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I started doing these huge walks where I'd walk for 30 -40 days, 20 -30 -40k a day with this big pack on.
No social media, no news, basically nothing that teleports you out of the moment.
Getting rid of all that ratchets up your attention, cranks up the focus.
I'm just collecting little archetypes of possibility, this is what life can be like, this is what life can be like.
For me, what I get out of these walks, I want to talk to as many people, I want to bear witness to as much life being lived as possible.
It's bearing witness to possibilities of how to live and how to live well.
Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. So right now, as I'm recording this introduction, this missive, it's Friday, May 2nd, which is six days before, and by the time you're hearing this, a few weeks after, going under the knife for a pretty extensive procedure called spine surgery, where they're gonna go in through my abdomen to basically scrape out the disc between my L5 and S1 vertebra.
So they can insert this cage basically, which creates space for the nerves that are currently impinged and contains this marrow material that ends up growing bone that over time like six months or more will fuse these two vertebrae together.
Then they're gonna flip me over and they're gonna go into my back to insert screws and rods to basically hold the whole thing together.
So my point is that this is gonna be a thing.
I'm a little bit scared, but I'm also looking forward to finally resolving this chronic issue that I've had for far too long.
And my recovery is gonna be long as well.
It's gonna go on for a long time.
And during that period of time, my movement practice is going to be focused predominantly on one type of activity.
There's gonna be other stuff, but there's gonna be one thing that I'm gonna be doing a lot of and that is walking, which is interesting because today's guest is kind of an expert when it comes to all things walking, not in terms of the physiology of it or matters related to the biomechanics of it, or even recovering from back surgery for that matter, but really on matters of meaning.
His name is Craig Mott.
He's an artist, he's an author, he's an essayist and a photographer who has spent the last 25 years living in Japan, where he's been sharing his insights with words and images, which he packages both online in newsletters and other forms of media, as well as in a series of these really beautiful books.
But central to Craig's life and by extension, in his art is walking, walking as a sort of inner cartography, which is something he has done across vast distances of Japan that has also taken him all over the world, often in the company of former pod hero Kevin Kelly, with whom he co -runs or co -walks, I should say, Kevin's famous walk and talks retreats.
The profundity of walking as this way of reclaiming our attention, of attuning ourselves to the present, to our surroundings.
This means for ruminating on the meaning of our lives to unlock creativity, to connect with ourselves, with other people, to make sense of our past and the world around us.
These are all themes fully mined in Craig's wonderful new memoir meets 300 mile walking travel log of rural Japan, which is entitled, Things Become Other Things.
Not only is Craig a deeply thoughtful guy and a terrifically talented writer, the improbable arc of his life is something really remarkable that we talk about today and hints at the ineffable I think, which now you are privileged to behold in what is one of the more soulful conversations I've had in the history of this show, it's the kind of conversation that reminds me why I got into this whole podcasting thing in the first place.
In addition to the new book, you can find all things Craig Maud at craigmaud .com, including his newsletters, Rhoden, and Ridgeline, and this very cool membership community platform that he hosts called Special Projects.
So hopefully by the time you're hearing this, I survived my back surgery.
If I did, you're gonna be hearing all about it pretty soon, but right now let's hear from Craig.
Great to have you here, man.
I'm excited to get into this with you.
You've lived a really dynamic, interesting life off the beaten path and are here back in the United States I was reporting back, with wisdom for us westerners who have led our lives astray and allowed our attention to be robbed of us.
So I thought a good way to kind of launch into it is with something that you say, which is lightness above weightiness, elevate everyone you encounter.
And this is a sort of theme for your work and your creativity, but it's really a mantra for life.
Yeah. How did you come up with that?
What does that mean?
Yeah, I mean, that grew directly out of the walking out of the big walks.
So I started doing these, big walks I started doing about 15 years ago.
But I would say the first real real real big one that I did where it was solo, it was kind of under the rule set that I now use for all my big walks was about six years ago.
And I was reading a lot of the literature about Japan from the eighties and the nineties.
And there was this kind of heaviness to it all, the way people would write about Japan.
And there was also this sense of real disparity of kind of perspective of writing down on Japan.
I mean, I don't wanna say it was explicitly sort of racist but there was a kind of Western way of like going to Japan, writing about it, being like, oh, now I understand this place.
let me explain to you these people that, sort of implicitly were sort of below the writer in a weird way, and that always made me uncomfortable.
And I started doing these big, huge walks where I'd walk for 30, 40 days, 20, 30, 40K a day with this big pack on.
And I started talking to everybody on the road.
Just saying hello, saying hello, saying hello.
And I've lived in Japan for 25 years.
So the language is no problem, I can speak to everybody.
Even in the countryside where the accents get pretty gnarly, I can kinda hang with them.
And I just realized what a gift it was to be able to meet all these people just exactly where they were.
And it's so easy to focus on the negatives or to focus on, I don't know the heaviness of situations.
And so just sort of again, implicitly in through the walking itself, there was a lightness to these interactions, to meeting these people to being out on the road.
And then also when I started writing these conversations down and started kind of giving these people a voice on a bigger stage than they had.
I realized naturally, I just wanted to elevate these people.
I was just so in love with everybody.
I think that was the thing that was surprising was this incredible amount of love I had for everyone I was meeting on the road.
And so that's sort of where that phrase comes from.
Right, and in the writing or in the chronicling of that, making sure that you're translating the sensibility and your emotional experience of these encounters in a way that is understandable and digestible, even if you're contending with weighty subject matters and themes.
Cause I mean, a lot of the Japanese countryside is depopulating right.
And so Japan's kind of on the forefront of what's happening to most first world countries which is just population is going down.
Japan is now I think at like 1 .2 kids per woman now, I guess, you know, South Korea is at the lowest. I think it's 0 .7.
You need 2 .1 to maintain population.
So these are pretty dire numbers.
And in Japan, you go to Tokyo, Tokyo is growing, Tokyo is full of kids and life and you don't feel that at all, but you get into the countryside and you feel that acutely everywhere.
And so it can be easy to I think like dwell on that to focus on, Oh my God, all these towns are disappearing, what does that mean?
And I've tried to instead go look at the social infrastructure that's here for these people that remain and how they're kind of being supported by this greater whole.
And what does that mean?
Yes, it's disappearing, but there's a certain amount of grace.
I kinda use that word a lot in what I'm writing about these countryside towns.
Yeah, there's a certain level of grace that's happening here that's present that feels really humane and important, and so that tends to be the thing I focus on.
I wanna tease that apart, but before we do that, I think it would be worthy for you to just articulate your thesis of Japan.
I'm sure people say to you all the time, like, what's it like to live there?
Like, how is it different than the way we live?
And, you know, despite our deeply interconnected world, Japan still is a world apart, and it has its own rules and its own culture.
And it's fascinating, but it can also be impenetrable for somebody like myself, who's never visited there and just hear stories about it.
So how do you like breathe life into that?
Yeah, I mean, I feel deeply uncomfortable.
Yeah, I'm not saying you have to be an ambassador for, you know, like your words are the definitive definition of this, but like through your lens, like putting, you know, sort of blying, like what our preconceptions might be or assumptions.
So, okay, if I was to sum up, like what I, the goodness I feel from Japan, it's that there is this kind of ambient sense of enough.
People have an enough line.
And I don't mean that in sort of like, oh there's a lack of striving or something like that, but just the fact that the middle class is so pervasive that there's a certain kind of, I'd say, high earner place, that gap between the lowest and the highest is very small compared to America, for example.
And America, to me, feels like it's a country that doesn't have enough of anything, like that ceiling is infinite.
And the enough thing in Japan manifests in a number of ways.
I think one of the most easiest to understand is this idea of a living national treasure.
So I was actually invited to photograph Jiro, the sushi dreams of Jiro, when I was 26.
Wow. I'd never eaten a real sushi meal in my life.
I'd been living in Japan, I'd been there for about five, six years at that point, and I got this call, He said, well, hey, this guy Jido is gonna be given living national treasure status.
We wanna do a little magazine piece on him.
Can you go and photograph him?
He's like, he'll be ready for you at noon on Tuesday or whatever.
I was like, okay, who is this guy?
I kind of like find him on, no Google Maps back then.
So, look, try to look them up.
I don't, have you ever been to Jido, you haven't been to Jido's right?
No, you've never been.
I've seen the documentary though.
And so, it's in a subway station.
It's like, it's very bizarre.
So, it's like you have to go undergrad, there's no windows.
you're in a subway station and you're like, it just looks like a random sushi shop.
So I go in, again, no research, I don't know who this guy is and there's sort of a handler and then there's Jido behind the counter and he goes, he goes, Modo -san, have you had lunch?
I go, no, not really, he's like, let me make you lunch. And so I got this one -on -one.
Your first experience with sushi is with the world's greatest master of it.
Yeah, exactly. How is it possible that you lived there so long and not had sushi?
I'd had, that's why I'd say, I'd had like Kaiten sushi, so like the cheap, like it goes around on the conveyor belt and you kind of, again, I grew up without an adventurous palette.
Like I really did not eat, I grew up on Spiatios basically, Chef Boyardee, fried bologna.
And yet, there was this thing inside of you that demanded to move to Japan when you were 19, we're gonna get to that, but let's leave that aside for the moment.
But I added egg roll thingies on top of rice and stuff like that.
But I had never had actual sushi sushi.
Again, I didn't have the money to have actual sushi sushi.
And so I sit down and Jiro gives me this one on one thing when they show me how to eat it.
And it's like you have a little plate in front of you and then he just makes the nigiri.
I'm watching him like, wow, this is so beautiful.
And he puts it on the plate.
And then he's like you put it in fish side down.
And you use your hands to eat it.
So all of this, so I was like, where am I?
And I was like, whoa, this is really good.
I was, you know, like each one I'm like, I'm just sort of like popping into my mouth like it's Wendy's or something, you know, and I'm not really sitting there with it because I'm a little nervous.
You're not giving it the due respect that a culinary master deserves.
No, no. Or he's probably used to, when people, you know, sort of have this transcendent experience.
Just this bumbling idiot, you know, 26 year old.
I got like this ponytail, you know, it's like, I was probably hungover, It was just a ridiculous situation.
So, I ate it, photographed him, photographed his son.
He was there, I photographed another one of his students.
And at the end I was standing with his son.
He said, oh that was really good.
I was like, I'd like to eat that again.
How much would that cost if I came back for lunch?
And he's like, oh what you ate today was like $300.
I was like, what? Rich, I've never, at that point in my life, I've never paid more than like $15 for like an entire meal.
But you knew going in that you were there for a purpose, which was to photograph this living legend.
So you must have had some inkling that this might not be $15 worth of food.
I appreciate how much optimism you have about my view.
I mean it was pretty ridiculous.
So the point being is that people like Jiro, who's got a shop in a subway station underground with no windows, and yet can be recognized as a living national treasure.
And you see this across the board. You see this in terms of potters, in terms of sword makers.
Everything in Japan can kind of be elevated in terms of craftsmanship, and those people do not make a lot of money and they live very humble lives.
And I think that having a social structure that is able to elevate craftspeople, people who commit themselves to mastery of something, that's such an, oh my God.
just having that ambiently in society in a way that it's not about the money and it's really not about status because these people are all for the most part almost totally unknown.
They're just kind of recognized by this kind of cultural body.
I find that really inspiring and I think a lot of my work is to drive inspiration from that.
Yeah, it feels like we were chatting before but your books, your work even the way you present your work online is all very aesthetically attuned, like there is a sensibility to it that has been highly considered.
And that feels very Japanese aesthetically and just with respect to intentionality and respect for craft, right?
Like skill and craftsmanship are revered and the aspiration is to infuse whatever it is you do with some semblance of that.
But how does that reconcile with what we know about Japanese corporate culture and work super hard and stay out all night drinking and you miss your train and you sleep in one of those like little, yeah, you know, like little, what do you call them?
Those hotels that are like little capsule.
If you're lucky, you sleep in the capsule hotel.
Yeah, that feels like a different world from what you're explaining.
Yeah, I mean, that's the paradox, right?
is that there is definitely this majority cohort of life in Japan, which is extremely depressing, to a certain degree.
You know, it's this, I'm going to do a 90 minute commute on a packed train, squish like a sardine.
It used to be worse, you know.
I think the eighties were sort of the peak of that, during the peak of the bubble.
And things have kind of, post bubble pop in the early nineties, you know, in the last 25 years of Japan has been sort of like frozen in a weird way.
You know, it's, it's been a very strange experience.
I've lived there since 2000 and when I arrived from basically 2000 to like 2015 almost nothing changed.
Like you turn on the TV.
It was the same people on TV, you turn on the radio, it's the same people on the radio the prices of things, you know, this has been a big deal with inflation in the last three, four years.
You know, the yen has gotten really weak.
Dollars got really strong a COVID screwed up shipping.
So a lot of products just cost more and shops for the first time in like 40 years rose prices.
For shops, this was like such a big deal.
Because in Japan, this idea of the joren, the regular customer and honoring the regular customer and respecting the regular customer.
And so if the regular customer expects a morning set that costs $3, where you get an egg and and coffee, and you can have your cigarette, that's what you as an owner of the shop wanted to deliver for decades, and decades, and decades.
So when you have to raise it to $3 .20.
It's a huge deal. It's huge.
And there's a huge amount of apologies and you should see the signage that was up for like raising 50 cents for this hotel or something.
I mean, it was really heartening in some ways that people cared that much. But Japan was frozen for most of the time I was there.
And now in the last five to 10 years, tourism has kind of like rediscovered Japan in a big way.
And I think social media has played a part in that.
And and through that, Japan has kind of had this new influx of energy and it's been responding to that in different ways.
But the core of the country is a bunch of office men, office women commuting on trains in pretty dire circumstances.
It has tremendous cultural relevance though, in terms of like fashion and trends, things like that.
but being older than you, the period that preceded this extended phase of relative stagnation was a period in which during my childhood, Japan was dominating everything.
I mean, all electronics, all innovation, technology, it was all coming from Japan.
And I grew up with the mindset that Japan was gonna take over the world, the idea that now it's China, it would have been unimaginable.
Well, but due to economic forces or tariffs or whatever was happening, I'm not an economics expert, but something happened that created a shift and left Japan kind of in the large.
Yeah, I mean, Japan's fourth biggest economy now, 10 years ago was number two.
So that's been interesting and I think complicated for Japanese people to reconcile with as well.
But a big part of that was just simply stagnation, like there's kind of a momentum that grew in the 70s and 80s.
I mean the economic miracle of Japan, you look at the 60s, 70s and 80s, I mean it truly is unbelievable.
Like Japan post -war, you go to Tokyo like 1946, 47, I mean it was gone.
The city, there was no city.
It was eviscerated, it was completely annihilated.
And then, sort of rebuild from that, you know, and a big part of like looking, walking through the countryside for me is trying to feel what is happening to the country today.
How's it changing today?
But to look at where Japan was post -war to where they got within 30 years.
I mean, it really truly is one of the most incredible economic turnarounds in the history of humanity.
And what is particular about the Japanese ethos that allowed them to go from that devastated post -war state into this Phoenix like, you know, kind of resurgence so relatively rapidly?
I mean, again, I'm not.
I feel like, I don't feel...
Well, you live there.
Your entire adult life, pretty much, so.
I know, I know, but I wish I'd been there.
I would've loved, if I could like take a little time machine, I wouldn't go to the Edo era.
I'd go to like 1960 and just see what, 1950, 1960.
I mean, I think it's the collectivism thing.
I think it's the fact that they're able to kind of like, you can have this thesis about what we should be doing right now.
And then everyone's just like, yep, let's do that, for good and bad, right?
I mean, that was sort of a negative thing during World War II.
Everyone kind of got moving in the wrong direction.
but if you can move that collectivist kind of mindset in the right direction, you can do incredible things economically.
But with respect to this idea of walking through the countryside in these rural areas, the off the beaten path tracks that you've been on and attuning yourself to the decline and the impermanence and all of these things.
I mean, it hearkens back to your youth and in certain ways, it's very similar to the environment in which you grew up as a kid, which then kind of catalyzes, all this internal reflection about identity and which is really the terrain of your books or certainly the latest book.
But let's go back to that time.
I mean, you paint the picture of growing up in Connecticut in this very strange household and leading up to this even stranger decision that you're gonna move to Japan at age 19.
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in basically a post -industrial American town.
So the town was typified by, there was an airplane engine factory that employed most of the town.
If you look at the last 120 years of the town or whatever, that was the major employer.
And then there was the gun factory cult across the river and Coca Cola bottling factory.
I mean, it was very much a salty earthy sort of place.
My grandparents on both sides of the family both worked at the airplane engine factory, That's where they met, and as you say in the book, basically are manufacturing, the machinery that was then utilized to drop the bombs on places that you have walked through.
Exactly, so to feel that, because when you walk the countryside, you feel where it was hit and where it wasn't hit, because it's sort of an aborted history that you sense in some of these towns that were firebombed.
And so much of Japan was firebombed.
It was all civilian populations for the most part, you know, with military sort of components.
But you feel this kind of aborted history where this city, you know, you walk through Nagoya, Nagoya doesn't feel like a city with a history.
It's so surreal, it's so bizarre.
It's almost like an ambient thing.
It's like almost like the smell of it.
It's like it stopped or it was born in 1945.
And then you have these other places where the history goes for 1000, 2000 years.
And yeah, I mean, walking and thinking about it and then realizing that some of the airplane engines that were built for the bombers, came out of my hometown that my grandfather probably had his hands on, is a very surreal thing.
And then being able to meet some of these older folks in these areas whose parents fought in the war, and being able to meet with them in this really kind of beautiful, peaceful way, and think about how quickly we can kind of transcend these, you know, these, these terrible violent impulses.
I find a lot of inspiration in that.
But I also find it being very bizarre that there's that connection through my grandparents working in an airplane engine factory, the war, these roads that I walked today, there's a lot there.
You were adopted. Yep.
Your adopted father seems like he was a real piece of work.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I just. The anti -pattern mentor.
Yeah. I mean, those stories are incredible.
You know, it's like my parents adopted me and then I got divorced basically two years later, which I find really fascinating.
I mean, I find fascinating...
Yeah, if you're gonna adopt somebody.
You think you'd... It's like, you think there'll be a little more...
That says everything you need to know a little bit.
I mean in a good way.
I mean, so my earliest memories are getting bit by a dog.
So we had this little dog named Jacques for some reason.
And I remember I was under the bed, I got bit by the dog.
I remember that. I was like, Shaq but there's no, I don't know why it was called Shaq.
Like that's truly one of the most bizarre naming elements of my family's history.
Maybe I'm inventing that.
And then all the other memories from that house are just my father in Fruit of the Loom underwear at the dinner table, eating steak and screaming.
It's just like, you know, and the thing he said to my mom that is still like the most incredible, like sad thing anyone's ever said to anyone in the history of the world, is he goes, in this house woman, I am Jesus Christ!
And you're like, where does that come from?
Where does that come from?
But it comes from, his father was an alcoholic who abused him, his stepfather, his mom remarried another alcoholic who was also abusive to him.
And he, my adoptive father, he was so sick his whole life.
he had two hearing aids, diabetes.
He had this flatulence issue.
I mean, all my memories with my dad are going to the movies and wanting to curl up in a ball and die because he would be farting in the movie theater.
And people around us would start gagging, would have to get up and leave. It was this man of just a constellation of deficits.
Yeah, that's the phrase he used in the book.
I mean, the biopic writes itself.
You know? But there's this other story that you tell around being in a movie theater, beyond the farting, it's sort of like, we'll just dump your shit on the ground.
Like the ground of the theater is the garbage pail and like they'll pick it up.
But that is a very interesting choice in terms of stories to tell because of Japan's very different relationship to garbage.
And you talk about like the Starbucks cup, like can you just elucidate that a little bit?
Because I think that is a window into the Japanese sensibility.
Yeah, well, garbage in Japan is your responsibility.
Like if you are carrying a Snickers bar, it's like it's so funny the psychology of garbage, like you have a Snickers bar in your pocket, you're totally cool with having a Snickers bar in your pocket.
And then you're like walking you go to a park, you eat the Snickers bar.
Suddenly that rapper is like toxic waste, It's like, you have to get rid of this.
Where's the garbage can?
And in Japan, you just don't have that.
So it's like, if you had a Snickers bar, and you ate it, and you have a wrapper, you take the wrapper home and you throw it away in your own garbage.
That garbage is not the responsibility of the city, because you happen to eat it in the park or whatever.
So, I remember one time, early in Japan, I had some coffee cup or something that I wanted to throw away.
And I randomly went into, I was walking around Shinjuku, who I remember very clearly, and I went into a random shop, I said, can I throw this away?
Because in America, whatever everyone's got a garbage can, no one cares.
Yeah, why would you think that, that was an odd question.
Yeah, oh my God, that guy looked at me like, I just asked to stand on the counter and pee all over the shoppers.
I mean, it was just like, you couldn't have asked a more offensive thing to this guy.
And I remember that, that hit me in this weird way of like, oh wow, I'm in a different place.
This isn't a country where anyone thinks the floor of the movie theater is the garbage.
It's like no father in Japan has ever said that to their kid.
But this idea of handle your own shit and don't make it anyone else's problem.
Yeah, in good and bad ways, because Japan, I think would benefit from a culture of therapy.
So there is no therapy in Japan.
I've been doing regular therapy with a guy in New York for the last eight years weekly.
And I've missed, even during these big walks, I make it a point to like have my weekly session with Dan.
I'm like, all right, where's Dan?
All right, Dan, we're getting you in there.
You know, no matter what, even if I've done a 40K a day.
And Japan doesn't have that.
And so in Japan, I actually try to talk about my history with therapy quite openly.
In the last few years, I've had the opportunity to do a lot of media.
I have a regular monthly radio show in Japan now.
And so I bring that up quite a bit because to destigmatize therapy, like some of your shit own it for sure.
Like you're garbage, that makes sense.
That makes a lot of sense, but there's a lot of psychological stuff too that I think Japanese people think they need to own more than they probably need to.
Is it a shame thing?
Like what is that stem from?
Little bit. I mean I just think America has done a really good job at destigmatizing it, right?
It's like I literally don't know anyone in New York that doesn't have a therapist. It's like, for better for worse, right?
It's like, I'm going to my analyst today or whatever.
In Japan, I just think that, and I don't think it's just Japan, I think Asia in general kind of has this, like talking about your emotions or you hear this a lot from Asian American immigrant, like kids, the sons and daughters of immigrants where it's just so hard to talk to their parents about emotional things.
And so I just think there's this kind of emotional repressiveness that is pretty pervasive there.
And also, there aren't that many therapists and then people who do see therapists are like in a really, really bad place.
So I think the idea that you can see a therapist as kind of a palliative before things get bad.
That's just not a philosophy that exists.
Yeah, I understand that.
I mean, was it all that different here in 1942 or whatever?
So it's changed here as well.
So you're this kid in high school in Connecticut, you've got your buddy Brian, you guys are doing whatever you're doing.
Bad, dumb things. Yeah, and then you graduate high school, you make this decision, you're gonna move to Japan, and then suddenly a tragedy strikes.
Yeah, so Brian and I met in first grade, side by side, You know, it's like, couldn't be more totally on the same level.
We kind of look like each other.
He's like three months, four months older than me.
So he's kind of like an older brother and we just, you know, it's like there's this chemical thing that happens with kids.
It's like you just fuse, you know, and like I'm adopted and I'd say the thing that has defined my childhood the most is the adoption for sure.
That just, there's a lot there.
We can talk more about adoption, the psychology of adoption, but like for me, Brian was a because I didn't have blood brothers.
And so I didn't have blood parents.
So to me, it was like, you just choose who you want to be as part of your family.
And we lived as close as you could live.
I mean, as siblings who weren't siblings and all of my elementary school experiences are kind of infused with this kid.
And then as can happen, testing in America kind of starts to separate kids out.
I tested a little better, he was not so good at testing and we kind of got separated more and more and more and if you started going down a not great path in my town, it led to really not great things, you know, it's like I remember, you know, going around like I'd visit a friend's place, you know, and they had just gotten for Christmas like a sack of weed that was their weed Christmas present, you know, but you go to their house and they don't have any furniture, you know, and that sort of thing.
God bless them. You know, and you're just like, oh, my God.
And when I think back to now, there was a lot of suicide attempts.
I mean, both of Brian's sisters were pregnant by 14, 15, 16.
There was just this kind of ambient sense of complex violence, not to the fault of anyone in the town, but you kind of look at it and even if you just - Systemically.
Systemically. Like if you go back now, how many of those kids that you went to high school with got out and are doing something different?
Right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, 0 .0001%.
It's like, it's very small.
So anyway, Brian and I ended up getting separated and like I was testing in a way that kind of put me in this, almost like a little bit of a protective bubble to a certain degree.
It's funny on the alcohol thing, throughout high school, I was straight edge.
And I saw, because I had intuitive very early in my life.
Part of it being adopted, part of it seeing just how the town didn't have the infrastructure to kind of help you out.
So I'd say 10 or 11 was like, okay, I have to own all of this.
I have to own my destiny here.
And I saw drugs and alcohol as an obvious impediment.
And I saw all the kids around me doing drugs and alcohol.
And ever since I, I remember 13, 14 or something, like, just deciding I'm never gonna touch that stuff in this town.
When I left the town, it was very different.
But in this town, because that will keep me here and I need to get out of here and I mean, that intuition was sort of proven right in the sense that I graduated.
Brian and I, we graduate and two weeks after we graduate, he's murdered at this house party." That was not uncommon. That fights would happen and, you know, you had sort of gang stuff going on.
It was kind of a mess.
And just as Brian is being murdered, you know, dying on the front lawn of this house, you know, under this guy on the fourth of July, I'm on my way to Japan in this kind of… are sort of violent responses to a place.
You know, to move to Japan and to stay there, it speaks to something that's a little bit broken in you to do that.
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So to be this young person, to incarnate into a set of circumstances and into a family that isn't even naturally your own.
And to be bewildered by that and to look around and say, and have that the self -awareness and the maturity, even at a young age, to realize like, Hey man, I can't do things the way these people are doing it, or I'm gonna end up that way." And the situation is dire enough that I have to pull the ripcord and eject in the most traumatic way possible.
It's like, it's an act of self -love on some level.
I mean, it's radical.
And whether you had conscious awareness of that or not, I don't know, maybe you do, but you had to save yourself.
It sounds like. Yeah, in the moment I had no awareness of that.
Certainly, it was, again, just moving on intuition.
And also, there was a socioeconomic choice.
Like, going to school in Japan was cheap.
It was really cheap.
But why Japan? Why Japan?
Now looking back on it so many years later, like, what do you make of this decision?
Like, it feel like it was somewhat spontaneous.
I mean, were you obsessed with Japan as a little kid?
No, I wasn't obsessed, but so I think, okay, if we were to break it down, I'm like 13, 14, I'm like 9, 10, 11, 12.
And I loved video games.
And the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, I think when I was like eight or something, or nine.
And I just remember the most joyful moments of my childhood were connected with this dumb thing, playing Zelda, playing Super Mario, playing Duck.
It was made in Japan.
It was made in Japan, and I remember thinking - The piopeque is continuing to write itself, okay?
I can see the scene where you're like looking at the...
And this was, I mean for Bryan and me, this was our escape, right.
And you kind of understand that this is really the power of video games in a lot of ways, is it allows you to escape a situation for a few hours, a few, you know, 30 minutes, if that's how long you're playing for.
But it is a form of escape and it can be a really positive one.
I mean, for me it activated my imagination, it got me thinking about storytelling But it was this thing that came from Japan.
And I just - Right, Made in Japan is an association with imagination, escape, safety.
Yeah, yes exactly. You know, all of these positive emotional experiences that you were lacking in your IRL.
Exactly. Yeah. And the local video store that I used to bike to back when they had local video stores, one of the guys there was an anime maniac back in the late eighties.
So he was really early on anime.
and he would make bootleg copies of like Akira for me or Fist of the North Star.
And we would watch these things and not really understand what they were about.
I mean, Akira is a really complicated, weird movie.
I don't know if he - But this has stayed with you because you keep referring to it in your book.
So, there was this ambient thing of like, from outside of this place this country called Japan exists and it makes a few things that are kind of interesting and bring me joy and like you said that you know it's a it's kind of an archetype of safety and protection and happiness.
And so I think that just stayed with me and when the time came to study abroad or tried, I was gonna drop out of school, I wasn't gonna go to, I was just gonna give up college.
And when the time came to study abroad, I was kind of looking I was like what would it be like if I went to Japan and I found a couple websites of universities and I was like how much does this cost?
And it was like, I don't remember the exact figure but it was like $5 ,000 for the year or with a home stay.
I mean, it was just so absurdly affordable, and even a plane to get back then wasn't that expensive.
You fly economy to Japan, there's no, I mean, hilariously, it's like there were no monitors in the seat backs.
It was like, it was a long flight, 14 hours or whatever from JFK, and I just thought, well, that makes sense.
Let's go do that before we completely drop out of school.
And your mom, God bless her, had been saving for you ever since she was a young person.
Ever since she was like 20.
Yeah. She told me that story.
She didn't go to college until later and she graduated high school and she just wanted to be a mom.
She worked at the airplane engine factory, I guess, her boyfriend dumped her or something but she had just started saving for a kid that she knew she wanted to have at some point for education because looking back at the salaries and everything like my family did not, we did not have an abundance.
There was no sense of abundance.
But my mom was able to save enough to basically say, look, leaving here is an option, going to college is an option.
And that from a very young age, she let me know.
And so to have that baseline there is a profound thing to give to a kid to say that there is a way out.
Even if like, I don't know the way out, even if your dad definitely doesn't know the way out, Like, maybe you can find the way out.
So how did it land with her, though, when you announced that, you know, these resources were gonna be deployed on the other side of the planet?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't think she thought I was gonna be there for 25 years, you know, or like make my life there.
So it was just, and it was a complicated thing, too.
I mean, my grandparents, you know, they were very anti -Japan.
My grandfather had these weird rules, He never ate rice, I'm not gonna eat rice because of World War II, which is an insane thing to associate rice with Japan and he never bought a Japanese car, only bought Fords, only bought...
Yeah, he was very consistent in this kind of inability to overcome these biases that he'd built up during the war.
And so for me to go there for them was emotionally quite complex. But you become this emissary to resolve generational trauma.
Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
I eat so much rice just to eat it, grandpa.
You have a lot to make up for.
Eat it, grandpa, yeah.
You can't get enough of it because you're eating for the whole line.
Yeah. Back generations.
So you land in Japan, this wide -eyed 19 year old kid who has been adopted.
Who's now sort of unbeknownst to you, like adopting a new country.
Yeah, yeah. That also has a very different relationship with adoption in general, which we'll get to that a little bit later.
But that had to be quite a seismic shock to the system.
It was. And again, it's like none of this was conscious, right?
So you just, when you're 19, you don't know anything about the world.
I mean you're really, that's a really young age, right?
And so you're just kinda moving on intuition.
And, you know, I moved to Japan, I'm in Tokyo.
I didn't know anything about Tokyo.
I'm living in Shibuya -ku.
I've never heard of Shibuya, which is now like everyone, everyone who's, you know, I've heard of that, you've heard of it, like, every 12 year old knows Shibuya, they want to go to Shibuya, it's like, it's this crazy thing that I really went there knowing very little, and immediately I just sensed, holy shit, everyone's taken care of.
Like, that was sort of the ambient sense that I think I felt in my bones.
Because I'd come from this place where, and again, when you grow up in it, you don't see it.
And I get to Japan and it was just like, everyone I'm passing, and I'm passing tens of thousands of people a day on my way to school.
It was kind of like a 30 minute commute to school.
I passed 10 ,000 people.
I passed through Shinjuku Station every day.
And you just felt like these people were taken care of by something.
Something bigger than all of us.
And that really blew my mind.
I mean, that's just that I think, that's why I ended up staying, that's why I committed to it.
That's what you were looking for.
Because that's what you didn't have and what you needed.
Yeah, it's almost this predestined thing, right?
It was a faded thing.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's something ineffable about it that I think is really beautiful.
It speaks to soft power too, you know.
It's like we talk about this thing of soft country is having soft power and like, Japan producing these things of delight that happened to catch me when I was young.
and in a place where I needed help, and kids can't always get help from their environment, and sometimes it's this external third -party thing that swoops in and provides a little bit of reprieve.
And the fact that the soft power of that, too, and Nintendo being such a good company, I think that this is also really interesting, is that if you look at all the video game companies in the world, Nintendo is genuinely probably the one least motivated by explicit capitalism and most motivated by joy and goodness of game design.
So it's like, there's a lot of games today that are essentially casinos, right?
Casino style games, Candy Crush and all that stuff, focused on making money.
Nintendo obviously has to make money and they make lots of money, but like you play Zelda, one of the latest Zeldas on Switch. That is a game with well -defined boundaries, you can finish it, it's not about a casino mechanic.
It's about exploration.
During COVID I played with my daughter a bunch. I bought a Switch. It was the first time, actually, when I was writing this book, I was like, oh, man, I owe Brian some video game time, so I bought a Switch. And I hadn't played video games in 25, 30 years.
And playing with my daughter was incredible.
She was, how old was she?
She would've been like 10 or 11.
And being able to put it up on the projector and walk through these worlds, and you just felt like this is a company that really does respect the gamer and respect the customer in a way that...
Yeah, the nostalgia quotient is very high Yeah.
That company, right?
It's sort of beloved by an entire generation, perhaps for that reason.
So it's even if the idea that it is a well run company by well -intentioned people is not something you're aware of, it's seeps into the products and that's perhaps why it's beloved in that way.
And it points back to the thing I said earlier, which is like, there's a sense of enough, right?
And like, you just get a sense that Nintendo is not about looking at a spreadsheet, going how do we make all these numbers go up forever.
You know, it's like, they want the numbers to go up, shareholders, whatever, they're public company, yada, yada, yada, but they want the numbers to go up.
But there is something, there's some sort of philosophy internal there that is saying we don't have to milk all of these things for the most possible money, and in fact, we want to be optimizing for just the most respect for the jotons on the regular, or the customer, the gamer or whatever, which I love that.
And I think it's why Nintendo, if you look, so many people want Nintendo to succeed.
It's a weirdly high, the nostalgia part quote is part of it, but they've also just engendered a lot of good vibes over the years.
And I love that, you know.
As much as Japan was a place in which you were like finding yourself, you have to like lose yourself to find yourself, right?
So it is this lost and found thing.
I mean, your story and the way in which you kind of address the weightier like themes and subject matter is a very yin yang thing.
And within this, you're finding yourself in this new place.
You had to break free to like, reimagine what your life could be like.
But there is also some grief and some sadness and a sense of loss and having lost yourself on an identity level by being so far away from home.
Yeah, it's a great way to put it, yeah.
I mean, it was complicated as hell.
You know, it's like, and you know, as much as I didn't touch drugs or alcohol throughout my teenage years, as soon as I got to Tokyo, it was like, you know, no holds barred.
Bring it on. Game on, well, everyone's partying, right.
I mean, it's a pretty alcohol -rife culture.
Yeah, the drinking culture.
Thankfully in the last, I'd say decade, it's kinda calmed down a little bit.
and I think the younger generations are not quite putting up with as much power harassment and alcohol abuse.
But when I arrived, it was eking.
I mean, we were at, it was, I've been a musician my whole life, a drummer, I studied jazz, that was kind of one of the things that was, had a few tricks, skills I was cultivating to get me out of town, get me out of my place, tethers to the greater world.
And music was a big part of it.
And when I moved to Tokyo immediately, I joined at the university.
I was at Waseda University, which is a great university, amazing.
It was kind of like a hippie version of Yale, sort of, if you want to, there's a lot of, like Murakami Haruki came from it.
There's a lot of artists and writers and stuff that come out of it.
But I joined the Music Circle and immediately just started playing drums. And part of the re -invention thing was, all right, no more jazz, let's do punk rock.
So I joined a punk rock trio.
And the music circle, my God, did those guys drink.
And so I joined them.
Yeah, you know. Good times.
Until it's not, right?
Yeah, how long until it wasn't?
I mean, so I drink, I was blacking out probably like two, three, four times a week from 20 to like 28, I'd say.
That's a pretty good dose.
Yeah, and, you know lesser and higher moments in there.
But it was this thing, and again being adopted is complicated because you don't have that family history to look at and go, oh, I should watch out for this or I should watch out for that.
Or, I have a predilection, to drink 15 drinks a night.
But there's something that activated in me.
If I had two drinks, I mean, you probably know this, right?
It's like suddenly everything in life is for the next drink.
It was just unreal, that desire, and then also personality change.
I mean, just a totally different person, like complete extrovert, sort of impresario of whatever of the place, and you know, buying shots for everyone and like getting it, well, you need to drink, you know, it's like, I've definitely almost killed friends like, you know, it's like you can kinda like chuckle about this now but it's like, I have friends who've like woken up in the street the next day.
And they like, they're like, you did this to me.
It's like I have no idea.
Well, like passing out on the street, I mean, from what I understand, like that's not unusual in Tokyo.
So no, they wake up, a cop is kind of shaking their shoulder saying, hey, you gotta wake up, they're in front of like Takashima, you know, a department store or something, you know, and they kinda get up and go home.
But you know, for me, the drinking was a shock how good I was at it, in the sense of I could have 15 or 20 drinks a night, and just the desire for it.
And it was almost like a perpetual motion machine.
You know, as soon as you had three or four, it was just, poof, it was off, we were off to the races.
I see that now connected to several things.
One, exactly like you were saying, the complexity of being in this new place and trying to find yourself and trying to shed who you were.
And so I think alcohol can kind of act as a reset for that.
But also like I didn't have any archetypes, I didn't have any mentors, I didn't have anyone I could talk to about these emotions, I didn't have a dad I could talk to about any of this stuff.
Like my mom, my grandparents, like no one could understand what I was doing.
And in this new city, I didn't have anyone older that I could say, hey, I need help with this.
And no therapist. And no therapist. If I could just go back in time and just like whispered to my ear in a bar somewhere.
I'd be like, just get the therapist, like just do that when you're 20.
I think the alcohol was acting as a, as kind of a surrogacy for the pain of wanting to become someone different and not knowing how to do it.
And also your best friend getting murdered and being brought up in an environment of chaos.
Well, and the guilt of kind of leaving that behind too.
and the guilt of I think when he was murdered, I internalized a lot more guilt than maybe I consciously recognized in the sense of what could I have done to have helped him?
How could I have pulled him in more in my direction?
Could I have done that?
And then you realize when you're a teenager, you're just trying to get your own stuff in order, and it's so difficult.
And so the idea that you could be, you don't have your mask on, you don't have your life jacket on, that you're saving another person who's drowning is just crazy, right?
And so I think that guilt was present in it as well, a lot of what I was doing.
And how long did you play out that narrative before you decided you needed to address it?
It was, like I said, 20 to basically 27, 28.
And it was funny. I mean, I was very high functioning in the sense that I was going to the gym three times a week, I was biking.
I got really into road biking.
I'd do 200 mile loops on the weekend.
Totally hungover, sweating out like a gallon of whiskey, but I would go and do these things.
So I had this weird knowledge that I think I needed to take care of my body so I could do more drinking.
Right. It's a two fold thing.
First, like when you're in your 20s, you can kinda do that, you know?
But secondly, and I relate to this deeply.
Like, if you are able to maintain being high functioning or high performing in whatever it is you're doing, that acts as a rationale.
Like, oh, as long as I'm going to the gym or I could do these things that I don't have a problem.
I don't have anything to look at.
And then also a little bit of false pride or superiority, like not only can I like go out and have 20 drinks, I can still show up on time and crush it in school or in my band or in whatever else you're involved in.
Exactly. And so then it gives you this inflated sense of power that is really just an illusion.
Yep. 100%. So I was, you know, I was working on, I was art director for indie press and we were winning awards and I was throwing all these book parties in Tokyo that were like the biggest, most fun book parties that anyone ever had.
It's all a big look at me.
Yeah, exactly. And getting these kind of artist residencies.
Benetton gave me this residency in Treviso north of Venice in Italy.
So I was doing all these things, but even that Italy time, I remember like how many times I blacked out like in the week I was, you know.
But you're like this tastemaker basically then at that time.
I was really lucky, I don't know.
I mean, I happened to be focused on from a young age, I loved books, I loved storytelling, I loved novels, and I loved technology and technology was twofold thing.
One, there was just something magical about it and I could see how it could help with storytelling, and so that was kind of like part of the addiction.
And then part two was like, like, holy crap, you can make a lot of money doing this.
And like, wait, I can make more than both of my parents combined, if I like make web pages, this is me when I'm 14.
It's like, okay, I should focus on this, like, we should cultivate this skill.
So I had this weird skill set where I was making physical books that were winning design awards as physical objects.
And then I was doing digital kind of design stuff and data visualization stuff, this like early 2000s.
That was also winning awards and getting me called to go abroad and be a judge at the art directors club.
You like took a detour to Silicon Valley for a while, didn't you?
That was 2010. So that was kind of post, okay, let's get sober let's fix our life.
But in the early, my early 20s, I was born in 80.
So it kind of maps to years easily, but in the early 2000s, you know, I'm drinking like a fish kind of destroying a lot of like friendships and romantic relationships.
And it was really when I was 26 and I was just truly what I thought was the love of my life.
just this person that was absolutely perfect, left me.
We went on this 40 -day trip through Tibet.
It was this totally crazy adventure that we went on.
We met instantly going on a 40 -day trip.
We're drunk the whole time, and it's just wild, and we're making love on a glacier.
It was just insane.
It was as crazy as you could imagine.
So good, it had to be doomed.
It was so doomed. And she left me.
It was basically just like, you are killing yourself, like I can't be with someone like you.
And like that truly just emptied me out, broke me.
And I was 27 ish, and that was when I realized, okay, I gotta stop.
Whatever I'm doing, I've gotta stop.
And I was playing music, and I was in the studio a bunch, but I was also playing a lot of live gigs, and there was a whole bunch of drinking connected with that.
So I actually, I stopped playing music, which is kind of extreme.
And I was like, I'm gonna take all this creative energy and it's gonna go into writing.
Because I'd been writing up until then, but I hadn't really committed committed.
I was like, okay, let's transmute music energy into writing energy.
And it was like three in the morning, I'm lying in my tiny six mat apartment which is barely bigger than probably two of these tables.
And I'm having suicidal thoughts, the love of my life has left me, I feel so empty.
I don't know how to become the person I want to be, which is someone that's creative and knows how to love and knows how to accept love and can do these things.
And I was like, all right, well, what do we do, and it's kind of funny now that I know about Stutz and his triangle and all this stuff.
I just intuitively, I was like, okay, let's start running.
And it was three in the morning.
Not like you, I didn't run 40 miles, but I got up and I ran like 5K around a quiet Tokyo at three in the morning and I was like, that felt good.
And I was like, all right, I'm gonna try to cut the alcohol out as much as I can and start doing more of this running.
And I signed up for a full marathon around Mount Fuji, Lake Kawaguchi and started training for that.
And that was my first, I think, it did a couple of things.
One, it realized, I realized I can't just quit drinking.
That's not gonna work for me.
I have to replace it with something else that gives me a purpose to not drink.
And so by knowing I had to train, that was a way to say no to the drinking at night.
It was also a way for me to tell friends I didn't have to drink.
Because the problem is, by the time you're 28, 29, you have this cohort of people that drink and expect you to drink, it can be a little difficult to almost like sociopathic to have to step away from that.
You almost have to be like, all right, guys, sorry, I'm never gonna hang out with you again, it's like, I can't do this.
And so I started doing that.
But what was really happening now that I look back at it was I had no self -worth.
Like my self worth was sub -zero.
And all throughout my teens and my 20s, and part of this is the adoption component.
Adopted kids, now that I know more about it.
I've talked to more people about it.
I've been on an adoption podcast with someone who's interviewed three, 400 adoptees.
And they're just these sort of pathological tendencies of an adoptee where you create all these emotional barriers.
You sort of lower your self -worth.
Adoptees are four times more likely to be substance abusers.
twice as more likely to suicidal thoughts.
There is just something implicit about, oh, you're not from our family, you're not from us.
As much as the family may say, oh, we love you, people vastly underestimate the amount of work that has to go into making an adoptive kid feel great.
And so then when you're in a situation like mine where these parents adopt you and then two years later they get divorced, and then the dad isn't really there, it just doesn't, then my mom had boyfriends and then I'd think, this guy is kinda like my dad and then they would break up and there was no reconciliation and he would just disappear.
And so, you just think, oh, I'm someone who's thrown away.
That's what you internalize.
Oh, I'm someone who can be thrown away.
And, man, that really doesn't do what it is for your self worth.
That's super interesting.
This idea that you're disposable and your higher self drops you into Japan, that has a very different relationship with disposability.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Yeah that's interesting.
I hadn't thought about that disposable component and the being taken care of by the greater whole component.
And the sensibility around adoption there, like adoption is aspirational almost, right?
It's like I'm taking you under my wing because you are worthy, not because you were discarded.
And you see that kind of in the craftsman and craft woman area of people being adopted into families to continue, continue the name.
And you see it in inns, so an inn that's been around for 600 years, you know, it's not the same blood family, but it's people have been adopted in and kind of taken over.
Yeah, there is a really kind of healthy relationship with that idea of that you can be folded into a family, kind of like flour into wet dough and it's not, you're not apart from the family, you're really integrated.
So I think that felt good to have that ambiance around me as well.
So the sobriety journey begins with the running, Like does that work for you?
Like how does this go?
You're not like falling into an AA meeting somewhere.
I'm not in an AA meeting because I don't...
They have AA meetings in Tokyo now, I know about that, but I'm sure they had them back then, but I wasn't privy to it.
And it wasn't a like, okay, I'm done and like, just, I'm clean now.
It took me about three years too.
And it was, if I look over those three years, it was about ratcheting up my sense of self -worth.
That's all I was doing.
Again, subconsciously, I had no conscious, there was no plan to do this.
The running was part of it, take care of the body.
Mood follows action, all that stuff.
And it was like, okay let me take care of the body, start doing that.
That's the one thing I have control over.
I didn't have any money so I didn't, it's not like, oh let me go do this fancy retreat in Thailand or something.
I didn't have the means to do that.
So, but I could go for runs, that's easy.
Doesn't cost anything.
That started to feel good.
And then I started charging more.
I just had this moment where I was like, I'm gonna start charging more for my time.
I was doing basically tech consulting stuff because I just had these skills I built up as a teenager.
And even though all of my main work was working on indie publishing and doing design for these books and working with these authors and putting on events and stuff like that.
It was all physical book publishing.
I had this skillset in digital where I could work for, I could do two weeks of work and have six months of living expenses because in Japan, that was another reason I stayed was my monthly cost of living was $1 ,000.
If I had $1 ,000, I covered rent, food, and going out and having fun.
So I was cultivating an asceticism as well all throughout my 20s.
And that gives you a tremendous amount of power, flexibility, and you aren't beholden to doing a thing that you don't want to do.
And so I was very lucky that in my 20s, I was pretty uncompromising, as much as I was self abusing myself with the alcohol and not taking care of myself.
I was uncompromising in that I was only working on projects I felt a deep spiritual, almost like theological connection to.
And so I was doing these little gigs, tech things here and there, I was like, okay, what if I charge three or four X?
And people started saying yes.
I was like, oh, that's cool.
And that started to raise, like if there's a little internal self value meter.
It's like I started out, the meter was broken and then I went in there with running and we started to fix the meter a little and then charging a little more, kind of ratcheted it up a little bit more.
And then, going out to Silicon Valley was sort of, I'd say, probably one of the most pivotal moments of my adult life.
In 2010, I had this opportunity, because of essays I had been writing, so gave up music, started committing to writing, putting these essays out into the world, and they just started to do really well, getting picked up.
The New York Times was writing about them.
You know, it's like, suddenly I've got all these followers, and I was invited to join this company in Palo Alto that was working at this intersection of kind of design, publishing, digital media.
Is that Flipboard? It's Flipboard, yeah.
Flipboard, I remember Flipboard. Flipboard, and so I joined right when they were, just started booming, employee number eight, you know, that sort of thing.
Oh, wow. And to go there, and I moved in to this house two blocks from Steve Jobs, and we were able to rent the house, me and these two guys from Stanford. Woodside?
No, no, this was in Palo Alto.
In old Palo Alto. So Steve Jobs, you know, I think he passed away in that house even, you know, he was right on Santa Rita.
And it was, I don't know if you've ever seen it.
It was - I don't know that I have. I knew he had a home in Woodside, like a really nice place.
I think that was earlier actually when he was younger.
He did the Woodside thing, he was like dating Joan Baez at the time, it was like this Dylan kind of like stalker, you know, sort of situation going on.
But his main home, at least for the later years of his life It was in Old Palo Alto and it's just a two story, it is the most unassuming place you've ever seen.
Like a couple blocks off university or something.
Yeah. Just super close to Stanford, right off the Caltrain stop.
Yeah, so I'd walk past this house every day.
So I went from, for as great as Tokyo is, it is pretty provincial and people there don't really think on an international scale.
So part of going to Silicon Valley was, I was like, all right, let me see what it's like to work with these top, top, top people.
And the guy who invited me, Marcos Westcamp, was a designer I had respected all throughout my 20s.
I mean, he was probably one of the most, for me, most respected designers in the world.
And to go be able to work with Marcos and have Marcos come to me directly and say, Craig, you need to be here with us right now.
This is so great. That, again, that little internal meter of like, do I have value?
And the imposter syndrome is constantly like fighting against that.
Do I have value? These little things ratchet it up.
So I moved to Old Palo Alto, And my two roommates were these Stanford d -school guys.
And we moved into this house, just this cute little single -story house.
And I was sleeping on a yoga mat for the first month, there's no furniture.
We had a kitchen table that we'd all kinda hunch around.
One guy was a filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, making amazing docs, these short form docs, and then the other guy, the guy named Enrique, Enrique Allen, he was just this bastion of love and creativity, and he was kind of working with investments and stuff, and I moved, you know, Japan famously doesn't really hug, doesn't really touch, so I'd lived essentially 10 years of my life without any hugs, you know, and then I moved into this house in Palo Alto, and these guys were just the freakin' huggiest guys in the world, and every day I'm just being smothered by these hugs, and they were so positive.
They were vegetarians, there was no drugs, alcohol.
They didn't drink, and I went from this place of everyone's getting blasted, blacking out.
You know, alcohol's part and parcel of everything.
Every meal is like just meat, you know, Japan loves meat, right?
It's just like beef everywhere to moving to this house where these guys are just hugging me constantly.
There's no meat, there's no alcohol.
And they come from clearly a place of abundance, these two guys.
You just felt, behind them were generations of love that had manifested these two human beings.
And to be in their presence, I lived with them for three years, to be in that presence even after two months, I met up with a good friend of mine, Liz Danzico, who is amazing design teacher, educator, we met up for pizza in New Haven, and she just at the end of pizza, she just goes, Craig I don't know what the hell's going on man.
Like you're a different guy, I've known you for five years at this point, you're a different human.
Like just keep doing this, whatever you're doing now, Keep following that path.
And so that was all just part of this how do I give myself again, not having a mentor, not having an archetype, not having someone older to lead the way, how do I give myself a greater sense of self worth?
And in doing that, the alcohol fell away pretty naturally.
And I'd say it was about 31 when I was finally able to really kind of say goodbye for good.
Put it completely in the rear view.
Yeah, but surrounding yourself with peers that are modeling healthy behavior, being such a profound thing.
Like they're not necessarily mentors, but you shifted your friend group and your environment such that you put yourself in a position to like observe what that might look like.
For sure. And it'd be on the receiving end of that from them to engender that kind of self -compassion and self -respect.
And I did it basically twice, right?
This was like my teenage years I was in one place, and I was like, I have to get outta here.
And then I'm 20 and I'm now in Japan and doing kind of a reinvention, which some good, some bad.
Whatever, the alcohol was suboptimal.
If I could remove the alcohol from my 20s, and I don't really believe this idea of like, oh well, because you went through that now you're a better person.
I've met kids who are in a good place at 20, and it's much better to be in a good place at 20 than like to be in a bad place and then struggle through alcohol and yada, yada, yada.
It's like maybe I can empathize with people who've had these struggles now in a way that you can't, it's difficult if you haven't, but if I could have avoided that, that would have been great.
But there was then a part of me that at the end of my 20s where I was like, okay, I need something else.
And again, it was switching cultural contexts, moving to Palo Alto to a place I'd never lived before, living with people I didn't know, and kind of putting on, again, this leaning into this new identity, which was an identity of abundance.
I was getting paid $30 ,000 a month or something like that.
and it's like I went from making $15 ,000 a year for most of my 20s.
You go back to Japan and live forever?
No, I wasn't, but that was always there because the escape hatch was always there.
I was like I know how to live on a $1000 a month and I can live richly.
So, okay, you just gave me 30 months of living in one month.
And in Palo Alto, I lived like an ascetic.
So you got a yoga mat getting paid that amount of money.
Yeah, that's wild. It was pretty weird. So, right around this time last year, Julie and I embarked on this really incredible once in a lifetime, two -week journey in India.
We visited the Dalai Lama, Dharamsala.
We then went to Rajasthan, where we toured ancient temples.
We took in the vibrant colors and daily life rhythms of Jaipur.
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Those guys that your housemates seem on some level to exhibit something that you talk about in the book, which for me, like one of the biggest, most impactful things that I took away from reading your book is this idea I'd never heard of before, called yo -yo.
Yeah. Is that how you say it?
Is that how you pronounce it?
Yo -yo. Yo -yo. I want to hear more about this, because I think this is a really, like, cool and profound idea.
Yeah, so yo -yo in Japanese is, you know, and I kind of, I bristle at the idea of like, quoting a mystical Japanese word, and saying like, you know, oh this is like, the magical art of...
The magical art for you.
The magical art of whatever.
It's just the word they have for an idea that we don't really have quite the word for.
Exactly, exactly. In English, it could kind of be empathy, but it's deeper than empathy.
And in Japanese, the way I've come to understand it is, is having the space in your heart to accept someone else, to have space in your heart for someone else, an abundance of space in your heart and your life to be able to accept hardship, but to be able to respond to hardship.
and that's I think what I felt fundamentally when I moved there is that having these systems on a greater level supporting people imbued everyone I saw on the street, everyone I was passing with this, a little bit of yo -yo and more people have more yo -yo and less yo -yo than others but there is this sense of space in the heart like you know when I first got off in Narita Express, yeah, I arrived in Tokyo.
This is how little I knew about Tokyo.
I arrive, get off at Narita, get on the Narita Express, The train stops at Tokyo station.
I think, oh, this is Tokyo City.
Not knowing that Tokyo had 100 stations.
So I get off at Tokyo station and I'm like, I have to go to Shibuya -ku.
I have to get to Shibuya.
I was living in Hataga and I kind of looked befuddled and someone came up to me.
A woman maybe in her forties or whatever, but I was 19.
So everyone felt if you're over 30, you're the ancient.
So a woman in her forties comes over to me, and is like, do you need help?
And I was like, I need to go to this address.
And she was like, oh my God, like you're nowhere near.
And she took me all the way, like half an hour on the train.
She took me to this other station, helped me transfer, did this thing.
That's unheard of. That's unheard of and that is yo -yu in action.
That is having an abundance of space in your heart to be able to do that for someone and that immediately, that as being literally my first interaction I had getting arriving in Tokyo, I think just started to re, recalibrate.
So reprogram my entire way of thinking about the world.
It's a relationship with abundance though Because in the West, abundance is something we're seeking and when we get it, we reward ourselves by trying to get more of it and hoarding it.
It's sort of an energetic thing.
Your relationship with this energy is such that should you be lucky enough to have it it's best deployed outward in service of other people.
And when you have a lot, like then you have more to give And it's your responsibility to give that, right?
And in doing that, you engender empathy.
It allows you to forgive more easily.
It opens up space to your point for these other emotions that we tend to like kind of clamp down on or we hoard those too.
Like, I'm not gonna forgive you until this or that.
We're very conditional about these things.
Yeah and I think being around people with Yo -Yo and realizing I grew up in a place with no Yo -Yo where everyone was economically kind of pushed against the wall.
And in terms of what are our opportunities, well there aren't any.
And so like when you're in a situation like that, where you can fall, when you see how far you can fall, I think this is like another thing about the American condition that's a little bit scary, is when you see how far you can fall, and you can fall to hell, beyond hell in America, there just aren't those safety nets to catch you.
When you see how far you can fall, it's really hard to feel a sense of abundance that you can give to other people.
And so in Japan, because of all these structures and these social structures, and you can only fall, oh I can see how far I can fall, it's not that far, it's not that scary for me to help this other person out.
I think just being around that and feeling that and then being on these big solo walks that I've been doing now for six, seven years, it was in that, and I write about this in the book, I was able to, I'm able to laugh about who my father was.
I was able to find this crazy sense of forgiveness for this guy that I didn't know was possible.
that I was capable of.
And feeling that, experiencing that is, again, we're getting back to this self -worth ratcheting.
And I think having a sense of yo -yo feeling that yo -yo, being able to deploy it in a way that's positive, that elevates people, again, that just helps you feel like you have more value as a human too.
It's like, it's mutually beneficial.
Why didn't you end up staying in Palo Alto?
What caused you to go back?
It served its purpose.
It was a great experience.
And like I said, probably one of the most profound, possibly most important three years of my life, living with these guys, doing this work with people that were operating at the highest, highest levels, getting paid these ridiculous amounts of money, but at the same time, I felt like I had, what I had cultivated in my 20s, the voice I had cultivated, the focus of the work I wanted to be focused on in my 20s, I felt like the financial abundance that existed in Silicon Valley was actively kind of working against what I built up.
Because as much as I was around these people who weren't drinking, you know, were vegetarian, were giving lots of hugs and things like that, there was also this other layer of people and the majority of people who were just like, Oh, let me get this Woodside House or let me get this Atherton House or let me get this, oh you just got a new Maserati, I got this thing.
And that to me didn't jive with who I had built up, who I'd spent the last 15 years building inside of me, and I had a lot of love for that person inside of me.
And who kind of worked in this intuitive way and had an uncompromising focus to work on books like these that were not gonna make me nearly as much as staying in Silicon Valley.
And I was really lucky.
I was being offered all these opportunities.
You know, I was close with Ed Williams. I was being, you know, asked to be, to work for every major company at that point was basically trying to hire me and have me be an advisor and all these things.
And I just had this moment where I was thinking about moving to San Francisco and I was waiting in line to rent an apartment for $4 ,000.
And it was in this neighborhood I didn't really like, and there's a guy dying on the sidewalk next to me, and the apartment was kind of junkie, and I was like, what am I doing?
What is this, like 2012 or something?
2013, yeah. 2012, 2013.
Yeah, okay. And I had this moment.
I was literally standing in line and I just thought, okay, I'm done with this, I'm going back.
And the whole time I had kept my place in Tokyo kind of as like this tether to the, to where I'd been.
And the cost was so low.
I mean, my rent, I basically never paid more than six, $700 rent in my life in Tokyo.
And so, this $600 rent over there was a rounding error.
It's like, okay, if you're making $30 ,000 a month, it's like, I can pay that.
And I was renting it out to a friend the whole time.
Anyway, it was, I could go back very easily.
And I just had this epiphany where I was like, okay, I'm gonna work on books and I want to commit.
During 2011 my father died and I had to go bury him.
It was this kind of complicated set of circumstances where he had moved to North Carolina when I was a teenager and he had moved with his mother and his sister and brother -in -law and they all died instantly, like, within three or four years.
So he was alone in the woods in North Carolina and his family was small to begin with and there were no relatives left alive when he died, and so I get this call.
In 2011, I'd just gotten to Palo Alto.
We were in the middle of crazy work.
I'd replaced alcohol with mega -work, work mania, working morning to night, and trying to ship this, yeah, I don't, you're so surprised, trying to ship this iPhone app and my dad dies in the middle of that, and I'm like, God damn it dad, you're bad timing!
it was basically like being called, if someone had picked a random person out of the phone book, it couldn't have been more of a stranger to me than this guy by this point.
So I was like, oh hey, come to North Carolina to a town you don't know and bury the stranger.
And I went out there and I rushed through it all.
And at the same time, even though I rushed through it all, there were moments of incredible profundity that I didn't get to sit with.
And I was kinda rushing through it and I was like OK, at some point I have to go back to that.
And it was around that time, 2012 or so, I got a McDowell writing fellowship, I was really lucky.
I applied randomly to McDowell to get a writing scholarship and to do a residency there.
And McDowell is the oldest writing residency in the country and I mean, it's just incredible.
Have you ever heard of McDowell?
I've heard of it, I don't know much about it.
It's in New Hampshire, it's been around for 120, 30 years.
I mean, it's just idyllic.
And you're there with Booker Award winners, National Book Award winners, you know, Like, oh, this person's played with Stevie Wonder.
This composer's written for...
It's just the top of the top and I somehow snuck in.
And again, that ratcheting up, that little ratcheting up.
And I went there and the thing I decided, okay, I need to work on is I'm gonna sit with my dad for, I was there for six weeks basically.
Let me sit with this story and work on that for six weeks.
And that was pretty important.
And then feeling that and feeling like, okay, this is the path that my heart feels pulled towards.
which wasn't building more technology stuff.
It was really great.
As a teenager, I had this fantasy of going to Silicon Valley and doing something, and then when I was 29, 30, I had the ability to go out and not only do it, but do it at one of the hottest companies with some of the most kind, compassionate, talented people I'd ever met, and to feel like I could stand total time with all these mega, talented A -list people in that world and touch it and feel like, okay, I can do this, and now I know I don't have to do this.
Yeah, a couple reflections.
On the one hand, I was rooting for Flipboard. This felt like the first app that was actually built for the iPad.
Like oh, this is like an elegant way to like consume the things that I wanna consume.
I wanted it to succeed.
Do I have you to blame for why this thing didn't work out?
No, you have me to blame because I quit.
Okay, that's what I'm saying.
If I had stayed. That's what I'm saying.
Part of me, so part of me wishes you'd stayed so this could, I could now be enjoying my content in that way and from everything I understand, Ev Williams is a wonderful guy and amidst all of those sort of iconic Silicon Valley pioneers, he's actually, we actually have him booked, he's coming in, I think we're trying to get a date to have him come in because he's got this new thing, Mozi, about like, connections and gatherings.
I've always thought he's a really interesting person, But on the flip side, the way I look at or interpret the story you just told is somebody who really got clear on what their values were.
And you can't do that unless you value yourself.
Like you had grown to a point where that level of self esteem was sufficient to resist the temptation.
Like a lot of money, this is where everyone was going at that time.
Like all the incentives were pulling you in that direction.
but you were able to honor that voice within you that realized there was a different path for you that would be more honoring of who you actually were rather than the mask that you could adorn that would be rewarded in our culture.
For sure. And when I was at Flipboard every weekend I would book a hotel in the city and I would just go up there Friday night and I'd get late checkout on Sunday and I would just write from Friday night till Sunday.
That's better than just drinking in the hotel room for three days straight.
That's the other version.
Sparkling water. I drank so much sparkling water.
But yeah, it was just sparkling water.
But no, so I was, even in the middle of it all, I was protecting this thing that I had cultivated throughout my 20s and was trying not to get pulled in these other directions and keep those values clear and apparent.
But what really made it easy to make that decision was I looked around my life.
And everyone in my life that I loved that I had the deepest connections to, even being able to work at Flipboard, all of that was connected to writing.
All of that was connected to being honest with myself and focusing on the things that I felt the need to focus on.
And people like Kevin Kelly, who has become one of the most important people in my life, probably, he'll be really embarrassed to hear that.
But Kevin is such a dear friend, and we met, actually I met Kevin two days after I buried my dad, and I rushed through burying my dad in order to get to the event in New York to give a talk, because that year I moved to Palo Alto.
I gave, I don't know, like 10 or 15 talks around the world.
I was just suddenly being invited to do these things.
And again, the scarcity mindset which plagued me throughout my entire life, scarcity, scarcity, scarcity, no value, no value, no value.
They're gonna find out that you're a fraud.
This is all gonna go away.
We have to say yes to all these things.
And so I had this thing in New York with O 'Reilly Media, and I literally, basically all but like threw my dad in the crowd.
You know, it's like, I was like, we gotta, I'm talking with the priest. I'm like, we gotta get this going fast. He's like, when do you need?
I'm like, tomorrow, we need to have this happen.
He's like what? I'm like, hey, we just got to get this done.
And I got to New York, I was on stage.
Another good scene in the biopic, by the way.
And I gave a talk on stage, and I got this email right after.
It was from Kevin Kelly, and he was like, hey, I like the things you're saying about publishing on stage there.
And I was like, who is, I didn't know who he was.
And I asked a friend, I was like, should I talk to this guy?
And he's like, Kevin Kelly, yeah, yeah, he talked to Kevin Kelly.
And I was like, okay, hey, I'm out back.
You know, come say hello.
And he came over and he's like, this tiny guy looks like he's Amish.
He's a gnome. He's a gnome.
He's a little gnome, Amish gnome.
And he goes, oh, yeah, so what publishing tool should I be?
I was like, who is this character?
And he just started inviting me to come take walks in Pacifica.
We'd walk along the coast. This is where the walks began.
Because we've done an entire podcast, we haven't talked about walking at all yet.
I'm sorry. No, it's good.
This is the way we do it.
This is where the walks begin, kind of Kevin.
This is the anti -clickbait, you know?
We're like, we're going to delay satisfaction on the subject of walking into an hour and a half in.
But go ahead, so it was Kevin who was the inception point.
And he kind of has history of walking.
And, you know, it's kind of his thing.
You've gone on to do these like walking talks with him, right?
All over the world.
Yeah, in fact, Kevin and I have done four of them in the last 15 months, which is a crazy pace for us, but Kevin has a deathclock on his computer, so he's looking at, Kevin every day is looking at how many hours of life he has left, I think.
So he's like, Craig, I wanna do more of these.
Ratchets up the pressure on you.
He's like, my clock's different, but.
Like, it might be the same clock, we don't know.
We don't know. But I appreciate his zeal for doing these things, but Kevin and I started putting these together about eight years ago where we invite six to eight people to walk with us somewhere around the world for a week, and we walk for seven days basically.
It's about 100K, 120K.
The ideal is about 20K a day.
That feels really good.
It's like just enough to move your body.
You can have a lot of conversations, but you can still stop and see things along the way and take breaks and stuff.
And then every night we have a Jeffersonian dinner.
So it's one topic, one table, one conversation, and Kevin is great.
Because he's such an elder aura, like his vibe is just this like you don't wanna offend Kevin.
I find people won't say offensive things around Kevin and then Kevin will be gone and then they'll say crazy things to me.
I'm like, just because Kevin's gone doesn't mean you can say crazy things to me, but he maintains this elder statesman atmosphere.
And so everyone plays along and we have these three hour discussions every night about all sorts of different topics and every day someone picks a new topic.
Kevin has said these are some of the best weeks of his life and so to be part of that for a guy like Kevin Kelly whose lived the life he's lived is incredible.
And he is a tractor beam for interesting people, right.
So I would imagine the people that show up for those walks are already loaded to bear with all kinds of insights and amazing experiences.
And we started doing those, and I invite half the people and he invites half the people and spending seven days almost 24 hours a day, you're like 15, 16 hours a day with these people where you're walking and you're walking in twos and you keep kind of moving between little groups and stuff and that.
You have these really profound dinner conversations to the point where I mean, there has not been a walk and talk where people aren't in tears.
It's like there's some point people are sobbing.
To have these discussions, and see how people's minds work, and all the discussions are done with an incredible amount of yo -yo, generosity, empathy.
And so to witness that, now for me, we've done eight or nine of them which means two and a half months of my life have been spent around tables with these incredible humans having these deep conversations, again, just creating in my mind all these archetypes for what could be.
And you spend seven days with someone and that is a profoundly different experience than just getting coffee with someone.
And so to be able to spend - Or laying on a lounge chair by a pool.
Exactly. And the walking is critical, that walking gives purpose to it, it moves the mind in a certain way, without the walking it doesn't work.
And you walk in to in, so we've done Cotswolds a couple of times, is we walked Thailand, Chiang Mai from the mountains down back into Chiang Mai, we walked in Bali, we walked across the island, and that one was the most intense.
That one, I will never do something like that again, but every day we'd get to a basically bamboo platform in the forest, and it was 10 of us, and we all just slept next to each other on this bamboo platform, did that for a week.
That said, the Bali chat group is the most active chat group of all the WhatsApp groups from all the walking talks.
Well, discomfort as a way of bonding people together.
But we just did Spain again, the Camino de Santiago's amazing.
We've done Japan a couple times.
But it is one of the greatest things in my life, again, ratcheting up sense of self -worth, and then being able to connect with these people that I've grown to, many of them have become just such close friends, people I love.
It's one thing to do these walks as a group and as a exercise in connection and idea sharing, et cetera.
It's altogether something different to decide I'm gonna go on these solo walks and I'm gonna go great distances.
Like maybe there's a light dusting of the alcoholism thing in here, like this is what I would do.
It's like I decide I'm gonna like run them and swim them, like push my body.
but the idea of slowing down and just being with yourself and the most undistracted way for extended periods of time as a challenge, as a way of reclaiming your attention, which is something you've written a lot about, reckoning with yourself.
Like the hardest walk is the walk inward, right?
And giving yourself space to do that.
So, is that like a byproduct of having these nourishing experiences with Kevin and these groups or?
It's sort of in parallel.
The solo walking stuff happened from another mentor that is just a dear friend who accidentally became a mentor, this guy John McBride, who I write about in.
Right, the book of John.
Like I wanna hear all about the book of John.
The book of John. But John, I met almost 20 years ago now through Art World Connections, cause I had written a book about the Tokyo art world and we got connected.
And it was one of these things where we sat down for breakfast together, and then we didn't stand up until 5pm.
It was like one of those like falling into just infinite conversation and just this almost like pheromonal deep connection.
Again, almost like the Brian thing as kids, but having that as an adult, it's kinda rare.
And then we just started doing, he'd invite me, oh, I'm gonna go stay in James Turrell's House of Light with some artists, do you wanna come?
And we started doing these things together.
And then John grew up essentially in Japan.
He came when he was 16, 17 on a scholarship, went to Japanese university, is totally fluent, you know, wrote his Sotsugo -Rombun, his graduation thesis in Japanese by hand, that sort of thing.
And when he was studying, he started doing all these old walks.
So there's the Tokaido, there's the Nakasendo, there's Matsubasho, the Haiku poet who did the Okono Hoso Michi, The Narrow Road to the North.
And John, as a teenager, started walking all these alone, because he wanted to understand the connection between literature and history.
And so he's taking notes, and his literature professor's kind of guiding him.
And so John had been doing that, and then he sort of retired in his early 40s.
He ran SkyTV in Japan, so launched it with Rupert Murdoch. He was the CEO when he was like 33.
So he's one of these wunderkind human beings, and kind of retired.
And then at 50, he was sort of looking for, I don't know, something to go back to, or reflect on, and he started doing these walks again.
And he started inviting me.
He's like, Hey, I'm gonna because I was, you know, I was writing my book about my dad, which and that, by the way, never came out.
It never became a thing.
But you know, I was writing I was freelance, I had time.
And John was like, Hey, come walk with me in, you know, Kumano Kodo, you know, this, this path called Kumano Kodo.
I was like, what's that?
And so he started opening up this world, the world that's in this book.
John 100 % opened up to me.
And we started going on these walks together, he and I, and his fluency and his yo -yo, his abundance as a human being blew me away.
Like Kevin and John share a lot of that abundance in different ways.
And we'd be walking these old pilgrimage paths on the key peninsula, which is the peninsula south of Kyoto and Osaka.
The dangling penis.
Yeah, that's how I describe it, it's the moist. The lovingly referred to in Japan.
The moist dangling penis of the Honshu.
Yeah, if you look at it that way.
And we'd be in the countryside walking, talking to farmers, talking to in owners, and I started observing John, just I'd stand back and I'd watch how he ensorcelled everyone we connected with with language, cause in Japanese you can kind of elevate people through the verb conjugation and the word choice and through his language, through his historical knowledge, through his presence, just the way he held himself to everyone, where again, it was no sense of, I'm above you.
I'm looking down even though it's a random, you know, could be a tomato farmer in the middle of nowhere.
Total elevation of who he was speaking with and watching those people flip over this kind of swingset and disbelief.
Because there's like, initially it's like, Oh my God, a white guy, this big lumbering dude.
He's like six two and you know, big, big guy.
You know, John lumbers up and you know, you can see them freaking out.
Oh my God. How am I going to communicate with this person?
And then within two seconds they realize, Oh, he's totally fluent.
And then within five seconds they realize, Oh my God, this is a really special human being.
And then within 30 seconds, they are willing to do anything for us.
It was like, do you want to live with me?
Do you want to marry my daughters?
Like, do you want, like, do you want tea?
Like anything. I mean, just, just to watch John do that.
And again, it's these archetypes and being present for archetypes and bearing witness to archetypes in action is something that Brian and I were bereft of as growing up as kids.
We had none of that.
And I say in the book, man, if we just had ten minutes with someone like John, when we were kids, how different could it have been to just witness John doing this for ten minutes?
And so, you know, I'm eternally grateful to John for inviting me on these walks.
I was basically 33, 34 when we started doing this and witnessing this.
And then from that, because I had the language skills, but I didn't know how to deploy them.
My whole thing is I've got this voice in the back of my head, ready to fight everybody.
It's like that's just how it was, where we came from.
You always have to be ready to fight.
And if you didn't fight you were gonna be diminished, you were gonna be snuffed out.
And that voice is still there in my head all the time.
And so if I perceive someone to be a bully, and I can be overly sensitive about this, I'm ready.
Like, oh, let's go to the mat.
You know, and John didn't have any of that.
He comes from a place of total abundance.
Well, he was the mentor that you needed your entire life.
He's your Mr. Miyagi.
He really, like, if you inverted Mr. Miyagi, you get John.
What for the opposite?
Yeah, exactly. And we should say, you keep bringing up Brian, but for the audience, the book is structured as basically an elongated letter to Brian, like, hey, I'm going on this journey.
Like you're reconciling with your grief and your guilt and all of these emotions, but you're doing it in the context of like sharing your experiences in a letter to this lost friend.
Right, yeah, the book opens just, hey, let me begin again for you, Brian.
And yeah, the whole thing kind of ends up being this letter to him.
Like if I could talk to him today, What would I want to tell him about and explain and being able to kind of think back on where I've gotten to in Japan to be walking alone, 700 kilometers, talking to cafe owners, smoking cigarettes with these jazz cafe people, to be able to get to that place from where we were and just go, Brian, man, look at this.
This is ridiculous.
You know, it's like there's one passage in there where I talk about having taken Jeff Bezos on a walk.
You know, it's like he joined one of these walks randomly.
I mean, it's just so surreal to have gone from where I was in the world to Jeff reaching out and being like, hey, I wanna join you.
You know, I wanna do a Kevin and Craig walk.
You know, and the surrealness of that.
And I think writing this to Brian helped me contextualize a lot of that in a way that would have been difficult otherwise.
Right, right, it's a vehicle to express everything you wanna say in a shorthand because you realize, like you realize the context of it.
Right. Yeah. So The Book of John, like what, tell me this like worldview theory then, like you're observing this charismatic person in -sorciling people, I love that word. I'm so glad you use that, but if you had to canonize it, what is that, how do you articulate that?
So The Book of John is this thing in this book that I talk about.
So John, you know, like we what we've done, I don't even know how many how many walks together we've done but we've probably travelled together 24 hours a day, sleeping in the same room, you know, like we're basically siblings, like I, like, he doesn't want to be called a dad, like, you know, so we travel together and people are always like, Oh, dad, father and son, he's 20 years older than me, you know, father and son.
Oh, that's so cute.
And he gets like, really upset.
He's like, I'm not his dad, you know, like, not, not actually upset but just kind of, but like, it really is sort of sibling -ish, you know, that's what it feels like.
And so we've spent six months, I would say, of our lives together, which is, I don't think I've spent that much time with any other human being outside of childhood.
And so John, even when we're not walking together, I'm walking alone.
He's like, he can see me on find my friends or whatever, and he always knows where I am.
And he knows the routes I'm walking.
He's walked them 50 times.
And so every day, he's emailing me, basically PDFs of sections of books that he's written about where I'm gonna be that day, even though he's never published any of these books.
He gives a lot of lectures and stuff.
And so every day I'm getting this download of like oh Craig hey I see you next to this shrine that here's the history of like you know and so I call this the Book of John.
I've gotten thousands of pages from John over the years, kind of like this angel on my shoulder looking at well okay this is where you're gonna be today, these are some cool things to see, you know.
And so that's one part of the Book of John.
But then the other part is just that in my mind this voice of John and like having borne witness to him, be such a human of compassion and abundance and empathy.
He's gonna sort of blush at all this but like it's true.
He really, he really is this person of yoyu, of incredible yoyu.
I keep that in mind all the time and anytime I find my mind veering to that scarcity place and that voice of fighting, of anger, kind of like being like, hey man, I'd like brushes it's like, hey, we're ready to go whenever you wanna go.
I kind of like refer back to the aura of the Book of John, which is like, just putting a little more energy, assume the best, try to elevate that person on the other side before you go to that place of scarcity.
He gives you the facts, but it's really a vibe check.
It totally is vibe check.
That's what it is, right?
And so what is the Book of Craig though?
Because it's got to have its departure points from...
I know. You're not a strict constructionist, Oh my God.
The Book of John. The Book of Craig is a super, super in progress book.
I mean, it is less history focused.
Like, this is not my thing.
I'm not able to retain facts.
I like history in the sense of giving me a little bit of context, but for me, what I get out of these walks, and the reason why I don't do nature walks, why all my walks are like village to village, or they have to pass through villages, and that's why with the Kumano Kodo, the walk of the Kumano Kodo that I like the most is called the Iseji, and that's a walk that few people do, but it is the walk that, it touches mountains, it touches the coast, it touches logging villages, fishing villages, you feel this kind of salt of the earthiness of people all along that walk.
And so for me, as I'm doing these walks, I wanna talk to as many people, I wanna bear witness to as much life being lived as possible.
And for me, I'm just collecting a weird squirrel, like little archetypes of possibility.
This is what life can be like, this is what life can be like, this is what life can be like.
Oh, this is, you can have a good life in this context.
Oh, in this context, you can have a good life.
And for me, those stories, the conversations I have with people, that is what it is for me.
It's bearing witness to possibilities of how to live and how to live well.
What would you say is the core takeaway take away or like thesis that you've extracted from these many experiences, the through line?
Well, I mean, I really do believe that social safety nets create an abundance that allows for the most interesting lives to be lived.
Because if you know you're gonna be okay, then you have the calmness and.
Well, you can take risks.
Yeah, you have more freedom to be yourself and to do the things you wanna do.
So I've done a lot of these big kind of historical countryside walks.
And but I've also done kind of iterations, I've been like, Oh, well, how can we do walks differently?
So one thing I did was I picked 10.
What you call like flyover cities, like Japanese flyovers, so places you would like never go to necessarily because there's nothing particularly special about these cities, but I kind of picked them from Hokkaido all the way down to Kagoshima.
And I tried to walk 50 kilometers in each city.
That was my goal. So I'd go to him, I'd spend three nights, and I'd try to walk 50k.
If you try to walk 50k, you're gonna touch almost every street in the city, and you're gonna end up talking to people and all this stuff.
And I started in Hakodate.
I went to Morioka, Sakata, Matsumoto, Tsuruga, Onomichi, Yamaguchi, Karatsu in saga, and Ehime.
I went to a city, and then I went and did Kagoshima.
So I went to these ten cities.
And I just started talking with folks.
And most of these places are very countryside.
And most of the Japanese countryside is depopulating shutter.
It's called shut the guy, so shutter street, so all the shopping streets are just shuttered.
The shops are all closed.
You don't see kids anywhere.
You don't see independent businesses thriving.
And in doing these 10 cities that I kind of picked almost at random, one of these cities in particular, Morioka.
I went and it was just abundance upon abundance, it just freaked me out.
I was like why has literally no one ever said to me in 23 years by that point, you should go to Morioka, it's cool.
It was just cafes, amazing cafes and bakeries.
And the cityscape was wonderful to walk and there's this huge park in the middle that the castle used to sit on, and there's 16th generation iron workers was building, like doing these amazing pots and like the 15th generation was the current guy's mom, who's like the super cool, like strong woman.
And I was just like, why has no one talked about this place?
And so a couple of years ago, New York Times came to me, I write for them freelance sometimes, they came to me and said, hey, we're doing our 52 places you should go to this year for 2023.
Do you have somewhere to recommend?
And I was like, yeah, sure, I like Morioka super cool.
Let me just recommend, and you kind of write this little paragraph.
It was probably like 200 words you write.
I submit it. I'm like, guys, this really is a great city.
Truly, please, I hope you consider it for the list. And they don't tell you where it's gonna come in the list. And they go, okay, it's gonna be on the list. So you're like, okay, it'll be 30, 40 out of 52, something like that.
And the list comes out in January, 2023.
And number one is London, because the queen had died and all this stuff was having...
There was a coronation happening.
And then number two was Morioka.
I didn't know it was number two.
I knew that you wrote that article and that it blew up and it created like a whole thing.
It was too and everyone in Japan just went, it was like the record scratched across, the needle scratched across the whole country.
And they were just like, what, like London and Morioka.
What is the population of this city.
It's like a hundred thousand, a couple hundred thousand.
I mean it's not like Podunk, Mississippi or whatever, it's like there are people there.
They're erecting statues, you know, in the town square.
Well, it was crazy because everyone was in shock.
And then there's one guy in the city who runs this old soba shop, he just went, this is insane, we need to use this to promote the city.
And he started pushing it, he started reaching out to media contacts, and was like, hey, and he's like, I think Craig speaks Japanese too, like the guy who wrote this article.
And so then suddenly, it was just, like I was in the middle of a giant media figure in Japan.
It went from, I had literally never spoken on TV or radio or anything before to I've now done hundreds of TV shows and radio shows and newspapers, magazines, everything, and they invited me up there.
They're like, hey, you should come on up.
The mayor wants to meet you.
I'm just like, okay, this'll be interesting.
I can do a follow up piece to the New York Times like, how is Morioka doing?
And I thought, they didn't tell me anything.
I'm like, I'm gonna go into a little room like this, gonna shake the mayor's hand, be like, hey, nice to meet you, let me know if I can help, use this to your advantage please.
And I walk in, and they open the doors, and it was like a scene from a movie, it's all, like the whole thing.
It was just all giant network TV cameras, you know, rapid fire paparazzi, you know.
You know, and I'm just like, what the, what is going on?
I haven't prepared a speech. I haven't prepared anything.
They bamboozled me, they totally did the bamboozle on me.
And so I walk in, they lead me to the mayor, he's sitting on like a throne.
And so like I sit next to him.
It was just so ridiculous and we shake hands and the mayor basically goes, he's like, thanks Craig, okay, I'm out of here.
Take it from here, and he just left me with all of this media.
Truly, I had not prepared like a speech for these people, I hadn't prepared anything.
And they start asking me questions And they're like, um, modo -san, how do we, uh, solve poverty?
And I'm just like, guys, guys, I don't hold on.
Like, I just think you have really good coffee shops.
Like, I don't know how to solve poverty.
I am so sorry. I think I'm not the guy you expected.
Uh, but anyway, it was, it was insane.
Like I'd walked down the street, people would stop their car and scream out.
Modo -san! Arigato! You know, like I'd walk into a, uh, uh, someone take me to like a restaurant.
I was hi, everyone would stand up and start clapping and try to buy me drinks and stuff, and it was just being stopped on the street for selfies.
And I was like, okay, this is how A -list celebrities feel everywhere they go in the world, and I could see this would drive you insane, this would make you a crazy person if this really happened at this level everywhere.
But it was funny, and what I was able to do from it, and the reason why I said yes to all the media wasn't because my ego wasn't like, oh my god, finally, we've arrived, this is what we've been waiting for our whole life, the absolute zero of that.
And in fact, it was really difficult for me to do a lot of this stuff.
But what I saw was a moral obligation to explain, like, why did I pick this city?
And these people were just dumbfounded, like, what do we do with this now?
And so I wanted them to get the most positive that they could rest from this as possible.
And I felt a moral duty to explain to them, why is your city great?
Like, what's cool about it?
Because they were all just like, Why, our city is boring.
It's like a middle of nowhere nothing town.
And so going on, a lot of these radio shows and TV shows people would be like, you know, what is it about Morioka that you liked?
And like, how many bowls of soba did you eat?
Like, that's what they're obsessed with.
And I was like - They must have the best noodles or there's some secret there that you unlock.
Yeah, and my answer was national health insurance.
That's what they forgot.
It was like national health insurance combined with a little bit of good infrastructure So the shinkansen stop happens to be there.
So that injects with a little bit of life.
But just having, because everything I loved about Morioka was independent business.
So it was this jazz place that's been doing Japanese jazz for 50 years and they were the progenitor of building a jazz cafe around Japanese jazz.
They were the only one doing it and they got heckled for it and they just stuck to their guns.
And it was one of these things where there's a certain kind of business that can't exist in Tokyo because there's just too much influence, but just enough outside the city where the cost of living's really low, where you're taken care of, you can have a family, you can run a small bookshop that becomes this community center, Morioka is just full of that, and that was what I loved about it.
And this is what we all want on our Main Street, that has completely vanished from modernity.
Yes, so it is a city of Main Street, it's just every street you walk, there's a tatami maker, here's a great bookshop, here's another cafe, here's a cafe that's been open for 55 years, here's one that's been open for three years here's out the daughter of this old ones opening a new one over here you know it's like there's this energy and community that comes from this yo you this abundance that is so heartening and that's I think why I was so moved by it and it was difficult to explain the Japanese media because I'm like well I come from this traumatized place of scarcity you know it's like and I'm
like saying this in media and I'm like going to a city like Morioka heals me it's like literally healing me to walk the to feel this abundance, to feel that this is possible, because I'm collecting this archetype of you can live like this, you can have a city like this.
What would it be like to be able to have a cool business and not live in fear of like never being able to pay the rent and just be able to celebrate and enjoy it for what it is without thinking about how it has to scale to 10 cities.
For sure, and so in Morioka you've got one coffee guy who is revered all across the country.
He was actually one of the first people to import, I think it's called a probot.
It's like a classic German roaster machine, giant machine.
And it's like he just got really into coffee and started doing this stuff and he was able to do it because rent was really low and no one was gonna raise the rent on him.
And even after all this attention, it's not like I've destroyed the city now.
But I'm sure there was a profound economic impact.
Do you have a sense of, like, have they been able to tally?
I mean, there's some estimates, but it's probably somewhere around like 100 million plus of positive economic impact.
That's wild. So 200 words led to a hundred million.
So maybe they did say, now we can move to Tokyo.
That's the American thing.
I was like, now we can get out of here and go to Tokyo.
But my thing was, all these political groups were asking me to give talks at like rallies and stuff like that.
I said no to everything.
All I wanted, for me the most important generation, the most important demographic to speak to is teenagers and people in their early 20s.
And so the biggest thing I wanted people to take away from this was for teenagers to feel pride in where they came from.
And so you leave and then you think about coming back to build on this greatness that's already there.
And so to me, that was the most important thing.
So talking to politicians in their 60s and 70s to me was pointless.
That was just idiotic even if they were gonna pay well.
I was like, I don't, and also like, you don't wanna touch that world, but talking to young kids talking to, I'm happy to do that until I'm blue in the face.
Another aspect of these walks is connecting with, I mean, that's a story of resilience to celebrate, but there's this impermanence aspect.
Like this peninsula is in decline and in decay and has had to suffer, You know, like, all these, was it like the hurricane that destroyed it, you know, like.
Yeah, yeah, so many.
So it was like, it's sort of littered with relics and wreckage that connects you with like the impermanence of all things, right?
Yeah. And when you walk this, you're in this deeply reflective state where you're like reflecting on your own life and perhaps reflecting on the impermanence of all things as a result of what you're seeing and experiencing, but at the same time, and you're like writing and you're like collecting all these knickknacks and you're curating and like, so there's a hoarding aspect to this also.
I like that description.
That's kind of like in conflict with that.
Well, hoarding, yeah, hoarding stories.
But part of the hoarding element is you feel it disappearing so rapidly.
So it's gone. 10 years from now, most of these people I'm speaking to are dead.
They're gone. The shops are gone.
They're kisses, that's what they're called.
These like cafes. There's nobody in them, right.
It's like there's very few people.
Existing for the few people who might come in.
You know the regulars.
Exactly, the few regulars who happen to still be alive and most of the time like the owners own the property so they don't have to worry about rent and they just go there you know.
But like in these really down and out economically depressed areas where it's been totally depopulated all the kids have gone to Nagoya or Osaka for the jobs that's where the jobs are.
So again, it's just like you get rid of the blue collar opportunities, you know, a lot of the lumber, a lot of the fishing has gone to China.
So these industries just aren't what they used to be.
And even on the peninsula I went down for 10 day photo shoot in February this year.
And you know, I go to the raw tuna market and they let me on the tuna boats and it's four in the morning.
All the people working are Indonesian, all Indonesian.
You can't find Japanese people who will work for this pay that makes it sustainable.
Even the Indonesians are having a hard time, they're having a hard time finding them because Indonesia has come up economically so much in the last 20 years, 30 years, that even for Indonesians, it's like this isn't really enough pay.
So it's difficult so the jobs aren't there.
And so you have this really thin relic of a past culture, a past way of life that truly, we are witnessing it in real time wink out of existence.
And so that kind of hoarding, desperation element of getting these stories, talking to these people I think just comes from the fact that I know in 10 years, it's all gone.
And if I can just capture a small element of what was through the stories and doing these sketches essentially of people like the Okonomiyaki lady, who's never been on the Shinkansen before, and then she tells me about her one ride on the Shinkansen.
It's like, I want to capture that because it really will disappear.
There's an endurance aspect of this also, right?
and suffering and these are difficult feats.
You're going for hundreds of miles and many, many, many days.
And also the asceticism of it.
Like there's no iPhone, you're not listening to podcasts and music, you're on a very restricted information diet and it's intended to be sort of a semi Vipassana moving meditation experience.
For sure. Yeah, I started setting these rules again.
Almost like intuitively.
Like what if we set these boundaries and how would that feel?
No social media, no news.
So I'm not allowed to look at the New York Times or anything or read other news sites.
No music, no podcast, basically nothing that teleports you out of the moment, which so much of what the phone is essentially a teleportation device out of discomfort, small discomforts, you know.
So you're on the subway commuting.
Oh, I don't want to be on the subway train.
Let me play candy crush or whatever, it's like, we bristle out any kind of discomfort now.
So a part of it is the aestheticism of leaning into these discomforts, but also getting rid of all that ratchets up your attention.
It really just kind of cranks up the focus.
You start to see things you wouldn't see otherwise.
And because you're so bored for most of it, you're desperate to connect with people.
So it's like this sort of forcing function to get you to talk to people.
And I have another rule, like you have to take a portrait of someone by 10 in the morning, and it'll be like 9 .30, and I'll be like, oh man, I haven't taken a portrait yet.
And so I'll just run into a random shop and be like, hey, can I take your picture?
And, again, that just catalyzes a human connection.
And so on these walks, I'm just filled with this abundance of connecting with people, strangers, and again, when you have a great interaction with a stranger and it feels magical, and there's been this weird thing now that I'm like a TV person and I've been on the radio.
It's like I'll meet people and they'll be like, I saw you on TV, you know, this thing, and so.
That's the walking guy.
That's the walking guy.
And so that adds another, they're really excited about that, but anyway it's this clearly mutually joyful thing that happens.
But I'm walking, I'm doing that while walking 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers day after day after day after day for weeks on end, and then every night I get to an inn or a hotel or whatever, and I'll sit down and I write for three, four, five hours.
I'm editing the photos for the day, I'm writing two, three, 4 ,000 words, And then I'm putting them together, I'm trying to create this kind of visual literary narrative.
And oftentimes I'll run a newsletter, a pop -up newsletter that starts and ends for the duration of the walk.
And I'll send that out to the people who are out there.
And that, for me, knowing there's a little bit of an audience out there on the other side.
Cause you've talked about this.
You don't wanna get up and do that run.
You're like, ah, let me skip today or whatever.
And after walking for eight hours, is after doing 45k you get to an end, you don't wanna write for three hours, you know?
So it's about that duality of using the body up as much as possible and then using the mind up as much as possible at night and proving to yourself that you've got so much extra juice in you than you may think you have. And I would say doing day after day after day after day for weeks and now months and now years I've been doing this has proven to me that if you sit me down and say, you've got three hours to write this essay, Like you can do it, and you can pull something interesting out of it.
And if you don't pull something interesting out of it, the onus is on you, not on the day.
And you have this audience that's waiting for it.
Yeah. That has an expectation that you're gonna deliver.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
How do you think about the relationship between the discomfort of it and the creative expression of it?
Like how does the discomfort like drive the deeper self -inquiry and the heightened level of attention to your environment?
Well, I mean, I think the physicality, again, mood follows action, right, it's like, I think the physicality of it makes it so, every day on a walk like this, I already feel like just having done the walk itself, like I've won the day in a weird way.
And so it puts me in just such a positive state of mind.
And again, it almost feels like spiritual, almost like theological, this, just the walking from point to point in and of itself.
And a lot of it, you know, the elevation gains and dissensions and stuff like that.
and so I mean some days I might be doing three, 4 ,000 meters of climbing with this big pack on.
I'm carrying three cameras, my laptop, and the changes of clothes and stuff.
So it's like a non -trivial amount of weight, so it's really physical.
I mean my body whittles down by the end of these walks, like it just feels great.
And so I think that that physicality and walking throughout history, people have said, oh walking helps me think.
And Einstein and all these great thinkers used to have their daily walks and that was when they had problems solved.
And for me, when I turn everything off And I don't have the distractions.
I don't have the teleportation.
My mind immediately goes into writing mode.
That's what fills the space.
When my mind has like a expanse of boredom that opens up, expanse of yo -yo, my mind immediately goes into a place of writing, synthesizing, in a really positive way.
And so I dictate, you can kind of just use like an AirPod and dictate and have it append to a note, in Apple Notes.
So I don't have to look at my phone.
I don't have to touch, I really don't wanna touch the phone.
But I dictate throughout the day as I'm walking.
And by the end of the day I'll have 10 ,000 words or whatever in this note.
And then I use that as a jumping off point.
But that in the real moment synthesizing and thinking about and then when you do this day after day after day you start to recognize patterns that you would otherwise miss.
And even if you have one other person which is one of the reasons I don't do these with John is because even just having one other person teleports you out of that moment.
And so the walks with Kevin, for example with eight or 10 people, those are about the talks.
It's not really about the walk.
and the walk is kind of a platform on top of which the talking happens.
I can't tell you anything about the Camino de Santiago because we're just talking the whole time.
Yeah, I think there's something about being in a persistent state of elevated heart rate, like just mildly elevated heart rate.
Is this zone two? It frees your, like even below zone.
I mean, if you're walking, like you have a pack, you're walking, like it's rigorous, is that zone two?
It's like maybe is high zone one, I don't know, but like elevated enough so that you're not at rest and sufficient enough to unlock the unconscious mind in a way that other things don't really, like you're suddenly able to kind of free associate and synthesize those ideas.
And that's why when I'm out running, it's like, yeah, I have to stop and dictate something, because I'll forget if I don't do it.
But there's a tension between that part, like the creative mind doing its thing and the being present and paying attention, which is kind of why you're there also, right?
Like those two things are at odds with each other.
So you have, how do you balance that out?
Because you're there to like, you wanna see these things and really be present with what you're observing.
And then there's the reflective aspect of that.
I think they're less at odds and just more in conversation with one another, and they kind of build off each other.
And so the more I'm able to allow myself to enter in the state of reflection in real time, because you do forget so fast. Like these things are like, I'll have a conversation with someone.
They're completely ephemeral and you think you're gonna remember?
You're not gonna remember, you've gotta, if you've ever done any field work, like design field work research, like I did research in Myanmar 10 years ago where I was going out there to with an NGO to help farmers farm better and we've tried to figure out how to distribute information better, but one of the takeaways was you do this field research And then immediately, as soon as you're done after you've met the fiery, you have to write it all down, everything.
Because even an hour later you forget half of it.
Like the half -life of memory is so quick.
So I'll have a conversation and I'll just be like, that turn of phrase is the greatest thing I've heard, like all day and I just have to get that down as quickly as possible.
But to me, it feels like it's almost heightening the attention by doing that because it's like we're looking for these kind of hooks, these snippets to build the narrative around.
and it feels healthy, I mean, those walks and the writing I do and the photography I do, those are some of the richest creative days of my life for sure.
From a meta view of it, to me it feels like these experiences are connecting you with yourself, they're connecting you with the land, they're connecting you with these other, with these people, they're connecting you with the past, Yep.
Your past and the past of this foreign land that you've adopted.
So there's a sense of oneness, right?
Well and also one of the complex things about being an immigrant to Japan, and you look like me, is you're never gonna be part of Japan.
Never ever gonna accept you and you're never gonna be a Japanese person.
And that's not the desire necessarily.
But I do think one of what I was looking for around 2013, when I went back, was why am I here?
What can I do that is additive to both me and the place?
And not look for something from the place to give to me.
I think a lot of people who immigrate to Japan then become disillusioned with it or angry at Japan is because they want something from it, they expect Tokyo to respect them in some way or the country to give them something.
Like, look, I'm committing to you.
Why don't you commit back to me?
But that's a very dangerous place to be in.
And I think I was able to go back and in doing these walks with John, I kind of realized like, wow, this is really special, has the historical component of it.
I'm able to use the language.
I'm able to do this thing that to me feels important just as a human, like collecting these archetypes of ways of life and then being able to share them in a way that's meaningful with others, amplify that, sort of present this part of Japan that people don't have access to.
Like this book is a whole set of stories that no one will ever be able to experience for the most part, it's like very, very few people in the world will be able to go to these areas.
And I think that that helped me find purpose of being there in a way that 13 years ago is important for me to find.
How do you know when you're using these walks to integrate, as opposed to escape.
You know, I like, can you catch yourself?
I have there been occasions where you're like, oh, now I'm the walking guy, so I can just go and do one of these walks.
But actually, what I really want to do is just like not deal with this other part of my life.
Or I mean, listen, they feel deeply integrative and very intentional.
So I'm not presuming that you're doing this but I just know for myself, like I can sort of make an argument, like I'm gonna go do this thing And it's easy to not be honest with myself about what maybe my attention probably it would be better attuned to that I'm just kind of avoiding.
I'm so paranoid. I mean, I am so pathologically paranoid.
Again, it's like that scarcity mindset thing.
I'm like, I'm gonna lose all my money.
I'm gonna have to move back to where it came from.
Like I'm gonna have to...
That's always there, that voice is always there.
And the paranoia also goes in this direction of are we escaping too much?
are we using this as a crutch?
So I'm constantly coming back to that and revisiting it.
Like making sure, are we doing something new with this or not, which is why I kinda did the 10 cities thing.
I was like, let's mix it up, let's start to find, instead of just walking an old historical route linearly, like what if we did this other thing?
What if we did this?
And I think with the media stuff in the last two years, that came out of left field, and I've kinda leaned into that, and that's kind of added another layer of richness to it all and purpose to the walks as well.
And so, it feels right now, pretty healthy, you know?
And at the same time, I was in this relationship, I'm no longer with the mom, but like I have a stepdaughter.
Right, so you still have a relationship with her?
With the stepdaughter, incredible, deep relationship with the stepdaughter.
And like I don't even like to call her stepdaughter.
Like in Japanese, it's Giri Musume, Giri no Musume.
And I had someone yell at me the other day, just like don't use that phrase.
Because, in English, step -child is so common. But in Japanese, there is something I guess that feels pejorative about it.
And I've come in English, too, to be like, I don't know if I wanna use step -kid anymore, so I just kind of call her my daughter, even though she's 100 % Japanese.
And she is 15 now. And as I was starting to do all these walks, she was six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, And I was more and more this kind of force in her life.
And I never grew up with reconciliation, witnessing that.
And I carried with me, until very recently, and it's still there, I'm sure, the sense that people could, anyone could throw me away.
And I started, I'd do these walks, I'd come back home, I'd spend a bunch of time with her.
And as I'm walking, we're videoing, FaceTiming every night or whatever.
And I would come back and we'd have like little fights, like she stopped going to school for a while and I'd kind of spray her with a water bottle or something, just trying to like get her up in the morning like you just don't know, you can get up, go to school.
And she would get really mad at me and wouldn't talk to me for like two weeks.
And the first time that happened I thought I was gonna die because I was like, oh, okay, she's done with me.
She doesn't need me, she's throwing me away.
This is just what happens in our life.
This little, this eight year old, nine year old, she's done with me, we're not connected by blood, she doesn't really see me as a dad, she's gonna throw me away.
And what I realized, this is obvious in hindsight, was she really wanted to reconcile, and I didn't have the tool kit to do that.
She didn't as an eight year old, she doesn't have the tool kit to do that.
And finally I found, I started talking with people and talking with a therapist and whatever, and just found these kind of modalities is to begin to reconcile with her and just immediately realize, not only was she so grateful to reconcile, she so desperately wanted me in her life.
And so we'd get into little more little fights and reconcile more quickly and that loop started closing and closing and closing.
And then I realized more and more, holy crap, I am such a force for good in this girl's life.
To the point where I think I'm probably the only dad in Japan where when she got her period, she ran out with her bloody underwear and showed me, she was like I got my period.
The first instinct is to go to dad.
Yeah, you know, because we had sort of, we had sort of destigmatized, you know, we knew it was coming and it was like, let's talk about this and not make it be this like stigmatized thing.
You know, and then I don't think she realized it was gonna happen forever.
I think she thought it just like happened once and it was done, and then once she realized, it was like, oh my god, this is gonna happen every month.
She had like a breakdown, we had to like, you know, like console her, you know, it's like that, I kind of understand the trauma of young girls now a little bit better having witnessed that.
But the fact that she's had so much trust directed towards me, and now I got her into boarding school, she's studying in New Zealand now, and I brought her down in January and we went together.
And it was just me and her, and going to school and being like, oh yeah, it's my daughter, and having everyone do a second look for a second, but then just accept it.
And then all the other kids who were not white asking her all, are you half, da -da -da, and kind of bringing them into her fold, or her into their fold.
But being able to go down there and witness that and be present for that and help catalyze that, like the level of self -worth, like no one and no other act in my life is giving me more value than my daughter and those interactions that we've had together and the mutual growth we've had together.
That's been so profound.
I don't know, man, there's this through line of adoption that just runs through everything here, you know?
Yeah. Being adopted, adopting a new country.
And then, I mean, formally you didn't adopt your stepdaughter, but that's what it is.
It's that dynamic. It's that relationship.
Well, it's funny, I'm paying for school and just because I can.
I mean in all manner, you've adopted this girl.
But people, you know, up until now, up until I said, oh, I'm yeah, I'm paying for school, you know, that's the thing that people go, oh, you're really her dad.
It's like this weird, like the financial thing, once it kicks in that like somehow legitimizes you in a strange way.
But she sees me, she calls me dad, you know, it's like I, we do a FaceTime call and someone asks him, I'm talking to my dad.
So, you know, I wanna honor that.
And as an adopted person, I think it's very easy for me to honor that.
In trying to make peace with this, you did seek out your biological parents though I know there's a story here.
I did, yeah my, the adoption papers said and this is the only information I had was my mom was 13 when she got pregnant and my dad had been in a car accident and then there was a murder at the site of the car accident.
So he was murdered like in a fight.
So as a kid, right, so as an adopted kid that you are the butt of all jokes on TV.
Oh, like that's whenever you wanna rank on someone but put someone down, you say, oh, you're probably adopted, right?
Like you see us on like sitcoms and stuff.
Oh, this is our adopted step, the redheaded step kid or whatever.
And so knowing that, oh, my dad was murdered in this car accident and then my mom was 13 and that.
So I concocted this terrible story to protect myself where I'm like, oh, my mom was probably a prostitute and she was a drug addict.
It said she smoked weed or whatever.
And I was like, had taken Valium.
And so my whole story that I told myself as a kid, young kid, and then as a teenager was, oh, you come from violence, you come from a place of pain where you're an accident, they didn't want you.
And the circumstances were terrible.
That was essentially my whole identity, origin story, identity.
And then being adopted into this family where they divorce immediately.
And there's all these other kind of like complexities of the town is just like, it was very hard. and you understand why I carry all this scarcity with me.
But a few years ago, it's 23andMe, ancestry .com, stuff like that.
It was mostly because, for my daughter, I wanted to know if I had any medical issues I should be paying more attention to.
That was really what catalyzed me looking for my birth parents, and that kind of genetic history.
It wasn't, oh, I need this person in my life.
I wanna connect with this person.
There was none of that.
And part of that may be because my adoptive parents did not give me permission to do that either.
I think it's really complicated adoption.
It's so complicated because the adoptive parents in some ways almost want to make believe that like you're not adopted.
And the more we talk about it, the less they'll think of us as real parents, so that's scary to them.
So they don't ever wanna give you permission to go search for your biological parents, right?
And in a weird way, because maybe if I give too much permission, then they can throw me away.
The complexities, it's a minefield.
Right, right. So understanding that at some point, you know, this person is gonna wanna find that out but interpreting that as a threat or a kind of a statement about how well they've parented you.
100 % and it's really hard. It's a really hard line to walk.
I have so much empathy for everyone involved in the equation, but a couple of years ago, I was like, okay, I wanna be around for my daughter.
And that was like actually the first time and I felt a sense of purpose to live beyond 40 too.
And the book stuff started working out and the walk started working out and I run a membership program and the members were sending me lots of really positive things.
I have a file on my computer called you're not a piece of shit dot txt.
And, and I put anytime someone says be a nice email, I copy and paste it, put it in the you're not a piece of shit file.
Did you just have some giant txt file?
It's huge now. It's like, it's very, it's very, I'm delighted to say it's big.
But it was the first time I was like, okay, I should actively try to live longer than, you know, certainly I thought I was gonna live in my 20s.
And so anyway, I did Ancestry, we connected on there.
I maintained anonymity.
So it was my birth mom, and I matched.
But on Ancestry, you can be completely anonymous, and so I stayed anonymous.
Because I was like, first of all, I was also paranoid.
I was like, is this person gonna be debt riddled?
And you know, are they gonna own a bunch of AR -15s?
And are we gonna be able to talk about anything?
And the last thing I needed was another adult, the mind of a child in the shape of an adult in my life, which I feel like I'd grown up with so many of those in my periphery.
And I was like, I just can't be another surrogate parent to an adult here.
And so I was like, all right, let me maintain as much distance as possible.
And it was 50 % overlap.
It was obvious this was my mom.
And I saw her name, and I was able to Google her and stalk her and all that stuff.
I was like, okay, that's enough, that's all, I don't really need to know more than this.
And, as soon as I did that, as soon as we matched, I saw her Facebook page got like, shut down, and I thought okay, maybe she didn't wanna match, or maybe her family had her do it, and she was kind of reluctant but didn't wanna talk about me, and so maybe she doesn't want me to connect, and doesn't want me to know who she is, and so I just stepped back, I said that's fine, I don't need her in my life, I'm in a place, I feel great about who I am, I don't need this.
And so for a year, we didn't communicate at all, It didn't message on Ancestry.
And then a year later she messaged me this short, little message that said, all you saw about me was male, 42, in Japan.
That's all it said.
And so it was a little bit confusing to her.
Like, why is this guy in Japan?
But it's 50 % overlap DNA.
It was obvious that we were like, mother -child.
And she sent me this little message that just said, I think we related?
It was bad grammar. It had no punctuation.
It was very weird. And I was like oh come on like asking me to do the heavy lifting again in this like obviously we're related obviously I'm 13 years younger than you like who like I am your child you had when you were 13 like there's no other option.
And so I sat with that for like three months and didn't respond and finally I was like all right what would I want to hear if I was her and I wrote this again anonymous response on Ancestry where I was just like, hey, it wasn't the best circumstances but like look, I've been able to create this life of abundance and joy and I'm able to do these things and it's been really amazing and I can't imagine how hard it was for you to do the things you did to give me this life when you were 13 and I just wanna say thank you for that and I'm doing really well and I just wanna let you know that and I was still
anonymous and then no response from her and then three months later and I'm just like, oh my God.
All right, she's hopeless or whatever.
And then three months later, I get this like tidal wave of messages from her, these two, 3000 word, beautiful essays, like beautifully written essays.
Oh my God, I don't have email notifications on.
For Ancestry, I didn't see this message until now.
I feel so stupid, oh my God, I'm so sorry.
I've made you wait three months, da, da, da.
And just this incredible emotional intelligence on the page, really shocking.
And I was sharing it with a couple of writer friends And they're just like, wow she's a really good writer.
It's coming into focus.
It's coming into focus, and I was in this really busy period of my life.
This was 15 months ago, super busy period.
I got a MRSA infection in my arm, I was in the hospital, I had a book coming out, I had all this stuff going on, and she's sending me these incredible essays.
I didn't have the yo -yo in my, anything to respond, and I kinda didn't, and then two weeks later she sends me another giant essay beautifully written about all the animals you grew up with and this is what your grandfather used to do.
He died 51 of colon cancer.
I was like great, I'm gonna get a colonoscopy next year.
All this stuff kind of coming together.
And again, I didn't have the time to respond, but I felt so guilty.
And now I'm like, oh great.
Now I'm like making two moms in the world feel bad because I'm not like sending enough messages.
And I said a quick little message.
I say, hey, look, I'm so overwhelmed right now.
Thank you for these messages.
These are so wonderful.
and I'll get back to you in the new year.
And then I didn't get back to her.
And then I was on a walk with Kevin, we were in Bali, we're sitting on our bamboo platform, and I kinda told him on the update, I'm like this is where things are with birth mom, and Kevin just goes, Craig, just go have lunch with her.
And I go, no. And then like two weeks later, I was like, you know what?
And I went on ancestry, I said hey, I'm gonna be in Chicago on this date, do you wanna get lunch?
She goes, absolutely, I'll make a reservation, I don't see you here at 1130, and just set it up.
Went out. I'm nervous because it's just, I don't know what's gonna happen.
Are we gonna like spontaneously combust when we hug, I didn't know what was gonna happen.
But I felt a couple things.
One was like, I was like, I don't need this to go well.
Like I don't need this to be perfect.
I don't need this person in my life.
Like I just see this as kind of like an interesting adventure.
Let's just go meet this person, and see what that feels like.
Just kind of go into that state of mind.
And then the second thing I felt, and I thank my daughter for this, being able to feel this way, was she is so lucky to meet me today.
This person that I am going to meet her, wow, she's lucky to meet this person.
In a way, in a totally non -narcissistic, non -egotistical way, just like, holy shit, I'm proud of who I am.
And I'm so happy to be this person for her, when we finally first get to meet.
And to be in that healthy state of not needing it to go a certain way or, for her to perceive you in any way.
You don't need anything from her like that, that allows for the openness.
Nothing and so, I walk up to the steak house and she's there, I knew everything about her, she didn't know my name still.
So you did, you put your coding to work to do a little slew thing?
Yeah, so I do everything, I do where she worked.
I do her ex -husband, like everything.
And I was like, hello, I am your son.
It's like, and we gave each other a hug and went into the steakhouse, sat down in a booth.
And the first thing she does is she pulls out a photo of me as a baby that the adoption agency must have given her.
and she goes, I've been carrying this my whole life.
And every year on your birthday, I think about who you might've become.
I pray for your happiness.
I think about what kind of family you might have. And I'm just like that is not what I expected to be the first thing to come out of her mouth, yeah.
And in that moment immediately, I just start to feel this rewiring happening.
Even now, saying this, my brain is tingling.
It was literal tingling of the brain of neurons of this narrative I had concocted of scarcity, of violence, of pain.
And the more she talked, the more she said, oh, no, the pregnancy wasn't planned.
Your dad, by the way, he's alive, he lives in Florida.
She said - So that was all bullshit.
She's like, he was 22, I was 13.
That's statutory rape, but it was completely consensual.
And I didn't wanna deal with courts.
So I just picked a guy who'd been murdered out of the newspaper, and said that was dad.
So already, she had this kind of entrepreneurial spirit.
She was just like, I'm just gonna figure this out, I don't care, I'm gonna get it done.
And she was, finally told her sister about it.
The sister told the mom.
The mom was like, oh my God, okay, well we'll deal with this.
She has four siblings, her dad died when she was nine, so it was like she was nine, and her oldest was I think like 16 when her dad, when the dad died.
And so it was a single mom raising these five kids, so she didn't have the energy to deal with that, so she sent her to her aunt and uncle in Connecticut, that's how I ended up in Connecticut, and you know my birth mom was just saying they were so welcoming, and I went to a high school there as a freshman, and they welcomed me even though I was like six months pregnant, they gave me a senior as a mentor, and I was taking all these prenatal vitamins.
It was just this story of being protected and taken care of, and she said, I didn't wanna give you up, but I knew that I was 13, I couldn't take care of you, and you were born and I held you for two days, and I didn't wanna leave you, and I wrote you this letter.
Did you get the letter I wrote to you?
I was like, oh, my God.
It was just so overwhelming to hear her side of this story that I had told myself for 42 years.
It was a very, very different story.
Yeah, the story that you've been telling your whole life is revealed to be a complete fabrication of the truth, and yet it has informed you like fundamentally as a human being for that period of time, and to have the opportunity to retell a new story is a gift, but I think the whole thing speaks to just how powerful these stories are and how much we allow them to really commandeer how we show up in the world and our worldview and how we behave and interact with other people on our fears, everything is a function of story.
Yep, and as we sat there and she told me about it, she's like, I was always a hard worker, I was working a part -time job at 13, that's why I met the guy who got me pregnant and I was working at a Deli and she's like, by the time I was 16, I bought my first car, 18 bought my second car, I bought my first house at 22.
She's like a baller.
She's just... She's got the entrepreneur thing, she's got the writer thing, and you're like you're seeing clearly, like.
And you wanna know what her job is?
No, I don't know, computer programming or something.
That's what it is. Did you know that?
No, I didn't know that.
She's a computer programmer.
So she's completely self -taught.
She didn't graduate from college, she's completely hacked together this life.
I'm just gonna make it work.
I'm gonna figure it out, I'm gonna do this thing.
You know, she's been to Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai, on like client work.
Oh really? Yeah, yeah, so just this.
Is she into like Nintendo Switch and like?
I think her family is.
I think her husband's like a big gamer or something, but like, um, but it was like hearing her say these things again, it's this rewiring.
And here's, here was the most kind of surrealist site like scifi moment as I'm sitting there and she's telling me these things I realized for the first time in my life, I know I understood where my brain came from.
I'm like, Oh, I just have your brain in my head.
Everything you're saying, the way you've dealt with everything is exactly how I've dealt with everything in my life.
I have just been using your blueprint, your genetic brain blueprint to move through this world because no one in my family understood what I was doing.
No one in my town could empathize with the decisions I was making.
And yet, here you are sitting in front of me and that nature element of this, I am just, you know, and the waitress didn't come over to us for two and a half hours seeing we were just, we didn't order anything for two.
And the weird thing is, like you're old enough such that she's kind of your age, like she's like a peer, you know what I mean?
seven. Yeah. So they thought we were on a really weird Tinder date, you know, it's like, it was just like, what is happening at this booth here?
You know, these the most profound, you know, yeah, weird, weird online dating situation.
But yeah. It was so strange.
And, and you know, she's like, do you have friends in Chicago?
I'm like, yeah, I've got some friends.
I got a dinner tonight.
And she was like, you have dinner tonight.
And I was like, yeah.
I mean, I thought we were just doing lunch and she goes, I got us tickets to the symphony and a pizza reservation and we're doing a architecture tour.
And I was just like, oh my god, like, of course, I'll cancel, like, you know, you've got me like, I'm here.
I'm here. And we did this walk through the city.
And she was like, she's like, I'm so glad you can walk because I wanted to do this big walk through Chicago and show you everything.
And she's like, I was hoping you weren't gonna be like morbidly obese.
I was like, What if he shows up in a wheelchair?
What are we going to do?
You know, she had like all these weird paranoia is about it.
And we ended up walking for like three or four hours that afternoon.
And it would start raining.
And we'd have to duck into a place and you know, and then we start walking again.
And It felt like all of the walking I had done and all of the work I had done on myself was in service of doing that walk.
Well this is the conclusion of the biopic.
You and your mom walking down the boulevard of Chicago with the sun setting over Lake Michigan and the credits rolling.
That's an amazing story.
And the fact that it culminated in like a walk And it sounds as if the walk was her suggestion.
It was, yeah, yeah.
She's like I wanna walk Chicago, let's go walk Chicago.
I was like, hey, you're speaking my language.
That's wild. Where does that leave dad?
Dad is complicated.
So dad, if you search his name, he has two results on Google.
One is filing the two court records, one is filing to stop paying child payments, and then the other is filing for bankruptcy.
He can wait a minute, maybe later.
Also turns out dad has struggled with alcohol so it's like, not a big surprise.
But the biggest for me kind of lovely delightful surprise is that I have a sister, I have sister, she's 28.
This is also the weird thing is like how young kind of everyone is.
28 married, she didn't want to connect at first. She's from the dad's side and she's an only child And her and her father also haven't spoken for 10 years.
So there's all this kind of estrangement weird, and in kind of through line through both of our lives.
And I immediately, I was just like, I have a younger sister and this is something I'd never thought about before, but I was just like filled with this almost like preternatural desire to just be like, I've got you sis.
Let me protect you immediately, just so bizarre.
And we reached out to her, she didn't wanna connect.
And then a couple months ago, she's sort of reconsidered and we connected and we did video call.
And it was just immediately like, oh my God, you're a great person.
You're a great person.
I want to have you in my life.
You know, and after the video call, she's like, Hey bro.
And she's like, can I call you bro?
Like texting. And, and we've suddenly, I think both realized like how incredible it is to like, as an adult suddenly have this new sibling and both of us be relatively grounded, not need the other.
You know, it's not this weird, like needy situation.
And I think I actually didn't meet me in my twenties.
Because I would have been a very different person for her to meet.
And now we both get to kind of revel in and try to figure out what does this mean?
How does this relationship work going forward?
I'm going on this book tour in America now and I'm going to be in Seattle and she's going to fly down and meet me.
And that's where we're going to meet for the first time.
But it is so cool to have this sister.
And we text each other, a couple of times a week.
And she asked me for advice.
to say I'm changing jobs, what do you think?
I heard you on this podcast, that was cool.
It's been a real shock to go from having no family, essentially, because my adoptive family is so small, to here's my mom and she has four brothers and sisters.
They have a bunch of kids.
I'm getting messages on Instagram from random people in Wisconsin that's like, hey, I'm your cousin, I run a flower shop, I'm 33.
Oh, because they know that, yeah, yeah.
It's spread. So that's wild.
It's spread, it's cause you know, after that meeting with my mom, she clearly went home.
It was like, my son is Craig and he's awesome.
I love him. Oh my God, check out all this cool stuff he's doing.
So like it's just the whole family.
He suddenly has me on the radar.
This is a fairy book ending, right?
I mean, it's lucky for you.
It's always been a journey to find home.
Yeah. And you had to go all the way around the world and they can go on all these long walks, all for it to culminate in Chicago.
Yeah, I know. Which is an awesome city.
But there's a cool thread line in there, which is this search for a sense of belonging within yourself and how you fit into the world and who these people are and adopting people and creating your own family along the way.
And then as a consequence of doing that, growing into yourself so that you could be someone who is appropriate and available for, you know, the family that gave birth to you.
Like, there's a cool full circle idea to this whole thing.
It is cool. And now Thanksgiving is like this potentially very big event.
It's like, oh my God, maybe 40 people at Thanksgiving dinner.
Or it could go crazy in haywire.
Yeah, it could be like that.
You don't know, right?
in reflecting on your book.
Like, there is, I'm curious about this.
Like, there's a veneer of sadness in it, you know?
Like, you can feel the grief without pointing a finger directly towards it.
It's sort of layered with a heaviness.
Yeah. But I think at the same time, there's a deeply hopeful aspect to your message, you know, which is, when you slow down and you really allow yourself to feel and be present with those emotions and with your environment and with the people that you encounter, you are able to see the beauty in the world.
And there's something optimistic about that, and it feels like an urgent message for the moment.
Yeah, well, I appreciate your generous reading.
But yeah, there is a way in the countryside is to focus on the negative, this de -population and what's gonna happen and almost like a natural disaster.
Like there isn't a way to reverse this at this point and trying to unpack why what's left still feels powerful in the last moments of this thing existing.
Of course, there's gonna be a sadness to that because it's disappearing.
But also in a very Japanese way that ephemerality of things, Mononohore.
Mononohore Buddhist. I mean, I don't know a lot about Shintoism.
Like what is the Shinto spin on that?
I mean, the same, but just this Shinto is fundamentally just this kind of animist respect of nature.
And the shrines are often built around, began as just natural objects.
So a beautiful tree and incredible rock.
And then that, around that, the shrine grows.
The most important shrines are those sorts of things.
Chippaei, isn't that the idea?
Do you know that idea?
I don't know. Basically the beauty and the imperfection, which applies, if I understand the word correctly to when nature reclaims buildings in decay or the landscape that is fallen into disrepair.
I like that. Yeah, you start to see a lot of that.
Yeah, but yeah, Shinto kind of leans into that because the shrine sort of exists in deep conversation with nature.
And then a lot of times there's rebuilding built into it.
So like the Ise shrine every 20 years gets rebuilt next to itself.
And you kind of see the 20 year old shrine and the brand new shrine next to each other and they use Hinoki Cyprus to build them.
And after 20 years, you just see how nature is already reclaiming it.
And then you see the brand new fresh, it almost looks like it's lit from within.
It's glowing. It's beautiful.
You understand why they use it Because Shinto is about purity and kind of birth.
And Buddhism is sort of where you have funerals, that's where you go do a funeral at a Buddhist temple, but Shinto is all about birth and life and things like that.
And to see them side by side is actually quite profound.
And every 20 years you kind of get that ceremony.
And it's a way of marking time.
So there's a lot of time marking in Shinto as well.
It's really beautiful.
Final thing before we end this.
How can we all pull a page out of the book of John and start, you know, like practicing this in our own lives?
Like how do you translate his language into something that we can do?
I mean, the reason I guess sort of got addicted to these walks or this way of working creatively is because for me, having that framework made it impossible not to do the work.
And as we've talked about mood and action following each other.
And so it started in my 20s trying to break with the alcohol, with the running.
And it's like okay, creating a little framework of running to break that habit or whatever.
And then wanting to do more writing and wanting to do more looking deliberately.
And so accidentally falling into understanding that these walks, these long walks, could allow me to do that.
So I would say starting to look at what simple structures you could build.
Start to build up from very small to it could be very complex as I'm doing with the walks.
to enable the thing, you to do the thing you wanna do.
And I said the one thing that everyone can do that most everyone is doing now the wrong way is take your phone out of your bedroom.
Like that for me is kind of the reason why I knew to disconnect on the walks was because about 15 years ago, right after the iPhones kind of got released, I started going offline at 10 p .m. And I wouldn't allow myself back online till noon or 1 p .m. the next day.
Because having that morning, that completely offline morning, that was when the best writing I was doing happened, that was when the most generative, creative work happened.
And I could feel almost like dopamine little guppies, you know, sort of like reaching for the fish food of dopamine in my brain, for give me news, give me social media and that freaked me out.
And so creating this rigid framework where you go offline at night and then you don't come back online to lunch, if you can do that, not a lot of people can do that, but you can probably do it on the weekend.
and you can certainly put your phone in a place that you won't see until lunch. And I think that is also critical.
It's like don't just put your phone in the living room, on the table, put it in a box in the corner of your garage or something where you have to deliberately go to that place to grab it the next day.
And try, just do that for a week, try doing that for a week where your bedroom is a phone free place and your mornings are phone free and I guarantee you, there's gonna be some kind of like richness of creative act that just naturally bubbles up.
And I've taken that, I've been doing that for many, many years.
I just took that and said, okay, what if we apply it to the whole walk?
And it turns out it works.
It's really powerful.
That's great advice.
It's super cool. Have you ever done one of these walks in the United States from like Philadelphia to Boston?
Like, I think the experience might be a little bit different.
We haven't. I mean, Kevin and I are like, well, let's do a walk in America, but there's no infrastructure for it.
Like there's no. Yeah, that's the problem.
You're just gonna be on some thoroughfare, where it was just 7 -Elevens and gas stations, or nothing.
Even here, like I'm staying 1 .4 kilometers from here.
And I looked at Google Maps, and Google Maps, the route to walk it was like an hour and 20 minutes.
Because it's like, there was like an 11 lane highway.
It's like America is so...
It's not oriented around...
It's not conducive to the kind of experience, you could do it, but it's not...
Yeah, it's not pleasurable.
Moving you in the direction of the kind of experience you're trying to have. And people kinda look at you like a crazy person too.
I mean, you can do the Appalachian Trail, but you're just not gonna run into...
you're not gonna have those experiences.
Well, and there isn't, you're camping the whole way.
So, Europe is great.
I mean, Spain, the Camino, is like the most perfect logistic infused walk.
And you can do it as cheaply, you can do it $10 a day if you want at the Camino, or you can spend a couple hundred bucks a day and stay in really nice places.
But it's there, the infrastructure's there.
You can camp if you want to.
But it's hardly off the beaten path at this point.
It's like a destination, it's like a tourist destination thing to do and check the box.
Well, I thought that way too, Have you ever walked - No, but it keeps coming up.
And I know a lot of people who've done it.
So at this point now I feel, I have resisted still is?
That's exactly how I felt.
That's exactly how I felt.
And Kevin and I did it in 2018.
We did the last 100K of the Portuguese Camino. So there's like there's English Camino, French Camino, Portuguese.
When everyone talks about the Camino, it's usually the French. So it's over the Pyrenees, into Spain, across to Santiago.
And we did the Portuguese, the last 100K of the Portuguese.
No one was on that.
And then before I did that with Kevin, I said, well, if I'm going all the way out there, Let me walk the first 150 K of the Camino from France.
And I was like, this is gonna be terrible.
I'm like, this is gonna be Disneyland.
I was so negative on it and I started it and I did it with a friend and we did eight days and I was so heartbroken to leave. It is magical, even with the people, even the fact that it's a destination, you can't deny the fact that what you're doing is hard. Doing a walk, this 600 K walk, where you take it five weeks or whatever to do it—that is demonstrably a difficult thing to do, even if it is a touristy thing—everyone is fully in on it.
And it's so surreal to be with a bunch of other people that are doing the same hard thing that you're doing.
And it's kind of cool, and you move at different paces and you meet all different people.
Like, I would so highly recommend, if someone is looking to do a long walk and kind of wants to do, what if I disconnect, what if I go offline, what if I don't look at the news or whatever, go do the Camino alone.
It's built for solo walkers because you're gonna naturally meet as many or as few people as you want.
And it is a profoundly magical thing.
And getting to Santiago, even though millions of people are doing this walk, getting to Santiago still feels like holy crap, this is special.
The Camino feels like the new psychedelics.
It's the peyote. It's like psychedelics for a period, it was just coming up constantly on the podcast, but now the Camino is taking its place, so there's something here for me to look at.
And I should say, like a week from today, I'm getting back surgery, like a very serious back surgery.
And I'm gonna have a very long road to recovery, but there's gonna be a good many, many, many, many, many months when all I'm gonna be able to do is walk.
Okay, go to the Camino. Maybe it'll stay that way, I don't know.
So like walking is like, you know.
This is what's showing up for me.
Yeah, yeah. Well, there are, Europe is replete with amazing trails, And England, the right of way, you can kind of make up trails everywhere.
It's pretty special.
And America just doesn't have the history to have that.
What's the big walk on your wishlist?
Walk wish wish list?
Like any walk in the world?
I wanna do more walks in Ireland.
I've only been to Belfast. I just wanna, I just like Irish people.
And I just feel like I like meeting more Irish people.
So that's a big one.
They're the nicest, kindest, most generous welcoming people you're ever gonna meet.
Amazing, and I'd love to do more in Italy.
The Dolomites, walking the Dolomites I think would be incredible.
So there's a few of those.
And then I would like to do the full Camino cause I've only walked the first like 150K and the last hundred K.
So I'd like to pump out the whole thing at some point.
In Italy, I know there's a trail system that goes all the way from Sicily all the way to the north.
That's basically historically been the routes that the vintners, like the grape farmers would take to transport their product or whatever.
And they've just been there for like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
There's like an ultra race that you like a multi, week whatever ultra race, but I'm sure like that would be an epic walk because you're not like on the road but you're going through these villages and townships and stuff all the way.
Yeah. Anyway. Sounds like a good one.
Its just great dude.
This felt like an old school podcast, And that's like just like really, really like, like soul nourishing.
Yeah, like really lovely to meet you and I think that your work is beautiful and artistic and such a meaningful expression that's much needed right now and I appreciate you coming here today and sharing with me.
Well, thank you. Yeah.
Thanks everybody. Good luck with the book.
Thanks. Things indeed do become other things.
They do, I know. And they will continue to do so.
Yeah. Cheers, man. Thanks.
That's it for today.
Thank you for listening, I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.
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Peace, plants. Namaste.
So you're walking down the Illini River to M
