? AC 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, my walking practice. I 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, 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 it's about this illuminating this part of Japan that you're not going to have access to. I'm proud of the book. I'm proud of where we got it. And I'm so excited for people to read it. And I want to engage with people about it. AC It's amazing. So for people who don't know William Gibson, who is William Gibson briefly? I mean, he has a quote that people see in Silicon Valley quite a lot, which is pulled

from Neuromancer, I believe, which is the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed something along those lines. Might be from that book, but legendary writer. B- Basically, whatever the progenitor of cyberpunk to a certain degree. But also, he's a guy who has seen, I think, the coolness of Japan before most of the world saw the coolness of Japan. And he's written great books that involve Japan, like Pattern Recognition is an incredible book. I read it 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 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. I'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 four thousand words a day. What the fucking hell? Yeah. That's- After walking 30 kilometers. Yeah. 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 Modland

and get a taste? Craigmod.com. Craigmod.comcom in service for 23 years. No, I think that don't make sense. 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. And that combined with the walking, and actually that gave me the permission to start committing to these big walks. So it's like everything builds on everything else, 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 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, and I filled Q&As from the members. I'm so lucky. My members are smart. They ask great questions. They're creative. They're wonderful people. And so you get 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. If you're a student, you just email me and say, I'm a student, you get it for free. I'm very loose about what constitutes a student. If you think you're a student, you're probably a student. Just email me and say, hey, I'm a student. I believe you. 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 this 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. When 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. Fucking ridiculous. There's no way. So anyway, go ahead. You were like, hey, let's start with eight years old.

I knew there was, I 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 it were spirits. I'll be, I don't want to smack talk whatever happened to end up in you and you were cradling some invisible object asleep overseas. But this is the fun of long form for me.

Right? Because I don't want to know exactly where it's going. So much of my life is regimented. So much of it is planned. There's so many times when I execute to spec and part of what I'm trying to inject more in my life, whether it's playing with fiction and just starting with a few characters in a scenario and letting it rip or having conversations like this, especially with someone I've spent time with, is ending

up in unexpected corners. There's so much to that. And it's similar in a sense. I mean, this is 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. AC It becomes theological. It really is. It's totally faith-based.

I mean, what creative practice is and what great creative practice isn't? I mean, what creative practice isn't? What great creative practice isn't? I mean, my favorite moment of a documentary about photographers is the Sally Mann documentary. How do you spell that? Sally Mann? S-A-L-L-Y, Sally. Huh? M-A-N? And then a woman, M-A-N-N, I think is her last name. And she, yes, if I say it fast, it sounds Sally Man. She has all these gorgeous, ethereal black and white photos of her family that she took and she gained so much notoriety. Anyway, there's this documentary about her and in the middle of it, she's working on a new set of works and she's getting rejected by Gallard. 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.

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. AC All right, Craig. We are going to very quickly record and release around to everybody who's listening to this should tune in for that for sure. My God. I mean, honestly, in part because I'll just give people a quick teaser with the exploratory bullets and I ask all guests to send ideas for exploratory bullets. We literally didn't

get to effectively any of them, right? I mean, the 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. We'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. AC 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. 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. And most people overlook them or think that the bar to entry is so insurmountable that like, why should I even try? Go out and there are huge lists. And once you start to crack the code, once you start applying, and you should aim to get rejected by a billion of them, but once you get into one or two of them, you start to understand the code a little more. And my God, they're so much fun and so interesting.

And they are such a way to level up your practice, whatever your practice might be, to be surrounded by people who are also committing themselves to it, working hard, and providing unexpected archetypes. I've had so many great friendships come out of, I've done McDowell, 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 get like provide more scholarships

and things like that, it's pretty powerful, pretty powerful stuff. Love it. All right, everybody, the end. CraigMod, craigmod.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. nice to see you bud. You just been a minute and we will see you

tomorrow. And for people listening, of course, we'll link to everything we discussed in this episode of Tim dot blog slash podcasts. There will not be another person with the last name mod. So you can search for Craig mod and he will pop right up. Of course, and until next time, which will be pretty soon, round two with Craig, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. We'll talk more about cultivating a rational belief and faith in oneself in round two.

So until then, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. for tuning in. 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 and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blogslashfriday, type that into your browser, tim.blogslashfriday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one.

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