Craig Mod

Summary

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Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Craig Mod

Release Date: July 6, 2026
Host: Debbie Millman
Guest: Craig Mod – writer, photographer, publisher, designer, and long-distance walker

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Episode Overview

In this profound and expansive conversation, Debbie Millman speaks with Craig Mod about how adoption, scarcity, technology, creativity, and the act of walking have shaped his life and work. Reflecting on his memoir Things Become Other Things, Mod explores belonging, self-worth, formative relationships, and his journey from a small industrial Connecticut town to Japan and beyond. The episode also dives into creative discipline, the tension between independence and recognition, the changing nature of technology, and the healing potential of movement through landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Childhood, Adoption, and Formative Loss ([04:29]–[12:48])

• Mod describes growing up in a Connecticut factory town centered around Pratt & Whitney, the “center of everything” for generations in his family.
• The murder of his childhood friend Brian shapes his memory of home:

  “The town is nothing to you without him.”
  —[06:20] Debbie Millman (quoting Mod)

• Mod shares the inner world of an adoptee—confusion, mythology, and inherent sense of being discardable.
• The need for ongoing, open dialogue about adoption and origins, over “just showing the child a book a couple of times.”

  “Far more explanation has to happen to adopted kids than any adopted parent understands.”
  —[07:59] Craig Mod

• Candid about carrying fragments of his history and how they formed an often painful origin myth.

2. Scarcity, Defensiveness, and the Quest for Value ([12:49]–[18:11])

• Examines the persistent fear of being discarded in relationships, and learning to hold space for conflict—especially as a parent.
• Debbie and Craig discuss pre-emptively wielding personal shame as a defense in school.

  “You get to prison and you’ve got to shank someone really fast... Or else you’re going to be in this tormented state for the rest of your time there.”
  —[16:44] Craig Mod

• Important early models were thin on the ground; “mostly warnings,” with rare exceptions from teachers who modeled broader horizons and creative paths.

3. Computers, Games, and Escape ([20:14]–[22:43])

• Escape through technology: a neighbor’s computer and Nintendo’s Zelda offered Craig knowledge, agency, and “hierarchical authority.”
• Early forays into programming and design, finding “my people” online before he could physically leave town.
• Abrupt lessons in cultural and professional gatekeeping—e.g., the dismissive Razorfish internship interview ([23:29]–[25:58]).

4. Creativity as an Avenue Out ([26:03]–[31:07])

• Music and drumming—another route to mastery, connection, and practical escape.
• Creativity, whether through music, writing, or design, as “ladders” and “bridges” out of constraining environments.
• Gravitation towards side doors and hacks:

  “The paradox of scarcity is it forces you to become a hacker... That’s the only way to get out.”
  —[28:52] Craig Mod

5. Arrival in Japan – Language, Walking, and Connection ([31:08]–[34:36])

• Tokyo’s “night walks” become early teachers in observation, presence, and witnessing without expectation or need.
• Japanese fluency achieved through relentless, immersive experience:

  “I did that for 35 days in a row ... after a rest, suddenly [the language] was just there.”
  —[33:41]–[34:35] Craig Mod

6. Education, Mentorship, and Professional Crossroads ([34:47]–[37:24])

• Transition from Japan to Penn’s unique hybrid program (DMD) — and lessons from demanding mentors.
• After college: cyclical returns to Japan and experiments in independent publishing.

7. Tech Industry & Choosing Independence ([37:25]–[44:33])

• Flipboard years: High-paying, high-intensity work in Silicon Valley, but an early drive for autonomy persists.
• The “financial discipline” Craig exercised was less about deprivation and more about independence—a shield from depending on others for validation or security.

  “I think we may have cracked something here—it’s always back to the Razorfish guy.”
  —[42:04] Craig Mod

8. Writing, Walking, and Long-form Attention ([44:33]–[54:19])

• Writing consistently delivers Craig’s most meaningful experiences and relationships.
• The soul-nourishing quality of small-scale, independent creative work, in sharp contrast to mass-market tech products.
• Intensive, reflective walking in Japan becomes an anchor, both in routine and in processing personal trauma.

9. Technology: Tool or Threat to Creativity? ([49:21]–[54:19])

• Distinguishing between technology as a creative tool (programming, making things) and as passive consumption (algorithmic feeds).
• Social media’s shift to “casino model” and its cost to deep work, attention, and creativity.

  “We are missing so much creativity ... the abundance of creativity we are losing every single day because of people being sucked into their phones.”
  —[65:14] Craig Mod

10. Newsletters, Community, and the Special Projects Model ([51:52]–[72:34])

• Email newsletters as “slow” spaces for sustained attention, though even these are affected by digital saturation.
• Special Projects—a membership-driven community built to escape the cycles of institutional rejection (“anti-Razorfish”). Now, it is a place for creative experiments, connection, and “the Good Place,” a custom social space for members.

11. Memoir, Loss, and Social Critique ([54:19]–[64:08])

• Writing about Brian’s murder, grief, and “things becoming other things” opens onto a critique of structural inequality in America—achieved through narrative, not polemic.
• Concept of Yo Yu (余裕) in Japan: not just “bandwidth,” but internal spaciousness—a foundation for compassion, safety, nonviolence.

12. Solitude, Walking, and Attention ([64:08]–[66:40])

• Walking alone as a practice for “seeing the road,” for boredom, and for a clearer sense of self and surroundings.

  “To be bored is to be free of distraction ... your levels of empathy go through the roof.”
  —[65:51]–[65:55] Debbie Millman / Craig Mod

• Solitude (even on group walks) is key to the creative and perceptual richness of the journey.

13. Opening the Heart and Forgiveness ([66:40]–[68:17])

• Walks and reflection lead Mod to greater empathy for others, including his adoptive father, and himself.

14. Belonging, Self-Worth, and Belated Homecoming ([83:33]–[86:57])

• The core insight: real belonging begins with self-worth.

  “So much boils down to self worth. ... You can’t belong if you don’t feel valuable.”
  —[83:42] Craig Mod

• The episode ends with Mod acknowledging an enduring gratitude for the people he’s built around himself and a matured, stable sense of value and place, even if he may never “belong” to Japan fully.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• The Value of Walking & Creativity

  “I think we are missing so much creativity. ... The abundance of creativity we are losing every single day because of people being sucked into their phones.”
  —[65:14] Craig Mod

• On Belonging & Self-Worth

  “A lot of toxic relationships, a lot of abusive relationships come from that desire to belong but not feeling valuable.”
  —[83:52] Craig Mod

• The Power of Community

  “Special Projects—It’s an anti Razorfish community, first and foremost.”
  —[68:35] Craig Mod

• The Joy and Limits of Recognition

  “I like to believe I have no ego ... But the two coolest things ... were William Gibson and David Mitchell blurbing it and writing to me. That feels pretty powerful.”
  —[74:37] Craig Mod

• Adoption, Discovery, Closure

  “For the first time in my life ... I’m hearing her [biological mother] tell this story, and I go, thank you for illuminating where my brain comes from. ... It’s genetic. I can put that away.”
  —[78:49]–[79:49] Craig Mod

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Key Timestamps

• [04:29]: Early childhood, family, and factory town context
• [06:20]: The loss of Brian and what his friendship meant
• [07:46]: Deep dive into confusion and stigma around adoption
• [13:10]: Emotional self-defense and shame in childhood
• [22:43]: Online communities as lifelines out of insular environments
• [25:58]: The power of “hacks” and side doors for those from scarcity
• [31:08]: Tokyo night walks and the art of observing other lives
• [33:41]: Achieving Japanese fluency through immersion
• [37:53]: Independence, community, and professional choices in tech
• [51:52]: Newsletters and the shaping of Special Projects
• [54:39]: Long form walking, grief, and creative habit
• [61:19]: The meaning and “danger” of Yo Yu in Japanese culture
• [64:08]: The necessity of solitude for deep observation and creativity
• [83:42]: Belonging, self-worth, and making peace with identity

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Tone & Takeaways

Craig Mod’s tone is candid, self-examining, often funny, and deeply empathetic—always aware of larger social structures even in intimate reflection. Debbie Millman nurtures the conversation with warmth and genuine curiosity, returning often to questions of meaning, creative process, and the healing arc of Craig’s life.

For listeners, the episode offers:

• Personal insight into adoption, trauma, and found family
• The challenges and small victories of building self-worth from modest beginnings
• Vigilance about how technology both liberates and hinders creative life
• The case for walking, slowness, and solitude as vehicles for joy and understanding
• Practical encouragement for independent creative experimentation outside the algorithm
• A nuanced meditation on the varieties—and limits—of belonging

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Notable Resources

• Craig Mod’s Newsletters: Roden & Ridgeline
• Books: Things Become Other Things (memoir), Kisa by Art Space Tokyo
• Special Projects (Membership Community): specialprojects.jp
• Craig’s website: craigmod.com

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“So much boils down to self worth and you can't belong if you don't feel valuable.”
—Craig Mod ([83:42])

Transcript

[Craig Mod]

So much boils down to self worth and you can't belong if you don't feel valuable. I think a lot of toxic relationships, a lot of abusive relationships come from that desire to belong but not feeling valuable. From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a wide ranging conversation with Craig Mod about adoption, about walking in Japan and about how technology is affecting creativity, the abundance of creativity. We are, we are losing every single day because of people being sucked into their phones. Hey Yetis, this is Nick and Jack from the Best One yet podcast. Now the last company we worked at, they used Paylocity and everything just went. It wasn't until launching our own media business this show that we realized how rare that is. Because Paylocity is one delicious burrito of operational needs. They roll up HR finance and it seamlessly into one delicious bite. When everything wraps together like that, all at once, your workforce, your tech stack, your business. You don't need more tools. You don't even need cilantro. You need one solution. And that is why Paylocity built a single platform to connect HR finance and IT with AI driven insights and automated

[Debbie Millman]

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[Craig Mod]

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[Debbie Millman]

This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. The Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vail Smart toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional, it's a philosophy that design changes everything. The Kohler Vail Smart Toilet is sleek with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing, and it goes beyond looks. The touchscreen controls and customizable cleansing features offer a level of comfort and cleanliness that exceed expectations. It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high performance function that's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out [e-mail] Craig Mod is a writer, a photographer, a publisher, a designer and long distance walker whose work is rooted in attention attention to roads, books, technology, memory and the lives we pass along the way. Craig writes the acclaimed newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and runs Special Projects, an independent publishing and membership community devoted to books, walks, photography and the making of thoughtful work outside the machinery of the algorithmic Internet. He is also the author of several books, including Kisa by Art Space Tokyo and the beautiful memoir Things Become Other Things, a book about friendship, grief, class, adoption, Japan, and the alchemy by which motion can turn memory into meaning. Craig Mod, welcome to Design Matters.

[Craig Mod]

Thanks for having me.

[Debbie Millman]

Craig, you grew up in a small industrial town in Connecticut where an airplane engine factory was not just an employer, it was the center of almost everything. Your grandparents met there, your parents met there, and nearly everyone seemed connected to it in some way. What did that factory mean to you as a child, before you had a language for class or labor or escape?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean it was probably most through my grandfather who I think he kind of identified most strongly with being there. And my grandmother, once, I think she got married and was pregnant with my mother, she left the factory. So it was really just my grandfather who was kind of there consistently. And then when my parents got divorced, all these things. So everyone ended up leaving it except for my grandfather. And he took a lot of pride of being there. And actually, you know, the factory is Pratt and Whitney and it was funny. We'd go to Disney World. This was like our one indulgence as a family is every summer we'd go to I went to Disney world probably literally 10 times 10 summers in a row. I could still probably to this day navigate Disney World without a map and know exactly where everything is. I'm like, oh, I know where Space Mountain is, I know where this is. And we would always go. And I think at Epcot center there was a special Pratt and Whitney sponsored ride or exhibition or something. And he had a little card that would get us into the back, like vip. And he was not a VIP at Pratt and Whitney. He was just a random guy on the floor. His salary was very modest, but we'd be able to go into that space. And I just remember that feeling really special and like, oh, wow. This is like an entity that has a certain kind of power and magic to it, which I don't think anyone would be able to say today about, you know, car manufacturers or, you know, airplane engine manufacturing or things like that.

[Debbie Millman]

Things become other things. Your most recent book is a memoir, but it's also a love story between you and your childhood best friend Brian, who was tragically murdered when he was still a teenager. There's a line in Things Become Other Things where you state the town is nothing to you without him. First grade is where the two of you meet, and your friendship infuses almost chemically. What do you remember about the boy he was when you first got to know him?

[Craig Mod]

It was just immediately someone I kind of admired. I mean, I think I'm adopted, and I think all adopted kids think deeply about their own mythology, where they came from or where they could have come from. I think we all really crave siblings, and I think Brian was just. We kind of looked enough alike.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah. You were mistaken for brothers a lot.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. Yeah. And I love that. I remember that being a really important, you know, fiction that, as a kid, held a lot of meaning. And so I think it was, you know, just a combination of these things that may be made more potent by being an adoptee.

[Debbie Millman]

Your adoption was explained to you early. Yeah, but you've said that knowing the word did not mean understanding what it meant.

[Craig Mod]

Right.

[Debbie Millman]

There is that childhood confusion that you had around Hawaii, your mother's honeymoon, the idea that you had somehow been in her belly. What were you trying to make sense of in those years?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, well, so, okay, look, every adopted kid, I think, carries with them so much confusion, and I think this is something that isn't. I had never heard really spoken about. I hadn't also hadn't really paid attention to the adoption community or forums or things like that or adoption podcasts until last year when I started doing some in kind of promotion for this book. And he very quickly realized, like, adopted kids have four or five times chance of becoming addicted to things or committing suicide. And you go, what is causing this? And you start to look for patterns with other friends. Families who have adopted kids, and the adoptees are often the ones that end up struggling. The Most in the family for one reason or another. And that could be in adoptions where the kid looks like the family or doesn't look like the family. There's a lot of South Korean adoptees that came into America in the 80s. I've talked to many of them. And there's a whole set of complex things that go on there where if you don't look like your parents when you're in elementary school, first or second grade, you don't want those people to come to the school, so you don't want them to walk you into the school, because then it creates this complexity. And I think it all stems from a misunderstanding of how family can function and what is a biological kid versus an adopted kid. So I think a lot of explanation has to happen. Far more explanation has to happen to adopted kids than any adopted parent understands. And as I speak to my friends who are kind of having kids through surrogacy or adopting kids, I think there is a stronger awareness of this today. But even then, I think it's a huge misunderstanding to believe that kids. You show them a book about, oh, this is what adoption means, or you talk to them a couple times about it, they do not get it. So, for example, my daughter, who I've adopted, I've been in her life since she was 2, and she doesn't have any connection to her birth father. And, you know, we are not genetically in any way connected or anything like that. But I've always known that I wanted someone to talk to me about these things, to talk about mythology, who the birth parents are. And I always felt that my adoptive parents made that a taboo, whether consciously or unconsciously. I think it's mostly an unconscious thing where you aren't allowed to talk about that because that's somehow robbing them of their true parental position or something like that. You know, it's. It's very. So I. Very early on in my relationship with my daughter, I made it a point anytime we were alone or we were, you know, And I've always had these deep conversations with her. And we actually never spoke English to each other until a year ago. She's 16 now, so all these deep conversations, and I always had them in Japanese because I always wanted them to be as deep as possible. And I would always say, look, you know, if you are ever thinking about your birth father, you know, that's okay. And she'd go, yeah, yeah. You know, I do think, I wonder who you could be. I'm like, yeah, that's totally fine, you know, and that's. You shouldn't feel ashamed about that. And please, if you ever want to talk to me about it, it's completely fine. And even last year, you know, we now have this new kind of relationship in English. She's been studying abroad and kind of learning English and she's fluent now. And I remember saying to her yesterday, last year, just saying, like, look, you were going to be interested in this person and I want you to know it'll never ever make me sad, ever. If you want to go find this guy and I'm there with you, I'm by your side on this trip. I'm there to support you in any way I can. And I just felt like I really needed that as a kid and I think most adoptees need that as kids. And so am I in the belly? Am I not in the belly? What does it mean to be adopted?

[Debbie Millman]

You also had so many fragments from the adoption paperwork. A 13 year old birth mother and her birth father said to have died after an accident and fight. And those fragments became a kind of origin myth before they became facts to investigate. What kind of story did you build around yourself from such little scraps, crumbs,

[Craig Mod]

you know, just a broken one. I mean, you know, the parents who adopted me got divorced when I was about 2. That also was sort of. Yeah, I think adoptees kind of have this internal sense of, oh, you're a thing that can just be discarded. You know, I think that's like part of the core essence of adoption in some way. It's like if it's not really handled delicately and almost to a point I think that adoptive parents would be uncomfortable with of just, you know, you really have to hammer home that it's okay to think about these things and you weren't discarded and yada, yada, yada, all that stuff. So that was a big part of it is having that kind of core sense of like, wow, okay, you know, as a human, you can just be cast off from a family. And so then reading the small bits of empirical data we had about my birth parents, it just hammered home like, oh, I come from a place of pain or suffering, bad guy, all these things. And so again, without someone to really talk you through that, it's one thing to be like, oh, hey, here's your adoption papers, good luck trying to figure out how to incorporate this into your psyche. And it's another to be like, wow, all right, we really need to talk about this. And extensively.

[Debbie Millman]

One thing that I was really struck by in your writing was the notion of because you felt that you had been discarded, that at any point, any friction in a relationship could also then mean that you'd be cut out of someone's life. You had a disagreement with your daughter that she might shun you.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

How have you managed to navigate through that type of emotionality? I struggle with that quite a bit.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. Look, and I'm bringing this stuff up not to. It's not like a woe is me thing, but I just think it's such a universal experience. I'm just trying to hold space for people that also have felt these things or are feeling these things and wondering if there is a way to get out the other side. So the discarding feeling, the way I kind of have pushed through it, I mean, it's several things. One, I think was moving to Japan. That's a way to be in a position where you're already discarded, so you can't be discarded more. And then I think with my daughter, she ended up being kind of unexpectedly like a. I don't want to say tool, but like, our relationship became this training ground because I couldn't turn away from it because I had this sort of parental position and I felt an obligation. And so up until then, if there was friction or strangeness in a relationship, it was very easy to go, okay, let's cut this tie before I get discarded. I'm going to do the discarding. I'm not going to be discarded. But with her, I couldn't do that. And we would get in these silly fights, you know, about her not going to school or getting up in the morning or something. And then I would find myself spiraling in this really irrational way. It's a scarcity mindset way where everything is going to be taken away. You're going to lose everything. I had this feeling with money for most of my life. It's sort of why I lived in a very tiny apartment and I didn't own any furniture except for one low table until I was 35. I mean, it's like you look back and you go, wow, there's a lot going on there. But the scarcity mindset sense of people and your position with people holds no value or has very low value. And so with her, you know, we'd get into these fights. I'd be like, oh, my God, she's never gonna talk to her. Or she wouldn't talk to me for three or four days. And I'd be like, oh, my, that's it. You know, she's done with me. Which is an Insane thing. It's just like a pathologically crazy thing to think.

[Debbie Millman]

Well, I don't know if I'd go quite that far, given I struggle with that all the time. I'd like to think it's just sort of a normal reflex from feeling like that happens to you over and over again as a child.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, but it's just once, I think once you understand the objective context of a relationship, like you have in this with the younger kid. And so she'd be eight or nine when we're getting these little fights. I'd quickly realized after this happened maybe four or five times, that it wasn't that she wanted to discard me at all. It's that she was so afraid of losing me. And actually what she. All she wanted was to repair, but she didn't know how to do the repairing. And also, like little kids, brains are nuts, the chemicals are bonkers. And it's like, again, this is like the position of a parent is to be able to hold all of this for the kid and know what to do and guide them through these kinds of emotional experiences as well. So it became this, this thing very quickly that I realized, like, wow, okay, I have all this autonomy and I have all of this agency over repairing these things. And over and over again it became a self reinforcing sense of like, value for myself. Now I've just more and more believed that. So that sense of scarcity or being thrown away or being lost dissipated naturally just through these interactions.

[Debbie Millman]

You know, you talk about preemptively ending things so that you're not the one that gets hurt.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

You experienced quite a lot of childhood cruelty and that private information that you were worried about people finding out, you actually turned into a bit of a weapon and preemptively weaponized your own adoption with your schoolmates before anyone else could.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

How early did you learn that the safest thing to do with shame was to strike first?

[Craig Mod]

It just felt so intuitive. I saw other kids around me being attacked. Like everyone was kind of always being attacked to a certain degree. And it was like, okay, you've either got to sort of like you get to prison and you've got to shank someone really fast, establish your power. Yeah, yeah, you got to kill the leader or else you're going to be in this tormented state for the rest of your time there. And I guess to a certain degree growing up in certain kinds of towns can feel like that where there's such an abundance of scarcity, like everyone is kind of suffering from the Same scarcity. And so your rubric for kind of hierarchy becomes perverted and demented. And so I just think early on I got this sense of like, okay, if I don't basically self attack preemptively and then in doing that show that I'm kind of invincible. It's going to be a painful 15 years or 16 more years of being in the school system.

[Debbie Millman]

You mentioned your adoptive parents divorcing when you were very young. I believe you were about 2 years old. You were largely raised by your mother and your grandparents. Your adoptive father becomes, in your book and in interviews, a sort of anti archetype, a man who taught you very little except what not to become. He also farted quite a bit, which operates in the book almost as a metaphor for who he is and how he behaves as a boy. How did you begin sorting the people around you into models, warnings and mysteries?

[Craig Mod]

So it was mostly warnings, I'd say almost entirely through try to think back on who was a model. I mean, of course as a kid you're always gonna idolize your father, no matter how broken he might be and even if you're not connected by blood or whatever. So there was a part of me that really wanted, you know, obviously my father to be my father and love me and like, you know, teach me things and do those sorts of things. But he, at the end was never able to step up to that position. Looking back on it now, I just see as sad what a bereft position to be in, you know, and he was taught that through his parents. And you just kind of, you look at these cycles and you go like, these people just don't. Aren't born. There's this whole systemic thing that's happening around them that creates them being as they are. But like, my neighbor across the street was an alcoholic and he tried to kill himself by turning the car on in the garage and leaving the door open. That happened very early on. Or another neighbor, he had a whole wall just covered in guns. It's like you go to his house and it's all guns. And his son would always have a switchblade or a handgun on him. So I think very quickly I realized, don't idolize any of the things you're seeing. But it wasn't until middle school and it was sort of through gifted program things. Without this gifted program, I would have been lost. That was where I learned programming. We were using logo once a week for I think it was like two or three hours. We'd just be in this separate kind of bubble. And the teachers who were involved with that, I remember being the first ones to kind of, like, really model for me a different way of being. And then in middle school, there was, again, this sort of gifted program teacher who taught me how to work on projects and kind of be performative in a way that I don't think anyone around me or anyone else in the town kind of knew how to do. And then in high school, I had a couple of teachers that really blew open the barn doors on, you know, okay, there is a world out there beyond what you can see here, and I have faith that you can operate in it, and I want to try to help you get there.

[Debbie Millman]

A neighbor with a computer, I believe, also changed your life by letting you come over. He eventually gave you a key and even got you a phone line.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, exactly. And in the book, I don't talk about this, but, like, you know, that was also very weird. He was always smoking weed. He always had, like. He always had weird girlfriends around. Like, the computer room I was in, I opened. I opened one of the drawers on the desk, and there was, like, a pair of soiled women's underwear in there. It's just, like. So on one hand, it was, like, really nice that this guy gave me access to this computer and this phone line, but it came with all of these, like, landmines, you know? And I look back on it, I'm like, I'm glad he wasn't a pedophile. I'm glad. You know, it's like there could have been so many other layers that, again, you look back and you go, this shouldn't be the experience of a kid. Like, there shouldn't be this many landmines of everything that they're kind of involved with or touching.

[Debbie Millman]

Nintendo and Zelda seem to have been almost like a portal for you.

[Craig Mod]

Oh, yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

You write about them as a golden cartridge with a sticker that states, made in Japan, and that seems to contain a wider world for you. What did that object open in your imagination before Japan was a real place, place that you could go to?

[Craig Mod]

Well, I think just video games immediately captured my attention because it is kind of an escapist thing. I think one of the reasons video games today are so popular is that we really want to not be here in this bizarre, kind of complicated world that's more and more complicated. And so Zelda. It was a couple things. One, it was just a cool game. It was fun, cool music. But also, it was the first. The first time I realized I had kind of Video games in general. I was just really good at them. And I would sit on the bus on the way to school, and I would hold conference sessions with kids, so I'd have my Zelda maps. And I would teach people where this bomb here, this is where this thing is. Kids would come and they'd be like, how do I get through this? I'd be like, oh, you got to do this. So it was the first time I kind of had this sort of hierarchical authority of knowledge. That was pretty cool.

[Debbie Millman]

You said that much of your early programming was in service of writing, and by 1997, you were already building rudimentary blogging software before blogging was even a mainstream form. You also had the early Internet, gave you access to tech space communities, ansi, art designers, coders, people far outside your local world. What do those online spaces teach you about finding your people before you could physically leave?

[Craig Mod]

It was mainly just, oh, there are people. People are out there. It was more just like, wow, all right. There are talented people doing interesting things. And the complicated aspect of that, though, was once I could leave and start to kind of engage with these folks, immediately I felt the deficits that I was carrying relative to them. And I think one of the reasons why you don't see a lot of people from difficult places make it is because you leave. You come to, like, New York, you go to San Francisco. I remember going to the Razorfish office. So I was very lucky. Right?

[Debbie Millman]

Tell the Razorfish story. Because that, I think, is a really indicative moment of what you had to contend with, given your upbringing.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. And so I was very lucky. I met a guy who started a little design agency, and he brought me out for the summer. When I was 18, I drove across America in a Honda Civic with no power anything or air conditioning. That was incredible, too. So being able to see America at that scale that early and kind of going to jazz clubs and having a fake ID and sneaking in to go see jazz in New Orleans or over here, over there in Colorado. And that summer when I was in San Francisco, I was thinking about the next summer, and I was like, I'd really love to work for a bigger agency. And I was really into K10K, and I was really into sort of the smaller, you know, indie, non traditional design universe online that was kind of emerging. Kyokan, K10K, you know, those folks. And I built the world's goofiest portfolio. And I went to Kinko's and I printed it out in the goofiest possible binder. And I remember going around to a few of these agencies. And so I go into the Razorfish office, and I kind of hand in this terrible portfolio. And the guy. I remember this really just pompous guy being like, who's your favorite designers? And I was like, the K10K guys. And he was just like, who are they? Just completely dismissing and be like, come back when you've actually studied design and you actually know something about design.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah, that story.

[Craig Mod]

And so that was so.

[Debbie Millman]

I wish we knew who it was.

[Craig Mod]

I know. I know who was there. Well, who was there in 1990.

[Debbie Millman]

And they were doing such beautiful work then. Oh, my God. The Razorfish work that they did. That timeline of typography that went on forever. Ever. Oh, my God.

[Craig Mod]

This was. I mean, that was why I was there. I was like, this is where I want to be. I remember meeting Adam Greenfield a few years later, and he was working with Razorfish. I just remember being like, oh, my God, I'm meeting someone that works with Razorfish. That's so cool. In Tokyo. So anyway, I was doing things like that, and I was trying to find my way out. But that sense of, like, you go, you take this risk, you do this thing, and someone just slaps you down, and you don't have a community or a family that knows how to talk you through that, because this is all foreign to them. So I think this is why most people that come from places like I come from don't leave, or they try to leave, and then they run back because you just go, wow, this is a lot. And so for me, the hack was to go to Japan because Japan couldn't throw me away. Japan couldn't put me into a socioeconomic hierarchy, and it allowed me to kind of try to work through this stuff on my own.

[Debbie Millman]

I have a couple more questions I want to ask you about life before Japan, if you don't mind.

[Craig Mod]

Sure.

[Debbie Millman]

You play drums obsessively. Jazz, classical, big band, and music later became a big part of how you entered Japanese social life.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

What did drumming give you as a teenager that words or computers or friendship didn't?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean, I think it all comes back to that sense of mastery of a thing and the power that comes from that. I was just a good drummer. You know, I was always kind of the best drummer in school. I was even good enough to get into kind of the Allstate Orchestra and, you know, do. I remember doing a snare solo to get in. And that was, you know, a really big deal. You know, people always say, do the thing that you love and you're really good at, you know, if you could find that, like, focus on that. So, you know, I had these impulses like, oh, should I study piano or should I, you know, do bass? Or, you know. But I was always like, no, just stick with the drumming because you're good at it and you enjoy it too. It's just really fun. There's something kind of powerful about it. But it also was the way I was able to connect, start making these connections outside of my town. So I played in a band when I was 16, 17, and we'd play in clubs all over New England. I was a 16 year old. I would just call up clubs in Rhode island and Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Vermont and New York and just be like, hey, we're a band. Can we play? When can we play? Like, who can you put us on with? We'll play, you know, just pay for our gas to get there. So it really was this tool in the same way that the computer and programming and design felt like again, these like ladders or extensions outside of the small island, that I felt like we were stuck on these bridges that were starting to be built using creativity, music, rhythm. And I kind of see writing and drumming as being, you know, intrinsically connected

[Debbie Millman]

as well at that point. What did you want to do professionally? Did you have a sense?

[Craig Mod]

I mean, the writing was always the thing. It was always, I want to write more, I want to do more writing. But being in a place where you feel like you don't know how to get out of that place and you feel like you need to get out of that place, you start to gravitate towards the things that are maybe more obvious to get you out of there. So with design and programming, with the advent of, you know, World Wide Web and then Mosaic comes out and Prodigy and you know, PPPs and, you know, your dial ups and all this stuff. As soon as I saw the web, I was just like, okay, this is it. This is how I get out of here. This is like. And also the sense of like, I can make more money than my parents at the 17, which was a very weird. That felt like almost like a break in the space time continuum, you know, and you go, this is a strange thing to be able to step through. I can do that. Okay, great, let's do it. I think if I wasn't trying to find those escapes so readily, the focus would have been almost entirely on writing.

[Debbie Millman]

You applied to go to school in Japan, mostly for practical reasons. The school provided you with a scholarship A homestay, a price that made more sense than the American study abroad machinery. How much of your life has been shaped by noticing the side door when the front door was too expensive?

[Craig Mod]

I mean, all of it, basically. I mean, this is. I mean, the paradox of scarcity is it forces you to become a hacker, you know, and you've got to find these hacks. This is how, if you don't come from a place of abundance, if you carry with you all these bizarre deficits, it's like you have to find hacks. That's the only way to get out or to move forward or to build more of a solid base. And so I'd say, you know, almost everything I've done has been that. And it's. It's always been even, you know, I sort of got my design footing. You know, I feel like we are sitting here today in some part because I would do these weird design experiments online and like, Jessica Hufland and Design observer would pick up on them when I was, you know, 21, 22, and they would say, this is cool. Here's a guy who's making print books and he's doing these online design experiments. If I was just doing print books, I don't think they would have picked up on me if I was just online stuff. So I was always looking for these strange intersections. Where's the Venn diagram where Kevin Kelly always says, don't be the best, be the only. I was like, where is my only on the Venn diagram? All these things I love, which is music and rhythm and publishing and writing and making objects and design, and it just kind of. I was able to kind of find that hack of that intersection and use that to connect to people like Liz Danzigo. You know, I met her when I was 26, I think I would come to New York in my 20s and I'd always have a new thing I made, and I would make a list of all the designers I loved, and I would just email them all and say, hey, I'm from Tokyo and I have a thing. And again, using Tokyo as a hack because it's like, oh, here's a guy from Tokyo. That's cool. I don't. People from Tokyo don't email me normally.

[Debbie Millman]

Well, design provenance in Tokyo is quite strong, for sure.

[Craig Mod]

For sure. So very, very consciously using that as yet another tool to make these connections, to start to feel this greater sense of abundance, and then all of this being in service to your sense of value for yourself. I mean, that's kind of what it

[Debbie Millman]

boils down to Tokyo at night became one of your first great walking teachers. You walked around and could hear baths being drawn, children behind doors, cigarettes in kitchens, radios in small rooms. What did those night walks teach you about being near other people's lives without needing anything from them?

[Craig Mod]

Well, I think in a lot of way, it functioned as art and music functioned for me as well, and as well as, you know, the Internet kind of functioned. It's a sense of archetypical creation of what's possible out there. Those night walks evoked in me a very similar feeling I get when I'm moved by a great piece of music or when I'm performing. I remember the first time I did a performance. It was at Trinity College in Hartford with my goofy band, and it was our first big performance.

[Debbie Millman]

What was the name of your band?

[Craig Mod]

I'm not gonna say, but I don't want. I didn't find that online. It's so goofy. But I remember finishing that gig, driving home in that Honda Civic. The saxophonist was next to me in the car. We were on the highway. I 85, doing like 30 miles an hour because I did not want the night to end so badly. That feeling of, oh, my God, that high you get when you connect with a beautiful thing or you participate in a beautiful bit of music or art or writing or whatever. But those night walks in Tokyo, I felt like were eliciting the same feelings. And often I was a little bit drunk when I was doing these walks, but I remember I would just be filled almost like, with this orchestral swell of joy and possibility. That's what kept me coming back to them.

[Debbie Millman]

That first year in Japan included a lot of alcohol, heartbreak, language challenges.

[Craig Mod]

First 10 years.

[Debbie Millman]

First 10 years, yeah. You talk about in Tim Ferriss podcast, podcast about simplification. You talk about how one of the three main things that you've done to simplify your life is to stop drinking.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

Was that a very conscious decision, or was that more of an organic sort of place you moved into?

[Craig Mod]

It sort of was forced on me just because so much was being hurt by the drinking. The question was, do I want to be able to have meaningful relationships with people and do the work I feel compelled to do, or do I want to drink myself into the ground all the time? It was like, that was kind of the trade. And I think to stop those kinds of patterns, you need to replace it with something else. And so for me, the work, there's a direct connection between trying to remove alcohol from my life and all these amazing things beginning to happen with work and what I was producing and who I was connecting with. So I don't think that's a coincidence.

[Debbie Millman]

You learned Japanese through a homestay, through your classes and a university music circle and the music circle gave you. You write about rhythm, slang, friendship, and the casual speech of people your own age. When was the first moment when Japanese stopped feeling like a subject and started feeling like life?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. Well, I got to Tokyo in August, and then for spring break, a friend and I hitchhiked across the country. We don't have any money. We can do this for free, I guess, and we'll see how it goes. And. And every day you had the same conversation. Who are you? What kind of music do you like? Where do you go to school? Where are you from? Da da, da. And I did that for 35 days in a row. I remember feeling at the end of that, just so exhausted. We were in Okinawa. We finished in Okinawa on this weird little island. We were staying in a tree house. And I remember just sitting outside the treehouse, smoking and just talking to my friend, going, I never want to speak Japanese again. I'm so tired. I'm so sick of this language. Because we had just sort of OD'd on it, you know, Every day something new is picking you up. I remember going back to Tokyo and about like four days later, after I had a rest, it was like, suddenly it was just there.

[Debbie Millman]

Wow.

[Craig Mod]

And. And I thought that was interesting, that kind of 10,000 hours, like brute forcing it through this thing that we didn't know was going to brute force it, and then coming out the other side and being like, oh, wow, okay, that skill is just there now.

[Debbie Millman]

What made you decide to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania?

[Craig Mod]

The dot com bubble collapsed. So my kind of plan was to go to Silicon Valley after Japan. I didn't have a clear path to stay in Tokyo at that point. So I was like, okay, I've got to do something, and if I'm not going to go to Silicon Valley, why don't I apply to a few schools in the States and see if I can get in, see if they can give me some money. And so I applied to Stanford, NYU, UPenn, but UPenn in particular because they had the DMD program, the digital media design program. At that time, I really wanted to go to the MIT Media Lab. It was only a grad program, so there's no undergrad for that. And DMD was sort of the only undergrad fine arts computer science program in America. I think at that time really DMD and UPenn was really leaning into that

[Debbie Millman]

unusual at the time. It was the program that combined computer science and fine art, and it was really a hybrid that was unusual. You had professors Joshua Mosley and Sharka Hyland. What do you think Sharker Highland saw in you before you fully saw it in yourself?

[Craig Mod]

I mean, I guess maybe a little bit of a aesthetic sensibility. I don't know. She just, look, I love professors that you really have to work to make them like you. Sharka is like, absolutely not a pushover. And she just had this otherworldly Eastern European sort of etherealness. Like she was like this apparition that appeared of like the ghost of rigid design rules, you know, And I was just in awe of her. And I loved it. And I was like, I want to be around people like this. These are my people. And, okay, give me a higher hurdle to hit than I would do on my own. It was powerful.

[Debbie Millman]

And then you went to Silicon Valley

[Craig Mod]

many, many years later. Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

So I just want to make sure I understand the timeline. This is a little confusing to me. So after Penn, you then did a magazine internship, is that correct?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, in between years of Penn, I did a magazine internship in Tokyo. And then as soon as I graduated, everyone else was like, trying to find jobs. The editor at the magazine was like, hey, I want to start a small independent publishing company. Do you want to be the art director? I was like, yes, can I live in Tokyo? He's like, yeah, sure. He was living in Tokyo, but then he moved to Seattle. And then I applied to grad school at the same time to be able to get a visa to be there. And so after Penn, I went right back to Japan. So it was sort of. I was in Japan. I came back for European summer in Tokyo. Back for Europe. Penn graduated, and then straight back to Japan for grad school and then running this publishing company.

[Debbie Millman]

When you did work in Silicon Valley, was it Flipboard?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, flipboard. And that was basically seven years after all this.

[Debbie Millman]

And. But that's really when I think you made some very specific decisions about how you wanted to live your life. Yeah, talk about what that was like, because from what I understand, in those years when many people around you were chasing scale and status, you seemed increasingly drawn to smaller rooms, self directed work, and real independence. So talk a little bit about where that resistance to conventional success came from.

[Craig Mod]

I think it started in that razorfish room. It's like, truly like, hey, screw you guys, okay? I don't need you. I'm Gonna build. I'll build my own razorfish. I really think that was, like, seated there. And I think I spent my 20s building up a kind of independence, a fierce ability to. To not need conventional systems, to not need to be in New York. Yeah, I want to connect with everybody, but I don't need you. But, you know, but I love your work and I'm inspired by it. Let's connect. And so I think going to Silicon Valley was sort of, in part, it was a bunch of reasons. One is like, Tokyo. Tokyo is actually very provincial. Even today, it's like, it. It is kind of like a tiny village. It does not think on a global scale. Most startups in Tokyo are not thinking about the world beyond outside of Tokyo. I mean, in a lot of ways, it's because the Japanese addressable market is big enough where you don't really have to do that. And in the design and art world, when I was in my 20s and it was in 2000s, I just saw the rest of the Internet kind of taking off, and I was like, I kind of want to participate in that more. And I was looking for a way to do that as I was building up my own kind of collection of projects and tools and, you know, output and doing art space Tokyo and things like that. It was also going to Silicon Valley dovetailed with me sort of dropping alcohol and ratcheting up my hourly rate. I remember I started charging more for, like, design consultancy, you know, when I was 27, 28, and then finally when I was 29. I'm I Margos West Camp, who was the first, you know, he was employee number four at Flipboard, and he's the lead designer. He and I were friends because he had lived in Tokyo and he had always loved my work. And we had coffee and he's like, dude, you gotta come out. Like, come out and work with us. I can't tell you what we're building, but it's cool. Like, you want to be here. And I was like, all right, I think I do need to leave Tokyo. I think I do need to be around people thinking in a bigger way. And so I went out and I joined initially as a consultant, making more money in a month than I had made in, like, two years doing everything else. So part of that was when we were negotiating the contract, doing mock negotiations with friends and just building up the courage to be able to say bigger numbers and then doing it and having them be like, yeah, sure. I was like, damn, I should have said bigger numbers. But it's like, all these little ratchets of self worth. Oh, I am valuable. I am worth that much an hour. Oh, it's really strange. A lot of kids are born into great circumstances where they don't have to do this, and then a lot of kids aren't, and you've got to find all these hacks. How do you, as an adult, make yourself believe in your value? And so that was a big part of it. And going out and living with Enrique Allen and Ben Henriteg, who are my roommates in Palo Alto. I live two blocks from Steve Jobs. That was, like, really interesting. It'd just be two blocks from Steve Jobs. See him walking around. I'd walk by his house every day on the way to work, feeling like I was able to hold my own in that universe with. With those players as like a. A team, as like a, you know, as an orchestra. That meant a lot to me. That was really powerful. But at the same time, I remember Mike McHugh was like, hey, we want to give you stock, and da, da, da. But you have to be a full time employee. And I remember that was like, there's this voice inside of me like, don't do it. You're. That's not our thing. We're here to, you know, to build our own thing. To look beyond just a single company to, I don't know, think. I don't know, more expansively than just a single. Like, it was really complicated. I remember the day I signed. I didn't want.

[Debbie Millman]

So you did sign.

[Craig Mod]

I did. Because I didn't feel necessarily bullied into it, but I just felt like I. I don't know. It was also like, I actually told him, I said, don't pay me a salary, just give me all stock. Thank God I didn't do that because I ended up. Stock ended up being. But I was like, what is the bigger bet I can take here? And also, you've just paid me for six months. I can literally live off what you just paid me for six months, for the next, like six years. So it's like, I don't need a salary right now. That's how aesthetic my life had been and how rigorous I was at creating a fixed cost of living that was low, where I could say no to anything that was really important.

[Debbie Millman]

Well, you frame financial discipline not as deprivation, but as protection.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

And I really, really understand that. I think a lot of people do.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

What do you think you were protecting yourself from when you kept your life so minimal?

[Craig Mod]

Maybe the Razorfish guy, always back to the Razorfish guy. I think we may have like, cracked something here. Yeah, just that ability to, I think, build my own universe, my own family, which I think a lot of adopted kids feel drawn towards and not be dependent on a larger entity granting you permission. And, yeah, I think that was. When you boil it down, that's mainly it.

[Debbie Millman]

How did you convince yourself it was time to go back to Japan?

[Craig Mod]

I ended up staying at Flipboard in total with the consulting time for about 15 months. And that felt like a really long time for me. It did not for the people in the company. And it was, you know, it felt like I was letting down my family. You know, I meant people, like, came up to me and said, I'm so disappointed in you. You know, that sort of thing. You know, it's like that level so

[Debbie Millman]

much worse than somebody being mad.

[Craig Mod]

I know.

[Debbie Millman]

Disappointed.

[Craig Mod]

Disappointed in you, you know, let me down. And after that, I remember telling everyone, never join a company if you think it's going to be family, because it's not. This is not family. This is a business sort of contract that you're entering into here. Don't forget that, because there is this narrative, oh, be part of the family and we're going to support you and take care.

[Debbie Millman]

My wife always says the job is never going to love you back.

[Craig Mod]

No, no. And I think in 2010, 2011, there was this hyper utopian optimism around tech as well. And so it's easier to kind of fall into that. Maybe today it's a little less. Although with AI and Anthropic, it's like, hey, do you want to come and build God with us? It's like, that's the new narrative, which I have to admit is very compelling. I would totally, by the way, go and work with Anthropic for six months right now just to get that front row seat of what is happening in these places. I think it is really fascinating. So when I left, I ended up spending about three years out there, and it was 2013. A couple things happened. One, Liz Danzigo told me about McDowell. She's always been so supportive of my writing and. And my writing is really what got me that job at Flipboard. My writing is what connected me with a lot of people. And so when I look back at my life, writing is always the thing that has had the biggest impact. All the people I love in my life that I am closest to, all of the greatest opportunities I've had have all kind of come out of writing. And so Liz was like, hey, you should do McDowell. I was like, what's McDowell? And so I applied on a whim to get into McDowell, and I got in, which was wild. And getting into McDowell was my formal way of being able to get out of Flipboard. So I was able to say, hey, I've got this fellowship. I've got to go do this thing. Peace out, guys. Good luck. And so that was really good. But Also, going to McDowell and being around these National Book Award winners is great.

[Debbie Millman]

Was Lynn Tillman there when you.

[Craig Mod]

Lynn Tillman, Yeah. Lynn Tillman became a super good friend right away. I mean, Susan Choi was there. She's had a number of, like, mega bestseller hits now, you know, and so being surrounded by that, again, how do you ratchet up self worth? You know, how do you surround yourself with people who are doing the work that you wish you could do or operating a level you wish you could operate at? And so I was so grateful to be there and feel that. And then I came back, and it was always about the writing. I'm in. I'm living in Silicon Valley. I'm kind of consulting, and I'm doing a little investing now, and my roommate started a fund, and I kind of started helping out with that. But it was always writing, writing, writing was the thing. And I remember getting these job offers. EV Williams gave me, you know, a job offer. I got a job offer from, you know, Matt Mullenweg to lead design at Automattic. I had all these really incredible opportunities, and I kind of looked at them all and I thought, someone else can do that job. What's the thing that only I can do? Again, this, like Kevin Kelly aphorism of be the only or whatever. I think throughout my 20s, I built up enough of a belief that a certain kind of independent work nourishes the soul in a way that scale can't. The iPhone version of Flipboard launched, and suddenly it had 80 million users. And I kind of didn't feel anything. Whereas I was putting out books that would have 1,000 readers or 2,000 readers in my 20s. And that made me feel everything. I remember being at a party, I was like, 24, 25. Someone asked, what do you do? And I said, oh, I make beautiful books. And it just felt so good to be able to say that. Whereas I helped build software that sells ads, which fundamentally, not to be reductive, but in 2010, 2011, 2012, that's all anything was. Yeah, it was software to sell ads. That was what everything was predicated on. And that's why I say now I think the anthropic and OpenAI and all this stuff. It's a different ads might be part of it, but ads are not the whole picture now. And that's a whole different discussion. But back then it was easier to step away from a Silicon Valley that was so ad focused. And this is also pre crypto and things like that.

[Debbie Millman]

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[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean, I think with the phones. I think really phones and social media, you know, in the early 90s when I first started programming and using my neighbor's computer, and then even the mid-90s and late-90s when the Internet was starting, web was starting to come online. The dopaminergic algorithmic sucking in of it. It was a different kind of being sucked in because you were building all the time. You know, I was using the computer 10 hours a day because I was writing songs using S3M trackers. You know, I was. I was doing ansi art, I was trying to figure out HTML and build web pages. I was trying to build software to write, to, blog. And when the technology felt like it wasn't, I wasn't participating as a creator anymore. I think is when things started to go sideways. And Twitter, as soon as Twitter launched, I kind of bounced off. It felt to me really superficial. And then the more algorithmic it became, which we forget, didn't really happen until like 2015, 2016, around the first Trump election, things like that. In 2010, 2011, it was still this. Like, the company could barely hold itself together technologically. It was down all the time. You know, God forbid you. Yeah. Remember the little fail whale?

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Craig Mod]

You know, but that was sort of, in a way, it made it better. I feel a little guilty being on Twitter at that time because I built up my audience. I was able to connect to great people at that time. But I do think it is when you have that in your pocket and it is the casino model, obviously people have talked about this ad nauseam now and the way social media functions. And again, you're building things for ads. And what are the incentives of the ads? It's like, more eyeballs. How do you get more eyeballs in here? And it's not about being participant, it's about being consumptive. And I think when all those shifts begin to happen is when I thought, okay, yeah, I want to step away from Silicon Valley. And then I just so happened, this mentor figure in my life, John, the Book of John, started inviting me on these big walks. And I thought, okay, this is interesting for a whole bunch of reasons that I get into in my book, but also as a way to respond to this toxic technological push that seems to be happening.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah. You've written about how the algorithmic timeline makes you feel like the worst version of yourself. You stated Twitter foments neurosis, Facebook sadness, Google news, a sense of foreboding.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

Instagram turns me covetous. All of them make me want to do it, whatever it may be. For the likes, the comments.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

Your newsletters Rodin and Ridgeline have become long running containers for photography, literature, technology, film, walking, Japan. What does the newsletter form allow that social media doesn't?

[Craig Mod]

Well, I think it's been changing a little bit. So I think 10 years ago it was just a slower place, the inbox. Yeah, you had a bunch of junk in there, but also it wasn't algorithmically ordered and people weren't competing to get likes in your inbox. It was kind of a quieter private space. And so it was sort of almost like the book. As close to a book or a magazine article as you could get online. I think with Substack, I think people are really tired because there's so much newslettering happening now. And so I think this is a real problem.

[Debbie Millman]

Has that affected your newsletter?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean engagement wise, I guess a little bit, but it's affected it more for me, motivation wise because I feel, and I don't know if I'm projecting or if it's real, but I just feel less of an interest out there. This is why I like my pop up newsletters. So I'll do these newsletters that run for say a week or three weeks or a month. And I think when you do that and you set this intentionality about hey, this is only going to be a limited time, you're not going to have to subscribe to this for infinity. I think it's a lot easier for readers to engage fully with it. And I found that to be really, really great for me. So I've probably run 10 or 15 pop up newsletters in the last six or seven years. But yeah, the newsletter to me feels like as close as you can get to kind of a quieter space, a quieter thing. But for me the book is always the quietest thing. And I think the fact that 25 years after I've really felt the pull to start making books, it still to me is the ultimate thing you can produce. It's the ultimate immutable. It's gonna be the thing that, that survives everything else you produce online. I think of everything I do online, no matter what it is as being disposable at this point. And newsletters are sort of the least disposable of all the disposable things, but still a disposable thing. And it's that taking the time to collimate your thinking, your thoughts, to put it into book form and all the attendant stress of doing that. Where you hit print, there's going to be 10,000 copies of this thing, 20,000 copies, whatever, 100,000. You got to get it right. And that pressure of getting it right I think is really powerful for again, making your thoughts as clean and fully formed as possible in a way that, you know, even the newsletters, it's kind of, I see those as kind of rough drafts, like almost sketching, improv, jazz, sort of, you know, improv performances, but always coming back to. And I say this when I run my board meetings for my special projects members, I say, I list out our goals. Number one, we're making books. Everything is to make books. And number two, educate.

[Debbie Millman]

That's kind of the corollary in your most recent book. And things become other things. You take a walk that begins in 2021, but you had already been long form walking for quite some time. What first motivated you to walk 30, 40, 50 kilometers at a time?

[Craig Mod]

Well, it was with John, who in the book becomes this book of John sort of character.

[Debbie Millman]

And this is John McBride, who is your mentor, friend, historian.

[Craig Mod]

And John and I connected through art because John's deeply involved in the art world, but also a connection with Japan. And so again, it's like you think about what are you putting out in the world that connects you with the most powerful in terms of archetypical, incredible, loving, abundant people. John is absolutely the most abundant, loving, incredible person I've met in my life. And it was doing art space Tokyo, it was writing about the art world in Tokyo. It was creating these objects. And so John began to invite me on walks. And it was also at the time I was trying to figure out what is my relationship to Japan, Why am I here? I don't work for a Japanese company. I'm never going to work for a Japanese company. I've tried, I've tried consulting for a few. It is, it is really not fun. It is just not fun. And he started inviting me on these walks and I watched him engage and also he would kind of make the walk shorter than I wanted. I always wanted more. And that was sort of what motivated me to start doing them on my own. Because I was like, we do a 10k day or 12k day. And I was like, I kind of want a 20k day. Or we'd start like halfway up the mountain. I'd be like, why are we starting halfway up the mountain? I want to start at the bottom of the mountain. And so I just felt this natural pull to do more physical things. And also watching him interact with all the people in the countryside provided again this archetype of how I could do it. And also I had this set of language skills and it's like, I'm not really using them for work. I could use it for this and start to do this kind of anthropological thing. And it was all accidental, sort of like again, following these feelings, those night walks in Tokyo was about following that feeling. Playing jazz, playing music, playing with people. What is that feeling? Why does this feel so good? Oh my God. What if we did it at this venue? What if we did it at this venue? I remember performing at the Reno Jazz Fest with my college jazz band. And I remember the crazy high from that. And it's like, what is that? Why does that feel so good? That. The act of creation, that spontaneous act of creation. And so again with John, I think I spent my 20s honing this radar for these feelings. And with John it was just like, okay, this is another one of those things and it's a brand new thing. Let's follow that thread and see how it feels.

[Debbie Millman]

You began walking during Japan's pandemic era closure. The world's closure, busyness had been stripped away and the, the deep seated trauma of Brian's murder started to resurface. When did you understand that? The walk was also a conversation with him.

[Craig Mod]

So I had been trying to process his murder. I remember hearing about it, you know, we were sort of on this like high school graduation trip and it was sort of again, this split of like haves and have nots. And not that anyone really had anything, but there was like a small cohort of people who had a little bit more enough to go on a really cheap graduation trip. And I remember, you know, hearing about it while we were off on this trip and being like, wow, all right, what do I do with that? Because it was always a sense of, I'm going to be able to reconnect with this kid and we're going to be able to talk about everything that happened as kids. You know, it was like this second half of my brain. And in college, immediately in my creative writing class, my first impulse was to write short stories about us. And I remember doing that for a couple years and Then kind of putting it away. And I think I had to build up the chops of seeing creative projects through fully. I think that's also a really difficult thing for people, again coming from scarcity deficits, things like that, to understand what it really means to finish something. If you aren't seeing your parents do that kind of work or people around you do that kind of work, it's really hard to understand what does it take to finish a book book in, in like a real way?

[Debbie Millman]

Oh yeah. Really hard.

[Craig Mod]

Unthinkable. Yeah, it's like you're like you don't know this mountain that you're about to climb. And so I think I had to kind of go through all my 20s and 30s and work with more people and see how projects kind of came together to be able to think, okay, maybe I can do a book that involves Brian. And you know, I built up this archetype of creativity, of the pop up walks and the long walks and writing every day and this kind of crazy asceticism of I would get up in the morning and write or I'd walk 30 clothes kilometers. I'd spend eight hours walking, interviewing, photographing, and I'd spend four or five hours at night writing, synthesizing, editing, and then publishing. And I think it was in doing all that I felt like I had built up enough chops to then turn towards Brian and maybe reconsider what that relationship was. Also to just think about the structural inequities implicit in kind of the American systems for people who come from places that don't have as much and why in Japan they don't have those inequities. And so it's like, yes, you can come from this place that socioeconomically was like identical to where we came from, but you didn't feel any of the violence or pain or any of the compromise that I felt like we had, all we had endured.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah. I was really struck by how you sort of refuse to separate private grief from the public systems around the conditions that caused this grief. The factory towns, healthcare, school funding, violence, scarcity, the failure of adults in raising their children. I was really impressed by how the social critique was embedded in the narrative rather than on top, then slammed on top of it.

[Craig Mod]

Well, yeah, and I deliberately didn't want it to be a critique of the place, you know, and it isn't the place.

[Debbie Millman]

No, you don't even actually mention the name of the town.

[Craig Mod]

I don't name the town. And I've gotten emails from people all over America who are like, thank you for writing about my town. You know, they're from the Pacific Northwest, they're from the south, they're from.

[Debbie Millman]

You know, I wasn't even questioning whether or not I should mention the town you were raised in because of that.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I didn't. It's not about that. I mean, it's really critical that I don't hold the town accountable at all, because it isn't accountable. I think it's really critical to recognize that no one had any agency in this. And to be in the richest state in America, the richest country in the world, and to have these kind of inequities is a crime. And, I mean, that was also what drove me away from America. It was the sense of, okay, not only because I went to college and saw the abundance. I went to Silicon Valley and saw the abundance of everyone else, and I just couldn't process that. How could this place be so bereft? How could there be such a deficit when these other people have such an abundance? I just mean in terms of, like, being able to write an essay or, like, clearly just having more than one great teacher.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah. Well, now we're looking at that microcosm being replicated all over the country. But you do write about yoiyu. It's a Japanese word.

[Craig Mod]

Yo Yu.

[Debbie Millman]

Yo Yu. Yo yu. Thank you. Tell us about yo yu. Because it's a beautiful, beautiful concept. And there really isn't the sort of appropriate word in English, and there should be one.

[Craig Mod]

Well, and it's kind of being affected right now by over tourism. It's sort of being killed, which is sort of. Of interesting to think about. But yo yu is like this concept of bandwidth. You could say, I got the bandwidth for that, you know. Oh, do you have bandwidth for this? Like, you can kind of use it very superficially for that, but it also contains within it the sense of, like, space in your heart to accept or deal with change or accept a stranger or be able to take a moment or beat to help someone or be present for something. So just the sense that you aren't pushed between a rock and a hard place. Which I think looking back at my town, it was a town bereft of yo Yu. Like, no one had that space because everyone's thinking about money. Everyone was thinking about, how do I make ends meet, how do we make rent, how do I kill myself, my neighbors, or whatever it takes. There was this profound lack of yo Yu. And then as I'm walking in the Japanese countryside and even living in Tokyo to a certain degree, you feel this abundance that people have, this little, this extra space that they can stop for you. And I do think, you know, yo yo exists in America in interesting ways. I think New York City also has its own kind of like crazy paradox of nobody has any yo yo and yet everyone kind of does. In a weird way. It's like the chaos here said very optimistically. I, you know, I've been on this trip, I've been here for a month now. I'm gonna be here for a month more. And I have actually been so inspired by the creativity and the craziness of it. And I think there is a kind of, there are multiple levels of Yo Yu anyway in Japan there's kind of a peaceful Yo Yu and for me, kind of feeling that was part of, I think my healing process for again, like believing in archetypes for different ways of being in the world, different ways that cities and places can be and how you don't need to have this nonsensical dichotomy of the haves and have nots to such an extreme degree that we have in America. And so Japan doesn't have that. And it turns out you get this Yo Yu abundance thing. And it actually feels kind of cool to move through these places that in America would be quite scary or I think less welcoming because of the, because of the attendant violence that comes with drug abuse. That's, that's where people end up going towards. Right. It's like you don't have yo Yu so you look for ways to be palliative, to kind of take you away from where you are. So fentanyl, meth, all that stuff is like a great yo Yu sort of disintegrator. If you don't have that in you. Okay, great, let me do some fentanyl and that'll take me away from thinking about my lack of yo Yo. And with that comes a strange kind of violence and, you know, crime and all this other stuff that sort of trickles out from that. Whereas in Japan you just have the Yo Yu and people don't reach for the drugs. And so you don't get the violence. You don't get these other kind of add ons.

[Debbie Millman]

You've written about how you can only truly see the road when you walk alone.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Debbie Millman]

Why is that?

[Craig Mod]

Well, because it's so fun to talk to someone else. It's like even just one other person. Yeah, I don't see anything. Again, it connects with like the social media, it connects with the dopaminergic loops when you have this thing that distracts you, that can always pull you away. When you aren't allowed to be bored is when you stop seeing. I was just reading a great Ursula Le Guin essay yesterday about how she kind of comes to her characters that she writes in fiction and how they never come when she wants them to come. They never appear when she's ready for them. They always appear in these moments, these interstitial moments of kind of, of boredom and expanse. And I just think, God, we are missing so much creativity. That's the thing I mourn, is this thing you can't see today. You can't see the negative. You can't prove the negative of a thing. So the abundance of creativity we are losing every single day because of people being sucked into their phones. And when I do these big walks, I'm reminded of how full a single day can be when you push all that aside and you are just with yourself and you are moving through the world. You're doing something physical that I think also activates a set of chemical, positive chemical interactions in your mind. I think we're really programmed to reward ourselves from movement. And walking is sort of like the ultimate self rewarding system. And so when you combine that with boredom, when you're not looking at your phone, you can't look at social media, you're not reading the news of moving through these spaces that you aren't familiar with, your attention just kind of goes off the charts because, you know, you're just looking for, for things to fill the boredom.

[Debbie Millman]

You said to be bored is to be free of distraction.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

And that you want to experience time.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

It seems like the ultimate goals and

[Craig Mod]

people and your levels of empathy kind of go through the roof. And your kind of curiosity for people goes through the roof. I mourn the loss of this globally every single day because we keep touching the casinos. So you add one person to that and you've kind of already lost the ability to go there. So, you know, Kevin Kelly and I run these walks around all over the world, world. And I always joke with Kevin. I say we could do these on treadmills, kind of, you know, because it's. It sort of, you're so, you know, kind of wrapped up, ensconced in these great conversations. You almost don't see where you are.

[Debbie Millman]

How does one get invited to those? Is that you apply for or you have a waiting list?

[Craig Mod]

We just have a list of people we like and it's, you know, just big lists and we just kind of keep going through It. That's pretty much it.

[Debbie Millman]

You said that one of the shocks of the walk that you did in your book was that your heart opened toward people you once judged or feared. That included your adoptive father. I'm wondering, did that include yourself?

[Craig Mod]

Ooh, yeah, that's a good one.

[Debbie Millman]

Probably.

[Craig Mod]

Probably. Because I think part of things become other things is contending with this guilt that you feel. Like, I felt like, oh, my God. Because I had access to the gifted program and Brian didn't. I was probably carrying a certain kind of guilt, even though you don't have any control over these things. But it's like, why was I allowed on this very. Just 1 millimeter difference of a degree of path that allowed me to kind of get out in a way that he could never. And so I do think part of these walks, part of ratcheting up my self worth. You can't forgive yourself if you don't think you're valuable. I think I had to get to that place of value. And, you know, my relationship with my daughter is kind of part of that. All these things kind of combined to allow me to, I think, turn back towards Brian and. Yeah. And forgiving. I don't want to say forgive, because I don't really. I wouldn't say I was ever carrying kind of like, oh, these people. You know, I was never thinking like that about any of the people I grew up with or the town or any of that.

[Debbie Millman]

I actually think it's more insidious when you barely notice it, but it's there.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. But being able to empathize with my father, who passed away 15 years ago, I think did come out of. Let me say, it wasn't a specific empathy for him. It was a general growing of empathy for all of humankind, you know, that sort of thing. And these people got wrapped, you know, included in that. And I guess, you know, myself as

[Debbie Millman]

well, Things become other things began as a special projects Fine art edition.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

So talk about special projects. This is your community. It's an art community. It's a camaraderie community. What first inspired you to start it and what does it mean to you now?

[Craig Mod]

Well, it's an anti Razorfish community, first and foremost. So this is the Anti Razorfish podcast. Does that company. Does it exist anywhere? Razorfish. Yeah, it does.

[Debbie Millman]

They do.

[Craig Mod]

Because I feel like it's been through so many iterations.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

But. Yeah, no, everything is to get back at Razorfish for not giving me a design internship.

[Debbie Millman]

Razorfish potential becomes other things.

[Craig Mod]

Yes. Razorfish becomes everything. Yeah. This is my life. But no, it was actually a response to the Atlantic. And the Atlantic had been like, hey, let's do this big article about walking I want to do. And I worked really hard on it for a long time and then just got ghosted by him. Like, truly just straight up ghosted. After all this communication, just go. And that again, triggering this. I'm someone who can be ghosted. I can be thrown away. Let's crap. So I was actually writing a piece for Wired. Nick Thompson saw me tweet something and was like, hey, can you write a piece about that? And it was about basically how digital books didn't become what we wanted them to be.

[Debbie Millman]

It's a wonderful article.

[Craig Mod]

Thank you. And part of that was saying, yeah, digital books kind of got frozen and they're boring and Kindle sucks and blah, blah, blah. But it turns out subscription services are kind of a thing now. And that was right when Substack started and Memberful existed and Patreon was a thing and Kickstarter. It was sort of the Genesis Stone of it all. And I wrote that article in December. And then after I wrote it, I was like, maybe I should just do that. Maybe I should try this. And I did a bunch of calls with editors at magazines and should I move to New York? Should I move to Washington? Should I work for New Yorker or whatever? Should I do that? And everyone's sort of like, well, you have your audience. You know what you want to write about. Do the other thing. Everyone in the newsroom kind of wants to be in your position. And so I launched it. I launched a special project. It was called Explorers Club when it started.

[Debbie Millman]

And isn't that a Netgeo thing?

[Craig Mod]

It's sort of a bunch of things. And that's why I was like. I was like, let me get rid of this. And, I mean, I know Special Projects is even more generic, but I like it. I'm going to own it. And it just felt right because I was doing a thing called Explorers Club Special Projects. I was like, you know what? I just like the Special projects thing. All of these are special projects, and

[Debbie Millman]

it's 40, 50,000 members. Right?

[Craig Mod]

Well, so that's for all my newsletters.

[Debbie Millman]

Okay?

[Craig Mod]

Special projects had 50,000 subscribers. I would have. We'd be doing this podcast on my yacht.

[Debbie Millman]

No, we wouldn't. We'd be doing it in Japan in a little hut.

[Craig Mod]

We'd be doing it in a hut. Because all of my money would be squirreled away and gold, gold underneath my mattress.

[Debbie Millman]

No.

[Craig Mod]

If I had 40,000 paying subscribers. Oh my God. We'd be in a different universe. No, no, no. 40, 50,000 like newsletter subscribers and those transit translated to certain thousands of special projects members. And it's great. It was my membership program that I just kind of homegrown built, built on top of memberful and have now built all of my own membership software around it and actually rebuilt Twitter for my members. And it's this thing called the Good Place. It's actually incredible. You can only post twice a day. All the posts disappear in a week. All the images appear first as one bit black and white photos. And it's become this like really beautiful community that people are so supportive and loving and they share amazing projects. And there's tgp, the Good Place meetups now happening in Amsterdam, London, Tokyo. It's pretty cool. So that has come out of it as well. And when you build your own infrastructure, you can do experiments like that. This is why I didn't want to do substack because I wanted to have control over the shape of the work I was doing. And again this pathology of ownership and independence. But it's allowed me to do my pop up walks and archive things in a special way. And I do members only board meetings and I archive all those board meetings. I have 120 hours of live streams and board meetings and I've indexed them all through their transcripts and you can search and it'll bring up all of the responses and you click on it and it loads the video to that moment. It's cool. I built up this really interesting membership corpus I'm pretty proud of.

[Debbie Millman]

Things become other things began as a special project, but it became last year a much expanded Random House book. What changed when work made for sort of an intimate community became a book for strangers?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. So we always joke that the books I make for special projects people or people in that periphery, it's for the Craigmod cinematic universe. So it's like everyone just kind of knows enough that I don't have to explain things things. And so going with Random House a couple things. One is I was allowed to keep fine art rights so I could do my book on my own terms again. This like crazy ownership pathology. And then two, I thought, great, now I can do this very different version for an audience where I assume they don't know anything about me. And I'd never written like that. And so working with Molly Turpin, my editor at Random House was, was amazing because she just went through the doc and asked like, like 600 questions and a big part of the Random House edition was responding and answering those questions and building out the book around those questions. And it turned out that answering those questions was a lot of fun and great. And I think it made the book. I mean, just objectively, it's double the length of the fine Art edition in terms of text. And I was able to be looser with it because I felt like I'd already done the performance. Now this was the. In some ways this is the Broadway, but it was kind of the Off Broadway in a weird way, so I could be looser. I feel like the book. The shoulders are less tense in the writing of the Random House edition. And I really like it. And I love that both exist in the world and also as kind of like an educational thing where you can put them side by side and see how the book changed. I think that's actually really instructive if you're a writer and thinking about doing books like this. But doing that Random House edition was about how do I get the story out to more people. I wanted to honor Brian on a larger scale, and so it allowed me to do this.

[Debbie Millman]

For someone who has built so much outside traditional literary approval systems, what has the really remarkable reviews of this book and this recognition now meant to you?

[Craig Mod]

It's good. I like to believe that I have no ego and I'm not seeking approval from anybody. But actually the. But the two coolest things that came out of this were William Gibson, who I've always admired and obviously writing about Japan. He's got so many seminal books and him blurbing it and responding and really taking to it was powerful. That was kind of cool to just feel that. And then David Mitchell again, who I'd been reading since number nine Dream, since he was writing. He was living in Hiroshima when he started, started his career as a novelist, reading his books for 20 plus years and then having him write a blurb. But Also this like 3000 word email to me in like the morning, the twilight of his morning, you know, like the dawn's breaking in Ireland or wherever he lives. And he writes this incredible close read email. And I was just like, okay, good, you know, great. I don't need anyone else to read this. I got these two people. That feels pretty powerful. So that was cool. And then just all of the readers writing in these hundreds or thousands of messages I've gotten from people and continue to get who talk about Brian and again say, I have someone. Thank you for writing about this person. I have someone like that in my life. Or thank you for writing about my town, even though they're completely wrong, or thank you for writing about Japan this way, or thank you for not othering Japan. You know, this is something I really tried to be. I try to be cognizant of. I'm overly probably sensitive to the way people like me, white Westerners have written about asia in the 1800s and you know, the 20th century and you know, going back to even writer, you know, Donald Ritchie, you know, the Inland Sea. This is like a seminal book about Japan. It's, it's a really, really fraught book. There's so much wrong with it. The fact that these are guiding lights for the western gaze of looking upon Japan. So I've always been hypersensitized to that. And even with the language of it, I wanted to try to bring the language of the people to the page in a way that was authentic. And so I've kind of translated them all into like North Carolinian English because that's the vibe of the language in the mountains there. And not trying to be academic, overly academic about it, but trying to be as empathetic as possible to the people and how they are.

[Debbie Millman]

The last thing I want to talk to you about is your adoption story. As we talked about earlier, you knew very little about your origin story, your biological origin story. Your biological mother recently found you on ancestry.com yep. After meeting her and hearing the fuller story in her own words, what part of the story you had been telling yourself finally had to follow up.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, all of was sort of like, you know, for. It was just all of the pain and suffering that I had projected onto it based on that little bit of data I had, you know, 13 year old and yada yada, all this stuff, it turned out to, according to her, not be true. She comes from a family with four siblings and her father, my grandfather, passed away when she was 9. And so it was just like this tough environment. And so for a 13 year old to get pregnant, she was sent to live with her aunt and uncle to kind of take care of her. And I always thought, oh God, that would have been full of shame and terrible. And no, it turns out it was lovely and it was full of. It was. They were totally loving and they totally supported her and she, you know, gave birth to me and didn't want to give me up. It was this really sad moment for her. But how could she raise me in this environment where economically they were struggling as a family? And she's 13, you know, it's like, or 14. And you know, you just can't take the kid on. But, you know, she wrote me a letter, which I didn't. Never got. I think probably adoption agencies have young mothers do that. It's kind of a cathartic thing. Maybe it's at the agency somewhere in some drawer. I'd like to. I should probably go look for it. So hearing all of that from her, and then also, I mean, the real powerful thing, sitting down with her for the first time, and the first thing she does is take a baby photo of me out of her wallet.

[Debbie Millman]

She'd been carrying it the whole time, her whole life.

[Craig Mod]

And she goes, every year on your birthday, I think of you, and I wish that you have a beautiful family, and I hope you're happy and healthy. I always pictured it as, oh, she's something. I'm something she wants to forget and push away and pretend never happened. And for her, it was like every year she was returning to me in this kind of shocking way. And then listening to her describe her life, which has involved a ton of hacking, and she never went to college. She ended up becoming a computer programmer. She's like a consultant. She's like, everything she's done, the way she's described everything, she's. All the decisions she's made in her life. For the first time in my life, I'm sitting there, I'm hearing her tell this story, and I go, thank you for illuminating where my brain comes from. Finally, I get it. Okay, great. This is why I do what I do. Thank you. It's genetic. I can put that away. Because literally no one in my town, no one in my family. Family provided the archetype for these impulses that have driven me all throughout my life.

[Debbie Millman]

What was it like to sit across from someone and recognize the architecture of your own brain?

[Craig Mod]

It's just overwhelming, the whole thing. I'm still processing it. You know, that lunch was, like, almost two years ago now, and I'm still trying to figure it all out. So that was really profound and powerful and again, this hammering home your value, but also, like, the surrealness of genetic influence. I think, as adoptees don't understand that in the same way kids who come from standard birth families experience, or maybe, you know, in these situations where we do meet our birth parents later in life, it's a more profound sense of, wow. Nature and nurture are very separate. And nature, it turns out, is really immutably powerful. Like, wow, like you. Like I have a clone. Like, your brain is my brain. It's so wild.

[Debbie Millman]

You also discovered you have quite a large extended biological family, including a younger half sister.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

What has that been like for you?

[Craig Mod]

That's been awesome. So she didn't want to connect. When I heard about her, I was like, oh. Oh. Immediately, that's who I'm here for. I just want, like, you know, I was an only child. Adopted. You always crave a sibling.

[Debbie Millman]

Did she know about you?

[Craig Mod]

No, no, no, not at all. And so. And also, like, I empathize with everyone involved in these situations where it's complicated and weird and, like, maybe you don't want to meet. And she didn't want to meet meet. And she was like, nope, I don't want to meet this guy. I was like, great. That's fine. If you ever. Do you know how to get a hold of me. And then, like, six, seven months later, her aunt. Our aunt reached out and was like, hey, we've kind of thought about it, and we're sort of interested in meeting you. And so then we set up a call, and it was me, the aunt, and her. And immediately the aunt sort of dropped away, and it was just her and me. And like, within, I'd say, like, two minutes, we were just like, oh, my God, I love you. I love you. It was just like, you just felt like goodness of the person. You can, you know, it's almost like pheromonal. Like, is this person gonna work or not? What's. What's kind of like in their soul? What's in their heart? And I think just immediately we were like, okay, wow. Yeah, we can trust this person. Like, immediate trust. And she's an only child, and so I think it's kind of cool for her to, you know, she's like 15 years younger than me, 16 years younger than me to, at this later stage in life, be like, oh, you have a sibling. That's cool. I feel like I have a lot of wisdom, so I'm happy to be an older brother who can kind of help out, navigate complex life stuff and give advice on jobs and how to think about moving through the world. She just had a kid, so I'm an uncle now. It's been very, very cool. A lot of Yo Yu. Yeah. Except for birth dad, who everyone's like, don't meet him. Don't meet him. So I haven't met him yet, but I'm trying to, because I think, you know, why not? Let's go meet him. But we'll see. But it's. It's been, I would say, as good as you could hope for in this, reconnecting with a birth family, everyone has exhibited a lot of emotional intelligence. There's a lot of boundary respect happening for everyone. I don't think anyone feels overwhelmed. And that's been really cool to feel modeled as. Well, just this. Okay, yeah, we have this connection and let's be grateful for it, but, you know, take it at whatever pace we need to take this at.

[Debbie Millman]

Craig, this is my last question for today.

[Craig Mod]

Sure.

[Debbie Millman]

So much of your work is about walking back through old terrain until it becomes legible. Your hometown, your best friend's life, Japan, your adoptive father, your younger self, and now your biological family you once only knew as absence.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

After all this returning, what do you understand now about belonging that you didn't understand before?

[Craig Mod]

I mean, I think not to be reductive, but so much boils down to self worth. It really does. And you can't belong if you don't feel valuable. I think a lot of toxic relationships, a lot of abusive relationships come from that desire to belong but not feeling valuable. And so you allow that to override sanity because belonging is such a powerful need. And I think for me, I look around at the people who are close to me in my life now and I just feel really grateful. You know, it's like I get to spend time with all of these people who are inspiring, thoughtful, grounded, enthusiastic, optimistic, successful at all different scales, people. It's taken me 25 years of building to get to this place, but I believe in the durability of things now. I believe in my own sense of self worth in a way that was impossible to even conceive of in my 20s. And in the moment you don't realize how low you value yourself. You know, that's the difficult thing is like you need to have this almost like third disembodied experience. Maybe 5 Meo DMT or something can help out with that. But this, how do you accelerate the disembodiment to understand what abundance feels like or what a lot of value feels like and then be able to come back to that place where you are and go, all right, now I know how to work through that or I know how to build this. So I just feel, I feel really grateful for all these things. And I think what's also important is to not need. I think a lot of people conflate belonging with needing to feel embraced by a thing. And so I think Japan can be complicated for this because you're never going to belong there or you're never going to be embraced by Japan, but you can find your own little niche, you can find your nook to kind of exist in. And you have to be very conscious of how that relationship is going to play out. And you can't demand Japan embrace you because it won't. It doesn't know how to. It's like asking a robot to sing opera. If all it is is a typewriter, it's just not going to work. And so. So I think understanding those parameters of relationships also is critical. I don't feel like I'm embraced by Japan and I don't feel like I'll ever be Japanese, for example, but I do feel like I belong in my own self concocted corner of it and I feel very good about that. But then also this trip to New York has been really powerful to me because I come here and I feel immediately this sense of belonging in a way that contrasts with Japan. And I think being able to move between those worlds is really powerful. And I think this is to kind of tie it all together too. This is the first time I've been in New York with a fully realized sense of value and I think that's what's been making this trip so exciting for me and why I feel like so inspired walking around the city. I've never been able to be here and embody that feeling before and now I am. And that's exciting. It took a long time to get here though.

[Debbie Millman]

Well, we're glad you're here.

[Craig Mod]

Thank you.

[Debbie Millman]

Craig Mod, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

[Craig Mod]

Thanks for having me.

[Debbie Millman]

To learn more about Craig Mod, you can go to his website craigmod.com, subscribe to his newsletters Rodin and Ridgeline and read his beautiful book Things Become Other Things. This is the 21st year year we've been podcasting Design Matters and I'd like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference or we can do both. I'm Debbie Melman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

[Craig Mod]

Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

[Debbie Millman]

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[Craig Mod]

The agents wrote the copy and managed

[Debbie Millman]

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[Craig Mod]

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[Debbie Millman]

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[Craig Mod]

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[Debbie Millman]

We've all heard that social media is taking away kids childhoods, giving them social anxiety and increasing rates of depression. Social media has been labeled the culprit. But what if it's not? What has been really shocking to me as I've stood here and kind of watched this debate unfold and seeing how things are translated to the broader public is that there's just this massive gap between what evidence has been generated to date and rigorous studies have found and expert panels have concluded, which is essentially that there's various tiny correlations between social media and mental health. That was developmental psychologist Candace Odgers, who joined us for a special interview to unearth the research that debunks social media as the cause of the mental health decline for our teens. What else is causing it, and what are the solutions for a path forward? Find out in the full episode of TED Talks Daily. Wherever you listen to podcasts.