Transcript

Matt Rodbard: And now please join me in giving a warm welcome to Craig Ma and Matt Rothbard. Welcome. Oh wow. What a great audience here. Hi. Hey, Greg. What a packed house on a rainy afternoon. We’re recording this live for our podcast. This is Taste. Thank you, clinging to our producer. Okay. First off, how many special projects members are in the house?

Raise your hand. What do we got here? Okay. We’re about like, I would say a third, Craig.

Craig Mod: Wow. Gotta work harder.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah, you gotta work harder. We can plug that at the end.

Craig Mod: Who? Who has Kea by Kea? Oh yeah. Okay.

Matt Rodbard: I like it. I like this. So there’s some folks who maybe know about Craig’s work and support Craig’s journeys, but also some who maybe just have heard of Craig.

So we’ll go into a lot of areas here. Just love the book. Congratulations. Thank you. Just incredible story about your friend Brian, and we’ll get into that. But you, Craig, you hold place so closely to you in your writing and I’ve been a fan of yours for five years, six years, and I just, I, those popups happen and.

I just read every one. Every word. I just have to ask you, when you’re in New York, when you’re walking around New York in the last couple days, are there any places that you go to that you observe, any rituals? ‘cause you’re a guy of ritual.

Craig Mod: Not really. Not really. I, it’s like my, I spent a lot of time in New York 15 years ago, 12 years ago, and I look at my Google Maps, which I was saving stuff back then.

And they’re all permanently closed now. There’s so many. Yeah, it’s like a graveyard of Google maps. There was a great cafe in the West Village called, I think Minerva. Yeah. That I used to go, I, it just had this weird other worldly vibe. It was like a little bit European, but not in New York, in, and I just sit there and everyone was surly.

It’s kinda being in Paris but not in Paris and it was so loud outside. Yeah. It was just this hushed nice environment. I go there and I write with me and Malcolm Gladwell probably Yeah. Who’s from nearby, but that’s gone.

Yeah.

And thankfully was it three lives? And Co.

Yeah.

Has renewed the lease.

Okay. And they’re around for another 10 years or so. Alright. Yeah. Which I love, it’s one of my favorite places in the city.

Matt Rodbard: We’re gonna have a lot to talk about with the book. And I really wanted to start and talk to you about the writing process of things Become other things because it’s really unique in publishing.

You start out it starts out as a popup newsletter and then it becomes a fine art edition, and then it becomes a random house trade hardcover that is out tomorrow. You’ve written extensively about digital publishing. We’re not gonna talk about that, but I I just want to ask you about how you have.

Written this book in this very unique process.

Craig Mod: Yeah. First of all, I would not recommend it. This is definitely not the recommended process. But I went on a walk four years ago, almost to this day, is when the walk started. Wow. Yeah. It was May 10th, 2021 in the sort of height of COVID. Japan had been locked down for over a year.

At that point, there was no, Japan didn’t have the vaccine yet.

Yeah,

so I remember everyone was talking about when they were gonna get the vaccine. It was coming in a couple months and I was being careful and I was like lemme go on this walk and lemme go do this. And, checking and being very above board about everything.

And I basically had the peninsula to myself and then I did this pop-up newsletter along with that walk. And it’s funny, you can go back through if you’re a member and you can see the archive of it and you can. Fine passages that became chapters in this book. But, it was basically, I did that walk, did the popup newsletter, wrote 30,000 words probably on that walk.

Came back, I thought I was gonna finish the book in three weeks. And it took, another two years for the fine art edition to come together and then from there,

Matt Rodbard: okay, so let house, let’s go from there. That’s an interesting journey because you released the fine art edition, you start with a thousand.

Where do you end up at? How many fine art edition of things become well, 2,500. So you ended up at 2,500. Yeah. But then how do you end up at Random House and then this expanded version, for those who own the fine Art edition, it’s very different. It’s very different and very expanded and very surprising.

And we’ll talk about how Brian played a role in the Fine Art edition, but then also in the trade. But how do you get to Random House?

Craig Mod: It’s embarrassing because it’s like having all of my drafts. Public. Exactly. In a way, like the popup was one draft, the fine art was another, not a draft, but like more realized version.

And then this version is very different than both of those. It was like two years ago, right about now, I was out in New York trying to find an agent. I didn’t have an agent and trying to find a publisher and I’d spent many years just getting rejected from everyone.

Matt Rodbard: Crazy.

Craig Mod: And the reason I did the fine art edition was because everyone rejected me on that trip two years ago. And I was sitting around just going, all right look what I was, what I really wanted was a, like a partner. I just wanted a buddy.

That’s what I

realized. It wasn’t about oh, I need the validation of an agent, or I need a big publisher to bless me or nightmare or anything.

It was just, I just wanted a buddy to work on this stuff with, I’d been working alone for my whole life, essentially, and doing all my indie work. And I just wanted that buddy, and it was crushing. It was really about two years ago right now. I was in a, it was a really dark place, and then I was like, all right, I’m just gonna do this myself.

I’m gonna do the fine art edition. I, I’m lucky enough that I’m friends with some of the best book designers in the world, amazing editors. I know how to put books together, and I have great relationships with printers in Japan. I know how to do these things. I have, a warehouse that can fulfill orders and, Shopify set up and Craig Starter and all this.

Love the videos from

Matt Rodbard: The Warehouse, by the way. Yeah. Have you guys checked out the videos from the warehouse? They’re incredible.

Craig Mod: So you can see printing, you can see a piece, bya, so great production videos and stuff like that. It’s amazing. So I was in the middle of I, I’d finally gotten over. I was like, okay, I have to do this on my own.

Everyone’s rejecting me. That’s okay, fine. I go for runs by the ocean and scream and and I had met with the printer. We had said, okay, this is the printing schedule we’re gonna, we’re gonna commit to. And then two weeks after that random house reached out to me, it was like, oh, we finally got around to reading your book.

Matt Rodbard: That’s amazing.

Craig Mod: And we like it. We really, we want it so love. But at that point it was a little weird ‘cause I had already internally committed to the fine art edition. And then I have this like preservationist. Scarcity mindset, psychosis, pathology where I’m like, I have to protect everything.

I’m, it’s like I can’t give up control. I need to, yeah. So Random House was very generous and we were able to I was able to say, Hey, look, I don’t think these additions are in competition with one another, and I need to maintain this autonomy and my, look, I’m gonna be selling my book for a hundred bucks a copy, and then we can do a bunch of rewrites and expansion and stuff.

So it’ll be a totally different thing. And God bless. Andy and Molly, they came around and we were able to come to this agreement and I maintained fine art rights and Random House got this, and in the end I like, I’m just so proud of where this thing landed. It’s

Matt Rodbard: incredible those listening to podcasts like publishers do more of these deals ‘cause it, it really brings fresh talent in enough book talk.

Let’s talk about the walking itself. I feel like. You, I wanna get your take on these walks are ex extraordinary. They’re very, there’s rules. They’re very, they’re minimalist. You’re not, yeah. You’re not on your phone during these twenty, thirty, forty kilometer walks. You’re observing and taking photos, but then you like dashed you your hotel room.

Yeah. And knock out on deadline. No copy editor, right? I imagine. Oh no. 3000 to 5,000 words after it’s. Extreme sport and the work is extraordinary, like it is gripping when you talk to these people, and we’ll get into how you can talk and how you interview. How did you come to this formula for these very minimal walks, but then they’re content engines, they’re incredible content engines.

Yeah, that’s a terrible word. Very,

Craig Mod: yeah, just very reluctantly. Again, like just a series of rejections forcing me to do this stuff. Like every, almost every, everything I’m doing, the way I’m doing it is because. I was just rejected by everyone. Yeah. It’s like I really wanted to write about walking in Japan and I’d started going on these big walks and I started just, world was opening up to me and I spent a good nine months working on this huge piece for a magazine I won’t name, and then got ghosted and that killed me.

It really killed me. And again this whole, this idea of. Okay. Pathological scarcity complex. Like how do I protect it? Protect myself. And so I started the membership program. Thank you. Everyone who’s a member, this is a direct product of that. I can’t do any of this stuff without the membership program.

I started the membership program to give myself autonomy because I was like, okay, I need to create almost like a bootcamp.

Yeah. You

know? What would it be like working in a newsroom where you’re on deadline Hey, mod write about this, mod write about this. That sort of thing.

Yeah. And so the walks. Accidentally became that. And so my rules are, no teleporting basically. So no social media, no podcasts, no music, no news. I did a huge walk. I walked from Tokyo to Kyoto during the 2020 election. So I’ve done Tokyo, Kyoto three times now. And the 2020 election, I was like, okay, I’m gonna, it’s gonna be right like a week after I start walking.

And what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna tell all my friends, don’t tell me who wins. Wow. Don’t tell me the results. And and my theory was some farmer in the middle of nowhere in Japan was gonna be like, have you heard? So this guy won and I was convinced that was gonna happen. And it turns out nobody in Japan cared like I was.

It was a week after the election and I was still, did not know what had happened. And it was obviously complicated and messy, but no one was screaming from the fields. And and finally I texted a friend. I’m like, all right, what happened? And he’s oh, you don’t wanna know?

Like three weeks later. Yeah like a couple weeks after it all went down. But anyway, just being. There’s something about removing yourself from that maelstrom of chaos that we can all be engulfed in, especially with the phones and teleporting. And I try to, on these walks, basically just meet everyone where they are on the road so I can communicate with everyone.

I’ve been living in Japan for 25 years. I can speak well enough to, fluently, talk about anything with any of these people. And I just say hello to everybody. And I have this like rule, take a portrait of someone before 10 in the morning. It’ll be like 9 45, and I’ll be, oh my God, haven’t taken a picture of someone.

And I’ll like just, scre, yell out to a farmer. I’ll knock on a door, I’ll go in, it’s a tommy shop. I’ll be

Matt Rodbard: like, Hey, can I take your picture? But then you create, you’ll write a thousand words about the interaction. Yeah. On deadline again.

Craig Mod: Yeah. And someone asked me the other day, they’re like, isn’t, you’re trying to be in the moment in attentive.

And yet you’re thinking about all this writing you have to do later. And I’m, isn’t that at odds? I’m like no. It’s totally in conversation. Yeah. And it just gets me to look harder and it gets me to be, to perk up about incredible terms of phrase that these people are throwing at me.

Yeah.

Or just, weird things that are happening throughout the day. And it’s given me this almost like theological belief that you can rest. Something interesting from any day.

Yeah.

If it’s the onus is on you to get that interesting bit out of it. Because, I’ll do these walks.

I’ll be 30, 40 days on the road writing every day. So walk for eight hours, walk 30, 40, sometimes 50 k, and then get to the hotel and you just gotta start writing. Editing the photos. Yeah. Do the draft, and as I’m walking, I’m dictating into a note that just keeps expanding. And I’ll get to the hotel or the inn and then you kinda look through the notes and go, oh yeah, that’s the thing I want to write about. There you go. You just, I

Matt Rodbard: mean, it’s a great lesson for writers. Yeah. You’re basically publishing first drafts and Yeah. Yeah. It’s just it’s a reason why sometimes the first draft is good and sometimes those natural instincts on the first draft

Craig Mod: work.

So the final chapter in this book I wrote on it was the last day of the walk, and I had walked, I think that day was like 40 5K. And I was so tired. It was such a crappy start of the day. It was just terrible. The road, the route was terrible. Yeah, it was hot. It was I didn’t have enough water.

I was dehydrated. You never

Matt Rodbard: shy away from complaining about the heat. In your writing, you’re like you’re not shying away from your disdain for weather, which I love.

Craig Mod: No, I don’t complain. No, that’s one of my rules is that I’m not allowed to complain. I’m not allowed to complain about any, you’re not complain, but you,

you’re not complaining.

But

Matt Rodbard: you, I mentioned it, you mentioned it in a way that we’re like, I’m

Craig Mod: just mentioning,

Matt Rodbard: alright. Craig’s going through right now. It’s hot.

Craig Mod: It is hot. Japan is gross. Don’t go to Japan basically from June 15th.

Yeah.

Till like October. Don’t go to Japan. That’s my, honestly don’t go, I, there, there’s another.

Big walker person who he emailed me and was like, Hey, when should I go? And I was like, don’t go in July. And he came in July and he had to abort the walk.

Yeah, he

walked for one day and then he was like, gonna walk for two weeks. He had to go home.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah.

Craig Mod: He just left Japan. He just left the country, I think.

Matt Rodbard: Wow.

Craig Mod: It’s terrible. But the point was, is that I got to the hotel, I’m disgusting, I smelled death. I, my feet hurt. Everything hurt. And there’s no universe in which I would’ve been like, great, let’s do 2000 words now. Except I committed to the pop-up and there was ostensibly an audience waiting for something.

And I sat down and I was in this totally halluc hall hallucinatory state. And I wrote this thing and that thing became the final chapter in this book. Again, I think about that a lot. You’re in, it’s, it was like 1115 at night. I just wanted to go to bed, but I had to do the, I had, I promised I made this covenant with myself.

It’s this weird. The thing you had jobs, your members too.

Matt Rodbard: It’s like they’re waiting for it yeah. There’s the pressure. Did Craig bail on day 31? Yeah. Yeah. Like you don’t want

Craig Mod: No. And the member, the weird thing that came outta the membership stuff and when I started it, it was very small and everyone’s Hey I wanna do a membership.

Should I do it? How do I do it? I’m like, don’t do it. Don’t do, just definitely don’t do it. It’s just so depressing and sad. Unless you’re, I don’t know. Unless you, you’re selling hundreds of. Millions of books and you’re gonna start off with 10,000 subscribers. It was so few people, and it took me about a month to realize okay, these people are paying me and I can divine a permission from this to go do these weird things.

Yeah. These big walks. Yeah. And so it came out of that. So yeah, there is, there’s definitely, it doesn’t feel like an obligation, but it feels I wanna honor that permission. Okay.

Matt Rodbard: I want to, many in the room have read your popups, but an element that you aren’t writing about in the popups is your friend Brian.

Yeah. In childhood. And it’s really, when I got to read the book in advance, I was stunned about this story about Brian and your life as an adoptee and just really how you were able to weave your early childhood with your time in Japan. So I think that’s like a really, for fans of Craig’s writing, this is just gonna be the, a biggest surprise that Craig has this other part of his life.

So how did you come to the. This idea that your early life and your relationship with Brian related to your walk to the key Peninsula over the years?

Craig Mod: Yeah. I think this is one of the risks of writing and publishing in real time is that you feel maybe like you’re unable to take certain risks or investigate certain things.

So I think thinking about Brian, Brian was a, yeah. Set up who Brian

Matt Rodbard: is a little bit.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Brian was essentially best friend. All I’m adopted, only child. Parents couldn’t have kids, and then they got divorced immediately. It was a very weird thing. And then Brian, I essentially met in first grade and we were basically best friends all through elementary school.

He was a brother. He was close to a brother as possible. And then I tested a little better. My town had no funding. It was a mess. And Brian just didn’t test well and ended up going in a very different direction. And we graduated. I talk about this sort of in, in so many things now it’s a little bit of a spoiler.

We graduated and basically a week after we graduated, he was murdered, right? So this was pretty common. Not super common, but it wasn’t that big of a surprise. You could imagine this happening to a lot of people in my town and you’re 17 and essentially half of your heart is gone from element.

It’s like all of my childhood memories with this kid and. He was my brother, and I just didn’t have the tools to process that. And I started, actually, the first thing I ever had published was a short story about Brian. And and I, I could see, looking back at early writing, I was like, I want, I was trying to figure out how to work through this.

I didn’t know how to, and so 25 years later, I’m doing this solo walk through COVID on this peninsula. And the Peninsula is pretty economically depressed and it mirrors the kind of blue collar. Tone of my town. Yeah. And kids and, socioeconomically, everyone’s at the same level as we were, but the violence is gone.

There is a social infrastructure there, there’s support there, there’s something happening there that we didn’t have. And just walking alone, again, not teleporting, not having news or other things, pulling your brain in other directions, you just start meditating. I’m like, why does this area lack the violence?

And, and those paths that we were embedded in. And and so the popup was great to in, in real time. Think about the peninsula. And then when I started thinking about what the book could be, Brian started sneaking in and then the first editor I worked with on the fine Art edition was reading a draft, and he was like, Hey man, I, this is a book about Brian.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah, he, he

Craig Mod: He was.

Matt Rodbard: It comes in later. Yeah, it comes in later. Yeah. And so if you’ve read the fine art edition, there’s just so much more to Brian Yeah. In this edition. In this release.

Craig Mod: Yeah. This whole, this book’s a letter to Brian.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah. That’s

Craig Mod: how this book is framed. So it opens just straight to Brian.

And in doing that, the fine art edition doesn’t shift to Brian until the last quarter. And this, the whole book is to Brian. And that allowed for a lot of other interesting narrative things to happen. ‘cause we were trying to protect Brian in the fine art edition. But now that Brian is. Foregrounded.

Completely. It allows me to talk about history, more about what I’ve been doing for the last 25 years, about friends like John, my friend John, who’s a really important Yeah. Book of John person in my life. Book of John. Yeah. Gets to appear. So

Matt Rodbard: Seamus makes an appearance. Seamus the priest, the Irish priest, if remember, Seamus from a popup.

I was so surprised to see an extended Seamus moment in this book. It’s really just lovely to read. When you know Craig’s writing and you remember these moments from these popups and you’re like. There’s more to that story. Yeah. It’s in this book.

nobody: Yeah.

Matt Rodbard: I wanna talk to you about voice because Craig, you have obviously a singular voice when you’re writing about yourself or just obser observing the world.

But then you do something that’s really unique. You with your language skills, your Japanese language skills. You can create like syntax and grammar of the folks living in the key peninsula. That I think many, if not, I don’t think any English speakers can have done like I, it. It’s an incredible feat and they’re very comical the way you describe your interaction.

So how does, how do you think about the exchanges you have with these folks who are farmers and shop owners, barbers? How do you think about translating their voice into a faithful version of it?

Craig Mod: Yeah, because it’s so Japanese, it’s like British English or whatever you have like B, B, C, English.

And then you have all the dialects and Japanese kind of has that too. And you get away from Tokyo and it gets really just syrupy and weird. And and people are just funny and sing songy. There’s so much like song to the language that never gets captured. And so all of my, in the middle of these popups were the foundation for this.

But I started hearing, I spent a bunch of time in North Carolina randomly of, it’s a western south. Southwestern North Carolina, near Asheville and hanging out with an old, I, one of my best friends in my thirties was this 80-year-old lawyer who lived in this little town in North Carolina.

And I would go visit him once or twice a year and we’d hang out for a week. You’re the best

Matt Rodbard: friends.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Matt Rodbard: He was like straight up you make really good. He was,

Craig Mod: he was nuts. He was he was so smart. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter. He carried a gun for most of his life. ‘cause he had all these people who wanted to kill him.

And he just had these bizarre stories anyway, and I loved his voice and I would record all of our conversations secretly. No, I’m just kidding you. And and so I have his voice in my head a lot when I’m walking in these kind of remote areas. And so I’ve tried to transpose middle of nowhere Japan to kind of Western North Carolina.

Yeah.

Appalachian sort of English. And that’s what I hear actually, when I’m talking to these people and. I think it’s pretty true to who they are.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah. ‘Cause we are exposed to translation of Tokyo, Japan, right?

Craig Mod: Yeah. Everything in, in Osaka.

Ben is different from Tokyo. Yeah. Yeah. And Mia, KK, all of her writing in Japanese is really wacky. And dirty in a way that I don’t think the, the English translations are amazing, but it’s hard. There’s certain things that are UNT translatable and it’s verb conjugations and, word selection and stuff like that.

So I’ve just tried to take the vibe of this, these Peninsula people and give them Southern American English. Do

Matt Rodbard: you stay in touch with these folks Yeah. Folks after your

Craig Mod: walks? Yeah, I just did. How does, yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause I keep going back.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah. So

Craig Mod: I’ve, I’ve been to the peninsula 20 times.

And I keep staying at the same places. And that’s that’s critical, is building these relationships. That’s actually I see them as the most important thing of these walks.

Yeah.

And people go, why are you doing that walk again? It’s ‘cause I wanna see, Namaan, I wanna see this guy, I wanna see this person.

And in February I wanted to do a a photo book of the people of the peninsula. So I’ve been not photographing the people for some reason. I just hadn’t photographed that many people. Yeah. So I I called everyone. I knew all these ins that I’ve been going to for a decade and I said, Hey, can you help me photograph some pearl divers and, tuna,

Matt Rodbard: tuna, the tuna market

Craig Mod: people, and boat repairs and truck drivers or whatever.

And everyone was so excited to help me. Yeah. And so I went and I did this 10 day actually drove, which was revolutionary to drive. I rented a car and I drove. Yeah, it’s not your style. 800 kilometers. But I was photographing from four in the morning till eight at night, almost every day. These markets were open real early and, they introduced me to these pearl divers, these women, these female pearl divers called Amma.

Any, has anyone here seen Tom Poppo? The movie Tom Poppo, the movie about ramen. Amazing, hilarious eighties movie about ramen. So there’s a scene in there where he, they beat the pearl divers and like basically the women in that movie were the women I photographed because there is no next generation.

So they were in their sixties. One woman was 75, she’s been pearl diving for 60 years. Yeah. She started as a high, a middle schooler. That’s

Matt Rodbard: incredible.

Craig Mod: And so going, seeing them and because I have these close relationships with the ins that work with them. They trust me immediately and they just bring me into their world.

And so that is, that’s the gift of doing this. Yeah.

Matt Rodbard: And that book will be released soon, right?

Craig Mod: Yeah. So I photographed in February. Yeah. And again, this pathological scarcity mindset, mania maniacal ness, laid it out, sequenced in March, went to press last month, and it goes on sale next week.

So yeah.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah. You got the metabolism man. To publish. Just go. This is all the books. Can we take a little aside and just talk about the New York Times and putting Mor Yoka on the number two, or you didn’t put it on there, but you wrote about this city. Yeah. And then you became like an overnight, you were known in Japan.

Not really. Not really. Sorry. You were known for your writing, but like you became like a celebrity in some ways. You were on television and like it was because of this one city plucked from Japan. Yeah. And it became the number two of 52 most travel, like travel where you should travel. Yeah, that’s a crazy story.

Because

Craig Mod: I was doing these walks and they’re very linear, right? So I’ll walk from Tokyo to Kyoto. I walk from Kyoto, Tokyo, I’ll walk the peninsula and it’s a thousand kilometers or 800 kilometers, and it’s just day after day. And I don’t take any transportation. And I just thought okay, how are, what are some other shapes of walks we can do?

And I said, okay, what if I pick 10? Like flyover cities, Japanese cities that you would never yeah. Get off the train at, but you, maybe your train would stop there and because you’re on your way somewhere else. What if I picked 10 of those cities and forced myself to walk 50 kilometers in each city, spend three nights, four, four days and just see what happens.

And on that walk on that project I did, it was haka, ha, moca, aka akata, Matsumoto suga amichi. Amichi guy here. This guy knows everything about Amichi. He’s great. That’s he’s rad. Amichi Matama Suga in saga and then carat in Saga, and then Kama. Anyway, in the middle of all that and moca, I just, I randomly picked these cities that were of a certain mid.

Mid mid size city and Moka I went to and it was just great. It was just wonderful everyone, it was lots of cool independent shops, great coffee people were lovely. I got an amazing buzz cut from like the most gentle tender. Like a haircut I’d ever gotten in my life. It took an hour to shave my head.

Oh,

nobody: beautiful.

Craig Mod: I was moved. I was so moved that guy became the most famous buzz cutter Oh yeah. In Japan by far. Because you went back, he was so overwhelmed. Yeah, we went with the TV crew and everything. Yeah. And I, so the New York Times asked me, they’re like, Hey, can you recommend a city in the world to go visit?

And I was like, yeah, Mor, obviously Mor Yoka, they should go there.

nobody: That’s,

Craig Mod: and then they didn’t, they don’t tell you where they’re gonna put it. ‘cause they’re masochistic like that. And then it comes out. And you find out when it comes out. And one number one was London, and then number two is moca.

And

this would be like, I don’t even, it’d be like putting like Woodstock or something after, after London. It would just be, it’s such a random city that it’s oh, that’s cool, but like why, why should it be number two after London?

nobody: Yeah.

Craig Mod: And then they just pushed, and there’s a soba shop guy up in the city who lived in New York.

And no one in Japan was really paying attention. And he was like, holy crap, this is incredible. ‘cause all of his friends in New York were messaging him and saying, dude, your soba shop is in the New York Times. ‘cause I wrote up this little thing and I put a soba shop in it. And and he’s this is like a huge opportunity.

He went to the mayor. He went to the governor and he was like, dude, like this is incredible. Like you should do. They’re like, what is, what’s the New York Times? Japan is really provincial. We forget how provincial this place is. And he pushed, he pushed all this and then he found out I spoke Japanese, and he was like, whoa.

And then suddenly it was this avalanche of just every media outlet, every TV show people were, I was in the middle of a Tokyo walk. I was doing this seven day mega Tokyo walk. And people were like coming to my hotel room with like camera crews and these are hotel rooms, was the size of the stage.

Yeah.

And they invited me up to meet the mayor. And I was like, oh, this will be cool. I’ll just go, say, Hey, congrats on your town. This is a lovely town. And they didn’t tell me anything and they bamboozled the hell outta me. Yeah, I showed up and press conference. Holy crap, dude. It was like.

It was like and no prep at all. And they were like, oh yeah Mr. Mud and here’s the enter in here. And they opened the two doors. And it was just like a room like this, just full of like reporters and, and it was like paparazzi style, like rapid shot and it was like 10 cameras on me and the flashes going off, and I’m just like, what the hell is going on?

And the mayor’s sitting, on the stage over here. I walk over, I shake his hand, he gives like a two second speech and he goes, all right he’s all yours. Then he leaves. He leaves me. And then the questions start. And they’re like, ah, Mr. Ma how do we solve poverty? And I’m like, ah, you have the wrong guy.

I just like your coffee. You have great coffee. Don’t know how to solve poverty. But you have healthcare. That’s cool. That’s good. That was great. Yeah. You

Matt Rodbard: had slide into healthcare. I’m, so when you were asked these, but now questions, you would slide I always go

Craig Mod: into healthcare. Yeah. So I ended up, I’ve done like a hundred TV shows.

Yeah. And I did a TV show with. The most famous guy in Japan, this guy Tom Modi son, and his team emailed me and I just ignored the email. ‘cause I don’t have a TV and I’ve never watched a TV. And his team emailed the message to the soba guy and dude, Craig won’t respond to us.

Matt Rodbard: He’s like Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg all in one.

He’s been on, he’s been, he’s like huge.

Craig Mod: He’s been on TV every day for 50 plus years in Japan. Yeah. He’s like the uncle of Japan.

Yeah.

And so he ended up. My friend was like, you have to do this. He won’t come to moca unless you do this with him. And I was like, I don’t want to do this. But I was like, alright, fine for the people of moca.

And I went, we walked around for two days in moca and it was like walking around with John Lennon. It was insane. This guy, this tiny, he’s so tiny, he’s 80. First shot we did was in front of the station, and they’re like, all right, mo’s on sand here. And then we’ve got, six camera, this huge 40 person crew mo’s on sand air.

Okay, yeah sure. And there was like another like announcer person, and then they’re like, all right, bring him out, bring out tomo. Like they take him out of some, I dunno, coffin or something. He like, comes out, he’s Dracula. And he comes out and like no introduction at all. And just, he stands next to me and they’re like, all right, go.

It was like, it was like lost in translation and he goes, I’m ti And then the other person goes. I’m Motis son, and I just go,

ah,

and I just, and I grab him. I grab him and I just start shaking him and I go, dude, we gotta say hello before we start this. And I don’t think anyone had ever touched a Motis son in the history of his career.

Yeah. Three people committed suicide. It was really intense.

Matt Rodbard: All right. We got a few more questions. Food is fun. We have a few more questions. We’ll open up the audience. I have food podcasts. I have to ask you, you’re usually, after 2030 K, you’re going to comi, you’re having a few snacks and you’re pounding it away, but sometimes you get to have incredible food While on these walks I do.

What? Just what comes, give us one example of a recent walk that you had a meal that really blew you away.

Craig Mod: Honestly on a lot of these walks, my favorite meal is Moss Burger. Which is, oh yeah, it’s just which is like Japanese healthy McDonald’s. Yeah, no,

that’s good.

They have an amazing fish sandwich and a great salad, really good salad, really good onion rings, but they, but you’re just eating every day.

You’re eating a lot of fish, a lot of grilled fish, a lot of sushi. And the ji, which is one of the main walks I’m doing in this book, the East a g is the walk I tell everyone to do. If you’re gonna go, you wanna do a seven day, eight day walk. Go do Ji and I’ve written about it a bunch.

I’ve, I have a whole itinerary. It’s easy to set up. But the food is just incredible ‘cause that peninsula, that area is known for isi. Which is technically ise. It’s ES shrimp, but it’s lobster. Oh, okay. And so some of these ins you stay at, the amount of food they give you is absurd. It’s a lobster, the size of this table, they cut in half and the brain is on display and you’re supposed to stir it or something.

Matt Rodbard: That’s Oh, the best. Yeah. No, I can’t,

Craig Mod: I can’t. No, you don’t. You don’t have a brain. I don’t do bread. I take four bites. Okay. And then I like, they’re, they look shocked ‘cause everyone goes to this area to eat this monster. And yeah. But then there’s another in, I go to, and the, it’s run by a husband and wife, father and son or.

Husband, wife and son and daughter-in-law, and the son and father cook all day. They cook from 9:00 AM till 4:00 PM and the meal is just amazing. The Inn is called Mi Suzu. I write up, I have their portrait in here, actually in this edition, and they’re just full of so much love and the food is so incredible.

And they have, they serve something called kasumi, which is like this, almost like this. Pressed, it’s almost like the body of Christ as fish eggs. Yeah. And he says he has the best in Japan. Okay. He’s convinced and it’s this delicacy and yeah, it’s pretty good.

Matt Rodbard: It’s pretty good. I wanna ask you, you write beautifully in the book about SEN culture.

Oh yeah. And just how, like the sen like the public bath and just being around your neighbors and just being naked with your community. Yeah. It does something. And I think anyone who’s visited Japan and been in Olsen, I think you can feel a little bit of that. It like is, there’s a release there and you, there’s a really beautiful section in the book when you write about it.

And I just wanted to get for the stage.

Craig Mod: Yeah. No, I think every every man in America is like, is my dick weird? It’s there’s that’s when you’re 14, 15, you’re like, my dickers were so weird. I think everyone thinks that. Yeah. And then the first time I was taken to a hot spring.

I was like, whoa, there are way weirder dicks out there. Yeah. There’s so many dicks, so many shapes. I didn’t know. I didn’t know this was possible. And I think there’s something really beautiful about seeing all these dicks. And the sooner you could see, the more dicks the better. That’s the takeaway I’ve gotten from it.

Exactly. Yeah. And it is, it’s, but being naked with people is great and, and I take, a lot of Americans will come, friends will come, and we’ll walk together and we’re staying at these inns and they have communal baths and we bathe together. And this is literally the first time these people, and they’re in their thirties or forties, fifties, sixties, have ever been naked with someone else that you know.

Yeah. In. And by day three or four, a lot of them said to me like, look, this is the most comfortable I’ve ever been with my body. Yeah. I’ve never. I’ve done this before.

Matt Rodbard: You, you see your future right there? Yeah. Terrify, like it’s right there in front of you. Terrify. Terrify. Or it’s not terrifying.

It’s like comforting to know. Oh

Craig Mod: sometimes it’s very terrifying.

Matt Rodbard: Have you been out to Bright Beach? I have not. That can be terrifying.

Craig Mod: I, yeah. I’ve seen some testicular that no man should ever gaze upon.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah.

Craig Mod: Everyone’s cordial. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Rodbard: But when you’re raised that way, you just have, the body image is different.

In Japan, it’s different. It’s different. We have, it’s a different relationship with your body

Craig Mod: and everyone is, if you look like me, everyone’s look, trying to look at your dick. Yeah. Because they’re, they’ve never seen most of these farmers have never seen a white guy.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah.

Craig Mod: Naked. And so they’re, everyone’s interested, they’re like, like peak.

You

Matt Rodbard: pose for selfies? I

Craig Mod: do. We do. We do. We do some, yeah. We do some bath selfies, but no, it’s funny. And just the crazy antics in the changing room. Like these farmers are so comfortable with their nudity. Yeah. And they’re, they look like their skin’s almost painted on because of their tans are so intense, but they’ll be, doing spread eagle stuff on like benches and, just bending over in crazy way right in front of you.

And it’s. The comfort.

Yeah.

It just makes you realize how uncomfortable you are, yeah. With your nudity. So I love it. And one of our friends here, the Amichi man there, he writes beautifully about Cento culture and what’s the name of your of your substack?

Dispatch is from dispatches from. Post growth, Japan Great newsletter. He writes about cento culture and I think the loss of that Yeah. Is quite sad. It’s quite depressing because of that commun communal ness of

Yeah.

Sharing nudity and having this communal space. And so it’s fun to go in, in the countryside to see where it’s still revered and and pretty active.

Matt Rodbard: Final question and me thinking we’ll be calling on the audience, where are we at with the qui says right now? Yeah you did a lot of work around, these dying qui says. Throughout rural Japan and also in Tokyo, I loved your jazz popup, which was about jazz bars and the death of jazz bars.

And yeah, depopulation has been well covered in the press and Japan and Korea and other places. But as a journalist yourself, as somebody who documents the death of culture, that’s a heavy topic. I guess what’s, we’re checking in on Quia right now. Where are we at? Are they really going away as fast as you first wrote about?

Craig Mod: Yeah, so Quia is short for Quia 10, which is basically mid-century, mid 20th century Japanese style cafe. So the analog would be essentially like a New York diner.

Yeah.

And like New York diners, they’re disappearing and we’re at the end of the generation who. Had committed their lives to it, not because they, it’s funny, you see these old quia that are left and people have been working at ’em, the owners will be, have been there for 50 years, 55 years.

And it’s not because they, were young and were like, oh my God, I have to run this quia. I love it. So it was because they didn’t want to go to an office. Yeah. They didn’t, and there wasn’t, there weren’t other options. And so they kinda did it reluctantly. And there’s a survivorship bias of the ones that are left.

Of just the ones that happen to be good. There’s a lot of bad ones and so the ones that are left are good, but it’s the end. It really is the end of this era of people committing to a community hub like that Again, connected with Cento culture. Aquia is a place where you have the regulars.

They come, they smoke, they have their morning set, they gossip. And in the countryside because of depopulation, a lot of villages, all they have left are barber shops and quia. That’s it. And so when I do these walks, the whole reason I started writing about Kiso was just because there’s literally nowhere else to go to have lunch.

Yeah. And they serve pizza toast. So I was eating a lot of pizza toast.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah. Describe what pizza toast is. It’s exactly

Craig Mod: what you think it is. It’s

Matt Rodbard: yeah, but it’s like the Japanese version of pizza sauce. Go, let’s break it down a little bit.

Craig Mod: Thick sliced bread. Like really thick milk bread.

Milk bread. The whitest bread. You can, you could like smoosh it, but Japanese milk bread.

Matt Rodbard: Kind of bomb.

Craig Mod: It’s good. Yeah. Totally good. And just really basic tomato sauce. Maybe some peppers, a couple of onions, salami, and like essentially American sliced cheese.

Matt Rodbard: So like a yellow cheese? Yeah.

Basically.

Craig Mod: Yeah. And a toast oven. The whole thing was postwar. These were mainly postwar institutions, so it’s just what can we do with the smallest possible set of ingredients and also the simplest kitchen. So you just have a little toast oven and you can kinda make pizza toast. You can do toast, pizza, toast.

And then they do napan spaghetti. Yeah. Which is basically just spaghetti with ketchup and some sausages. Yeah. Like a step above Chef boeri, barely, basically.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah. And the coffees love legend and

Craig Mod: the coffee. Yeah. There, it’s pour over, but also cloth drip.

Yeah.

There’s a lot of cloth drip at these quia.

And then siphon, in America in the last like decade. There’s been this, you can go to Blue Bottle, I think the San Francisco blue bottle had a whole siphon thing, and you’d go and it would be $18 for a siphon coffee. But Siphon was the standard for a lot of Japanese qui Satan in the sixties and seventies.

You go and it’s two bucks for a siphon coffee in a lot of these old

Matt Rodbard: places. Yeah. So Craig, what’s next? You’re on book tour for the next several weeks. I know, but like you, six weeks, your, again, your metabolism for creating books and popups and content and everything is really high. See, I know you, you have mentioned on the membership that you have several book projects for members, but what’s the roadmap right now looking like for you?

Craig Mod: Honestly, just survive this. That’s it. This is six weeks on the road. Yeah. I’m doing, it’s 10 events. I’ll be in Washington on Friday off to San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles. We. Some dinners there. Trying to set up a members only dinner, like a little thing for members over there.

I’m just trying to, have fun. Yeah. Just try to enjoy this and just be present. I’m treating this essentially as a walk, yeah, again, try to stay off. No

Matt Rodbard: popup though at the end of our talk. No

Craig Mod: popups. No, I can’t.

You, I can only do the popups because I finished at five.

I finished walking at five and then I’m just silent.

Yeah.

From five to 10 or 11 just working. And so this is two section, but

Matt Rodbard: you’re working on like the jazz bar record. Oh, for the other books? Yeah. Some other books in the works.

Craig Mod: Yeah. The jazz kisa thing. Yeah. I love that. I did three weeks of visiting these north tohoku in Hoka Jazz Quia, and I went to I think 20 or 21 of ’em two years ago.

And already I think four of them have disappeared ‘cause the owners have died. So again, we’re at this, we’re this literally

Matt Rodbard: in real time.

Craig Mod: It’s, we’re at this stage where there’s 10 to 15 years left. For whatever the originals. That’s

Matt Rodbard: incredible.

Craig Mod: Lemme say that way. And I was thinking okay, now I have to go to Koku and I need to, I should go to Shu and I should go to, all over Japan.

I should visit these jazz quia to do a book. And really I should just write about Northern Jazz for now.

Yeah, you have it.

Just do it. And that’s also interesting thinking about what are the constraints of, for these projects. ‘cause they can just keep expanding forever. Yeah.

Matt Rodbard: You. Tamp down

Craig Mod: Do Northern Jazz and I’ll go do koku.

Beautiful. I can’t wait to read

Matt Rodbard: that. Thank you, Craig. This book is incredible. Thank you for having, thank you so much for joining and we’re gonna open it up for, so we’ll get a round of applause here. Craig, I really hope you all can read the book and I think we’re gonna open it up for a few questions.

With the microphone. Raise your hand question. Who wants to kick it off? Somebody? Yes. Yes. Oh, I, yeah. No. Can I call on somebody? No. No, we’re right here. Thank you. You’re great. First question.

Audience Member: Hi. Thank you for this. What have you noticed has changed

Craig Mod: the

Audience Member: most since you’ve

Craig Mod: lived

Audience Member: in Japan?

Craig Mod: In the cities or countryside or both, or first of all, one, I moved there 25 years ago.

Japan was forgotten. If you, if you just look at the tourist numbers, Japan now gets in one month. More than we got in a year, far more than we got in a year. Also, China didn’t exist as a tourist cre, as a country that created tourists. And so there was zero Chinese tourists 25 years ago.

Now it’s something like 60 or 70% of all tourists are Chinese. So that’s really interesting to see these sort of economic shifts throughout Southeast Asia, Indonesia the tuna boats are mainly man and actually there are almost no women on these boats because. They believe it’s bad luck.

The boats are named after women. They don’t wanna have, this is what they say. And they’re manned, they’re helmed by Indonesian workers. Even now that’s the case. And it’s getting harder and harder because Indonesia has gotten so economically stronger in the last 25 years that they can’t pay them enough.

So for Indonesians, it used to be incredible to come and be able to work on a boat and send money back home. And now it’s should I do that? It’s, it’s a dangerous job. It’s really hard. I, it. Looks terrible. They should be getting paid way more than whatever they’re getting paid.

I’m sure. So those changes have been interesting. And then the obvious, the aging of the population, the countryside is just denuded of people. You just don’t see kids, you don’t see a lot of these cities that 25 years ago would’ve been active. They’re called shutter streets now. So all the shutters are closed on the shops because everyone’s died and there’s no economic incentive to run a shop there.

And so seeing that. And seeing how municipalities are being brought together to form bigger, just saying, okay, these three towns are now one town and talking to the old timers about kids. You know this, the elementary school used to have 150 kids now all the class rooms, there’s 14 kids.

So stuff like that and just the, how are they dealing with it? What are they, what are they thinking about? But also seeing the immigrant influx in service workers. In Tokyo, 25 years ago, you would never ever, anywhere ever see a non-Japanese person working anywhere ever.

And now I’d say 50% of the convenience stores, the people behind the counter are non-Japanese. Wow. A huge percentage are Nepalese. Actually, there’s a massive Nepalese. Population working in Tokyo and there’s a Okinawa and soba shop that I’ve been going to for 25 years and 25 years ago, everyone there is Japanese.

You go, now it’s nine Nepalese workers and one Japanese worker, and they speak great Japanese and they love it and they’re grateful to be here and they’re excited. So I’m curious about the political situation about supporting these people. And making sure that they’re taking care of well, and that they’re given, on-ramps to becoming full-fledged citizens and, they have so much pride of being there, and you want to, we wanna nurture this and we want this to be great.

And so I’m talking more and more with politicians about like, how do we make sure these people are loving it, and wanting integrate fully, and how do we support them in the best way possible? But I’ll be in the middle of nowhere and like a Nepalese guy will ride by on his bike.

And he’ll stop and he’ll be like, who are you? I’ll be like, who are you? He’s I work at the Bento shop. He’s 23, 24 years old and all he wants to know is he’s like, how many girlfriends do you have? He’s like, how do I get a Japanese girlfriend? That’s all they want to talk about.

Oh, really? So that’s all new. None of that existed. And then the tourism thing is in, just in general in Tokyo is overwhelming. More

Matt Rodbard: questions. We have one over here you wanna just yell at ya at? Yeah,

Audience Member: yeah. In tim Ferris, you talked about a professor that shaped your life. The kind of scary one is like being like a teacher, professor, something you would ever think about.

I just ask like I, I would take that class. Many

Craig Mod: of us would, I’ll give you a free membership. Yeah. I think it was a high school teacher that was scary if you. Weren’t playing ball like, but if you were trying, he was totally on your team. But he was, the sort of guy where if someone was fooling around a lot, he handed a lighter to the person sitting next to him and said, light him on fire.

If he talks again, that, like jokingly, he was he was the Dave Letterman school of Comedy of Biology teachers. But he was incredible. The teaching thing, I feel like I’m trying to figure it all out. I don’t, I feel like I don’t know anything. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing with any of this stuff.

And the membership program has become the place where I just try to talk about what I’m doing and the board meetings for members. I do a board meeting every six months and I just say, okay, what do we do in the last six months? What am I looking to do in the next six months? And I opened up to q and a and the questions are always amazing.

And I have the archives of all that stuff up and we have indic indices for all the questions. And so I feel like that’s a pretty good archive and that’s the best I can do right now. But I just feel like there’s still so much I’m trying to figure out. But that’s the membership program is me talking to myself when I was 20, wishing I had that, wishing I had the voice to talk about these things.

And that’s how I frame it.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah. Another question right there. Yeah. I’m curious. I’ve heard you talk

Audience Member: a lot on podcasts about your writing, but less so about your photography. Yeah. I’m curious, who do you have influences that drive your work? And maybe it’s just a synchronicity, I’m reading it right now of ‘cause biography, which read I recommend, but I see certain parallels in his experience in yours.

But who, how did you learn? About photography, what kind of is your mental

Craig Mod: map to where you are now? Photography, I’d always been drawn to it, but we couldn’t afford a camera in high school. So all throughout my teenage years it was, I’m always, no one had a camera around me. And then finally when I got to Tokyo, I could afford, there was so many used camera shops and for a hundred bucks you could have a great camera set up.

And I basically like with everything in my life, I taught and was influenced by the internet. My biggest photography influences were photo, photo.net. I dunno if anyone knows this website. I spent all of, when I was 19 and 20 in the computer lab just reading and reading and trying to understand how to take pictures and how to think about pictures.

And then as I’ve gotten older, like Becky Young was a big influence for me. She’s a photographer in Philadelphia. I studied with her and just hearing about how she thinks about the world and. And she gave me a lot of of sort of permission to be really zany and bizarre and spiritual in the practice.

But then, obviously folks like Eggleston and Steven Shore and, a lot of the countryside walking I’m doing is drawing on, on, on them. But there’s also, there’s a new generation of street photographers that are appearing on YouTube and Instagram right now. And like Trevor Wise Cup, I dunno if you know this guy just a really interesting, wacky.

Totally out there, guy. And I think what’s fascinating about this younger generation, first of all, no one under 30 shoots digital at all. It’s really fascinating how nobody shoots digital. Everyone shoots film. And I went back to film two years ago. I’d grown up with, shooting film, 1920, basically from 19 to 25, 26.

Had a dark room in my apartment. It was developing everything on my own. And then digital started getting better and it was, if you’d dealt with film, digital was just so obviously so much better that it, it felt like, why would I wanna keep doing this? And you could move faster and it felt good. And then I think something flipped in the last decade, last five years, especially with we’re so in the phones, apple music sucks.

Spotify, it is just like you have no relationship with media. And I think the younger generation intuitively feels that. And it was, it’s been fascinating to engage with younger and younger photographers and they all shoot film. Okay. And I think that slowness, and I think the loop of engagement is really fascinating.

nobody: Yeah. Where

Craig Mod: it’s not immediate. You can’t immediately look chimp and check if you’ve got the shot or not. And I I was suspicious when I went back to film two years ago, I went back on a lark. I had my hassle blad sitting on the counter. And I put a role of film through it and just taking it out.

Something felt really special about that and I was just immediately back in and so this new book that is coming out next week is? Yeah, tomorrow. Tomorrow? Yeah. This one, no, this was coming out tomorrow. The photography book that I shot in February was almost entirely filmed.

Matt Rodbard: Yeah. Okay. And that’s yeah, the labs, if you like, downtown, like the photo labs are popping here.

Yeah. No it’s, they’re busy. It’s crazy. It’s bananas. It’s five years, last five years.

Craig Mod: And if you talk to the labs in Tokyo too, the tour coming with that need to get film developed.

Matt Rodbard: Oh yeah. So it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming. So I think we have time for one or two more questions.

A quick one there.

Craig Mod: There on

Matt Rodbard: the right. Yeah. Over here

Craig Mod: we’ve.

You mentioned some of the

Audience Member: difficulties with writing, particularly after these long walks Yeah. Form, but I was curious if you could talk about maybe some of the benefits of writing this particular format of whether it’s out pops after your walks or your more serialized news that like originally.

Craig Mod: Yeah. I just think having a deadline is good. That’s it. That’s that’s 99% of it. It’s just, I need a deadline. I can’t work without a deadline. I look at my twenties and I’m like, there’s so much loss. Time in my twenties ‘cause I didn’t have any deadlines. And again, getting, going through that magazine thing and getting ghosted and rejected and all this, and I realized intuitively I was just creating a set of deadlines for myself.

That’s what it boiled down to. And so getting to the end of the day, even when you’re exhausted and learning how to create that space where you just have to get it done, you have to do the work. I’ve now done that for hundreds of days and. Yeah. That’s a powerful thing to feel. And so now if you say you gotta finish Marni, who’s been amazing PR helping me out, she’s orchestrating so much stuff and getting me, essays and stuff to place in various magazines.

Marni comes to me with any pitch and I’m just like, oh yeah, easy. Whatever. Yeah. Give, throw. Yeah. It’s you build up this muscle where you’re just like, okay, if I sit down and I have the deadline and I need to get it done, and you give me the word count, I’m gonna get something done. And I didn’t feel that.

Five years ago, I couldn’t do that five years ago, so I started building that muscle when I was 38, 39, which is like probably way too late. But I was reading a lot and I was doing a lot of other things, but I was loose about deadlines and the pop-up walks especially taught me how to have a deadline.

And ridgeline. Now it’s not weekly, even though it should be, it’s technically supposed to be, but for the first two and a half, three years it was. Religiously weekly, even during the big walks, I would even, I would keep the ridge lines going and that was important to me just to, again, build that muscle and honor that, that muscle.

Matt Rodbard: Great. One more question. What do we got? It wasn’t right there.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Hello? Hey. So many old faces here. Not old. Familiar. Familiar faces. Familiar. We’ve known each other for 22 years, 23 years, something like that. Yes. I remember you. Of publishing, publishing yourself, designer. Yeah. Now you’re working big publishing company.

How? How is it different 20 years ago? You just have to give up all control. You have to, so the question was. K’s known me for, 20 plus years and he’s seen me run through all these book parties in Tokyo and do independent publishing stuff and be the designer and sort of editor and what all this, all everything.

And his question was how does it feel to, work with a big publisher now and everyone first I was lucky because I was able to maintain fine art rights, right? So that was really important. So I felt like my addition that I did a couple years ago. Great. We did that and here’s a c canonical, fine arty version of it.

And so that made me so chill about the rest of the process. And then everyone told me, Craig, just be ready. It’s gonna be terrible. So everyone told me it was, working with a big publisher is the worst thing in the world. Untrue. You’re gonna be disappointed by everything. That’s what everyone told me. They were just like, Craig, be ready to be disappointed.

I was all right, this is clearly gonna be the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. And and so I went into with that mindset. And it turned out it was great.

You

know, Molly, my editor at Random House was fabulous. And again, like I said earlier, I was looking for a buddy to go on this journey with, and Molly was just such, such a great buddy, and she totally got the book.

And the editorial process for building this version out was she went through the other draft, the other manuscript and put. 3, 4, 500 questions in it. And I just re wrote, responded. She’s you don’t have to respond to all the, I responded to every question and I just, there were wonderful questions.

I wanted to respond to it. I felt relaxed about the process. And I think this addition, especially, there’s a relaxedness to it, a kind of playfulness that I’m really proud of where it landed. And then I think it feels great. Like in hand. I think that the size is just about right. I think the cover came out great.

The interior design. I, I. I knew we weren’t gonna be doing four color. And you don’t wanna do four color, four color. If you do four color. The expectation of the reader

Matt Rodbard: it’s different,

Craig Mod: gets so high and you have to do it right. It’s,

Matt Rodbard: you have more margin of error. So much more air. You’re doing

Craig Mod: all a bunch of four color stuff.

Yeah. And it’s just so complex. It is.

Matt Rodbard: Corrections are crazy.

Craig Mod: And so leaning into sort of mass markety, hardcover design, knowing that language, knowing the kind of paper it’s gonna be produced on, and then redeveloping all the photos for that. Think rethinking the layout for that. That was also really freeing.

And I don’t think, I can’t think of another book that looks like a book like this, that’s come out of randomness. And I just want to call out the designer. I’m being a real jerk for not knowing the designer’s name. Satchi Chand, Rami Chand Ram. Jesus. I’m such an asshole.

Chand Ramani. Satchi. Chand. Ramani. Did the cover and possibly also the interior design. Sorry, it was just such a ca. There’s a lot going on with the process, but it came out great and so in the end, giving up that control, it was fine ‘cause the team was wonderful so

Matt Rodbard: that’s great. Great to lucky hear that It’s really nice and it’s not just ‘cause they’re sitting here.

I know. They’re like literally sitting the front row, but No, it’s, I’m not lying. It’s wonderful to hear that, the death of books is no longer apparent. Your famous New York Times. Article from 15 years ago.

Craig Mod: Oh yeah. Yeah. We wanna talk about that, Daniel. Let’s not talk about that. Prince

Matt Rodbard: is not dead.

No. Yeah, prince is not dead. I’ll leave it at that. Everyone. Everyone knows that article, we wanna talk about that. Thank you so much for joining us, Craig. Thanks for coming up. Congratulations. Thank you, Clayton, our producer on the show. The show is this download conversation there.

nobody: Thank you.