Transcript

Robin Sloan: Thank you. Alright. That was great. Thank you. This is fabulous. Thank you all for coming out. We’re gonna have such a fun time here tonight. I want to take just a moment before we dive into establish my bonafides for this role.

As I was coming over and especially seeing the line in the big crowd, I was reminded of a time, quite a few years ago when I was the interlocutor for Ed, another San Francisco area bookstore for John Darnell, who’s also known as the Mountain Goats. Phenomenal writer and musician. And this event was for his novel, which I had read and loved and had many thoughts about, but I was like not a big mountain goats fan or was just, I didn’t know much about it.

And everyone else in the room. Spilling out onto the street emphatically was, and I was conscious the entire time of these, like daggers coming at me because they knew, they were like, you’re not a John darn Neil fan. You don’t know anything about the mountain goats. Why do you get to sit on that chair, talk to ’em.

What’s different is that I do deserve to be in this chair. ‘cause I am the world’s biggest Craig Mod fan. So I have standing. And there actually there’s a similar kind of multifariousness here in this chair beside me because Craig is in addition to being a writer, a really tremendous writer, he’s also a photographer, a designer, an athlete, a particular kind of athlete.

It’s true. And a teacher. And he does all of those things at a, I would say pretty profoundly world class level. That’s rare. Or maybe even unique in. In that combination. My objective tonight is for us to find out how that is possible. Okay. And I wanna begin not with the boring, where’s the idea for this book come from question, but something a little broader.

You’ve done a lot of things over the years. You’ve lived different places gotten up to different projects lived here in the Bay Area for a spell by the way.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Robin Sloan: To me there’s this most recent phase of the Craig Mod cinematic universe that we’re still in, and it’s very much marked by two things, at least.

One is the membership program. That’s been such a great success for you. And the other one is this book things become other things. I’d be curious to hear you talk about the origin not just of this book project, but of that phase of like your work, your life.

Like what. What was the crucible outta which this thing that we’re all in together now emerged.

Craig Mod: J just a lot of rejection really, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Tons of rejection. By the way, I, this is all new to me. Robin didn’t brief me on this at all tonight, so that’s as, as new to you as it is to me.

Yeah. First of all, thank you all for showing up. This is awesome. This is really cool. I was telling Robin, all you have to do is wait 20 years to do an event and then people show up, just do one every 20 years. Yeah. And but yeah, no, this, the membership program, all of that came out of yeah.

Just getting summarily rejected by the publishing industry.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig Mod: I spent, 20 13, 14, 15, 16, working on another book, doing a lot of residencies, doing the I Writer’s workshop, doing all this other stuff and kind of building up chops. Yeah. On a book that never. Made it anywhere. Yeah.

And I felt a little I don’t know, I was talking to people and they were like being very laudatory and like saying, oh yeah. Like basically saying, we’ll publish it at some point. Just keep coming. And then it never materialized.

Yeah. Yeah. And

Robin Sloan: The years are ticking by, the years gonna go by.

Craig Mod: And that was pretty traumatic. Yeah. To be honest, it was very traumatic to kinda go through that. And then with the membership program, it was, I had been writing this huge piece about walking in Japan. This is 20 18, 20 19, and.

I had been, I’d pitched it to a big magazine. They wanted it, they accepted it. I worked on it for six, seven months, and then I just got ghosted by the editor.

So it was pretty terrible. So again, that was another one of these moments of, okay what should I do? And I was, I called up all of my friends who were journalists and writers, and I was saying should I just move back?

Should I move to the States? Do I just, I don’t know how to do this. Yeah. I remember

Robin Sloan: You were talking about getting a normal job at that time. Yeah, I was. This is the end of wild, it’s wild. 20 Wild to imagine the counterfactual. Truly because we definitely got a call. Yeah. And,

Craig: I was like I just don’t think I have the chops and I don’t know how to pitch these things.

I don’t know, I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t, I had never worked out a big magazine before and everyone to a tee was like, you have an audience. Yeah. It’s not mega giant, but you have some, you have an audience out there. Yeah. And you know what you wanna write about.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: So just go for it.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. And

Craig: That was it. It took about a month or two of planning and then. Launched explorers Club, which then turned into special projects, renamed a little later.

Robin Sloan: It’s, I think about that, that transition. ‘cause it is, it’s such a, it was, there’s like a, almost like a, when a, an electron jumps to a different energy level and an atom, and there’s this like emission, this emission of energy.

And that transformation that you created, that kind of, this was not a smooth, this was not a following the smooth road. This was a rupture in your life. And one of the things that it, that seems to have come out of that, you use this word a lot, this is like a core word in the Craig Lexicon No. Permission.

Yes. Yes. And I, it’s interesting, right? ‘cause like you were interested in many or all of these things in the years leading up to, to, to launching this program and, then embarking pretty quickly after that on the stream of work and the writing that would become this book.

But you didn’t, I don’t know, you didn’t feel like you had permission. What, what did that what was that granting of permission and like what did that come on? Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. Look, I wasn’t looking for the industry to say, okay, I, I now night you and you’re now an official writer, yada yada.

I was just looking for partners, looking back on it now.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: I wanted partners to be able to go on this walk together with you. Yeah. The literal metaphorical walks and that was what I was hungry for. Yeah. As an adopted person Yeah. Who, has always felt on the outside and then choosing to live in Japan, which is also this sort of conscious choice to be like I’m gonna be a place that can never reject me.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: All of that together. And so I was just looking for a buddy.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. That’s all I wanted was a buddy to

Craig: like,

Robin Sloan: do

Craig: these projects with, it sounds so sad. So you

Robin Sloan: created this virtual buddy? This, yeah. Virtual mass of Craig fan Flesh. Rolling, Craig. Oh, wow. Good work buddy.

Good work, man. Keep it going. But it works. But it worked. Like the gam the Gambit obviously ly worked well.

Craig: It took, yeah, it took a little while. Launched the program and it wasn’t immediately. Oh, okay. I’m a wa there’s 10,000 people paying. It’s that was not like that.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. It was quite a slow build. Sure. And it took me about a month to get into the mindset of, okay, what can I pull from this? Yeah. And permission was there. Yeah. And then that, that kicked off the Nendo walk that became Kisa by Kisa and all this other stuff.

Robin Sloan: That, there’s a question that tees up for me immediately, but I want to dwell in that in the permission thing for just a moment and kind of maybe operationalize it for folks in the room a little bit.

‘cause I know you’re actually really passionate and quite disciplined about metabolizing some of the things that you learn and experience into stuff that other people can use. Do you think based on maybe folks or just your sense of other creative people in the world, do you think there’s like a deficit of that permission?

Do you think there’s to put a point on, do you think there’s people in this room that maybe need permission and don’t realize that they do in some sense. Yeah. ‘Cause I didn’t

Craig: realize that’s what I was looking for either. Yeah. It’s just so lonely that create certain creative processes and certain writing.

Yeah. And to have even that editor on the other side, even, this random House edition which is a massive reworking.

It was, Molly, the editor at Random House. Got it. She got the book, we talked on, we did a couple calls and I was like, okay, this person gets it.

And so I trusted her and she just went through the fine art manuscript and left. 300 questions. That was how she responded to it. And then this book came from just responding to all. She’s you don’t have to respond to the, I’m like, no, I like all these questions. This is great. Yeah.

And just knowing she was there.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even though it wasn’t, we weren’t on the phone every day, we weren’t doing anything like that. Just knowing she was there. I, for me, this version, there’s a quality of relaxedness. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think I didn’t have in the other one, just because it felt so good to have that official, not official, but like someone who had done a lot of books and whose opinion was not something I had in my immediate orbit.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: And I felt really lucky to finally have access to that.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. He is relaxed is an interesting word. ‘cause of course that’s a form of confidence as well. A kind of that thing, it’s often magnetic. That kind of just easy, self-assured. Grace. Which, the, which?

The hungry, anxious, creative mind like, oh my God, are people getting ignored? This too, just the other thing and the other thing, is yeah. Becomes like a bad smell. Yeah. The shoulder

Craig: relax a little. Yeah. You know it. And so when, I got Molly’s response with all these questions, it wasn’t like, oh my God, what do I do now?

It was actually really freeing. It was just exciting. Yeah, it was. I was couldn’t wait to get in there and respond to them all. And it was like we’ve already done this once and I’m really proud of the thing that we made. So I don’t have anything to prove with this edition. Yeah, absolutely.

And it, it was a really joyful process Yeah. Kind going through and it’s yeah,

Robin Sloan: I’ve had the, I’ve had the luxury of reading the book already. And I think you, you will find that on the page there is a real lightness and a buoyancy. There’s a paradox in there though, too, because so much of what you’ve talked about is about the confidence and kind of the the buoyancy of having, like collaborators, whether they’re distant and virtual or, people like one-on-one creative relationships.

But you walk alone, the walks that form such a big part of your kind of creative and journalistic work and the walk that is like literally the spine and the content of this book. And you are so serious about that. You’re like,

Craig Mod: oh, hey Craig,

Robin Sloan: man, can I wanna, can I like come along?

You’re like, can. Absolutely not. And so I, and I think this is actually this, I wanted to dwell on this point too, because I think it’s really rich and there’s a lot in here. Okay. So why is the too simple a question. What is different about your brain and your imagination and your vision when you’re walking one of these roads alone?

Yeah. Versus when you’re walking with just one other person who’s also great and smart and who you really like. Yeah. No. What’s d what’s different?

Craig: If it’s one person or if it’s five people, it doesn’t matter. Yeah. Just one other person changes everything.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: And when I’m alone, there’s just this other voice there that, doesn’t pop up. Yeah. Otherwise, yeah. Just one other person

Robin Sloan: Yeah. Kills it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like a so it actually is a, yeah. And it’s, it scares it away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I sometimes think this is just bullshit theorizing. It’s like the, be careful about, you’re like, evolutionary psychology, we have these social animal brains.

I always think that if there’s one other human face in your eyesight, and certainly, taking a space next to you all day, like all the blood flows into that part of your brain that’s like watching them and are they cool? Are we cool? Is this cool?

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

Robin Sloan: And when you don’t have that I don’t know, the blood flows elsewhere and you get different thoughts and you just look at things more freely and it’s amazing.

Craig: Yeah. And I’ve talked a lot about creating sort of boring spaces, in a non pejorative way, using the word boring. Yeah. And it’s from boring. Boring for yourself. Boring for yourself. Yeah. Yeah. So you’re not teleporting You know, my rules, I always talk about my walk rules, like no social media, no news, like no, just don’t read the news.

Get rid of Yeah. Information entering. Yeah. No podcasts, no music. Yeah. Anything that teleports you, none of that.

Speaker: Yeah. And

Craig: The point being, and having one other person immediately makes it not boring.

Speaker: Yeah.

Craig: And so the point being is you just want to be. Bored outta your skull, like hour four or five, you’re on mile 20, 30 of the day and you’re just like, oh my God.

Like I’m, this is pretty painful. It’s, I’ve been walking, I haven’t talked to someone in 90 minutes. I haven’t seen another human in 90 minutes. It’s another Pachinko parlor, oh my God. And then you end up hungry for those connections. Sure. And so then that, that gets me to be way more extroverted than I am.

Robin Sloan: Sure. My day to day life. Yeah. ‘cause whereas if you were already plugged into, it’s like, again, it’s like I keep my, all my analogies are chemistry. For some reason. I don’t even like chemistry. But it’s like your ports are taken, like your bonds, the covalent bonds are all kinda locked up.

Exactly. And but no, but we know when you’re when you’re walking on your own, you’re just some freaky little ion. You’re just like ready to grab onto something. I don’t want, I want, I wanna stay in this, in the space of the walk, ‘cause I have some more questions about that. But quickly just on that point of kind of the alone brain and the board brain and like what happens there?

Do you. Take that out and apply that wisdom in the space outside the walk, when you’re like editing a book or laying out a photo book at home. Do you also try to cultivate that space?

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. Very much. Okay. Yeah. Very much. I started I realized I started doing the kind of total disconnection thing about 15 years ago.

Okay. And I wrote a little piece for Andy McMillan’s, the manual. Ah, yes, it was, remember that? Yes. Anyone remember the manual? It was

Craig Mod: fabulous. Yeah. Nice print.

Craig: Little sweet Print magazine. Yeah. And I wrote this. He did, he hated this piece that I wrote. He’s, he was like, this wasn’t what I asked for.

Yeah.

Robin Sloan: I, that was one the long march of projection led that led us to this room.

Craig: It was about like Bob Dylan and, and like turning off the internet. But I started I think 15, 16 years ago where I, when I went to bed, I’d turn off the internet and then I’d have no internet until after lunch.

Yeah. And that experience was just so bizarre. ‘cause you’d wake up and you’d have. All this creative space, this boring space in the morning. And then by the time lunch would roll around, I could feel it was like my brain was a bowl of goldfish, and they were like, guppies, and like dopamine was the food.

And it was like they were all at the top of the dip. Give me dopamine. And then I’d open Twitter and I’d open New York Times and I’d be like, this kind of ecstatic moment. And then, so I was doing that, and then I did Vipasana

Robin Sloan: Oh.

Craig: Before I started doing all the big walks.

And that was I saw a friend invited me, he’s Hey, come to this thing at Stanford. And I went and there was like 10 people in the room, and Yuval Harari popped out and he gave a talk for us. He was like, oh, okay. This is interesting. And he was just, Yuval is just like laser beam man.

And I was kinda looking him up after, and he does two months of the Boston every year. Wow. And I was like, this guy’s. Clearly has a lot of opportunities to do things. He’s very busy. Obama likes his book, yada, yada. Yeah. And yet he just, he

Robin Sloan: has people who would like him to talk in those in the, during those weeks.

Yeah. So much talking. Yeah. Yeah. And yet

Craig: he just, abides by, carving out these two months and not filming. Amazing. And so I was like, I can do 10 days. And that’s, I did vipa soon after that. Okay. And then doing that about the boredom, the cultivation of sort of attention, and looking at the physiological things that are happening to your body, bringing your attention up and down your body, scanning your body.

That plus the manual stuff like where I was turning off the internet 15 years ago. It was where, yeah. Things landed when I went on the first video. Yeah. No, I, that makes sense. Put this all

Robin Sloan: together actually. I didn’t know that. That’s interesting. There’s some kind of yeah. Precursors there.

Staying in the space of the walk and, but maybe getting a little, going a little less like cerebral and more again to that athleticism. I, and I think you know this, I think that even for as much as you’ve documented your walks I think there’s people in this room who’ve, who follow, virtually follow along with you with great pleasure.

Even with all that. I think that the athleticism of them is like underappreciated. I think. I, it is, I think, and it’s also I think in a way I very interesting performance art. I think of someone like Matthew Barney, who I think many people in the room will know. This is the one cliche thing everybody knows, but he’d do these drawings where he was couldn’t reach the canvas and he’s a strapping muscular guy, and so the drawings are him like.

Struggling, to make a mark on the canvas. It’s oh. It’s like the athleticism of it. And there’s something to that. In the spectacle of Craig Ma spending all day walking, experiencing the world in such a vivid deep way, having conversations with people, taking great photos, retiring to his hotel room to write a dispatch, which is then is immediately transmitted to thousands of people around the world.

Sincere question. I’m really curious to hear the answer to this. When you think about that, what that experience is for you, the whole package and then, and you’ve turned it almost into a genre at this point. You’ve created this thing this event, this module.

You can deploy when you’re not doing it, when it’s like normal Craig time, you’re just, you’re working on stuff, doing your taxes. You know what is living a normal life.

Speaker: Yeah.

Robin Sloan: What is the feeling. Do you start to feel itchy? Yeah. And you’re like, I gotta get on the road. Yeah. Is it, is that it?

I was is it muscular? Is it more

Craig Mod: calculated? It’s

Craig: what’s, what happens? It’s like a, there’s like an edge that you feel dulling.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: And you’re like, oh Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. I gotta go do something.

Robin Sloan: Really? Yeah. And would is it more, is it like up here or is it like in here? It’s in

Craig: the chest.

Yeah.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: And it just feels it’s like going to the gym. That’s, it’s it’s oh shit. How when’s the last time I did a big walk? Yeah. When’s the last time I did a big pop-up or whatever Yeah. When I was really going for it. Yeah. And this is why I shoved into February of this year, 10 day, 10 day photo journey, which I rented a car.

I cheated. I rented a car. And drove the key peninsula, but I was photographing. Yeah. ‘cause it was we were trying to cover so much ground. But I was thinking about this book tour coming up and I was thinking about this book coming out. I was just getting really nervous.

I was just like, man, this is gonna be all, everything’s gonna be too meta. Yeah. I’m not actually, I’m not making anything. Yeah. And I just started getting really nervous and itchy and it was like, itchy. I gotta do something. I gotta go do something. And so I just, I, I didn’t have time to do this photo tour at all.

Yeah. I definitely didn’t have time to do it. And just shoved it into the schedule and went, and I called everyone in the book, a lot of the ins, a lot of the people in here, I called ’em, Hey, I’m, I wanna come, I wanna go do a, I wanna photograph some pearl divers. I wanna meet some of the tuna fish people.

I wanna meet the boat repair people. And they were just so psyched to hook me up and I went and I would shoot some days 4:00 AM till 10:00 PM Yeah. Where I’m just being taken around to all these different folks and like setting up, I was at a market for six hours one morning, just standing there basically in one or two spots, just kinda watching the light in this market change.

Speaker: Yeah.

Craig: And so Feb, end of February, shot. 10 days super intense and all on film. This is my first like all film

Robin Sloan: thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Craig: Didn’t even know if I got the shots, thankfully, got some shots, and then spent March sequencing laying it out. Which also I didn’t have time to do. Yeah.

I was in a walk and talk with Kevin Kelly and there were two photographers on the walk and talk, and I pulled ’em aside one night. I was like, all right, we have to do, book sequencing. Yeah. And then go to print in April. Yeah. And then it just, the book just went on sale today and it started shipping tomorrow.

Robin Sloan: Do you think you could go six months without doing all these walks? Or would you, would it actually, I don’t know why it, if I was like, Craig, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a million dollars not to go on a walk. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That was cheesy. But it does, it’s just, it’s interesting to me that there’s this reflexive kind of again, this is a little simplistic, but a sense of a, both a mental and physical therapy and kind of a, and just resetting and a renewal and again, I just, I think there’s something maybe that there’s something operationalizable.

Yeah, what a word about that too, about people, engineering, those kind of, those things those energetic, I don’t know just periods for themselves.

Craig: And part of it too is just like knowing the richness that lies in doing these things. Yeah. It’s when I first started off, I did the knock as in 2019 and walked to Kakoa to Tokyo.

And already when I got to Tokyo I was like, oh boy, yeah. This is gonna be hard. Yeah. I didn’t know how to wear my pack properly. Yeah. My shoulders were bleeding, my feet were already starting to bleed. It’s like day three. And I had miscalculated Google Maps gave me all the wrong distances.

Everything was off by 25%. So I was like, oh, this’ll be a 30 K day. And it was like a 40 k day, yeah. This was a 40 k day, it was a 45, 50 k day. And but I just pushed through and there was a fullness there. That first one was the SNS project, right? So I was, I set up an SNS system where I was using text messages Oh, yeah.

To deploy. Yeah. And everyone, yeah. I would say at the end of the day, I send a little text message and a little photo with the, in the SNS thing. You sign up with your phone number and you could reply, but I couldn’t see any of the replies. They all went on some database. And then at the end of the walk, I hired someone to lay out a book.

That’s right. And I didn’t know how many people were signed up.

Robin Sloan: You have done so many weird things. I am just always to remember it.

Craig: I didn’t know how many people were signed up. I didn’t know how many responses there were. And then I had this one off blurb book waiting for me at home when I got back from the walk.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Craig: And that was really cool.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Craig: And that was, I was only sending a sentence each night. Yeah. And, but that felt like a lot.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah, it felt like a lot.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. Thinking about those, it’s interesting, right? So that’s, I had I had a sort of a spectrum set up in my mind, but I of course didn’t even know the ends of the range.

I was thinking merely of the range from the kind of classic, now established Craig walk, which is a meaty missive at the end of every day. Arriving really with the feel of a loaf from the bakery, still warm. You’re like, oh,

Craig just touched this, and it’s and it’s all, it’s part of the internet, right?

It’s that immediacy, the directness the sort of the looseness and you read them there and then they’re like a little wonky sometimes. ‘Cause you’re like up late. So that’s one. And, but, and it’s great. It’s a amazing performance and an amazing sort of piece of work. And that’s one end of the spectrum in my mind.

The spectrum has a lot to do with pace, the pace of production.

And maybe the improvisational nature or not, another end of the spectrum is. The book here in the room with us, which is a project of four and some years. Four.

Craig: Four years. That started two days ago. Yeah, four years ago.

Yeah. So May 10th.

Robin Sloan: So these are and not only the product of time, the product of incredible revision and evolution. Not only from manuscript to manuscript, but from addition to addition. This is real. This is a rich thing that has has baked and fermented and found this really beautiful form.

So you do both these things so well, which is amazing. Is one for you and maybe for anyone, is one better than the other? Is one like the home pace and then the other is something you do some of the other time?

Craig: It’s just, it’s it’s just a completely different Yeah. Activity and to the point now where I have so much backlog of popups.

So I’ve got the 10 city tour, I’ve got the jazz tour, I’ve got all the Tokyo walks. I’ve got two Tokio full walks that I’ve written. And I haven’t touched any of that stuff. Yeah. And I want to make a book out of all of it.

Robin Sloan: You do.

Craig: Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And so for me, I see the next five books. Sure.

And it’s it’s just having the discipline to sit down. Yeah. Yeah. That would create that book because it’s much easier. You, and you must know how this is, you live like us, where we’re not going to an office. Yeah. And everyone just thinks you can make time all the time when you’re home.

So it’s oh, Hey, I’m in town. Let’s hang out, da. And you do you want to hang out? And what I love about going off on the walks is that it’s like going to the office. Everyone knows I’m gonna be gone.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: I can say no to everyone and it doesn’t feel bad.

Robin Sloan: That’s great.

Craig: And the deadline is there and you get the work done.

Robin Sloan: That’s right. That, yeah. To, to oper again, operationalize it. I don’t know why I have, I insist on bringing like the ugliest word into our conversation, but to operationalize it, the deadline thing, of course, for for that short term project is so powerful.

Speaker: Yeah.

Robin Sloan: And it has been in, in the past for me hugely energizing and liberating as well. It another word in the great Craig Mod Lexicon, I should have a little booklet I pull out and consult is Archetype. And we’re gonna talk a little more about archetypes in a second. But just imagine yourself as an archetype for a moment of being a creative person in the world and a writer perhaps offering advice to, aspirants.

Would you steer them more in the direction of their version of the popup walk, or would you steer them more in the direction of no, you gotta make something really rich and real and substantial.

Craig: No, everything’s popup.

Robin Sloan: Okay.

Craig: Yeah. Everything

Robin Sloan: okay.

Craig: It’s like everything that I’m doing now came from Okay.

That insight of, oh, I can use these walks. It’s the fuel as a platform.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. Yeah.

Craig: And the deadlines.

Robin Sloan: Boy, that’s great.

Craig: That’s that. It’s, this is what I wished I had when I was in my twenties. Yeah. I think I was like pining for some kind of structure. I didn’t know how to give it to myself. I, I was able to hack together a few projects.

Yeah. I think from the outside it looked like I was doing quite a few things.

Robin Sloan: I’m laughing because as you were talking, I was imagining the like awful content marketing version of that advice, which is come up with an activity that generates a pile of content, which you can then develop into multiple finished formats to use across channels blog.

But but it’s true. That, that is actually, that’s there’s something to that and maybe the kind of the meta versions of that is you didn’t engineer it this way. You literally walked your way into it. But that kind of machine. Or the engine can just be so powerful.

And you can just go forever. You can just go forever. I was

Craig: talking today with a friend Ben here. We were talking about do you have a life what was the phrase? Life purpose or mission? Mission statement. Life mission and mission statement for life. Ben was like, companies have mission, why, maybe have a mission statement for life.

And I was just saying my mission statement essentially, that I’ve figured out over the last six years is just I wanna have as full a day as possible. Yeah. And then the next day be as full as possible, and that’s it. And it’s not about, okay, in 50 years, what’s this, or 20 years. It’s just I just have a faith that if I collect enough of these full days they add up to something. Interesting.

Robin Sloan: You say that yeah, you say that and I believe you mostly that’s it. But but you’ve talked at the same time. Compellingly about the value of books and part of it is the kind of part posterity value of books and it’s so noteworthy.

Again, I just, it just to, to dwell in the fact that you like. Are such an amazing maker of images. You can do video. You do, you have put together beautiful videos. You can make software. It is like this too is in your purview and yet you pledge your allegiance. Here we can affirm in this temple of binding that you pledge your allegiance to the book.

Why Craig, why the book of all things? It’s

Craig: just, it just works.

Robin Sloan: Yeah, it does work. It works. You too, the technology. Yeah. It’s

Craig: been interesting to watch Robin come around more to this like full force. A hundred percent. Yeah. You’re like it really does just work. It feels weird to say everything should be about the print book, but if you do aim for the print book

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: I think it just gets the best work outta you.

Robin Sloan: I think so too. I It just does Yeah. Yeah. Forcing function. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. The other, yeah that’s it’s in the lexicon. Yeah. Yeah. You could, we could come up with a good list and it would actually, it would be a good, if you just meditated on all the words, you would end up pretty good.

So

Craig: when I say the rich full day stuff it’s not just to. Part of the fullness is the doing at the end of the day.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. So

Craig: it’s that walking 30, 40, 50 kilometers sometimes.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: And then spending five hours at night.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: Using the mind, right? Yeah. Just that’s the fullness.

Yeah.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. And

Craig: And it’s not just to do it and then throw it away. It’s not, I’m not like some monk. I’m meditating in a cave. That’s what

Robin Sloan: I always say. I would say some people, not everyone is like this, but sometimes I say about writing, I’m like, I’m not doing this for my health.

This is I wanna make something and I want, yeah. I want people to read it. Hopefully a lot of people to read it. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Craig: And it’s at the end of the day, having the audience out there again, the permission from members or initially and now, yeah. More people who subscribe.

Having that permission was the thing that would get me to sit down. It would be 11 o’clock at night. The last chapter in this book was written on the last day of this walk. And I, it was the longest day, and it was terrible. It was hot. I didn’t have enough water. I was parched. I felt disgusting. There were flies everywhere.

It was just, yeah. I walked into one quia, I opened oh, the romance of the pilgrimage route. Yeah. I opened the door to one Quia and I looked in and it was just like, deliverance. These guys were gonna shoot me and play the banjo over my body. And I was, all right, I’m not gonna go in there. And I just wanted to give up on everything.

And I think that day ended up being about 45, 46 k. And I got to the hotel and it was 10, 11 o’clock at night. And I was like, holy shit, I have to write today’s newsletter. Yeah. And in that, but having that again, that weird deadline. The permission. Yeah. That a little bit of accountability.

Yeah. And it’s like, all right, let’s just, whatever, let’s knock it out, whatever we got. And it ended up being one of the most. S interesting things I think that I wrote.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: On the whole walk. And again, it’s this, just do it. That’s right.

Robin Sloan: Just do it. That’s, that’s probably per, it’s not, so it’s not just permission, it’s also kind of invitation.

Craig: Yeah.

Robin Sloan: Or as we say in my household, remember, it’s not freedom from responsibility. It’s freedom through responsibility. The reward is more work. Yeah. Good work is more work. It’s good. I got a couple more big questions and then we’re gonna do a lightning round and then we’re gonna, we’re gonna put invite questions from the room here.

So if you have any please begin to formulate them in your mind. They can be questions about Japan, walking, photography, books Python, best practices, apparently flask. Yeah. So it’s the whole, it’s the code. Full range. The whole gamut. Digital ocean. I I want, I’m gonna, I’m gonna end on a slightly more like meta and.

Regionally situated question but to close out this arc of like you and this phase that we’re in, and to go back to this word a key Craig word, which, which comes up in the book in some really compelling ways. The word is archetype. I think you are well aware that through your work and your, dedication and creativity and everything else, you have become an archetype for a lot of people.

And I think some fraction of those are folks who are maybe a version of you in a different timeline. And it’s just the Craig that took a bunch of different turns and now finds himself probably quite profitably employed at some tech company. I was like, yeah,

Craig Mod: okay.

Robin Sloan: And they see Craig, walking and being, having that sort of sovereign creativity. I think that is just tantalizing. And of course I think they there, I think there might be some people in this room who sometimes feel like they’re living vicariously through you.

Do you think they ought to do, are you comfortable being that, that archetype of wow, what a life and I wish I could do those things. Do you think that’s just like the wrong way of thinking about Craig Mod?

Craig: I just, I don’t, I am so in imposter syndrome mode constantly.

Yeah. Like still, I’m not being, I’m not being facetious. Yeah. I mean it’s like constantly just I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where this goes. I don’t know how this thing’s gonna do. I don’t know any of this. I didn’t think, is anyone gonna show up? Should I even do this book tour thing?

Honestly, that’s like constantly going through my head. Yeah. And I don’t wanna lose that.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: I like that. You protect it,

Robin Sloan: Protect that. Yeah. And

Craig: yeah, in the arc archetype corpus of crap that I’ve made, it is this, it’s all pathological, right? Yeah. This is I’m just protecting myself.

Yeah. I’m just, I’m like, I need my, by having the members, I can say no to the stuff like this. Sure. Or I don’t need this to be successful or as, as successful as, yeah. Like I, I’m, everything isn’t resting on this. Yeah. Yeah. I know how to do the other books. I know how to do ’em, in my way without compromise or ah, and I own the systems.

I own the stacks. I’m flask. Yeah. I coded it myself. I could, the GI repository, I can move it, wherever I need it to be. Yeah. And that’s that’s just completely psychotic. Yeah. All twisted. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s completely twisted. Yeah. But, the reason I do the board meetings for members. Yeah. And when the membership started, there was no, you got nothing. Yeah. There’s no members section. If you’re joining today, you’re getting this rich.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. Yeah. Hundred 20 hours of video a library. It’s like a streaming service. It’s a really, it’s actually to a really nerdy streaming service.

It’s the Yeah. It’s the worst

Craig: streaming service in the world. Yeah. And it has, its own search engine. It’s like that’s how much crap I’ve built in there. Thank you. Cloud code. Yeah. But the board meetings in particular Yeah. Are just the thing I started doing because I was like, okay there’s enough people that are paying me that whatever.

I’m gonna take that as permission to do a board meeting. Yeah. And then again, it’s all selfish. Every six months I do this board meeting and it’s purely just for me to keep track of myself. I wouldn’t do any of this stuff. Yeah. It’s like the end. Who does anyone here do an end of year review of your life?

It’s like a December 30th and one, we have one person who does 2, 3, 3 people that you couldn’t, I couldn’t do any of this stuff if I was just alone. Yeah. And there was, I didn’t know there was an audience somewhere out there. Yeah. I wouldn’t do it.

Speaker: Yeah. I, I’d

Craig: go on these walks, there’s no way I would write three, 4,000 words.

Or edit the photos in real time. I wouldn’t do it. And so the board meeting thing is the closest I can get to not turning into a pillar of salt because of embarrassment of reflecting on what I’ve been doing. Yeah. Putting it in a form that maybe if people can find value in it, great.

And then I can, and it mainly just helps me.

Robin Sloan: I like that. That’s, again, these, what are we doing? These multiple frames? I, it comes into focus. All the systems that you’ve built, that you have membership program, the newsletters the walks themselves as this kind of like exo suit to both defend your squishy bits and to magnify your reach and your grasp and the things that you know that you’re capable of doing.

And this, and I think this too. This is like a weird extra arm. Now you’ve got the reach of a publishing house, to be, it’s interesting in bookstores, in, in libraries, right? That’s the thing that even the most, I think we’ve talked about this a little bit in the past, even the most successful, really incandescent successful self-published authors with rare exceptions are not in.

Public libraries and things become other things is like people are adding it to their, they’re like placing their hold in, Libby, which is, it’s really something. It’s cool. Yeah. It’s great.

Craig: Thanks to your suggestion, Robin. I’m an evangelist to tell everyone to use Libby.

Robin Sloan: I’m an evangelist, say it’s very, it’s, I think it’s quietly the most important new force in American reading.

But

Craig: this thing, going on the Random House journey I also, I, a lot of you probably know how I negotiated the contract, which was I kept fine art rights. Yeah. I was in the middle of doing my fine art edition because I thought no one wanted this edition, wanted to do this.

And so when Random House finally said, Hey, yeah, we, we love the book. We really want it. And I did a call with him. I said, that’s great. I’ve been ghosted by so many people now. I was like, do you actually want it or are we just having a call about maybe saying you want it? I said, ‘cause I’m ordering my paper next week for the fine Art edition.

Yeah. And they’re like. Okay. Hold on. That’s great. Give us two days. That’s great. Yeah.

Robin Sloan: I look at y you’re like, listen, the paper is the paper’s in the truck? The paper

Craig: order is coming.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: And I’m reserving the presses and yada. That’s great. And then they, to their credit, they really stepped up really quickly and we were able to nail a deal.

But that was in part to, again, protect myself. Giving up the fine art rights to me wasn’t worth it.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Craig: I wanna keep that because having that independence is so critical.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Craig: And then who knows what happens with this? But it’s, it was like, okay, if we can negotiate in these in this way, then I’m again, a looseness kind of sets in where you’re like, oh, I got the fine art edition. That’s fine. Yeah. And let’s have fun with this. Yeah. Let’s see where this goes. And not be, I don’t know, not be too, not have, not put too much

Craig Mod: pressure on

Robin Sloan: it. Exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely. It can just, it can be whatever. It can just be, it can be whatever’s smooth.

Craig Mod: It can just be, and listen, if it just, all that people, line of people down Ha Street in San Francisco, so be it.

Robin Sloan: I do I, people ought to see you as an archetype, not. It’s not specifically ‘cause it would be foolish for someone to try to just do what you do. They would do it badly and there, there might only be a market for one Craig Mot specifically.

But again, the sense of having built this utterly bespoke system that just makes so many really new things possible is it’s exemplary. It really is a great a great example in a very meta sense.

Craig: And the fun thing about having your own system, so a lot of what I’m doing too

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Craig: If I just had a Substack account in a Substack newsletter, I couldn’t do No. Any of the experiments I’m doing. Yeah. So the whole thing with the popups is to have these things that appear and disappear and you have to enthusiastically opt into ’em.

Speaker: Yeah.

Craig: The whole membership. S backend.

Speaker: Yeah.

Craig: With having the video archives and I use YouTube unlisted videos and and I have these scripts that, create these beautiful layouts all that. All of the the archive of videos, it’s, I like having that clay to play with. Yeah. That’s right. It’s material and material. And then is anyone here on the good place and good placers? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Sweet. Yeah. So being able to produce that is been, that’s a,

Robin Sloan: This a Yeah.

Yeah. Great. You’re such a you’re such a good salesman for your own stuff. You should not have to be the only salesman. Let me just affirm, lemme give the pitch. The membership, Craig’s Long Standing membership program really is one of the best deals in creative all access passes in the world.

Not only do you get all the content, you also get your kind of really I would say very vulnerable diaristic thoughts about about these processes and what you’re working on next and what you’re thinking about and now access to a really sweet and nourishing. Social network. So platform essentially that you built yourself and you have been so far fairly responsive to feature requests.

So that’s, yeah, that’s pretty good too. Okay. I’m gonna, I’m gonna transition us into the q and a period with a lightning round. This is just a signal that we’re switching gears. The rules of the lightning round are simple but stringent. You will be presented with a binary choice, and you cannot ask for clarification or quibble.

You must simply choose one. Okay? Okay. It’s very simple. Claude or chat, GPT Claude Film or digital

Craig: film? No.

Robin Sloan: Hardcover or paperback? Oh, God. Paperback. This one’s a little, this weird. No we’re all learning. We’re all learning a lot right now. This one’s a little sort of little, this is a little more like Bo Boian.

So there’s two, they’re both, it’s a mouthful. The first one is, this is the first choice, all possible knowledge about the universe, except it’s only accessible via an old school, BBS at 2,400 bod Okay. Or two sprawling creative infrastructure at your command. Think a studio, tech people, facilities, you name it.

Speaker: Yeah.

Robin Sloan: Except you can only access it and interact with those people and those resources through an iPad.

Craig: Oh God. The first one.

Robin Sloan: Okay. A hundred percent. Yeah. You’re a, you’re a thousand percent, you’re a BBS guy. Thousand percent.

Craig: BBS,

Robin Sloan: Light roast or dark roast.

Craig: Oh, Robin, really?

Is this really a question?

Robin Sloan: You’ve chosen wrong, haven’t you? Okay. A

Craig: thousand percent.

This one that I don’t get. You’re a dark guy,

Robin Sloan: right? Yeah, I am. It’s a, the world the world’s gone mad noodling. This here we a streaming showdown apple TV plus or Max, formerly known as H-B-O-H-B-O, okay?

Definitely. Now, HBO or the Criterion Channel.

Craig: Criterion. Yeah.

Robin Sloan: And now Criterion Channel or a hard drive full of Torrented, MKV files.

Craig: The hard drive. Okay. Of course, the hard drive. I’ll still pay for criterion, but gimme the hard drive. Gimme the hard job. Okay. I just won’t look at it.

Robin Sloan: Okay, last one. Isn’t that

Craig: what we all do?

We all pay for criteria. And how many times do we Once a month, we remember? It’s sad. You know what I love? The Criterion has the great thing they have is they just have a 24 hour. Stream that’s going on. That’s, they’re just playing stuff. You can’t fast forward or you just hit play. Yeah. That’s nice. I throw that up on my projector.

Craig Mod: Wait, and you don’t have to pay for that free? No,

Craig: you have to pay for that. Oh. You have to pay for that. Okay.

Craig Mod: But it’s just nice, it’s just

Craig: nice to go into it and not have to choose. That is nice. Which weird old French punk and white movie,

Robin Sloan: which au film you believe that you might be about to watch

Craig: and not pick up your iPhone 15 minutes into No

Robin Sloan: it’s rough.

It’s, even Craig, it’s nice to know that even Craig. Yeah. Succumbs. Okay. This one, this last one is bracket style. Okay. Like tournament. Okay. I love

Speaker: it. Yeah.

Robin Sloan: And so this is who would you rather take a walk with? Okay. And just the little asterisk is it’s this person they’re alive.

Okay. They’re in their prime and they can walk, they can keep up with you. Okay. Okay. Steve, I gotta practice. Okay. Uhoh Steve Jobs or Tim Cook.

Craig: Oh, Steve Jobs.

Robin Sloan: Steve Jobs. Tim Cook.

Craig: Tim Cooker was so boring.

Robin Sloan: Annie,

Craig: sorry, Tim, are you Annie

Robin Sloan: Dillard. Annie Dillard or Robert? Caro. Annie. Okay. Wow, that was great.

That was okay. Beyonce or the new Pope? Leo? The 14.

Craig: Oh my God. I think I do Leo. Okay. That’s great.

Robin Sloan: He seems great. I wouldn’t, I’d

Craig: have more to talk about with Leo. I don’t know anything about Beyonce.

Robin Sloan: Ben Franklin or, hi Miyazaki. Miyazaki. Miyazaki. Okay. But now it gets hard. But Miyazaki,

Craig: when he was still smoking, I’d wanna smoke cigarettes.

Robin Sloan: Yeah. Yeah. Again, in the prime. It’s all in the prime. He quit. He

Craig: quit. Yeah, he quit a little.

Robin Sloan: So now, but now we narrow, so now it’s Steve Jobs, or, and Dillard.

Craig: Dillard.

Robin Sloan: Dillard. Sorry. Jobs. New Pope or Hi Miyazaki.

Craig: I, he’s smoke,

Robin Sloan: he’s smoking.

Craig: I hear Miyazaki. I hear he is a dickhead.

So I think I’ll do the Pope.

Robin Sloan: I think I’ll do the Pope. And oh, and so this is I’m sure only the Fifth Book event this month that has ended with the question Annie Dillard or the new Pope.

Craig: I feel like the Pope would be a harder get, so I think I’d go with the Pope.

Robin Sloan: Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Craig: I think Annie, you could get, we could get Annie somehow. You could get Dard under your own steam. Yeah. Yeah. You need

Robin Sloan: the magic. Yes. I need magic. Get to get the Pope. Okay. That’s great. So it’s confirmed me, you the Pope and Char root Ruan. That’s my guest. Okay.

Craig: We’re gonna book it.

Sounds great.

Robin Sloan: That’s great. I have a quote, I have a sort of an epigram I wanted to end with ‘cause it’s just the most Craig thing ever. Even though this is some folks will know this. This is William Blake poet illustrator, printer, inventor of his own te. Blake who said, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s, I will not reason and compare my business is to create.

And with that, yeah. Let’s hear for Craig and

Craig: questions so you can get mad at me if you don’t get your question

Speaker: selected. So

who should we start? Yes. Do I have children?

Craig: Do I wanna have children one day? Is this an offer?

Speaker: Take mine?

Craig: Is that it?

Speaker 5: Are you asking me if you want to have kids with me? Yeah, consider it. No,

Craig: I have a stepdaughter.

Yes.

Speaker: Tyler, by the way, Tyler

Craig: has been on a walk and talk, and he is the weirdest, most insane walk and talk person that you could ever possibly have. We were in the middle of Bali, in the middle of nowhere, and he was licking the trees, which I don’t think you should lick the trees, random trees in Bali.

He took a banana leaf, he put it down the back of his shirt. He started walking around like a tri, like a tyrannosaurus rex, and with this giant banana leaf coming at him. And this poor Polynesian village woman came around the corner and Tyler goes, he jumps out of the bushes at this woman. She bursts into tears.

Speaker 5: No. Okay, this is your telling.

Craig: Versatile.

Robin Sloan: You’re not tears, you’re not this guy’s not coming with you. Me and the Pope?

Craig: No, the guy the tour the guy, the guide. We had a guide. He almost pees himself. He starts laughing so hard and Tyler ends up just hugging this poor woman. And they’re both crying and laughing and anyway, that’s what Tyler did for seven days nonstop.

It was unreal. This guy is powered by some nuclear something. I don’t know where it is. This is what you get when you ask me a weird ass question in front of a hundred. What else we got? What else we got? What else we got? What else is there?

Speaker: I saw your hand up. Yeah. You

Speaker 6: talk a lot about leading a very rich and full life.

What are your thoughts on rest and quiet? Sure. Obviously the walking is very quiet, but

Craig: Yeah. Most of the time I’m not walking, so most of the time there’s a lot of rest bake in. But this is really hard for me. This thing I’m doing right now, the six weeks on the road.

This is a lot. And so I’m planning for the rest on the other side of it. So I, I to do things in little chunks.

Speaker: Yeah.

Craig: And the rest has to be baked in and if it isn’t, I tend not to do it. So I also try to rope other people into, force me to slow down a bit.

But, when I’m on the walks I’m really careful about, what I’m eating, how much sleep I get. I, every night I make sure I’m sleeping eight hours. Can’t do it. You can’t do 40 days in a row of doing that stuff without really sleeping. I try to be cognizant of that and I, I gave up alcohol essentially completely 13, 14 years ago because it got to this point where I was like, okay, if I have one drink, tomorrow is diminished in such a way that I can’t do the work I wanna do.

And that was a real easy way to, to start saying no and saying no. In. Social context. It’s I just have too much to do tomorrow. I have this thing to do yada. So rest, I feel like there is quite a bit of rest. And I got a big crazy massage when I was in New York by this giant dude.

He was like six four, weighed like 300 pounds in my mind. He weighed 300 pounds. He had a giant, snow like snowman, Santa Claus beard and just, pulled all of the tension of the TOXs and stuff outta me. So that’s a big part of this.

Robin Sloan: Maybe this is this kind of, this is serious.

Tuck this one away. Maybe. ‘cause of course this is, we don’t see, this is the dark matter of your existence. Maybe you should do a popup that’s just you, I’m serious at a bunch of wonderful inns hot springs and stuff and just write with all, I’ve done nothing right with that. With that, that poise and that energy about doing nothing.

It’d be great.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. Could do it.

Robin Sloan: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Do a lot of Japanese people follow you,

Craig: More now? Yeah. I’ve had this weird thing happen in the last two years where I’ve. Done like a hundred TV shows. And I have a monthly radio show in, in, in Japanese, in, in Tokyo. Now I recommended some cities for the New York Times, and one of the cities number one that year was London.

And then number two was the city I picked on their list. And they just went bananas because they’re like, why is this? It’s a small city up north. Like no one had ever recommended it to be in my 23 years of living in Japan. And and I went and it was really cool. And when the New York Times said, Hey, do you wanna recommend somewhere?

I said, oh, this place is cool. And so to have London be followed by this city in the middle of nowhere blew everyone’s mind in Japan. And they wanted to know why, where did this come from? What, what was happening? And then they found out I could speak Japanese. And then it was just this crazy flood.

And so then suddenly I was on TV all, all over the place. And I went up to the city the mayor was like, Hey, come up. You, I’d love to talk to you. So I went up to meet the mayor. What they didn’t tell me was. I thought it was just gonna be this quiet little meeting in a back room and, shake hands.

Hey, thanks. Oh, this is cool. I like your city, yada. Thanks for, whatever. I go in, they open the doors, say, oh, come this way. They open the doors into the meeting room and it was like a room like this, except all of you were reporters, and it was just giant TV cameras and like paparazzi, like machine gun photography and lights going off.

And I was like, oh my God. I put on, for some reason I had the foresight to put on a suit and they lead me over to the mayor. He’s sitting on like a throne, and I sit next to the mayor on this weird little throne and he gives like a two second speech. And he goes, all right, good luck. And then he leaves and it’s me in front of all of Japanese media and there’s like a mic, and they line up to ask me questions.

They go, ah, mosan how do we solve poverty? I’m like, you got the wrong guy. I just like your coffee. I do not know how to solve poverty. But so that triggered a sort of awareness of modal sun. Yeah. And we had, we’ve had a lot of fun with that. I did a TV show last year with one of the most famous Japanese people on tv.

He’s been on TV for 50 years, almost every day. And walking around with him was like walking around with John Lennon. It was just wild. I brought him to the city basically as a gift to the city, and we spent two days walking around and. They’re just construction workers screaming to him and like old ladies jumping up and down crying, oh my God, it’s Tam Mosan, and then everyone was coming over to me, oh, Mosan, thank you for bringing Tam Mosan to our city, and it was just so bizarre. And then I had a Japanese edition of my book, Kisa by Kisa come out six months ago. So that has given people something to read. And yeah, I’ve, I’m doing book events there now, and it’s cool.

It’s just so much fun. That’s great. Yeah. So slowly growing.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 7: So how do you solve poverty? Mountains. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I want to talk about the phases of like your creative process. So it seems like the genesis of a lot of your work is in that solo mode where you’re walking, you’re taking photography, but then it seems like at the end there’s a lot of that collaborative effort.

You’ve got the editors, you’ve got the folks that are actually creating the physical object. You mentally where does most of your energy go? Do you think it’s 50 50 split? Like how does that work for you?

Craig: Yeah. A big push is on the popup, but there’s a reason why I don’t have the archives publicly available just because it really does feel so fresh out of the oven.

And then, I did the popup for this book four years ago. And it was like 30 days or something like that. And then I made this another popup newsletter to document just for members to document writing this. ‘cause I was like, okay, I’m gonna do it in three weeks. That’s my deadline.

So I’m gonna take everything I wrote in the popup, I’m gonna like compress that, re-edit it, expand it, whatever. And that’ll be a book 21 days.

Robin Sloan: That’s so Craig, that Gonzo. Let’s do it. Let’s wrap.

Craig: ‘Cause I know I’m such, I’m so lazy. I’m so fundamentally lazy. I won’t do it. And that newsletter called Nightingale Andal, I just sent out the 298th edition of 21.

Of 21. Definitely more of the energy goes into the backend of putting this stuff together. And I like it. But like I said earlier too, I get nervous when. Something new isn’t being worked on. And in February I was like, okay, this year I don’t foresee my ability to do anything just energy wise after this for a couple months.

And I was like, ah, I really wanna get something new. I don’t want this year to just be, oh, this came out. Which is whatever. That’s also, that’s great too. But I was like, I need something else. Try to, this photo book was a way for me to see if I could do a book really quickly.

Go shoot it, sequence it, have it out within three months. And it’s been a really cool experience to do that. And I actually think the work, I think this photo I’m really proud of where this book landed. And so again, it’s this thing of set the deadlines, hit ’em, and hopefully something interesting will come out the other side.

Yeah.

Speaker: So you had a question back over there.

Speaker 5: You said that Zelda

Craig: Oh yeah. Golden cartridge. Yeah. Like a. Portal to another world. Yeah. And now that you’ve lived in that made in Japan

Speaker 5: world, is there anything that kind of feels like that, like a subculture or something that kind of feels like a golden cartridge in the

Craig: same way?

It’s funny, Japan, I came to know of the existence of Japan simply from Nintendo and saying, made in Japan on the cartridges. Incredible. And it was the first, it was like, oh wow, there’s this place that makes this thing that saves me and I love. And and that’s what pushed me in that direction.

Weirdly. Soft power. Soft power.

Robin Sloan: That is amazing. Yeah, it really is amazing. It’s

Craig: incredible the power of soft power. It’s funny because in Japan, I’m not into anything about Japan. Having lived there for 25 years, I’m not, I don’t know anything about J-Pop, the TV guy to Modi son, the guy did the TV show with the last two.

He, his team emailed me. And I just ignored it. ‘cause I didn’t know who Tom Modi was. And then he emailed a mutual friend. They’re like, Hey, can you get Mosan to like, do this? This is so weird. He’s ignoring us. So I don’t know of anything that’s really happening pop culture wise in Japan.

I don’t follow the fashion. I don’t follow any of that stuff. And the thing that I do love and that I, it’s, it sounds so stupid, but to live in a place where people feel taken care of, and this is what I end up talking about on all the TV shows and all, and the radio show and all this stuff, because everyone’s oh, Mosan, how many bowls of so did you eat?

And what’s the best ramen? And what’s the, what’s the greatest scone you’ve had? And I’m like, let me tell you about. Healthcare. Healthcare is awesome. Yeah. You guys have healthcare. It really works. And the reason why I like these small cities that I’m going to, and the reason why these people can run these weird bookshops and these weird jazz cafes, is because you give them the infrastructure, the social infrastructure to do that and have a family, have some kids do it all without worrying about how, God, if I break my arm or something bad happens, I’m gonna be, screwed.

And there’s something really powerful about that. And if you grow up in it and you live in it you can’t see. It’s like the fish in the water situation. And so I’ve become this kind of weird interviewee where I talk about social infrastructure on national Japanese tv when they really just wanna talk about how many bowls of soba.

Eight. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the fun subculture I’m into now is a little bit of little political that is.

Robin Sloan: But I actually did, I’ve, of course seen and appreciated these places as well. These like tiny, completely unlikely businesses. Someone’s running a weird little. Cafe or just I a record store.

A little bookstore. Little bookstore in a tiny little room. And they’re there three hours a day, four days a week or something. And indeed, in the context of the Bay Area and what’s possible here and the economics of this place even at its best that seems as fantastical as, scenes from Zelda, you’re like, oh wow.

How, what is that? Some sort of mythical creature. And it is it’s like the joyousness of it and of that possibility, the kind of the flip side of that, I think for us, especially someone in a very expensive place in the United States is very melancholy.

Craig: And I think craftsmanship like this, reverence for craftsmanship in general, crafts, craft, commitment to something over the long haul.

A lot of these quia I go to, jazz, quia, whatever, normal quia people have been there for 40 years, 50 years. And there’s something about that consistency that’s actually really inspiring. And it creates community. It creates pillars of community. It creates there’s all these second order effects that come from just someone committing to one small little business for an entire life. And that’s very cool. And the first time I became aware of living national treasures, I was invited to photograph Gido from Gido Dreams of Sushi. When I was, so this is 20 years ago, he had just gotten living national treasure status. And you go, you think, oh, I’m gonna go the living National treasure.

This is gonna be an amazing shop. This is gonna be so cool. Then you go and, the shop is in the basement of a subway station with no windows, and you’re just like, what is this? And the guy has just been there and I roll up and the place is empty. And he goes, oh, did you eat lunch? And I go, no, I didn’t eat lunch.

He goes, okay, sit down. And I get this. I look, I had never really eaten sushi before in my life. I’ve been living, I lived in Japan for five years at that point, and I just, I didn’t sushi. I didn’t like any, I, I ate toast. That’s about all I ate in Japan. Toast and ramen. And and I’m like, oh my God, sushi.

Ugh. This is gross. And and jido, it’s Jiro. He’s in front of me one-on-one, and he’s got like a handler who’s making sure I don’t know, kiss him or something. And it’s, the way he does it is it’s not, you don’t get like a plate of sushi. He does one at a time and you see him make it and he puts it in front of you and you use your hands and you put this fish on your tongue.

You don’t put the rice on your tongue. And it was this weird masterclass in eating sushi. And I was like, it was all the grossest looking stuff too. And I was like, oh my God, I have to eat this ‘cause I can’t say no. And I was like, oh, that’s really good. Oh, that’s really good. And I had this weird, magical sushi experience.

And then I shot him, took photographs of him, and then afterwards I was with his son, who, God bless his son, judo is 95 now, and his son is like 75 and his son has been waiting for this guy to die for 40 years. Yeah. He is come on dad, I want to take over now. And this poor bastard.

And I go, Hey, that was really good. How much, if I came back for lunch, what, what would that be? And he’s that was like $350 of sushi. And I was like, oh my God. Yeah. So I’ve never been, I’ve never been, but I should have paid more attention so that crafts, that craft thing that just permeates it all is fabulous.

And you feel that, and I love that. That’s, and I felt that you feel that in Nintendo. I think Nintendo’s a great company that embodies that as a company. And I think I love that they’re successful because the way they make the things they make, I think is the best possible way to make those things.

Speaker 6: Yes. So this guy over here says you wanna have kids. And I think that, sorry to bring it up again. I love it. One of the things that stood out to me as some, I’ve been reading your newsletters for maybe four years, but it irregularly, I don’t have my shift together. And is how measured you are about telling your own stories, how much your, you as Craig mod a, a active narrator who’s making the scene move forward, is also like meeting out only these small pieces of your own context.

How do you make choices about that?

Craig: Yeah, that’s a good question. Definitely Truman’s show stuff is not, I’m not into that. It’s not just about the, and even this, this, it says a memo, a walking memoir. I, this is the very reluctant memoir. Like I did, I, and it was Randomhouse being like, Hey look, you gotta give some context and, and it turned out, I don’t know I was like, oh, I have more to say about this than I thought I had to say. But I’ve been, I’ve, very guarded and even talking about my stepdaughter, I’m, very protective of that. It’s, this kind of bizarre, complicated relationship. She’s 15, and it’s 15 year olds are just complicated in general.

But it’s mainly when I feel like I’ve talked with my therapist about something enough that I feel like it’s not scary anymore. And now, okay, now I can write about that. And I, that’s half joke, half reality. And it just, whatever feels natural along the way, like talking about the alcohol stuff is more and more felt valuable.

‘cause I know a lot of people struggle with that. And then the small things I’m learning with my stepdaughter, talking about that, thinking about that. And then the adoption stuff has been this huge new door. I’d never touched, I’d never opened until I met my birth mother for the first time last year.

She had me when she was 13. And so we met after it was a long process to, to build up whatever it was to go have that lunch. I flew to the States to just have this lunch with her. And that was such a profound meeting. We sat down, she didn’t know who I, she didn’t know my name.

She had never seen a photo of me, nothing. And I stayed anonymous the whole time we were communicating. And so I, she was standing in front of the restaurant. I knew everything about her. I Google, I’d gotten privatized, I had all her divorce records. I had all this stuff. And I go, Hey, I’m the guy that you know, hey, I’m your son.

And, we hugged and we went into this restaurant and, she pulls out this baby photo of me and she goes, she gotten it from the adoption agency. And she goes, I’ve been carrying this my whole life. And every year on your birthday, I think of who you’ve become. And I wish for your happiness and I want you to have a family.

And it’s just, I had created this narrative which I talk about this book of my origins as being so violent. 13, that’s totally non-consensual. It has, there’s no way, even if she, if someone says it’s consensual, it’s not consensual. And so just coming from this place of violence and kind of pain and then meeting her and in real time, having her reprogram that story, and also for the first time in life, the family who adopted me did the best they could do.

But I’ve never felt a deep connection there. They’ve never understood what I’m doing. It’s, they’ve never got, I never felt like they ever got me. And I’m sitting here with this woman, at this booth and listening to her tell her story and everything she’s saying is what I would’ve done.

And it felt like for the first time in my life, I was like, this is where. My brain comes from, and it was really affecting. And it was cool that she was so cool. She’s a computer programmer, come on, self-taught, didn’t go to college. Super entrepreneurial, just a totally person, someone just hacking their way through everything and figuring it out and have, having complicated relationships with all sorts of, different men and women and children and all this stuff.

But there was this kind of pulsing curiosity and also the voice that has been driving so much of what I do. It was just there. It was, you talk about nature staring you in the face. That’s

Speaker: wild.

Craig: It was so bizarre. So on this podcast tour I’ve been doing, I did an adoption podcast a couple months ago and it’s just been interesting to talk about this in public and then to get all these stories back as well.

And a lot of these events adoption people have been showing up and saying, thank you and this and that. And so this is a whole nother universe that I’ve been. Afraid to touch and you feel guilty, I think, as an adoptee about dishonoring your adoptive parents. And I think that creates a lot of barriers and this journey has been so informative.

I feel like it would just be wrong to not start to reveal bits of this. So that’s what I’m trying to do on this tour. And in the writing,

yes, we back,

Speaker 5: Beautiful story first of all. But I wanted to touch on, you mentioned like your birth mother hacking her way through things. You have this mentality hacking your way through things. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Do you get a sense or do you, can you see the future where you look back and you’re like, holy shit, look what I have done, or what does like success look like for you?

How do you measure that? Does it mean to be measured? Just curious of your thoughts. On that?

Craig: No, th this is very I’m, I feel super successful. I just feel this is crazy. It’s like the membership program funds everything. I can live an incredibly rich life on that alone. I don’t feel beholden to anyone, it’s like I feel like I can follow my whims if I want to go do adoption stuff for the next year.

I feel like my members are gonna support that. That’s such an incredible place to be. I have this, all the infrastructure set up and the relationship set up to do books, uncompromisingly exactly how I wanna do them, and they make good money. And you add that all together. That’s unreal to be able to do what I’m doing and have it be on a business side, this functional, and then on a personal spiritual side, be so rich and full.

Like what? Everything else is just bonus, honestly. So that, again, that’s why doing the Random House thing, I’m not. There’s very, there’s weirdly little ego involved just because I feel, I just feel so lucky to be doing what I’m doing already. So it’s I’m, and I’m happy to feel this in real time, but this is a pretty new feeling.

This is the last three or four years it’s pretty new and it was decades, all pretty much from 15 to 38. Just endless struggle, like endless just ev drinking myself into the ground. ‘cause I don’t know what to do. Not having archetypes, not having mentors any of that stuff.

It was really, it was a solid 22 years of just, blacking out. I’m lucky I’m alive, honestly. I’ve blacked out. I’ve, in Nepal I cracked my skull open, ‘cause I blacked out. And the last night when I was in I was in the capital of Nepal and woke up and there was just blood all coming down.

I have to get on a flight. I get back to Tokyo and go immediately to the hospital, get an MR mri. It’s like that sort of stuff was happening pretty frequently. And so it was tumultuous. It’s only been in the last, and actually the adoption stuff started to come up because of the stepdaughter’s stuff where I was like, oh I feel like I’m such an additive force in this person’s life.

I should probably see if I am predisposed to stuff. So it was really about health. It wasn’t about meeting my mom or whatever. And, all these other things have come out of that. Like in Seattle, this book tour is also a family tour in New York. And aunts and uncle that I met for the first time came to Rizzoli in Seattle.

My sister, who I’m gonna meet for the first time is coming to the book event Chicago. My mom is gonna be at that book event. So it’s this I had lunch with a cousin in Brooklyn. So it’s been this really bizarre layering of many things on top of it itself. So IJ anyway, it all just feels I just feel really lucky and to have folks like you show up.

You’re, it’s such a good group, such cool people. So thank you.

Craig Mod: I think that is ending. Oh, that’s perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Now.