YouSaid · the spoken record

Craig Mod

lines on the record
174
first
2025-03-25
most recent
2025-03-25
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “So, I mean, again, the rent in Palo Alto was a thousand bucks a month for me for my share of the house. I didn't have a car. I just walked to the office. I was spending no money. I was like, this is great. I'm just going to bank all of this. This is like pure future freedom. That's all I saw it as. I was like, and I told Mike McHugh, the CEO, I was like, Mike, look, I'm not out here to work at this company forever. I'm so hungry to do X, Y, and Z, all these things I want to work on, all these things I want to do. you know, being out there and being close to everyone every weekend, I would book a hotel in San Francisco and I'd go up there and I'd lock myself in the hotel room from Friday night. I'd do a late checkout on Sunday every weekend. I would go up there and I would just write new essays about digital books and publishing. I couldn't compromise. That part of me felt so, that writing part of me, the literary part of me, I could not compromise. That paycheck, what are the three most addictive substances, carbohydrates, heroin, and paychecks, right? That's what they say.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Pure asceticism the whole way. And that house living in those house with Enrique Allen and Ben Hendritig, these two guys, and feeling their love, and these were two people who came from incredible families full of love and brilliance. That was life-changing to me. I met up with Liz Danzigo a couple months after I moved in there. We went to have pizza in New Haven at Sally's, I think a pizza. And Liz after dinner, she took my shoulders and she just says, Craig, you are a different human. Because we had known each other since I was about 26 and I was 30. And I moved into this house. And it was like a sponge. I was so ready to accept this love of people and to work with these incredible people and to just, again, believe in that self-worth ratcheting up. But the entire time I was at Flipboard, every weekend I was getting paid $30,000 a month, $25,000 a nice.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I got to this house in Palo Alto and it was just these two guys, we had no furniture. Our refrigerator just had like hummus and kombucha in it. No one knew how to cook anything. And I was sleeping on a yoga mat for the first like two months and then it's a tommy mat and it was like.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Design school at Stanford. These guys were such incredible people. I moved out there and I had gone from, I hadn't realized what a dearth of hugs I had had in my life. Sorry.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “I had two roommates. These two guys, Stanford D school grads, who just graduated, they were 24. I was 30. I just turned 30 when I moved out there”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “It was the first app that needed a waiting list because the servers couldn't handle people. It was the first waiting list app. It was like you'd give it your Twitter feed and it would create a magazine out of all the articles. And it was just pages flipped. Marcos Westcamp designed. It was just gorgeous. It was just beautiful. It epitomized like there was the Berg group in London doing like future studies about what books could be. There was a push pop press people Mike Mattis doing experiments around digital design on the iPad. All these beautiful design experiments on Flipboard was kind of part of that Melieu of folks that were experimenting, right? And it was like, great. Yeah, this is like totally my wheelhouse of like digital publishing, book design, beautiful design. And I get to hang out with people who are the top, top, top of their class, just incredible pulsing humans, like generous and brilliant. I mean, I moved out there. I moved out to a house two blocks from Steve Jobs, old Palo Alto.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I know it's so long ago now. The iPad came out, Flipboard came out six months later, and it was the most beautifully designed social media magazine.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And I was able to go to these publishing conferences because of the publishing company that I was part of, and I was able to kind of do art directors club stuff. And I was able to give little talks at universities about the bookstand. I always felt like I had a tethered to the greater world and I was able to use Japan as this incredible tool to uncompromisingly work on the work I wanted to do and to build up this asceticism, this sense of asceticism. But I went to Silicon Valley because at the end of my 20s, as I developed this sense of self-worth, I ran out of people that I wanted to collaborate with here, and I just wanted to work on a bigger scale with people that were thinking bigger. And Japan and Tokyo, for all of its megalopolisness, is a very provincial place. It does not think internationally. And if you want to kind of work on projects that are bigger and be around archetypes of people that are just thinking bigger, you kind of have to leave. So that was why I went to Silicon Valley. And it was dovetailing with all those articles, and I developed this kind of a little bit of online celebrity and mystique, and that allowed me to join Flipboard.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “It's all connected. It's all connected It's all the same thing. And so the entire time I've been here, the plan wasn't like, oh, I'm going to stay here forever. It was always, oh, there's an interesting opportunity. I'm doing this publishing thing. It's kind of going well. I'm having fun. Cost of living is so low. I can be uncompromising about what I'm doing. I was very lucky. I was going to New York quite a bit because of the publishing stuff. And so I didn't feel trapped here. I think a lot of expats or a lot of immigrants to Japan, in particular developed this kind of anger or frustration connected with it, because you can never be fully integrated. You can never be part of this place. And yet, a lot of people are just here as English teachers, our headhunters, and they're, I think options for personal growth are severely limited. But then they get to a certain age where they can no longer go back home and they can no longer kind of reintegrate back from where they came from or they don't have the skill set or they're too old to go back and they develop this kind of anger and this frustration. I was very lucky in that I was always engaging on kind of an international level with people.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “There's a huge safety of being in a place that can never throw you away because you're never going to be part of the thing. I mean, it's a really sad way of framing it, but that is 100%, I think, what for me made me feel comfortable here.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I was like, okay, this is interesting. And across all socioeconomic kind of strata, it wasn't like, oh, everyone here is super rich. It was like, no, I get these people, but everyone is kind of being taken care of in a way that I felt subconsciously. And because I will never be able to integrate fully, they can never throw me away. And I think as an adoptive person.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I think being adopted, the narrative I concocted in my head was that I was thrown away. I had very few facts about who my birth mother was. I knew she was 13. I just assumed it had been terrible circumstances, so I was born from a certain kind of violence in the adoption paper that we had. It said the father there had been a car accident and then he got in a fight at it and was murdered at the scene of the car accident. So I was like, okay, there's just violence everywhere. So I'm kind of thrown away. My genesis story that I concocted was one of just pain and kind of like, you don't belong here. And so I think part of what was great about Japan was that as soon as I landed, I felt a few things. One was society was taking care of people. I was walking past so many people.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “It could have been anywhere, but obviously Asia living in a country where you are obviously the minority and where you can never become accepted as A true citizen where you're forever going to be an immigrant, you're never ever going to be integrated is a weird choice. And I mean, it comes from, again, it just comes from all this scarcity, trauma, self-worth, like all this stuff. For me,”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “It was really in about 2013 2014 When I started doing the big walks and the big walks gave me purpose to being in Japan because I was kind of flailing. I was like, why am I here? What am I doing? And then the big walks were so, for me, transformative, exciting, fun that I thought, okay, I need to start giving these things form much the same way doing Annapurna, coming back, writing that article, giving that shape digitally. But those containers, they're still up on my website, though. Those articles are still up there from 15, 16, 17 years ago. And, you know, the design, the container was always really important. And I was like, okay, these walks are becoming more and more profound for me personally. How can I give them shape?”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Lot tens of thousands. Yeah, just bananas. No, I mean, that story is interesting. You know, and so all my adult life, certainly books of A huge part of it, and I've been making them. I've been working with printers, obsessing about paper and inks and design margins and all this stuff. Reading Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style over and over and over and over. It's so dog-eared my copy of it. And so, you know, this is not like a new thing. It wasn't like a couple years ago. I was like, oh, books, hmm, yes, let me do that. It's just always been there.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, it's Aren't profitable things, so all the money in tech kind of goes to other places. So, anyway, the digital book thing kind of puttered out.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “You almost need a Rockefeller who just be obsessed with digital books and they would fund it to great personal loss. They always say, how do you make a good fortune start with a great fortune and found a publishing company?”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Physical The whole thesis of that iPad piece too was like, look, don't make throwaway books, make incredible physical books, make beautiful physical books that lean into all the qualities that make physical things amazing. You know, the books that I'm producing, the books that I make, you know, it's like cloth bound, how do you do cloth bound with silkscreen, you know, with beautiful papers that open full bleed, just every page, every spread is a lay flat spread. It's like, how do you lean into this stuff? These qualities that can't be replicated elsewhere. I've just been lucky in the sense that they're still valuable and people are still really into books. Like we didn't, we didn't entirely throw them away. And the digital stuff kind of ended up being red herring. And it never really went where we thought it would go, in part because of monopolies, in part because of Amazon over controlling the market, in part because there just isn't that much money to be made in digital books. And so the investment side of things just really isn't there.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “So look, books have always been the focus since I was nine years old. You know, it's like I've just always been drawn to them as objects, the storyteller. It's always been there. Everything else has been a kind of side quest in support of the books, in support of like building up self-worth, in support of building up a financial foundation, in support of like becoming independent, all of that. And I mean, there's a reason why I left college. I didn't go back to Silicon Valley. I didn't go to Silicon Valley. And I immediately helped start this independent publisher. I felt so drawn to the power of these objects and the immutability of them. And even in the face of like the rise of the internet, that still to me felt like there was so much value there and that value wasn't going to disappear.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Learning from other people, meeting folks like Rob Giant Pietro, who's an incredible designer and design thinker, Frank Camaro, who's an incredible designer and design thinker, Liz Danzico, who I've mentioned earlier, who's an incredible designer and just amazing human. Meeting these people and watching them work and getting close to them. And then just realizing how much value there was in feeling that and just being happy with the ride. The fact that these articles did well and took off, it was bonus. It was deserved.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “And so, you know, all of my 20s, I had cultivated that asceticism, and I knew that I'd done plenty of things that didn't explode like those articles did. And so I was like, oh, I'll just keep, you know, I was just going to keep doing it. I don't know. I was just going to keep doing those things because there's so much inherent value to me doing them. I felt so drawn to it. And the process of learning to do them better, watching Oliver”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “And then as soon as I kind of felt I had that one summer where I introduced the bigger company that paid me really well and I was like, okay, this doesn't work for me. This totally does not jive with my And so when I got to Tokyo and I realized, oh wow, rent is this cheap, cost of living is this cheap, it just felt like it was like a wormhole in reality where I could live in the biggest, most incredible city in the world and I could pay so little and I could focus uncompromisingly, again uncompromising.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “It's not like I was like, you know, we were going on these crazy vacations and like had a yacht and like, you know, it was like we had six houses and like 15 cars and I was driving around. It was like there was, I wasn't coming from this place of incredible abundance and then like having to sacrifice all through my life I had been sort of trained ascetically.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “My tenacity was plowed into creating a lifestyle where I could always say no to things that I didn't want to do and I knew I could, there would always be another creative or fine art project that I could commit myself to and could do so uncompromisingly.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Yeah, I mean, part of what I was doing, you know, I listened to the Brandon Sanderson interview. I mean, that's an incredible interview. Just talk about tenacity, like infinite, infinite tenacity. What? Like six writing six, seven books before you go to the market to even try to sell them.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Books in the age of the iPad. I hit publish here in Japan at night. I went to bed and I woke up. The New York Times had written about it. I had like hundreds of emails in my inbox. It really changed my life. It was just suddenly I went from being this invisible person to being this voice about books and digital media and where things were going. I went to south by southwest like a month later and it was just insane. Everyone I wanted to meet wanted to meet. All of these heroes, these design heroes, these design figures.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Winter House was this just an incredible early 90s 2000s design studio. And one of the directors there was one of the people, board of directors for the art directors club. And he had just been watching my work online. I was doing these kind of experiments. We were putting out these books. And he's like, oh, this kid is doing interesting stuff. He should come and be a judge. You know, I had these things that were happening that were sort of signals that were hard for me to believe in. This is a fluke, this is a fluke. I'm not valuable. This happened accidentally. And then I go to the art directors club and I'd meet all the people there and I'd be like, oh my God, I'm not supposed to be here. It's just this incredible infinite imposter syndrome. Anyway, but there's a slow ratcheting up and the iPad comes out. And then I was like, okay, I've been doing these books. I've been doing a lot of digital work. I'm like, I can write about the future of books on the iPad. And I wrote, again, committed to this article. And I wrote this thing called...”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Mindset. And I did that, and then that led like a month after that, the iPad came out. And I had been doing all of this book design. I'd been winning awards as a book designer. When I was 24, I was asked to be a judge in the art directors club in New York City. I thought it was a joke email. It was one of the Winterhouse people. Again, talk about these like people picking you out.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Having those options to live in this place and to get the benefits of being in a big city and only needing to make $1,000 a month. So, anyway, getting $20,000 was like, oh, great. There's like two years of rents taking two years of living. And I got that, you know, in a month doing this thing. And it taught me there's a financial sustainability to this. If I commit to these things, I try to transmute these experiences, these kind of personally transcendent experiences into something that I give to other people. There's a response to that. It resonates. So that was exciting. Again, these slow, like, you could just hear this creaking, this ratcheting up of like this meter, this weird old meter of like self-worth. Like, oh, I have value. I don't have to operate on such a scarcity.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “That is the interesting thing about Tokyo is that there are options. You don't have to live far in the outskirts. And every neighborhood, still to this day, there are affordable options. Yes, it's small or whatever. Sometimes they don't have baths. You have to use the public bath, things like that. But there are options, which is what is so powerful about the city. And again, it's we can talk about what I felt here that kept me here subconsciously about kind of just being supported by society.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “We were selling like millions of dollars of these cameras, and I had always lived because of this sense of scarcity. I had always lived. Pathologically below my means. My cost of living, one of the reasons I stayed in Tokyo throughout my 20s was my cost of living was so low. I could live in the center of this incredible city, and I needed to make $1,000 a month that would cover my rent, all my food, and like entertainment, which was just like...”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Stephen King back in the cocaine. So I committed to this thing and it came out and it just got picked up everywhere. And it, you know, it turns out there's a reason why there was all these camera review sites because I was smart enough to put affiliate links on it. And basically in a month, it generated like, I don't know, $20,000 in revenue. It was insane.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “I think at 11, and I'm just like up. I'm like writing this camera review eating carrots and stuff. They had like a bag of carrots. I'm like eating carrots like a rabbit, writing this camera review. I remember we were in Harlem and it was like a it was almost like a basement apartment. I'm looking out. There's like people's feet walking out outside the window and I'm like, I got to write this review.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Was a long time. It wasn't that big of an article. Refining. I remember hilariously, I was in New York for part of this. I was in New York City and a friend was like, hey, do you want some Adderall? I was like, I'm working on this thing. They're like, you want some adderall? And I'm like, yeah, sure. I'll try some, give you some adderall. So I remember it's like, I'm in Harlem. I met my friend's apartment in Harlem. Like, it's like 11 o'clock at night. I had never taken Aderall before. I was like, oh, okay. I take it.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “And so I came out of that Nepal experience believing in magic and believing in that kind of love and being able to like generate it on my own, not having to have that person. Again, ratcheting up the sense of self-value and like I can produce these kinds of experience on my own. And I want to give that to the article. And so I just worked on it for weeks and weeks and weeks, which is like.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “I took that archetype of Oliver, who was generous enough to give me studio space in his studio. I applied it to this walk and to this camera view. This guide, too, he was like, there was this love that I wanted to give this thing because we came down from the mountain, the guide, his name is Home, Home H-O-M. We come down and we're both we're saying goodbye and it's like such an emotional goodbye. We don't want to say goodbye. He goes, diet, you know, older brother, he goes like a month before we met, my older brother died in a motorcycle accident. And I've not had any happiness since then. And meeting you, it was like meeting him coming back. And we're both just like sobbing like, oh my God, I love you.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “There was a guy in Tokyo who I was sharing a studio with Oliver Reichenstein who's running this thing called information architects and he was doing it and again this is like the power of archetypes I would sit next to Oliver and watch him work on these mega articles about typography or whatever and design these beautiful pages and I was like oh that's how the work is done this is how long it takes this is how much you have to refine so”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “There was a lot of designers on the web like Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, working in the early mid-2000s, late 2000s, like refining the CSS spec and like showing CSS Engarten showing what you can do with design and stuff like that. But it was always... There were blogs and stuff, but there weren't really articles that were like long-form design in the same way you do for like a magazine.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “But this was early. I mean, very early. This is 2009, and it was the Panasonic GF1. It was this tiny little camera that was actually made, I think it was made to market to women because it was like meant to be this like really tiny cute camera, but it was also this amazing camera. And it was Micro Four Thirds, this new technology, this new sensor. And I was like, this is really kind of exciting, really cool. I wrote about that, and the article went bananas.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “And you're kind of at this lip, it's a huge fall down, but you're also in this, not caldera, but you're in this cradle. You're surrounded by an aperna and mach pachade and like all these other megapeaks. It's just amazing. The base camp is in this cradle of beauty and lifelessness. It's like you're on the moon. And I sat up there and it was just a really important moment to sit there and not have a smartphone and not to be like taking photos and like trying to tweet or whatever. That trip was so powerful to me. I came back and I was like, I have to write about this and I have to write about the camera that I was using. And I have to create something from this. I have to rest something from this experience, give it form. And I wrote this ridiculous camera review. That was kind of one of the first, I don't want to say it was the first field review. You know how like everyone does like the field review of like iPhone cameras and stuff now?”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Got to Basecamp on my 29th birthday. And it was a full moon. And I put this thermos of coffee or hot water in my jacket. And I walked out to the edge of the moraine looking out over, essentially you're on the moon up there. I mean, the edge of the what?”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Yeah, so I fly out there, I go to Polkata, which is the town that kind of everyone starts the trek from. I wasn't going to hire a guide at the last second. I thought, okay, maybe I shouldn't do this alone. And I went to like the random guide shop and I said, hey, do you have a guide? I just want them to be there to make sure I don't die. I need to be alone. This needs to be kind of like a solo thing. I'm being like a weirdo. And he's like, the guy's like, yeah, no problem, no problem. Yeah. He gives me this young guide. He must have been like 18. And he was the sweetest, most compassionate, incredible human. We bonded. As brothers. He was calling me older brother. I was calling him younger brother, die and buy.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “It's headache elevation. That's the elevation. Headache elevation. You're definitely not comfortable. You're definitely at altitude sickness levels.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “And that was after we had broken up, and I felt like all the magic of my life was done. I felt like there was no way for me to experience magic again. I felt like she, and again, it's this totally irrational sense of scarcity. The amount of scarcity I felt as an adult in my twenties is just shocking. It was this fathomless sense of scarcity. Like the money's not going to be there. The love isn't going to be there. The support isn't going to be there. And then when I lost her, I was like, I'm never going to have anyone who will ever love me like this person loved me. And like, I'm never going to be able to create like I created with this person. And I had to start proving myself that that wasn't true. And I climbed up. I was like, okay, I'm just going to go to Nepal and I'm going to climb up Anapurna, go to Basecamp. It was pretty random choice.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “These were the most important years of tiny little steps. My time is more valuable. I'm going to be a person who runs. I'm going to be a person who can take care of himself. I still drank, even though I tried to not drink, but I started lowering. It took me about four full years to completely get off the sauce in a really dangerous way. And it kind of, part of it culminated in going to Nepal and climbing up to Annapurna Base Camp.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “I was at this time with the publishing company thing, we were producing these books that were winning awards and making absolutely no money. And so I was consulting, doing like web design, consulting and stuff like that. And I was like, okay, I'm going to start charging absurd amounts of money for my time. The worst that can happen is people reject. They started accepting it. And I was like, oh, little by little, all these stupid little steps from the time I was basically 27.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Deliberately address this lack of self-worth that I've been carrying around for all of my adult life and that had, I think, driven me to drink the way I drank, that to give into whatever those genetic impulses were, and to start to go, okay, we're going to run, we're going to be someone who runs. A lot of this is also like very atomic habits style stuff. It's like, who are you going to be and how are you going to set yourself up to be successful? I'm going to be a person who runs. I'm going to be a person who doesn't drink. I'm going to be a person who charges a lot.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “But losing her was probably the biggest psychic damage I had ever encountered in my life, you know, as an adult. And I remember just lying in my tiny apartment in Tokyo, my six mat, Tatami Rum apartment in Tokyo. It was three in the morning. I wanted to die. It was rock, rock, rock bottom. This isn't like a rich role story. I didn't like get up and run 40 miles or anything like that. But I was like, I'm going to start running. And I went out and I ran like 5K at three in the morning through the streets of Tokyo. And I was like, that felt good. And I was like, okay, I need to stop drinking. And to stop drinking, I'm going to run.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “On that trip that happened a couple months later We end up staying together for about three months. And basically, I mean, it was just about 10 years worth of lifetimes as bright.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Experiences like this, I think, informed this sense of like just give yourself up to what the day Could potentially give to you And so I ended up going to all these temples I would have never gone to. I went to the Dream Readers apartment, which was like the most bizarre, beautiful place I went to in all of Tibet in that entire trip. We went to these temples, you know, met these monks, say, hey, can you burn this for me? Oh yes, of course, absolutely, you know, give them like a dollar, 50 cents or whatever. The whole thing cost nothing. It was clearly not a scam. It was clearly this thing that a lot of locals were participating in. And it was magic. It was just pure magic. So anyway, things like that were happening with this woman. I screwed it up because of my drinking. I ruined the relationship. She punched me in the face at one point very rightfully so, you know. And she was like, hey, I can't be with someone like you.”

    2025-03-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #802: Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT