Transcript

Sam Anderson: Thank you, Laura.

Craig Mod: Thank you.

Sam Anderson: And thank you everyone for coming. This is the last stop on Craig’s nationwide book tour, and I’m so excited that he’s ending it here with us at the greatest little bookstore. In the world. Pinnacle Books, round of applause for Pinnacle Books. They do so much great work. Not only do they have incredible books, they know books inside and out.

They do great work like the Beacon Prison Books project where incarcerated people can request books to read and customers buy them and they get sent and delivered. It’s just a beautiful thing, so you can find those books inside and buy those too. Craig Mod, so Craig has done, you’ve been on the road for.

Six weeks, you have done like a hundred podcasts, including some really big, strange ones, supposedly. Yeah. Tim Ferris, the guy who wrote the Four Hour Work Week, you’re on his podcast and I feel like I’ve listened to all of those and I’ve read all of Craig’s work. So I just wanna give like a little bit of an introduction to Craig and who he is and what he’s doing.

And then I wanna let Craig kick his feet up and do like story time with Craig. ‘cause Craig is a really beautiful storyteller. So this is Craig. Some of you might know him very well. Some of you might not know him at all, like Laura, but that’s the nature of Craig Mod. He is a guy who’s from right around here, grew up right around here, and then he moved all the way across the world to Japan.

And kind of in the space between those two places, he’s made this fascinating career and he’s just one of the smartest, loveliest, most thoughtful guys you’ll ever run into. And if you read his work, you’ll really fall in love with him, which is why people line up around the Bach in San Francisco and come out during a thunderstorm in Beacon.

So I’m really pleased to be here. His new book is called, things Become Other Things. And Craig over the years has produced a ton of writing about technology, books and all kinds of stuff, including a huge body of writing about walking around Japan, which is a really deep kind of spiritual practice that he does.

And he is produced these gorgeous art books on his own. And this book is his first kind of traditional New York publishing world book, and it’s grown out of all that. Compost of his walking, and it’s just, it’s really gorgeous. So we’re gonna do a little reading from that, and then we’ll hear some fun stories.

I think we should start by respecting the rain, because Craig’s book starts with a kind of apocalyptic typhoon, the Great Typhoon of 1888. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just a really punchy, little, beautiful, poetic paragraph. God, I think we should read it. Do you wanna read it or do you want me to read it? Go me.

Okay. All right. This is the opening of his book.

They say the great typhoon of 1889 filled the air of key with a mythic kind of rage. May G 22, the black skies cracked and down it came. Waters rocked. Rivers rose. That towering Tory of UNG Grand hon. Grand fell hard. The holy land went all mush. They say earth unstuck. Undulated like the ocean above three legged oily rascals, wheeled and surveyed the slop.

For when that divine mayhem of all penetrating wetness finally pulled back, they say Kgu had been reduced to a slurry. Mud. Mud and more damn mud shrines and homes swept halfway down the peninsula shattered, floating off into a dead still sea. The end. It’s pretty good. Thanks, Sam. Standing ovation, this peninsula is one of the wettest places on earth. Yeah. Wetter than the Amazon rainforest. That’s, yeah, that’s what Wikipedia tells. I’ve been there. It was raining so hard the whole time. Yeah. And there is a lot of kind of danger and death and decrepitude and a lot going on there.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Sam Anderson: And you had some hairy moments. I wondered if you could tell us the story of the time you almost fell off a cliff and died. Sure

Craig Mod: I, so there’s a lot of roots that, so the Key Peninsula has probably what’s most famously known as Kimo kol. And so there are two UNESCO World Heritage Walking roots in the world.

One is the French Camino, so it starts in on the other side of the Pyrenees. You walk over into Spain, walk all the way to Santiago. That’s UNESCO World Heritage, blessed. And then the other is. The Kao Codo, which is on this key peninsula. The Key Peninsula is a peninsula south of Kyoto in Japan, and the Kao Codo, unlike the French Camino, although these pilgrimage paths are tricky because everyone’s trying to get to some holy spot, so on the Kado, they’re all trying to get to Mgu Grande Shrine.

And then on the Camino, they’re all trying to get to Santiago. You have lots of different Caminos, but the one that’s UNESCO is the French one. That’s the one kind of everyone walks when they say they do the Camino. And the same thing with Kao Kdo is that there are many, there’s the Ochi Nakai, Kochi Ji, and the omi, and the one that everyone kind of walks is the Akai, which is pretty relaxed, although some, an Australian woman died on it like two years ago.

You, it’s it’s tricky. It doesn’t look like it’s gonna be tough, but some of the parts of the path are quite skinny with kind of big dropoffs. But what really gets you is you kind of trip, fall and then hit a tree and that’s what you don’t want to

Sam Anderson: do. Yeah. And these are pilgrimage routes that go back like a thousand plus years because this is, a

Craig Mod: lot of this is Shinto, which predates a lot of, the Buddhism and stuff like that.

And you

Sam Anderson: described in its heyday it would’ve had a hundred thousand people walking this.

Craig Mod: Yeah. One of the. Portuguese, Japanese to Portuguese dictionaries from the 16 hundreds describes the roots as kind of ants. ‘cause it was just, you just would see, you couldn’t see the ground. There was so many people squished and walking.

So it was, I, me walking them today, or anyone walking them today, you’re kinda walking the worst version of them in a weird way, right? It’s like the least walk, the least populated, the inns, the tea houses, all that stuff is not there as it was even 70, 80 years ago. There you could kinda get to a summit in the mountains down on this peninsula and there’d be a tea house where you could have like little dongle, like pounded rice cakes and some tea.

But, so the walk that almost killed me was the kuchi, which is the route that aesthetic pilgrims used to train. So it’s an aesthetic training ground Shinto kind of pilgrims. A long time ago. If you wanted to go to these shrines, you needed a guide. And most of the Imperial family wanted to do these kind of pilgrimages.

And so they needed a system to allow to train Boy Scouts essentially like old style boy scout. And so they do training and this was one of the route you do training on. And then if you did a good enough job, you got a license. And so my friend John, who’s features heavily in the book, my buddy John, who is just the smartest, kindest, he’s 20 years older than me. He’s lived in Japan forever. He’s been walking Japan since he was 17. He’s a real sort of mensch, kind of magical force gumpy in life. It’s like everything that positive that could have happened to this guy has happened. And so he was like, let’s go walk this aesthetic training route.

And we didn’t really prepare for it because we’d walked everything else. If it wasn’t that bad, you look at the map and it was 10 kilometers, you had to walk on day one and it, it said seven hours it took, we’re like, it’s not gonna take seven hours. And then you start, and every single step you have to pay attention to because nothing is flat, nothing is easy, it’s all rocks, it’s crazy terrain.

And then you’re on these ridges that are, it’s like hundreds of foot drop off both sides and it’s like mis shrouded and there’s nothing to hold onto. There’s no railing. And so it’s really hairy. So I never write about or talk about this route because I don’t want anyone to go do it.

‘cause it just feels like this shouldn’t be a place that tourists go and play on. And there’s another weird element to it, which is, it’s one of the only bits, I think it’s the only route left in the country that has a no women allowed rule, which dates back. A thousand years. So they have, you can walk to a certain part and then from this part there’s this huge to gate and it has, it says, no women past this point.

And what’s really cool is that the sign is always vandalized. And so it, they cross out the no, and they write men and they do the, it’s like always being vandalized by someone. And I tell everyone, just go. ‘cause it’s not like you walk past that and suddenly it’s all these really serious men, really studying and doing their practice.

It’s a bunch of ding-dongs drinking beer. It’s like the least it’s, anyway, that bit is a little strange, but you keep going and it gets more and more intense. And one of the bits, super skinny path, and it was just lined with bamboo grass, the edges of it. And so you couldn’t really see where the path ended.

And I was walking and I just missed the edge and I went flying off and grabbed there, happened to be a route, one route right there on the path at that moment, and grabbed it and it was, a hundred foot drop onto just boulders. And you’re in that moment. It’s this weird, mission impossible Tom Cruise moment.

You’re like, oh my god.

Speaker 3: Yeah,

Craig Mod: you’re hanging off and you got your pack on, which weighs 20, 25 kilos. And so it’s like the momentum and everything is really like

Sam Anderson: 300 pounds. It’s like

Craig Mod: 12,000 pounds. Okay.

Sam Anderson: It’s always talking to kilos

Craig Mod: and kilometers,

Sam Anderson: like really pretentious.

Craig Mod: And anyway, that was there and I was able to pull myself.

Back up and didn’t die, and I went back a couple years later to photograph the root. I went to go find it and take a picture of that one specifically. Did you find it? I

Sam Anderson: did, yeah. I don’t think I’ve seen that photo. Yeah. Anyway, good story. Next one. Another very scary story that I’m so glad I was so pumped when I read your book and found this story in there, because I’ve been secretly sharing this story with a lot of people and I didn’t think I was supposed to tell it probably.

Okay. But then you published it out into the world. So I was like, now we’re free. We can all hear this story. So please tell us about the time. That you were walking in Japan with Jeff Bezos. Okay. And do the impression of him and what he said for the people, because this is the most this is the best distillation of America I’ve ever heard.

Craig Mod: So I do these walks. We need some context. So I met Kevin 15 years ago and I had no idea who he was. Who here doesn’t know who Kevin Kelly is? Like most people write. Yeah. So he co-founded Wired Magazine back in the nineties, and he’s a techno optimist. He’s written all these books and like the war KY siblings have used, he, everyone that was in the matrix had to read one of Kevin’s books, for example.

And anyway he’s really big in China. Like he will go to, he’ll give a reading in China and there’ll be like 17 year olds with his tattoo on their arms and stuff. It’s very bizarre. But Kevin’s a big walker. He is been walking for his whole life and we started walking together about 10 years ago.

And then we started running walk and talks around the world. So we’d invite six or seven people and we’d go, we walked Southern China, Thailand. Sam joined one of ’em. We walked Bali a year ago. Right now we were just about to go. Oh yeah, that’s right. Right about now. Yeah. Bali, we’ve done a couple in England and a couple in Japan, and somewhere along the line.

Jeff Bezos found out we were doing these walks.

Sam Anderson: Kevin Kelly is like a guru in Silicon Valley tech world.

Craig Mod: He, yes. People, he heard about our walks, and so I get an email from his team and they’re like, Hey, Jeff wants to walk with you. And it’s weird. Yeah, it’s super weird. But you’re like, all right.

He’s he can only come for a couple days, which we normally don’t allow. And so he is just gonna come for the last three nights, four days of the walk, and we’re like, all right, we’ll make an exception. Every night what we do is we walk, so we walk 20 K in the day and then every day we have a dinner called, Jeffersonian dinner.

So it’s one table, one conversation, and we talk for two or three hours about this one thing. Everyone talks, it’s one, everyone talks one at a time, and it’s pretty amazing. You do that six, seven nights in a row with a bunch of people you’ve never met before, and you get really close. Like you just find out a lot and then all day you’re walking together and you can kinda chat more about it in the day.

It’s actually a really amazing kind of experience. You enjoyed it. I think, yeah. Yeah. It was fun. Yeah. Ours was the most intense. We did it in Bali and there were no rooms, and every night we slept on a bamboo platform in the middle of the jungle and mosquito

Sam Anderson: nets, beds

Craig Mod: next to each other, and we didn’t sit in a chair for a week there, had no chairs.

We were just all lounging. Smart. But it was good. It was great. So Jeff says, I want to come, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, he shows up. It’s as weird as you can imagine it being. It’s so weird. It’s

Sam Anderson: weird, right?

Craig Mod: Like we. Yeah, we had five days. We had five days without him and it was so incredible and we had this beautiful bonding and everyone was so real and just such great, honest, open, real people.

And then Jeff gets out of his cab right in front of Hung Go Shrine and every like this switch flipped of some weird alpha monkey arriving in the tribe and everyone just started laughing really loudly at everything. It was just, it was bananas. And Jeff famously has a completely crazy laugh.

If you search Google, Jeff Bezos let you get all these videos of him laughing. It’s totally insane. And everyone started mimicking it. Anyway, we’re walking around. I’m guiding reluctantly and I really don’t like to be a guide on these things. And we’re walking around and we turn a corner and the biggest Shinto to gate, so those big gates with the two things on top and the two poles usually red.

The biggest one in Japan, it’s like 40. I’m gonna say meters. It’s like a hundred feet tall. It’s this huge thing made of steel. And we turn the corner and I go, Hey guys, we got the crew. Everyone’s laughing like hyenas. I go, Hey, this is, yeah. And it’s like really impactful. I go, Hey, this is the biggest to gate in Japan in the world.

And Jeff he talks like this, so he, it’s really nuts, it’s like he just has this like really wild, intense talk. And he turns to me and he goes. That’s the biggest in the world. And I go, yeah. And he goes, let’s build a bigger one.

I was like, oh my God, what is going on? So I didn’t have to sign an NDA or anything, so I don’t think I can get sued by telling you. It’s amazing that

Sam Anderson: you

Craig Mod: didn’t I know. No, we, yeah, and there were no like. There were armed guards nearby all the time. He didn’t know and then in the mountains like, ah, I don’t know what was going on.

And his girlfriend

Sam Anderson: was there and yeah, there’s a whole, there’s a whole thing going anyway. Anyway, big Sacred Gate, he sees and says, screams a bigger one. Build a bigger one. Yeah.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Sam Anderson: Boot. Yeah. Anyway, I’m just glad it’s out in the world now. A huge part of the beauty of your writing in this book, all your writing really on these walks is there’s so much life.

That you encounter and that you distill for us. And there’s so many people, and you’re very, when you’re on these walks, you are so hopped up on curiosity and love, and you have a great line in the book. I want to kiss everyone in the world on the forehead. And there’s just all these like loving encounters with strangers who live in these kind of rural areas.

Farmers shopkeepers. Yeah. And you do them the honor of paying deep attention and just bring them to us as people on the page. So I was wondering, one of them that I particularly loved, one story was this retired logger who was in his eighties, who had never before. Oh yeah, you remember this guy?

So I tell the people about this encounter.

Craig Mod: So this is with John?

Sam Anderson: Yeah. This is with your friend John. So

Craig Mod: John, so before I, I started doing the walks alone and the book is about a solo walk. And I find like even one other person joining walk changes the. Vibe completely. And you, I can’t write, I can’t photograph, I can’t really talk to people in the same way.

And so before I started doing my solo walks, before I built up the confidence, I walked with John. John invited me to go explore the peninsula. He was the first, he was doing sort of academic research and he was, he really put it on my radar. I had never heard of it. I never knew what the Kako was.

I’d never heard of Cosan, none of this stuff. And John, for the first couple of years, we would do. A couple months outta the year we’d be walking together and I was kinda always just watching John, witnessing John and he’s got beautiful Japanese, he’s done tea ceremony for 40 years, which is like its own sort of subset of like language that you use in tea ceremony and he brings it to the countryside and uses it on farmers and you just see everyone gets moved by this kindness of John.

Sam Anderson: I was wondering, you described. Really beautifully in the book, how he speaks to people in this kind of very elevated Japanese, very formal. It’d be like if we were speaking Victorian English to someone and they were just like, so moved and honored and touched.

Craig Mod: Not freaked out by

Sam Anderson: it. Not freaked out, but it was and people just open up to him immediately.

Yeah. And you’re watching this, can you do an impression of John? Can you give us a sense of what that sounds like? Or is that impossible? It’s

Craig Mod: You can, you just, you use different conjugations and it just, things kinda get longer. But a big part of it too is. Historical knowledge.

So he just, he’s like a walking encyclopedia about where we, where we’d be walking

Speaker 3: that day.

Craig Mod: Yeah. And that’s also embedded in what moves people, right? So by paying attention to the place, it’s funny it’s very easy to make people feel seen and loved and excited about where they live is.

If you know something about the area, you go and ask. Probing questions like that. You’d only know if you’d studied or Yeah.

Sam Anderson: Unlock people. So this logger.

Craig Mod: Yeah. So we go to this basically a little bar that we’d been walking past for years and never had the courage to go in and we were staying in, in, around the corner from it.

And I was like, all right, tonight, let’s go to that bar. Just see what it was called. Cobalt. It just looked so cool. It was this old bar had been there since the sixties in the middle of nowhere in this town. Just loggers, logging town. And we go in. And there are five people can sit at the counter. There are three people sitting there, and John and I sit in the middle and John is next to an old guy.

I’m next to two guys, and John just has this thing where I call the John Effect that he just, people fall in love with this guy constantly. It’s really, in some ways inspiring in other ways, just it shows how much of a deficit you have as a human, like that people aren’t doing this with you to the same degree, like anyone who likes me along the road, I’m like, oh man, if John was here, like they would like.

They would like us so much more. So we’re sitting there and I’m chatting with the owner and I look over and John is like deep in discussion with this guy who is about 85 years old. Tiny, weird little lager guy, completely alcoholic. Everyone’s just totally juiced up and they’re talking and then suddenly he’s he’s picking up John’s big fat arm.

John’s this pretty big dude. He’s got these huge meaty forearms and he’s all his hair on. He’s Australian and he’s just like. Rubbing John’s arm stroking it. They’re talking deep conversation and then the clock hits 8 55 and apparently he has to be home by nine and call his kids, or they won’t let him go out.

So he stands up and he declares to the bar. He goes, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever spoken to a foreigner. He’s like 85. And he goes, I used to think they were ferocious, scary beasts. But now I know that’s not true. And he leaned over and he kissed John on the cheek and waddled out of this bar.

And it was just the perfect John moment. That’s just what he gets an 85-year-old lagger to be in love with foreigners and give him a kiss. Yeah. So I learned everything I’m, that I’m doing like what you’re talking about, about, trying to elevate people and just meet people and.

Find this. Goodness. I learned that all from watching John for two years, essentially and seeing, ‘cause I hadn’t, I’d never had that modeled for me.

That’s a big, another big part of the book is that Yeah. Anti model. Anti model. Exactly. That’s where I

Sam Anderson: was gonna go next was that you mentioned a sort of sense of deprivation that people must have to need to respond so strongly.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Sam Anderson: And you write a lot about how you grew up with that deprivation and the way, this is a book about society. And about the success of society versus the failure of society. And in your story, your. Town that you grew up in is just a really stark dramatic example of kind of a failure of society. You have a great line that’s like, how could I ever trust a country that would do this to a town?

Craig Mod: Yeah,

Sam Anderson: It’s this post-industrial place where the factories that employed everyone for generations have closed and that vacuum gets filled with no social services, no fentanyl community gets filled with fentanyl and other toxic things. You write about that in a really beautiful way and a lot of the book.

I won’t give away the story, but it’s written as a letter to Craig’s childhood best friend who they grew apart and Craig went off on this wild path to Japan and his friend stayed home and you write about it very tenderly. And I was wondering if you could read for us as a short little chapter Sure.

That I loved about your grandfather. Sure. Your grandfather who. The most fascinating fact. You know what I’m gonna say? Go for it. Craig moved to Japan, was a lot about, Japan is immersed in Japan. His grandfather grew up in the era of World War II and all that, and had such a visceral hatred for Japan.

‘cause the American propaganda that he. Tell the amazing fact about your grandfather, please.

Craig Mod: He never ate rice for the rest of his life. That was his revenge against Japan. I have to say that like I’m adopted, so that’s a big part of the story as well. As more and more I talk about adoption and meet adopted kids and parents have adopted kids, the more you realize it’s a real complicated mess.

The whole adoption situation, it’s so hard to do it well in the sense of. Helping an adoptive kid kinda get through. There’s so much bizarre trauma. Even if the parents do their best and provide a really loving environment, there’s so many questions, all these taboos. ‘cause you don’t wanna offend the adoptive parents by searching for your birth parents and things like that.

It’s so tricky to do statistically. Part of this podcast thing, I went on an adoption podcast.

And I never engaged with that world before. It’s called adoptee on and this woman Haley’s interviewed like 400 adoptees and she’s. Encyclopedic about adoption data. It’s something like four times greater risk of self-harm, suicide.

There’s a massive drop off in having children for adopted adoptive kids. Adopted kids. So it’s, there’s a lot going on there. And part of that was Japan and going to Japan was responding to all that. Tumult that was happening along with everything in the town. Sure. So anyway, this is my adoptive grandfather.

Sam Anderson: Yeah. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of toxicity back home and there’s a lot of kind of prickly characters and, but you also write so beautifully about them. So yeah. If you read this chapter called One Quick Walk, which I’ve drawn a heart next to, I drew hearts all over the margins of Craig’s book. I just think he’s so cute and lovable.

Craig Mod: Alright, one quick walk and my friend that I’m, I’ve written to is Brian. Here’s something I never told you. My grandfather used to invite me on, walks around the neighborhood, come walk with me, he’d say, as he put on his overcoat and hat, I always declined though in my heart. I wanted to join from my second floor bedroom window.

I’d peek out and watch him stroll with measured elegance down the driveway, turn the corner, disappear, and I’d immediately feel bad about having said no. How simple. I thought how simple it would be to just walk next to pop. But I also thought about the other kids. I thought about being seen. I thought about what that might mean.

Me walking with my grandfather. Stupid, yes. But there it was this fear keeping me from doing something so simple from giving him this kindness. Nearly 20 years later, I had built a life in Japan and came back to visit. We went to our local state place, the place we always went for special occasions. My visiting being a big one, and he had our well done forever.

Well done leathery stakes on the car ride home. I sat in the back next to him and held his hand, a hand I should have held much earlier. Later at home, I heard him tell my mom, Craig held my hand. He was crying. This dumb thing, this holding of an old man’s hand. I knew he would be gone soon and he was. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s beautiful.

Sam Anderson: And standing ovation

such a weirdo. There’s such a, there’s such a resonance then in your walking in Japan. And one of the things that I really love about this book is the way that it very artfully and subtly. Flips back and forth between this world of Japan and these walks and this world that you grew up in and the story of Brian and the story of your family and the story of these people who you run into.

And because, you say the Daymark demographics of Japan are pretty stark these days, especially in these areas. Yeah. Where the young people have disappeared and so you have all these closed shops and empty homes and this aging population and you’re running into. Grandparents, grandmothers and grandfathers and you are having this deep connection with them.

Just in passing, maybe you could tell us about the guy who showed you all his frogs. It was just like, there’s so many encounters, but this one really stuck with me ‘cause it was just a great example of an older person just being seen and being So

Craig Mod: yeah, there. Yeah. So this guy, he was a iron worker and he’d welded his whole life.

And then in retirement he started a cafe in his kind of old welding garage. And it was really good. It’s a really good cafe in this weird town that should be way more active than it is, but it’s kinda all fallen apart. And if it was, in the states, there’d be really nasty stuff happening. But because there, there’s, there are essentially no drugs in Japan.

This is I think, important, an important piece of data. There’s no weed. Like weed and heroin are classified identically. It’s so strange. I even feel bad. I feel nervous talking about weed in public because if Japanese media hears me talking about weed, I feel like that could be this hugely negative thing.

The fact that I’m not. It’s so staunchly against it. It’s you’ll be talking about something that seems so progressive in Japan and you’ll just bring up something and be like, oh, isn’t it funny that weed is, marijuana is so illegal here. And they’ll look at you like you just said, oh, sh pedophilia should be illegal.

Should be illegal. It’s so intense these feelings around drugs. Okay, there are no drugs in these places, so that means there’s a lack of a certain kind of ambient violence and pain and suffering and stuff like that. And anyway, this guy built this great little cafe in this town that kind of has almost no one in it.

And I’d spent the morning there having coffee and taking notes and stuff. And I said, Hey, I’m gonna take off. And he goes, oh, do you wanna see something? The customers are thinned out. And he goes, do you wanna see? I was like, yeah, sure. Let’s, what do you got to show me?

Sam Anderson: What did you expect at this point?

Craig Mod: I. Honestly, he was so gruff and mean to me. I didn’t know what was gonna go. I was just, I was so delighted that he was talking to me. He seemed so disinterested in connecting it all. I had tried and I was like, all right, I’ll just let him be. And he goes come. And he was pouring outside and he runs, he sprints through the rain and I’m chasing him down this little alley.

And we go into his backyard of this house and into this garage and up these stairs. It’s like pitch black. I’m like, this guy’s gonna murder me up here in his garage. And we go up and he turns on the lights and it’s just all these like Christmas lights and circling the room. And the room is just filled with hundreds of iron frogs, little iron frogs.

And he just spent his life making. These iron frogs and they’re doing judo and they’re climbing the Tower of Babel and they’re meditating and he walks me through all, he’s look at this one, it’s playing tennis. How big? They’re like this big. Okay, these little iron made of iron. And he is welded

Sam Anderson: them together.

He

Craig Mod: just kinda welded. These are frogs together.

Sam Anderson: Are they different colors or

Craig Mod: they all They’re all painted and they’re all hand painted? Yeah. Oh, okay. It’s pretty. It’s a life work of fogginess. Yeah. And he is got these light bulbs all set up to make it dramatic. And it was like, it was very moving and intense.

But yeah, that’s just one of many encounters I had like that.

Sam Anderson: Yeah. I should say this, Craig is an incredible photographer and this book has black and white photos in it, but he also does these. Special project books on his own with these really lush, huge, colorful layouts. Do you have your red book around?

I don’t, no. You can order them from his website and they’re really stunning. I was just looking through the kind of companion piece to this with, which has a photo of these iron frogs.

Craig Mod: Yeah, you could see it. Yeah. In the new book that just came out. I, because I was, I’m insane. I released a photo book two weeks ago in the middle of this tour, so you can grab that.

Sam Anderson: Craig is endlessly inspiring to me because he’s always, I think he feels, we talked about this earlier, he feels like a lot of us feel where he is looking at his own life and output and thinking like, oh, I should be doing so much more or something. Whereas I look at it and I think I’ve never seen someone more driven and organized and doing more, just making stuff happen and doing all these projects and like when he does these walks, he’ll start what he calls a popup.

Newsletter. Yeah. Where you give him your email address and he says, I will not abuse it. I will not sell it. I will not use it past the length of this walk. You will get updates on the walk. And then the thing is over, the newsletter is over.

Craig Mod: Every day I’ll do 20, 30, 40 k of walking. And then I get to my in and I’ll write, that’s 90 miles.

It’s 20 miles a walk or whatever. Yeah. And thank you for translating. And and then I’ll get to my end, and then I start the night process, which is four or five hours of writing. And photo editing. And so I’ll write two, three, 4,000 words every night and I’ll do that for 30, 40 days in a row.

And that’s the drafts where of where the books come from. The book

Sam Anderson: grows out essentially.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Yeah. Most of it gets cut, but it’s just oh yeah, you can pick this thing out, not to go. Did you find the language strange at all? Like the way people talk in the book?

Sam Anderson: Did I find the language the dialogue of people speaking to you?

Yeah. You do a nice thing where, you should tell everybody how they speak and what their accents are like. But you do a kind of like americanizing of like country American folk, slang. They use slang they use, and I guess they, that’s the equivalent of what they sound like in Japanese to you.

Craig Mod: Yeah, because a lot of translations of Japanese, it’s all Tokyo Japanese, right? Everything kinda just gets transposed to. The, like the most generic version in English. And as soon as I started gonna this pencil, I’d sp I, as I discovered the pencil, I was also spending a bunch of time in Western North Carolina.

My dad, my adopted father, who I had essentially was a stranger to me. He passed away in 2011 and I got this call, Hey, you gotta come bury this guy. And it was, you could have picked a stranger out of the phone book and it would’ve been a similar experience to going to this house that I didn’t know in this town I didn’t know.

And one of the weird things that. It’s happened, the magical things that happen, and again, like I believe, if your antenna are up, there’s really incredible connections to be made. Almost every situation. And in the town, tiny town, Tryon, North Carolina, I don’t know if anyone knows that. Do you know?

Yeah, my parents

Speaker 3: live there.

Craig Mod: Your parents live. It’s a beautiful little, like Nook, Asheville’s right around the corner, up the, you got some great VBS and all this stuff. Anyway, my dad was in the forest and try on living alone, and then when I went to go bury him, I met. The one lawyer, the town has one lawyer.

He was, when I met him, he was like 75 and he’s just this, he was this fascinating, essentially a good old boy who supported Bernie Sanders. That’s the only way, like a brilliant southern lawyer who had never left the town and he was a full hyper liberal Bernie supporter, and we just started hanging out.

He had been a terrible father. He has three kids, and he was basically a complete alcoholic, terrible father until his forties. And it was just a law man. He’s everyone wanted to shoot me. I had to have a gun ‘cause all these guys wanted to kill me. And all these fuckers in jail wanted to get out and get me.

And I was like, whoa, this is interesting. Who are you? And I think he knew. I didn’t know my dad and I didn’t think my dad loved me. And I think he saw it as this opportunity to bridge us. My father and me in his death. And then also at the same time, he saw, maybe saw a little bit of atonement in this act of kindness with me and my dad as sort of an atonement for how he had been as a father to his own kids.

But he adopted me, him, he and his wife. And I said, kept going to tryon over and over again to kinda take care of this house and the whatever, his records, poker records and stuff like that. And they started taking me out to go on hikes in the mountains. We go up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, go to little Switzerland, go to the bookstore there, go to all these cool places.

And I just love them and found this incredible connection unexpectedly. And fell in love with that part of North Carolina. And then his wife passed away a couple years after that and I kept going. I, like my dad’s stuff was all done. I kept going once or twice, three times a year to just go visit this guy, bill.

And I’d go down there and I’d rent a car and I’d pick him up and we’d spend five or six days together and I’d just, he listened to his stories and, four or five years into it. Finally his sons were like, I think we were like, dude, who is this guy you’re hanging out with? And so we finally met and I think they were like, who’s this guy from China coming out here? Why is his boy from China keep visiting our poppy? Why is he visiting our daddy? I think they’re like, is he trying to have sex with our daddy? Is he trying to fuck our daddy? Like I like they had, there was no world in which they could imagine that we had just become weird friends.

He’s 80 years old. I was like 35 and we just loved each other. It’s a strange, bizarre friendship.

And so anyway, we’d have dinner with the sons and that all kept going, but as I was walking the peninsula, I just. Saw this immediate connection between the tenor, the vibe, the way that Japanese has spoken there, and this kind of western North Carolina.

There’s a, there’s like a singsong to it, like a beauty of poetry to it. And same in the Japanese. And I just thought, oh, this is a pretty natural transposition.

Sam Anderson: So in the book, those people speak in a

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Sam Anderson: Country Carolina

Craig Mod: accent. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Anderson: Okay. Yeah.

Craig Mod: And it’s fun.

Sam Anderson: Yeah, there’s just these great little moments where you walk past a lady who doesn’t even look at you and you try to say hello and she doesn’t even look up.

And then you hear her say as you walk away, what does she say? She goes,

Craig Mod: they done some bay or yonder, or something like that. It’s like the equivalent of whatever that would be in Japanese, which, there’s all these weird perversions that happen to the language when you kinda get into the mountains.

What is your Japanese accent? Like just Tokyo. Do you sound American? Do you have a on the phone? People don’t know. They’re like, are you from Osaka? But the more time I spend in the peninsula, I start to pick up a lot of their, it just infuses, when I go to North Carolina, I start picking up a weird little

Sam Anderson: southern thing.

So y’all,

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Sam Anderson: Okay. You mentioned getting in trouble in the Japanese media for talking about drugs. Craig is a, he’s a figure in Japan, in certain parts of Japan for sure.

Craig Mod: Accidentally,

Sam Anderson: yeah, accidentally a very famous person. So maybe you could tell everyone about the, your journey with this city called Mor Yoka.

Craig Mod: Sure. So I started doing, I was doing these linear walks. So I’ve walked Tokyo to Kyoto. I’ve walked that three times, and I’ve done other thousand, 400 mile, 500 mile walks, and I wanted to do something that was different. So I wanted to go to 10. Mid-size cities that like no one ever goes to and walk 50 kilometers in each city over three days and just try to talk to as many people as possible.

We’ve all done that. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Craig Mod: And so I did that and I walked a bunch of cities and one of the cities was Mor Yoka. And then I write sometimes for the New York Times and they do a 52 places list. And they asked me, Hey, do you have a place you wanna recommend? Not Japan, anywhere in the world? And I was like this city had gone to more uca.

No one in at that point. It had been like 23 years of living in Japan, 22 years. And no one had ever recommended it to me. No one had ever said the word to me, Mor Yoka. And it was this, it was like beacon, to be honest. Just like this beautiful, walkable little city with history. And

Sam Anderson: where is it relative to Tokyo?

North Tokyo. So

Craig Mod: it’s up north. So it’s in Tohoku, north of Sendai, Uhhuh. So it’s in between Tokyo and Hokkaido basically. Okay. And a beautiful park and amazing cafes and great food and just young people building businesses. And because I’d walked all of these other bits of Japan, I’d seen the depopulation, I’d seen how dour and dire it was to find this like bastion of energy and goodness.

It was like, what? What is this? And we need to protect this to understand this and highlight it. And so I recommended it to the times they don’t tell you if they’re gonna pick it. And you write your 200 word little pitch. And I pitched it, and then they’re like, yeah, okay, it’s gonna be in there, and then you don’t know where it’s gonna be.

And then the list comes out. And that year number one was London. ‘cause of the coronation and all that stuff. And then number two was Morocco and Japan lost its mind. Japan did not know what to do with that. And then someone found out I spoke Japanese and it was just this like tidal wave of media, like who are you and why is it number two?

‘cause you know my name’s on it. And they’re like,

Speaker 3: yeah,

Craig Mod: this is the guy who picked Mor oca. And they were like finding me in the street. I was doing this other project, I was in hotels and like a TV crew would come into my hotel room and I’d be sitting in the corner and there’d be like cameras and lights and stuff.

It was so bizarre. I had gone from zero media to a thousand percent media and then the mayor invited me up. He goes, come on up. Love to just say hello. I’m like, all right, I’ll go see. I’ll just go say hi to the mayor. Wanted to go back to the town, see how everyone was doing. I go up there and I’m expecting, okay, go meet.

The mayor is like, handlers come get me. And I thought we were just gonna shake hands and they opened the doors. I’m like, the mayor’s in here. And they opened the doors and the doors open and it looked like this. All of you, except you were all media and you all had giant network TV cameras on your shoulders and like giant s SLRs.

And it was like, like flashes are going off. And I’m just like, what is, and the mayor’s in the back, he’s sitting on kinda like a throne in the back and I go back there and I sit next to him and everyone’s but you follow me. As I walk in. It was so bizarre. It’s I’ve been part of the Manson murders or something.

It was so intense. And we shake hands and he basically just goes oh yeah, hey, thank you Mosan for whatever picking us, and then good luck. And he left me in front of all these news people. He just took off and there’s a mic and they all line up for questions. And the first question. Guy gets up there and he goes, Mozo son, how do we solve poverty?

And I was like, you’ve got the wrong guy. This is not, I’m not, I just like your coffee. I think you have amazing coffee and good scones. They have really good scones up there. I don’t know why. It’s a big going thing. And so it just became this crazy circus and. More and more TV shows wanted me on, and I saw it as truly, there was no ego involved because it’s like I didn’t do anything.

I just pointed. And so it’s it’s not like it was a, something I made, I was just like pointing over there. I felt an ethical duty to help them understand it and then I realized there was an interesting opportunity to talk about. Certain things. So they always, all the questions would be, what’s your favorite noodles?

Or what’s your favorite soba? How much soba did you eat when you went to Mor Yoka? That would be, that’s all they wanted to know. And I would go, I ate a bit of soba, but what I really loved was the national healthcare that enabled all those cool shops do exist and Japan has a really great social infrastructure.

Like you can’t fall that far. But no one really recognizes or understands it, and it’s just funny to bring that to the surface and get people talking about it and realize how lucky they are that you can run a small bookshop with a family and not think about insurance and healthcare and all this stuff.

Yeah. You have this community hub that you know, can evolve organically. It’s a really inspiring thing to be part of and bear witness to. And so I was able to transmute this crazy media thing into sort of a political awareness of all these social services and how great it is for these towns.

Yeah. Hey, my alarm’s

Sam Anderson: going on. So we’ve been talking for 45 minutes, which means we’re gonna open it up to some questions and do about 15 minutes or so of questions. I didn’t get to ask about the haunting story in Tibet where a ghost appeared at night and you were rocking a baby in your sleep or something.

But, so if someone wants to do that for the q and a, go for it. So yeah, let’s take a handful of questions, see what we can get through if anyone has any.

Just talk about the No it’s a long, he doesn’t, okay. It’s too long. It doesn’t, let’s, he was asleep in Tibet and then his girlfriend was like, last night you were, I was trying to wake you up. I couldn’t wake you up. You were rocking a baby or something. No, and then let me tell the story.

And then oh, and then she took the baby from his arms or something, and then he woke up and felt okay, and then I know this is not right, but this is the worst telling of this story. And then the next morning they went to the guy who ran the inn and they were like, something weird happened last night.

He’s oh, did you see the woman holding the baby who was a ghost in your room? And then Craig was like, yes, she was in my body. And then stuff like that happens. It is a really good story, but it is a little bit long.

Craig Mod: You

Sam Anderson: could

Craig Mod: listen to it on the

Sam Anderson: Tim

Craig Mod: Ferriss

Sam Anderson: podcast. Yeah, listen to that podcast. Like Craig is great on podcasts.

Okay. So he did the ghost. Any other questions for Craig? Yeah,

Craig Mod: for the Jeffersonian dinners what are the kind of topics that you discuss and who gets to decide topics?

Sam Anderson: Great questions. Yeah, so for on these famous Walk, walk-in talks that Craig does with Kevin Kelly for the Jeffersonian dinners, they are, why the Jeffersonian dinners.

Who, what do, what topics do people bring up and who gets to select the topics?

Craig Mod: Yeah. You’ve been on one, do you want I

Sam Anderson: went on one. The Jeffersonian dinner, to be honest, was one of the reasons I was always resistant to go on one of these walk and talks because it just sounded structured and like corny and whatever.

But turned out to, it did turn out to be great and we had incredible discussions and it wasn’t as strict as I was led to believe. Yeah, but they ranged from everything. From your question was, my question was amazing and but it was also interesting because it was very controversial. It, one of the guys in our group hated my question so much.

He secretly went to Kevin Kelly after Kevin announced my question that we’d be discussing at the next dinner. He went to him and said, I hate this question so much. Why would we waste our time? I’m so angry. This is not what I came here to talk about.

Craig Mod: He didn’t. He didn’t say that to Kevin. He said it to the whole group at the dinner table.

Sam Anderson: He said it to Kevin first. He said it to Kevin and then Kevin at the dinner, I was ready to discuss my fun question and Kevin was like, before we get into the question, I wanna say someone at the dinner had a real objection to this, and then this guy starts going yeah, what the hell is this question?

Why would we ever, so the question was. My favorite conversation starter, which is just very simple. What is your very first memory in your entire life? Okay. That’s it. And it turned out to

Craig Mod: be a great, it was awesome. It was so revealing. Kevin’s was like a, oh my god. Beautiful. Had a beautiful sunlit underneath the tree with a leaf floating down with a paternal loving father figure off to the side.

He could feel his presence as this leaf just floated down from. Maple

Sam Anderson: helicopter, sea pod, and it was his grandfather who like never spoke to him or something. It was, it gets really like moving and then you just start to ask questions like, oh, what was your relationship to your grandfather? And it just turns into this whole like therapy session.

It’s really beautiful. Yeah. So that was a lot of fun. So that was, that’s one example. What are some other

Craig Mod: examples? What’s or what is something you’ve changed your mind about? It’s one that comes up. We do. We do one call. What’s one of your heresies? So like what? Which is something that you believe in that probably the people around you may not agree with.

So I have one that I say, which is like, all parents should be legally responsible for and receive the same punishment as their children until they’re 25. For anything their kids do. And like people are like, no, you should do that. Or it gets weirder and weirder.

Sam Anderson: And some are extremely specific and some are just what is the best life advice?

What is a great sort of little, tiny hack in your life that has improved your life? I buy the tiniest mechanical pencil. It’s called the OTO Mini Mo. It’s the, it’s like a piece of lead with an aluminum sheep. It’s like this big, and I always have it in the book. I’m reading and I’m underlining and writing, and it’s just my greatest happiness in life. So stuff like that. Yeah. What is Kevin, what you were gonna say? Something about Kevin? No. No. Okay.

Craig Mod: So that’s it. Good question. Anyone else but basically each person in the group gets to pick one. Oh, one of the nights. Yeah. And everybody’s responsible for one question.

And sometimes, there’s a little pushback and sometimes Kevin’s very good at going that, that’s probably not a good question, Kevin. He guide edits the question sometimes. He is a real sunny

Sam Anderson: optimist, and so some of the questions he interprets as too negative and he makes people re rephrase them.

Craig Mod: And his presence brings this weird, like wisen gnome.

Sam Anderson: Yeah.

Craig Mod: Do everyone kind of behaves?

Sam Anderson: Yeah.

Craig Mod: And probably abides by the rules better than if Kevin wasn’t there. Someone wanted to ask what how do you,

Sam Anderson: how has everybody kept themselves from being ruined by success? And Kevin was like, that’s far too negative.

Why would anyone ever be ruined by success? And he, it got re rephrased to something about regenerative success.

Craig Mod: Or there’s one where it’s like, when have you, what was the angriest you’ve ever been and how did you overcome that? And Kevin will say something like, I’ve never been angry ever in my life.

Not once. Yeah. And you just go I don’t think that’s true. I’ve seen you, you were angry yesterday. Sorry. I was wondering, when you’re walking, do you bring technology with you? Do you use technology? Do people in the group use technology? Do you use it to navigate? Yeah. The question was how do I use technology on the walks?

How much do I bring? Do I use it to navigate things like that. When we do the walk and talks, now we’re explicit because I think actually on the, was it Bali? No, Thailand every time we stopped, everyone was pulling out their phones and it was, we’d never had that before. So now we say. Please, put your phones in your bags.

And some people think, the whole week we have someone on Bali that didn’t even turn their phone on once the whole time. Yeah. And so we try to not do that. When I do my own solo walks, I have rules. So no, no news. I’m not allowed to read the news at all. No social media, no podcasts, no music.

‘cause I the idea is to not tell ever teleport. So you always have to be as present as you are, and the boredom is for me, what generates a lot of the writing. And so as I’m walking, if I’m not doing this stupid stuff, my brain just starts processing and writing and sentences. So I’m transcribing a lot.

So I use AirPods. To, and I have a little script I can say to the AirPods and it’ll append to a text file for me so I can just be walking and start talking. And so by the end of the day, when I do the writing, when I’m writing, two, three, 4,000 words, I’m referencing that text file all day.

I’ve been transcribing notes and things and that is really important. And I use, I have an Apple watch just for the map. So again, I don’t ever have to touch my phone and no notifications, nothing turned on for it. So that works pretty well. I find that’s good, but for I want to be as offline as possible.

I did this thing in the 2020 election. It was Biden and Trump and the walk started a few days before the election. I told all my friends like, don’t tell me what happens. And I had this fantasy ‘cause it was so crazy here. Everyone was, the news was so insane and everyone was, kinda losing their minds.

And I was like, oh my God, I’m gonna be walking and it’s. The election’s gonna be done and a farmer is gonna yell. Did you hear like Biden got it. People are just gonna be going nuts in the middle of nowhere. Japan. That was my fantasy of it. And the election happened and no one said anything. I was going in shops and cafes.

I was talking to farmers every day. Not one person said anything about the election. It was really shocking. It was just bizarre. I was like, so two weeks later you were the person I texted. And I said, alright, what’s going on? Because I told everyone not to tell me. So it’s an interesting exercise to do these kind of forced disconnections from these cycles.

And I found it to be enlightening for me in a way to keep a grounding and regenerate and then to be able to, you, you then get back plugged into it and you can face it in a stronger way. I find more kind of meaningful way. As opposed to just being like, oh my God, it’s all, everything’s falling apart.

Ah. Being in that state 24 hours a day. Yeah.

Sam Anderson: Which is what we are right now, unfortunately. Okay. Saw hand back there. Yep. Now that you have

Craig Mod: found your family, my birth family. Your birth family, Chicago. Yes. Take your mom, your sister walk. So the question was now that I found my birth family and I walked with my mom in Chicago, someone’s been listening to Rich Roll and to Ferris and I have.

So last summer I met my birth mom for the first time. She was 13 when she got pregnant. So she’s pretty young and we connected and it took a while. Ancestry. Anyway, long story short, we finally met last summer in Chicago and went to lunch and I had been completely anonymous through all the communication.

She didn’t know what I looked like or didn’t know anything. And I saw her and I knew kind of everything about her. And I was like, oh, hi, I’m the guy, and we go inside. To the steakhouse and sit down in a booth and the first thing she does and look like 13, like that’s not consensual. So I’m, my whole life, and I knew this about her, that she was 13 and then the birth father there had been a car accident and then a fight at the scene of the car accident, and then he was murdered.

So my genesis story was demented, right? It’s okay, there was a rape. This guy’s murdered, it’s, and that was like, that’s where I come from. That was the story that I carried with me for 43 years. And I sit down with my birth mom and the first thing she does, she opens her wallet and takes out a baby photo of me that the adoption agency had given her.

And she goes, I’ve been carrying this my whole life. And every year on your birthday, I think about you and who you’ve become. And I pray for your happiness and that you have a beautiful family and all this stuff. And I was like, whoa. Oh my God. And she just started talking more and more. And the pregnancy, she claims very enthusiastically that it was consensual.

She’s I, it was, I was a hundred percent in and yada what? Put that aside. So it wasn’t. But anyway, it wasn’t quite as terrible thing as you might imagine. But also, like she just said, I was so supported in the pregnancy and my aunt and uncle were there for me and I was getting, prenatal vitamins and I went to this other high school and I was given a mentor and all this great stuff.

And so that whole story starts to get rewritten and then she starts to talk about her story and she’s a computer programmer, it turns out, and I have a degree in computer science and she’s this kind of. Fierce entrepreneur that’s just hacked and pushed. And it was the first time in my life, the family that adopted me was very kind, but I never for a second really felt of them.

And it was always this kind of weird distance there. It’s they don’t get me. They don’t under, even today. They just don’t get what I’m doing at all in a way that kind of has always hurt. And sitting across from this woman and hearing her describe her life and every decision she made was the decision I would’ve made.

And how I’ve moved through the world. It was like, oh my God, this is where my brain comes from. It was so bizarre to sit there and feel that and then kinda have this genesis story rewritten about. You don’t come from murder. And I go what about dad? What? What’s the situation there?

She goes, oh, he’s alive. He’s in Florida. And she goes, he was 22, and I didn’t wanna deal with the court stuff and the police, so I picked a random guy who had been murdered out of the newspaper and said, that was your dad.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So

Craig Mod: very industrious. Yeah. 13-year-old.

Sam Anderson: He still owns the film rights for this too.

Craig Mod: Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah. Any producers out there? Yeah. Yeah. You’re welcome. Welcome to negotiate with my agent. But so that’s been a pretty weird thing that happened. And then part of that was finding out I had a sister, she’s 28, she lives in Alaska, and part of this book tour has been meeting family members.

So in New York, six weeks ago, my aunt and uncle came up. I met them for the first time and they’re like, Hey, we wanna take you to lunch. And I was like, sure. And they’re like, we’re gonna go. We’re gonna take you to Benihana. I was like, great. I’ve never been. I was like, this is not Japanese food. Whatever they served us was not, that was, I wasn’t even Asian food.

That was just slush. A slurry. Slurry of weird food by a guy who had, he was not into it. He dropped his flippy thing and got sauce all over the floor. It’s pretty hilarious. But they were fun to meet. They were pretty wacky. And then my sister, who didn’t wanna connect at first and I, which I was fine with, I’m like, this is all really heavy.

And then three months later she reached out and said, oh, actually I’m willing to talk. And we did a video call and immediately just realized we liked each other. She’s super cool. She’s got like a nose ring and cool tattoos, and she’s an elementary school teacher and she hates social media and she’s married to this really good guy, mark, who seems like a super dude, good dude.

And they have a dog and they go hiking all the time and they said, Hey, we want to come meet you on the tour. And they flew down to meet me in Seattle. And the night of my book event in Seattle was the first time I met my sister. I was getting pretty intense to have that right before you on do the event.

And then the next day we did a hike. In Seattle up to Rattlesnake Ledge and they planned it all. And the, the huge hikers, they were like, we wanna go canoeing and hiking. I was like, let’s just pick one. And it was pouring rain, like just. Total torrential downpour. And she was just like, let’s do it.

Yeah. And we’re just, I got an umbrella. I’m the only guy on the mountain with an umbrella. Everyone’s giving me weird side eye who is this guy’s not from Seattle? And one other guy had an umbrella and we were like, yeah, some umbrella brothers. And they’re just soaked. And her husband who’s in the National Guard was like, I think we should turn back.

This seems dangerous. And she’s no, we’re going to the rattlesnakes for ledge. So we did that and just great. She’s really amazing. And with the adoption stuff and the birth family stuff, there is so much. A baggage, especially with the parental stuff. I’m an only child. She’s an only child, and I think as soon as we connected and realized the other person wasn’t hopeless, wasn’t a complete ding dong.

I, we were both like, whoa, actually having a sibling is pretty cool and getting it when you’re 28 and 44 is funny. So we, we’re sending texts and she’s Hey bro, can I call you, bro? So it’s turned into this kind of cute thing. My birth mother wants to take me on like a hike in Switzerland, so her sister lives in Switzerland.

There’s all this stuff going on. So I dunno, we’ll do a little walk at some point, but it’s been, that’s been the sub. The journey of this tour has been to do the book tour, but also I’ve met my aunt and uncle. My birth mother was at the Chicago show. Some guy right behind her asked a question like, what’s the most intense adoption thing you experienced?

She’s right in front of him. I met my sister. It’s just been, it’s been fun. My cousin lives in Brooklyn. He works, he’s done worked on shows for HBO and stuff, A poet. It’s neat. Yeah. Cool. Fun journey.

Sam Anderson: Okay. We should probably stop so that Craig can assign some books. You gotta go buy this book.

You can get him inside the bookstore. Yeah,

Craig Mod: we’re going do. I’m gonna, I’ll be sitting in the back room and inside he signs it. He has a little stamp. It’s really cute. Yeah. You get numbers. I’ve been numbering every signature. Yeah. On the tour.

Sam Anderson: Yeah. So thank you all so much for coming. Thank you Sam. And thank you to medical books and thank you.

Yeah. Thank you so much for the sound. Thank you. Mariza.

Craig Mod: Thank you to God for no rain. Yeah. Stopping the rain right on time. Thank you. Alright. Once Who does that? Okay. That’s a good,

Sam Anderson: it’s a good way to end theologically.

Craig Mod: Thank you. Yeah, thanks a lot. That was fun. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you man.