Craig Mod Returns — Epic Walks, The Art of Slowness, and More

1. 0:00 – 0:33

   Start.

   1. CMCraig Mod0:00

      We're walking through town and people are stopping their cars, buses are screeching, construction workers are screaming down, "Tamori-san, ohayo gozaimasu!"

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:10

      [laughs]

   3. CMCraig Mod0:10

      Old ladies were jumping up and down crying. I'd never been in proximity with someone for whom the beams of love were so intense. Everyone in town knew who I was, too. I was Moto-san.

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:20

      [laughs]

   5. CMCraig Mod0:21

      So everyone was coming up to me and, like, hugging me and being like, "Moto-san, you brought Tamori-san to our town," and, like, shaking my hand, and like, "Moto-san, thank you so much for bringing Tamori."

   6. TFTim Ferriss0:30

      [laughs]

   7. CMCraig Mod0:30

      And I was just like, "What the fuck is going

2. 0:33 – 3:51

   More than a decade of Perfect Days in a six-tatami mat room.

   1. CMCraig Mod0:33

      on?"

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:34

      Moto-san, ohayo gozaimasu.

   3. CMCraig Mod0:36

      Hai, konbanwa.

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:37

      [laughs] Exactly. Time zones. Lots and lots of time zones between us.

   5. CMCraig Mod0:44

      Oh.

   6. TFTim Ferriss0:44

      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-

   7. CMCraig Mod0:54

      Yeah. Mm-hmm

   8. TFTim Ferriss0:54

      ... which was living in a six-tatami mat room.

   9. CMCraig Mod0:58

      Yeah.

   10. TFTim Ferriss0:58

       For many people listening, they may not know exactly what that means. What does that mean?

   11. CMCraig Mod1:03

       In Japan, you used to measure everything by basically tatami mats. Tatami mat is two meters by half a meter or something like that. It's a rectangle mat. And yeah, you had rooms. Rooms are kind of like classical Japanese rooms are based on certain tatami mat numbers: six-mat room, eight-mat room, 10-mat room, 12-mat room, things like that. And I lived for most of my adult life, from age 22 to 35, I was in a six-mat tatami room.

   12. TFTim Ferriss1:30

       [laughs]

   13. CMCraig Mod1:31

       I lived a really ascetic [laughs] 20s and early 30s, and it's super affordable and it, you know, in the middle of the city. It worked out. It worked well for me.

   14. TFTim Ferriss1:39

       I'm looking up the name of a movie that I saw recently. If people want a visual on a-

   15. CMCraig Mod1:44

       Yeah

   16. TFTim Ferriss1:44

       ... roughly six tatami room.

   17. CMCraig Mod1:47

       Perfect Days?

   18. TFTim Ferriss1:48

       Perfect Days. Yes.

   19. CMCraig Mod1:50

       Perfect Days, yeah. Exactly. Wim Wenders, the new one. The amazing thing about that movie is I think they wrote it and shot it in a matter of just, like, three weeks, four weeks.

   20. TFTim Ferriss2:00

       They shot it quickly.

   21. CMCraig Mod2:01

       They shot it so fast, but it works.

   22. TFTim Ferriss2:04

       Which is part of the beauty of an independent film like this. If you can control the locations-

   23. CMCraig Mod2:10

       Yep

   24. TFTim Ferriss2:10

       ... you know, if you're not throwing in a bunch of CGI, [laughs] if you can apply some constraints, you can make a beautiful little film-

   25. CMCraig Mod2:18

       It's amazing

   26. TFTim Ferriss2:18

       ... that really does the trick, and you can rely on that old-fashioned thing called storytelling and character development. I will say-

   27. CMCraig Mod2:26

       Yeah

   28. TFTim Ferriss2:26

       ... 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.

   29. CMCraig Mod2:40

       Mm.

   30. TFTim Ferriss2:40

       But then at some point that I could not put a finger on, it starts to become really hypnotic, and then it gets very-
3. 3:51 – 10:07

   The first steps of Craig’s huge walks: exploring Tokyo’s nightlife.

   1. CMCraig Mod3:51

      pretty awesome.

   2. TFTim Ferriss3:52

      Let's jump to the meat and potatoes of Craig Mod 2.0-

   3. CMCraig Mod3:58

      Okay. [laughs]

   4. TFTim Ferriss4:00

      ... which is Huge Walks.

   5. CMCraig Mod4:01

      Yes.

   6. TFTim Ferriss4:02

      We covered so much ground.

   7. CMCraig Mod4:04

      [laughs]

   8. TFTim Ferriss4:05

      Pun intended.

   9. CMCraig Mod4:06

      I'm sorry. [laughs]

   10. TFTim Ferriss4:11

       [laughs] 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.

   11. CMCraig Mod4:22

       Yep.

   12. TFTim Ferriss4:22

       Why? How? Where?

   13. CMCraig Mod4:24

       Yeah.

   14. TFTim Ferriss4:25

       What is it like? All the things. Where should we start? What is step one here?

   15. CMCraig Mod4:29

       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. You know, there's just something about being able to move through the city without worrying about anything, without thinking about safety.

   16. TFTim Ferriss4:44

       Yes. Yeah.

   17. CMCraig Mod4:45

       And people's lives are really, I wanna say exposed.

   18. TFTim Ferriss4:50

       Mm.

   19. CMCraig Mod4:50

       Like, you walk down a street and you can hear everything, and you can hear the baths being drawn, you can hear the kids laughing behind, you know, closed doors. You can smell someone having a cigarette, you know, in their kitchen as they're listening to the radio. Many, many things kept me here, but those walks, those late night walks around Tokyo-

   20. TFTim Ferriss5:05

       Mm

   21. CMCraig Mod5:05

       ... when I was 19, 20, I mean, that really set something moving in my heart, and I think I kinda held onto that for a long time.

   22. TFTim Ferriss5:14

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

   23. CMCraig Mod5:22

       I mean, I was just drinking too much.

   24. TFTim Ferriss5:24

       Skulking around [laughs] with bottle in hand. [laughs]

   25. CMCraig Mod5:27

       [laughs] I was drinking. No street drinking, but I was going to Golden Gai, right? And this is before... Now you go to Golden Gai.

   26. TFTim Ferriss5:32

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

   27. CMCraig Mod5:36

       Golden Gai was a post-war, almost like a black market drinking area in Shinjuku next to Kabukichō, which is like the big red light district.

   28. TFTim Ferriss5:44

       Yeah.

   29. CMCraig Mod5:44

       And it was a whole bunch of ramshackle shacks, you know, one story, two stories, and then they all had attics, and it was all for prostitution.

   30. TFTim Ferriss5:51

       Mm-hmm.
4. 10:07 – 15:28

   Discovering pilgrimage trails with John McBride.

   1. TFTim Ferriss10:07

      Where does Craig go from alcohol and Golden Gai walks to something more, what would we call it, epic?

   2. CMCraig Mod10:18

      Yeah, epic.

   3. TFTim Ferriss10:18

      [laughs]

   4. CMCraig Mod10:19

      Truly epic. 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.

   5. TFTim Ferriss10:35

      Hmm.

   6. CMCraig Mod10:35

      So it was kind of this novel thing to do. And I met this guy through doing that, this other art-related guy named John McBride. A mutual friend connected us, and we sat down for breakfast at, like, 10:00 AM, and we didn't get up till, like, 5:00 PM.

   7. TFTim Ferriss10:50

      [laughs]

   8. CMCraig Mod10:51

      It was just instant, 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 he, when he was 17, 18, 19, he was a Monbusho scholarship student here in Japan.

   9. TFTim Ferriss11:05

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CMCraig Mod11:05

       He went to Gaigodai.

   11. TFTim Ferriss11:06

       That's the Ministry of Education, right?

   12. CMCraig Mod11:09

       Yep. And he had, like, a full scholarship, and he was just a Japanese student at Japanese university.

   13. TFTim Ferriss11:14

       Yeah.

   14. CMCraig Mod11:14

       He's Australian. And while he was doing that, he started doing walks because his literature professor, they were reading things like Basho, and he wanted to understand what was Basho seeing. So he went and did, like, the Okuno Hosomichi walk.

   15. TFTim Ferriss11:27

       That's cool.

   16. CMCraig Mod11:28

       The narrow road to the north.

   17. TFTim Ferriss11:30

       Yeah.

   18. CMCraig Mod11:30

       And he walked the Tokaido, and he went and he walked Shikoku. 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.

   19. TFTim Ferriss11:48

       Mm-hmm.

   20. CMCraig Mod11:48

       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 Tokaido was. I knew there was a Shinkansen that was called the Tokaido Shinkansen.

   21. TFTim Ferriss11:56

       [laughs]

   22. CMCraig Mod11:56

       I didn't really know what the Nakasendō was. I didn't know what any of this stuff was. John was like, "Hey, come. Let's do some research. Like, 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. I mean, Koyasan is one of the most amazing, beautiful power spot places I think I'd ever been. Have you been?

   23. TFTim Ferriss12:29

       I have not been.

   24. CMCraig Mod12:30

       Oh, wow.

   25. TFTim Ferriss12:30

       So I need to go.

   26. CMCraig Mod12:31

       Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

   27. TFTim Ferriss12:32

       We need to do another walk.

   28. CMCraig Mod12:33

       Absolutely.

   29. TFTim Ferriss12:34

       Kumano Kodo, for people just to wrap a little context around that... Well, I'll keep it simple and let you fill in the gaps, but it is a, it's more than a pilgrimage trail. [laughs] It's like a-

   30. CMCraig Mod12:46

       Yeah
5. 15:28 – 22:17

   What’s so appealing about pilgrimage trails?

   1. CMCraig Mod15:28

      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 it... I just became immediately addicted to it.

   2. TFTim Ferriss15:50

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CMCraig Mod15:51

      Like, instantly. Instantly had to do all of them.

   4. TFTim Ferriss15:53

      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?

   5. CMCraig Mod16:03

      It was the combination of incredible fecundity, we'll use that word again, fecundity of-

   6. TFTim Ferriss16:08

      [laughs]

   7. CMCraig Mod16:08

      ... 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. I mean, it is just green and mossy and lush.

   8. TFTim Ferriss16:20

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

   9. CMCraig Mod16:24

      Yes, yes.

   10. TFTim Ferriss16:25

       In the last conversation. [laughs]

   11. CMCraig Mod16:27

       It's a moist, dangling penis of Japan. There was just this incredible richness of nature. The air was amazing. The religious and spiritual syncretism that's happening there, and one of the reasons why it's UNESCO World Heritage, is that Japan, throughout most of its history, Buddhism and Shinto... Shinto's 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, and 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, like, a very tl;dr. And so Buddhism and Shinto were forcibly split, and a lot of temples were destroyed. And what was special about the Kii Peninsula was because it was so s- kind of far away from Edo, it's so far away from Tokyo, they kinda didn't split.

   12. TFTim Ferriss17:26

       Mm.

   13. CMCraig Mod17:26

       There's a few places left in Japan. Yamagata has Dewa Sanzan, which is the Three Mountains of Dewa, which also has, uh, a lot of syncretic history that's still present.

   14. TFTim Ferriss17:36

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CMCraig Mod17:36

       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 peaceful. And it's like all these shogunates and daimyo.

   16. TFTim Ferriss18:01

       Yeah.

   17. CMCraig Mod18:01

       It's like the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Japanese samurai. [laughs]

   18. TFTim Ferriss18:06

       [laughs]

   19. CMCraig Mod18:06

       It's pretty interesting.

   20. TFTim Ferriss18:07

       So I wanna give people just a little bit of context-

   21. CMCraig Mod18:10

       Yeah

   22. TFTim Ferriss18:10

       ... real quick.

   23. CMCraig Mod18:11

       Yeah.

   24. TFTim Ferriss18:11

       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.

   25. CMCraig Mod18:33

       Yep.

   26. TFTim Ferriss18:34

       That we think of even extending into the sort of mid 1900s.

   27. CMCraig Mod18:40

       Yeah.

   28. TFTim Ferriss18:40

       And then one last thing I just wanna say. Basho, for people who were like, "Who the hell was that?"

   29. CMCraig Mod18:46

       You mentioned it briefly. I don't know who the other foreigner [laughs] was who was wandering around Japan. I, I'm blanking on his name, but he was like, "I wanna see what Basho saw."

   30. TFTim Ferriss18:53

       Was?
6. 22:17 – 30:31

   Learning politeness and language in Japan.

   1. CMCraig Mod22:17

      routes.

   2. TFTim Ferriss22:17

      This is gonna get nerdy, but a lot of my listeners are nerdy, so they might enjoy it. You mentioned politely speaking.

   3. CMCraig Mod22:26

      Yeah.

   4. TFTim Ferriss22:26

      And I don't wanna gloss over this because politely speaking in the US is, [laughs] like, please, thank you.

   5. CMCraig Mod22:32

      [laughs] Right.

   6. TFTim Ferriss22:33

      Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. There's a lot more to it in Japanese, right?

   7. CMCraig Mod22:37

      Yeah.

   8. TFTim Ferriss22:38

      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.

   9. CMCraig Mod23:00

      Yeah.

   10. TFTim Ferriss23:00

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

   11. CMCraig Mod23:12

       He had spent 40 years doing tea ceremony.

   12. TFTim Ferriss23:14

       Mm.

   13. CMCraig Mod23:15

       Tea ceremony, by the way, is not just five minutes. You fold a handkerchief, you pour some tea, you're done. It's like six, seven, eight hours. You know? Like a full tea ceremony.

   14. TFTim Ferriss23:22

       [laughs]

   15. CMCraig Mod23:22

       You're cooking meals, and you're presenting stuff. And it's a really involved thing. And so there's a lot of language connected with tea ceremony.

   16. TFTim Ferriss23:28

       Mm-hmm.

   17. CMCraig Mod23:28

       So first of all, he'd just been studying this kind of imperial tea ceremony language. And then I think, you know, being a CEO, where ni- 100% of his interactions were in Japanese. I mean, he just learned to talk at a CEO level with everyone.

   18. TFTim Ferriss23:43

       Yeah.

   19. CMCraig Mod23:43

       We're walking through. We're meeting farmers. And he's treating them with the same reverence he would treat Son-san, the CEO-

   20. TFTim Ferriss23:49

       Yeah

   21. CMCraig Mod23:49

       ... of SoftBank, with whom he would have breakfast with, like, once a week or whatever when he was, you know, running his thing.

   22. TFTim Ferriss23:53

       Mm-hmm.

   23. CMCraig Mod23:54

       And so I think these people, first of all, were just blown away that we could speak Japanese to begin with.

   24. TFTim Ferriss23:59

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CMCraig Mod24:00

       But then secondly, that they were being seen in a way that they had never been seen before.

   26. TFTim Ferriss24:05

       Mm.

   27. CMCraig Mod24:05

       They felt, I think, elevated in a way that no one had ever elevated them before. And weirdly, no Japanese person would probably think to elevate them.

   28. TFTim Ferriss24:11

       Mm-hmm.

   29. CMCraig Mod24:12

       And John, I think, just has this intuitive sense of how to make people feel great. It comes from this totally genuine place.

   30. TFTim Ferriss24:18

       Mm-hmm.
7. 30:31 – 31:34

   An invitation from Kevin Kelly.

   1. TFTim Ferriss30:31

      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-

   2. CMCraig Mod30:43

      Yeah

   3. TFTim Ferriss30:44

      ... what form did that take? And what purpose did it serve for you?

   4. CMCraig Mod30:49

      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, or I'd tweet about it or something. And actually, Kevin Kelly reached out and he said, "Hey, I'm gonna be giving a talk in Tokyo."

   5. TFTim Ferriss31:01

      Now you knew who he was.

   6. CMCraig Mod31:02

      Yeah, yeah. [laughs] We had walked at Pacifica a couple times. He's like, "Hey, I'm, I've given a talk in Tokyo. I'd love to walk part of the Nakasendō." And I'd done Nakasendō with John a couple of times, like bits of it. And I was like, "Great. Let's walk it together, 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 wanna make sure I don't kill Kevin Kelly."

   7. TFTim Ferriss31:21

      [laughs]

   8. CMCraig Mod31:21

      And we set that up, and we did that walk, and that was probably 2014, 2015.

   9. TFTim Ferriss31:26

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CMCraig Mod31:26

       And it was so much fun that just the two of us, and we were like, "Oh my God, we need to invite more people to do stuff like this." We did.

8. 31:34 – 33:05

   The birth of a photo book.

   1. CMCraig Mod31:34

      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 wanna give shape to these things. They're so immaterial." Like, you do the walk and it disappears. It just goes up in the air like smoke. And I was like, "I wanna do a book." And so Dan Rubin is a photographer friend of mine-

   2. TFTim Ferriss31:54

      Mm-hmm

   3. CMCraig Mod31:54

      ... from ages ago. And I was like, "Dan, let's walk the Kumano Kodo, and we'll do eight days, nine days, and we'll photograph it, and then we'll hide in a farmhouse, and we'll be in the farmhouse for a week, and we have to produce the entire photo book in that week." And it's like we just have to time box this. We're busy people. We just gotta do this. These walks just really demanded, like give them a shape. Give them a shape. This is 2016.

   4. TFTim Ferriss32:16

      What do you mean by give them a shape?

   5. CMCraig Mod32:18

      Give them a forum. Make them immutable in some way.

   6. TFTim Ferriss32:21

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CMCraig Mod32:21

      Because they were just so immaterial.

   8. TFTim Ferriss32:23

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CMCraig Mod32:24

      Yeah. I was like, "Okay, what's the most minimum viable shape you can give?" And it's like a photo book kinda felt like that. And so we did it. We did the walk. We hid in a farmhouse. We made the book.

   10. TFTim Ferriss32:31

       [laughs]

   11. CMCraig Mod32:31

       Kickstarted it, sold it. It did really well. And that activated something in me, too. It reminded me of how much I love books, 'cause it had been a while since I had made a book book. And then Kevin brought over Hugh Howey-

   12. TFTim Ferriss32:44

       Mm-hmm

   13. CMCraig Mod32:44

       ... who's the author of the Silo series and the Silo Apple TV show.

   14. TFTim Ferriss32:49

       Wool and all of that. Mm-hmm.

   15. CMCraig Mod32:51

       Wool, all that. So Kevin, Hugh, and I then walked the Kumano Kodo in the fall of 2016, and that was so much fun. And we were like, "Oh my God, we gotta do this with bigger groups." It was this really organic kind of escalation [laughs] of like, okay, this

9. 33:05 – 34:03

   The big solo walks begin.

   1. CMCraig Mod33:05

      is an interesting thing.

   2. TFTim Ferriss33:05

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CMCraig Mod33:05

      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.

   4. TFTim Ferriss33:25

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

   5. CMCraig Mod33:31

      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.

   6. TFTim Ferriss33:48

      [laughs]

   7. CMCraig Mod33:48

      And I was in this really depressed kind of space. And I had been doing the writing residencies. I had been working on a novel that I couldn't sell. Anyway, there was a bunch of stuff going on.

   8. TFTim Ferriss33:56

      A daughter who leaves her father? No, I'm kidding. [laughs]

   9. CMCraig Mod34:00

      [laughs] That was after I had all the bottles of Nihonshu

10. 34:03 – 34:59

    Launching a membership program.

    1. CMCraig Mod34:03

       sitting around.

    2. TFTim Ferriss34:03

       [laughs]

    3. CMCraig Mod34:04

       So it was the end of 2018. 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 mildly popular. They're like, "You have an audience. You know what you wanna write about. Just launch a membership program." And at that time, Substack was sort of nascent, and subscriptions were kinda becoming a thing, and Memberful had launched, and Patreon had launched, and, like, people were kind of okay with the idea. So I, 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-

    4. TFTim Ferriss34:37

       Mm-hmm

    5. CMCraig Mod34:37

       ... to be a walker. [laughs] 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.

    6. TFTim Ferriss34:49

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

    7. CMCraig Mod34:52

       This is like NPR. I'm gonna walk, and I'm gonna write about it, and you're funding that. And enough people joined where it was like, okay, this is a thing.

11. 34:59 – 39:42

    The Nakasendō experience.

    1. CMCraig Mod34:59

       And so for my first big walk, I did Nakasendō.

    2. TFTim Ferriss35:02

       Mm-hmm.

    3. CMCraig Mod35:02

       So I was based mainly in Kamakura then, and so I walked Kamakura up to Tokyo, Tokyo all the way up through Saitama, Nagano, into Gifu, all the way to Kyoto. And then from Kyoto, I ended up going down. I walked some other bits in the Kii Peninsula, but the main thing was the Nakasendō.

    4. TFTim Ferriss35:21

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

    5. CMCraig Mod35:24

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

    6. TFTim Ferriss35:29

       Which is roughly 373 miles.

    7. CMCraig Mod35:33

       Yeah.

    8. TFTim Ferriss35:33

       Just for people to put that in perspective.

    9. CMCraig Mod35:35

       And up until then, the longest solo thing I'd done was about seven or eight days. So this felt like a pretty big jump. And it was really hard. I miscalculated all the distances.

    10. TFTim Ferriss35:48

        [laughs]

    11. CMCraig Mod35:49

        I underestimated. By day four, I was like, "Oh my God, what am I gonna do?" I didn't really even know how to wear my backpack properly. It was, like, cutting into my shoulders. I wasn't doing the, the waist straps. I was wildly under-experienced. I should've known better. I was doing, like, 30, 40K days.

    12. TFTim Ferriss36:04

        [laughs]

    13. CMCraig Mod36:05

        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 kinda 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'd be a photo, and it'd be, like, a little three sentences about the day. And so I did that, and you could respond to it, but I couldn't see the responses.

    14. TFTim Ferriss36:41

        [laughs] If you couldn't see the responses, what happened to them? [laughs]

    15. CMCraig Mod36:44

        Hold on. The responses were being collected in this database.

    16. TFTim Ferriss36:47

        Okay. There we go. [laughs]

    17. CMCraig Mod36:49

        I hired a designer- To lay it all out for me in a print-on-demand book. So 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.

    18. TFTim Ferriss37:04

        Mm.

    19. CMCraig Mod37:04

        So I'd have this analog experience. 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.

    20. TFTim Ferriss37:13

        Mm.

    21. CMCraig Mod37:14

        And then I spent months writing essays responding to all the questions and messages that people sent-

    22. TFTim Ferriss37:20

        Mm

    23. CMCraig Mod37:21

        ... and putting that up on my blog. The loops for social media are so tight.

    24. TFTim Ferriss37:24

        Mm-hmm.

    25. CMCraig Mod37:24

        Right? They're seconds. You post, you get r- responses. And like, there's something terrible about that. You don't have any time to reflect. You don't have any distance from the thing that you're doing and what the expectations are on the part of your audience. And so to do this thing where there was basically a month built in where I wasn't gonna see these responses-

    26. TFTim Ferriss37:41

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

    27. CMCraig Mod37:43

        Ooh. Is he okay?

    28. TFTim Ferriss37:46

        I don't know what's going on. She didn't, she didn't even eat. Sorry, give me a second. This is gonna be gross. I was pushing her off of the carpet. That's a new one for the podcast. [laughs]

    29. CMCraig Mod37:56

        Oh, no.

    30. TFTim Ferriss37:57

        Okay, sorry. [laughs]
12. 39:42 – 40:42

    Craig’s rules for walking.

    1. CMCraig Mod39:42

       I'm just cognizant of the fact that, like, sometimes I'm just in bloviation mode.

    2. TFTim Ferriss39:46

       [laughs] That'd be a good T-shirt, bloviation mode.

    3. CMCraig Mod39:49

       Blovation mode. My walk rules are you can't read the news. You're not allowed to read the news. There's no social media.

    4. TFTim Ferriss39:55

       And by you, that means Craig.

    5. CMCraig Mod39:57

       Yeah. If you're walking or if I'm walking, yeah, I always talk about me in the third person.

    6. TFTim Ferriss40:01

       Got it.

    7. CMCraig Mod40:01

       So you can't read the news. You can't do social media. You can't touch any of that stuff. The idea is to just be radically present and radically cultivate a boredom.

    8. TFTim Ferriss40:10

       Mm-hmm.

    9. CMCraig Mod40:10

       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?

    10. TFTim Ferriss40:22

        [laughs]

    11. CMCraig Mod40:23

        That's 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?

    12. TFTim Ferriss40:38

        [laughs]

    13. CMCraig Mod40:39

        It's kind of profound to feel boredom.

13. 40:42 – 50:22

    The Vipassana influence.

    1. CMCraig Mod40:42

       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?

    2. TFTim Ferriss40:54

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

    3. CMCraig Mod40:56

       Maybe you experienced this on the seven. When did you do the seven-day? How old were you?

    4. TFTim Ferriss40:59

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

    5. CMCraig Mod41:04

       Okay.

    6. TFTim Ferriss41:05

       Mm-hmm.

    7. CMCraig Mod41:06

       Yeah, I guess, geez, 2015, 2016 is 10 years ago.

    8. TFTim Ferriss41:09

       Would've been late 30s.

    9. CMCraig Mod41:10

       Yeah. For me, when I went, did the V- Vipassana in Kyoto, which was great, by the way. It was amazing. It was really well run. Food was amazing. It was just great. It took me, like, three days, four days to arrive at the retreat center psychically.

    10. TFTim Ferriss41:23

        Yeah.

    11. CMCraig Mod41:23

        I just wasn't there.

    12. TFTim Ferriss41:24

        Mm-hmm.

    13. CMCraig Mod41:25

        Actually, it took me about a day to realize I was experiencing information withdrawal, and I was getting angry.

    14. TFTim Ferriss41:30

        Hmm. Or stimulation withdrawal, too.

    15. CMCraig Mod41:33

        Yeah, stimulation, information withdrawal. And I was getting angry. And I was like, where is this anger coming from? You're just sitting there for 10 hours a day, you know, observing your body, the physiological, like, phenomena that's happening in your body. And I was just observing this anger and going, "Wow, this is so bizarre because I don't know what's triggering this." And then I realized, oh my God, I'm so addicted to information and just being stimulated by phone or the internet or whatever.

    16. TFTim Ferriss41:57

        Mm-hmm.

    17. CMCraig Mod41:58

        That that's what I'm kind of expe... Anyway, and so getting over that three, four days in, and then having all the mystical breaking down into particulate matter, which is something that I felt and could control by the end of my Vipassana retreat. It was pretty bizarre. That feeling of attention control, which is, you know, basically what you're learning when you do that-

    18. TFTim Ferriss42:18

        Mm

    19. CMCraig Mod42:18

        ... was foundational for, I think, these rules that I ended up applying to my walks. And so the walks end up, for me, being 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 it every day, day after day after day. And being off those tight loops of social media and being radically present, not teleporting, saying hello to everybody. I force myself to say hello to every single person I see. And with photography, too, I kind of have these rules where I'm like, I have to take a portrait of someone before 10:00 AM. 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. I'd be like, "Oh my God, I have to hit my 10:00 AM portrait." No one's holding me to this.

    20. TFTim Ferriss43:10

        Mm-hmm.

    21. CMCraig Mod43:10

        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. There'd just be a shop next to me wherever I was on the road, and I... It would be like a tatami shop in the middle of nowhere in Saitama, and I would just be like, "Hey, hi. Can I please take your portrait?" You know? And you would end up having this conversation, this incredible conversation. 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 Nakasendō walk was kind of the first big one, but I wasn't operating in full walk mode yet. I was operating at about 65%, 70% walk mode for that first Nakasendō.

    22. TFTim Ferriss43:49

        Mm-hmm.

    23. CMCraig Mod43:49

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

    24. TFTim Ferriss44:30

        What do you mean by Siri scripts?

    25. CMCraig Mod44:33

        So you can kind of do shortcuts in iOS now where you can sort of tap a button on your home screen and it like appends to a note in Notes. It does a transcription.

    26. TFTim Ferriss44:43

        Mm-hmm.

    27. CMCraig Mod44:43

        So you don't have to interact with your phone. You can just like tap a button. You can set it up so it's a Siri call-out you can do as well, and you just dictate, and it transcribes it pretty well.

    28. TFTim Ferriss44:52

        Mm-hmm.

    29. CMCraig Mod44:53

        I'm just walking and dictating and talking to myself like a crazy person. And, you know, 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?" You know, and just doing this all day long. I get to my inn. I get to my hotel at like 5:00 PM, 4:00, 5:00 PM. That's the ideal. Start doing laundry. Oftentimes I'll just grab something from the konbini because then I'm gonna write and edit photos.

    30. TFTim Ferriss45:21

        Konbini is a convenience store.
14. 50:22 – 58:16

    Logistics of walking in Japan.

    1. TFTim Ferriss50:22

       idea.

    2. CMCraig Mod50:22

       I guess one of my other rules for these walks too is, like, everything has to be booked in advance. Whenever I leave on a walk, I have a giant spreadsheet that has all of the distances, it has all of the bookings for the inns. I know what meals are included or not included. Because, like, I don't wanna think about logistics for one second when I'm out in the field.

    3. TFTim Ferriss50:41

       Mm-hmm.

    4. CMCraig Mod50:42

       And exactly what you're saying. And, uh, some people hear that and they go, "Oh my God, but aren't you missing out on, like, the romance of, like, you might meet, like, an interesting farmer and they wanna take you to their hou-" 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.

    5. TFTim Ferriss50:57

       [laughs]

    6. CMCraig Mod50:58

       I don't need to have that in the walk. That's a different thing. For me, I absolutely thrive on that pre-scheduling of it all, precisely f- because it gives you the freedom-

    7. TFTim Ferriss51:09

       Mm-hmm

    8. CMCraig Mod51:09

       ... to be so radically present and so, I think, observant and committed to the, the craft of what you wanna produce that day. Thinking about where you're gonna stay tomorrow night is a huge cognitive burden.

    9. TFTim Ferriss51:22

       Mm-hmm.

    10. CMCraig Mod51:22

        It's huge.

    11. TFTim Ferriss51:23

        Yeah.

    12. CMCraig Mod51:23

        Making the reservations, it sucks. It could take an hour, easily an hour. You think it's like, "Oh, it's a 10-minute thing." It can easily take an hour. So I spend probably, if I'm gonna do a month of walking, I spend a week of making reservations-

    13. TFTim Ferriss51:35

        Mm-hmm

    14. CMCraig Mod51:36

        ... to do a month of walking.

    15. TFTim Ferriss51:37

        For people who are like, "Wait, what? A week?" This may not be fair. Tell me if this is as outdated as my, [laughs] 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 gonna live there," if they're visiting and they're gonna stay at a nice hotel, it's a different experience. But if they're like, "I'm gonna move there for two months," I'm like, "Okay."

    16. CMCraig Mod52:02

        Yeah.

    17. TFTim Ferriss52:03

        "Let me just tell you that you think Japan is Blade Runner."

    18. CMCraig Mod52:08

        [laughs]

    19. TFTim Ferriss52:09

        And I'd say it's 60% Blade Runner, depending on where you are, and then it's at least 40% DMV. [laughs] Like, the number of triplicate copies-

    20. CMCraig Mod52:21

        Yeah

    21. TFTim Ferriss52:21

        ... that you're gonna have to sign.

    22. CMCraig Mod52:23

        Yeah.

    23. TFTim Ferriss52:23

        The amount of [laughs] fucking paperwork. The number of times you're gonna have to try to get ahold of someone is going to shock you, so right. A week of settling logistics, yeah.

    24. CMCraig Mod52:34

        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.

    25. TFTim Ferriss52:39

        Yep.

    26. CMCraig Mod52:39

        And it's shocking how much trust there is. It's like, you call this inn, they go, "Hey, who, uh, hello, it's the inn." You know, that's kinda like what they sound like in Japanese.

    27. TFTim Ferriss52:48

        [laughs]

    28. CMCraig Mod52:48

        And you go, "Hey, oh, honorable sir, I would love to book." "Hey, you wanna... Okay, you wanna stay? When are you staying? Okay, May, May 12th? Okay, s- okay, yeah, sure. How mu- uh, wait. When are you... Okay, what do you... What? Oh, you want dinner? Okay, sure. Okay, go- we'll see you May 12th. Bye."

    29. TFTim Ferriss53:02

        [laughs]

    30. CMCraig Mod53:02

        That's how reservations are sometimes done. You arrive on May 12th and you're like, "Was that really a reservation?" [laughs] You know? [laughs] You're like, "What the, the fuck was that?"
15. 58:16 – 1:02:59

    Depopulation and pizza toast.

    1. CMCraig Mod58:16

       But so I'm walking the Nakasendō. I'm going up into these mountain villages. And I, what I'm witnessing is depopulation firsthand. There's two buzzwords you hear in Japanese. Shoshika mondai, which is a child birth problem. There's just, like, no children being birthed. I think Japan's at 1.2 now, is the-

    2. TFTim Ferriss58:34

       Hmm

    3. CMCraig Mod58:35

       ... per woman sort of number of children being produced. Korea, Gideon Lewis-Kraus just wrote this amazing article about Korea's situation, which I think is .7 or .6.

    4. TFTim Ferriss58:47

       Mm-hmm. Yep. Not a great situation.

    5. CMCraig Mod58:50

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

    6. TFTim Ferriss58:53

       I could explain more related to that. I don't know how f- how much of a digression we wanna take, but there are actually a bunch of structural problems that help 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. And very briefly, very briefly, is that rent is very, very expensive. A lot of people move to, say, Seoul.

    7. CMCraig Mod59:13

       Yep.

    8. TFTim Ferriss59:13

       And in Seoul, to upgrade to a larger apartment you would often have to put down, like, a 6 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 n- I don't wanna say intractable, but sort of, uh, systematized economic hurdles that people just can't clear. Anyway, please continue.

    9. CMCraig Mod59:43

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

    10. TFTim Ferriss59:49

        [laughs]

    11. CMCraig Mod59:49

        Just make the babies. Shoshika mondai, right? Which you hear this a lot, but you don't experience it in Tokyo, 'cause Tokyo's growing, and there's actually a lot of kids in Tokyo. And it, th- it feels very vibrant. Tokyo's growing, you know, pretty steadily. And then the other one is koreka shakai-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:00:03

        Hmm

    13. CMCraig Mod1:00:03

        ... which is the elderly society, 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 Nakasendō was the first time I felt that palpably.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:00:19

        Yeah.

    15. CMCraig Mod1:00:20

        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. Up until last year I had been shaving my head for five years. And so part of the reason why I was shaving my head was 'cause you'd get your head shaved anywhere, and it's, like, 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 Showa era.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:00:49

        Hmm.

    17. CMCraig Mod1:00:50

        Ozu, we were talking about Ozu. His films kind of embody the Showa era.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:00:53

        1926 to 1989.

    19. CMCraig Mod1:00:56

        '26 to '89. And Showa is the post-war Japan, the mid-century Japan. It's mid-century modern architecture and, like, design. And- Kissaten were one of the many sort of local mom-and-pop things that kind of grew out of this post-war economy. And people who didn't wanna join the workforce, didn't wanna be a salary man or salary woman, they opened kissaten, which were 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 gonna have lunch. And I realized by, like, day 10, every day I was going to a kissaten, and every day I was eating pizza toast.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:01:43

        [laughs]

    21. CMCraig Mod1:01:44

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

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:01:50

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

    23. CMCraig Mod1:01:53

        Basically, yeah. The 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 kind of see some of that in action.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:02:04

        Mm-hmm.

    25. CMCraig Mod1:02:05

        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.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:02:14

        Mm.

    27. CMCraig Mod1:02:14

        If you have a toaster oven, you can make pizza toast with Kraft cheese, Cheese Singles, spaghetti sauce out of a can. Maybe you get some peppers you cut up and some onions, and that's it. That's your pizza toast. Maybe a salami, like a cheap salami from the, you know, the shop. And then the other thing is Neapolitan spaghetti, which is just spaghetti with ketchup. [laughs]

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:02:38

        [laughs] Oh.

    29. CMCraig Mod1:02:40

        Spaghetti with ketchup and pizza toast fed a big chunk of Japan in, like, the '50s, '60s, and '70s. [laughs]

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:02:47

        [laughs]
16. 1:02:59 – 1:05:39

    How Kissa by Kissa came to be (and its unexpected success).

    1. CMCraig Mod1:02:59

       So I became obsessed with that, and then that grew, uh, into an article which then grew into my book that I launched during COVID in 2020 called Kissa by Kissa.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:03:10

       Yeah, it's 15 feet behind me.

    3. CMCraig Mod1:03:12

       That title is a reference to Bird by Bird, which I think you've talked about before.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:03:16

       [laughs] Yeah. Anne Lamott, of course. Bird by Bird.

    5. CMCraig Mod1:03:19

       Yeah. I love that book.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:03:20

       Actually, now that I think about it, literally Bird by Bird is probably two bookshelves above your book.

    7. CMCraig Mod1:03:25

       There you go.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:03:25

       And I never put it together. Right back there. [laughs]

    9. CMCraig Mod1:03:29

       That is 100% homage to Anne. And so yeah, Kissa by Kissa, which was me riffing on pizza toast and these cafes along this walk.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:03:39

        Hmm.

    11. CMCraig Mod1:03:39

        COVID had hit. It was April 2020, and I was like, "Okay, well, all this travel I planned on doing I'm not gonna do." And it was actually a big relief. I had been doing too much traveling internationally.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:03:49

        Mm-hmm.

    13. CMCraig Mod1:03:50

        Every summer I'd been teaching at the Yale publishing course. I'd been sort of giving the keynote lecture about books and digital publishing and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I'd run out of stuff to say anyway. And so I was like, okay, let's produce 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, you know, print-on-demand SMS book-

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:04:14

        Mm-hmm

    15. CMCraig Mod1:04:14

        ... was another kind of like, oh wow, this is really cool. And then this was gonna be like, okay, what if we took all of that and really did the apotheosis of, like, a beautiful walk book with photos and the narrative? 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 gonna make 1,000 copies, and I'll be lucky if we sell out of that print run in, like, a year or two.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:04:46

        Mm-hmm.

    17. CMCraig Mod1:04:47

        It's an expensive book. It's a weird subject. Like, no one's gonna really be into this. I launch it. We sell 1,000 copies in, like, 36 hours.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:04:56

        So what happened? Why did that happen?

    19. CMCraig Mod1:04:58

        I had underestimated the audience I had built up, I guess.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:05:01

        Hmm.

    21. CMCraig Mod1:05:01

        And people were just excited about these walks and what I was doing, and they were just psyched about it. It was, like, very weird.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:05:08

        Maybe not weird if you think about the timing also.

    23. CMCraig Mod1:05:10

        I think the timing-

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:05:11

        Right

    25. CMCraig Mod1:05:11

        ... was really good. And what I did that was really smart, I'd been running the membership program by that point for 18 months, and I was like, "Okay, I wanna do this book, and I wanna have it be expensive. But I wanna 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, like, the first real perk I'd ever offered members, and it was, like, kind of like a thank you, and treating the membership payments almost as a investment to, like, allow me to do these things, and then I wanna give a little bit of that investment back to you. Pay a little dividend. And so

17. 1:05:39 – 1:06:49

    Kicking off Craigstarter.

    1. CMCraig Mod1:05:39

       I set up a thing. I looked at Kickstarter, and I was like, Kickstarter hadn't really changed in, like, 10 years, and I was like, why am I gonna give these guys such a high percentage? You couldn't do coupons. I wanted to offer coupons, and Kickstarter didn't have, like, coupon functionality. And so I looked at Shopify. And I have my engineering background. I know how to program and, you know, enough to get me in trouble. And I was like, well, Shopify is actually amazing, and you can modify the templates. And so I cloned Kickstarter and I called it Craigstarter.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:06:06

       [laughs]

    3. CMCraig Mod1:06:07

       It's on GitHub. You can clone it if you want and start your own Craigstarter.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:06:11

       [laughs]

    5. CMCraig Mod1:06:12

       I wanted to own the whole stack of software.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:06:14

       Mm.

    7. CMCraig Mod1:06:15

       And it's weird with Kickstarter, like, you get all these purchases, and then to get the addresses into the shipping software, it's, like, different soft- Anyway, 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, you know, include postcards. If we do 800, then I will make a documentary about pizza toast. I was like, I'm never gonna have to make this documentary.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:06:43

       [laughs]

    9. CMCraig Mod1:06:44

       We sold 1,000 immediately. And I was just like, oh shit, all right, I gotta make this documentary.

18. 1:06:49 – 1:07:43

    The pièce de résistance membership strategy.

    1. CMCraig Mod1:06:49

       But what the real, I think, sort of pièce de résistance that I, 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 'cause we were doing DHL and yada, yada, yada, and it was expensive to ship. It's still expensive to ship So it was 130 bucks. So it's like you could do that or you could pay another $100 to become my member, join the membership program, get a discount on the book, then buy the book. You could spend $130, or you could spend $200 and get the membership.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:07:30

       Mm.

    3. CMCraig Mod1:07:30

       And the conversion rate of people who did the membership was 30% of everyone who bought it-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:07:36

       Wow

    5. CMCraig Mod1:07:36

       ... which is insane. Insane.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:07:38

       That's wild.

    7. CMCraig Mod1:07:39

       Okay, we just unlocked something special.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:07:41

       It's a great experiment.

19. 1:07:43 – 1:08:11

    Finding product-market fit.

    1. CMCraig Mod1:07:43

       That, for me, was this light bulb moment of, "Okay, this is what I'm doing for the next 20 years. Got it."

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:07:48

       Mm.

    3. CMCraig Mod1:07:49

       I wanna make these books. I wanna do these walks.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:07:52

       Mm-hmm.

    5. CMCraig Mod1:07:52

       There's an audience here. There's, like, a product market fit, to use that terrible expression.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:07:58

       [laughs] PMF. Somebody just texted me yesterday. 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." [laughs]

    7. CMCraig Mod1:08:05

       Yeah. That was this really, "Whoa, okay, this is interesting and

20. 1:08:11 – 1:08:42

    The importance of sustainable scale.

    1. CMCraig Mod1:08:11

       special." And, like, look, I'm operating at my scale. 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.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:08:20

       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.

    3. CMCraig Mod1:08:28

       Yeah, yeah.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:08:29

       Because people become intoxicated and make bad decisions chasing, in some cases, a false idol, right?

    5. CMCraig Mod1:08:38

       Yep.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:08:39

       Or worshiping a false idol. So maybe you could speak to that.

21. 1:08:42 – 1:16:11

    Membership community rules.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:08:42

       And I'm going to offer an on-ramp-

    2. CMCraig Mod1:08:47

       Mm-hmm

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:08:47

       ... in the form of something of yours that I printed yet again.

    4. CMCraig Mod1:08:51

       Yes, yes. Love it.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:08:53

       And what I printed, people can find this at craigmod.com/essays/membership_rules. So these [laughs] are your membership community rules, which are of great interest to me because I currently have, really for the first time, an active community, or certainly the first time in a decade, an active community of test readers for the new book-

    6. CMCraig Mod1:09:22

       Mm-hmm

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:09:22

       ... that I'm working on.

    8. CMCraig Mod1:09:23

       Cool.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:09:24

       And we have about 100, which is the right scale.

    10. CMCraig Mod1:09:27

        That's awesome.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:09:27

        Like 85 to 100-

    12. CMCraig Mod1:09:29

        Yep

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:09:29

        ... I'd say. Started off with super, super high engagement, like 90% 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% in terms of lurkers to active posters. I'm gonna not touch everything, but I'm gonna run through real quickly here. So here are some of the rules. One, have clear creative goals. Mine are make books and educate. Number two, staple those goals to your walls, your mirror, your forehead. If you ever have a decision to make, ask yourself, "Does it help me achieve these goals?" Number three, all membership activities are in support of these goals. Four, the program exists for the goals, not the members. I'm gonna say that again. The program exists for the goals, not the members. Number five, equally important, that's my wording, that may sound cold, but if you frame it properly, the members understand and enthusiastically support this. Six, fundamentally, you're building a community. Seven, but your goal is not to manage a community. And then there are-

    14. CMCraig Mod1:10:33

        Mm-hmm

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:10:33

        ... a number of bullets under that. Eight, by the way, deadlines are not only your friends, they're the only way work gets done. So obsessive irrational adherence to deadlines and work is non-negotiable. Number nine, and there are a number of bullets underneath this, I won't necessarily get into all of them, but you can certainly elaborate. Don't let the shape of membership software determine the shape of your activities/work. 10, make strict decisions, but be willing to change your mind. And then a parenthetical, I renamed my membership program 18 months into it, and I'm glad I did, as an example. 11, and finally, know your scale. This is why I wanted to bring this in.

    16. CMCraig Mod1:11:09

        Mm-hmm.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:11:10

        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.

    18. CMCraig Mod1:11:22

        Yep.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:11:22

        Take it away, Craig. [laughs] Scale.

    20. CMCraig Mod1:11:27

        Yeah, I think a lot of people are, to use the word again, ensorcelled by this, like, idea of mega scale.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:11:33

        [laughs]

    22. CMCraig Mod1:11:34

        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?" Or, you know, it's the same with people going to Google and saying that too. In tech, this is a very common trope to be like, "I wanna 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, like, you're a very, very tiny cog, and the amount of change that you can affect on these things is quite small. Actually, you know, it's like you're a worker on the Titanic to a certain degree, and you're gonna hit an iceberg, whether you're causing genocide in Myanmar or something that, like, you just don't see coming.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:12:34

        Mm-hmm.

    24. CMCraig Mod1:12:34

        I think it's kind of like a false narrative to be like, oh, yeah, the only way to have a real effect in the world is to, like, be operating at this crazy mass scale. And I had a little bit of that working at Flipboard. I mean, part of 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. Like, that app had a huge scale. I remember we launched the iPhone version of it, and I just felt nothing. I'd been very attuned to, like, does my heart move or not. And I remember launching that and just being like, that was cool to work on, but I felt absolutely nothing seeing, like, you know, user feedback come in or whatever. Whereas at the same time, by that point, I had made many books that had sold You know, thousands of copies as opposed to millions or hundreds of millions or whatever that 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. Like, I run a little publishing company," you know? And I remember being so happy I could say that, and something felt so right about that. I remember exactly where I was standing. I could picture it. I can almost remember what apartment block I was in. Like, anyway, it was this real moment of like, "Okay, this is something to follow. This feeling is-"

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:14:01

        Mm-hmm.

    26. CMCraig Mod1:14:01

        "... something special, and we need to protect this." So for me, scale, I had spent my 20s working on my, my art projects, doing independent publishing, and for me, that was a scale that really resonated with my heart and made me feel good, and I knew there was a way to do it sustainably, in part because of the cost of living thing that we talked about happening in Japan.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:14:19

        Mm-hmm.

    28. CMCraig Mod1:14:19

        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, we basically sold, like, 6,000 copies of this thing, so it's like $600,000 in book sales.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:14:31

        Also a non-trivial number. Not to invoke the Kraken of scale, which is not what I'm doing, but, like, that is not a trivial number of books.

    30. CMCraig Mod1:14:40

        Right.
22. 1:16:11 – 1:27:35

    Navigating the publishing world.

    1. CMCraig Mod1:16:11

       coming out in May.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:16:12

       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?

    3. CMCraig Mod1:16:20

       There was.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:16:21

       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.

    5. CMCraig Mod1:16:32

       Yep.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:16:33

       So it's a different situation.

    7. CMCraig Mod1:16:34

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

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:16:39

       That's what I'm saying.

    9. CMCraig Mod1:16:40

       I'm all set.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:16:41

        Yeah.

    11. CMCraig Mod1:16:41

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

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:17:35

        So let me reframe that for a second-

    13. CMCraig Mod1:17:38

        Yeah, yeah

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:17:38

        ... just for people who are like, "Oh, the P word, politics."

    15. CMCraig Mod1:17:41

        Mm-hmm.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:17:41

        "I'm out. Where's the parachute?"

    17. CMCraig Mod1:17:44

        Yeah.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:17:44

        Is it fair to say it's more of a societal commentary than a-

    19. CMCraig Mod1:17:49

        Yes

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:17:50

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

    21. CMCraig Mod1:17:58

        It exists between the lines. There's nothing didactic about it at all. I'm telling a story of friendship with this kid, Brian, who I dearly loved. We were best friends all through elementary school. We graduate, and he's murdered.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:18:10

        Mm-hmm.

    23. CMCraig Mod1:18:11

        It's reflecting on the first 18 years of our life, and in reflecting on that, it's invariable that certain commentary about society is just embedded in that reflection, embedded in that-

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:18:22

        Sure

    25. CMCraig Mod1:18:22

        ... story. There's absolutely nothing didactic about it.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:18:24

        Mm-hmm.

    27. CMCraig Mod1:18:25

        The whole time I'm talking with all these farmers and fishermen and port people and people working at the inns, and, you know, there's this incredible, colorful cast of characters of the peninsula, of Japan, that you will never be able to meet in any other context unless you've lived here kind of as long as I have and you've started to do these walks and things like that. So it's both, you get this adventure in Japan, and then alongside that adventure is this story of friendship.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:18:50

        Mm-hmm.

    29. CMCraig Mod1:18:50

        But I just thought that story of friendship, because it was kind of a universality to it that was more than just like, "Hey, man, pizza toast and wacky mid-century cafes."

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:18:58

        [laughs]
23. 1:27:35 – 1:41:31

    Promoting midsize cities in Japan as a wild and strange celebrity.

    1. CMCraig Mod1:27:35

       Okay. [laughs]

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:27:36

       Your wild and strange celebrity in Japan-

    3. CMCraig Mod1:27:39

       Mm-hmm

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:27:39

       ... around promoting midsize cities.

    5. CMCraig Mod1:27:42

       Yeah. [laughs]

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:27:43

       How did this start, and what the hell is going on? Because I remember reaching out to you not too long ago, where you're like, "Yeah, I'm really busy because I'm doing like 12 TV shows and doing this and doing that."

    7. CMCraig Mod1:27:54

       [laughs]

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:27:54

       And then I'm like, "What? What are you doing?"

    9. CMCraig Mod1:27:57

       Yeah.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:27:57

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

    11. CMCraig Mod1:28:04

        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 kinda like 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. So I went to Hakodate, Morioka, Sakata, Matsumoto, Tsuruga, Onomichi, Yamaguchi, Karatsu, Kagoshima, and Matsuyama. That was the 10 that I went to.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:28:54

        Mm-hmm.

    13. CMCraig Mod1:28:54

        And my thesis was I would go to these cities, do three nights, four days in each city, and I would force myself to try to walk 50 kilometers inside of the city limits. My thesis was that if I tried to walk 50 kilometers, I was not only gonna, like, touch most of the city. In just doing that, having that weird rule of walking 50 kilometers, I was gonna meet a bunch of people. It was gonna be an adventure.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:29:17

        Mm-hmm.

    15. CMCraig Mod1:29:17

        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.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:29:24

        [laughs]

    17. CMCraig Mod1:29:25

        I name all of my tours strange tour names. And it was incredible. Incredible. That was in November, December 2021. And then I was writing stuff for The New York Times. I do an article every now and then. And in the fall of 2022, my travel editors reached out to me. And as they reach 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 had... It was an old castle town that had a beautiful park, two rivers connecting, a beautiful mountain in the... this... I was like, "This is just a great city." And I was like, in literally 23 years of living in Japan, not one person has ever told me to go to this city, so I'm gonna effusively go to bat for the city to The New York Times. So I wrote my little pitch to the Times people, and they're like, "Oh, that sounds great." And timing-wise, Japan had basically been under lockdown for COVID still.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:30:28

        Mm-hmm.

    19. CMCraig Mod1:30:29

        It was just coming out at the end of 2022, and so this list comes out in January 2023. And so they don't tell you where they're gonna put these places. And I knew that it had gotten in.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:30:40

        Which city was it that you'd recommended?

    21. CMCraig Mod1:30:43

        It was Morioka.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:30:45

        Morioka.

    23. CMCraig Mod1:30:45

        Which is up in Tohoku. It's up in the north. It's in Iwate Prefecture. If you go north on the Shinkansen, you go to Sendai. You go to, like, Fukushima, Sendai, and then everyone gets off. No one keeps going. Morioka's kinda like the next stop on the Shinkansen.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:30:57

        Mm-hmm.

    25. CMCraig Mod1:30:57

        And so Morioka, I knew it was gonna be in there. I had revised my pitch. You know, you write a little 300-word article. And in January, the list comes out. Number one is London, and number two is Morioka.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:31:12

        [laughs]

    27. CMCraig Mod1:31:14

        And Japan went bananas. They were just like, "What is happening?"

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:31:21

        [laughs]

    29. CMCraig Mod1:31:23

        "Who put London and then Morioka?"

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:31:26

        [laughs]
24. 1:41:31 – 1:43:28

    The economic and cultural effects of this promotion.

    1. CMCraig Mod1:41:31

       stuff, so.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:41:32

       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?

    3. CMCraig Mod1:41:41

       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, like, when this happened, they were ready to run with it. They were totally prepared.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:41:54

       Mm-hmm.

    5. CMCraig Mod1:41:55

       So they, they were able to, I think, catalyze more activity, more inbound. It's not just inbound from abroad. It's a lot of, like, Japanese people traveling to these cities now, too, because, like, just a buzz picks up, people moving to the cities. So one study was done, and I think they estimated the impact in Morioka over, like, the first two years is something like close to $100 million-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:42:19

       [laughs]

    7. CMCraig Mod1:42:20

       ... financial impact. Which I wrote 300 words, so whatever that is, that's like, you know-

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:42:27

       Hundreds of thousands

    9. CMCraig Mod1:42:28

       ... hundreds of thousands of dollars of impact per word. [laughs]

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:42:31

        That's so cool.

    11. CMCraig Mod1:42:32

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

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:42:37

        Eh, we'll see. We'll see, Modo-san. [laughs]

    13. CMCraig Mod1:42:40

        We'll see. But it's 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.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:43:09

        Mm-hmm.

    15. CMCraig Mod1:43:09

        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.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:43:14

        [laughs]

    17. CMCraig Mod1:43:15

        Kind of two years later, I didn't ruin this place. I'm just really grateful.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:43:19

        Yep. Wasn't the hug of death.

    19. CMCraig Mod1:43:21

        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.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:43:26

        All right.

    21. CMCraig Mod1:43:26

        It's a cool c- it's a cool place.

25. 1:43:28 – 1:45:42

    Hidden gems and walks in Japan.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:43:28

       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.

    2. CMCraig Mod1:43:39

       When I recommended Yamaguchi City-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:43:42

       Mm-hmm

    4. CMCraig Mod1:43:42

       ... part of it was because there's a great walk there, and it's called the Hagi Ohukan.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:43:46

       Mm-hmm.

    6. CMCraig Mod1:43:48

       It connects Yamaguchi and Hagi City, and it's a two-day walk. You can actually do it in one day. If you really power through, you can plow through in one day. There is an inn to stay at in the middle, in... It's above a tofu shop.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:43:58

       [laughs] Oh, that one. [laughs]

    8. CMCraig Mod1:44:01

       What's it called? I just stayed there last week.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:44:03

       [laughs]

    10. CMCraig Mod1:44:04

        Anyway, if you search for the inn on the Hagi Okan, it's the only one that pops up.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:44:08

        How do you spell that?

    12. CMCraig Mod1:44:09

        H-A-G-I, Hagi.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:44:12

        Uh-huh.

    14. CMCraig Mod1:44:12

        And then O-K-A-N, Okan.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:44:15

        Okay.

    16. CMCraig Mod1:44:15

        It connects to Hagi City, and Hagi City is this really beautiful, kind of very undervisited, 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-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:44:32

        Mm-hmm

    18. CMCraig Mod1:44:32

        ... which has Yuda Onsen, which is a great little onsen town that's basically connected with Yamaguchi, and there's an amazing inn called Sansui-en-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:44:41

        Uh-huh

    20. CMCraig Mod1:44:42

        ... which is a beautiful bunkazai, cultural heritage inn from Taisho era, so it's a- 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 Okan to Hagi, and I'd say spend a couple days in Hagi. It's an incredible city.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:45:05

        All right. This is good. We'll introduce a little friction for people who want to hunt down this Easter egg of sorts.

    22. CMCraig Mod1:45:13

        Yeah.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:45:13

        Meaning the inn near or off of or in a Hagi Okan, you can send that to me afterwards, and we'll put that in the show notes for people.

    24. CMCraig Mod1:45:23

        Sure.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:45:23

        So they can track that down if they're sufficiently motivated.

    26. CMCraig Mod1:45:28

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

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:45:35

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

    28. CMCraig Mod1:45:39

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

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:45:41

        [laughs]

26. 1:45:42 – 1:48:39

    Walking beyond Japan.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:45:42

       All right. We're gonna 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?

    2. CMCraig Mod1:45:57

       Well, I haven't done big solo walks elsewhere.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:46:00

       Not solo, but the walk and talks.

    4. CMCraig Mod1:46:03

       I've done walk and talks with Kevin Kelly. You know, I did the Nakasendō 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-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:46:33

       Mm-hmm

    6. CMCraig Mod1:46:33

       ... next week.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:46:34

       Oh, wow.

    8. CMCraig Mod1:46:34

       Heading out next week.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:46:35

       [laughs]

    10. CMCraig Mod1:46:36

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

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:46:38

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

    12. CMCraig Mod1:46:44

        Cotswolds, yeah. And I also did, independent of Kevin, I walked with another friend. We did Wainwright coast to coast, which is in northern England.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:46:53

        Mm-hmm.

    14. CMCraig Mod1:46:53

        And it starts in the Lake District on the west, and you walk coast to coast across the country, and that is pretty amazing. It's 300 kilometers. It takes about 10 to 12 days.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:47:04

        Mm-hmm.

    16. CMCraig Mod1:47:04

        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 it.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:47:17

        All right. What I also highly recommend is that people go to the source of all good things, craigmod.com. And [laughs] 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-

    18. CMCraig Mod1:47:40

        Yeah

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:47:40

        ... how you and Kevin architect these walk and talks, and I've had the good fortune to walk with you guys. And the basic idea, there's a lot more to it, but the basic idea is you are walking extensively every day, and then you have a group meal at the end of the day, which is Jeffersonian style.

    20. CMCraig Mod1:48:01

        Mm-hmm.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:48:01

        Meaning there's only one conversation, and the participants in the walk get to choose the topic or the question that they want-

    22. CMCraig Mod1:48:10

        Mm-hmm

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:48:10

        ... people to explore. And it's wonderful.

    24. CMCraig Mod1:48:12

        Mm-hmm.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:48:12

        It is just such a-

    26. CMCraig Mod1:48:13

        Mm-hmm

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:48:13

        ... lovely experience.

    28. CMCraig Mod1:48:14

        Mm-hmm.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:48:15

        And so counter to so much of what we experience, as you described it earlier with the increasingly contracted feedback loops of-

    30. CMCraig Mod1:48:28

        Yeah
27. 1:48:39 – 1:49:41

    Craig was a Mod before you was a mod.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:48:39

       Craig, I have a very important question that I need to ask you.

    2. CMCraig Mod1:48:42

       Yep.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:48:42

       And that is, is Mod your birth name? Where does Mod come into things?

    4. CMCraig Mod1:48:48

       Mod is not my birth name, but because I'm adopted, and then the, the parents who adopted me got divorced when I was basically 18 months, two years old or whatever.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:48:58

       Mm-hmm.

    6. CMCraig Mod1:48:58

       And my father, whose name I ended up keeping, and my mother didn't go back to her maiden name. It just seemed... There was a point in my, you know, teenage years where it just seemed weird. He wasn't raising me. He literally taught me nothing.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:49:14

       Mm-hmm.

    8. CMCraig Mod1:49:15

       He was like an anti-archetype. He was like, "Okay, this is, like, what you shouldn't do, and like..."

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:49:18

       Hamen kyōshika.

    10. CMCraig Mod1:49:20

        Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:49:21

        [laughs]

    12. CMCraig Mod1:49:21

        The opposite teacher.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:49:22

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

    14. CMCraig Mod1:49:28

        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 kinda have this name. And so, yeah, no, I, I just changed it.

28. 1:49:41 – 2:08:45

    How Craig reconnected with his birth family.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:49:41

       So that is a little ET Reese's Pieces trail to lure you

    2. CMCraig Mod1:49:48

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:49:48

       ... into telling the fucking wild story related to the recent chapters in your-

    4. CMCraig Mod1:49:57

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:49:58

       ... adoption journey.

    6. CMCraig Mod1:50:00

       Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:50:01

       I will cue that up, and you can tackle it any way you want.

    8. CMCraig Mod1:50:06

       Yeah. I mean, I think adopted people in general, you get a very different experiences of being adopted. But I think a common one is, like I've explained in part one of what we were talking about, my, my history. You know, you feel apart from things. You do not feel necessarily of a group, of a family. Even the, 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, you know? And I think different people can want different things from that mythology. And as 23andMe and Ancestry.com and all these, like, DNA testing things have become more and more commonplace, I think it's become more and more easy for people to find out who their birth parents are. And so all of my life, you know, I'd never really been that curious about who my birth parents were. Uh, you know, like, I had this peripheral sense. Part of it is I think you don't wanna dishonor your adoptive parents-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:51:10

       Sure

    10. CMCraig Mod1:51:10

        ... by having this. And I think if I was gonna 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 get the taboo out by airing that conversation over and over and over again, beating it to death in a, to a certain degree to say, "Hey, you know, like, do you wanna explore, you know... Do you wanna look up your genetic background? If you ever wanna connect with your birth mother, let me help you. I'm here to help you. I'm here to give you support for that," da, da, da. My family didn't do any of that, so I think I kind of suppressed a lot of the curiosity. But it's always there.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:51:45

        Mm-hmm.

    12. CMCraig Mod1:51:46

        And the one thing I did have, a- as I explained last time, was I had adoption paper notes, and my birth mother was 13 when she got pregnant, and my birth father, according to the adoption notes, there was a car accident and he was murdered at the site of the car accident, so he was dead. And that's all I knew. And I joined 23andMe, like, 12 years ago, and I got, you know, whatever, fourth cousin hit. We're probably, like, third cousins or something, you know. It's like everyone's a fourth cousin, fifth cousin. It's sort of meaningless. And nothing really close. And then I was on actually a walk in England two years ago, three years ago now, three years ago with Kevin and everyone. I was like, "Yeah, you know, I did 23andMe." And they're like, "Oh, dude, you gotta do Ancestry. That's where everyone is." And I was like, "Really?" I was like, "All right." I came back, did Ancestry, and lo and behold, boom, there's my mom.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:52:31

        [laughs]

    14. CMCraig Mod1:52:32

        It was like, "Oh, okay. I guess, yeah, people are on Ancestry." So I get a name. I was mainly interested just in genetic history and health history. You crest 40, and if you have things you wanna live for, you start thinking about health.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:52:46

        Mm-hmm.

    16. CMCraig Mod1:52:46

        You know, 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 the sense of scarcity, this, this lack of myself having value that I felt all through my 20s, and if there's one thing that supercharged all of it, of abundance and value, self-value, it was the relationship with my stepdaughter, and it's particularly when she was eight, nine, 10, 11 years old. And working through conflicts with her. Not big conflicts, just weird little things. We'd get in these little fights. She wouldn't get up to go to school. I'd, like, squirt her with a water bottle, and then she wouldn't, like, talk to me for three weeks.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:53:26

        [laughs]

    18. CMCraig Mod1:53:26

        And that stuff... You know, it's just like, whatever. Little, little girls could be kind of insane sometimes. And, like, I was driven to such places of sadness by that because I had never seen reconciliation. You know, I'd never had that modeled for me. And I thought, "This little girl is gonna 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 wanna 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, like, she kinda got upset at me for something dumb or whatever, she was acting up or whatever, and 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.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:54:18

        Hmm.

    20. CMCraig Mod1:54:18

        And that was something I never believed because I'd never had it modeled for me. And so this is an important thing to cue up meeting, you know, connecting with my birth mom because by the time we matched on Ancestry, I had gone through so many, I think, iterations of self. And the self I was when we connected, when we matched, I was really proud of.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:54:39

        Hmm.

    22. CMCraig Mod1:54:40

        And I felt really good about, and I believed in my, I believed in my value. I had, like, empirical evidence of it. And I was anonymous on Ancestry 'cause I'm protective of a lot of s- even though I'm, like, being quite open here, I'm also quite protective, as, as you are to a certain degree, uh, 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 wanna match. Maybe her family made her join. You know, she has a traumatic experience." In my mind, it was like being pregnant with me was tremendously traumatic. And I was like, "Okay, I don't wanna rustle her feathers. I don't wanna disrupt her life." I had her name. I found out everything about her. I could just, like, Google... You know, 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. All this stuff, I could see that. And I was like, "Okay, cool. I just kinda know who this person is. I don't feel the need to meet her. I don't feel this need for, like, a mom. 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% of DNA. Like, we're definitely related. [laughs] 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 wanna 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."

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:56:22

        Mm-hmm.

    24. CMCraig Mod1:56:22

        "Would you like to connect?" Da, da, da. Instead, it's this weird, cryptic bizarro message.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:56:26

        [laughs]

    26. CMCraig Mod1:56:27

        So I didn't respond for three months, and then I finally, after stewing on it for a while, I was like, "Okay, what would I wanna get if I was her?" Who I had this kid when I, you know, 13, 14. And so I wrote her this message that I stayed anonymous in. I just kind of outlined my life. 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, you know, have been successful in many ways, and, like, I'm so grateful. And I can only imagine how hard it was for you to have done what you did, you know. And thank you for having me, and thank you for going through the process of putting me up for adoption." Basically, like, to assuage any sense of worry about who I might be or what had happened to me, to give her that gift. And so I sent her that message, and I'm still anonymous, and I get no response from her. And I'm like, "Oh my God. Okay, this is, like, a lost cause."

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:57:23

        Mm-hmm.

    28. CMCraig Mod1:57:23

        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'd ever gotten.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:57:45

        Hmm.

    30. CMCraig Mod1:57:46

        And it was just like, this person is so tuned in. And I was like, I was just like, "What do I do with this?" And I couldn't... I was, like, so overwhelmed. I was launching my fine art edition of Tebot, and, like, Things Become Other Things, and doing all this. I was like, "Oh my God, how do I process this?" And then a week later, she sends me another 5,000-word letter.
29. 2:08:45 – 2:12:08

    Reflections and future plans.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:08:45

       Well, man, so are you gonna connect your stepdaughter with your family?

    2. CMCraig Mod2:08:52

       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, have her meet everyone. That'd be fun.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:08:59

       Yeah, yeah. Well, Craig, this is not something I often say on the podcast [laughs] but you have a beautiful soul. I love spending time with you.

    4. CMCraig Mod2:09:09

       Aw.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:09:09

       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-

    6. CMCraig Mod2:09:29

       That's a good word

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:09:30

       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?

    8. CMCraig Mod2:10:05

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

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:10:09

       Why not? You're here.

    10. CMCraig Mod2:10:11

        Yesterday, two days ago, I got a incredible email from David Mitchell, who'd read the book.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:10:17

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

    12. CMCraig Mod2:10:20

        David Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas. That's probably his most famous book.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:10:25

        Mm-hmm.

    14. CMCraig Mod2:10:25

        But he's done Number9Dream, ghostwritten Cloud Atlas. There's one, it's like Green Swan, Black Swan or something. That's actually one of my favorites of his. Black Swan Green I think is what it's called.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:10:34

        Mm-hmm.

    16. CMCraig Mod2:10:35

        He's an incredible writer. He's someone that I've admired and have been reading his work in Japan. He lives in Hiroshima. He taught English in Hiroshima. Some of his books takes place in Japan. I've always admired this guy and the felicity with which he writes and u-use of language, everything. He's a beautiful... Oh, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet I think is-

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:10:56

        Mm-hmm

    18. CMCraig Mod2:10:56

        ... his book about Dejima over in Nagasaki. Historical fiction, beautiful book. Anyway, if I was gonna pick three authors in the world, th- first of all, I'd 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 it was, honestly, it was just, like, one of the most shocking emails I've ever gotten. He blurbed it. He did a nice blurb. But, like, David Mitchell really, really, really, really liked this book, and he was quoting extensively.

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:11:27

        Yeah.

    20. CMCraig Mod2:11:27

        I was embarrassed by the end of this email. So just putting that out there.

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:11:31

        [laughs]

    22. CMCraig Mod2:11:33

        If you're a David Mitchell fan, if you like Cloud Atlas, you'll like Things Become Other Things possibly.

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:11:37

        [laughs]

    24. CMCraig Mod2:11:39

        Maybe.

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:11:40

        Check it out, guys.

    26. CMCraig Mod2:11:41

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

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:11:43

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

    28. CMCraig Mod2:11:47

        Yeah. I was like, "Oh my God, David Mitchell, this is insane."

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:11:51

        It was so wild. So wild. God, talk about, you know, full circle in a way. I'm excited for your next chapters, man.

    30. CMCraig Mod2:11:58

        Thanks. A lot to come. Who knows what?
30. 2:12:08 – 2:12:59

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:12:08

       that's all I got for now, Craig.

    2. CMCraig Mod2:12:10

       That's all I got too. [laughs] Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:12:13

       It is God knows what time. It's, like, 1:00 AM in where you are.

    4. CMCraig Mod2:12:17

       It's 2:00 AM. [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:12:17

       At 2:00 AM, 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 [laughs] that's Craig's homework assignment. It's the end name. And you will be able to find that at tim.blog/podcast as always. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than necessary to others, but also to yourself. That's an important piece of the puzzle. As Jack Kornfield would say, "If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete." And thanks for tuning in

Episode duration: 2:13:10