Walking As Medicine: Craig Mod’s 300-Miles On Foot, Japan's Philosophy Of Enough, & The Profound Power Of Undistracted Presence

Craig Mod is an artist, author, and photographer who has lived in Japan for 25 years, chronicling the country through thousands of miles of recent solo walks. We explore walking as inner cartography—a practice that transforms attention into meaning. We discuss Craig's journey from his best friend's murder in Connecticut to finding home in Tokyo, the ineffable Japanese concept of "yōyū," reconciling adoption trauma through movement, and how 300-mile walks without digital distraction became his path to healing. His story takes a stunning turn when these walks ultimately lead him back to meet his birth mother at 42. Craig transforms heavy into light. And this conversation reveals how. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Bon Charge: Get 15% OFF all my favorite wellness products w/ code RICHROLL 👉 boncharge.com Bragg: Get 20% OFF your first order with code RICHROLL👉 Bragg.com AG1: Get a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much 👉airbnb.com/host Squarespace: Use the code RichRoll to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain 👉Squarespace.com/RichRoll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  I started doing these huge walks where I'd walk for 30, 40 days, 20, 30, 40 K a day with this big pack on. No social media, no news, basically nothing that teleports you out of the moment. Getting rid of all that ratchets up your attention, cranks up the focus. I'm just collecting little archetypes of possibility. This is what life can be like. This is what life can be like. For me, what I get out of these walks, I want to talk to as many people. I want to bear witness to as much life being lived as possible. It's bearing witness to possibilities of how to live and how to live well.

• 1:42Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. So, right now, as I'm recording this introduction, this missive, it's Friday, May 2nd, which is six days before, and by the time you're hearing this, a few weeks after, going under the knife for a pretty extensive procedure called spine surgery, where they're gonna go in through my abdomen to basically scrape out the disc between my L5 and S1 vertebra. So they can insert this cage, basically, which creates space for the nerves that are currently impinged and contains this marrow material that ends up growing bone that over time, like six months or more, will fuse these two vertebrae together. Then they're

• 2:27Rich Roll?

  going to flip me over and they're going to go into my back to insert screws and rods to basically hold the whole thing together. So my point is that this is going to be a thing. I'm a little bit scared, but I'm also looking forward to finally resolving this chronic issue that I've had for far too long. And my recovery is going to be long as well. It's going to go on for a long time. And during that period of time, my movement practice is going to be focused predominantly on one type of activity. There's going to be other stuff, but there's going to be one thing that I'm going to be doing a lot of, and that is walking, which is interesting because today's guest is kind of an expert

• 3:08Rich Roll?

  when it comes to all things walking. Not in terms of the physiology of it, or matters related to the biomechanics of it, or even recovering from back surgery for that matter, but really on matters of meaning. His name is Craig Mott. He's an artist, he's an author, he's an essayist and a photographer, who has spent the last 25 years living in Japan, where he's been sharing his insights with words and images, which he packages both online in newsletters and other forms of media, as well as in a series of these really beautiful books. But central to Craig's life, and by extension, his art, is walking. Walking as a sort of inner cartography, which is something he has done across vast distances

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  of Japan, that has also taken him all over the world, often in the company of former pod hero Kevin Kelly, with whom he co-runs, or co-walks, I should say, Kevin's famous Walk and Talks Retreats. The profundity of walking as this way of reclaiming our attention, of attuning ourselves to the present, to our surroundings, this means for ruminating on the meaning of our lives, to unlock creativity, to connect with ourselves, with other people, to make sense of our past and the world around us. These are all themes fully mined in Craig's wonderful new memoir meets 300 mile walking travelogue of rural Japan, which is entitled, Things Become Other Things. Not only is Craig a deeply thoughtful guy and a terrifically

• 4:37Rich Roll?

  talented writer, the improbable arc of his life is something really remarkable that we talk about today and hints at the ineffable, I think, which now you are privileged to behold in what is one of the more soulful conversations I've had in the history of this show. It's the kind of conversation that reminds me why I got into this whole podcasting thing in the first place. In addition to the new book, you can find all things Craig Maude at craigmad.com, including his newsletters, Rodent and Ridgeline, and this very cool membership community platform that he hosts called Special Projects. So hopefully by the time you're hearing this, I survived my back surgery. If I did, you're going to be hearing all about it pretty soon. But right now, let's hear from Craig.

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  Great to have you here, man. I'm excited to get into this with you. You've lived a really dynamic, interesting life off the beaten path and are here back in the United States, reporting back with wisdom for us Westerners who have led our lives astray and allowed our attention to be robbed of us. So I thought a good way to kind of launch into it is with something that you say, which is lightness above weightiness, elevate everyone you encounter. And this is a sort of theme for your work and your creativity, but it's really a mantra for life. So how did you come up with that? What does that mean?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that grew directly out of the walking, out of the big walks. So I started doing these big walks, I started doing about 15 years ago, but I would say the first real, real, real big one that I did where it was solo, it was kind of under the rule set that I now use for all my big walks, was about six years ago. And I was, I was reading a lot of the literature about Japan in the, from the eighties and the nineties. And there was this kind of heaviness to it all, the way people would write about Japan. And there was also this sense of real disparity of, of kind of perspective of writing down on Japan.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't want to say it was explicitly sort of racist, but you know, there was a kind of Western way of like going to Japan, writing about it, being like, oh, now I understand this place. Let me explain to you these people that, you know, sort of implicitly were sort of below the writer in a weird way. And that always made me uncomfortable. And I started doing these big, huge walks where I'd walk for 30, 40 days, 20, 30, 40 K a day with this big pack on. And I started talking to everybody on the road, just saying hello, saying hello, saying hello. And I've lived in Japan for 25 years, so the language is no problem. I can speak to everybody, even in the countryside where the accents get pretty gnarly. I can kind of hang with them. And I just realized what a gift it was to be able to meet all these people

• 7:33Speaker 01

  just exactly where they were, you know, and to, it's so easy to focus on the negatives or to focus on, I don't know, the heaviness of situations. And so I just sort of, again, implicitly and through the walking itself, there was a lightness to these interactions, to meeting these people, to being out on the road. And then also when I started writing these conversations down and started kind of giving these people a voice on a bigger stage than they had, I realized naturally, I just wanted to elevate these people. I was just so in love with everybody. I think that was the thing that was surprising, was this incredible amount of love I had for everyone I was meeting on the road. And so that's sort of where that phrase comes from.

• 8:14Rich Roll?

  Right. And in the writing or in the chronicling of that, making sure that you're translating the, the sensibility and your emotional experience of these encounters in a way that is understandable and digestible, even if. You're contending with weighty subject matters and themes.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Because, I mean, a lot of the Japanese countryside is depopulating, right? And so Japan's kind of on the forefront of what's happening to most first world countries, which is just population is going down. Japan is now, I think, at like 1.2 kids per woman now, I guess. You know, South Korea is at the lowest. I think it's 0.7. You need 2.1 to maintain population. So these are pretty dire numbers. And in Japan, you go to Tokyo, Tokyo's growing, Tokyo's full of kids and life, and you don't feel that at all. But you get into the countryside and you feel that acutely everywhere. And so it can be easy to, I think, like dwell on that, to focus on, oh, my God, all these towns are disappearing. What does that mean?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And I've tried to instead go look at the social infrastructure that's here for these people that remain and how they're kind of being supported by this greater whole. And what does that mean? Yes, it's disappearing, but there's a certain amount of grace. I kind of, I use that word a lot in when I'm writing about these countryside towns. You know, there's a certain level of grace that's happening here, that's present, that feels really humane and important. And so that tends to be the thing I focus on.

• 9:44Rich Roll?

  I want to tease that apart, but before we do that, I think it would be worthy for you to just articulate your thesis of Japan. I'm sure people say to you all the time, like, what's it like to live there? Like, how is it different than the way we live? And, you know, despite our deeply interconnected world, Japan still is a world apart and it, and it has its own rules and its own culture.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  And it's fascinating, but it can also be impenetrable for somebody like myself who's never visited there and just hears stories about it.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  So how do you, like, breathe life into that?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I feel deeply uncomfortable.

• 10:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I'm not saying you have to be an ambassador for, you know, like, your words are the, you know, definitive definition of this. But like, from, through your lens, like, putting, you know, putting, you know, sort of belying like what our preconceptions might be or our assumptions.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, okay, if I was to sum up, like, what I, the goodness I feel from Japan, it's that there is this kind of ambient sense of enough. Like, people have an enough line. Like, there is, and I don't mean that in sort of like, oh, there's a lack of striving or something like that, but just... The fact that the middle class is so pervasive, that there's a certain kind of, I'd say, you know, high earner place, that that gap between the lowest and the highest is very small compared to America, for example. And America, to me, feels like it's a country that doesn't have enough of anything. Like, that that ceiling is infinite. And the enough thing in Japan manifests in a number of ways. I think one of the most easiest to understand is

• 11:25Speaker 01

  this idea of a living national treasure. So I was actually invited to photograph Jiro, the Sushi Dreams of Jiro guy, when I was 26.

• 11:35Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I had never, I'd never eaten a real sushi meal in my life. I'd been living in Japan, I was, I'd been there for about six, five, six years at that point. And I got this call, hey, this guy Jiro is gonna be given living national treasure status. We wanna do a little magazine piece on him, can you go and photograph him? He's like, he'll be ready for you at noon on Tuesday, or whatever. I was like, okay, who is this guy? Kind of like, find him on, you know, no Google Maps back then, so, you know, look, try to look him up. I don't, have you ever been to, you haven't been to Jiro's, right? No, you've never been.

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  I've seen the documentary, though.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  And so it's in a subway station. It's like, it's very bizarre. So it's like, you have to go underground, there's no windows. You're in a subway station and you're like, it just looks like a random sushi shop. So I go in, I, again, no research, I don't know who this guy is. And there's sort of a handler, and then there's Jiro behind the counter. And he goes, he goes, Modo-san, have you, have you had lunch? And I go, no, not really. He's like, let me make you lunch. And so I got this one-on-one.

• 12:38Rich Roll?

  Your first experience with sushi is with the world's greatest master of it.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:43Rich Roll?

  How is it possible that you've lived there so long and not had sushi?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  I had had, that's why I say like, I'd had like... Kaiten sushi, so like the cheap, like it goes around on the conveyor belt and you kind of all I, again, like I grew up without an adventurous palate, like I really did not eat, I grew up on SpaghettiOs, basically. Chef Boyardee, fried bologna.

• 13:01Rich Roll?

  And yet, there was this thing inside of you that demanded to move to Japan when you were 19. We're gonna get to that, but let's leave that aside for the moment.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  But so I had, you know, like egg roll thingies on top of, you know, rice and stuff like that. But I had never had actual sushi sushi. Again, I didn't have the money to have actual sushi sushi. You know, and so I sit down and Jiro gives me this one-on-one thing when they show me how to eat it. And, you know, it's like you have a little plate in front of you and then he just makes the nigiri, you know, I'm watching, I'm like, wow, this is so beautiful. And he puts it on the plate. And then he's like, you know, you put it in fish side down. So this is, and you use your hands to eat it. So all of this, I was like, what's, where am I? And I was like, whoa, this is really good. Hmm. I was eating like each one. I'm like, I'm just sort of like popping it in my mouth like it's Wendy's or something, you know, and I'm not really sitting there with it because I'm a little, I'm a little nervous.

• 13:52Rich Roll?

  Not giving it the due respect that a culinary master deserves.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 13:57Rich Roll?

  Or he's probably used to when people, you know, sort of have this transcended experience.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Just this bum, just this bumbling idiot, you know, 26 year old, I got like this ponytail, you know, it's like I was probably hungover, you know, it was just a ridiculous situation. And so, you know, I ate it, photographed him, photographed his son, he was there, photographed another one of his students. And at the end, I was like standing with his son, I said, oh, that was really good. I was like, I was like, I'd like to eat that again. How much, how much would that cost if I came back for lunch? And he's like, he's like, oh, what you ate today was, uh, like $300. And I was like, what? I mean, Rich, I've never, at that point in my life, I'd never paid more than like $15 for like an entire meal.

• 14:37Rich Roll?

  But you knew going in that you were there for a purpose, which was to photograph this living legend. So you must have had some inkling that this might not be, you know, $15 worth of food.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  I appreciate, I appreciate how much optimism you have about my view. I mean, it was, it was pretty ridiculous. So the point being is that people like Jiro, you know, who's got a shop in a subway station, underground with no windows. And yet is can be recognized as a living national treasure. And you see this across the board. You see this in terms of potters, in terms of sword makers. Everything in Japan can kind of be elevated in terms of craftsmanship. And those people do not make a lot of money and they live very humble lives. And I think that having a social structure that is able to elevate craftspeople, people who commit themselves to mastery of something.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  That's such an, oh my God, just having that ambiently in society in a way that it's not about the money. And it's really not about status because these people are all, for the most part, almost totally unknown. They're just kind of recognized by this kind of cultural body is is. I find that really inspiring and I think a lot of my work is derived inspiration from that.

• 15:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it feels like, you know, we were chatting before, but your books, your work, even the way you present your work online is all, you know, very aesthetically attuned. You know, like there is a sensibility to it that has been, you know, highly considered. And that feels very Japanese aesthetically and just with respect to intentionality and and respect for craft, right? Like, skill and craftsmanship are revered and the aspiration is to, you know, infuse whatever it is you do with some semblance of that. But how does that reconcile with what we know about Japanese corporate culture?

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  And like, you know, work super hard and, you know, stay out all night drinking and you miss your train and you sleep in one of those like little, you know, like little, what do you call them? Those hotels that are just like little capsules?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Capsule hotel. If you're lucky, you sleep in the capsule hotel.

• 16:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that feels like a different world from what you're explaining.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the paradox, right? Is that there is definitely this majority cohort of life in Japan, which is extremely.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Depressing to a certain degree, you know, it's this, I'm gonna do a 90 minute commute on a packed train, squished like a sardine. It used to be worse, you know, I think the eighties were sort of was sort of the peak of that during the peak of the bubble. And things have kind of post bubble pop in the early 90s. You know, in the last 25 years of Japan, has been sort of like frozen in a weird way. You know, it's been a very strange experience. I've lived there since 2000. And when I arrived from basically 2000 to like 2015, almost nothing changed. Like, you turn on the TV, it was the same people on TV. You turn on the radio, it's the same people on the radio. The prices of things, you know, this has been a big deal with inflation in the last three, four years. You know, the yen has gotten really weak, dollar's gotten really

• 17:41Speaker 01

  strong. Covid screwed up shipping, so a lot of products just cost more. And shops, for the first time in like 40 years, rose prices. For shops, this was like such a big deal. Because in Japan, this idea of the jorin, the regular customer, is honoring the regular customer and respecting the regular customer. And so, if the regular customer expects a morning set that costs $3, where you get an egg and toast and coffee, and you can have your cigarette, that's what you, as a owner of the shop, wanted to deliver for decades and decades and decades. So when you have to raise it to $3.20, there's

• 18:20Rich Roll?

  It's a huge deal.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  It's a huge, and there's a huge amount of apologies. And you should see the signage that was up for like, raising, you know, 50 cents, you know, for this like hotel or something. I mean, it was, it was really heartening in some ways, that, that people cared that much. But Japan was frozen for most of the time I was there. And now, in the last five to 10 years, tourism has kind of like rediscovered Japan in a big way. And I think social media's played a part in that. And, you know, and through that, Japan has kind of had this new influx of energy. And it's been responding to that in different ways. But, the core of the country is a bunch of office men, office women, commuting on, you know, trains in pretty dire circumstances.

• 19:02Rich Roll?

  It has tremendous cultural relevance, though, in terms of like fashion and trends, things like that.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:10Rich Roll?

  But, being older than you, The period that preceded this extended phase of relative stagnation was a period in which during my childhood, Japan was dominating everything. I mean, all electronics, all innovation, technology, it was all coming from Japan. And I grew up with the mindset that Japan was going to take over the world. The idea that now it's China would have been unimaginable. But due to economic forces, or tariffs, or whatever was happening, I'm not an economics expert, but something happened that created a shift and left Japan kind of in the lurch.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Japan's fourth biggest economy now. 10 years ago, it was number two. So that's been interesting, and I think complicated for Japanese people to reconcile with as well. But a big part of that was just simply stagnation. Like, there was kind of a momentum that grew in the 70s and 80s. I mean, the economic miracle of Japan, if you look at the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I mean, it truly is unbelievable. Like, Japan post-war, you go to Tokyo in like 1946, 47, I mean, it was gone. The city, there was no city. It was eviscerated. It was completely annihilated. And then so to rebuild from that, and a big part of like walking through the countryside for me is trying to feel

• 20:33Speaker 01

  what is happening to the country today. How is it changing today? But to look at where Japan was post-war to where they got within 30 years, I mean, it really truly is one of the most incredible economic turnarounds in the history of humanity.

• 20:46Rich Roll?

  And what is particular about the Japanese ethos that allowed them to go from that devastated post-war state into this phoenix-like kind of resurgence so relatively rapidly?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  I mean, again, I'm not...

• 21:01Rich Roll?

  Well, you've lived there, you know, your entire adult life, pretty much.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  I know. But I wish I had been there. I would have loved if I could like take a little time machine. I wouldn't go to the Edo era. I'd go to like 1960 and just see what 1950, 1960. I mean, I think it's the collectivism thing. I think it's the fact that they're able to kind of like... You can have this thesis about what we should be doing right now and then everyone's just like, yep, let's do that for good and bad. Right? I mean, that was sort of a negative thing during World War II. Everyone kind of got moving in the wrong direction. But if you can move that collectivist kind of mindset in the right direction, you can do incredible things economically.

• 21:35Rich Roll?

  But with respect to this idea of, you know, walking through the countryside in these rural areas, the, you know, the off the beaten path tracks that you've been on and attuning yourself to the decline and the impermanence and all of these things. I mean, it hearkens back to your youth and in certain ways is very similar to the environment in which you grew up as a kid, which then kind of catalyzes, you know, all this internal reflection about identity and which is really the terrain of your books or certainly the latest book. But let's go back to that time.

• 22:16Rich Roll?

  I mean, you paint the picture of growing up in Connecticut in this very strange household and, you know, leading up to this even stranger decision that you're going to move to Japan at age 19.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I grew up in basically a post-industrial American town. So the town was typified by, there was an airplane engine factory that employed most of the town. If you look at the last 120 years of the town or whatever, that was the major employer. And then there was the gun factory cult across the river and Coca-Cola bottling factory. I mean, so it was very much, you know, salty the earthy sort of place. My grandparents on both sides of the family both worked at the airplane engine factory. That's where they met.

• 22:59Rich Roll?

  Right. And as you say in the book, basically our manufacturing, you know, the machinery that was then utilized to drop the bombs on places that you have walked through.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. So. To feel that, because when you, when you walk the countryside, you feel where was hit and where wasn't hit, because there's sort of an aborted history that you sense in some of these towns that were firebombed. You know, and so much of Japan was firebombed, you know, it was all civilian populations for the most part, you know, with military sort of components. But you feel this kind of aborted history where this city, you know, you walk through Nagoya, Nagoya doesn't feel like a city with a history. It's so surreal, it's so bizarre. It's this almost like ambient thing, it's like, almost like the smell of it, it's like it stopped in, or it was born in 1945. And then you have these other places where the history goes for a thousand, 2,000 years.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  And yeah, I mean, walking and thinking about it and then realizing that some of the airplane engines that were built for the bombers came out of my hometown that my grandfather probably had his hands on, is a very surreal thing. And then being able to meet some of these older folks in these areas whose parents fought in the war, and being able to meet with them in this really kind of beautiful, peaceful way, and think about how quickly we can kind of transcend these, you know, these terrible violent impulses. I find a lot of inspiration in that. But I also find it being very bizarre that there's that connection, you know, through my grandparents working in an airplane engine factory, the war, these roads that I walk today. There's a lot there.

• 24:37Rich Roll?

  You were adopted.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:39Rich Roll?

  Your, uh, your adopted father, uh, seems like he was a real piece of work.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, I just-

• 24:48Rich Roll?

  The anti, the, you know, the anti-pattern, you know, mentor.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:53Rich Roll?

  I mean, those stories are incredible.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, you know, it's like, my parents adopted me and then got divorced basically two years later, um, which I find really fascinating. I mean, I find fascinating-

• 25:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if you're gonna adopt somebody, you'd think you'd, you know-

• 25:08Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like, you'd think there'd be a little more-

• 25:10Rich Roll?

  But that says everything you need to know, almost, a little bit.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  I mean, in a, in a, in a good way. I mean, so my, my earliest memories are getting bit by a dog. So we had this little dog named Jacques for some reason, and I remember, it was under the bed, I got bit by the dog, I remember that.

• 25:24Rich Roll?

  Very continental.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Jacques, but there's no, I don't know why it was called Jacques, like, that's truly one of the most bizarre naming elements of my family's history. Maybe I'm inventing that. And then all the other memories from that house are just my father- In Fruit of the Loom underwear, at the dinner table, eating steak and screaming. It's just like, you know, and the thing he said to my mom that is still like the most incredible, like sad thing anyone's ever said to anyone in the history of the world is, he goes, "In this house, woman, I am Jesus Christ." You're like, where does that come from? Where does that come from? But it comes from, his father was an alcoholic who abused him.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  His stepfather, you know, his mom remarried, another alcoholic, who was also abusive to him, you know? And he, you know, my adopted father, he was so sick his whole life, you know, he had two hearing aids, diabetes, he had this flatulence issue. I mean, he just, like, all of my memories with my dad are going to the movies and wanting to like curl up in a ball and die because he would be farting in the movie theater. And like, people around us would start gagging, would have to get up and leave, you know? And it was just this man of just a constellation of deficits, you know?

• 26:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, that's the phrase you use in the book. I mean, the biopic writes itself.

• 26:48Rich Roll?

  But there's this other, other story that you tell around, you know, being in a movie theater, you know, beyond the farting, it's sort of like, well, just dump your shit on the, on the ground. Like, you know, the, the, the ground of the theater is the garbage pail and like, they'll pick it up. But that is a very, you know, interesting choice, you know, in terms of stories to tell because of Japan's, you know, very different relationship to garbage, you know? And you talk about like the Starbucks cup. Like, can you just elucidate that a little bit? Because I think that is a window into the Japanese sensibility.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, garbage in Japan is your responsibility. Like, if you are carrying a Snickers bar, you know, it's like, it's so funny, the psychology of garbage. Like, you have a Snickers bar in your pocket, you're totally cool with having a Snickers bar in your pocket. And then you're like walking, you go to a park, you eat the Snickers bar, suddenly that wrapper is like toxic waste. You know, it's like, it's like you have to get rid of this, where's the garbage can, da, da, da. And in Japan, you just don't have that. So it's like, if you had a Snickers bar and you ate it and you have a wrapper, you take the wrapper home and you throw it away in your own garbage. That garbage is not the responsibility of the city, you know, because you happen to eat it in, in the, in the park or whatever. So- I remember one time, early in Japan, I had some coffee cup or something that I wanted

• 28:05Speaker 01

  to throw away. And I randomly went into, I was walking around Shinjuku, I remember very clearly, and I went into a random shop. I said, can I throw this away? Because in America, whatever, everyone's got a garbage can, no one cares.

• 28:17Rich Roll?

  Why would you think that that was an odd question?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, my God. That guy looked at me like, you know, I just asked to, you know, stand on the counter and, you know, pee all over the shop. I mean, it was just like, you couldn't have asked a more offensive thing to this guy. And I remember that that hit me in this weird way of like, oh, wow, I'm in a, I'm in a, I'm in a different place. This isn't, this isn't a country where anyone thinks the floor of the movie theater is the garbage. It's like, no father in Japan has ever said that to their kid.

• 28:46Rich Roll?

  But this idea of, of handle your own shit.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:50Rich Roll?

  And don't make it anyone else's problem.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah. In good and bad ways. Because Japan, I think, would benefit from a culture of therapy. So there is no therapy in Japan. I've been doing regular therapy with a guy in New York for the last eight years, weekly. And I've missed, like, even during these big walks, I make it a point to like, have my weekly session with, with Dan. I'm like, all right, where's Dan? All right, we gotta, Dan, we're getting you in there, you know, no matter what, even if I've done a 40K a day. And Japan doesn't have that. And when I, and so in Japan, I actually try to talk about my history of therapy quite openly. I've, in the last few years, I've had the opportunity to do a lot of media. I have a regular monthly radio show in Japan now. And, and so I bring that

• 29:34Speaker 01

  up quite a bit because to de-stigmatize therapy, like, some of your shit, own it, for sure, like your garbage. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. But there's a lot of psychological stuff, too, that I think Japanese people think they need to own more than they probably need to.

• 29:51Rich Roll?

  Is it a, is it a shame thing? Like, what does that stem from?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  A little bit. I mean, I just think America's done a really good job at de-stigmatizing it, right? It's like, I literally don't know anyone in New York that doesn't have a therapist. It's like, for better or for worse, right? It's like, you know, I'm going to my analyst today or whatever. In Japan, I just think that, that, and I don't think it's just Japan, I think Asia in general kind of has this, like, Talking about your emotions, or you know, you hear this a lot from Asian American immigrant, you know, like kids, the sons and daughters of immigrants, where it's just so hard to talk to their parents about emotional things. And so I just think there's this kind of emotional repressiveness that is pervasive there. And also, there aren't that many therapists,

• 30:35Speaker 01

  and then people who do see therapists are like, in a really, really bad place. So I think the idea that you can see a therapist as kind of a palliative before things get bad, that's just not a philosophy that exists.

• 30:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I understand that. I mean, was it all that different here in 1942, or whatever? So it's changed here as well?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 31:01Rich Roll?

  So you're this kid in high school in Connecticut, you've got your buddy Brian, you guys are doing whatever you're doing.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Bad, dumb things.

• 31:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and then you graduate high school, you make this decision, you're gonna move to Japan, and then suddenly, you know, a tragedy strikes.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, so Brian and I met in first grade, side by side. You know, it's like, couldn't be more totally on the same level. We kind of looked like each other, he was like three months, four months older than me. So he's kind of like an older brother. And we just, you know, it's like, there's this chemical thing that happens with kids. It's like, you just fuse, you know, and like, I'm adopted, and I'd say, the thing that has defined my childhood the most is the adoption, for sure. That just, there's a lot there. And we can talk more about adoption, the psychology of adoption, but like, for me, Brian was a brother, you know, because I didn't have blood brothers. And so I didn't have blood parents. So to me, it was like, you just choose who you want to be as part

• 32:01Speaker 01

  of your family. And we lived as close as you could live, you know, I mean, as siblings who weren't siblings. And all of my elementary school experiences are kind of infused with this kid. And then, as can happen, you know, testing in America kind of starts to separate kids out. I tested a little better, he was not so good at testing, and we kind of got separated more and more and more. And if you started going down a not great path in my town, it led to really not great things, you know. It's like, I remember- You know, going around, like I'd visit a friend's place, you know, and they had just gotten for Christmas, like a sack of weed. That was their weed Christmas present. You know, but you go to their house and they don't have any furniture. You know, that sort of thing.

• 32:43Rich Roll?

  God bless them.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're just like, oh, my God. And when I think back to now, there was a lot of suicide attempts. I mean, both of Brian's sisters were pregnant by 14, 15, 16. There was just this kind of ambient sense of complex violence, not to the fault of anyone in the town, but you kind of look at it and even if you just...

• 33:05Rich Roll?

  Systemically.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Systemically.

• 33:07Rich Roll?

  Go back now, how many of those kids that you went to high school with got out and are doing something different?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, point zero zero zero, 1%, you know, it's like, it's very small. So anyway, Brian and I ended up getting separated. And like I was testing in a way that kind of put me in this, almost like a little bit of a protective bubble to a certain degree. And it's funny, on the alcohol thing, throughout high school, I was straight edge. And I saw, because I had intuitive very early in my life, part of it being adopted, part of it seeing just how the town didn't have the infrastructure to kind of help you out. So I, from, I'd say 10 or 11 was like, okay, I have to own all of this. I have to own my destiny here. And I saw drugs and alcohol as an obvious impediment. And I saw all the kids around me doing drugs and alcohol.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  And ever since I, you know, I remember 13, 14 or something like that, just deciding I'm never going to touch that stuff in this town. When I left the town, it was very different. But in this town, because that will keep me here and I need to get out of here. And I mean, that intuition was sort of proven right in the sense that I graduated, you know, Brian and I, we graduate and a week, two weeks after we graduate, he's murdered at this house party. That was not uncommon, that fights would happen. And, you know, you had sort of gang stuff going on. It was, it was kind of a mess. And just as Brian is being murdered, you know, dying on the, on the front lawn of this house, you know, under the sky of 4th of July, I'm on my way to Japan in this kind of,

• 34:44Speaker 01

  both are sort of violent responses to a place. You know, to move to Japan and to stay there, it speaks to something that's a little bit broken in you to do that.

• 35:04Rich Roll?

  So to be this young person, to incarnate into a set of circumstances and into a family that isn't even, you know, naturally your own, and to be bewildered by that, and to look around and say, and have the self-awareness and the maturity even at a young age, to realize like, hey, man, I can't do the things the way these people are doing it, or I'm gonna end up that way. And the situation is dire enough that I have to pull the ripcord and eject in the most traumatic way possible.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:39Rich Roll?

  It's like, it's a, it's a act of self-love on some level. I mean, it's radical. And, and whether you had conscious awareness of that or not, you know, I don't know, maybe you do, but you had to save yourself.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the moment, I had no awareness of that, certainly. It was, again, just moving on intuition. And also, there was a socioeconomic choice, like, going to school in Japan was cheap. It was really cheap.

• 36:05Rich Roll?

  But why Japan? Why Japan? Now, looking back on it so many years later, like, what do you make of this decision? Like, it feels like it was somewhat spontaneous. I mean, were you obsessed with Japan as a little kid?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't obsessed, but I, so I think, okay, if we were to break it down, I'm like 13, 14, or I'm like 9, 10, 11, 12, and I loved video games, right? And the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, I think when I was like 8 or something, or 9. And I just remember the most joyful moments of my childhood were connected with this dumb thing, playing Zelda, playing Super Mario, playing Duck.

• 36:42Rich Roll?

  It was made in Japan.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  It was made in Japan! And I remember thinking like-

• 36:47Rich Roll?

  The Pyo pick is continuing to write itself, okay? I can see the scene where you're like, looking at the-

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Made in Japan. So it was like, this was, I mean, for Brian and me, this was our escape, right? And you kind of understand that this is really the power of video games in a lot of ways is it, it allows you to escape a situation for a few hours, a few, you know, 30 minutes, if that's how long you're playing for. But it is, it is a form of escape and it can be a really positive one. I mean, for me, it activated my imagination. It got me thinking about storytelling. But it was this thing that came from Japan.

• 37:21Rich Roll?

  Right. Made in Japan is an association with, with like imagination, escape, safety.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:28Rich Roll?

  You know, all of these positive emotional experiences that you were lacking in your, in your IRL.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the local video store that I used to bike to back when they had local video stores, one of the guys there was like an anime maniac back in the late 80s. So this was, he was really early on anime. And he would make bootleg copies of like Akira for me, or Fist of the North Star. And, you know, we would watch these things and not really understand what they were about. I mean, Akira is a really complicated, weird movie. I don't know if you've

• 37:59Rich Roll?

  But this has stayed with you because you keep referring to it in your book.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  So, you know, there was this ambient thing of like, from outside of this place, this country called Japan exists. And it makes a few things that are kind of interesting and bring me joy. And like you said, that, you know, it's, it's kind of an archetype of safety and protection and happiness. And so I think that just stayed with me. And when the time came to study abroad or try to, I was gonna drop out of school. I wasn't gonna go to, I was just gonna give up college. And when the time came to study abroad, I was kind of looking, I was like, well, what would it be like if I went to Japan? And I found a couple of websites of universities. And I was like, how much does this cost? And it was like, I don't remember the exact figure, but it was like $5,000 for the year

• 38:44Speaker 01

  with a homestay. I mean, it was just so absurdly affordable. And even a plane ticket back then wasn't that expensive. You know, you fly economy to Japan. There's no, I mean, hilariously, you know, it's like, there were no monitors in the seat backs. It was like, it was a long flight, 14 hours or whatever from JFK. And And I just thought, well, that makes sense. Let's go do that before we completely drop out of school.

• 39:07Rich Roll?

  And your mom, God bless her, had been saving for you ever since she was a young person.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Ever since she was like 20.

• 39:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  She told me that story. It was just like she, you know, she didn't go to college until later. And she graduated in high school and like she just wanted to be a mom. You know, she worked at the airplane industry factory. I guess her boyfriend dumped her or something, but she had just started saving for a kid that she knew she wanted to have at some point for education. Because I mean, looking back at the salaries and everything, like my family did not, we had, we did not have an abundance. There was no, there was no sense of abundance. But my mom was able to save enough to basically say, look,

• 39:51Speaker 01

  leaving here is an option, going to college is an option. And that, from a very young age, she, she let me know. And so to have that baseline there is a profound thing to give to a kid. To say that there is a way out, you know, even if like, I don't know the way out. Even if your dad definitely doesn't know the way out, like, maybe you can find the way out.

• 40:11Rich Roll?

  So how did it land with her though, when you, you announced that, you know, this, this was gonna, these resources were gonna be deployed on the other side of the planet?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't think she thought I was gonna be there for 25 years. Or like make my life there. So it was just, and you know, and it was a complicated thing too. I mean, my grandparents, you know, they were very anti Japan. My grandfather had these weird rules. He never ate rice. He was, he had this, I'm not gonna eat rice because of World War II. Which is, you know, an insane thing to associate rice with Japan. And he never bought a Japanese car, only bought Fords, only bought, yeah. I mean, he was very consistent in this kind of. Inability to overcome these biases that he had built up during the war. And so for me to go there for them was emotionally quite complex.

• 41:04Rich Roll?

  But you become this emissary to resolve generational trauma.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, exactly. I eat so much rice.

• 41:13Rich Roll?

  Eat it, grandpa.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Eat it, grandpa, yeah.

• 41:16Rich Roll?

  You can't get enough of it because you're eating for the whole, the whole line. Back generations. So you, you, you land in Japan, this wide eyed 19 year old kid who has been adopted, who's now, you know, sort of unbeknownst to you, like adopting a new country, you know?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:34Rich Roll?

  That also has a very different relationship with adoption in general.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:38Rich Roll?

  Which will get, maybe we'll get to that a little bit later, but that had to be quite a, quite a seismic shock to the, to the system.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  It was, and again, it's like, none of this was conscious, right? It's so you're just, when you're 19, you still, you don't know anything about the world. I mean, you're really, that's a really young age, right? And so you're just kind of moving on intuition. And, um, you know, I moved to Japan, I'm in Tokyo, I didn't know anything about Tokyo. I'm living in Shibuya Koo. I'd never heard of Shibuya, you know, which is now like everyone, everyone who's.

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  Even I've heard of that.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  You've heard of it, like, you know, every 12 year old knows Shibuya, they want to go to Shibuya. And it's like, it's this crazy thing that I really went there knowing very little. And immediately I just sensed, holy shit, everyone's taken care of. Like, that was sort of the, the ambient sense that I think I felt in my bones. Cause I had come from this place where, and again, when you grow up in it, you don't see it. And I get to Japan and it was just like, everyone I'm passing, and I'm passing 10s of thousands of people a day on my way to school. It was kind of like a 30 minute commute to school. I passed 10,000 people, I passed through Shinjuku Station every day. And you just felt like these people were taken care of by something, something bigger than all of us. And that, that really blew my mind.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  I mean, that's just that, I think that's why I ended up staying, that's why I committed to it.

• 42:58Rich Roll?

  That's what you were looking for, that's what you didn't have and what you needed.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's almost this predestined thing, right? It was a faded thing.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:11Rich Roll?

  I mean, there is a, there's something ineffable about it that I think is really beautiful.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Well, it speaks to soft power too, you know? It's like, we talk about this thing of soft, countries having soft power and like, you know, Japan producing these things of delight that. Happened to catch me when I was young and in a really in a place where I needed help, you know, and kids can't always get help from their environment. And sometimes it's this external third party thing that swoops in and provides a little bit of reprieve. And the fact that like the soft power of that too, and Nintendo being such a good company. I think that this is also like really interesting is that if you look at like kind of all the video game companies in the world, like Nintendo is genuinely probably the one less

• 43:55Speaker 01

  least motivated by explicit capitalism and most motivated by joy and goodness of game design. So it's like, there's a lot of games today that are essentially casinos, right? Casino style games, Candy Crush and all that stuff focused on making money. Nintendo obviously has to make money and they make lots of money. But like you play Zelda, you know, one of the latest Zeldas on Switch. That is a game with well-defined boundaries. You can finish it. You know, it's not about a casino mechanic. It's about exploration. During COVID, I played with my, with my daughter a bunch. I bought a Switch. It was the first time, actually, when I was writing this book, I was like, oh, man, I owe Brian some video game time. So I bought a Switch and I hadn't played video games in like 25, 30 years.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  And playing with my daughter was incredible, you know, and she was, how old was she? She would have been like 10 or 11. And being able to put it up on the projector and walk through these worlds. And you just felt like this is a company that really does respect the gamer and respect, respect the customer in a way that.

• 44:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the nostalgia quotient is very high for that company, right? It's sort of beloved by an entire generation, perhaps for that reason. So it's, it's even if, even if the idea that it is a well-run company by well-intentioned people is not something you're aware of, it seeps into the products. And that's perhaps why it's beloved in that way.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  And it points back to the thing I said earlier, which is like, there's a sense of enough. Right? And like you just get a sense that Nintendo is not about looking at a spreadsheet going, how do we make all these numbers go up forever? You know, it's like, they want the numbers to go up shareholders, whatever, they're a public company, yada, yada, yada. But they want the numbers go up. But there is something, there's some sort of philosophy in internal there that is saying, we don't have to milk all of these things for the most possible money. And in fact, we want to be optimizing for just the most respect for the the Jodensun, the regular, the customer, the player, the gamer, whatever, which I I love that. And I think it's why Nintendo, if you look, so many people want Nintendo to succeed. Like, it's a weirdly high, the nostalgia part, quote, quote, is part of

• 45:59Speaker 01

  it. But they've also just engendered a lot of good vibes over the years. And I love that, you know?

• 46:04Rich Roll?

  As much as Japan was a place in which you were like finding yourself, you were also, you have to like lose yourself to find yourself, right? So it is this lost and found thing. I mean, your story and the way in which you kind of address the, the, the weightier like themes and subject matter is a, is a very yin yang thing, you know, it's like, and within this, you know, you're, you're finding yourself in this new place. You had to break free to like reimagine what your life would could be like. But there is also, you know, some grief and some sadness and a sense of loss and having lost yourself

• 46:47Rich Roll?

  on an identity level by being so far away from home.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great way to put it. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was complicated as hell. It's like, and, you know, as much as I didn't touch drugs or alcohol throughout my teenage years, as soon as I got to Tokyo, it was like, you know, no holds barred.

• 47:05Rich Roll?

  Bring it on. Yeah, game, game. Well, everyone's partying, right? I mean, it's a pretty alcohol life culture.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  The drinking culture. Thankfully, in the last, I'd say, decade, it's kind of calmed down a little bit. I think the younger. Generations are not quite putting up with as much power harassment slash like alcohol abuse that, but when I arrived, it was peaking. I mean, we were at, it was, you know, I've been a musician my whole life, a drummer, I studied jazz. That was kind of one of the things that was, I had a few tricks that I was, skills I was cultivating to like, get me out of town, get me out of my place, like, you know, tethers to the greater world. And music was a big one of, part of it. And when I moved to Tokyo, immediately I joined at the university, I was at Waseda University, which is a great university, amazing. It's kind of like a hippie version of

• 47:52Speaker 01

  like Yale, sort of, if you want to, like, there's a lot of like, Murakami Haruki came from it. There's, you know, there's a lot of, lot of artists and writers and stuff that come out of it. But I joined the music circle and immediately just started playing drums. And part of the reinvention thing was like, all right, no more jazz, let's do punk rock. So I joined a punk rock trio and the music circle, my God, did those guys drink. And so I joined them.

• 48:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  You know?

• 48:18Rich Roll?

  Good times.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Until it's not, right?

• 48:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How long until it wasn't?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 48:27Speaker 01

  so I drank, I was blacking out probably like two, three, four times a week from 22 to like 28, I'd say.

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  That's a pretty good dose.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, lesser and higher moments in there. But it was this thing, you know, and again, being adopted is complicated because you don't have that family history to look at and go, oh, I should watch out for this, or I should watch out for that, or, you know, I have a predilection, you know, to, to drink 15 drinks a night. But there's something that activated in me. If I had two drinks, I mean, you probably know this, right? It's like, suddenly, everything in life is for the next drink. It was just unreal.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  That desire and then also personality change. I mean, just a totally different person, like complete extrovert, sort of impresario of whatever of the place. And, you know, buying shots for everyone and like getting everyone, oh, you need to drink. You know, it's like, I've definitely almost killed friends of mine. Like, they're like, you know, it's like, you can kind of like chuckle about this now. But it's like, I have friends who've like woken up in the street the next day. And they like, they're like, you did this to me. It's like, I have no idea.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  But like passing out in the street, I mean, from what I understand, like, that's not unusual in Tokyo.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  So now they wake up, a cop is kind of shaking their shoulder, saying, hey, you gotta wake up. They're in front of like Takashimaya, you know, department store or something, you know? And they kind of get up and go home. But, you know, I, for me, the, the drinking was a shock. How good I was at it in this, in the sense of I could have 15, 20 drinks a night. Like, and my, and just the desire for it. And how that, it was almost like a perpetual motion machine. You know, as soon as you had three or four, it was just, it was off. We were off to the races. I see that now connected to several things. One, exactly like you were saying, the complexity of being in this new place and trying to find yourself and trying to shed who you were, right? And so I think alcohol can kind of act as a reset for that. But also, like, I didn't have any archetypes.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  I didn't have any mentors. I didn't have anyone I could talk to about these emotions. You know, I didn't have a dad I could talk to about any of this stuff, like, you know, my, my mom, my grandparents, like, no one could understand what I was doing. And, you know, in this new city, I didn't have anyone older that I could say, hey, I need help with this.

• 50:58Rich Roll?

  And, and no therapist.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  No therapist. God, if I could just go back in time and just like whisper into my ear in a bar somewhere, I'd be like, just get the therapist, like, just do that when you're 20. I think the alcohol was acting as a, as kind of a surrogacy for. The pain of wanting to become someone different and not knowing how to do it.

• 51:20Rich Roll?

  And also, you know, your best friend getting murdered and being, you know, brought up in an environment of chaos.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Well, and the guilt of kind of leaving that behind, too. And the guilt of, I think, when he was murdered, I internalized a lot more guilt than maybe I consciously recognized in the sense of like, what could I have done to have helped him? How could I have pulled him in more in my direction? Could I have done that? And then you realize like, when you're a teenager, like, you're just trying to get your own stuff in order. And it's so difficult. And so the idea that you could be, you don't have your mask on, you don't have your life jacket on, that you're saving another person who's drowning is just crazy, right? And so I think that guilt was present in it as well, a lot of what I was doing.

• 51:59Rich Roll?

  And how long did you play out that narrative before you decided you needed to address it?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  It was, you know, like I said, 20 to basically 27, 28. And it was funny. I mean, I was very high functioning in the sense that I was going to the gym three times a week. I was biking. I got really into road biking. I'd do 200 mile loops on the weekend, totally hungover, sweating out like a gallon of whiskey. But I would go and do these things. So I had this weird knowledge that I think I needed to take care of my body so I could do more drinking.

• 52:33Rich Roll?

  Right, it's a twofold thing. First, like, when you're in your twenties, you can kind of do that, you know? But secondly, and I relate to this deeply, like, if you are able to maintain being high functioning or high performing in whatever it is you're doing, that acts as a rationale, like, oh, you know, like, as long as I'm going to the gym or I could do these things, then I don't have a problem, I don't have anything to look at. And then also, a little bit of false pride or superiority.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 53:07Rich Roll?

  Like, not only can I, like, go out and have 20 drinks, I can still show up on time and crush it, you know, in school or in my band or in whatever else you're involved in.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 53:18Rich Roll?

  And so then it gives you this inflated sense of power that is really just an illusion.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yep, 100%. So I was, you know, I was... Working on, I was art director for Indie Press and we were winning awards. And I was throwing all these book parties in Tokyo that were like the biggest, most fun book parties that anyone ever had.

• 53:38Rich Roll?

  It's all a big look at me.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And getting these kind of artist residencies. I was in, Bennetton gave me this residency in Treviso, north of Venice in Italy. And like, so I was doing all these things, but even that Italy time, I remember like how many times I blacked out like in the week. I was, you know.

• 53:56Rich Roll?

  But you're like this tastemaker, basically, then, at that time.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  I was, I was really lucky. I don't know. I mean, I happened to be focused on, from a young age, I loved books. I loved storytelling. I loved novels. And I loved technology. And technology was twofold thing. One, it was, there was just something magical about it and I thought it could, I could see how it could help with storytelling. And so that was kind of like part of the addiction. And then part two was like, holy crap, you can make a lot of money doing this. And like, wait, I can make more than both of my parents combined if I like make webpages. This is me when I'm 14. It's like, okay, I should focus on this. Like, we should cultivate this skill. So I had this weird skill set where I was making physical books that were winning design awards as physical objects. And then I was doing digital kind of design stuff and data visualization stuff. This is like early 2000s.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  That was also winning awards and getting me called to go abroad and be a judge of the art directors' club.

• 54:51Rich Roll?

  You like took a detour to Silicon Valley for a while, didn't you?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  That was 2010. So that was, that was kind of post, okay, let's get sober, let's fix our life. But in the early, my early twenties, I was born in 80, so it kind of maps to yours easily. But in the early 2000s, you know, I'm drinking like a fish, kind of destroying a lot of like friendships and romantic relationships. And it was really when I was 26 and I was just, truly what I thought was the love of my life, just this person that was absolutely perfect, left me. You know, we went on this 40-day trip through Tibet. We met, you know, it was like this, it was this totally crazy adventure that we went on. We met instantly going on a 40-day trip. We're like, you know, drunk the whole time and it's just wild.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  And like, we're, you know, making love on a glacier and like, it was just insane. It was, it was, it was as crazy as you could imagine.

• 55:43Rich Roll?

  So good, it had to be doomed.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  It was so doomed. And she left me. It was basically just like you. Are killing yourself. Like, I can't be with someone like you. And that truly just emptied me out, broke me. And I, I was 27-ish, and that was when I realized, okay, I gotta stop. Whatever I'm doing, I've gotta stop. And I was playing music and I was in the studio a bunch, but I was also playing a lot of live gigs. And there was a whole bunch of drinking connected with that. So I actually, I stopped playing music, which is kind of extreme. And I, I was like, I'm gonna take all this creative energy and it's gonna go into writing. Because I'd been writing up until then, but I hadn't really committed, committed. And I was like, okay, let's transmute music energy into writing energy.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  And it was like 3:00 in the morning, I'm lying in my tiny six mat apartment, which is barely bigger than probably two of these tables.

• 56:36Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  And I'm having suicidal thoughts. The love of my life has left me. I feel so empty. I don't know how to become the person I wanna be, which is someone that's creative and knows how to love and knows how to accept love and can do, can do these things. And I was like, alright, well, what do we do? And, and it's kind of funny now that I know about Stutz and his triangle and all this stuff. It's like, I just intuitively, I was like, okay, let's start running. And it was 3:00 in the morning, not like you, I didn't run 40 miles, but, but I got up and I ran like 5K around a quiet Tokyo at 3:00 in the morning. And I was like, that felt good. And I was like, alright, I'm gonna try to cut the alcohol out as much as I can and start doing more, more of this running.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  And I signed up for a full marathon around Mount Fuji, Lake Kawaguchi, and started training for that. And that, that was my first, I think, it did a couple of things. One, it realized, I realized I can't just quit drinking, that's not gonna work for me. I have to replace it with something else that gives me a purpose to not drink. And so by knowing I had to train, that was a way to say no to the drinking at night. It was also a way for me to tell friends I didn't have to drink. Because you know, the problem is, is like you've, by the time you're 28, 29, you have this cohort of people that drink and expect you to drink. It can be a little, a little difficult to, almost like sociopathic to have to step away from that. You almost have to be like, alright guys, sorry, I'm never gonna hang out with you again. You know, it's like, I can't do this. And so-

• 58:04Speaker 01

  I started doing that, but what was really happening now that I look back at it was I had no self-worth. Like my self-worth was sub-zero. And all throughout my teens and my twenties, and part of this is the adoption component. Adopted kids, now that I know more about it, I've talked to more people about it. I've been on adoption podcasts with someone who's interviewed 300, 400 adoptees. And there are just these sort of pathological tendencies of an adoptee where you create all these emotional barriers. You sort of lower your self-worth. Adoptees are four times more likely to be substance abusers, twice as more likely to have suicidal thoughts. There is just something implicit about, oh, you're not from our family. You're not from us. As much as that family may say, oh, we love you.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  People vastly underestimate the amount of work that has to go into making an adoptive kid feel great. And so then when you're in a situation like mine where these parents adopt you and then two years later they get divorced. And then the dad isn't really there. I mean, it just doesn't. And then my mom had, you know, boyfriends and then I'd think this guy's kind of like my dad. And then they would break up and there was no reconciliation and he would just disappear. And so you just think, oh, I'm someone who's thrown away. That's what you internalize. Oh, I'm someone who's just, who can be thrown away. And man, that really doesn't do wonders for your self-worth.

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  That's super interesting. This idea that you're disposable and, and your higher self, you know, drops you into Japan. That has a very different relationship with disposability.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that disposable component. And the, and the being taken care of by the greater whole component.

• 59:44Rich Roll?

  And the sensibility around adoption there, like adoption is, is aspirational almost, right? It's like, I'm taking you under my wing because, because you are worthy, not because you were discarded.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  And you see that kind of in the craftsman and craft woman area of people being adopted into families to continue, continue the name. And you see it in inns, so an inn that's been around for 600 years, you know, it's not the same blood family. But it's people have been adopted in and kind of taken over. Yeah, there is a really kind of healthy relationship with that idea of, that you can be folded into a family, kind of like flour into wet dough. And it's not, you're not apart from the family. You're really integrated. So I think that felt good to have that ambience around me as well.

• 1:00:28Rich Roll?

  So the sobriety journey begins with the running. Like, does that work for you? Like, how does this go? Like, you're not falling into an AA meeting somewhere.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  I'm not in an AA meeting because I don't... They have AA meetings in Tokyo now. I know about that. But I'm sure they had them back then, but I wasn't privy to it. And, you know, it wasn't a like, okay, I'm done. And like, just I'm clean now. It took me about three years to... And it was, if I look over those three years, it was about ratcheting up my sense of self-worth. That's all I was doing. Again, subconsciously, I had no conscious... There was no plan to do this. The running was part of it. Take care of the body. Mood follows action, all that stuff. And it was like, okay, let me take care of the body. Start doing that. That's the one thing I have control over. I didn't have any money. So I didn't... It's not like, oh, let me go do this fancy retreat in Thailand or something. I didn't have the means to do that. But I could go for runs. That's easy.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Doesn't cost anything. That started to feel good. And I started charging more. Like, I just had this moment where I was like, I'm gonna start charging more for my time. You know, I was doing basically tech consulting stuff. Like, because I just had these skills I'd built up as a teenager. And even though all of my main work was working on indie publishing and doing, you know, design for these books and working with these authors and putting on events and stuff like that, it was all physical book publishing. I had this skill set in digital where I could work for, you know, I could do two weeks of work and have six months of living expenses. Because in Japan, that was another reason I stayed, was my monthly cost of living was $1,000.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  If I had $1,000, that covered rent, food, and going out and having fun. So when that... So I was cultivating an asceticism as well all throughout my twenties. And that gives you a tremendous amount of power, flexibility. And you aren't beholden to doing a thing that you don't want to do. And so I was very lucky that in my twenties, I was pretty uncompromising. As much as I was self-abusing myself with the alcohol and... Not taking care of myself. I was uncompromising in that I was only working on projects I felt a deep spiritual, like, almost like theological connection to. And so I was doing these little gigs, you know, tech things here and there. I was like, okay, let me, what if I charge like three or four X? And people started saying, yes. I was like, oh, that's cool. And that started

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  to raise, like, if there's like a little internal self-value meter, you know, it's like, I started at the meter was broken, you know, and then I went in there with running and we started to fix the meter a little, and then charging a little more, kind of ratcheted it up a little bit more. And then going out to Silicon Valley was sort of, I'd say, probably one of the most pivotal moments of my adult life. In 2010, I had this opportunity because of essays I had been writing. So gave up music, started committing to writing, putting these essays out into the world, and they just started to do really well. Getting picked up, the New York Times is writing about them, you know, it's like suddenly I've got all these followers. And I was invited to join this company in Palo Alto that was working at this intersection of kind of design, publishing, digital media.

• 1:03:26Rich Roll?

  Was that Flipboard?

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  It was Flipboard, yeah.

• 1:03:27Rich Roll?

  Flipboard, I remember, Flipboard.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Flipboard. And so I joined right when they were like, just, just started booming, employee number eight, you know, that sort of thing.

• 1:03:34Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  And to go there, and I moved in to this house two blocks from Steve Jobs, and we were able to rent the house, me and these two guys from Stanford.

• 1:03:45Rich Roll?

  In Woodside?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  No, no, this was in Palo Alto.

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  Oh, in Palo Alto.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  In old Palo Alto. Steve Jobs, you know, I think he passed away in that house even, you know, it was, he was right on Santa Rita. And it was, I don't know if you've ever seen it, it was-

• 1:04:00Rich Roll?

  I don't know that I have. I knew he had a home in Woodside, like, a really nice place.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  I think that was earlier, actually, when he was younger.

• 1:04:06Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  He did the Woodside thing, he was like dating Joan Baez at that time. It was like, this Dylan, kind of like stalker, you know, sort of situation going on. But his main home, or at least for the later years of his life, was in old Palo Alto. And it, like, it's just a two-story, it is the most unassuming place you've ever seen.

• 1:04:23Rich Roll?

  Like a couple blocks off university or something?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:04:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, just super close to Stanford, you know, right off the Caltrain stop. Yeah, I mean, so I'd walk past his house every day. So I went from- For as great as Tokyo is, it is pretty provincial and people there don't really think on an international scale. So part of going to Silicon Valley was, I was like, alright, let me see what it's like to work with these top, top, top people. And the guy who invited me, Marcos Westkamp, was a designer I had respected all throughout my twenties. I mean, he was probably one of the most, for me, most respected designers in the world. And to go be able to work with Marcos and have Marcos come to me directly and say, Craig, you need to be here with us right now. This is so great. That, again, that little internal meter of like, do I have value? And, you know, an imposter syndrome was constantly

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  like fighting against that. Do I have value? You know, these little things ratcheted it up. So I moved to Old Palo Alto and my two roommates were these Stanford D school guys. And like, we, you know, we moved into this house. It was like this cute little like single story house. And I was sleeping on a yoga mat for the first month. Like, there's no furniture. We just had, we had a kitchen table that we'd all kind of hunch around. One guy was a filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, making amazing docs, these like short form docs. And then the other guy was this guy named Enrique, Enrique Allen. He was just this bastion of love and creativity and he was kind of working with investments and stuff. And I moved, you know, Japan famously doesn't really hug, doesn't really touch.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  So I'd lived essentially 10 years of my life without any hugs. And then I moved into this house in Palo Alto. And these guys were just the freaking huggiest guys in the world. And every day I'm just being smothered by these hugs. And they were so positive. They were vegetarians. There was no drugs, alcohol, they didn't drink. And I went from this place of everyone's getting blasted, blacking out, you know, alcohol is part and parcel of everything. Every meal is like just meat. You know, Japan loves meat, right? It's just like beef everywhere. To moving into this house where these guys are just hugging me constantly. There's no meat, there's no alcohol. And they come from clearly a place of abundance, these two guys.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  You just felt behind them were generations of love that had manifested these two human beings. And to be in that, their presence, I lived with them for three years, to be in that presence, even after two months, I met up with a good friend of mine, Liz Danzico, this amazing design teacher educator. We met up for pizza in New Haven. And she just, at the end of pizza, she just goes, Craig, I don't know what the hell's going on, man. Like, you're a different guy. I've known you for five years at this point. You're, you're a different human. Like, just keep doing this, whatever you're doing now. Keep, keep following that path.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  And so that was all just part of this, how do I give myself, again, not having a mentor, not having a, an archetype, not having someone older to, to lead the way, how do I give myself a greater sense of self-worth? And in doing that, the alcohol fell away pretty naturally. And I'd say I was about 31 when I was finally able to really kind of say goodbye for good.

• 1:07:37Rich Roll?

  Put it completely in the rearview. Yeah, but surrounding yourself with peers that are modeling healthy behavior, being such a profound thing, like, they're not necessarily mentors, but you shifted your friend group and your environment such that you put yourself in a position to like, observe what that might look like.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:07:59Rich Roll?

  And to be on the receiving end of that from them to engender that, that kind of self-compassion and self-respect.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  And I did it basically twice, right? So it was like, my teenage years, I was in one place, and I was like, I have to get out of here. And then I'm 20 and I'm now in Japan and doing kind of a re-encarnation, which some good, some bad, you know, whatever, the alcohol was suboptimal. If I could, if I could remove the alcohol from my twenties, and I don't really believe this idea of like, oh, well, because you went through that, now you're a better per, you know, like, you are, I like, I've met kids who are in a good place at 20, and it's much better to be in a good place at 20 than like, to be in a bad place and then struggle through alcohol and yada, yada, yada. It's like, I can, maybe I can empathize with people who've had these struggles now in a way that you can't, it's difficult if you haven't, but like, if I, if I could have avoided that, that would have been great. But there was then a part of me that at the end of my twenties, where I was like, okay, I need something else.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  And again, it was switching cultural contexts, moving to Palo Alto, to a place I'd never lived before, living with people I didn't know, and kind of putting on, again, this leaning into this new identity, which was an identity of abundance, you know, I was getting paid. You know, $30,000 a month or something like that. It's like, I went from making $15,000 a year.

• 1:09:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  For most of my twenties.

• 1:09:10Rich Roll?

  Go back to Japan and live forever?

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  No, I was, but that was, that was always there because the escape hatch was always there. I was like, I know how to live on a thousand dollars a month and I can live richly. So, okay, you just gave me, you know, 30 months of living in one month. And in Palo Alto, I lived like an ascetic.

• 1:09:26Rich Roll?

  Sitting on a yoga mat, getting paid that amount of money. Yeah, that's, that's wild.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  It was pretty weird.

• 1:09:40Rich Roll?

  Those guys that your housemates.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Rich Roll?

  Seem on some level to exhibit something that you talk about in the book, which for me, like, one of the biggest, most impactful things that, that, that I took away from reading your book is this idea I'd never heard of before called yo-yu.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Rich Roll?

  Is that how you say it? Is that how you pronounce it?

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Yo-yu.

• 1:10:03Rich Roll?

  Yo-yu.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Yo-yu.

• 1:10:04Rich Roll?

  I want to hear more about this because I think this is a really like cool and profound idea.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So yo-yu in Japanese is, you know, and I bristle at the idea of like quoting a mystical Japanese word and saying like, you know, oh, this is like.

• 1:10:22Rich Roll?

  Let me translate it for you.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  This is the magical art of whatever.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  It's just there, it's just the word they have.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  It is a word.

• 1:10:28Rich Roll?

  For an idea that we don't really have quite the word for.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And, and, and you can, in English, it could kind of be empathy, but it's, it's deeper than empathy. You know, and in Japanese, the way I've, I've come to understand it is, is having the space in your heart to accept someone else, to have space in your heart for someone else, an abundance of space in your heart and your life to be able to accept hardship, to be able to respond to hardship.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  And that's, I think, what I felt fundamentally when I moved there is that having these systems on a greater level supporting people imbued everyone I saw on the street, everyone I was passing with this, a little bit of yo-yo. And more people have more yo-yo and less yo-yo than others. But there is this sense of space in the heart. Like, you know, when I, when I first got off Narita Express, you know, I arrive in Tokyo. This is how little I knew about Tokyo. I arrive, get off at Narita, get on the Narita Express. The train stops at Tokyo Station. I think, oh, this is Tokyo City. Not knowing that Tokyo had, you know, 100 stations in it. So I get off at Tokyo Station and I'm like, I have to go to Shibuya Ku. I have to get to Shibuya. I was living in Hatakei. And

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  I kind of looked befuddled and someone came up to me, you know, a woman, maybe in her 40s or whatever. But, you know, I was 19, so everyone felt, you know, if you're over 30, you're the ancient. So a woman in her 40s comes over to me and is like, do you need help? And I was like, I need to go to this address. And she's like, oh, my God, like, you're nowhere near. And she took me all the way, like a half an hour on the train. She took me to the, this other station, helped me transfer, did this thing.

• 1:11:57Rich Roll?

  That's unheard of.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  That's unheard of. And that is yo-yo in action. That is having an abundance of space in your heart to be able to do that for someone. And that, immediately, that as being literally my first interaction I had getting, arriving in Tokyo, I think just started to recalibrate, sort of reprogram my entire way of thinking about the world.

• 1:12:16Rich Roll?

  It's a relationship with abundance, though.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  Because in the West, abundance is something we're seeking. And when we get it, we, we reward ourselves by trying to get more of it and hoarding it.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:12:31Rich Roll?

  It's sort of an energetic thing. Your relationship with this energy is such that should you be lucky enough to have it,

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Rich Roll?

  it's best, it's best deployed, you know, outward

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Rich Roll?

  in service of other people.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Rich Roll?

  And when you have a lot, like, then you have more to give. And it's your responsibility to give that, right?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:52Rich Roll?

  And in doing that, you engender empathy. It allows you to forgive more easily. Like, it, it opens up space, to your point, for these other emotions that we tend to like kind of. Clamp down on, or you know, we hoard those too. Like, I'm not going to forgive you until this or that. We're very conditional about these things.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think being around people with yo-yo and realizing I grew up in a place with no yo-yo, where everyone was economically kind of pushed against the wall. And in terms of what are our opportunities? Well, there aren't any. And so like, when you're in a situation like that, where you can fall, when you see how far you can fall, I think this is like another thing about the American condition that's a little bit scary, is when you see how far you can fall, and you can fall to hell, beyond hell, in America. There just aren't those safety nets to catch you. When you see how far you can fall, it's really hard to feel a sense of abundance that you can give to other people. And so in Japan, because of like all these structures and these social structures, and like you can only fall, oh, I can see how far I can fall. It's not that far. It's not that scary for me to help this other person out.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  I think just being around that and feeling that, and then being on these big solo walks that I've been doing now for six, seven years. It was in that, and I write about this in the book, you know, I was able to, I'm able to laugh about who my father was. I was able to find this crazy sense of forgiveness for this guy that I didn't know was possible. I didn't know I was capable of. And, you know, feeling that, experiencing that is again, is again, we're getting back to this self-worth ratcheting. And I think having a sense of yo-yo, feeling that yo-yo, being able to deploy it in a way that's positive, that elevates people. Again, that just helps you feel like you're, you have more value as a human, too. It's like, it's mutually beneficial.

• 1:14:36Rich Roll?

  Why didn't you end up staying in Palo Alto? What caused you to go back?

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  It served its purpose. You know, it was like, it was a great experience. I mean, like I said, probably one of the most profound, possibly most important three years of my life, living with these guys, doing this work with people that were operating at the highest, highest levels, getting paid these ridiculous amounts of money. But at the same time, I felt like I had, what I had cultivated in my twenties, the voice I had cultivated, the focus of the work I wanted to be focused on in my twenties. I felt like the financial abundance that existed in Silicon Valley. Was actively kind of working against what I had built up. Because as much as I was around these people who weren't drinking, you know, were vegetarian,

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  were giving lots of hugs and things like that, there was also this other layer of people and the majority of people who were just like, oh, let me get this Woodside house, or let me get this Atherton house, or let me get this, oh, I just got a new Maserati, I got this thing. And that to me didn't, it didn't jibe with who I had built up, who I'd spent the last 15 years building inside of me. And I had a lot of love for that person inside of me and who, who kind of worked in this intuitive way and had an uncompromising focus to work on books like these that were not going to make me nearly as much as staying in Silicon Valley. And I was really lucky, I was being offered all these opportunities, you know, I was close with Ed Williams, I was being, you know, asked to be, work for every major company at that point was basically trying to hire me and have me be an advisor and all these things.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  And I just had this moment where I was thinking about moving to San Francisco and I was waiting in line to rent an apartment for $4,000 and it was like in this neighborhood I didn't really like and there was like a guy dying on the sidewalk next to me and, you know, the apartment was kind of junky and I was like, what am I doing?

• 1:16:26Rich Roll?

  What is this, like 2012 or something?

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  2013, yeah. 2012, 2013.

• 1:16:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  And I had this moment, I was literally standing in line and I just thought, okay, I'm done with this, I'm going back. And the whole time I had kept my place in Tokyo, kind of as like this, like, you know, tether to the, to where I'd been. And the cost was so low, I mean, my rent, you know, I basically never paid more than $600, $700 rent in my life in Tokyo. And so this $600 rent over there was a rounding error, it was like, okay, if you're making $30,000 a month, it's like, I could pay that. And I was renting it out to a friend the whole time. Anyway, it was, I could go back very easily. And I just had this, this epiphany where I was like, okay, I'm going to work on books and I want to commit. During 2011, my father died and I had to go bury him. It was this kind of complicated set of circumstances where he had moved to North Carolina when

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  I was a teenager and he had moved with his like mother and his sister and brother-in-law and they all died instantly, like within like three or four years. So he was alone in the woods in North Carolina and his family was small to begin with and there were no relatives left alive when he died. And so I get this call in 2011, I'd just gotten to Palo Alto, we were in the middle of- Crazy work, you know, I'd replaced alcohol with like mega work, work mania, uh, working, you know, morning to night and trying to ship this, yeah, I know you're so surprised, trying to ship this iPhone app and, uh, and my dad dies in the middle of that. And I'm like, God damn it, Dad, like, bad timing. Um, you know, and it was basically like being

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  called, if someone had picked a random person out of the phone book, it couldn't have been more of a stranger to me than this guy by this point. So I was like, oh, hey, come to North Carolina to a town you don't know and bury the stranger, you know? And I went out there and I rushed through it all. And at the same time, even though I rushed through it all, there were moments of incredible profundity that I didn't get to sit with.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  And I was kind of rushing through it and, and I was like, okay, at some point I have to go back to that. And around, it was around that time, 2012 or so, I got the McDowell Writing Fellowship. I was really lucky. I applied randomly, uh, to McDowell to get a writing, uh, scholarship and to do a residency there. And McDowell is the oldest writing residency in the country. And I mean, it's just incredible. Have you ever heard of McDowell?

• 1:18:43Rich Roll?

  I've heard of it. I don't know much about it.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  It's in, it's in New Hampshire. It's been around for 120, 30 years. I mean, it's just idyllic. And it's, you know, you're there with Booker Award winners, National Book Award winners, you know, like, oh, this person's played with Stevie Wonder, this composer's, you know, written for, it's just the top of the top. And I somehow snuck in. And again, that ratcheting up, that little ratcheting up. And, and I went there and the thing I decided, okay, I need to work on is I'm going to sit with my dad for, I was there for six weeks, basically. Let me sit with this story and work on that for six weeks. And that was, that was pretty important. And then feeling that and feeling like, okay, this is the path that my heart feels pulled towards, which wasn't building more technology stuff. It was really great. As a teenager, I had this fantasy of going to Silicon Valley

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  and doing something. And then when I was 29, 30, I had the ability to go out and not only do it, but do it at like, one of the hottest companies with some of the most kind, compassionate, talented people I'd ever met. And to feel like I could stand toe to toe with all these mega talented A-list people in that world and touch it and feel like, okay, I can do this. And now I know I don't have to do this.

• 1:19:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. A couple of reflections.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Rich Roll?

  On the one hand, I was rooting for Flipboard. Like, this felt like the first app that was actually built for the iPad. Like, oh, this is, this is like, an elegant way to, like, consume

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:05Rich Roll?

  the things that I want to consume.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:20:08Rich Roll?

  I wanted it to succeed. Do I have you to blame for why this thing didn't work out?

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  No, you have me to blame because I quit.

• 1:20:15Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:20:17Rich Roll?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  I could, I could.

• 1:20:18Rich Roll?

  So, part of me wishes you'd stayed, so this could, I could now be enjoying my content in that way.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Rich Roll?

  Um, and, you know, from everything I understand, Ev Williams is a wonderful guy.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Rich Roll?

  And, you know, amidst all of those sort of iconic Silicon Valley pioneers, he's actually, we, we actually have him booked. He's coming in, I think we're trying to get a date to have him come in, because he's got this new thing, Mosey.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Connections.

• 1:20:41Rich Roll?

  Gatherings.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:43Rich Roll?

  I've always thought he's a really interesting person. But on the flip side, the way I look at or interpret the story you just told is somebody who really got clear on what their values were.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:54Rich Roll?

  And you can't do that unless you value yourself. Like, you had grown to a point where that level of self-esteem was sufficient to resist the temptation. You know, like, a lot of money, a lot of, like, this is where everyone was going at that time.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Rich Roll?

  Like, all the incentives were pulling you in that direction. But you were able to honor, like, that voice within you that realized, like, there was a different path for you that was, would be more honoring of who you actually were, rather than, um, the, the mask that you could adorn and that would be rewarded, you know, in our culture.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  For sure. And when I was at Flipboard, every weekend, I would book a hotel in the city, and I would just go up there Friday night, and I'd get late checkout on Sunday, and I would just write from Friday night till Sunday.

• 1:21:40Rich Roll?

  That's better than just drinking in your hotel room for three days straight. That's.

• 1:21:45Rich Roll?

  That's the other version.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Sparkling water. I drank so much sparkling water, but yeah, it was just sparkling water. But no, so I was even in the middle of it all. I was like protecting this thing that I had kind of cultivated throughout my twenties and was trying not to get pulled in these other directions and to sort of keep those values clear and apparent. But what really made it easy to make that decision was I looked around my life and everyone in my life that I loved, that I had the deepest connections to, even being able to work at Flipboard, all of that was connected to writing. All of that was connected to being, you know, honest with myself and focusing on the things that I wanted to, that I felt the need to focus on. And, you know, like people like Kevin Kelly, who has become one of the most important people in my life, probably, he'll be really embarrassed to hear that. But like,

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  Kevin is such a dear friend. We met, actually, I met Kevin two days after I buried my dad and I rushed through burying my dad in order to get to the event in New York to give a talk. Because that year I moved to Palo Alto, I gave, I don't know, like 10 or 15 talks around the world. I was just like suddenly being invited to do these things. And again, this scarcity mindset, which plagued me throughout my entire life. Scarcity, scarcity, scarcity, no value, no value, no value. They're gonna find out that you're a fraud. This is all gonna go away. We have to say yes to all these things. And so I had this thing in in New York with O'Reilly Media and I like literally like basically all but like threw my dad in the, in the ground. It was like, I was like, we gotta, you know, I'm talking with a priest. I'm like, we gotta get this going fast. He's like, when do you need, I'm

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  like, tomorrow. We need to have this happen. He's like, what? I'm like, yeah, we just gotta get this done. And I, you know, I got to New York, I was on stage.

• 1:23:20Rich Roll?

  Another good scene in the biopic, by the way.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I gave, I gave a talk on stage and I got this email right after. It was from Kevin Kelly. And it was like, hey, I like, I like the things you're saying about publishing on the stage there. And I was like, who is, I didn't know who he was. And I asked a friend, I was like, should I talk to this guy? And he's like, Kevin Kelly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk to Kevin Kelly. And I was like, okay, hey, I'm, I'm out back, you know, it's come say hello. And he came over and he was like, this, you know, this tiny guy looks like he's Amish. He's got, he's a gnome. He's a little gnome, Amish gnome. And he goes, oh, yeah. So what publishing tool should I be? I was like, who is this character? And he just started inviting me to come take walks in Pacifica. You know, we'd walk along the coast.

• 1:24:00Rich Roll?

  So this is, this is where the walks began. Cause we've done an entire podcast. We haven't talked about walking at all yet. No, it's good. This is the way we do it.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  This is where the walks begin.

• 1:24:12Rich Roll?

  This is the anti clickbait, you know, we're like, we're gonna delay satisfaction on the subject of walking until an hour and a half in, but go ahead. So it was Kevin.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  It was Kevin.

• 1:24:21Rich Roll?

  Was the inception point.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Which, and he kind of has a history of walking, you know, it's kind of his thing.

• 1:24:26Rich Roll?

  And you've gone on to do these like walking talks with him, right?

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  I have, yeah. Yeah. In fact, Kevin and I have done four of them in the last 15 months, which is a crazy pace for us. But Kevin, Kevin has a death clock on his computer. So he's looking at, Kevin every day is like looking at how many hours of life he has left, I think. So, so he's like, Craig, I want to do more of these.

• 1:24:48Rich Roll?

  Ratchets up the pressure on you.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  He's like, let's do it.

• 1:24:49Rich Roll?

  My clock's different, but.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Like, it might be the same clock. You know, we don't know. We don't know. But, but I appreciated his zeal for doing these things. But Kevin and I started putting these together about eight years ago, where we invite six to eight people to walk with us somewhere around the world for a week. And we walk for seven days, basically. And it's about 100K, 120K. The ideal is about 20K a day. That feels really good. It's like just enough to move your body. You can have a lot of conversations, but you can still stop and see things along the way and take breaks and stuff. And then every night, we have a Jeffersonian dinner. So it's one topic, one table, one conversation. And Kevin is great because he's such an elder aura, like his vibe is just this, like, you don't want to offend Kevin. You know, I find, people won't say like offensive things around Kevin,

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  and then Kevin will be gone. And then they'll say crazy things to me. I'm like, well, you know, it's like, just because Kevin's gone, doesn't mean you can say crazy things to me. But he, he kind of maintains this sort of like elder statesman atmosphere. And so everyone plays along. And we have these three hour discussions every night about all sorts of different topics. And every day, someone picks a new topic. And these have become, Kevin has said, these are some of the best weeks of his life. And so to be part of that for a guy like Kevin Kelly, who's lived the life he's lived is incredible.

• 1:26:03Rich Roll?

  And he is a tractor beam for interesting people, right?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  So I would imagine.

• 1:26:07Rich Roll?

  Incredible. The people that show up for those walks are, you know, already loaded to bear with all kinds of insights and.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:26:14Rich Roll?

  Experiences.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  And, and we started doing those. And, you know, I invite half the people and he invites half the people. And. Spending seven days, almost 24 hours a day, you know, you're like 15, 16 hours a day with these people where you're walking and you're walking in twos and you keep kind of moving between little groups and stuff. And then at night you have these really profound dinner conversations to the point where, I mean, there has not been a walk and talk where people aren't in tears. It's like there's some point people are sobbing. To have these discussions and see how people's minds work and all the discussions are done with an incredible amount of yo-yo, generosity, empathy. And so to witness that now for me, we've done eight or nine of them, which means, you know, two, two and a half months of my life have

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  been spent around tables with these incredible humans, having these deep conversations. Again, just creating in my mind, all these archetypes for what could be. And you spend seven days with someone and that is a profoundly different experience than just getting coffee with someone. And so to be able to spend-

• 1:27:15Rich Roll?

  Or laying on a lounge chair by a pool.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the walking is critical. That walking gives purpose to it. It moves the mind in a certain way. Without the walking, it doesn't work. And you walk in to in. So we've done Kotswalds a couple of times. We walked Thailand, Chiang Mai, from the mountains down back into Chiang Mai. We walked in Bali. We walked across the island. And that one was the most intense. That one, I will never do something like that again. But every day we'd get to a basically bamboo platform in the forest and it was 10 of us and we all just slept next to each other on this bamboo platform.

• 1:27:49Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Did that for a week. That said, the Bali chat group is the most active chat group of all the WhatsApp groups from all the walk and talks.

• 1:27:57Rich Roll?

  Well, you know, discomfort as a way of bonding people together.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  But, but we just did Spain again. The Camino de Santiago was amazing. We've done Japan a couple of times. But it is, it is one of the, one of the, I think the greatest things in my life. Again, ratcheting up sense of self-worth and then being able to connect with these people that I've grown to, many of them have become just such close friends, people I love.

• 1:28:25Rich Roll?

  Do these walks as a, as a group and as a, a exercise in connection and idea sharing, et cetera. It's altogether something different to decide, I'm going to go on these solo walks and I'm going to go great distances. Like, maybe there's a light dusting of the alcoholism thing in here, like, like, you know, this is what I would do. You know, it's like, I decide I'm gonna like, run them and swim that, you know, like, push my body. But the idea of slowing down and just being with yourself in the most undistracted way for extended periods of time as a challenge, as a, as a way of reclaiming your attention, which is something you've

• 1:29:09Rich Roll?

  written a lot about, reckoning with yourself. Like, the hardest walk is the, you know, the walk inward, right? And giving yourself space to do that. So is that like a byproduct of having these nourishing experiences with Kevin and these groups?

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  It's sort of in parallel. The solo walking stuff happened from another mentor that is just a dear friend who accidentally became a mentor. This guy, John McBride, who I write about in-

• 1:29:36Rich Roll?

  Right, the Book of John. Like, I want to hear all about the Book of John.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  The Book of John. But John, I met almost 20 years ago now through art world connections, because I had written a book about the Tokyo art world. And we got connected. And it was one of these things where we sat down for breakfast together, and then we didn't stand up until 5:00 PM. It was like one of those, like, you know, falling into just infinite conversation and just this almost like ceremonial, like, deep connection. Again, like, almost like the Brian thing as like kids, but having that as an adult is, you know, it's, it's kind of rare. And then we just started doing, he'd invite me, "Oh, I'm gonna go stay in James Torell's House of Light with some artists. Do you want to come?" And we started doing these things together. And then John had, grew up essentially in Japan. He came when he was 16, 17, on a scholarship, went to Japanese university, is totally fluent, you know, wrote his-

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Sotsugiro Rombun, his graduation thesis in Japanese by hand, that sort of thing. And when he was studying, he started doing all these old walks. So there's the Tokaido, there's the Nakasendo, there's Matsuo Basho, the haiku poet who did the Okunohosomichi, the narrow road to the north. And John, as a teenager, started walking all these alone because he wanted to understand the connection between literature and history. And so he's taking notes and his literature professor's kind of guiding him. And so John had been doing that and then he sort of retired in his early 40s. He ran Sky TV in Japan, so launched it with Rupert Murdoch. He was the CEO when he was like 33. So he's one of these wonderkind sort of human beings.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  And kind of retired and then at 50, he was sort of looking for, I don't know, something to go back to or reflect on. And he started doing these walks again and he started inviting me. He's like, hey, I'm gonna, because I was, you know, I was writing my book about my dad, which, and that, by the way, never came out. It never became a thing. But, you know, I was writing, I was freelance, I had time. And John was like, hey, come walk with me in, you know, Kumano Koto, you know, this path called Kumano Koto. And I was like, what's that? And so he started opening up this world, the world that's in this book, John 100% opened up to me. And we started going on these walks together, he and I.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  And his fluency and his yoyu, his abundance as a human being blew me away. Like Kevin and John share a lot of that abundance in different ways. And we'd, you know, be walking these old pilgrimage paths on the key peninsula, which is the peninsula south of Kyoto and Osaka.

• 1:32:03Rich Roll?

  The dangling penis.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  As it's, uh, belovedly referred to in Japan.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  The moist dangling penis of Honshu. Yeah, if you look at it that way. And we'd be in the countryside, walking, talking to farmers, talking to in-owners. And I started observing John, just, I'd stand back and I'd watch how he ensorcelled everyone we connected with, with... Language, because in Japanese, you can kind of elevate people through the verb conjugation and the word choice. And through his language, through his historical knowledge, through his presence, just the way he held himself to everyone, where, again, it was no sense of I'm above you, I'm looking down, even though it's a random, you know, could be a tomato farmer in the middle of nowhere. Total elevation of who he was speaking with.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  And watching those people flip over this kind of swing set and disbelief, because there's like, initially, it's like, oh, my God, a white guy, this big lumbering dude, he's like 6'2" and, you know, big, big guy. You know, John lumbers up and, you know, you can see them freaking out, oh, my God, how am I going to communicate with this person? And then within two seconds, they realize, oh, he's totally fluent. And then within five seconds, they realize, oh, my God, this is a really special human being. And then within 30 seconds, they are willing to do anything for us. It was like, do you want to live with me? Do you want to marry my daughters? Like, do you want, like, do you want tea? Like, anything. I mean, just, just to watch John do that. And again, it's, it's this archetypes and being present for archetypes and bearing witness

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  to archetypes in action is something that Brian and I were bereft of, right, as growing up as kids. We had none of that. Like, I always say, I say in the book, like, man, if we just had 10 minutes with someone like John when we were kids, like, how different could it have been to have just witnessed John doing this for 10 minutes? And so, you know, eternally grateful to John for inviting me on these walks. You know, I was basically 33, 34 when we started doing these. And witnessing this, and then from that, because I had the language skills, but I didn't know how to deploy them. And I, you know, my, my whole thing is like, I've got this voice in the back of my head, ready to fight everybody. You know, it's like, that's just how it was. Where we came from. You always have to be ready to fight.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  And if you didn't fight, you were going to be diminished, you were going to be snuffed out. And that voice is still there in my head all the time. You know, and so if I, if I perceive someone to be a bully and I can be overly sensitive about this, I'm ready, like, oh, let's go to the mat, you know? And John didn't have any of that. He comes from a place of total abundance.

• 1:34:37Rich Roll?

  Well, he was the mentor that you needed your entire life, right? He's your Mr. Miyagi.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Like, like if you adverted Mr. Miyagi, you get John. What if for the opposite?

• 1:34:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. And we should say, you keep bringing up Brian, but for the audience, the book is structured as basically an elongated, you know, uh, letter to Brian.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Rich Roll?

  Like, hey, I'm going on this journey. Like you're, you're reconciling with your grief and your guilt and all of these emotions, but you're doing it in the context of like sharing your experiences in a letter to this lost friend.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, the book opens just, you know, hey, let me be beginning on for you, you know, Brian. And yeah, the whole thing kind of ends up being this letter to him. Like if I could talk to him today, what would I want to tell him about and explain, you know, and being able to like, kind of think back on where I've gotten to in Japan, to be walking alone, 700 kilometers, you know, talking to cafe owners, smoking cigarettes with these like jazz cafe people, um, to be able to get to that place from where we were and just go, Brian, man, look at this. This is ridiculous. You know, it's like, there's one, one passage in there where I talk about having taken, taken Jeff Bezos on a walk. You know, it's like he, he joined one of these walks randomly.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just so surreal to have gone from where I was in the world to Jeff reaching out and being like, hey, I want to join you, you know, I want to do a Kevin and Craig walk, you know? And, um, and the surrealness of that. And I think writing this to Brian helped me contextualize a lot of that in a way that would have been difficult otherwise.

• 1:36:17Rich Roll?

  Right. Right. It's a vehicle to express everything you want to say in a shorthand because you realize, like you realize the context of it.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:27Rich Roll?

  So the book of John, like, tell me this like worldview theory then, like you're observing this charismatic person, like insourcing people. I love that word. I'm so glad you use that. But if you had to canonize it, you know, what, what is that? How do you, how do you articulate that?

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  So the book of John is this thing in this book that I talk about. So John, you know, like we, what we've done. I don't even know how many walks together we've done, but we've probably traveled together 24 hours a day, sleeping in the same room. You know, like, we're basically siblings. Like, he doesn't want to be called a dad. Like, you know, so we travel together and people are always like, "Oh, Dad, Father and Son." He's 20 years older than me. You know, "Father and Son, oh, that's so cute." And he gets, like, really upset. He's like, "I'm not his dad." You know, like, not actually upset, but just kind of... But like, it really is sort of sibling-ish. You know, that's what it feels like. And so we've spent six months, I would say, of our lives together, which is, I don't think I've spent that much time with any other human being outside of childhood. And so John, even when I'm, even when we're not walking together,

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  I'm walking alone. He's like, he can see me on Find My Friends or whatever, and he's always knows where I am. And he knows the routes I'm walking. He's walked them 50 times. And so every day, he's emailing me, like, basically PDFs of, like, sections of books that he's written about where I'm gonna be that day, even though he's never published any of these books. He gives a lot of lectures and stuff. And so every day, I'm getting, like, this download of, like, "Oh, Craig, hey, I see you're next to this shrine. You know, here's the history of, like..." You know, and so I call this the Book of John. I've gotten thousands of pages from John over the years, kind of like this angel on my shoulder, looking at, "Well, okay, this is where you're gonna be today. These are some cool things to see," you know. And so that's one part of the Book of John. But

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  then the other part is just that, that in my mind, this voice of John, and like, having borne witness to him be such a human of compassion and abundance and empathy, he's gonna, you know, sort of blush at all this. But like, it's true. He really, he really is this person of yoyu, of incredible yoyu. I keep that in mind all the time. And anytime I find my mind veering to that scarcity place, and that voice of fighting, of anger, kind of like, being like, "Hey, man," like, brushes off his, like, "Hey, we're ready to go whenever you want to go." I kind of like, refer back to the aura of the Book of John, which is, like, just putting, putting a little more energy, assume the best, try to elevate that person on the other side before you go to that place of scarcity.

• 1:38:55Rich Roll?

  He gives you the facts, but it's really a vibe check.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  It totally is vibe check.

• 1:38:58Rich Roll?

  That's what it is, right? And so, what is the Book of Craig, though? Because it's got to have its departure points from...

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:39:07Rich Roll?

  You're not a strict constructionist.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 1:39:09Rich Roll?

  The Book of John.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  The Book of Craig is a super, super in-progress book. I mean, it is less history-focused. Like, that's just not my thing. I'm not able to retain facts. I like history in the sense of giving me a little bit of context. But for me, what I get out of these walks, and the reason why I don't do nature walks, why all my walks are like village to village, where they have to pass through villages. And that's why with the Kumano Kodo, the walk of the Kumano Kodo that I like the most is called the Isegi. And that's a walk that few people do. But it is the walk that it touches mountains, it touches the coast, it touches logging villages, fishing villages. You feel this kind of salt-of-the-earth-iness of people all along that walk.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  And so, for me, as I'm doing these walks, I want to talk to as many people. I want to bear witness to as much life being lived as possible. And for me, I'm just collecting like a weird squirrel, like little archetypes of possibility. This is what life can be like. This is what life can be like. This is what life can be like. Oh, you can have a good life in this context. Oh, in this context, you can have a good life. And for me, those stories, the conversations I have with people, that is what it is for me. It's bearing witness to possibilities of how to live and how to live well.

• 1:40:28Rich Roll?

  What would you say is the core takeaway or like thesis that you've extracted from these many experiences? The through line?

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I really do believe that social safety nets all create an abundance that allows for the most interesting lives to be lived.

• 1:40:49Rich Roll?

  Because if you know you're gonna be okay, then you have the calmness and the...

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Well, you can take risks.

• 1:40:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can, you can, you can, you have more freedom to be yourself and to do the things you wanna do.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  So, I've done a lot of these big, kind of, historical countryside walks, and, but I've also done kind of iterations. I've been like, "Oh, well, how can we do walks differently?" So, one thing I did was I picked ten, what you call like flyover cities, like Japanese flyover cities. So, places you would like never go to necessarily, because there's nothing particularly special about these cities. But I, I kind of picked them from Hokkaido all the way down to Kagoshima. And I tried to walk fifty kilometers in each city. That was my goal. So, I'd go to them, I'd spend three nights, and I'd try to walk fifty K. And if you try to walk fifty K, you're gonna touch almost every street in the city, and you're gonna end up talking to people and all this stuff.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  And I started in Hakkodate, I went to Morioka, Sakata, Matsumoto, Tsuruga, Onomichi, Yamaguchi,

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Karatsu in Saga, in Ehime. I went to a city, and then I went, ended in Kagoshima. So, I went to these ten cities. And I just started talking with folks. And most of these places are very countryside. And most of the Japanese countryside is depopulating. Shutter, it's called shatta-gai, so shuttered streets. So, all the shopping streets are just shuttered, the shops are all closed. You don't see kids anywhere. You don't see independent businesses thriving. And in doing these ten cities that I, I kind of picked almost at random, one of these cities in particular, Morioka,

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  I went and it was just abundance upon abundance. It just freaked me out. I was like, "Why has literally no one ever said to me in twenty-three years by that point, 'You should go to Morioka, it's cool'?" It was just cafes, amazing cafes and bakeries. And the cityscape was like wonderful to walk, and there's this huge park in the middle that the castle used to sit on. And there's sixteenth-generation ironworkers building, like, doing these amazing pots. And like, the fifteenth generation was the current guy's mom, you know, who's like this super cool, like, strong, you know, woman. And I was just like, "Why has no one talked about this place?" And so, a couple of years ago, New York Times came to me, I write for them freelance sometimes. They came to me and said, "Hey, we're doing our fifty-two places you should go to this year for 2023.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Do you have somewhere to recommend?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure. I like Morioka, super cool. Let me just recommend." And you kind of write this little paragraph. It was probably like 200 words you write. I submit it. I'm like, guys, this really is a great city. Like, truly, please, like, I hope you consider it for the list. And they don't tell you where it's going to come in, in the list. And they go, okay, it's gonna be on the list. And so you're like, okay, it'll be, you know, it'll be 30, 40 out of 52, something like that. And the list comes out in January 2023. And number one is London, because the, the Queen had died and there's like, you know, the, all, all this stuff was happening, or the, there's a coronation happening. And then number two was Moriyoka.

• 1:43:47Rich Roll?

  I didn't know it was number two. I knew that you wrote that article and that it blew up and it created like a whole thing.

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  It was two and everyone in Japan just went, it was like the record scratched across, the needle scratched across the record, across the whole country. And they were just like, what? Like London, then Moriyoka?

• 1:44:05Rich Roll?

  What is the population of this, this city?

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  It's like 100,000, a couple hundred thousand. I mean, it's not like, it's not like, you know, Podunk, you know, Mississippi or whatever. It's like, there are people there.

• 1:44:17Rich Roll?

  They're erecting statues to you in the town square.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was, it was crazy because they were, everyone was in shock. And then this one guy in the city who runs this old soba shop, he just went, this is insane. Like, we, we need to use this to promote the city. And he started pushing it. He started reaching out to media contacts and was like, hey, he's like, I think Craig speaks Japanese too, like the guy who wrote this article. And so then suddenly it was just like, I was in the middle of a giant-

• 1:44:45Rich Roll?

  You're a media figure in Japan.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it went from, I had literally never spoken on TV or radio or anything before to I've now done like hundreds of TV shows and, you know, radio shows, newspapers, magazines, everything. And, you know, they invited me up there. They're like, hey, you should come up. The mayor wants to meet you, you know? And I'm just like, okay, this will be interesting. I could do like a follow-up piece to the New York Times, like, you know, how's Moriyoka doing? And I thought, they didn't tell me anything. You know, I'm like, I'm gonna go into a little room like this, gonna shake the mayor's hand, be like, oh, you know, hey, nice to meet you, like, let me know if I can help, like, you know, use this to your advantage, please. And I walk in and they open the doors and it was like a scene from a movie.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  It was like, just all, like, the whole thing, it was just all giant, like, network TV cameras, like, you know, rapid-fire paparazzi, like, you know, and I was just like, what the, what is going on? I like, haven't prepared a speech, I haven't prepared anything. You know, they bamboozled me, they totally did the bamboozle on me. And so I walk in, they lead me to the mayor, he's sitting on like a throne, and so like, I sit next to him. You know, it was just, it was just so ridiculous. And we shake hands and the mayor, the mayor basically goes, he's like, thanks Craig, uh, okay, I'm out of here, uh, take it, take it from here. And he just left me with all of this media, you know, and I, truly, I had not prepared like a speech for these people, I hadn't prepared anything.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  And they start asking me questions and they're like, um, Modo-san, um, how do we, uh, solve poverty? And I'm just like, guys, guys, I don't, you, hold on, like, I just think you have really good coffee shops, like, I don't know how to solve poverty, I am so sorry, I think I'm not the guy you respected. But anyway, it was, it was insane, like, I'd walk down the street, people would stop their car and scream out, Modo-san, arigato, you know, like, I'd walk into a, uh, someone would take me to like a restaurant, everyone would stand up and start clapping and like buy me, try to buy me drinks and stuff, you know, and, and it was just, you know, being stopped on the street for selfies and like, I mean, it was just, I was like, okay, this is how, you know, A-list celebrities feel everywhere they go in the world, and I could see like,

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  this would drive you insane, this would make you a crazy person if this like really happened at this level everywhere. But it was funny and what I was able to do from it, and the reason why I said yes to all the media, wasn't because I was like, oh, my ego wasn't like, oh my god, finally, we've, we've arrived and this is what we've been waiting for our whole life, is zero, absolute zero of that. In fact, It was really difficult for me to do a lot of this stuff. But what I saw was a moral obligation to explain. Like, why did I pick this city? And like, these people were just dumbfounded. Like, what do we do with this now? And so I wanted them to get the most positive, that they could rest from this as possible. And I felt a moral duty to explain to them. Why is your city great? Like, what's cool about it? Because they were all just like, why? Our city is boring. It's like a middle of nowhere, nothing town.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  And so going on a lot of these radio shows and TV shows, people would be like, you know, what is it about Moriyoka that you liked? And like, how many bowls of soba did you eat? Like, that's what they're obsessed with.

• 1:47:49Rich Roll?

  They must have, they must have the best noodles. And are there some secret there that you've unlocked?

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And my answer was national health insurance. That's what they've got. You know, it was like, national health insurance combined with a little bit of good infrastructure. So the Shin-Kansen Stop happens to be there. So that injects a little bit of life. But just having, because everything I loved about Moriyoka was independent business. So it was this jazz place that's been doing Japanese jazz for 50 years. They were the progenitor of building a jazz cafe around Japanese jazz. They were the only one doing it. And they got heckled for it. And they just stuck to their guns, you know? And it was one of these things where there's a certain kind of business that can't exist in Tokyo, because there's just too much influence. But just enough outside the city, where the cost of living is really low, where you're

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  taken care of, you can have a family, you can run a small bookshop, that becomes this community center. Moriyoka is just full of that. And that was what I loved about it.

• 1:48:47Rich Roll?

  And this is what we all want on our main streets.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:48:51Rich Roll?

  That has completely vanished from modernity.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Yes. So it is a city of Main Street. It's just, every street you walk, there's a tatami maker. Here's a great bookshop. Here's another cafe. Here's a cafe that's been open for 55 years. Here's one that's been open for three years. Here's, oh, the daughter of this old one's opening a new one over here. You know, it's like, there's this energy and community that comes from this yoyu, this abundance, that... Is so heartening and that's, I think, why I was so moved by it. And it was difficult to explain to Japanese media because I'm like, well, I come from this traumatized place of scarcity. It's like, and I'm like saying this in media and I'm like going to a city like Moriyoka heals me. It's like literally healing me to walk the streets, to feel this abundance, to feel that this is possible because I'm collecting this archetype of you can live like this, you can have a city like this.

• 1:49:38Rich Roll?

  What would it be like to be able to have a cool business and not live in fear of like never being able to pay the rent or pay the bill and just be able to like celebrate and enjoy it for what it is without thinking about like how it has to scale to 10 cities?

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  For sure. And so in Moriyoka, you've got one coffee guy who is revered all across the country. He was actually one of the first people to import, I think it's called Probot. It's like, it's like a classic German roaster machine, giant machine. And he, you know, it's like, he just got really into coffee and started doing this stuff. And he was able to do it because rent was really low and no one was going to raise the rent on him. And even after all this attention, it's not like I've destroyed the city now.

• 1:50:22Rich Roll?

  But I'm sure there was a profound economic impact. Do you have a sense of, of like, have they been able to tally?

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I, the, there's some estimates, but it's probably somewhere around like a hundred million plus of

• 1:50:35Rich Roll?

  That's wild.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Positive economic impact.

• 1:50:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  So 200 words led to a hundred million.

• 1:50:40Rich Roll?

  So maybe they did say, well, now we can move to Tokyo. That's the American, the American thing was like, now we can get out of here and go to Tokyo.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  But my, my thing was, I like, you know, all these political groups were asking me to give talks at like rallies and stuff like that. I'd said no to everything. All I want to, for me, the most important generation, the most important demographic to speak to is teenagers and people in their early twenties. And so I, the biggest thing I wanted people to take away from this was for teenagers to feel pride in where they came from. And so you leave and then you think about coming back to build, to build on, on this greatness that's already there. And so to me, that was the most important thing. So talking to politicians in their sixties and seventies to me was pointless. That was just idiotic, even if they're going to pay well. I was like, I don't, and also like, you don't want to touch that world. But talking to young kids, talking to, you know, I'm happy to do that until I'm blue in the face.

• 1:51:30Rich Roll?

  Another aspect of these walks is connecting with, I mean, that's a story of resilience to celebrate, but there's this impermanence aspect, like this peninsula is in decline and in decay and has had to suffer, you know, like, you know, all these, was it like the hurricane that destroyed it?

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:51Rich Roll?

  So there's like, it's sort of littered with relics and wreckage that connects you with like the impermanence of all things, right?

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:00Rich Roll?

  And, and, and when you walk this, you're in this deeply reflective state where you're like reflecting on your own life and perhaps reflecting on the impermanence of all things as a result of what you're seeing and experiencing. But at the same time, you're like writing and you're like collecting all these knickknacks and you're, you know, curating and like, you know, so there's a, there's a hoarding aspect to this also.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  I like that, I like that description.

• 1:52:24Rich Roll?

  That's kind of like, you know, in conflict with that?

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  Well, hoarding, yeah, hoarding stories.

• 1:52:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  But part of the hoarding element is you feel it disappearing so rapidly. So it's gone. 10 years from now, most of these people I'm speaking to are dead. They're gone. The shops are gone.

• 1:52:41Rich Roll?

  They're kisses, that's what they're called, these like cafes.

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  Kisses.

• 1:52:44Rich Roll?

  There's nobody in them, right?

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  It's fair.

• 1:52:47Rich Roll?

  They're just existing for the few people who might come in, you know, they're regulars.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. A few regulars who happen to still be alive. And most of the time, like the owners own the property, so they don't have to worry about rent and they just go there, you know, but like in these really down and out economically depressed areas where it's been totally depopulated, all the kids have gone to Nagoya or Osaka for the jobs, that's where the jobs are. Again, it's just like you get really blue collar opportunities. You know, a lot of the lumber, a lot of the fishing has gone to China. So these industries just aren't what they used to be. And even on the peninsula, I did a, I went down for a 10 day photo shoot in February this year and, you know, I go to the, the raw tuna market and they let me on the tuna boats, it's 4:00 in the morning. All the, all the people working are Indonesian. All Indonesian. You can't find Japanese people who will work for this pay that makes

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  it sustainable. Even the Indonesians are having a hard time, they're having a hard time finding them because Indonesia has come up economically so much in the last 20 years, 30 years, that even for Indonesians, it's like, this isn't really enough pay. So it's difficult. So the jobs aren't there. And so you have this, this really thin relic of a past culture, a past way of life, that truly, we are, we are witnessing it in real time, wink out of existence. And so that, that kind of hoarding desperation element of getting these stories, talking to these people, I think just comes from the fact that I know in 10 years, it's all gone. And I, if I can just capture a small element of what was through their stories and, you know, doing these sketches essentially of

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  people like the Okonomiyaki lady, you know, who's, you know, never been on the Shinkansen before. And then she tells me about her one ride on the Shinkansen, you know, it's like, I want to capture that because it, it really will disappear.

• 1:54:32Rich Roll?

  There is an endurance aspect to this also, right? A suffering and these are, these are difficult feats. You're going for, you know, hundreds of miles and, you know, many, many, many days. And also, the asceticism of it, like, there's no iPhone, you're not listening to podcasts and music, you're, you're on a, you know, a very restricted information diet. And it's intended to be, you know, sort of a semi-vipassana moving meditation experience.

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah, I started setting these rules, again, almost like intuitively, like, what if we set these boundaries and how would that feel? No social media, no news. So I'm not allowed to like, look at the New York Times or anything, or read other news sites. No music, no podcasts, basically nothing that teleports you out of the moment, which so much of what the phone is, is essentially a teleportation device, out of discomfort, small discomfort, you know, so you're on the subway commuting, oh, I don't want to be on the subway train, let me play Candy Crush or whatever. It's like, we bristle at any kind of discomfort now. So a part of it is the asceticism of leaning into these discomforts, but also getting rid of all that.

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  Ratchets up your attention. It really just kind of like cranks up the focus. You start to see things you wouldn't see otherwise. And because you're so bored for most of it, you're desperate to connect with people. So it's like this, this sort of forcing function to get you to talk to people. And I have another rule, like you have to take a portrait of someone by 10:00 in the morning. And it'll be like 9:30 and I'll be like, oh, man, I haven't taken a portrait yet. And so I'll just run into a random shop and be like, hey, can I take your picture? And again, that just catalyzes a human connection. And so on these walks, I'm just filled with this abundance of connecting with people, strangers. And, and again, when you have a great interaction with a stranger and it feels magical. And there's been this weird thing now that I'm like a TV person and I've been on the radio. It's like, I'll meet people and they'll be like, I saw you on TV, you know, this thing.

• 1:56:28Rich Roll?

  It's the walking guy.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  That's the walking guy. And, and so that adds another, like, they're really excited about that. And but anyway, it's this clearly mutually like joyful thing that happens. But I'm walking, I'm doing that while walking 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers, day after day after day after day for weeks on end. And then every night I get to an inn or a hotel or whatever. And I'll sit down and I write for three, four, five hours. You know, I'm editing the photos for the day. I'm writing two, three, 4,000 words and then I'm putting them together. I'm trying to create this kind of like visual literary narrative. And oftentimes I'll run a newsletter, a pop-up newsletter that starts and ends for the duration of the walk. And I'll send that out to the people who are out there.

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  And that, for me, knowing there's a little bit of an audience out there on the other side. Cause you know, you've, you've talked about this. You don't want to get up and do that run. You're like, ah, let me skip today or whatever. And after walking for eight hours, if after doing 45K, you get to an inn, you don't want to write for three hours. So it's about that duality of like using the body up as much as possible and then using the mind up as much as possible at night. And proving to yourself that you've got so much extra juice in you than you may think you have. And I would say doing day after day after day after day for weeks and now months and now years I've been doing this. Has proven to me that like, if you sit me down and say, you've got three hours to write this essay, like you can do it. And you can pull something interesting out of it.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  And if you don't pull something interesting out of it, it's the onus is on you, not on the day.

• 1:57:58Rich Roll?

  And you have this audience that's waiting for it. That has an expectation that you're going to deliver.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:04Rich Roll?

  How do you think about the relationship between the discomfort of, of it? And the creative expression of it, like, how does the discomfort like drive the deeper self-inquiry and the heightened level of attention to your environment?

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think the physicality, again, mood follows action, right? It's like, I think the physicality of it makes it so, every day on a walk like this, I already feel like, just having done the walk itself, like, I've won the day in a weird way. And so it puts me in just such a positive state of mind. And again, it almost feels like spiritual, almost like theological, this, just the walking from point to point in and of itself. And a lot of it, you know, there'll be elevation gains and dissensions and stuff like that. And so, I mean, some days I might be doing, you know, three, 4,000 meters of climbing with this big pack on, I'm carrying three cameras, my laptop, and, you know, changes of clothes and stuff, so it's like a non-trivial amount of weight. So it's really physical. I mean, my body whittles down by the end of these walks, like, it just feels great.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  And so I think that that physicality and walking, you know, throughout history, people have said, oh, walking helps me think, and, you know, Einstein, all these great thinkers used to have their daily walks, and that was when they would problem solve. And for me, when I turn everything off, and I don't have the distractions, I don't have the teleportation, my mind immediately goes into writing mode. That's what fills the space. When my, when my mind has like an expansive boredom that opens up, an expansive yo-yo, my mind immediately goes into a place of writing, synthesizing, in a really positive way. And so I dictate, you can kind of just use like an AirPod and dictate and have it a pen to a note in Apple Notes, so I don't have to look at my phone, I don't have to touch, I really don't want to touch the phone. But I dictate throughout the day as I'm walking, and by the end of the day, I'll have 10,000 words, or whatever, in this note.

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  And then I use that as a jumping off point. But that in the real moment, synthesizing and thinking about, and then when you do this day after day after day, you start to recognize patterns that you would otherwise miss. And even if you have one other person, which is one of the reasons I don't do these with John, is because even just having one other person teleports you out of that moment. And so the walks with Kevin, for example, with eight or 10 people, those are about the talks, it's not really about the walk. And the walk is kind of a platform on top of which the talking happens. I can't tell you anything about the Camino de Santiago, because we're just talking the whole time.

• 2:00:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think there's something about being in a persistent state of

• 2:00:33Rich Roll?

  Elevated heart rate, like just mildly elevated heart rate.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  Is it zone two?

• 2:00:37Rich Roll?

  That frees your, like even below zone. I mean, if you're walking, like you have a pack, you're walking, like it's rigorous. Is that zone two? It's like maybe it was high zone one. I don't know. But like elevated enough so that you're not at rest. And sufficient enough to unlock the unconscious mind in a way that other things don't really like you're you're suddenly able to kind of free associate and synthesize those ideas. And that's why when I'm out running, it's like, yeah, I have to stop and dictate something, you know, like, because I'll, I'll forget if I don't do it.

• 2:01:09Rich Roll?

  But there's a tension between that part, like the creative mind doing its thing and the being present and paying attention, which is kind of why you're there also, right? Like those two things are, are at odds with each other.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:24Rich Roll?

  Well, you have to, how do you balance that out? Because you're there to like, you want to see these things and really be present with what you're observing. And then there's the reflective aspect of that.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  I think they're less at odds and just more in conversation with one another and they kind of build off each other. And so the more I'm able to allow myself to enter in this state of reflection in real time, because you do forget so fast. Like these things are like, I'll have a conversation with someone.

• 2:01:49Rich Roll?

  They're completely ephemeral and you think you're going to remember.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  You're not going to remember. You've got to, if you've, if you've ever done any field work, like design, fieldwork research, like I did, research in Myanmar 10 years ago, where I was going out there to, with a NGO to help farmers farm better. And we were trying to figure out how to distribute information better. But one of the takeaways was you do this field research and then immediately, as soon as you're done, after you've met the farmer, you have to write it all down, everything. Because even an hour later, you forget half of it. Like the half life of memory is so quick. So I'll have a conversation and I'll just be like, that turn of phrase is the greatest thing I've heard, you know, like all day. And like, I just have to get that down as quickly as possible. But to me, it really does, it feels like it's almost heightening the attention

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  by doing that, because it's like, we're, we're looking for these, these kind of hooks, these snippets to build the narrative around. And it feels healthy. I mean, those walks and the writing I do and the photography I do, those are some of the richest creative days of my lives, of my life for sure.

• 2:02:50Rich Roll?

  From a meta view of it, to me, it feels like. These experiences are connecting you with yourself. They're connecting you with the land. They're connecting you with these other, with these people. They're connecting you with the past.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:03:06Rich Roll?

  Your past and the past of this foreign land that you've adopted. So there's a, there's like a sense of like oneness, right?

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  Well, and also, one of the complex things about being an immigrant to Japan, and you look like me, is you're never gonna be part of Japan. Never ever gonna accept you. You're never gonna be a Japanese person. And it's not the desire necessarily. But I do think one of, what I was looking for in around like 2013, when I went back, was why am I here? What is, what can I do that is additive to both me and the place? And not look for something from the place to, to give to me? I think a lot of people who immigrate to Japan, then become disillusioned with it or angry at Japan is because they, they want something from it. They expect Tokyo to respect them in some way, or the country to give them something.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  Look, I'm, I'm committing to you. Why don't you commit back to me? But that's a very dangerous place to be in. And, and I think I was able to go back and, and in doing these walks with John, I kind of realized like, wow, this is really special. It has the historical component of it. I'm able to use the language. I'm able to do this thing that to me feels important just as a human, like collecting these archetypes of ways of life. And, and then being able to share them in a way that's meaningful with others, amplify that, sort of present this part of Japan that people don't have access to. Like this book is a whole set of stories that no one will ever be able to experience for the most part. It's like very, very few people in the world will be able to go to these areas. And I think that, that helped me find a purpose of being there

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  in a way that 13 years ago was important for me to find.

• 2:04:48Rich Roll?

  How do you know when? You're using these walks to integrate as opposed to escape. You know, like, can you catch yourself? Have there been occasions where you're like, oh, now I'm the walking guy. So I can just go and do one of these walks. But actually, what I really want to do is just like not deal with this other part of my life. Or, I mean, they, listen, they feel deeply integrative and very intentional. So I'm not, I'm not presuming that you're doing this, but I just know in my, for myself, like, I can, I can sort of make an argument like, I'm gonna go do this thing. And, and it's easy to not be honest with myself about like, what I maybe, what maybe my attention probably should, it would be better attuned to that I'm just kind of avoiding.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  I'm, I am so paranoid. I mean, I am, I am so pathologically paranoid. Again, it's like that scarcity mindset thing. I'm like, I'm gonna lose all my money. I'm gonna have to move back to where I came from. Like, I'm gonna have to like, that's always there. That voice is always there. And the paranoia also goes in this direction of like, are we escaping too much? Are we using this as a crutch? Are we, you know, so I'm constantly coming back to that, revisiting it, like, making sure, are we doing something new with this or not? Which is why I kind of did the 10 cities thing. I was like, this, let's mix it up. Let's start to find, instead of just walking an old historical route linearly, like, what if we did this other thing? What if we did this? And, you know, I think with the media stuff in the last two years, that came out of left field and I've kind of leaned into that.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  And that's kind of added another layer of richness to it all and purpose to the walks as well. And so it feels right now, uh, pretty healthy, you know? And at the same time, um, I was in this relationship, I'm no longer with the mom, but like, I have a stepdaughter.

• 2:06:30Rich Roll?

  Right. So you still have a relationship with her.

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  With stepdaughter, incredible, deep relationship with a stepdaughter. And like, I don't even like to call her stepdaughter. Like, in Japanese, it's giri, giri musume, giri no musume. And I had someone yell at me the other day, there's just like, don't use that phrase, like, because in English, stepchild is so common. But in Japanese, there is something, I guess, that feels pejorative about it. And I've come in English too, to be like, I don't know if I want to use stepkid anymore. So I just kind of call her my daughter, even though she's 100% Japanese. And, um, you know, she is 15 now. And as I was starting to do all these walks, you know, she was six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. And I was more and more this kind of.

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  Force in her life. And I never grew up with reconciliation, witnessing that. And I carried with me until very recently, and it's still there, I'm sure, the sense that people could, anyone could throw me away. And I started, you know, I'd do these walks, I'd come back home, you know, spend a bunch of time with her. And as I'm walking, we're videoing, you know, FaceTiming every night or whatever. And I would come back and we'd have like little fights, you know, like she like stopped going to school for a while. And like, you know, I'd kind of spray her with a water bottle or something like, you know, just try to like, get her up in the morning. Like, you just don't know. Like, you get up, go to school. And she would get really mad at me and wouldn't talk to me for like, two weeks. And the first time that happened, I, I thought I was gonna die.

• 2:07:58Speaker 01

  Because I was like, oh, okay, she's done with me. She doesn't need me. She's throwing me away. This is just, this is just what happens in our life. This little, this eight year old, nine year old, she's done with me. We're not connected in my blood. She doesn't really see me as a dad. She's just gonna throw me away. And what I realized, you know, this is obvious in hindsight, was she really wanted to reconcile. And I didn't have the toolkit to do that. She didn't, as an eight year old, she doesn't have the toolkit to do that. And finally, I found, you know, I started talking with people and talking with a therapist and whatever, and just found these kind of modalities to be, to begin to reconcile with her. And just immediately realized, like, not only was she so grateful

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  to reconcile, like, she's so, so desperately wanted me in her life. And so, you know, we'd get a little more little fights and reconcile more quickly. And that, that loop started closing and closing and closing. And then I realized more and more, like, holy crap, like, I am such a force for good in this girl's life. You know, to the point where, I think I'm probably the only dad in Japan where, when she got her period, she ran out with her bloody underwear and showed me. She was like, she was like, I got a, I got my period.

• 2:09:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the first instinct is to go to dad.

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, because we had sort of, we had sort of de-stigmatized, you know, we knew it was coming. And it was like, let's talk about this and not make it be this like stigmatized thing, you know. And then I don't think she realized it was gonna happen forever. I think she thought it just like happened once and it was done. And then once she realized, it was like, oh, my God, this is gonna happen every month. She had like a breakdown. We had to like, you know, like, console her, you know, it's like, I kind of understand the, the trauma of like, young girls now, a little bit better, having witnessed that. But the fact that like, she's had so much trust. Directed towards me and now, you know, I got her into boarding school. She's studying in New Zealand now and I brought her down in January. We went together and it was just me and her and, you know, going to school and being like, you know, oh yeah, I'm the dad is my daughter and having everyone kind of like do a second

• 2:09:55Speaker 01

  look for a second, but then just accept it, you know? And then all the other kids who were not white, asking her, are you half? You know, da, da, da, and like kind of bringing them into her fold, her into their fold. But being able to go down there and witness that and be present for that and help catalyze that, like the, the level of self-worth, like no one in, no one and no other act in my life has given me more value than my daughter and those interactions that we've had together and the kind of the mutual growth we've had together. That's been so profound.

• 2:10:24Rich Roll?

  I don't know, man. There's this through line of adoption that just runs through everything here, you know?

• 2:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:33Rich Roll?

  Being adopted, adopting a new country. And then, I mean, formally you didn't adopt your stepdaughter, but like that's what it is. It's that dynamic. It's that relationship.

• 2:10:45Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, I'm, you know, I'm paying for school and just because I can.

• 2:10:50Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, in all, in all manner, you've adopted this, this girl.

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  But people, you know, up until now, up until I said, oh, I'm, yeah, I'm paying for school, you know, that's the thing that people go, oh, you're really her dad. You know, it's like this weird, like the financial thing, once it kicks in that like somehow legitimizes you in a strange way, but, but she sees me, she calls me dad. You know, it's like I, we do a FaceTime call and someone asks, who are you talking to? I'm talking to my dad, you know, da, da. So, you know, I, I want to honor that. And as an adopted person, I think it's very easy for me to, to honor that.

• 2:11:22Rich Roll?

  In trying to make peace with this, you did seek out your biological parents though. I know there's a story here.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. My, uh, the adoption papers said, and this is the only information I had, was my mom was 13 when she got pregnant and my dad had been.

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  In a car accident and then there was a murder at the site of the car accident. So he was murdered like in a fight. So, so my, as a kid, right? So as an adopted kid, you are the butt of all jokes on TV. Oh, you know, like that's whenever you wanna rank on someone, put someone down, you say, oh, you're probably adopted. Right? Like you see this on like sitcoms and stuff. Oh, this is our adopted step, you know, the redheaded stepkid or whatever. And so knowing that, oh, my dad was murdered in this car accident. And then my mom was 13 and that. So I concocted this terrible story to protect myself. Where I'm like, oh, my mom was probably a prostitute and she was a drug addict. It said she smoked weed or whatever. I was like, had taken Valium.

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  And so my whole, my whole story that I told myself as a kid, young kid, and then as a teenager was, oh, you come from violence. You come from a place of pain where you're in an accident, they didn't want you and the circumstances were terrible. That was essentially my whole identity, origin story, identity. And then being adopted into this family where they divorce immediately. And, you know, there's all these other kind of like complexities of the town. It's just like, it was very hard. You understand why I carry all this scarcity with me. But a few years ago, you know, it's 23andMe, ancestry.com, stuff like that. It was mostly because for my daughter, I wanted to know if I had any medical issues I wanted, I should be paying more attention to.

• 2:13:04Speaker 01

  That was really what catalyzed me looking for my birth parents and that, and that kind of genetic history. It wasn't, oh, I need, I need this person in my life. I want to connect with this person. It was, there was none of that. And part of that may be because my adopted parents did not give me permission to do that either. I think it's really complicated. Adoption is so complicated because the adopted parents in some ways almost wanna make believe that like you're not adopted. And the more we talk about it, the less they'll think of us as real parents. So that's scary to them. So they don't ever wanna give you permission to go search for your biological parents. Right? In a, in a weird way, because maybe if I give too much permission, then they can throw me away. The complexities, it's, it's a minefield.

• 2:13:44Rich Roll?

  Right. Understanding that at some point, you know, this person is gonna wanna find that out.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:50Rich Roll?

  Interpreting that as a threat or a, or a kind of a statement about their, you know, how, how well they've parented you.

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And. It's really hard. It's a really hard line to walk. I have so much empathy for everyone involved in the equation. But a couple of years ago, I was like, okay, my, you know, I want to be around for my daughter. And that was like, actually, the first time I felt a sense of like, purpose to live beyond 40, too. And the book stuff started working out, and the walk started working out. And I run a membership program, and the members were sending me lots of really positive things. I have a file on my computer called you're not a piece of shit.txt.

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  And I put, anytime since, so it sends me a nice email, I copy and paste it, put it in the you're not a piece of shit.

• 2:14:33Rich Roll?

  Does he just have some giant txt file?

• 2:14:36Speaker 01

  It's huge now. It's like, it's very, it's very, I'm delighted to say it's big. But it was the first time I was like, okay, I should, I should try to like actively try to live longer than, you know, certainly I thought I was gonna live in my 20s. And so, anyway, I did Ancestry. We connected on there. I maintained anonymity. So it was my birth mom, and I matched. And but on Ancestry, you can be completely anonymous. And so I stayed anonymous. Because I was like, first of all, I was also paranoid. I was like, is this person gonna be debt riddled? And like, you know, I think I own a bunch of AR-15s? And like, are we gonna be able to talk about anything? And like, the last thing I needed was another adult, the mind of a child in the shape of an adult in my life, which I feel like I'd grown up

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  with so many of those in my, in my periphery. And I was like, I just can't be another surrogate parent to an adult here. And so I was like, all right, let me maintain as much distance as possible. And it was like, 50% overlap. It was like, obvious, this was my mom. And I saw her name, and I was able to Google her, and like, kind of stalk her and all that stuff. I was like, okay, that's enough. That's all, that's kind of all, I don't really need to know more than this. And as soon as I did that, as soon as we matched, I saw her Facebook page got like, shut down. And like, I thought, okay, maybe she didn't want to match her, you know, maybe she, her family had her do it, and she was kind of reluctant, but didn't want to talk about me. And so maybe she doesn't want me to connect, and doesn't want me to know who she is. And so I just stepped back. I said, that's fine. I don't need her in my life. I don't, I'm

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  in a, I'm in a place, I feel, I feel great about who I am. I don't need this. And so for a year, we didn't communicate at all, didn't message on Ancestry. And then a year later, she messaged me, this short little message that said, all you saw about me was male, like, 42, in Japan. That's all it said. And so it was like, a little bit confusing to her, like, why is this guy in Japan? And, but it's like, 50% overlap in DNA. It was obvious that we were like, mother, child. And she sent me this little like, message that just said, I think we related. It was like bad grammar. It had like no punctuation. It was it was very weird. And I was like, oh, come on, like, asking me to do the heavy lifting again in this like, obviously, we're related. Obviously, I'm 13 years younger than you.

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  Like, who like, I am your child you had when you were 13. Like, there's no other option. And so I sat with that for like, three months and didn't respond. And finally, I was like, all right, what would I want to hear if I was her? And I wrote this, again, anonymous response on Ancestry where I was just like, hey, you know, it wasn't the best circumstances, but like, look, I've been able to create this life of abundance for, you know, and like, joy, and I'm able to do these things. And it's been really amazing. And I can, I can't imagine how hard it was for you to do the things you did to give me this life when you were 13. And I just want to say thank you for that. And, and I'm doing really well. And I just want to let you know that. And I was still anonymous. And then no response

• 2:17:26Speaker 01

  from her. And then three months later, and I'm just like, oh, my God, all right, she's hopeless, or whatever. And then three months later, I get this like tidal wave of messages from her. These two, 3,000 word, beautiful essays, like beautifully written essays. Oh, my God, I don't have email notifications on. For Ancestry, I didn't see this message until now. I feel so stupid. Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I've made you wait three months, da, da, da. And just this incredible emotional intelligence on the page. Really shocking. And I was sharing it with a couple of writer friends. And they're just like, wow, she's a really good writer, you know, like,

• 2:18:00Rich Roll?

  It's coming into focus.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  It's coming into focus. And I, I was in this really busy period of my life. This was 15 months ago. Super busy period. I got a MRSA infection in my arm. I was in the hospital. I was, I had a book coming out. I had all this stuff going on. And she's sending me these like incredible essays. I didn't have the yo-yo in my, anything to respond. And I kind of didn't. And then two weeks later, she sends me another giant essay, beautifully written about like, all the animals you grew up with. And this is what your grandfather used to do. And, you know, he died, you know, 51 of colon cancer. I was like, great, I'm gonna get a colonoscopy next year. You know, it's like, all this, all this stuff kind of coming together. And Again, I didn't have the time to respond, but I felt so guilty. And now I'm like, oh, great.

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  Now I'm like making two moms in the world feel bad because I'm not like sending enough messages. And I sent a quick little message. I said, hey, look, I'm so overwhelmed right now. Thank you for these messages. These are so wonderful. I'll get back to you in the new year. And then I didn't get back to her. And then I was on a walk with Kevin. We were in Bali. We're sitting on our bamboo platform. And I kind of told them in the update, I'm like, this is where things are with my, with birth mom. And Kevin just goes, Craig, just go have lunch with her. And I go, no. And then like two weeks later, I was like, you know what? And I went on Ancestry, I said, hey, I'm going to be in, I'm going to be in Chicago on this date. Do you want to get lunch? She goes, absolutely. I'll make a reservation. See you here at 11:30. And just set it up. Went out.

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  I'm nervous because it's just, I don't know what's going to happen. Are we going to like spontaneously combust when we, you know, we hug? I, who, I didn't know what was going to happen, but I felt a couple of things. One was like, I was like, I don't need this to go well. Like, I don't need this to be perfect. I don't need this person in my life. Like, I just see this as kind of like an interesting adventure. Let's just go meet this person, see what that feels like, like just kind of go into the, in that state of mind. And then the, the second thing I felt, and I thank my daughter for this, being able to feel this way, was she is so lucky to meet me today. Like this person that I am going to meet her. Wow, she's lucky to meet this person.

• 2:20:11Speaker 01

  In a way, in like a totally non narcissistic, non egotistical way, just like, holy shit. Like, I'm proud of who I am. And I'm, I'm so happy to be this person for her, you know, when we finally first get to meet.

• 2:20:26Rich Roll?

  And to be in that healthy state of not needing it to go a certain way, or, you know, for her to perceive you in any, in any way. You don't need anything from her. Like that, that allows for the openness.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Nothing. And so. You know, I walk up to the steakhouse and she's there. I knew, I knew everything about her. She didn't know my name still.

• 2:20:46Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did. You put your coding to work to do a little sleuthing?

• 2:20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I knew everything. I knew where she worked. I knew her ex-husband, you know, like everything. And I, you know, I was like, hello, hi, I'm your son. It's like, and we gave each other a hug and went into the steakhouse, sat down in a booth. And the first thing she does is she, she pulls out a photo of me as a baby that the adoption agency must have given her. And she goes, I've been carrying this my whole life. And every year on your birthday, I think about who you might have become. I pray for your happiness. I think about what kind of family you might have. And I'm just like, that is not what I expected to be the first thing.

• 2:21:35Rich Roll?

  Beautiful.

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  To come out of her mouth. Yeah. And in that moment, immediately, I just start to feel this rewiring happening. Even now, saying this, I can, my brain is like tingling. It was like literal, literal tingling of the brain of neurons of this, of this narrative I've concocted of, of scarcity, of violence, of pain. And the more she talked, the more she said, oh no, like the pregnancy wasn't planned. Your dad, by the way, is alive. He lives in Florida.

• 2:22:09Rich Roll?

  So that was all bullshit?

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  She's like, she's like, he was 22. I was 13. That's statutory rape, but it was completely consensual. And I didn't want to deal with courts. So I just picked a guy who'd been murdered out of the newspaper and said that was, that was dad. So already she had this kind of entrepreneurial spirit. She was just like, I'm just going to figure this out. I don't care. I'm going to get it done. And she was. Finally told her sister about it. The sister told the mom. The mom was like, oh my God, okay, well, we'll deal with this. She has four siblings. Her dad died when she was nine. So it was like she was nine and her oldest was, I think, like 16 when her dad, when the dad died. And so it was a single mom raising these five kids. So she didn't

• 2:22:53Speaker 01

  have the energy to deal with that. So she sent her to her aunt and uncle in Connecticut. That's how I ended up in Connecticut. And, you know, my birth mom was just saying they were so welcoming. And I went to high school there as a freshman and they welcomed me, even though I was like six months pregnant. And they gave me a senior as a mentor. And I was taking all these prenatal vitamins. It was just this story of like being protected and taken care of. And she said, I didn't want to give you up, you know, but I knew that I was 13, I couldn't take care of you. And you were born and I held you for two days and I didn't want to leave you. And I wrote you this letter. Did you get the letter I wrote to you? I was like, oh, my God, like, it was just so overwhelming to hear her side of this story that I had told myself for, you know, 42 years is very, very

• 2:23:38Speaker 01

  different story.

• 2:23:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The story that you've been telling your whole life, like, you know, is revealed to be a complete, you know, fabrication of the truth, right? And yet it has informed you like fundamentally as a human being for that period of time.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:54Rich Roll?

  And to have the opportunity to retell a new story is a gift. But I think the whole thing speaks to just how powerful these stories are and how, how much we allow them to really commandeer, you know, how we show up in the world and our worldview and how we behave and interact with other people and our fears. Everything is a function of story.

• 2:24:17Speaker 01

  Yep. And as we sat there and she told me about her, like, she's like, I was always a hard worker. I was working a part time job at 13. That's why I met the guy who got me pregnant. And I was at a, working at a deli. And she's like, by the time I was 16, I bought my first car, 18, bought my second car, bought my first house at 22.

• 2:24:33Rich Roll?

  She's like a baller.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  She's, she's just.

• 2:24:35Rich Roll?

  She's got like the entrepreneur thing. She's got the writer thing. And you're like, you're seeing clearly.

• 2:24:39Speaker 01

  And do you want, you want to know what her job is?

• 2:24:41Rich Roll?

  No, I don't know. Computer programming or something.

• 2:24:43Speaker 01

  That's what, that's what it is. Did you know that?

• 2:24:46Rich Roll?

  No.

• 2:24:46Speaker 01

  Yes, she's a computer program. So she, and she's completely self-taught. She didn't graduate from college. She's completely hacked together this life. I'm just gonna make it work. I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna do this thing. You know, she's been to Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai on like client work.

• 2:24:59Rich Roll?

  Oh, really?

• 2:24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:00Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. And is she into like Nintendo Switch and like?

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  I think her family is. I think her husband's like a big gamer or something. But like, um, but it would like, hearing her say these things. Again, it's this rewiring and, and here's, here was the most kind of surrealist, like sci-fi moment. As I'm sitting there and she's telling me these things, I realized for the first time in my life, I know, I, I understood where my brain came from. I'm like, oh, I just have your brain in my head. Everything you're saying, the way you've dealt with everything is exactly how I've dealt with everything in my life. I have just been using your blueprint, your genetic brain blueprint to move through this world. Because no one in my family understood what I was doing. No one in my, in my town could empathize with the decisions I was making.

• 2:25:44Speaker 01

  And yet here you are, sitting in front of me and that nature element of this, I am just, you know, and the waitress didn't come over to us for two and a half hours. We were just, we didn't order anything.

• 2:25:54Rich Roll?

  And the weird thing is, like, you're old enough such that she's kind of your age. Like, she's like a peer.

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  She's 57.

• 2:26:00Rich Roll?

  She's younger than I am.

• 2:26:02Speaker 01

  So they thought we were on a really weird Tinder date. You know, it was like, it was just like, what is happening in this booth here? You know, these, it's the most profound, you know, yeah, weird, weird online dating situation. But yeah, it was so strange. And, and, you know, she's like, do you have friends in Chicago? I'm like, yeah, I've got some friends. I got a dinner tonight. And she was like, you have dinner tonight? I was like, yeah, I mean, I thought we were just doing lunch. And she goes, I got us tickets to the symphony and a pizza reservation and we're doing an architecture tour. And I was just like, oh my God, like, of course I'll cancel. Like, you know, you've got me, like, I'm here, I'm here. And we did this walk through the city. And she was like, she's like, I'm so glad you can walk because I wanted to do this big walk through Chicago and show you everything. And she's like, I was hoping you weren't going to be like morbidly obese. I was like, what if, what if he shows up in a wheelchair? What are we gonna do?

• 2:26:46Speaker 01

  You know, she had like all these weird paranoias about it. Um, and we ended up walking for like three or four hours that afternoon. And it would start raining and we'd have to duck into a place and, you know, and then we'd start walking again. And it was.

• 2:27:00Speaker 01

  It felt like all of the walking I had done and all of the work I had done on myself was in service of doing that walk.

• 2:27:06Rich Roll?

  Well, this is the conclusion of the biopic. You and your mom, you know, walking down, walking down, you know, the boulevard of Chicago with the sun setting over Lake Michigan and the credits rolling.

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:27:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah. That's an amazing story and the fact that it culminated in like a walk. And it sounds as if the walk was her suggestion.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  It was. Yeah, yeah. She's like, I want to walk Chicago. Let's go walk Chicago. I was like, hey, you're speaking my language.

• 2:27:35Rich Roll?

  That's wild.

• 2:27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:37Rich Roll?

  Where does that leave Dad?

• 2:27:38Speaker 01

  Dad? Dad is complicated. So Dad, if you search his name, he has two results on Google. One is filing the two court records. One is filing to stop paying child support payments and then the other is filing for bankruptcy.

• 2:27:53Rich Roll?

  He can wait. He can wait a minute. Maybe, maybe later.

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  Also turns out Dad has struggled with alcohol. So it's like, not a big surprise. But the biggest for me, kind of lovely, delightful surprise is that I have a sister, a half sister. She's 28. This is also the weird thing is like how young kind of everyone is. 28, married. She didn't want to connect at first. She's from the dad's side and she's an only child and her and her father also haven't spoken for like 10 years. So there's all this kind of estrangement, weird, you know, in kind of through line through both of our lives. And I immediately, I was just like, I have a younger sister. And this is like something I'd never thought about before, but I was just like filled with

• 2:28:39Speaker 01

  this almost like preternatural desire to just be like, I've, I've got you sis. Like, let me protect you. Like immediately, just so bizarre. And, you know, we kind of reached out to her. She didn't want to connect. And then a couple of months ago, she sort of like reconsidered and we connected and we did a video call and it was just immediately like, oh my God, you're a great person. You're a great person. I want to have you in my life. You know, and after the video call, she's like, hey, bro. And she's like, can I call you bro? Like texting. And, and we've suddenly, I think both realized like how incredible it is to like as an adult, suddenly have this new sibling and.

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  Both of us be relatively grounded, not need the other. You know, it's not this weird like needy situation. And I think she didn't meet me in my twenties, you know, because I would have, you know, I would have been a very different person for her to meet. And now we both get to kind of revel in and try to figure out what, what does this mean? How, how does this relationship work going forward? You know, I'm going on this book tour in America now and I'm going to be in Seattle and she's going to fly down and meet me and that's where we're going to meet for the first time. But it is so cool to have this sister, you know? And we text with each other, you know, a couple of times a week and she asked me for advice, hey, I'm changing jobs. What do you think? You know, I heard you on this podcast. That was cool.

• 2:29:55Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's, it's a, it's been a real shock to go from having no family essentially, because my adopted family is so small, to here's my mom and she has four brothers and sisters. They have a bunch of kids. I'm getting messages on Instagram from like random people in Wisconsin that's like, hey, I'm your, I'm your cousin. I run a flower shop. I'm 33.

• 2:30:18Rich Roll?

  Oh, because they know that. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:21Speaker 01

  It's spread.

• 2:30:21Rich Roll?

  So that's, that's wild.

• 2:30:22Speaker 01

  It's spread. It's because, you know, after that meeting with my mom, she clearly went home. It was like, my son is Craig and he's awesome. I love him. Oh my God, check out all this cool stuff he's doing. So like, it's just the whole family suddenly has me on their radar.

• 2:30:35Rich Roll?

  This is a fairy book ending, right? I mean,

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  It's lucky.

• 2:30:40Rich Roll?

  For you, it's always been a journey to find home.

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:44Rich Roll?

  And you had to go all the way around the world and go on all these long walks, you know, all for it to culminate in Chicago.

• 2:30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Which is an awesome city.

• 2:30:54Rich Roll?

  But it's, there's, there's a cool thread line in there, which is this, this search for a sense of belonging within yourself and, you know, how you fit into the world and who these people are and, you know, adopting people and creating your own family along the way. And then as a consequence of doing that, growing into yourself so that you could be someone who is appropriate and available for.

• 2:31:20Rich Roll?

  You know, the, the family that gave birth to you. Like, there's a, there's a cool, full circle idea to this whole thing.

• 2:31:29Speaker 01

  It is cool. And now Thanksgiving is like this potentially very big event. It's like, oh, my God, might be 40 people at Thanksgiving dinner.

• 2:31:37Rich Roll?

  Or it could go crazy in haywire.

• 2:31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be like the bear.

• 2:31:41Rich Roll?

  In reflecting on, on, on your book, like, there, there is, I'm curious about this, like, there's a, there's a veneer of sadness in it, you know? Like, there's, you can feel the grief without pointing a finger directly towards it. It's sort of layered with a heaviness.

• 2:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:58Rich Roll?

  But I think at the same time, there's a, there's a deeply hopeful aspect to your message, you know, which is when you slow down and you really allow yourself to feel and be present with those emotions and with your environment and with the people that you encounter, you are able to see the beauty in the world. And there's something optimistic about that. And it feels like an urgent message for the moment.

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I appreciate your generous reading.

• 2:32:34Speaker 01

  But yeah, there is a way in the countryside to focus on the negative, this depopulation and what's going to happen. And almost like a natural disaster, like, there's, there isn't a way to reverse this at this point. And trying to unpack why what's left still feels powerful in this, in the last moments of this thing existing, there, of course, there's going to be a sadness to that because it's disappearing. But also in a very Japanese way, that, that ephemerality of things, the mononohara.

• 2:33:05Rich Roll?

  Very Buddhist. I mean, I don't know a lot about Shintoism. Like, what is the Shinto spin on that?

• 2:33:10Speaker 01

  I mean, same, but just this Shinto is fundamentally just this kind of animist. Respect of nature, you know, and you, the shrines are often built around, began as just a natural object. So a beautiful tree, an incredible rock. And then that, around that, the shrine grows. The most important shrines are those, those sorts of things.

• 2:33:29Rich Roll?

  And Chape, isn't that the idea?

• 2:33:32Speaker 01

  Chape.

• 2:33:33Rich Roll?

  Do you know that idea?

• 2:33:34Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:33:35Rich Roll?

  Basically, the, the beauty and the imperfection, which applies, if I understand the word correctly, to when nature reclaims.

• 2:33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:46Rich Roll?

  You know, buildings in decay or, you know, the landscape that has fallen into disrepair.

• 2:33:50Speaker 01

  I like that. Yeah, you start to see a lot of that. Yeah. But yeah, Shinto kind of leans into that because the shrine sort of exists in, in deep conversation with nature. And then a lot of times there's rebuilding built into it. So like the Issei Shrine, every 20 years gets rebuilt next to each, next to itself. And you kind of see the 20 year old shrine and the brand new shrine next to each other. And they use Hinoki cypress to build them. And after 20 years, you just see how nature is already reclaiming it. And then you see the brand new, fresh, it almost looks like it's lit from within. It's glowing. It's beautiful. You understand why they use it because Shinto is about purity and kind of birth and Buddhism is sort of where you have funerals. That's where like,

• 2:34:32Speaker 01

  you know, you, you go do a funeral at a Buddhist temple, but Shinto is all about birth and life and things like that. And to see them side by side is actually quite profound. And every 20 years, you kind of get that ceremony. And it's a way of marking time. So there's a lot of time marking in Shinto as well. It's, it's really beautiful.

• 2:34:49Rich Roll?

  Final thing before we end this. How can we all pull a page out of the book, Book of John and start, you know, like practicing this in our own lives? Like, how do you translate his language into something that we can do?

• 2:35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the reason I I guess, sort of got addicted to these walks, or this way of working creatively, is because for me, having that framework made it impossible not to do the work. And as we've talked about, mood and action following each other. And so it started, you know, in my twenties, trying to break with the alcohol, with the running. And it's like, okay, creating a little framework of running to break that habit or whatever. And then wanting to do more writing and wanting to do more looking deliberately. And so accidentally falling into the understanding that these walks, these long walks, could allow me to do that. So I would say, starting to look at what simple structures you could build, start to

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  build up from very small to be very complex, as I'm doing with the walks, to enable you to do the thing you want to do. And I said, the one thing that everyone can do, that most everyone is doing now the wrong way, is take your phone out of your bedroom. Like, that, for me, is kind of the reason why I knew to disconnect on the walks, was because about 15 years ago, right after the iPhones kind of got released, I started going offline at 10:00 PM, and I wouldn't allow myself back online until noon or 1:00 PM the next day. Because having that morning, that completely offline morning, that was when the best writing I was doing happened, that was when the most generative creative work happened. And I could feel, almost like dopamine, little guppies, you know, like, sort of like, reaching

• 2:36:32Speaker 01

  for the fish food of dopamine in my brain, for, give me news, give me social media. And that freaked me out. And so creating this rigid framework, where you go offline at night, and then you don't come back online till lunch, if you can do that, not a lot of people can do that, but you can probably do it on the weekend. And you can certainly put your phone in a place that you won't see until lunch. And I think that is also critical. It's like, don't just put your phone in the living room, on the table, put it in a box in the corner of your garage or something, where you have to deliberately go to that place to grab it the next day. And try, just do that for a week, you know, try doing that for a week, where your bedroom is a phone-free place, and your mornings are phone-free. And I guarantee you, there's going to be some kind of richness of creative act that

• 2:37:16Speaker 01

  just naturally bubbles up. And I've taken that, I've been doing that for many, many years, and I just took that and said, okay, what if we apply it to the whole walk? And it turns out, it works, it's really powerful.

• 2:37:26Rich Roll?

  That's great advice, super cool.

• 2:37:30Rich Roll?

  Have you ever done like a one of these walks in the United States from like Philadelphia to Boston? Like, I think that experience might be a little bit different.

• 2:37:38Speaker 01

  We have. I mean, Kevin and I are like, well, let's do a walk in America, but there's no infrastructure for it. Like, there's no-

• 2:37:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's the problem. You're just gonna be on some thoroughfare, you know, where there's just 7-11s and gas stations or nothing.

• 2:37:51Speaker 01

  Even here, like, I'm staying 1.4 kilometers from here. And I looked at Google Maps, and Google Maps, the route to walk it was like an hour and 20 minutes. Because it's like, there's like an 11-lane highway. You know, it's like, America is so-

• 2:38:04Rich Roll?

  It's not oriented around. It's not conducive to the kind of experience. You can do it, but it's not-

• 2:38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not pleasurable.

• 2:38:10Rich Roll?

  -moving you in the direction of the kind of experience you're trying to have.

• 2:38:12Speaker 01

  And people kind of look at you like a crazy person, too.

• 2:38:14Rich Roll?

  I mean, you can do the Appalachian Trail, but you're just not gonna run into, you're not gonna have those experiences.

• 2:38:18Speaker 01

  Well, and there isn't, you're camping the whole way. So like, like, Europe is, is great. I mean, Spain, the Camino, is like the most perfect logistic-infused walk. And you can do it as cheaply. You can do it 10 bucks a day if you want at the Camino, or you can spend a couple hundred bucks a day and stay in really nice places. But like, it's there. The infrastructure's there. You can camp if you want to.

• 2:38:37Rich Roll?

  But it's hardly off the beaten path at this point. It's like, it's like a destination, it's like a tourist destination thing to do and check the box.

• 2:38:45Speaker 01

  Well, I thought that way, too. Have you ever walked-

• 2:38:47Rich Roll?

  No, but it keeps coming up. And I know a lot of people who've done it. So at this point, now I feel I have resistance to it.

• 2:38:53Speaker 01

  That's exactly how I felt. That's exactly how I felt. And Kevin and I did it in 2018. We did the last 100K of the Portuguese Camino. So there's like, there's English Camino, French Camino, Portuguese. When everyone talks about the Camino, it's usually the French. So it's over the Pyrenees into Spain, across to Santiago. And we did the Portuguese, the last 100K of the Portuguese. No one was on that. And then, before I did that with Kevin, I said, well, if I'm going all the way out there, let me walk the first 150K of the Camino from, from France. And I was like, this is gonna be terrible. I'm like, this is gonna be Disneyland. I was so negative on it. And I started it, and we, you know, I did it with a friend, and we did eight days. And I was so heartbroken to leave. It is magical. Even with the people, even the fact that it's a destination, you can't-

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  Deny the fact that what you're doing is hard. Doing a walk, you know, the 600K walk where you're taking five weeks or whatever to do it. That is demonstrably a difficult thing to do, even if it is a touristy thing. Everyone is fully in on it. And it's so surreal to be with a bunch of other people that are doing the same hard thing that you're doing. And it's kind of cool and you move at different paces and you meet all different people. I would so highly recommend if someone is looking to do a long walk and kind of wants to do, what if I disconnect? What if I go offline? What if I don't look at the news or whatever? Go do the Camino alone. It's built for solo walkers because you're going to naturally meet as many or as few people as you want. And it is a profoundly magical thing. And getting to Santiago, even though millions of people are doing this walk,

• 2:40:21Speaker 01

  getting to Santiago still feels like, holy crap, this is special.

• 2:40:26Rich Roll?

  The Camino feels like the new psychedelics.

• 2:40:29Speaker 01

  It's the peyote.

• 2:40:29Rich Roll?

  Psychedelics for a period. It was just coming up constantly on the podcast, but now like the Camino is taking its place. So there's something here for me to look at. And I should say, like a week from today, I'm getting back surgery. Like a very serious back surgery. And I'm going to have a very long road to recovery, but there's going to be, you know, a good, many, many, many, many, many months when all I'm going to be able to do is walk.

• 2:40:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:40:55Rich Roll?

  And maybe it'll stay that way. I don't know. So like walking is like, you know, this is what's showing up for me.

• 2:41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, there are, you know, Europe is replete with amazing trails. And England, you know, the right of way, you can kind of make up trails everywhere. It's pretty special. And it's, you know, America just doesn't have the history to have that, so.

• 2:41:16Rich Roll?

  What's the big walk on your wish list? Walk wishlist, like any walk in the world?

• 2:41:22Speaker 01

  I want to do more walks in Ireland. I've never been, I've only been to Belfast. I just want to, I just like Irish people and I just feel like I'd like meeting more Irish people. So that's a big one.

• 2:41:32Rich Roll?

  They're the nicest, kindest, most generous, welcoming people you're ever going to meet.

• 2:41:36Speaker 01

  Amazing. And I'd love to do more in Italy, the Dolomites, walking the Dolomites, I think would be incredible. So there's a few of those. And then I would like to do the full Camino. Cause I've only walked the first like 150K and the last 100K. So I'd like to do the, pump out the whole thing at some point.

• 2:41:53Rich Roll?

  In Italy, I know there's a trail system that goes all the way from Sicily, all the way to the north. That's basically. Historically been the routes that the Wintners, like the grape, the grape farmers would take to transport their product or whatever, and they've just been there for like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

• 2:42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:12Rich Roll?

  So there's like an ultra race that you like a multi, you know, week, whatever ultra race, but I'm sure like that would be an epic walk because you're, you're not like on the road, but you're going through these villages and townships and stuff all the way.

• 2:42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:26Rich Roll?

  Anyway.

• 2:42:27Speaker 01

  Sounds like a good one.

• 2:42:27Rich Roll?

  This is great, dude. This felt like an old school podcast, like just like really, really like, like soul nourishing. Yeah, like really lovely to meet you and I think that your work is beautiful and artistic and such a meaningful expression that's much needed right now. And I, I appreciate you coming here today and sharing with me.

• 2:42:49Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 2:42:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:50Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:42:51Rich Roll?

  Good luck with the book.

• 2:42:52Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:42:53Rich Roll?

  Things indeed do become other things.

• 2:42:55Speaker 01

  They do.

• 2:42:56Rich Roll?

  I know. And they will continue to do so.

• 2:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:00Rich Roll?

  Cheers, man. Thanks.

• 2:43:01Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:43:10Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at mealplanner.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful.

• 2:43:54Rich Roll?

  This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the ...meal planner and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at ritual.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor.

• 2:44:35Rich Roll?

  And of course, our theme music was created, all the way back in 2012, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support, see you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.