#803: Craig Mod Returns — Epic Walks in Japan, The Art of Slowness, Digital Detox, Publishing “Impossible” Books, and Choosing Beauty Over Scale

Craig Mod Returns! Craig https://craigmod.com/ is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the author of Things Become Other Things https://www.amazon.com/Things-Become-Other-Walking-Memoir/dp/0593732545/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and Kissa by Kissa https://shop.specialprojects.jp/products/kissa-by-kissa-4th-ed. He also writes the newsletters Roden https://craigmod.com/roden/ and Ridgeline https://craigmod.com/roden/ and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more. Sponsors: Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period) Momentous https://livemomentous.com/tim high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off) Helix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim https://helixsleep.com/tim (Between 20% and 27% off all mattress orders and two free pillows) Timestamps: [00:00:00] Start. [00:07:25] More than a decade of Perfect Days in a six-tatami mat room. [00:10:44] The first steps of Craig’s huge walks: exploring Tokyo’s nightlife. [00:17:33] Discovering pilgrimage trails with John McBride. [00:22:49] What’s so appealing about pilgrimage trails? [00:31:25] Learning politeness and language in Japan. [00:40:09] An invitation from Kevin Kelly. [00:41:23] The birth of a photo book. [00:42:50] The big solo walks begin. [00:43:53] Launching a membership program. [00:44:58] The Nakasendō experience. [00:50:01] Craig’s rules for walking. [00:51:04] The Vipassana influence. [01:00:43] Logistics of walking in Japan. [01:09:03] Depopulation and pizza toast. [01:13:42] How Kissa by Kissa came to be (and its unexpected success). [01:16:34] Kicking off Craigstarter. [01:17:47] The pièce de résistance membership strategy. [01:18:41] Finding product-market fit. [01:19:12] The importance of sustainable scale. [01:19:50] Membership community rules. [01:27:15] Navigating the publishing world. [01:38:37] Promoting midsize cities in Japan as a wild and strange celebrity. [01:52:50] The economic and cultural effects of this promotion. [01:54:46] Hidden gems and walks in Japan. [01:56:56] Walking beyond Japan. [01:59:47] Craig was a Mod before you was a mod. [02:00:47] How Craig reconnected with his birth family. [02:19:32] Reflections and future plans. [02:23:00] Parting thoughts. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And so to do this thing where there was basically a month built in where I wasn't going to see these responses.

• 0:06Tim Ferriss?

  And then Sorry, my dog's vomiting. Give me a sec.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 0:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's a new one for the podcast.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  No.

• 0:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, sorry.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Your dog hates SMS.

• 0:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. Give me a second to deal with this. Never had my dog vomit while I'm recording a podcast right next to me before. That's a new one. This is the glamorous life of a podcaster, folks.

• 0:34Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers, people who are the best at what they do, people who are the deepest in the deep end of whatever their specialty happens to be. This episode that you are going to hear is my second interview, my second conversation with Craig Maude, a gem of a human being. Love the guy. Now, important note, though, you do not need the first interview to enjoy this one. This, what you're about to listen to, is perfectly self-sufficient as a standalone conversation. So go forth, enjoy. But if you also want to check out our first convo, which covers his early years and his

• 1:18Tim Ferriss?

  winding path through Japan, you can find it at tim.blogs/moude, M-O-D. Today's episode will dive very deeply into Craig's walking philosophy and practice. I'll explain what that means, why it's relevant, his incredible experiences and experiments with publishing of all sorts, independent and traditional, his unexpected celebrity in Japan, which is wild and just so fun, and the profound impact of reconnecting with his biological family. And we'll get into all the nuances and background necessary for that. This is a packed episode. Craig is such a joy to listen to, great storyteller, and there are a lot of takeaways.

• 2:01Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. Who is Craig? He is a writer, photographer, and walker, we'll talk about that a lot, living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa, K-I-S-S-A. Don't worry about it, we'll get to it. He also writes the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline, and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more. He has walked thousands of miles across Japan in every conceivable place, and since 2016, he has been co-running walk-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,

• 2:45Tim Ferriss?

  Spain, which includes the Portuguese and French Caminos, and much more. You can find Craig Maud at craigmod.com. That's the HQ for everything Craig Maud, C-R-A-I-G-M-O-D dot com. You can find him on Instagram, at Craig Maud, and on Blue Sky as well, craigmod.com. And with that, and just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible, we'll get right into the meat and potatoes of Craig Maud. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. Kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean, they frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. What kind of mattress is it? What do you do? What's the magic juju?

• 3:31Tim Ferriss?

  It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in, and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I've had. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full-perimeter zoned lumbar support right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils that create a soft, contouring feel, which also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains I might create. And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief... I look forward to nesting into that bed every night that I use it.

• 4:15Tim Ferriss?

  The best part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling fully rested with a back that feels supple instead of stiff. And that is the name of the game for me these days. Helix offers a 100 night sleep trial, fast free shipping and a 15 year warranty. So check it all out. And you, my dear listeners, can get between 20 and 27% off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders. So go to helixsleep.com/tim to check it out. That's helixsleep.com/tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now. About three weeks ago, I found myself between 10,000 and 12,000 feet going over the continental divide, carrying tons of weight, doing my best not to chew on my own lungs.

• 4:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I needed all the help I could get. And in those circumstances, I relied on Momentous products every single day and every single night. Now, regular listeners probably know I've been taking Momentous products consistently and testing them, the entire spectrum of their products for a long while now. But you may not know that I recently collaborated with them, one of the sponsors of this episode, to put together my top picks and I'm calling it my performance stack. I always aim for a strong body and sharp mind. Of course, you need both and neither is possible without quality sleep. So I didn't want anything speculative. I wanted things I could depend on and it is what I use personally. So I designed my performance stack to check all three boxes. And here it is. Creapure creatine for muscular and cognitive support.

• 5:43Tim Ferriss?

  The cognitive side is actually very interesting to me these days. Whey protein isolate for muscle mass and recovery and magnesium 3 and 8 for sleep, which is really the ideal form of magnesium, as far as we know, for sleep. I use all three daily and it's why I feel 100% comfortable recommending it to you, my dear listeners. Momentous sources create pure creatine from Germany and their whey isolate is sourced from European dairy farmers held to incredibly strict standards. And I've chatted with the CEO about their supply chain, about how they manage all of these things. It's incredibly complex and they go way above any industry standards that I'm familiar with and I am familiar with them. All Momentous products are NSF and informsport certified, which is professional athlete and

• 6:27Tim Ferriss?

  Olympic level testing. So here's the main point. What's on the label is exactly what you're getting. And this is not true for the vast majority of companies in this industry. So this is a differentiator. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use TIM at checkout for 20% off of my performance stack. One more time, that's livemomentous.com/tim. I'll spell it out, it's a long one. Live moment O U S dot com slash Tim. So livemomentous.com/tim for 20% off.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Now would be the appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  The Tim Ferriss Show.

• 7:26Tim Ferriss?

  Moto-san, ohayou gozaimasu.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Hi, konnawara. Konnawara.

• 7:31Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. Time zones, lots and lots of time zones between us. And I suppose that is as good a segue as any to ask you a question related to something that you said in passing in our last conversation, which was living in a six tatami mat room. For many people listening, they may not know exactly what that means. What does that mean?

• 7:55Speaker 00

  In Japan, you used to measure everything by basically tatami mats. So tatami mat, it's like two meters by half a meter or something like that. It's a rectangle mat, basically. And yeah, you had rooms. Rooms are kind of like classical Japanese rooms are based on certain tatami mat numbers, six mat room, eight mat room, 10 mat room, 12 mat room, things like that. And I lived for most of my adult life, from like age 22 to 35, I was in like a six mat tatami room. I lived a really ascetic sort of twenties and early thirties. Super affordable and you know, in the middle of the city. It worked out. It worked well for me.

• 8:34Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm looking up the name of a movie that I saw recently. If people want a visual on a roughly six to Tommy room.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Perfect Days.

• 8:43Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect Days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wim Wenders. Exactly.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  The amazing thing about that movie is I think they wrote it and shot it in like a matter of just like three weeks. Four weeks. They shot it so fast, but it works.

• 8:56Tim Ferriss?

  Which is part of the beauty of an independent film like this. So you can control the locations. Yeah. If you're not throwing in a bunch of CGI. If you can apply some constraints, you can make a beautiful little film. That really does the trick and you can rely on that old fashioned thing called storytelling and character development. I will say that this particular film, Perfect Days, just as a warning slash promise to people. It starts off very slow. It gets to a point, at least it did for me, where it starts to get repetitive and almost annoying. But then at some point that I could not put a finger on, it starts to become really hypnotic.

• 9:41Tim Ferriss?

  And then it gets very reassuring. Then it ends up very endearing.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  It's worth the whole push through. I think it's a good piece of film. But basically where the guy, the protagonist of Perfect Days lives is exactly the sort of room I lived in for like roughly 13, 14 years.

• 9:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's worth checking out. The rumor I heard, this was second or third hand, so I have not fact checked this. Is that at some point, I guess it was Tokyo Toilet or whoever actually. I imagine it's the municipality that owns the toilets was looking to do an advertising campaign featuring some of their more unusual sort of art piece toilets, which people will see in the film. And that somehow Wim Wenders, the filmmaker, got wind of this and said, "That all sounds great, but why don't you just give me your entire budget and I'll make a film about a toilet cleaner."

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Pretty astonishing.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:41Tim Ferriss?

  It's pretty, it's pretty awesome.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:44Tim Ferriss?

  Let's jump to.

• 10:49Tim Ferriss?

  The meat and potatoes of Craig mod 2.0, which is huge walks. We covered so much ground, pun intended.

• 11:02Tim Ferriss?

  We covered so much ground in the last conversation. We never got to what a lot of people want to know from you, which is huge walks. Why, how, where, what is it like, all the things, where should we start? What is step one here?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  I mean, step one is just like, I arrived in Tokyo, I'm 19 years old. I'm walking through the city at night and I'm just mesmerized. You know, there's just something about being able to move through the city without worrying about anything, without thinking about safety.

• 11:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  And people's lives are really, I want to say exposed. Like you walk down a street and you can hear everything and you can hear the baths being drawn. You can hear the kids laughing behind, you know, closed doors. You can smell someone having a cigarette in their kitchen as they're listening to the radio. And there was something about all of that, I think that really many, many things kept me here. But like those walks, those late night walks around Tokyo when I was 19, 20. I mean, that really said something moving in my heart. And I think I kind of held on to that for a long time.

• 12:07Tim Ferriss?

  So before we segue from that, why were you walking around at night? Was it insomnia? Were you taking photographs? What were you doing?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  I mean, I was just drinking too much.

• 12:17Tim Ferriss?

  I was skulking around with bottle in hand.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  So yeah, no street drinking, but like I would be, you know, I was going to Golden Guy.

• 12:24Tim Ferriss?

  You should explain what that was and what it is for people who don't know.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Golden Guy was a post-war, almost like a black market drinking area in Shinjuku, next to Kabukicho, which is like the big red light district. And it was a whole bunch of ramshackle shacks, you know, one story, two stories. And then they all had attics and it was all for prostitution. So you'd go to these bars post-war and then there'd be prostitutes there and they'd take you up. If you go in some of the bars in Golden Guy still have these like attic rooms. And that would be where the Roxanne stuff would happen. Yeah, where Roxanne would turn on a red light. And anyway, over time, it became a place of like artists, filmmakers, directors, poets would gather and drink there. Kind of in the, I'd say probably in like the seventies, eighties, nineties.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Another Wim Wenders film, Tokyo Ga, where he's kind of exploit, he's like chasing Ozu and he goes to a bar.

• 13:15Tim Ferriss?

  What is Ozu?

• 13:17Speaker 00

  Ozu is sort of like, if you had, a lot of people know Kurosawa, so you have Seven Samurai. Ozu, Ozu is like the Kurosawa contemporary where if you flipped all the action of Seven Samurai, it created like the inverse of it where nothing happens and the camera just sits on the ground. That, that is Ozu, but it's, Ozu made so many films. Ozu never got married. He never had any kids. He made so many films and every single film is about a daughter leaving her father to go get married. And the father being like super depressed and sad, like the daughter being like, I don't want to leave you. And he'd be like, no, you have to. And you should watch, if you're gonna watch one Ozu film, watch, Samanuaji is what it's called in Japanese. I think it's- Samanuaji. Samanuaji. So The Taste of Mackerel.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Samma. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Samanuaji. I love that film. The Taste of Mackerel. The Taste of Mackerel. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful title. He was a huge drinker too. And he would kind of go into the mountains with some of his writing partners and they would measure how far they were on their script by how many bottles of, empty bottles of sake they would line the room with. So by, by the end of his script, and I don't know why it took him so long, because literally every script is the same script. But like, they would, they would end up, you know, kind of filling the room with these sake bottles. But so you'd, you know, like, there's sort of like this Ozu kind of element of people. And Wim Wenders in Tokyo Ga, he came to Tokyo in the eighties, I think it was like 84. And he was kind of hunting down what was left of Ozu. He's kind of like chasing Ozu.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  But what he ends up doing is he captures a bunch of Tokyo in the eighties and it's amazing. And one of the places he goes to is a bar in Golden Gate, which is still, as of like five years ago, it was still active. And the same woman was, is still running it. And you could go there and you, you watch the Wim Wenders film and you see this bartender and this room that's like literally, I mean, it holds like six people max, you know? And it's like this tiny little closet of a bar. And she's been standing behind that bar for 40 plus years. And she's still there and she's got like a little Wim Wenders poster up on the wall and, you know, she's immortalized in that film. So it was then that in the eighties and the nineties. And I started going there around 2000 and it was still like-

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Should I be here? I mean, it was very shady. It was sort of like, you know, you kind of had to really work your way into these shops. And then about 10 years ago, with the tourism boom starting here and like really resurging, or really for the first time ever, Japan having a mega tourism boom began about 10 years ago. People found Golden Guy because of social media. It's now like you go there and everyone's just Instagramming and live streaming and it's a circus, basically. I haven't been in a while. It's really painful to go to now.

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that sounds rough.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  I would go to Golden Guy. I would go to Otokichi or Brain Busters, I think, was the bar that I used to go to. It's not there anymore.

• 16:05Tim Ferriss?

  Aptly named.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Have a few drinks and then I'd walk home and I'd just like walk home with this like really wistful, you know, kind of like floaty feeling and just, I don't know. Those were really special weird walks for me when I was that young. It was teaching me something.

• 16:21Tim Ferriss?

  I'm adding a footnote to this, which is just a recommendation for folks. Since you invoked the demon of social media by mentioning it, I will mention someone I found on Instagram, even though I haven't had any social apps on my phone for two years because it's like having heroin around the house. There is a website, teemosphoto, T E E M U S photo.com. And it is almost entirely nighttime shots of Japan and urban Japan. And it gives you actually a very, he loves rain. It is not always raining in Japan.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:03Tim Ferriss?

  But these are beautiful shots. Talks about his setup and which camera he uses, et cetera. But it is a really beautiful compilation. And if you browse through, you'll get some of the feeling that Craig is referring to. All right. So where does Craig go from alcohol and Golden Guy walks to something?

• 17:28Tim Ferriss?

  More, what would we call it? Epic?

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, epic, truly epic. So I co-authored slash co-produced a book called Art Space Tokyo. And it came out 2007, 2008. And then we reprinted it with a Kickstarter in 2010. It was one of the first book kickstarters, actually. So it was kind of this novel thing to do. And I met this guy through doing that, this other art related guy named John McBride. A mutual friend connected us and we sat down for breakfast at like 10 a.m. And we didn't get up till like 5 p.m. It was just like instant, like, just like, go, go, go, go, go. He's 20 years older than me and he's just lived this kind of really incredible, rich, interesting life. When he was 17, 18, 19, he was a Monbusho scholarship student here in Japan. He went to Gaigodai.

• 18:17Tim Ferriss?

  That's the Ministry of Education, right?

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Yep. And he had like a full scholarship and he was just a Japanese student at Japanese university, basically. He's Australian. And while he was doing that, he started doing walks because his literature professor, they were reading things like Basho and he wanted to understand what was Basho seeing. So he went and did like the Okunohosomichi Walk, you know, the narrow road to the north. And he went and he walked the Tokaido and he went and he walked Shikoku. And so he started doing all this when he was really young and then he had this whole career, this wild career, incredible, ridiculous career. And right around the time we met, he started getting back into walking. And in 2013, he invited me to come and do Kumano Kodo with him. And I had never heard of Kumano Kodo. I'd never heard of any of this stuff.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  I didn't even really know what the Tokaido was. I knew there was a Shinkansen that was called the Tokaido Shinkansen. I didn't really know what the Nakasendo was. I didn't know what any of this stuff was. Basically, John was like, hey, come, let's do some research, like, it'll be interesting. And he brought me to Koya-san, which is this Shingon Buddhist sort of epicenter in, I think it's just in Nada prefecture, but it's on the key peninsula. It's part of Kumano Kodo. And I was just blown away. I mean, Koya-san is one of the most amazing, beautiful, power spot places I think I'd ever been.

• 19:39Tim Ferriss?

  And Kumano Kodo? I have not been, so I need to go.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:45Tim Ferriss?

  We need to do another walk.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 19:47Tim Ferriss?

  Kumano Kodo, for people, just to wrap a little context around that, it is, well, I'll keep it simple and let you fill in the gaps, but it's more than a pilgrimage trail. It's like a pilgrimage delta of sorts, but you're going up the delta as opposed to out to the ocean in a sense. And it is the, if I'm getting this right, World Heritage Site Sister Pilgrimage Trail to the Camino de Santiago.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  Am I getting that right?

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you get a stamp book for one, on the opposite side of that piece of paper that's folded, you have the other pilgrimage trail.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Exactly. So yeah, there's only two UNESCO World Heritage Pilgrimage Trails in the world. It's Compostela de Santiago and then Kumano Kodo. Actually, this year is the 20th anniversary of them getting the UNESCO, so there's all these banners and they're very exciting.

• 20:39Tim Ferriss?

  Fun.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  The Kumano Kodo is very confusing because it's a network of trails. So there's Kohichi, Nakahichi, Ohichi, Isegi, and Omine Okugakemichi. So that, those are kind of like the five main ones.

• 20:51Tim Ferriss?

  Everybody get that?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  And the problem is, is like when people are like, oh, I went and did Kumano Kodo, they've, 99.99% of the time, they walked what's called the Nakahichi. And it's a very cool bit, but it's a very, very, very tiny bit of the whole. But that's an interesting, we can talk more about it if you want, but it's an interesting exercise in branding, like how the Nakahichi became the thing that all essentially foreigners would come to do to do the Kumano Kodo.

• 21:19Tim Ferriss?

  Let's sidebar, how the hell did that happen? I'm super curious, because I did part of the Nakahichi with my brother long ago. And if we were to, as we did, go to a guiding company in Japan and say, we want to do the Kumano Kodo, then low and behold, that's where we end up. So. How did that happen?

• 21:43Speaker 00

  So essentially, it's about prefectural investment in infrastructure and like sort of inbound facing books, guides, websites, things like that. And Wakayama prefecture, and actually the city of Tanabe in particular, had a, I think he's Canadian, this guy named Brad, he's kind of like this epic, I've never met him, I've never met Brad.

• 22:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's like Madonna, Brad.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Brad ended up living in Tanabe city for some reason, for like a jet program. And right around the time, I guess, when it got the UNESCO.

• 22:14Tim Ferriss?

  This is an English teaching program.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  English teaching program that kind of puts you in the countryside. You know, you kind of come to Japan, you don't live in Tokyo, you don't live in Osaka, you get far flung. And so he ended up in Tanabe, and it was right when the UNESCO thing happened. And he just ran, he became like the, he's like, I'm gonna make all the English literature, I'm gonna do, and they just focused on that Nakahichi bit. And so that just became it. You know, Wakayama put the money in, they put up the signs, they made the pamphlets, they worked with the tour agencies and, you know, they kind of won the, won the tourist bucks, so.

• 22:48Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  So John brought me to Koyasan, and that just activated like everything in my body about like, things I wanted to explore, I didn't know the side of Japan existed, these archetypes that you have or don't have, these mentors that you have or don't have, that open up entirely new pathways. And this one little trip was sort of like, oh my God, there's this network of pilgrimage trails and there's these other trails. And then I just became immediately addicted to it. Like instantly, instantly had to do all of them.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  What grabbed you? Right, what had teeth? What was it that took a pit bull grasp on your mind or soul and wouldn't let go?

• 23:27Speaker 00

  It was the combination of incredible fecundity, we'll use that word again, fecundity of, of the nature. I mean, it's just, you know, the Kip Peninsula is one of the wettest places on the planet. Actually, it gets more rainfall than the Amazon. And you just feel it. I mean, it is just green and mossy and lush.

• 23:45Tim Ferriss?

  This is what you described, I think, as the dangling penis of Japan in the.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 23:50Tim Ferriss?

  In the last conversation.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  It's moist, it's a moist dangling penis of Japan. So there was just this incredible richness of nature. The air was amazing. The religious and spiritual syncretism that's happening there. And one of the reasons why it's UNESCO World Heritage is that Japan, throughout most of its history, Buddhism and Shinto, Shinto is the native religion, the sort of animist, native Japanese sort of spiritual philosophy, theology. Shinto, which are shrines, and Buddhism, which is temples, they used to coexist extremely peacefully, and they often would be on the same grounds. And then the Meiji Restoration happened, in part of essentially imbuing or creating this god narrative around the emperor. They said, hey, we have to split these things.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  We want Shinto to be stronger. This is like a very TLDR. And so Buddhism and Shinto were forcibly split, and a lot of temples were destroyed. And what was special about the Kii Peninsula was because it was so kind of far away from Edo, it's so far away from Tokyo, they kind of didn't split. So it's one of these places, there's a few places left in Japan. Yamagata has Dewa Sanzan, which is the Three Mountains of Dewa, which also has a lot of syncretic history that's still present. And Kumano Kodo is also very syncretic between Shinto and Buddhism. So that was exciting to see that. It just felt great. The ceremonies are amazing. The temples are amazing. You can do shikubou, which is what's called when you stay at a temple. Very easy to do, very affordable. The graveyard up in Koyosan was

• 25:21Speaker 00

  just astounding. One of the absolute most beautiful places. So peaceful. And it's like, all these like shogunets and daimyo, it's like the Hollywood Walk of Fame for like, Japanese samurai. It's pretty interesting.

• 25:36Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to give people just a little bit of context, real quick. So Meiji Restoration, this says it began around 1868. This marked the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and Restoration of Imperial Rule. And then that was also Correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but sort of a signpost and an opening for a lot of the rapid modernization and transformation of Japan.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:02Tim Ferriss?

  That we think of even extending into the mid 1900s. And then one last thing, I just want to say, Basho, for people who were like, who the hell was that? You mentioned it briefly. I don't know who the other foreigner was who was wandering around Japan. I'm blanking on his name, but he was like, I want to see what Basho saw was.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:22Tim Ferriss?

  John, yes, right.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  My buddy John.

• 26:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. The most famous Japanese poet of the Edo period and.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  He put haiku on the map.

• 26:31Tim Ferriss?

  He put haiku on, the guy who made haiku cool. And there you have it. Tell me if I'm getting my timelines right. Did part of the appeal of these trails coincide, or maybe it was just reinforced at a later point by you getting sober and deciding to run and move around in that way? Or did that come later?

• 26:56Speaker 00

  For sure. Yeah. And this is an extension of that for sure. I think getting sober and in that stint I had living in Palo Alto and kind of just upping, like we were talking about self-worth, the sense of scarcity, getting rid of that sense of scarcity, creating more senses of abundance in your life. I felt a real abundance here, you know? And, and then also watching John, because John, John is this, I mean, truly, I don't think anyone's had more of a, a bigger, more positive impact on my life than John. And in my book that's coming out in May, that Things Become Other Things, he's featured heavily in it as kind of this background character. We started doing walks together. We'd spend like weeks and months together every year and starting about 2012, 2013, we do, okay, let's do this walk, let's do this trip, let's do this. And it was just so easy.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  We just traveled together effortlessly. It was like one of these things where it just totally on the same wavelength, completely. Copasetic, just totally easy. And I would watch John and John's Japanese is so exceptional, so perfect, so high register imperial because so he started doing tea ceremony when he was like 19 in Kyoto. We had like a super hard to get into tea ceremony temple. He just kept knocking on the door until they finally let him in. And he's been doing that for 40 years. He was the CEO of Sky TV, which was Rupert Murdoch's first cable satellite network that was launched out of Japan. He ran that for 10 years. He is just operating at this extremely high level. So we would

• 28:23Speaker 00

  be walking, we'd be doing these, you know, walking the Kohichi, walking the Nakahichi. And I would watch him interact with farmers and I'd watch him interact with locals. And I'd never seen someone move people through the use of polite language and curiosity about their history, curiosity about what was happening nearby, what had happened nearby, and watching everyone become our ally in this way that was so profound and exciting. That was another big part of it because I was trying to figure out, what am I doing in Japan? Because I wasn't working for Japanese companies. I didn't have a partner then. And I was like, okay, I have the language

• 29:07Speaker 00

  ability and this is my base. But like, what am I really doing here? And spending that time with John, watching him move through these old roads, these pilgrimage routes, and ensorcel everybody that we met with this love.

• 29:19Tim Ferriss?

  Ensorcel, Craig, you just garried me. What is that mean?

• 29:24Speaker 00

  You know, just, just do a little magic trick on them to like, just

• 29:27Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm gonna use that.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Totally pull them over to your side.

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  It's a magic trick just to use that word.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  It was so profound for me to watch that happen. And then I started emulating it. And then basically that became a foundation for me. After, I'd say it took me about three years before I felt like I had studied enough with John to start walking on my own. So it wasn't until about 2015, 2016.

• 29:49Tim Ferriss?

  And how much of the studying was roots, where to stay? And how much of that was the interaction piece?

• 29:55Speaker 00

  I'd say it was like 80% interaction and 20% roots.

• 30:02Tim Ferriss?

  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 Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. And I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business. But the tools then were absolutely atrocious and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers into buyers.

• 30:44Tim Ferriss?

  Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. And Shopify is truly a global force as the e-commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklinen and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions. Established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? So sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/Tim, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to start selling today with Shopify. One more time, Shopify.com/Tim.

• 31:25Tim Ferriss?

  This is going to get nerdy, but a lot of my listeners are nerdy, so they might enjoy it. You mentioned politely speaking and I don't want to gloss over this because politely speaking in the US is like, please thank you. Yes, sir, yes, ma'am. There's a lot more to it in Japanese, right? You have keigo, you have exalting language, which you can use to put the person on a higher pedestal. You have humbling language. You've got a million.

• 31:56Tim Ferriss?

  Grades, you have this whole spectrum in between. There are entire books written on how to write short letters that are polite at the right level with the right combination of ingredients.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:08Tim Ferriss?

  What made the language that he used so enchanting, maybe so recruiting for the people he interacted with in the countryside?

• 32:21Speaker 00

  I think it was like, okay, he had spent 40 years doing tea ceremony. And tea ceremony, by the way, is not just like, you know, five minutes, you fold a handkerchief, you pour some tea, you're done. It's like six, seven, eight hours, you know, like a full tea ceremony. And you're, you're cooking meals and you're presenting stuff. And it's like, it's a really involved thing. And so there's a lot of language connected with tea ceremony. So first of all, he's, he'd just been studying this kind of imperial tea ceremony language. And then I think, you know, being a CEO where a hundred percent of his interactions were in Japanese, I mean, he just learned to talk at like a CEO level with everyone. So we're walking through, we're meeting farmers and he's treating them with the same reverence he would treat Son-san, you know, the, the CEO of SoftBank with whom he'd have breakfast with like once a week or whatever, when he was, you know, running his thing.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  And so I think these people, first of all, were just blown away that we could speak Japanese to begin with. But then secondly, that they were being seen in a way that they had never been seen before. They felt, I think, elevated in a way that no one had ever elevated them before. And kind of weirdly, no Japanese person would probably think to elevate them. And John, I think, just has this intuitive sense of like, how to make people feel great, you know, and he wants, it comes from this totally genuine place. And he's, he's so encyclopedically sort of versed about the history of the area. So he'll be asking questions, these deep historical questions, and you can just see people so moved by it, like, oh my God, this person really cares about where we are.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  And then on top of that, he's just using verb conjugations or like, you know, they'll give us, they'll say, would you like some tea? And he'll be like, oh my God, it would be my most cherished honor to accept your humble tea, you know, like some, basically something like that in Japanese, which doesn't sound, you say it in English and you're like, all right, shut up, you dickhead. But like in Japanese, if you could do it, if you do it the right way, it's sort of like, wow, oh, wow, okay, cool. This person gets it. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

• 34:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  So that was profound to see because like, look, I come from a place where we spoke, it's like working class, potty mouth to the max. I grew up with that. And then I got to Tokyo and I studied or whatever, but they weren't teaching us tea ceremony Japanese at school. And I was playing music and so I was in the studio. I was in clubs, you know, I learned that like yakusa Japanese. I was that golden guy.

• 34:36Tim Ferriss?

  While you're wandering around.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, drinking with guys, guys who were like missing pinky fingers and stuff. So like, a lot of people speak Japanese. This is the danger. It's like you don't speak Japanese. That opens a lot of doors. You speak a little bit and people are like delighted that you speak a little bit. Then once you cross the threshold, they expect more of you and then you don't hit that politeness and then you're kind of insulting in a weird way.

• 34:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You know enough for them to take it personally when you don't.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, for them, for them, yeah, for them to be like, yeah, why aren't you, you could level up a little more for me, I think. So I was not, not polite, but I was definitely not in the super polite zone. So I would say in the last decade, my Japanese went up multiple, multiple levels, thanks to, again, you know, like we were talking about in, in the previous episode about having people near you that are better than you, just a couple of levels better than you. And then you learn so much from that. So when I travel with John, like, I don't say anything. I'm just listening, taking notes the whole time. You know, it's like, oh yeah, wow, you can say that. Oh shit, you can say that? Cool. Okay. Yeah, that's amazing.

• 35:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's so cool. And just to underscore the complexity of this, a lot of younger generation, native Japanese speakers have trouble with a lot of this politeness and they screw it up and they make mistakes. And you could probably give a good example, but the more polite you get, and that can take a number of forms, the longer everything gets. Right? So you would have like, I'm trying to think of a good example. I, I'm not going to be great at this because it's been a hundred years, but this also doesn't translate well to English. None of it translates well. But I remember my friend's father,

• 36:18Tim Ferriss?

  who is from New Zealand, but worked in Japan for like 15 years. He was somewhere, I want to say in the US, and these Japanese businessmen came in and they were speaking Japanese. And he very politely sort of edged into the conversation and was like, "Thank you so much for indulging me with your beautiful Japanese." Effectively, that's a bad translation, but it was like, "日本語聞かせていただいて非常に感謝しております." You know, that kind of thing.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:50Tim Ferriss?

  Which otherwise would be super, super, super short. I don't know if I fucked that up, but.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  No, and for the listeners out there, like Tim's Japanese is very, very good. Like, very, very good.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  You're doing well.

• 37:01Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. Yeah, thanks. It's been 25 years, more, 27 years. I gotta get back. You've inspired me. So, quick sidebar. In Japan, you know, like a lot of folks here are like, "What do we all look the same?" Like, an Asian person might say, because white people have sometimes trouble, or just non-Asians have trouble telling some Asians apart. But when I was in Japan, they were like, "You know who you look like?" I had two people say this to me, but different celebrities. And I was like, "No, who do I look like?" And they're like, "Harrison Ford." I'm not sure about that. But John, when you say his Japanese is very good, that makes me kind of take a step back because when we walked in Japan, I was taking notes.

• 37:43Tim Ferriss?

  And you had adopted the John playbook so well that whether it was a farmer we bumped into, or in the case, and we'll get to this, I'm sure, of a small semi-ghost town that we would walk through and the mayor would chase us down in his little utility van.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  That was insane, yeah.

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  And give us all little plush town mascots. That's another thing we could talk about. In any case, just incredibly impressed with your Japanese. And yes, you've been there a long time, but it seems to me like the vast majority of folks who live in Japan, even if they're there for a long time as non-natives, really do not learn much Japanese. That's my impression. Maybe that's unfair, but at least the vast majority of people I know who have moved there barely speak a lick.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have to commit. I do think there's a new generation. I mean, I think now we're seeing more and more people who are really great at Japanese who are coming in and just sort of existing. I mean, I think YouTube is just full of people that

• 38:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  speak amazing Japanese now and stuff like that. So I think there's this new generation. And actually, I mean, part of what this book also kind of talks about is being, I feel like I'm one of the first true immigrants to choose to not live in America, to choose to leave America, to like, look out into the world and be like, where do I want to live and have America not be that place. And I think we're seeing more of that. And I just, anecdotally, from my experience, I've been encountering more and more incredible, super talented, brilliant, great Japanese speaking foreigners here in the last like five or six years than I have certainly 15 or 20 years ago. And I think there was

• 39:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  in the 80s and 90s, the expat trope was you come here, you teach English, you make an insane amount of money doing that, and you don't really learn any Japanese besides bar Japanese. And I think that was, that was very, very common for many people.

• 39:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, my reference point might be outdated because I was there in 92, back in the Pleistocene era. And that was like peak David Spector days, right? Where it's like, if you looked exceptionally non-Japanese and spoke pretty good conversational Japanese, you ended up on television as, you know, guyjin tarento, like foreigner talent. Okay, let's get back to the walks. I took us on a huge side quest. When did, after studying at the knee of John and getting comfortable with doing these walks on your own, what form did that take? And what purpose did it serve for you?

• 40:22Speaker 00

  I was doing these and I was just having such an incredible time doing it. And I started kind of writing about it a little bit on my blog, where I tweet about it or something. And actually, Kevin Kelly reached out and he said, hey, I'm going to be giving a talk in Tokyo.

• 40:35Tim Ferriss?

  Now you know who he was.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  Now, yeah, yeah. We had walked in Pacifica a couple of times. He's like, hey, I'm giving a talk in Tokyo. I'd love to walk part of the Nakasendo. And I had done Nakasendo with John a couple of times, like bits of it. I was like, great. Great, like, let's walk it together. So me and you. And so to prepare for that, I went and walked a little chunk of it on my own. I was like, okay, this is good. I want to make sure I don't kill Kevin Kelly. And we set that up and we did that walk. And that was probably 2014, 2015. And it was so much fun that just the two of us. And we were like, oh, my God, we need to invite more people to do stuff like this. So we did. So in 2016, and then I was thinking about at this point, I was like, these walks, there's a richness here because like just the people you're meeting,

• 41:18Speaker 00

  the conversations that you're having, the photographs that I was taking, the stories I was hearing. I was like, I want to give shape to these things. They're so immaterial. Like you do the walk and it disappears. It kind of, it just goes up in the air like smoke. And I was like, I want to do a book. And so Dan Rubin is a photographer friend of mine from ages ago. And I was like, Dan, let's walk the Kumonokoto and we'll do like eight days, nine days. And we'll photograph it and then we'll hide in a farmhouse. And we'll be in the farmhouse for a week and we have to produce the entire photo book in that week. And it's like, we just have to time boxes. We're busy people. Like, we just got to do this. Cause I just wanted to, these walks just really demanded, like, give them a shape, give them a shape. This is 2016.

• 41:57Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by give them a shape?

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Give them a form, like make them immutable in some way because they were just so immaterial. And so, yeah, I was like, okay, what's like the minimum, most minimum viable shape you can give it? And it's like a photo book kind of felt like that. And so we did it. We did the walk. We hid in a farmhouse. We made the book, Kickstarter it, you know, sold it, did really well. And that activated something in me too. It reminded me of how much I love books because it had been a while since I had made a book book. And then Kevin brought over Hugh Howey, who is the author of the Silo series and the Silo Apple TV show.

• 42:32Tim Ferriss?

  Wool and all of that.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Wool, all that. So Kevin, Hugh and I then walked the Kumonokoto in the fall of 2016. And that was so much fun. And we were like, oh, my God, we got to do this with like bigger groups. So it was this really organic kind of escalation of like, okay, you know, this is an interesting thing. But at the same time, like as much as I enjoyed being with these people, I was doing these exploratory walks on my own. And I realized that there was definitely a register or a tenor of the walk that only existed when I was alone. And I wanted to explore that more. And then that is what really kicked off the big solo walks.

• 43:09Tim Ferriss?

  Let's hear about it. And maybe you could include your, a discussion of your rules of walking.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  The first, I would say, big, true walk I did was 2019. I had just launched my membership program. Basically, in 2018, I'd spent the year working on a bunch of magazine articles about walking in Japan that got rejected from every magazine and I got ghosted by editors. And I was in this really depressed kind of space. And I had been doing the writing residencies and I'd been working on a novel that I couldn't sell. Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff going on. And I was like,

• 43:42Tim Ferriss?

  A daughter who leaves her father?

• 43:48Speaker 00

  That was after I had all the bottles of Nihon shoes sitting around.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  So it was the end of 2018. I was like, what should I do? And I did Zoom calls with every journalist friend I had. And they're like, Craig, like, you have an audience. I had a newsletter that was like mildly popular. Like, you have an audience, you know what you want to write about. Like, just launch a membership program. And at that time, like, Substack was sort of nascent and like, there was this, subscriptions were kind of becoming a thing. And Memberful had launched and Patreon had launched. And like, people were kind of okay with the idea. So I launched a membership program in January 2019. And then I, it took me a little while, but within a few months, I was deriving a certain permission from the fact that people were paying me to be a walker. Essentially, that was the pitch. It was like, you don't get anything by joining this membership program.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Now you get a ton of stuff. Like, if you join the membership program now, you get like 120 hours of video. Like, like, what, like, there's so much stuff you get access to.

• 44:46Tim Ferriss?

  At that time, it was, I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk and tell you about it.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  This is the, this is like NPR. I'm gonna walk and I'm gonna write about it. And like, you're funding that. And enough people joined where it was like, okay, this is a thing. And so for my first big walk, I did Nakasendo. So, you know, I have a place, I was based in Kamakura, mainly in Kamakura then. And so I walked Kamakura up to Tokyo, Tokyo, all the way up through Saitama. Nagano into Gifu, all the way to Kyoto. And then from Kyoto, I ended up going down. I walked some other bits in the Kip Peninsula. But the main thing was the Nakasendo.

• 45:22Tim Ferriss?

  What distance are we talking? What does that add up to?

• 45:25Speaker 00

  It took 30 days and I want to say it was about 600 kilometers, something like that. It was a pretty, it was a serious walk.

• 45:32Tim Ferriss?

  Which is roughly 373 miles, just for people to put that in perspective.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  And up until then, the longest solo thing I'd done was about seven or eight days. So this felt like a pretty big jump. And it was really hard. I was doing, I miscalculated all the distances. I underestimated. By day four, I was like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? I didn't really even know how to wear my backpack properly. It was like cutting into my shoulders. I wasn't doing the waist strap. So I was wildly under experienced. I should have known better. But the days, you know, I was doing like 30, 40 K days. I was in shock. My body was in shock. And every night I was publishing a little thing. I was publishing a photo and I ran this SMS experiment. I had this thesis that people were kind of tired of email and people were tired of social media.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  And like the most intimate space on the phone was kind of your SMS messaging app. So I built a one to many SMS tool that would allow me to publish every night. To, everyone could subscribe, put their numbers into this thing and they would get an SMS from me every night at the end of the day. It'd be a photo. It'd be like a little, like three sentences about the day. And so I did that and you could respond to it, but I couldn't see the responses.

• 46:45Tim Ferriss?

  So wait, what is, if you couldn't see the responses, what happened to them?

• 46:49Speaker 00

  So, so, so, so, hold on, so, hold on. The responses were being collected in this database.

• 46:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, there we go.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  And then I hired, I hired, I hired a designer to lay it all out for me in a print on demand book. And all of the responses, my little photo of the day, my little like three sentences. And then all the responses for the day would be laid out in a book. And I had no idea how many there were. And then the idea was that at the end of the walk, I would come home and the book would be waiting for me at home. So I'd have this analog experience of like, I got home from the walk and the book was there and it was so incredible. It was thousands and thousands of these messages from people and.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Then I spent months writing essays responding to all the questions and messages that people sent in there, like in putting that up on my blog. So it was this beautiful kind of like really long, the loops for social media are so tight, right? They're seconds. You post, you get responses and like, there's something terrible about that. You don't have any time to reflect. You don't have any distance from the thing that you're doing and what the expectations are on the part of your, your audience. And so to do this thing where there was basically a month built in where I wasn't going to see these responses. And then-

• 47:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, my dog's vomiting. Give me a sec.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 48:02Tim Ferriss?

  That's a new one for the podcast.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  No.

• 48:05Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, sorry. Your dog hates SMS.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 48:11Tim Ferriss?

  Give me a second to deal with this. Never had my dog vomit while I'm recording a podcast right next to me before. That's a new one. This is the glamorous life of a podcaster, folks. All right. Give me, give me one second, man. Please don't lose your, your place. Sorry, bud. That was gross. All right.

• 48:31Tim Ferriss?

  That could be worked into the, the intro. That'll be like the cold open of the show.

• 48:37Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Where were we?

• 48:39Speaker 00

  So I got home and I got the responses and I got that book. Yeah.

• 48:42Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Then you spent months responding and then the loops. That's where it worked.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Because it was, it ended up being this thing of like, oh, wow. Actually, these social media, the tightness of the social media loops feels really detrimental. And there's something really negative and there's something being lost there and not having more time and space between-

• 48:59Tim Ferriss?

  Also very hurried, right?

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Call and response. Exactly. Exactly. And you, you felt it in the responses too, that everyone knew I wasn't going to see him in real time. So there was some really moving things and people were very, it was all anonymous and people were very, I mean, it was almost like a confession booth for some people. I mean, you know, it was, it was shocking. You know, it was like, you know, like my mother just died yesterday and I'm thinking about this as, you know, I'm reading, you know, I'm getting your message. I'm thinking about where you are on the walk and it, thank you for doing this. And it was just like these, how people want to, you know, weave what you're doing and, you know, this kind of epic thing that you, this journey that you're on and help them like put in perspective things that are happening. Anyway, it was good to see that and good to experience that. And that led me to think about my own rules for how I wanted to be when I walked.

• 49:47Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  I can.

• 49:49Tim Ferriss?

  Pregnant pause.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  I'm trying to.

• 49:53Tim Ferriss?

  We'll be back right after this commercial break.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  After, yeah, I'm just, I'm just cognizant of the fact that like, sometimes I'm just in bloviation mode, but like the, basically here are my rules. No news.

• 50:03Tim Ferriss?

  Good, good T-shirt.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Bloviation mode. So my walk rules, you can't read the news. You're not allowed to read the news. There's no social media.

• 50:12Tim Ferriss?

  And by you, that means Craig.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  That means, yeah, if you're walking or if I'm walking, I'll always talk about me in the third person. So you can't read the news. You can't do social media. You can't touch any of that stuff. Basically, the idea is to just be radically present, radically, radically present and radically cultivate like a boredom, an incredible sense of boredom and never teleport. I mean, I think one of the weirdest things about being a contemporary human is like, first of all, we're never bored because we always have this stupid black mirror slap in our pocket. Right? That's like always distracting us with some other dopamine hit. And we're constantly teleporting. If there's any millimeter of friction, if there's one millisecond of friction in your life, you just pull that stupid thing out and start sucking at the teat of whatever information, you know, cow is in there. Right?

• 50:59Speaker 00

  So it's kind of profound to feel boredom, you know? And actually, I, in 2015, 2016, I did a 10 day vipassana retreat. And that was also foundational for me for thinking about this stuff. I don't know. Have you ever done the 10 day?

• 51:18Tim Ferriss?

  I have done a seven day, not a 10 day.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  So maybe you experienced this on the seven. When did you do the seven day? How old were you?

• 51:25Tim Ferriss?

  I was, I want to say maybe, I think about this, 10 years ago, something like that. Okay.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  So yeah, yeah, I guess, geez, 2015.

• 51:33Tim Ferriss?

  Would have been late 30s.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So for me, when I went to the Vipassana in Kyoto, which was great, by the way, it was amazing. It was really well-run. Food was amazing. It was just great. It took me like three days, four days to arrive at the retreat center, like psychically. I just wasn't there. It took me about a day to realize I was, I was experiencing information withdrawal.

• 51:55Tim Ferriss?

  Or stimulation withdrawal too, right?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, stimulation, information withdrawal. And I was getting angry. And I was like, what is it? Where's this anger coming from? You're just sitting there for 10 hours a day, you know, observing your body, the physiological like phenomena that's happening in your body. And I was just observing this anger and going, wow, this is so bizarre because I don't know what's triggering this. And I realized, oh my God, I'm so addicted to information and just being stimulated by a phone or the internet or whatever. And so getting over that three, four days in, and then having all the mystical, you know, breaking down into particulate matter, which is something that I felt and could control by the end of my Vipassana retreat. It was pretty bizarre. That feeling of attention control, which is, you know, basically what you're learning when you do that, was foundational for, I think, a lot of, you know, these rules that I ended up applying to my walks.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  And so the walks end up for me being, it's weeks, it can be two, three, four, five, six weeks of walking. And what's critical is the repetition and what's critical is actually the length, doing it every day, day after day after day. And being off those tight loops of social media and being radically present, not teleporting, saying hello to everybody. I force myself to say hello to every single person I see. And with photography too, I kind of have these rules where I'm like, I have to take a portrait of someone before 10 a.m. I guess I set these really arbitrary rules. And I just find that by doing that, by setting a, not an unreasonable number of them, but like a few arbitrary rules, it really opens up the day.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  It kind of like really sets the tone. And, you know, it'd be like 9:55 in the morning. I'd be like, oh my God, I have to hit my 10 a.m. Portrait. No one's holding me to this, but like, I, you know, I just feel this covenant I've made with myself. I can't break the covenant. And I would just run into a shop, like there'd just be a shop next to me, wherever I was on the road. It'd be like a tatami shop in the middle of nowhere in Saitama. And I would just be like, hey, hi, can I please take your portrait? You know, and you would end up having this conversation, this incredible conversation, and it would fill you. What I found is it filled me with this sense of possibility and joy and fullness and.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  That just kept escalating. And I realized Nakasendo Walk was kind of the first big one, but I wasn't operating at full walk mode yet. I was operating at about 65%, 70% walk mode for that first Nakasendo. And full walk mode for me is I get up at eight, I walk 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50K a day, carry my pack. Sometimes I have two, three, four cameras on me. Sometimes I'm shooting videos. Sometimes I'm doing binaural audio stuff. I'm talking to people all day. I am dictating notes constantly. I find that when I cultivate that radical boredom, that radical sort of like in the moment-ness, my mind immediately

• 54:42Speaker 00

  just wants to write. I just, it can't not write. It's just writing about what I'm seeing. And I, so I just, I set up like these Siri scripts to be able to dictate and not really have to interact with my phone.

• 54:54Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by Siri scripts?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  So you can kind of do shortcuts in iOS now where you can sort of tap a button on your home screen and it depends to a note in Notes. It does like a transcription. So you don't have to interact with your phone. You can just like tap a button. You can set up, so it's a Siri call out you can do as well. And you just dictate and it transcribes it pretty well. I'm just walking and dictating and talking to myself like a crazy person. And I'll see someone, I'll interact with them, I'll photograph them. I'll have a 15-minute, 20-minute conversation. What was it like around here? Like, you know, what's your background? What are your kids doing? Where do they live? What's going on? You know, and just doing this all day long. I get to my inn, I get to my hotel at like 5:00 PM, 4:00, 5:00 PM, that's the ideal. Start doing laundry. Oftentimes, I'll just grab something from the convenience

• 55:40Speaker 00

  because then I'm going to write and edit photos.

• 55:43Tim Ferriss?

  Convenience store.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  Convenience store, just grab a sandwich, grab an udon. And then I'm writing every night. For four or five hours, writing and editing photos every single night. So I'm doing eight hours of walking and then I'm doing five hours of creative work every night. And I'm writing two, three, four thousand words a night. And then publishing it as well. And that, for me, that mode, that's the max of what I can do. Eight hours of walking, talking, photographing people, being radically, totally bored and present. And then at night, just living in, because you forget so quickly. If you don't write immediately, you, you really do, things just like evaporate. Just everything you experienced and felt and saw that day, the highlights, a certain conversation.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  You know, I'll be walking and there'll be a conversation I have and I'll be like, that is it. That's the hook of the essay for tonight. This one moment, this one person, this one, and it just got me. First of all, it was this epic shugyo, which is ascetic training. So like mountain asceticism here in Japan, Yamabushi is a certain kind of asceticism. And you train in the mountains and you do smoke inhalation training and you don't sleep and you, whatever. There's like sleep deprivation and all sorts of stuff and fasting and whatnot. And I had concocted essentially with these walks, my own ascetic training. And if you spend 30 days doing that physical activity every day, to that degree, your body changes. You become what I call a bobbing consciousness.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Like by day 20, 25 on the road where you're walking 20, 30, 40 K, your legs are just so powerful. And because you're not teleporting, it feels like you are a, in a VR helmet that's just floating down the road. It's totally surreal. It's totally bizarre. And then cranking out every night, an essay, two, 3,000 words, editing photos. So creating this visual narrative mix, doing that every night, 30 days. And I've done now, you know, many, many walks where I've done this for multiple weeks and months at a time. You just develop this confidence that you can do that, which is wild. I think this is how newspaper people feel, like in the olden days.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  You're in there, you got your pencil and your, the thing comes in, you got 20 minutes to write the lead, you gotta get this thing done. Like, I feel like there was a version of journalism, newspaper writing, that trained you in like the 60s, 70s, 80s, 50s, whatever, that is maybe harder to access today, because we don't kind of, maybe the newspaper room doesn't work at such an insane kind of pace anymore. I don't know, I haven't worked in a newspaper, so I'm just talking on my butt. But doing these kind of weird ascetic walk training exercises, for me, it was like going to writing bootcamp, it was going to life bootcamp. And I would finish every day on these walks, get in bed and just feel that was the fullest possible way I could have experienced that day.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Given the cards dealt to me of this day, there was no fuller version of this day. And feeling that over and over and over again, and understanding what that fullness can be like, when you come out of the walk, you bring that back to your everyday life, which you can't operate at that intensity all the time, but you can bring back that archetype of what a full day feels like. And man, that bleeds into your relationships with your friendships of fullness, you know, with my stepdaughter, you know, with my family, with people I love. It is totally pulled back into that space of life. So it's a pretty powerful thing.

• 59:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, a few things strike me. First is a recommendation for folks, if you want to see some pretty interesting mountain ascetic practice, the Marathon Monks of Mount Hie. If people want to see some fantastic photographs and also descriptions of some of these practices, and the tiny modicum of food these monks consume while they're running around in these woven sandals, it's wild. So people can check that out. Also, what I was going to say is that what you just described strikes me as almost Vipassana retreat in motion, because part of what allows your mind

• 59:49Tim Ferriss?

  To ultimately settle, right, for the snow globe to settle and for you to experience the thing you experienced is this reliable daily schedule and scaffolding.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:00:01Tim Ferriss?

  So that you are not distracted by trivial choice and shifting conditions. So similarly, when you're going on these walks and you have this schedule and you have these rules, by 10 o'clock, I must do X, it's like you're a rock climber, let's just say on an indoor route, could be outdoor, where you have the same route every day. And on the first day, you're figuring it out. Then on the second day, you get a little more comfortable. By the 10th day, your mind starts to go interesting places while you're doing it with this automaticity that you couldn't experience if it were a different route every day, so to speak. It's not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  So I guess one of my other rules for these walks too is like, everything has to be booked in advance. Whenever I leave on a walk, I have a giant spreadsheet that has all of the distances, it has all of the bookings for the ins. I know what meals are included or not included because like, I don't want to think about logistics for one second when I'm out in the field, exactly what you're saying. Some people hear that and they go, oh my God, but don't, aren't you missing out on like the romance of like, you might meet like an interesting farmer and they want to take you to their house. It's like, hey, if I meet an interesting farmer, I get his number. I live in Japan. I can just come back after the walk. We can have our, it's like, I don't, I don't need to have that in the walk. This is a different thing. That's a different thing.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  And so for me, I absolutely thrive on that pre-scheduling of it all, precisely because it gives you the freedom to be so radically present and so, I think, observant and committed to the craft of what you want to produce that day. Thinking about where you're going to stay tomorrow night is a huge cognitive burden. It's huge. Making the reservations, calculating, it's like, it sucks. It could take an hour, easily an hour. You think it's like, oh, it's a 10 minute thing. It can easily take an hour. So I spend probably, if I'm going to do a month of walking, I spend a week of making reservations to do a month of walking.

• 1:02:00Tim Ferriss?

  And just for people who are like, wait, what? A week? The way that I sometimes, this may not be fair. Tell me if this is as outdated as my perception of foreigners speaking Japanese, although I still think there are a lot of lazy non-Japanese who don't speak Japanese, but. The description I give people when they're like, I'm going to Japan and I'm going to live there. If they're visiting and they're going to stay at a nice hotel, it's a different experience. But if they're like, I'm going to move there for two months. I'm like, okay, let me just tell you that you think Japan is Blade Runner. And I'd say it's 60% Blade Runner, depending on where you are. And then it's at least 40% DMV, like the number of duplicate copies that you're going

• 1:02:44Tim Ferriss?

  to have to sign, the amount of fucking paperwork, the number of times you're going to have to try to get ahold of someone is going to shock you. So, right, a week of settling logistics. Yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  A week of settling. And a lot of it is calling people because they don't have websites or they don't take online bookings. And like, it's shocking how much trust there is. It's like, you know, you call this in, they go, hey, hello, it's the N. You know, that's kind of like what they sound like in Japanese, basically. And you go, hey, I'd like to, oh, honorable sir, I would love to book. Hey, you want to, okay, you want to stay? When are you staying? Okay, May, May 12th. Okay, okay, yeah, sure. How, wait, what are you? Okay, what do you, what? Oh, you want dinner? Okay, sure. Okay, see you May 12th. Bye. Like, that's how reservations are sometimes done. And you're like, and you arrive, you arrive on May 12th and you're like, are they, are they, was that really a reservation?

• 1:03:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I had this experience firsthand with you. So you and Kevin and I in a small group did a walk in Japan. And so you'd show up and you'd be like, are they here? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. We'll find out.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  We'll find out.

• 1:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  And it's not like if they're not there, you just walk four doors down and you have

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 1:04:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's not how it works.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  The experience of booking is probably what it was like booking in the 1950s. Like, honestly, like that hasn't changed much. Japan is Blade Runner is what we imagine the future would be in 2000. And then it just never evolved beyond that, basically. It's been stuck. It's been stuck in 2000 for the last 25 years.

• 1:04:19Tim Ferriss?

  So question for you.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:04:21Tim Ferriss?

  2021 is what I have written down here. You had an essay, a piece come out in Wired magazine, walking across Japan, disconnected and bored. I remember reading this piece. And you did certain things. You imposed certain restrictions, say, on digital distractions to induce productive boredom. I'm wondering if you could maybe describe briefly what you did then and what you do now.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  That Wired essay kind of is exactly what we've been talking about. Just the no social media, no distraction, no podcasts, no music even.

• 1:04:57Tim Ferriss?

  Basic flip phone, right? You downgraded to the basic flip phone and an offline Kindle? Am I getting those right?

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  I didn't downgrade to a flip phone, but I ran software on my iPhone that disabled everything. It disabled like, because I needed GPS. I needed a map. I needed to have a map. So I needed, I mean, I didn't need GPS, but I could have gone even more analog. But I had GPS. I ran the software called Freedom, which is actually pretty good. Freedom.to is the website. I've used that for a while to like, basically break my devices to make them more.

• 1:05:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, my friend and also fellow writer Neil Strauss uses it all the time.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. I would say a lot of what I've accomplished as a writer is thanks to Freedom, turning off the internet at night and keeping it off until after lunch. So yeah, that Wired article is a good, if you're listening and you're like, oh, I just kind of want to read, give me the 3,000 word distillation of all this. Like, that's a good place to go. And I remember when that came out and you mentioned it, I think, on your podcast. And you said you'd printed it out and put it up on your, like, part of it on your wall. I think you'd like, printed out a quote. Yeah, I was like, I was very moved to hear that. And also, I got so many freaking emails from people who were like, oh, Tim Ferriss printed out your article, man. I was like, oh, cool. I was like, that's good to know.

• 1:06:14Tim Ferriss?

  I still print, maybe in part Japanese.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  You fax, I'm surprised, I'll fax you the next one.

• 1:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they do love. I mean, is faxing still a thing in Japan? It is. It's gotta be.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Tim Ferriss?

  Must be.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  That Wired article came out of that Nakasendo walk as well. There was just a few things that came out of the Nakasendo walk. And then also, so, okay, let me explain what the Nakasendo is too. In the Edo period, you had the shogunate take over and to consolidate a certain amount of wealth and power, they enacted this thing called San-Kin-Ko-Tai, where the daimyo, the rulers, the local rulers, had to basically keep residents in Edo, which is what Tokyo used to be called. And they commuted to Edo. Every year, they had to do like a commutation. And so they had to build roads. They had to build infrastructure for all these daimyo, which sometimes, you know, for the bigger prefectures, the band of people would be 2,000 people long. That would be traveling with the daimyo to go to Edo.

• 1:07:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hell of an entourage.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  It's a big entourage. They had, you know, it's like turtle, just imagine turtle, like 2,000 turtles, you know, and that character from the show. No one remembers turtle.

• 1:07:22Tim Ferriss?

  I have no idea what you're talking about.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Tim Ferriss?

  You got me thinking about 2,000 turtles, though.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  We should never think about turtle. So, so they built.

• 1:07:30Tim Ferriss?

  Turtles from the show. I was thinking actual turtles with shells. I was like, I don't know where this is going, but I'm in, I'm in for the ride. Okay, got it. Yes, turtle.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  Part of the entourage. And so they built infrastructure in Nakasendo and the Tokaido were the two main arteries of essentially the commute. It was like the 101 of Edo period Japan. And so the Nakasendo kind of goes north. It's more mountainous. It has fewer river crossings. And so people liked it, even though it was more arduous in the mountains. People don't like river crossings. And in the Edo period, essentially, you weren't really allowed to build bridges in order to protect domains from attacks. So all of the river crossings kind of had to be on people's shoulders or ferry to cross. It was kind of a pain in the butt to cross rivers. And the Tokaido, which if you've come to Japan, you've ridden the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto, you may have ridden the Tokaido Shinkansen.

• 1:08:21Tim Ferriss?

  The bullet train?

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  The bullet train follows the old Tokaido route roughly, which was Kyoto to Tokyo, kind of along the coast. And that has many river crossings. And so people would not love that, for example. And even on the Tokaido, there's like kind of detours. They're called the Himekaido, which was like a detour to avoid this one river crossing. It's called the Princess Route because women didn't want to ride on the shoulders of strange porters or something. I don't, there's all sorts of different things why people chose Nakasendo. Or they'd go on Nakasendo and they'd come back on the Tokaido just to mix it up, just to have some fun in the 1600s. And so the Nakasendo is the northern mountainous route. And that's the one I walked in 2019. I've since done the Tokaido twice. So I'm walking the Nakasendo. I'm going up into these mountain villages.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  What I'm witnessing is depopulation firsthand. So there's two buzzwords you hear in Japanese. Shoshikamondei, which is childbirth problem. There's just like no children being birthed. I think Japan's at 1.2 now is the per woman sort of number of children being produced. Korea, Gideon Lewis Cross just wrote this amazing article about Korea's situation, which I think is 0.7 or 0.6.

• 1:09:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, not a great situation.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  They just hate kids there. Anyway, so Japan's not quite that bad.

• 1:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  I could explain more related to that. I don't know how much of a digression we want to take, but there are actually a bunch of structural problems that helped to produce that in South Korea. But we'll come back to it. For instance, I'll give one example that doesn't get talked about very briefly, very briefly, is that rent is very, very expensive. A lot of people move to, say, Seoul. And in Seoul, to upgrade to a larger apartment, you would often have to put down like a six to 12 month security deposit. And people can't afford to do it. So a lot of the reasons for fewer kids relate to some of these, I don't want to say intractable, but systematized economic hurdles that people just can't clear.

• 1:10:24Tim Ferriss?

  Anyway, please continue.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  Hey, man, my homestay, there was one kid living in a closet. The other kid slept between his parents. Like you could do it in a tiny room.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Just make the babies. So you have shoshika monde, right? Which you hear this a lot, but you don't experience it in Tokyo because Tokyo is growing. And there's actually a lot of kids in Tokyo and it feels very vibrant. Tokyo is growing pretty steadily. And then the other one is koreka shakai, which is the elderly society. So like basically aging aging population. And you know, you hear these words bandied about all the time, but you don't feel them until you really walk the countryside. So the Nakasen was the first time I felt that like palpably, viscerally every day. And I would walk through these villages that were essentially disappearing. And there were two things left in all these villages. And it would be a barber shop that was like very bizarre. And I actually, I, up until last year, I'd been shaving my head for five years.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  And so part of the reason why I was shaving my head was because you get your head shaved anywhere and it's like pretty easy and fast. And so I would start going to these barber shops in the middle of nowhere to get my head shaved because it was just like they were there. And then the other thing that's around is kisaten. So these are the old style, basically Shoah era. We were talking about Ozu, his films kind of embody the Shoah era. And if you want to see what Shoah looks like.

• 1:11:40Tim Ferriss?

  1926 to 1989.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  26 to 89. And Shoah is the post-war Japan, the mid-century Japan. It's mid-century modern architecture and like design. And kisaten were one of the many sort of local mom and pop things that kind of grew out of this post-war economy. And people who didn't want to join the workforce, didn't want to be a salary man or salary woman. They opened kisaten, which are little cafes. And they became de facto community hubs in a lot of these villages. And they're one of the few things that are left. So I hadn't planned to go to kisaten every day, but it turned out nothing was left for me to go have lunch at. So I'd be walking and like basically the one bit of logistics was I had to figure out where I was going to have lunch. And I realized by like day 10, every day I was going to a kisaten and every day I

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  was eating pizza toast. Like, I was just like, oh, wow, I've had a lot of pizza toast on this walk. Like this walk is kind of fueled by pizza toast.

• 1:12:36Tim Ferriss?

  And that's toast with some tomato sauce and cheese on it?

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  Basically, yeah. So like the food that Kisa Ten serve is again a post-war construction. Like people didn't have money. Japan was extremely impoverished post-war. Again, watch Ozu, you can kind of see some of that in action. And so Kisa Ten would open and it'd be like, well, what is the minimum viable food products that we can make? Essentially, two things came out of it. One is toast and pizza toast. If you have a toaster oven, you can make pizza toast with like Kraft cheese, cheese singles, spaghetti sauce out of a can. Maybe you get some peppers you cut up and some onions and that's it. That's your pizza toast. Maybe like a salami, like a cheap salami from the shop. And then the other thing is Napolitan spaghetti, which is just basically spaghetti with ketchup.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  Spaghetti with ketchup and pizza toast fed a big chunk of Japan in like the 50s, 60s and 70s. So I was eating pizza toast all the time and I was like, this is really fascinating and kind of amazing. And it's interesting because like, we might make pizza toast in America, but like a shop would never think of serving pizza toast because it's too weird. So I became obsessed with that. And then that grew into an article, which then grew into my book that I launched during COVID in 2020 called Kisa by Kisa.

• 1:13:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's right. 15 feet behind me.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  And that title is a reference to Bird by Bird, which I think you've talked about before as a book.

• 1:14:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Anne Lamott, of course, Bird by Bird.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that.

• 1:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's also, actually, now that I think about it, literally, Bird by Bird is probably two bookshelves above your book and I never put it together, right back there.

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  That is 100% homage to Anne. And so, yeah, Kisa by Kisa, which was basically me riffing on pizza toast and these cafes along this walk and producing a book. COVID had hit. COVID hit. It was April 2020. And I was like, okay, well, all this travel I'd planned on doing, I'm not going to do. And it was actually a big relief. I'd been doing too much traveling internationally. I'd been teaching at Yale. Every summer I'd been teaching at the Yale Publishing Course. I'd been sort of giving the keynote lecture about books and digital publishing and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I'd run out of stuff to say anyway. And so I was like, okay, let's produce.

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  A really beautiful book based on this walk. Kind of again, like the Dan Rubin book that we made was like one version of it, one degree of it. And then that one off print on demand SMS book was another kind of like, oh wow, this is really cool. And then this was going to be like, okay, what if we took all of that and really did the apotheosis of like a beautiful walk? Book with photos and the narrative. And I made this book and I priced a hundred dollars a copy. I launched it in August 2020 and I was like, okay, based on my publishing history, I know how these things sell. I'm going to make a thousand copies and I'll be lucky if we sell out of that print run in like a year or two. I was like, it's an expensive book.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  It's a weird subject, like no one's going to really be into this. I launch it, we sell a thousand copies in like 36 hours.

• 1:15:48Tim Ferriss?

  So what happened? Why did that happen?

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  I had underestimated the audience I had built up, I guess. And people were just excited about these walks and what I was doing and they wanted, they were just psyched about it. It was like very weird.

• 1:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe not weird if you think about the timing also, right?

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  I think the timing was really good. And what I did that was really smart. I'd been running the membership program by that point for 18 months. And I was like, okay, I want to do this book and I want to have it be expensive, but I want to offer a big discount to members. So if you're a yearly member, you're paying a hundred dollars a year to be a member. This is like the first real perk I'd ever offered members. And it was like, kind of like a thank you and treating the membership payments almost as like a investment to like, allow me to do these things and then I want to give a little bit of that investment back to you. Pay a little dividend. And so I set up a thing, I looked at Kickstarter and I was like Kickstarter hadn't really changed in like 10 years. And I was like, why am I going to give these guys like such a high percentage? You couldn't do coupons. I wanted to offer coupons and Kickstarter didn't have like coupon functionality.

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  And so I looked at Shopify and I have my engineering background. I know how to program and you know, enough to get me in trouble. And I was like, well, you know, Shopify is actually amazing and you can modify the templates. And so I cloned Kickstarter and I called it Craigstarter and I basically added.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  It's on GitHub. You can clone it if you want and like start your own Craigstarter. But like, I wanted to own the whole stack of software. And like, it's weird with Kickstarter, like you get all these purchases and then to get the addresses into the shipping software, it's like different software. It's kind of dumb. Everything's all over the place. So Shopify, everything is just right there. And I was like, this makes sense. So I made Craigstarter and I made some promises. I was like, oh, if we, you know, if we sell, if we do 300 copies, I'll sign them all. If we do 500, I'll include postcards. If we do 800, then I will make a documentary about pizza toast. So I was like, I'm never gonna have to make this documentary. And we sold 1,000 immediately. And I was just like, oh shit, all right, I gotta make this documentary. But what the

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  real, I think, sort of piece de resistance that I figured out by accident, was by offering the discount. It was like a $40 or $50 discount off the 100 bucks if you were a yearly member. The conversion rate I got of people buying the book. So basically, you'd land on the page, you'd be like, oh yeah, I want this book. It's 100 bucks. Sure. Plus, by the way, like $30 in shipping, because we were doing DHL and yada, yada, yada. And it was expensive to ship. It's still expensive to ship. So it was 130 bucks. So it's like, you could do that, or you could pay another $100 to become my member, join the membership program, get a discount on the book, then buy the book. So basically, it was like you could spend $130, or you could spend $200 and get the membership. And the conversion rate of people who did the membership was like 30%

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  of everyone who bought it.

• 1:18:33Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  Which is insane. Insane.

• 1:18:36Tim Ferriss?

  That's wild.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  And I was like, okay, we just unlocked something special.

• 1:18:39Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great, great experiment.

• 1:18:41Speaker 00

  That for me was this like lightbulb moment of, okay, this is what I'm doing for the next 20 years. Got it. I want to make these books. I want to do these walks. There's an audience here. There's like a product market fit, to use that terrible expression.

• 1:18:57Speaker 00

  But

• 1:18:58Tim Ferriss?

  PMF. Somebody just texted me yesterday. I was like, what the fuck is PMF? The product market fit. I was like, oh yeah, I know the full word version.

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So that was this really like, whoa, okay, this is interesting and special. And like, look, I'm operating at my scale, my scale, you know, whatever. You have people on here selling 400 trillion books and stuff like that. I love my scale because it's sustainable. It gives me total creative freedom.

• 1:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  Talk to that, right? Because Noah Kagan is a friend of mine, considers scale to be almost a four-letter word. Yeah. Because people become intoxicated and make bad decisions chasing,

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:19:36Tim Ferriss?

  in some cases, a false idol or worshiping a false idol. So maybe you could speak to that. And I'm going to offer an on-ramp in the form of something of yours that I printed yet again.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 1:19:50Tim Ferriss?

  And what I printed, people can find this at craigmod.com/essays/membership rules. So these are your membership community rules, which are of great interest to me because I currently have, really for the first time, an active community, or certainly the first time in a decade, an active community of test readers for the new book that I'm working on. And we have about 100, which is the right scale, like 85 to 100, I'd say. Started off with super, super high engagement, like 90% posting.

• 1:20:31Tim Ferriss?

  And then it became more manageable, at least for me, since I'm consuming and digesting and synthesizing the feedback. Probably at a nice kind of 35% in terms of lurkers to active posters. But here, I'm gonna not touch everything, but I'm gonna run through real quickly here. So here are some of the rules. One, have clear creative goals. Mine are make books and educate. Number two, staple those goals to your walls, your mirror, your forehead. If you ever have a decision to make, ask yourself, does it help me achieve these goals? Number three, all membership activities are in support of these goals. Four, the program exists for the goals, not the members. I'm gonna say that again. The program exists for the goals, not the members. Number five, equally important.

• 1:21:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's my wording. That may sound cold, but if you frame it properly, the members understand and enthusiastically support this. Six, fundamentally, you're building a community. Seven, but your goal is not to manage a community. And then there are a number of bullets under that. Eight, by the way, deadlines are not only your friends, they're the only way work gets done. So obsessive irrational adherence to deadlines in work is non-negotiable. Number nine, and there are a number of bullets underneath this. I won't necessarily get into all of them, but you can certainly elaborate. Don't let the shape of membership software determine the shape of your activities slash work. Ten, make strict decisions, but be willing to change your mind. And then a parenthetical, I renamed my membership program 18 months into it, and I'm glad I did. As an example.

• 1:22:01Tim Ferriss?

  Eleven, and finally, know your scale. This is why I wanted to bring this in. So know your scale, then there's a link to that. Or I should say a link under those three words, know your scale. What scale do you want to work at? What scale makes you happy? Use that knowledge to drive membership decisions. All right. Take it away, Craig. Scale.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think a lot of people are, to use the word again, insourced by this like idea of mega scale. They're just like, you know, I remember in the, in the late 2000s. I did not have a great impression of Facebook. I was very early of not being like, oh, I think this is a great thing. I did not love it. I was sad seeing so many talented designers go to Facebook in like 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, who were previously, up until that point, doing incredible independent work and doing kind of like, almost what you could say are projects and things like that. And they went to Facebook and a lot of them were saying things like, well, how else can I affect 100 million people? Or, you know, same with people going to Google and saying that too. In tech.

• 1:23:07Speaker 00

  This is a very common trope, you know, like I want to have this impact on like hundreds of millions of people. This is the only way to do it. And I think, okay, yeah, sure. And then you kind of go to these places and you realize in the end that like you're a very, very tiny cog and the amount of change that you can affect on these things is quite small. It's like you're a worker on the Titanic in a certain degree and you're going to hit an iceberg, whether you're causing genocide in Myanmar or something that like you just don't see coming. And so I think it's kind of like a false narrative to be like, oh yeah, the only way to have a real effect in the world is to like be operating at this crazy mass scale. And I had a little bit of that working at Flipboard. I mean, part of like going there and working with those guys was to both give myself confidence that I could

• 1:23:48Speaker 00

  hang with top tier people and be surrounded by great, incredible, loving, generous, talented folks, but also to touch that scale a little bit, like that app had a huge scale, you know, and we launched, I remember we launched the iPhone version of it and I just felt nothing. I'd been very attuned to like, does my heart move or not? And I remember launching that and just being like, that was cool to work on, but like I felt absolutely nothing seeing like user feedback come in or whatever. Whereas at the same time, by that point, I had made many books that had sold thousands of copies as opposed to millions or hundreds of millions or whatever data points that we were hitting with Flipboard. And those hundreds of readers, thousands of readers to me felt so good. I just felt drawn in that direction. And I

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  remember the first time I told someone at a party, I was like 23 and I was at a party and they're like, what do you do? And I was like, I work on books, like I run a little publishing company. And I remember being so happy I said I could say that. And something felt so right about that. Right from the very first, I remember exactly where I was standing. I could picture it. I kind of know, I can almost remember what apartment block I was in. Like, anyway, it was this real moment of like, okay, this is something to follow. This feeling is something special and we need to protect this. So for me, scale, I had spent my twenties working on my art projects, doing independent publishing. And for me, that was a scale that really resonated with my heart and made me feel good. And I knew there was a way to do it sustainably, in part because of the cost of living thing

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  that we talked about happening in Japan. And so when Kisa by Kisa hit like that and we're going back to print next week and we're doing like the sixth edition. So we sold like 6,000 copies of this thing. So it's like $600,000 in book sales.

• 1:25:30Tim Ferriss?

  Also, non-trivial number. Not to invoke the Kraken of scale, which is not what I'm doing, but like that is not a trivial number of books. Like my initial print run for my Random House book, my very first book, which was intended to have national distribution, was 10,000 copies, right?

• 1:25:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:48Tim Ferriss?

  And did not sell all of those immediately. 6,000 copies is enough in a soft week to put you on a lot of national bestseller lists, depending on the category you end up in. Like, that's a real number of books.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Also, this is an art book. It sells for 100 bucks.

• 1:26:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  You don't sell this many books normally. You talk to publishers like Mac Press in the UK is doing some of the most beautiful photo books around and their print runs will max out at 1,000. You know, they'll do runs of 500. So the fact that this book sold 6,000 is just bananas and continues to sell. And you know, that's why we're kind of going to print again. It just moved me. And for me, that is like such a beautiful scale. It's totally uncompromising. I can do exactly the kind of book I want to do. I'm lucky enough to have incredible editor friends. I'm getting editorial feedback at the highest level I would get with anyone else. And I have enough design experience and I'm connected with incredible designers like Gray 318, John Gray, who's done all those 80 Smiths covers. Like, I can just call John and be like, hey, can we go over, like, I'm working

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  on this cover for my book. Can you give me some feedback? And John hops on a Zoom call with me. So I'm very, very lucky. I'm able to be totally uncompromising about this stuff, which is why the Random House relationship is really exciting for me, too, because it's kind of stepping outside my comfort zone of scale and it's moving up to this different, different level for the book that's coming out in May.

• 1:27:12Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you decide to do that?

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  And was there anything interesting or of note in terms of deal structure or how you thought about approaching it?

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  There was.

• 1:27:22Tim Ferriss?

  Because you're sort of like the MacGyver who's done every job, right? So you're coming into it with a much broader awareness of how all the different pieces move and how you can move them. It's a different situation.

• 1:27:34Speaker 00

  And I have a, you know, a relationship with a printer. I have a distribution network set up. I have my Shopify things set up.

• 1:27:39Tim Ferriss?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:27:39Speaker 00

  So I'm all set. So, but this book, Things Become Other Things, the story of it, about Brian, essentially me doing this 300 mile walk around the peninsula during the peak of COVID and walking through this depopulated peninsula, very spiritual and kind of reflecting on my childhood and reflecting on this friendship. There was a kind of political element, very subtle. It's a very sly political element, but commentary on the state of America. Again, like who's being supported? Why are people being supported? Why are some people not being supported? Why are certain towns supported more than other towns? And then reflecting that through the lens of my experience in Japan, which is like the foundational societal baseline is so much higher.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  Like the, the social safety net is so high here relative to what I experienced growing up in America. Those themes to me feel like they warranted potentially a larger scale than I could bring on my own.

• 1:28:35Tim Ferriss?

  So let me reframe that for a second, just for people who are like, oh, the P word, politics. I'm out. Where's the parachute? Is it fair to say it's more of a societal commentary?

• 1:28:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:28:49Tim Ferriss?

  Than a political diatribe, right? It's not a left versus right, right versus left. It's more of a societal commentary, right? Cultural commentary.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  It exists between the lines. There's nothing didactic about it at all. I'm telling a story of friendship with this kid, Brian, who I dearly loved. We were best friends all through elementary school. We graduate and he's murdered. It's reflecting on that, basically the first 18 years of our life. And in reflecting on that, it's invariable that.

• 1:29:20Speaker 00

  Certain commentary about society just comes, is just embedded in that reflection, embedded in that story. And it's not didactic. There's absolutely nothing didactic about it. And it's all, the whole time I'm talking with all these, you know, farmers and fishermen and port people and people working at the inns. And, you know, there's this incredible colorful cast of characters of the peninsula of Japan that you will never be able to meet in any other context unless you've lived here kind of as long as I have and you've started to do these walks and things like that. So it's both, you get this adventure in Japan and then alongside that adventure is this story of friendship. But I just thought that story of friendship, because it was, there was kind of a universality to it that was more than just like, hey, man,

• 1:30:02Speaker 00

  pizza toasts and wacky mid-century cafes. I thought, let me try to pitch this to some publishers and some agents in New York and see if anyone's interested. Everyone rejected me.

• 1:30:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to push it that for a second. So why see if people are interested? Is it to reach more people with a lower entry point? Because it's a story that maybe has broader appeal than the kisa by kisa. Why explore the traditional route, so to speak?

• 1:30:33Speaker 00

  First of all, it's meant to honor both, I think, like the people of this peninsula. And I think they are really amazing and they deserve kind of a big platform. And then also to honor Brian and this friendship and his memory. And I almost felt like for Brian, this story should be given every opportunity to hit the scale that it wants to hit. You finish a book and it's out of your hands. And I was kind of willing to say like, well, let's go explore where this book could possibly go. And I love talking about the themes of it. Just the reality of the world is that there's a status connected with having a big publisher behind you, that publishing something independently, you'll never accrue. And it's not because like, oh, like that makes me feel good.

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  But it's like, oh, to do like an NPR show, if you want to be on Terry Gross.

• 1:31:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's true. It's true.

• 1:31:21Speaker 00

  You know, if you want to do something like that, you need Penguin, you need Random House behind you, unfortunately, you know? And I just felt like this may be one of the only stories I ever tell, you know, I have my next five books I'm in the middle of writing and they're like, they're definitely weirder.

• 1:31:33Tim Ferriss?

  Your next five books?

• 1:31:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:36Tim Ferriss?

  Good Lord, Craig. All right. Well, that's, I guess that's what you can do if you can write 4,000 words a day. For fuck's sake, Craig, I need to eat whatever you're having for breakfast.

• 1:31:45Speaker 00

  Natto kimchi.

• 1:31:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my microbiome. Oh, my. Yes.

• 1:31:50Speaker 00

  I had a MRSA infection last year and I was on a heavy antibiotics.

• 1:31:55Tim Ferriss?

  Nasty.

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was pretty nasty and I blasted myself in the antibiotics and that got me on this mega natto kimchi gohan kick and I freaking love it. My body just craves it now. No, so I just thought, look, I'm talking with Kevin Kelly and he's like, Craig, just try new things. Just bitch it to these people. Like, give it a go. You know, he's like, why not?

• 1:32:14Tim Ferriss?

  Why not?

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  Might be a fun adventure. So I went out and I pitched to a bunch of agents because you're supposed to have an agent before you go to the publishers and blah, blah, blah. And everyone rejected me.

• 1:32:23Tim Ferriss?

  This is shocking to me, Craig, because you are a very good writer. You had a number of things go viral, do very well, online with reputable outlets. You can point to your self publishing track record with these, I don't want to say obscenely expensive, but by traditional bookstore, let's just say trade paperback hardcover standards, very expensive books. Did anyone give you a plausible reason for saying no?

• 1:32:52Speaker 00

  Most of it was like, hey, you're interesting, but I don't think we can sell this book. That's kind of.

• 1:32:59Tim Ferriss?

  How many followers do you have on TikTok, though?

• 1:33:03Speaker 00

  I know. So in the end, it was this weird thing. One of my members, actually of the membership program, runs a podcast at Penguin Random House. And he was like, hey, look, I love your work. I think Andy Ward, who's the publisher of Random House, he's the editor of George Saunders, who I, if I'm listing my favorite authors, George's top five. Human being and author, just incredible, incredible person, just amazing.

• 1:33:32Speaker 00

  And Andy Ward, my friend Matt goes, hey, look, you gotta meet Andy Ward. You just pitched this thing to Andy Ward. And I was like, okay. And I was gonna be in New York for something. And Andy was like, hey, I'd love to meet you. Let's meet up. I went to Andy Ward's office, Penguin Random House. It's me, Andy Ward and the vice president. Andy's like the president of Random House, right? And we have like the most high energy, mind meld. I bring Kisa by Kisa. I'm like, look, I sold thousands of copies of this thing. I got this next book and it's this walk and blah, blah, blah. And Brian and yada, yada, and all this stuff. And he's like, this sounds amazing. Great. Send it over. Let's make this work. And four months go by, crickets. And like, this is just what happened with everyone else too. Like everyone just ghosted me.

• 1:34:15Speaker 00

  And I was like, I was in a really dark place. I was just like, what? Yeah. Like, what am I supposed to do? I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I'm like coming at this really vulnerably. And I, you know, I've gotten 30 rejections or whatever for this thing. And so I go, okay, I'm gonna do it on my own. I'm gonna do it on my own. Like I've done everything else, blah, blah, blah. I queue up printer time. I'm like buying paper and I get this email and it's from Andy. And he goes, hey, yeah, we want the book. This is like, you know, four weeks later, like zero feedback or anything. So I hop on a call with Molly, who ends up being the editor, my editor. And she's just like, I love the book. She's saying all the right things. She just totally gets it.

• 1:34:56Speaker 00

  And I go, look, I just booked printer time and I'm gonna be producing my fine art edition of this in November. This was July. I said, I'm gonna go do this. I would love to produce an edition with you guys. Like, can you get me an offer in the next like two days? And she's like, okay, we'll get back to you in two days. So two days later, a call with Molly and Andy, and they're like, can we pay you not to do your version of the book? I was like, look, I don't think these are gonna compete. The fine art edition is gonna be a hundred dollars. Like, it's just not gonna compete. We're gonna re-edit it for you and blah, blah, blah, blah. I felt so broken by the process and all of this rejection.

• 1:35:35Speaker 00

  I was just like, if I don't protect my fiercely independent capabilities of doing the work I wanna do, then I don't wanna be in this position where I'm that vulnerable. I'm that exposed. I was like, look, I'm just gonna do my addition. Like, don't worry about it. And I was able to stand my ground and. We were able to come up with a contract, I think it's one of the first contracts in Random House history where it was written into the contract. Like, I got fine art rights to the book, and there's a price minimum that I'm not allowed to sell under of my edition. It's capped how many I can produce, but after we sell a certain number of the Random House, I can produce more and yada, yada, all this stuff. So that felt really good to keep that.

• 1:36:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it must feel fantastic. It's like a psychoemotional insurance policy.

• 1:36:21Speaker 00

  Well, it was funny, listening to Brandon Sanderson talk about like getting the leather bound, you know, rights back for his books. It was sort of like, oh, that was interesting. But this was like from the get-go. It's like, okay, I'm gonna do this edition. And so I published it. I kind of like, talking about this makes it all really complicated. But I published my edition 16, 17 months ago. And what was great about that, it was sort of like getting, you're talking about your test readers. I basically produced 2,000 copies and we sold all of those. And so in doing that, I got amazing feedback and amazing emotional letters and responses from people. But because I had done that, it freed me as a writer. It was this crazy

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  thing psychologically. And when I went back to do my revisions for Random House, and Molly basically took my manuscript that I had published, and she just peppered it with questions. She put like 800 questions in the manuscript. And I loved them. They were amazing questions. And I was so hungry. Because I had done my edition uncompromisingly, it felt like the weight was off my shoulders. I could relax and like, let's go for it. And the thing that came out, I doubled the length of the manuscript by simply responding to Molly's questions. And it unlocked all of these layers of the story that I had wanted to get to, but I didn't really know how to. And I was nervous and I was kind of like uptight about it. And so this Random House edition to me, like this relationship has been really, really

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  good. It got me to a place I couldn't have got to on my own, which is always what I'm looking for in working relationships and editorial relationships. It's like when I published with the New York Times, or I published with the Atlantic or whatever, it's like, it's always about that editorial back and forth. Here's an essay, how do we make it even better? And so this book, I can say, this Random House edition, I am so proud of. And it taps into this emotional vein I couldn't get to on my own. And I love the fact that it's gonna be like 22 bucks or whatever. It's like you can preorder it now on Amazon or Bookshop. And it's like, I think $28 for the hardcover or whatever. Like, that's also a price point I've never operated at before. So that's exciting.

• 1:38:23Tim Ferriss?

  Super exciting.

• 1:38:24Speaker 00

  Super exciting.

• 1:38:25Tim Ferriss?

  It's super exciting. Things become other things. Craig's writing is amazing. Everybody, go get the book. You'll be glad you did. And I want to hop to a few other things. You're a wild and strange celebrity in Japan around promoting mid-sized cities. How did this start? And what the hell is going on? Because I remember reaching out to you not too long ago. We were like, yeah, I'm really busy because I'm doing like 12 TV shows and doing this and doing that. Then I'm like, what? What are you doing?

• 1:38:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:59Tim Ferriss?

  And this was the explanation. So what's the backstory? How did it start? And what is it now?

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  This is another reason why I love independence and I love operating at my scale and doing the weird things and following basically funding quirks. You know, it's like the membership program funds my quirks. And so I was doing all these walks and I would take trains to kind of like go to the start of the walk or whatever. And like, there were all these cities I'd pass through. The Shinkansen would stop at, no one would get off at. And I always thought like, what is this city? And so in 2021, I decided to go on a 10-city tour of mid-sized cities that no one ever goes to across Japan. I went to Hakkodate. I mean, these are like, people go to these cities a little bit. We call them the B-side of Japan.

• 1:39:43Speaker 00

  So I went to Hakkodate, Moriyoka, Sakata, Matsumoto, Suruga, Onomichi, Yamaguchi, Karatsu, Kagoshima, and Matsuyama. That was the 10 that I went to. And my thesis was, I would go to these cities, do three nights, four days in each city, and I would force myself to try to walk 50 kilometers inside of the city limits. My thesis was that if I tried to walk 50 kilometers, I was not only going to like touch most of the city. And in just doing that, having that weird rule of walking 50 kilometers, I was going to meet a bunch of people. It was going to be an adventure. And so I did that. I had an amazing time. The tour was called Tiny Barber Post Office. That's what we named it for some reason.

• 1:40:27Speaker 00

  That was like, fine, that was what it was called. And I name all of my tours strange tour names. And it was incredible, incredible. That was in November, December 2021. And then I was writing stuff for the New York Times. I do an article every now and then. And in the fall of 2022, my travel editors reached out to me. And as they reached out to hundreds of people a year and they say, hey, we're doing our 52. Places to visit this year and we want you to recommend somewhere. And I had done that 10 city tour and one of the cities that really moved me because the people were incredible, the coffee was great, there was a sense of independence, there was a vibrancy, the cityscape was beautiful, the history was interesting, it was an old castle town that

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  had a beautiful park, two rivers connecting, a beautiful mountain in this, I was like, this is just a great city. And I was like, and literally in 23 years of living in Japan, not one person has ever told me to go to the city. So I'm gonna effusively go to bat for the city to the New York Times. So I wrote my little pitch to the Times people and they're like, oh, that sounds great. And timing wise, Japan had basically been under lockdown for COVID still, and it was just coming out at the end of 2022. And so this list comes out in January 2023. And so they don't tell you where they're gonna put these places. And I knew that it had gotten in.

• 1:41:46Tim Ferriss?

  Which city was it that you'd recommended?

• 1:41:47Speaker 00

  It was Morioka, which is up in Tohoku, it's up in the north, it's in Iwate prefecture. If you go north on the Shinkansen, you go to Sendai, you go to like Fukushima, Sendai, and then everyone gets off. No one keeps going. Morioka is kind of like the next stop on the Shinkansen. So Morioka, I knew it was gonna be in there. I had revised my pitch. You write a little 300 word article. And in January, the list comes out. Number one is London and number two is Morioka. And Japan went bananas. They were just like, what is happening? Who

• 1:42:28Speaker 00

  put London and then Morioka? Like, what? How?

• 1:42:35Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, what would the equivalent be? It would be like,

• 1:42:37Speaker 00

  I mean,

• 1:42:38Tim Ferriss?

  It would be like Paris and then, I mean, not Flint, Michigan necessarily, not, I'm not throwing shade on Flint, Michigan, but I'm just imagining the response to, you know, a parallel universe. It would be shocking, right? For this place that. Everyone skips in Japan to end up number two.

• 1:42:54Speaker 00

  It's a little bit like Asheville, North Carolina to a certain degree.

• 1:42:58Tim Ferriss?

  But There we go.

• 1:42:58Speaker 00

  The difference is, is that Asheville people like have pride in Asheville and they're like super psyched about Asheville and they'd be like, yeah, yeah, number two after Paris. That makes sense. Japanese people, you know, aren't like, oh dude, our city's awesome. Like actually, that's one of the things that these mid-sized cities kind of have to overcome. They can be great places, but they're really bad at self-promoting. And they feel like, oh, you know, like maybe we aren't that great or like, you know, yeah, we're a cool city, but like, we shouldn't be number two, not after London. That doesn't make sense. So it was this perfect storm of, of so many things happening. And then word got out to Japanese media that I spoke Japanese. And then that was the end of things, like

• 1:43:35Tim Ferriss?

  The unlock.

• 1:43:37Speaker 00

  This tidal wave of

• 1:43:40Tim Ferriss?

  Pandora's box.

• 1:43:41Speaker 00

  Holy crap.

• 1:43:41Tim Ferriss?

  Stage left.

• 1:43:42Speaker 00

  Every single TV show, newspaper, magazine, radio show. I did 40 or 50 TV shows and radio shows in like three months. And so it was weird because you might be like, oh my God, this is my dream. Like I'm on media in Japan, like, oh, I'm a famous like on the TV now. And like, I had no desire to do this at all. And so the reason why I said yes to everything was I felt so bad for putting the spotlight on this place. And I felt like such a sense of duty to help them get the most out of it. And for them to gain the most benefit from this spotlight, which I knew could be really annoying. You know, they didn't come to me. They didn't, they weren't saying, hey, like, please send people to Morioka.

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  But I also knew it was remote enough that you wouldn't get, you, it wouldn't suffer from over tourism. Like you weren't going to suddenly have a trillion

• 1:44:31Tim Ferriss?

  The conversion wasn't going to be off the charts.

• 1:44:33Speaker 00

  It wasn't going to be off the charts. But I felt this real need to help them believe in themselves. And so it ended up being a duty and obligation for them to have pride. If I was speaking to anyone, I was speaking to like the kids in the town, the high school kids, I wanted to instill the sense of like, hey, your town is kind of amazing. There's amazing companies coming out of it. There's amazing cafes, there's amazing music spots. These places only can exist because of this mid-sized city life. Baseline that they give you, like the cost of living is quite low, running a business is quite low, and yet you have universal healthcare and like all these other infrastructures there. You've got the Shinkansen, blah, blah, blah. And so like, if you do go to study in university in Tokyo, think about coming back because your city is kind of amazing. So that was

• 1:45:17Speaker 00

  kind of the, my theory, and that's why I went on and did all these shows. That was really bizarre and really surreal. And I thought, okay, great. Six months of doing that, that's the end of that. Last year, the New York Times asked me again, and I was like, okay, yeah, I'll recommend another city, Yamaguchi, another, one of the other places I went to. I was like, this is a really cool place. They put it at number three on the list last year. Again, just this torrent. So, and by then I was pretty good at it.

• 1:45:43Tim Ferriss?

  Good at which aspect?

• 1:45:45Speaker 00

  I was good at judoing the conversation into like weird places because they would be like, all the typical questions are like, uh, Modo-san, like, what's your favorite noodle in Morioka? And I'd be like, my favorite noodle is universal healthcare. You know, it's like, I'd be like, the really interesting thing isn't the doodles. It's the fact that like these, these places exist and they exist because we have a good healthcare system here. Everyone's like, oh my God, yeah, we've never thought of that. So those conversations were really fun to have. The peak of it was last year. I've never owned a TV in Japan. I've never watched TV in Japan. I don't know anything about Japanese pop culture. I just don't have an interest in it. I have a vague sense of celebrities, but I really don't

• 1:46:29Speaker 00

  know who they are. I got this email and I, I get so many emails. I had to hire an assistant just to deal with media arbitrage because it was, there was just so much coming in. And I got this email and I ignored it. And then the team reached out to this soba shop in Morioka that I'm like, I'm friends with the owner now. And they were like, hey, Modo-san won't respond to us. Can you poke him? And this soba guy, this soba guy reaches out to me and he's like, he's like, Modo-san, you need to do this TV show. This is like the biggest TV celebrity in Japan and he will only come to Morioka if you agree to come and walk with him. And I was like, who is this guy? I was like, I don't really want to do this. And I was like, I'm gonna do this other walk and like, the timing is really bad. I don't, I really didn't want to do it.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  The team came out and met me and they're like, please, Moro-san, do this thing with this guy and like da-da-da. And I was like, okay, this will be my final gift to the city. Because like clearly, everyone loves this guy and he's never been to the city. And he wants to do a special about the city and we're gonna walk together for two days or all around the city and just talk to people. And I was like, okay, fine, let's do it. So we did this thing and it was the craziest

• 1:47:40Speaker 00

  experience I've ever had in public in my life. So this guy's name is Tamori-san, Tamori, T-A-M-O-R-I. He's 80 years old now. He's been on TV every day for like 55 years. He literally, every day. Like, he hasn't been canceled, there's no Me Too stuff about him. He's like, I think he's like genuinely like a pretty good guy. He's smart, he loves history. He has a walking show called Buddha Tamori that ran for like decades. You know, John watches it and like the theme music comes on, he starts crying. Like, people like just love this guy, right? And I didn't know anything about him. I literally knew nothing about this guy. And we meet up and he's got this team. It's like a 30-person crew of this TV shoot. There's like five cameras, like everyone's holding like mics and stuff.

• 1:48:25Speaker 00

  The first shoot was in front of the train station and they're like, okay, Moro-san, stand here. And then there was like another announcer with us, this like beautiful young woman who was like, kind of like also just in the mix, like talking about history. And she was standing there and then they're like, okay, we're set, call out Tamori-san, bring him out. And he comes out of like this like vault in a van, you know, he's like protected. And we hadn't been introduced and I'm just like, what is happening? And this like tiny little dude in a suit with sunglasses on, he lost his eye when he was a kid. So his thing is he always wears these dark sunglasses. He comes out and he stands him next to me and they're like, okay, all right, start all. You know, like, it was like totally this lost in translation moment. And Tamori-san is like, he goes always like, Tamori-des. And then the woman's like, whatever her name is, Mori-des.

• 1:49:10Speaker 00

  And then I just go, ah, I just scream and I grabbed Tamori-san and I start shaking him. And I go, we have to hug before this starts. And the crew, I swear to God, like six people almost committed ritual suicide in front of us. Like, I had never seen people so terrified that I like, I don't think anyone had ever touched Tamori-san before. And like, I'm like, he's this tiny little dude. I was just like, dude, we gotta say hello, we can't just, I don't know what I'm doing. I've never done a TV show like this before.

• 1:49:41Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, hold on. How did he respond to that? Did it just go into like a deathly silence? Did he, was he like?

• 1:49:47Speaker 00

  He kinda laughed.

• 1:49:48Tim Ferriss?

  Taken aback and then thought it was awesome?

• 1:49:50Speaker 00

  He kinda laughed and he was just like, what? Who is this joker? I thought we had a pro. Like, you know, it's like, I'm like, sorry. Sorry, Tomori-san. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I've just, you know, I'm like a talking head on TV. If I'm doing anything, I'm not like doing location stuff. So anyway, that was trial by fire, ice bath to start it. And we're walking through town and it is like walking with John Lennon. It is insane. People are stopping their cars. Buses are screeching. Construction workers are screaming down, "Tomori-san, Ohio gozaimasu." Like, we went to the market and there were like hundreds of people in the, in the morning market. And it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. Old ladies were jumping up and down crying.

• 1:50:35Speaker 00

  I was getting this contact high. I had never like been in proximity with someone for whom the beams of love were so intense. And it was just like, what is going on? And everyone in town knew who I was too. I was, it's like, "Moto-san." And so everyone was coming up to me and like hugging me and being like, "Moto-san, you brought Tomori-san to our town." And like shaking my hand and like, "Moto-san, thank you so much for bringing Tomori." And I was just like, what the fuck is going on? Cause I had no cultural context. I was just like, all right, I'll do this thing with this guy. Everyone wants me to do it. Sure, let's do it. That was the peak of it. Pretty insane. Pretty insane.

• 1:51:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And just for those who might think you're exaggerating about his ubiquitous appearance on television. I just looked him up and I'm like, oh yeah. I saw that guy every time the fucking television was on.

• 1:51:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Tim Ferriss?

  When I was 15.

• 1:51:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:51:29Tim Ferriss?

  As an exchange student.

• 1:51:30Speaker 00

  Literally 55 years, every day, TV.

• 1:51:33Tim Ferriss?

  Consistently.

• 1:51:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:35Tim Ferriss?

  Just incredible. So have you retreated into the? Cave of creativity. Have you forsaken the glamorous television life? Or are you gonna put something at number three or four again? And then you're gonna get thrown right back into the arena.

• 1:51:50Speaker 00

  Well, this year I recommended Toyama City and that one was on the list, not three or four. But they learned their lesson. Like it's kind of a one trick. You can't do that every year, but it beat Osaka because Osaka has the expo this year. And it was ranked higher than Osaka. But now what's happened? What's really interesting is that the 52 places thing is now a brand. And it kind of doesn't matter where you are and just to be on it is a big deal. And it's like, and it's become Modo-san's pick of the year. And like everyone in January is waiting with bated breath to see what city I'm gonna pick. And I get emails constantly from like cities that are like, please come walk in our city. Like, we'd love to have you walk by the coast in this city, you know, in the middle of, you know, over here and whatnot.

• 1:52:34Speaker 00

  It's very sweet, but I now batch it all. Toyama, you know, wanted me to come out and, you know, meet the mayor, meet the governor and like kind of do some press stuff, talking about why I picked the city. And I'm gonna do that all in the fall. I was just too busy in the spring. I just got too much going on with the Random House stuff.

• 1:52:50Tim Ferriss?

  What has been the economic impact? If you have any idea, what has been the economic impact of this spotlight that you've put on these different cities?

• 1:53:00Speaker 00

  So Morioka has definitely been the biggest one. And in part, that was because Morioka had a couple of key people in the city who were really good at promoting. So like they, when this happened, they were ready to run with it. They were like totally prepared. So they were able to, I think, catalyze more activity, more inbound. It's not just inbound from abroad. It's a lot of like Japanese people traveling to these cities now too. Because like just a buzz picks up, people moving to the cities. So one study was done and I think they estimated the impact in Morioka over like the first two years or something, like close to $100 million, like a financial impact.

• 1:53:40Speaker 00

  Which like, I wrote 300 words. So whatever that is, that's like hundreds of thousands of dollars of impact.

• 1:53:46Tim Ferriss?

  That's so cool.

• 1:53:48Speaker 00

  I'm never, ever, ever gonna impact something like that. I mean, that's just insane. So.

• 1:53:54Tim Ferriss?

  We'll see.

• 1:53:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53:55Tim Ferriss?

  We'll see, Modo-san.

• 1:53:56Speaker 00

  We'll see, but.

• 1:53:59Speaker 00

  It's been two years and change in Moriyoka. I was just there. I just launched a book there. I ended up forming this relationship with a great indie publisher and we put out a Japanese edition of Kisa by Kisa. We launched it in Moriyoka. It was so wonderful to be able to do this event in the town and have everyone come out and see everyone. And honestly, I think it's been almost entirely positive and it has added this like a bit of vigor to the town that that maybe wasn't there before. And it has not burdened them. And I think it's been really heartening to see. And it's kind of a relief for me as well. Two years later, I didn't ruin this place.

• 1:54:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. Wasn't the hug of death.

• 1:54:38Speaker 00

  It wasn't the hug of death. Thank God. If you're listening, you should totally go check out Moriyoka if you get a chance. It's a cool city. It's a cool place.

• 1:54:46Tim Ferriss?

  What is a place you have not written about in the New York Times or shared widely that people should check out in Japan if they do not speak Japanese? I'll just make that a condition.

• 1:54:56Speaker 00

  Well, so when I recommended Yamaguchi City, part of it was because there's a great walk there and it's called the Hagiokan. And it connects Yamaguchi and Hagi City. And it's a two day walk. You can actually do it in one day. If you really power through, you can plow through in one day. There is an inn to stay at in the middle. It's above a tofu shop.

• 1:55:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that one.

• 1:55:17Speaker 00

  What's it called? I just stayed there last week. Anyway, if you search for the inn on the Hagiokan, it's the only one that pops up.

• 1:55:24Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that?

• 1:55:25Speaker 00

  H A G I, Hagi, and then O K A N, Okan. Anyway, it connects to Hagi City. And Hagi City is this really beautiful, kind of very under visited, mainly because it's kind of a pain in the butt to get to. But a great combo would be to go to Yamaguchi City, which has Yuda Onsen, which is a great little Onsen town that's basically connected with Yamaguchi. And there's an amazing inn called San Sui En, which is a beautiful bunkai, cultural heritage inn. From Taisho era, so it's about 100 years old.

• 1:56:06Speaker 00

  Amazing baths, beautiful gardens, wonderful owners. The original family still owns it. And you can walk from there over the Hagiokan to Haggi. And I'd say spend a couple of days in Haggi. It's an incredible city.

• 1:56:19Tim Ferriss?

  This is good. We'll introduce a little friction for people who want to hunt down this Easter egg of Sora's. Meaning the in, near, or off of, or in a Hagiokan. You can send that to me afterwards and we'll put that in the show notes for people. So they can track that down if they're sufficiently motivated.

• 1:56:42Speaker 00

  You can stay there if you don't speak Japanese, but the people who run it don't speak English. But like, you can figure it out. It's a little bit of work.

• 1:56:50Tim Ferriss?

  Google Translate's become pretty good and other tools like that.

• 1:56:53Speaker 00

  The tofu's amazing. The dinner is amazing, truly.

• 1:56:55Tim Ferriss?

  All right. We're gonna keep this particular part short, but lest people think you've only done big walks in Japan. Where are other places outside of Japan where you've done big walks?

• 1:57:08Speaker 00

  Well, I haven't done big solo walks.

• 1:57:11Tim Ferriss?

  Not solo.

• 1:57:12Speaker 00

  Elsewhere, but I've done-

• 1:57:13Tim Ferriss?

  The walk and talks.

• 1:57:14Speaker 00

  Walk and talks with Kevin Kelly. You know, I did the Nakasenda with Kevin, then Hiu Howi comes out. We did Kumano Kodo. And then we were so excited by that. We've done now, I don't even know how many, seven or eight or nine others around the world. We've done Southern China, Thailand. We've walked across Bali. We've done England twice. We've done Japan with bigger groups again. It's been great. We've done Spain once, and I'm actually doing Spain again with him, a different part of the Santiago, Community de Santiago, next week. We're heading out next week.

• 1:57:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:57:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm busy. It is a busy period.

• 1:57:50Tim Ferriss?

  Kevin's an enthusiastic walker as well. And both England trips were the Cotswold way?

• 1:57:55Speaker 00

  Cotswolds, yeah. And I also did, independent of Kevin, I walked with another friend. We did Wainwright Coast to Coast, which is in Northern England. And it starts in the Lake District on the west and you walk across the coast to coast across the country. And that is a pretty amazing, it's 300 kilometers. It takes about 10 to 12 days. And that is beautiful. If you think of England, and as you should, you think of it as rolling hills. Lake District is like serious mountains. It's very cool. It's very beautiful. It's wonderful. Highly recommended.

• 1:58:30Tim Ferriss?

  So what I also highly recommend is that people go to the source of all good things, craigmod.com. And if you go to craigmod.com/ridgeline, one word, slash 176, you could also just Google this, it'll be a lot easier. The Walk and Talk subtitle, Everything We Know. This describes how you and Kevin architect these walk and talks. And I've had the good fortune to walk with you guys. And the basic idea, there's a lot more to it, but the basic idea is you are walking extensively every day, and then you have a group meal at the end of the day, which is Jeffersonian style, meaning there's

• 1:59:13Tim Ferriss?

  only one conversation, and the participants in the walk get to choose the topic or the question that they want people to explore. And it's wonderful. It is just such a lovely experience. And so counter to so much of what we experience, as you described it earlier, with the increasingly contracted feedback loops of social media and so on, which we're not evolved to metabolize very well. So I encourage people to check that out. We'll put the link in the show notes. Craig, I have a very important question that I need to ask you. And that is, is Maud your birth name? Where does Maud come into things?

• 1:59:55Speaker 00

  Maud is not my birth name, but because I'm adopted, the parents who adopted me got divorced when I was basically 18 months, two years old, or whatever. And my father, whose name I ended up keeping, and my mother didn't go back to her maiden name, there was a point in teenage years where it just seemed weird. He wasn't raising me. He literally taught me nothing. He was like an anti archetype. It was like, okay, this is like what you shouldn't do.

• 2:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  Amen, Kyoshika.

• 2:00:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yes, the opposite.

• 2:00:28Tim Ferriss?

  Opposite teacher. It's somebody who role models the opposite of what you want to do.

• 2:00:33Speaker 00

  So, look, he had a really tough childhood, and he came from a place bereft of archetypes as well. And so he didn't know how to be a dad. But anyway, it just seemed weird to kind of have this name. And so, yeah, no, I just changed it.

• 2:00:47Tim Ferriss?

  That is a little ET Reese's Pieces trail to lure you into telling the fucking wild story related to the recent chapters in your adoption journey. I will cue that up and you can tackle it any way you want.

• 2:01:11Speaker 00

  I think adopted people in general, you can have very different experiences of being adopted, but I think a common one is like I explained in part one of what we were talking about, my, my history, you know, you feel apart from things. You do not feel necessarily of a group, of a family. The family who adopted you can do all of the right things and you can still not feel that way. You feel like there's kind of a mythology out there elsewhere and it can kind of haunt you, you know? And I think different people can want different things from that mythology. And as 23andMe and ancestry.com and all these like DNA testing things have become more and more commonplace, I think it's become more and more easy for people to find out who their birth parents are. And so all of my life, you know, I had

• 2:01:55Speaker 00

  never really been that curious about who my birth parents were. Part of it is, I think you don't want to dishonor your adoptive parents by having this. And I think if I was going to give a piece of advice to adoptive parents, it would be you have to work so hard to remove the stigma of curiosity around where you come from as an, for an adopted kid. And you actually have to have so many more conversations than you think you have to have. You have to really get the taboo out by airing that conversation over and over and over again, beating it to death to a certain degree to say, hey, you know, like, do you want to look up your genetic background? If you ever want to connect with your birth mother, let me help you. I'm here to help you. I'm here to give you support for that, da, da, da. My family didn't do any of that. So I think I kind of suppressed

• 2:02:40Speaker 00

  a lot of the curiosity, but it's always there. And the one thing I did have, as I explained last time, was I had adoption paper notes and my birth mother was 13 when she got pregnant. And my birth father, according to the adoption notes, there was a car accident and he was murdered at the site of the car accident. So he was dead. And that's all I knew. And I joined 23andMe like 12 years ago and I got, you know, whatever, fourth cousin hit. We're probably like third cousins or something, you know, it's like everyone's a fourth cousin, fifth cousin. It's sort of meaningless and nothing really close. And then I was on, actually a walk in England two years ago, three years ago now, three years ago with Kevin and everyone. I was like, yeah, you know, I did 23andMe and they're like, oh dude, you gotta do ancestry. That's where everyone is. And I was like, really?

• 2:03:22Speaker 00

  I was like, all right. I came back, did ancestry and lo and behold, boom, there's my mom. And it was like, oh, okay. I guess, yeah, people are on ancestry. So I get a name. I was mainly interested just in genetic history and health history. You crest 40 and if you have things you want to live for, you start thinking about health. Stuff just starts popping up and my relationship with my stepdaughter became so profound to me in the last five years and gave me such a strong sense of self-worth. All of this other stuff was ratcheting up. Like I talked about the sense of scarcity, this lack of myself having value that I felt all through my twenties. And if there's one thing that's supercharged, all of it, of abundance and value, self-value,

• 2:04:06Speaker 00

  it was the relationship with my stepdaughter and particularly when she was eight, nine, 10, 11 years old and working through conflicts with her, not big conflicts, just weird little things. We'd get in these little fights. She wouldn't get up to go to school. I'd like squirt her with a water bottle and then she wouldn't like talk to me for three weeks. That stuff, you know, it's just like, whatever, little, little girls could be kind of insane sometimes. And like, I was driven to such places of sadness by that because I had never seen reconciliation. I'd never had that modeled for me and I thought this little girl is going to throw me away because that was my default for all of my relationships in my life. This person can throw me away. And what I realized was not only does she not want to throw me away,

• 2:04:50Speaker 00

  she really wants to reconcile. She really wants to repair things and she desperately, desperately wants even more of me in her life. And once we went through a few cycles of like, she kind of got upset at me for something dumb or whatever, like, you know, she was acting up or whatever. And I was like, I took away her iPad or something. And once we went through a few cycles of that, I realized how much of a great dad I could be. And that was something I never believed because I'd never had it modeled for me. And so this is an important thing to queue up, you know, connecting with my birth mom because By the time we matched on Ancestry, I had gone through so many, I think, iterations of self. And the self I was when we connected, when we matched, I was really proud of. And

• 2:05:35Speaker 00

  I felt really good about, and I believed in my value. I had like empirical evidence of it. And I was anonymous on Ancestry because I'm protective of a lot of stuff, even though I'm like being quite open here, I'm also quite protective, as you are to a certain degree, as we all are. And so she couldn't see my name. And we matched, and then we didn't send each other a message for a year. And I was just like, oh, okay, she doesn't want to match, maybe her family made her join. She, you know, she has a traumatic experience. In my mind, it was like, being pregnant with me was tremendously traumatic. And I was like, okay, I don't want to rustle her feathers. I don't want to disrupt her life. I had her name. I found out everything about her. I could just like Google, you know, you'd get all the records. I knew where she worked. I knew where she lived at, her home address.

• 2:06:18Speaker 00

  I knew who she was married to. I knew she had been divorced, like that, all this stuff. I could see that. And I was like, okay, cool. Like, I just kind of know who this person is. I don't feel the need to meet her. I don't feel this need for like, a mom, like, I have my mom, like, I don't need another mom. I like, there was none of that. And then a year later, she sent me a little message that just said, hi, with like, no punctuation. It was like, hi, I think we're related. Do you live in Japan? It was like, the weirdest message. And it was like, you think we're related? We share 50% of DNA. Like, we're definitely related. And it triggered this thing in me where I was like, I grew up with not having a lot of adults be adults around me. And she sent this message, and it just

• 2:06:59Speaker 00

  made me feel like, okay, here's another adult who doesn't want to do the hard emotional work of being the adult, of being a parent in this situation, and being like, hey, I'm your mom. This is great to match. I joined because of these reasons. Would you like to connect? Da, da, da. Instead, it's this weird, cryptic, bizarro message. So I didn't respond for three months. And then I finally, like, after stewing on it for a while, I was like, okay, what would I want to get if I was her? Who, I had this kid when I, you know, 13, 14. And so I wrote her this message that I stayed anonymous in. I said, look, I just like kind of outlined my life. And I just, I was like, look, not everything has been easy, but I've gotten to this place and I've been really lucky and I've been really blessed

• 2:07:41Speaker 00

  in a lot of ways. And I have this amazing relationship with this young daughter and I, you know, I've been successful in many ways and like, I'm so grateful. And I can only imagine how hard it was for you to have done what you did. And thank you for having me and thank you for going through the process of putting me up for adoption. Basically, like to assuage any sense of worry about who I might be or what had happened to me, to give her that gift. And so I sent her that message and I'm still anonymous. And I get no response from her. And I'm like, oh my God, okay, this is like a lost cause. And then three months after that, I get this message and it's like, oh my God, I don't have notifications turned on for ancestry. I am so sorry. And it's a

• 2:08:26Speaker 00

  5,000 word letter that is the most emotionally intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful thing I had ever gotten. And it was just like, this person is so tuned in. And I was like, what do I do with this? I was like so overwhelmed. I was launching my fine art edition of T-Bot and like things become other things and doing all this. I was like, oh my God, how do I process this? And then a week later, she sends me another 5,000 word letter and she's like, I'm so crushed that I didn't respond to your other message. I just want to tell you about my childhood. I want to tell you about like where you came from. I want to tell you about like the family you come from and like, I'm the youngest of five siblings and my father died when I was nine. And so like, I had to work at a sandwich shop when I was 13 and I was super entrepreneurial. Like it was just

• 2:09:11Speaker 00

  like, we had pet turtles and I had three goldfish and six cats and this thing and that thing. And I was like, oh my God, I couldn't process it. I wasn't ready for someone to be so hungry. And she was just like, I know you may not want to meet. I am happy to talk on whatever terms you want to talk on. Here's my address. Here's my phone number. Here's my email. And I was just like, I couldn't process it. I had so much going on in my life. And I sent her a little email at the end of the, a little message at the end of the year, still anonymous. I just said, hey, look, I'm so overwhelmed. I'm going to get back to you in the new year. And she's like, no worries. Don't worry. I didn't respond. Mother's Day comes. She sends me a letter. I'm thinking about you on Mother's Day. Like, I hope you're with your adoptive mom and I hope you're, she's giving you a big, I'm just like, oh my God. Like now I'm

• 2:09:55Speaker 00

  a terrible son to like two moms and like, I haven't met this person. And finally, I'm with Kevin, we're on a walk, we're in Bali. I'm talking about this and Kevin just goes, Craig, just go have lunch with her. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, screw it. All right. I messaged her, still anonymous. I said, hey, how about we get lunch in August? I'll be in Chicago. I'll meet you out there. She lives in Chicago. And she was like, great. Let's do it this day, this time, blah, blah, blah. We set it up. I'm still anonymous. I still haven't told her my name. I'm like, I don't want her to Google. I don't want her to know anything. I fly out to Chicago, pretty nervous. Don't know what to expect, but also I'm not going into this needing something. I'm not like, oh, I need her to be this. I need this relationship. I'm just like, this is kind

• 2:10:39Speaker 00

  of a fun adventure. Like, let's go meet this person. She's standing outside this like steakhouse that she booked for lunch. And I see her and I like, hi, you know, I'm, I'm the anonymous weirdo that I'm like, I apologize for not like telling her my name before we met. I give her a big hug and we go into this steakhouse and sit down and it takes us two hours before we order drinks. Like, it was just, we sat down in this booth, the waitress came over and was just like, honey, you've got something going on. I'll come back when you're ready. And she goes, I've been thinking about you every day on your birthday. And she pulls out of her wallet, a baby photo of me that

• 2:11:20Speaker 00

  the adoption agency had given her. And she goes, I've been carrying around this my whole life. And she goes, I have thought about you every year.

• 2:11:31Speaker 00

  I've wondered who you've become and I've never once felt bad. I have no negative feelings. I have no negative emotions around the experience. Actually, getting pregnant with you, it was this accident, but it was totally copacetic. And by the way, your father's still alive. I lied. She was 13. She's like, he was 22 and that was going to cause a bunch of problems. So I just picked a guy out of the newspaper who'd been murdered and I said, that was the father. I was like, oh my God, like it's super, just like, she was so strong headed. She was just like, I was just going to handle this pregnancy on my own. But in the end, my sisters helped me out. I moved out with my aunt and uncle in Connecticut.

• 2:12:12Speaker 00

  That's how you ended up in Connecticut and everyone was so supportive and it was so beautiful. And it was such a great experience in the school. The high school supported me and they gave me like a mentor. And she's like, when I gave birth to you in the hospital, I held you. I could only hold you for two days and I wrote you a letter. Did you get the letter? I was just like, oh my God, it's just, she's telling me all this and my genesis story is just being completely reconfigured in real time. And I don't know what to do with it. And she tells me her story and she's just like, she's a computer programmer and she runs a consultancy and she's totally self taught. She's like, I bought my first car at 16, my second at 18, my first house when I was 24. I was just like, who are you? And we're sitting there and I'm, and I just go, this is the first time ever in my life

• 2:12:57Speaker 00

  that I understand where my brain comes from. We have some features that it wasn't like looking into a mirror, but it was like listening to someone who had jacked into my brain, talking about their life, like they had used my, I was like, that's, this is where my brain comes from, because no one in my family has any of the impulses I have. No one, no one I grew up with has any of these impulses. And it was just so clear, like how she handled everything in her life is exactly how I've handled everything in my life. And it was this, it was so surreal. And she goes, do you have friends in Chicago? And I go, yeah, I have friends. I'm going to have dinner with one tonight. And she goes, you have dinner plans? And I was like, yeah, I thought we were just getting lunch. She's like, I got us tickets to the symphony. I got us a riverboat ride. We have pizza dinner. I was just like, oh my God.

• 2:13:40Speaker 00

  Like, obviously, I'm gonna cancel my plans. You know, like, of course, let's go to the symphony. And we ended up, you know, spending the whole day talking, going to the symphony, going to get pizza. It was so surreal. And at the end of it all, we were gonna do more. And I just said, look, I need to be alone now. And she's like, I totally get it. And she gave me this little gift basket. And the whole time, we hadn't cried, we hadn't gotten emotional. At the end of brunch on Sunday, she goes, I can't tell you how much this meant to me. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for meeting up. This means so much, and I hope this isn't the end of this relationship. And here's this gift basket. She's like, don't look at it now. It's embarrassing.

• 2:14:22Speaker 00

  And I opened it up later and it had like chocolate bars and Twizzlers. And it had this like, this print on demand book of like my entire family tree and history and family photos and like my grandparents and, you know, all of her brothers and sisters. And this is who you come from. And this is like when they came to America. And it was just like, the whole thing was just so overwhelming and so moving. And I feel like the timing of it was so perfect because I could go to that meeting with her, not needing anything from it, to just be there in the moment, to be totally radically present, focused. And also just so, I know this sounds weird to say, but proud of who I was, who I had become,

• 2:15:03Speaker 00

  to say hello to her, to meet her. And you just saw it in her as well. Like, I was, I was like, oh, I'm doing this thing. And she's like, I can't believe you're my son. She was just so proud. And it was obviously on Saturday night, she went home. She went back to the hotel Saturday night and she called everybody. She called her aunt and uncle, who she stayed with when she gave birth to me. I started getting all these emails from cousins. I get, you know, I get this email from someone in like Wyoming. They're like, hey, I run a flower shop in Wyoming. I'm 33. I'm your cousin. Like, let's do a Zoom. I was like, what? I've suddenly got all these aunts and uncles, all these cousins. I've got this whole family. And she was like, obviously so proud of like who I was and who I'd become. And I don't know, the whole thing has just been really, really cool. And it turns out that I also have a half sister who's 28. She lives in Alaska. We did a Zoom call.

• 2:15:48Speaker 00

  Like a month ago, and she's awesome. She's so cool. She's married to this coast guard. They're gonna come out and do a walk in Japan. I'm gonna go to Alaska and go hunting. And I'm doing a book tour in America in May and June. They're gonna fly out and join like one of the dates on the book tour. She's also an only child. I have an only child and we're both like, we love that we now have a sibling. We're like, this is so cool. Texting every day, sending stupid photos. It's a very weird, unexpected chapter of life that came out of nowhere. And I'm here for, I'm ready for it. I'm excited by it.

• 2:16:20Tim Ferriss?

  So you went into it not needing anything. Initially, you did not have the impulse to reconnect. What does it feel like now? Like, what has it done to you?

• 2:16:30Speaker 00

  You know, it's been eight months since we met. And the sister thing is just like a month ago. It takes a long time to unravel the mythologies that you've set for yourself, your genesis story. And I feel it, it's almost like these tightly wound springs of tension are slowly unwinding, like a spring in a watch or something like slowly on like loosening. And I just feel like my heart is opening in a weird way that it's never been open to before. And again, that sense of value, it's like, I don't come from this place of, I thought, you know, 13 years old, raped, the guy's murdered, he's like a gangster, it's like terrible, blah, blah, blah. It turns out it wasn't. She was just kind of a sexy 13 year old, I guess, and like looked older and

• 2:17:15Speaker 00

  was like, older for her age or whatever. And I guess my biological father, whatever, like, his dad owned the sandwich shop that she was working at. So like, I guess he'd come to get sandwiches and they met. And whatever, they wanted to have sex. So they had sex and it happened. So it wasn't like this place of pain there and the pregnancy wasn't painful. Like, it's just weird to think all these things. And so it just takes time. And it's this slow, but really, really beautiful unraveling and opening of the heart. And I don't know, I think it's gonna take even, even more time. And we're going slowly. We're just taking it very respectfully in both directions. And not too much communication, not too much expectation,

• 2:17:58Speaker 00

  and just being like, this is cool. Let's have fun with it and, and just see where it goes. It's great. It's really good.

• 2:18:05Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so happy for you, man. So happy for you. I remember, I guess it was over a dinner, when you first shared pieces of this. There were a handful of folks there and everyone's jaws dropped, mouths agape. Like, wait, what? Such a beautiful story and it's still unfurling, right? This is the first steeping of the tea leaves with many more steepings left to go. And the flavors and the aromas, the entire texture of that emotional experience, I'm sure will continue to develop. Not to mix too many metaphors, I was gonna say like photograph in a darkroom, but it's true, right? It's like certain things you see, certain things you feel.

• 2:18:50Tim Ferriss?

  Really excited for you, man. Super happy for you.

• 2:18:52Speaker 00

  Thanks. I'm psyched to have a younger sister. I'm just like, cool, I want, you know, ask me questions. I know about stuff. Ask me questions. It's like, I want to help you. I want to give you dollars. I want to like, you know, I'm happy to mentor you about stuff. I don't know, like that impulse is just so intuitive. I look forward to cultivating that relationship. It's just so weird to suddenly to go from like being an only child who, you know, my adopted family is very tiny. There's like three people left alive. It's a go to having this like, there's an aunt in Switzerland who's like a yoga teacher and I've got like 14 cousins now and, you know, all this stuff. It's like, it's pretty interesting, pretty exciting.

• 2:19:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, man, so you're gonna connect your stepdaughter with your family?

• 2:19:38Speaker 00

  I'd love to. Yeah, I'd love to do that. If the, the timing works out, do like a little trip to the States with her and have her, have her meet everyone, that'd be fun.

• 2:19:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Craig, this is not something I often say on the podcast, but you have a beautiful soul. I love spending time with you. You also write beautifully and I really want to encourage people to check out Things Become Other Things. I mean, this is the tip of the iceberg and the way you weave prose and.

• 2:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of inject nostalgia and liminality and

• 2:20:15Speaker 00

  It's a good word.

• 2:20:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, it is. And the emotional experience of moving slowly and then historically flashback, moving quickly through the world, all of these things that you put into a beautiful tapestry of a reading experience. I really encourage people to check it out. So Things Become Other Things. People can find all things Craig Maud at craigmod.com. Easy to remember. Is there anything else you'd like to say, Craig, before we wind to a close?

• 2:20:51Speaker 00

  Just to like, extra plug the book, because like, why not?

• 2:20:55Tim Ferriss?

  Why not? You're here.

• 2:20:56Speaker 00

  But, you know, yesterday, two days ago, I got a incredible email from David Mitchell, who'd read the book.

• 2:21:04Tim Ferriss?

  Explain who that is, for people who may not recognize it.

• 2:21:07Speaker 00

  David Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas. That's probably his most famous book. But he's done Number Nine Dream, Ghostwritten Cloud Atlas. There's one, it's like Green Swan, Black Swan, or something. It's, that's actually one of my favorites of his. Black Swan Green, I think is what it's called. He's an incredible writer. He's someone that I've admired and have been reading his work in Japan. He lived in Hiroshima. He taught English in Hiroshima. Some of his books take place in Japan. I've always admired this guy and the felicity with which he writes and his use of language, everything. He's, he's a beautiful, oh, The Thousand Autumn of Jacob de Zoi, I think, is, is book about Dejima over in Nagasaki. Historical fiction, beautiful book. Anyway, if I was gonna pick like, three authors in the world that I'd be

• 2:21:51Speaker 00

  honored to have them read the book, he would be top three, for sure. And the fact that he read it, he sent over a 2,000-word email, just

• 2:22:00Speaker 00

  Saying how much he he loved it. And it was like, honestly, it was just like one of the most shocking emails I've ever gotten. He blurbed it. He did a nice blurb, but like, David Mitchell really, really, really, really liked this book. And like, he was like quoting extensively. I was just like, I was embarrassed by the end of this email. So just putting that out there. It's like, if you're a David Mitchell fan, if you're David Mitchell fan, if you like Cloud Atlas, you'll like Things Become Other Things, possibly. Maybe. Anyway,

• 2:22:32Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out, guys.

• 2:22:33Speaker 00

  I'm just proud of that. It made my week.

• 2:22:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Oh, you should be. I mean, well, we were texting as it happened.

• 2:22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:22:39Tim Ferriss?

  I was like, oh, my God, David Mitchell, this is insane. It was so wild, so wild. And just, God, talk about, you know, full circle in a way. I'm excited for your next chapters, Ben. There's a lot to come. Who knows what. But I also hope to do a walk with you again soon. So I'll have to figure out what that looks like. And that's all I got for now, Craig.

• 2:23:03Speaker 00

  That's all I got.

• 2:23:04Tim Ferriss?

  It is God knows what time. It's like 1 a.m.

• 2:23:06Speaker 00

  It's 2 a.m.

• 2:23:07Tim Ferriss?

  Where you are. At 2 a.m. And I need to get to the airport. So everybody out there, Craigmod, craigmod.com. And we will link to everything, including some Easter eggs in the show notes. So that's Craig's homework assignment. It's the in name. And you will be able to find that at tim.blog/podcast, as always. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than necessary to others, but also to yourself. That's an important piece of the puzzle, as Jack Cornfield would say, if your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. And thanks for tuning in.

• 2:23:50Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 2:24:32Tim Ferriss?

  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.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. About three weeks ago, I found myself between 10,000 and 12,000 feet, going over the continental divide, carrying tons of weight, doing my best not to chew on my own lungs, and I needed all the help I could get. And in those circumstances, I relied on Momentous products every single day and every single night.

• 2:25:17Tim Ferriss?

  Now, regular listeners probably know I've been taking Momentous products consistently and testing them, the entire spectrum of their products, for a long while now. But you may not know that I recently collaborated with them, one of the sponsors of this episode, to put together my top picks, and I'm calling it my performance stack. I always aim for a strong body and sharp mind, of course, you need both, and neither is possible without quality sleep. So I didn't want anything speculative, I wanted things I could depend on, and it is what I use personally. So I designed my performance stack to check all three boxes, and here it is. Creapure creatine for muscular and cognitive support, cognitive side is actually very interesting to me these days, whey protein isolate for muscle mass and recovery, and

• 2:25:58Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:26:43Tim Ferriss?

  And this is not true for the vast majority of companies in this industry. So, this is a differentiator. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use TIM at checkout for 20% off of my performance stack. One more time, that's livemomentous.com/tim. I'll spell it out, it's a long one. Live, moment, O-U-S, dot com, slash, Tim. So, livemomentous.com/tim for 20% off. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. Kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean, they frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages.

• 2:27:28Tim Ferriss?

  What kind of mattress is it? What do you do? What's the magic juju? It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in, and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I've had. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support, right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils that create a soft contouring feel. Which also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains that might create. And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into that

• 2:28:13Tim Ferriss?

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