Please enjoy this transcript of my second interview with Craig Mod, a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. Craig is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He also writes the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more.
He’s walked thousands of miles across Japan, and since 2016, he has been co-running “Walk and Talks” with Kevin Kelly in various places around the world: the Cotswolds, Northern Thailand, walking across Bali, Southern China, Japan, Spain (Portuguese and French Caminos), and more. He’s a MacDowell fellow, Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow, and Ragdale fellow.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: [Japanese].
Craig Mod: [Japanese].
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Time zones, lots and lots of time zones between us. And I suppose that is as good a segue as any, to ask you a question related to something that you said in passing in our last conversation, which was living in a six-tatami mat room. For many people listening, they may not know exactly what that means. What does that mean?
Craig Mod: So yeah, in Japan you used to measure everything by basically tatami mat. So tatami mat is basically, it’s like a meter and it’s like two meters by half a meter or something like that. It’s a rectangle mat, basically. And yeah, you had rooms, rooms are kind of like classical Japanese rooms are based on certain tatami mat numbers, six-mat room, eight mat room, 10-mat room, 12-mat room, things like that. And I lived for most of my adult life, basically from age 22 to 35, I was in a six-mat tatami room. I lived a really ascetic sort of 20s and early 30s. And it’s super affordable in the middle of the city. It worked out. It worked well for me.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m looking up the name of a movie that I saw recently. If people want a visual on a roughly six-tatami room —
Craig Mod: Perfect Days?
Tim Ferriss: Perfect Days. Yes.
Craig Mod: Perfect Days, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wim Wenders [inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
Craig Mod: The amazing thing about that movie is I think they wrote it and shot it in a matter of just three weeks, four weeks.
Tim Ferriss: They shot it quickly.
Craig Mod: They shot it so fast. But it works.
Tim Ferriss: Which is part of the beauty of an independent film like this. If you can control the locations, if you’re not throwing in a bunch of CGI, if you can apply some constraints, you can make a beautiful little film that really does the trick and you can rely on that old — fashioned thing called storytelling and character development. I will say that this particular film, Perfect Days, just as a warning/promise to people, it starts off very slow. It gets to a point, at least it did for me, where it starts to get repetitive and almost annoying. But then, at some point that I could not put a finger on, it starts to become really hypnotic and then it gets very reassuring. And then it ends up very endearing.
Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s worth the whole push through. I think it’s a good piece of film, but basically where the protagonist of Perfect Days lives is exactly the sort of room I lived in for roughly 13, 14 years.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s worth checking out. The rumor I heard, this was second or third hand, so I have not fact-checked this, is that at some point, I guess it was Tokyo Toilet or whoever actually, I imagine it’s the municipality that owns the toilets, was looking to do an advertising campaign featuring some of their more unusual sort of art piece toilets, which people will see in the film. And that somehow Wim Wenders, the filmmaker, got wind of this and said, “That all sounds great, but why don’t you just give me your entire budget and I’ll make a film about a toilet cleaner?”
Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Pretty astonishing. Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.
Craig Mod: Really beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s jump to the meat and potatoes of Craig Mod 2.0, which is huge walks.
Craig Mod: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: We covered so much ground, pun intended.
Craig Mod: I’m sorry.
Tim Ferriss: [Japanese]. We covered so much ground in the last conversation, we never got to what a lot of people want to know from you, which is huge walks, why, how, where, what is it like? All the things, where should we start? What is step one here?
Craig Mod: Step one is just, I arrived in Tokyo. I’m 19 years old. I’m walking through the city at night and I’m just mesmerized. There’s just something about being able to move through the city without worrying about anything, without thinking about safety. And people’s lives are really, I want to say exposed. You walk down a street and you can hear everything and you can hear the baths being drawn. You can hear the kids laughing behind closed doors. You can smell someone having a cigarette in their kitchen as they’re listening to the radio. And there was something about all of that, I think, that really many, many things kept me here, but those walks, those late night walks around Tokyo when I was 19, 20, that really set something moving in my heart, and I think I kind of held onto that for a long time.
Tim Ferriss: So before we segue from that, why were you walking around at night? Was it insomnia? Were you taking photographs? What were you doing?
Craig Mod: I was just drinking too much.
Tim Ferriss: Skulking around with a bottle in hand.
Craig Mod: So yeah, no bottle, no street drinking. But I was going to Golden Gai, and this is before, now you go to Golden Gai and Golden Gai is this like —
Tim Ferriss: You should explain what that was and what it is for people who don’t know.
Craig Mod: Golden Gai was post-war, almost like a black market drinking area in Shinjuku next to Kabukicho, which is the big red light district. And it was a whole bunch of ramshackle shacks, one story, two stories, and then they all had attics and it was all for prostitution. So you’d go to these bars post-war, and then there’d be prostitutes there, and they’d take you up. And some of the bars in Golden Gai still have these attic rooms and that would be where the —
Tim Ferriss: Where the action happens.
Craig Mod: ]— Roxanne stuff would happen. Where Roxanne would run on a red light. And anyway, over time it became a place of artists, filmmakers, directors, poets would gather and drink there kind of in the, I’d say, probably in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s. Another Wim Wenders film, Tokyo-Ga, where he’s chasing Ozu and he goes to a bar.
Tim Ferriss: What is Ozu?
Craig Mod: Ozu is sort of like if you had, a lot of people know Kurosawa, so you have Seven Samurai. Ozu is the Kurosawa contemporary, where if you flipped all the action of Seven Samurai and created the inverse of it where nothing happens and the camera just sits on the ground, that is Ozu. Ozu made so many films. Ozu never got married, he never had any kids. He made so many films. And every single film is about a daughter leaving her father to go get married and the father being super depressed and sad. And the daughter being like, “I don’t want to leave you.” And him being like, “No, you have to.” Anyway, if you’re going to watch one Ozu film, watch Sanma no Aji is what it’s called in Japanese. I think it’s called —
Tim Ferriss: Sanma no Aji.
Craig Mod: Sanma no Aji. So The Taste of Mackerel?
Tim Ferriss: [Japanese].
Craig Mod: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sanma no Aji.
Craig Mod: I love that film.
Tim Ferriss: The Taste of Mackerel.
Craig Mod: The Taste of Mackerel. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful title. He was a huge drinker too. And he would kind of go into the mountains with some of his writing partners and they would measure how far they were on their script by how many bottles of empty bottles of sake they would line the room with. So by the end of his script, and I don’t know why it took him so long, because literally every script is the same script, but they would end up filling the room with these sake bottles. There’s sort of this Ozu kind of element of people. And Wim Wenders in Tokyo-Ga, he came to Tokyo in the ’80s, I think it was like ’84, and he was kind of hunting down what was left of Ozu. He’s kind of chasing Ozu. But what he ends up doing is he captures a bunch of Tokyo in the ’80s and it’s amazing.
And one of the places he goes to is a bar in Golden Gai, which is still, as of five years ago, it was still active and the same woman is still running it. And you could go there and you watch the Wim Wenders film, and you see this bartender in this room that’s literally, it holds six people max, and it’s this tiny little closet of a bar and been standing behind that bar for 40 plus years, and she’s still there. She’s got a little Wim Wenders poster up on the wall, and she’s immortalized in that film.
So it was then that in the ’80s and the ’90s, and I started going there around 2000, and it was still like, should I be here? It was very shady. It was sort of like you had to really work your way into these shops. And then about 10 years ago with tourism boom starting here and really resurging, or really for the first time ever Japan having a mega tourism boom began about 10 years ago. People found Golden Gai because of social media. Now you go there and everyone’s just Instagramming and live streaming, and it’s a circus basically. I haven’t been in a while. It’s really painful to go to now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that sounds rough.
Craig Mod: I would go to Golden Gai. I would go to Otokichi or Brain Busters, I think, was the bar that I used to go to. It’s not there anymore.
Tim Ferriss: Aptly named.
Craig Mod: And have a few drinks, and then I’d walk home and I’d just walk home with this really wistful, floaty feeling and just, I don’t know. Those were really special walks for me when I was that young, it was teaching me something,
Tim Ferriss: I’m adding a footnote to this, which is just a recommendation for folks since you invoked the demon of social media by mentioning it, I will mention someone I found on Instagram, even though I haven’t had any social apps on my phone for two years, because it’s like having heroin around the house. There is a website, Teemus Photo, T-E-E-M-U-S Photo-dot-com, and it is almost entirely nighttime shots of Japan and urban Japan. And it gives you actually a very, he loves rain. It is not always raining in Japan. But these are beautiful shots, talks about his setup and which camera he uses, et cetera. But it is a really beautiful compilation, and if you browse through, you’ll get some of the feeling that Craig is referring to. All right, so where does Craig go from alcohol and Golden Gai walks to something more, what would we call it, epic?
Craig Mod: Yeah, epic. Truly epic. So I co-authored/co-produced a book called Art Space Tokyo, and it came out 2007, 2008, and then we re-printed it with a Kickstarter in 2010. It was one of the first book Kickstarters actually. So it was kind of this novel thing to do. And I met this guy through doing that, this other art related guy named John McBride, a mutual friend connected us, and we sat down for breakfast at 10:00 a.m. and we didn’t get up until 5:00 p.m. It was just like instant just like, go, go, go, go, go. He’s 20 years older than me, and he’s just lived this kind of really incredible, rich, interesting life. And when he was 17, 18, 19, he was a Monbukagakusho scholarship student here in Japan. He was [Japanese].
Tim Ferriss: That’s the ministry of education. Right?
Craig Mod: Yep, yep, yep. And he had a full scholarship and he was just a Japanese student at Japanese University, basically. He’s Australian. And while he was doing that, he started doing walks because his literature professor, they were reading things like Bashō and he wanted to understand what was Bashō seeing. So he went and did the Oku no Hosomichi walk.
Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.
Craig Mod: The Road to the North. And he went and he walked the Tōkaidō and he went and he walked Shikoku. And so, he started doing all this when he was really young. And then he had this whole career, this wild career, incredible ridiculous career. And right around the time we met, he started getting back into walking. And in 2013, he invited me to come and do Kumano Kodo with him. And I had never heard of Kumano Kodo. I had never heard of any of this stuff. I didn’t even really know what the Tōkaidō was. I knew there was a Shinkansen that was called the Tōkaidō Shinkansen. I didn’t really know what the Nakasendō was. I didn’t know what any of this stuff was. And basically John was like, “Hey, let’s do some research. It’ll be interesting.” And he brought me to Koyasan, which is this Shingon Buddhist sort of epicenter in, I think it’s just in Nara Prefecture, but it’s on the Kii Peninsula. It’s part of Kumano Kodo. And I was just blown away. Koyasan is one of the most amazing, beautiful power spot places I think I’ve ever been.
Tim Ferriss: And Kumano Kodo —
Craig Mod: Have you ever been?
Tim Ferriss: I have not been. So I need to go. Oh, wow.
Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: We need to do another walk. Kumano Kodo, for people, just to wrap a little context around that, it is — well, I’ll keep it simple and let you fill in the gaps. But it’s more than a pilgrimage trail, it’s like a pilgrimage delta of sorts, but you’re going up the delta as opposed out to the ocean in a sense. And it is, if I’m getting this right, World Heritage Site, sister pilgrimage trail to the Camino de Santiago. Am I getting that right?
Craig Mod: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So when you get a stamp book for one on the opposite side of that piece of paper that’s folded, you have the other pilgrimage trail.
Craig Mod: Exactly. So yeah, there’s only two UNESCO World Heritage Pilgrimage trails in the world. It’s Compostela de Santiago and then Kumano Kodo. Actually this year is the 20th anniversary of them getting the UNESCO. So there’s all these banners and they’re very excited.
Tim Ferriss: Fun.
Craig Mod: Yeah. But the Kumano Kodo is very confusing because it’s a network of trails. So there’s Kohechi, Nakahechi, Ohechi, Iseji, and Omine Okugake Michi. And those are kind of the five main ones.
Tim Ferriss: Everybody get that?
Craig Mod: And the problem is when people are like, “Oh, I went and did Kumano Kodo.” 99.99 percent of the time they walked what’s called the Nakahechi. And it’s a very cool bit, but it’s a very, very, very tiny bit of the whole. But that’s an interesting — we can talk more about it if you want, but it’s an interesting exercise in branding, like how the Nakahechi became the thing that all essentially foreigners would come to do to do the Kumano Kodo.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s sidebar, how the hell did that happen? I’m super curious, because I did part of the Nakahechi with my brother long ago. And if we were to, as we did, go to a guiding company in Japan and say, “We want to do the Kumano Kodo.” Then lo and behold, that’s where we end up. So how did that happen?
Craig Mod: So essentially it’s about prefectural investment in infrastructure and sort of inbound facing books, guides, websites, things like that. And Wakayama Prefecture, and actually the city of Tanabe in particular, had a, I think he’s Canadian, this guy named Brad. He’s kind of like this epic. I’ve never met him. I’ve never met Brad, but Brad —
Tim Ferriss: Just like Madonna, Brad.
Craig Mod: Brad ended up living in Tanabe City for some reason, for a JET program. And right around the time, I guess when it got the UNESCO —
Tim Ferriss: This is an English teaching program. Right?
Craig Mod: English teaching program that kind of puts you in the countryside. You kind of come to Japan, you don’t live in Tokyo, you don’t live in Osaka, you get far-flung. And so, he ended up in Tanabe, and it was right when the UNESCO thing happened and he just ran. He’s like, “I’m going to make all the English literature, I’m going to do it.” And they just focused on that Nakahechi bit. And so, that just became it. Wakayama put the money in, they put up the signs, they made the pamphlets, they worked with the tour agencies, and they kind of won the tourist bucks.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.
Craig Mod: So John brought me to Koyasan, and that just activated everything in my body about things I wanted to explore. I didn’t know this side of Japan existed. These archetypes that you have or don’t have, these mentors that you have or don’t have that open up entirely new pathways. And this one little trip was sort of like, oh, my God, there’s this network of pilgrimage trails and there’s these other trails. And I just became immediately addicted to it instantly. Instantly had to do all of them.
Tim Ferriss: What grabbed you? What had teeth? What was it that took a pit bull grasp on your mind or soul and wouldn’t let go?
Craig Mod: Yeah, it was the combination of incredible fecundity, we’ll use that word again, fecundity of the nature. The Kii Peninsula is one of the wettest places on the planet actually. It gets more rainfall than the Amazon. And you just feel it. It is just green and mossy and lush.
Tim Ferriss: This is what you described, I think, as the dangling penis of Japan in the last conversation.
Craig Mod: Yes. Yes. It’s a moist dangling penis of Japan. So there’s just this incredible richness of nature. The air was amazing. The religious and spiritual syncretism that’s happening there. One of the reasons why it’s UNESCO World Heritage is that Japan, throughout most of its history, Buddhism and Shinto, Shinto is the native religion, the sort of animist native Japanese spiritual philosophy, theology. Shinto, which are shrines, and Buddhism, which is temples, they used to coexist extremely peacefully and they often would be on the same grounds. And then, the Meiji Restoration happened in part of essentially imbuing or creating this God narrative around the Emperor, they said, “Hey, we have to split these things. We want Shinto to be stronger.” This is a very TL;DR. So Buddhism and Shinto were forcibly split and a lot of temples were destroyed.
And what was special about the Kii Peninsula was because it was so kind far away from Edo, it’s so far away from Tokyo, they kind of didn’t split. So it’s one of these places, there’s a few places left in Japan. Yamagata has Dewa Sanzan, which is the three Mountains of Dewa, which also has a lot of syncretic history that’s still present. And Kumano Kodo is also very syncretic between Shinto and Buddhism. So that was exciting to see that. It just felt great. The ceremonies are amazing. The temples are amazing. You can do Shukubo, which is what’s called when you stay at a temple, very easy to do, very affordable. The graveyard up in Koyasan was just astounding, one of the absolute most beautiful places. So I don’t know, just so peaceful. So peaceful. It’s like all these Shogunates and Daimyo, like the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Japanese samurai. It’s pretty interesting.
Tim Ferriss: So I want to give people just a little bit of context real quick. So Meiji Restoration, this says, it began around 1868. This marked the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and restoration of Imperial Rule. And then that was also, correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but sort of a signpost and an opening for a lot of the rapid modernization and transformation of Japan that we think of even extending into the sort of mid-1900s. Right? And then one last thing I just want to say. Bashō, for people who were like, “Who the hell was that?” You mentioned it briefly. What was this? I don’t know who the other foreigner was who was wandering around Japan. I’m blanking out his name, but he was like, “I want to see what Bashō saw.”
Craig Mod: John, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: John, yes, right.
Craig Mod: My buddy John. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: The most famous Japanese poet of the Edo period. And sidebar —
Craig Mod: He put haiku on the map.
Tim Ferriss: The guy who made haiku cool. And there you have it. Tell me if I’m getting my timelines right, did part of the appeal of these trails coincide, or maybe it was just reinforced at a later point by you getting sober and deciding to run and move around in that way, or did that come later?
Craig Mod: For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an extension of that for sure. I think getting sober and that stint I had living in Palo Alto and kind of just upping, like we were talking about self-worth, this sense of scarcity, getting rid of that sense of scarcity, creating more senses of abundance in your life. I felt a real abundance here. And then also watching John, because John is this, I mean, truly, I don’t think anyone’s had more of a bigger, more positive impact on my life than John. In my book that’s coming out in May, Things Become Other Things, he’s featured heavily in it as kind of this background character. And he basically, we started doing walks together. We’d spend weeks and months together every year starting in about 20 12, 20 13. We do, okay, let’s do this walk, let’s do this trip, let’s do this. And it was just so easy.
We just traveled together effortlessly. It was like one of these things where just totally on the same wavelength, completely copacetic, just totally easy. And I would watch John. And John’s Japanese is so exceptional, so perfect, so high register. Imperial. So he started doing tea ceremony when he was 19 in Kyoto at a super hard to get into tea ceremony temple. He just kept knocking on the door until they finally let him in. And he’s been doing that for 40 years. He was the CEO of Sky TV, which was Rupert Murdoch’s, the first cable satellite network that was launched out of Japan. He ran that for 10 years. So he is just operating at this extremely high level.
So we would be walking, we’d be doing these, walking the Kohechi, walking the Nakahechi. And I would watch him with farmers and I’d watch him interact with locals. And I had never seen someone move people through the use of polite language and curiosity about their history, curiosity about what was happening nearby, what had happened nearby, and watching everyone become our ally in this way that was so profound and exciting. And that was another big part of it, because I was trying to figure out what am I doing in Japan? Because I wasn’t working for Japanese companies. I didn’t have a partner then. And I was like, okay, I have a language ability and this is my base, but what am I really doing here? And spending that time with John, watching him move through these old roads, these pilgrimage routes, and ensorcell everybody that we met with this love.
Tim Ferriss: Ensorcell! Craig, you just GRAed me. What does that mean?
Craig Mod: Just to do a little magic trick on them.
Tim Ferriss: Ooh, I’m going to use that.
Craig Mod: Totally pull them over to your side.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a magic trick just to use that word.
Craig Mod: It was so profound for me to watch that happen and then I started emulating it. And then, basically that became a foundation for me after I’d say it took me about three years before I felt like I had studied enough with John to start walking on my own. So it wasn’t until about 2015, 2016.
Tim Ferriss: And how much of the studying was routes, where to stay, and how much of that was the interaction piece?
Craig Mod: I’d say it was like 80 percent interaction, 20 percent routes.
Tim Ferriss: This is going to get nerdy, but a lot of my listeners are nerdy, so they might enjoy it. You mentioned politely speaking, and I don’t want to gloss over this because politely speaking in the US is like, “Please, thank you. Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am.” A lot more to it in Japanese. You have Keigo, you have exalting language, which you can use to put the person on a higher pedestal, you have humbling language, you’ve got a million grades. You have this whole spectrum in between. There are entire books written on how to write short letters that are polite at the right level with the right combination of ingredients. What made the language that he used so enchanting, maybe so recruiting for the people he interacted with in the countryside?
Craig Mod: So I think it was like, okay, he had spent 40 years doing tea ceremony. And tea ceremony by the way is not just like five minutes, you fold a handkerchief, you pour some tea, you’re done. It’s like Six, seven, eight hours, like a full tea ceremony. And you’re cooking meals and you’re presenting stuff. It’s a really involved thing. And so, there’s a lot of language connected with tea ceremony. So first of all, he’d just been studying this kind of tea ceremony language. And then I think being a CEO where 100 percent of his interactions were in Japanese, he just learned to talk at a CEO level with everyone. So basically, we’re walking through, we’re meeting farmers, and he’s treating them with the same reverence he would treat Son-San, the CEO of SoftBank, with whom he’d have breakfast with once a week or whatever when he was writing his thing.
And so, I think these people, first of all, we’re just blown away that we could speak Japanese to begin with. But then secondly, that they were being seen in a way that they had never been seen before. They felt no one had ever elevated them before, and kind of weirdly, no Japanese person would probably think to elevate them. John, I think, just has this intuitive sense of how to make people feel great. It comes from this totally genuine place. He’s so encyclopedically sort of versed about the history of the area. So he’ll be talking, be asking questions, these deep historical questions, and you can just see people so moved by it like, “Oh, my God, this person really cares about where we are.”
And then, on top of that, he’s just using verb conjugations or they’ll say, “Hey, would you like some tea?” And he’ll be like, “Oh, my God, it would be my most cherished honor to accept your humble tea.” Basically something like that in Japanese, which doesn’t sound, you say it in English and you’re like, “All right, shut up, you dickhead.” But in Japanese, if you do it the right way, it’s sort of like, “Wow. Oh, wow, okay, cool. This person, this person gets it. Wow, okay, yeah, come on in.” So that was profound to see, because look, I come from a place where we spoke, it’s like working class, potty mouth to the max. I grew up with that. And then I got to Tokyo and I studied or whatever, but they weren’t teaching us tea ceremony Japanese at school. And I was playing music. And so, I was in the studio, I was in clubs, I learned that Yakuza Japanese. I was at Golden Gai —
Tim Ferriss: You were wandering around.
Craig Mod: Yeah. Drinking with guys who were missing pinky fingers and stuff. So a lot of people speak Japanese. This is the danger. It’s like, you don’t speak Japanese, that opens a lot of doors. You speak a little bit and people are delighted that you speak a little bit. Then once you cross the threshold, they expect more of you and then you don’t hit that politeness, and then you’re kind of insulting in a weird way. And then you have to really —
Tim Ferriss: You know enough for them to take it personally when you don’t get the politeness right.
Craig Mod: For them to be like, “Yeah, you could level up a little more for me, I think.” So anyway, I was not not polite, but I was definitely not in the super polite zone. So I would say in the last decade, my Japanese went up multiple, multiple levels, thanks to, again, like we were talking about in the previous episode by having people near you that are better than you, just a couple of levels better than you. And then you learn so much from that. So when I travel with John, I don’t say anything. I’m just listening, taking notes the whole time. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, wow. You can say that. Oh, shit, you can say that. Cool. Okay. Yeah, that’s amazing.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool. And just to underscore the complexity of this, a lot of younger generation native Japanese speakers have trouble with a lot of this politeness and they screw it up and they make mistakes. And you could probably give a good example, but the more polite you get, and that can take a number of forms, the longer everything gets. Right?
Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m trying to think of a good example. I mean, I’m not going to be great at this because it’s been a hundred years, but if you want to say, this also doesn’t translate well to English. None of it translates well. But I remember my friend’s father who is from New Zealand, but worked in Japan for 15 years, he was somewhere, I want to say in the US, and these Japanese businessmen came in and they were speaking Japanese, and he very politely sort of edged into the conversation and was like, “Thank you so much for indulging me with your beautiful Japanese.” Effectively, it’s a bad translation, but it was like [Japanese]. That kind of thing. Which otherwise would be super, super, super short. I don’t know if I fucked that up.
Craig Mod: No, no. And for the listeners out there, Tim’s Japanese is very, very good. Very, very good. You’re doing well.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you. Yeah, thanks. It’s been 25 years, more, 27 years. I’ve got to get back. You’ve inspired me.
So quick sidebar. In Japan, a lot of folks here are like, “What? Do we all look the same?” Like an Asian person might say, because white people have sometimes trouble, or just non-Asians have trouble telling some Asians apart. But when I was in Japan, they were like, “You know who you look like?” I had two people say this to me, but different celebrities. And I was like, “No. Who do I look like?” And they’re like, “Harrison Ford.”
I was like, “I’m not sure about that.” But John, when you say his Japanese is very good, that makes me kind of take a step back. Because when we walked in Japan, I was taking notes. And you had adopted the John playbook so well that, whether it was a farmer we bumped into, or in the case, and we’ll get to this I’m sure, of a small semi ghost town that we would walk through and the mayor would chase us down in his —
Craig Mod: Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: — little utility van.
Craig Mod: That was insane. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And give us all little plush town mascots. That’s another thing we could talk about. In any case, just incredibly impressed with your Japanese. And yes, you’ve been there a long time. But it seems to me like the vast majority of folks who live in Japan, even if they’re there for a long time as non-natives, really do not learn much Japanese. That’s my impression. Maybe that’s unfair, but at least the vast majority of people I know who have moved there barely speak a lick.
Craig Mod: Yeah, you have to commit. I do think there’s a new generation. I mean, I think now we’re seeing more and more people who are really great at Japanese who are coming in and just sort of existing. I mean, I think YouTube is just full of people that —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Craig Mod: — speak amazing Japanese now and stuff like that. So I think there’s this new generation. And actually, I mean, part of what this book also kind of talks about is being — I feel like I’m one of the first true immigrants to choose to not live in America, to choose to leave America, to look out into the world, and be like, “Where do I want to live?” And have America not be that place. And I think we’re seeing more of that.
And just anecdotally from my experience, I’ve been encountering more and more incredible, super talented, brilliant, great Japanese-speaking foreigners here in the last five or six years than I have certainly 15 or 20 years ago. And I think there was, in the ’80s and ’90s, the expat trope was, you come here, you teach English, you make an insane amount of money doing that, and you don’t really learn any Japanese besides bar Japanese. And I think that was very, very common for many people, but —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, my reference point might be outdated because I was there in ’92, back in the Pliocene era.
Craig Mod: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And that was peak David Spector days, right?
Craig Mod: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Where it’s like, if you looked exceptionally non-Japanese and spoke pretty good conversational Japanese, you ended up on television as —
Craig Mod: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: You know? Gaijin tarento.
Craig Mod: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Like foreigner talent. Okay, let’s get back to the walks. I took us on a huge side quest. When did, after studying at the knee of John and getting comfortable with doing these walks on your own, what form did that take and what purpose did it serve for you?
Craig Mod: So yeah, so I was doing these and I was just having such an incredible time doing it. And I started kind of writing about it a little bit on my blog where I’d tweet about it or something. And actually, Kevin Kelly reached out and he said, “Hey, I’m going to be giving a talk in Tokyo.”
Tim Ferriss: Now you knew who he was.
Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had walked to Pacifica a couple of times and he’s like, “Hey, I’m giving a talk in Tokyo. I’d love to walk part of the Nakasendo.” And I’d done Nakasendo with John a couple of times, like bits of it. And I was like, “Great, let’s walk it together, so me and you.” And so to prepare for that, I went and walked a little chunk of it on my own. I was like, “Okay, this is good. I want to make sure I don’t kill Kevin Kelly.” And we set that up, and we did that walk, and that was probably 2014, 2015.
And it was so much fun, just the two of us, and we’re like, “Oh, my God. We need to invite more people to do stuff like this.” So we did. So in 2016, and then I was thinking about, at this point, I was like, “These walks, there’s a richness here.” Because just the people you’re meeting, the conversations that you’re having, the photographs that I was taking, the stories I was hearing, I was like, “I want to give shape to these things.” They’re so immaterial. You do the walk and it disappears. It kind of just goes up in the air like smoke. And I was like, “I want to do a book.”
And so Dan Rubin is a photographer friend of mine from ages ago. And I was like, “Dan, let’s walk the Kumano Kodo, and we’ll do like eight days, nine days, and we’ll photograph it. And then, we’ll hide in a farmhouse. And we’ll be in the farmhouse for a week, and we have to produce the entire photo book in that week. And it’s like, we just have to timebox this. We’re busy people, like we just got to do this.” Because I just wanted to — these walks just really demanded like give them a shape, give them a shape. This is 2016. So Dan and I —
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by give them a shape?
Craig Mod: Give them a form, like make them immutable in some way, because they were just so — you know? Immaterial. And so, I was like, “Okay, what’s the most minimum viable shape you can give it?” It’s like a photo book, kind of felt like that. And so, we did it. We did the walk. You know, we hid in a farmhouse. We made the book, kickstarted it, sold it, did really well. And that activated something in me too. It reminded me of how much I love books because it had been a while since I’d made a book book. And then, Kevin brought over Hugh Howey, who is the author of the Silo Series and the Silo Apple TV Show.
Tim Ferriss: Wool and all of that.
Craig Mod: Wool, all that. So Kevin, Hugh, and I then walked through Kumano Kodo in the fall of 2016, and that was so much fun. And we were like, “Oh, my God. We’ve got to do this with bigger groups.” So it was this really organic kind of escalation of like, “Okay, this is an interesting thing.” But at the same time, as much as I enjoyed being with these people, I was doing these exploratory walks on my own, and I realized that there was definitely a register or a tenor of the walk that only existed when I was alone, and I wanted to explore that more. And then that is what really kicked off the big solo walks.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s hear about it, and maybe you could include your discussion of your rules of walking.
Craig Mod: Yeah. So the first, I would say, big true walk I did was 2019, I had just launched my membership program. Basically in 2018, I’d spent the year working on a bunch of magazine articles about walking in Japan that got rejected from every magazine, and I got ghosted by editors. And I was in this really depressed kind of space. And I had been doing the writing residencies and I’d been working on a novel that I couldn’t sell about — anyway, there’s a bunch of stuff going on, and I was like —
Tim Ferriss: A daughter who leaves her father. No, I’m kidding.
Craig Mod: That was after I had all the bottles of Nihonshu sitting around. So it’s the end of 2018, and I was like, “What should I do?” I basically did Zoom calls with every journalist friend I had, and they’re like, “Craig, you have an audience.” I had a newsletter that was like mildly popular. They’re like, “You have an audience. You know what you want to write about. Just launch a membership program.” And at that time, like Substack was sort of nascent. And like there was this, subscriptions were kind of becoming a thing.
And Memberful had launched and Patreon had launched, and people were kind of okay with the idea. So I launched a membership program in January 2019. And then, it took me a little while. But within a few months, I was deriving a certain permission from the fact that people were paying me to be a walker. But essentially that was the pitch. It was like, you don’t get anything by joining this membership program. Now, you get a ton of stuff. Like if you join the membership program now, you get 120 hours of video. There’s so much stuff you get access to.
Tim Ferriss: At the time it was, “I’m going to walk, and tell you about it. “
Craig Mod: This is like NPR. I’m going to walk, and I’m going to write about it, and you’re funding that. And enough people joined where it was like, “Okay, this is a thing.” And so for my first big walk, I did Nakasendo, so —
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Craig Mod: You know? I have a place. I was based mainly in Kamakura then. And so, I walked to Kamakura, up to Tokyo. Tokyo all the way up through Saitama, Nagano, into Gifu, all the way to Kyoto. And then from Kyoto, I ended up going down. I walked some other bits in the Kii Peninsula, but the main thing was the Nakasendo.
Tim Ferriss: What distance are we talking? What does that add up to?
Craig Mod: It took 30 days. And I want to say it was about 600 kilometers, something like that. It was a serious walk.
Tim Ferriss: Which is roughly 373 miles.
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Just for people to put that in perspective.
Craig Mod: And up until then, the longest solo thing I had done was about seven or eight days. So this felt like a pretty big jump. And it was really hard. I miscalculated all the distances. I underestimated. By day four I was like, “Oh, my God. What am I going to do?” I didn’t really even know how to wear my backpack properly. It was cutting into my shoulders. I wasn’t doing the waist strap. So I was really kind of like — excuse me. I was really kind of not — you know? I was wildly underexperienced. I should’ve known better. But the days, I was doing 30, 40K days. And I was in shock. My body was in shock. And every night, I was publishing a little thing. I was publishing a photo.
And I ran this SMS experiment. I had this thesis that people were kind of tired of email, and people were tired of social media. And like the most intimate space on the phone was kind of your SMS messaging app. And so, I built a one-to-many SMS tool that would allow me to publish every night. Everyone could subscribe, put their numbers into this thing, and they would get an SMS from me every night at the end of the day. And it would be a photo. It’d be like three sentences about the day. And so, I did that. And you could respond to it, but I couldn’t see the responses. And then, I hired this —
Tim Ferriss: Wait, what is that? If you couldn’t see the responses, what happened to them?
Craig Mod: So hold on, so hold on.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Craig Mod: The responses were being collected in this database.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, there we go.
Craig Mod: And then, I hired a designer to lay it all out for me in a print-on-demand book. And all of the responses, my little photo of the day, my little three sentences. And then, all the responses for the day would be laid out in a book. And I had no idea how many there were. And then the idea was that, at the end of the walk, I would come home, and the book would be waiting for me at home. So I’d have kind of like this analog experience of like —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Craig Mod: You know? Seeing. And I got home from the walk, and the book was there, and it was so incredible. It was thousands and thousands of these messages from people. And then I spent months writing essays responding to all the questions and messages that people sent in there and putting that up on my blog. So it was this beautiful kind of like really long — the loops for social media are so tight, right? They’re seconds.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Craig Mod: You post, you get responses. And there’s something terrible about that. You don’t have any time to reflect. You don’t have any distance from the thing that you’re doing and what the expectations are on the part of your audience. And so, to do this thing where there was basically a month built in where I wasn’t going to see these responses. And then —
Tim Ferriss: Sorry, my dog’s vomiting. Give me a sec.
Craig Mod: Ooh. Is he okay?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what’s going on. She didn’t even eat. Sorry, give me a second. This is going to be gross. I was pushing her off of the carpet. That’s a new one for the podcast.
Craig Mod: Oh, no.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Sorry.
Craig Mod: Your dog ate your SMS.
Tim Ferriss: Can you give me a second just to —
Craig Mod: Sure. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Give me to deal with this. I’ve never had my dog vomit while I’m recording a podcast right next to me before. That’s a new one. This is the glamorous life of a podcaster, folks. All right, give me one second, man.
Craig Mod: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: Please don’t lose your place.
Sorry, bud. That was gross. All right.
Craig Mod: No worries.
Tim Ferriss: That could be worked into the intro. That’ll be like the cold open of the show. Okay, where were we?
Craig Mod: So I got home, and I got the responses, and I got that book.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Craig Mod: And just the fact that the loops was so —
Tim Ferriss: And then, you spent months.
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Then, you spent months responding. And then, the loops, that’s where we were.
Craig Mod: So basically, it ended up being this thing of like, “Oh, wow.” Actually, the tightness of the social media loops feels really detrimental, and there’s something really negative, and there’s something being lost there in not having more time and space between.
Tim Ferriss: Also, very hurried. Right?
Craig Mod: Call and response. Exactly. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Very rushed.
Craig Mod: And you felt it in the responses to that. Everyone knew I wasn’t going to see them in real time, so.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Craig Mod: There were some really moving things. It was all anonymous. And people were very — I mean, it was almost like a confession booth for some people. I mean, you know?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Craig Mod: It was shocking. You know, it was like, “My mother just died yesterday. And I’m thinking about this as I’m reading.” “I’m getting your message, and I’m thinking about where you are on the walk.” “Thank you for doing this.” Just like how people want to weave what you’re doing, and this kind of epic thing, this journey that you’re on, and help them put in perspective things that are happening. Anyway, it was good to see that and good to experience that. And that led me to think about my own rules for how I wanted to be when I walked.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it.
Craig Mod: Which I can explain.
Tim Ferriss: Pregnant pause.
Craig Mod: I’m trying to —
Tim Ferriss: We’ll be back right after this commercial break. Yeah. Right.
Craig Mod: I’m just cognizant of the fact that sometimes I’m just in bloviation mode. So basically, here are my rules. No news —
Tim Ferriss: Good T-shirt. Bloviation mode.
Craig Mod: Bloviation mode. So my walk rules are, you can’t read the news. You’re not allowed to read the news. There’s no social media.
Tim Ferriss: And by you, that means Craig.
Craig Mod: Yeah. If you’re walking or if I’m walking, yeah. I’ll always talk about me in the third person.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Craig Mod: So you can’t read the news. You can’t do social media. You can’t touch any of that stuff. Basically, the idea was to just be radically present, radically, radically — and radically cultivate like a boredom, an incredible sense of boredom, and never teleport. I mean, I think one of the weirdest things about being a contemporary human is like, first of all, we’re never bored because we always have this stupid Black Mirror slab in our pocket, right?
That’s like always distracting us with some other dopamine hit. And we’re constantly teleporting. If there’s any millimeter of friction, if there’s one millisecond of friction in your life, you just pull that stupid thing out, and start sucking at the teat of whatever information cow is in there, right? It’s kind of profound to feel boredom, you know? And actually, in 2015, 2016, I did a 10-day Vipassana retreat. And that was also foundational for me for thinking about this stuff. Have you ever done the 10-day?
Tim Ferriss: I have done seven-day, not a 10-day.
Craig Mod: So maybe you experienced this on the seven-day. When did you do the seven-day? How old were you?
Tim Ferriss: I was, I want to say, maybe — let me think about this. 10 years ago. Something like that.
Craig Mod: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I guess just 2015, 2016 is 10 years ago.
Tim Ferriss: So would’ve been late 30s.
Craig Mod: Yeah. So for me, when did the Vipassana in Kyoto, which is great by the way. It was amazing. It was really well run. Food was amazing. It was just great. It took me like three days, four days to arrive at the retreat center, like psychically. I just wasn’t there.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Craig Mod: Actually, it took me about a day to realize I was experiencing information withdrawal, and I was getting angry.
Tim Ferriss: Stimulation withdrawal too. Right?
Craig Mod: Yeah, stimulation information withdrawal. And I was getting angry. I was like, “Where is this anger coming from?” You’re just sitting there for 10 hours a day, observing your body, the physiological phenomenon that’s happening in your body. And I was just observing this anger and going, “Wow, this is so bizarre because I don’t know what’s triggering this.” And I realized, “Oh, my God. I’m so addicted to information and just being stimulated by a phone, or the internet, or whatever.” That’s what I’m kind of — anyway.
And so getting over that three, four days in, and then having all the mystical, you know? Breaking down into particulate matter, which is something that I felt and could control by the end of my Vipassana retreat. It was pretty bizarre. That feeling of attention control, which is basically what you’re learning when you do that, was foundational for, I think, these rules that I ended up applying to my walks. And so, the walks end up for me being — you know, it’s weeks. It can be two, three, four, five, six weeks of walking.
And what’s critical is the repetition. And what’s critical is actually the length and doing every day, day after day after day. And being off those tight loops of social media, and being radically present, not teleporting, saying hello to everybody. I forced myself to say hello to every single person I see. And with photography too, I kind of have these rules where I’m like, “I have to take a portrait of someone before 10:00 a.m.” I set these really arbitrary rules.
And I just find that by doing that, by setting a, not an unreasonable number of them, but like a few arbitrary rules, it really opens up the day. It kind of like really sets the tone. And you know, it’d be like 9:55 in the morning and I’d be like, “Oh, my God. I have to hit my 10:00 a.m. portrait.” No one’s holding me to this. But I just feel this covenant I’ve made with myself. I can’t break the covenant. And I would just run into a shop, like there’d just be a shop next to me wherever I was on the road, and it’d be like a tatami shop in the middle of nowhere in Saitama.
And I would just be like, “Hi, can I please take your portrait?” You know? And you would end up having this conversation, this incredible conversation, and it would fill you. What I found is it filled me with this sense of possibility, and joy, and fullness, and that just kept escalating. And I realized the Nakasendo walk was kind of the first big one, but I wasn’t operating in full walk mode yet. I was operating at about 65 percent, 70 percent walk mode for that first Nakasendo. And full walk mode for me is, I get up at 8:00, I walk 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50k a day.
Carry my pack. Sometimes I have two, three, four cameras on me. Sometimes I’m shooting video. Sometimes I’m doing binaural audio stuff. I’m talking to people all day. I am dictating notes constantly. I find that when I cultivate that radical boredom, that radical sort of like in-the-momentness, my mind immediately just wants to write. It can’t not write. It’s just writing about what I’m seeing. I set up these series scripts to be able to dictate, and not really have to interact with my phone.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by series scripts?
Craig Mod: So you can kind of do shortcuts in iOS now, where you can sort of tap a button on your home screen and it appends to a note in Notes. It does like a transcription. So you don’t have to interact with your phone. You can just tap a button, or you can set it up. It’s a Siri call out you can do as well. And you just dictate, and it transcribes it pretty well. I’m just walking, and dictating, and talking to myself like a crazy person.
And I’ll see someone, I’ll interact with them, I’ll photograph them, I’ll have a 15 minute, 20 minute conversation. What was it like around here? What’s your background? What are your kids doing? Where do they live? What’s going on? And just doing this all day long. I get to my inn, I get to my hotel at like 5:00 p.m., 4–5:00 p.m., that’s the ideal. Start doing laundry. Oftentimes, I’ll just grab something from the konbini because then I’m going to write and edit photos.
Tim Ferriss: Konbini is the convenience store?
Craig Mod: Convenience store, just grab a sandwich, grab an udon. And then, I’m writing every night for four or five hours, writing and editing photos every single night. So I’m doing eight hours of walking, and then I’m doing five hours of creative work every night. And I’m writing two, three, 4,000 words a night, and then publishing it as well. And that, for me, that mode, that’s the max of what I can do. Eight hours of walking, talking, photographing people, being radically, totally bored and present. And then at night, just living in — because you forget so quickly. If you don’t write immediately, things just like evaporate. Just everything you experienced and felt and saw that day, the highlights, certain conversation.
You know, I’ll be walking, and there’ll be a conversation I have, and I’ll be like, “That is it. That’s the hook of the essay for tonight.” This one moment, this one person’s one — and it just got me — first of all, it was this epic shugyo, which is ascetic training. So like mountain asceticism here in Japan, yamabushi, is a certain kind of asceticism. And you train in the mountains, and you do smoke inhalation training, and you don’t sleep, whatever. There’s like sleep deprivation, and all sorts of stuff, and food — you know? Kind of like fasting and whatnot. And I had concocted essentially with these walks, my own ascetic training.
And if you spend 30 days doing that physical activity every day to that degree, your body changes. You become what I call a bobbing consciousness. Like by day 20, 25 on the road where you’re walking 20, 30, 40k, your legs are just so powerful. Because you’re not teleporting, it feels like you are in a VR helmet that’s just floating down the road. It’s totally surreal. It’s totally bizarre. And then, cranking out every night an essay, 2–3,000 words, editing photos. So creating this visual narrative, like sort of mix, doing that every night, 30 days. And I’ve done now many, many walks where I’ve done this for multiple weeks and months at a time. You just develop this confidence that you can do that, which is wild.
I think this is how newspaper people feel, like in the olden days, you know? You’re in there, you got your pencil. The thing comes in, you got 20 minutes to write the lead. You got to get this thing done. I feel like there’s a version of journalism and newspaper writing that trained you in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’50s, whatever that is maybe harder to access today because we don’t kind of — maybe the newspaper room doesn’t work at such an insane kind of pace anymore. I don’t know. I haven’t worked in a newspaper, so I’m just talking on my butt. But doing these kind of weird ascetic walk training exercises for me, it was like going to writing bootcamp. It was going to life bootcamp.
And I would finish every day on these walks, get in bed, and just feel that was the fullest possible way I could have experienced that day. Given the cards dealt to me of this day, there was no fuller version of this day. And feeling that over and over and over again, and understanding what that fullness can be like. When you come out of the walk, you bring that back to your everyday life. You can’t operate that intensity all the time, but you can bring back that archetype of what a full day feels like. And man, that bleeds into your relationships with your friendships of fullness, with my stepdaughter, with my family, with people I love. It is totally pulled back into that space of life. So it’s a pretty powerful thing.
Tim Ferriss: Well, a few things strike me. First is a recommendation for folks. If you want to see some pretty interesting mountain ascetic practice, The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei. If people want to see some fantastic photographs and also descriptions of some of these practices, and the tiny modicum of food these monks consume while they’re running around in these woven sandals. It’s wild.
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So people can check that out. Also, what I was going to say is that, what you just described strikes me as almost the Vipassana retreat in motion. Because part of what allows your mind to ultimately settle, right? For the snow globe to settle and for you to experience the thing you experienced is this reliable daily schedule and scaffolding.
Craig Mod: Yes. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: So that you are not distracted by trivial choice and shifting conditions. So similarly, when you’re going on these walks, and you have this schedule, and you have these rules, by 10:00, I must do X. It’s like you’re a rock climber, let’s just say on an indoor route, could be outdoor, where you have the same route every day.
And on the first day, you’re figuring it out. Then on the second day, you get a little more comfortable. By the 10th day, your mind starts to go interesting places while you’re doing it with this automaticity that you couldn’t experience if it were a different route every day, so to speak.
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea.
Craig Mod: So I guess one of my other rules for these walks too is like, everything has to be booked in advance. Wherever I leave on a walk, I have a giant spreadsheet that has all of the distances. It has all of the bookings for the inns. I know what meals are included or not included, because I don’t want to think about logistics for one second when I’m out in the field. And exactly what you’re saying. Some people hear that, and they go, “Oh, my God. Aren’t you missing out on the romance of like, you might meet an interesting farmer, and they want to take you to their house?”
It’s like, “Hey, if I meet an interesting farmer, I get his number.” I live in Japan, I can just come back after the walk. We can have our — it’s like, I don’t need to have that in the walk. This is a different thing. That’s a different thing. And so, for me, I absolutely thrive on that pre-scheduling of it all, precisely because it gives you the freedom to be so radically present. And so, I think observant and committed to the craft of what you want to produce that day. Thinking about where you’re going to stay tomorrow night is a huge cognitive burden. It’s huge.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Craig Mod: Making the reservations, calculating. It sucks. It could take easily an hour. You think it’s like, “Oh, it’s a 10-minute thing.” It can easily take an hour. If I’m going to do a month of walking, I spend a week of making reservations to do a month of walking.
Tim Ferriss: For people who are like, “Wait, what? A week?” Sometimes this may not be fair. Tell me if this is as outdated as my perception of foreigners speaking Japanese. Although I still think there are a lot of lazy non-Japanese who don’t speak Japanese. But the description I give people when they’re like, “I’m going to Japan, and I’m going to live there.”
If they’re visiting and they’re going to stay at a nice hotel, it’s a different experience. But if they’re like, “I’m going to move there for two months.” I’m like, “Okay. Let me just tell you that you think Japan is Blade Runner, and I’d say it’s 60 percent Blade Runner, depending on where you are. And then, it’s at least 40 percent DMV.” The number of triplicate copies —
Craig Mod: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: — that you’re going to have to sign. The amount of fucking paperwork. The number of times you’re going to have to try to get a hold of someone is going to shock you. So right, a week of settling logistics. Yeah.
Craig Mod: A week of settling. And a lot of it is calling people, because they don’t have websites or they don’t take online bookings.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Craig Mod: And like it’s shocking how much trust there is. It’s like you call this inn, they go, “Hey. Hello, it’s the inn.” That’s kind of like what they sound like in Japanese basically. And you go, “Oh, honorable sir, I would love to book.” “Okay, you want to stay? When are you staying? Okay, May 12th. Okay. Okay. Yeah, sure. Okay, you want dinner? Okay. Sure. Okay, see you May 12th. Bye.” Like that’s how reservations are sometimes done. You arrive on May 12th, and you’re like, “Was that really a reservation?” You know? You’re like, “what the fuck was that?”
Tim Ferriss: I had this experience firsthand with you. So you and Kevin and I and a small group did a walk in Japan. And it’s like, you’d show up and you’d be like, “Are they here? I don’t know. Maybe.”
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: “Maybe not.”
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll find out.
Craig Mod: We’ll find out. Yeah, it’s pretty —
Tim Ferriss: And it’s not like if they’re not there, you just walk four doors down, and you have the Holiday Inn. That’s not how it works.
Craig Mod: No, no. I mean, the experience of booking is probably what it was like booking in the 1950s, honestly.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Craig Mod: That hasn’t changed much. Japan is Blade Runner is what we imagine the future would be in 2000. And then it just never evolved beyond that basically. It’s been stuck in 2000 for the last 25 years.
Tim Ferriss: So question for you. 2021 is what I have written down here. You had an essay, a piece come out in Wired magazine, “Walking Across Japan, Disconnected and Bored.” I remember reading this piece. And you did certain things. You imposed certain restrictions, say on digital distractions, to induce productive boredom. I’m wondering if you could maybe describe briefly what you did then and what you do now.
Craig Mod: Yeah. Well, I mean, that Wired essay is exactly what we’ve been talking about, just the no social media, no distraction, no podcasts, no music, even?
Tim Ferriss: Basic flip phone, right? You downgraded to the basic flip phone and an offline Kindle. Am I getting those right?
Craig Mod: I didn’t downgrade to a flip phone, but I ran software on my iPhone that disabled everything. Because I needed GPS, I needed a map. I needed to have a map. So I mean, I didn’t need GPS, but I could have gone even more analog. But I had GPS. I ran the software called Freedom, which was actually pretty good. Freedom.to is the website, and I’ve used that for a while to basically break my devices to make them boring.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, my friend and also fellow writer, Neil Strauss, uses it all the time as well.
Craig Mod: Yeah. I would say a lot of what I’ve accomplished as a writer is thanks to Freedom, turning off the internet at night and keeping it off until after lunch. So yeah, that Wired article, if you’re listening and you’re like, “Oh, give me the 3,000 word distillation of all this,” that’s a good place to go. And I remember when that came out, and you mentioned it, I think, on your podcast, and you said you’d printed it out and put part of it on your wall, I think [crosstalk] quote.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, as a reminder.
Craig Mod: Yeah. I was very moved to hear that. And also, I got so many freaking emails from people who were like, “Oh, Tim Ferriss printed out your article, man.” I was like, “Okay, cool.” I was like, “That’s good to know.”
Tim Ferriss: I still print. Maybe I’m part Japanese.
Craig Mod: I’ll fax you the next one.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, is faxing still a thing in Japan? It is. It’s got to be. It must be.
Craig Mod: Yeah. But that Wired article came out of that Nakasendo walk as well. So there was just a few things that came out of that Nakasendo walk. Let me explain what the Nakasendo is too. In the Edo period, you had the Shogunate take over. And to consolidate a certain amount of wealth and power, they enacted a thing called Sankin-kōtai, where the daimyo, the local rulers, had to basically keep residents in Edo, which is what Tokyo used to be called. And they commuted to Edo. They had to go every year. They had to do a commutation. And so they had to build roads, they had to build infrastructure for all these daimyo, which sometimes for the bigger prefectures, the band of people would be 2,000 people long that would be traveling with the daimyo to go to Edo to —
Tim Ferriss: That’s a hell of an entourage.
Craig Mod: It’s a big entourage. It’s like Turtle. Just imagine like 2,000 Turtles, that character from the show [Entourage]. No one remembers Turtle.
Tim Ferriss: I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve got me thinking about 2,000 turtles though.
Craig Mod: Yeah, anyway we should never think about Turtle. So they built infrastructure —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Turtle’s from the show. I was thinking actual turtles with shells. I was like, “I don’t know where this is going, but I’m in for the ride.” Okay, got it. Yes, Turtle.
Craig Mod: Part of the Entourage. And so they built infrastructure, and Nakasendo and the Tōkaidō were the two main arteries of essentially the commute. It was like the 101 of Edo period Japan. And so the Nakasendo kind of goes north. It’s more mountainous. It has fewer river crossings, and so people liked it. Even though it was more arduous in the mountains, people don’t like river crossings. And in the Edo period, essentially you weren’t really allowed to build bridges, in order to protect domains from attacks. So all of the river crossings had to be on people’s shoulders or ferried across. It was kind of a pain in the butt to cross rivers. And the Tōkaidō, which if you’ve come to Japan, you’ve ridden the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto, you may have ridden the Tōkaidō Shinkansen.
Tim Ferriss: It’s the bullet train.
Craig Mod: The bullet train follows the old Tōkaidō route roughly, which was Kyoto to Tokyo, kind of along the coast. And that has many river crossings. And so people would not love that, for example. And even on the Tōkaidō, there’s kind of detours called the Hime kaidō, which was like a detour to avoid this one river crossing. It’s called the Princess route, because women didn’t want to ride on the shoulders of strange porters or something. There’s all sorts of different things why people chose Nakasendo or they’d go on Nakasendo and they’d come back on the Tōkaidō just to mix it up, just to have some fun in the 1600s.
And so the Nakasendo is the northern mountainous route, and that’s the one I walked in 2019. I’ve since done the Tōkaidō twice. So I’m walking the Nakasendo, I’m going up into these mountain villages, and what I’m witnessing is depopulation firsthand. So there’s two kind of buzzwords you hear in Japanese, shōshika mondai, which is childbirth problem. There’s just no children being birthed. I think Japan’s at 1.2 now, is the per-woman sort of number of children being produced. Gideon Lewis-Kraus just wrote this amazing article about Korea’s situation, which I think is 0.7 or 0.6.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, not a great situation.
Craig Mod: They just hate kids there. Anyway, so Japan’s not quite that bad.
Tim Ferriss: I could explain more related to that. I don’t know how much of a digression we want to take, but there are actually a bunch of structural problems that helped to produce that in South Korea, but we’ll come back to it. For instance, I’ll give one example that doesn’t get talked about. Very briefly, very briefly, is that rent is very, very expensive. A lot of people move to, say, Seoul. And in Seoul, to upgrade to a larger apartment, you would often have to put down a six to 12 month security deposit, and people can’t afford to do it. So a lot of the reasons for fewer kids relate to some of these — I don’t want to say intractable, but sort of systematized economic hurdles that people just can’t clear. Anyway, please continue.
Craig Mod: Hey man, my homestay, there’s one kid living in a closet, the other kid slept between his parents. You could do it in a tiny room. Just make the babies. But no. So you have shōshika mondai, which you hear this a lot, but you don’t experience it in Tokyo, because Tokyo is growing and there’s actually a lot of kids in Tokyo, and it feels very vibrant. Tokyo is growing pretty steadily. And then the other one is kōreika shakai, which is the elderly — shakai — society, so, basically, aging population. And you hear these words bandied about all the time, but you don’t feel them until you really walk the countryside.
And so the Nakasendo was the first time I felt that palpably, viscerally every day. And I would walk through these villages that were essentially disappearing. And there were two things left in all these villages, and it would be a barbershop that was very bizarre. And actually up until last year, I’d been shaving my head for five years. And so part of the reason why I was shaving my head was because you could get your head shaved anywhere, and it’s pretty easy and fast. And so I would start going to these barbershops in the middle of nowhere to get my head shaved because it was just like they were there.
And then the other thing that’s around is kissaten. So these are the old style, basically Shōwa era — We were talking about Ozu. His films kind of embody the Shōwa era.
Tim Ferriss: 1926 to 1989.
Craig Mod: ’26 to ’89. And Shōwa is the post-war Japan, the mid-century Japan. It’s mid-century modern architecture and design. And kissaten were one of the many sort of local mom-and-pop things that grew out of this post-war economy. And people who didn’t want to join the workforce, didn’t want to be a salaryman or salarywoman, they opened kissaten, which are little cafes. And they became de facto community hubs in a lot of these villages. And they’re one of the few things that are left. So I hadn’t planned to go to kissaten every day, but it turned out nothing was left for me to go have lunch at. So I’d be walking, and basically the one bit of logistics was I had to figure out where I was going to have lunch. And I realized by day 10, every day I was going to a kissaten, and every day I was eating pizza toast. I was just like, “Oh, wow, I’ve had a lot of pizza toast on this walk.” This walk is kind of fueled by pizza toast. And so kissaten serve —
Tim Ferriss: And that’s toast with some tomato sauce and cheese on it?
Craig Mod: Basically, yeah. So food that kissaten serve is, again, a post-war construction. People didn’t have money. Japan was extremely impoverished post-war. Again, watch Ozu, you can see some of that in action. And so kissaten would open and it’d be like, “Well, what is the minimum viable food products that we can make?” And essentially two things came out of it. One is toast and pizza toast. If you have a toaster oven, you can make pizza toast with basically Kraft cheese singles, spaghetti sauce out of a can. Maybe you get some peppers you cut up and some onions, and that’s it. That’s your pizza toast. Maybe like a salami, like a cheap salami from the shop.
And then the other thing is Napolitan spaghetti, which is just basically spaghetti with ketchup. And basically spaghetti with ketchup and pizza toast fed a big chunk of Japan in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. So I was eating pizza toast all the time, and I was like, “This is really fascinating and kind of amazing.” And it’s interesting because we might make pizza toast in America, but a shop would never think of serving pizza toast. It’s just too weird. And so I became obsessed with that. And then that grew into an article which then grew into my book that I launched during COVID in 2020 called Kissa by Kissa. And that if a —
Tim Ferriss: It’s right — 15 feet behind me.
Craig Mod: And that title is a reference to Bird by Bird, which I think you’ve talked about before as a book —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Anne Lamott, of course, Bird by Bird.
Craig Mod: Yeah, I love that book.
Tim Ferriss: Actually, now that I think about it, literally, Bird by Bird is probably two bookshelves above your book, and I never put it together, right back there.
Craig Mod: That is 100 percent homage to Anne. And so yeah, Kissa by Kissa, which was basically me riffing on pizza toast and these cafes along this walk and producing a book. COVID had hit, right? COVID hit. It was March, April 2020. And I was like, “Okay, well, all of this travel I’d planned on doing, I’m not going to do.” And it was actually a big relief. I had been doing too much traveling internationally. I’d been teaching at Yale. Every summer I’d been teaching at the Yale Publishing course. I’d been sort giving the keynote lecture about books and digital publishing and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I’d run out of stuff to say anyway. And so I was like, “Okay, let’s produce a really beautiful book based on this walk,” kind of again, like the Dan Rubin book that we made was one version of it, one degree of it, and then that one-off print-on-demand SMS book was another kind of like, “Oh, wow, this is really cool.”
And then this was going to be like, “Okay, what if we took all of that and really did the apotheosis of a beautiful walk book, with photos and the narrative?” And I made this book and I priced it at $100 a copy, and I launched it in August 2020. And I was like, “Okay, based on my publishing history, I know how these things sell. I’m going to make 1,000 copies and I’ll be lucky if we sell out of that print run in a year or two.” I was like, “It’s an expensive book. It’s a weird subject. No one’s going to really be into this.” I launch it. We sell 1,000 copies in like 36 hours. It was just —
Tim Ferriss: So what happened? Why did that happen?
Craig Mod: I had underestimated the audience I had built up, I guess, and people were just excited about these walks and what I was doing. They were just psyched about it. It was very weird. And that for me —
Tim Ferriss: Maybe not weird, if you think about the timing also, right?
Craig Mod: I think the timing was really good, and what I did that was really smart — so I had been running the membership program by that point for 18 months. And I was like, “Okay, I want to do this book and I want to have it be expensive, but I want to offer a big discount to members.” So if you’re a yearly member, you’re paying $100 a year to be a member. This was the first real perk I had ever offered members. And it was kind of like a thank you, and treating the membership payments almost as an investment to allow me to do these things. And then I want to give a little bit of that investment back to you, pay a little dividend.
And so I set up a thing. I looked at Kickstarter and Kickstarter hadn’t really changed in 10 years. And I was like, “Why am I going to give these guys such a high percentage?” You couldn’t do coupons. I wanted to offer coupons, and Kickstarter didn’t have coupon functionality. And so I looked at Shopify. And I have my engineering background, I know how to program enough to get me in trouble. And I was like, “Well, Shopify is actually amazing, and you can modify the templates.” And so I cloned Kickstarter and I called it Craigstarter, and I basically added — it’s on GitHub. You can clone it if you want and start your own Craigstarter. But I wanted to own the whole stack of software. And it’s weird, with Kickstarter, you get all these purchases. And then to get the addresses into the shipping software, it’s a different — it’s kind of dumb. Everything’s all over the place. So Shopify, everything is just right there. And I was like, “This makes sense.”
So I made Craigstarter and I made some promises. I was like, “Oh, if we do 300 copies, I’ll sign them all. If we do 500, I’ll include postcards. If we do 800, then I will make a documentary about pizza toast.” I was like, “I’m never going to have to make this documentary.” And we sold 1,000 immediately. And I was just like, “Oh, shit. All right, I’ve got to make this documentary.” But what the real, I think, pièce de résistance that I figured out by accident was by offering the discount, it was like a $40 or $50 discount off the 100 bucks if you were a yearly member, the conversion rate I got of people buying the book —
So basically you’d land on the page, you’d be like, “Oh, yeah, I want this book. It’s 100 bucks. Sure.” Plus, by the way, like $30 in shipping, because we were doing DHL and yada yada yada. And it was expensive to ship. It’s still expensive to ship. So it was 130 bucks. So it was like you could do that or you could pay another $100 to join the membership program, get a discount on the book, and then buy the book. So basically it was like you could spend $130 or you could spend $200 and get the membership. And the conversion rate of people who did the membership was like 30 percent of everyone who bought it became — which is insane. Insane.
Tim Ferriss: That’s wild.
Craig Mod: And I was like, “Okay, we just unlocked something special.”
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great experiment.
Craig Mod: That, for me, was this light bulb moment of like, “Okay, this is what I’m doing for the next 20 years. Got it.” I want to make these books, I want to do these walks. There’s an audience here, there’s a product-market fit, to use that terrible expression, but it felt —
Tim Ferriss: PMF. Somebody just texted me yesterday, and I was like, “What the fuck is PMF?” They’re like, “Product-market fit?” I was like, “Oh, yeah, I know the full word version.”
Craig Mod: Yeah. So that was this really like, “Whoa, okay, this is interesting and special.” And look, I’m operating at my scale; my scale, whatever. You have people on here selling 400 trillion books and stuff like that. I love my scale because it’s sustainable. It gives me total creative freedom.
Tim Ferriss: You should talk to that, right? Because I know Kagan, who’s a friend of mine, considers scale to be almost a four-letter word, because people become intoxicated and make bad decisions chasing, in some cases, a false idol, right, or worshiping a false idol. So maybe you could speak to that. And I’m going to offer an on-ramp in the form of something of yours that I printed, yet again.
Craig Mod: Yes, yes. Love it.
Tim Ferriss: And what I printed, people can find this at craigmod.com/essays/membership_rules, so these are your membership community rules, which are of great interest to me because I currently have, really for the first time, or certainly the first time in a decade, an active community of test readers for the new book that I’m working on.
Craig Mod: Cool.
Tim Ferriss: And we have about 100, which is the right scale, like 85 to 100, I’d say.
Craig Mod: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Started off with super, super high engagement, like 90 percent posting, and then it became more manageable, at least for me, since I’m consuming and digesting and synthesizing the feedback, probably at a nice kind of 35 percent in terms of lurkers to active posters.
I’m going to not touch everything, but I’m going to run through it real quickly here. So here are some of the rules.
1. “Have clear creative goals. Mine are make books and educate.”
2. “Staple those goals to your walls, your mirror, your forehead. If you ever have a decision to make, ask yourself, ‘Does it help me achieve these goals?’”
3. “All membership activities are in support of these goals.”
4. “The program exists for the goals, not the members. I’m going to say that again. The program exists for the goals, not the members.”
5. “Equally important,” that’s my wording, “that may sound cold, but if you frame it properly, the members understand and enthusiastically support this.”
6. “Fundamentally, you’re building a community.”
7. “But your goal is not to manage a community.” And then there are a number of bullets under that.
8. “By the way, deadlines are not only your friends, they’re the only way work gets done. So obsessive, irrational adherence to deadlines and work is non-negotiable.”
9. And there are a number of bullets underneath this, I won’t necessarily get into all of them, but you can certainly elaborate, “Don’t let the shape of membership software determine the shape of your activities/work.”
10. “Make strict decisions, but be willing to change your mind (I renamed my membership program 18 months into it and I’m glad I did, as an example).”
11. “And finally, know your scale.” This is why I wanted to bring this in. So know your scale. Then there’s a link to that, or I should say a link under those three words, “Know your scale. What scale do you want to work at? What scale makes you happy? Use that knowledge to drive membership decisions.”
All right, take it away, Craig.
Craig Mod: You just got to —
Tim Ferriss: Scale.
Craig Mod: Yeah, I think a lot of people are, to use the word again, ensorceled by this idea of mega scale. It’s like I talked to so many — I remember in the late 2000s, I did not have a great impression of Facebook. I was very early of not being like, “Oh, I think this is a great thing.” I did not love it. And I was sad seeing so many talented designers go to Facebook in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, who were previously up until that point doing incredible independent work and doing kind of almost, what you could say, art projects and things like that. And they went to Facebook and a lot of them were saying things like, “Well, how else can I affect 100 million people?” Same with people going to Google and saying that too. In tech, this is a very common trope to be like, “Well, I want to have this impact on hundreds of millions of people. This is the only way to do it.”
And I think, “Okay, yeah, sure.” And then you kind of go to these places and you realize in the end that you’re a very, very tiny cog, and the amount of change that you can affect on these things is quite small. And actually, it’s like you’re a worker on the Titanic to a certain degree. You’re going to hit an iceberg, whether you’re causing genocide in Myanmar, or something that you just don’t see coming. And so I think it’s kind of like a false narrative to be like, “Oh, yeah, the only way to have a real effect in the world is to be operating at this crazy mass scale.”
And I had a little bit of that working at Flipboard. I mean, part of going there and working with those guys was to both give myself confidence that I could hang with top tier people and be surrounded by great, incredible, loving, generous, talented folks. But also to touch that scale a little bit. That app had a huge scale. And I remember we launched the iPhone version of it, and I just felt nothing. I’d been very attuned to, does my heart move or not? And I remember launching that and just being like, “That was cool to work on,” but I felt absolutely nothing seeing user feedback come in or whatever. Whereas at the same time, by that point, I had made many books that had sold thousands of copies as opposed to millions or hundreds of millions or whatever data points that we were hitting with Flipboard. And those hundreds of readers, thousands of readers, to me, felt so good. I just felt drawn in that direction.
And I remember the first time I told someone at a party, I was like 23 and I was at a party and they’re like, “What do you do?” And I was like, “I work on books. I run a little publishing company.” And I remember being so happy I could say that. Something felt so right about that, right from the very first — I remember exactly where I was standing. I can picture it. I can almost remember what apartment block I was in. Anyway, it was this real moment of like, “Okay, this is something to follow. This feeling is something special and we need to protect this.”
So for me, scale, I had spent my 20s working on my art projects, doing independent publishing. And for me, that was a scale that really resonated with my heart and made me feel good. And I knew there a way to do it sustainably, in part because of the cost of living thing that we talked about happening in Japan. And so when Kissa by Kissa hit like that, we’re going back to print next week and we’re doing like the sixth edition. So we basically sold like 6,000 copies of this thing. So it’s like $600,000 in book sales.
Tim Ferriss: Also, a non-trivial number, not to invoke the kraken of scale, which is not what I’m doing, but that is not a trivial number of books. My initial print run for my Random House book, my very first book, which was intended to have national distribution, was 10,000 copies, and I did not sell all of those immediately. 6,000 copies is enough in a soft week to put you on a lot of national bestseller lists, depending on the category you end up in. That’s a real number of books.
Craig Mod: Also, this is an art book. It sells for 100 bucks.
Tim Ferriss: That’s what I’m saying.
Craig Mod: You don’t sell this many books, normally. You talk to publishers like Mack Press. Mack in the UK is doing some of the most beautiful photo books around. And their print runs will max out at 1,000. They’ll do runs of 500. That will be it. So the fact that this book sold 6,000 is just bananas, and continues to sell. That’s why we’re going to print again.
So it just moved me. And for me, that is such a beautiful scale. It’s totally uncompromising. I can do exactly the kind of book I want to do. I’m lucky enough to have incredible editor friends, so I’m getting editorial feedback at the highest level I would get with anyone else. And I have enough design experience and I’m connected with incredible designers like gray318, John Gray, who’s done all of Zadie Smith’s covers. I can just call John and be like, “Hey, I’m working on this cover for my book. Can you give me some feedback?” And John hops on a Zoom call with me. So I’m very, very lucky. I’m able to be totally uncompromising about this stuff, which is why the Random House relationship is really exciting for me too because it’s kind of stepping outside my comfort zone of scale and it’s moving up to this different level for the book that’s coming out in May.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you decide to do that? And was there anything interesting or of note in terms of deal structure or how you thought about approaching it?
Craig Mod: There was.
Tim Ferriss: Because you’re sort of like the MacGyver who’s done every job, right? So you’re coming into it with a much broader awareness of how all the different pieces move and how you can move them. It’s a different situation.
Craig Mod: Yep, yep. And I have a relationship with a printer. I have a distribution network set up. I have my Shopify thing set up.
Tim Ferriss: That’s what I’m saying, yeah.
Craig Mod: So I’m all set. But this book, Things Become Other Things, the story of it, about Bryan, essentially me doing this 300-mile walk around the peninsula during the peak of COVID and walking through this depopulated peninsula, very spiritual, and kind of reflecting on my childhood and reflecting on this friendship, there was a kind of political element; very subtle, it’s a very sly political element, but commentary on the state of America. Again, who’s being supported? Why are people being supported? Why are some people not being supported? Why are certain towns supported more than other towns? And then reflecting that through the lens of my experience in Japan, which is the foundational societal baseline is so much higher. The social safety net is so high here, relative to what I experienced growing up in America. Those themes, to me, feel like they warranted potentially a larger scale than I could bring on my own. And so I thought, “Okay…”
Tim Ferriss: So let me reframe that for a second, just for people who were like, “Oh, the P word, politics. I’m out. Where’s the parachute?” Is it fair to say it’s more of a societal commentary than a political diatribe, right? It’s not a left versus right, right versus left. It’s more of a societal commentary, a cultural commentary.
Craig Mod: It exists between the lines. There’s nothing didactic about it all. I’m telling a story of friendship with this kid, Bryan, who I dearly loved. We were best friends all through elementary school. We graduate and he’s murdered. And it’s reflecting on basically the first 18 years of our life. And in reflecting on that, it’s invariable that certain commentary about society just come — it’s embedded in that reflection, embedded in that story. And it’s not didactic. There’s absolutely nothing didactic about it.
And the whole time, I’m talking with all these farmers and fishermen and port people and people working at the inns. And there’s this incredible, colorful cast of characters of the peninsula of Japan that you will never be able to meet in any other context unless you’ve lived here as long as I have and you’ve started to do these walks and things like that. So it’s both you get this adventure in Japan, and then alongside that adventure is this story of friendship. But I just thought that story of friendship, because there was kind of a universality to it that was more than just like, “Hey, man, pizza toasts and wacky mid-century cafes,” I thought, “Let me try to pitch this to some publishers and some agents in New York and see if anyone’s interested.” And everyone rejected me.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to push at that for second. But why see if people are interested? Is it to reach more people with a lower entry point?
Craig Mod: Yes. It’s —
Tim Ferriss: Is that because it’s a story that maybe has broader appeal than the Kissa by Kissa? Why explore the traditional route, so to speak?
Craig Mod: Because first of all, it’s meant to honor both I think the people of this peninsula, and I think they are really amazing and they deserve a big platform, and then also to honor Bryan and this friendship and his memory. And I almost felt like for Bryan, this story should be given every opportunity to hit the scale that it wants to hit. You finish a book and it’s out of your hands. And I was willing to say, “Well, let’s go explore where this book could possibly go.” And I love talking about the themes of it. Just the reality of the world is that there’s a status connected with having a big publisher behind you that publishes something independently, you’ll never accrue. And it’s not because, “Oh, that makes me feel good,” but it’s like, “Oh, to do an NPR show, if you want to be on Terry Gross,” which is sort of —
Tim Ferriss: It’s true. It’s true.
Craig Mod: If you want to do something like that, you need Penguin. You need Random House behind you, unfortunately. And I just felt like this may be one of the only stories I ever tell, because I have my next five books I’m in the middle of writing. And they’re definitely weirder, and —
Tim Ferriss: You have your next five books?
Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Good Lord, Craig. All right. Well, I guess that’s what you can do if you can write 4,000 words a day. For fuck’s sake, Craig, I need to eat whatever you’re having for breakfast. All right.
Craig Mod: Not the kimchi.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my microbiome. Oh, my, yes.
Craig Mod: Yeah. I had a MRSA infection last year, and I was on heavy antibiotics.
Tim Ferriss: Nasty.
Craig Mod: Yeah, it was pretty nasty. And I blasted myself with the antibiotics, and that got me on this mega natto kimchi gohan kick, and I freaking love it. My body just craves it now.
So, I’m talking with Kevin Kelly and he’s like, “Craig, just try new things. Just pitch it to these people. Give it a go.” He’s like, “Why not?” He’s like, “It might be a fun adventure.” So I went out and I pitched to a bunch of agents, because you’re supposed to have an agent before you go to the publishers and blah, blah, blah. And everyone rejected me. It was just —
Tim Ferriss: This is shocking to me, Craig, because you are a very good writer. You had a number of things go viral, do very well online with reputable outlets. You can point to your self-publishing track record with these, I don’t want to say obscenely expensive, but by traditional bookstore, let’s just say trade paperback, hardcover standards, very expensive books. Did anyone give you a plausible reason for saying no?
Craig Mod: I mean, most of it was like, “Hey, you’re interesting, but I don’t think we can sell this book.” That’s kind of —
Tim Ferriss: How many followers do you have on TikTok though?
Craig Mod: What’s that — yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I know.
Craig Mod: So in the end it was this weird thing. One of my members actually of the membership program, runs a podcast at Penguin Random House. And he was like, “Hey look, I love your work.” And I think Andy Ward, who’s the publisher of Random House, he’s the editor of George Saunders who — I mean, if I’m listing to my favorite author —
Tim Ferriss: George Saunders.
Craig Mod: — George is top five human being and author, just incredible, incredible person, just amazing. And Andy Ward. Anyway, so this guy, my friend Matt goes, “Hey look, you got to meet Andy Ward. You just pitch this thing to Andy Ward.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I was going to be in New York for something. And Andy was like, “Hey, I’d love to meet you. Let’s meet up.” And I went to Andy Ward’s office, Penguin Random House. It’s me, Andy Ward, and the vice president. Andy’s like the president of Random House. And we have like the most high energy mind meld. I bring Kissa by Kissa. I’m like, “Look, I sold thousands of copies of this thing. I got this next book and it’s this walk, and blah blah blah, and Bryan, and yada yada,” and all this stuff. And he’s like, “This sounds amazing. Great. Send it over. Let’s make this work.”
And four months go by, crickets. And this is just what happened with everyone else too. Everyone just ghosted me. And I was in a really dark place. I was just like, “What am I supposed to do? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” I’m coming at this really vulnerably, and I’ve gotten 30 rejections or whatever for this thing. And so I go, “Okay, I’m going to do it on my own. I’m going to do it on my own. Like I’ve done everything else, blah, blah, blah.” I queue up printer time, I’m like buying paper. And I get this email and it’s from Andy and he goes, “Hey, yeah, we want the book.” This is like four months later, zero feedback or anything. So I hop on a call with Molly who ends up being the editor, my editor.
And she’s just like, “I love the book.” She’s saying all the right things. She just totally gets it. And I go, “Look, I just booked printer time, and I’m going to be producing my fine art edition of this in November.” This was July. I said like, “I’m going to go do this. Like, I would love to produce an edition with you guys. Can you get me an offer in the next like two days?” And she’s like, “Okay, we’ll get back to you in two days.” So two days later a call with Molly and Andy, and they’re like, “Can we pay you not to do your version of the book?” And I was like, “Look, I don’t think these are going to compete. The fine art edition is going to be $100. It’s just not going to compete. And I’m going to write, we’re going to re-edit it for you, and blah blah blah blah.”
I felt so broken by the process and all of this rejection, I was just like, “If I don’t protect my fiercely independent capabilities of doing the work I want to do, then I don’t want to be in this position where I’m that vulnerable, I’m that exposed.” And so I was like, “Look, I’m just going to do my edition, don’t worry about it.” And I was able to stand my ground, and we were able to come up with a contract. I think it’s one of the first contracts in Random House history where it was written into the contract. I got fine art rights to the book. And there’s a price minimum that I’m not allowed to sell under of my edition. And there’s a certain number, it’s capped how many I can produce. But after we sell a certain number of the Random House I can produce more, and yada, yada, yada, all this stuff. So that felt really good to keep that. And then the flip side —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Must feel fantastic. It’s like a psychological psycho-emotional insurance policy, right?
Craig Mod: It was funny listening to Brandon Sanderson talk about getting the leather bound rights back for his books. It was sort of like, “Oh, that was interesting.” But this was like from the get-go, it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to do this edition.” And so I published it. Talking about this makes it all really complicated. But I published my edition basically 16, 17 months ago. And what was great about that, it was sort of like getting, like you’re talking about your test readers. So I basically produced 2000 copies, and we sold all of those. And so in doing that, I got amazing feedback, and amazing emotional letters and responses from people. But because I had done that, it freed me as a writer. It was weirdly weird. This was a crazy thing psychologically.
And when I went back to do my revisions for Random House and Molly basically took my manuscript that I had published, and she just peppered it with questions. She put like 800 questions in the manuscript. And I loved them, they were amazing questions. And I was so hungry. Because I had done my edition uncompromisingly, it felt like the weight was off my shoulders. I could relax, and, let’s go for it. And the thing that came out, I doubled the length of the manuscript by simply responding to Molly’s questions.
Tim Ferriss: Holy shit.
Craig Mod: And it unlocked all of these layers of the story that I had wanted to get to, but I didn’t really know how to, and I was nervous, and I was kind of like uptight about it. And so this Random House edition to me feels like this relationship has been really, really good. It got me to a place I couldn’t have got to on my own, which is always what I’m looking for in working relationships and editorial relationships. It’s like when I publish with The New York Times, or I publish with The Atlantic or whatever, it’s always about that editorial back and forth. And I want it like, “Here’s an essay. How do we make it even better?”
And so this book I can say, this Random House edition I am so proud of, and it taps into this emotional vein I couldn’t get to on my own. And I love the fact that it’s going to be like 22 bucks or whatever. It’s like you can pre-order it now on Amazon, or Bookshop, and it’s like I think $28 for the hardcover or whatever. That’s also a price point I’ve never operated at before. So that’s exciting.
Tim Ferriss: Super exciting.
Craig Mod: It’s super exciting.
Tim Ferriss: Things Become Other Things, Craig’s writing is amazing Everybody go get the book. You’ll be glad you did. And I want to hop to a few other things. So you’re a wild and strange celebrity in Japan, around promoting midsize cities. How did this start, and what the hell is going on? Because I remember reaching out to you not too long ago, and you were like, “Yeah, I’m really busy because I’m doing like 12 TV shows, and doing this and doing that.” And then I’m like, “What? What are you doing?” And this was the explanation. So what’s the backstory? How did it start and what is it now?
Craig Mod: This is another reason why I love independence, and I love operating at my scale, and doing the weird things and following basically funding quirks. You know, it’s like the membership program funds my quirks. And so, I was doing all these walks, and I would take trains to kind of go to the start of the walk or whatever. And there were all these cities I’d pass through — the Shinkansen would stop at, and no one would get off at. And I always thought like, “What is this city?” And so in 2021 I decided to go on a 10-city tour of midsize cities that no one ever goes to across Japan. I went to Hakodate. I mean, people go to these cities a little bit, but we call them the B side of Japan.
And so I went to Hakodate, Morioka, Sakata, Matsumoto, Tsuruga, Onomichi, Yamaguchi, Karatsu, Kagoshima and Matsuyama. That was the 10 that I went to. And my thesis was, I would go to these cities, do three nights, four days in each city, and I would force myself to try to walk 50 kilometers inside of the city limits. And my thesis was that, if I tried to walk 50 kilometers, I was not only going to touch most of the city, and in just doing that, having that weird rule of walking 50 kilometers, I was going to meet a bunch of people. It was going to be an adventure. And so I did that. I had an amazing time. The tour was called “Tiny Barber Post Office.” That’s what we named it. For some reason that like — what that was — it was called. And I name all my tours strange tour names.
And it was incredible, incredible. That was in November, December, 2021. And then I was writing stuff for The New York Times. I do an article every now and then. And in the fall of 2022 my travel editors reached out to me, and as they reached out to hundreds of people a year. And they say, “Hey, we’re doing our 52 places to visit this year and we want you to recommend somewhere.” And I had done that 10-city tour, and one of the cities that really moved me, because the people were incredible, the coffee was great, there was a sense of independence, there was a vibrancy, the cityscape was beautiful, the history was interesting. It was an old castle town that had a beautiful park, two rivers connecting, a beautiful mountain. I was like, “This is just a great city.”
And I was like — “And literally in 23 years of living in Japan, not one person has ever told me to go to this city, so I’m going to just effusively go to bat for the city to The New York Times.” So I wrote my little pitch to the Times people. And they’re like, “Oh, that sounds great. And timing wise, Japan had basically been under lockdown for COVID still, and it was just coming out at the end of 2022. And so this list comes out in January, 2023. And so they don’t tell you where they’re going to put these places. And I knew that it had gotten in. And my —
Tim Ferriss: Which city was it that you’d recommended?
Craig Mod: It was Morioka.
Tim Ferriss: Morioka.
Craig Mod: Which is up in Tohoku. It’s up in the North, it’s in Iwate Prefecture. So everyone takes the — if you go north on the Shinkansen, you go to Sendai, you go to like Fukushima, Sendai, and then everyone gets off, no one keeps going. Morioka is kind of like the next stop on the Shinkansen. And so Morioka, I knew it was going to be in there, I had revised my pitch. You write a little 300 word article. And in January the list comes out. Number one is London, and number two is Morioka. And Japan went bananas. They were just like, “What is happening? Who put London and then Morioka? What? How?”
Tim Ferriss: I mean, what would the equivalent be? It would be like —
Craig Mod: I mean —
Tim Ferriss: It would be like Paris, and then, I mean, not Flint, Michigan necessarily, I’m not throwing shade on Flint, Michigan. But I’m just imagining the response to like, you know, a parallel universe. It would be shocking, right, for this place that everyone skips in Japan to end up number two?
Craig Mod: It’s a little bit like Asheville, North Carolina to a certain degree.
Tim Ferriss: There we go.
Craig Mod: But the difference is, is that, Asheville people have pride in Asheville, and they’re super psyched about Asheville. And they’ll be like, “Yeah, yeah, number two after Paris, that makes sense.” Japanese people aren’t like, “Oh, dude, our city’s awesome.” Actually, that’s one of the things that these midsize cities are going to have to overcome. They can be great places, but they’re really bad at self-promoting. And they feel like, “Oh, you know, like maybe we aren’t that great.” Or like, “You know, yeah we’re a cool city. But we shouldn’t be number two, not after London. That doesn’t make sense.” So, it was this perfect storm of so many things happening. And then, word got out to Japanese media that I spoke Japanese, and then that was the end of things.
Tim Ferriss: You got clocked.
Craig Mod: This tidal wave of —
Tim Ferriss: Pandora’s Box, enter stage left.
Craig Mod: Holy crap. Every single TV show, newspaper, magazine, radio show, like, I did 40 or 50 TV shows and radio shows in like three months. And so it was weird because you might be like, “Oh, my God, this is my dream. I’m on media in Japan. Oh, I’m a famous like, on the TV.” Like, I had no desire to do this at all. And so the reason why I said yes to everything was, I felt so bad for putting the spotlight on this place. And I felt like such a sense of duty to help them get the most out of it, and for them to gain the most benefit from the spotlight, which I knew could be really annoying. They didn’t come to me. They weren’t saying, “Hey, please send people to Morioka.” But I also knew it was remote enough that it wouldn’t suffer from over tourism. Like, you weren’t going to suddenly have a trillion people —
Tim Ferriss: The version wasn’t going to be off the charts.
Craig Mod: It wasn’t going to — but I felt this real need to help them believe in themselves. And so, it ended up being a duty and obligation for them to really be like, to have pride. And if I was speaking to anyone, I was speaking to like the kids in the town, the high school kids. And I wanted to instill the sense of like, “Hey, your town is kind of amazing. There’s amazing companies coming out of it. There’s amazing cafes, there’s amazing music spots. And these places only can exist because of this mid-sized city life baseline that they give you. Like the cost of living is quite low, running a business is quite low. And yet you have universal healthcare and like all these other infrastructures there, you’ve got the Shinkansen, blah blah blah. And so like, if you do go to study in university in Tokyo, think about coming back, because your city is kind of amazing.”
So that was kind of my theory, and that’s why I went on and did all these shows. And that was really bizarre and really surreal. And I thought, “Okay, great. Six months of doing that, that’s the end of that.” Last year The New York Times asked me again. And I was like, “Okay, yeah, I’ll recommend another city, Yamaguchi, one of the other places I went to.” I was like, “This is a really cool place.” They put it number three on the list last year. Again, just this torrent. And by then I was pretty good at it.
Tim Ferriss: Good at which aspect of it?
Craig Mod: I was good at judo-ing the conversation into like weird places. Because they would be like, you know, like all the typical questions, so like, “Oh, Mod-San, what’s your favorite noodle in Morioka?” And I’d be like, “My favorite noodle is universal healthcare.” It was like, “The really interesting thing isn’t the noodles, it’s the fact that these places exist, and they exist because we have a good healthcare system here.” And everyone’s like, “Oh, my God, yeah, we’ve never thought of that.” So those conversations were really fun to have. Basically the peak of it was last year. So like look, I’ve never owned a TV in Japan, I’ve never watched TV in Japan. I don’t know anything about Japanese pop culture, I just don’t have an interest in it. I have a vague sense of celebrities, but I really don’t know who they are.
I got this email. And I get so many emails, I had to hire an assistant just to deal with media arbitrage, because there was just so much coming in. And I got this email and I ignored it. And then the team reached out to the Soba shop in Morioka that I’m like, I’m friends with the owner now. And they were like, “Hey, Mod-San won’t respond to us, can you poke him?” And this Soba guy reaches out to me and he’s like, “Mod-San, you need to do this TV show. This is the biggest TV celebrity in Japan, and he will only come to Morioka if you agree to come and walk with him.” And I was like, “Who is this guy?” And I was like, “I don’t really want to do this.” And I was like, “I’m going to do this other walk, and the timing is really bad.” I really didn’t want to do it.
And the team came out and met me. And they’re like, “Please Mod-San, do this thing with this guy,” and da, da, da. And I was like, “Okay, this will be my final gift to the city. Because clearly everyone loves this guy, and he’s never been to the city. And he wants to do a special about the city, and we’re going to walk together for two days, or all around the city and just talk to people.” And I was like, “Okay, fine, let’s do it.” So we did this thing. And it was the craziest experience I’ve ever had in public in my life. So this guy’s name is Tamori-San, Tamori, T-A-M-O-R-I. He’s 80 years old now. He’s been on TV every day for like 55 years, literally every day. He hasn’t been canceled, there’s no MeToo stuff about him. I think he’s genuinely a pretty good guy. He’s smart, he loves history.
He has a walking show called Bura Tamori that ran for like decades. John watches it. And the theme music comes on, he starts crying. People just love this guy. And I didn’t know anything about him. I literally knew nothing about this guy. And we meet up, and he’s got this team, it’s like a 30-person crew of this TV shoot. There’s like five cameras, like everyone’s holding like mics and stuff. The first shoot was in front of the train station. And they’re like, “Okay, Mod-San, stand here. And then there was like another announcer with us, this beautiful young woman who was kind of like also just in the mix, like talking about history. And she was standing there. And then they’re like, “Okay, we’re set. Call out Tamori-San, bring him out.” And he comes out of like this vault in a van, he’s protected. And we hadn’t been introduced and I’m just like, “What is happening?”
And this tiny little dude in a suit with sunglasses on, he lost his eye when he was a kid. So his thing is, he always wears these dark sunglasses. He comes out and he stands him next to me, and they’re like, “Okay, all right, [Japanese] start all.” It was like totally this lost in translation moment. And Tamori-San is like [Japanese] Tamori this.” And then the woman’s like, she’s like, whatever her name was [Japanese]. And then I just go, “Ah.” I just scream. And I grab Tamori-San, and I start shaking him. And I go, “We have to hug before this starts.” And the crew I swear to God, six people almost committed ritual suicide in front of us. I had never seen people so terrified that like, I don’t think anyone had ever touched Tamori-San before. And I’m like, he’s this tiny little dude. I was just like, “Dude, we’ve got to say hello. We can’t just…” I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ve never done a TV show like this before.
Tim Ferriss: Hold on. How did he respond to that? Did it just go into a deathly silence? Was he like —
Craig Mod: He kind of laughed.
Tim Ferriss: — taken aback and then thought it was awesome?
Craig Mod: He kind of laughed. And he was just like, “What? Who is this joker, I thought we had a pro?” I’m like, “Sorry, sorry Tamori-San.” I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m like a talking head on TV if I’m doing anything, I’m not like doing location stuff. So anyway, that was like, you know, trial by fire, ice bath to start it. And we’re walking through town, and it is like walking with John Lennon. It is insane. People are stopping their cars. People are like, you know — buses are screeching, construction workers are screaming down, “Tamori-San, [Japanese].” We went to the market, and there were like hundreds of people in the morning market. And it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. Old ladies were jumping up and down crying.
I was getting this contact high. I had never been in proximity with someone for whom the beams of love were so intense. And it was just like, “What is going on?” And everyone in town knew who I was too was, it’s like Mod-San. And so everyone was coming up to me and like hugging me, and being like, “Mod-San, you brought Tamori-San to our town.” And like shaking my hand, and like, “Mod-San, thank you so much for bringing Tamori.” I was just like, “What the fuck is going on?” Because I had no cultural context. I was just like, “All right, I’ll do this thing with this guy. Everyone wants me to do it. Sure, let’s do it.” So that was the peak of it. Pretty insane, pretty insane.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And just for those who might think you’re exaggerating about his ubiquitous appearance on television, I just looked him up and I’m like, “Oh, yeah.” I saw that guy every time the fucking television was on when I was 15 as an exchange student.
Craig Mod: Literally 55 years every day, TV.
Tim Ferriss: Consistently.
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Just incredible. So have you retreated into the cave of creativity? Have you forsaken the glamorous television life? Or are you going —
Craig Mod: I have.
Tim Ferriss: — to put something at number three or four again? And then you’re going to get thrown right back into the arena?
Craig Mod: Well, this year I recommended Toyama City, and that one was on the list, not three or four, but they learned their lesson. It’s kind of a one trick, you can’t do that every year. But it beat Osaka because Osaka has the expo this year, and it was ranked higher than Osaka. But now, so what’s happened, what’s really interesting is that, the 52 places thing is now a brand. And it kind of doesn’t matter where you are. And just to be on it is a big deal. And it’s become Mod-San’s pick of the year. And everyone in January is waiting with bated breath to see what city I’m going to pick.
And I get emails constantly from cities that are like, “Please come walk in our city. We’d love to have you walk by the coast in this city in the middle of no — over here,” and whatnot. It’s very sweet. But yeah, no, I now batch it all. And Toyama wanted me to come out and meet the mayor, meet the governor, and kind of do some press stuff talking about why I picked the city. And I’m going to do that all in the fall. I was just too busy in the spring. I just got too much going on with the Random House stuff.
Tim Ferriss: What has been the economic impact, if you have any idea? What has been the economic impact of this spotlight that you’ve put on these different cities?
Craig Mod: So, Morioka has definitely been the biggest one. And in part that was because Morioka had a couple key people in the city who were really good at promoting. So when this happened, they were ready to run with it. They were totally prepared. So they were able to, I think, catalyze more activity, more inbound. It’s not just inbound from abroad, it’s a lot of Japanese people traveling to these cities now too, because just a buzz picks up, people moving to the cities. So one study was done, and I think they estimated the impact in Morioka over the first two years or something close to $100 million, it’s like a financial impact. Which like, I wrote 300 words. So whatever that is, that’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars of impact per word.
Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.
Craig Mod: I’m never, ever, ever going to impact something like that. I mean that’s just insane.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll see, we’ll see Mod-San.
Craig Mod: We’ll see. But it’s now been two years and change in Morioka. I was just there, I just launched a book there. I ended up forming this relationship with a great indie publisher, and we put out a Japanese edition of Kissa by Kissa. We launched it in Morioka. It was so wonderful to be able to do this event in the town, and have everyone come, out and see everyone. And honestly, I think it’s been almost entirely positive. And it has added a bit of vigor to the town that maybe wasn’t there before, and it has not burdened them. And I think it’s been really heartening to see, and it’s kind of a relief for me as well. Kind of two years later, I didn’t ruin this place.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It wasn’t the hug of death.
Craig Mod: It wasn’t the hug of death, thank God. If you’re listening, you should totally go check out Morioka if you get a chance. It’s a cool place.
Tim Ferriss: What is a place you have not written about in The New York Times, or shared widely, that people should check out in Japan, if they do not speak Japanese? I’ll just make that a condition.
Craig Mod: Well, so when I recommended Yamaguchi City, part of it was because there’s a great walk there, and it’s called the Hagi Ōkan. And it connects Yamaguchi and Hagi City, and it’s a two-day walk. You can actually do it in one day if you really power through, you can plow through in one day. But there’s an inn to stay at in the middle. It’s above a tofu shop.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that one.
Craig Mod: What’s it called? I just stayed there last week. Anyway, if you search for the inn on the Hagi Ōkan, it’s the only one that pops up.
Tim Ferriss: How do you spell that?
Craig Mod: H-A-G-I, Hagi, and then O-K-A-N, Okan.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Craig Mod: Anyway, it connects to Hagi City. And Hagi City is this really beautiful kind of very under visited, mainly because it’s kind of a pain in the butt to get to. But a great combo would be to go to Yamaguchi City, which has Yuda Onsen, which is a great little Onsen town that’s basically connected with Yamaguchi. And there’s an amazing inn called Sansuien, which is a beautiful boonkasai cultural heritage inn from Taisho era, so it’s about 100 years old. Amazing baths, beautiful gardens, wonderful owners. The original family still owns it. And you can walk from there over the Hagi Ōkan to Hagi. And I’d say, spend a couple of days in Hagi. It’s an incredible city.
Tim Ferriss: So, this is good. We’ll introduce a little friction for people who want to hunt down this Easter egg of sorts. Meaning, the inn near or off of or in Hagi Ōkan. You can send that to me afterwards, and we’ll put that in the show notes for people, so they can track that down if they’re sufficiently motivated.
Craig Mod: You can stay there if you don’t speak Japanese, but the people who run it don’t speak English, but you can figure it out. It’s a little bit of work.
Tim Ferriss: Google Translate’s become pretty good, and other tools like that.
Craig Mod: The tofu is amazing, the dinner is amazing, truly.
Tim Ferriss: All right. We’re going to keep this particular part short. But lest people think you’ve only done big walks in Japan, where else? Where are other places outside of Japan where you’ve done big walks?
Craig Mod: Well, I haven’t done big solo walks.
Tim Ferriss: Not solo, but the walk and talks.
Craig Mod: Walk and talks Kevin Kelly. I did the Nakasinda with Kevin, then Hugh Howey comes out, we did Kumano Kodo. And then we were so excited by that, we’ve done now — I don’t even know how many, seven, or eight or nine others around the world. We’ve done Southern China, Thailand, we’ve walked across Bali, we’ve done England twice, we’ve done Japan with bigger groups. Again, it’s been great. We’ve done Spain once, and I’m actually doing Spain again with him, a different part of the Santiago Camino de Santiago next week. We’re heading next week.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah, I’m busy.
Tim Ferriss: Kevin’s an enthusiastic walker as well. And both England trips were the Cotswold Way?
Craig Mod: Cotswold, yeah. And I also did independent of Kevin, I walked with another friend. We did , we did Wainwright coast to coast, which is in Northern England, and it starts in the Lake District on the West, and you walk coast to coast across the country. And that is a pretty amazing — it’s 300 kilometers, it takes about 10 to 12 days, and that is beautiful. If you think of England and as you should, you think of it as rolling hills, Lake District is like serious mountains. It’s very cool, it’s very beautiful. It’s wonderful. Highly recommend.
Tim Ferriss: So what I also highly recommend is that people go to the source of all good things, craigmod.com. And if you go to craigmod.com/ridgeline, one word /176, you could also just Google this, it’ll be a lot easier. “The Walk and Talk,” subtitle, “Everything We Know.” This describes how you and Kevin architect these walk and talks. And I’ve had the good fortune to walk with you guys. And there’s a lot more to it, but the basic idea is, you are walking extensively every day and then you have a group meal at the end of the day, which is Jeffersonian style, meaning there’s only one conversation and the participants in the walk get to choose the topic or the question that they want people to explore. And it’s wonderful. It is just such a lovely experience. And so counter to so much of what we experience, as you described it earlier, with the increasingly contracted feedback loops of social media and so on, which we’re not evolved to metabolize very well. So I encourage people to check that out. We’ll put the link in the show notes.
Craig, I have a very important question that I need to ask you, and that is, is Mod your birth name? Where does Mod come into things?
Craig Mod: Mod is not my birth name. But because I’m adopted, and then the parents who adopted me got divorced when I was basically 18 months, two years old or whatever. And my father, whose name I ended up keeping, and my mother didn’t go back to her maiden name. There was a point in teenage years where it just seemed weird. He wasn’t raising me. He literally taught me nothing. He was like an anti-archetype. He was like, “Okay, this is like what you shouldn’t do.” And he wasn’t —
Tim Ferriss: [Japanese].
Craig Mod: Yeah, exactly. The opposite. Yes, the opposite.
Tim Ferriss: The opposite teacher. It’s somebody who role models the opposite of what you want to do.
Craig Mod: Look, he had a really tough childhood and he came from a place bereft of archetypes as well. And so he didn’t know how to be a dad. But anyway, it just seemed weird to kind of have his name and so no, I just changed it.
Tim Ferriss: So that is a little E.T. Reese’s Pieces trail to lure you into telling the fucking wild story related to the recent chapters in your adoption journey. I’ll cue that up and you can tackle it any way you want.
Craig Mod: Yeah, I mean, I think adopted people in general, you can have very different experiences of being adopted, but I think a common one is, like I explained in part one of what we were talking about, my history. You feel apart from things, you do not feel necessarily of a group of a family, even the family who adopted you can do all the right things and you can still not feel that way. You feel like there’s kind of a mythology out there, elsewhere, and it can kind of haunt you. And I think different people can want different things from that mythology. And as 23andMe and Ancestry.com and all these DNA testing things have become more and more commonplace. I think it’s become more and more easy for people to find out who their birth parents are.
And so all of my life, I had never really been that curious about who my birth parents were. I had this peripheral sense. Part of it is I think you don’t want to dishonor your adoptive parents by having this. And I think if I was going to give a piece of advice to adoptive parents, it would be you have to work so hard to remove the stigma of curiosity around where you come from for an adopted kid. And you actually have to have so many more conversations than you think you have to have. And you have to really remove, get the taboo out by airing that conversation over and over and over again, beating it to death to a certain degree, to say, “Hey, do you want to explore? Do you want to look up your genetic background? If you ever want to connect with your birth mother, let me help you. I’m here to help you. I’m here to give you support for that, dah dah.” My family didn’t do any of that. So I think I kind of suppressed a lot of the curiosity, but it’s always there.
And the one thing I did have, as I explained last time was I had adoption paper notes. And my birth mother was 13 when she got pregnant. And my birth father, according to the adoption notes, there was a car accident and he was murdered at the site of the car accident. So he was dead. And that’s all I knew. And I joined 23andMe 12 years ago, and I got whatever, fourth cousin hit. We’re probably like third cousins or something. It’s like everyone’s a fourth cousin, fifth cousin, like that kind of — it’s sort of meaningless and nothing really close.
And then I was on actually a walk in England two years ago, three years ago now, three years ago with Kevin and everyone, I was like, “Yeah, I did 23andMe.” And they’re like, “Oh, dude, you’ve got to do Ancestry. That’s where everyone is.” And I was like, “Really?” I was like, “All right.” I came back, did Ancestry, and lo and behold, boom, there’s my mom. And I was like, oh, okay. I guess, yeah, people are on Ancestry. So I get a name. And look, I’m not — I was mainly interested just in genetic history and health history. You crest 40 and if you have things you want to live for, you start thinking about health. It’s just whatever, stuff just starts popping up. And my relationship with my stepdaughter became so profound to me in the last five years and gave me such a strong sense of self-worth. All of this other stuff was ratcheting up.
Like I talked about this sense of scarcity, this lack of myself having value that I felt all through my 20s. And if there’s one thing that’s supercharged all of it, of abundance and value, self-value, it was the relationship with my stepdaughter. And particularly when she was eight, nine, 10, 11 years old and working through conflicts with her, not big conflicts, just weird little things. We’d get in these little fights. She wouldn’t get up to go to school. I’d like squirt her with a water bottle and then she wouldn’t talk to me for three weeks, you know, it’s just like whatever, little girls could be kind of insane sometimes.
And I was driven to such places of sadness by that because I had never seen reconciliation and I’d never had that modeled for me. And I thought this little girl is going to throw me away because that was my default for all of my relationships in my life. This person can throw me away. And what I realized was not only does she not want to throw me away, she really wants to reconcile. She really wants to repair things and she desperately, desperately wants even more of me in her life. And once we went through a few cycles of she got upset at me for something dumb or whatever, she was acting up or whatever, and I was like — I took away her iPad or something. And once we went through a few cycles of that, I realized how much of a great dad I could be. And that was something I never believed because I’d never had it modeled for me.
And this is an important thing to cue up connecting with my birth mom because by the time we matched on Ancestry, I had gone through so many, I think iterations of self, and the self I was when we connected, when we matched, I was really proud of and I felt really good about and I believed in my value. I had empirical evidence of it. And I was anonymous on Ancestry because I’m protective of a lot of stuff, even though I’m being quite open here, I’m also quite protective, as you are, to a certain degree, as we all are. And so she couldn’t see my name and we matched and then we didn’t send each other a message for a year. And I was just like, oh, okay, she doesn’t want to match. Maybe her family made her join. She has a traumatic experience — in my mind it was like being pregnant with me was tremendously traumatic.
And I was like, okay, I don’t want to ruffle her feathers, I don’t want to disrupt her life. I had her name. I found out everything about her. I could just like Google, you get all the records. I knew where she worked, I knew where she lived, I had her home address, I knew who she was married to, I knew she had been divorced, like all this stuff. I could see that. And I was like, okay, cool. I just kind of know who this person is. I don’t feel the need to meet her. I don’t feel this need for, like, a mom. Like, I have my mom, I don’t need another mom. There was none of that.
And then a year later she sent me a little message that just said hi with, like, no punctuation. It was like, “Hi, I think we’re related. Do you live in Japan?” It was like the weirdest message. And it was like, you think we’re related? We share 50 percent of DNA, we’re definitely related. And it triggered this thing in me where I was like, I grew up with not having a lot of adults be adults around me. And she sent this message and it just made me feel like, okay, here’s another adult who doesn’t want to do the hard emotional work of being the adult, of being a parent in this situation and being like, “Hey, I’m your mom. This is great to match. I joined because of these reasons. Would you like to connect, da da da.” Instead, it’s this weird, cryptic, bizarre message.
So I didn’t respond for three months and then I finally, after stewing on it for a while, was like, okay, what would I want to get if I was her, who I had this kid when I was 13, 14? And so I wrote her this message that I stayed anonymous in. I just kind of outlined my life. And I was like, “Look, not everything has been easy, but I’ve gotten to this place and I’ve been really lucky and I’ve been really blessed in a lot of ways, and I have this amazing relationship with this young daughter, and I’ve been successful in many ways and I’m so grateful. And I can only imagine how hard it was for you to have done what you did. And thank you for having me, and thank you for going through the process of putting me up for adoption.”
Basically to assuage any sense of worry about who I might be or what had happened to me, to give her that gift. And so I sent her that message, and I’m still anonymous, and I get no response from her. And I’m like, oh, my God, okay, this is like a lost cause. And then three months after that I get this message and it’s like, “Oh, my God, I don’t have notifications turned on for Ancestry. I am so sorry.” And it’s a 5,000 word letter that is the most emotionally intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful thing I had ever gotten. And it was just like, this person is so tuned in. And I was just like, what do I do with this? I was so overwhelmed. I was launching my fine art edition of TBOT, Things Become Other Things. I’m doing all this. I was like, oh, my God, how do I process this?
And then a week later she sends me another 5,000 word letter and she’s like, “I’m so crushed that I didn’t respond to your other message. And I just want to tell you about my childhood. I want to tell you about where you came from. I want to tell you about the family you come from. And I’m the youngest of five siblings and my father died when I was nine. And so I had to work at a sandwich shop when I was 13 and I was super entrepreneurial.” It was just like we had pet turtles and I had three goldfish and six cats and this thing and that thing. And I was like, oh, my God, I couldn’t process it. It was just, I wasn’t ready for someone to be so hungry. And she was just like, “I know you may not want to meet, but I am happy to talk on whatever terms you want to talk on. Here’s my address, here’s my phone number, here’s my email.” And I was just like, I couldn’t process it. I had so much going on in my life.
And I sent her a little email, a little message at the end of the year, still anonymous. And I just said, “Hey, look, I’m so overwhelmed, I’m going to get back to you in the new year.” And she’s like, “No worries, don’t worry.” I didn’t respond. Mother’s Day comes, she goes, she sends me a letter, “I’m thinking about you on Mother’s Day. I hope you’re with your adoptive mom and I hope she’s giving you a big hug.” I’m just like, oh, my God, now I’m a terrible son to like two moms and I haven’t even met this person.
And finally I’m with Kevin, we’re on a walk, we’re in Bali, I’m talking about this. And Kevin just goes, “Craig, just go have lunch with her.” I was like, “You know what? Yeah, screw it. All right.” I messaged her, still anonymous. I said, “Hey, how about we get lunch in August? I’ll be in Chicago, I’ll meet you out there.” She lives in Chicago. And she was like, “Great, let’s do it this day, this time, blah, blah.” We set it up. I’m still anonymous. I still haven’t told her my name. I’m like, I don’t want her to Google. I don’t want her to know anything. I fly out to Chicago pretty nervous, don’t know what to expect, but also I’m not going into this needing something. I’m not like, oh, I need her to be this. I need this relationship. I’m just like, this is kind of a fun adventure. Let’s go meet this person.
She’s standing outside this steakhouse that she booked for lunch. And I see her and I’m like, “Hi, I’m the anonymous weirdo that…” I’m like, I apologize for not telling her my name before we met. And I gave her a big hug and we go into the steakhouse and sit down and it takes us two hours before we order drinks. It was just — we sat down in this booth, the waitress came over and was just like, “Honeys, you’ve got something going on. I’ll come back when you’re ready.”
And she goes, “I’ve been thinking about you every day on your birthday.” And she pulls out of her wallet, a baby photo of me that the adoption agency had given her. And she goes, “I’ve been carrying around this my whole life.” And she goes, “I have thought about you every year. I’ve wondered who you’ve become. And I’ve never once felt bad. I have no negative feelings, I have no negative emotions around the experience. Actually getting pregnant with you, it was this accident, but it was totally copacetic. And by the way, your father’s still alive. I lied.”
She was 13. She’s like, “He was 22. And that was going to cause a bunch of problems. And so I just picked a guy out of the newspaper who had been murdered and I said that was the father.” I was like, oh, my God, it’s super — she was so strong-headed. She was just like, “I was just going to handle this pregnancy on my own. But in the end, my sisters helped me out and I moved out with my aunt and uncle in Connecticut. That’s how you ended up in Connecticut. And everyone was so supportive and it was so beautiful and it was such a great experience. And the school, the high school supported me and they gave me a mentor.” And she’s like, “When I gave birth to you in the hospital, I held you. I could only hold you for two days. And I wrote you a letter. Did you get the letter I wrote?”
I was just like, oh, my God. She’s telling me all this. And my genesis story is just being completely reconfigured in real time and I don’t know what to do with it. And she tells me her story and she’s just like, she’s a computer programmer and she runs a consultancy and she’s totally self-taught. And she’s like, “I bought my first car at 16, my second at 18, my first house when I was 24.” I was just like, who are you? And we’re sitting there and I just go, this is the first time ever in my life that I understand where my brain comes from because we have some features that, it wasn’t like looking into a mirror, but it was like listening to someone who had jacked into my brain talking about their life. They had used my —
I was like this is where my brain comes from because no one in my family has any of the impulses I have. No one I grew up with has any of these impulses. And it was just so clear, like how she handled everything in her life is exactly how I’ve handled everything in my life. And it was so surreal. And she goes, “Do you have friends in Chicago?” And I go, “Yeah, I have friends. I’m going to have dinner with one tonight.” And she goes, “You have dinner plans?” And I was like, “Yeah, I thought we were just getting lunch.” She’s like, “I got us tickets to the symphony. I got us a riverboat ride. We have pizza dinner.” I was just like, “Oh, my God, I’m obviously, I’m going to cancel my plans, of course. Let’s go to the symphony.” And we ended up spending the whole day talking, going to the symphony, going to get pizza.
It was so surreal. And at the end of it all, we were going to do more. And I just said, “Look, I need to be alone now.” And she’s like, “I totally get it.” And she gave me this little gift basket. And the whole time we hadn’t cried, we hadn’t gotten emotional. At the end of brunch on Sunday, she goes, “I can’t tell you how much this meant to me. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for meeting up. This means so much and I hope this isn’t the end of this relationship. And here’s this gift basket.” She’s like, “Don’t look at it now. It’s embarrassing.” And I opened it up later and it had chocolate bars and Twizzlers and it had this print on demand book of my entire family tree and history and family photos and my grandparents and all of her brothers and sisters, and this is who you come from, and this is when they came to America. And it was just, the whole thing was just so overwhelming and so moving.
And I feel like the timing of it was so perfect because I could go to that meeting with her not needing anything from it to just be there in the moment to be totally radically present, focused. And also just so — I know this sounds weird to say, but proud of who I was, who I had become to say hello to her, to meet her. And you just saw it in her as well. I was like, “Oh, I’m doing this thing.” And she’s like, “I can’t believe you’re my son.” She was just so proud. And it was obviously —
On Saturday night she went home, she went back to the hotel Saturday night and she called everybody, she called her aunt and uncle who she stayed with when she gave birth to me. I started getting all these emails from cousins. I get this email from someone in Wyoming like, “Hey, I run a flower shop in Wyoming. I’m 33. I’m your cousin, let’s do a Zoom.” I’m like, what? I’ve suddenly got all these aunts and uncles, all these cousins. I’ve got this whole family. And she was obviously so proud of who I was and who I’d become.
And I don’t know, the whole thing has just been really, really cool. And it turns out that I also have a half-sister who’s 28. She lives in Alaska. We did a Zoom call like a month ago, and she’s awesome. She’s so cool. She’s married to this Coast Guard. They’re going to come out and do a walk in Japan. I’m going to go to Alaska and go hunting. And I’m doing a book tour in America in May and June. They’re going to fly out and join like one of the dates on the book tour. But she’s also an only child. I’m an only child. And we’re both like, we love that we now have a sibling. We’re like, this is so cool. Texting, every day sending stupid photos. It’s just a very weird, unexpected chapter of life that came out of nowhere. And I’m here for it. I’m ready for it. I’m excited by it.
Tim Ferriss: So you went into it not needing anything, initially you did not have the impulse to reconnect. What does it feel like now? What has it done to you?
Craig Mod: It’s been eight months since we met, and the sister thing is just like a month ago. It takes a long time to unravel the mythologies that you’ve set for yourself, your genesis story. And I feel it. It’s almost like these tightly wound springs of tension are slowly unwinding like a spring in a watch or something, slowly loosening. And I just feel like my heart is opening in a weird way that it’s never been open to before. And again, that sense of value, it’s like I don’t come from this place of — I thought 13 years old, raped, the guy’s murdered, he’s like a gangster. It’s terrible, blah, blah, blah. It turns out it wasn’t. She was just kind of a sexy 13-year-old, I guess, and looked older and was older for her age or whatever. And I guess my biological father, whatever, his dad owned the sandwich shop that she was working at. So I guess he’d come to get sandwiches and they met and whatever.
They wanted to have sex, so they had sex and it happened. So it wasn’t like this place of pain there and the pregnancy wasn’t painful. It’s just weird to think all these things. And so it just takes time and it’s this slow, but really, really beautiful unraveling and opening of the heart. And I don’t know, I think it’s going to take even more time. And we’re going slowly, we’re just taking it very respectfully in both directions and not too much communication, not too much expectation, and just being like, this is cool. Let’s have fun with it and just see where it goes. It’s great.
Tim Ferriss: I’m so happy for you, man.
Craig Mod: Thanks.
Tim Ferriss: So happy for you. I remember, I guess it was over a dinner when you first shared pieces of this, and there were a handful of folks there, and everyone’s jaws dropped, mouths agape. Wait, what? Such a beautiful story. And it’s still unfurling, right? This is the first steeping of the tea leaves with many more steepings left to go, and the flavors and the aromas, the entire texture of that emotional experience, I’m sure will continue to develop. Not to mix too many metaphors. I was going to say, like, photograph in a dark room. But it’s true, right?
Craig Mod: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like certain things you see, certain things you feel. I’m really excited for you, man. Super happy for you.
Craig Mod: Thanks. I’m psyched to have a younger sister. I’m just like, cool. Ask me questions, I know about stuff, ask me questions. It’s like I want to help you, I want to give you knowledge. I want to — I’m happy to mentor you about stuff. I don’t know, like that impulse is just so intuitive. Yeah, I look forward to cultivating that relationship. It’s just so weird to suddenly to go from like being an only child who — my adoptive family is very tiny. There’s like three people left alive to go to having this. There’s an aunt in Switzerland who’s like a yoga teacher, and I’ve got like 14 cousins now and all this stuff. It’s pretty interesting. Pretty exciting.
Tim Ferriss: Well, man, so are you going to connect your stepdaughter with your family?
Craig Mod: I’d love to, yeah, I’d love to do that. If the timing works out, do like a little trip to the States with her and have her meet everyone. That’d be fun.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Wow. Well, Craig, and this is not something I often say on the podcast, but you have a beautiful soul. I love spending time with you. You also write beautifully. And I really want to encourage people to check out Things Become Other Things. I mean, this is the tip of the iceberg and the way you weave prose and sort of inject nostalgia and liminality and —
Craig Mod: It’s a good word.
Tim Ferriss: Yes it is. And the emotional experience of moving slowly and then historically flashback, moving quickly through the world. All of these things that you put into a beautiful tapestry of a reading experience, I really encourage people to check it out, so Things Become Other Things. People can find all things Craig Mod at craigmod.com. Easy to remember. Is there anything else you’d like to say, Craig, before we wind to a close?
Craig Mod: I mean, just to extra plug the book, because —
Tim Ferriss: Why not?
Craig Mod: — why not?
Tim Ferriss: You’re here.
Craig Mod: But yesterday, two days ago, I got an incredible email from David Mitchell, who’d read the book —
Tim Ferriss: Explain who that is. That’s for people who may not recognize him.
Craig Mod: David Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas, that’s probably his most famous book, but he’s done Number9Dream, Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas. There’s one, it’s like Black Swan Green or something. That’s actually one of my favorites of his, Black Swan Green, I think is what it’s called. He’s an incredible writer. He’s someone that I’ve admired and have been reading his work in Japan. He lived in Hiroshima, he taught English in Hiroshima. Some of his books take place in Japan. I’ve always admired this guy and the felicity with which he writes and his use of language, everything. He’s a beautiful — oh, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I think, is his book about Dejima over in Nagasaki, historical fiction, beautiful book.
Anyway, if I was going to pick three authors in the world that I would love to get that — first of all, I would just love to have read the book. I’d be honored to have them read the book. He would be top three for sure. And the fact that he read it, he sent over a 2,000 word email just saying how much he loved it. And honestly, it was just one of the most shocking emails I’ve ever gotten. And he blurbed it. He did a nice blurb. But David Mitchell really, really, really, really liked this book. And he was quoting extensively. I was just embarrassed by the end of this email. So just putting that out there, it’s like if you’re a David Mitchell fan, if you like Cloud Atlas, you’ll like Things Become Other Things, possibly, maybe.
Tim Ferriss: Check it out, guys.
Craig Mod: I’m just proud of that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Oh, you should be. I mean, while we were texting as it happened.
Craig Mod: Yeah, I was like, “Oh, my God, David Mitchell. This is insane.”
Tim Ferriss: It was so wild, so wild. And just, God, talk about full circle in a way. Well, I’m excited for your next chapters, man.
Craig Mod: Thanks.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot to come. Who knows what, but I also hope to do a walk with you again soon. So we’ll have to figure out what that looks like. And that’s all I’ve got for now, Craig.
Craig Mod: That’s all I’ve got too.
Tim Ferriss: Only God knows what time. It’s like 1 a.m. where you are.
Craig Mod: It’s 2 a.m.Tim Ferriss: 2 a.m. and I need to get to the airport. So everybody out there, Craig Mod, craigmod.com, and we will link to everything, including some Easter eggs in the show notes. So that’s Craig’s homework assignment. It’s the end name. And you’ll be able to find that at tim.blog/podcast as always. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than necessary to others, but also to yourself. That’s an important piece of the puzzle. As Jack Kornfield would say, “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” And thanks for tuning in.
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