Transcript

Liz Danzico: Wow. That was a… What an intro. Thank you. Quite an intro, yeah.

Craig: Yeah, geez.

Liz Danzico: Very good. Well, what an honor to be here. What an exciting time. Thank you so much for everyone who walked here. And Craig and I walked about a little bit. 50 meters. Yeah, about 50 meters to get here as well. And we are excited to start out today by… doing something perhaps untraditional these days. And that is, I’m going to ask Craig if he would start us off today by reading a passage from the book itself, which is a bit of a tradition from older times. And this is a passage from the first chapter. And so Craig, if you wouldn’t mind starting us off with this first passage here.

Craig: Sure. I’ve been categorically not reading at any of my events. I just feel like, you know, hey, I’ve got someone I love up here with me. Let’s just talk. But Liz has convinced me I’ll do it. It’s very short, so don’t worry. I know it can be so painful. With that simple impulse to walk, my life was forever changed. I know that sounds hyperbolic, a bit bonkers, but it’s true. A walk, life-changing, yeah. What did I feel on the road that first time? Nothing explicit, nothing I could name in the moment, just the diffuse scent of purpose out there between villages and the trees and the mountains. By that point, I had lived in Japan for over a decade. That I made it past 30 is still a bit unbelievable. And the fact that I’ve now crested 40 and heck, 50 seems possible are all facts. I’m still wrapping my head around how differently would we have lived had we believed all this time was splayed out before us. and was looking for the reason why, exactly, I had stayed so long and where my place might be in a country that would never see me as more than a visitor. Here it was, to walk, and walk well, and witness the people along the way. But why? That’s the riddle I’m still figuring out. To believe? To make others believe? You could say my eyes were opened. You could say I had a conversion event. Whatever you say, I was off walking whenever I could.

Liz: Thank you. Thank you for starting us off. So, you know, I’ve wondered this myself and especially after reading, you know, when was it that you, that walking really became this practice, this creative practice for you?

Craig: It was sort of around actually when I read McFarlane’s The Old Ways. So I remember I was at a dinner with someone when, I feel like it was like 2011 maybe, 2012-ish when that book came out. And they recommended, you’ve got to read the old, this is an amazing new book, it just came out, Robert McFarlane. And I just remember it shifting something in my mind, at least in terms of what literature and how literature and walking could be in conversation. But it really started when John, who is featured heavily in this edition of the book, invited me to Koya-san and to walk part of Kumano Kodo. And that was about 2013-ish. And that was immediately. As soon as I finished that trip, I got home to my apartment in Tokyo. All of these things started to happen where I was shifting things in my life. So I got home and it was loud outside my apartment. A bar just opened across the street. And I just remember going, why am I living here? And I emailed a friend who lives in Kamakura. And I had been doing these walks in Kamakura. And I was like, oh, this is actually kind of a really great city. And I emailed a friend. I said, hey, do you have… house I could rent you know or just like a place I could try out living down there and within 48 hours I had keys and I had started to this journey of moving out of Tokyo for a big period I just kind of moved back last year and all these other things kind of transitioned from that so the walking was really you know this key moment I’d say. a lot of change. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s this juxtaposition between slow seeing this, like the way that walking for you seems to elicit, you know, slow seeing and the way that it also brings to the surface, this decision-making and this clarity. So there’s this kind of speeding up of things, but also the slowing down, which seems quite important at this moment in time as well. Yeah. Is that fair? Is that true? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the The disconnecting to me feels more and more important. And I started disconnecting. Actually, you edited an essay of mine for the manual. Do you remember this? I do. Right, so Liz and I have known each other for almost 20 years, 18, 17 years, something like that. And the manual was this publication, magazine. Did anyone subscribe to the manual? Wow. I’ve got three, two manual readers. And it was this kind of indie thing. And Andy McMillan, who’s in Portland now, I think, right? So he’s pretty nearby. asked me to write something, and I ended up writing this very weird essay about Bob Dylan and disconnecting, getting offline. And that was around the time, this was 2010, 2011 maybe? I feel like. And this is the time where I started doing this thing where I would turn off the internet at night, and actually I borrowed a friend’s typewriter. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but I borrowed a friend’s typewriter, I turned off the internet at night, and I wouldn’t allow myself to get back online until after lunch. And that was the, this is, you know, the iPhone had just come out, Social media, Twitter is kind of gaining more energy in the world. And I just felt like I needed to start protecting my mornings. And that, I think, is… I’ve continued to carry that forward. And then Vipassana, doing the 10 days silent meditation, things like that. When I started walking, I had this kind of little… shallow personal history of disconnecting, and then I was able to apply that to the walks. It felt like a nice combo. That’s right. Yeah, and there’s been this progressive kind of continued way of. I’m just gonna move the mic a little bit closer. Yeah. Just pick you up a little bit better in the back. been this progressive way of disconnecting and finding ways of of doing that of making sure that you’re disconnected but also documenting at the same time right so you’re documenting but also disconnected which is an interest in so there’s there’s three parts right there’s a discipline there’s a documentation, and then there’s a kind of disconnecting as well. So talk about the relationship between those three. How does that work for you? What does it elicit? Yeah, I mean, people have said, like, aren’t these in conflict with one another? Like, you know, you’re trying to be more present, but you’re… also doing transcriptions and photographing people and thinking about what you’re going to write that night but for me i mean that the point is to not teleport right that’s the whole point so no social media no news no podcasts no music even uh so you’re meant to be completely present where you are this is like what i’m trying to do in the walks and so all the other tasks you know like having a rule where it’s like try to photograph someone before 10 in the morning and It’ll be 9.45 and I’ll yell to a farmer in a field like, hey, can I take your photo? Or just run into a random shop and like, hey, something to catalyze a creative act. And in doing that, I mean, just having that kind of connection with a stranger. where 99.9% of the time it’s positive, sets a tone for the rest of the day and kind of infuses, I find it infuses me with a really kind of special energy to keep going and keep talking to more people. And so doing that makes me way more present than I would be otherwise if I didn’t have these dumb tasks or these self-imposed deadlines by the end of the day.

Craig: Right. So for those who aren’t familiar with these walks, so we’ve sort of, we’ve gone into the middle of the story, right?

Liz Danzico: So describe one of these walks that you’re talking about. Like, how do they come to be? What does it look like?

Craig: So, yeah, I mean, I think talking about the first one I did. So the walk I did for this book, I started it four years ago on May 10th. And that was, it was basically 30 days. But one of the first big walks I did was six years ago, like big continuous walks. And that was about 40 days in total of walking. And I set off from Kamakura and I walked up to Tokyo. Then I walked from Tokyo all the way across the country to Kyoto. And I wanted to do some kind of documentation, but I didn’t want to use email. And I wanted everything to be… Not in real time, if that makes sense. So I think one of the pernicious things about social media and a lot of these network tools is that everything is happening and you post and then two seconds later you’re getting responses. Then you feel the need to response. Like there’s this obligation and there’s this like expectation that can be, again, teleporting. You’re just thinking about this thing as opposed to whatever, doing what you’re trying to do. And so I built a system where people could subscribe using SMS. So you text a number. And then you’d be in the system. I didn’t know how many people had subscribed. I couldn’t see who they were. And at the end of the day on this walk, so I’d walk 20, 30, 40, 45 kilometers some days because this first big one I did, Google Maps completely miscalculated all the distances. So I’d be like, oh, it’s a 20K day. And like 28Ks later, I’m like, I still got 5K to go. So I was struggling. But at the end of the day, I’d get to my inn and I would send, because it was SMS, it had to be short. So it was only a couple of sentences and a little photo. So I’d send that out, and then you could reply, but I wouldn’t see the replies in real time. So all the replies were being stored in a database somewhere, and then when I finished the walk, I hired a designer, and I said, okay, put this… I’m not going to look at it. Here’s the database. lay out a book with the responses. And again, I didn’t know if I had five responses, if I had 5,000 responses. I said, just lay out a book with this. Don’t let me know anything about it. We’re going to do a blurb book, so just one-off print-on-demand. And I’m going to have that waiting for me at my house when I get back from the walk. And this is actually what catalyzed all the other sort of this renaissance of book work. And I got home, and this book was waiting for me, and it was… you know, hundreds of pages long. It was just thousands of responses. And not only was, I mean, that was beautiful and like overwhelming, but there’s something about telling people I wasn’t going to see it in real time. And also that everyone was going to be anonymous. That unlocked this bizarre intimacy. And it almost became confessional. People weren’t confessing murders, but they were confessing other things. It was so intimate and strange that me doing the walk, talking about the walk, and having it be consecutive and consistent. Most people get it in the morning because most people are not in Japan. And so it was a lot of I wake up and you’re message is waiting for me and that means something to me. And seeing that progression, I’d post how many kilometers I walked. And so there’s something really powerful about that. And it further hammered home this need to not be doing things in real time and not be doing stuff on generic social media platforms. Yeah, you do seem to invent your own, even when there’s a platform or an app or a document or a notebook. that is at the ready. You do seem to invent your own, even still. To this day, this is going back 10, 15, 20 years. And you do so with the spirit of what seems to be generosity and openness, and you kind of open up yourself and your work to so many. I mean, you’re describing some of it now. What is that… Is it giving something back to you? And if so, how does that kind of inform the work that you’re doing? I mean, a lot of it is pure selfishness, right? So these are ways to get me to do the work. There’s kind of an accountability that appears. And I think one of the things I struggled with in my 20s was not having that… accountability, maybe as well defined as I wanted it to be. So you’re signing up. It’s like, I’m doing this thing. Yeah. 10,000 people. Yeah. Yeah. And so the, you know, I have the membership program now. And that was the reason I went on that first walk is because I started this membership program. And I started the membership program because I had been rejected from all these publications. It came out of this place of… I’d spent nine months working on this huge essay about walking up in Yamagata, the Rukujuri Goya Kaido, and up with the Yamabushi and all that. And I’d spent all this time working on this essay for this big publication, and I just got ghosted by the editor. Just, like, totally gone. And now I realize, like, every editor at every publication right now is losing their mind. Like, everyone is overworked. But in that moment, it was, like… I mean, it was pretty painful and it was pretty depressing. And I’m sure we did a video call about this, like, what should my next step be? Because it just didn’t feel like I knew what to do. And talking with a bunch of friends who were journalists and whatever, and I’d written a piece for Wired about how digital books had kind of failed because Amazon overly, whatever, captured the market and stopped innovating. And the big five kind of don’t want to collaborate with independent startups, so there was really no… space or possibility for invention to happen in digital books so they’re kind of frozen and but subscription and membership programs were starting to do really well and that was kind of the weird digital publishing thing that we didn’t see coming necessarily and then it was kind of in ascendance subsac had just kind of launched and all this stuff and so i had just written that and i was like well maybe i should do a membership program it was very reluctant but in doing that it created this formality and having this money come in from members was, you know, it was like a weird little permission machine. And that felt great. So a lot of what I’m doing now is sort of feeding back into that system. And a lot of it is thinking about who I was when I was 20, which I talk about in this book quite a bit, and being in this place of pretty extreme struggle and not having any archetypes, not having any mentors, not having really anyone… lighting the path and choosing Japan too as a place to kind of reinvent you know Jake Adelstein’s a friend the guy who did Tokyo Vice you know and for sure like I mean there’s just this history of people choosing Japan in particular as a place of resetting you know the slate and just kind of rebuilding yourself so I was kind of intuiting that but when I’m doing a lot of this membership stuff I’m putting up videos doing board meetings things like that that’s for me what I wish I had when I was 20. And in doing it, it helps me also have clarity about the work I’m doing now. And if it helps other folks figure things out or acts as a guide, then that’s like a bonus. But it’s fundamentally a very selfish thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, it does feel generous on this side. That’s good. So let’s switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to talk about some of the topics in the book. You explore a character or a person. There’s a few characters, and one of them is the person that you seem to be writing the book to or with or for, which is you talk about you’re going back to… childhood and kind of coming to Japan and kind of moving there, which is a childhood friend. And so you’re talking about, you know, I want to relate your membership to, you know, to this person, but sort of like writing for this person. And I just wondered how you… came to that or where that began to show up? I think I’ve seen some of that person in other books that you’ve written, but can you talk a little bit about that person and how that decision came to be? Yeah. I mean, so the person’s Brian, right? So I had this childhood friend, Brian, featured heavily in this book. And it’s sort of a spoiler, so cover your ears if you don’t want to know. But, you know, we were best friends in elementary school and then kind of all through elementary school. And then, you know, the American school systems start to cleave people depending on how you test and if you test higher or lower. Anyway, Bryan didn’t test very well, but we were shoulder by shoulder, like, absolutely equal in first grade. And by the time I graduated high school, it was quite a huge cleaving. And my town is not a well-funded town, and there’s a lot of issues with drug abuse and… It’s a post-industrial town that is sort of trying to figure out what it can be today, which I think a lot of towns in America are. Coincidentally, Ocean Vuong’s new novel takes place in my town. So just out of bizarre coincidence. So if you’re reading that book, that’s sort of where Brian and I grew up. He’s sort of changing a little, but it’s in that wheelhouse. But we graduated high school, and a week after we graduated, Brian was murdered. And so that was a shock, obviously. But it was also not a shock, because that was kind of part and parcel of the town to a certain degree. And, you know, when you’re 17 and that happens, you don’t really have the emotional toolkit to process that. And certainly no one around us, none of the adults know how to process it. And so, yeah, you carry a lot of guilt, you know, and I think I’ve been carrying guilt for 30 years about like, could I have done something, something to like just shift, you know, just not get them to go to that house party that night or, you know, this, it’s really. a complicated thing to experience at that age and also losing half of my childhood memories essentially you know even though we weren’t super close when we graduated there was always this like oh well you know we’ll be in contact again at some point right and get a drink and say hey remember Growing up, what was that like? Yeah, because you can’t look back on digital photos and Instagram. I think there’s one… I don’t think we have a single photo of us together. That’s how bereft of photography and media we were. So I wanted to write about Brian and process this for a long time. And actually, the first short story I ever had published, I had published when I was 18. It was part of the freshman writing seminar. that I was in and it was this national thing you submitted to and I kind of submitted it on a whim and it was a short story about Brian and I kind of in the winter and like anyway and I was kind of drawing on Sandra Cizernos House on Mango Street had a profound impact on me when I was 18. I remember reading that. It seems like a bizarre thing to… I wouldn’t see myself in that book, but the voice of that book and how she was writing about where she came from just spoke to me very clearly. And I tried for years to process Brian through stories and just didn’t have the chops to do it, didn’t know how to do it. So this was very reluctant for him to come out in this book, and it took… several revs and actually the fine art edition of the book my editor Ali Chance was reading one of the drafts and Brian was kind of sneaking in and he was like who is this this is this is what it feels like you know this guy his presence is so strong even though he’s so infrequently sort of mentioned I want to know who this person so he helped me draw that out and then the Random House edition rev The fine art edition. So this book also has a complicated history in the sense that the contract I did was I maintained fine art rights and then Random House kind of bought the rights while I was in the middle of producing my edition. And this is actually really… a weird gift, in a sense, because my edition, I was, you know, a little nervous. I’m writing about Brian, like, ugh, I don’t know how to do this. So in the finer edition, he doesn’t appear until the last third of the book. And then when I was six months away, okay, let’s go back to it for the Random House Rev. And this is a significantly changed edition. And my editor, Molly Turpin… basically wrote in the manuscript 400 or 500 questions, and I just responded to all those questions. That’s kind of how this edition came out.

Craig: Interesting.

Liz Danzico: And then going back and feeling the energy of that last third of the fine art edition and going, well, why don’t we just start with that? So this book just begins turning towards Brian. Yeah. And in doing that, it allows… He’s so foregrounded that it allows me to bring in all these other characters that I didn’t want to bring into the other one because I didn’t want Brian to be diminished. So this is whatever, maybe this is like two in the weeds for how these things have been made. So this one by Brian is on page one. I’m able to bring John in. I’m able to bring Asamura-san. You know, just like all these other kind of quirky characters that have been important people in my life. And kind of frame them as like, Brian, I wish I could bring these people back to us. You know, if we had one person like this in our town that we were rubbing shoulders with, like how differently would it have been? And you just realize how little it takes to have a positive impact. And so part of maybe back to the membership, too, is like I just feel like I’m trying to throw things back to Brian. the height of probably feeling all those emotions about losing him yeah yeah and there’s the this contrast between this tremendous loss and tremendous grief and this this tremendous documentation I mean just this like embarrassment of riches documentation which is just like so this generosity of documentation it’s not only that you’re documenting but you’re sharing with people. You’re giving us frameworks and newsletters and templates for documentation, which is just so beautiful. And the contrast between them is quite interesting because it’s not just Brian. But then you also face the, there’s another character, who’s not just a character, but your own father. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In the book as well. So if you want to get in, if we might as well address that as well. Yeah, sure. So my history is I’m adopted. only child. And then my parents got divorced really quickly. So it was just so bizarre. You think there’d be more, you know, it’s not like you accidentally adopt someone, you know, it’s like, oh shit, we adopted this kid. Oh, what are we going to do? But no, so my, my dad, you know, it’s like, he just, no one was educated. You know, no one had any kind of positive archetypes about how to be a good parent, you know, and his mentality, you know, the first thing he said when my parents moved in together was in this house woman, I am Jesus Christ. You know, that was his like, welcome to my home to my mother. So anyway, she extracted herself from that really quickly. And this guy, you know, he just wasn’t a presence in my life at all. And so Brian’s dad was kind of like a surrogate dad, sort of. And, you know, there’s these other characters. But I ended up… being called to bury my father in 2011. And he had moved to North Carolina, and he had moved into the woods, and he was all alone, and everyone else in the family was dead. And I basically got this call out of the blue that was like, hey, dad’s dead, you gotta come deal with this. And it was essentially like, you couldn’t have picked someone randomly out of the phone book and had it feel less like someone I knew. It was just so bizarre. And so I went and did that in 2011, and I spent a lot of time writing about that. I wrote a whole book about actually this experience of going down there, not published, probably for the best of things to not be published. We can go back to that maybe in 10 years. But going down there and I had, I would say that experience was when I was first turned on to The fact that there’s, not to use lame language, but there’s so much magic to be extracted if you’re just looking for it everywhere at any time. And so going to bury my father, I ended up meeting this lawyer. My dad didn’t really have much. He had this tiny little house and some boxes and poker records, and that was about it. But the lawyer was, like, this 73-year-old dude named Bill Bill. And he was, like, this weird good old boy who also voted for Bernie Sanders, you know. And, like, he was the town lawyer, and he had been the lawyer forever. And he, you know, carried a gun most of his life because so many people wanted to kill him. And, you know, he was just, he had been a fierce alcoholic. He had three sons, and he had been a fierce alcoholic until his 40s. And then suddenly one day… He couldn’t drink white liquor anymore. It just stopped. And so we met. And I was trying to process, like, who the hell was this guy I just buried? And I kind of rushed through it. I was like, let’s get this guy on the ground. You know, the priest was like, why are you in such a rush? I’m like, come on, come on. Let’s get this guy. Let’s get this done. And so he saw me as conflicted. And then I think he’s like, you know, your daddy knows. you know, loved you more than you thought. You know, he’s telling me all these weird little bits of, like, history about, like, talking with my dad. But at the same time, he, as far as I could tell, was a very terrible father. Like, really terrible. And I think he saw in me this weird, almost like symbiotic redemption that could happen. And so I ended up going down every year several times to North Carolina to go spend time with this guy who was, you know, we had no connection. And it was him and his wife, and they would take me out for dinner or whatever. And then finally I met one of his sons, and I think they were just like, who is this boy from China coming out here? Is he trying to fuck our daddy? You know, it’s like, there’s this weird, there’s like this, what is this guy? Why does he keep coming to hang out with our dad? This guy who we didn’t like growing up with. And I just found him to be one of the most magical, incredible people. and he finally passed away. His wife passed away first, and then he had his prostate taken out, and I’d go pick him up, and we’d be driving around, and he’d pee his pants in my car. He’d go, God damn it, I peed my pants in your car. Don’t ever let those goddamn motherfuckers take your prostate. Part of his tips for life. And this is a guy who never cried or anything, and I saw him cry several times with me, talking about the wife that he lost. Anyway, just an incredible… friendship that came out of nowhere out of total left field in a place I’d never been to and didn’t know anything about and so a lot of what I’m translating in this book when I’m on the peninsula I haven’t seen people really translate Japanese dialect properly in the sense of Japan is very varied like there’s so many dialects and what you tend to see is sort of like Tokyo Japanese translated And so when I am on the peninsula talking with these people who talk with this incredible sing-songiness and use weird conjugation and verbiage, and it’s just bizarre. And the deeper you get, the weirder it gets. It’s very banjo, you know, like deliverance vibes going on. And when I’m talking with them, I hear Bilbil and I hear like Western North Carolinian English as being kind of the analog to it. So that’s what I’ve tried to bring to the translations in this book. which I hope, which is meant to honor, you know, the kind of, the joy and beauty of how these people talk. Yeah, very good. Yeah, well, next book, perhaps. Revisiting that. Revisiting that 10-year-old. Well, he’s dead now, so I feel okay publishing it. It’s always like, I was like, are his sons going to sue me? Like, what’s going to, you know?

Craig: Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Liz Danzico: Just elevating them.

Craig: Yeah.

Liz Danzico: Well, we want to, you know, we’re kind of coming up on a little bit of time, but I want to think about the book itself, and there’s so much in it. There’s photographs, the writing itself, and the juxtaposition between the two. We talked a lot about documentation, and how… do you want people to read the book? In other words, when you think about putting together a book, and I know you’ve thought a lot about it, you’ve written extensively about it, is it the kind of thing that someone should read from cover to cover? Do you want people to pick it up? Do you want people to be walking while reading it?

Craig: How would you like people to read the book?

Liz Danzico: Yeah, I mean… Kisa by Kisa is a book you can read. This is the book I did before this one. It’s a book you can read in about 90 minutes pretty easily at a leisurely pace. And so this idea of it being kind of like a movie, I like that. And I want people to revisit and reread. I think there’s a lot. Especially in this book that I think rereading will illuminate or reveal. So, you know, this isn’t that long of a book. I think it’s not even 60,000 words or it’s 60,000-ish words. So that’s, you know, a couple of sessions. But I think… Doing it in a compressed way, not in a rushed way, but just putting aside, okay, I’m going to do two, three hours. And really, because there is this magic. I’m in the middle of reading Ocean Vuong’s new one, and there is just something amazing about sitting with these characters and doing it, not for five minutes or ten minutes or whatever, but really being in there for three, four hours. I have these flights and stuff I’ve been on, so I’ve just been living in this world of fast food preparation, which this new book is weirdly focused on that. A lot of fast food prep. So I would, you know, the visual element plus the words to me feels, you know, there’s something filmic that I’m trying to get to with this in a way that maybe like Rings of Saturn uses photos in a different way, but this is meant to be both illustrative and… Emotionally evocative. Yeah, yeah. There was an advanced copy of the heartbreaking work of Styrene Genius years ago that had footnotes running across the bottom and they disappeared in the actual copy. I felt the same way about this where you could just look at the photographs and not read. And then you could, of course, just read. But the photographs themselves just tell a story. And I wondered if you had that in mind. with this. Let’s say I have that in mind.

Craig: Book of Photographs, yeah.

Liz Danzico: It’s quite a beautiful book of photography on its own. So before we shift to one last thing, I was curious if you could recommend a particular walk to people in the audience? Yeah, I mean… So I run these walk and talks with Kevin Kelly, who is the co-founder of Wired Magazine. He’s kind of this tiny Amish-looking sage character. He’s a very, very interesting human. We started walking together by chance about 15 years ago. Actually, I met Kevin Kelly two days after I buried my dad. And part of the reason why I was rushing to put my dad in the ground was because I had a talk to give in New York City. at O’Reilly Media, back when O’Reilly Media did big events in New York City. TOC, Tools of Change, possibly? I think that was my little bit. Anyway, get on stage. It’s me and New York Times, someone else, and we’re talking about digital books or whatever. I get off stage and I look at my email and this guy, Kevin Kelly, had written me. He goes, I like what you’re saying up there. I have some questions about tools. That’s Kevin Kelly’s voice. And I didn’t know who he was. And I asked a friend, I was like, who is this guy? And they’re like, you don’t know Kevin Kelly? I’m like, I don’t know anything. And you should meet him. And I met him. And he was this tiny, interesting little guy. And he was very sweet. And he invited me up to his house in Pacifica. And we went for a walk on the coast and watched whales in the distance and talked about YouTube and using tools and for learning and things like that. Why isn’t YouTube better at learning? Is there a better interface? And all this stuff. And then we ended up walking together in Japan. And then we had so much fun, we thought, oh, we should invite someone else. We invited Hugh Howey, who did the Wool series, Silo, Apple TV thing. So Hugh Howey came out. Three of us walked together. That was a lot of fun. We were like, we should invite more people. And so we started doing these walk-in talks where we’d invite six, seven, eight people. And we walked for six or seven days. And then we have, every night we have a Jeffersonian dinner. So it’s one table, one conversation, one topic. And we talk for three hours, two, three, four hours sometimes. And you do that every day. So you walk 20, the ideal is like walking about 20K a day. That feels like the right distance. You walk 20, maybe 25K. And then you get to the, wherever we’re going, the inn, the hut. Sometimes, last year, right about now, we were walking in Bali. We walked across the island. And we stayed in the jungle on bamboo platforms. And everyone just slept next to each other. No one had a chair for a week. It’s like very bizarre when you’re not having any furniture for a week. You’re just trying to figure out what to do. And every day we had like six or seven hours on the platform. And so we’ve done lots of those. And they have been some of the richest, most incredible weeks. of our lives. Kevin has said many times, like these are the best weeks he’s ever had. And, uh, so we’ve walked Southern China, Thailand, Bali, uh, Cotswolds twice. And then the Camino de Santiago, the last 110 K of French. And then. Last 100K of the Portuguese. And out of all this stuff and the Japan walks or whatever, I really think the French Camino, even though it’s the most well-known, most popular, you’re going to hear about it a lot, I think it’s the easiest one to dismiss because it’s so popular. And you think, oh, this is just going to be like Disneyland. It’s not going to be fun or whatever. It’s going to be too many people. I thought that too, and so I did the first 120K starting in France, walking over the Pyrenees, and it’s amazing. It’s just really magical. And yes, there can be a lot of people. The last 100K walking into Santiago on the French Camino is pretty, it’s a little weird, just because it’s so touristic. I’d say 90% of people who walk it just walk that bit. But the whole thing takes about five weeks, and you cannot deny the… of walking from the border of France all the way across Spain to the ocean, which is what you do. You keep going to Finisterra. And it is magic. It doesn’t matter that it’s so popular. It doesn’t matter that it… There’s a lot of folks doing it. And I would say do it alone. It’s kind of made to be done alone. And you’ll constantly be meeting people, as many as you want, talking to as many people. And the infrastructure of it is so good. And every day you’re walking through incredible old ancient medieval village after village after village. And it’s these tiny little things with these cathedrals that took generations to build. And they’ve all got one. And so you feel the difference between Japan and, say, Europe is Japanese structures have all been rebuilt. There’s nothing original. So like Ise Shrine, I read about it in here. Every 20 years for the last 2,000 years, they’ve been rebuilding Ise Shrine next to it. And that, in its own way, is almost more impressive than just building something out of stone and having it stand there forever. because you have to keep passing this knowledge down without breaking it. And so you say shrine, the idea is you have three generations of carpenters working side by side, and so you have the young ones, the new ones, and then the master carpenters. And you do that for 2,000 years and you keep it going. That’s pretty impressive. Whereas, like, the Colosseum in Rome, you know, they built it once. We sort of until recently didn’t know how they did the concrete. I think we know now. But it was, like, very recently we didn’t even know how they built it. So this idea of knowledge passed down. But the French Camino overall, in feeling these structures and feeling… thinking about the spiritual belief and to commit to something over generations, which again is something I think we have a tough time doing now. And to feel that all these structures are built every day, day after day after day after day after day, you’re kind of touching these things, witnessing these things. It’s pretty cool. And I would say if you get a chance to walk the whole Camino, go for it. Fantastic. So good segue. We’re going to transition into questions in just a couple minutes. And I have just like one kind of like thing to talk about before we do that. So think about questions you might want to ask. And we’re going to do something we’re calling packet speed round.

Craig: Speed round.

Liz Danzico: And what I’m going to do is I’m going to say a list of things that you might want to bring on your next walk. Okay. but this is actually for people here to consider what they’re going to bring on the French Camino walk that they might do. And if you, you have to choose only one of the things that you can bring. So you have to just say, I’m going to give you two things. You could choose one and then we’re going to move on. If you need to qualify, if you really need to qualify, you could say a couple of words, but choose one and we’re going to move on very quickly. Okay. If you could have one of these things with you, what would it be? Coffee or tea? Coffee. Hookahs or New Balance? New Balance. Ponto or umbrella? Umbrella. Notebook or voice memo app? Voice memo app. Backpack. Sorry. Paper. So backpack or tote bag? Oh, backpack. Ramen or rice balls? I think ramen.

Craig: Ramen. On a walk. Yeah. All right.

Liz Danzico: Interesting. If I could choose, I think the ideal walking food is British sandwiches. A British cheese with Branston pickle sandwich is, to me, the perfect walking food. The Cotswolds. With some potato chips, yeah. Yeah, I agree with you there. Headlamp or flashlight? Headlamp. Analog watch or phone clock? Analog watch. Three t-shirts or one really good one? Three t-shirts. Slippers or bare feet? Where? In what context?

Craig: For the evening. For the evenings?

Liz Danzico: Bare feet, yeah. Ryokan or hotel? How long is a walk? Seven days. Yokas get exhausting, let me tell you. There’s only so much grilled fish you can eat every morning before you start to lose your mind. So I think hotels are safer. That’s the more sustainable choice.

Craig: Okay.

Liz Danzico: Text message or voice memo? I think we know the answer. Text message or voice memo? Voice memo, yeah. Voice memo or text message? For communicating with people? I thought that was going to be easy. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, I’ve been getting a lot of voice memos recently.

Craig: Mm-hmm. Things are changing.

Liz Danzico: Yeah, I think text is easy, though. Okay. Okay. Torrential downpour or swarms of mosquitoes? Oh, downpour, 100 billion percent. Chatty innkeeper or silent temple host? Chatty. Innkeeper. Or silent temple host? Mm-hmm. Yeah, silent temple host. Dog or deer? Dog. To, like, walk with? Can I have a deer that’ll walk with me? Yeah. I mean, that would be pretty awesome. We have a trained deer. I’ll take that. Okay. And then last, Kevin Kelly as your companion or a new companion every time? Oh, yeah. We are being recorded. Yeah. I mean, if I pick Kevin, we’re going to attract so many people anyway, so he comes with his own swarm of companions. That’s right. Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. We’re all prepared. Okay. Anyone has a question for Craig? Craig, I see hands already.

Craig: Thanks so much.

Liz Danzico: Can you tell me something about Vipassana and walking? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so many years ago, when Sapiens came out, whenever that was, it had just come out, and a friend was like, hey, you should come to, I was in California on a trip, and he said, oh, come to Stanford. I have someone coming to talk. And I went, and it was like 10 of us in a room, and then Yuval Harari appeared. And I was like, I didn’t know who he was. And yeah, and he started talking and it was immediately just, whoa, who is this guy? He was just so, the intensity and the focus and it was overwhelming, the presence. And so I looked him up afterwards, you know, I was like, I want to know everything about this guy now. And he does two months a year of Vipassana. He’s been doing that for a long, long time. And he was someone that busy. Obama likes his book, you know, he’s whatever, he gets $2 billion a talk. And yet… He could be given talks every week for the rest of his life, and yet he always carves out two months to do his vipassana. And I thought, okay, I can do ten days, because I’ve been thinking about it for a while. And so I did it. I did it in Kyoto. And it was really special. I mean, it was really incredible. And people asked, do you really need to do ten days? And you do, because you arrive there… It’s totally silent. 10 days, you’re doing 10 hours of meditation a day. And it’s free and they feed you good vegetarian food. It’s actually a really, really good setup. But the first two, three days, you’re going through information withdrawal. And you’re feeling angry and frustrated and annoyed by everything. And you realize it’s… It is this dopamine kind of addiction that we’ve put away because you can’t have books. You’re not allowed books, not even paper and pencil. I created a memory palace to remember things. I’d never used a memory palace before. And I was like, I want to remember stuff from this. Every day I want to remember something. And it worked. I’ve forgotten it since. Afterwards I was like furiously writing down my memory palace. And you know, day four, five, six is when you finally kind of arrive and the magic starts to happen and you’re just controlling your attention. So the first three days I think you spend just observing your breath on your upper lip. And it sounds insane, but you do that for 20 hours and you do start to go a little insane. But you also start to become really attuned to controlling your attention. And then you start moving it up and down your body and all over. And these things happen. You kind of break into particulate matter and you can control really this spotlight of attention like anywhere on your body. And the whole point is you’re supposed to be observing physiological sort of pains and pleasures. And you’re supposed to… essentially short circuit the reaction to that and not feel displeasure, not say I don’t want to feel this pain anymore or not say I want more of this pleasure. And it’s kind of a training ground, using your body as a training ground to do that. Because a lot of what we experience emotionally, so the theory goes, is it manifests physiologically first, a split second before your brain processes it. So if you can get in between that, you can have more control over how you respond to the world and life. And you can go, okay, well, is this response the direction I wanna be moving in or is it the direction that I’m sort of like almost knee-jerk reacting to because of this physiological sensation? So it’s incredible training for that. I had a wonderful time. It was amazing. And so then when I did my first solo-ish longer walk, it was eight days Kumano Kodo, right after that. And they just dovetailed so effortlessly. And just the pain of the walk and being able to just observe it and kind of be disconnected from it and be dispassionate from it. And just go, oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, my ankles are bleeding. Oh, yes, that’s fascinating. Yes, okay, I’m just going to keep going. I’ll put some tape on that. So I think that allowed me, that kind of weird little training session there, allowed me to do the 40-day walks and push through because there’s a lot of pain. And then by day 25 or so, you enter into what I call the floating consciousness state where your body is just this machine that is carrying consciousness forward. And it really does. It just feels like you’re floating and you’re almost like in a virtual reality helmet. And you can just move the camera around and you can look at the world. You go, oh, let’s talk to this guy. What’s this NPC doing over here? Let’s talk to this guy. And I don’t know if I would have really pushed through if I hadn’t had the Vipassana training. And you should be careful with it because if you are prone to psychotic breaks, apparently it can trigger that. But if you have the opportunity to do it and you think it’s okay for you, I would highly recommend doing it. It’s pretty powerful. And then maybe go do the Camino de Santiago right after. So, to me, you seem like a really young writer. Okay. Thanks. The latest editions you have out seem to be different printings of… Where is your writing taking you next? I mean, you probably can’t comment too much on your next book because your publisher is paying you just to promote this one. Yeah. In a general way, where is your writing going to take you next? Would you mind just repeating the question briefly, summarily, for the folks in the audience? Sure. So I’m a young writer. And he’s curious about where the writing goes next. Is that about it? Yeah. I mean, that’s a great question. I have absolutely no idea. I know the next five books I want to do. And I have drafts of them going. So we’ll see where that goes. But that’s it. I’ve had so many unexpected events, turns, things happen in the last couple of years. One was recommending cities to the New York Times for their 52 places. So New York Times publishes this 52 places to visit this year. And three years ago, they asked me, oh, hey, where would you like to go? And I had done this walk. thing where I’d chosen 10 mid-sized cities that no one ever goes to in Japan. And I’d gone to them and I’d walked 50 kilometers in each city and I’d, you know, photographed, talked to people. And I made that into a walk. So getting away from just strictly linear walking to doing like whatever more dispersed, distributed walking. And One of the cities was incredible. It was just this amazing city called Morioka and it had all these independent businesses and was a lot of fun and everyone seemed to be living a good life. And I was just like, this is very bizarre that no one had ever recommended the city to me in 23 years of living in Japan. And so when the New York Times came to me, I said, hey, look, there’s a city, Morioca, no one really knows about it. You know, it’s beautiful, beautiful. You know, it’s an old castle, you know, a park in the middle of town, great coffee, amazing soba, yada, yada, yada. And they don’t tell you where it’s going to be on the list. And they don’t even tell you if it’s really going to be on the list. And then the list comes out and then you find out. And the list came out and that year number one was London. So London, okay, great. You know, king, coronation, all this stuff happening. And then number two was Morioca. And it just short-circuited Japan. And I did not expect this to happen. I didn’t expect suddenly… One of the people in the town found out that I spoke Japanese and told every newspaper and TV show in the country. And I went from zero media engagement to I’ve now done 100 TV shows. I’ve been in every newspaper. I’m going to be on the cover of some magazine in like two weeks. It’s very bizarre. And they brought me… And they brought me up. They said, oh, hey, the mayor would like to meet you. And so I go up to meet the mayor. And thankfully, I had the foresight to put on a suit. I hadn’t worn a suit in a while. And I was like, oh, I’m going to meet the mayor. I should put on a suit maybe. And I thought it was just going to be in the back room. We were just going to shake hands and just be like, hey, oh, I like your city. Thanks for writing about it. And I get there. And they go, OK, yeah, come down this hallway. Come over here. And they open these doors. And the room looked like this. And all of you were media people. Yeah. And everyone had giant like network cameras on and it was like paparazzi DSLRs and flashes going off. And they totally bamboozled me with this thing. And the mayor’s sitting on like this throne in the back of the room. And I go in and I shake his hand and we talk for 12 seconds. He’s just like, he’s like, thanks, Moldo-san. And he’s like, good luck. And then he left me. in front of everybody. I hadn’t prepared anything. And they start, you know, there’s like a mic and people start lining up to ask me questions and I’m just like, what is going on? And the first question was, Moldo-san, thank you for highlighting our city. How do we solve poverty? I was like, guys, you got the wrong dude. I just like your coffee. I’m just here for coffee and scones and that’s enough. So anyway, that led to a million other weird things. And I said yes to all these media things, not because there was some like ego part of me. I was like, oh my God, finally, we’ve made it. I can be on Japanese TV and people over 60 can watch me because that’s the only people who watch TV in Japan. There’s none of that. What it was, was I felt an incredible ethical duty to explain why the city was interesting and why I thought it was valuable, and also to help them extract as much value out of this without it becoming a burden. So I felt a tremendous responsibility to do that. And so a lot of the shows, the questions would be like, hey, oh, what’s your favorite soba? And I’d be like, well, I like soba, but what I like more is national healthcare. And we talk about why this city is able to exist as it exists because of all this social infrastructure that they have. Someone can run a bookshop like this independently and have a family and they don’t have to worry about things. So that was something I could never predict. To get back to your question about where do you go next with the writing. I resist trying to overly engineer or guide things just because this side quest of doing all this Japanese city stuff was not seen. And it’s been really meaningful, I think, to me and to the people in these places. And so that’s great. And then there’s other things that have been happening in the last year that feel like they deserve attention. So even though I do know five books that I’d like to do, maybe the next one I do is not one of those five. That was a very long answer. I’ve been in Japan pretty much continuously since 2000, so 25 years now. Still in Tokyo. Back to Tokyo. I moved out of Tokyo. I mean, I moved to the Hudson Valley of Tokyo, essentially, just a train ride away. Sorry, this is a New York reference. I don’t know what the Seattle version of that would be.

Liz: Wait, what is the Tokyo version?

Craig: Kamakura. Yeah, so I just moved down the coast. It’s, you know, a 45-minute train ride. One train, super easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I moved back to Tokyo last summer just because Tokyo’s amazing. Yeah, it’s a great place.

Liz: I have, like, a couple of questions. Sure, yeah. One of them is just, like, can you talk about how it feels? Like, do you ever feel… Yeah, I mean, I resisted writing about Japan for most of my life.

Craig: And then it was only when I started doing the big walks and started to feel like I was touching something… I don’t know, it just felt important, you know, the history of these places and then being able to communicate with these people, you know, the farmers and the in-owners and stuff that really had no voice or platform, you know, outside of, it’s like, it’d be like going to the middle of Tennessee somewhere, you know, these people aren’t writing things for, you know, for big audiences. It was only when I started to kind of touch that world. and that I felt able to meet these people also where they were. Because a lot of writing about Japan also I bristle at, like being a Japan writer or whatever. If you look at a lot of the writing in the 80s and 90s, if you go back to the 1800s, it’s even crazier. But 80s and 90s, it’s riddled with racism. It’s just, it’s not nice. There’s this expatriate sort of looking down on the people of Japan gaze that is omnipresent. And so I was always really paranoid about that. And so what I’ve tried to do and what I think has worked out is, you know, by meeting these people where they are and like not, I don’t need anything from them. I’m not trying to get anything and I don’t have any agenda. I’m really just mesmerized by their conversations in the same way I was mesmerized by Bill Bill. in north carolina like they’re totally one in the same so it’s only been since kind of discovering that and kind of through great reluctance starting to write about this stuff and i i never want to feel i get so nervous when i look at like tick tocks and youtubers who are doing like like discover you know invisible japan and so i can’t look at any of that stuff because it makes me it makes me there’s a weird part of my brain that goes should i be doing that Which, no, I shouldn’t be doing that. I love the long game of books. I love this idea. Like, look, if I don’t walk again for 10 years, I’ve got those five books that I already started that I can just work. That’s 10 years of work right there. And I’d much rather… Commit to that. Again, it’s this idea of platforms. How long does stuff last? Is any of this meaningful? Doing stuff on Instagram Reels or TikTok, like you reach a million people, but it also evaporates. It also, there’s over tourism issues. You’re imposing incredibly on places. YouTube makes people do incredibly stupid things. Like there’s all these YouTubers going to Tokyo. you know, creating chaos to film, to get clicks. So there’s all these perverse incentives that are being sort of engendered by these systems. And I really don’t want to touch any of that if I can. And that’s why I’m so grateful to the membership program because that alone funds everything. And then me doing my editions of my books means I maintain control financially of some of the IP, of the fine art IP. And that together, honestly, that’s it. Someone asked me the other night, looking back in 10 years, what would success look like? I’m like, are you crazy? This is so successful right now. This is far beyond anything I could have imagined. Even six years ago, starting the membership program, none of this was on the radar. I, I, I’m not, I do not see myself as a voice of anything for Japan or a representative of anything for Japan. I am just, I’m an immigrant to Japan is how I do see myself. And I’m trying to engage in the most, you know, mutually beneficial, uplifting way possible out of respect in both directions. That’s kind of. And actually, one of the best things that’s happened in the last couple of years is that my Kisa by Kisa was translated to Japanese. And we launched that in actually in Morioka six months ago. And the governor of the prefecture came out and did the opening remarks. And it was so bizarre. He had his little entourage and security. But that has been so fun to be able to have a conversation with Japan about these old roads kind of reflected through my history, which to them is so foreign. This idea that your best friend would be murdered or, you know, there’s no health care or people, you know, like, oh, your neighbor is committing suicide. You know, just there’s a lot of. I think fundamentally American experiences that don’t exist there, and so being able to talk about those contrasts, and the readers have just been really wonderful. I’ve done a few book events, and it’s really fun. The goal is to keep focusing on these guys, books for the long run. We’ve got time for one more question, and I saw your hand grab right there. Okay. Yeah.

Liz: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah, so, you know, I come from this place that is essentially a cultural black hole. Culinarily, artistically, musically, it’s bizarre. It’s really insane that Ocean Vuong had this novel come out a week after my book came out that we’re both telling a story about this place in the world because I think so few people are able to get out of this, out of the place that we came from. So Japan was on my radar simply because of Nintendo. And talk about soft power, right? Actually, South Korea has done an incredible job with soft power in the last decade. All the K-pop stuff. I mean, this is a governmental mandate to do these things. It didn’t just emerge from a puff of smoke. It was like, let’s do that. We want to be stronger musically, have this influence. And it really works. And so Nintendo… NES had just come out and Zelda in Mario Brothers, these cartridges were a way for Brian and me to escape. And it was this place of joy. It was this thing that created joy. And, you know, it said made in Japan on the back of the cartridges. And that was my first experience ever thinking about, oh, there’s this place outside of where we come from. And not only does it exist, but it brings joy. Incredible joy. So that was just there. That was just there in the back of my mind. And then at a video store, Magic Video is a video store we used to go to back when they existed. And one of the guys there was a big anime dork. And so he started video, copying videos of like Fist of the North Star and Akira. And we were, you know, we were watching these, we didn’t really understand what was going on, but it was again this, oh, this is interesting. And then by chance, by the time I was 13, my family had managed to save some money and my mom was working and my grandfather was working at the airplane engine factory still. And we had enough money to take a vacation to Hawaii. And so when I was 13, 14, we went to Waikiki. And Waikiki in 1994 was essentially just Tokyo. I mean, it was 50% Japanese and probably 60 or 70% owned by Japanese. We forget how powerful Japan was in the 80s and they were just buying everything. And I think a lot of Hawaiians even to this day have a really negative view of Japan because they’re just so whole hog kind of inhaled. But I was there and I didn’t know what was going on. And in America, you know, you can play golf here for five bucks for 18 holes on a public course. So I grew up playing super cheap golf with wooden clubs and balls that my dad and I would scavenge in the forest. And… We got to Waikiki and I was like, I want to play some golf. And so I go to the golf course nearby and they wouldn’t let me play alone. And they paired me up with two Japanese businessmen. who were probably in their 40s, maybe, and I’m 14, and we’re playing, and they’re like, I’m trying not to do a racist voice. I keep slipping into doing it. But I feel like I’m allowed to do that, having lived there for 25 years. But these guys were like, oh, are you married? I’m like 14. I’m like, who are these people? And one of them had a hat on that it was W-H-O-O-F on the top, and then the line below had A-R-T-E-D, and if you read it fast, it said, who farted? Thank you. And I was like, do you know what that means? He’s like, no, what does it mean? I was like, oh, it means farting. I was just like, who? And they were so patient with me, generous and kind. And I, you know, it was just so bizarre. It was my first interaction with truly non-American, American, you know, non-Americans. And because there’s no filter. I mean, the Japanese would just come to Hawaii and not speak any English, really. And that also stuck in mind. It was kind of bizarre. So it was just these weird chance, soft power encounters. That when I was 19, I was thinking, well, wouldn’t it be fun to study abroad? And I looked, and there was like three Japanese universities that had English websites. And I looked at the tuition, and it was so cheap. It was like $5,000 for a year with a homestay. I mean, it was just insanely cheap compared to what a U.S. university was costing. And I was like, all right, I’ll apply. I was going to drop out of school anyway. I was like, all right, let’s apply. Let’s go to Japan for a year. And when I was 19, I got in just on my own without going through any U.S. university. And that was it. I was stuck. And then it was just, the better I get at the language, the more kind of doors unlock. And then you asked about the experience, and I’m never, ever, ever, the paradox of it is like, and this is why I think it’s important not to expect anything of a country like Japan, where someone like me, who looks like me, moves there. You’re never going to be integrated. You’re never going to be considered a citizen fully, even if I get a Japanese passport or whatever. You just have to accept that. And so in the countryside, obviously people see me coming and they freak out a little bit. But then I just yell all this complicated Japanese at them, and then that makes them feel comfortable. And then within three seconds, once you’ve illustrated that you know a little bit about the history, that you know the context of the road that you’re walking, you know about the town that you’re in… They’re so moved by that because so few Japanese walkers know any of that that they become your ally really quickly. And then essentially the racial stuff breaks down pretty fast. And then they’re just on your side. And I have relationships going back with some of these inns and restaurants and stuff that are now 13, 14, 15 years old. And I can call them tomorrow and they’ll hook me up with a… introducing me to fishermen or divers, pearl divers or whatever, whatever I need access to. So that’s been great. And it is surreal going to Spain. I was walking the Camino two months ago and I go over there and nobody looks twice at you. You know, it’s like, oh, you’re just a Spanish person. And there is something seductive about that, about being able to just immediately blend in where you aren’t constantly… being kind of weird little microaggressions of like, oh, when are you going home? You know, that’s a question you get a lot. It’s like, well, it’s been 25 years and I own a house here. And I’ve paid so much in tax that I have to extract all of my tax value. That’s going to take another 30 years. But, you know, like, oh, wow, your Japanese is really good. Yeah, I’ve lived here forever. You know, or, you know, just like you’re going to leave at some point, that kind of. And doing the media stuff in the last two years, has been weird because it’s validated me. So all of my neighbors suddenly come up to me and go, oh, now I see you’re an asset. It’s sort of like Naomi Osaka. If Naomi Osaka wasn’t really good at tennis, Japan probably wouldn’t be embracing Naomi Osaka. It’s like one of these things. So they kind of… they kind of want you to not have both feet in the circle unless you can prove you’re of some kind of exceptional nature. And so now that I’ve done TV shows with people like Tamori-san, you know, my bank, I go into my bank and they’re like, oh, Moto-san’s here, oh my god. It’s just weird to be considered kind of part of the inner circle through celebrity, which feels both icky and unfortunate, but also I didn’t realize how… truly on the outside, I had felt until this weird celebrity stuff started happening. And it’s been kind of, it’s been sort of nice. And, you know, you kind of take whatever wins you can get in some way.

Liz: Yeah. All right. We’re going to call it there. Please join me in giving Craig a little bit more value.