The Real Japan — Craig Mod

Tim Ferriss interviews Craig Mod, tracing his path from a lower middle-class post-industrial Connecticut town to Japan, where he has lived for 25 years. They explore how chance access to a neighbor's computer, an early love of books and video games, and a fierce drive to escape scarcity shaped his uncompromising creative life. Craig recounts learning Japanese through music and homestays, a transformative 2009 hike to Annapurna base camp that helped him quit drinking, and viral early articles that launched his career as a voice on books and digital media. The conversation centers on writing as the source of nearly every meaningful relationship in his life, the power of artist residencies and archetypes, and his new book about a Japanese walk and a murdered childhood friend. Ferriss and Mod agree to split the material into two episodes because there is too much to cover.

• Craig reveals the most affecting story of his recent life is the adoption material and meeting his birth mom, which he says he has never talked about publicly in English anywhere before this interview.
  00:01:36
• Craig describes a 40-day trip through Tibet with a girlfriend during which he was possessed by a spirit, spoke in Tibetan in his sleep while cradling something not there, and was taken by a hotel manager to a Tibetan dream reader.
  00:43:09
• Craig admits his alcoholism ruined that intense relationship; she rightfully punched him in the face, and losing her was the biggest psychic damage of his adult life, leading him to start running at 3am through Tokyo.
  00:51:29
• Craig recounts climbing to Annapurna base camp on his 29th birthday as the culmination of getting off alcohol, an experience that made him believe he could generate magic and self-worth on his own.
  00:53:37
• Craig reveals he published his essay on books and the iPad, went to bed in Japan, and woke to find the New York Times had written about it and his inbox held hundreds of emails, transforming him into a recognized voice overnight.
  01:03:30
• Craig explains his forthcoming Random House book Things Become Other Things grew from a 600km, one-month COVID walk in 2021 on the Kii Peninsula, into which his murdered childhood best friend Brian unexpectedly entered the narrative.
  01:41:54
• Craig reveals his childhood friend Brian was murdered just weeks after graduating high school, and his own high school was publicly named by Betsy DeVos as one of the worst high schools in America.
  01:43:59
• Craig reveals that author William Gibson blurbed Things Become Other Things, which felt to him like the hand of God coming down to approve his work.
  01:49:07

• A divorced, lonely neighbor who had lost his son gave the young Craig the key to his house and bought him his own phone line so he could use the computer; Craig went to thank him ~10 years later and found he had died of a heart attack.
  00:07:18
• Craig was doing ANSI art and got into IRC around age 12-13, connecting with older artists mostly in California who later invited him to intern at their startup after high school.
  00:09:53
• Craig's first Tokyo homestay was a working-class udon shop family where the 11-year-old son masturbated around the house, a Korean laborer slept in the closet and asked him nightly to come to church, and an arcade friend bought him a full-body snowsuit to sleep in because the uninsulated house was freezing.
  00:24:51
• Craig is color blind; he can see strong vibrant red well, which is why his design work has been black, white, and red for 25 years.
  00:40:35
• Craig wrote his viral Panasonic GF1 camera review partly on Adderall in Harlem, put affiliate links on it, and it generated roughly $20,000 in affiliate fees in a month from selling millions of dollars of cameras.
  00:59:50
• Craig lived in central Tokyo through his 20s needing only about $1,000 a month to cover rent, food, and entertainment, letting him work uncompromisingly on books.
  01:00:21
• During his 23-25 era Craig was making about $15,000 a year, supplementing book work with CSS consulting.
  01:06:37
• At age 24 Craig was invited to be a judge at the Art Directors Club in New York, an email he initially thought was a joke.
  01:06:05
• At Flipboard (employee number eight or nine) Craig was paid $30,000 a month while paying about $1,000 a month rent in Palo Alto, banking it as future freedom.
  01:18:04
• Craig keeps his phone out of the bedroom and out of sight until after lunch when writing, and reads two paragraphs of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to jump-start his writing; he has reread Denis Johnson's Train Dreams 15-20 times.
  01:35:41