What if You Could Erase Your Life and Start Over? | Craig Mod | Good Life Project

So have you ever felt like you just needed to kind of leave the life that you've been living in order to create a clean slate that you need to live the life you yearn for and maybe to be able to shed the old stifled you and reinvent yourself or more accurately reclaim the version of you that's been kind of hiding inside for years?

That is exactly what my guest today did.

Craig Maud grew up in a working -class town in New England, but something inside drew him across the world to Japan at just 19 years old, speaking very little of the language.

He wanted to, in his words, erase his old self and start fresh where nobody knew him or his story or his history.

With no real plan and barely any language skills, he immersed himself in art and music and writing and eventually publishing and bookmaking, and also along the way, he started these long walking pilgrimages, like 30, 45, 60 days, that remade him from the inside out.

And Craig eventually landed in what he describes as a six mat tatami room in Tokyo, which is like six yoga mats large, embracing a pretty minimalist lifestyle to maximize creative and financial independence.

And that really set the state for a breathtaking career as an author and artist, artisanal bookmaker and adventurer.

And it's all supported by this global community of thousands of patrons now who follow along with his journeys and line up to scoop up his books, selling out limited editions within hours of publication.

In his latest book, the critically acclaimed Things Become Other Things, Craig weaves this unlikely journey into an intimate letter to a childhood friend while sharing insights from a recent extended walk.

Along the way, he also shares some pretty mind -expanding realizations, like how choosing fullness over distraction is the path to living each day without regret or why tuning out quote tight feedback loops allows him to go deeper into life's riches experiences and the surprising way that limiting beliefs imposed by wealth and privilege kind of shattered his reality at university inspiring a total life reboot.

And Craig also really shares a story that will make you question every excuse you make about why you can't live with unbridled expression and adventure and a commitment to honoring who you truly are and sharing that with the world.

So excited to share this conversation with you.

I'm Jonathan Field, and this is Good Life Project.

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Good Light Project is sponsored by Headspace So, you know that moment when someone asks, how are you, and just kind of automatically respond, good, without even thinking about it.

I started wondering, what if we could actually mean it when we say we're good.

That's one of the things that drew me to Headspace.

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excited to dive in with you i mean there's so many different aspects of you your story, how you've sort of like crafted living in a life that I'm just so curious about.

And then of course, diving into things become other things.

You grew up in a working class town in Connecticut, a kid who has access to really is drawn from what I understand to computers and music and grew up in this town.

And so much of it is woven through and just such like beautiful and intimate ways.

This story about a walk in Japan like decades later, but you make this interesting decision at around 19 years old to get on a plane to Japan.

This is not part of an organized program.

You're not part of like a pre -planned school.

You don't speak the language.

Take me into this. I wanted to drop out of university because when I got to school, the sort of deficit gaps between where I came from and where most of the other kids who were at university came from was just really shocking.

I'd gotten into a good school and and it was a bunch of kids who were just from extremely privileged backgrounds.

And so I didn't have the emotional intelligence to process it or to respond to it.

I think I started speaking with like a fake British accent, like accent, like I wasn't even trying to like it was just the, my brain was just completely haywiring.

I just remember speaking to someone there like, you have the most beautiful accent.

I was like, do I have X and it does like, Oh God, I have to pretend to have this accent.

There was a lot of things that made it really uncomfortable for me and I didn't have any mentors or archetypes to guide me through it or talk to through it.

So my plan was simply to just drop out of school and I thought, well, while I'm still in a school context, I can use that to do something interesting and I can, I can say, Hey, I'm a university student in America.

Can I come for a year abroad to your university in Japan?

Whereas I think if I didn't have the school credential, that would've been harder to do.

It worked out well for that.

I just told my school I was taking a year off.

I didn't tell him I was dropping out because my intention wasn't to return.

I felt from an early age, being adopted, I think this kind of instills in you.

It kind of plants the seed of, you come from elsewhere.

And so the pull to discover that elsewhere or the pull to experience elsewhere was just always so present.

And Japan felt like an interesting challenge, like more than Europe, like I felt like Europe I could go to.

And if I keep my mouth shut, I kind of look like a European or whatever.

So Japan was sort of like going all the way in, you know, in a way to kind of erase who I was entirely, which I think a lot, it was the reason a lot of people pick Japan historically, but Asia more and more.

I mean, I think Shanghai served that purpose a lot in the two thousands when China was sort of in this really interesting moment of ascendancy and not yet such a authoritarian grip on things.

But there's a looseness there.

I mean, I used to, I was in Shanghai for a few, for six months in 2006, 2007.

And there was like this really, really wild energy, really interesting energy.

And I think the people that choose these places who aren't from these places are looking for that kind of self -erasure and then the ability to rebuild.

Which is what moving to a culture that will never see you as part of their culture and moving to a culture where they don't understand your history at all, allows you to do that.

So it's pretty powerful.

Well, I mean, it's really interesting also, because I feel like so many of us, when we thought about college, even in the U .S., or in a culture where we understood it, where we were accepted, nobody asked.

That's a lot of what we were doing, especially the first year or two.

Oh yeah. I'm taking myself way back, trying to remember freshman year.

And I was like, I was really excited.

I remember there's a visceral, embodied feeling of whoever I was known as up until this moment, I actually get to step into an environment where I can choose whether I want that to follow me or I can choose to step into it and just show up very differently.

And then, like, actively choosing to show up differently.

But what you did is the extreme version of that.

I mean, I tried with the British accent and I was like, this isn't enough.

I need another language.

I need people who don't understand socioeconomic kind of placements.

But I think it is important to have those moments, especially after high school, after coming out of your town, wherever you may have grown up, it's so constricting.

And I think that is one of the, if not the most important purpose of college, is to get you to reimagine yourself, to rethink yourself, to learn how to think again.

These are all the things that I think are critical, outside of just ticking off boxes of whether or not I have this marketable skill now.

You know, it's I probably should have gone to a really, really classic hippy liberal arts, tiny university, college.

That's where I should have gone.

But no one in my family.

I've gone to schools.

Like read college or something.

Should've gone to read.

I should have, like, just shadowed Steve Jobs.

Taken some calligraphy courses.

I like that. I think that would have made me a lot happier, but it's daunting, you know, facing that landscape.

So you do, you do the best you can.

Yeah. I mean, when you catch in Japan then one of the things, because you didn't have any language at that point, right?

I had actually taken two very nonintensive years at university.

So it wasn't zero, but it was very low.

There was 13 or 14 levels of language class at the university I went to, and I was in two.

So whatever that, it wasn't that great.

Whereas kids who had studied at real intensive language -focused universities who had only done one year were entering at like 11 or 12, so it's pretty wild, like the gap there, if you really put in the energy.

So I'd studied a little, but I effectively knew nothing.

From what I understand also like when you show up, I know a lot of people who actually ended up heading to Japan sort of like early 20s -ish, and they would generally gravitate towards those expat communities and kind of stay fairly insular.

It sounds like you did almost the opposite, you sort of like immersed yourself and said, and it sounds like for you, maybe the language that was a little bit more connective tissue was music, was drumming.

I tried to not just get stuck in the clicks of foreigners hanging out with foreigners.

I mean, all the people in my school actually were incredible.

It was super diverse.

It was folks from all over Europe, all over Asia, Australia.

I mean, it really was like this idealized university experience and everyone was curious and hardworking and smart.

So it was a great group.

But I was also a musician.

Music had been a big part of my identity as a teenager, and was also one of those computers and music with the two things that were kind of, like, these are tools I can use to get to a different place.

So I immediately joined one of the music clubs at university, which was only Japanese people, and went for it.

And that was quite good.

And then my life was just immediately filled with, I was in the studio all the time, and I was playing in clubs and drinking too much. That's also where like all the drinking started too because like Japanese college kids is really, I mean, you think American college kids like to drink.

Japanese college kids put them to shame and it was a really great way to feel embedded in, I think, Tokyo, by getting access to all these like secret clubs and like, you know, playing gigs.

And like, it was great.

I was able to invite all the international kids to the shows and, you know, and then we had all of our Japanese fans and blah blah blah.

So, it was pretty fun, and I had been playing, as part of the reinvention thing, I had been playing pretty much like jazz my whole life.

You know, I'd been studying jazz.

I played rock steady and reggae in high school and I got to Tokyo and I was like, all right, let's do punk.

So, I was in a three -piece punk band.

As one does. Yeah, it was fun.

So, you're hanging there and at some point, though, what starts as, oh, let me go to Japan And that's sort of like there's this self -erasure element.

There's this immersing in a completely new, different context.

And then really losing yourself into it.

How and when does the switch get flipped that makes you say, well, maybe this isn't just a moment.

But maybe this is actually where I want to be?

In some ways, it doesn't get flipped ever.

In other ways, I think it flips immediately.

I think subconsciously, something flipped in the first week, And so I would just like to go from a place where the greater whole doesn't feel taken care of, where the resources aren't there.

You know, and that was sort of what was the traumatic part of university was seeing people who came from obviously resource -heavy places, just the shock of that, the inequity of opportunity distribution in America really knocked something loose in my, like really shook me.

and coming to a country like Japan, I think I could have gone to Sweden and had probably an identical experience.

You know, just coming to a country or even like, you know, the UK in the early 2000s was probably someone akin, it's a little more weird now, but there was something akin to this happening if I was like studying in London, but just that sense that the people, the strangers you pass on the street are taking care of is a powerful thing.

My friends weren't even taking care of, nevermind the strangers back home, you know, and you just go, wow, okay, this is possible?

It's like really hopeful.

I mean, it's really, really, really astounding and part of what I think has kept me here too, it's inspiring to be near that.

It's inspiring to live in a place that takes care of the people around you, that you feel like there is this thing bigger than us.

I mean, what's the point of building these societies, building these cities, if there aren't gonna be, if those resources, and there is such an abundance of resources.

This is the thing that kills me about when we talk about contemporary stuff I mean really it's just talking about contemporary America is this inability to recognize the insane vast absurd amount of resources that could easily be deployed in such a way that even in the States it feels like it does here.

That would be so easy to activate.

It's just funny that it doesn't get activated and it's one of the things that I think can be depressing unless you are in places where is activated.

So again like Scandinavia, big parts of Europe, Japan, and you see it functioning, you see it working, not without certain compromises to certain degrees, but I actually don't think when you talk about oh well there's this cultural compromise or this compromise it's more cultural compromises more than oh that's because of economic policy per se.

Japan does interesting things like, you're a home loan, primary home loan in Japan, the rate as of like six months ago was 0 .4%.

0 .4%, it means that anyone, first home, it's only for your primary home.

If you're not doing it for a primary residence, you don't get that rate.

But banks subsidize the, I mean it's not free, but it's effectively free money, you know, 0 .4 % is like a rounding error.

And then you can add things on top of it like there's a 0 .2 % upgrade.

So if you pay like 0 .6 % you get a life insurance policy connected with the loan where if you die, it's totally absolved, and that's the end of the loan.

But also, if you get diagnosed with literally any cancer, like if you get skin cancer, instantly the loan is nullified.

These are really, really, really kind things to do at large.

And the idea of your first home should be, or your primary residence, shouldn't be this thing of stress where you're worried about crazy variable mortgage rates, and you're paying 6 % or 8 % or whatever it might be.

That's just one example of how you can kind of create structures that enable people to do the stuff they should do, which is not thinking about mortgages and thinking about paying off loans, but building companies or building businesses or raising great families.

These are the things that make that raise the quality of life for everybody, not just the family itself.

It's just such a thoughtful way into creating, stepping into society and society in a very different way, like a holistic way where everyone feels like they're taking care of.

I mean, it's interesting also, because you look at things a couple of weeks ago, the latest version of the global happiness study came out.

It's always the same countries that are sort of like in the top 10.

Well, actually not always.

The US used to be and now it's pretty far down the list. I was like 29 or something, wasn't it?

But it's, it's the ones that tend to have like really strong social ties and social safety nets, which is kind of interesting to see all of is, I'm imagining like this becomes a part of like what you get really curious about and experience over time but like when you're a kid this is not what's keeping you in japan.

No but that sense of safety I think I think ambiently subconsciously huh that you know set a foundation to be like oh maybe this is a place to live no what I didn't know what I was doing I was just completely ridiculous I was blackout drunk half the time we didn't know anything about the history we didn't You know, we were studying some of a theology and politics here, but we really didn't understand anything.

And so when spring break hit my friend and I hitchhiked across the country.

We spent a month hitchhiking from Tokyo to Fukuoka and we got picked up by, I don't know, 20, 25 different cars.

And we would get blind blackout drunk with strangers in the middle of the rice patties and give food or whatever, or like a truck driver's truck got stuck on a mountain, snowy mountain near Hiroshima.

and we had to kind of get out and help push it up and smoke cigarettes.

We're trying to push this truck and we don't know where we are.

So it was pretty chaotic.

And it was really just how do I I was so hungry for all of it.

And it was like how do we just fill as much of this life as possible with everything we can see and everything we can touch here.

And then from Fukuoka we flew to Okinawa, we took boats down to Takitomijima, Ishigakijima, met a bunch of interesting people down there, stayed in a crazy hostile.

You know, even people I'm still friends with, to this day, that was 25 years ago.

I still I'm in contact with one of the people I met on that little trip I saw just two months ago.

That's amazing. It was pretty, pretty wild, but that it was really just, okay, here's a safe place to do as much exploring as you want to do.

I think that maybe that's really critical, a critical part of it is there was no sense of ever being in danger because Japan is so safe.

And, um, I think it just felt like let's go for it.

Whatever we can imagine.

Let's do it. Was there a sense of urgency also, like, was there anything, was there a voice inside of you that kind of said, well, this is going to end or was it more of just an open -ended like, let me just do what I can do while I'm here.

It was just, you know, for a year, that first, that first year, the plan was kind of to go to California and do some design stuff and the market collapsed when I was in Japan, that first year.

so like suddenly Silicon Valley doesn't exist anymore.

So I ended up applying to a different university while I was in Japan, I used the fact that I was in Japan as this kind of like lever to get into a good school, an even better school.

So I ended up going back for that, but then in the summer, between those two years, I came back to Japan for the summer for three months and did an internship, and then as soon as I graduated, I was back again.

In part because the language component was just so compelling, like that was the hook because I had taken Spanish classes in high school but I was terrible it was my worst class by far I just couldn't do it without immersion and Japan I came to Tokyo and I'm immersed in all this music and I remember we did that hitchhiking trip by day like 25 after having introduced myself several dozen times and you know you say the same things every day oh yeah I'm going to this school I like this music I do this I you know and it's It's funny.

It was like the wax on wax off thing with the karate kid.

You know, he's like, why is Mr Miyagi having me do all this stuff.

Why am I painting the fence like this?

And then suddenly it was just there.

It was like, Oh, I have language now.

That's wow. This is really exciting.

And I think the music component and having a musical ear is a big help for that as well.

And then just the kids I was surrounded by it were great, great people and they were all talented.

And so they were all just a couple levels higher than me.

So I was always hearing a slightly different grammatical deployment and I was oh, that's interesting.

What's that? What's that?

What's that? That was just addictive, to feel your body absorb this new language.

And with it, like we were talking about earlier, the ability to be someone else, to feel your mind move in different ways from your mother tongue.

All of that was just so seductive.

So I came back to go to university again and keep up the studies.

And at the same time, it's interesting, because you actually have a chapter in the latest book things become other things, literally titled language.

Where you described, like, don't just hang out in Tokyo, go out onto the other places, but also to hear the quote dirty language.

And then also, it really gets memory where you kind of drop into like how, what you hear in like the outer areas just brings you back to your childhood, the way that you and your friends used to hang out.

So there's like a familiarity at the same time.

Yeah, because I mean, all languages, like if you're an alien looking down, all language is identical.

Like, right, there's no real difference between no huge differences between the languages in the end.

But for us, like on this kind of like up close scale there certainly are.

And so then when you you start looking for analogs, you know, and when you get out into the countryside of Japan at first, unless you've really learned the language, you kind of don't hear what the local dialects are doing.

That's also part of what's really fun about the travels is in the walking and the meeting people in the middle of nowhere is luxuriating in these different dialects.

You begin to realize more and more, it's like, okay, in Tokyo, you don't really meet people.

I didn't meet that many people that reminded me of where I came from, but walking on the key peninsula in Mie, Nairoice, talking to like old fisher people or boat workers or the Ama divers or whatever, it's like their language and where I came from, it was like, wow, okay, there's something...

it is in conversation with one another, even though they are literally a world apart.

And that's fun. I mean, like having the ability to do that, I think to notice that and to play with that is also exciting because it means your language has hit a certain level as well and skill acquisition is fun, it turns out.

Yeah, who knew? Right?

So as you decide that, okay, I'm going to make this my home for like however long that feels right, you start to the life you struck to be living, you, as I've heard you describe, for the better part of 13 years, live in a room that is a six -to -talk me mat room, which is like, thinking about like, kind of like the size of a yoga mat almost. And six of those, and the Western mind hears that and they're like, what?

But it's not that uncommon, especially in the life that you were talking about, in the time of your life.

Well yeah, not only is it not that uncommon, but also like in New York, people live in really tiny places.

In San Francisco, people live in really tiny, expensive places.

Especially now, like postage -sized places, yeah.

Yeah, I think it's worse and worse now.

But Japan, I mean, I think Americans have a very perverted sense of like, expected space.

Yeah, it's just like, there's, America is big, there's a lot of land, whatever, building isn't that expensive because of whatever reasons.

So I think a lot of Americans are freaked out by this idea of minimalist. just, but Europe, you know, it's like, look at apartments in Paris or in London, you know, or New York.

I mean, there's a lot of smallness out there.

Italy apartments in Venice, things like that.

And Japan, I mean, Tokyo, one of the great gifts of the city to people is that you can live in pretty much any neighborhood you want and there's affordable housing in every single neighborhood.

And if you're okay with something that's a little older, it's easy, it's easy to do.

And you know, the cost is just so low.

I didn't come from and abundance, you know, it's like my bedroom growing up was actually smaller, I think it must've, I'm just, I'm trying to remember the size of that bedroom.

It was so small. I mean it must've been 100 square feet, I want to say maximum.

Is that even like, what would that be?

10 foot by 10 foot is 100 square feet.

So yeah, if that. It was like, that's basically the size of the bedroom I grew up in.

So like, you know, I came from a very sensetic sense of growing up.

So to live in these tiny rooms in Tokyo, which also were normalized, and so all my friends were living in small rooms. It wasn't like everyone was in a big room and I was in a small room.

It was like a superpower.

You know, it was really incredible.

And then it also meant that I could be uncompromising because rent was low, and I could focus on the work I wanted to work on.

I didn't have to take jobs to pay for rent.

I didn't want to pay.

Jobs I didn't want to do.

And I could just focus on thinking about books, thinking about book making, building relationships with printers, building relationships with writers, artists, you know, just trying to engage with that world, trying to basically give myself kind of a post -grad grad program of my own, about how to be an artist and how to be a creator and how to be a writer and that, and do it all in, you know, one of the biggest cities in the world.

So that's kind of what that afforded me.

But yeah, it's a good training program.

I feel like everyone for a couple of years in their 20s should live in a six mat tatami room apartment and sleep on the floor on a f -tong, because you realize not only is it not that bad, it's actually quite comfortable.

As a material, tatami is pretty astounding.

Since then I've never lived somewhere without tatami.

I always have tatami made.

So that's the other thing that's interesting about tatami.

It's standard sized.

Tokio has one size and Kansai has another size.

But tatami makers will come to your house and they'll make perfect fit like a glove to Tommy for any room, any space, any corner, and they're happy to do it, and it's not that expensive.

So it's actually this kind of incredible material to create these spaces of just kind of spine leisure where you can just kind of lie on pillows and read books and take naps and roll around with your dog or whatever.

It's an amazing building material.

It's an amazing flooring material.

Yeah, I mean it sounds super cool.

And we'll be right back after word from our sponsors.

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So you know that moment when someone asks how are you and you just kind of automatically respond good without even thinking about it.

I started wondering what if we could actually mean it when we say we're good?

That's one of the things that drew me to Headspace.

So Headspace is this app that helps me and 100 million people with their mental health and well being with guided meditations, and mindfulness practices, and breathing, and calming exercises, and so much more.

I am reducing stress, boosting my mood, and sleeping better.

The other night i listened to their night town sleep cast that had me drifting off literally, i feel like my eyes closed and i was just asleep and i literally just finished a 7 minute midday check -in meditation.

Which was just such a great reset for me so whether you're dealing with stress, looking to improve your sleep, or just Wanting to feel more centered?

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home cooking. Here's what's fascinating while we are out there creating these rich travel experiences our homes could be working for us I mean think about it those weeks when you're away your space could be an airbnb too.

Whether it's a business trip family vacation or weekend getaway or visiting your kid or relative your home could be earning while you're exploring the world.

So ready to turn your next adventure into an opportunity your home might be worth more than you think find Find out how much at Airbnb .com slash host. I don't want to skip over what you mentioned though because this is so powerful this notion of you having the ability to live in a comfortable space and really control your means gave you the space to be uncompromising and what you said yes to.

So you start to develop an interest in books and bookmaking and design and art.

And rather than saying OK so I've just signed like a big lease for a whole bunch of space and I literally need to take a job, largely to cover my living expenses, you make the opposite decision that a lot of people make and say like, let me minimize this.

Let me sort of like really strip it down because the thing that matters most to me is I want to do the work that I want to do and I want to develop the aesthetic sensibility that I want to develop and that's paramount.

I mean, for me, it wasn't even a question.

It wasn't like, Oh God, should I move into a bigger place?

that I like, I had very little savings and at that point I did have marketable skills because I'd kind of spent my teenage years again, seeing technology as the way out as the, as kind of the hack to get somewhere else in the world.

So I had done an internship when I was 19 at like kind of a big, quite boring, but still everyone was really sweet, very nice and sweet to me company in the Valley and it paid really, really well.

And I just remember feeling that summer I was walking around San Francisco with a friend and saying to him, Rob, I was like, Rob, I, you know, I can't do this.

I'd already, in my teenage years essentially concocted some artistic impulse that I felt I had to follow that I felt I had to kind of like abide by or respect or at least see through to some degree.

And so when I got to Tokyo too, it was, I was able to kind of continue that because I had touched world of kind of high paying office job stuff.

Early on I was really lucky.

I mean, that was like just such a fluke of an internship that I got random connections, IRC stuff I was doing when I was 13 really, really, really truly just like sliding towards randomness.

But because I had already had that experience, I'd sort of quelled that question mark inside me where it was like, well, what if I went and did this?

What would it be? And that was kind of an ideal environment.

Everyone was really sweet.

There was no stress kind of working on interesting problems and it paid really, really well but the commute made me wanna shoot myself in the face every morning.

And I was just like, I remember making a covenant with myself in my Honda Civic with the muffler about to fall off, I'm on 101 commuting, and I was just like, we are never, ever, ever gonna ever agree to anything that forces us to do this again.

I mean, I just felt death happening, you know, 19 years old already.

So that kind of, let's minimize costs in order to maximize artistic exploration and artistic freedom.

It was an easy decision for me to make.

That said, I think that you do need stresses on the system in order to push it forward. And I do think there, like look I've just been really lucky.

But I also know that Tokyo can be so easy that you can tread water forever.

And I know people, you know, you meet people who are in their 50s and 60s and 70s or whatever that have just been here forever and you can just see how they've sort of treaded water in a way where if they had maybe been doing the same thing they were trying to do like in New York City, there was kind of a pressure because there's so many people doing, competing.

And I think that could be really healthy.

And so it's just a matter of finding how do you balance that.

But getting the basics of like not paying $3 ,000 for a shoebox is pretty silly.

Get rid of that. Like you don't need that in your life.

And you can kind of figure out other ways to inject self -concocted or found external pressures to push you forward as an artist, but the cost of living thing is a big cornerstone of it all.

Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense and, and it really allowed you to just lean into this other part of you that was just like more and more, more like this is there's something is speaking to you and you're like the aesthetics of bookmaking and art and design and also writing.

you know I know that you had sort of like a stint back in the valley for a hot minute when the iPad comes out then flipboard and it becomes sort of like the darling, you know, of the the new apps for that and you're there for a little bit and then...

and then you leave that to do a writing residency.

Yeah. What's the through -line with writing for you?

Is it something that was always there or is it something that kind of like emerged later?

Oh, it was always there.

I was writing... I remember I was writing Akira 2 like fan fiction when I was like 10 or whatever.

No kidding. Yeah, always there, always there, always loved it.

And, yeah, I was always just compelled and drawn.

I remember Stephen King The Dark Tower, The Gunslinger, that first book, I think it was one of the first adulty books I ever read, maybe it was like fourth grade.

It's like when you experience a great piece of art or great movie, and you feel kind of filled with the essence of that thing, and you want to emulate it.

I mean, I felt that that Holy with my entire body.

I remember it so distinctly.

And I remember like the opening of book too, where he's like on an airplane and try and eat this tuna fish sandwich and.

And I did like that seared into my mind.

So yeah, this connection, this, this love of, or connection to books and like this sort of almost like pheromonal interest in prose.

And I was reading Stephen King because that's all anyone read around us.

Like that was, that was the deepest, most literary thing that was in, in, in town.

And then as I got, I got into, you know, university and actually one of the greatest, there were a couple of great things in the tumultuous first years of university and one was freshmen writing seminar and we read The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisarnos and, you know, hilariously, she's writing about this kind of immigrant experience.

And that book spoke to me like, so, so intensely, like I'm definitely not, who that book is supposed to speak to as far as I can tell right.

But it was it reconfigured my brain completely in terms of like what pros could do and how pros should feel and I just remember you know emulating her soon after and actually I was in this emulation mode and I was writing short stories and I wrote a short story strangely enough about Brian so you know this is the main character basically the or the ambient main character and things become other things and the first piece of writing I ever really put out in the world was this Bryan short story, and actually won an award and was included in this national collection of fiction, freshman writing seminars

all over the country and McMillan I think picked, you know, there's like 30 short stories from all over the country and so that got in there and I was actually commuting on 101 on the way to that job actually I was going on the way home from that job and I got the call, they said, Hey, you, you know, we've picked you for this thing.

And I had written some insane pseudonym in for my name.

Like, like, uh, I f I forget what it was.

It was like, I think, cause I was really into like doctor Octagon the rapper or something back then and they were like, you should use your real name.

Like don't use doctor Octagon.

And I was like, okay, fine.

Yeah. Yeah. Use my real name.

But it was, um, that has always been there.

Like this kind of ventriloquistic impulse, you know, and really like the house on thing really shocked me, I think because of the simplicity and the power going hand in hand in a book like that, I'd never seen before.

There were no errors, there was no pomp, there was no pretension.

It was just really straightforward, simple prose that just freakin' cut right to the heart.

And I was like, wow, okay, this is the kind of literature that represents where I come from in a way that none of this other stuff does.

Ulysses is like, that has nothing to do with me.

Or Pride and Prejudice, that has nothing to do with.

There's no, I'm not seen in any of that literature.

But there's something about that prose that really made me feel like, wow, okay, yeah, sit in this register for a while.

Yeah, I mean, when things come together like that, it's just, it's so powerful.

Often, I feel like, we don't have moments like that often in our lives, but when we do, I think a lot of us, when they drop, They can often be so jarring that rather than saying yes and standing in a place of wonder and curiosity, we kind of reject them.

We rebut them. We even tell ourselves that this isn't happening.

I'm not seeing or feeling what I think I'm seeing and feeling because to acknowledge this would be so just darn to my system right now that it would be disorienting on a level that I don't want to be disoriented.

So we kind of push it aside and then wonder why we, quote, haven't found or thing or things where our whole lives once been knocking at the door of our psyche for decades.

Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I think I felt the exact opposite.

I mean, maybe this is self -selecting.

It's like as soon as I feel any of those, I'm just like running towards it as fast as I can and kind of like without, without even looking 10 feet down the road, I'm just like barreling, barreling in that direction, which I think the hitchhiking across Japan trip was sort of like that.

We were just like so hungry, we wanted to just be fully intoxicated by how do we maximize like just being here and touching everything and smelling and feeling and eating everything, and I think that trip was emblematic of that.

But yeah, I think a lot of, most people are really great at creating excuses not to do things, and that's why the cost of living stuff, I think, is great to have removed because that tends to be the most extensive excuse.

I can't do it because I've got this thing.

I had to do this thing and blah blah blah.

Especially when you're young.

When you're older, things change.

And especially if you've gotten, if you opt into a certain set of things in your 20s, and then you arrive in your 30s, and you kind of double down on that stuff, like by the time you're 40, you're not going to, it's almost impossible to change.

Like if you have got a certain kind of mortgage, and you've got a certain kind of friend group, and you have kids, and you have this thing, and you have all these financial responsibilities.

Yeah, it's just a lot harder, and it's not just your decision anymore at that point also.

Exactly, exactly. So it's really about baking in those impulses as soon as possible, really in your teenage years.

And it'd be interesting to do some research on, like, how do you cultivate that in a teenager to get rid of that fear?

That would be amazing, actually.

Yeah. It's interesting because as you referenced also again, sort of like, you know, like the, the cross country hitchhiking, and also you're running towards this impulse in your case.

Which I think brings us to, also in my curiosity around, you know, the big walks.

So at some point years into your trajectory, you basically, you know, a guy named John McBride and Ozzy, people may or may not know his name, kinda says to you, hey, let's go for a walk.

But not just a short walk.

You know, like it's not like, hey, let's meet for a walk and have a little coffee and chat.

And this starts like a season of these giant walks.

Kind of take me into this a little bit.

Yeah, John invited me, I mean, John and I met through a mutual friend and John was involved with the art world.

John has this really Forrest Gump -ian history.

He ran Sky TV. He launched Sky TV with Rupert Murdoch here in Japan.

He was setting up airline routes for Anset, which is an Australian airline that doesn't exist anymore, but I think he opened the Osaka, Sydney route or something like that.

So he just had this really bizarre history, and then he basically retired when he was like 45, let's say, because running Sky TV was so intense.

And then he shifted into, because he is that in his heart, like an academic, he shifted into the art world.

And so he had been deeply engaged with aboriginal art.

I don't know if you remember about 20 years ago, there was kind of this world tour at all the major kind of modern art museums of contemporary Aboriginal art that was happening, huge pieces by these kind of really old folks in the, you know, in the desert and stuff.

And like John was kind of instrumental in doing that, and he supported all of these young artists, essentially buying lots of their work, collecting it, and then doing donations.

So he has like, he has, you know, collections at the British Museum and other museums around the world in order to give a platform to these younger artists.

That's kinda, that was the purpose of his collecting and donating.

And he learned this all from his mentor, who was a big gallery director in Australia.

of America. So because he was doing all this art stuff, I had done an art book and a friend was like, oh, you guys should meet.

And we met and it was just like, we met for breakfast and we stood up at 5pm, you know, it was just like we can just like instant like mind meld and it was fun.

And then he just kind of, you know, he'd invite me on little things.

We went to James Charles House of Light with a couple of Australian artists who were visiting and that was kind of interesting.

And then I don't remember exactly why, but he had He spent his late teens.

He came to Japan when he was really young.

He spent his late teens in Japan doing research, Japanese literary research on the road.

So basically going, walking the Tokaido, walking the Nakasendo, walking the 88 temples, walking the Okunohoso Michi, in order to understand the literature.

For those who also don't know any of those surfaces these are long, like, walks, potentially hundreds of miles or kilometers.

Yeah, so they could be a thousand kilometers or, you know, 400 miles, 500 miles, things like that.

So he had been doing that in his late teens, early 20s, and he kind of took a break from that and then in his early 50s, late 40s, early 50s, he kind of came back to it.

And just as he was coming back to what we met, and he was like, oh, hey, you should come like, come to Koyasan with me.

You know, I was like, what's that?

It's funny, it's just so easy to not, because history and culture can be really inaccessible.

especially if you come from a place where there is no culture, there is no history, so you're not thinking about those things.

And if you don't have someone to go, hey, look, there's a door here actually.

You've been standing next to this door for 20 years, or at that point, 13 years.

Why don't you open this door?

It's just been here since the day you arrived in Japan, and it's like, what?

Oh, I guess there is a door here.

Let me open it. Oh wow, there's historical walks and they bring you to incredible places, and you know, places like Koya -san that are just filled with this kind of power spot energy and incredible nature and history, and then the more you dig the language and just kind of quirkiness of culture.

The monks up in Koya -san, which is like the center of Shingon Buddhism, they're very bizarre people.

There's one who's a famous race car driver.

It's just like, who?

What is happening here?

So he just kind of unlocked, or just very gently opened the door.

That was always there—that I could have always walked through at any moment.

Instead of hitchhiking across from Tokyo to Fukuoka, if we had known there was a historical walk from Tokyo to Kyoto, oh, a hundred billion percent we would have done that.

But like, we just didn't know that.

There's no one talking about these things.

There's no one exposing us to these things.

So what's the poor man's version of doing a historical walk?

You hitchhike because that's all you know.

So I think the physical challenge of the walk would have totally lit our 20 -year -old minds on fire.

I'm like, yeah, we're gonna go do that.

So he just kind of opened that door for me and started inviting me and he had a kind of freedom because he had done his work.

He had compressed 60 years of work into 20 years from 24 to 44.

And I had come back from my stint in California and I was back living in a shoebox.

My cost of living again, I'm 33.

my cost of living is a thousand dollars a month.

So I had this freedom to say yes to whenever he was going to do research. And we started researching together.

We started walking together and it just kept going in a way that felt intuitive and also just an easy friendship.

That's really what it boiled down to.

It's just funny because people meet us and they're like, they're like, oh, are you a father and son?

That's awesome. He's 20 years older than me.

And of course, that just pisses John off.

He's just totally annoyed by that.

And then we're like, no, actually we're not father or son.

And then they're like, oh.

It's like, oh, I see, you got the young lover which we also just find hilarious because you couldn't have less sexual energy between two human beings, like two living creatures.

Honestly, just an utterly effortless friendship.

And I don't think there's anyone in the world that is easier for me to travel with than Jon.

And so if we're together for two weeks, 24 hours a day, sleeping in the same room, essentially, it's like you get all these tatami rooms, you're just sleeping in a row, it takes zero energy for me.

And in fact, it feels mutually kind of elevating and energy -giving.

I think that was also why we continued for so long, is because that doing these walks together, just because it really was, for me at least, maybe for John, it was terrible, and he was just totally losing his mind.

He's like, oh my God, Craig is complaining about this thing again, or he's, Oh, you know, he's doing this or he wants to walk too fast or, you know, who knows.

But for me, it was just pure joy, effortless, pure joy of this world, these doors being opened and more doors and more doors and more doors, and watching John move through the world as an archetype, the way he uses language, his kindness, his patience, his ability to manipulate people in the best possible way.

So like to get into a shrine that you're not normally allowed to get into, like, watching him use language to finagle that.

Or just getting access to things that would otherwise be off limits.

Or blowing people's minds to such a degree that they say, hey, I have this thing I've never shown anyone, let me show you guys.

And watching that all kind of unfold, completely reconfigure my brain in the best possible way.

And there's something so beautiful also about this notion that, So you're deepening into this literally chosen family level friendship.

And you're exploring the world together.

And you're deepening into ...

And there's a physicalization of it.

You're literally moving through space the entire time that you're doing this.

And we rarely do things like that.

Maybe we do it for a hot minute.

Like I said, you know, I'm very fortunate I live in Boulder, Colorado.

Nobody goes for a coffee here.

We go hikes. So I'm out with friends all the time for a couple of hours in the mountains just walking next to them, shoulder to shoulder and developed astonishing friendships in a relatively short amount of time just by doing that.

And I can imagine what if you extend that to a week?

What if you extended to a month?

What if you extended to two months, like 30, 40, 50, 60 days?

The full sweep of I'm sure emotions, physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual comfort and discomfort have to emerge.

Boredom, I have to imagine.

That's a part of the experience also.

AO, Well, boredom is when you're alone.

When I'm with John, there's no boredom.

It's just… Well, it can be with John.

The one thing that can… It's not necessarily boredom.

It's just information overload.

John is certifiably, I would say, genius level.

This is why he's running a company for Rupert Murdoch in the 90s.

This is why he's setting these things up in, in his twenties is kind of a savant, but because of that, his notion of enough information is like 400 billion times more than a normal person.

So completely different set point than the average mortal, the thing with John is like, sometimes I just have to walk away.

He'll be, he'll talk with someone for literally an hour and a half more than I would talk with them.

You know, it's like it'd be five minutes would be enough for John.

He's talking for two hours.

He's taken notes on all this.

I'm just like, it's just overload.

So that's the only point of boredom is when things like that happen, but it's, you know, it's, it's all coming from such a good place.

And I think it's important to also note that hilariously like my editor at random house wrote me a note about something about one of the chapters, like a John chapter.

And she's like, ah, it's so amazing.

This fatherly figure and I forwarded it to John and he was like, just mortified.

Cause he's like, we, there's no fatherly, there's no hierarchy present at all in the friendship.

It is just a friendship, that's it.

And there's something really nice about that.

And yet from the outside, everyone is constantly trying to like, you want to map it.

A hundred percent. So when you start going out on your own then, and when I use the word boredom, by the way, I wasn't using it as a negative.

Because I would imagine when you start going out on your own and okay, so now you're taking these long walks on yourself.

And, Grant, you meet tons of like interesting characters and people and the places themselves become characters in this as you're walking.

But I wonder also, with the role of I'm literally out on the road, you know, and there are going to be long swaths of time where all I can do is look like listen, smell, and be with my mind.

And how much of that is also a part of the experience of these long walks for you?

Yeah, I mean, that's ultimately the entire experience.

That's the point, is to get to those places, to cultivate that kind of space of boredom in order to heighten attention in order to heighten all the other senses.

Because when you take away that stimulus of the phone, the internet, infinite amounts of information coming into your brain all the time.

And we should mention, by the way, when you do these, generally, technology stays off for most of this.

For most of it, yeah, I kind of have these rules.

So I'd be doing all these things with John, and then I started tiptoeing my way out and doing things alone just because there was more stuff I wanted to do and John would be busy or he wouldn't be in the country or something.

So I started doing these things on my own and building up more and more confidence of being able to do them on my own.

And, um, once I started doing it on my own, I very quickly realized I wanted to, I needed a set of rules and I'd actually done Vipassana, a 10 -day Vipassana retreat at the same time.

I started doing a lot of these solo walks and the Vipassana retreat was a 10 -day, no, obviously no technology thing.

And I think what was shocking about that was feeling the, my physiological addiction to information constantly entering my brain.

I just wanted that so badly, and doing the Vipassana showed me how to move beyond that and actually how present that really was.

And so I kind of came out of that way more sensitive to how my phone was making me feel or how certain websites like Twitter made me feel.

And I tried to cut as much of that back as possible.

And so on the big walks, I have my rules of like no social media, no news, no podcasts, no anything that allows you to teleport essentially, and you have to be fully present in the walk, in that moment, in the walk.

When you do that, you really do open up these spaces in the mind.

So when you get rid of that inundation of information, which I think we're all suffering from for the most part, like everyone listening to this right now is probably jogging and doing something else.

And like, you know, it's our, they're cooking while they're listening to this.

It was like, you know, multiple levels of multitasking constantly going on.

I what's great about walking as a physical act is it's really hard to do other things while you're doing it.

You can walk and chew gum, but walking and looking at your phone is really stupid and it's like both things are suffering.

While walking and getting rid of all that information, you just feel your mind open up.

You feel those parts of your mind that were otherwise filled with essentially meaningless information.

It's so much of the news that we consume.

Wait a week and get the summary of it because it's going to change anyway, especially now with the chaos of, of these news cycles.

So the idea that everything has to be consumed in real time is sort of a contemporary pathology that we probably be better without.

And when you start to get rid of those, those sort of inroads into your mind, yeah, that boredom thing kicks in, but with that boredom thing, that space of boredom allows for is just, at least for me, an incredible amount of writing.

So I just find my mind immediately wants to write.

It fills all of that stimulated space with words, sentences, paragraphs, thoughts, and desires to connect with people and desires to synthesize what they're saying.

And it heightens my awareness for quirky things that they might say strange things that might say that are unique to that person or of that moment.

And I'm just way more receptive.

It's like the antennas are just so much stronger for all of those things.

And then also just like patterns in the world and looking for like in Japan, all over the country.

There are these hidden Christian signs that are sort of present all over the country.

It's very weird. There are these strange little black and yellow signs about Jesus' blood.

I mean, it's very much like… You'd see driving around North Carolina.

It's like, why are these signs in Japanese all over the country, on little barns and stuff?

And so it's noticing that, which otherwise you just pass by and you kind of never take a second look at or like the Kisa -ten.

It's like when I first walked the Nakasendo, which was from Tokyo to Kyoto, I didn't intend to eat pizza toast every day.

I didn't intend to go to Kisa -ten, which are these mid -century Japanese -style kind of diner cafes.

But I'm walking. I don't have any stimulation, and I'm hungry, and I start noticing that everything is shuttered, except for barbershops and like Kisa -ten.

I was like, okay, this is another pattern to investigate.

So it just, it gives your mind the space to engage fully with the world in a way that being plugged in doesn't.

And the walk acts as kind of a forcing function for it all because it gives you purpose.

I like walking, but for me, and I'm lucky in the sense that my body likes walking too, like I can do 30, 40K a day, I can carry a big pack.

I was always really self -conscious about my very muscular butt.

Because pants like never fit me because my butt, now I finally understand why it's there.

Yes, finally this butt has a purpose.

It's like I could climb seven mountains a day with a 30k pack and it's like whatever.

My butt's like, yeah, give me more of this.

So it was just funny.

So I'm lucky in that sense that I can walk for 40 days and my body for the most part is okay, but the walking itself is not the thing that I'm insorcelled by.

I'm not seduced by walking.

Walking, as a physiological act, opens up in the mind and makes it easy to say, I'm gonna get rid of these other things.

Because that point -to -point purpose lays a foundation of purpose for your day.

I have to get to this place.

Okay, I'm gonna get to that place.

That's the work for today and it makes it so much easier for me, at least, to say, okay, no social media, no news, no teleporting.

And so that's really the power of the walk that's what I really love about the walk and also biking, it's just too technical.

It's like you have to think about gear and maintenance and, okay, you got to flatter, deal with that.

With walking, it's just like, there's a purity to it and a simplicity, just your feet.

That's the only thing you really have to care about, like worry about your feet, make sure they're okay, make sure your knees are okay.

That's about it. I mean, I love that and it sounds like for you, like there's an attunement that happens when you're walking.

It's like, especially, like without the technology out there, you're, like, you're paying attention to the environment, to everything around you in a way that you wouldn't be if you were cycling, or if you had tech, or if you were hitchhiking, whatever it may be.

And then when you get to a place at the end of the day, I know you've written about oftentimes the cycle that you have when you're on these longer walks where you're out on the walk in the evening, you might sit down there and basically collect your images and your thoughts and maybe write for four or five hours that evening and do this day -in and day -out.

And I think it was probably Pizza Toast that book, if I have it right and tell me if I don't, where basically you were sharing in real -time with a select group of people, but, and they could write back to you, but it didn't get passed on to you until you finally returned.

And then you basically got everything all at once.

Was that the book or was it Kisa Ba Kisa?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Kisa Ba Kisa is the book that came out of that walk.

But as I was doing that first big walk that was kind of member, so I have membership program, and it was sort of the first member funded walk, I kind of divined some permission from the members to do it.

I built this really weird SMS messaging system where I could message a little note in a photo every night and then people could respond.

But I didn't see the responses and they were collected on a server.

And then ideally we're going to have it auto kind of lay out this book, but that was too complicated.

So I just gave the Excel file of responses to a designer and said, hey, can you lay out this book?

Here's the templates, don't show me the messages.

and then he laid out the book hit print on blurb, got one book.

It was waiting for me at home at the end of the walk.

So just again, like thinking about the tightness of contemporary communication, like the, of these loops, these communication loops, like until 40 years ago with before email, it was like, you had, you wrote a letter that was it.

I mean, it's so crazy how recent that was where that, you know, or you made a phone call, but if you really want it to like sit with your thoughts and like send someone and something considered, it was like, you wrote a letter.

That took a couple days, and then they took a couple days and they came back.

So that loop was like maybe a week long of communication.

And now all of our loops are on the millisecond level.

It's like people are watching in real time, there's red receipts, which I think are one of the worst things that we've ever, self -inflicted harm that we've ever done to ourselves.

It's like putting red receipts on messages.

Talk about like traumatizing teenagers, like that's absolutely the worst thing we could have done in messaging apps.

And so all these loops are just so stupid and tiny and a knee -jerk and reactive, and the expectations are that the responses are going to be immediate.

And so when you can kind of subvert that, you just find people open up in a way that they don't say like normal email or normal social media.

And so I got this book at the end of The Big Walk and it was just really mind blowing.

Like kind of the stuff people were writing to me, just the intimacy of it because they knew I wasn't gonna see it immediately.

So I think that gave them a little bit of a permission to dig emotionally more deeply.

And then I went back and responded to those in essays over the course of several months.

I was able to mix sharing how I felt in real time with this older analog level of communication loop in terms of timeframes and then fold that back into doing newsletters that were then doing email essay responses to some of the questions that were posed in the book.

So it ended up being this really kind of beautiful experiment that was, for me, extremely successful.

Hammered Home, important it was to protect yourself from those loops, from the quickness of social media, to enable your mind to really luxuriate and sit in the boredom spaces and what your attention is drawn to in those moments of boredom.

Because when the loops are tight, you're constantly getting pinged and there's always another dopamine ping hit waiting for you.

And so say I was doing realtime communication on the walks, a piece of my mind always thinking about, oh, has someone responded?

I should look, maybe I should respond, I don't know.

Yeah, and how much would you miss?

I mean, by not being there.

Yeah, you'd miss everything.

Right, it's like when I go to a concert, and I see everybody holding their cell phones up over their head, and I want to see you sort of capture the moment and get credit for it.

I'm just like, what if you were just here?

You're never gonna see that again.

And you're just sending it out for social currency so other people know that you were there.

But you've just missed something that could have been just gorgeous.

And we do that all day every day in our lives now, in everyday events, in everyday interactions, with a barista or in the great moments.

It's just like, we're partially there but rarely ever fully there.

And I'm always wondering, how much of our lives are we missing through this simple quirk of technology and behavior?

All of it. We're missing all of it.

We really are. I mean, I get traumatized by people on Instagram who do like 20 to 50 stories a day.

I still use Instagram because when I'm doing these big walks and people want to connect, it's actually a great way to connect with businesses out in the middle of nowhere or young people out in the middle of nowhere.

It kind of creates these threads back to those places that have paid really meaningful dividends over the years just of staying connected or being able to call on for favors or something if I'm going back to the area.

So for me, Instagram has that kind of value.

So I open it every now and then to just take a peek.

And I'm just shocked at these people who every day are doing 20, 30, 40 stories and you just realize are so manipulated by the system itself.

And some of these people are quote unquote artists or creators, and I want to kind of just shake them and go, okay, take a month off, you're not allowed to post any stories, You're only allowed to do your work.

Just work on your work, get the writing done, go take photos without thinking about Instagram.

Sit in that space because I think it's easy to forget what life outside of that dopamine loop feels like.

And I do think the art suffers.

I think it is impossible to make great art, which is art that is getting to certain kinds truths or art that you know is offering a new perspective on things when you're plugged into those systems because those systems are so they're so anodyne.

That's the thing that is so frustrating about it it's like no one has ever made great art in an Instagram story.

Ever. There's no one's ever like you know no one's seen an Instagram story and been like this belongs in the MoMA.

That will never happen because the system doesn't want that.

Although somebody may have taken a picture of something that's great art that's hanging in my own chair on Instagram, but I so agree with that.

Inferiors though, I mean, I think a lot of people, especially like people with an artistic impulse, people who are makers and artists, and like, they really want actually, they want to make great art.

They want to figure out what is my truth in this moment in time and figure out how can I express it in a way that feels aligned with me.

And at the same time, they bought into a mythology that says you have got to spend a substantial chunk of your time out there actually being perpetually public, because that's how you're going to get the work out.

But we never look at the opportunity cost of that.

And then we're always wondering, why do I always have to keep being here and here and here and here, over and over and over and over?

And never asking the question, is part of this because I'm taking a pretty substantial chunk of my bandwidth, my instinct, my attunement, my attention, my creative expression, and allocating it towards that rather than allocating it to the craft so that I can create something so that when I do step into those platforms in those communities and those spaces, what I have to offer is now at that level that you're describing where instead of people saying, Oh, they're just like, Oh, sweet.

What? Oh, wow. I'm in tears.

I need to actually tell everyone bring everyone that I know here and we want to participate in this.

I think so often we don't think of the opportunity cost to the work itself when we're doing this.

Yeah, there's a huge opportunity cost. The community is so important to creative practice.

It's so critical and I think that the real move for young artists is to find ways to create community in physical space and create recurring community events, connections, meetups that can be completely divorced from social media stuff.

And I think very quickly, you realize the richness of that is 100 billion times greater than whatever phony kinds of connections you feel like you can make on Instagram Stories.

It's like, Instagram Stories aren't worthless.

TikTok isn't worthless.

But you have to, I think, be very careful of how you engage with that space because that space wants you to just live there forever.

That space is not your friend.

What am I saying no to by saying yes to this?

I think we don't ask that question enough.

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I want to dive into that notion of community a little bit more.

You mentioned earlier membership people that are literally, I mean you built this fascinating model.

I'm absolutely, I'm so fascinated by this.

Where effectively you have a community, although I'm actually curious whether you actually call them a community.

You have a group of people who've raised their hands to say like what you're doing is interesting to me.

it's cool to me, for some reason I want to not only ride along with you and participate in the things that you're sharing and what you're experiencing, both in terms of whether it's a newsletter or every couple of years, beautiful social objects that really distill it into things.

They're not just saying I want to participate in it, I want to live vicariously a little bit, but I also want to pay you so that you can go and do these things and then create these things.

Take me into this model because it's also not different because you've also incredibly generously written something like 40 ,000 words, basically over a six -year window of having this paid model explaining like, this is what I did.

This is what I learned.

This is how to change it.

This is the evolution of it.

And not too long ago published the sort of like the rules of this, of the special projects that you do.

And early on in that list, you say, let me be really clear here.

This is about me making books.

This isn't about me managing a community.

It's beautiful. And also really contrarian.

That's how you have to operate.

If you want to be a quote, unquote, artist, or, you know, kind of untethered creative person in the world, you have to be militant about protecting space for you to do your work.

The membership program started in 2019, January 2019, and it just kind of came out of frustration with not being able to sell bigger articles to bigger magazines.

And I had a whole set of writing I wanted to be doing and I didn't know how to do it.

in the sense of I was never trained to be a long form writer in magazines or whatever and like I'd done all these writing residencies but it was all kind of fiction.

I was just having a really hard time selling these pieces and I finally just hit this wall and I was like fine I guess I'll do a membership program because it was right around when everything was kind of emerging.

Substack was courting me like crazy back then, they really wanted me to join.

But I don't like constricted spaces and so like Patreon wasn't interesting to me.

I like I like feeling as a creative person unrestricted in—I love rules, but I love when they're my rules.

I don't love it when some other ding -dong is making the rules for me.

I love rules as long as I set them.

Yeah. I love them, and I love setting them.

And I love sticking by them until I don't want to stick by them anymore and then make more rules.

So I ended up building my own system using Memberful to do payments and stuff like that.

But Memberful is very open.

And back then it even more barebones.

It was really just this kind of NPR style like, I'm literally giving you nothing.

You've just been reading my work for, say, 12 years and want to support me and I'm going to just try to be more radically independent now.

That was kind of the pitch. It started with that.

Then like I said, my first big walk from that was the Nakasendo walk.

That really unlocked this sense of power that a community supporting you financially can bring to your work.

The kind of permission that comes from that.

I'd say that's been the thing I've divined from this community is permission." And that first year, I didn't have a cohesive manifesto.

I didn't have rules, really.

I just wasn't going to make anything—I knew that from the beginning.

I didn't want to make things just for the community because I didn't want to get caught in this Catch -22 of you're doing a community to make your work, but you end up making work for the community, and so you don't do the work you want to do in the beginning.

That's what want to avoid.

And then that second year, 2020, when COVID hit, it put the breaks on like me traveling anywhere.

I was like, okay, well, let me do a book because that one off book I did with the responses from everyone was so powerful to me.

And it reminded me because in my twenties, I'd been making books, beautiful books.

That's how I connect with John.

And then my thirties, I sort of stepped away from books a bit.

I was kind of focused more on my own craft. I didn't want excuses to not be writing.

And so I was spending all of my time doing residencies and and just living in my my craft And I was like, well maybe yeah, you know I do love love love books and I want to like what if I went back and on my own entirely Independently on my own because in my 20s, I had a kind of a business partner and we were running Yeah, this publishing company and I was like what if I did this completely on my own where it's just me And we really went crazy because it's covid.

We can't do anything anyway, like just try to make a really beautiful book.

And I leaned into that, and then that book priced at 100 bucks, I thought based on my history in publishing, I was like, okay, this will take me a couple years to sell a 1000 of these.

And I wanted to be able to offer a discount, a coupon to members and the membership partner.

I was like, oh, okay, this will be the first like membership perk.

Beyond just like patronage.

Thank you for doing what you're doing.

Yes, it's like this is like gonna be the first tote bag, the first NPR tote bag and I was like, okay, I want to offer a discount to members, especially yearly members who are paying me a hundred bucks a year, I want to give them a discount.

I looked at Kickstarter and like you couldn't do coupons with Kickstarter.

I was like, this is bullshit.

I looked at Shopify for the first time ever in my life and I wish I looked at it earlier because I bought Shopify stock so much sooner.

It's just such a good product.

I was blown away by how freaking good Shopify was and I was able to build.

This is pre -LLMs, pre like code helpers.

I was able to build a Kickstarter clone called Craig's starter in Shopify over the course of like a week.

And I was like, okay, this is cool.

And I could do coupons and.

And so I launched that and it was just bananas.

The, we sold out in two days, a thousand copies of that first edition, which I was just like, wow, I didn't think that was going to happen.

And so many people joined the membership program to get that discount.

And I just realized there was this incredible potential for even deeper symbiosis between me wanting to produce this work, which to me felt like just the apotheosis of giving shape to what I was doing, and then people wanting to support that and support me as a patron and get a little kickback with the discount.

That was just, whoa, okay.

That was not planned.

And then in that moment, it was like everything reconfigured itself.

It was like, okay, this is what we're doing for the next 20 years.

when you say a book, by the way, you know like, because people heard you say a hundred dollars for a book like, wait, what?

We're talking about a book that is a beautiful, like literally it's a work of art.

It's a very small, limited run.

So this is like a limited edition, like piece of art.

You know, like this is something that's extraordinary.

That said, and you having a really strong, like as used that word earlier in conversation, uncompromising aesthetic.

When you're like, okay, I'm going to put this first thing out into the world.

The typical book is like, the actual price is 26 bucks but people ended up paying like 15 to 20 bucks.

I'm charging $100 just and yes it's a special book and it's beautiful and it's handmade and nervous about that at all?

Were you freaked out about it at all or were you just like, this is what this is worth?

No because... So I taught at Yale for 10 years in the Yale publishing course.

So every summer I'd fly out and I'd do usually the keynote lecture but I had office hours.

Basically, publishers from all around the world would come to New Haven.

It was usually the CEOs of all these publishing companies and so there'd be this room of 50 to 100 publishing CEOs and we would just spend a week totally geeking out on publishing.

And I did this other book, Koya Bound, which was in 2016 and I was just about to launch some campaign and I was giving my keynote and I was talking about the book and I kind of did an informal poll of all the CEOs in the room I was like what do you think this should cost?

And they're like 100 bucks.

I was like really? And everyone was like are you kidding me?

Yeah absolutely 100 bucks and I was like yeah.

Because in my 20s we were doing super beautiful books and we were charging I'm trying to remember exactly what it was but it was more like 40 or 50 dollars a book and that kind of felt like the upper limit to us and we were working with Ingram to do National Distribution in the States and they hate books that are more than like 30 dollars.

I had experience with higher priced books.

But it was because of the luck of teaching in that program and having access to all these essentially mentor -like figures of people with a lot of experience and then saying, like, oh yeah, just a hundred bucks, obviously.

And then I launched that book, Koya Bound, at a hundred bucks and it sold really well, and I was like, oh, okay, there's a market for this.

So there was no fear at all, but like I said, I was like, oh, yeah, we'll sell out of this.

It'll just take a year or two.

I had no worries about that at all.

The fact that it happened in two days was just really wild.

Yeah, kind of mind blowing.

It's like a huge signal that says yes.

Yeah, it was a huge signal, and I kind of had to walk back.

I had to walk back my, oh, this is gonna be a super duper duper limited edition.

So, but the only, because it was just, This is one more printing, and there's gonna be one more.

Yeah, well, it was just, it was dumb to leave that much market interest on that.

It was just stupid.

Especially if people want it.

Yeah, and obviously I need, I should fulfil this need Because this money is just going to be plowed back into doing more of this work.

Who could, you know, you go, Oh God, am I being disingenuous?

Am I not, you know, did I lie to the first edition people?

It's like, no. I mean, first editions are stamped and signed and none of the others are signed.

It's like, there is something really special about it.

Hilariously, it just got better and better.

So the second edition was just a clone of the first edition, with, without signing because we were just like trying to like speed run it.

It was like, Oh my I want to meet.

If I can capture a hundred thousand dollars in market interest, that for me for someone who is living at a thousand dollar a month's cost of living, that's huge.

Yeah. So please, let me get that locked in because that just gives me more creative freedom.

But by addition three, four, five, it just keeps getting better and better.

So the people who the first edition have the rarest, probably most, I don't know, second market, highest sellable copy, but in terms of print quality, construction binding, it's the lowest quality by far.

So it's only gotten better.

I don't feel bad about that because you want things to get better.

But it is this hilarious irony of being early.

No small part there.

It's also, like, sure, they're buying the boat, they're buying the social object, but there's also something else kind of brings me to actually one other really big I was curious around, so the membership is called Special Projects, the paid membership.

It's now like thousands of people participate in this.

And as you mentioned, yes, when you come out with a book or a print or whatever it may be coming a couple times a year, they get a pretty meaningful discount when they purchase it.

Outside of that, you've had to have sort of like really thought about this.

What are people actually paying you for?

I mean, I think the discount is a big part of it.

I think that it's so dumb, and the psychology, we are such, such basic creatures.

Like when you boil it down, it was so stupid.

Because it's like, people land on the book page and they're like, ooh, I could pay 100 bucks for this book or I could pay $200 and get a $40 discount coupon.

Yeah, that makes sense, like I love that.

And I get to support this guy.

And it's like, for some reason, that is an attractive option for a lot of people.

Like the sense of supporting, Now, they're getting into in those first couple years, they were getting nothing extra.

It was just a discount, that was it.

And then over the years, I've just built up this corpus of stuff.

You have a stunning set of archives of JillyPrint, of video of just like so much stuff in there now for somebody who really wants to dip into it.

So when I give my board meetings, so every six months, I do a members only board meeting, which again, is just for me.

Everything is just for me.

Everything is totally selfish.

Everything. And I think if you run a membership program, it should be pathologically selfish.

Like you should be doing nothing for members and just say that right from the beginning.

And it's okay to do that.

It's like, just tell everyone, Hey, I'm none of this is for you.

It's entirely for me and for my work.

And you joining enables that, like, as long as you message that, you know, you're not being a.

Ding -dong and so I do the board meetings because it just helps me remember what I've done, worked on.

It helps me plan the rest of the year.

It helps give context.

The Q &As are really helpful too, like from members.

I do it, I use a big weird stack of technology, but I find just YouTube unlisted YouTube videos and doing them live, people can just put questions in the comments, works super well.

Those questions too are really clarifying for me.

Doing those questions and responding to them, we're creating this archive of now hundreds of questions that people have asked me over the last for years or so.

I think that's probably about how many years of archives we have of the board meetings.

Almost any question you could have about me doing this is answered in that archive.

So that's so powerful as an educational resource.

And so that, as a member of the program, you get access to that.

So it's 100, over 120 hours of video now.

But that video, again, like I never sat down, it was like, oh, I gotta do another member only video.

Let me do this. It was always about, okay, this is gonna make me do this book better.

This is gonna make me edit this stuff faster.

This is gonna make me think more clearly about the rest of the year.

So it's all selfish but with this nice residual bonus benefit of hey, oh yeah, we create this corpus of Q &A that I think if I was 20, I mean, I would be in heaven having access to something like this, thinking about my practice, thinking about what I wanted to do.

And also it's like you're going out into the world living a very engaged, interesting life, you're going on journeys, you are really immersing yourself and participating in learning and experiencing and yes, you bring people along on the freely available newsletters but this takes them into a much richer, deeper experience of what's happening with you and also the making experience and it's a much deeper, full -spectrum experience and I think a lot of people are just, they're locked into whatever their day -to -day is in a way where when they see somebody like you saying yes, this I'm uncompromising

in the way that I wanna live my life, I'm going out into the world and doing this thing, I'm capturing it, I'm reporting from the front lines of actually being fully engaged in life with the outside world, and then I'm reporting back to you in beautiful and compelling ways.

I wonder if part of what's going on there is that so many people are not getting that in their lives right now with the way that they're living, the choices that made.

And no shame or blame here.

We all make our own choices.

That when they have an opportunity to get a hit of that by experiencing what you're doing, it's sort of like, okay, if this is what I have available to me at this moment in time, for a modest investment, this is helping me feel better.

Yeah, I mean, that's the hope.

And it's also why I have students get access for free.

If you're a student...

my definition of student is extremely broad.

If you think you're a student, you're a student.

That's fine. Just send me an email and say, I think I'm a student.

Great. You don't have to send me, don't send me your ID, don't send me your LinkedIn profile, showing you go to George Washington University or whatever.

Here's my credit report.

Yeah, no, it's like, I'm not that precious about this stuff.

And the reason for the student disk -free thing is I think the most important time to start making these decisions about the kind of person you wanna be how you wanna live is in your teenage years.

I feel like the biggest impact this can have is if I can speak to people who are 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, like that age group.

Especially maybe kids who are just about to graduate undergrad, who are thinking about who they wanna be, what kind of jobs they wanna take, what they wanna explore, what they wanna kind of commit to.

That's 1 trillion percent position that's gonna have the biggest impact of getting exposure to The Q &A is the Board meeting, stuff like that.

And so I want to make sure that's maximized.

The people for whom the impact will be biggest have the maximal amount of access.

That's great. And so everyone else is subsidizing the ability to offer these kind of student discounts.

And that also allows the students to get discounts on the books because I want them to also be able to buy the objects but they're really prohibitively expensive.

And so if I can give them that discount as well, maybe it makes it a little more accessible even though they're still expensive even after the discount.

That's kinda how I think about it.

And it also shows them, like I think, by actually showing them, okay, so I can make something that is not ephemeral.

I can make something that is beautiful and enduring and then expect the world, or at least enough people, to say like this feels good to me, this matters to me.

And that when they're thinking about maybe the choices that they're making, even if it costs them a little bit more and they have to dig a little bit more to actually get their copy of this thing then they might pay for, like a book in a large scale retailer.

It's like that process gives them the lived experience of saying, oh, you can do this.

And I'm proof that like somebody actually wants this to exist. At a very early point in life, most of us never get that signal, which kind of brings us also.

And I want to, you know, to the newest book, Things Become Other Things.

Is this something that you publish yourself?

It's a really interesting and kind of different book.

Because yes, it's grounded in another big walk.

So there are a lot of similarities in terms of the walking process and the characters that you meet in the locations and the places.

But there's this other thread that we use through the whole thing, which is it's this letter, almost a tribute to a childhood friend.

And the whole book is you're not saying dear reader.

You're saying dear Brian.

JS Yeah, exactly. The genesis of that walk was, in COVID, walking the Kii Peninsula which is kind of the peninsula south of Kyoto—Mie, Wakayama, Nara prefectures kind of compose it—and just going to do during really the kind of height of COVID and uncertainty this 30 -day walk of that peninsula and really explore and be offline and but I'm writing every day, you know, I'm walking eight hours and then writing four or five hours every night.

And the book kind of came out of that process.

And the stillness of COVID and the kind of stillness and emptiness of the peninsula just made me reflect on that childhood friendship, which is sort of like a tragic story and it was one that, like I said, I wrote a, the first short story I ever wrote was about Brian, kind of inspired by House on Mango Street and that won an award, got published and then i spent years trying to write about brian again i just couldn't i like just didn't know how to do it and i didn't have the um the work ethic either i didn't really know what truly doing the work of writing a book looked like or felt like so on this walk

i mean i just started reflecting more and more on him and our friendship and what was lost the peninsula itself is quite poor.

So socioeconomically the peninsula and where I come from are quite aligned.

But the peninsula lacks the violence, the drugs, the, I don't know, just like that lack of social safety net, that lack of mired brokenness that I think so much of where I came from is typified by.

So much of contemporary America, I think a lot of people come from a lot of places that are typified by that kind of brokenness.

and why this place could exist socioeconomically in a parallel world, but without all these other things.

It was like kind of this mirror, this strange mirror that took away a lot of the violence, a lot of the badness, and just thinking about what would the childhood been like here as opposed to there?

What would we have done?

What would we have gotten in trouble with?

What kind of stupid stuff would we have done?

How would we have thought about life and ourselves growing up in this environment versus where we were?

And so just that kind of exercise started drawing Brian out more and more.

And he became the focus of the book kind of unwittingly.

And then I, you know, I have my fine art edition and the Random House edition is very different.

It's almost, I would say, a new book, in kind of an exciting way.

Cause like my, my fine art edition is sort of the most paired back minimalist version, where it's sort of the Craig Maud Cinematic Universe version, where it's like, you're already following me, you know my story, you've been reading my work for a decade or whatever, and then you buy this book, so I don't have to explain too much. And then the Random House version was like, okay, what if no one had ever heard of me before, read any of my work, what does that look like?

Actually, as an exercise, it was really generative, and I think just so positive.

And also in the Fine Art Edition, I was really struggling with Brian being such a present central figure and in the writing process he kind of like snuck his way in.

And so in the fine art edition I turn towards him about three quarters of the way through the book.

So you're reading, reading, reading and he's kind of this background presence and you're sort of like who is this guy and I finally turn towards him and then the last quarter of the book is like basically a letter to Brian.

And I always got a really incredible energy from that last section of the book, you know?

And there's folks like Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, you know, like Stephen King on writing.

And they always, you know, their advice is always like, if you have a ace up your sleeve, don't ever hold it.

Just play it immediately.

Always be playing, always be playing it.

Right, don't bury the lead into the last chord of the book.

Yeah, and so kind of going back to the Random House edition, I was like, this turning towards Bryan is so powerful.

What if we just started the book with it?

And then that allowed all these other things to happen like John was in drafts of the fine art edition But because Brian was like we wanted the focus to be on Brian and well and he was kind of sneaking his way in We ended up cutting John cutting all these other people and then because now the Random House Edition is from page 1 Brian Hey, this is a letter to you.

He's so omnipresent He's such a force in the book that he doesn't get diluted by having other other characters And so, Jon now is a big presence in the Random House book.

And just more of these other, Asamoto -san and, you know, just these other people that I had to take out.

But now can be there because everything is sort of being told to Brian.

So it's no longer Jon competing with Brian, it's saying, Brian, there's this guy Jon, he's fucking cool, and like, this is really interesting.

What if we had one person like this in our lives when we were growing up, and we didn't.

We didn't have anyone who was operating on this level.

What if we had just had one person?

What would have changed?

And that's kind of the thrust of the literary conceit of the whole book.

HM Yeah, I mean, it's really powerful, you know, it's like you're, you realize immediately that you're not writing to me the reader.

And yet, I'm so deeply compelled by the story.

And also, I don't know who Brian is in the beginning.

And it really, it unfolds slowly, you know, really it takes time for me to understand like, Oh, so it's almost like the power behind the story built throughout.

Like the more you realize the depth of relationship and also, you know, like some of the sadness that eventually emerges from it.

I'm curious what it was like, sort of like being in the middle of pandemic, walking alone.

And I guess when you were, Brian is a huge part of this, when you were actually doing the walking, was he on your mind also or was this something that really wove into the telling later?

He's been on my mind for almost 30 years and I think I was kind of repressing a lot of it because I didn't know how to think about that friendship that was lost and, you know, this core friendship of childhood, like essentially brother.

So he's always been there and he's been present every walk when I see kids and stuff, I, you know, you'd always pop up, but it was this, you know, this Covid walk in particular where I just think we're in a moment where I think we were receptive to revisiting kind of the purpose of being alive, you know, or like what we're doing on this earth or why we're here, and I think that catalyzed.

More of the Brian when I was writing the newsletters, he wasn't popping up, but he was hyper present in mind.

And then when I started writing my draft of the fine art edition, he started appearing more and more.

And I felt like, okay, maybe we revisit that.

And then my editor, Ollie Chance, was reading early drafts.

And he was like, dude, this has to be a book about Brian.

And I was like, what?

He's like, yeah, this is what the book has to be.

So he gave me permission to go back there in a way that I think I was afraid to do on my own.

So that was really great.

And then the Random House edition was just in a weird way, doing my fine art edition allowed me to have what I considered like the apotheosis, as like the best version of this book.

The kind of uncompromising director's cut, minimalist version, fine art edition, beautifully made, blah, all that crap.

So when went to the Random House, edits and rewrites and editions and all that stuff.

The tension had kind of left my shoulders and I was able to just approach it with a far more relaxed and open heart, I feel like.

Because it wasn't this, the performance anxiety was gone.

The performance was done.

I've gotten tons of feedback, people really liked it.

It was great, okay, we did that, now let's return to this and not be worried about how the dance is gonna go.

It's like, we could do the dance, we did the dance, and that was really important I think to getting to this Random House edition which I'm proud of on so many different levels, but being able to reframe it all around Brian and having it be this letter to Brian essentially and writing to Brian, not the reader.

but Brian, you know, Brian's a little kid.

And so, you know, the reader gets a lot of information.

It allows me to talk about history.

It allows me to talk about me, about my history in a way that feels also less indulgent than if it was to the reader because it's like, Hey dude, we haven't spoken in 40 years.

Like I gotta catch you up.

Here's what I'm doing.

It's very weird. I went on a walk with Jeff Bezos.

That's super fucking weird. Like, you know, it's like I could say these things because it's to Brian.

Whereas I think it could feel a little, a little more annoying if it was just like, dear reader, this is what I'm doing in my life.

It's such an interesting sort of like literary mechanism to be able to leverage, but at the same time it doesn't feel like you're just leveraging a literary mechanism.

It feels like you're actually speaking to somebody.

And like I would love, it's like, Brian, I really want you to know this.

I want to share this with you.

And at the same time, you are able to draw so much of your history of like who you are, where you came from, why you are the way you are, what you believe, how you see the world from this shared conversation and references that we don't have as the reader, but eventually we do.

And it gets built in a way that just keeps you leaning in.

And I just found it really compelling as a writer also.

I'm just like, this is fascinating.

First, I just want to be in a book because it's immersive and beautiful and great storytelling.

And then as a writer, I'm like, this is so interesting what you're doing Phew.

You're like, from a writing context with the book, but that's not what jumped out.

Like the first is just a beautiful immersive read that takes me along a journey.

You know, like through a countryside and through a country that I know almost nothing about and also brings me into just a deeply -moving personal story.

I just found it like really compelling.

Just one little interjection there.

I recorded the audio book three or four days ago.

It took 15 hours. It was like waterboarding your brain.

I don't know if you've ever recorded an audio book.

I've done a couple of my books, and people are like, it must have been amazing.

You're only living with your voice, and I'm like, I don't know why I could not wait to get out of the booth.

It's so hard, anyway.

But it ended up being a pretty profoundly weird experience because the book is this letter to Brian, and so I was reading out loud, talking to Brian in this booth, and like the last third of the book is pretty emotional to go to those places because it is in that epistolary form.

It was really just a weird, weird surreal experience to be the kind of like, almost like yelling to Brian in this booth.

You know? Of like...

Yeah, anyway, it was bizarre.

I hope it turned out okay.

I didn't know what I was doing.

I was just trying to be as present as possible, but God bless audiobook professionals.

That is some hard, hard work.

That's great. I'm picturing you in like this booth right now.

So, you have this deeply emotional experience speaking out loud.

And then like the editor coming in your ear and saying, you need to put a pillow over your belly, I'm hearing your stomach sounds.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

No, I mean, I'm like, well, it's like the last line in the book is like this like crazy, super heightened line.

And you know, you read it.

And then yeah, the I've got the director in my ear and he's like, why don't we do the last two sentences?

It's like glass. Who said this is right?

How do I just get into, like, how How is that going to work anyway?

It's like, we only have 12 more takes and then we should be pretty good.

And now I have more empathy for actors who work with people like Fincher, who want like 60 takes on like stupid stuff and are like little things.

And yeah, God, what a draining thing every day.

So you kind of, I also have, I have more empathy for actors who kind of like go crazy on set.

If like a sound person is in the shot or if something like goes wrong, you know, it's like, I can totally see snapping because getting to those emotional, those places emotionally is so, so exhausting.

So if you've done four, five, six, 10 times, some little thing on the side kind of gets in the way.

I could see you just going, ah!

Christian Bale, I think on the set of Terminator went crazy, but I was like, oh, okay, I get that now.

It's tough. Well, I just so enjoyed diving into just so many aspects of who you are and how you sort of like about your life and your living.

And this just beautiful aesthetic that is, as you said uncompromising, like you are so just completely dedicated to like, this is the thing.

This is what I'm doing.

And I invite people to come along on this ride and these are the rules too.

And they're just kind of like my rules.

And then I get to actually put into the world the thing that feels truest to me.

And I love being able to share your story because it's an example of what's possible, I think to a lot of people who don't believe that this way of living and working and creating is possible anymore.

And it kind of opens the door and says to someone, huh, look, you may do this very differently, but maybe just start to get curious about what your version of something like this is if you have that impulse inside of you and you've been keeping it at bay or believing that this just could never be a part of who I am or the way they step into my life.

So it feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation I always wrap with the same question which is in this container of Good Life project.

If I offer up the phrase to live a good life what comes up?

Fullness of days. I think that's kind of where I've landed.

How do I just maximize?

And not in an optimization way, not in some kind of cold calculated way.

But just how do I maximize the number of days that at the end of the day I slide into bed and I am just totally used up, but used up by the best possible things.

And I just feel a fullness that I could not have played the cards that were dealt to me that day any better.

I'm purposely vague about it, because that sense of fullness can come from so many different things.

So, when I'm on a walk, it's about the physical act of the walking, the saying hello to all these new people, me, hearing their stories, getting to the inn or the hotel at the night, and spending the four or five hours writing, editing, reflecting on the day.

That is its own kind of fullness.

And then there's obviously fullness of family and spending a day with my stepdaughter, bringing her to New Zealand to go to school or whatever.

And those are big days where I'm not doing anything that looks like work, but at the end of the day, I'm getting in bed and going, wow, okay, couldn't have done more with that day.

I think if you keep that sort of compass point on the horizon of fullness, a full day, the difficulty is that you need to build up an archetype of what a full day looks like and what that feels like.

I think for a lot of people you haven't experienced a full day.

I think you can kind of say what aren't full days as a way to try to get to what our full days are.

Swiping on TikTok for four hours automatically means that cannot be a full day.

So anytime your agency is taken away in service to some kind of capitalistic or corporate hunger, I think you are immediately removing full dayness from things.

And so it's interesting.

Playing video games, I think you can have a rich full day of playing video games, but it has to be the right kind of video games.

So for example, Zelda during COVID, one of my things was to play Zelda with my daughter.

And then she wasn't that good.

And I made another account on the switch to just keep playing on my own.

And so Zelda is a great example of a game that is not trying to take away from you.

It's like you buy it once, you own it, it's not a casino, it's not a jackpot machine.

You build up skills inside of the game how to play it, how to use it.

There is a concrete completion zone where something like Candy Crush is just pure casino. Can you have a full day having played Zelda?

Sure! You can do 10 hours of Zelda and be like, Oh my god, I went on this amazing adventure in Hyrule.

But if you do 10 hours of Clash of Clans, absolutely not.

You've just thrown that away.

You've burned that day in service to actors with malevolence towards you as a user.

Nintendo is one of these great companies that I think does respect, for the most part, its customers in a way that's pretty rare today and it's pretty inspiring.

So Nintendo doing well is always a heartening thing to see.

So when I say that the good life is a life of full days, it can take many, many different forms. And if you were to start to nudge yourself in a direction of how does that feel, I'd say getting your phone out of your bedroom is like step number one to putting yourself in the realm of possibility of having a full day.

And then try keep getting your phone out of your room, and then also getting your phone out of sight in the morning and away from you until lunch. And just feel a morning without the phone.

Feel a morning without immediately going into the news or like seeing, you know, what chaos is happening or whatever, and just sit with a, quote unquote, boring morning of creative time.

So what do you want?

Do you want to paint?

Do you want to draw?

Do something physical.

Do something analog and I think if you did a week of no phone in the room, the phone is like under the sink or whatever in the morning so you don't even look in it's direction and you don't touch it till noon.

You get up at, you know whenever you get up, seven, eight, nine, six, five if you can, whatever, and you just say okay, this is gonna be a morning of just pure analogness where I'm allowed to read physical books.

I'm allowed to draw.

I'm allowed to write in a notebook and that's it.

If you did that every day for a week, you would come out with such a different sense of what quietude feels like, what focus feels like, what attention feels like, and that would put you on, I think, a really great path towards building fuller and fuller days.

So that would be my actionable advice.

You've just left me with my next experiment.

Nice, awesome. It's coming.

Thank you so much, Craig.

Thank you. Hey, if you loved this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Seth about challenging conventional paths and thinking differently as an artist or entrepreneur.

You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes.

This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter who crafted our theme music, and of course if you haven't already done so please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too.

If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring chances are you did because you're still listening here do me a personal favor a 7 -second favor share it with just one person I mean if you want to share it with more that's awesome, too But just one person even then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered to reconnect and explore Ideas that really matter because that's how we all come alive together Until next time.

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[Reclaiming the Self: Craig Mod’s Journey of Reinvention, Minimalist Living, and the Power of Unplugged Exploration]-[What if You Could Erase Your Life and Start Over? | Craig Mod]

📋 Summary

The Art of Reinvention and Living a Life of Fullness

The Impulse for Self-Erasure

Minimalist Living as Creative Freedom

The Power of the Long Walk

The Epistolary Nature of Things Become Other Things

Redefining Community and Patronage

Conclusion: The Path to Fullness

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript