How to take a long walk (w/ Craig Mod) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Chris Duffy: You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host Chris Duffy, and today we are talking about walking. Now I grew up in a family of walkers. Partly that's because I grew up in New York City, so if we wanted to go somewhere, we were walking or we were taking public transportation. But it's also because both of my parents really love to walk, albeit in very different ways.

My dad is a big nature walk guy. He loves hiking. He loves backpacking, he loves camping. He loves to walk in the woods. My mom, on the other hand, is an urban walker. She loves to explore new neighborhoods, to walk past shops through parks and through museums. Despite the fact that my parents love walking so much, it's not something that I've thought about a lot.

I haven't really examined walking very deeply, but it is something that today's guest, Craig Mod has put a lot of time and mental energy into. He has built this career as a photographer and a writer by documenting his walks long, often, multi-day or multi-week, walks through Japan where he has been living for more than 20 years.

Craig uses walking as a way to create a narrative to force himself to see the world at a human scale and to interact with people, places, and businesses that he might not otherwise ever encounter. And while Craig is normally walking in Japan, he has also walked paths around the world. Some famous like the Camino de Santiago in Europe and others, much less well known.

Wherever he's walking, Craig is very conscious about what he's trying to get out of a walk. Sometimes he's trying to get deep focus on his photography and writing. Other times it's connection and community with people who he's walking with. Sometimes it's adventure and other times it's returning to a place and knowing that place more and more deeply.

To me, the fact that there are so many different rewards that can come from taking a long walk, if we're conscious and thoughtful about it, well that means that pretty much whoever you are, wherever you are, and whatever it is that you might be looking for, Craig is gonna have something that is relevant to you.

So to start us off, here's a clip from Craig's beautiful new book, Things Become Other Things. In this clip, he's explaining his life and philosophy to his childhood friend Brian, who was tragically killed. And the book is written as a letter to Brian.

Craig Mod: 27 years since we last spoke. A catch up is in order.

Here are the broad facts. I'm now 41. I moved to Japan when I was 19. I walk a lot, mostly alone. Always compulsively down these old Japanese roads. I walk 20, 30, sometimes 40 or more kilometers until my feet feel wonky, hot in spots, minced until I'm sure I can't take another step. Then I do the same thing again the next day, and then the next repeat this For weeks, months.

I do this easily as if my body has been waiting for this my whole life. I photograph those, I meet the things. I see the banalities of life I pass, I dictate my observations and thoughts into a recorder, talking to myself like that bag lady who roamed our suburban sidewalks, who walked past our homes. Why didn't any of us try to help her?

Each night I spend three or four or five hours collating the photographs, compiling my notes, doing laundry, chatting with in owners, creating an archive. Where does it all go? Here? You're listening to it. The whole thing. In aesthetic practice. I even shave my head like some performative mendicant one who lives off stories as alms.

This is a walk. Yes, but also. A series of relationships with people and objects. Purpose wrought from a slide show of faces, old tales, new tales, histories, fields, forest climbs, pachinko parlors, and pine trees.

Chris Duffy: Okay, let's get into the conversation with Craig. Okay.

Craig Mod: Hi, I am Craig Mod. I'm a writer and photographer and my newest book is called Things Become Other Things, and it is Out from Random House, which is a big new thing for me. All of my other books have been pretty independent based, but this one's out from one of the big guys, so go check it out.

Chris Duffy: So let's start with kind of a simple question that's also a huge one, which is what does it mean to walk.

Craig Mod: I mean, for me, a big part of it is just, it's a tool. It's a forcing function to just focus the attention when you're really walking, you know, if you're being a considerate walker, you don't have your phone out.

You have to be hyper present. I mean, I think we are just programmed evolutionarily in the sense of like walking rewards us, because walking is what essentially saved us, I think, or pushed us to explore the world, to move beyond where we might have been. You know, 50,000 years ago or whatever. And so, I mean, the reason why we walked all over the world was because it feels really good to walk.

Chris Duffy: And there's, you know, there's so many studies that talk about the physical health benefits and the mental health benefits of walking, but you get at this kind of a spiritual aspect of walking and of exploring that some of us have lost. You have this great quote on page 13 of the book, but later on in the path into adulthood, many of us seem to lose this simple impulse to traverse dirt, to push on the edges of what's known to us.

We grow older and settle in, and the world shrinks, and the next time we lift our heads and survey things. It can feel like we've been stuffed into a suitcase.

Craig Mod: Well, I think for me, what became sort of spiritual about the walking, it took a little while for me to recognize this, but it's the continuousness of it.

So it's like if you just go for a walk in the afternoon, that's one thing. But really when it starts to become kind of heightened is when you do it day after day after day for weeks, and. You know, while I'm walking, I'm also photographing and talking to people, and I have all these rules. I have my walking rules, so I'm, you know, I'm not on social media.

I'm not listening to podcasts. I'm not listening to music. I'm not looking at the news. So anything that can teleport you out of the moment, and even when I arrive somewhere, I don't touch any of those things either when I'm in the middle of a big walk, because again, it's about that kind of hyper presence.

And every morning I wake up and I kind of go, well, is there gonna be something to write about? Is there gonna be something interesting enough in the day? For me to encounter. And if you just believe in it, and every day you do it over and over and over again, you just realize like, yes, the world, like the most banal of days is full of so much potential adventure.

I mean, that sounds so cheesy to say, but it's, it's really true. Like there are just so many interesting people that you're passing every single day that you never pay heed to in part because you've teleported or you're playing Candy Crush or whatever it is. And if you just make it. Your purpose to engage with all those people and walking is like the ultimate kind of hack slash tool to just do that.

And I think that's probably been the most, you know, spiritual slash theological element of all the big walks for me.

Chris Duffy: You know, this idea of not teleporting, while probably relatively few people listening are gonna be able to, you know, take a month off from whatever work and family responsibilities they have and just walk.

I think this idea that we end up in our day like teleporting out of where we are by looking at our phone or by getting sucked into the news or social media. I think that's something that everyone can relate to and something I know you really feel strongly about is using walking and using, like being on this human scale to cultivate boredom, to actually be present, even if there's not something immediately attention grabbing about that, that that's actually something really important.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of. Honing attention is driving yourself crazy with boredom, you know, because then you just start paying attention more. 'cause you're so, you're so hungry for input when you are walking and you know, my walks, you know, I'll go hours and hours without talking to anyone or interacting with anyone.

You know, there's certain walks I've done where I'll walk for days and days and days past, like KO gambling parlors, that's, or like big box shops and like, it's just giant trucks trundling by, you know? And so those kinds of days can be really, really. Quite exhausting. Your boredom is sort of at a, a peak, but you do pay attention to those things.

So in a way that while you're driving a car, you can kind of, as you pass all the gambling parlors or whatever, you can kind of just, I don't know, in, in a car, it's really easy for your mind to just be elsewhere. I find more so than in walking 'cause I walk the Tokaido, which is the route between Tokyo and Kyoto.

It's the old, one of the old route and it's the route that kinda, the sheen content, the bullet train takes. I've walked that twice. And then I drove it with a friend over seven days, kind of slowly last November. And it was interesting to feel in the car acutely just how different the road seemed. So like all these bits and pieces that when I was walking kind of felt really dire and dour and exhausting in the car, you just, you don't even feel 'em at all and you kinda just pass it.

So part of it too for me is that. Boredom is really critical to kind of put a finger on the pulse of a country or the pulse of a place and you can kind of tell by like how much that boredom is spiking or how much the exhaustion or how much you're kind of like pushing back against where you're walking, how much that's spiking as a, I dunno, resonance of just where I.

The country or the city or the prefecture or the state or whatever is at this moment in time, you know, which direction is it heading in? Is it being more generous to walkers or, or more generous to cars? But unlike a day-to-day thing, if you, if you know, listeners can't do, obviously can't do a, a week or a month of walking, and with this, the real sad thing is most people wait till they retire to do it.

And I don't see many other people doing like the Tokaido or the Nakasendo, but it's either college kids who are like on break. Or like 65, 70-year-old men who've just retired and they're, they're just pounding it out. But for everyday normal stuff, I'd say that the most transformative thing you can do, take the phone out of your bedroom.

I haven't slept with a phone in my bedroom in like 15 years. That was really intuitive to me a long time ago. The phone's outta your bedroom. Get like an alarm clock. Braun makes a bunch of great little alarm clocks. They're fine. Or get a HomePod Mini if you really, really need to have some kind of connected thing near you, but just don't have it.

Have a screen. And then in the morning also don't look at your phone. Don't touch it. Put it in a place where it's totally out of sight. I try to go until after lunch, before touching my phone. And if you can do that, great. And I, I find that even just doing that, the quality of the work I'm able to do in the morning.

And I try to also not have my computer be online. So it's like what you really, you, before you go to bed, you decide, okay, what's the thing I wanna work on in the morning? You have that set up on the computer, everything else is turned off, and you just go right into that thing. And I find the space I can inhabit when I do that is.

It feels almost like Godlike, you know, compared to like when you have the phone and all these notifications are coming in because your attention is just so in your own control.

Chris Duffy: Okay, we're gonna take a short break and I'm gonna let you focus your attention onto some podcast ads because would it even be a podcast if we didn't have ads? I think legally it might not be.

And we are back. We're talking about the art of taking long, multi-day, maybe even multi-week walks with photographer and writer Craig Mod. I kind of dismissively was like most people who are listening aren't gonna be able to, you know, take this long walk. But that's actually not true. I mean, if, if anything you're proof that like you have built a life where you make time for this, despite being I'm sure very busy and there being all sorts of reasons why it doesn't make sense to take a week or three weeks and go walk.

Yeah. 17 miles a day, right? Like there's, there's reasons why that would, is really difficult even in your life all the time. Yeah. And you still do it

Craig Mod: and a bunch of people do it. I've talked about Vipassana before. I've written about Vipassana. It's a 10 day retreat meditation retreat, and people go, you know, eh, you're so lucky to be able to take 10 days off.

And you know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Yes. I am so lucky because like I crowbar that into my life. But the reason why I even thought I could crowbar it into my life. Was, I wa I was invited to Stanford to see this guy give a little talk and it was like, there's like 10 of us in the room and it was Yuval Harari.

This is like 15 years ago, and I think Sapiens had just come out or something. And I just remember thinking like, wow, this guy, just the focus and attention and, and just inten the intensity of this guy was really overwhelming. And afterwards I looked him up. I, I literally had never heard of him before in my life.

And you know, he does famously, like six weeks of Vipassana or two months of Vipassana every year no matter what. And I was like, okay, if this guy who's now doing like the, you know, world Book tour and Obama's like, this is the greatest book I've ever read, sapiens, and yada, yada, yada. If this guy can always shove two months and he's been doing this for like a decade of Vipassana into his life, I can find 10 days.

Come on, you can, I can find it. Let's, let's work hard. Let's, instead of taking that. Other vacation we were gonna take or whatever, like, let's, let's make the vipa another thing also, what's good about knowing that these things exist, they're super fancy silent meditation retreats. You can do in Bali or whatever for a trillion dollars, and they give you, you know, like Ayurvedic, like oil drips on your forehead or whatever.

I don't know what they do, but Vipassana is free and it is was fine. I went to the Kyoto one and like, the food was amazing actually. It was really good. Everything about it was. Was totally acceptable, especially for the price. Like just knowing these things exist in the world, like you may have a moment that opens up where you can do a 10 day thing and not everyone can do it, obviously.

And especially if you've created, you know, that suitcase stuffing that can happen later in life where? You just have all these things and you know, family and kids and mortgages and all that crap certainly make it more difficult to do these things, but you know, you'd be surprised. I think certain partners are really encouraging of this stuff and like you can be like, Hey, if.

If you handle the kids for 10 days, I will give you, you know, you get a 10 day ticket to do whatever the heck you want to. And I think a lot of people are surprisingly okay with that. So there are lots of options to do these things. I think we, we love to talk ourselves out of doing these difficult things because it's easier to, to believe that we couldn't do it rather than, you know, struggling through something that might, you know, be tough.

Chris Duffy: And also doing a long walk is one of those things that is remarkably accessible. There's pretty much nowhere where there wouldn't be some sort of interesting walk if you walked far enough.

Craig Mod: I think actually America, America is one of the hardest places to do this because it is so car car centric. Like, you know, I run these, these um, walk and talks with Kevin Kelly and Kevin Kelly's the co-founder of Wired.

He is written all these books about technology. He's 73 now, I think, and he's just, you know, a wonderful guy really. Huge traveler and everything, and we've tried many, many times to set up walk and talks in America and they just, there doesn't exist roots that you could walk with with sufficient lodging along the way in the, in the way like these old pilgrimage roots have.

So we just did Spain two weeks ago, and I would say anyone listening, if you're like, oh, I wanna do a walk, I don't know where to do it. Uh, two places that make it so easy. You, you can't talk yourself out of it. Camino de Santiago in Spain, the French Camino is so great. In fact, I would just say that would be the one to do.

And if you only have like five or six or seven days, just do the last a hundred kilometers. I just walked the last a hundred K with this wonderful group and the. Path is amazing. It's beautiful. The hotels, like you have great hotels to stay at. The infrastructure's good, the food is good, but there are all sorts of companies that you, they'll just set it all up for you and you just show up and you just do the walking and they handle luggage and they handle hotel booking and all that stuff.

So anyway, that, that would be my advice.

Chris Duffy: I'm glad you brought up the Kevin Kelly walks because I wanted to talk to you about. You have all these rules and these ways that you think about walking, but you do it in two really kind of dramatically different ways as far as your experience. One is solo as really getting internal and doing your own creative work.

And then the other is being in these small group walks with Kevin Kelly, where it's a group of people and you're all together the whole time and you're having these conversations at night. So can you tell us a little bit about like how the rules differ and how the experience for you differs between those two?

Craig Mod: Yeah, I mean, they couldn't be more different. I mean, for me, the only way I'm able to do quote unquote real work, you know, things become other things, was written essentially drafted on a walk I did in 2021. That can't happen if I'm in a group, even with just one other person, I can't do it because when I'm alone and I'm walking, and during those big moments of boredom, what I find my brain does to kind of take up the slack, because what my mind wants to do is it wants to write.

You know, it's just, I, my, I just can't stop my mind from writing. And so as I'm walking and I'm in these deep, deep pockets of boredom, there's just tumbling sentences and paragraphs and thoughts and, you know, sort of. Synthesis. And as I'm moving and I'm just kind of dictating it into Notes app, you know, and just having it like do dictation, like literal, just like Siri dictation or whatever.

So when I'm solo walking and I don't have any of the teleportation things, no social media, none of that stuff, and then I'm interacting with people on the road. That's the only time I can do my quote unquote real work. And then when I do something like I do with Kevin, where we're walking in a group and I, I think the ideal number is eight, because what we do is we walk during the day for, you know, five, six hours.

And then at night we have. A three-hour dinner every night around one table and eight people is kind of the perfect size, where even if you're in a slightly noisy environment, you can kind of hear the other person across like the furthest point across the table. And then we do a three hour, uh, so-called Jeffersonian dinner every night where it's one topic, one conversation, uh, which means there are no like sub.

Conversations happening at one side of the table. Everyone is participating in every moment of the conversation. If a solo walk is about building a practice with yourself and honing sort of that sense of boredom and remembering what boredom feels like and allowing your mind to kind of flourish because of that, doing a walk and talk like Kevin and I do, is about this incredible bonding that happens between people at these dinners.

Over the course of seven, basically have six or seven dinners, so you're having. 21 hours of deep discussion with people over the course of a week, which as an adult, like basic, basically no one does, but like it is so moving and you know, again, like to do these walks. Did I have, do I really have time right now to be going to Spain?

And yet I know I've just prioritized it. I, I've created, I have this faith that. Doing these walks, doing these things, having these conversations is gonna pay dividends so much bigger than what I have to sacrifice right now to get to the place and do the thing.

Chris Duffy: I mean, hearing you describe it and reading about it, it is one of those things where I do feel like, wow, that sounds so amazing because it is something you don't get to do as an adult, is to have this really like dedicated time with people, but also to have this dedicated time where you're.

Thinking about the same topic altogether for that long. Yeah. Like it's been, the three hours of one night is so rare for people to have, like, we're just gonna have a deep conversation that's not, let's just catch up. They end up being what you did and kind of a summary. And then the other person gives a summary and then you say, okay, see you in another three months.

Craig Mod: You know, to talk about these different topics in depth with these different characters sitting around the table with you is, is is pretty profound and. Everyone kind of gets something out of it. You know, it's like we finished that Spain walk and like this happens with most, most of these walk and talks.

People kind of go like, this was one of the most in incredible meaningful weeks of my life. It all, you know, we didn't do anything aside from just walk and pay attention and be mostly offline, but. Yeah, it's, it's shocking how something so simple. Again, it's about this faith kind of what are contemporary theologies, what do they look like, what do they feel like?

And I think doing things like this help codify, you know, like what a good religious practice or healthy, you know, contemporary, modern religious practice feels like. And for me, these walk and talks definitely, uh, you know, feel like going to church in a really profound way.

Chris Duffy: I'll say for myself, the idea that being around other people and not taking out your phone and just being present and having shared experience, that that would be really, really meaningful.

That all is intuitive to me, for sure. Yeah. One thing that I think is actually not intuitive, that I know is one of your rules, and it sounds like it's actually a rule on both the individual walks and the the group walks, is to have everything booked in advance so that there's no thinking about logistics.

Oh, yeah.

Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No logistics is death. I mean, people underestimate just how much time it takes to like figure out where you're gonna stay. I mean, the Camino's, the Camino's a little different in the sense of, I think a lot of walkers who are like truly doing it as pilgrimage. Like you could do it really, really, really, really, really inexpensively.

You just kind of go to a town and just like knock on all the doors and someone will have a bed for you. But when I'm doing the Japan stuff, especially, the problem is, is there might not be another town for like. 20 miles. Mm-hmm. So you've got gotta, you've really gotta have it, you know, locked down in advance.

And also I make a spreadsheet, so like, you know, if I'm doing a 30 day walk, I have a spreadsheet of distances and like what meals are included. So I know exactly what I have to be thinking about. Do I need to figure out lunch and this and that? Because when I'm walking, I don't want. Any of my energy to go towards that, you know, and figuring out a hotel and figuring out, okay, how far am I gonna walk today?

I know people can, might hear that and go, oh my God, it's a spreadsheet that's so unromantic. There's definitely that angle, which I get right. You know, you meet someone along the road, maybe you wanna stay with them, you know, like what happens if you do that? Yeah. You know, there are all these like, dissenting voices to this, but my, my whole thing is always, well, if I meet something interesting or someone interesting or like, I'll just go back after the walk, the walk isn't to do that for me, at least these kinds of walks.

Is isn't to like go with as where the wind blows me, you know, it's to have it all set up in advance as a kind of tool and then to extract as much fullness out of the days as I can within the parameters of the, of how the thing is set up. And for me right now, the more important thing to focus on are the relationships, the fleeting relationships I have as I'm in the middle of a walk.

And I think there is something really powerful. Actually about accelerating intimacy because you know you're gonna be leaving this person in say, 15 minutes or 20 minutes. So, you know, I've, I've definitely made old men cry in weird little cafes in the middle of nowhere, not because I like beat them up or anything, but because you, you're able to go to a place of such vulnerability so quickly because you know you're just gonna leave in 30 minutes or an hour.

And I think if you are in this mindset where, oh yeah, I might just stay here all day, yada, yada, yada, you can tend to under. Accelerate that intimacy. Or you might think, oh, well we've got, you know, six hours together, or we've got a night together. And I think that is a very different thing than what I'm doing

Chris Duffy: because it's not just about booking hotels, it's also like knowing where your food is.

It's also knowing like exactly where you'll be and, and not, and not taking these side adventures. Right. Like, you know, a farmer invites you over to his house for dinner, you say like, I can't do that. Yeah. But I think the thing that is, is interesting to me about that is that. There's this real clarifying of what is and is not the task at hand, right?

Yeah. Like this is the vision of what I am doing, and as a result, I am not doing other things. And I think as an artist, it can be really hard to not pursue all the other possibilities that pop up. It's actually very, very hard to not say like, well, that seems interesting, or That seems like maybe it would be promising or lucrative, or any of the other things that it could be.

And to instead say, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing and there aren't excuses. I just do this thing.

Craig Mod: Yeah. I mean, the point of the walk is the work. I love the phrase, the reward of good work is more work. It's like the point of the walk for me is. To have all those experiences and then at the end of the day spend, you know, 'cause I'll walk for eight hours and then I spend four or five hours every night synthesizing, you know, where I'm writing two, three, 4,000 words.

But when I'm shooting, usually I'll shoot film and digital and then I'll take those digital photos and I will do a rough edit of those. And so. The point is that at the end of every day, I am completing this kind of full synthesis of the day. And also like you forget things really quickly. So even though I'm kind of note taking and, and doing those sorts of things, at the end of the day, if you do not sit down and spend the time to write up what you felt and what you experienced, you're gonna lose a lot of it.

And so for me, that is, is kind of the work at hand. Everything else that gets in the way of being able to do that is a little bit of a distraction. And also I think. There is a little voice in the side of, in the back of your head that might be going, well, why don't you go to the farmer's house? You know, what, what could be waiting at the farmer's house?

You know, da da da. And like I said, I can always just be like, Hey, here's my card. Like, and if, if that connection felt really potent, I can just go back and I have gone back over the years, I've, I've formed these really deep relationships with many people in the middle of nowhere. These folks who run the inns and cafes and, and hotels.

I have deep relationships and like going back again and again and again. And so the seductive thing about going off on the side quest is that it keeps you from doing the quote unquote real work, which can be scary. And so anything that feels like a great distraction from quote unquote the real work is seductive.

That's just the nature of things, and that's also why the phone is so seductive and why all the dopamine stuff and and notifications are seductive because it feels like you're doing something slightly meaningful or you know. At least it's keeping you busy when mm-hmm. You know, what you really should be doing in the morning is your writing, or you're illustrating, or whatever it is, whatever your creative practice might be.

You know, you have to have rules and you have to fight. Creative work gets done by fighting and, you know, maintaining the, you know, that space for it. And it can be hard sometimes it can be really tough.

Chris Duffy: Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but we will be back with more from Craig in just a moment.

And we are back. I've heard you say that one of the things you're trying to do in your work and make sure that you do every year is make things that are in the shape of a book.

Craig Mod: I mean, for me, books have always been the thing that have captured my attention. I mean, whatever, we all have this, you know, as kids we love books and you know, books and Nintendo were the things.

And then like computers kind of grew outta that because computers were an access to another version of Nintendo, you know, different video games and then, you know, you start programming and that's exciting and seductive. But books were always. These kind of cornerstone objects. And when I graduated college too, you know, I was really inspired by McSweeney's and what Dave Eggers was doing.

And then Eli Horowitz was doing with McSweeney's, like the, the, you know, I just, the book as an object to me, never lost its aura to me. The immutability of it has, has made it so powerful in the face of, uh, the internet and the, the fleetingness of so much stuff that's online, even though we may not delete things now as much as we used to and stuff is being archived or whatever, like still everything that exists online.

It feels like it could be gone tomorrow, and that wouldn't be surprising at all. And the same thing with like, you know, digital photos. I, I've only gone back to film in the last two years and I kind of. I sort of went back on a lark and the reason why I've continued shooting film is that having the negatives feels so powerful as an archival unit, but having stacks of the negatives, which will outlive pretty much all of us.

You know, I mean, they're like petroleum, you know, it's like just plastic stuff that like will never. Probably never biodegrade. It's kind of cool to have that. And I think that books, these objects are not only like a perfect technology in the sense of you don't need an instruction manual. If you can read, you know, reading is the only requirement.

They just make sense as objects. They are fully attention respecting, like they aren't pulling you in other directions when you're with a physical book. You're totally present. And as a clarifying goal for me, for my writing practice and my photography practice, having that as a, as a deadline, having, you know, producing a book, getting to getting to the book, I find nothing clarifies my, my artistic work or gets me to edit more, you know, and having those edges, having it not be digital where it can expand forever.

Mm-hmm. Essentially zero cost is also really powerful. So I love it. All the constraints of it. I mean, there's a reason why LPs are kind of having a big comeback. Mm-hmm. It's like we. Like being able to hold things we have an emotional connection to when it comes to music or art or you know, literature, there's something powerful about that.

You don't want a Kindle book, you want the physical book.

Chris Duffy: I totally hear that and I really admire it. And in myself with my own work, it's hard to not get sucked into the temptation of feeling like something that I make myself that doesn't have some sort of institutional stamp on it and that doesn't have some sort of.

Paycheck stamp on it and that that only makes it out to, you know, my circle and a small ripple out. Not a giant ripple out. It's sometimes hard to feel like that has as much value as it would if it was widely distributed. And I feel like, it seems like you believe that they have equal or different value that like, it's not like, oh, when I self-publish a book, that book is less than when I publish a book with random house.

And I think that's hard for many people to, to actually feel in themselves, to believe in.

Craig Mod: Well, it is hard to believe in because we have so much status points, you know, attributed to things like, okay, do you have this stamp or do you not have this stamp? You know, I'm having conversations with my community now about this who are kind of like, please don't change.

And like, 'cause I have this, I've cultivated this really incredible group of people that have supported my work. And now that I'm like touching Random House, I'm kind of going to these bigger, slightly bigger scales. But for me, okay, like look the point. Like, not to get too meta about, about like, why are we alive and like, what's the point of it?

So for me, what's really important is a, is a fullness of days, right? Like I, so I, I actually don't really believe that there's much meaning to anything that we're doing, or that, like us being alive really means everything's gonna disappear and we're gonna leave like no trace and no one will ever find anything.

And like, that's totally fine. So is is once you're like, okay with that. It sort of doesn't matter, but I do think like it makes all the, all the more miraculous that, you know, I love this idea of like us having vision, us having cognition, consciousness is the universe itself observing itself. You know, it's like it takes away our autonomy in this kinda interesting way.

So it's just a tool of the universe to observe itself. And so anyway, I think the miracle of that, whatever this. Thing is that we are doing in order to respect that or is to try to, within the context of your own scale and your own capabilities, is just find as many full days as possible. If your skills and your focus is family, that how do you make every day with your family as full as possible?

How do you get to the end of the day and you slide into bed and you just go, oh my God, this hand that I was dealt today, I couldn't have played it any better. I couldn't have gotten any more out of it in terms of fullness. And when I say fullness, I mean connection and kindness. So okay, we have that set, right, that baseline.

Okay. We're trying to find fullness. And then for me, doing the books is a way of further respecting. What I've experienced in those days. And so it's giving form to that fullness. And so it just feels like it's all part of this process of respecting whatever that my weird theology around fullness and like the meaninglessness of life and all that stuff.

Once you've got that established and you think about, okay, well how do I respect the work? How do I give the best possible platform to this work? And for a lot of my work, it's a, it doesn't have to be a big scale. So, you know, a thousand books or 3000 books or 5,000 books. The goal of. Going with Random House, with trying to hit a list is to, is to respect the work, respect the story of that book.

So things become other things is essentially this love letter to a best friend from elementary school. That's kind of the framing of the whole book and his memory I think is so important and it's so important to me that giving his memory the greatest chance of being experienced on a, on as big a scale as possible is the best way I can honor.

Who that guy was. So Brian, that's, that was his name. That's the best way I can honor Brian and what our friendship was and the themes of the book and being able to, I hope, I hope, have these kinds of conversations like we're having right now in a way that gets to more people. I. It gets more people doing these things because the more people that are cultivating attention and focus and, and, and going on long walks and thinking about the possibility of going on long walks, guess what?

I believe that the better the world will become and the better we, we will be able to respect this strange miracle of consciousness that we have. And I think, you know, being kind and exploring the world that is all part of our duty as, as humans.

Chris Duffy: Two final things that I'd love to, to talk about that play a role here, and I know that you really believe strongly in one, is kind of the like political and social choices that are made that allow for these full days to happen, right?

You've written really beautifully about. Your, your adopted country, right? Like Japan, you've lived for more than 20 years. This is, this is your home now. Japan has a really strong social safety net. It has the ability to have a comfortable, good life without having to work nonstop seven days a week and still not make ends meet.

And, and you've written about how that is. Is part, part and parcel of how to, how to find this fullness in those days. But on page 32, in your book, you talk about the Japanese word that loosely translates as abundance. And can you tell us about that concept and how that plays into all this?

Craig Mod: Can you read?

Chris Duffy: Okay. There's a word in Japanese that sums up this feeling better than anything in English “Yoyuu”. A word that somehow means the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance, it can be applied to hearts, wallets Sunday afternoons and more. When did this happen to me?

This extra space, this Yoyuu, this abundance space that carried with it. Patience and gasp. Maybe even love for a guy who provided almost nothing. These are the shocks of the walk. The walk makes me better than I ever could have imagined I could be. And in this too, I see how good you could have been. And you're talking to Brian there.

So there's this right. Personal fullness, but there's also this abundance because you are living in a place that makes it possible to experiment and to support.

Craig Mod: Yeah, I mean, I think what's difficult for people to understand who, who don't live in a, in a country that has robust social safety nets is feeling your neighbors totally taking care of is an incredible thing to feel walking down the street in a giant city where you're passing tens of thousands of people and knowing that they can only fall so far.

Is a weirdly exciting. Uplifting thing to feel. It's a contemporary American condition to not experience that because I think most of the rest of the world, you know, there is a pretty robust social safety net. Mm-hmm. In most first world countries that that can do it. They've chosen to do it. You can be like, I wanna have a family, I wanna have four kids, and I wanna run an independent bookstore and I don't have to compromise.

Like those kids are gonna be okay. Like, we don't have to pay a, you know. $10,000 for family healthcare because like, you know, my, my company isn't providing healthcare. Whatever, whatever weird, cockamamie thing is, you know, is the standard in, in contemporary America. And so from that you get. That term Yoyo, which, you know, as I wrote in the book, is this kind of excess space.

You know, I I, I've been describing it more and more as like the space in your heart to accept someone else, the space in your heart to have empathy. And I think a lot of what we feel in contemporary American politics is this, this crushing lack of Yoyuu on the part of, you know, so many people that are, that have so little empathy for others because they're terrified, because that social safety net doesn't exist because you know how far you can fall if you fall.

In a country like America, it's like just go walk down the streets of, I imagine downtown LA or downtown San Francisco. Certainly, you know, it's on display, like that's how far you can fall, and I think everyone in America kind of feels to a certain degree like. I, that could be me. And the reason I left 25 years ago when I chose to move to Japan, you know, and I think what moved me when I got here was feeling that social safety net and feeling people being taken care of.

And that was such a profound thing on a subconscious level to experience. That's part, part of why I decided to stay here. And then plus cost of living was super reasonable, so I didn't have to compromise on my work. I have to add this caveat, like of course there's. A terrible way of living in Japan, which is like the salary man life or the salary woman life, where you are just a sort of completely yoked to this job and you can't leave because the expectation is nobody leaves until like your boss leaves or whatever, and you're working these terrible hours and you're doing these terrible commutes.

Like that is also very prevalent here. But any of those people could choose to step away. So that option is here it is. It is available if you want it in Japan, even as a Japanese person who. Classically would be plugged into that system. I've had many Japanese friends who opted out of it and they have lived these, you know, as poets, as painters, as musicians, and they've had incredible lives and it's been made possible because of those social decisions that collectively everyone has, has kind of bought into and, and recognizes the value of.

And I just wanna say too, like there are so many parts of America, even contemporary America, that I love and that are incredible and that. Is, it just makes it all the more heartbreaking that everyone in the states isn't able to, you know. Lean into and enjoy. I mean, the amount of entrepreneurial energy in America totally, totally puts even a city like Tokyo to shame just the, that that gumption doesn't exist.

And so there are, I think, certain tradeoffs. I mean, and they can be, it's not, it's not to say like you can't, if you have a social safety net, you don't have like, like kind of an entrepreneurial society. Like I think that's a false dichotomy. I'm just befuddled by the fact that. You know, contemporary America kind of keeps getting in.

Its in its own way of achieving that vision. It's very bizarre to me because there is, I, there is so much I love and I am really looking forward to this book tour because these are all cities and places and I know there are gonna be people that I just love that are there and I just can't wait to be part of that.

But at the same time I go, I want all of you to feel what having this abundance is like what having Yoou feels like. And I wish that. I could give everyone that gift in, in America and see what happens. See what kind of decisions were made, understanding what's possible.

Chris Duffy: Um, Craig, it has been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much for making the time and, and giving us the energy to, to be on the show. I really, really appreciate it.

Craig Mod: Thanks for having me.

Chris Duffy: That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Craig Mod. I. His new book is called Things Become Other Things, and I highly, highly, highly recommend it. You can find more about Craig's work and read all about his walks@craigmod.com. The audio excerpt from that book was excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House audio from Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod, and it was read by the author Craig Mod.

I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects@chrisduffycomedy.com. How to be a better human is put together by a team that I would walk 500 miles with. On the TED side, I'd walk 500 more with Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bojanini, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le, and Joseph DeBrine.

This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson. And Matheus Salles who wants you to know that I would never actually walk 500 miles for anything? Touche fact checkers. Touche. on the PRX side, they are the social. Safety net of audio. I'm talking Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez.

Thanks again to you for listening. Please share this episode with a friend or a family member who you think would enjoy it. Share it with someone who you could imagine tolerating on a long walk. We will be back next week with even more how to be a better human. Until then, thanks for listening and take care.