YouSaid · the spoken record

Craig Mod

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174
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2025-03-25
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2025-03-25
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  1. “Someone's in the dream reader room, and we're waiting for them to get out. And then our term comes up. I go in there, you go into this room, it's all candles, Dalai Lama photos, like all this stuff. It's like, you feel like you're in this really holy space. And the guy from the hotel interprets for us. And I tell her the dream, I tell her what happened, and she gives me this blessing, puts a white wreath around my neck, gives me this little satchel of seeds and tells me to put them under my pillow when I sleep. And then writes me a prayer. And she says, okay. Here's these three pieces of paper. You have to take them to these three temples and they will burn them for you tonight. They'll know what to do. Just tell them the dream reader sent you. And you'll be okay. You'll be fine. Everything will be good. And I was like, no one's asking me for money. And the guy, the hotel guy is like, oh, you can like leave a tip if you want or whatever. And like, you know, it was like two dollars or something. I like put two dollars in a little thingy. And then we go to the temples and like it ended up becoming this incredible adventure. This connects with a lot of my walking as well. You know, it's like having”

    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. “One of the workers there is like, you know, the manager's like, okay, take them to the Dream Reader. And I'm thinking, okay, this is a scam. I'm getting scammed. Something's like weird. It's going. He takes us and we go to the outskirts of Laza. We go to this really kind of weird apartment block that was just made of concrete. It was maybe like two or three stories tall. And he takes us to this room on the third floor. And there's a line of people, line of Tibetans waiting at this door. And they were all waiting to have their dreams read. So it was like, okay, this is bizarre. So we wait, we stand in line. We go inside. We sit down inside. The most beautiful, I don't know how old she was. She was anywhere between 15 and 1,000 years old. Like she was just this creature of just the most bizarre light walks out. It was like being in the matrix, you know, the scene in the matrix where they're like with the spoon and the bending and you're in this random apartment, the TV's on, you know, it was like that situation. She comes over, brings some yak buttermilk tea, some cookies.”

    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. “He's like, oh, yeah, yeah. No, we know what's going on with that here. We'll take you to the Dream Reader. And so I was like, what? You'll take me to the Dream. So I ended up, I'll try to truncate this because it can kind of get a little bit long”

    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. “It was so bizarre. And we had been, you know, and you have to imagine, like, I don't know if you've ever been in love to this degree where it just feels like everything in the world is fated, like everything is a sign that you need to be together, that this is magic. Like only these things can possibly happen because you're connected, you're together. We both bought, I remember we pulled out our books on the first day of the trip. We had both brought The Stranger by Camus. It was like, oh my God, we're faded. I went back to the hotel and I went to the manager and I was like, hey, I don't think we can stay here tonight. He's like, oh, what's wrong? And I was like, well, you know, I was kind of possessed, saw this. He's like, did you see the woman? And I was like, yeah. Oh, God.”

    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. “We can't I mean. Yeah, there was we stated this one little hotel in Laza that had not always been a hotel. You know, it was this old structure and woke up the next morning and My girlfriend was being very strange. She was being very weird. And I was like, What's going on? She's like, I'll tell you when we get outside. I was like, what? You'll tell me when we get outside. Like, what's this about? And we go outside and she goes, okay, last night, we have to get out of there because last night I woke up in the middle of the night. You were on your side of the bed cradling something that was not there. You were speaking in Tibetan. I couldn't get you to wake up. I was trying to speak to you in English, trying to speak to you in Japanese. You wouldn't respond. And I finally crawled over on your side of the bed and I kind of took the air that you were holding. And I turned you on your side and you were able to like calm down and go to sleep. And I was like, oh my God, I had this because I had had this vision slash dream of this woman in white standing in the doorway and at the foot of the bed the night before. And I don't know what was.”

    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. “Something like that. And I was madly in love. I fell madly, madly in love. I was 26, 27 years old. And I just, I had the most incredible love connection I had ever felt, this like otherworldly sense of being in love with this person. And we connected so intensely and immediately went on a 40-day trip like a week after meeting.”

    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. “Allows me to just drink, and then after two or three drinks, something activates where it's just all we live for is more drink. And I think, you know, for most of my 20s, because I had such a low sense of self-worth, because of where I came from, because I felt this abundance of people around me that I didn't feel I had. And I didn't know how to ratchet that up. And I had this desire to produce culture or to produce art, to produce literature at a level that I didn't know how to and I didn't know how to bridge that gap. And what I ended up doing was because I didn't have mentors, because I didn't have archetypes near me, I just drank like a fish. And I played a lot of music because that was one thing I did have mastery over and played a lot of music and I played a lot of that blacked out. And, you know, it was just, I'm really lucky I didn't die. I mean, it would be one of these things where many, many mornings of my life, I woken up and it's just been checking, is my face okay? Did I break my skull open?”

    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. “Can you tell? Yeah, that's an inflection point. I just got like goosebumps actually. So I really struggled with alcohol in my 20s. My teenage years, I didn't touch anything. I was militantly straight edge-ish. And basically, looking back now, I realized I had such a strong impulse to make sure I could get to whatever the next place was. Anything I saw that could hold me back, which included falling in love or doing drugs or anything like that. That was like a retarding agent as a teenager. I was like immediately, I was like, okay, I don't need this. And I got to Japan and it was like, oh, this is a place to reinvent myself. And I started drinking because as you do, because people drink so much here. And it turns out that I can drink a lot. I can have 15, 20 drinks not thrown.”

    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 like a sane boarding school. It's not fancy. But there's resources and there's like a great music program and she can take piano lessons and guitar lessons and there's like a great sports program and all this stuff. And I was just like, oh my God, you're so like, you don't understand. I'm like shaking her. She's like, please stop. You're embarrassing me. Like, why? Go, leave, please. Dad, get out of here. But I was just like, I was like, this is so, so incredible that you can do this. So as like the sense of like, I know how I could use those resources in a way I think even when I was at UPen, I didn't quite understand. But I did. I worked hard. I was committing to these things. I was working hard.”

    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. “Oh my god, I would have cut off. I would have literally cut off a finger to have had this opportunity when I was 15 to be able to come to a place like this. It's not that fancy. It's like, you know, whatever. It's like, I didn't want to surrounded by a bunch of pricks. So it's like it's very 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

  11. “Big back story to all of this, but I dropped her off. She's going to school in New Zealand. We wanted her to kind of like find an interesting place. This is like my ex-kid. So it's like this, we can talk about this and adopt and like what blood means for family or whatever. But I consider her, she's my daughter, you know, even though whatever, like it's a complicated situation. Anyway, to New Zealand, and I brought her there in January, the two of us, I took her down to school. I went to like the parent initiation and all that stuff. She's 15. And I was so excited for her. I mean, it was a little bit embarrassing. I was probably too excited. But I 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

  12. “I'd like to say that I was caring more, but I'm not sure I knew how to work yet. When I think back to who I was back then, I don't think I understood what really truly committing to like a creative project felt like. I wish I could go back in time. Like going to university, I think when you're 18, 19, 20 is such a waste. You just don't know what you're doing. I certainly didn't. There's a part of me that's like, I would really love to go back to school. I just dropped my, as a footnote, I just dropped my stepdaughter off at boarding school.”

    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. “But Sharka, I would say, saw enough of like potential slash and intuitive sense of design that she elevated. And I did some branding work. I did branding work for the publishing company that started with this guy, the editor-in-chief. And she kind of reviewed it and she gave me all this amazing feedback. So she really, she made me feel like I could do it. Which was incredible.”

    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. “Design slash all of my design. It's like red plays a pretty, it's basically black, white, and red. That's like. I've been riffing off of for 25 years.”

    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. “Yeah, red, green, but like a strong, vibrant red, I can see really well, and so that's kind of what I was drawn to. If you look at a lot of my early”

    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, he was totally, he was terrible. He was terrible. But this is the thing I think that's difficult for people to understand. If you come from a place, Where you aren't surrounded by kind of a sense of culture or a sense of archetypes or whatever. And then you leave and you go into the bigger world and you realize people aren't sort of operating with the same deficit you might have in those ways, that your sense of self-worth to ratchet that up is a really difficult, long process. And that's basically what I spent all my 20s doing. And I think Sharka saw in me that I had a certain intuitive eye for design and she was able, even though she was so critical and she was critical of some of the things I remember she asked me. She's like, why did you make that red? And I was like, I don't know. I kind of like red. She's like, look at this idiot. He doesn't even know why he made it red. You know, I was like, I was like, oh man. But really, the reason was, you know, I'm colorblind and like I don't really see that many colors. And so I was like, oh, red is like a color that is easy for me to use.”

    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. “I printed out a portfolio at Kinko's, this really terrible design portfolio. And I went to Razorfish. I went in there. I was like, hey, I'd like to talk to someone about, you know, maybe interning here or working here. And they brought over this manager. And he just, he was this really nasty guy. And he just, he was like, who are your favorite designers? Who do you like? And I was like, you know, I'dn't gone to design school at this point. I was like 18 years old. I was 19 years old. I came from this place that like literally no one had picked up like a John Uptike book, let alone looked at the cover, let alone thought about who designed it. And I'm like, you know, I was really into internet design. So I was like, K10K, and I was naming all these handles of anti artists and stuff. And he's like, who's that? So I 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

  18. “So, I think I'd spend a lot of my teenage years in this autodidactic way of trying to understand design. I didn't know any of the greats. And I remember the first summer I was out in San Francisco, I remember going to razorfish.”

    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. “The publisher out of San Francisco, Dave Edgar's, he's got heartbreaking work of staggering genius comes out. The moment that was like, what is happening? This book is so meta. This is like, you know, this is so much fun. You know, he's funny, it's a moving story. And he founded McSweeneys. And McSweeney's was doing so many interesting things with the book as a form. Do like mini mix sweenies that's kind of connected with Japan. That was kind of the thesis.”

    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. “Designs like I remember we had to like design a book cover and I had like the sun also rises or something. I thought it was a Hemingway cover. Everyone's got their stuff up on the wall. Kids are like crying because she's like, this has got to be, I hate this. This sucks. This is terrible. This is bad. But like be very specific, more specific than I'm big. Let me tell you the ways I hate this. Yes, so many. Where do I start? Yeah. She was amazing. She was so great. She blew open my mind about design and about book design and it got me obsessed with wanting to make books. I'd always loved books. I'd always loved technology. You know, all the tech stuff, the blogging stuff, you know, the online writing, whatever, the news groups, all this was interesting, but nothing really captured my attention like physical books. And around the same time, McSweeney's”

    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. “In this digital media lab, yes, yes, okay, and teaching us how to use the latest 3D programs. It was this totally interesting kind of like analog digital thing happening. I had some amazing photography professors. My focus was photography, but I also had a design professor, Sharka Highland, who was like this Eastern European, I don't really know what her background was, but she was like the meanest unless she liked your work and which she loved you. You know, it was like one of these teachers that like she would not pull any punches. And so like everyone has their.”

    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. “Super early, super early, because you had the MIT Media Lab, but that was only grad school. And I loved John Midas' stuff, Ben Fry's stuff, Casey Ray's stuff. That was all coming out of MIT Media Lab. And I was so into all that. But I was too young to go to MIT as a grad student. And I was like, okay, where can I do this? And, you know, and it was like NYU kind of had a program that was like technology, I think, in maybe, or CMU had technology in theater. And UPenn had fine arts and computer science. So I was like, great, let me do that. And the fine arts component was incredible. And I had two professors that kind of changed my life. One was Joshua Mosley, who he was an acclaimation animator guy. He runs the department now. He was just this incredible archetype of the artist doing these bizarre claymation things.”

    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. “Tokyo as a student. I want to go do grad school stuff anyway. We can start getting the publishing company up and running. And when I was at UPen, I had a couple of amazing professors. The reason why I picked UPenn was because it had a computer science and fine arts program. It was called the DMD, Digital Media Design.”

    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. “I can't do this. And I remember walking around San Francisco that summer that I had, I was working at the big company, and I was just like talking with my friend Rob. And I was just like, and they offered me, they're like, hey, we'll pay for college. Like, stay with us. They really, you know, I was like, whatever. I was kind of talented at doing web crap. Like back then. Not many people were. And I was like, no, I can't do this. I was like, I'm running away to Japan. I had always had this fierce independence. And it's connected with where I come from because like where I came from, I saw there was no healthcare. People were fairly struggling. You know, a lot of my friends, their sisters were pregnant as teenagers. It was like kind of endemic. Like people just weren't really being supported. So from a very young age, I was like, I have to be independent. I have to control my destiny. I have to be sort of pathological about making sure I'm secure to like get to the next stage. And so being independent was really important to me. My buddy, you know, the editor-in-chief's like, hey, let's start a publishing company. I was like, great, let's do that. I'll move back to Toronto.”

    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. “Summer between junior and senior year, I did an internship in Tokyo at a magazine, and the editor-in-chief there was like, hey, I want to start a publishing company. Do you want to be the art director? And I was like, yes. Just because one of the summers in Silicon Valley, I did an internship with a startup, like a small design agency. And it was great. And then the second summer, I got a job with a bigger company. And I got a taste of being in a company. And what does that mean and like being part of this system? And I was just immediately like, okay, I can't do this. I had no intention. I just couldn't do it. I was like, okay, this isn't for me. This isn't for me. The system is.”

    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. “Here, here's my advice. Okay, you're listening to this. You're like, you're a teenager or whatever. You think you want to go to Japan? Go to Japan, don't do a home stay. That's my advice. I think all of my friends who are in the dormitories, I was so jealous of them because it was just sane and controlled and you had heaters and stuff like that.”

    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. “It's funny now, but it was pretty stressful. It speaks to how much I was enjoying everything else. I hitchhiked across the country. And I told them, I said, hey, I'm going to go hitchhike to Fukuoka now. And they're like, oh yeah, good luck. Bye.”

    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. “And so he would come into my bedroom every night and he would kneel in the entryway of my bedroom and go, Kregusan, I want, will you please come with me to church? Like every night he would ask me to come to church. So I'm like, I'm just in the most, and I'm trying to like figure out who I am. I'm trying to like recreate this personal identity. And I'm just like, there's ejaculate flying everywhere. There's cockroaches shooting across the room. I'm going to sleep in a snowsuit. This Korean kid is asking me to go to church with him.”

    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. “So I've got the 11 year old son jerking off all over the place. And then there's this Korean guy who's like maybe 25. He sleeps in the closet. He was super Christian. Because, you know, it's like Christianity is sort of like it's a huge thing in Korea.”

    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. “They had so many gigs that they had another gig was they were like hosting a Korean kid who Was just working, I guess, like as a laborer at the Udon restaurant. But he lived, he slept in the closet.”

    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. “No, I was like, oh my God, I sort of pulled the short straw on my homestead. Like other kids' homestead families, it was like, they were like, oh, I live on the 34th floor of this beautiful, you know, tower apartment block. And my family is taking me skiing next weekend. My family, they're like, oh, we're going to go to our summer home. You want to come? I was like, yeah, great. Summer home. They take me to their summer home. It's like a shack by the river, like with cockroaches. I was like, what is going where? Who are these people? They were very sweet, but it was, I was like, I don't know if these people should have homestead dudes.”

    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. “If Japan had therapy, which no one goes to therapy in Japan, we could talk about that too, which I think is a great travesty of Japan. But if Japan had therapy, this kid definitely probably caused him some therapy. He probably, he hasn't masturbated 24 years.”

    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 don't know how to say don't masturbate. So I came home from school the next day and we were alone. And I was just like, I got to tell him to not jerk off everyone. And so I was like, I mimed it. I had to like mime, don't masturbate under the table, you know, like his brain, I'm sure.”

    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. “South Park when you went to bed. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, how am I supposed to do? This is literally the coldest I've ever been in my life. Anyway, so we're sitting under the Kotatsu. I'm doing emails. The little 11 year olds like reading manga. And then suddenly I realize he's doing a little more than reading. So he's just jerking off everywhere. This kid is just, he's just masturbating all over the house.”

    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. “This house was so cold. This house got, I swear to God, probably like three minutes of sunlight a year. Like it was just, I don't even know how they architected it to have so little sunlight. It was just so freezing, no insulation. One of the people I met at the arcade, I was like complaining about like how cold it was. And they bought me a full body snowsuit to wear it to bed.”

    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. “Is a low table with a heater underneath it, so basically you put your legs under it, there's like a big heavy blanket, like everything that's under the table is kind of a mystery. You don't know what's lurking under the table.”

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  37. “So I would be. Try to send an email at the Kotatsu, so it's you know, it's like November, it's kind of chilly. I'm sitting under the Kotatsu. We'd had like, the house was so cold.”

    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. “A place that felt really, I was like, oh, okay, I know these people, I know this part of town. It was a very working class part of Tokyo. And, you know, there was like kind of homeless people out walking around that would like say hi to all the time. And like, I'd go to the arcade and there'd always be, you know, these weird people that just clearly didn't have jobs playing Street Fighter all the time. So we'd just play together. I was like, I get this. These are totally my people. So they had an Udon shop and there was an 11-year-old son. And unfortunately, for me, he slept in his parents' bed, so he didn't have any privacy. And he decided he had discovered his penis soon after I arrived. And he decided that he was going to release frequently around the house in different places.”

    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 at the same time, soba can also be incredibly refined where you spend $30 on a bowl, and it's like two slurps, and you're done. And so anyway, Soba's got that weird gamut, but Udon is like firmly just like working class food. It doesn't really get fancy. And so some places that try to make it fancy, but it's really not the fancy. So anyway, this is a working class family. So it was.”

    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. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like Soba is sort of Soba is weird because it's both like the fast food in Japan in the sense like there's tachigui soba in front of stations that you can go to at 7 in the morning and just slurp something up before you go to work and it costs two bucks”

    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. “Kids were there were amazing speakers, and so when we hang out, it's great to hang out with people who are a few levels above where you speak because then you're able to pick it up. You're like, oh, what's that little grammatical thing you're doing? What's that word you're using? And then I just hung out with Japanese people constantly and played music. And music was really, you know, this lingua franca sort of thing where I could just hang with all these incredible musicians. I had been playing drums for so long. I was in the studio all the time. And you just start to pick up slang and casual Japanese.”

    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. “They have the most total badass language program. Like, honestly, if you want to learn Japanese, go to science, just go to science. Those kids, they'd done one year at SOAS. They arrived in Tokyo. They were in level 10, level 11. Holy shit.”

    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. “Is not a lot. It's nothing. I mean, basically, I could barely say hello, and even that was probably not correct. So there are 13 levels of Japanese class at the university. I was in two. There were kids who came from SOAS in London who had done one year at SOAS. They came in.”

    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. “International program was what I had always dreamed and hoped university would be. It was super international, super mixed kids from all over the world. They were all extremely serious about their studies. They were all way better Japanese speakers than me. I'd had like one year of university Japanese before I came. To give you an example, there are 13.”

    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. “Think in general, language learning is easier if you have a musical background. And I grew up all through my teens obsessively playing drums, just drumming, drumming, drumming, playing jazz, playing classical, playing in big band orchestras, playing everything. I think listening, being a good listener obviously is paramount. But when I got to Tokyo, I did a homestay. They couldn't speak one word of English. And I immediately just joined the music circle at university, which was only Japanese people. I wasn't trying to avoid the international crowd. In fact, the international group I was with were amazing. It was actually, I got to the school, I got to Wasida.”

    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. “Sense of self-worth. And the draw of an ivy was just too big. So anyway, I ended up getting in, much to my shock. And so after that first year in Japan, I went back, went to UPen. I did that for two years in the summer between, I came back to Japan, did an internship at a magazine. And then as soon as I graduated UPAN, I was back to Japan going back to Waseida, doing another year of intensive language studies in a grad program. And then I basically just stayed since then.”

    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. “Yeah, Japan for a year. And then in the middle of it, everything collapsed. And then I was like, okay, well, maybe I should graduate university. So I applied in the middle of it as a transfer student to a university I thought I would like better than the one I was at before. And I got in. I ended up going to UPen. And so for me, I was the first person in my family to go to university, certainly big university. My mom went to community college. She worked her butt off to become an elementary school teacher. But I was the first person to go to like university, university. My father didn't go anywhere. My grandparents were both working at the airplane engine factory. So this is a big deal. And should I have gone to Penn or not? I mean, honestly, it was just the ivy. So this incredible sense of I have to create or generate on my own.”

    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. “Yes, sort of. So to give you the macro timeline, I go when I'm 19, I stay for a year. I go to university there. I love it. While I'm there, the Silicon Valley bubble, the first bubble pops. So there really isn't a Silicon Valley. I applied on a whim to university there, and I applied independently, so I wouldn't have to, normally when you kind of do study abroad, you keep paying your American university fees. Yeah, right. International, and I looked at the fees for Japanese universities, and for like a year with homestay, it was like, you know, $8,000, $5,000. It was like an absurdly affordable amount of money. And, you know, there was scholarships available. It was like, why wouldn't I just go do this? Of course I'm going to do this. But my plan was to drop out and move to Silicon Valley and just build stuff.”

    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. “In the moment I had absolutely no words for it. I had no way to describe it. It really was just a just because you're operating from a lack of experience, like you haven't seen enough of the world But you just intuitively, there was a sense of okay, we aren't being supported. And then when I went to college, that was the big shock for me, was getting to college and meeting everyone else and immediately feeling this gap of kind of abundance. I was lucky I scored really well. I could, even though I'm bad at tests taking, I don't like taking tests. I tested well. I was able to go to a good college, a really good university. And it was just the first three days, four days, I was just in shock. I was like, oh, these people are from a different planet. The resources they had, the archetypes they clearly had in their lives, the way they've learned to learn, to speak, to move through the world, like what they expect. I was just like, this doesn't compute for me at all. And it was immediately I bounced off of it so fast. I was just like, I can't be here. I shouldn't be here. There's something fundamentally missing broken sort of like lacking inside my inside my chest.”

    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. “And there's definitely an alternate reality where I had a little more opportunity. I was in Silicon Valley a little bit earlier, and I just had the sense of self-worth and confidence, I think, to do things differently and build stuff. That was like one timeline that didn't happen. And I went out there and I loved it and I enjoyed it. At the same time, I really wanted to live abroad. I knew I needed to get away. And because of certain things that kind of happened and things that I felt in my town, but not being kind of the people of my town, not being supported by the greater whole, I kind of had this from a very early age, a lack of, I would say, belief in the American system. And I just felt like I had to leave America. There's a very strong impulse. Like I have to get outside of this country to see things differently. This felt important to me for some reason, intuitively.”

    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